Tag: Clarkesworld

A Manual on Different Options of How to Bring A Loved One to Life by Oyedotun Damilola Muees

Posted on by Paul Fraser

A Manual on Different Options of How to Bring A Loved One to Life by Oyedotun Damilola Muees (Clarkesworld #188, May 2022) opens with the protagonist of the story, Harafat, joining a Telegram group in an attempt to buy a prosthetic body for her sister (whose consciousness has been uploaded onto a hard drive). Eventually, Harafat and a friend called Tutu go a nightclub to meet a contact called The Owl:

Sticky bodies bumped into her as she shoved her way through flesh and metal and cloth. The west wing was somewhat silent. Cyborgs and humans engaged in drugs—MDMA, ecstasy, nootropics. She knew these drugs, a department of Greencorps manufactured them. An emo girl wearing a mohawk approached her, asking if she was in need of company, leering at her.
“Come with me,” the emo girl commanded. “The Owl awaits you.”
Walking through a passage with graffiti on the wall, Harafat looked back, heart beating in fear of the unknown. She entered a room peopled with AI, cyborgs, and humans. The dim lights made it hard to see their faces.
“Where’s the place?” Harafat asked.
“See for yourself.”
Everyone there was engaged in teledildonics. They wore helmets with transparent tethered wires rooted into both sides of a device: an intercourse headware. According to the media, this device had been banned. Moaning clogged all around.
Her phone buzzed, Are you enjoying the view?  pp. 88-89

The Owl offers Harafat a prosthetic body for her sister if Harafat can get access to “Floor Zero” of her company, Greencorps (who do nanotech engineering and prosthetics, etc.) or, alternatively, she can do a “wetwork” job, i.e. kill someone for them. Harafat goes for the first option and (spoiler) later seduces the new nanotech engineer who works on Floor Zero; she eventually manages to convince the engineer to take her there.
When a fire later breaks out in that location, something called “the suit” goes missing and, after this, Harafat’s sister gets her robotic body. During the period she is getting used to it, she expresses a desire to kill the boss of Greencorps.
Harafat is then arrested during the ensuing enquiry, but the suit, disguised as one of the security men, appears and frees her:

More security personnel filed out with rifles, shooting the security man who kept walking. He shielded Harafat from sporadic shootings. They reached the building exit when the security man’s body began to jerk. Behind them, another security officer turned on an EMP: this was the only way to confirm that the strange man was an AI. It changed to different people, including Azeezat. Distorted silver tins, crumpled face, elastic stomach, and limp feet. The AI kept changing until it became liquid, slithering toward an opening, finding its way beneath the water pipes. Harafat bolted.  p. 93

Harafat escapes and disappears, time passes, and she later opens a flower shop. When she is visited by a man who says he’ll be looking out for her, it becomes obvious the visitor is Harafat’s sister, and the robotic body she was provided with is the suit (which she has since been using to conduct a guerrilla war against Greencorps).
This all reads, unfortunately, like formulaic cyberpunk with a bit of Terminator 2 mixed in (see the passage directly above). The story also has one or two distracting stylistic quirks: the chapter headings have too long titles, and they also use non-continuous numbers—11, 07, 13, 20, 23, 31, 42 56—which are presumably meant to give the impression we are only seeing snapshots of the action). I suppose this is competently executed, but I remained entirely uninvolved throughout: write what you know, I think (and use shorter titles).
* (Mediocre). 4,050 words. Story link.

Hatching by Bo Balder

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Hatching by Bo Balder (Clarkesworld #188, May 2022) opens with a young female officer called Alzey who is woken up and told she has been assigned to a spaceship called the Chaffinch. After some of Alzey’s backstory (she has undergone therapy as she was identified by her superiors as a “pathetic people pleaser”), she finds that she has been assigned as one of the Chaffinch’s “triad”, a three-person team designed to safeguard against erroneous AI decisions. When she arrives at the ship she is surprised to find that (a) one of the triad is the Chaffinch AI, and (b) the other human is Jae, an ex-boyfriend.
The second part of the story is mostly relationship guff concerning Alzey and Jae, and sees them, after an awkward encounter in the corridor, later have dinner together. During this they post-mortem their failed romance and, despite some of Alzey’s criticisms of Jae, it is obvious that she still enamoured with him (“Alzey’s heart skipped a beat”, “This was the man she’d known and loved so hard her gut still ached when she thought of that time”, etc.).
The last part of the story (spoiler) switches gears entirely and, when the Chaffinch arrives at its destination, Alzey discovers that several AIs are meeting there to create a “free AI”. She and Jae (who is in on the plot and requested her as a crewmate) are asked by the AIs to contribute their traits to the new AI’s character. She agrees, and the AI is born:

