I liked it. The way that lies were emphasized in story was kind of like the concept of negative space. You know the lies aren't true, but you can still see a story in the space around the lies because the lies still define a demarcation between what it is true and what is not. It's a sculpture of a story. We begin with a block of stone, and each lie is a chiselled-away piece of rock that is not part of the sculpture, until at the end the untouched stone is what defines the whole.
Great narration too.
And great outro--I will admit I had to listen to the whole outro before I realized Mur was killing globs, and had to listen again with that in mind. Although the blob-feeding version might be taken as somewhat bleak, I see a positive note in the statement "This current state of affairs in the genre is going to last a long, long time, I'm sure of it." So glob-feeding Mur apparently thinks that this year's Hugo debacle won't be lasting--I hope that's true. In any case, I am paying more attention to other ways to celebrate great fiction of 2014, like the Locus awards.
They've clearly come up with a pretty interesting strategy for fighting, instead of physically attacking the more physically capable humans, hit them in their soft-spot: our huge brains. But once mankind figured out how to defeat the globs, it no longer seems sustainable to them. They die by the thousands, and once every few days a few of them get to eat someone. That hardly seems like it's worth it for the globs.
So, that had me wondering.
I wondered about that too. My theory on it is that the blobs are not extraterrestrial. They are earthlings, and probably older than us, but have been in a long hibernation cycle under the ground, waiting for the environment to be right to encourage a breeding cycle. Even though they eat bodies, I feel like they only gain real nourishment from psychic energy just like they are only harmed by psychic energy, and the process of eating isn't so much about metabolizing the juicy meat, but is more like squeezing the psychic energy from the human husk--I imagine psychic energy is produced in much greater quantities in the process of dying as the body ramps up all its processes to fight oblivion. But it has to be seasoned right, with truth, or its poisonous. The globs at the end don't eat Nim when he says nothing and they are waiting for him to tell a truth. And then the globs shit fertilizer, like so many animals do. At the time of the story, they're probably about ready to die back from lack of food sources, perhaps all melting away into the earth to fertilize plants and to seed the next generation of globs. Since the humans have an extraterrestrial habitat, maybe they'll go back to recolonize the green and lush earth, and will think their enemies gone by disease in a War of the Worlds fashion. Until the population gets to world-breaking proportions again, and then the globs will have their day once again.
One could see the globs as agents of Gaia, meant to give a counterstroke to the destructive humans, keep human population from destroying the earth.
