As Good as New by Charlie Jane Anders
My rating: 3/5 cats
Marisol was an award-winning playwright, but that hadn’t saved her from the end of the world.
it wasn’t until today, when i (finally) sat down to reread this story for review, that i realized this was written by the author of All the Birds in the Sky, a book i bought in hardcover because it was so pretty. this story is more “cute” than anything else, so it’s not propelling me over to that book where it languishes unread on my shelf, but it was fun enough and it has some good lines.
marisol is an award-winning, but lapsed, playwright who forsook the theater for medical school, which seemed more meaningful at the time. when she was putting in a housekeeping stint for a wealthy gent to pay for med school, the world ended, and marisol found herself spending the apocalypse in a really swank panic room, with an endless supply of frozen food, and nearly every tv show available to watch, fancy-style. despite all this bounty, she finds herself watching 16 hour marathons of the facts of life, which seems therapeutic for her:
When Marisol let herself think about all the people she could never talk to again, she got so choked up she wanted to punch someone in the eye until they were blinded for life. She experienced grief in the form of freak-outs that left her unable to breathe or think, and then she popped in another Facts of Life.
these marathons are interrupted only by the giant quakes occurring in whatever is left of the world. after 2 years time, the quakes abate somewhat, and marisol decides it’s time to check out the situation. she finds the world covered by white powder which she assesses as fungus, and she figures it’s safe enough for her to be out there.
“The fungus would have all died out when there was nothing left for it to feed on,” Marisol said aloud. “There’s no way it could still be active.” She tried to pretend some other person, an expert or something, had said that, and thus it was authoritative.
she also finds a bottle which, when opened, unleashes a former theater critic-turned wish-facilitator named richard wolf, who takes one look around and says, “Oh, fuck. Not again.”
marisol is granted three wishes by richard, and she’s savvy enough in the wish-granting-game to not use up all three wishes impulsively, and even manages to snag a fourth. she bides her time, trying to learn all she can from richard, and life continues much as it has until then – she watches more facts of life, she talks shop and watches plays with richard, she even writes another play as an exercise in mapping out how best to deploy wishes, for the purposes of saving the world.
pleased to finally have company, she takes advantage of richard’s presence, and they have many funny and lively discussions about the state of contemporary theater, and the nature of performance, writing, etc.
including a nice remark about the nature of criticism that some should take to heart:
“I mean, I get why people want criticism that is essentially cheerleading, even if that doesn’t push anybody to do their best work.”
“Well, if you think of theatre as some sort of delicate flower that needs to be kept protected in some sort of hothouse”—and at this point, Wolf was clearly reprising arguments he’d had over and over again, when he was alive—“then you’re going to end up with something that only the faithful few will appreciate, and you’ll end up worsening the very marginalization that you’re seeking to prevent.”
there’s also some nice snark about postmodernism, after marisol tells richard all about her award-winning play and he groans at it
“Sorry! I mean, maybe it was better on the stage; I bet you have a flair for dialogue. It just sounds so . . . hackneyed. I mean, postmodern Cyrano de Bergerac? I heard all about postmodernism from this one graduate student who opened my bottle in the early 1990s, and it sounded dreadful. If I wasn’t already sort of dead, I would be slitting my wrists. You really did make a wise choice, becoming a doctor.”
and additional snark about cliché, as marisol approaches her wishes systematically, studying all the possible ways things could go wrong:
The media server in the panic room had a bazillion movies and TV episodes about the monkey paw, the wishing ring, the magic fountain, the Faustian bargain, the djinn, the vengeance-demon, and so on. So she had plenty of time to soak up the accumulated wisdom of the human race on the topic of making wishes, which amounted to a pile of clichés. Maybe she would have done more good as a playwright than as a doctor, after all—clichés were like plaque in the arteries of the imagination, they clogged the sense of what was possible. Maybe if enough people had worked to demolish clichés, the world wouldn’t have ended.
and marisol comes to a conclusion about the saving-the-world-by-wishes situation that is informed both by her writing and medical backgrounds:
This was pretty much exactly like trying to cure a patient, Marisol realized. You give someone a medicine which fixes their disease but causes deadly side effects. Or reduces the patient’s resistance to other infections. You didn’t just want to get rid of one pathogen, you wanted to help the patient reach homeostasis again. Except that the world was an infinitely more complex system than a single human being. And then again, making a big wish was like writing a play, with the entire human race as players. Bleh.
it’s a cute story, but it delivers better on its theatrical discussions than as a contribution to post-apoc fantasy or wish-fulfillment narratives.
however, i think it would actually make a nice play, and if someone someday decides to grant me that station eleven graphic novel, this would be a nice inclusion, with its complementary themes of theater and the end of world. just a thought.
and now i can’t get the facts of life theme song out of my head. great.
read it for yourself here:
http://www.tor.com/2014/09/10/as-good…
