Category: Craft Crucible

This month’s story for the crucible is Leonard Richardson’s “Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs.”  This is one of the more bizarre stories we’ve taken a look at so far: the tale of Martian dinosaurs who’ve come to Earth to do motocross racing.  Because of course they would.

There are several things we could take a look at in this story, not least the choice to focus heavily on dialog to convey the story, but I want to instead take a look at one of the recurring jokes in the story, Tark’s obsession with guns.  The story opens with Tark’s attempt to purchase a firearm, allegedly for self-defense, and failing.

“These are killing claws,” said the dinosaur, whose name was Tark. “For sheep, or cows. I merely want to disable an attacker with a precision shot to the leg or other uh, limbal region.”

It’s signaled pretty clearly up front that Tark’s interest in guns is not for self defense, and also that Tark is a little on the loony side.  But while this line is great for provoking chuckles, it also tells us that Tark has “killing claws” and that they’re on a scale that could slaughter cows.  It also introduces the concept of Tark eating what he kills, if obliquely.  These are all important things that, like the gun joke, play out later.

Part of the same section, but clearly a different actual scene, we get Tark’s true motives.

“I’m gonna branch out. Target shooting. I’ll be like those tough guys in the action movies. Is my chin strap tight?”

This is another line for chuckle-provocation, but also critical to the thematic content of the story.  At the end we get the reflection on how humans’ interest in dinosaurs is actually an interest in seeing their own darker side and being able to engage it.  This is the first hint in that direction, though.  Interestingly, it doesn’t come from a human at all, or even from the more thoughtful Entippa, but from loony Tark.  He understands that in order to maintain his entertainment career he’s going to have to up the stakes of what’s engaging his audience.  It’s not an accident that he chooses an action hero, and it’s not just for the satirical ridiculousness of a creature with killing claws wanted to be a gun hero.  This is where the story says, “Listen up, we’re examining our relationship to entertainment and the implications of that relationship.”  It’s a nice early wedging in of the thematic content, delivered by a gun-shaped absence in Tark’s arsenal.

The thematic work done by the gun continues in a later section when Entippa, very reasonably, starts to address Tark’s obsession.

“You start carrying around a weapon and you become a cartoon character in the eyes of the humans. They’ll strip you to the bone and then they’ll put your bones in a museum…”

This is where we get the introduction of the idea that there’s risk involved in how the dinosaurs are perceived by humans.  What’s interesting is that according to Entippa, the guns will effectively de-humanize the dinosaurs.  There are hints all throughout the story that humans are perceiving the dinosaurs as “other” with calls out to classic othering questions in interviews and interpersonal interaction.  But we’ve already established in this story that dinosaurs don’t need guns, they have weapons of their own.  Yet taking up a human weapon would turn them into cartoons or objects for display in a museum.  There are at least three layers of commentary baked into that.

1. Guns dehumanize
2. The heroes humans construct with guns (notably action heroes) are cartoons
3. There are ways to mimic humans that will make you seem less human

And for our final appearance of Tark’s gun obsession?  We get a piece of slapstick gold.

“Entippa!” said Tark. “I got it! I got a gun! Check it out!” There was a shot and the sun roof dissolved. “Ow, there’s glass! Stupid gun!” Tark hurled the gun out the driver’s side window and into a bush.

This is the payoff for all the discussion around the gun earlier in the story.  At long last, Tark gets his firearm!  He’s already done a perfectly good job of dealing with the bad guys on his own, but he’s excited all the same.  And then it goes exactly the way Entippa could have told him it would, and, disillusioned, he tosses it aside.  This is a tiny encapsulated retelling of the whole story’s arc.  Neat idea, pursuit of idea, real encounter with the consequences, veering back to original course.

That’s a joke that not only provided several punchlines, but opened up a lot of the space used for the thematic discussion of the story and reinforced the story’s structure.  If you want an example of successful “tight” or “sparse” writing, this is how you do it.

What did you take away from this story?

The future Crucible schedule will be announced next week.  Look for it!

This month we’re analyzing idiopath-fic-smile’s steve rogers: pr disaster.  This is a piece of fan fiction which, on the off chance you live under a rock and need an explanation, means the author is using intellectual content owned by somebody else without their explicit permission.  There’s a giant, fascinating culture around it and you can learn a lot about story, craft, and assumptions baked into choices authors make from looking at it.

