SciFi and Fantasy Book Club discussion

This is a thread to discuss D.I.Y by John Wiswell. The story can be found free online at: https://www.tor.com/2022/08/24/d-i-y-...
It should probably take about 15 minutes to read.

Feel free to chime in with your thoughts/reviews etc. I'll plan to start one of these threads each month as long as there is interest.

From the Wikipedia article on Wiswell his previous awards are:
"In 2021, Wiswell won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story[2] for his work "Open House on Haunted Hill" published in Diabolical Plots.[3] This work was also a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Short Story,[4] Locus Award for Best Short Story,[5] and World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction.[6]

His short story "8-Bit Free Will" originally published in PodCastle[7] was shortlisted for the 2021 British Fantasy Award for Short Fiction.[8]

His novelette "That Story Isn't The Story" published in Uncanny Magazine won the 2022 Locus Award for Best Novelette, as well as being a finalist for the Nebula Award for Best Novelette and the Hugo Award for Best Novelette."

Personally, I read and enjoyed "Open House on Haunted Hill" so I am excited to try a new story from this author.

Here are some reviews online:
https://www.tor.com/2022/09/16/must-r...
https://maria-is-reading.blogspot.com...
https://locusmag.com/2023/01/paula-gu...

Ok, that's great. How inspirational... I needed to see young people working for a better future, even if they are fictional. Thank you.

So, discussion question, how thirsty are you right now? Me, incredibly so! See you after a quart of fresh clean tap water!

If I didn't adore such a charming and inclusive tale, what kind of person does that make me? (wincing)

So were some of the people so desperate thirsty that they tried to drink sewage water?

Somebody aimed a webcam at a nearby storm drain to film all the gallons of brown water that came streaming out of those ruined buildings. When we saw people try to drink that water, I turned it off.

Bonnie, you want more from your reading than charm, and that's fine.

And yes, they were drinking runoff from fire-fighting. So, yes, they're going to get cholera, just like too many people are vulnerable to getting in real life right now.

Which is pertinent to my serious discussion question. This is what most would call a dystopian setting, with unfunded health care and no water etc. But it does awfully resemble our present-day, just up a notch or two, with internet access. Similarly, when I read SF from the 1960s and around then, the authors created dystopian situations that we're already experiencing (albeit at a different slant).

So: Is dystopia a meaningful term, actually? Or isn't there good and bad in every era? People keep loving, laughing, having children, and sharing stories whether it's the Black Death, Covid-19, or some imagined future devastating plague, after all. What would an actual dystopia look like, and could it actually happen to the point where we'd recognize it (or are we like the proverbial frog in the boiling pot)?

I think this was well written, but (and maybe this is a function of nuance being tough to accomplish in a short story form) I felt like it was perhaps a bit too didactic. So for me, that took me out of it as I could too easily see the author's political points and there wasn't enough of a story beyond that for me to see past it. I think short stories *can* be a good place to make statements (for example The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas), but the one here felt a little too obvious to have the same effect.

This was sweet. A little heavy-handed but sweet. It reminds me of living in the desert Southwest, in years when any sign of rain was a cause for celebration (most of them these days). Now that I live in the Pacific Northwest it's more the signs of sun that produces that result. But that aside I appreciated the way everything came together at the end.

"D.I.Y" is on the Nebula Award for Best Short Story finalist list that was announced yesterday.

I'd still like to discuss, instead of just present opinions. See my question re' dystopia above, please, for one.

Btw, I reread (Open House on Haunted Hill and that, too, has a dark side but is mostly, well, yes, sweet.

