It's not often I read SF from the New Yorker, and George Saunders is new to me, so this piece was doubly interesting. And a World Fantasy Award winner in 2006 to boot. CommComm is at first a bit of a tough story to get a handle on--it's definitely dystopian, possibly near future, and features an oddly (or perhaps normally) disconnected protagonist. The world seems to be undergoing a slow death from pollution, for which our protagonist is a professional apologist. But as we go along, we get other archetypes. A crotchety old man (with perfectly good reasons to be crotchety) is ordinary enough, but we also have a sort of super Joel-Osteen Christian who is hovering between hero and petty villain. Which will it be? Go ahead and find out--though I didn't find it fully compelling, I still enjoyed it pretty well. 3 stars.
I see the Burn post is doing real well--17 hits in one day, as much as I have seen before.
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