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.