Bugs in the Arroyo by Steven Gould
My rating: 3/5 cats
A man with male pattern baldness was standing a bit further down where the road turned. He held a cloth hat in his hand and he was twisting it back and forth in his hands though the sun fell full upon his head. “I ran over a damn bug.”
because the tor site doesn’t mention it, allow me to: this is not really a standalone story, it’s an excerpt from the novel 7th Sigma. and that’s fine if you know that going into it, but i don’t even like reading those free tor shorts that are set in the same worlds as existing books i have not read, let alone a genuine excerpt. in fact, i nearly abandoned this one in its earliest moments because it opens with a 2-paragraph quote from something called When the Metal Eaters Came: First-Person Accounts and it said “excerpt,” to which i scoffed “no, thank you!” before clocking that it was a fakebook chronicling a fakephenomenon.
but it got me in the end, didn’t it?
some readers may be perfectly satisfied with this story as it stands. but even before i realized this was an excerpt, i felt i was missing something, going back and rereading several passages to determine if i’d overlooked facts, names, entire chunks of story that explained previous relationships or character backstory or swathes of worldbuilding. FYI, i had not.
the story was fine, but i didn’t like that mental itch that made me feel i was only seeing a portion of it. and this happens a lot with stories that are supposedly “standalones;” when authors/publishers are too close to the material, too familiar with context and previous content to realize that certain details that they take for granted will trip up a reader coming to these “standalones” blind.
it wasn’t a terrible experience—the premise of metal-chomping bugs held my interest, but not enough to read an entire novel, and the story isn’t eventful enough to impress on its own.
read it for yourself here:
https://www.tor.com/2009/04/17/bugs-i…
