Everything That Isn’t Winter by Margaret Killjoy
My rating: 4/5 cats
“Why do you think they did it?” I asked.
Bartley shrugged. “People don’t like it when other people have nice things.”
my weekly quickreview of a free tor short.
i’m torn on this one. i really liked all the action-parts – strong, necessary, consequential violence as post-apoc survival strategy, but the other half of this story is all seesawing relationshippy feels, and i can always do without that. althea ann’s review compares this to an episode of The Walking Dead, and that’s exactly right. whenever there are zombies in that show, it’s fun as hell, but whenever people are just sitting around talking about their ‘motions, i tune out and wait for the zombies to come back. no zombies in this story, but other than that, it inspires the same rise and fall of my interest level.
as far as not divulging the gender of the narrator, aiden, i go both ways on that. on the one hand, the author pulls it off without making the story read awkwardly or drawing too much attention to the omission. on the other hand -meh. i suppose it’s a fine writing workshop exercise to write an ungendered POV, but there’s no narrative purpose for it here. it’s a novelty that merits a mention, but its absence doesn’t contribute anything to the story itself. if you’re going to tell a story, you need to give the reader enough detail to grip onto, and if you’re gonna be coy about some of it, it’s more satisfying to be coy-with-purpose that coy for coy’s sake. but what do i know; i’m just me.
read it for yourself here:
https://www.tor.com/2016/10/19/231037/
