(SFF Bingo): Singer Distance, by Ethan Chatagnier

I don't do star ratings, because it's really hard for me to sum up what does and doesn't work about a book on a one-dimensional axis. But one of the things that often comes up in these reviews is "does it stick the landing." Because sometimes my assessment would be like "boring first half, 3.5 stars, rounded up to 4 because it finally gets good." Or "compelling prose, 3.5 stars, rounded down because the end is a total anticlimax." This really impacts my reading experience.

Singer Distance is a book that sticks the landing. There are digressions that are less engaging than the SF stuff, like, flashbacks to the narrator's teenage years and pranks that local kids play on his dad's farm. But it all comes together in a way that I didn't see coming but then totally should have, which is the sign of doing something right. There is closure to the plot questions we have, I'm not sitting there thinking "well that was a waste." So it gets the rounding-up seal of approval that way.

Premise: the "channels" on Mars really were canals; there are intelligent Martians, and they're sometimes communicative. From the 1890s to the 1930s, Martians carve large-scale displays that Earth can see with telescopes, and correctly interpret them to be mathematical formulae. Earth responds with similarly large-scale constructions.

Within a few months a robust plurality had settled on this interpretation:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
2 + 2 = 4
3 + 3 = _
Our first true message from the Martians: pop quiz, kindergartners.

But then the Martians pose something about distance that befuddles all Earth's scientists, and when nobody can formulate a response, Mars goes silent. The book begins in 1960; Rick is a grad student at MIT, and his girlfriend, Crystal, thinks she's solved the equation. They and some friends go on a road trip from Boston to the Arizona desert to broadcast their answer.

Rick is madly in love, and he proposes, but she tells him to finish his own degree and not bask in her reflected glory. Then she basically ghosts him. Thirteen years later, in 1973, Rick has to go on another cross-country road trip, this time without his buddies in tow.

There's opportunities for US regional humor:

The great thing about Oklahoma, Priya said, was that each state after it got a little better.

Just my luck, I thought--I was trying to find the love of my life and had to rely on the goodwill of a Philadelphian.

I like SF, and math, and can relate to nerdy obsessive mathematicians also having interests in music and cartography and other seemingly unrelated things, so this book was a specific recommendation to me. The flip side is, I can be more critical of things I know well. It's harder for me to suspend my disbelief when it comes to "what if the way we conceptualize distance is misleading, what if there's a more meaningful sense of distance? Sometimes when you're physically close to somebody, emotionally, you're still miles away. Everything is relative, dude." That kind of faux-profundity is a hard sell.

This is the best explanation of "Singer Distance" we get, and I actually think it's a pretty good one in terms of "fake math":

Imagine a mountain range. Traditional measurement was like measuring from the base of the southernmost mountain to the base of the northernmost mountain in a straight line through the Earth, ignoring the complex topography of the thicknesses and compositions of each peak. Though she theorized that mapping the actual, exact topography of any distance was a task on par with mapping the universe, she explained how the averages could be calculated, with a detailed process that had to take into account inertial speed or acceleration, medium, and a mysterious variable the editors referred to as the Tanzer Value, but which Crystal named "Intent."
I sort of agreed with the editors, that Intent was a troublesome name for the quantity, one that both failed to help visualize how the variable operated and anthropomorphized an ineffable particle; it made distance seem subject to mood swings.

This is good. There's also a follow-up Martian message about entropy, and the humans comment, "you can't reverse the flow of a river...well actually yes you can, they literally did that in Chicago, maybe entropy isn't the whole story," which was fun. But by the time we get there there's been a lot of "how can you be so far away and I still feel so close to you??? #makesyouthink."

The discovery of intelligent Martians changes very little about Earth's history from the 1890s onwards. The world wars still happen. NASA still lands on the moon in 1969. There are eventually orbiters sent to Mars, but they abruptly lose transmission 13,000 miles away. This disinterest in alternate history makes it feel more like "litfic with SF elements" than "attractive to SF fans."

This is a small nitpick but: "She'd started college at seventeen and grad school at twenty-one. Twenty-four now, she was the youngest of us by four years."

How realistic is this? In my experience it's pretty common to begin college at 18 and, if you go directly to grad school from undergrad, start that at 22 or so. Let's say Crystal is more prodigious than her peers and skipped a grade early on. I still don't think it would be super likely to see a four year gap between her and her colleagues? Was it different for people in the sixties?

More generally, I find the dynamics of "socially awkward genius/"person who has practical and social skills" as a romance trope can be kind of tiresome. This version has a woman in the first slot and a man in the second instead of the reverse, props. But I don't think we get a compelling sense of what Crystal sees in Rick. She treats him (and other people close to her) with incredible callousness for those thirteen years. And then he's extremely forgiving, like, "I would rather have her in my life than be estranged from her for no reason, maybe she just went crazy from too much math and can't help it," but it felt unearned. Their relationship parallels the Earth-Mars one; Mars is aloof and normally doesn't bother to communicate with Earth unless Earth can solve their puzzles. Crystal says that maybe Earth just needs to change the conversational topic. In the Earth-Mars case, it might work, although Mars is destroying/turning off/ignoring their rovers, so it still might not. I'm not convinced that "the relationship between unequals" really works for Crystal and Rick, even if Crystal claims she's in awe of his practical skills.

Bingo: I'll probably use this for the "recycle a bingo square" (there's plenty that it could count for, eg, "Published in 2022," hard mode as Chatagnier's first published novel). I've been very lucky in not needing to fall back on that one yet!

If you're interested in using it for this year's card, arguments could be made for "a book in parts" (there are three parts, longer than traditional chapters, but they aren't subdivided into actual chapters). It's not dwelled on in detail, but Crystal and her parents were refugees from fascism in the WWII era, so arguably "stranger in a strange land." If you really want to stretch it, maybe "Impossible Places," because what if small distances and large distances are actually, like, indistinguishable, dude. Big spoilers:

( the bingo square is a spoiler )