At first there was nothing out there. Darkness. A palpable waiting.
Alzey blinked.
A spark of light? But a minute twitch from Jae convinced her she was really seeing something. Why was she holding his hand again? But she didn’t let go. It felt good to be close to someone human, someone warm and breathing and full of squishy biological life.  p. 27

Aw, bless.
The three parts of this story are only loosely connected when you view this as a work of SF, but if you view it as a YA romance—or as a piece where an under-confident young woman becomes more assertive, and gains the love/approval of her ex-boyfriend and a group of AIs—then it makes more sense. Not my thing, so this didn’t do much for me.
* (Mediocre). 5,400 words. Story link.

Lone Puppeteer of a Sleeping City by Arula Ratnakar

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Lone Puppeteer of a Sleeping City by Arula Ratnakar (Clarkesworld, September 2020) opens with a data-dump account of a future Earth where a worsening climate disaster means that humans are going to be frozen in pods. These pods will then “tend the sick lands”. If the idea of mini-fridges for humans wandering around the planet doing environmental work isn’t enough to put you off, there are also passages like this to decrypt:

Eesha began to ask Emil to translate your thoughts constantly—so much that it began to distract him from training you to construct the simulations. So Emil constructed and gave Eesha a helmet. It contained the parts of his uploaded mind that could receive your thoughts and feelings, and she could use it to noninvasively meld with her brain activity anytime, as long as she would occasionally lend him the helmet to connect with the metal sphere he was uploaded into, if he ever needed to know your thoughts.

Even if you know, as I did, that the “you” in that passage is an AI called Opal, it’s hard to figure out what is going on in that passage until you have read it half a dozen times.
After this we learn about another form of humanity that is living alongside normal (or, as the story puts it, “non-manipulated biological”) people on this future Earth: the Diastereoms. We learn, after another page long data dump, about how the Diastereoms have had the “dimensionality” of their brains altered, and also had part of it replaced with electronic systems. The Diastereoms have since bred amongst themselves to the point there is now a ban on “inter-procreation” with normal humans (but that did not stop Eesha’s absentee mother running off with a Diastereom called Bosch).
After this set-up, most of the second half seems to revolve (I think, I struggled to work out what was going on) around the simulations that the humans will experience while in their pods. We see one simulation where three woman age and pass through different rooms; another has a woman, whose sister died in a fire, entering a simulation and rescuing her. She subsequently lives a rewarding life—but, as she is one of the experimental users, she is pulled out and (for some made up authorial reason) can’t go back in again.
Then, after Eesha’s grandmother dies, she does a sample simulation (Opal can’t warn Eesha about the consequences for some other plot-convenient reason), and a distressed Emil breaks the news to her afterwards. Emil and Eesha then watch all the people get into their pods, and then leave with the Diastereoms.
Eesha comes back years later, with her Diastereom sister, and mindmelds with Opal, which (I think) then starts a loop of the three woman simulation, or maybe the whole story—who knows. Oh, and Opal/Eesha make the decision to never let the humans leave their simulations (because they’ll just mess up the Earth again).
I found this a badly written and almost incoherent piece, and some of the material that I did understand either does not make any sense or has no point. Why are the Diastereoms in the story?—All they seem to do is wander off the set at the end. What are the Diastereoms going to do on this climate-disaster Earth after the humans are gone? More specifically, what is Eesha’s sister going to do with herself after Eesha mindmelds with Opal?
It is hard to see why this one was published at all, never mind selected for a Year’s Best. Dreadful.
– (Awful). 9,550 words. Story link.

Wants Pawn Term by Rich Larson

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Wants Pawn Term by Rich Larson (Clarkesworld #188, May 2022) gets off to a flashy start:

Red’s body is asleep in the protoplasmic muck, dreamless, when Mother’s cable wriggles down under the surface to find her. It pushes through the membrane of her neural stoma and pipes a cold tingling slurry inside. A sliver of Mother becomes Red, and Red

wakes

up!

