DMI2017: More Catching Up (Weeks 21-24)

This group of four stories brings me up to the end of last week, so I am officially caught up now. And it's definitely a mixed bag of stories!

Week 21: "Why I Live at the P.O." by Eudora Welty
Card: Two of Hearts (Mississippi authors)
Collection: The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty
How have I missed this story all these years? I know that it has been widely anthologized and whenever one mentions Welty, this story usually comes up. In addition to being a famous author, Welty was also known for her photography, and supposedly this story was inspired by one of her photographs showing a woman ironing in the back of a post office. This is a truly funny story of sibling rivalry and the ways in which it can cause family relationships to go all to hell. I'm sure I'm not the first person to think of this, but I definitely saw glimpses of the Biblical parable of the Prodigal Son in this story. But more than anything else, I just wallowed in the Southern cadences and turns of phrase that Welty uses all throughout the story.

Rating: 5 stars, no contest!

Week 22: "The Apprentice" by Larry Brown
Card: Seven of Hearts (Mississippi authors)
Collection: Big Bad Love
When I put together my list of Mississippi authors for my Hearts suit, I'm ashamed to say that I didn't actually know many beyond the obvious ones like Welty, Faulkner, and Wright. So I started googling and came up with a pretty long list of authors born or raised or living in Mississippi, and Larry Brown was on that list. He passed away in 2004, but in his lifetime he was a pretty notable author and won many awards, including the Mississippi Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts, as well as the Southern Book Award for Fiction. He hailed from Oxford, Mississippi and became known for his gritty, down-to-earth stories and novels.

This story, "The Apprentice," was actually pretty funny, but with an undercurrent of darkness and despair. Lonnie and Judy are a married couple who, according to Lonnie, at least, were happy until Judy decides she's going to become a writer. She writes all the time, which is actually OK with Lonnie, except that he begins to read some of her stuff and it's completely awful. (Her story "The Hunchwoman of Cincinnati" is what finally leads him to realize that she's a terrible writer.) The problem is, if he tells Judy the truth about her writing, she becomes unhinged; if he lies and says it's great stuff, then they have amazing sex. So he's in-between the classic rock and hard place.

Rating: 5 stars; I really liked Brown's tone and style, and I am very eager to read more of his stuff.

Week 23: "How To Become a Mars Overlord" by Catheryanne Valente
Card: Queen of Diamonds (Science fiction/Fantasy)
Collection: Twenty-First Century Science Fiction
This was one of those stories that I really wanted to like. The premise is irresistible: the "story" (really more of a humorous essay) consists essentially of instructions on how to become a Mars overlord, with examples of those who have gone before you. It's true that there's only one Mars in our solar system, but apparently every solar system in the Universe contains a Mars-like planet, just ripe for the taking by any enterprising overlord. The sections of the essay include: "Welcome, Aspiring Potentates!", "Query: Why Mars?", "Step One: Get to Mars," and "Step Two: Become an Overlord."

Rating: 3 stars; I wanted to like this story, but I didn't really because it was not a story. The title was the best part. The essay consisted of tale after tale of Mars overlords and what they were like and what they did to conquer their Mars, and in the end I just found it all very confusing.

Week 24: "My Dear, My One True Love" by Lee Durkee
Card: Ten of Clubs (Mystery/Detective set in Mississippi)
Collection: Mississippi Noir
This is another story that's not a story (have I missed something somewhere in the rules of modern fiction?) but it's entertaining nonetheless. It's an ode to the crazy woman. It begins: They have the most beautiful eyes, crazy women do, differing tints and gleams, true, but always that pinprick of wilding incandescence, the swamp gas rising. Of course, relationships with crazy women don't end well. And with no risk of a spoiler, here's the end of the story: Life goes on in this manner until someone gets led away in handcuffs or we find ourselves late at night once again shoveling away under the Mississippi stars, my dear, my one true love.

Rating: 4 stars; even though it's not really a story in my opinion, it was well-written and humorous, always pluses to me.

