We took a break in the last section from Fat's incessant pop cultural references, but they came back with a vengeance in these chapters. Fat is so lacking in imagination that he cannot comprehend that, over the next 400 years, humans are going to come up with new things to focus their culture on. Fat's world is stuck in the piss-colored, brittle amber of early 21st century American media.
"Buckle in," Hashin said. "Company health insurance doesn't cover injuries sustained from stupidity."
"Doesn't the ship have inertial dampers or something?"
"Stop watching Star Trek," Jrill said. "We have artificial gravity but it has a 0.037 refresh rate. That's more than enough time to splatter you against the view screen..."
What's so infuriating about this reference isn't just the idea that Star Trek is still a thing in 2500 - it's that a space-faring people with real space technology are getting their ideas about space from Star Trek instead of, you know, their own lives. And worse off - the Star Trek of a space future is using pretend, made-up technology instead of referencing real world tech in the first place. This passage hurt.
"Yippee ki-yay, motherfu-"
"Language, young lady," Hashin said from his own seat as he applied some sort of medicated patch to his upper arm.
"But how did you even know..."
"We've all seen Die Hard. We have Christmas out here, too, you know. It's mostly a retail driven holiday, but then, what holiday isn't?"
"Assembly space celebrates Jesus Christ's birth?" First asked incredulously.
"Who?"
"Oh, thank God," First said.
I remind my dear readers that the number of humans who have made it this far into the universe number in the single digits. However, the alien cultures in Fat's world are so weak and uninteresting that they all immediately adopted American pop culture. They've got our movies. They've got our holidays. They've got our problems about losing the real meaning behind holidays (the tragedy of which Fat then immediately undermines by being grateful that Christmas in his book has lost its meaning entirely.) The whole purpose of alien cultures in fiction is to take us somewhere new. Fat, however, can't leave his own city. It's sad.
First had never seen a party like it in her life. The closest she'd come had been in Florida at Universal Studios when six contractually obligated "performers" in full costume had serenaded her at a Hogwarts main hall table for her twelfth birthday, while five hundred other tourists looked on and applauded in halfhearted disinterest.
Here, not only do we have a reference to a theme park that's stayed in operation for four hundred years, running the same programming the entire time, but we've also got Fat messing up the continuity of his book. Back in chapter 2, Fat wrote, "Her parents had taken a vacation to Earth once when she was ten. They'd scrimped and saved almost since the moment she'd been born. They'd told her it might be the only time she'd ever be off world, and they wanted her to see their original home." So she'd been to Earth once, Fat specifies that they left the planet, and then he goes on and writes that she was at Universal Studios Florida two years later. He could have done something slightly more clever by saying it was Universal Studios Orion or some other off-world branch of the company, but nope. He just doesn't care enough about continuity or novelty to do that much work.
Then someone requested that damn song again, "Pho Queue," by the Wolverines. The crowd roared in approval.
"Who are these guys," First asked aloud, mostly to herself, but she was overheard by... a squid carrot?
"The Wolverines! They're your kin. Surely you've heard of them?"
"I heard them over the radio in a car two days ago. That's it."
"Impossible!" the squid carrot proclaimed.
"There are twenty billion humans. No, I don't know all of them personally, if these guys are even really human. What kind of music is this even?"
"They're a hair band. It's blowing up. They're out on tour of this arm of the galaxy right now. Not even I can score tickets, not for fin or tentacle. Me! Can you believe it?" the unknown alien said, expecting First would understand the gravity of the sentiment without further explanation.
"No, I really can't," First said. "You know that music was popular, like, four hundred years ago, right?"
"Light speed delay. We only just got MTV a few cycles ago."
First rubbed a temple. "That explains so much."
Why did I type all that up? I could have clipped the line about the Wolverines and made the point that Fat makes too many pop culture references, but I think you, my dear readers, deserve to know just how much he belabors the point. This is the second time he's made the Wolverines Pho Queue joke, and here he spends nearly a page justifying his
lack of world-building joke, and it's just such a slog to get through. That wasn't funny. There was no important information relayed in that conversation. It was total dead weight, and he spent nearly a page on it.
