Author Topic: EP473: Soft Currency  (Read 15931 times)

SpareInch

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Reply #25 on: January 05, 2015, 03:05:12 PM
"She set down a twenty-coupon note on top of the fifty. “Why do they have separate money for men and women?”"
You immigrated to this country and one of the most unusual practices it has never came up before?  Yes, maybe the reader needs to understand why this unusual behaviour exists, but it should have been introduced more subtly or perhaps you leave it as a given.


If you had managed to reach the end, then you'd have noticed that the supposed Australian immigrant was in fact a born US citizen who had probably never been to Australia. She was a government agent provocateur sent to ferret out dissidents.

Since a short story can't devote hundreds of pages to the slow and delicate process by which a secret agent recruits and grooms a contact, and given that this unwitting contact was a schoolgirl, so subtlety may well have been wasted on her, you still have to do SOMETHING to show her being groomed so that she will vouch for the agent and cause her boss to get arrested.

As for comment on a country's strange laws and customs... When I was a student at a Scottish university, I had a conversation with a postgraduate student from Oman who had already done his Bachelor's degree in the UK. Despite having spent four or five years in Britain, he still wanted to know why we tax people, in the form of an annual licence, for the privilege of watching TV.

I say that again. After paying a couple of hundred pounds every year for half a decade to watch TV legally, he STILL asked me why we Brits do that.

Makes the question in the story perfectly plausible, if you ask me.

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Fenrix

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Reply #26 on: January 05, 2015, 08:08:45 PM
Cash-only systems would be significantly impacted by the gendered cash system. Working under the table as well as drug dealing would be significantly impacted. But the (hetero) sex industry (legal or illegal) would be severely damaged. Their frequent cash-changing activities without a husband would raise red flags and lead to additional stings and arrests. Politicians would use family values and the delicate sensibilities of The Children to maintain the gendered cash system.

All cat stories start with this statement: “My mother, who was the first cat, told me this...”


jkjones21

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Reply #27 on: January 05, 2015, 08:55:36 PM
This is kind of a weird aside, but as I was listening to the story, I kept getting distracted by the reader's put on Australian accent.  It didn't sound very good to me (but I'm an American who's never met an Australian, so I likely have no idea what a genuine Australian accent might sound like), but then when I got to the end of the story and discovered that she was a federal agent doing an undercover operation, the poor accent made more sense.  Of course, the southern accent was also not very good (and I am from the South, so I have slightly firmer ground to stand on here), but that's just getting into quibbles.  Overall I genuinely enjoyed the reading.

As for the ending with Cassie's mom burning the letter, I go back and forth on what it means.  I feel like the author might have been going for some ambiguity there, with Ms. Glick trying to communicate to Cassie how the system set her up to break the law, and feeling ambivalent about the direction her life had taken.  The burning of the letter could probably be read either as Cassie's mom disapproving of Ethel's quiet rebellion, or finding the backpedaling distasteful and a poor example in Cassie's education of how the system was unjust.

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Fenrix

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Reply #28 on: January 05, 2015, 08:58:21 PM
I think the motivation for the letter burning is a Rorschach blot for the reader. I see a butterfly.

All cat stories start with this statement: “My mother, who was the first cat, told me this...”


Unblinking

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Reply #29 on: January 06, 2015, 02:02:43 PM
I found it hard to finish this story.  I found the alt-hist believable, and as others have said is only a slightly more formal enforcement of gender rules than were actually basically in effect from social norms at the time. 

But I found the story unreadable--it was little more than infodumping its premise on me and then beating it to death over and over.  It's not that difficult of a concept to understand, though of course the implications require some further thought to really hash out, but the story went over and over it as though it needed all that explanation.  Let's have one character explain the entire premise to another character who really ought to know already.  The "twist" of the secret agent didn't help matters any--it was clear an arrest was going to happen to justify all this explaining, the undercover officer felt kind of shoehorned in to make that feasible.

