association-list

It’s hard for me to tease out what I don’t like here about this story from what I don’t like about its embed­ded assump­tions about human­ity, Amer­ica, and people.

Like some­one said a couple of sto­ries ago, I am dog-​​tired of first-​​person nar­ra­tives. I am tired of a lot of things, and this story man­ages to hit on a lot of them. So if you strip away the science-​​fiction aspects of the story, you have a slightly sexist and racist reac­tionary stick-​​figure of a pro­tag­o­nist wor­ship­ing his golden idol of a father because his father loves him less than his dogs. I’d have con­sid­ered the father-​​son rela­tion­ship here a cheap, sen­ti­men­tal trick in a better story. Here, the main char­ac­ter is so warped by this unlikely rela­tion­ship that he’s effec­tively emas­cu­lated, despite the fact that he has worlds more power than his father in every con­ceiv­able way. The only way to make the device more crass would be to move it into 1970s Amer­i­can Male Author daddy-​​issue ter­ri­tory by having the kid lust after Mona more and have a painful scene in which the kid dis­cov­ers that his daddy have been ‘com­fort­ing’ her in her grief, after her hus­band died. Suf­fice it to say that I find the char­ac­ters unbe­liev­able, schematic, and uninvolving.

The embed­ded assump­tions are maybe going to be less appar­ent or obnox­ious to the non-​​American people; it might even be West Coast spe­cific. Capitalist/​libertarian-​​oriented, dully US-​​centric, assum­ing that each tech boom will be fol­lowed by another, the coun­try is better than the city, manual work better than intel­lec­tual work, gov­ern­ment is evil when not incom­pe­tent, etc., etc., so on and so forth. It cir­cum­scribes the world declar­ing that while it might be dif­fer­ent, it can never really be better. I am against the golden age, as a human con­cept. The fact that we all feel it says some­thing about us, rather than some­thing about the world. If the story had been a dis­sec­tion of this feel­ing through its blink­ered and backwards-​​looking main char­ac­ter, it might have been some­thing inter­est­ing, but it doesn’t even remain unex­am­ined; it seems to be the explicit posi­tion of the story.

It could be that I am riding my own hobby horses into some­one else’s nar­ra­tive, and taking these things too seri­ously, but the fact remains that improve­ments in the state of the world do have real con­se­quences. To write a story in which the bet­ter­ment of the lives of bil­lions of people is side­lined by the quo­tid­ian drama of the decline of the aged is, in some ways, to entirely miss the point of using a science-​​fictional set­ting. No doubt there are issues of taste at the heart of it. Also there’s an elec­tion coming up, and that always gets my polit­i­cal juices flow­ing and my ide­o­log­i­cal anten­nae quivering.

Even putting aside the ide­o­log­i­cal under­pin­nings of the story, the fail­ures of char­ac­ter would be enough to damn it, all on their own. Prose-​​wise, it feels under-​​baked, larded with a few too many stock phrasings.

More specif­i­cally, a mechanic for cap­tur­ing col­lec­tive action problems.

You need at least three people to play, but ide­ally five. Odd num­bers are best, no ties. That said, tie-​​breaking can be done with a coin or dice.

You have three teams. Every­one who is play­ing is assigned to one of the teams at random. If there’s no one on one of the teams, the least pop­u­lous team donates one member. Every­one rolls a die and triples the result. This is taken as their ini­tial score. Then, they vote. The vote can be to give one of the teams two points, or to give all teams one point, or to take one point from a team. After the vote the dice is rolled. 1 – 3 means one of the teams loses a point, 3 – 6 means one of the teams gains a point.

The first player to break fifty points wins, but if any player is under twenty-​​five points when the game fin­ishes, every­one loses.

Obvi­ously there are elab­o­ra­tions to be made to make this a palat­able mechanic, and it might be pos­si­ble to make the idea sim­pler, but I just wanted to bench­mark where my think­ing was at this point.

I am deeply tempted to start this off with a rant about how ter­ri­ble the sto­ries bought for Tor.com’s theme months are, but I will not, other than to note that they have a pretty bad track record there.

From the author’s con­tri­bu­tions to the com­ments, she doesn’t typ­i­cally trade in para­nor­mal romance (do people in the UK really call them ‘fang bangers?’), and I think that it’s all the better for it. She doesn’t attempt to trade on the pre­sum­ably well-​​worn tropes of the genre, and appar­ently all this hap­pens in a world where we both have were­wolves and Buffy still aired (side note: Buffy ended a year after the date that mon­sterkind is revealed in the world of the story. I am curi­ous as to what that last season would have been like, in that uni­verse. Also I am a dork).

Since I don’t read a lot of PR books, I might be miss­ing the people who’re trying to sub­vert the con­ven­tions of the genre, but this is the best piece that I’ve read so far in that vein. Were­wolf hunters as psy­chopaths and sadists rather than bad-​​ass super­heroes is a sub­ver­sion that res­onates with a lot of my com­plaints about the entire genre, not just its PR sub­sec­tions (cyber­punk did us a dis­ser­vice, I think).

The the­matic spine of the story is, of course, the ties here between oth­ered com­mu­ni­ties. Nor­mally, an LGBT com­mu­nity (or another out­sider com­mu­nity) spring­ing to the defense of ‘mon­sterkind’ here would be a bit obvi­ous, but some­how she man­ages it here with­out making it too ter­ri­bly unsub­tle. Nor­mally out­sider com­mu­ni­ties don’t like to go around bor­row­ing trou­ble, but in larger cities, there’s a sense that the more people who band together the more pow­er­ful you become. So it makes sense, narrative-​​wise that the whole com­mu­nity that this women has access to would come out and stand up. This isn’t simple, of course. Just wit­ness the dif­fi­cul­ties trans­gen­der per­sons have had get­ting prop­erly rep­re­sented by the ‘main­stream’ LGBT orga­ni­za­tions. It’d have amped up the real­ism a bit more to show the phonecalls that she made, so that we could see not just who came, but who couldn’t be both­ered and who actively didn’t want to come.

I also like how gov­ern­ment is pre­sented as com­pli­cated, with mul­ti­ple levels and fac­tions. Too often, espe­cially in lit­er­a­ture coming from the notional left, or from any non-​​centrist ide­o­log­i­cal posi­tion, that gov­ern­ment is one single block oozing evil and sim­per­ing hench­men. The evo­ca­tion of this here wasn’t nec­es­sary to the plot, but I thought that it was a nice touch all the same.

My only real com­plaint with the story is that the prose is too trans­par­ent. Well enough writ­ten, but not exactly fine. Totally capa­ble of sup­port­ing the piece, though, so it’s some­thing of a minor quibble.