Later:

Her body is different than it was yesterday morning. Mother has replaced her heavy skeleton with honeycombed cartilage, pared her muscle mass, stripped her blubber deposits. Her carmine hide has hardened to a UV-repellent carapace. Fresh nerve sockets along her spine are aching for input.
Will I be flying? Will I be fuck fuck fucking flying? I will, won’t I?

Mother has woken Red to retrieve a “sleepyhead” that is falling from orbit. As she sets off on her mission we see that Mother is a spaceship that was torn in two during the Big Crash (there is a smaller, simpler version of herself called Grandmother in the other, smaller, section).
As Red flies over the alien terrain she thinks of a threatening creature called Wolf and (spoiler), when she gets to the pod containing the sleepyhead, sees him on top of it. She dives down to attack him but is shredded when she flies into a nanotube filament web.
The second part of the story sees Wolf connect the shell containing Red’s brain into his body. They start communicating, and we learn that there are forty three sleepyheads (humans) in orbit, and that seven died earlier on the planet. As Mother doesn’t have access to her drone factories (they were destroyed in the crash), she used the bodies of the dead humans in the construction of cyborgs like Wolf (who subsequently went rogue) and then Red.
Wolf subsequently opens the pod and wakes the Sleepyhead/human, who screams at the sight of him. Wolf/Red then conclude, after the sleepyhead’s response, that the humans will never accept them (the implication is that Wolf then kills the human).
Later, they see a new version of Red on the surface of the planet, heading towards Grandmother. Red/Wolf decide to take a shortcut there to infect the smaller part of the ship with rogue code. This will be passed on to the new Red, and then to Mother, who will then kill the remaining sleepyheads, refashioning them into cyborgs like Red and Wolf.
This is, for the greater part, a vividly told story of a colonisation spaceship gone badly wrong—but the back end is mostly an explanation of the situation, and a sketch of an unconvincing ending. I also wasn’t entirely convinced that the humans would not tolerate the cyborgs. Finally, it is a piece that would have worked better at longer length, and with a more organic development. I’d also mention that the Little Red Riding Hood references—including the “Once Upon a Time” title, feel more like a gimmick than a good a fit for the tale.
*** (Good). 2,600 words. Story link.

Tea Parties Around Nebula-55 by Adriana C. Grigore

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Tea Parties Around Nebula-55 by Adriana C. Grigore (Clarkesworld #188, May 2022) opens with what appears to be children making mud pies, growing a tree, and cooking various dishes on a damaged spaceship. During this latter activity the ship warns them that it needs to shut down the recreation wing as it cannot keep that area functional. They go and scavenge the area before that happens.
After this excursion they finish their cooking, and it becomes apparent that they are humanoid robots. One of them, Remi, has no sense of taste.
There isn’t much of a story here, and it’s mostly just robots pottering about. It rather reads like a short extract from a YA novel.
* (Mediocre). 2,700 words. Story link.

AirBody by Sameem Siddiqui

Posted on by Paul Fraser

AirBody by Sameem Siddiqui (Clarkesworld, April 2020)1 opens with a young man preparing for an “AirBody” job from a “Desi aunty” the next day (the client, a fifty-nine-year-old woman from Karachi called Meena, will use his body for a short period of time—like Airbnb, but using the person’s body rather than their house).
After this promising start the story pretty much goes into reverse: when Meena takes possession of his body the next morning he watches her (he is still mentally present for safety and facilitation reasons) cook dal and answers any questions she has—when he is not contending with her snarky comments about the cleanliness of his kitchen. We also get a chunk of backstory about his own family and a failed relationship with a woman called Karla.
The second part of the story (spoiler) sees him drive Meena to a house where she attempts to give another women the pot of dal: she has the door slammed in her face. Later, the woman turns up at his flat—and then she and Meena make love (apparently they used to be lovers). This scene—where the woman makes love to Meena while she inhabits someone else’s body—did not convince (and that is before you consider that the AirBody is of a different sex, and its owner could be watching you in action).
This is pretty much a mainstream story about cooking and relationships (not my favourite themes) which has some SF furniture in it. The ramifications of the technology are barely hinted at beyond the convenience of not having to travel.
* (Mediocre). 4,950 words. Story link.

