The Great American Read

September 16, 2018 / Rick Ellrod / Leave a comment

PBS is conducting a poll asking about our favorite novels in connection with a TV mini-series, “The Great American Read.” Through October 17, we can vote each day for one or more of 100 candidates. I haven’t watched the TV shows—but the poll alone is fascinating.

In my area, Fairfax County Public Libraries is running its own variant. They’ve broken down the 100 books and series into brackets, like a tournament. We vote on a series of pairs—which of the two we prefer—and the candidates get whittled gradually down to a climactic final round. They’re about halfway through at the moment.

The Best and the Best-Loved

Looking at somebody else’s “Top Ten” (or Top 100, or generally Top N) list is always interesting. We may be talking about books, classic rock songs, movie heroes and villains, or almost anything: the most common reaction, I suspect, is when we look at some of the entries and ask ourselves, how could that possibly have gotten on the list? Or, conversely, how could they ever have left out this?

Obviously a list of the “twelve tallest buildings” or “five longest rivers” is going to be relatively uncontroversial. But when there’s no quantitative measure that can be applied, the lists are bound to have a subjective element. Reading them stimulates us to ask—what could were the listmakers have been thinking when they made those choices?

With the Great American Read (“TGAR”), the subjective side is even more emphasized, because the list (and the poll) is about “America’s 100 best-loved novels,” not the best novels. The criteria aren’t the same. There are books we respect, but don’t like. My favorite piece of music, as it happens, isn’t what I would judge the greatest piece of music. A more personal appeal is involved.

Someone for Everyone

It’s clear that PBS was at pains to include something for everyone. The books cover a wide range of genres. The list includes plenty of “classics”—the ones we got assigned in high school—and also a lot of popular volumes that couldn’t be considered classics by any stretch of the imagination. (I suspect there are no high-school reading curricula that include Fifty Shades of Grey.)

In other words, we’ve got our “guilty pleasures” right alongside acknowledged masterpieces. I always enjoy the way alphabetical listings produce similarly odd bedfellows: on my bookshelf, Jane Austen rubs shoulders with Isaac Asimov, while Tolkien is bracketed by James Thurber and A.E. van Vogt.

Almost any reader should find something to vote for in the TGAR collection. If you don’t like Tom Sawyer, how about Alice in Wonderland? Not enthused about The Godfather—try The Pilgrim’s Progress? If you’re not in the mood for 1984, maybe you’ll find Anne of Green Gables more congenial.

By the same token, I’m guessing almost no one would accept every book on the list as a favorite. If there’s someone whose personal top ten list includes The Handmaid’s Tale, Atlas Shrugged, and The Chronicles of Narnia, I’d like to meet them.

The F&SF Division

In my own sandbox, the science fiction and fantasy field, the listmakers came up with an interesting cross-section. I was a little surprised to see Asimov’s Foundation series on the list: it’s great stuff, and an SF classic, but I’d have thought it was “inside baseball,” widely known only among card-carrying fans. Another classic, Frank Herbert’s Dune, is probably more widely read. (I notice the entry for Dune is not marked as a series, which is a good thing. While there are quite a few follow-on Dune books, after the original the quality drops off exponentially.)

Other SF picks are more contemporary. We’ve got The Martian, which I’ve mentioned before, and Ready Player One, which was just made into a movie this year—both good choices (by my lights), though not yet perhaps seasoned enough to be classics like the Asimov and Herbert entries.

We’ve got the comedic Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the classic Frankenstein, the satirical Sirens of Titan, the young adult Hunger Games, SF horror in Jurassic Park, dystopian tales in both 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale. We have what you might call prehistorical fiction, The Clan of the Cave Bear, which I’d class as a variety of SF, and time-travel romance in Outlander (also recently come to video). A Dean Koontz novel, Watchers, which I’d never heard of, may represent the SF thriller. Then there’s Atlas Shrugged, which probably belongs in SF given a technological premise, although these days it’s more often thought of as a political tract.

