The Spare Man
1.0 Stars
1-20-2023

A murder mystery aboard a space-cruise-liner, which uses The Thin Man as its loose inspiration. I found it to be unreadable. The story is set in a future neo-liberal dystopia, where hordes of wage slaves spend their existence bowing and scraping and serving the trillionaire main character. For her part, she spends her time worrying about her tiny dog, her PTSD, her chronic pain, her medications, her triggers, her pronouns, and how best to ruin peoples lives with SLAPP lawsuits. One airlock could solve all of the problems for both the crew and her. This problem of class is particularly glaring when you compare this book to the original Thin Man books. In the Thin Man, the main characters are well off, in the sense that they have a nice penthouse in Manhattan, some shares in a lumber conglomerate, and no immediate material concerns. But at the same time, they are not in a completely different realm of existence from the rest of humanity. They do not completely own one segment of the infrastructure of a star-faring species. They do not need to be constantly shielded by a team of bodyguards, or else hidden by a cloak of anonymity. Instead, one of the neat features of the original protagonist is that he is comfortable with and has connections at all levels of society, from bankers, lawyers, dancers, musicians, criminals, cops, reporters, veterans, doctors, etc. etc. He and his wife go to clubs with normal people, they are packed into trains along with everyone else. So, yeah, that is the problem with the book in a nutshell. It completely eliminates class or any complaints about oligarchy, while elevating a gaggle of (boring) botique concerns to the point that they slow and obscure any actual story or plot.

Incidentally suffers from something common to most sci-fi mysteries, which is that the reader is not able to effectively reason about these worlds and so the mystery ends up feeling disconnected, unfair, and cheap. E.g. why is this a mystery at all, and why is every inch of this spaceship not covered with microscopic scale cameras? Any ship capable of intra-stellar travel is also potentially a gigantic WMD, like a fully loaded 747 but with orders of magnitude more potential energy. The idea that you would just let randos crawl all over this fusion powered rocket in an unsupervised manner is insanity, but that is of course what is going on in the story.

Edit: Another annoyance with the book that has stuck with me and that I feel compelled to expel from my mind is the vagueness with which the author describes her characters. For some reason the author is against physical descriptions of people, so we get character introductions like this: (chosen at random)
"An elegant passenger with beach blond hair and a soft, curving jawline"
Uh, what was their hair like? Long, short, close cropped, bangs, comb-over, wavy, other? Were they tall? Fit? How were their clothes and style elegant? Tell me about their face! Tell me about their fucking face. The author does this with like 50% of her character descriptions; she can only bring herself to describe the most trivial and unimportant parts of the person, like the color of their hair and maybe one other feature.
Compare this to a randomly chosen Iris Murdoch description of a tertiary character: "Noel was a very big man with a pale and unwrinkled face and pale colourless hair. With his look of gentle bland amiability he was like a large teddy bear. He smiled down at Dora, wanting to be sympathetic without humouring her mood."
or on the same page for a more prominent character:
" Before she sat down she inspected herself quickly in the mirror. In spite of all her awful experiences she looked good. She had a round well formed face and a large mouth that liked to smile.Her eyes were a dark slaty blue and rather long and large. Art had darkened but not thinned her vigorous triangular eyebrows. Her hair was golden brown and grew in long flat strips down the side of her head, like ferns growing down a rock. This was attractive. Her figure was by no means what it had been." "
But the author of The Spare Man cannot use this language, since it would imply lookism? ableism? fatphobia? ageism? And so she is left only being able to describe the most circumstantial features of her characters, like the color of their hair.

Edit 2: The fact I read this as an ebook might also have contributed to my problems with it, as for whatever reason my brain evaluates ebooks as being a notch lower in quality than physical books.