Do You Dream of Terra-Two? - Temi Oh

I was really excited for this book. Some of my favorite books have a similar setup, such as Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora, or Greg Egan's Orthogonal series, or Beth Revis' Across the Universe (which is also a young adult novel). There is something incredibly compelling about a crew of people struggling to survive a huge journey through space with nothing but smarts and teamwork (and, I guess, many metric tons of expensive space hardware). Unfortunately, Do You Dream of Terra-Two? ended up striking me as mostly a soapy drama with a baffling plot and details that make no sense in the context of interstellar travel.

Given the harsh take I just launched above, let me qualify it by saying I have not written a sci-fi novel in my own life (maybe my Ph.D. dissertation gets close). I can only imagine how difficult it is, especially since it is Temi Oh's first book. So, let me clarify that I am taking issue with this story, but am grateful that the story is out there for people to read. I complain about a bunch of fine details, so perhaps my take is unnecessarily cynical. Probably, I am not the target audience for this book. Finally, let me say there are tons of spoilers from here on in this review.

When I have exceedingly negative views of a book, I'm curious to see what other people think. There are very positive reviews from NPR and a book blog focusing on underrepresented and marginalized views. There are also some other mixed reviews, the latter of which alludes to the idea that not everyone really loved this book. But none of them are nearly as harsh a review as my own -- so take everything I say with a heaping helping of salt!

The plot is as follows. An Earth-like planet, Terra-Two, has been discovered in a nearby solar system, and the UK's space agency is creating a manned mission to go colonize it. To crew the mission, they create an elite school where the best and brightest children get accelerated courses in everything they might need to be astronauts -- and, at the end of the day, only six of them will be chosen. We follow these six through the ordeals of school, family, and teen love, until they eventually end up on the ship that will take them to Terra-Two. Shenanigans ensue, the crew ends up staying in our solar system after getting rescued conveniently by a presumably-lost Chinese interstellar crew, and the book ends with just a couple of the crew deciding to try going to Terra-Two after all. I felt it was a really disappointing and rushed plot -- at least they could have made it to the other planet, but they barely made it to Saturn.

A few particular details stick out to me as particularly frustrating: the ship, the history, and the interpersonal dynamics. Beware, from here on, I'm just stating very specific complaints so that, when I look back on this blog in several years, I'll remember things about this book.

The Damocles, the spacecraft on which our intrepid crew is to voyage for 23 years, makes hardly any sense. Some details seem like minor oversights about how one would design technology for use in space. For example, all over the ship, there are hanging glass lamps and mirrors, which the characters are constantly breaking. Furthermore, the garden on the ship is mounted in the center, with the lowest artificial gravity (created by the ship's spin). Besides this making it unnecessarily difficult to grow plants, it would also cause severe drainage issues, as has been explored in Aurora or Joan Sloncewski's The Highest Frontier. Finally, the plot makes a huge point of the shipboard greenhouse taking a year of work to get up-and-running after the crew has been on board, forcing them to eat pre-made meals until then. The Damocles was built in space and stocked over the course of five years before the main characters arrived, so why wouldn't the craft's engineers have planned to get the greenhouse working earlier?

The alternative history in the book is also a mess to ponder. It is clearly established that humans have been going to space for over half a century by the time the book takes place (in 2012). Indeed, the book is absolutely correct in establishing how important it is to the possibility of an interstellar mission that humans have been in space for a long time, and have visited the far reaches of the solar system. Yet, the ramifications of a culture in space have no effect on the rest of society, nor on its science and engineering. The alternative history still has the same wars, the same nations, and the same popular figures as our own history. It frustrates me that the story would massively alter the past without fleshing out more of the possible social and cultural ramifications.

The book's history leads to its most incredibly nonsensical aspect: the social interactions of the crew. Nearly the entirety of the plot is driven by interpersonal conflict, which begins before the characters even leave Earth, and persists the entire time aboard the Damocles. If humans had been in space for so long, wouldn't we be much better about picking crews to cohabit a spacecraft for extended periods of time? Wouldn't the main and backup crews of the most expensive mission in human history be chosen to get along, and be fully prepared to leave their lives on Earth behind? As a contrasting example, in Peter Watts' Blindsight, there is plenty of inter-crew conflict and confusion, but it makes sense in the context of the book, because the crew consists entirely of altered superhumans with severe personality disorders who are knowingly sent on a suicide mission. On the other hand, in Do You Dream of Terra-Two?, the crew have trained together from a young age and been specifically groomed for this mission. Yet, they have never gone to space before the main mission, have never been locked together in any sort of isolation simulation, and have nearly no overlap in their roles to cover each other during inevitable emergencies. This lack of sensible mission planning permeates even into the spacecraft design: the young crew are split by gender into two three-person rooms, whereas the four senior crew members each get their own rooms. How could such a setup ever be feasible for twenty-three years of life on board?

At the very end of the book, there is a small consolation. One of the characters, who commits suicide early on, supposedly learned that the entire mission was doomed to fail, and that nobody on Earth actually believed in it. This could have been a really intriguing point -- maybe the crew could have beat the odds, and upset The Man! Instead it came across to me as a sort of plothole-plugging afterthought.

Altogether, though I wish it were otherwise, I strongly recommend reading any other book about interstellar travel. Start with Across the Universe, then Aurora, then lean in to the Orthogonal series. Or go get the entire Hainish cycle and let it consume you! Meanwhile, I'll wait for Temi Oh's next book to see how it shakes out.