Weightless
Feb. 2nd, 2021 10:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishJohn M. Ford, Growing Up Weightless
Growing Up Weightless is a damnably opaque book, even for Ford. On the surface it's the story of Matt, a kid on a Lunar colony who wants to go to space; he and his role-playing friends sneak off for a week-long train trip, and at the end of it he unexpectedly, almost accidentally, achieves his desire. And behind and underneath that... I have read the book maybe a half dozen times now and I am not sure I could explain the "plot," which I think revolves around Luna's push for self-sufficiency and the Vaccuum Corporation of Earth's attempts to exert control. (I believe that at one point Mike said something like "No one in Weightless knows all of what's going on. At the end of the book Albin constructs a narrative of events, that's plausible from his perspective.")
And the last twenty pages still make me cry every damned time. I suspect that's as simple as seeing Matt get the freedom he so badly wants, and how that affects his (supportive but hurt) family and (wildly varied) friends. It's a Me Thing, is I guess what I'm saying.
I mentally file Weightless as a companion piece with The Last Hot Time, which is only right in that they're both about growing up (different angles on it, though). I think it's really that they both invoke Orwell at the end, almost in passing: "The object of power is power, and the object of torture is torture."
I don't love Growing Up Weightless. I like the well-thought-out worldbuilding (except for the overly compressed timescale), I like the depictions of role-playing and of one-sixth-gravity theatre. I'm happy to spend time with the characters, and to keep trying to tease out the "plot." But I reread Weightless for catharsis. It's a personal book for me, and I expect most people to say "huh" or "that was neat" and be done with it. I'm okay with that.
Growing Up Weightless is a damnably opaque book, even for Ford. On the surface it's the story of Matt, a kid on a Lunar colony who wants to go to space; he and his role-playing friends sneak off for a week-long train trip, and at the end of it he unexpectedly, almost accidentally, achieves his desire. And behind and underneath that... I have read the book maybe a half dozen times now and I am not sure I could explain the "plot," which I think revolves around Luna's push for self-sufficiency and the Vaccuum Corporation of Earth's attempts to exert control. (I believe that at one point Mike said something like "No one in Weightless knows all of what's going on. At the end of the book Albin constructs a narrative of events, that's plausible from his perspective.")
And the last twenty pages still make me cry every damned time. I suspect that's as simple as seeing Matt get the freedom he so badly wants, and how that affects his (supportive but hurt) family and (wildly varied) friends. It's a Me Thing, is I guess what I'm saying.
I mentally file Weightless as a companion piece with The Last Hot Time, which is only right in that they're both about growing up (different angles on it, though). I think it's really that they both invoke Orwell at the end, almost in passing: "The object of power is power, and the object of torture is torture."
I don't love Growing Up Weightless. I like the well-thought-out worldbuilding (except for the overly compressed timescale), I like the depictions of role-playing and of one-sixth-gravity theatre. I'm happy to spend time with the characters, and to keep trying to tease out the "plot." But I reread Weightless for catharsis. It's a personal book for me, and I expect most people to say "huh" or "that was neat" and be done with it. I'm okay with that.