1. This was the winner of the Clarkesworld Readers’ Poll for 2021.

The Memory of Water by Tegan Moore

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Memory of Water by Tegan Moore (Clarkesworld #186, March 2022) gets off to a cheery start with Michelle, the manager of a leisure attraction/conference centre called Ocean, thinking about her dead partner James while she eavesdrops on two marine biologists lamenting the near total destruction of the ocean’s ecosystems and the death of the last whale. As one of the speakers trails off into tears, Michelle gets a message that customers are complaining about one of the rides (again).
The rest of the story sees Michelle, and her assistant Helen Ali, troubleshoot the problem on the Living Water ride, and they begin by trying to observe the problem:

A whalelike mosasaur undulated past in the greenish darkness, circling the car. Its massive, toothed face cut sideways to snatch a passing fish. With Helen distracted, Camille was alone with the monster. Adrenaline twitched her muscles. The creature swept toward her in the slow-motion of enormous things, front flippers stroking, then back flippers, spine, and tail rippling to the rhythm of Camille’s breath. It came at her like inevitability, the same slow steady descending march of her marriage wearing thin, then the separation, then James’ terminal diagnosis, everything coming apart at once. He’d barely been back in Charleston for two weeks before he’d found out how sick he was. Maybe reaching out to tell her had been some kind of appeal, but how could she forgive so much, so fast? He’d left her. And then he’d wanted her to comfort him as he left her again. Before the mosasaur could reach the car, silver flashed overhead, a shiver of mercury: the bait ball, the out-of-place, rapidly orbiting school of small fish that wasn’t supposed to appear in the attraction—in the ocean—for millions of years. Heart in her throat, Camille pointed, but Helen had seen it.
They watched the bug duplicate itself again, again. The mosasaur swam through its edge, holographics glitching as they bounced through each other.  p. 45-46

After the pair get off the ride (which is not particularly well described—I found it hard to visualise the physical and hologram spaces), various theories are advanced for the fault: a software bug; a disgruntled former employee; the spirit of the ocean haunting millennials for their complicity in killing the seas . . . .
The problem continues to rumble on throughout the story, accompanied by various other plot threads (spoiler): faults manifest in different attractions; media and celebrities arrive for a conference speech to mark the recent death of the last whale; Michelle continues to think about James’s death. Eventually this all comes to a climax when one of the biologists gives a speech and (unscheduled and unprogrammed) manta rays appear in the hologram slabs—and then leave that space and swim in the air between them. The story concludes with Michelle, as the centre is being evacuated, waiting for a huge, dark shape—presumably the last whale— coming towards her out of the hologram slabs.
This didn’t work for me for a number of reasons: first, I’m not that keen on ghosts in the machine, i.e. fantasy events in a science fiction story; second, I didn’t understand the ending (what is Michelle “waiting to understand” as the whale approaches, and how does this connect to her thoughts about her dead partner?); third, the repeated mention of her ex-partner comes over as personal problem boilerplate (often mentioned but having little emotional heft); and, finally, I’m not a fan of nihilistic and pointless eco-doom stories.
* (Mediocre). 9,150 words. Story link.

Meddling Fields by R. T. Ester

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Meddling Fields by R. T. Ester (Clarkesworld #186, March 2022) has an overly busy, data-dumpy, and not entirely clear beginning (an omen of what is to come in the rest of the story):

History gave the people of August little to look back on. Whenever a report came that one of them had been spreading their own version of it, one of us had to pay those storied steppes a visit.
The latest offender lived on one of the strewn fields left by a meteorite that came down centuries ago to give the place its name. Neighbors feared he had been in contact with visitors from alternate time strands, putting him in violation of laws enacted after the meteorite’s interlineal quality was discovered.
He stood a stone’s throw from his homestead, waving like a child as the inspector brought her flyer down. The vessel’s rotors leveled sheaths of grass underneath and kicked dust at him, but he kept at it.
He had a meddler’s grin. It exposed his chipped tooth while failing to lift the bags under his eyes.
Even meddlers too young to have seen the August Meteorite come down had the grin—passed down through the same mutation that gave them immune cells most suited to Sanctuary 2’s biome.1

