{"id":5889,"date":"2022-10-17T10:54:53","date_gmt":"2022-10-17T10:54:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=5889"},"modified":"2022-10-17T20:17:55","modified_gmt":"2022-10-17T20:17:55","slug":"let-all-the-children-boogie-by-sam-j-miller","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=5889","title":{"rendered":"Let All the Children Boogie by Sam J. Miller"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Let All the Children Boogie<\/em><\/strong> by Sam J. Miller (Tor.com, January\u2013February 2021) starts with the narrator Laurie remembering the time she first heard Iggy Pop\u2019s The Passenger<\/em> on the radio and how, at the end of the track, there was an interruption, \u201cstaticky words, saying what might have been \u2018Are you out there?\u2019<\/em>\u201d
Then, next day in a local thrift shop, Laurie hears someone singing the song:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The singer must have sensed me staring, because they turned to look in my direction. Shorter than me, hair buzzed to the scalp except for a spiked stripe down the center.
\u201cThe Graveyard Shift,\u201d I said, trembling. \u201cYou were listening last night?\u201d
\u201cYeah,\u201d they said, and their smile was summer, was weekends, was Ms. Jackson\u2019s raspy-sweet voice. The whole place smelled like mothballs, and the scent had never been so wonderful. \u201cYou too?\u201d
My mind had no need for pronouns. Or words at all for that matter. This person filled me up from the very first moment.
I said: \u201cWhat a great song, right? I never heard it before.
Do you have it?\u201d
\u201cNo,\u201d they said, \u201cbut I was gonna drive down to Woodstock this weekend to see if I could find it there. Wanna come?\u201d
Just like that. Wanna come?<\/em> Everything I did was a long and agonizing decision, and every human on the planet terrified me, and this person had invited me on a private day trip on a moment\u2019s impulse. What epic intimacy to offer a total stranger\u2014hours in a car together, a journey to a strange and distant town. What if I was a psychopath, or a die-hard Christian evangelist bent on saving their soul? The only thing more surprising to me than this easy offer was how swiftly and happily my mouth made the words: That sounds amazing.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

This passage pretty much limns the the story, which is that of one odd sock finding another and becoming a pair. The next day they set off together on a trip to a record store and, during their journey, they hear another interruption on the radio after David Bowie\u2019s Life on Mars<\/em> (the comments include mention of an airplane crash\u2014which occurs later that day\u2014and a \u201cspiderwebbing\u201d epidemic).
The rest of the tale sees the pair spend their time (in between further, increasingly meaningful, radio messages) navigating the mostly self-inflicted emotional dramas of teenage life in 1991 (during which Laurie seems perpetually on the verge of a nervous breakdown). These tempests-in-teapots include, among other situations, dealing with both sets of parents\u2014and when Fell first meets Laurie\u2019s parents, Laurie tells them that Fell is also a \u201cshe\u201d to placate any potential concerns about what might happen to their daughter upstairs. Laurie then feels sick at having done so, as \u201cIt was a negation of who Fell was\u201d. I assume from this that Fell is a biological woman who has chosen to be a trans man (but, as I find this stuff of little interest, and can\u2019t be bothered trying to confirm my impressions, I could be wrong). Later, we also get a look at Fell\u2019s dysfunctional family set up, which essentially consists of an alcoholic and hostile mother who apparently uses the wrong pronouns for her child (something I didn\u2019t think you could do in 1991).
Eventually (spoiler), the content of the messages (\u201cI don\u2019t know if this the right . . . place. Time\u201d; \u201cTo tell you the future can be more magnificent, and more terrifying, than what you have in your head right now\u201d; \u201cTwo soldiers trapped behind enemy lines\u201d, etc.) leads the pair to triangulate the signal to a nearby record shop (the massed Air Force trucks nearby seem unable to do so)\u2014but there is no-one there. Fell concludes that an earlier hypothesis\u2014about the affirmatory messages coming from their future selves\u2014is correct.
This story will probably only work for those interested in safe, non-threatening (the only drama here occurs in Laurie\u2019s head), and emotional YA material about insecure teenagers. The SFnal idea is weak and not really developed in any meaningful way (the series of transmissions from the future are concluded by the \u201canswer\u201d being given by Fell). It is essentially a mainstream story about growing up.1<\/sup>
I\u2019d also note in passing that the gender pronoun handwringing that goes on in this seems wildly ahistorical.
* (Mediocre). 7,000 words. Story link<\/a>.

1. Unless the SFWA has suddenly been swamped by emotional teenage writers, this seems like another mystifying Nebula Award short story finalist (it also placed sixth in the Locus Poll).

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Let All the Children Boogie by Sam J. Miller (Tor.com, January\u2013February 2021) starts with the narrator Laurie remembering the time she first heard Iggy Pop\u2019s The Passenger on the radio and how, at the end of the track, there was an interruption, \u201cstaticky words, saying what might have been \u2018Are you out there?\u2019\u201dThen, next day […]<\/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_post_was_ever_published":false,"_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":""},"categories":[1357],"tags":[21,50,1360,1359,1361,1358,12,116],"class_list":["post-5889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sam-j-miller","tag-21","tag-50","tag-juvenile","tag-messages-from-the-future","tag-relationships","tag-sam-j-miller","tag-short-story","tag-tor-com"],"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\/5889","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=5889"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5889\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5909,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5889\/revisions\/5909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}