Short Fiction Tuesday

A couple of stories are staying with me this week. First is Carol Ermshwiller's "On Not Going Extinct." I loved the opening here, especially the bit about the word "ramekin" being a part of the narrator's subculture that has spread to the culture at large. (No red squiggle under ramekin tells me it's a real word...and wikipedia tells me it's from either Dutch or Low German, by way of French. Huh.) This sense of the narrator losing her culture, of her trying to find others like her, was nicely done. The ending seemed a bit, well, conventional I guess. Not storytelling-wise, but the choice she makes...it surprised how quickly she accepted it. But that's not a complaint...just an observation.

I'm also reading a longer story and haven't had time to finish, one that I'm enjoying so far. James Lecky's "And Other Such Delights." It's a Dying Earth kind of story with musician who creates music out of found sound that he records with a high-tech/sorcerous recording box. Parts of it, especially early on, feel a bit awkward on a storytelling level, but the imagination of it and the nature of the world he travels through is keeping me reading (except alas, I need to sleep now...so I'll have to finish it later and see how well the ending makes the story as a whole as good as those parts I'm liking so far).