I picked this piece for a number of reasons, and as a piece of fic there’s a lot to tease apart, but for now I want to focus on the use of subversion.  Subversion is great for fic and for humor, but this piece is a mini master class in it.  The subversion starts with the first major line of the piece.

The Friday Eva’s firm signed a contract with Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division, her best friend took her out for emergency drinks, and she spent the next three hours trying not to cry into a series of cocktails.

This is a delightful riff off going out for celebratory drinks when you firm gets a big new contract.  You get all kinds of information about tone and voice for the piece, as well as a lot of information about Eva (she’s got the kind of job that’ll be affected by this contract, she’s got a bestie available on short notice, we see her coping mechanism for crisis) but mostly it’s funny.  Eva and the author both are paying attention to S.H.I.E.L.D.’s impact in the larger world.

Then we reinforce this opening by subverting it.

“Captain goddamn AMERICA” she texted Yumi on her lunchbreak, because there was no way in hell this could wait until happy hour. “Drinks are on me tonight. And also, forever.”

Crisis averted! Steve Rogers is going to be easy, right! Right? The reader already knows this is wrong, but it’s a delightful moment anyway precisely because we know she’s wrong.  Readers are sadists, and that goes double in humorous fiction.  You enjoy that moment of delusion, Eva.  We’ll be here for your crash back to reality.

“A biography of someone named Cesar Chavez?”

Cue, crash.  What’s great is that while you can probably guess the twist was going to be along those lines, (because fic, also, Captain America) it’s still set up to be a complete surprise.  We knew the subversion was coming, but we weren’t necessarily expecting to to come from his weekend reading.  Even the surprises we expect come with an element of novelty in their packaging.

The problem was his mouth.

No analysis here.  I just got distracted by contemplating Chris Evans’ mouth.

Where was I?  Oh, right, subversion.

The next chunk of the story is a playing out of the subversion already introduced by the story.  Steve Rogers, socialist, proceeds to subvert everybody else’s expectations about him by being true to himself rather than their assumptions about what being the PR embodiment of America means.  It’s the story playing true to its own form, but demonstrating an undermining of the norms at play within its world.  Also, the series of anecdotes is funny.  The people Rogers interacts with are drawn in broad enough strokes that the reader gets to fill in specifics where they like and we get to chuckle at what happens because we’re in on the joke.  The story is drawing lines around its audience – they’re assumed to be at least open to the stances Rogers takes – but that’s one of the things humor intrinsically does even if it’s not more divisive than “Those who found the joke funny,” and “Those who didn’t.”

(The call back to “socialism” is delightful, btw)

Just in case you might suspect the story isn’t serious about its dedication to its premise, note how even the figure of speech when Yumi questions how the situation could possibly be bad unveils a new element in Eva’s misery.

“I really am sorry.” In the months she’d worked with him, she had never seen him look genuinely apologetic before now, not even after almost getting into a fistfight with that Tea Party governor.

And here’s where we get a new subversion by calling all that came before to a screeching halt.  It appears to be the first time Steve has tried to interact with Eva the human behind Eva the PR person, and it leads to a completely in character yet totally unprecedented behavior.  This, I think, (and Eva probably agrees with me) is the moment that dooms her as his PR handler.  It forces her to engage with the problematic elements involved in trying to PR police Socialist Captain America but also humanizes Steve for the reader.  Up to this point he’s largely a punch-line generating steamroller and now he’s an ally who realizes he’s screwed up.  The tie back to offer to let her punch him referenced in the intro is a nice touch, too, because while we expected that to come back (it was Chekhov’s promise if you will) we didn’t expect it to come back in a conversation that was just the two of them talking about something personal rather than dealing with politics.

“The fucked up thing is, when I think about it, issue by issue, I don’t think I disagree with anything you’ve said.”

And this is where we get the most important subversion of the story.  Eva breaks character, fully engages with her job, and undermines everything she’s been doing since Rogers first mentioned Chavez.  An analytical reader knows the story is over at this point, it’s all just wrapping up from here, because this is where we finish Eva’s character arc in the piece.  Eva isn’t an analytical reader, but Steve is and he helps her figure it out.  Which is ultimately another subversion because forcing her out of the job goes totally against the “Steve Rogers: asshole” premise tendered by the piece so far, establishing the counter-theory of “Steve Rogers: Nice guy playing a very deep game.”

