Caltrops - Dead Trees





	[quote name="Fussbett"][quote name="Zsenitan"]we have a detailed picture of our personal smallness and irrelevance. All first-worlders are encouraged to feel a grief that was formerly the province only of aristocracy: that we have failed to make the most of our potential, that we will not succeed even as far as our parents did. This is a grief that I feel permeates the 60s and 70s, a grief written into your story here.[/quote] That's quite a lot of reading into the backstories of the four characters who have no backstories at all (aside from one guy having learned Mandolin previously). Can we really start talking about underachieving malaise and disappointing your father from those 5.5 pages? [quote]We would be mystified if some long-standing regular suddenly demonstrated that he thought that this was a <i>wrongly done forum</i> - not just that he felt personally unwelcome or failed to hack it, but that the way that the forum itself is structured, the rules it has and the traditions it rests upon... that these things were inherently incorrect.[/quote] Wasn't that BDR? And he "killed himself" by going to Qt3, so your theory holds up there. [quote]Victor and Julia and Edward all built lives based on certain assumptions, which they held in spite of evidence to the contrary, or even because they would rather hold the assumption than grasp a worthlessly ugly reality. When it was no longer possible to stay deluded, they were overcome by grief and committed suicide. That some of the suicides in the story are witnesses to others is just standard-issue Lynchian unreliable narrator stuff. Ann, their child - biologically in two out of three cases, culturally in two out of three cases - will enter into the same world of potentially lethal irrelevancy. The results are left unreported.[/quote] I don't think Victor was living any delusions at all. In fact in most ways Victor is portrayed as a nearly passionless realist/fatalist. I also don't agree with the unreliable narrator explaining away the constant huge inconsistencies in the tales, including different people dying in some versions. Or more correctly, I <i>hope</i> that's not the explanation for something so deliberate and intrinsic to the story, because that's a terrible gimmick to throw in for no reason, for no bigger statement. Let's consider that the John W. Campbell award winner who Harlan Ellison says is "one of the few writers in the world whom I will gladly, happily, loudly declare is a better writer than I am" is doing something larger. Because otherwise this story sucks as a pointless poor-man's Rashomon. We all agree that these characters are in (a) hell(s), as naming the story Gehenna makes that clear, but can we also agree there is a sci-fi component? The prologue from the "Best SF 71" editors alludes to something going "terribly wrong with the subway"...[/quote]