I found the burning of the letter about the only strong point--for me it was quite clear that Ethel was spreading her revolutionary message in the letter.  She knew her letter would be censored and if she said anything overtly incendiary the letter would never make it past the prison administration.  Instead she says straight out that Cassie is innocent to avoid implicating her young friend, but at the same time she spells out exactly how and why she had done what she had done, basically laying the path so that someone else who read the letter could follow in her footsteps.  The mother reads the letter, sees it for the secret call to revolution that it shows, and burns the letter to save her daughter from a dangerous corrupting influence--she wants what's best for her daughter even if she knows her daughter wouldn't understand.



hardware

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Reply #30 on: January 06, 2015, 11:49:15 PM
As many here, I found the story to be more interested in setting up a scenario than telling a story, the exposition didn't feel organic and the system described in itself felt unpractical, or at least as something that would have more wide ranging and sinister consequences than what the story hinted at. I enjoyed the subplot with her friends and the fact that the mother burned the letter in the end - which I assumed anyway had been written under duress.



albionmoonlight

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Reply #31 on: January 08, 2015, 07:01:03 PM
It was not until 1971--after the setting of this story--that the Supreme Court recognized a constitutional obligation on behalf of the government not to discriminate on the basis of gender.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed_v._Reed

And, it was in 1873 when Supreme Court justices still wrote things like
Quote
[t]he natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life... The paramount destiny and mission of women are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator.
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradwell_v._Illinois  (Funny thing there is that the case was actually decided on the much more technical issues of whether the right to practice law is a "privilege and immunity."  This whole "God thinks women are too delicate to be lawyers" bit was a concurrence that Justice Bradley just felt needed to be added.)

Things are, thankfully, better now.  But it is not like these issues are ancient history.
« Last Edit: January 08, 2015, 07:04:06 PM by albionmoonlight »



ElectricPaladin

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Reply #32 on: January 16, 2015, 06:35:53 PM
I really enjoyed this story. I loved the creeping sense of wrongness as I gradually came to understand what was going on. It was practically a horror story in that sense. But particularly, I loved the way it used the "soft" elements - the relationships and dialogue, all masterfully done - to underline the "hard" brutality of this sexist society. The grocer's story, how she ended up in jail because she broke the law because it was the only way to stay in business, all because she found it fulfilling to do something that society told her was not her "place." Which, of course, mimics the sexism in our society. That's what sexism is - a brutal, uncaring, artificial limit on our humanity, a lie that limits and degrades us all.

I found this story pretty inspiring. I'm working on a fantasy story about a brutally divided sexist society, and I'm thinking of stealing a lot from this story and maybe taking it further. What if men and women had more than just different money - what if the space in their cities were sharply divided, with residences and some public buildings as the only crossover locations? What if they had different languages, with a third, shared language that everyone was fluent in? I'm going to have to chew on this... it's an interesting concept.

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UnfulredJohnson

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Reply #33 on: February 13, 2015, 01:04:06 AM
Yeah I had to pass on this one, in the end I found to be a story about coupons,  and that's just not my thing.



Midsouth.Mouth

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Reply #34 on: February 13, 2015, 02:12:17 AM
I enjoyed this one so much I listened to it three times in one week.  It even spurred me, a LTLFTC, to register.

The comments about the plausibility of the currency system miss the history of the United States as place that used to have competing currencies.  This piggybacks on the comment about the how story makes us question supposed normalcy. This an alternate history story that asks us to reframe mundane history as strange and historically specific.




CryptoMe

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Reply #35 on: July 01, 2015, 10:38:49 PM
Only thing I think missing was a movement to change things. 

I would disagree with this greatly. There was in fact a quiet movement to change things. The women doctors who worked for coupons. They were certainly changing things.

And I have to say that the most interesting character for me was Tonya (the black girl who was Cassie's class mate). She had plans and ambitions that were not strapped down by the two-tier currency system.