Super Flat Times: Stories
Derby's unnerving, audaciously intelligent debut collection of satirical short stories is set in a future in which everything that could go wrong with current technologies does. The result is a brutal world in which language itself has suffered severe and systematic violence. Derby's characters can barely form or remember words, and the government controls what can and cannot be said. The era in question begins with the Super Flat Times in which mass executions are followed by the state's taking control of human reproduction. A foolhardy experiment has created battalions of "hard, dark, permanent clouds" that have made agriculture impossible, and Derby's glum, meat-fed characters no longer know the "joy of eating." In fact, there is no joy whatsoever, only a wan longing for the past. Think Orwell, Huxley, and Atwood, although Derby's bold cautionary tales are stylistically much stranger, more on the order of George Saunders and Tom Paine in their syntactical fracturing and intrinsic alienation, even as they are unique in the searing intimacy of their grim prophecies; weird, edgy wit; and the morbid fascination they evoke.Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved