News You Can Bruise for 2008 October 1 (entry 0)

Wed Oct 01 2008 22:03: Hey, nobody writes depressing-ass stories like George Saunders. But I wanted to rave a bit about Offloading For Mrs. Schwartz, which I just read yesterday. That's a damn good piece of science fiction. Not for the story's future tech gimmick, which is poorly designed, but for the plot, which is based on the gimmick working as a technology. Often Saunders writes fantasy-type stories where the weird element is a ghost or some other unexplainable or subjective phenomena. But here it's something that can be quantified, focus-grouped and sold, equipment built around it, etc., and all that peripheral activity drives the plot.

I originally wrote "poorly designed in a way that screams 'I'm writing genre fiction but have no grounding in the field!'" but took it out not wanting to be mean and having no evidence. But then I found this interview where he says, "I never read a lot of science fiction when I was a kid, and what I read I didn't really like." And presumably doesn't read a lot of it now, or he wouldn't have cast back to when he was a kid. Well, keep writing creepy stories, George Saunders.