Of course it’s always possible to regret the omissions—Heinlein or Brin or Bujold, for example—but a list of 100 nationwide favorites in all genres is never going to be able to pick up every quality work. Since the TGAR candidates were largely chosen by a random survey of 7200 Americans, it’s easy to see why more widely-read examples are favored, whether or not they represent the highest quality. The focus on American readers also introduces some selection bias, which might account for omitting, say, Arthur C. Clarke.

Over in fantasy, the “high fantasy” epic is well represented by The Lord of the Rings, The Wheel of Time, and A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones), with the children’s division held down by the Narnia tales and Harry Potter. Again, there are some familiar subgenres: satire (Gulliver’s Travels), whimsy or children’s books (Alice, The Little Prince), horror (The Stand), young adult (Twilight).

I was a little surprised to see three entries in what one might call the Christian fantasy column: The Shack, Left Behind, and something called Mind Invaders. When an item turns up that you’ve never heard of, it’s a useful reminder of how far-ranging people’s tastes really are.

An Author’s Range

The list can also spark some interesting reflections on the range of a prolific author. Probably most people would pick Dune as Frank Herbert’s leading entry, and Pride and Prejudice as the most well-loved of Austen’s several great novels. But the only candidate for Dickens on the list, for example, is Great Expectations.

Now, I’m fond of Dickens, but Great Expectations isn’t one of the stories I particularly like. Yet it does seem to come up frequently whenever Dickens is mentioned. (I don’t even hear quite as much about A Tale of Two Cities, which we did read in high school—possibly chosen for school because it’s relatively short; assigning a class one of Dickens’ doorstoppers would have consumed an entire semester’s worth of reading time.) Is Expectations really representative of Dickens’ best? I’d have picked Little Dorrit or Our Mutual Friend, say, if I’d been in on the original survey. Or David Copperfield, maybe, as the most accessible to a modern reader. But, again, the list suggests there’s a reservoir of interest in Expectations that I just don’t happen to share—a broadening thought.

In a similar way, it may be harder to come up with the most representative Stephen King or Mark Twain novel—there are so many of them. (The listmakers did confine themselves deliberately to one entry per author, which makes sense.) Even within a single author’s oeuvre, it’s intriguing to see which work a majority of readers picked as outstanding.

Incommensurable Goods

After enough of this kind of reflection, we may find ourselves with a certain skepticism about the whole comparison process.

The Fairfax County bracket system, entertaining as it is, only strengthens this impression. There is a sorting algorithm to create a ranking by going down the list and placing each item in turn in relation to those above it. And it’s fun to weigh random pairs of works against each other, even within the particular classifications the libraries used (Classics, Midcentury, Late Century, Contemporary).

But the match-up process yields some odd results. (I understand sports tournament designers also have to take care to ensure good playoffs.) There’s some plausibility in a face-off between Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights. But what should we make of pitting Anne of Green Gables against War and Peace? The Great Gatsby against Alice? In some cases the entries hardly seem to be in the same weight class, so to speak. It strikes me as a no-brainer to match The Lord of the Rings against Where the Red Fern Grows, a novel I’ve never heard of.

Even within a given author’s work, one can wonder about how conclusive a comparison actually is. There’s a scale factor that makes some matches clear: Asimov’s sweeping Foundation series seems a more logical “top” candidate than even an excellent short story like “The Last Question” or “Robbie,” just because of its greater scope and size. But it can be hard to decide between stories on the same scale—two great short stories, say, or two very different novels.

At this point I’m reminded of an argument made by philosopher John Finnis in his Natural Law and Natural Rights (1980). Noting that one of the classic objections against utilitarianism (“the greatest good for the greatest number”) is the inability in practice to reduce all possible good and bad things to a uniform measure of “utility,” Finnis takes the position that there are a number of categories of human goods that can’t be reduced to each other. His list of such goods includes life, knowledge, play, aesthetic experience, friendship, practical reasonableness, and religion (ch. IV.2, pp. 86-90). These goods aren’t interchangeable. They are literally “incommensurable”—they can’t be measured against each other.

