Author Topic: Pseudopod 332: Willow Tests Well  (Read 17207 times)

Bdoomed

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on: May 04, 2013, 04:31:28 AM
Pseudopod 332: Willow Tests Well

by Nick Mamatas

“Willow Tests Well” was first published in the anthology PSYCHOS: SERIAL KILLERS, DEPRAVED MADMEN, AND THE CRIMINALLY INSANE, edited by John Skipp, which was published in September 2012.

NICK MAMATAS is the author of several novels, including BULLETTIME and the forthcoming noir novel LOVE IS THE LAW. Recent short stories have appeared in the anthologies BLACK WINGS II, FUTURE LOVECRAFT, and FUNGI, and the new UK-based magazine the “Imperial Youth Review”. He is also published by Wildside Press - whose website is here. Check them out!

Your reader this week - Julie Hoverson - plies her audio trade as the main creative force behind award winning audio drama anthology series 19 NOCTURNE BOULEVARD. (In particular, check out their interesting dramatization of Lovecraft’s THE DUNWICH HORROR!)



“Tenth birthday: greeting cards from the CIA and NSA. Willow had scored ridiculously well on the Race to the Top tests, and even discovered the instructions for and answered the questions in the secret test integrated into the exam. Questions like

What does the old saying “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” mean?”

a. birds are unpleasant because they need to be cared for

b. it’s better to own something than risk what you have for a potential reward

c. if you have a bird in your hand, you can squeeze it, you can kill it…

d. possession is nine-tenths of the law”




PLEASE HELP PSEUDOPOD AND ANSWER A VERY SHORT DEMOGRAPHIC SURVEY AT THIS LINK. IT WILL HELP US IMMEASURABLY! and thank you!

SURVEY



The Flash Fiction Contest is in the Final Round!



Listen to this week's Pseudopod.
« Last Edit: May 25, 2013, 09:01:32 AM by Bdoomed »

I'd like to hear my options, so I could weigh them, what do you say?
Five pounds?  Six pounds? Seven pounds?


adrianh

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Reply #1 on: May 04, 2013, 09:17:08 AM
I liked this.

Especially the way it took you from not being sure whether the tests were real or just in Willow's head to the world of weaponized sociopathy. The relationship between Willow and her minder was nicely done too.

(On the survey: Being neither married, single, divorced, separated or widowed - I cannot answer truthfully so declined to participate. Sorry ;-)



Just Jeff

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Reply #2 on: May 05, 2013, 04:53:50 AM
Meh. It started out interesting, but by the midpoint I'd started to suspect it wasn't going anywhere worth my time. It didn't.



zoanon

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Reply #3 on: May 06, 2013, 12:13:21 AM
meh. maybe I just didn't get it but the motivation seemed pretty lame, and Willow's big idea seemed kinda stupid.



lowky

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Reply #4 on: May 06, 2013, 12:23:15 AM
interesting little story.  Not totally my cup of tea, but interesting.


Scumpup

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Reply #5 on: May 06, 2013, 01:48:13 PM
Psychopathic secret agents aren't one of my favorite tropes, though such big names as Stephen King and Dean Koontz have made use of them.  I listened through to the end but the story didn't take me anywhere I hadn't seen before.



flintknapper

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Reply #6 on: May 06, 2013, 03:14:55 PM
I thought the story was decent. However, there appeared to be a lot of shock for the sake of shock. It seemed to transition rather abruptly from psychological horror to gore and then back again. Also, as others have said, the ending didnt do it for me. I guess without giving away parts of the story, it felt like we were going on a journey and at the end, it still felt we were on that journey as opposed to some sort of conclusion per se.

I will say though that the writing was great. The story was easy to follow. Also the narration was clear and articulate.



adrianh

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Reply #7 on: May 06, 2013, 03:31:25 PM
@Scumpup - interesting. I didn't read Willow as the standard psychopathic secret agent. Indeed - I didn't see her as a secret agent at all.

I read Willow (and her chums) as weapons - in the same way the a-bomb or an aircraft carrier is a weapon. They weren't being collected and groomed to perform "useful" tasks - but out of fear that "they" would produce better psychopaths than "us".

(Meta: What's the etiquette on spoilers in these threads. As a newbie poster (but long time listener) I assumed that we were allowed spoilers here - but flintknapper's comment on not giving away parts of the story seems to indicate otherwise?)



Bdoomed

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Reply #8 on: May 06, 2013, 03:57:56 PM
Spoil away, anyone in this thread should have listened first, or at least be prepared for spoilers.  :)

I'd like to hear my options, so I could weigh them, what do you say?
Five pounds?  Six pounds? Seven pounds?


Red Dog 344

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Reply #9 on: May 06, 2013, 04:34:24 PM
I liked this.

Especially the way it took you from not being sure whether the tests were real or just in Willow's head to the world of weaponized sociopathy. The relationship between Willow and her minder was nicely done too.

(On the survey: Being neither married, single, divorced, separated or widowed - I cannot answer truthfully so declined to participate. Sorry ;-)

Clearly you failed to detect, and answer, the secret test inside the Pseudopod survey.



adrianh

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Reply #10 on: May 06, 2013, 04:51:39 PM
Clearly you failed to detect, and answer, the secret test inside the Pseudopod survey.

Clearly you failed to detect my answer to the secret test inside the Pseudopod survey ;-)



eytanz

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Reply #11 on: May 07, 2013, 05:43:57 PM
This one didn't work for me. Secret government conspiracies always feel to me like wishful thinking, and this is no exception. Knowing that all the horrible stuff going in the world isn't just random but there by design means that there's a reason, and that it's definable. If there was really an agency grooming people like Willow and employing them to do evil, and - as the story posits - they're responsible for *everything* wrong with the world, then I don't have to worry about the consequences of my actions anymore - I'm not an agent, I'm not a sociopath, therefore I'm not part of the problem.

So the core premise of the story didn't work for me, which left me just with a story about a horrible person getting horrible things done to her and doing horrible things to other in return. Which isn't much to be left with, as far as stories go.



Sgarre1

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Reply #12 on: May 07, 2013, 06:14:47 PM
It might be worth mentioning that I bought this because I felt it was a great piece of wry, pitch-black horror comedy - everyone seems to be analyzing it so much I worry that perhaps my sense of humor meters might need recalibrating, or perhaps it's just the tone whiplash effect that tends to occur from week to week?



Scumpup

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Reply #13 on: May 07, 2013, 06:35:34 PM
As I listened, I did get the impression that the author was trying to be funny.  I, personally, wasn't amused.  
One of the reasons the "super-secret agency full of vicious psychopaths" schtick has never appealed to me (no matter who was using it) is that such stories, like this one, heavily depend on the S-SAFOVP continuously getting away with the most heinous acts.  I don't find that idea or the descriptions of the acts themselves even blackly amusing.
« Last Edit: May 08, 2013, 03:56:15 PM by Scumpup »



eytanz

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Reply #14 on: May 07, 2013, 06:53:34 PM
It might be worth mentioning that I bought this because I felt it was a great piece of wry, pitch-black horror comedy - everyone seems to be analyzing it so much I worry that perhaps my sense of humor meters might need recalibrating, or perhaps it's just the tone whiplash effect that tends to occur from week to week?

It didn't strike me as very comedic, but I'm wondering if that's partially the narrator's choice - there were definitely places in the story (especially the very beginning) where I felt she was deliberately playing down ironic statements. When I read the excerpt that at's the beginning of this thread it struck me as somewhat humorous, but the reading of it did not.

(This is not a criticism, by the way, I think this was a perfectly valid choice. I just think that that may be part of the explanation for the difference in tone between how you saw it and how it was perceived).



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Reply #15 on: May 08, 2013, 02:02:31 PM
Man, I wanted to love this one. Beautifully written in a visceral way, but I thought the whole thing fell apart with the final scene. Okay, psychopaths are being used by the shadow government to torment third-world kids because ... why exactly? The motivations didn't seem clear. Neither did Willow's (presumably) tongue-in-cheek suggestion at the end, although the reference to the cat poster helped a little. Started with a bang, finished with a whimper.

