Review: Interstellar MegaChef

Interstellar MegaChef by Lavanya Lakshminarayan
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

Unlike some other books I've read recently, this one at least makes an attempt at worldbuilding, rather than just taking a contemporary milieu and transposing it wholesale into a supposedly different time and place for the sake, apparently, of the aesthetic.

Unfortunately, a lot of the worldbuilding just didn't work for me. The backstory is that 300 years from now, Earth gave up on nations and united, and sent out interstellar missions to colonize (though of course that word isn't used) new planets. Two thousand years later, Earth has somehow fallen back into a war-torn, environmentally degraded, human-rights-violating primitive hellhole looked down on by all its probably-shouldn't-call-them-colonies, and the self-proclaimed centre of culture is on another planet entirely.

Now, I could just have bought 300 years, even if some of the minor cultural features did seem a bit too close to our own present day. But I never believed in the 2000 years even for a fraction of a second. It seemed far too long for the small amount of change and the large amount of stability (including Earth being, apparently, in a stable state of internal strife and environmental degradation). And then there were so many small details that just didn't make sense to me. For example, it's somehow more environmentally friendly to expend what must be a huge amount of energy on the city's buildings constantly changing shape (using the technology of programmable matter), and compensating for this by the manipulation of gravity so that people inside them don't notice (and I didn't understand how that would work either). This doesn't appear to cause any negative psychological effects, even though humans rely on landmarks and other constants in their environments to give themselves a sense of stability.

Cooking is a key part of the plot of the book, and even there, there was a detail that seemed odd to me. From everything I've been taught, if you were making a fish curry, you'd start out by making the sauce to give it time to develop, and cook the fish only in the last few minutes, because it cooks quickly (that's to do with how fish muscles don't have to support themselves against gravity, like the muscles of land creatures). The cooked fish doesn't need to rest, for the same reason, or certainly not for very long. But when one of the main characters, a highly trained chef in a major cooking competition, makes fish curry in the course of an hour, she cooks the fish first and leaves it to rest, then starts the sauce, and finally cooks the fish some more in the sauce and then even more inside bamboo-leaf parcels. This, to me, sounds like an excellent way to have overcooked fish, but maybe I'm missing some nuance of technique.

At one and the same time, the economy of the distant planet appears to be communist (you can't choose where you live, you get assigned housing that's the same quality as everyone else's) and capitalist (there's a corporation that's been around for centuries, things it produces cost a lot and make a lot of money). I couldn't make sense of it.

I also consider the "easier to leave Earth than fix it" trope a potentially toxic one, in that it cultivates an attitude of helplessness in the face of our problems, and is arguably also not supported by the facts. That's a debate that can be had, and I do generally make allowance for tropes in genre fiction, and this one is necessary to kick off the story situation, but I'm noting that I don't love it.

The copy editing/prose is much better than average. I gather that the author was born in, and is still resident in, India; if this is the case, it seems the Indian education system is much better at teaching English than the British or American education systems, judging by the average products of British and American authors, or else this author is exceptional, or has had a very good editor. (I read a pre-publication ARC via Netgalley, and those are usually bad.) Just a few excess hyphens and a strange use of the word "hoarded". On the other hand, sometimes the prose is so exuberant and and attention-seeking that it fails at its main job of conveying what happened and what things look like, especially early on.

The three viewpoint characters are not likeable. They are egotistical and nakedly ambitious and alienated. It's not, of course, compulsory to have likeable characters, but I personally prefer it in the books I read. The most likeable of the three (for me) is the chef, who comes from an awful family of corrupt politicians and became a chef partly to escape them and partly because she loves it; her main fault is that she's obsessively driven, which from what I understand is pretty standard among top-class chefs. The least likeable is the technologist, a rude self-centred diva who is absolutely determined not to have a relationship that means anything, and drives herself and her colleagues too hard out of ambition and existential emptiness. (That would be more plausible, by the way, if the company was a startup rather than being centuries old.) In the middle is the politician, who is willing to ignore the basic principles by which the polity is supposed to live in pursuit of cultural dominance by her own planet, and the fact that she wasn't the least likeable character should give you some idea of just how awful the technologist is.

Between constantly disbelieving the worldbuilding and not enjoying any of the characters, I took a break and read something else to give the book my "do I care enough what happens to these people to come back to them" test, and decided that I didn't. Perhaps they learn important lessons. Perhaps they improve the systems that have mangled them. I didn't choose to stick around to find out.

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