It’s possible that some similar principle of incommensurability applies to the books we’ve been discussing. Would I want to give up, say, Pride and Prejudice in favor of The Lord of the Rings, or vice versa? They’re unique achievements, and we realize something quite different from reading each of them. We might be able to create some rather vague order of precedence—for example, by the traditional question of what one book you’d want to have with you if marooned on a desert island. But that’s not the same sort of comparison as equating a dollar with ten dimes.

On the other hand, the fun of weighing (note the measurement analogy) one story against another suggests there’s some common element, or elements, in our enjoyment of a good book. If nothing else, such match-ups can get some entertaining discussions going.

Moon Bases

March 11, 2018 / Rick Ellrod / 5 Comments

Widespread Lunacy

There’s a lot happening on the Moon, it seems. In the last several months I’ve read three different novels about the first lunar colony. And they really are recent: all three were published in 2017. “The world is too much with us,” perhaps—but in any case the Moon seems to be very much with us at the moment.

The stories come from very different points of view. We talked last time about Andy Weir’s Artemis, which gave us a cynical young woman’s view of a thriving lunar city built on tourism, complete with smugglers, mobsters, and mayhem. As we saw, Artemis illustrates anything but the clean-cut NASA world of its predecessor The Martian.

Gray Rinehart’s Walking on the Sea of Clouds follows two married couples, Stormie and Frank Pastorelli and Van and Barbara Richards, as they train for places at the first Moon base. The base is bankrolled by the Asteroid Consortium, multinational venture capitalists whose primary interest is in asteroid mining. The story revolves around the four main characters—how the lunar venture motivates them and affects their relationships. So much of the book involves training and preparation that it might be called a “science procedural,” on the model of the “police procedural” that focuses on the methodical work of a police investigation rather than the high-profile antics of private detectives.

Our third sample is Moon Beam, by Travis Taylor & Jody Lynn Nye. This is a middle-grade (MG) novel whose hero, sixteen-year-old farm girl Barbara Winton, is selected to join a group of brilliant young students under the wing of Dr. Keegan Bright, a Carl Sagan-like science communicator with a popular Webcast and a world-wide following. Bright and his students happen to be based at Armstrong City, the first moon colony. Barbara ends up taking the lead in a pathbreaking expedition by the “Bright Sparks” to set up a huge telescope on the far side of the Moon. The young people must cope with unexpected dangers on the way. (Unexpected by the characters, that is; readers will of course be primed to anticipate something more than mere routine.)

Common Ground

Despite their difference in tone, the three books have a lot in common. There’s a good deal of serious science in each one, though it properly stays in the background and doesn’t slow down the plot. The science is solid, too: none of the stories extrapolates far beyond technologies that we can practice, or reasonably predict, today. Nobody discovers a monolith left behind by mysterious aliens or discovers any exotic principles of physics (unless one counts the hypothetical “E-M” drive mentioned glancingly in Moon Beam).

The stories also share the assumption that private enterprise will play a leading role in creating these moon colonies. We saw that Weir’s Artemis is founded by the nation of Kenya, but as a venue for private businesses. Rinehart’s lunar base is funded by private corporations. Moon Beam doesn’t pay a lot of attention to how Armstrong City as a whole is operated; we spend almost all our time with Dr. Bright and his teenagers, who essentially constitute a private STEM demonstration project.

Enterprising Venturers

What’s with this rash of lunar narratives? Why is a permanent home on the Moon on our minds at this particular moment? Three examples is barely enough for a trend, of course. But half the fun of these observations is the chance to try out a wild extrapolation and see where it leads.

There was a surprising amount of popular interest in last year’s lunar eclipse—but that doesn’t explain why these books were already in the publishing pipeline for 2017. That astronomical attentiveness probably shares whatever is the cause of the booming market for moon stories.

