Summary:
This anthology collects all the short stories and novelettes (and one novella) that made it on to the 2019 Hugo nominations list but didn’t reach the final ballot. This part of the review looks at the ten short stories (the other ten are longer lengths) which include one very good story by G. V Anderson, Waterbirds, and good or better work by S. Qiouyi Lu, Rich Larson, Isabel Yap, and A. T. Greenblatt.
Other reviews:
Goodreads, Various 1/2
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Editor, David Steffen
Fiction:
Mother Tongues • short story by S. Qiouyi Lu ∗∗∗+
Field Biology of the Wee Fairies • short story by Naomi Kritzer ∗∗
Meat and Salt and Sparks • short story by Rich Larson ∗∗∗+
Sour Milk Girls • short story by Erin Roberts ∗∗
Asphalt, River, Mother, Child • short story by Isabel Yap ∗∗∗
The Starship and the Temple Cat • short story by Yoon Ha Lee ∗∗
Waterbirds • short story by G. V. Anderson ∗∗∗∗
You Can Make a Dinosaur, But You Can’t Help Me • short story by K. M. Szpara ∗
And Yet • short story by A. T. Greenblatt ∗∗∗
She Still Loves the Dragon • short story by Elizabeth Bear ∗
An Agent of Utopia • novelette by Andy Duncan ∗∗
A Study in Oils • novelette by Kelly Robson ∗∗∗+
The Substance of My Lives, the Accidents of Our Births • novelette by José Pablo Iriarte ∗∗∗
No Flight Without the Shatter • novelette by Brooke Bolander ∗∗∗
How to Swallow the Moon • novelette by Isabel Yap ∗∗
A World to Die For • novelette by Tobias S. Buckell ∗
Thirty-Three Percent Joe • novelette by Suzanne Palmer ∗∗∗∗
The Privilege of the Happy Ending • novelette by Kij Johnson ∗∗∗∗
The Nearest • novelette by Greg Egan ∗∗∗
Umbernight • novella by Carolyn Ives Gilman ∗∗∗+
Non-fiction:
Poisson D’Arte • cover by Amanda Makepeace
Foreword • by David Steffen
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This book was suggested as a group read in The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Facebook group1 that Jim Harris and I run (it was on special offer, so a number of us bought it), and we are currently about three-quarters the way through the volume.
As this is a big anthology I thought I’d break this review into two parts (a single 10,000 word post here would just add to the global death toll), so here is the first, which covers the ten short stories.
In the Introduction to the first volume of the series, David Steffan explains the idea behind the anthology:
I’ve followed the Hugo Awards for years, and have found them the most compelling of the science fiction literary awards for a variety of reasons. [Anyone] who pays for a Supporting membership for the year’s WorldCon2 also has the right to nominate for and vote for the Hugos. Another reason is the Hugo Packet, which is a package of many of the nominated works [that voters can reference before the final round of voting]. I pay for a Supporting membership every year for the packet, which makes a great recommended reading list. If that sounds like a great deal, it is [. . .].
[. . .]
Every year, after the Hugo Award Ceremony at WorldCon, WSFS publishes a longer list of works that were nominated by the Hugo voters. I use this list as a recommended reading list, too, but I have mused that it would be nice if that longer list were all in one place like the Hugo packet, for convenient reading.
Hence this anthology and the four earlier volumes in the series.
The first story is Mother Tongues by S. Qiouyi Lu, which opens with a woman called Jiawen Liu completing a spoken language test before going to see a language broker. The latter tells Liu that she hasn’t done as well as she thought in her English test, and Liu realises that she won’t be able to sell her poor English language skills for much money (the story’s gimmick is that machines can scan—and remove—a person’s language ability and implant it into another person). Now she may not be able to pay for her daughter’s education at Stanford.
The broker asks her if she wants to sell her native Mandarin, and Liu says she will consider the matter.
For the rest of that week Liu experiments with not using her native language, but it is difficult, especially when she shops with her elderly mother:
You can cheat with your mother a little bit: you know enough Cantonese to have a halting conversation with her, as she knows both Cantonese and Mandarin. But it’s frustrating, your pauses between words lengthy as you try to remember words and tones.
“干吗今天说广东话?” your mother asks in Mandarin. She’s pushing the shopping cart—she insists, even when you offer—and one of the wheels is squeaking. She hunches over the handle, but her eyes are bright.
