Review: Enjoyable short story with some funny moments
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 08 14, 2011
This story is told to us in first person by Pete, newly unemployed and sitting at home on his couch, slacking the day away between episodes of Price Is Right and Baywatch. Pete gets a call from his brother, Jackson, a univeristy professor, to come down to the campus and have lunch with him. Jackson is in charge of some NASA-sponsored research project. As Pete pokes around his brother's workstation, he stumbles across some loose wires, and "wouldn't it be funny if the underachiever of the family fixed the problem and made NASA history at the same time?"And so begins Pete's travel to the future where he discovers the true cause of society's downfall, but Pete is hardly a saviour sent from the past to fight society's own apathy, right? The writing in this short has a dry, sharp edge to it. I do think the ending seemed a little rushed, but overall I did enjoy this story. Layered over some social commentary, there was some nice snarky humor to it.