Nor is the reason likely to be found in the sporadic statements from NASA or the federal government on the subject. The last several Administrations have been promising us the Moon, or Mars, on a regular basis, and we’re nowhere nearer either planet(oid) as a result.

But one thing has changed over the last five or ten years. We have a number of private ventures aiming at space travel, spearheaded by wealthy visionaries like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. Bezos’ Blue Origin (whose name “refers to the blue planet, Earth, as the point of origin,” according to Wikipedia) and Musk’s SpaceX (whose full name is “Space Exploration Technologies Corporation”) have made significant strides toward actual human spaceflight. They suggest a new kind of outward path, driven by private enterprise rather than government projects. That shift dovetails with the United States’ own policy of relying on private companies (or other countries) for launch services in the post-Space Shuttle era: space as a business venture looks considerably more promising with the government as an anchor tenant.

There’s plenty of science fiction precedent for private trips to the Moon. The first moon flights are made by private parties in Heinlein’s novella “The Man Who Sold the Moon” (1951) and its juvenile counterpart, Rocket Ship Galileo (1947). But it was NASA that carried out the real moon flights.

I grew up thinking of NASA as the natural venue for space exploration. But that was never supposed to be a permanent role. NASA’s job is to carry out the experimental work that provides the foundation for commercial aeronautics—and astronautics. Maybe we have arrived at the moment where the venture of expansion into space can be handed off to ordinary business enterprises. And maybe that’s turning our thoughts toward seeing the Moon as a place to live and work—not just to reach once upon a time.

From Martian to Moonling: Artemis

February 25, 2018 / Rick Ellrod / 6 Comments

Andy Weir took the world by storm with The Martian, both the book and the movie adaptation. Naturally, there was a great deal of interest in Weir’s second novel, Artemis (2017). Here’s my take.

The book’s been out long enough that the spoilers below won’t occasion a great deal of surprise, but if you haven’t read the story yet, you may want to save these gems of wisdom until you’ve done so.

A New Departure

First, Artemis is not a sequel to The Martian. As far as I can see, the two stories have nothing to do with each other. That’s good. It’s easy to get stuck in a single storyline, especially if it’s a howling success.

Moreover, Weir gets credit for trying out an entirely different kind of story. The Martian was a classic survival/rescue tale, populated by clean-cut NASA types. Artemis is more of a caper story, with a cast of crooks, con artists, and wheeler-dealers. They’re both set in space environments, but aside from that, the books are poles apart. That was intentional. As an interview in The Verge (11/14/17) reported, “Weir told me that following The Martian was scary, and that he shifted his expectations with writing it.”

A Motley Cast of Characters

Moving from a single exploratory mission to a thriving city on the Moon allows Weir to deploy a more varied array of characters. For example, our first-person narrator, Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara, is a small-time smuggler in Artemis, the first city on the moon. She’s a feisty, cynical young woman semi-estranged from her Muslim engineer father. Jazz’s ambitions are nothing so noble as exploring new worlds: she simply wants to make a lot of money so she can improve her hand-to-mouth life. She’s an engaging main character, if you like a scamp.

On the other hand, Jazz is not the charming sort of scamp you might envision—a female Han Solo or Aladdin. She’s tough, no-nonsense, and rather abrasive. Weir noted in a Newsweek interview (11/14/17) that readers don’t much like her. I found that an issue too. There are a lot of unfortunate character traits to deal with. Jazz is practically a genius (in ch. 3, she admits nonchalantly that she taught herself electronics from an online tutorial in an afternoon)—but she doesn’t live up to her potential. She’s promiscuous, she’s materialistic, she sees almost all transactions in terms of money.

Jazz’s main virtue is that she’s an ethical thief: when she makes a shady deal, she sticks to it. Actually, this rude sense of justice isn’t a bad place to start respecting a character. Like the proverbial honest politician (“one who stays bought”), she has some principles. She’s also daring (if reckless), clever (if hardly infallible), brave, and determined. Although she wasn’t my most-loved character of all time, I enjoyed hanging out with her enough that I didn’t lose interest in the story.

