{"id":1875,"date":"2021-11-16T13:05:59","date_gmt":"2021-11-16T13:05:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=1875"},"modified":"2022-01-14T18:25:10","modified_gmt":"2022-01-14T18:25:10","slug":"mediation-by-cadwell-turnbull","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=1875","title":{"rendered":"Mediation by Cadwell Turnbull"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><strong><em>Mediation<\/em><\/strong> by Cadwell Turnbull (<em>Entanglements: Tomorrow\u2019s Lovers, Families, and Friends<\/em>, 2020) starts with a widow recounting her family\u2019s custom of having birthday dinners (her and her son\u2019s in June, the daughter\u2019s in August, and her dead husband\u2019s in October). We also learn that she has been dodging these (or merging the October one with Thanksgiving) for a couple of years now, and this year has plans to go to a conference. This latter leads to an argument with her children, who want the tradition to survive. During their disagreement, their house AI suggests they should perhaps make the October meal a memorial one. The mother tells the AI (more annoying since its mediation code was loaded) to switch off.<br>Most of the rest of the story deals with the mother\u2019s attempts to avoid dealing with her grief, although there is also an account of her husband\u2019s diagnosis, and his decision that they should go to therapy before he died. During this period, he told her that he wasn\u2019t happy with his reclusiveness, and he didn\u2019t think she was either.<br>The conflict with her kids comes to a head when she returns home to find them having the memorial dinner without her; she stomps off to her room, where she talks to an AI copy of her husband. The story ends with reconciliation and cake.<br>This is well enough done but it is essentially a slight mainstream story (a woman comes to terms with her grief and reconciles with her children) with some SF furniture.<br>\u00a0**+ (Average to Good). 4,300 words.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mediation by Cadwell Turnbull (Entanglements: Tomorrow\u2019s Lovers, Families, and Friends, 2020) starts with a widow recounting her family\u2019s custom of having birthday dinners (her and her son\u2019s in June, the daughter\u2019s in August, and her dead husband\u2019s in October). We also learn that she has been dodging these (or merging the October one with Thanksgiving) [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[484],"tags":[256,296,487,486,485,460,12],"class_list":["post-1875","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cadwell-turnbull","tag-2-5","tag-296","tag-ai","tag-bereavement","tag-cadwell-turnbull","tag-entanglements","tag-short-story"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1875","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1875"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1875\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2418,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1875\/revisions\/2418"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}