association-list

This week’s short story club story is The Shangri-​​La Affair by Lavie Tidhar, who I’d never heard of before.

It’s really quite good.

I was struck from the first by the con­fi­dence of the nar­ra­tive voice. The story fol­lows an unnamed pro­tag­o­nist from a quite close third-​​person per­spec­tive through a future war in South-​​East Asia, con­cern­ing a par­tic­u­lar MacGuf­fin in the form of a peace plague (the Shangri-​​La of the title), virally trans­miss­able fellow-​​feeling that stops hos­til­i­ties in their tracks. We only get to see its effects for a moment before every­thing is blown to atoms by the unseen back­ers of our name­less view­point char­ac­ter. The story’s prime emo­tional con­flict is his strug­gle between destroy­ing the peace plague and let­ting it spread. Finally, he decides that peace not chosen is no peace worth having. This strug­gle would have more res­o­nance if we had some theory as to how the peace plague works. If the reader were allowed another view­point on whether or not the plague nul­li­fies free will, it very well might deepen the effect of his choice. The doubt it still there, but I think that it’d be better if it were made a bit more explicit.

The story isn’t per­fect, of course. There are only token female char­ac­ters and the people that we encounter for the most part are generic Men of Action and Con­se­quence. The plot is at least four decades old and the tone is taken straight from smeary spy novels set in war­zones far away from the home front, with­out any real engage­ment with the con­se­quences of the war on the people who live there. What virtue the piece has lies in the clev­er­ness of its syn­the­sis of these ele­ments, and I think that it suc­ceeds very well (that said, I tend towards syn­the­sis ( see update below ) in my tastes, per­haps to a fault, Gene Wolfe and Michael Swan­wick being favorites of mine).

Since read­ing it, I’ve gone on some­thing of a Tidhar binge, and what is out there on line really strikes me as qual­ity stuff, some of it better, I think, than this par­tic­u­lar piece, 304 Adolf Hitler Strasse over at Clarkesworld being the best of the stuff online, in my opin­ion, at least that I’ve found. I also went out and bought Hebrew­Punk and ordered The Book­man, so I may be in the throes of an irra­tional enthu­si­asm. Look­ing for­ward to what he pro­duces in the future.

UPDATE: see here for a clar­i­fi­ca­tion of the ter­mi­nol­ogy that I’m using above.