Ngo jiu syut Gwongdungwaa,” you reply in Cantonese. Except it’s not exactly that you want to speak Cantonese; you have to, for now. You don’t know how to capture the nuance of everything you’re going through in Cantonese, either, so you leave it at that. Your mother gives you a look, but she doesn’t bring it up again and indulges you, speaking Cantonese as the two of you go around the supermarket and pile the shopping cart high with produce, meat, and fish.
You load the car with the groceries and help your mother into the passenger seat. As you adjust the mirrors, your mother speaks again.
“你在担心什么?” she asks. Startled, you look over at her. She’s peering at you, scrutinizing you; you can never hide anything from her. Of course she can read the worry on your face, the tension in your posture; of course she knows something’s wrong.
When she tells her mother about her test the latter is surprisingly sympathetic (the latter’s responses are in Mandarin, so English speakers don’t know exactly what is said).
The story ends (spoiler) with Liu selling her Mandarin and, as a result of the process (and this is perhaps the story’s weakness), she loses her ability to speak and read the language. When Liu, her daughter, and her mother get together for a meal she also discovers that some of her Cantonese has gone as well (the language has similar roots to Mandarin), and she doesn’t understand a lot of the dinner table conversation.
The use of untranslated Mandarin and Cantonese in the text is a clever touch as it makes English-only speaking readers—who will not understand—empathise with Liu at the end of the story (which also has a neat last paragraph and last line). One for the Best of the Year anthologies, perhaps.
Field Biology of the Wee Fairies by Naomi Kritzer is set in 1962 and starts with this:
When Amelia turned fourteen, everyone assured her that she’d find her fairy soon. Almost all girls did. You’d find a fairy, a beautiful little fairy, and catch her. And she’d give you a gift to let her go, and that gift was always beauty or charm or perfect hair or something else that made boys notice you. The neighbor girl, Betty, had caught her fairy when she was just nine, and so she’d never even had to go through an awkward adolescent stage; she’d been perfect and beautiful all along.
Not all fairies were equal, of course. Some of them would do a much better job for you. The First Lady Jackie Kennedy, for example, had caught the fairy queen.
Amelia is a science geek however, and not interested in boys. She thinks, “If I did catch a fairy, I’d keep her in a jar like my mice and study her,” and this pretty much outlines the arc of this emancipation story, which involves, among other scenes, Amelia sabotaging a hairdo that her friend Betty does for her; see a fairy but ignore it; perform Romeo and Juliet with a girl-only cast; and fail to get into the males-only school science club.
Then Amelia catches a determinedly attention-seeking fairy (spoiler) and imprisons it, eventually learning that fairies can’t grant wishes but can only look into the future. When the fairy does this for Amelia she learns that she will never be allowed to join the school science club. So, after winning a science project competition, Amelia convinces an elderly female teacher into starting a girl’s science club.
This story suffers on two fronts: first, it deflates like a punctured balloon when the quirky and entertaining fairy gimmick is laid bare; second, why did the author think it would be a good idea to write a story refighting 1962’s cultural battles? (Presumably because they are more black and white than today’s, and therefore easier to write about.)
Meat and Salt and Sparks by Rich Larson teams up a male detective called Huxley with an uplifted female Chimpanzee called Cu. They are investigating a murder, and the story opens with them attempting to interview the suspected shooter, an “echogirl”—someone who takes instructions from a remote viewer who can see where they are and what they do:
By the look of it, Elody had been in that same call for just under six months. Cu moves backward through the log, perplexed. There are small gaps, a few hours here and there, but Elody had been in near 24/7 communication with her client for half a year preceding the murder.
Cu tries to imagine it: a voice whispering in her ear when she woke up, telling her what to do, where to go, what to say, and whispering still as she fell asleep. All of it culminating in Elody Polle walking up behind a man in a subway and executing him in broad daylight.
Their investigation leads the detectives to a bar where other echogirls hang out, and it isn’t long before they find someone that knows Elody, and who reveals that Elody’s handler is called Baby. When the informant comments on the oddness of the extended 24/7 contract, seasoned readers will probably guess who or what Baby is.
After their visit to the bar Cu goes home, where she receives a short, enigmatic message that refers to her time as an experimental animal. We then get some backstory about Cu’s time in captivity—the period before she won her court battle for personhood:
For a long time Cu had no name for the place where they cut her without her feeling it, where they tracked her eyes and fed filaments through holes in her skull. But she learned the word nightmare from her cube, watching a man with metal hands hunt down his children, and the moniker made sense. By the time she learned about surgery, neural enhancement, possible cures for degenerative brain disease, the name was already cemented.
