Girlfriend on Mars by Deborah Willis (review)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: Girlfriend on Mars by Deborah Willis Yang Yiyi DEBORAH WILLIS Girlfriend on Mars New York. W. W. Norton. 2023. 368 pages. THE INFORMATION REVOLUTION brings a new round of human alienation, and the existential crisis becomes more apparent. In her timely novel Girlfriend on Mars, the Calgary-based Canadian writer Deborah Willis uses everyday language to depict a real world, where living on Mars seems to be not science fiction but an imminent future for mankind: disease epidemics, rampaging AI, collapse of food stocks, resource wars between nuclear-armed states, together with overpopulation and ecological problems, all help boost the billionaire Geoff Task's pet project, which aims to relocate some of humanity to another planet. The main character of the story, Amber, is chosen to be a Marsonaut. Amber and Kevin have been in love for fourteen years, but a crisis arises when Amber signs up for the first human-led mission to Mars and stars in the MarsNow reality TV series, followed by a sequence of cheating, betrayal, and breakup. Amber was once an Olympic gymnast whose career was ruined by a shoulder injury. Now she tries hard to leave the planet, dreaming of saving the earth out of human hubris, and escaping the trauma of her family of origin, but her "daddy issues" haunt her—she makes every effort to win the approval of her evangelical Christian father, but in vain. Kevin is a failed screenwriter, prone to smoking marijuana as a "spaceship" to travel to any unreality—one of his fantasies is "to make profound, literary love to Zadie Smith." He blames himself for his mother's death and grows agoraphobic because he feels unable to save Amber from the exploitation-industrial complex, the religion of fame, and the System itself, which results in "the most dramatic, narcissistic suicide in the history of humanity." The author portrays both the social media carnival and the profit-oriented enterprise with bitter sarcasm but shows the utmost tolerance and respect for ordinary people with warmth and tenderness: when Amber miscarries, suffers from cancer, and faces death on Mars, her Martian partner, Adam, utters comforting and forgiving words she has never heard from her father. When Kevin learns about her fate through Instagram, he finally decides to leave the "sanctuary," going outside to meet with his friends. Amber's footsteps on Mars ("one small step for woman," as she believes) and Kevin's footsteps out of his apartment are [End Page 63] both hard steps on the road to discovering the meaning of life and self-existence. Like Kevin's desert-island book The Great Gatsby, Girlfriend on Mars tells "a story ostensibly about love but really about soul-crushing decadence. Ostensibly about decadence, but really about love." Through this dark rom-com, Willis illustrates the eternal propositions of human beings—love, freedom, and faith—against the context of an absurd capitalist society and prophesies a new promised land: since it is unsuitable for survival on frozen Mars, we might as well turn attention to our own garden and explore the inner universe. Yang Yiyi Nanjing Normal University Copyright © 2023 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.033 | 0.015 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".