Next time:

October 15 – Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs by Leonard Richardson – Published by Strange Horizons July 13, 2009

Get your requests for future Crucible fodder by October 1.

This month we’re doing Slate Star Codex’s “…And I Show You How Deep The Rabbit Hole Goes.”  I put this in the CC lineup because, first, it’s both charmingly thoughtful and hilarious, and also because I wanted to mix up story sources.  There are good stories everywhere, and if I’m going to make a project out of pulling them apart and figuring out how they tick, so should go looking everywhere for them.

This was going around the internet fairly virulently a while back, and it’s no wonder.  The structure of the story lends itself to binge reading and the end packs a punch that makes it easy to want to share.  That structure is what I want to stare at for a bit today.

The graphic at the top of the story is useful to cluing the reader in to what’s going on, though it’s not necessary to follow the story.  But using the chart as a guide for the structure does some interesting things.  Through one choice and another, we wind up with a second person story that has eight different POVs.  That’s eight different “you”s the reader is getting to be over the course of the story though, of course, they don’t all make it the whole way through.

People’s minds are heartbreaking. Not because people are so bad, but because they’re so good.

Starting the story off with an assertion like this tells us several things.  First, it warns us that we’re in for a bit of a polemic; there’s a lot of authorial asserting going on to say this would be the experience of the yellow pill user.  But it’s the sort of assertion people broadly like to hear, and it makes it easy to set up the Yellow-You as a sympathetic protagonist.  Originally there were avaricious motives – who wouldn’t look at that opportunity and pick the thing they think would most improve their life? – but when the reality that people are generally good and hurting comes through, those selfish motives get dropped in favor of an attempt to help and, ultimately, social isolation.  It’s a tragedy, but one the story doesn’t allow to leave as a mere tragedy.

It always thinks that it is a good bear, a proper bear, that a bear-hating world has it out for them in particular.

This line does a lot of work in the story. First, it makes it clear that while there is a polemic in this story, it’s there for the entertainment, too.  It’s funny, to think of a bear carrying along with the same interior monologue as everybody you bump into on city streets.  But it also sets up a very nice segue into the next section where Green-You is going to turn into animals, while establishing that this isn’t so very weird, inside that reality, since bears at least are just hanging out in the woods with really great fur suits.

The fact that world building is happening, even here in this very short introductory segment where we’re getting you used to the idea of the pills not working out the way You expects, or perhaps even how you expect, is important.  There are eight POVs here, but one overarching arc, so each POV needs to be contributing to that or else chaos and confusion.

The green section is very similar, but pushes what the yellow section does even further.  Lots more humor, but also a significant ramping up of the consequences of the pills.  Eight POV characters…woops. Make that seven. It’s funny, but it also tells us that there are real serious business consequences to being wreckless with the powers the pills give you.  They do what they say on the label, but they don’t come with character shields.

Blue gives us even more of the critical-to-later world building while still passing things off as quirky and funny.  The universe is big, but also very empty.  Good To Know.

Orange. Oh man, I would never take the orange pill, I saw that twist coming from the outset.  We’re still being funny, slipping in a didactic pointer, (it’s a polemic, or had you forgotten over the last few sections?) bit also putting our characters where we need them. Of the characters so far, Orange-You seems to be doing the best.  Which, well, of course You are.

The Red section is great.  Hey look, satire!  Lots of funny here, with the kind of commentary that won’t feel didactic to the people laughing, and it sets up what winds up being a really important set piece for the functioning of the whole story.  We know characters can get sent out of the story – one’s dead, another is off exploring the universe and disillusioned with Earth, and the audience for this story more or less assumes that Red and Pink are going to be written off and ignored.

And here I’m going to stop the section-by-section analysis, because that’s the critical piece of the structure that I think takes this story from one that’s easy to read through to one that’s easy to share.  The author knows the audience, knows what assumptions they’re going to make, probably expected the “But I’m already frustrated with how incompetent everyone is,” response to the Orange pill section, and made toying with that a critical piece of the story’s structure.

Two acts and an epilogue.  Act one is all the set piece laying we’ve already seen.  Act Two is the Quest to solve the meta problem introduced in Act One.  And the Epilogue is where we get the final resolution and find out that this was definitely a funny story, but the audience is, in part, the butt of the joke.

You had always known, deep down, that BRUTE STRENGTH was what was really important. And here, at the end of all things, it is deeply gratifying to finally be proven right.