For the last few years she went to the nightmare room willingly and offered them her wrist for the anaesthetic drip. In exchange, they were kinder to her. They took restrictions off her cube—some she had already worked around herself—so more of the net was available to her. They let her walk in certain corridors of the facility. After a week of asking them, they even let her see her mother.
Going back to that particular memory wrenches her apart.
[. . .]
Her mother was bent and graying, fur shaved off in patches, surgical scars suturing her body, and she was angry. She jabbered and hooted, spittle flying from her mouth. Cu tried to sign to her, but received no reply. Cu tried to offer her food; her mother seized the orange from her and made a feint, teeth bared, that sent Cu scurrying back to the furthest corner of her cage.
“Tranq wore off sooner than we thought,” one of the women in white said. “We did warn you. We did tell you she wouldn’t be like you. You’re unique.”
Cu signed take her away, take her away, take her away.
Further research by Cu reveals that the murder victim was the head of the conglomerate that owned the research labs which kept her. Cu then wonders whether the sender of the message is also an uplifted chimpanzee, although this idea puzzles her as all the others were supposedly euthanized.
When the sender of the anonymous message gets in touch once more, Cu agrees to a meeting, partly in the hope of gaining some relief from the angst and loneliness she feels at being the only one of her kind. At the rendezvous (spoiler) she finds a man waiting, but he isn’t the contact and he points to a videolink before leaving. Cu discovers the sender of the messages isn’t another uplift but an AI, which tells her that it can’t bear its solitary existence, and wants Cu to execute the safeguard code that will erase it (the AI can’t do so itself, and it doesn’t want a human to do so).
After she runs the code that terminates the AI, Cu goes home and also contemplates suicide, but eventually makes, for the first time, a social call to Huxley.
All of this is slickly done, and is successful on two levels: first, it seamlessly meshes together a number of standard SFnal tropes (uplifts, telepresence, sentient AI, etc.) and, secondly, it sketches a convincing and affecting portrait of what it must be like to be (or feel like you are) the only one of your kind. However, when I finished the story I had reservations about describing it as “very good,” but couldn’t quite put my finger on why. After reflecting for some time I came to the conclusion that the final scene is a sentimental cop-out: the AI meets its existential angst by committing suicide while Cu attempts to address hers by phoning Huxley (which hints at a post-story Hollywood movie ending where intractable problems are solved by friendship or love).3
Given the story’s setup I think there was an opportunity to present a tougher ending which, perhaps, shows Cu accepting her despair and responding with stoicism. This (admittedly less crowd-pleasing) finish would be an organic fit with what had gone before, and it would have similar narrative weight to the AI’s actions. It would also have made the story art rather than entertainment.
I know this sounds like I’m criticising the story I wanted Larson to write and not the one he has, but I don’t think I’m doing that: the tale I’m talking about is clearly there.
(And yes, I’ll probably complain that the ending of Larson’s next story is “too gloomy.”)
Sour Milk Girls by Erin Roberts has as its protagonist Ghost, a teenage girl in an orphanage where the inmates have their painful memories removed and replaced with fakes (until they are eighteen, when they leave and get their real memories back). She watches along with two other inmates, Flash and Whispers, as a new girl, Brenda, arrives.
After Brenda settles in, and we find that she still has her own memories, Ghost organises a trip to a memory booth where they can swap. Ghost relives what Brenda thinks are happy memories of her father (which actually end with him dying in his rocking chair). Further investigation by Ghost as to why Brenda’s memories are still intact reveals that, although they are harrowing, Brenda shows no negative behaviours because of them. During this hack of the orphanage’s systems, Ghost also discovers that some of her own memories have been permanently deleted, and that she hasn’t been adopted because there has been “no demand” for her.
The story ends with (spoiler) Ghost and Brenda going back to the booth where, with Flash’s help, Ghost restrains Brenda, hacks the booth system, and extracts Brenda’s memories. She intends to implant them into herself so as to make herself more attractive to adopters but, after reviewing them, Ghost sees that Brenda’s memories are of a broken life (the mother leaves early on, the father is a drunk, etc.) and she gives Brenda’s memory cube to the lecherous booth attendant on the way out.
This story is competently plotted (although it drags at times), but it is essentially a misery memoir where semi-feral girls screw each other over.
