"A beautiful exploration of guilt and hurt and healing"
Quick Sip Reviews had some nice things to say about the Escape Pod performance of my short story "In-Body" and I wanted to share them here:
“In-Body” by Vincent H. O’Neil (4982 words)
No Spoilers: Colonel Dentzler is a teacher on a satellite orbiting a world that humanity hopes to colonize. But some...mistakes have left humans a bit cautious, and at the moment the process is only at the stage of sending scouts with mechanized dogs to see what can be seen and how ultimately hospitable the planet is.
Being a scout...isn’t easy, but Dentzler was a good one until a mysterious illness sidelined him and disqualified him from ever serving again. To now he teachers and helps to train new scouts. Scout who often go down to the planet...and die. And for each who doesn’t return, Dentzler experiences their final moments via a king of neural link that allows him to see through their eyes. The effects of which...aren’t great, and definitely seem cumulative as he tries to balance his guilt and his desire to do the best job he can.
It’s a heavy piece, walking the edge of trauma and coping, and while it’s not an easy read, it’s a beautiful exploration of guilt and hurt and healing.
Keywords: Memories, Colonization, Teaching, Trauma, Birds, CW- Suicide
Review: I really like how the story captures all the complex feelings that Dentzler is having without really ultimately valorizing him for having them. The story is careful with the trauma and PTSD that he has, with the ways that he tries to cope. But it doesn’t let him off the hook for the ways he’s being selfish and self destructive (mainly, well, Veronica doesn’t let him off the hook for it).
Because that’s in part what he is when he’s making himself experience every death. And I love how he ultimately has to see what he’s doing, through the experiences as the bird, losing a nest, sitting out in the dark waiting for the end to come, for a predator to take him, only for the dawn to come and the bird to live on.
Dentzler is waiting there, after losing so many of his students. He’s waiting for something to take him, for something to punish him for those deaths, when they aren’t his fault, when it wouldn’t make any of it better, or right. It would just be making those deaths about him, which they aren’t. They’re often tragic, and unfair, but that happens.
It’s no one’s fault, really, and that can be hard to deal with, hard to parse. Because it means grappling with survival, with not being able to control the lives and deaths of others.
It’s something that Dentzler has to be kind of hit over the head with, and I like how that happens, the ways the people around him care, the ways they all step outside regulations to really cope with what they are asked to do, what they must do if humans are to have a chance to settle other worlds.
It’s a story that captures a sense of grief and loss and guilt and hope. One that shows people helping people, realizing that they can’t take on everything on their own, can’t bear all that weight, and they don’t have to. Because there are people willing and wanted to help. It’s a lovely read that I definitely recommend checking out!
Here's the link:
http://quicksipreviews.blogspot.com/2020/11/quick-sips-escape-pod-754-756.html