Other characters are pretty varied: Martin Svoboda, the geeky engineer lacking social skills; Trond, the slick magnate, and his engaging daughter Lene; Ammar Bashara, Jazz’s considerably more strait-laced but competent and loyal father; law-abiding Rudy DuBois, the city’s entire police force; Fidelis Ngugi, the visionary founder of Artemis; and so on.

There’s no romance in the story, although there’s a faint suggestion at the end that Jazz will eventually get together with Martin—not a combination I would have thought of.

A Land of Liberty and License

Weir pictures the first lunar city as a lightly-governed free-for-all. It’s been established by Kenya, which in this scenario takes the advantage of its equatorial location for space launches. Under Ngugi’s leadership, Kenya sets up an attractive, largely unregulated base for businesses on the Moon—mainly businesses connected with tourism. It’s a logical financial basis for the first moon colony. The situation reflects Weir’s fascination with economics, an aspect that didn’t have much play in The Martian.

In the interview with The Verge, Weir uses the term “libertarian”—and in that connection cites the Robert A. Heinlein novel The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress (1966), which does leap to mind as a predecessor. Heinlein’s story, perhaps his best single novel, imagines the Moon as a multinational penal colony, just as Australia was for Britain in the eighteenth century. Since the colony’s administration doesn’t much care what happens to the inhabitants, they’re left to manage their own internal affairs, according to customs and practices that evolve out of the peculiar conditions of lunar life. The result is a colorful, freewheeling polyglot society that allows Heinlein to make a lot of pithy observations about conventional Earthly manners and mores.

Heinlein’s “Loonies” live in a harsh but in some ways utopian culture. Weir’s Artemis is not presented in quite so favorable a light. We do enjoy the chiaroscuro combination of resort-town luxury and shady underbelly in which Jazz operates. But it’s clearly a hardscrabble life for a considerable part of the population—the service people and human ‘infrastructure’ that make the tourists’ luxury possible. It’s what Weir, in the interview, calls a “gold rush” setting.

On the other hand, this libertarian polity is seen as a stage in a long progression, not a utopian end in itself. Toward the end of the story (ch. 17, p. 300), Fidelis Ngugi, the visionary founder, says: “It’s all part of the life-cycle of an economy. First it’s lawless capitalism until that starts to impede growth. Next comes regulation, law enforcement, and taxes. After that: public benefits and entitlements. Then, finally, over-expenditure and collapse.”

Because Artemis is so colorful and well-drawn, the city is almost a character in itself, like Dickens’ London or Nero Wolfe’s New York City. I wouldn’t mind seeing more stories set in Artemis as it develops.

Science Capers

One thing the book does have in common with The Martian: science. Weir frequently drops into detailed explanations of How Things Work, and the conditions of the lunar environment play key roles in the plot, as the Martian landscape did in the prior book. I find this fascinating. I’m not sure whether every reader will—but the success of The Martian (in both its incarnations) suggests there’s a sizable audience that does. More on that point in a later post.

But the science here is at the service of a very different plot. With the prospect of a vast payoff, Jazz evolves a complex plan to undermine one business so that another can take over. She then has to devise an even more involved scheme to keep gangsters from effectively taking over the city. Readers of The Martian can find a common form of enjoyment here, in watching these plans play out, even though the characters’ purposes and contexts are rather different.

There’s actually a good deal of precedent for this “science caper” type of story. The old “Mission Impossible” TV series typically displayed an elaborate scheme deployed by the mission team to outwit and bamboozle the bad guys. (Not so much the more recent movies, which tend to be more general-purpose thrillers.) The 1985–1992 series “MacGyver” also turned on the technical wizardry of the lead character, a consummate engineering improviser.

In fact, there’s a whole category of techno-thrillers about using complex plans and technology to break into something or make off with something. Sometimes the emphasis is on the trickery, as in The Thomas Crown Affair (I saw the 1999 version). Sometimes it’s more on the techniques, as in Entrapment or the early part of National Treasure. Many of the James Bond films invoke this trope.

