Must artists suffer? The novelist and poet Thomas Hardy thought so, quipping that “light writes white”. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is a narcotised shopping mall, its zombie denizens, blissed into political quiescence.
Deborah Walker (@deboree), a runner-up in our recent short story competition, broadly agrees – but her story, set in a world where pleasure has been harnessed and commodified, is altogether more mischevious. There is no conspiracy here, no attempt to defraud humankind; only a technology that speaks to some very deep, politically uncorrect (and largely male) assumptions about what greatness is, and how it can be achieved.
It’s also a playful period piece that, in its attention to detail and speech rhythms, knocks all that steampunk malarkey out of the court.
Read the whole story here, or scroll down for a short extract.
“May I have the honour of reading your work?” I asked
“Here,” Dunstable said, rummaging in his voluminous garments to produce a battered manuscript
“What are the themes?” I leafed through the pages, many closely written with many deletions and underscores, sometimes ripping the page.
“Love, war, wilderness and loss. What it still means to be a man in a world dominated by women.” Dunstable cast a particularly unpleasant and meaningful stare at Circe.
“I am not a woman,” said Circe mildly. “I only wear a shell.”
“Women are concerned with happiness, nurturing, mothering. That’s what you are. You have emasculated the world. You have ripped the balls off a generation.”
“I say, steady on old boy.” I laid a friendly hand on Dunstable’s shoulder.
“Where’s your woman, then?”
I placed my fist to my mouth. “She is gone,” I said.
Dunstable smirked.
“Reginald is very attractive to women,” said Circe. “I’ve no doubt that he will attract another woman when his muse allows.”
He smirked again.
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