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Friday, November 14, 2014

"If You Want" by Luc Reid

Appeared in Flash Fiction Online.

In a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style, Reid presents a second-person character to whom a world of misery slays him: from parents to orientation, to zombies, cryogenics and identity theft. The character is given his choices... (sort of a spoiler)

...and chooses something different. This one becomes powerful on reflection. Sometimes we humans pressure one another into binary decisions when another choice may actually be better. One might say this is about religion, but I think a better fit might simply be the arts (or politics or humanity) in how sometimes we pigeon-hole and limit what and who people can choose. But we have the ability to choose, to write our own stories. Potent.

The character isn't quite as sympathetic, perhaps because we never fully inhabit the character. The issue is the mirror opposite to Steven W. Johnson's "Monoceros, Ptolemy Cluster".

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