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benjaminjb

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Reply #16 on: May 09, 2013, 06:45:24 PM
It might be worth mentioning that I bought this because I felt it was a great piece of wry, pitch-black horror comedy [...]

I found "Willow Tests Well" funny in a way, but perhaps because I'd been primed by the Philip K. Dick story "Null-O," where Dick has fun with Van Vogt's notion of superior slans and unempathic logic: a bunch of psychopaths are recruited by the government (or the government within the government) and go ahead with their plan to return the universe to its true state of undifferentiated matter.

Although the Dick story presents the young super-genius as the main character, doing impressive things, Dick never lets us forget that these are terrible things. In a way, it reminds me of Norman Spinrad's "What if Hitler had become an sf writer?" novel, The Iron Dream, where Spinrad shows how ubermensch fascism runs through Nazism and some Golden-Age sf; in Dick's story, we've got the super-bright kid, fighting against the mediocrity of the normal people--and he's a fucking monster. Since it's Dick, in "Null-O" the good guys turn out to be the small people--janitors, bus drivers, waiters, fry cooks, etc.

Nick Mamatas is playing a different game in "Willow Tests Well," with (as the outro pointed out) no victory conditions: this is a terrible conspiracy where even the revelation of that conspiracy would only make things more terrible. Willow can bend all she wants in the face of this storm, but surviving isn't the same as thriving. As for the revelation that most horror is human-derived, I agree with eytanz that conspiracy thinking tends towards the comforting: it's someone else's fault, there's a reason for everything. But there's the counter-argument in this story that the terrible things are being done for a reason in our name. This is, yay!, an other opportunity to bring up my favorite Foucault quote: "People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does."

Dick could have the average people as saviors in a minor way; Mamatas points an accusing finger at the average person (us). Hey, I no longer find this story that funny!



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Reply #17 on: May 09, 2013, 10:37:38 PM
The writing and the narration were both so good I found myself really swept along by this one. It was great horror, in that it hit exactly the right emotional keys in a darkly delicious way.

I kept thinking about it in the days afterwards, too. Why didn't she rebel against the conspiracy that ruined her life? Is that what she was doing at the end? Or did they pick her because she had a predisposition to accept abuse from the strong and take revenge on the week?

Good stuff.



Kat_Rocha

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Reply #18 on: May 09, 2013, 11:11:47 PM
I really enjoyed this one. Sociopaths are an interesting breed. Their competitiveness and urge to be on top I find fascinating on a psychological level. Has anybody seen the extremely short lived TV series "Profit" from the 90's. It's about a sociopath who is climbing the corporate latter and will do anything to get to the top.

One thing I really like about this story is that I found myself wondering how much of what I was hearing was real and how much was in her head. How much was her "seeing" the world as if it revolved around her.

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ElectricPaladin

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Reply #19 on: May 10, 2013, 04:42:55 PM
I never got into stories like this. I don't know why. The sociopath-as-compelling-antihero trope has always fallen flat for me. It's a pathetic, broken creature in human skin. Some of its pitiful flailing happens to resemble brilliance. However, its insights will always be flawed - and, ultimately, useless - because it doesn't understand humans. It might be goot at manipulating people in the short term, but in the long term the only reason it seems so smart is that it's repurposed the parts of its freakishly huge human brain that are supposed to help us grok other people. So, its brain fails at what it's for.

I just don't understand the fascination. Teach the safe ones how to deal with people, put the dangerous ones away until we know how to fix them. They aren't cool, they aren't compelling, and they aren't useful. They're sad and broken and (sometimes) dangerous. End of story.

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Reply #20 on: May 10, 2013, 05:42:15 PM
This story gets a great big "Meh" from me. I enjoyed the quasi-mystery of whether or not Willow was imagining the government connections. However, once it became clear that it was all real, the story slowly deflated for me. Like ElectricPaladin, I'm not real big on sociopath protagonists/anti-heroes much for the same reasons that E.P. already covered. It was very well written, just not my thing.

