This week, I read "Savannah Liars Tour" by Will McIntosh. I heard about it through one of my favorite websites, io9, which features one short story each month from the current issue of Lightspeed Magazine. I've heard great things about Lightspeed - it won a Hugo in 2014 (plus four nominations), and its short stories often get nominated for SF short fiction awards. The current editor, John Joseph Adams, recently edited a volume I've been meaning to read: the first ever Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy.
(A brief aside: I've had an obsession with the Best American series since high school, when I read one of their Best American Essays collections. Each Best American series collects either short fiction or essays from a particular genre; generally one person is the series editor, and they have a guest edit each volume. I've purchased almost every Best American book I've ever found at my favorite used book store, more than . There's a Best American collection for everything, from essays to horror to science writing. But there wasn't a collection for sci-fi and fantasy until 2015?! Atrocious.)
Either way, for better or for worse, I've heard great things about Lightspeed but nothing about Will McIntosh in particular, and nothing about the story - I'm trying to add a smattering of short stories, both recent and archived, from a variety of sci-fi mags, to my reading app each week, but I don't generally read the blurb so I'm always surprised.
The title of the story captures possibly the most charming and memorable part of the story for me. The main character (Ben)'s dead lover, Delilah, was in her life the tour guide for the titular tour. Her job: tell outrageous but entertaining lies about the town of Savannah to tourists on the trolley. She never tells the same lie twice - Ben can attest to this because he takes her tour frequently before approaching her. The brief yarns we hear from her in the corners of the story make me want to hop onto the trolley with her, and add some much-needed character to the story.
Because this is largely one of those Idea stories characteristic of the sci-fi/fantasy genre. The author has an Idea, either for a cool world or a particular story frame or character they want to use, and then add the rest of the story elements to serve that Idea; everything else comes second to whatever the Idea is. Of course, that's not a bad thing, per se, if it's done well and the characters aren't flat and the story and the world-building work together. Nor are these stories unique to SFF - I think they're more obvious in those genres, though, because SFF places much more emphasis on world-building (obviously), and because navel-gazing description of a realistic idea could summarize most short stories in the New Yorker and is therefore a canonized 'literary' style, while navel-gazing description of an SFF idea reads as indulgent at best and infodump at worst.
I'm not sure if the Iiea here is the SF device or the plot; one is slaved to the other, but I'm not sure which. The device: people can speak to any dead person, but only if they pay exorbitant fees to go into cryogenic sleep. The plot: Ben is torn between his dead lover, Delilah, and his wife, Jillian. We know almost nothing about these characters, except that Ben keeps visiting Delilah, Jillian doesn't want him to, and Delilah delights in lying (and is dead). The conflict in this story feels artificial or contrived - exactly like McIntosh had an Idea for a story and forced everything in the story to revolve around that idea. The characters' wants and existences didn't matter beyond the conflict of desires that propelled the story forward. We literally get no details about the characters, and few details about the world, beyond what is directly necessary for this story to work.
For me, this is a fatal flaw. It wasn't like it was unpleasant to read, but I was distinctly un-wowed by this, and was surprised it made it to publication. To me, it read like stories I've read as a slush reader for an SF/F/horror magazine and passed on. Sure, it has some lovely turns of phrase and an interesting premise. But your world, your characters, and your message all need to take a step beyond the premise to be interesting and compelling. There's a lot of opportunity in a story where death is kind of a nebulous concept to delve into deeper topics, but instead the story hinges on what feels like a cheap twist. Overall, I'd say this is 2 stars (which, according to the Goodreads metric, means 'it was ok' - and it was).
For me, this is a fatal flaw. It wasn't like it was unpleasant to read, but I was distinctly un-wowed by this, and was surprised it made it to publication. To me, it read like stories I've read as a slush reader for an SF/F/horror magazine and passed on. Sure, it has some lovely turns of phrase and an interesting premise. But your world, your characters, and your message all need to take a step beyond the premise to be interesting and compelling. There's a lot of opportunity in a story where death is kind of a nebulous concept to delve into deeper topics, but instead the story hinges on what feels like a cheap twist. Overall, I'd say this is 2 stars (which, according to the Goodreads metric, means 'it was ok' - and it was).
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