This story was a pastiche of the works of Harriet Beecher-Stowe, Frederick Douglas and Harriet Jacobs and other slave narratives and abolitionist works, just with a thin layer of fantasy on the outside. I honestly forget that the narrator was supposed to be a centaur. This puts it on the same level as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: a cute variation on classic material that adds nothing and detracts from the source.
(snip)
This story is putting Roots in a pantomime centaur suit.
Well, I was going to make some sort of similar comparison, but much less educated-ly. Now I don't have to.
Look, I totally get that this is a fantasy story. It has mythical beings in it, see? Except that it didn't bring anything new to the genre, or anything new to the "slavery really sucked, and Europeans and Americans were great big douchebags for engaging in it" argument, either. The only thing I really got out of this story was a way to pass an hour of my 90-minute wait at the doctor's office today. (I think that last sentence belongs in the Pseudopod forums. I was on the hospital property for literally 2.5 hours, if you include the time in the parking garage.)
The reading was extremely dry. I realize that this is supposed to be some sort of newspaper account of the slave's... I mean, the beast's life. But I didn't really care about the beast at all. I did in the beginning, before I realized this was, as Peter Tupper said above, "Roots in a centaur suit". Once I figured it out, though, I stopped caring. I think a good telling of the story could have made this one better. Every actor brings something different to a role -- what if Sydney Pointier or Dennis Haysbert or Tracy Morgan or Kel Mitchell had played Kunta Kinte, instead of LeVar Burton? Similarly, I think with a different narrator, this story could have at least held my interest a little better and kept me from thinking "Oh, I get it now, it's one great big allusion to slavery in the American South" over and over again.
I got Dave's sarcasm right off, though as the story progressed, it was surprisingly spot-on.
Genre fiction has the power to make us look at bad things in new ways, and draw new conclusions we hadn't before about why or how they're bad. This story, however, made us look at a bad thing, squint at it a bit, and realize we already knew it was bad because we learned about it all through grade school.
(Note: non-American readers might have a different take on the allusion-to-slavery because they grew up without the experiences Americans had in the Civil Rights Movement and the subsequent reparatory and educational efforts. But I think even they would have figured it out.)