Midway Relics and Dying Breeds by Seanan McGuire
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
“The trouble with wanting to do the right thing is that frequently the right thing today is the wrong thing for tomorrow, or the wrong thing for the people who are standing between you and your perfect, platonic future. The wild was the wrong place for our elephant, just like the recycler was the wrong place for Billie, and the cities were the wrong place for me.”
A tale of bioengineering, a carnival, and the cost of finding one’s right place.
The story, at first glance, is simplistic – a carnival employee who loves her genetically-engineered beast doesn’t want to be separated from it, and wants to find a way to keep her. But the world of this short story is the star – McGuire has created a future with intelligent life forms, and advanced tech so much so that the world is very ecologically balanced. A relic of the past, the carnival operates as a amber-encapsulated adventure for most people. But despite living in a progressive future, the ties of family and tradition keep Ansley from doing what she wants.
Ansley’s personal problems are a list – the boss is someone she spurned (a distant cousin who would never respect her), the beast she carts around is the only thing she values and to get money to keep the family business running, the aforementioned jerk of a boss wants to sell her beast, she feels beholden to keep up her family traditions, and an ecologically sensitive world with a touch too much ‘caring’ for ‘wildlife’. That forms the main arc of the story, but the narrative built around it is a community of people who care for each other, yet don’t know much about each other. Like, the dozens of ‘cousins’ running around whom she is not even related to, the misogyny pervasive even in an almost-utopic world, and the bonds you form when sentience and intelligence is shared by more than humans. It ends abruptly but also gives a nice resolution to her problems.
Read it at Tor.
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