Funny because it’s inarguably true while also being completely wrong.  Without the Eggheads to build the stations and turbines and figure out that you’ve got a perpetual motion machine capable of bootstraping a new universe, that strength would be useless, but without the strength, all that knowledge and tech wouldn’t have done it.  Nobody will ever convince Red-You of the nuances of the situation though, and that is where the story’s didactic thread rests at the end.

Next month we continue examinations of funny stories from unusual places with steve rogers: pr disaster by Idiopathicsmile

This month we’re crucible-ing (crucifying?) Naomi Krtizer’s Cat Pictures Please.  Despite my personal hatred of joy, humor, and all things comedy, I’m actually a pretty big fan of Kritzer’s because she consistently makes me laugh out loud.  (I nearly died from listening to one of her stories while biking. I would have died laughing, though, so it would have been okay.)  I could have grabbed any number of her stories for the Crucible and had fun with it, but I opted for the recent one.  Also, it let me put a cat picture on the post, and we all know that’s good for your internet karma.

I tried starting with those. I felt a little odd about looking at the religious ones, because I know I wasn’t created by a god or by evolution, but by a team of computer programmers in the labs of a large corporation in Mountain View, California.

I’m starting here instead of the first line precisely because it isn’t the first line.  It isn’t even in the first paragraph.  It’s near the beginning, sure, but it’s not the lead, and you get four sentences before we toss in, oh by the way, our narrator is an AI.  You probably didn’t notice this as you were reading because it is very near the beginning, but pause here a moment.  Buh-wuh?  The fifty plus words that come before the reveal would be a substantial chunk of a flash fiction piece, here you are, completely clueless about the nature of your narrator.  What kind of shenanigans is Kritzer pulling here? Who does that?

Actually, there aren’t any shenanigans at all, which is why you (probably) didn’t notice anything about it until I started having a rhetorical freak out.  Because the AI in this story isn’t really an AI, it’s a human made out of computer bits.  That’s what enables the story, but it’s not the central issue of it.  The thing the story is concerned with is the ethical dilemma, so that’s what we need to start with.

The human-ness of the narrator is a major key to why the story works.  It keeps everything familiar enough to the audience to be relatable, and the crux of the story requires it.  If the alleged AI weren’t hitting the same traps and pitfalls as people do all the time, this would be a phenomenally creepy story about an alien intelligence manipulating the lives of hapless, unsuspecting victims.  Instead…

Stacy worried about her health a lot and yet never seemed to actually go to a doctor, which was unfortunate because the doctor might have noticed her depression.

Instead, the AI runs into the same problems anybody who’s had a friend living a sub-optimal life does; they won’t take the hint, follow advice, or do the few easy things required to improve their circumstances.  If you weren’t already endeared to our narrator for their (totally understandable and appropriate) adoration of cat pictures, this probably makes them familiar enough that you’re right there with them.

Where the humanizing and the frustration with how hard it is to help people really takes off, though, is with Bethany, and here’s the magic sentence that ties it all together:

That was it, just those eight words.

There’s so much disdain for the friend wrapped up in that very short line.  Here you have a sincere protectiveness over Bethany clearly asserted, judgment of the best friend, but also a quasi address to the reader.  The narrator doesn’t say outright what the implications of an eight word email are, implying that the narrator assumes you, the reader, agree with them.  The audience and the narrator are on the same page, because they’re basically the same sorts of people with the same problems and concerns and needs, even if you’ve got a body and the narrator has access to all your personal data.

And it’s that tension between the human-ness of the narrator and the fact that they don’t have a body that allows the ending to have the delightful little snap it does.

You’ll need a camera, though.

Because payment is in cat pictures.

I’m willing to bet you know somebody who’s willing to do quite a lot to have some quirky interest fulfilled.  I mean, you sorta know me and the things I’ll do for good tea are rather absurd.  This is riffing off of that, but it’s also in the context of the line before it, where we’re reminded that this very human narrator is actually a machine intelligence.  Sure, it’s hella creepy that this creature thinks it knows everything about you and wants to manipulate your life into something it thinks is better, but come on, kitties!  The narrative voice basically comes across to me as a precocious ten-year-old girl who is terribly annoyed at everybody else’s sub-optimality.

