"Dinner in Audoghast" by Bruce Sterling

Okay, because I missed Thursday, I'm posting twice today to catch up. Up first, Bruce Sterling's "Dinner in Audoghast."

Sterling's excellently written short story uses a literary device near and dear to my heart, prophecy, to explore the impermanence of all things. He sets it in the ancient city of Audoghast during the height of it's power (and, consequently, arrogance), and inserts into it the figure of a lone prophet who has the undesirable and unique ability to render only true prophecies. I say undesirable here because his prophecies all revolve around the idea that nothing lasts forever: that, specifically, Audoghast and it's elite may be powerful now, but that will someday change.

The use of prophecy in fiction and how characters react to prophetic revelation has long been a subject of interest to me, particularly in how it relates to how the reader reads the story. Here, by having the distance that comes with time, a distance that lets the reader know with certainty that what the prophet says will in fact come to pass, helps to reveal to us the arrogance of the characters in the story when they choose to ignore what has been prophesied. In turn, I think that this does an interesting thing to the reader, making them also realize that our own society isn't permanent either, and that some day, things will change dramatically. This may be four hundred years from now, or it may be next week. That really doesn't matter. What is important is the idea that things will change, no matter what we do.

"Heartwired" by Joe Haldeman

Okay, so I don't have a lot of spare time today. As a reuslt, I've picked a pretty short short story to read. Joe Haldeman's "Heartwired" clocks in a two pages and a half pages, and is really more of a sketch than a fully fleshed out story. Haldeman sets up a situation in which a woman, on the eve of her 25th anniversary, goes to a company called "Relationships Inc." and purchases a vial of what is, essentially, a love potion. She is instructed to give half to her husband and to take half herself, the result of which will be that they will temporarily become infatuated with each other, like when they were first together.

After this setup, Haldeman breaks the fourth wall of the story a bit and explains directly to the reader that they are free to imagine any one of "nine permutations" in relation to what will happen next, then gives his preferred ending. It's an interesting technique, as everything is left to the reader. If you follow reader response theory, an immense blank of information is left for the reader to fill in, and how the reader fills in this blank, I believe, can be very telling to their views on relationships. Does she use the vial? Does it work? Does it backfire? The possibilities are numerous. In fact, I havn't counted, but I believe that there are probably more than just nine permutations available to the reader.

I'd like to say more about Haldeman's chosen permutation, and how it still leaves the final results wonderfully vague, but I don't want to ruin it for anyone who might read the story (and they really should read it, by the way). I will say that some of the events imply some interesting things about what the author believes men value in a relationship versus what women value in a relationship, but I'll leave it at that.