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ElectricPaladin

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Reply #21 on: May 10, 2013, 07:11:58 PM
This story gets a great big "Meh" from me. I enjoyed the quasi-mystery of whether or not Willow was imagining the government connections. However, once it became clear that it was all real, the story slowly deflated for me. Like ElectricPaladin, I'm not real big on sociopath protagonists/anti-heroes much for the same reasons that E.P. already covered. It was very well written, just not my thing.

I did neglect to mention that the story was remarkably well written and well paced. Kudos for that, at least.

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Balu

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Reply #22 on: May 10, 2013, 11:24:59 PM
The sociopath-as-compelling-antihero trope has always fallen flat for me. It's a pathetic, broken creature in human skin. Some of its pitiful flailing happens to resemble brilliance. However, its insights will always be flawed - and, ultimately, useless - because it doesn't understand humans.

Unless, of course, our solipsism blinds us to the fact that they understand humans much better than we do.




Red Dog 344

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Reply #23 on: May 12, 2013, 04:01:16 AM
It might be worth mentioning that I bought this because I felt it was a great piece of wry, pitch-black horror comedy - everyone seems to be analyzing it so much I worry that perhaps my sense of humor meters might need recalibrating, or perhaps it's just the tone whiplash effect that tends to occur from week to week?

FWIW, that's exactly how I read it too.  Anything about secret agents that you write these days has got to be a bit "meta" or postmodern or ironic.  Though maybe I think this because my stepchildren made me watch SpyKids 2 about a million times.



ElectricPaladin

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Reply #24 on: May 12, 2013, 06:23:14 AM
The sociopath-as-compelling-antihero trope has always fallen flat for me. It's a pathetic, broken creature in human skin. Some of its pitiful flailing happens to resemble brilliance. However, its insights will always be flawed - and, ultimately, useless - because it doesn't understand humans.

Unless, of course, our solipsism blinds us to the fact that they understand humans much better than we do.

That's not my impression of the situation, but my understanding could be incomplete. Care to elaborate?

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adrianh

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Reply #25 on: May 12, 2013, 09:27:14 AM
The sociopath-as-compelling-antihero trope has always fallen flat for me. It's a pathetic, broken creature in human skin. Some of its pitiful flailing happens to resemble brilliance. However, its insights will always be flawed - and, ultimately, useless - because it doesn't understand humans.

Unless, of course, our solipsism blinds us to the fact that they understand humans much better than we do.

That's not my impression of the situation, but my understanding could be incomplete. Care to elaborate?

There's a moderate amount of evidence that sociopaths/psychopaths have better insight in average into  human behaviour. For example "traits associated with psychopathy were more apt to correctly identify individuals with a history of victimization" - http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/take-all-prisoners/201001/vulnerability-and-other-prey-psychopaths.

They're also much better at picking up and interpreting micro-expressions http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/The-Pros-to-Being-a-Psychopath-176019901.html?c=y&page=2

I seem to remember some research that they're less susceptible to some common cognitive biases but google is failing me ATM.

Just because they don't run on the same rules doesn't mean they don't understand them. Possibly better than "normal" people do.

There are also N different definitions of socio/psychopathy - so to some extent it depends on what you pick.

(Willow - for example - probably wouldn't be classic sociopath under some categorisations. She's sounds more like antisocial personality disorder. ASPD folk can also be very, very good at understanding what "normal".)

BTW If folk want an interesting fiction read on consciousness, sociopathy, science-based vampires and alien contact - I thoroughly recommend Blindsight by Peter Watts http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm



eytanz

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Reply #27 on: May 12, 2013, 10:43:18 PM
The sociopath-as-compelling-antihero trope has always fallen flat for me. It's a pathetic, broken creature in human skin. Some of its pitiful flailing happens to resemble brilliance. However, its insights will always be flawed - and, ultimately, useless - because it doesn't understand humans.

Unless, of course, our solipsism blinds us to the fact that they understand humans much better than we do.

That's not my impression of the situation, but my understanding could be incomplete. Care to elaborate?

We see things like empathy as being feelings which it is both good and natural to obey.

But maybe empathy is like discomfort. It's neither good nor bad, but an inbuilt signal which should be listened too or ignored as our interests dictate.