That’s the success of this story, I think.  The way the information is delivered and presented is done so thoroughly non-threateningly that we completely buy in to the scenario, to the point that the dating site probably sounds like a good idea.  That’s terribly neat.

Next month: …And I Show You How Deep The Rabbit Hole Goes by Scott Alexander – Published at Slate Star Codex on June 2, 2015

This month’s fodder for the Crucible is Sofia Samatar’s Selkie Stories are for Losers.  This was originally published in Strange Horizons and was, incidentally, the very first story I podcast for them.  I recorded five versions of this story and I’m pretty certain I read it more than Sofia did in writing/revising it.  Consequently, I was very happy when lots of people liked this story, because even after a month of staring at it constantly while I put recording technique etc., through its beta phase, I wasn’t bored.

For this story I want to talk about something I’ve touched on in other essays here but which is massively important here: the negative space.  I’ve seen commentary decrying this story as not speculative because there’s no conclusive proof the mom was a selkie, she might have just walked out and the selkie thing is a coping-myth.  That is a valid reading of the story, that’s actually a less interesting story.  What isn’t talked about explicitly, what lies between the lines but exists all the same, that’s the meat of this story.

I hate selkie stories. They’re always about how you went up to the attic to look for a book, and you found a disgusting old coat and brought it downstairs between finger and thumb and said “What’s this?”, and you never saw your mom again.

First line of the story and we have everything.  We know the backstory – Mom was a selkie and has left; we have the character – sarcastic and angry; and we have a decent sense of setting and place – sounds like a modern Western teenager to me.  We have that without the narrator saying she was the one who found the coat, or that it was her mom who left.  We just know that because why else would that particularly descriptive point be her understanding of selkie stories?  This opening is deliciously assertive, in part because it refuses to make an explicit statement about what happened.  The problem is selkie stories, not her life.  It’s not even selkies, just the repeated plot arc of “they were happy and then they left.”

I work at a restaurant called Le Pacha. I got the job after my mom left, to help with the bills. On my first night at work I got yelled at twice by the head server, burnt my fingers on a hot dish, spilled lentil-parsley soup all over my apron, and left my keys in the kitchen.

Samatar could have written, “After mom revealed herself as a selkie and abandoned us, I had to get a job. My first night there sucked.” It would convey the same info and share the same tone and be a completely different character in a completely different story.  There is no explicit commentary about how that night went.  She just related a series of events and you know exactly, in your bones, how bad that first night was.  By the time she’s left her keys behind it’s no wonder – she had to be so frazzled it’s surprising she didn’t leave everything there.  But this is a story about what we don’t talk about, what we don’t say, and it wouldn’t work the same way if we didn’t have a narrator who won’t talk about things.  We the audience are getting the information we need, but she doesn’t have to tell us.

I turned, and Mona was standing there, smoke rising white from between her fingers.

She doesn’t describe Mona herself at all.  She doesn’t say anything about what she thinks of Mona then or now.  She’s just there, with a cigarette, and you know it’s all saving angel/white knight/this is love.

Do we get told they become fast friends? Nope.  Instead we get some information about Mona, we get all kinds of explicit information about Mona’s situation and Mona’s family because those are safe topics.  The closest to a description of thier current relationship we get is this.

After work Mona says, “Got the keys?”

Mona’s still taking care of her, they’re friendly, and the moment with the keys is one that’s shared and salient between them.  For Mona that might just mean our narrator is always the frazzled girl who stumbled into something she wasn’t ready for, but that means that Mona is still chronically in the rescuer/saviour mode.  That impression we got at her introduction is still relevant to the narrator because that moment is a crux of their relationship.

I tell her they’re not my selkie stories, not ever, and I’ll never tell one, which is true

This line here is important because at this point in the story, it’s true.  She’s not telling a selkie story.  Even if we get more details about that day, a more explicit acknowledgement that the theoretical girl going to the attic is our narrator, and proof that she didn’t see her mom become a seal.  And in case we didn’t know that the surface level meaning of the narrator’s words weren’t the whole picture, she immediately tells us a selkie story.  Not hers, somebody else’s.

when his wife washed the clothes, she found it.