This story ended up among Nebula nominees this year

This story got my hackles up initially. The setting was too US-centric what with the lack of medical care coverage and the dirty drinking water reminding me of the situation in Flint. The tone in the first few paragraphs made it obvious that the story was going to gripe about the state of play in the US, but the pov character was going to come to the rescue of the masse. It wasn't going to do anything new, which on most days of the week would be a (literary) crime if I had my way. I even stopped after a page to moan about how no one in SFF explores economics, but instead they work on the same foundation of presumptions that have been repeated so often that few realise they aren't actual truths. Its hard to believe I was arguing for more economists to author SFF works, but thats what the opening of this story had me doing. When I finally calmed down and got back to the story it managed to charm me. I'm not even sure how it did it. It was still predictable, for the most part, and as Christopher said it lacked nuance, but those aren't so much negative critiques but simply features of a pretty well executed idea. I particularly liked the ending where our protagonists attempt at saving the world was refined by other people to do more good without further input from him.



Cheryl wrote: "Which is pertinent to my serious discussion question. This is what most would call a dystopian setting, with unfunded health care and no water etc. But it does awfully resemble our present-day, just up a notch or two, with internet access. Similarly, when I read SF from the 1960s and around then, the authors created dystopian situations that we're already experiencing (albeit at a different slant).

So: Is dystopia a meaningful term, actually? Or isn't there good and bad in every era? People keep loving, laughing, having children, and sharing stories whether it's the Black Death, Covid-19, or some imagined future devastating plague, after all. What would an actual dystopia look like, and could it actually happen to the point where we'd recognize it (or are we like the proverbial frog in the boiling pot)?

Dystopian
adjective
relating to or denoting an imagined state or society where there is great suffering or injustice.

I feel like I can argue (poorly) for and against 'dystopia' being a meaningful term. As with all words its a meaningful term for those who share an understanding of it. Every story can be dystopic depending on the perspective taken, but so much of what gets published by the US and UK publishing industries fits a rather limited idea of a dystopia being limits to personal freedoms and/or a generally overbearing authoritarian regime being in control of ones life. You're right to point out that people keep on living under the worst of circumstances, which is something a lot of dystopian fiction fails to include, but that kind of undermines your last question about what an actual dystopia would look like. It would look like now and yesterday and tomorrow. Always.

This should probably be its own thread if you want others to chime in with their thoughts, but I couldn't resist replying.

Ryan wrote: "It would look like now and yesterday and tomorrow. Always..."

That's what I've been thinking for the past several years. I'm glad to see someone got there quickly. I'm not surprised it's you, Ryan.

I feel like at any given moment there could be one person's dystopia existing alongside another person's utopia. An SFF book that springs to mind for this is Red Rising where a caste system means that the upper class lives in luxury while the lower castes toil away in the mines. And I guess such situations have existed throughout human history.

Beyond that, I think one could look at one's situation as being in a dystopia if one could imagine a much better environment/government system than one currently has (or the characters have in a story), but the exact line seems up for interpretation and perhaps political belief.

One element of this story that bothered me a bit was the depiction of education. The main characters eschew formal education (partly because they are not accepted at first and later because they cannot afford it) and instead rely on looking things up on the internet. Maybe that's too much of a simplification, but I feel like there's still value to a formal education system and that looking up answers on the internet rather than relying on any education can lead one down rabbit holes that can be destructive. I know student loans are not popular, but I feel like schools got too bad of a rap here.

I think it's a great idea to read a short story each month. Thank you, Christopher, for suggesting it. And it really was a great choice for March.
A first the story didn't do much for me, but as it progressed, the fantasy-magic part and Interned-nerd part entangled in quite a particular way, which made my inner nerd purr in satisfaction :)

Good point about education, Christopher. A good system will, among other things, teach learners how to distinguish opinion, fake news, & propaganda from more thoughtful and unbiased data & analyses (for example). So our characters *could* use the Skills they would have learned to evaluate the Knowledge/Content gleaned from just "looking things up on the internet."

In this particular story, though, I read it to be saying that a formal education would be a good thing... but what was being offered was not a true education, but rather something more like a brainwashing?

Btw, the children's classic The Giver is an ambiguous Utopia/Dystopia, too, depending on which character's eyes we're looking through.

Olga, I like the thought of 'purring' over this story. Well put!

Three stars. I think the story is on par with the Haunted Hill one, but much better than That Story Isn't The Story. The earlier parts were rather boring, it became better later.

I've posted the April short story here.