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A review by trike
Emily Eternal by M.G. Wheaton
1.0
Initially I was like, “Wow! This is going to be a 4-star read, easy!” And then I was like, “If he sticks the landing, this might actually achieve 5 stars!”
...and then he drives this sucker off a cliff where it explodes into a flaming ball of nonsense. Mark, I gotta ask, did you let your 7-year-old take over partway through? Pretty sure this is how it went:
Wheaton: “So here’s the set-up, kiddo: the sun is dying, but at MIT they’ve created an AI designed to help people get over trauma. It’s a combination of JARVIS and BARF from the Iron Man movies. How do you think she solves the problem and saves humanity?”
Wheaton’s kid: “I love Iron Man!!! Ooh, he has to meet Wolverine!”
Wheaton: “Well, no, Wolverine has an impossible healing factor that’s borderline magical, so he doesn’t really belong-”
Wheaton’s kid: “But I love, love, love Wolverine!”
Wheaton: “I know, honey, but this-”
Wheaton’s kid: “I WANT WOLVERINE!”
Wheaton: “Ok! Fine! Wolverine is in! Now what?”
Wheaton’s kid: “Your computer should make EVERYONE Wolverine! Like, they can change their bodies instantly and become anything! That way the sun ‘sploding don’t matter!”
Wheaton: “Well, that’s actually a different Marvel character named Darwin who can adapt to anything.”
Wheaton’s kid: “Yeah, him! And the computer should fight another computer, like in Avengers!”
Wheaton: “Sigh. Okay, kiddo.”
So much promise, squandered on impossible tech, bullshit biology, and an utter lack of research. Looking at Google Maps is NOT research.
Let’s take the New Hampshire parts of the book, for instance. (Disclosure: I live in NH.) It makes sense people would escape from Massachusetts to New Hampshire. Anyone who has sat in I-93 traffic northbound on a Friday afternoon can see the miles of Massholes heading to the lakes region. (“Massholes” is a term of endearment. We love you shitty drivers here in the 603. Stay home. Or at least USE YAH BLINKAHS!!!) So that’s all good.
But then he has our flesh-and-blood hero and virtual heroine (the titular Emily) break into a house in Wolfeboro, which just so happens to be the retired police chief’s home. Okay, coincidence, that’s fine. The chief is a woman, which, all right, not outside the realm of possibility in a sci-fi thriller. And now she’s black.
Um.
Yeah, I’m a liberal in a mostly red state, and I’m a feminist, and I’m all about inclusion, but you can’t just ignore the reality on the ground. New Hampshire is about 95% Caucasian, and Wolfeboro is about 108% white. I’ve been there quite a bit and I’m fairly sure I’ve never once seen an African-American. I’m not sure any black people have even *visited* Wolfeboro. I mean, people there look at *me* sideways and I’m Italian with a last name that sounds like it might be Hispanic. In 2016 Wolfeboro voted for Trump nearly 2-to-1.
I’m just sayin’.
He compounds the issue by making our black female police chief a painfully cringe-worthy Magical Negro with a side helping of Whoopi Epiphany Speech. These are white male author tropes that you dumbasses REALLY need to stop perpetuating. Read about them here: MN: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MagicalNegro WES: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WhoopiEpiphanySpeech
With the weird comic book DNA stuff and the poorly-researched setting, it comes as no surprise that later in the book he gets physics absolutely wrong every chance he gets. Just the deaths in outer space alone are disqualifying. You don’t “die in seconds” as your lungs explode. It takes minutes to die of that... which is actually more horrifying. If you’ve seen Kubrick & Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey then you’re familiar with Bowman’s desperate attempt to get back into the Discovery. In his haste to rescue Poole, he jumps into a pod without his helmet. HAL refuses to let him back in. “Open the pod bay doors, Hal.” “I’m sorry, Dave. I can’t do that.” So Bowman makes an emergency entrance into the ship without his space hat. He’s fine. Because exposure to vacuum is not an instakill death sentence. Even if you were unprotected in space, exposed to the heat of the sun, you wouldn’t die quickly.
But at this point I’m just needlessly nitpicking because the book had lost me long before. Oh, did I mention the confusion between “computer virus” and “virus virus”? Yeah.
