I am camping this week, in celebration of my son’s first birthday. We’re calling it “Jack-Fest”. Happy Birthday, Jack! You are the best and most important story I will ever help to write. I hope the smash cake (exactly what it sounds like) we got you is the smashing-est cake that any tiny fist ever smashed.
Up first this week is Rabbit Test, by Samantha Mills. I read this story earlier this year and thought “wow, this is likely the best story I’ll read this year, how absolutely harrowing and fantastic”. Well, now it’s officially won the Nebula and Hugo Awards for Best Short Story, so lah-dee-dah, I was right.
Sometimes, I read a story and get envious because I wish I’d written it. This story is very much not like that. It’s so specific and nuanced and distinctively female that there’s just no way I could have written it, but I’m so glad that it exists and it makes me want to be the best writer I can and gives me hope for the future. The author just sold her debut novel, which is out next year, and which I will most certainly be reading. So should you, but start with this story and hang onto your hats.
Second and Finally, a classic. Ars Longa, Vita Brevis is by Scott Alexander, available there on his archived blog. (He’s now writing on Substack.) It’s not nearly as intense as “Rabbit Test”, but it’s conceptually very clever and has stayed with me for ~six years since I first read it. It has done more to shape my current view about art, education, and epistemology than almost anything else, certainly on a per-word basis.
It’s organized as a dialogue, the flavor of which gives big Douglas Hofstadter energy (which, if you haven’t read his masterwork GEB, that’s a third recommendation for this week, albeit one that’s much more of a time investment), in a very fun way, but the underlying point about the history of knowledge is deadly serious, and only getting more relevant as the years pile up. In sum: The more we as a species know, the harder it is to get to the cutting edge of anything!
I hope everyone has a wonderful summery weekend and a great week. Enjoy, and I will be back next Sunday with another original story!
I just finished Rabbit Test. So horrifying and not very hopeful, it just hits you in the face. I will be thinking about this story for some time.