Sic Semper, Sic Semper, Sic Semper by Douglas F. Warrick
My rating: 3/5 cats
He opened the door of the chamber and set to work emptying Lincoln’s skull. It wasn’t really murder. The president was already dead, and would die very soon anyway. So the time traveler felt no consternation about loading great shovelfuls of brain and cartilage and assorted headmeats into the chamber and shipping them off to some other chamber, constituted in some time and space where nobody would ever be bothered by it.
when the synopsis promised a story of a time-traveling man constructing a studio apartment in the hollowed-out skull of the sixteenth President of the United States, can you blame me for assuming that it would be comical, despite the descriptor “miserable” being applied to that time-traveling man?
it’s not that it’s never funny; i enjoyed the playful over-deployment of verb tenses and there are flourishes of stiffly-delivered humorous absurdity:
A skull—even an empty one—is not naturally conducive to the construction of an apartment suitable for human habitation, and the time traveler therefore required a great deal of lumber and lacquer and nails and tools.
but overall, the tone leans in to “bleak” much more than “lighthearted,” and by the story’s end, it’s almost claustrophobic in its gloom.
which is what i liked about it.
i’m just not sure i understood all of it—whether i missed some explainy bits due to my dratted intellectual threshold when it comes to time travel, or whether it’s intentionally left ambiguous/undeveloped, in any event, i’m pretty neutral towards the meat of the story, and left with nothing more than a sense of having had hopelessness drilled into me, leaving me a little stunned and queasy. which may actually say more about me and my own perpetual hopelessness than the story itself. WHO CAN SAY!?
just let me know when someone writes a short story set in the hollowed-out skull of the fourteenth president of the united states.
short review for a short story!
read it for yourself here:
https://www.tor.com/2016/07/06/sic-se…
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