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A review by nataliya_x
Uncanny Magazine Issue 34: May/June 2020 by Chimedum Ohaegbu, Elsa Sjunneson, Michael Damian Thomas, Lynne M. Thomas
4.0
This review is for two stories in this issue: Arkady Martine’s “A Being Together Among Strangers” (4 stars) and A.T. Greenblatt’s “Burn or The Episodic Life of Sam Wells as a Super” (3 stars).
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A Being Together Among Strangers by Arkady Martine:
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Oh, this is good. Short and good and dense with meaning and really just pitch-perfect.
And it’s the memory of the miners’ voices that propels our narrator to intervene in the everyday ugly of hatred targeted at a climate refugee from drowning parts of the country. She uses her tech and her training to project the understanding of anger that stems from desperation — and her human actions serve as a bridge for understanding and compassion.
It’s such a short story and yet so densely packed with meaning and emotion. It’s a story about empathy and understanding, and is conveyed so well, without platitudes or cheap play of overreliance on relatability of emotion. It is ultimately a story about those bits of humanity that do not change regardless of how much technology progresses — empathy, communication, channeling of desperation into hatred and taking it head on with compassion. It straddles that thin line between detached and personal, and the combined effect is powerful.
Arkady Martine is the author of my new favorite SF duology [b:A Memory Called Empire|37794149|A Memory Called Empire (Teixcalaan, #1)|Arkady Martine|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1526486698l/37794149._SY75_.jpg|59457173] and [b:A Desolation Called Peace|45154547|A Desolation Called Peace (Teixcalaan, #2)|Arkady Martine|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1654565596l/45154547._SY75_.jpg|61309907]. Her works are very thoughtful, and this one is not an exception to that. It struck that special chord in my heart, and I simply loved it.
4.5 stars.
You can read it free here, on Uncanny Magazine site: https://uncannymagazine.com/article/a-being-together-amongst-strangers/ . You can hear it on their podcast (link on the site, story starts at 8 minutes, interview with Arkady Martine at 30 min).
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Burn or The Episodic Life of Sam Wells as a Super by A.T. Greenblatt (nominated for Best Novelette for Hugo 2021 and Nebula 2020 Awards):
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I suppose the idea of an accountant for superpowered beings has its allure for writers (see [b:Hench|49867430|Hench|Natalie Zina Walschots|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1594616305l/49867430._SY75_.jpg|73236179] for a bloodier take on this). I mean, if you had to come up with an antithesis for all superheroic shenanigans, it would have to be accounting, right? It’s that contrast between the showy superpowers and ordered mundane world of spreadsheets and invoices that seems quite interesting to explore.
Here we have Sam Wells, an accountant who apparently has a superpower of bursting into flames — and is ostracized by the rest of the world for this perceived otherness. Naturally he struggles with self-disdain and self-hatred, and joins a team of “Supers” to help his self-image - of course, as an accountant. What follows is a quiet melancholic story of friendship, self-acceptance, fitting in, and the inherent small-minded evils of “othering”.
Yet it failed to engage me. Maybe it’s the low-key narration, or my overall “meh”-feeling about superheroes, or the too-transparent parallels to real world, or my persistent bafflement as why you would be an asshole to people who have abilities to hurt you badly. There nothing wrong with it, but it left me feeling that I’ve read something of this sort many times before, with the melancholic sadness feeling too familiar. It’s a well-trodden territory in recent fiction.
3 stars.
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My Hugo and Nebula Awards Reading Project 2021: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3701332299
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Recommended by: Dennis
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A Being Together Among Strangers by Arkady Martine:
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Oh, this is good. Short and good and dense with meaning and really just pitch-perfect.
“It does take blood, to make a city. That’s part of the problem. We haven’t figured out how not to feed ourselves on ourselves.”Narrated by a 22nd century New York subway commuter who works in conflict resolution using the tech implanted in her head - in the time of climate refugees and scarcity and kids who have never even eaten an apple - this starts with a poignant look at the cave-in during the 1903 building of a section of New York Subway, a disaster taking lives of many miners, some of whose names remain unknown to us. The bloody disaster is imagined as an enormous horrific sacrifice to the city. An extra dynamite blast is fired during the construction of the tunnel - two blasts are considered safe, third may not be, “but cities have demands, and so do subcontractors” — and so among blood and mangled limbs and dying cries that carried to the surface some 180 feet above them, dying in the dark, the miners sacrifice to the growing city added to the terrible symbiosis.
