Deriving Life by Elizabeth Bear
My rating: 4/5 cats
WELCOME TO DECEMBER PROJECT!
this explanation/intro will be posted before each day’s short story. scroll down to get to the story-review.
this is the FOURTH year of me doing a short story advent calendar as my december project. for those of you new to me or this endeavor, here’s the skinny: every day in december, i will be reading a short story that is 1) available free somewhere on internet, and 2) listed on goodreads as its own discrete entity. there will be links provided for those of you who like to read (or listen to) short stories for free, and also for those of you who have wildly overestimated how many books you can read in a year and are freaking out about not meeting your 2019 reading-challenge goals. i have been gathering links all year when tasty little tales have popped into my feed, but i will also accept additional suggestions, as long as they meet my aforementioned 1), 2) standards.
if you scroll to the end of the reviews linked here, you will find links to all the previous years’ stories, which means NINETY-THREE FREEBIES FOR YOU!
2016: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show…
2017: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show…
2018: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show…
reviews of these will vary in length/quality depending on my available time/brain power.
so, let’s begin
DECEMBER 30
We all forget that people in the past were really just like us. We want to forget it. It makes it easier to live with the knowledge of how much suffering they endured.
this is another excellent story by elizabeth bear, who always seems to know where this reader’s tenderest spots are for her spiky authorial jabbing. this takes place in the fuuuuturrre, so those ‘people in the past’ mentioned in the quote are us, and that suffering is ours, but here’s the thing—2019 may have been a dumpster on fire, but this world elizabeth bear has come up with here is way worse. not just the parts about the natural world going to shit, but death? grieving? illness? loneliness? all of that is way more complicated and lingering and loopholed than anything we have to endure.
beautiful, bleak, emotional, i love elizabeth bear very much.
read it for yourself here:
https://www.tor.com/2019/01/31/derivi…
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