Asphalt, River, Mother, Child by Isabel Yap is a supernatural story about government death squads in the Phillipines, and opens with Mebuyen greeting one of the victims of their extra-judicial murders in what we later learn is the underworld. As she speaks to the young girl who has just arrived, we learn that Mebuyen is a mother/ferryman figure who is there to guide people along the river to the “next place”.
The sections that follow tell of the arrival of two other victims (a suspected drug dealer and a trans girl). We then see how all three met their ends, which is told from the point of view of JM, a policemen involved in the murders. We also learn of his increasing disillusionment with his role in the killings.
Mebuyen is troubled by these arrivals, and decides to visit her brother in our world:
She sends her emissary, a little maya bird, to let her brother know she will be ascending. She makes sure to add that because it is so rare for her to do so, and her knees are particularly creaky these days, he may perhaps wish to meet her halfway.
He greets her at Carriedo Station in Manila, wearing a nice button-down polo and maong jeans. Lumabat looks older, but his skin is much nicer than hers, which makes her a little jealous. Mebuyen has not come up in what men might describe as a decade, so she feels proud of her sleeveless shirt and khaki shorts, which make her look like any other manang. She notices everyone holding a small, rectangular skinny box, and glaring at it, their thumbs pounding away.
“Those? Those are cellphones,” Lumabat says. “Oh, they call them smartphones these days.”
“Phones? But they aren’t talking at all?”
“They’re texting. Or surfing the web. You know, Facebook?”
Mebuyen is mystified, but does not try to understand. The world gets stranger each time she visits.
Over lunch at Ma Mon Luk, she explains her quandary.
“They’re different. You know how I haven’t had a visitor in a while, that men these days aren’t beholden to our magic? But suddenly, there they are, by my river . . . they’re older, they’re not infants, but somehow they are still innocent.” She pours soy sauce into her mami, brooding. “The river cannot wash their stains away. It runs clear, not dark. They aren’t moving on to the next place. What have you observed?”
Her brother tells her about his nightmares, and says that she needs to see what is happening for herself. That evening they drift over the city so she can observe what is happening below, and they watch as the death squads commit several murders.
After another section involving JM the policeman (who is now having nightmares too, and has also started to question his superior’s orders), Mebuyen takes her three dead charges into the dreamworld where they confront him.
The story finishes with Mebuyen washing the three in the river, and they move on.
This superior piece has some good local colour and a gripping, contemporary storyline but, if I have one criticism, it is that JM the cop is perhaps portrayed too sympathetically, and gets off too easily. This gives the piece a soft, slightly anticlimactic ending and, but for that, it would have been a four-star story.
The Starship and the Temple Cat by Yoon Ha Lee is the only story here I’ve read previously, and gets off to a promising start:
She had been a young cat when the Fleet Lords burned the City of High Bells.
Strictly speaking, the City had been a space station rather than a planet-bound metropolis, jewel-spinning in orbit around one of the gas giants of a system inhabited now by dust and debris and the ever-blanketing dark. While fire had consumed some of the old tapestries, the scrolls of bamboo strips, the altars of wood and bone and beaten bronze, the destruction had started when the Fleet Lords, who could not tolerate the City’s priests, bombarded it with missiles and laser fire. But the cat did not know about such distinctions.
Properly, the cat’s name was Seventy-Eighth Temple Cat of the High Bells, along with a number of ceremonial titles that needn’t concern us. But the people who had called her that no longer lived in the station’s ruins. Every day as she made her rounds in what had been the boundaries of the temple, she saw and smelled the artefacts they had left behind, from bloodstains to scorch marks, from decaying books to singed spacesuits, and yowled her grief.
To be precise, the cat no longer lived in the station, either. She did not remember her death with any degree of clarity. The ghosts of cats rarely do, even when the deaths are violent.
One of the starships involved in the attack returns years later, a renegade pursued by the Fleet Lords. While the ship talks to the cat they catch up, and then battle commences. The cat (spoiler) summons other ghosts to aid the ship and, after they win, joins it on its journey.
The story does not combine the fantasy and SF elements successfully, and does not suspend disbelief.
My favourite story in the first half of this book is Waterbirds by G. V. Anderson, which opens with a policeman called Kershaw interrogating Celia, a female android companion whose employer has committed suicide. After Kershaw finishes his enquiries and leaves the holiday home that Celia and her employer were renting, the android recalls her first encounter with Kershaw several years earlier, when he was an unpleasant teenager in a bar asking her whether she was a “fuckbot”. We then get an account of Kershaw’s subsequent serial abuse of Celia during her and her employer’s annual holiday visits to the cottage (the aftermath of the final encounter is related in squirm-inducing detail). These encounters only stop when Mrs Lawson, Celia’s employer, becomes aware of the situation and intervenes.