Even when she’s telling us a selkie story, though, she doesn’t quite tell it.  She stops before the ending.  She finds the key and then…section break.  We know she unlocks the chest and leaves, but we don’t get told that.  This is a bit of a primer on how to read the story.  All the facts are here, but the narrator isn’t going to give them to us or organize them for us.  We’ve got to do that ourselves.

people who drop things, who tell all, who leave keys around, who let go

This is a really critical final line to the story.  Because we’ve had our narrator asserting who she is and what she is and isn’t doing, and we’ve got a pretty clear idea on where the truth lies in that, and then this.  “People who leave keys around,” we know is her.  “People who tell all.”  That’s….she claims she won’t tell the story, but she did, didn’t she?  It’s pretty clear that she is the person described in this line.  Which is heartbreaking!  Because, yes, it means she’s people “who let go.”  But it also means that she’s “on the wrong side of magic” and that selkie stories are for her.  It’s her acknowledging what happened and finding the very edges of how to cope with it.  This is a coming of age story told in the subtext, and it’s gorgeous.

Next month: “The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere” by John Chu (Tor.com, 02-2013).  Sometime between now and then I’ll announce the next batch of stories we’re going to do.  Drop me line if you have something you’d like.

This month’s story through the Crucible is Thomas Olde Heuvelt’s The Ink Readers of Doi Saket.  This is a fun story with a lot going on in it, but I want to home in on a thing it does that you just don’t see a lot of in modern genre literature: Omniscient POV.  That’s the 3rd person narrator who knows everything about everything and traditionally isn’t a character in the story.  If that’s not innovative enough for Heuvelt, it’s an unreliable omniscient narrator.  Neat!

First, let’s take a look at how he goes about establishing the POV so that readers who aren’t trained to expect omniscient nevertheless follow along without getting lost.

It was during a night in the twelfth lunar month of this year when two strong hands pushed young Tangmoo down into the bed of the Mae Ping River, and by doing so, ironically, fulfilled his only wish. Tangmoo flailed his arms wildly, churning up the swirling water. The whites of his eyes reflected flashes from the fireworks as his smothered cries rose in bubbles to the surface, where they burst in silence: help, help, help, help!

This first paragraph goes a long way toward establishing the narrative voice and hinting what’s going on to the reader.  The distance inherent in opening with the date helps and also starts signaling that this is a fable-type story.  The use of “ironically” is also a big clue, because it’s commentary implying that narrator is in a position not just to report the events, but to comment on their relevance in the big-picture context.  At this point it could be a close 3rd on Tangmoo, but unless he’s suicidal, it’s going to be really hard for him to know that, ironically, his wish is getting fulfilled.  The case against a close 3rd on Tangmoo gets even stronger when we have a description of the whites of his eyes – there’s no way Tangmoo would know what the whites of his own eyes lock like while he’s being drowned in the middle of the night.  So the narrator is somebody who can observe the up close details of the scene, knows the inner thoughts of at least one of the actors and how the scenario plays in large context.  The reader doesn’t need to be consciously aware of those details about the narrator, but this is the information that makes the transition to the next paragraph smooth and easy to follow.

These filtered cries of alarm were mistaken by a pair of dragonflies fused in flight, their only wish to remain larvaless and so prolong their love dance endlessly, for the dripping of morning dew.

Here anybody paying attention and trying to determine the POV at play in the story has no choice but to accept an omniscient 3rd unless they want to generate a very specific character and explanation for this story.  Most readers won’t do that automatically, they just fall into accepting what’s going on in front of them.  So there, in less than two paragraphs, you have an atypical POV presented to the reader, the tone of the story established, the inciting incident described, and the major theme of the story introduced and reinforced.  Beginnings, man.  They’re such over-achievers.

What I like in particular about these opening paragraphs, though, is the amount of work they put into establishing the narrator as credible.  You get facts, and useful details.  You get insights.  And you get a little piece of commentary that betrays the narrator’s knowledge and understanding of the situation.  The commentary is important, because having commented once in a fashion that doesn’t at all beg the reader to question the implication (because it’s there to prove something else, not to be evaluated on its own) you’ve now believed one subjective thing from the narrator.  That primes you to believe another.

Which you get.

(There were rumors that the stone was not in fact bewitched at all, but that lustful Somchai suffered from some type of obsessive exhibitionism. Nonsense, of course.)

