SEAL Book Club

[InspectorCaracal]

The kids woke me up way before J today and I got this draft saved ahead of time so I'll go first today.

I Was a Teenage Space Jockey

I was expecting something completely different from the title and spent most of my first read-through being confused about where the story was going to go. I think this one goes in the category of "a good story which I can appreciate but it isn't really my kind of thing". There's a lot to unpack in it which I don't really have the... skills? qualifications? to talk about so *gestures vaguely*. The bit in particular where Marten decides to cut off his other braid to keep his dad from going to jail was like, ow, but also, like, a relatable choice.

One lighthearted takeaway: the focus on being in an arcade as a historical time period made me feel old lol

This makes for a second "normal life in the past but with One Weird Reality-Bending Trick" story, which I find interesting. Is this more common than I thought or is it a coincidence?


Space Pirate Queen of the Ten Billion Utopias

This one was a lot of fun! Incredibly standard message about environmentalism and social activism and kind of an abrupt conclusion, but the bulk of the story was a lot of fun.

Do you think it was intended as a reimagining of Night on the Galactic Railroad or just inspired by the flying trans-galactic train imagery?


Stowaways

I got like 1/3 of the way through this one and went "oh, it's a skip" and yeah. It's basically a skip lol. From that angle it was a really fun clever little piece.

Buuuuuut.

The ending super annoyed me??? The entire write-up says that the work is behind a curtain, one that the card and you are in front of. It talks about ethics and consent. And then the ending is like "surprise! it's behind you! you've already been infected!" What the fuck was that??


To Reach the Gate, She Must Leave Everything Behind

I got to the word "quiver" in the first paragraph and I knew exactly what this story was going to be and I made myself read it anyway in case I was wrong.

I was not wrong.

I'm really, really tired of the whole "Aslan is Bad, Actually" genre of Narnia fanfiction and I regret not quitting at the second sentence.

I'll spare you all the rant.


The Poetry

Nothing much to say about them this week. The first poem was very contemporaneous. The second poem had some great referential imagery but I couldn't figure out whether it was about the ex-heroes or about the children of the ex-heroes, which changes the tone of the piece pretty dramatically.

What about y'all? You two usually have better reads on the poems than I do.

[Bee]

So the bad Narnia fanfic made me so angry it ruined the momentum and I never got to read the Space Pirate Queen story

I haven't given up yet, though

[thiskurt]

Ok, sorry for the lateness, but no one told me I should not try reading these all in one go! (I didn't finish everything yet and looks like B didn't either, so maybe I'll push of the next announcement to tuesday and extend this week's discussion a bit?)

Here's the short stories already:

I Was a Teenage Space Jockey

Because this was set in the '80s, I'm guessing, the title and that it mentioned the military for some reason I kept picturing his brother being in a starship-troopers style spaceship up to shenenigans, which didn't really fit. And then I started hearing the narration in the style of Stand By Me and The Sandlot. I'm not sure why, I think my brain just went all over the place since it couldn't place where it was going.

I find it hard to talk about these mostly-normal stories with a magical element at the end to tie/push the themes too. It may be more common in SFF magazines I think, depending on how 'literary' they want to be? I think I like the genre.

Space Pirate Queen of the Ten Billion Utopias

Or as I like to call it The Trainhopper's Guide to the Multiverse.

I feel I liked this one a lot less than I could have. I don't know, I was just thrown of from the moment she sang her contemporarily-minus-nine-months relevant song. I'm not sure how to explain it.

She's hopping trains through the entire multiverse and everyone she comes people are like "You're from late 2010s/early 2020s America? That truely is the most unimaginable horror". (But I guess they were all specifically from utopias)

It's not that I disagree or didn't want the story to be about that, it's... erm, likeit didn't actually explore what the song was about or show how it affected the character personally?

It felt detached from the actual story, like it was just the author popping in every once in a while going "I sure think current American politics are shit". *shrug* Well, duh.

I'm not saying it was irrelevant to the story, the opposite actually it's kind of the whole point, but it felt like the story assumed everyone would be on the same page on it and didn't bother to develop it at all?

But I think even if the reader is on the same page the story still needs to show this?

And so for many any lessons at the end about how things don't have to be good to be perfect as long as people work at making things better kind of felt flat for me at the end.

[thiskurt]

Stowaways

My first thought when reading this story, about 1/4 of the way through it, was: "I this supposed to be a mashup of dense art analysis talk and technobabble? If so it's doing a great job, because I have no idea what they're talking about."

So I started over and was pleased to realise it did actually make sense and was a pretty interesting idea.

Is this story also kind of about how easy misinformation spreads online and how social media causes people to form bubbles in which it's easy for shared ideas or even delusions to become truth to the people in the bubbles.

