Lucas Blogs About Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

Oh yeah, one of the pages came loose while reading. Might want to get on that Saga Press.

Hey! Once again I'm setting aside the framework of the Hypothetical Reader to discuss a book that I enjoyed, and yet feel hasn't quite lived up to its potential. This time it's Temi Oh's debut science fiction novel, Do You Dream of Terra-Two? On an unrelated note, I'm a sucker for books whose titles are questions. I mean, I don't always buy them, but I think it's an effective marketing gimmick because it automatically engages the potential reader. Although it is sort of a double-edged sword because the response could just be, "Well, that's a stupid question." Anyway, in the case of this book, I initially misread the title as Oh Do You Dream of Terra-Two? because only the author's surname was given on the spine.

Back on topic. Do You Dream of Terra-Two? is about the United Kingdom Space Agency's attempt to launch the first manned mission to the titular planet. See, Terra-Two is the name given to an extra-solar planet approximately 3-ish light-years from Earth that is in the "Goldilocks Zone" that has two suns, two moons, and an abundance of life. At least according to a probe that was able to send back photographs. The expedition will take the crew of the portentously named Damocles interstellar vessel twenty-two years to complete and is meant to serve as a vanguard for future colonization of the planet. Pretty standard Asimov/Campbell Golden Age type stuff. Rugged individuals using science to tackle mankind's problems in the final frontier. But what if [record scratch] most of the crew were children?

Okay, so because the journey will take so long, the UKSA has decided that most of the crew members of the Damocles should be in their late teens. So they open a special school specifically to train and select astronauts for the voyage. Kids apply between the ages of eleven and thirteen and once there are subject to a draconian and grueling academic and athletic regimen (along with a battery of frequent physical and psychological examinations) that will result in what is called the Beta: the group of six teens who will accompany a team of seasoned spacefarers from the 20th century space race (including both the first man on Mars and the previous youngest man in space) on the expedition. The Beta comprises Poppy Lane, the bubbly, red-headed polyglot who will serve as the communications officer and beam science lessons back to kids on Earth; Harry Bellgrave, the hot-shot of the school's piloting program and the commander-in-training; Astrid and Juno Juma, twin sisters whose missionary father instilled them with a strong faith and who will be training to be the expedition's astrobiologist and medic; Eliot Liston, the moody and withdrawn engineering wunderkind; and Ara Shah, who is set to be the expedition's junior botanist until her shocking suicide on the day before launch.

That's right, it turns out that Jesse Solloway, the viewpoint character from the first chapter who makes it through the Dalton School (named for the woman who first noticed the wobble indicative of an extrasolar planet) only to be relegated to the backup team for the Beta will actually have a chance to prove himself after all. Now, it's probably apparent to you that there are some . . . ethical issues with having a school where you train kids as young as eleven to be astronauts on a twenty-plus year interstellar flight. And this is made even more clear when you find out that not only is the UKSA continuing with the launch as scheduled, they're also switching out the ship's medical officer at the last moment. Meaning that not only do the Beta have to deal with the sudden loss of a close friend and comrade, they have to give up their trusted and admired counsellor. But everything will be fine. I mean, they're all about eighteen or nineteen now, so they're adults, right? They can make their own choices about about lifetime commitments, right? They've all had time for potentially mission-disrupting mental health concerns to be discovered and treated, right? Right?

I mean, you've read novels before, right?

So, there are your obvious sources of conflict: the other members of the Beta resenting Jesse for stepping in to replace Ara; the fact that their medic doesn't want to be there; the fact that people in their late teens can seem surprisingly mature without having outgrown some of their worst impulses; and the fact that if you ask six people who've spent the last six years viewing each other as rivals to start working together tensions will be inevitable. Oh, and lots of Odd Couple: "Can six teenagers share a space ship without driving each other crazy?" shenanigans that eventually escalate to a "prank" where Harry pretends he's going to vent Jesse out of an airlock. And that's just the problems that people report. Poppy sinks into depression once Earth is no longer distinguishable from other celestial bodies, Astrid begins having vivid dreams of Terra-Two, Eliot begins hallucinating Ara as a ghostly presence on the ship, Juno has an eating disorder (that's right, has, as in she's been successfully hiding it on Earth), you get the idea.

