2007 books

17) Michael Friedman, Martian Dawn, 2006
Read for its curiosity value, being the fiction debut of Michael Friedman the New York poet, not the eponymous author of dozens of Star Trek books. The plot centres around 'Richard' (buddhist movie star) and 'Julia' (ex-hooker, turned actress), and the making of a science fiction film called Martian Dawn. The parallels with Pretty Woman are entirely intentional (that film itself being an update of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion), but here with the juxtaposition of a real male actor involved with his fictional female counterpart. The film is shot on Earth and Mars, the characters' lives are complete in an utterly self-absorbed way but also completely empty, and they circle around each other with shallow Hollywood dialogue at a far removal from the real world. Martian Dawn would seem to be a strange post-modern exercise looking at the often blurred interchange between reality and fiction in the creative process while those involved are often unable to tell the difference, but beyond that I couldn't really comment definitively. It's also both mainstream and science fiction (just) though definitely not slipstream, and it left me unsatisfied and a little bemused, not knowing what further conclusions I could draw, other than it being a quite deliberate low-gravity experience.