Deal Me In 2017 is hosted by Jay at Bibliophilopolis.

DMI2017, Week 14: "Chicken Little" by Cory Doctorow

The Ten of Diamonds was the card for this week, and it introduced me to a most intriguing story by Cory Doctorow from the collection 21st Century Science Fiction.

 

We all know the story of Chicken Little and "the sky is falling." It's one of those folk tales whose origins have been lost in the mists of time. What is most interesting is how the basic premise of the story (don't overreact to insignificant events and fall into paranoia and hysteria) has been reworked and reimagined over the centuries.

This story is a fine example of a futuristic scenario in which mass eradication of fear and uncertainty (via pharmaceutical means) is finally a possibility -- but of course the fundamental question is, is this ethical? Is this even good for the human species, understanding that much of our evolution and development has been shaped by that very same fear and uncertainty?

The story's protagonist, Leon, has begun work at an ad agency called Ate. This agency, like many others, seeks to cater to ultra-wealthy individuals who have achieved a version of immortality. As their bodies fail, they move into vats, and are kept alive by the latest scientific developments and hundreds if not thousands of employees who become their "bodies." Still perfectly conscious, they continue to conduct business in this way and become even more wealthy and powerful. So if an ad agency such as Ate can sell even one thing to these individuals, its reputation (and income) is set for life.

This is what has happened to Ate. Long ago, the agency made a sale to one vat person, and the income from that sale has kept the agency going for a long time, and not just with bare-bones accommodations. Ate's offices are in a lavish, state-of-the-art complex and no need of its employees is ever denied. They don't actually have to ever make another sale, that's how good the first one was. The employees do whatever they want to, and are free to pursue any kind of lead that might lead to another sale. And if they could make one more sale, it would cement the agency's existence forever, So this has become the holy grail of the agency, and many employees have come and gone in what has turned out to be a fruitless pursuit. When a person such as one of the vat people needs literally nothing, what can you possibly sell them? So Leon's goal, as is the goal of everyone at Ate, is to figure out what that could be.

One day Leon meets with Ria, an envoy of one of the vat people. She represents Buhle, who went to his vat at 103, the youngest age ever for one of these individuals. It was apparently due to some kind of "accident," and as the story unfolds, this accident becomes critical to the climax of the story. Also, as it turns out, Leon is actually being courted by Buhle, who knows of his past history and also has an idea of what Leon can sell him. During his grad school days, Leon hit upon a new type of drug that allows humans to make cold, rational calculations about events. Taking this drug, no one would ever buy a lottery ticket, for example, because they would know instantly that their chances of actually winning were almost zero. Buhle's idea is that the drug would release humanity from its fear and uncertainty and usher in a new era of optimism and progress. But Leon's resistance to his own creation is that it would also take away many of the things that make human existence so ultimately rewarding in the first place.

I don't want to give any more of the story away, of course, but there are many, many layers to this excellent story which makes it well worth reading. It's definitely a five-star story.

Deal Me In 2017 is hosted by Jay at Bibliophilopolis.

DMI2017, Week 13: "Evil Robot Monkey" by Mary Robinette Kowal

This week's card, the Eight of Diamonds, leads us to a very short and intriguing story from the collection Twenty-First Century Science Fiction.

"Evil Robot Monkey" is one of those stories that gets into my Deal Me In roster solely due to its title. Who could resist wanting to know what that title means? However, having finished the story, I am still not sure.

The story centers on Sly, a chimpanzee who has been altered with some kind of brain transplant that makes him hyper-aware of his interactions with humans. In fact, the story is told from his point of view, showing that he very much has what we would recognize as human consciousness. He even creates beautiful pottery on a pottery wheel in his enclosure. But there's the rub -- he's a fully conscious animal in what appears to be a zoo. One day he's startled by a group of schoolchildren and ruins the pottery he's working on. He flies into a rage and acts out, scaring and embarrassing the children and their teacher, who complains about the "evil robot monkey."

