I didn't really care for this story, but I do have to give it props for being full of dirty hippies without being strictly anti-corporate. Also, I need to take the folks to task who are calling this an anti-corporate story. Advertising is quite corporate, and it would take big corporate funding to genetically modify plants to advertise for products. So the underlying message is corporations are cool if they do stuff you like. And the opt-in advertising style is very libertarian. The story
was very anti-establishment-print-advertising, but that's pretty narrow. So this was a neat concept, but I think it would have been significantly better as a flash piece.
There were two big things that bothered me about the story. The first, that has been already mentioned by several people, is bad social psychology. I can believe a trend of body modifications that involves trees being grafted to human bodies. But I can't believe that the driving force behind it is a universal rejection of advertisements. Not only for reasons like the fact that never in the history of mankind did one form of advertising replace another, but rather they just add up incrementally. And no democratic government would outlaw an existing business model - putting thousands of advertising agents, printers, graphic designers, etc. out of work - because a vocal minority thinks they have a better solution. But there's a far simpler reason - people like advertising. Not all the people, and not all the time, but advertising is designed to appeal to people, and in aggragate, it is succeeds.
Rather than a universal societal rejection of traditional advertising, I took it as more a case of a deluded True Believer who over-perceived the trees having a larger impact than they do. The line where she claimed that "everyone hates advertising" is where I dismissed her character, yet found her believable. I've interacted with far too many True Believers in fringe causes who believe that their passion for a thing translates to everyone's passion for the same thing. Probably because they cause uncomfortable silence and acquiescence in the people the preach to ("If I nod and smile maybe this crazy lady with a tree growing out of her shoulder and smelling of a combination of patchouli and rot - maybe she will leave")
The second reason is - bad botany. Occicat mentioned the smell of Durian trees, a detail that the story conveniently forgets. But the story starts with bananas - bananas don't grow on trees. They grow on tree-sized herbs. There are some crucial distinctions - one of them is that each banana "tree" only flowers once and only produces one set of fruit. After that, it will start producing shoots that will grow into other banana "trees", and the main stem eventually dies. If it's smaller, it will go through it's life cycle quicker.
I'm also not willing to handwave the durian's horribleness with relation to this story. She talked about modifications to other fruits, but not to the elephant in the room. If all mods were omitted then it would be an omission. Since mods were explicitly included, then it is an error in either execution or research.
For a story about people and plants, it is a rather big problem that neither people nor plants acted in a way that seemed vaguely realistic to me. That left the third main theme in the story, sex. Which, unlike people and plants, the story seemed to understand quite well. But I personally have a pretty negative reaction to body modification - I find it extremely unsexy. And one theme in SF/horror I find really terrifying human-plant hybrids (the 1970s Invasion of the Body Snatchers scarred me for life when I was very young). So I found the sex scenes disturbing rather than erotic or appealing.
I thought the story could have benefited from focusing more on the sensual and less on the prurient. The dildo just felt strapped onto the rest of the story.
