Friday short fiction #16: dystopias 2

[peteryoung]

Matthew Sabo  Dystopian Paradise  2007
Tor.com have been having a Dystopia Week, including a post centred around John Joseph Adams's huge anthology of dystopias, Brave New Worlds, plus at the same time making freely available Kim Stanley Robinson's 'The Lunatics'. That story plus many others from that collection are what I seem to have been hooked on this week:

Ray Bradbury, 'The Pedestrian'  (THE REPORTER, 7 AUGUST 1951)
A 22nd Century night walker becomes entangled with the law, simply for walking the streets. Its dramatic content is a little too straightforward for my tastes but there's no denying Bradbury could write SF than would strike a chord with a wider readership outside the confines of SF fandom.

Kim Stanley Robinson, 'The Lunatics'  (BETH MEACHAM, ed., TERRY'S UNIVERSE, 1988)
Miners on the moon working in complete darkness try to free themselves from slavery. In the dystopian context which Adams frames it in his introduction – that of indentured nineteenth century Pennsylvanian coal miners – this becomes rather poignant, otherwise I would have found it more difficult to gain the necessary perspective. A good story, but not IMHO a great one.

Genevieve Valentine, 'Is This Your Day to Join the Revolution?'  (FUTURISMIC, 1 SEPTEMBER 2009)
A straight-down-the-middle dystopia of the best-known variety, with shady government forces lying to the people to keep them in line. The style however is rather sly, light and humorous, as the story's protagonist is led towards her wake-up call.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr., 'Harrison Bergeron'  (THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION, OCTOBER 1961)
Depicting a future society that has drastically adopted a 'lowest common denominator' approach to human potential, this is still gorgeously absurd and ridiculous.

Favourite short story of the week: Adam-Troy Castro, 'Of a Sweet Slow Dance in the Wake of Temporary Dogs'  (KEITH R.A. DeCANDIDO, ed., IMAGININGS, 2003)
Mr. Castro seems to have been all over my recent reading: his story 'Arvies' was selected by more Million Writers Award judges than any other story (and also gained my own nomination), and I discovered yesterday that Chapter 7 from Atlanta Nights that I plugged a couple of weeks ago was also penned by him. 'Sweet Slow Dance' is also included in Brave New Worlds and asks: could you live in a place that's 9/10s utopia and 1/10 hell on Earth? Every tenth day the city of Enysbourg descends into unremitting barbarism with everything but the memory of it erased overnight. As beautifully written as this story is (and as questioning as Le Guin's 'The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas') this Nebula-nominated novelette is also a gold-plated mindfuck, and one of my favourite short reads of the year so far.