Why do I love bad writing so much? It's a question I often ask myself as I bludgeon what few brain cells and critical faculties I have left with some dreadful book or other. There are so many great books I've never read. Why do I keep reading drivel?
It's a question I'm asking myself more than a lot at the moment because I am currently wading through a book called either
Eden Rising
----1----
The Dark Sanctuary
or
The Dark Sanctuary - Book One
- depending whether you read the front cover or the spine. The back cover lumps for
Eden Rising. 'Eden Rising will draw readers into a dark dystopian world like no other.' so that's the spine outvoted.
Needless to say it screams 'self-published'!
blurb said:
In a not-so-distant future, women outnumber men 7 to 1, and no one can explain it.
Threatened by this mysterious phenomenon, the government impulsively passes new abortion laws and strips women of their rights.
I nearly put it down after the weird use of digits in '7 to 1,' I think the usual rule of thumb is to write out from zero to one hundred rather than use figures but was I intrigued to see how the author manages to get that scenario on its feet. Given that kind of ratio, and given that ninety-five percent of the women I know wouldn't just idly sit back and let that kind of thing happen with a fifty fifty (ish) population ratio, I just can't see it happening. But it's been a long time since I read any overtly feminist SF which I haven't really done since the days when Vonda McIntyre, Marge Piercy, and Marion Zimmer Bradley* were making waves. I wondered what the field was like now. Copyright date of 2022. Up to date stuff!
Eden Rising. Big good old feminist fist in Venus symbol on the front... and it's AWFUL!
For one thing it claims to be taking place in the 'Present Day' - and in 'flashbacks' which are apparently, according to the text (pg. 11), taking place in or around the the year 2062. So the 'present day' is even further into the future... okay, and the prologue, if I'm getting the internal logic correct, took place some time in between. So this book is taking place in three time frames: a future 'Present Day' time and 'Flashback' - but still in our future - past, and 'Prologue' in between time - and all three are written in the present tense.
I find present tense first person narration very annoying and hard to read. Especially when the first person narrator keeps changing from one chapter to the next and in this book, within the first thirty of so pages, there are at least three of them. Why
do I keep reading this drivel?
Because some of the writing is just too deliciously bad for me to put it down:
'There's a woman standing beside my mom's window. Her hair is bigger than her head, and there's a goofy smile on her face.' (Pg.35)
'Her turquoise eyes look like Halloween candy-perfectly round and much bigger than the average eyeball.' (Pg. 43)
It didn't take me long to work out that there is no way in hell this author is going to deal with the problem of how to convince the reader that 87.5 percent of the population (women) will have their reproductive rights taken away from them by the other 12.5 (men) - which is what a 'seven to one' ratio would be. Because, on page five, the evil male politician being interviewed on TV infodumps that it's been 20 years since people noticed the change in birth statistics, and that 'now' seventy percent of the world's population are women. Well 'seventy percent' of anything isn't 'seven to one' of what's left. It's seven to three.
And since there's no mention is made of male life expectancy suddenly significantly dropping - I really can't see how you go from fifty-fifty (ish) to saying seventy percent of the world's population are 'women' in only twenty years. Most of the people born in that twenty years would still be children and ineligible to vote. So at the time that the 'government impulsively passes new abortion laws and strips women of their rights.' the population would contain only slightly more voting-age women than men.
I really hate it when the logic of SF books fall to pieces
quite so quickly.
But...
'The skin of her forehead creases into rolls, and she's breathing hard through big nostrils. (pg. 7)
*When it was still possible to read her books without feeling uncomfortable.
