Spot the Deliberate Mistake
Posted by Niall Harrison
31 December 2011
Cheryl Morgan reviews YA generation starship novel Across the Universe:
In fact, if it wasn’t for one fatal passage, I would be wholeheartedly recommending Across the Universe to SF readers. You’d love it, until you got to chapter 63, in which Eldest explains to Elder why the Godspeed is so far behind schedule. Apparently their uranium recycling system isn’t as efficient as expected, and as a result the ship can’t keep up the required level of thrust. It is slowing down, and will eventually drift to a halt.
I'm only lukewarm about the book as a whole; I think it's an interesting attempt to combine the narrative virtues of golden age sf and contemporary YA (hard-sf sociological generation starship story meets zeitgeisty first-person dystopia-romance), but not entirely successful (it doesn't seem to take enough advantage of what's distinctive about its setting; there's clearly no chance that we're actually going to see multiple generations pass in the main frame of the story, for instance). But I had exactly the same abrupt disconnect on reading the above passage that Cheryl reports, which was notable because I can normally take a certain amount of scientific laxness in my stride.
External to the novel there's every indication that this error is not an error: as Cheryl further notes, Revis has given interviews like this one, in which she states that "Very observant readers — I’ve had maybe a dozen contact me — have noticed that there’s actually a pretty big scientific 'error' in the book. It’s actually not an error; it’s a clue for the sequel." But if this error is the clue, I don't think it's a very well handled twist. I really wanted to be able to assume that Eldest, who has previously lied to Elder about a lot of the details of the starship society, was lying in this scene too, but I couldn't find a way to justify it. The above scene is positioned as pulling back the veil, as Eldest finally telling Elder what's really going on, and I couldn't see any motivation for Eldest to be holding back. Put another way, what caused the disconnect in my reading experience was not that it was an error per se, but that it was an error that the weight of the story was trying to convince me was the truth.
(In fact, since ARCs of A Million Suns are now doing the rounds, my spies have confirmed whether or not this error is the clue in question. Not that I'll reveal that here...)
Comments (1)
Posted by Phoebe on December 31, 2011 10:11 AM
Not that I'll reveal that here...
Evil, you are! ;)
Oddly, last year's other space colony book, Glow makes the exact same mistake, though you can tell that the author was trying to be very careful about the physics. Very frustrating.