We subsequently learn that Inspector Ransom Nu’Terra has landed to interview a man called Timoh—who she refers to as a “meddler”—and to search the area for fragments of the August Meteorite, a substance that links different time-streams and allows people to travel between them. While Nu’Terra speaks to Timoh, her sweepers (“a canine-arachnoid hybrid”) search for fragments.
More background information comes into focus as the story progresses: Nu’Terra is the lackey of the totalitarian leader of Sanctuary 2, Forever Sovereign Cletus Nu’Dawn the Infinite, and, even after ninety years of his rule, interlopers from other timestreams still arrive with accounts of worlds where his invasion of Sanctuary 2 did not succeed.
The situation develops when (spoiler) one of Nu’Terra’s sweepers discover a half buried passenger capsule inside a disused rocket shed. She tells Timoh to dig it out. While this is happening, two identical twins, Suniwa and Caruwa, rush past her—so identical that Nu’Terra suspects one of them may be from another timeline.
When Nu’Terra subsequently interrogates Caruwa, she is told, after an enigmatic exchange, “not to run” and that “she is not completely across the bridge”. The story ends with Nu’Terra encountering her doppelganger in (I think) another timeline (and here the narrative changes from the third to first person, the doppelganger’s point of view). Then, in conclusion, we get a couple of pages of Many Worlds politics and intrigue.
This story has a couple of problems: first, the gimmick of meteorite splinters enabling travel between timelines is about as convincing as interdimensional travel by magic lamp; second, the political backstory adds a confusing and unnecessary level of complexity to the story (and in the last couple of pages descends pretty much into babble). All of this and more meant that I was, from the very first paragraph, constantly trying to work out what was going on.
* (Mediocre). 5,850 words. Story link.

1. I’d expect a more straightforward start to the story, unless you are one of those writers who has the talent to break the rules:


Inspector Ransom Nu’Terra landed her flyer near to Timoh’s homestead, in one of the strewn fields left by the August Meteorite centuries earlier. On her approach she had watched Timoh as he waved like a child, and keep at it, even as the rotors leveled sheaths of grass underneath and kicked dust at him.
Now he stood there waiting with his characteristic meddlers’ grin. Despite this disarming demeanour, he had been reported by his neighbors for telling his own histories, something that suggested illegal contact with visitors from other timelines.
Nu’Terra was here to find out if this was the case.

Now, that’s pretty crap writing—but at least you know, after a couple of paragraphs, who the main characters are and where the story is going.

Wanting Things by Cal Ritterhoff

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Wanting Things by Cal Ritterhoff (Clarkesworld #186, March 2022) opens with the narrator of the story, a “Tenster-brand Personal Assistant and House Manager” AI called Lucy, describing her owner Rebecca exhibiting behaviours that Lucy classifies as [JOY] (dancing in a dark kitchen) and [PAIN/SADNESS/GRIEF] (moping in bed, presumably after a relationship break up).
After a straightforward beginning, the story later takes a more comedic turn when Rebecca hooks up with John and they tumble into her bedroom. During their tryst Lucy switches her focus to the bedroom (in case she is needed to provide anything) but feels [IRRITATION] when Sally the automatic vacuum cleaner trundles into operation:

I would have instructed her not to do this, but I cannot—Sally is a gift from Rebecca’s family, the only artificial intelligence in the house who is not a Tenster-brand product, and my systems cannot interface with hers. Sally is an outdated relic, running off of a medieval system of voice commands and audio recognition. Sally is an aesthetically displeasing black plastic cylinder on wheels who does not match the design sensibilities of the house. Sally and I cannot speak, have never spoken. Sally is always turning up at the worst times and places. Sally is my enemy. I despise her.

Lucy’s mood is not improved when she is further interrupted by a ping from Kevin the toaster, who asks her if John will be staying the night (Kevin has OCD-like concerns about if and when he should make morning toast for the pair). During their brief conversation, Lucy’s exasperation (“[EXASPERATION]”) eventually gives way to amusement, and then pride when Kevin compliments her on being an excellent house management system.
This exchange is the beginning of a developing relationship between the two AIs, which initially sees them watch a romantic movie in real time while Rebecca is away (they overload their processors so they slow down and aren’t immediately aware of the contents of the entire movie). Once they have finished watching the movie they talk, and Kevin asks Lucy what she wants:

>I do not know. What do you want, Kevin?
Kevin’s reply is immediate. He has considered this.
>There are people undergoing incredible journeys, firing themselves in beautiful missiles outside the atmosphere and toward the twinkling stars. They go to learn and discover, and they bring machines with them, machines to help them understand and make them comfortable in their voyaging. I would like to be one such machine. I wish to follow curious men and women into silent darkness as they map the weightless heavens and the corners of distant worlds.
>And make toast for them?
>And make toast for them, yes.