I don't know, I just felt like the whole memetic intelligence spreading from host to host, running on excess processing cycles of the brain, having the form of cartoonish figures, or figures from animation, and being humurous and entertaining, etcetera...

All that felt like it was somehow a metepohor for how, sometimes bad, sometimes blatantly incorrect, ideas spread through seemingly innocuous memes online? Maybe I'm just associating the 'memetic' part too much with social media/the internet because of the use of 'meme' in that context.

With that the "aha you've been already infected" thing at the end seemed to me to be about the inescapabilty of those memetic ideas as soon as you set foot in the gallery/internet.

Even if that's not the case it doesn't annoy me, I think it's kind of funny and in line with Arend's original "disformance art", actual performance art has had dubious approaches to consent too.

To Reach the Gate, She Must Leave Everything Behind

Ha. I didn't mind this one much. I have now read more the-problem-of-susan style stories than I've actually read Narnia stories, though, since I've only read the Magician's Nephew. (Not in total words obviously, but still funny.)

[InspectorCaracal]

Scheduling

I'm cool with postponing the next set, a couple days or a week, altho we might want to take a week break for Christmas? I dunno, what do y'all think.

So the bad Narnia fanfic made me so angry it ruined the momentum and I never got to read the Space Pirate Queen story

yeah I'm lucky I always read it in the order Kurt posts the listings so I got through everything but the poetry first or I might've joined you on this

I Was a Teenage Space Jockey

Because this was set in the '80s, I'm guessing, the title and that it mentioned the military for some reason I kept picturing his brother being in a starship-troopers style spaceship up to shenenigans, which didn't really fit.

YES. EXACTLY. I mean I never saw Starship Troopers so not exactly but I was definitely expecting more Star Wars, less Quantum Leap.

I gotta say tho that it definite wins a place on the very short list of stories where I expected one thing and got something totally different where I didn't feel disappointed by the actual story.

Space Pirate Queen of the Ten Billion Utopias

[...]

It's not that I disagree or didn't want the story to be about that, it's... erm, likeit didn't actually explore what the song was about or show how it affected the character personally?

Yeah!! Yeah, that's a good observation and now that you mentioned it, I think that's why I got the vibe of like, social activism boilerplate? The deepest it goes emotionally is it sort of gently explored the kind of self-perpetuating psychological baggage that shit living circumstances can create, but in a really superficial way.

Stowaways

[...]
With that the "aha you've been already infected" thing at the end seemed to me to be about the inescapabilty of those memetic ideas as soon as you set foot in the gallery/internet.

I actually like this read a lot. I still thought it was a crappy experience, reading it - I'm really not a fan of the "SURPRISE, everything we've set up in the story so far is actually a LIE" style of twist ending - but I can respect it as a possibly intentional shock-value move in order to mimic real-life phenomena in a metaphorical fiction.

To Reach the Gate, She Must Leave Everything Behind

Ha. I didn't mind this one much. I have now read more the-problem-of-susan style stories than I've actually read Narnia stories, though, since I've only read the Magician's Nephew. (Not in total words obviously, but still funny.)

Honestly... The only thing I can say about this story without devolving into a tangential rant is that I am as sure as I possibly could be that the author of this story did not intend it to be about Susan descending into Hell, which makes it all the more amazing and depressing how perfectly it represents exactly that within the theological metaphor of the entire Narnian universe.

[thiskurt]

Hey again. This week the magazine is Beneath Ceaseless Skies and it's just two stories this time.

We'll probably skip next week what with Christmas. Probably.

Here are the link.

Short Stories (12097)

1. The Fox's Daughter by Richard Parks
Wordcount: 5106
Link: https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com ... -daughter/

2. Fall To Rise by David Tallerman
Wordcount: 6991
Link: https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com ... l-to-rise/

[Bee]

This week has been ... Yeah

I completely forgot. I've never even posted about last week's pieces.

[InspectorCaracal]

This week has been ... Yeah

I completely forgot. I've never even posted about last week's pieces.

go ahead and post about last week's piece, we're taking next week off for christmas anyway so let's just drag this one out

i haven't read either of the most recent set myself

[thiskurt]

This week has been ... Yeah

I completely forgot. I've never even posted about last week's pieces.

go ahead and post about last week's piece, we're taking next week off for christmas anyway so let's just drag this one out

i haven't read either of the most recent set myself

Yep, we got a whole extra week to talk about this one or the last one.

[thiskurt]

I still haven't read last week's stories! (viewtopic.php?p=4581#p4581)

Next weekend is also new year, will it work for people to have a new session next week? Maybe we should skip that one too or push last week's discussion forward and start fresh on the 3rd?