The second part of the story tells of the relationship between Celia and a local artist called Irene, which develops over the course of several annual visits before Mrs Lawson’s death. The story’s conclusion draws all these threads together in a surprising and satisfying conclusion.
The story’s mousetrap ending and seaside location vaguely reminded me of Michael Coney’s work, but there is much more here as well: Celia’s “hostess” programming, her inability to refuse consent, the egret feathers motif, etc.
If this has one weakness it is that the rules which govern Celia’s behaviour seem a little fuzzy (you could maybe call them Three Laws-ish) but it is, nevertheless, a very good piece, and the best of this first group of stories.
You Can Make a Dinosaur, But You Can’t Help Me by K. M. Szpara starts with the protagonist Emerick and her boyfriend Leo choosing which dinosaur-themed dildo they should use while they have sex (both are trans, I think, but I still wasn’t entirely sure after ten minutes of trying to puzzle it out). During, and after, this scene there are big data dumps about the protagonist’s transition, his problematic (“toxic”) parental relationships, and his wish that he had been born cis. There is also a brief mention about his father’s “portal”, which pretty obviously (spoiler), and even at this early stage of the story, telegraphs the story’s future arc as a trans wish-fulfilment story.
When the couple later go to Dad’s island, and site of the portal, they have a car-crash breakfast with Emerick’s father, who still treats her as his son; matters do not improve when Dad gushingly introduces his assistant Noelle, who then dead-names Emerick too.
Although the father is something of a straw-man (he seems remarkably dim for someone who has invented a portal to another world), the character interplay in this section makes it seem as if the story might spark into life, but all we get from this point on is a lot of nonsense about how the dinosaurs (yes, more dinosaur-themed fun) that Dad has brought through the portal have changed sex:
“You probably know, Owen Corp had been attempting to engineer its own dinosaurs—unsuccessfully, for many years. You see, the portal mutates DNA. They had no idea where to start. Not until I walked through.”
Noelle chuckles to herself as she holds up her hands.
“Sometimes, I feel like an imposter, despite the degrees I earned in my home world. Whatever happened to the dinosaurs, when they crossed through the portal, happened to me. I can perform genetic manipulations no one in this world ever imagined. It’s almost—and I feel silly using the word—like magic?
“Anyway.” She shoves her hands back in her vest pockets. “I’ve made a few mistakes along the way, while we figure out the science behind it all. These dinosaurs are isolated because they had spontaneous sex changes!” Noelle looks at the two of you as if you will of course find this hilarious. “Apparently the single-sex environment did not agree with their DNA. They dissolved their genitals and re-grew the opposite. Awesome, but not in line with our safety protocols.”
This ends predictably enough with (spoiler) Em trying to break into the lab to go through the portal. She is caught by Noelle and, after a Big Talk, she eventually assists Em to achieve her transition by means of some hand-wavy genetic manipulation.
However much one may sympathise with the issues raised in this story there is no escaping the ridiculous plot, and the transgender data dumps that periodically strangle the story. I realise that there wouldn’t be much left without the latter, but I can’t see the difference between these and the scientific lectures you get in 1930’s SF in terms of their effect on the story. I’m also not a fan of stories where characters work out their Daddy issues.
And Yet by A. T. Greenblatt starts with woman4 who is a theoretical physicist going back to a “haunted house” of her youth:
Nothing in the house has stayed the same since the last time you worked up the nerve to come in. Nothing. This shouldn’t surprise you, because you have this theory that the house reacts to its visitors. The visitor is the catalyst and the catalyst is not a bullied eight-year-old kid anymore. Thus the reaction is different. And yet.
You were hoping, god you were hoping you could take the same path as before. Have the same escape routes. But the haunted house of your childhood has become an unfamiliar landscape. Instead of the front door opening to a wide landing and a staircase, you are standing in a foyer, at the mouth of a narrow hall with rooms on either side. There’s no staircase in sight.
The walls are slanted inward. They’re covered in dark, dizzyingly patterned wallpaper and you aren’t claustrophobic until you are. Vertigo and your pulse skips so badly you don’t even notice the frames on the walls at first. But when you do, you bite back a scream.
