If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love by Rachel Swirsky
My rating: 3/5 cats
this is a 3.5 stars cats, because it balances out my two readings of it.
it’s a perfectly good story on the first reading: it’s engaging, it inspires emotions, it sets up an unusual situation and brings the reader trippingly along on the journey, hypnotized by its nursery-rhyme cadence. i finished it and i thought, “huh. i liked that just fine – why all the low ratings on here?”
so i put on my dora the explorer hat and oh. more of this old battle over awards and genre-specificity and sad puppies. if you’re new to this controversy, i will ham-fistedly summarize: in what is the opposite of what happens with movie trophies, some people in the SFF community are outraged by there being too much diversity when it comes hugo-award time, and that most of the stories barely qualify as speculative fiction but they win because of the gender/ethnicity of the author or the progressiveness of the story’s message. i came across this earlier in my tor reading, with The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere – and i didn’t really understand the complaints; even though that story was so *gasp* gay and chinese, it seemed to live deep enough in magical realism/fantasy territory to qualify for the honor.
this one is different, though – this time i can totally understand the pushback, as it relates to genre. there is nothing of the fantasy or speculative fiction to this story unless you are being extremely loose with your boundaries. LGM.
daydreams aren’t SFF, stoners musing, “what if we made a bong out of that pumpkin?” isn’t SFF, doodles, no matter how fanciful, aren’t SFF.
and honestly, this story is a bit of a doodle. again, on the first reading, it does everything a story is meant to do and it does it well – it appeals to the reader’s emotions, and there’s something very inspiring about it, something very – oh, god, is karen going to drop that reference again, is she??
she is.
feel free to make a legend of billie jean drinking game outta me
but it really does suffer on subsequent readings, and considering this won a nebula and was nominated for a hugo; that people who are supposedly authorities in the community read this story multiple times and considered it to be upper-tier, well… it’s hard not to see the sad puppy point.
it’s a story that seems powerful until you grab one of its threads and start pulling only to find it’s all surface-emotion, and there’s no structure or underlayering or real craft to it. as a battle cry, it’s excellent. as an award-winning story, it’s lacking.
its strong points are its relevancy, the flow that hides its spikes under its safe-for-babies cadence, and its reveal.
and while i am in agreement with some about the genre-inappropriateness and award-unworthiness, the multiple accusations i saw on here and other sites, for this story being hate speech or anti-working class is so bananas i need to make a point of distancing myself from that particular nonsense parade. it’s such a bizarre interpretation of what’s actually written on the page. it says nothing about rednecks or hicks or anything like that. for the record, i read a lot of working-class fiction, and ain’t none of them drinking gin. the biggest consumers of gin in my own personal experience have been fancypants gay men and bookish folk. according to buzzfeed’s scholarly article What Your Drink Of Choice Says About You, in which A rowdy group of social drinkers and former bartenders speak from their experience, this is what and who gin is for:
“A gin and tonic is for old white men with too much money.”
“A gin and tonic is for when you’re like: I’d like a cocktail but I have no imagination.”
“I don’t get sleepy when I drink gin and tonics, I get…more polite?”
“You don’t have bar fights during a night of gin and tonics — you have bar disagreements.”
“‘Settle down, man. Here, have a gin and tonic.’”
so, now you can read this story picturing sleepy old rich white men instead of whatever inbred hicks you were accusing the writer of maligning.
