The Song by Erinn L. Kemper
My rating: 4/5 cats
There was a reason staff were supposed to stay away from the kill floor. And a reason why all the butchers had to go for regular shrink visits.
another near-future/last gasp of nature kind of story that shows the toll of man’s careless brutality not just on the creatures we were meant to have dominion over (in the protective-stewardship way, not the hunt-unto-destruction way), but also on humans themselves.
set on a whale-processing ship (a bloodless euphemism for ‘slaughterhouse’)—the kind of lonely far-from-home gig that attracts saturnine loners to begin with—this story follows the tentative unfurling of a friendship between a welder-poet and a behavioral scientist specializing in whalesongs who has arrived to decipher the meaning of some recent, unusual cetacean behavior.
it’s a bleak one; full of desolation and death, bloody and suicide-saturated, in which every attempt at staving off loneliness seems destined to fail.
maybe not the best way to ring in 2021, but an affecting piece nonetheless.
read it for yourself here!
https://www.tor.com/2019/02/13/the-so…
read my book reviews on goodreads
