Saturday, May 6, 2017

Sweetlings, by Lucy Taylor

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(Climate Apocalypse Horror) As the seas have risen, terrible things have come crawling out of them. Jersey wants Mir to come with him and move inland, but she won’t go without her disabled father. (8,723 words; Time: 29m)

Rating: ★★☆☆☆ Not Recommended


Mini-Review (click to view--possible spoilers)

Pro: The dialogue is good and so is the narration. Mir’s love for Jersey is shown, not told, and that makes it feel very real and very solid. This making the ending truly horrifying.

Con: The story starts off as a post-climate apocalypse story and gradually turns into a supernatural horror story, but it keeps using the language of science. It’s almost impossible to suspend disbelief for this sort of  “fantasy science,” and that ruins the story.

For example, extinct creatures never come back. Unless we recreate them ourselves, trilobites will never swim the oceans again.

Statements like “evolution is moving to erase its mistake” make no sense; evolution has no intelligence and no goals any more than gravity does.

Mutations are not going to magically occur just because sea-level has risen, and if they did, they’d be random—not changes to make it easier to adapt to the new environment. Huge mutations (like a baby with functioning gills) are never going to happen at all.

Living people are definitely not going to mutate into different forms later in life. That’s pure magic.

Finally, sea-level rise might hit ten meters by 2200 at the extreme outside. Nothing is ever going to flood the interior of the country.

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Lucy Taylor Info: Interviews, Websites, ISFDB, FreeSFOnline


1 comment (may contain spoilers):

  1. Maaaybee it could have worked if it had either been more fantastical or more science fictional. But I agree that the pseudo-science spoiled it. Also, it's pretty rare for me to like horror.