Another view of Terry Bisson's story in Subterranean #7

[ellen_datlow]

Daniel Braum reviews the issue on his blog

Daniel Braum


Spoilers regarding Terry Bisson's "Pirates of the Somali Coast"







A. Nakama's review of it:

Pirates of the Somali Coast," by Terry Bisson, starts off whimsical and ends up disturbing, but for all the wrong reasons. Told through a series of emails from a boy stuck on a cruise ship taken over by modern day pirates (a twist on Bisson's distinctive dialogue-only story writing), the story is meant to disturb the reader through the boy's gleeful description of partaking in the murder and terror happening around him, but it is riddled with sloppy holes. The more subtle ones include repeated time stamps and an internet lexicon not even remotely resembling one that kids are using these days, but the more deep holes show Bisson's complete lack of understanding of his subject matter and youth culture. I haven't heard anyone get excited about a "GameBoy" for about a decade now, for example.

What really glares, however, is the none-too-subtle implication that the boy's inability to discern between reality and fiction stems almost entirely from video games. Thus, the boy's psyche might be disturbing to hand-wringing housewives obsessed with Oprah's doom-saying, but anyone aware of the research done on precisely this subject would be unable to suspend their disbelief -- the story itself is just too divorced from reality. And so Bisson sacrifices plausibility to the altar of an easy scare. All too disappointing, considering that it's from the author of the fantastic, "They're Made Out of Meat."


Here's what Dan says about it:

" In a way this story is an alternative version of that crazy story of a cruise ship taking unorthodox evasive actions of making dangerous waves to fend off an attack by Somali pirates. In this story things don't go as well as they did in real life. The joy in this story, for me, as in many Bisson stories is the tight POV. This story is told from the perspective of a very young and very immature boy and via e mail ( one way.) I was willing to suspend disbelief and go along for the ride and enjoy the story being told from this point of view. I found this to be the muse and the point of the story. For me the story wasn't a deep commentary on human nature like his award winning Macs, but a fun story to take delight in the way it was told."



Obviously, I think the story works or I wouldn't have bought it. I found it utterly chilling as I realized what was going on.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Ah, the old Curse of the Expert problem. I've seen this is many different guises over the years. Most professional writers, of course, are painstaking in their research, but few can ever match the knowledge of an expert in the subject. Obviously the likes of Dr. Bedford can write well about astrophysics, and Dr. Vinge can write well about computer science, but once writers stray from their areas of expertise they can get into trouble. Give me an novel that talks too much about economics and I'll probably dislike it. Give Farah a novel that talks about theories of history or how historians work and she'll probably find it full of errors.

Writing about youth culture is fraught with danger in two ways. Firstly there are far more youths than experts is economics or history who are likely to spot your mistakes; and secondly it can change so rapidly that a story becomes out of date in a year or so (when did Terry write that story?). Given the fashion for YA books these days, I'm surprised more writers haven't come unstuck in this way.

Of course A. Nakama is right to point out that the story has flaws. But it is also true that for people who are not well versed enough in youth culture to detect those flaws the story may be perfectly enjoyable.

[ellen-datlow.livejournal.com]

Right (whoever you are :-))... I don't know when Terry wrote the story, but I bought it from him a bit more than a year ago.