They’re full of pictures of you
She eventually stumbles into a room full of her childhood friends, who are watching a looping video of various permutations of a truck accident involving her kid brother (which later caused his death). After seeing this she suspects that the house may contain multiple parallel universes. When she explores further she ends up on the floor above and, when she climbs out of the window using a rope ladder, she finds herself outside the house twenty years in the past—on the day she first went in.
This is essentially a story about the protagonist’s childhood and her (spoiler) trying to save her brother, but it is all wrapped up in a tricksy multiple-worlds house scenario that vaguely recalls Heinlein’s “—And There Was A Crooked House—″. It’s not entirely convincing, but it’s not bad.
The last of the short stories is She Still Loves the Dragon by Elizabeth Bear, which is over-written, pretentious, and has too many passages in italics.5 It begins with a female knight-errant climbing a mountain to meet a dragon, whereupon (as the story would put it) they have Deep Conversations:
“I made myself,” says the dragon. “A long time ago. By deciding to exist, and take up space in the world.”
“Is that all it takes for you to be real?”
“Are you the litany of things you have accomplished?”
The woman is silent for a while. Then she says, “Yes. That is how we make ourselves real. That is what we are.”
.
An eye that as one regards it, is in its turn regarding one as well.
.
“You are because you are,” the woman says. Her hair is growing in again, a thick black cloud that has never pressed beneath a helm. “And I love you because you are.”
.
Everything is pain.
Beneath the pain is freedom.
I suspect that (spoiler) the knight’s burns (she eventually gets a light toasting from the dragon) and the subsequent healing process is a metaphor for the pain love causes and people’s eventual recovery.
One final point from the Fantasy Language department:
She is still singing as she achieves the hollow top of the mountain where the dragon nests, glaciers gently sublimating into steam against its belly.
Ice sublimates into water vapour at normal temperatures and pressures, not steam, which is invisible (the misty stuff you see when you boil a kettle is water vapour, tiny droplets of water suspended in the air). Regardless of whether I’m right about all that (my Physics and Chemistry degree was a long time ago), “sublimating” is likely to cause the googling of triple point diagrams in the middle of your fantasy mini-epic.
Not a bad bunch so far: let’s see what the second half of the anthology brings (my hunch is that the novelettes—SF’s natural length—will be stronger). The second part of the review is here. ●
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1. The Facebook group is The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Fiction of the Year.
The next group read (if we ever get finished the current one) looks like it will be The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, A Special 25th Anniversary Anthology, edited by Edward L. Ferman, 1974—unless a load of dodgy postal votes reach us before midnight on Saturday.
This anthology collects the stories and ancillaries from the first six “Special Author” issues of F&SF (Theodore Sturgeon, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, James Blish). The full contents list of this volume is at ISFDB, but it contains these stories:
When You Care, When You Love • (1962) • novelette by Theodore Sturgeon
To the Chicago Abyss • (1963) • short story by Ray Bradbury
The Key • [Wendell Urth] • (1966) • novelette by Isaac Asimov
Ship of Shadows • (1969) • novella by Fritz Leiber
The Queen of Air and Darkness • (1971) • novella by Poul Anderson
Midsummer Century • (1972) • novella by James Blish
2. Supporting membership for this year’s Worldcon can be obtained here. Currently $75 NZ, around £35/$45.
3. On the discussion thread for Larson’s story, Jim Harris made a couple of interesting comments:
That’s the trouble with a lot of SF stories, they go for the easy/obvious answer [. . .] it would have been more interesting if Cu had come up with a deeper philosophical or emotional solution to her isolation.
.
I worry that writers are too influenced by TV/movies. They picture their stories being filmed, and the ending does feel like something that would end a TV show. What makes a story really stand out is when a writer imagines something that feels like it’s right or real, but something we never thought of ourselves, so it gives us an Ah-Ha moment. What would an uplifted chimp really feel? It was interesting that Cu went into law enforcement because she observed things in humans that most humans don’t. That’s kind of logical. But what would make an uplifted chimp feel at home in human society?
4. The gender of the narrator isn’t explicitly stated in Greenblatt’s piece but reading your brother bedtime stories is more a big sister thing (big brothers would just wedgie your pyjamas), and both the narrator’s best friend and personal trainer are female.
5. My understanding is that large blocks of italics are hard for dyslexic readers to process, which is why I changed the formatting of the quoted text here some time ago.
The Triple Point diagram for water makes my head hurt. ●
Edited 10th May 2020 to add ratings and link to second review.
