Pete's Log: Days of Grass
Entry #1227, (Books, Writing, n such)(posted when I was 23 years old.)
While I was home over break I was given the opportunity to take any books I wanted out of several boxes full. Most of the books I took I chose because they looked like good books. But I also chose a few books that were blatantly bad science fiction. And last night I found myself wanting to read some bad science fiction. So I read Tanith Lee's Days of Grass. It was 250 pages of trash and I worked my way through it as some sick exercise in who knows what.
The story was unbelievable, unappealing, and, I'm pretty sure, self-contradicting at times. The characters were unbelievable and unlikable. The writing was confused and generally poor.
I feel no reason not to share the plot here, so if you think you will ever want to read this novel yourself, you may want to quit reading now. The premise is that 150 years ago alien invaders forced humanity underground. Now Esther, a young woman whose parents died long ago, has found her way Above (yes, Above and Below are capitalized in this book) and begins making regular trips there despite a law forbidding it. After several years she is caught because people notice she has a tan. She is brought to the leader of their colony, and instead of getting in trouble, is taken under his wing. He teaches her the history of how they came to be underground and so on and eventually confesses to her he wants her to be the next leader. On her next trip Above, Esther sees one of the invaders for the first time and also runs into Cury, a man who has been living above ground. She returns Below with Cury to find the leader has died. So she makes herself the new leader. Cury is suddenly revealed as a traitorous dog-minded masochist with prurient vampirism habits. He betrays the colony to the invaders and they are all captured. The invaders take the poor humans to their city for who knows what purpose. Except Esther is kept separate from the rest of the humans. She then apparently spends several months doing little other than having sex. Then she gets to meet one of the aliens up close and personal. He turns out to look exactly like a human because obviously an alien race would only be interested in conquering earth if they were, physically, very similar to humans. What? So then more time goes by in which Esther is left to herself, then the alien guy has sex with her. Then she's left alone for a long while again. Then the alien tells her that he's actually the only alien left, that before her colony had been captured he had begun killing all the other aliens because he thought humans were better. The book ends with him telling her she should lead the newly free humans and asking her to kill him.
Tanith Lee, it appears, has a number of books published (another one of them is apparently titled Kill The Dead). If he was able to get this one published, I think there is hope for all who write science fiction. I marked a few of my favorite quotes in the book and will share them:
"The two were utterly opposed in character, goal and outlook, as if they viewed the devastated world each through a different pane of colored glass, one knowing everything to be scarlet, while the other asserted that everything was indigo."
"Everything was striped or latticed with shadow and light, white on black, black on white, white on black on white."
"All five [rats] were lapping, like picture-book kittens from a stream of spilled canned milk. Only the milk was red."
As bad as this book was and as much as I feel it should never have been published, for some reason I feel refreshed for having made my way through it. I'm now ready again for more real books.