The Plague by Ken Liu
My rating: 5/5 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 24
Some have claimed that the plagued are happy as they are. That is nothing but bigotry and an attempt to evade responsibility. An accident of birth put me inside the Dome and her outside. It isn’t her fault that she picks at her deformed skin instead of pondering philosophy; that she speaks with grunts and hisses instead of rhetoric and enunciation; that she does not understand family love but only an instinctual, animalistic yearning for affection.
We in the Dome must save her.
i was unprepared for how short this story actually was, so when that surprise ending hit, it hit me like a double-whammy of a surprise.
this is a tale of nanobots and misplaced charity and what happens when you presume that living in a dome makes you near the top of the great chain of being, and when you bring your condescending noblesse oblige attitude towards those poor malformed creatures outside the dome, well—they will show you the great chain of being in a handful of dust, my friends.
yes, i know. you were warned of the limitations of my holiday-brain. this is what i got for you today, before i go buy soft cheeses and sell books to all the desperate procrastinators on xmas eve.
this story, though, is excellent.
read it for yourself here:
https://www.tor.com/2013/07/11/the-pl…
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