My notes, on reading this story, simply say: “Wow”.
A List of Forty-Nine Lies is a pretty intriguing title, and the story delivers immediately.
My name is not Levi. I am not afraid. The machines that hover in swarms over the streets cannot read the thoughts inside my head.
I am not running from them. I have nothing to hide.
Continue reading “[Reading Room] A List of Forty Seven Lies by Steven Fischer”
(Compare this to Geoffrey A Landis’s story where nothing the time-traveler did in the past could affect the future in any way.)
Silverberg does a great job of creating signposts for readers that make the effects of time travel seem almost mundane (one character tastes cotton in his mouth when the past has been changed, another gets a persistent twitch under the left eye…).
As writers today, we wouldn’t have a character stop to explain why the gadget in their pocket was buzzing (We wouldn’t write, “My phone buzzed again. It did that every time a friend send what we called a ‘text message’ from a similar device, over the wireless cell network…” No, we’d just say, “My phone buzzed. Alan again.”)
Similarly, these characters simply mention the significance of the sensation the first time and then use it in the story to signal to the reader that someone’s been time-traveling again.
It was nice to read a story with potentially disastrous technology that wasn’t completely dystopian. It did seem a little shallow at times, though, because I’m so used to ‘realistic’ takes on doomsday technologies in current stories. Not sure how I feel about that, being an upbeat and optimistic person who likes a laugh, but felt a little cheated by this story.
It’s funny how stories age. I guess we can’t worry too much about that. We just have to write the best stories we can, and keep writing them as we change and age. Some of our work will survive. Some will become embarrassing. And that’s OK.
As something of a side note, it’s interesting to go back and read older short stories and find things I wasn’t expecting.
For example, I’ve never worried too much about the sex (or gender) of the person who wrote a story or of the main character. I’ve never worried too much about older social attitudes that we have, thankfully, left behind, showing up in stories where we couldn’t expect the author to have a more modern outlook.
But in spite of not going around looking for these nits to pick, I am increasingly impatient with stories in which the women are cardboard cut outs. I don’t know if I should curse Alison Bechdel for bringing it to my attention, or simply shrug and accept that there’s so much good writing out there no that DOESN’T fail the Bechdel test, that it’s OK for me to be more picky.
I’m not willing to cut myself off from a world of literary history, just because the writers weren’t inclusive (or not-horribly-racist), but I can’t seem to help having a niggling, deep down dissatisfaction when a good writer excludes half the population or is clueless about basic human dignity.
Again, I’m glad these stories were written, and I won’t not read them because they aren’t inclusive. The writers were working with what they had. Some were better than others. But me? I’m certainly becoming less likely to read and praise them just because somebody tells me I should.
Read this story in The Time Traveler’s Almanac
Do you worry about reader or posterity when you write? How do you feel about stores that have aged badly in one respect, while still having other features to recommend them? Join the discussion in the comments.
This is one of the best time travel stories I’ve ever read, and I’m a huge fan of the sub-genre.
Although this story was first published in 1988, I haven’t seen anyone else treat time travel and it’s consequences like this. In fact I’m amazed no ones turned this into a script [1. Assuming they haven’t] (it’d be perfect for Black Mirror). Continue reading “[Reading Room] Ripples In The Dirac Sea by Geoffrey A. Landis”
But concentrating on that takes away from the exquisite, concise, clear writing, characterization and big ideas of the original material. He really is a tremendously good writer.
His stories contain big ideas, thoughtfully dealt with in crisp prose that I could read until the end of time.
This story was adapted into an early Twilight Zone episode. It comes from the early days of space exploration, when ideas were big and facts in short supply. Some of the assumptions in the story are suspect by today’s scientific standards, but that was never what these early sci-fi stories were about. (You know, unless they were written by Arthur C. Clarke, who also had a hand in inventing Radar, so he’s a bit of a special case.)
In this story three men in a space ship survey new planets, looking for new homes for the humans from the chronically overcrowded Earth. When they go down to investigate a particular planet, things start to get weird.
From that point on, the story is a purely about human nature and drama, with the space-faring backdrop becoming fairly unimportant.
That’s one of the things I find irresistible about science fiction. The writers hook you with the setting, with the gadgets and the ‘what ifs’, but then all the best stories end up being about the human condition.
They do what art is supposed to do: make life look a little bit strange, so that we can reassess our own position towards it. No matter which side of the political shouting match you’re on, it seems like that’s something our civilization could us at the moment, don’t you think?
What setting or story type could you use to reel in a reader who needs to see part of their own life with fresh eyes?
This week I’m bringing you an interview with Tony Conaway whose story The Radium Room is in the anthology Spring Into ScFi.
We talk about his inspiration for the story, how his love of detail (he calls it “trivia”) informs his writing, and yes, we talk about homing rats… Continue reading “[Reading Room] The Radium Room by Tony Conaway”
I was blogging and podcasting a lot, last month, about short story forms, and how short stories do not have to read like mini novels.
And the month before that was all about Flash Fiction.
Today, I’m recommending that you take a look at this story Paradox, by Naomi Kritzer.
It is both flash fiction and a non-narrative story. And it’s great.
It starts,
This is the original timeline.
This is a great example of how you can make every word count, and how short fiction is a wonderful place to practice that.
That single word, “original” does all the heavy lifting. It tells you a lot about what kind of story this is going to be: confusing, time-travel-y, chatty. It conveys genre, style, and tone.
Five words. That’s all it took her to set the reader’s expectations.
(Note to self: write to the author and ask her what the original first line looked like. I’m betting it wasn’t this. Second note to self: rewriting is key!)
It is written in the first person (sometimes first person, plural) and we never find out the character’s name or gender. It plays deliciously, hilariously, with all the time travel tropes and questions out there, and talks, knowingly, to the reader.
This is no mini-novel.
And it leaves us with a flippant question at the end, the deeper question it asks is not about time-travel at all.
Recommended!
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