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riefly,
I wrote this story about five years ago. It's of near publishable
quality, or at least the rejections came back with comments.
Ten thousand words is a lot of space to commit in your magazine:
if I was the next Harlan Ellison something would get junked to
make space, but as it's already only marginal.... Yes, I wrote
other stuff at the time, most of it not as good. It's alarmingly
hard work for me--I may be a natural with computers, but
evidently I'm not ''a natural storyteller'' without great effort.It's got pace and plot and something to say. The characters stand up, just about, so long as you don't look behind and notice they're cardboard stand-ups. Some are stereotypes, even national stereotypes, though it's not just ''Brits good, Yanks bad'': rather the decent side of America---the hero is a humane eastcoast intellectual type---against the uglier side. When I wrote it, ordinary folks weren't on the Internet, and nobody was likely to read it abroad! Hmmm... a Chinese character who says ''victolly''; well, at the time he is behaving as a parody of himself. One assumes he is a Chinese American, and earlier as his normal self speaks with a standard American accent. The untold story is that the Chinese and native Indian workforce in barracks conditions are the largely unseen [by the narrator] workforce that keep the place going, living cheaply in barracks conditions under a different and more direct exploitation than the better-off tennants. This, rather than an identification with China itself, is what makes them ripe for a different myth.
Mostly it's the ''biased narration'' of the well meaning though rather self-obsessed narrator. The women aren't that convincing: Sandy is sympathetically portrayed, but doesn't really get a look in. Female evil is a strong theme too, remembering the period it was written in dominated by the figure of a widely hated female public figure -- ''Theresa'' very nearly got called ''Margareta''.
Yes, I can here the construction creaking in places as I re-read it. But, at the same time, I think it does have something worth saying. I hope you'll agree!!