{"id":3592,"date":"2022-04-18T12:13:19","date_gmt":"2022-04-18T12:13:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=3592"},"modified":"2022-04-27T16:20:06","modified_gmt":"2022-04-27T16:20:06","slug":"saturn-devouring-his-son-by-e-a-mylonas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=3592","title":{"rendered":"Saturn Devouring His Son by E. A. Mylonas"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Saturn Devouring His Son<\/em><\/strong> by E. A. Mylonas (Clarkesworld<\/em> #186, March 2022) begins with the narrator, Jacob, recounting a childhood memory of his father being fitted with a prosthetic arm\u2014the first of two he would eventually receive as a result of accidents at the pig processing factory where he worked. So, from the start, we have a near-future society that is sophisticated enough to fit high-tech prosthetics to injured people, but where they are still doing manual labour in factories that apparently have no concept of health and safety. In short, the arm is from the 2050s, the factory setting from the 1970s.
Jacob then returns to his home town for his father\u2019s funeral. He is greeted by his brother, to whom he hasn\u2019t spoken for years, and then learns that that his mother has turned into a bed-bound vegetable:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ma, who was only fifteen years older than me, but whose hair had already turned gray. Ma, who joined the plant soon after she had me, where she got a job at the head table. They called it that because that\u2019s where pig heads ended up. After noses and eyes and ears and cheeks and jowls and snouts were removed, the brains got scooped up. The Company sold the slurry to canned goods producers. It made soups thicker.
Back then, it used to be that one had to work through the skull with a meat saw, and then cut the brain out. One day, the Company figured it was faster firing compressed air into the skulls, then siphoning the remains.
Ma inhaled pig brain for years. Her own body, going into overdrive, started destroying itself. Who knew pig brains and human brains shared so much biology? Not something they taught at my school. Built and paid for by the Company.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The rest of this piece is an equally miserabilist, anti-capitalist tract that has (spoiler) the brother try to convince Jacob to come back to work in the company-run town. Jacob refuses (obviously). Then, after their father\u2019s funeral, Jacob\u2019s brother reveals his plan to keep his father\u2019s prosthetic arms and have them attached to himself after having his arms surgically removed (the company are looking to recycle the\u2014ten, fifteen-year old?\u2014prosthetics onto another maimed worker, but the brother has a plan to trick them). Jacob becomes complicit with his final words, \u201cLet\u2019s talk to the doctor tomorrow.\u201d This latter development doesn\u2019t really flow from what has occurred previously, but it is maybe suggesting that \u201cyou take the boy out of the town, but you can\u2019t take the town out of the boy\u201d.
As I\u2019ve suggested above, this is a rather backward looking story (and the arms plot at the end makes it an unlikely one too), and I couldn\u2019t help but think that this would probably have worked better as a straightforward literary small press piece\u2014where the writing and characterisation wouldn’t have been hobbled by the unconvincing premise.
Finally, even if factories like this are still around today (it\u2019s hard to believe such appalling Health & Safety would be tolerated in Western countries), the robots are coming.
* (Mediocre). 5,000 words. Story link<\/a>.

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Saturn Devouring His Son by E. A. Mylonas (Clarkesworld #186, March 2022) begins with the narrator, Jacob, recounting a childhood memory of his father being fitted with a prosthetic arm\u2014the first of two he would eventually receive as a result of accidents at the pig processing factory where he worked. So, from the start, we […]<\/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":[853],"tags":[21,539,622,854,856,855,12],"class_list":["post-3592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-e-a-mylonas","tag-21","tag-539","tag-clarkesworld","tag-e-a-mylonas","tag-hometown-visit","tag-prosthetics","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\/3592","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=3592"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3592\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3717,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3592\/revisions\/3717"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}