“Breathing creatures are hungry ones, and the city took the miners twice: once with joy, into its pubs and brothels and theaters, into its rooming-houses in Spuyten Duyvil—and once with blood.”
And it’s the memory of the miners’ voices that propels our narrator to intervene in the everyday ugly of hatred targeted at a climate refugee from drowning parts of the country. She uses her tech and her training to project the understanding of anger that stems from desperation — and her human actions serve as a bridge for understanding and compassion.
“[…] but if I keep talking to her, the rest of the people in this car will rotate around, they’ll make a human space where they recognize this woman as a person. We’re New Yorkers, and one of the other laws of the subway is when someone fucks up we all shout them down.”
It’s such a short story and yet so densely packed with meaning and emotion. It’s a story about empathy and understanding, and is conveyed so well, without platitudes or cheap play of overreliance on relatability of emotion. It is ultimately a story about those bits of humanity that do not change regardless of how much technology progresses — empathy, communication, channeling of desperation into hatred and taking it head on with compassion. It straddles that thin line between detached and personal, and the combined effect is powerful.
‘Thomas Lynch on his knees’, I tell myself, and ‘they heard the screaming from the surface’, and I breathe in and out and think about holding back the sea a little longer, with my own hands if I have to. With my own voice.
Arkady Martine is the author of my new favorite SF duology [b:A Memory Called Empire|37794149|A Memory Called Empire (Teixcalaan, #1)|Arkady Martine|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1526486698l/37794149._SY75_.jpg|59457173] and [b:A Desolation Called Peace|45154547|A Desolation Called Peace (Teixcalaan, #2)|Arkady Martine|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1654565596l/45154547._SY75_.jpg|61309907]. Her works are very thoughtful, and this one is not an exception to that. It struck that special chord in my heart, and I simply loved it.
4.5 stars.
“But I know they’re still here. With us in the dark. Sometimes I am sure they bought us the city, the vast machine of it that still runs despite everything we’ve done to the world. Sometimes I think that if we’d never sacrificed them, we’d never have had to have despite. Cities work by old magic, though, and there’s only so much you can plan for. They make demands. They grow and they die, and they make us, too, we small vicious brilliant things, and we grow and we die too, under their care, and we murder and nurture them the same.”
You can read it free here, on Uncanny Magazine site: https://uncannymagazine.com/article/a-being-together-amongst-strangers/ . You can hear it on their podcast (link on the site, story starts at 8 minutes, interview with Arkady Martine at 30 min).
—————
—————
Burn or The Episodic Life of Sam Wells as a Super by A.T. Greenblatt (nominated for Best Novelette for Hugo 2021 and Nebula 2020 Awards):
—————
I suppose the idea of an accountant for superpowered beings has its allure for writers (see [b:Hench|49867430|Hench|Natalie Zina Walschots|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1594616305l/49867430._SY75_.jpg|73236179] for a bloodier take on this). I mean, if you had to come up with an antithesis for all superheroic shenanigans, it would have to be accounting, right? It’s that contrast between the showy superpowers and ordered mundane world of spreadsheets and invoices that seems quite interesting to explore.
“The time-space continuum might be back to normal, but what about the paper trail?”
Here we have Sam Wells, an accountant who apparently has a superpower of bursting into flames — and is ostracized by the rest of the world for this perceived otherness. Naturally he struggles with self-disdain and self-hatred, and joins a team of “Supers” to help his self-image - of course, as an accountant. What follows is a quiet melancholic story of friendship, self-acceptance, fitting in, and the inherent small-minded evils of “othering”.
Yet it failed to engage me. Maybe it’s the low-key narration, or my overall “meh”-feeling about superheroes, or the too-transparent parallels to real world, or my persistent bafflement as why you would be an asshole to people who have abilities to hurt you badly. There nothing wrong with it, but it left me feeling that I’ve read something of this sort many times before, with the melancholic sadness feeling too familiar. It’s a well-trodden territory in recent fiction.
3 stars.
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My Hugo and Nebula Awards Reading Project 2021: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3701332299
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Recommended by: Dennis