My, God, Gary! This is masterful: honest without editorial, density without volume, thought-provoking without pretension; just simple storytelling of a world different from ours, and yet the same in its complex, aching humanity. Bravo.
Thank you. The thing I was most afraid of was the tech swallowing the grief, about letting it become a story about archives rather than a father. You went straight to the humanity, which tells me it stayed where it needed to. Grateful for the read and the genreous comment.
That’s one of the things I loved about it. So much scifi gets tech-trenched; yours kept itself focused on what really mattered: how grief and memory are somehow both malleable and immutable; how each of those are both blessings and curses to our aching hearts.
That paradox is the engine, and you've named it better than I managed to while writing it. The comfort and the theft are the same mechanism: you can't have the one without risking the other, and Isaac knows it, which is why he can't choose. Means a lot that it landed there for you.
My, God, Gary! This is masterful: honest without editorial, density without volume, thought-provoking without pretension; just simple storytelling of a world different from ours, and yet the same in its complex, aching humanity. Bravo.
Thank you. The thing I was most afraid of was the tech swallowing the grief, about letting it become a story about archives rather than a father. You went straight to the humanity, which tells me it stayed where it needed to. Grateful for the read and the genreous comment.
That’s one of the things I loved about it. So much scifi gets tech-trenched; yours kept itself focused on what really mattered: how grief and memory are somehow both malleable and immutable; how each of those are both blessings and curses to our aching hearts.
That paradox is the engine, and you've named it better than I managed to while writing it. The comfort and the theft are the same mechanism: you can't have the one without risking the other, and Isaac knows it, which is why he can't choose. Means a lot that it landed there for you.