Much of The Martian consisted of scientific problem-solving, though on a more low-key, continuing basis. (Mark Watney remarks that he’s going to have to “science the s— out of this” to survive, though given the way he fertilizes his crop, maybe he should have said “science the s— into this.”) Only at the end does the techno-wizardry move into crisis mode.

In Weir’s Verge interview, he says, “My approach was pretty similar to The Martian. There was a lot of problem-solving . . .” The difference is that Jazz’s science schemes in Artemis face hostile human opposition, not just a dangerous universe. The suspense is more focused and urgent.

The Next Movie

Artemis seems even more cinematically apt than The Martian. It’s no surprise that the movie rights have already been sold and directors chosen. We can monitor developments here at IMDB.

I don’t know whether Artemis will be as successful as The Martian at the theaters. The abrasive heroine might turn out to be less of a crowd-pleaser than the amiable Watney. But that’s just the kind of nuance that a movie could easily adjust. It’ll be interesting to see them try.

Unlikable Lovers

February 11, 2018October 7, 2018 / Rick Ellrod / 10 Comments

It’s hard to root for a romance if you don’t care about the characters. We generally sympathize with the main character (“MC”). But that’s not always so for the MC’s romantic interest (the “RI,” let’s say). What happens when we don’t like the person the MC’s supposed to be interested in?

There’s a variety of types of problematic lovers, and sometimes a particular type is called for by the nature of the plot. Let’s look at a few.

The Friendly Enemy

There’s an entire category of plotline in which the eventually happy couple start out at odds with each other. TV Tropes captions this “Belligerent Sexual Tension,” and has a splendid list of examples. They range from Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing with the feuding Beatrice and Benedick (here’s the Tropes page) through F&SF examples like Leia and Han in The Empire Strikes Back, Kim Kinnison and Clarissa MacDougall in the Lensman series, Taran and Eilonwy in the Chronicles of Prydain, Aravis and Shasta in C.S. Lewis’s The Horse and His Boy.

A subcategory of these turnabout stories involves characters who fight in one context while falling for each other in another. 1998’s You’ve Got Mail, and its predecessors such as The Shop Around the Corner (1940), fall into this group, as does my forthcoming novella The World Around the Corner.

Sometimes the turbulence between the main characters is based on some conflict in their characters (scoundrel and diplomat in Empire) or their interests (rival businesses in You’ve Got Mail). Sometimes it’s almost a matter of their own combativeness or aggressive attitudes, as in the romantic comedy Laws of Attraction (2004). But the writer has to walk a fine line here. If the relationship is so strained as to become hostile or nasty, we may begin to wonder whether the RI is that great a catch after all. Would Leia be better off with a “nice man”? (Other than Luke, of course.) In You’ve Got Mail, is Frank disqualified by his willingness to take unfair advantage of the fact that he knows who Kathleen is and not vice versa?

In a fight-then-flirt scenario, the romantic interest has to be sufficiently flawed that his tension with the MC doesn’t seem contrived—yet not so flawed that the attraction seems implausible. The tension must be difficult enough to pose a challenge, and to keep the romance from concluding too quickly. But the RI has to be admirable enough to be worth winning.

Winning Over the Bad Boy

There’s another class of plots that depend on making the romantic interest disreputable, troubled, or outright wicked. Not too wicked, of course; they’ve got to be capable of reform—by the right lover. We see this predominantly with female MCs and male RIs, but not exclusively so.

Take Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind. His appeal seems to lie especially in the fact that he’s a smuggler who defies the gentleman’s code of the antebellum South and pokes fun at their romanticized ideals. Scarlett O’Hara doesn’t set out to reform him, but she does find him fascinating. And she does reform him, as we can see but she can’t. Interestingly, in this case Scarlett herself is pretty problematic too: she’s a difficult, self-centered, domineering woman, with whom it can be hard to sympathize—though we do sympathize, mainly because we can see her inner thinking and where those traits come from. (Personally, I always liked Melanie better.)