Perhaps psychopaths see us "normals" as we see addicts or the morbidly obese; sad and weak people who are incapable of transcending their animal nature.



Scumpup

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Reply #28 on: May 13, 2013, 02:27:00 AM
Perhaps psychopaths see us "normals" as we see addicts or the morbidly obese; sad and weak people who are incapable of transcending their animal nature.


"We?"



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Reply #29 on: May 15, 2013, 02:33:39 AM
I quite enjoyed this at the beginning, but that was when I was firmly convinced that it was a character study of this broken girl and her desperate attempts to make sense of the world by creating the myth of a conspiracy to "recruit" her.  I maintained this belief up until the social worker apparently turned out to actually be a secret agent instead of just a social worker trying to draw out her client's delusions to see if she was dangerous or needed further help.  Unless that was supposed to be the psychotic break point, and the rest of the story was pure hallucination, Willow's interpretation of group therapy in a psychiatric ward or something.  I didn't get that impression, but I see it as a potential explanation, anyway.

With everyone else, and particularly Eytanz, I found the premise of a secret cabal of sociopaths working to ruin the world to be an uncompelling ending to the story, and quite a flawed premise for horror overall.  Basically, reiterate all of Eytanz' comments as far as why.

I did see this as a humorous story, and even chuckled several times.  I'd say "So no worries, Shawn," except that I think we've established by now that my taste in humor is apparently quite a lot blacker and bleaker than the average.  If you're hitting my funny bone, then your aim is apparently pulling really far to one side and not the middle.  ;-)



Sgarre1

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Reply #30 on: May 15, 2013, 02:41:43 AM
Quote
I did see this as a humorous story, and even chuckled several times.  I'd say "So no worries, Shawn," except that I think we've established by now that my taste in humor is apparently quite a lot blacker and bleaker than the average.  If you're hitting my funny bone, then your aim is apparently pulling really far to one side and not the middle.  ;-)

I've got some jet-black Saki I've been wanting to decant... perhaps a Black Comedy Horror showcase is in the future....



ThomasTheAttoney

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Reply #31 on: May 16, 2013, 06:18:14 PM
Meh. It started out interesting, but by the midpoint I'd started to suspect it wasn't going anywhere worth my time. It didn't.
i wish i had suspected earlier, i wasted expectation of a payoff.
If your character is a little crazy, you can do more with them.
If your character is too crazy, there is not much you can do with them, and no one cares.
This should have had a character who had motivation, like an elder sibling who was trying to protect Willow.
Willow had no motivation to do anything, of course she was bored, she is boring.  Crazy is only interesting played against normal.  Without a normal character, it is a yawn.



ThomasTheAttoney

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Reply #32 on: May 16, 2013, 06:24:31 PM
meh. maybe I just didn't get it but the motivation seemed pretty lame, and Willow's big idea seemed kinda stupid.

Yes, meh, yes.  Motivation lacking.  A lot of effort went into crafting a dead end character. 

I envy the author the naivete to still believe that one needs a psychopath to do hugely evil things. 

You don't need a psychopath to do evil; History shows us that you just need to provide a little money, and evil will show up, on time, with its lunch already in its briefcase, so that it can evil right through the lunch without having to go out.



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Reply #33 on: May 16, 2013, 06:41:20 PM
Thomas, that was pretty much the theme of the story.  At the end, Willow's most horrifying idea, the one that gets all her fellow sociopaths buzzing, is to openly announce to everyone that the United States has a program to cultivate and encourage sociopathic think tanks, and then watch them all agree that this seems like a good and right and necessary thing to do.  In other words, that no, one doesn't need sociopaths to do evil; that perfectly ordinary people are quite capable of generating it themselves, thank you very much.



Balu

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Reply #34 on: May 17, 2013, 11:36:37 PM
I've got some jet-black Saki I've been wanting to decant... perhaps a Black Comedy Horror showcase is in the future....