And I don't want to make it sound I object to all the YA interpersonal drama. That's fine. If you're going to read a TEENS IN SPAAAAACE! novel, you expect there to be a certain amount of drama. It's just that Oh just doesn't quite stick the landing in resolving these conflicts. The resolutions usually feel a bit too neat. For example, I would call Harry's treatment of Jesse unforgivable, but their reconciliation is accomplished relatively easily. Likewise, the characters with serious mental health issues largely admit that they have a problem, seek treatment and it's sort of portrayed as "crisis averted" rather than a first step. Now, I don't want to say that Oh minimizes any of these problems, they are all treated with an appropriate weight, it's just that by the end of the book the portrayals don't quite ring true.

That's a shame because there are several other aspects of the novel that showcase Oh as a talented writer. She's quite good at knowing when to show and when to tell. An example of this is in Juno's unhealthy relationship with food. She's shown carefully rationing the small amount of junk food she's allowed to bring on the expedition, then going on a binge. She's self-conscious about the fact that other characters notice that she's losing weight. By the time everyone else catches onto the fact that her eating habits aren't healthy, the reader will be forgiven a certain smugness. Oh also deploys this careful attention to detail when it comes to the ethical implications of the novel's premise. Throughout the book there are references to the fact that the Damocles's mission is controversial, and subject to lawsuits and investigations. You know, because of the fact that training kids to spend the rest of their life in space is unconscionable. But it isn't until the end that it's revealed that . . . oh wait, it's a SPOILER: Ara commits suicide because she thinks the UKSA is ignoring the high likelihood of mission failure in order to get the glory for launching the "first" mission to reach Terra-two. Anyway, the point is that the whole novel is sort of "about" how the main idea of the expedition is flawed and Oh does a good job of demonstrating this rather than outright stating it.

Oh's talent is also on display in the book's near-compulsive readability. Her ability to craft suspense meant that I was able to read the whole thing on airplanes and in airports on my trip to Illinois for my grandma's 90th birthday party. And you might say, "But Lucas, you were a captive audience. What were you going to do, put the book down and stare at the seat in front of you?" Which is a fair point. But even as I found myself disappointed with the neatness of the resolutions, I still compelled to keep reading and find out what happened to these characters. The situations they're in are inherently suspenseful and, as mentioned, Oh is able to communicate a good deal without belaboring the obvious.

One of the things that's both a strength and a weakness of the novel is the setting. Once again, Oh shines by filling in background details without infodumps. We learn that the UKSA (or it's predecessors) have been conducting manned space flight since at least World War I, that the Space Race was a good deal more ambitious, but that Neil Armstrong was still the first man on the Moon, and that the Soviet Union still seems to exist (one of the older astronauts is a cosmonaut who defected to the UK in order to develop his new propulsion technology for the Damocles), and also, it's 2012. It's cool that we get to learn this alternate history in bits and pieces (although one detail I haven't mentioned makes a plot development toward the end of the novel easy to predict) but the fact that it all takes place in the recent past makes the whole thing feel a little weird. It's sort of like when you read an old science fiction novel that takes place in 1999 or something like that. Also, while the world seems drastically different in some ways, the fact that events like the 2008 recession and 2012 London Olympics and, let's face it, the Moon Landing, still happened the same way as in our reality seems like a bit of a stretch.

So, yeah, this is a fun novel with a premise that guarantees both suspense and conflict, but which suffers a bit from a lack of verisimilitude. But it's well-written and I'm actually curious to see what Temi Oh follows it up with.

Do You Dream of Terra-Two? by Temi Oh, Saga Press trade paperback edition, 2019, 532 pages, pairs well with macronutrient broth and undiagnosed psychological issues that might disqualify you from a twenty-two year space mission

Links:

Here's the author's website, if you're into that kinda thing.