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A short story I read in a sci-fi anthology way back when. Don't ask me why I even bother when all I remember are a few details, but here goes: Soldiers, fighting a war against some alien race. Everybody is required to wear some kind of distorting mask with a visor, and possibly take some sort of medication, supposedly to protect them from the aliens. The punchline is that the protagonist happens to see some of the alien soldiers without protection and realizes that they are, in fact, humans too, wearing the same distorting masks.
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Feb 27, 2008 16:17
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imnotinsane posted:Also one other book that i read earlier maybe 8 or 9 years ago was called something like "Space Gun" or "Space Zapper" or something about a gun. I am pretty sure it was by an Australian author so maybe not many Americans will have heard about it. Anyway, here's an easy one for you: I think it was one of William Gibson's earlier short stories; it was basically about this emergency counselor type whose job is to make first contact with astronauts coming back from missions to another dimension or something, who had the habit of killing themselves immediately upon returning.
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Mar 22, 2008 19:34
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I listened to this story on a podcast, probably Starship Sofa. Must’ve been at least 10 years ago and I’m fuzzy on the details. Broadly, it’s about a guy living in a totalitarian dystopia who’s been convicted of rape, and part of his sentence is being subject to experiments where increasingly bizarre pieces of alien anatomy are grafted onto his body. The central conceit was to create a creature so alien that it somehow pushes the boundaries of reality. Mankind had been somehow trapped in a limited amount of space and this was part of an effort to break out. In the end, I think he escapes, although it’s not really him any longer at that point. I seem to recall the protagonist lives in an apartment building where all the apartments are in constant webcam communication with each other, and his neighbours will regularly tell him how he shouldn’t have raped that girl if he didn’t want to be in his predicament. He’s summoned for his sessions by a flying insect drone finding him and injecting some kind of drug, unannounced. Yeah, it sounds crazy, but there was something about the story and the narrator’s delivery that did it for me at the time. Looking at what I just typed, it has dream-logic written all over it. Any ideas?
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Sep 18, 2019 20:25
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