Now THAT is a plan :)



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Reply #35 on: May 18, 2013, 02:50:09 PM
I ended up really rather liking this one as jet-black political commentary:  I have a strong dislike for conspiracy theory (not its existence in fiction, but the kind people believe is real) based on personal experience, and this felt like a pure thumb-in-the-eye of that theory.  "This is the logical extension of that kind of thought." the story seems to be saying.  I also liked it as a wildly non-standard storytelling arc and structure, but I have a love of experimentalism anyway.  This is not to contradict the other points of the other comments, there are some good points in there that I'll have to think over.

However, the impact of the story on me may have been amplified by context.  This story came up on my ipod as I was returning to the US from some work abroad.  I had just landed in the Atlanta international terminal (which, for those unfamiliar, could only have been designed by an industrial sadist) when the story started.  I listened to the story during my 1/2 mile walk through the terminal to immigration, and for most of the hour and a half wait in line at declarations.  At about the halfway point, when stuck in the midst of the mouse-maze velvet ropes, an announcement came on over the loudspeakers.  "We have experienced a nationwide computer outage."  The entire airport passport check system for the nation had just gone down, with commensurate delays and outraged passengers.  I can't decide if this level of incompetence proves the non-existance of a central conspriacy (they couldn't keep such a thing running and secret), or proves that it exists and is malicious.



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Reply #36 on: May 21, 2013, 01:44:24 PM
I will echo eytanz's comment about conspiracy theories, and Electric Paladin's comment about not understanding the fascination with sociopaths.  I say this even more after reading fiction slushpiles for a few years.  If you think that there are a lot of published stories/movies/whatever about sociopaths, there are a whole lot more unpublished ones, many of which are really badly written. 

The story was very distantly written, which may have been a specific stylistic choice considering the subject material, but regardless it was not effective at making me care.  I didn't care what happened to anyone, and thought it odd that her handlers had apparently not considered the possibility that their pack of sociopaths might not place nice with the system they're placed in.

Shawn, I could sense some humor in the story, hinted at by the title itself which has a bit of misdirection and has a feel of cold-war era propaganda to me.  But to me anyway, it felt like a comedian telling the same 30-second joke repeatedly for an hour, so the humor wore off pretty quick.  *shrug*



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Reply #37 on: June 04, 2013, 07:32:18 PM
I thought this story was fantastic. It wasn't too much of an exaggeration of how government goon squads actually operate. In America, the bodies of people who question the government line, or who happen to be in the vicinity of "terrorist attacks," or a witness to anything, tend to pile up. There are always suicides, car accidents, plane accidents, heart attacks, or guys going insane and shooting everyone in their family before killing themselves. Some of the things the author touched on in passing are actually documented government black ops and soft kills perpetuated on civilians. If I was Nick Mamatas I'd be looking over my shoulder from now on...  ;)

Salaam.


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Reply #38 on: July 17, 2013, 01:05:47 AM
This is wonderful dark satire. I enjoyed this story in the "Psycho" anthology, and the reader did a great job here.



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Reply #39 on: April 02, 2014, 05:55:09 PM
MEh from me too. Conspiracy and sociopath protag were ok but just didn't find it well written. Didn't hold my interest.



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Reply #40 on: April 10, 2014, 09:02:21 PM
A couple of years ago, I was diagnosed with high-functioning autism and one of the things the counsellors talked about was how a lot of socially-accepted behaviour just doesn't make sense to me. Commonly accepted "normal" behaviour can seem outright ridiculous some times.

Ironically, it's stories like this (also "The Wasp Factory" by Iain Banks and the excellent "Slights" by Kaaron Warren) really help with understanding these differences, albeit distorted to pantomime extremes.

The protagonists in these stories are, despite their crimes, intensely sad and tragic characters. Willow is not a cackling villain, a sick, broken animal or a monster, she's just doing what seems right to her and what conforms to her worldview.

This is not a moral choice thing, but a software/hardware incompatibility that affects how they view and interact with the world.

The true horror and evil is that society as a whole encourages the negative aspects of differences (those with depression are put into workplaces that promote stress and anxiety, for instance) and I think the metaphor of taking these individuals who with help could become gifted and using them instead as attack dogs gets the point across.