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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   3830 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 18, 2024

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Again I was given a book, this one fiction, called Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, who wrote The Martian, or the book the film is based on. I am 4 chapters in and I am already dreading the rest of it. The story, the plot itself, is fine-- interesting even. But the author's writing style sets my teeth on edge.

Example passage:

Ah. Dr. Grace. You look refreshed." She gestured to her left. "There's food on the credenza."

And there was! Rice, steamed buns, deep-fried dough sticks, and an urn of coffee. I rushed over and helped myself. I was hungry as heck."

The "hungry as heck" bug you? It does me. And he does this throughout the 1st person narrative. Now I don't need swear words to feel realism, but if you want to eliminate epithets, just go without. He doesn't. It's like reading a book written by a Sunday school teacher for ten-year olds, which might be fine if it weren't ostensibly a story based in science. The humor is equally twee and grating. I am rarely this annoyed by a writer's style. Ok that's not true I am often annoyed by writers' styles but rarely like this.

There is a maxim for writers: show, don't tell

show: I rushed over and helped myself.

The reader learns from the hurry that the person was hungry, just as though the reader had seen the unseemly haste himself and inferred the hunger.

tell: I was hungry as heck.

Aaargh! Don't "show then tell"

Andy Weir writes like a Redditor, and it shows. Truly a shame.

I think this is more the character he was trying to write, rather than a consistent issue with the author. He wanted to write a goofy two shoes who would rather be a teacher than a top researcher.

While I enjoyed the puzzle in Project Hail Mary, The Martian is a superior book.

Very well could be, I admittedly have not read any other Weir work. It's driving me nuts though.

Using this kind of voice is an iffy proposition. I happen to like Holden Caulfield but I understand now how some people viscerally dislike him and by extension Catcher in the Rye.

The "hungry as heck" bug you? It does me. And he does this throughout the 1st person narrative. Now I don't need swear words to feel realism, but if you want to eliminate epithets, just go without.

To me the use of "heck" rather than a stronger epithet or swear word is indicating that the hunger is significant, but in a safe or comic way rather than a serious one. Similar, I'd view "scary as heck" as describing a safe scare that someone was comfortable with vs "scary as hell/fuck" where I'd be worried that someone was actually seriously scared and possibly in need of support.

I don't disagree. I just find the constant use of these terms unnecessarily childish. Why not say "I was ravenous"? "I was suddenly keenly aware of my own hunger" "I had reached the table and brought a bun to my mouth before I had even thought about it"? Or any of a dozen other ways to write the sentence?

I don't know if you have read Weir, but this book at least is replete with a goofy humor that for me at least falls very flat. He is a bestseller so maybe there's a wide audience for this type of writing. I'm not part of it.

The protagonist a scientist burnout who literally became a children's school teacher. His train of thought is not quite "Sunday School teacher for ten-year olds", because that's the sort of person who may just never start cursing to begin with, but it's pretty solid as "late-career-change teacher for eleven-year olds", because that's the sort of person who may find themselves at work saying "What the he ... ck" so often that the euphemisms replace the original habit.

To each their own, though. I didn't like his second book, Artemis, for what I thought of as an incoherence along those lines; the main plot could have come out of a 1950 Boy's Life sci-fi adventure, while one or two of the side plots were R-rated, so it didn't work for me as adult fiction or young adult.

But in Hail Mary the goofy humor is what keeps the whole thing tonally coherent for me; it bridges the gap between the very dark plot points (where it works as gallows humor) and the very lighthearted plot points (where it works straight).

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