One of Sly's keepers, Vern, is sent to talk to Sly (through sign language) and explain that he has to be disciplined for his behavior, which involves taking away the clay for his pottery. Their conversation reveals that Vern actually "gets" Sly, unlike most people, which makes Sly trust Vern and accept the punishment. But between them, they figure out a way to get around the punishment so Sly can still make pottery.

In the brief introduction to "Evil Robot Monkey," the collection's editors make the statement that this story is "a reminder that it's possible to tell a fully-realized SF story in fewer than a thousand words." That may be true in general, and this story is definitely short, being just a couple of pages long, but I am not sure it succeeds in being a fully-realized story. It's an interesting story, but it seems very bare bones and left way too many unanswered questions for me, with the result that it feels very incomplete. However, it's well-written so it gets four stars from me.

Deal Me In 2017 is hosted by Jay at Bibliophilopolis.

DMI2017, Week 6: "Bread and Bombs" by M. Rickert

This week, the King of Diamonds takes us over to the science fiction side of this suit with a story selected from 21st Century Science Fiction, edited by David Hartwell and Patrick Hayden.

  

The story "Bread and Bombs" is one of those that innocently and unassumingly works its way down into your psyche and festers there. Events in this story take place in the unnamed narrator's childhood, but are being described years after, when the narrator is an adult and understands things very differently. This gives the entire story a kind of foreshadowing that feeds directly into its overall unsettling atmosphere.

The setting of the story is post-apocalyptic. Something terrible has happened (we get bits and pieces of details as the story progresses), the country is at war, and everything has changed. I know that is the vaguest sentence possible, but it reflects the way the author unfolds the details of the story. Nothing is told head-on, and the reader learns more by what is not said than by what is said. For example, the narrator's father reminisces about a time when people could travel anywhere they wanted to on airplanes. Airplanes still make appearances in the story, but when they fly overhead, everyone panics, puts on helmets, and runs for cover. So it's clear that the skies are no longer safe. Things like snow are no longer safe as well, due to some kind of biological warfare going on. The narrator learns of a nearby family who got sick and died just because they loved playing in the snow. More humorously, the narrator's father also reminisces about having six different kinds of cereal at one time, "coated in sugar, can you imagine?" And when the cereal got stale, they had the luxury of just throwing it out. Thus we also get the idea that regular food is suspect in this story, as well as just being hard to get.

So naturally, it's into this new and paranoid world that outsiders come. A refugee family with two little girls moves into an abandoned house just up the street from the narrator. The first reaction is fear and distrust, as the narrator's mother says things like, "I don't want you going to their house," (understandable and normal, perhaps) and "Don't eat anything they offer you" (maybe not so normal). Most of the neighborhood children are fascinated by the two girls, because of course they look and are dressed differently than anyone else, they don't go to school, the younger of the two girls cries all the time ("because of the war and all the suffering," her older sister says), and because the two girls ride up and down the street in a cart pulled by a goat. At one point the narrator tries to make a friendly overture to the girls by offering them a loaf of bread, but they recoil from it in horror -- it turns out that, in their country, warfare was conducted using bombs disguised as loaves of bread (hence the title of the story). But in spite of the fascination, the neighborhood children generally keep their distance from the girls -- all except for the narrator's friend, Bobby, who plays with the girls, rides in their cart, and gets pretty close to them, all to the consternation of the entire neighborhood, adults included. Some of the adults are accused of being prejudiced, and in fact the refugee family is widely distrusted simply because they came from the country that "started it," in the words of the narrator's mother.

The adults call town meetings to discuss what should be done with the refugee family. The children have their own kind of meeting about the outsiders as well, but theirs turns dark very quickly, with talk of matches, stick piles, and locked doors. The climax of the story comes in the most disturbing way possible, with almost everything left to the imagination of the reader.

I thought this was an excellent story, interesting in its own right, but made even more interesting by the skillful way the author understated even the more horrific details of the story. It definitely deserves five stars.

Deal Me In 2017 is hosted by Jay at Bibliophilopolis.