“Falling Onto Mars”, more American Gods
First of all, there was a very good story in the July/August Analog: “Falling Onto Mars” by Geoffrey A. Landis. It’s only four pages long, so you can read it standing up in Borders.
I find something dissatisfying about the stories that are part of series, even when interesting in themselves, like Brenda W. Clough’s second story about Captain Titus Oakes. The big disappointment, though, was “Mammoth Dawn,” by Kevin J. Anderson and Gregory Benford. As an adventure it was well-written, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what the theme was supposed to be. Were the bad guys bad because of what they did, or were they bad because of what they thought? One usually resorts to demonizing the enemy when one can’t win the argument on the basis of reason - and I didn’t see the hero winning any arguments. In fact, rather than have him win an argument with his Evo opponent, the narrator instead decides that the Evo is just jealous that his name wasn’t included on a scientific paper years before. This is an ad hominem argument, not a story. All the more so when the bad guys do their thing later in the story - it’s never made clear why they do it, or how their cause could possibly profit from it. All it is is demonizing a caricature - I don’t know why or how I was supposed to enjoy this story.
I did finish the story, though. I usually read through Analog, just out of curiosity. It’s the rare story I won’t finish, and one of those was last year’s “Sunday Night Yams at Minnie and Earl’s,” which was the overwhelming favorite novella of the year, according to the voting results on page 8. That put me in mind of American Gods, the hit of last year and a book I found almost entirely uninspiring.
I was beginning to believe that I was the only person who disliked American Gods, but I’ve found some company: Josh Lacey in The Richmond Review.
One encounter epitomises what this novel could have been. In Iceland, Shadow meets another Odin; the one who was left behind when the Vikings went to America. The Icelandic Odin is very different to his American incarnation: grave, serious, sad, and thoroughly Old World. From his perspective, we look on America’s gods with clear eyes, and suddenly see them for what they are.
Moments like this make American Gods a frustrating read: punctuated by reminders of what it might have been, but, for some reason, isn’t.
He goes on to say something that I was also thinking: “An ambitious failure is more interesting than a cautious success,” but I wonder why an ambitious failure is taken as a grand success in the first place. Is it just grade inflation, or is it a clash of genres in which my side (sf/f) lost but prefers to pretend it won?