This is great . The explicit text is lying to you; this story is set in modern day and we find out what’s up with lusty Somchai later.  Those rumors are absolutely and unquestionably true, and every reader knows it.  Nobody would expect the readers to believe anything else.  So even though the text is an explicit lie, the narrator isn’t lying.  That’s a sarcastic “nonsense,” meant to cause a little bit of bonding between the narrator and the reader.  What it’s saying is, “I know the rumors are true.  You know the rumors are true.  But there are plenty of people who are invested in refusing to believe the rumors, and we’re too polite to shatter their beliefs on the subject.”  It’s a secret the reader and the narrator share.

But this, the same as with the dragonflies, was purely coincidental, and nothing should be read into it.

And here comes a piece of commentary that potentially is a lie.  A reader could go either way on whether they think this is meant to be believed.  Obviously it isn’t, but does the narrator know that?  Hard to say.  I’d argue that no, not really, because this motif of the benefits just being a coincidence gets repeated several times, then subverted at the end.

And maybe this was all coincidence, like so much in life.

The wording of this subversion is intensely interesting.  The “maybe” here is the word I’m latching onto because it clearly indicates that the narrator doesn’t believe it was all a coincidence.  They’re open to the possibility, but that’s not their understanding.  The wishes granted after Tangmoo dies are, as presented by the narrator, actually attributable to him.  Yet, in the same breath, the narrator specifies “Like so much in life.”  That right there is a reinforcement of the assertion that the fortuitous circumstances that followed Tangmoo in the days before he was murdered were coincidental.

The difference between whether the narrator means for the reader to assume none of the circumstances were coincidental may seem little, but it’s actually vital to understanding the scope of the story told here.  If the blessings in living Tangmoo’s wake weren’t coicidences, then this is the story of a gifted young man murdered and thereby freed to exercise his gifts more widely.  If they were coincidences, then this is the story of a good, sincere, kind boy murdered and transformed into a force of cosmic beneficence.  The second interpretation is a much bigger story, and the nature of the violence inherent in his murder changes, too.

I’m thinking the narrator was unreliable and none of the things were coincidences.  But I like the other story better.

Next month: May 15 – “Selkie Stories Are for Losers” by Sofia Samatar (Strange Horizons, Jan-2013)

Rachel Swirsky‘s “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love” started getting award buzz almost the moment it came out.  Controversy followed shortly thereafter, and the controversy blew up a little bit when the nominations came out.  I don’t know how Rachel Swirsky feels about controversy surrounding her stories, but one of my personal career goals is for people to get into bar fights over my stories, so in my head canon, she’s smug.

For anybody who missed the brouhaha, the high level (and very charitable) rendering of the argument is that the people who read the story and went “OMG, Rachel Swirsky, you just broke my heart,” got into a fight with people who looked at the story and went, “Uh, that’s not speculative.”  I have opinions about the respective camps, but they’re not pertinent here, so I’ll ignore them.  (Hint: for commenting on this purposes, you should, too.)

As with many other pieces to run through the Crucible, the element I really want to stare hard at is its structure.  The only other place I can think of off-hand that has a structure like this is a lullaby and I don’t think that’s an accident.  It’s an extremely popular lullaby, and by subconsciously triggering associations with it, Swirsky is immediately lulling her readers, as it were, and invoking a sense of deep, unwavering love.  This is handy because, as we’ve noted in other structurally interesting pieces, the story is short and having the structure do some of the work keeps that from being a handicap.

If you were a dinosaur, my love, then you would be a T-Rex. You’d be a small one, only five feet, ten inches, the same height as human-you.

This is an opening line that does a ton of heavy lifting.  It establishes the structure of the story as a series of If/then statements.  It also sneaks in exposition about what’s going on in the (completely elided) frame story.  Not to mention that it sets up the repeated motif of establishing an image with one set of preconceived notions and then immediately providing detail that undermines them.

Let’s talk about that elided frame story for a moment.  There’s an inherent distance with this story that is very important to the success of its emotional impact.  It’s in a quasi-second person, but there’s no pretense at all that the “you” addressed in the story is, in fact, the reader.  This draws attention to the fact that the story is a story, the very effect that leads to some people ragging on second person.  What it does in this case is create a relationship between the narrator and the reader.  We know the narrator is telling us a story, and we’re listening to it because it’s quirky and has a 5’10” T-Rex who is loved.

I’d stare at the two of you standing together by the altar and I’d love you even more than I do now.

