#482 Foes- Lorrie Moore

#482 Foes- Lorrie Moore

Imagine being at a high-class function, and not only does the person you’re talking to seem oblivious to the sarcastic way you are talking but also seems to be diametrically opposite of your core political leanings. You try to bring the tense moments around with humor but they either don’t take the lifeline or they have no desire to be pleasant.

“Now would not be the time to speak of timing. It would be unlucky to speak of luck. Could he speak of people having things they didn’t deserve, in a room full of such people?”

Baker is an author of a recent George Washington biography and has been invited by a literary magazine to be at their fundraiser. His job as a famous writer is to sit at the table and charm the guests that are paying $500 a plate. He gets stuck in this heated discussion with a self-proclaimed “Evil Lobbyist.” Sounds like loads of fun.

I did find this description of Washington DC to be pretty on-point: “An ostentatious company town built on a marsh—a mammoth, pompous chit-ridden motor vehicle department run by gladiators. High-level clerks on the take, their heads full of unsound sound bites and falsified recall.”

Rating: 8-8-7-7 Total= 30

#360 The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees- E. Lily Yu

#360 The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees- E. Lily Yu

Printed in the a Nebula Awards Showcase, this piece was named one of the best science fiction or fantasy stories of 2013. It is a political science lesson played out in apiary terms. A colony of wasps are forced from their home, so they strike out for new territory. Once they found it, they looked to conquer:

“Ours is a race of explorers and scientists, cartographers and philosophers, and to rest and grow slothful is to die. Once we are established here, we will expand.”

And expand they did, taking control of the indigenous bee population, one that far outnumbered the wasps but were less sophisticated or practiced in the arts of war and aggression.

One day “By the sheerest of accidents, one of the bees trained as a cartographer’s assistant was an anarchists.” The mutation stuck and slowly took root among the oppressed colony of bees.

“Anarchism being a heritable trait in bees, a number of the daughters of the new queen found themselves questioning the purpose of the monarchy…A perfect society needs no rulers…knowledge and authority ought to be held in common. In order to imagine a new existence, we must free ourselves from the structures of both our failed government and the new unjustifiable hegemony of the wasp nest.”

What followed is chaos, death, insurrection, and revolution, not in that order. Mistakes are made, but among the smart, they are only made once, pass it along!

Rating: 8-10-10-9 Total= 37