Edward Rochester of Jane Eyre barely escapes crossing the line into unacceptability, to my mind. He’s brusque, domineering, and frighteningly deceptive. We’re willing to approve him mostly because Jane is in love with him, and we love Jane. And his comedown at the end both chastens him and engages our pity.

In my view, Wuthering Heights’ Healthcliff does cross the line. I’m unmoved by his harsh and erratic behavior, and I don’t respect Catherine for her mad attachment to him. He lacks redeeming qualities. On the other hand, his very flamboyant unlikability is the basis for a hilarious imaginary counseling session held for the novel’s characters in Jasper Fforde’s The Well of Lost Plots (2003, chapter 12)—so I guess there’s some justification for his existence, at that.

The Proud, the Crude, and the Gothic

Few of these undesirable, yet desirable, RIs are as comprehensively intolerable as Heathcliff. Generally one or two off-putting traits are enough to create the necessary tension or conflict.

The archetype of the proud or arrogant RI, of course, is the much-loved Mr. Darcy of Pride and Prejudice. Darcy has some unpleasant attitudes and makes some dreadful missteps, but Austen succeeds in convincing us that he’s admirable for all that, partly through his delayed but ultimately sincere devotion to Elizabeth. Darcy retains such a hold on romantics that he’s even been successful as an artificial intelligence (AI) in Ashlinn Craven’s contemporary story.

Our era’s fondness for the earthy and outrageous gives us a procession of crude romantic interests, whose vulgarity or rudeness may represent a barrier to be overcome by the Right Woman or merely a species of candor and bluntness—especially in romantic comedies. Mike Chadway in The Ugly Truth (2009) has made a profession out of cynicism and outrageousness, but comes around in the end, after we’ve seen that his attitude stems from a past rejection. The main character of Andy Weir’s 2017 novel Artemis sails perilously close to this edge. But in this era we’re tolerant enough of crudity that the merely indecorous RI doesn’t usually pose a problem.

The brooding, Gothic or Byronic hero can also win readers’ hearts—witness Edward Cullen in the Twilight series. But his kind of moodiness can so easily slip into annoying self-indulgence that it’s highly vulnerable to parody. We may be more inclined to snicker than to sympathize, as we see in much of the critical response to Twilight.

The Misguided Romantic Interest

One of the easiest ways to generate conflict without wholly compromising the RI is to make them simply mistaken or wrongheaded. This aligns neatly with a plot in which the MC shows the romantic interest the error of his (or her) ways.

Pretty Woman (1990) is a fine example. Edward Lewis (the third Edward on our list so far—coincidence?) is a repressed workaholic who uncaringly buys up business operations and sells them off in pieces. Lively Vivian Ward not only loosens him up personally, but goads him into “using his powers for good” and working to save a company rather than break it up. Edward’s change of heart in business parallels the more obvious romantic softening and emphasizes the completeness of his transformation.

A character—particularly a female character—working for the bad guys is especially subject to this kind of change. For example, the atypical Disney heroine Megara in Hercules (1997) aids the scheming Hades, albeit for initially noble reasons. There’s an entire category of such repentant subvillainesses, documented by the ever-vigilant TV Tropes.

Because the merely misguided RI is only superficially unworthy, this trope is a favorite of Hallmark Christmas romances, where either the MC or the love interest is often a big-city character who wants to turn some idyllic country spot into a soulless commercial enterprise. This kind of relationship works equally well for either gender.

Overdominance

Genre romance with a female MC has a certain fondness for the strong, dominant male RI. (If you belong to Critique Circle, here’s a lengthy forum discussion on the “alpha male” from mid-2017.) But this can easily go awry. What sounds romantic at first blush may be creepy or distasteful once we think of it in real life. Many of the male leads discussed above can be classified as dominant types, but there’s a fine line between dominant and domineering. When this is taken to extremes, we can drift into the dubious territory of the Fifty Shades books.

