Tag: short story

By on

This week at Strange Horizons: Sex With Ghosts by Sarah Kanning.

This is the first story that I can recall reading whose protagonist is explicitly asexual–that is, not hermaphroditic or ungendered, but simply lacking any sex drive. And of course she gets paired with a robotic double who consists of nothing but sex drive, and hilarity ensues.

Well, not quite hilarity. The story winds up being an interesting reflection on the nature of sexuality and personhood and the interplay between them. There is a suggestion that the sexless narrator is lacking something, and that the encounter with her hypersexed robot twin is necessary to teach her about herself and humanity. There’s a more explicit suggestion that the woman and the robot are mirror images of each other, and are so equally equipped to do the job of interviewing the robot brothel’s clients–the one because she’s completely indifferent to the clients’ behavior, and the other because she’s pruriently interested in all of the clients’ needs.

I find that an intriguing idea, though I don’t know if I’d actually apply it to life. In particular, I have known one or two people in my life who were asexual or close to it, and I don’t think that they are incomplete for it. And if I knew someone who was suffered from monomaniacal nymphomania in the way the robot does, I’d consider it deeply unhealthy. The story was nonetheless thought-provoking.

By on

Hey, so it turns out that Meghan McCarron, who wrote Tetris Dooms Itself that I briefly commented on yesterday, also wrote The Magician’s House, which appeared a few weeks ago at Strange Horizons.

If I were to analyze McCarron based on these stories, I’d suggest that she has some issues that need working out. Tetris is a story about an icky, abusive relationship centered on violence and mutilation; The Magician’s House is about an icky, abusive relationship borne of an older magician’s ability to manipulate his student. Ick and abuse all around!

But I don’t actually think she has issues, mostly because (a) I’ve never met her and know nothing about her, and (b) writers are not their stories. Item (b) is the important one, here. I hate to think what someone would think who was diagnosing me based on the stuff I’ve written.

By on

Tetris Dooms Itself by Meghan McCarron, currently up at Clarkesworld.com, reminds me a lot of Kill Me by Vylar Kaftan. Aside from the themes of sadism and masochism, they both left me feeling icky. Stories about extreme sadomasochism just don’t work for me. In the case of Tetris Dooms Itself, there’s the bonus of not understanding much of what happened in the story, even at the literal level.

On the plus side, Blue Ink by Yoon Ha Lee was awesome.

By on

In this case, you made it all the way through round two and into the winnowing phase. There were some rough spots, one person thought, but two others thought it was quirky and interesting enough to publish. It lost out in the winnowing phase. That’s pretty far — about 5% of all stories make it there.

Woohoo! Maybe next time.

By on

Strange Horizons has an amazing story up today about loss, regret, and a telepathic ATM. The end literally brought me to tears.

Strange Horizons has been on a roll lately. Last week’s story was an educational “Letter to the Editor” about the history of tarot, which was unusual in that it appeared to be mostly factual. Like this piece about maps of Antarctica, it’s a story that has to be glimpsed through the slats of a verf different surface narrative. I love that kind of stuff.

By on 7 Comments

This is a reaction of a sort to this story by Lisa Mantchev. If you haven’t read it yet, go ahead and do so, then briefly peruse the comments.

The comments section is the really interesting thing. (Unlike most of the commenters there, I didn’t like the story itself that much–it was cute but not all that memorable, and I couldn’t figure out what the point was of making the horrible, spiteful little girl grow up into a horrible, spiteful adult.) The entire argument in the comment thread revolved around whether the story was racist for including the idea of “peddlers” (i.e. gypsies or Romani) buying a child. There were a few commenters of Romani ancestry complaining that it was, along with a group of like-minded supporters. Across the aisle were others that thought the story was fine and leapt to its defense with a variety of arguments. Some of these arguments were pretty stupid (“it’s a free country!”), while some were legitimate (“nothing in the story suggests that the peddlers are gypsies”).

It’s this last argument that I’m interested in pursuing. Nothing identifies the peddlers as gypsies except for the fact that they’re peddlers, and the child-buying is not what the story was about. The author herself appears in the comments and explains the explicit efforts she made to dissociate the peddlers from the stereotypes about Romani. This seems like a good-faith attempt to avoid perpetuating destructive stereotypes without gutting the story, so my sympathies lie with the author. What else is she supposed to do?

“Don’t write stories about selling children,” one commenter suggested with a straight face. This makes an extraordinary claim about the responsibilities of an author when dealing with racial stereotypes: the author can never mention them or even use things that resemble them at all unless specifically to repudiate them. The appearance of any character or situation that smacks of stereotype is automatically disallowed.

I find this alarming, and not just because it limits the sorts of stories that authors are “allowed” to tell. The real problem is that this discourages authors from using non-mainstream non-privileged characters at all. In this case the author explicitly tried to remove the racial implications, and still fell under the opprobrium of the offended. What option is there but to avoid the non-mainstream entirely? I don’t just say this hypothetically: I’ve had stories that I wanted to write, but hesitated because I was afraid of potentially racist interpretations. The solution is often to make the character white, or male, or mainstream, because at least no one can then accuse you of stereotype.

This hardly seems like a victory. For anyone.

By on 1 Comment

Wow. A bumper crop of envelopes in my mailbox… but none of them say what I want. I do want to highlight one response I received, though. This wasn’t for my novel, but for one of my short stories:

We thought it had a promising start — the writing is good, and it’s genuinely funny in places. But… [snip lots of useful information about what this editor didn’t like about the story]. That said, please do try us again with more work in the future.

I’ll take that. Yes I will. It’s not quite the same thing as an envelope full of money, but it’s the next closest thing.

By on 1 Comment

Vylar Kaftan wrote an interesting post about stories that are three sentences off. I was going to leave her a nice comment, but the server she’s hosted on ate one comment, and didn’t seem to work when I tried to post another. So instead I’m writing this post, and maybe the pingback will work. (After meeting her husband Shannon and recognizing him as a fellow Linux geek with a tiny laptop that was teh k00l, I suspect that her site is hosted on a server in their garage. Shannon: get some more CPU and/or bandwidth on that baby.)

Do you ever write a story, and have it ALMOST working–but it’s three sentences off?

Approximately three sentences, of course. Might be a few more or less. Might be sentences you need to add, delete, change, or some combination of the above. But those tiny changes make all the difference.

Yes. This happens to me all the time. However, I am lazier, or perhaps more impatient than Vy. If I get to that point and I can’t see what the fix is, I’m sorely tempted to say “What the hell”, slap it in an envelope, and send it on its way. This is a terrible idea. What I really should do is set it aside for a few days and come back to it later. That usually gives me the perspective to see what’s wrong, or (more likely) gives me the perspective to see dozens of other things that are wrong.

Although I successfully evaded that problem with my two most recent subs, as both Lights and Confession of Adrianna Belle had problems in their endings that I did eventually fix. I think I’m perfectly happy with each of them at present.