{"id":15268,"date":"2016-05-12T09:23:00","date_gmt":"2016-05-12T16:23:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2016\/05\/12\/15268.html"},"modified":"2016-05-12T09:23:00","modified_gmt":"2016-05-12T16:23:00","slug":"sh-flashback-archipelago-by-an","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2016\/05\/12\/sh-flashback-archipelago-by-an\/","title":{"rendered":"SH Flashback: “Archipelago,” by Anil Menon"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A new entry in my almost-weekly Strange Horizons<\/cite> retrospective:<\/p>\n

\n
“Archipelago<\/a>,” by Anil Menon<\/dt>\n
On an artificial island where everyone has embedded high-tech “sensoriums” that let them share experiences and perceptions, Tommy falls for a new arrival who doesn't have the implant. More or less NSFW. (Published in 2005.) (5,500 words.)<\/dd>\n

The idea was to get a group of people to hook up their sensoriums in a certain way and then use a data feed—the “stim”—to trigger a synchronization of minds; a firefly swarm, as it were, of minds all blinking, signalling, and responding in unison.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n

(See also the full list of Flashback stories<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

(I'm still behind on posting Flashback stories, but if all goes well, I'll catch up shortly.)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

SPOILERS FOLLOW<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n

I found the tech in this story interesting, and especially the way that it does and doesn't enable interactions among the characters. And I like the ways in which the story does and doesn't echo the concerns of other stories featuring posthumans or near-posthumans, the unevenly distributed future tech, the barely glimpsed conflict between, as the story puts it, “the Chosen and the Extinct.”<\/p>\n

I also like the portrayal of the “sotto voce” secondary communication stream among the posse; it reminds me of the multichannel communications from the old comic book Starstruck<\/cite>, and of real-life back-channel conversations via chat or texting while other things are going on.<\/p>\n

And I like the opening dream, though it may be a little hard to follow; in particular, I've had the dream where it turns out it was all a mistake, the person who died is alive after all, and you reunite with them and then you wake up and realize it was a dream.<\/p>\n

And there's some lovely language, like the line “as if all of Connie were now part of the tongue's pointillist arcana.”<\/p>\n

But most of all (as is so often true with these Flashback stories) what I love about this story is the ending, that moment of coming to terms with loss while finding a path forward, a reconciliation with grief and dreams.<\/p>\n

\n

Facebook post<\/a><\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A new entry in my almost-weekly Strange Horizons retrospective: “Archipelago,” by Anil Menon On an artificial island where everyone has…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-short-stories","category-strange-horizons"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15268"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15268\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}