My thoughts on the story I posted in my
Hugo short story review:
This story starts out with the whimsical hypothetical in the title, as spoken by a woman to a friend she loves dearly, and continues on to give real life reasons why she is pondering this whimsy.
The characters read as real once the story got to the story, but I found all the hypotheticals more irritating than entertaining or illuminating. If A, then B. If B, then C. If C, then D. A story this short shouldn’t feel too long, but to me it did. Eventually the story gets to the actual story behind the hypotheticals, but by that time I was just impatient for it to be over.
I can see why the story has such a following. It has a strong emotional core. But IMO, that core reveals itself too late, when the story text is more than half over. If I had found the pre-emotional content at all entertaining, then it could've worked wonderfully for me, but as it was my progression of reaction was: flat flat flat annoyed annoyed annoyed EMOTIONALCLIMAX!
The neverending string of hypothetical statements does seem reminiscent of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. But for me it put me more in mind of a string of car insurance commercials that have run in recent years that start with something like "If you choose a cut-rate car insurance company, then X" and string along hypotheticals until something ridiculous and clearly bad happens like apes taking over the world or something (I don't recall any of the details of the commercials, just the string of hypotheticals structure) and then ends with the conclusion: "Don't let apes take over the world. Buy our car insurance". Which I generally just found annoying for logic reasons, because many of the steps are not things that I would personally do, so the whole thing falls apart at its weakest link and the commercials weren't good enough to make up for that annoyance.
I was also generally unhappy with the Hugo Short Story category this year because it only had 4 stories (because of the minimum 5% vote rule that I think needs to be cut) and 2 of those stories were apparently not speculative, including this one. And 3 of the stories just fell flat for me.
My vote for the category went:
1. The Water that Falls on You From Nowhere.
2. No Award.
I don't think I have yet found a Rachel Swirsky story that I liked. I think I might be missing the gene for it or something--they never seem to invoke the response in me that they are apparently meant to.