The Martian Obelisk by Linda Nagata
My rating: 4/5 cats
It was not supposed to happen like this. As a child she’d been promised a swift conclusion: duck and cover and nuclear annihilation. And if not annihilation, at least the nihilistic romance of a gun-toting, leather-clad, fight-to-the-death anarchy.
That hadn’t happened either.
Things had just gotten worse, and worse still, and people gave up. Not everyone, not all at once—there was no single event marking the beginning of the end—but there was a sense of inevitability about the direction history had taken.
i chose this story for my weekly free tor short read more or less at random. it’s not one that i ordinarily would’ve read, nor has it ever caught my attention in my many years of devotion to the free tor short—the “cover” is pretty dull, and i generally scroll past anything that sounds outer-space-y because it’s not my thing, but this one is more human-powered than aaaalien, and i enjoyed it very much.
it was supposed to be some kinda tear-jerker, but it takes more than that to jerk my tears.
the story is basically about whether moral responsibility still has a place at the end of the world, when a woman must choose between her art and personal legacy (inflated to the legacy of Earth) and a handful of human lives. ordinarily, not a difficult choice, but in an uncertain world, it’s more of a choice between hope and reasonable expectation, where “reasonable expectation” is a downer. if none of that makes much sense, it’s because i am doing that thing where i wave my hands about to distract you while i try to avoid spoilers. it’s a shortish story, so you can go read it yourself and then we can wave our hands around together.
in other “this won’t look like anything to you unless you’ve read the story,” i’m with the exhausted, resigned nate on this matter:
He shook his head. “This all looks like hope, but it’s a trick. It’s fate cheating us, forcing us to fold our hand, level our pride, and go out meekly. And there’s no choice in it, because it’s the right thing to do.”
you do the right thing because it’s what you do, but there sure ain’t no glory in it. which is kind of how i feel right now—i work really hard and grind myself into dust for no money and then i starve to death in the gutter and no one cares. whee!
read it for yourself here:
https://www.tor.com/2017/07/19/the-ma…