But we don’t have to go that far to encounter difficulties. Heinlein’s juvenile SF novel The Star Beast features a somewhat passive hero, John Thomas Stuart XI, and his bratty high-school girlfriend, Betty Sorenson. Betty is laudably active and independent, but she’s so brash and overbearing that she rather gets on my nerves. We like to see both strong women and strong men—but we don’t like to see them demonstrate their strength in ways that are tyrannical or overbearing.

The various iterations of Beauty and the Beast illustrate the difficulty. The Beast has to be fearsomely harsh and threatening; that’s the point. But this quality can’t be so exaggerated as to undermine his potential for transformation into a caring lover.

Excuses

A romantic interest’s bad behavior can be offset when the author provides information that makes the actions understandable, or even sympathetic. An io9 article by Charlie Jane Anders makes the general argument that there are “10 Ways to Make Everyone Root for Your Amoral Protagonist.”

Anders is a good source on the subject: her Hugo-nominated 2016 novel All the Birds in the Sky features male and female protagonists who are each highly stressed and at times hard to love. But the ending, to my mind, is very satisfying. Part of the reason is that we see so much of the characters’ prior experiences and difficulties. We comprehend how they got to where they are.

One technique that can help us excuse a character’s faults is to let us hear them speaking in first person at least part of the time. The romance technique of telling the story by alternating the two principal characters’ viewpoints does the same thing. It’s rare that characters seem evil to themselves, and letting us in on their thoughts gives us a useful perspective.

Female Variations

We’ve noted that the “bad boy” characters are generally, though not exclusively, male RIs for female MCs. There are other potentially troublesome character types that tend to skew female. One is the Manic Pixie Dream Girl: as TV Tropes puts it, “She’s stunningly attractive, [e]nergetic, high on life, full of wacky quirks and idiosyncrasies (generally including childlike playfulness) . . . She’s inexplicably obsessed with our stuffed-shirt hero, on whom she will focus her kuh-razy antics until he learns to live freely and love madly.” An example that seems to go too far is Sandra Bullock’s character in Forces of Nature (1999). Possibly this is why, unusually, the hero ends up marrying someone else, although he benefits from the Dream Girl’s free-spirited attitudes.

Another primarily female archetype is what we might call the Siren, the mysteriously fascinating and unattainable character with whom the male MC is irresistibly obsessed—frequently capricious and even cruel. My favorite example is the title character in Stanley Weinbaum’s SF classic The Black Flame. Here, as with the equally melodramatic Byronic hero, the character type has been so overused that it’s easy for it to become either unbelievable or unlikable.

When It’s the Main Character

Less common, but not unheard-of, is where the main character is the one whose romantic suitability is in question. We’ve noted Artemis as one such case.

I recently got around to watching About a Boy (2002), starring Hugh Grant, which came highly recommended by Connie Willis. While it’s been observed that Hugh Grant is inherently irresistible, I found that in this case his character was so aimless and shallow that I felt the women in the story would indeed be well advised to steer clear of him, until almost the very end, when he finally shapes up a bit.

The 1999 romantic comedy 10 Things I Hate About You (a modernization of The Taming of the Shrew) also successfully makes the main character just sympathetic enough to sustain our interest. It’s essential to the Shakespearean plot that Kat be so prickly and abrasive as to be a questionable romantic prospect. But the excuses we hear, and the perfect fit of the actress’s persona to the dual requirements of abrasion and attraction, give us just enough to go on.

Conclusion

In gauging the acceptability of a character as a romantic partner, even more than in most such judgment calls, “your mileage may vary.” But we can all recognize that just as there’s peril in making the romantic interest too perfect, there’s a corresponding set of pitfalls if the object of our MC’s affections pushes imperfection to the point of no return.

Rick Ellrod's Observatory

Science fiction and fantasy, philosophy, music and romance

Andy Weir

The Great American Read