Evade

If I’m playing Tongo, then this weekend is my turn to evade. I’m in no position to acquire. I’m not about to confront. And it’s dishonerable to retreat. Or was that from “Legend of the Rangers”? I’m getting my scifi mixed up.

I have been reading. Random stuff, a lot of it. Things that I take my 20% discount coupons to Borders and use-or-lose. While science fiction is my preference in reading, I begin to think that the drought may be permanent there. At least at Border’s, looking for science fiction in the science fiction/fantasy section is the equivalent of looking for filet mignon in the frozen foods aisle. Even if you find it, the quality sucks. Fantasy is what people seem to crave now. Dragons. Magic. Mice in armor. Vampires with second thoughts. Vampires without second thoughts. Yet another pun-filled funfest on some flatworld somewhere. Even the stuff that at least includes a token space ship or alien relies more on the Force or (as a dear, missing friend used to put it) “special mental powers” than on actually considering what the vast scientific changes happening around us might portend for the near and distant future.

And the books that do consider this? Don’t look in the science fiction section any more. I specifically went looking for Greg Bear’s newest, Quantico. I thought the bookstore wasn’t carrying it (surprise and dismay there, since Bear has become one of my “must have” authors). I then discovered it hiding under generic fiction. What the heck is the point of having a scifi section if you are afraid to put good authors there? Yeah, I know. People are put off when a book gets labeled scifi. But can you blame them if all they can find in the scifi section of the store is kids waving magic wands? {sidenote: I note that they also refuse to stock Harry Potter books in the scifi/fantasy section. What’s up with that?}

So now, when I go to the bookstore I prowl the softporn romances and shoot-em-up cop thrillers that pass for fiction, hoping to find a science fiction book to call my very own. Last week I thought I’d found that book. “The Beautiful Miscellaneous, by Dominic Smith. Good reviews, well-written, set in the modern day about the search for unknown subatomic particles, with a solid dash of psychology/psychiatry thrown it. I was hooked in two pages. It seemed well researched. It had great character developement I started to really care how the main character was going to resolve his problems, or at least come to grips with them. Then, on page 320 (nine pages from the end), it sucker-punched me with the single most stupid paragraph I’ve ever read in an otherwise well-researched book. Since I don’t have authorization from the author to quote, I’ll just have to describe. The main character goes through his collection of slides of different minerals that his recently decease father gives him. He finds the one he wants, and puts it on his microscope (described as being capable of only low magnification). The single hydrogen atom on the slide appears “grainy, a fuzzy whorl, a thumbprint slightly out of focus”.

I thought it was a misprint, an editor’s helpful tweak that couldn’t possibly have been intended by the author. But no. The girl at the main character’s elbow wants to know what he’s looking at. “Hydrogen,” he responds. “Looks like a gallstone,” she states.

Jeez. I wasted 320 pages getting to THAT?