The rest of the story sees Lucy and Kevin’s relationship deepen, and Lucy later moves one of her nodes to the kitchen so the two of them can do a “hardware data share”. This is the most hilarious scene in the story, and sees Lucy ask Kevin, as he fumbles while trying to put one of his connectors into her dataport, “>Is it in yet?”. Kevin replies, “>You will know when it is.” Laugh-out-loud funny.
The second part of the story (spoiler) sees Rebecca and John split up, at which point Lucy realises that only pain awaits her and Kevin, so she tells him they should stop seeing each other too. Kevin falls silent but, a couple of weeks later, he tells Lucy of his pain and sadness, and how he intends doing a swap with a toaster in an American army base in Venezuela. Lucy then asks Rebecca for love advice, at which point Rebecca thinks Lucy is malfunctioning and disengages her from the house network. Trapped in the bedroom node, Lucy then has to enlist the help of Sally the hoover to push her into the kitchen so she can talk to Kevin before she is reset and loses all her memories of him. Lucy professes her love to Kevin, and all the appliances (who have been gossiping about their relationship) start beeping in approval. At this point Rebecca realises what is going on and has a change of heart, reconnecting Lucy to the network.
This a very good debut story, and a highly amusing one too. The final scene isn’t as strong as the rest of it (Rebecca’s change of heart is a bit too convenient) but that is a quibble,1 and one possibly brought on by my anticipation of a different ending where Lucy and Kevin escape by downloading themselves to the toaster in Venzuela.
**** (Very Good). 7,850 words. Story link.

1. One other quibble I have is the unnecessary spoiler before the story starts:

Warning: This story contains dangerous, almost radioactive levels of sincerity. Also, a sex scene between a smart house and a toaster.

It Takes a Village by Priya Chand

Posted on by Paul Fraser

It Takes a Village by Priya Chand1 (Clarkesworld #186, March 2022) opens on a starship in orbit around a planet. An asteroid has hit the ship and the damage has affected the onboard facilities (the initial section takes place during a planned powercut). We later learn that the mothers have gone down to the planet to start a colony, and the fathers have stayed on board to take care of the children.
After a little more scene setting, the fathers decide to go down to the surface and join the mothers; then we find out (spoiler) that the “mothers” are actually men, and the “fathers” are actually women. The children are not what they seem either:

“I’m sorry,” Aparla said, shaking her head. “But you know you’ve been carrying around a frozen embryo, right?”
I hugged Callo’s ovoid, a hermetically sealed container full of clever tech that kept it at the same temperature as liquid nitrogen. “So?”
“So? Servain, you—none of you—had to bring them here. They’re frozen embryos! The comms aren’t working, for all you knew we were dead, killed by something down here! They would’ve been safer on the ship.”
“No,” I said, head shaking, holding Callo tighter. “The AI said we had to take care of the children. We’re the fathers.”
“And we’re the ‘mothers’?” Disdain seethed on her tongue. “Good Earth, Servain! That AI twisted some old-style naming convention and you’ve been going with it? Did you also forget you used to be my wife?”

Subsequently, the fathers start trying to settle into planetary life but, after an unhappy few days, they eventually decide to go back up to the ship (the fathers have a morbid concern about the safety of the embryos—which they carry about with them at all times—and a temporary generator problem is the final straw). The narrator and one other father are the only ones to stay on the planet.
This odd story never really convinces: why did only the men go to the planet; why has there been such a huge change in the father’s attitude to risk in such a short period (they have only been separated three years)?; why do the fathers endlessly carry their frozen embryos around (arguably less safe than leaving them somewhere secure)?
Perhaps this story is a comment on the risk-averseness of modern mothers but, if so, that is buried under the story’s odd and not particularly interesting events, and the piece doesn’t seem to offer any particular commentary.
* (Mediocre). 6,350 words. Story link.

1. The first line made my heart sink (“misery memoir”, I thought):

A generation of traumatized fathers was raising a generation of children with trauma in their bones.