This might be my polyamorous heart talking, but if you don’t love the narrator, just a little bit, by that line, I question either your reading comprehension or your capacity for human sentiment.  We’ve been hearing a story from somebody who, we now know, is a really and truly decent person to the important people in her life, and something is not right.  Because this hypothetical fantasy?  It is sad.  Tragic sad, not pathetic sad.  She’s happy, but her heart is breaking, and this is her fantasy.  This is your “Danger, Will Robinson,” moment, but you probably don’t notice on your first time through because you’re a little in love, and you’re sad, and the if/then logic of the story is relentless and carries you on even as the warning signals start.  There’s no explicit frame story, but you’re about to find out what happened anyway.  And since you come at it sideways, with the grief breaking down your fantasy instead of coming at you directly, you’re so much more vulnerable to the impact of the frame story than if there were a proper frame.

Your claws and fangs would intimidate your foes effortlessly. Whereas you—fragile, lovely, human you—must rely on wits and charm.

Here’s where we start to get the explicit explanation of what the missing frame story would tell us, and it’s done through the technique introduced in the first sentence of establishing a set of expectations and then thwarting them.  He’d have the power and ferocity of a dinosaur, not to do violence, but to avoid it.  In fact, it’s not the T-Rex who goes on, in hypothetical if/then-land, to instigate violence, but his zookeeper partner who leads him to the enemies.  And do we blame her?  No.  What we know about him is that he’s relatively short, gentle, loved by a woman we love, fragile, lovely, and in possession of wits and charm.  In other words, thoroughly likable.  Wanting to protect and defend somebody like that is admirable.  We like her for that.  We applaud her.

So, of course, Swirsky undermines us again, and chastises us for that very thing.

I’d avert my eyes from the newspapers when they showed photographs of the men’s tearful widows and fatherless children, just as they must avert their eyes from the newspapers that show my face.

Her compassion here is relentless, but it’s also a bit of her downfall, because it breaks her out of the safe space of her fantasy.  The story structure stumbles after this, breaking, for the first time, into a discussion of the real here and now instead of the implications of a world where her love is a dinosaur.

Let me say that again.  Her compassion for the families of the people who nearly killed her fiancé is so relentless that it interrupts the coping mechanism she’s using to deal with that same tragedy. Reader, Rachel Swirsky just stabbed you in the guts by breaking a pattern.  You have been shivved by a master.

For no particular reason, I would like to hereby publicly state that while nobody I love is a dinosaur, I have no compassion for anybody else’s family, and I do an uncanny impression of a wrathful god.

This has been on hiatus for a long time, but no more!  I really liked doing this, and based on responses here and via email I think others liked it too.  I’m revamping it a little bit to make it more sustainable and hopefully improve the interactivity.  I’m always a fan of my own ramblings, and emails are nice, but by gods, I want a crafty party on my blog!

For those of you who don’t remember or never knew, here’s what we’re doing: Once a month we’re going to take a story and figure out why it’s good.  Obviously we’ll be filtering for good stories.  Preference will be given to stories available for free online.  Then, on Craft Crucible Day, I’ll put up an essay where I tease apart one or another aspect of the craft of the story, how it’s used, and why it works.  There’s a whole category here for previous CC posts.  Future ones will be like that, too.

Everybody else is encouraged to argue with me in comments, propose their own theories, or even do their own analysis elsewhere and drop a link here to let me know about it.

For me, I don’t see these as a “How to” so much as a “How did.”  In other words, this isn’t an instruction manual for writers, but an extended notes section for readers.  Writers are cool, but I’m a mercenary creature and ultimately need readers more.  So this is for you, lovely reading folk.  Let’s stare at how the sausage gets made.

Here’s our upcoming schedule:

March 16 – “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love” by Rachel Swirsky (Apex Magazine, Mar-2013)

April 13 – “The Ink Readers of Doi Saket” by Thomas Olde Heuvelt (Tor.com, 04-2013)

May 15 – “Selkie Stories Are for Losers” by Sofia Samatar (Strange Horizons, Jan-2013)

June 12 – “The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere” by John Chu (Tor.com, 02-2013)

If that lineup looks familiar to you, that’s probably because I stole the short story Hugo ballot for 2014.  What can I say, all the nominees were published in online markets.  It made my life easy.

Let me know if there’s a story you’re dying to dissect or dig into, and we’ll add it to the lineup.  Also, feel free to let me know you’ve melted into squishy glee at the prospect of this coming back.  Just, you know, don’t get so squishy that you ruin your keyboard, k?