Word-portals between worlds

October 27, 2021 8:51 AM

Two scifi stories about literary professions in uncertain futures. "The Bookstore at the End of America" by Charlie Jane Anders, about a bookseller at the border between California and America: "Some of those screaming people were old enough to have grown up in the United States of America, but they acted as though these two lands had always been enemies." "Apologia" by Vajra Chandrasekera, about a poet visiting "the committee’s carefully Chosen Moments of history": "This guilty poet, this raging poet, he could retroactively make the apologies that we had never made the first time around. It was, or would be, never too late for the big sorry."
posted by brainwane (6 comments total)

That Charlie Jane Anders story left a mark on me when I read it in A People's Future of the United States (Previously on Ask)
posted by DigDoug at 9:08 AM on October 27, 2021 [2 favorites]

California vs. America sounds about right, doesn't it.
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:42 AM on October 27, 2021 [1 favorite]

Both of these stories are great.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 11:04 AM on October 27, 2021

Whew, that second one is objectively gradual, but for me certainly snapped into focus all of a sudden in the second half. Perhaps it's because I just came from the article about the Deaf school.
posted by BlueBlueElectricBlue at 11:24 AM on October 27, 2021

Vajra Chandrasekera is a fantastic writer (with a novel coming out next year). Applied Cenotaphics in the Long Long Longitudes is one of my favorite science fiction stories and IMO should definitely have been nominated for Various Important Awards.

If you would like some grim climate fic, The Translator, At Low Tide is your story. I found it really haunting and disturbing, so if climate anxiety makes you spiral it might not be the story for you but it's a really good one.
posted by Frowner at 1:21 PM on October 27, 2021 [3 favorites]

Some of those screaming people were old enough to have grown up in the United States of America

I'm in.
posted by mule98J at 9:50 AM on October 28, 2021