This is the kind of stupid lazy sci-fi I hate, where literally a weekend’s worth of research on Wikipedia would’ve made the story orders of magnitude better.
...and then he drives this sucker off a cliff where it explodes into a flaming ball of nonsense. Mark, I gotta ask, did you let your 7-year-old take over partway through? Pretty sure this is how it went:
Wheaton: “So here’s the set-up, kiddo: the sun is dying, but at MIT they’ve created an AI designed to help people get over trauma. It’s a combination of JARVIS and BARF from the Iron Man movies. How do you think she solves the problem and saves humanity?”
Wheaton’s kid: “I love Iron Man!!! Ooh, he has to meet Wolverine!”
Wheaton: “Well, no, Wolverine has an impossible healing factor that’s borderline magical, so he doesn’t really belong-”
Wheaton’s kid: “But I love, love, love Wolverine!”
Wheaton: “I know, honey, but this-”
Wheaton’s kid: “I WANT WOLVERINE!”
Wheaton: “Ok! Fine! Wolverine is in! Now what?”
Wheaton’s kid: “Your computer should make EVERYONE Wolverine! Like, they can change their bodies instantly and become anything! That way the sun ‘sploding don’t matter!”
Wheaton: “Well, that’s actually a different Marvel character named Darwin who can adapt to anything.”
Wheaton’s kid: “Yeah, him! And the computer should fight another computer, like in Avengers!”
Wheaton: “Sigh. Okay, kiddo.”
So much promise, squandered on impossible tech, bullshit biology, and an utter lack of research. Looking at Google Maps is NOT research.
Let’s take the New Hampshire parts of the book, for instance. (Disclosure: I live in NH.) It makes sense people would escape from Massachusetts to New Hampshire. Anyone who has sat in I-93 traffic northbound on a Friday afternoon can see the miles of Massholes heading to the lakes region. (“Massholes” is a term of endearment. We love you shitty drivers here in the 603. Stay home. Or at least USE YAH BLINKAHS!!!) So that’s all good.
But then he has our flesh-and-blood hero and virtual heroine (the titular Emily) break into a house in Wolfeboro, which just so happens to be the retired police chief’s home. Okay, coincidence, that’s fine. The chief is a woman, which, all right, not outside the realm of possibility in a sci-fi thriller. And now she’s black.
Um.
Yeah, I’m a liberal in a mostly red state, and I’m a feminist, and I’m all about inclusion, but you can’t just ignore the reality on the ground. New Hampshire is about 95% Caucasian, and Wolfeboro is about 108% white. I’ve been there quite a bit and I’m fairly sure I’ve never once seen an African-American. I’m not sure any black people have even *visited* Wolfeboro. I mean, people there look at *me* sideways and I’m Italian with a last name that sounds like it might be Hispanic. In 2016 Wolfeboro voted for Trump nearly 2-to-1.
I’m just sayin’.
He compounds the issue by making our black female police chief a painfully cringe-worthy Magical Negro with a side helping of Whoopi Epiphany Speech
Spoiler
before she dies. Because of course she does. From cancer, the ONE THING the magical “reprogramming DNA” tech can’t solve. Because she needs to be the Magical Negro helping out the white protagonistWith the weird comic book DNA stuff and the poorly-researched setting, it comes as no surprise that later in the book he gets physics absolutely wrong every chance he gets. Just the deaths in outer space alone are disqualifying. You don’t “die in seconds” as your lungs explode. It takes minutes to die of that... which is actually more horrifying. If you’ve seen Kubrick & Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey then you’re familiar with Bowman’s desperate attempt to get back into the Discovery. In his haste to rescue Poole, he jumps into a pod without his helmet. HAL refuses to let him back in. “Open the pod bay doors, Hal.” “I’m sorry, Dave. I can’t do that.” So Bowman makes an emergency entrance into the ship without his space hat. He’s fine. Because exposure to vacuum is not an instakill death sentence. Even if you were unprotected in space, exposed to the heat of the sun, you wouldn’t die quickly.
But at this point I’m just needlessly nitpicking because the book had lost me long before. Oh, did I mention the confusion between “computer virus” and “virus virus”? Yeah.
This is the kind of stupid lazy sci-fi I hate, where literally a weekend’s worth of research on Wikipedia would’ve made the story orders of magnitude better.