Rachel Swirsky is a very reliable award nominee, it seems like I have reviewed a story of hers every year. They are always good literary stories, and The Grand Jete is no exception. The speculative piece is a robot avatar--a capture of a person in robot form, developed for military use. It is a rather light framework for the story, concerning the relationship between a dying girl and her engineer father. The cultural exploration is Jewish--the father tries to keep Shabbat and kosher, but they bend the rules significantly, particularly to accommodate her illness.
It's a fascinating and difficult exploration, told from both the father and daughter perspective. The father intends to keep the robot as a replacement for his dying daughter, but in order to complete the process must have her permission. We see what she goes through as she considers this.
The story has a little bit of a feeling like it's both speculative and dated. We have a household run by AI (only a mild enhancement of Google Now) but it is exercised mostly to play DVDs. It's in keeping with the household and the father, though--he is a tinkerer and has patched together the household components.
Overall, I give it a strong 3 stars for literary value. Enjoy
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
When the Moon Hits Your Eye, by John Scalzi
Scalzi is able to write humorous novels that get at deeper truths and really go places. "Red Shirts" and "The Kaiju Preservat...
-
The introduction to Slow Tuesday Night is by Gardner Dozios, the great editor, and he tells us that "only those stories that were the ...
-
There are some interesting theories out there on what Gene Wolfe's "The Ziggurat" short story means . Indeed, Wolfe is heavil...
-
Shadow Christ is an awfully tough story to explain. It's sort of about playing with time, and religion, and deeper cultural commentary...
No comments:
Post a Comment