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“The Orange”, by Benjamin Rosenbaum
“The Orange” is probably the shortest story I will ever include here. The whole thing fits neatly on one page. As a matter of fact, it would take you longer to assess my review of the work than it would just to read it, so why not short-circuit the decision and just read it? I’ll even make it easy:
The Orange, by Benjamin Rosenbaum
An orange ruled the world.
It was an unexpected thing, the temporary abdication of Heavenly Providence, entrusting the whole matter to a simple orange.
The orange, in a grove in Florida, humbly accepted the honor. The other oranges, the birds, and the men in their tractors wept with joy; the tractors’ motors rumbled hymns of praise.
Airplane pilots passing over would circle the grove and tell their passengers, “Below us is the grove where the orange who rules the world grows on a simple branch.” And the passengers would be silent with awe.
The governor of Florida declared every day a holiday. On summer afternoons the Dalai Lama would come to the grove and sit with the orange, and talk about life.
When the time came for the orange to be picked, none of the migrant workers would do it: they went on strike. The foremen wept. The other oranges swore they would turn sour. But the orange who ruled the world said, “No, my friends; it is time.”
Finally a man from Chicago, with a heart as windy and cold as Lake Michigan in wintertime, was brought in. He put down his briefcase, climbed up on a ladder, and picked the orange. The birds were silent and the clouds had gone away. The orange thanked the man from Chicago.
They say that when the orange went through the national produce processing and distribution system, certain machines turned to gold, truck drivers had epiphanies, aging rural store managers called their estranged lesbian daughters on Wall Street and all was forgiven.
I bought the orange who ruled the world for 39 cents at Safeway three days ago, and for three days he sat in my fruit basket and was my teacher. Today, he told me, “it is time,” and I ate him.
Now we are on our own again.
Replay, by Ken Grimwood
NOT SUITABLE FOR CHILDREN. Includes explicit sex and great personal loss.
Replay begins with one of the lines that I remember mostly clearly of all
lines in fiction: “Jeff Winston was on the phone with his wife when he died.”
And that’s the end for him; he’s quite dead.
Except he doesn’t stay dead. The next thing he remembers, he wakes up in his
college dorm room, twenty-five years in the past, twenty-five years younger, and
remembering absolutely everything of consequence that’s going to happen in the
next twenty-five years.
Needless to say, he lives a very different life. Wouldn’t you, if you knew the future? If you could make long odds bets. . . and win?
He lives a whole life. And then he dies again. And wakes up. Again. And again. And again.
Replay is about what Jeff learns to value, what he gets out of another
viewpoint on his life, and how he learns to love. It’s not an easy book in
places–there’s a couple of scenes that always make my skin crawl. It’s
joyously upbeat overall, however. A book that I’ve reread any number of times
since I discovered it when it won the World Fantasy Award in 1988. It always makes me want to tell the folks that I love how much they mean to me.
Unfortunately, Grimwood never wrote anything else nearly this good. The three
novels he wrote before Replay (Breakthrough, Elise, and The Voice Outside)
have not lasted the years since their original publication, all being out of
print for at least a decade. His follow-up novel, Into The Deep, was vastly
better than than the first three books, but it was still only good, compared to
Replay’s greatness.
Grimwood passed away in 2003, and at the time of his death, was writing a sequel
to Replay, which it seems will not be published. This I consider a tragedy. If it was half as good as the original, it would be well worth reading.
“When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth”
I have been a fan of the Disney theme parks for, depending on how you measure, either one or three decades. So when I heard that a science fiction novel called Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, set in a future Walt Disney World, was coming out, I put it on my to-read list, and moved on.
Then I found out that the author, Cory Doctorow, had made it freely available. While being blown away, I downloaded it, loaded it onto my handheld, and started reading it.
It was good. It was so good that I didn’t finish the electronic version; I wanted to support this author, and so I went and bought the book. And that was my first experience with free fiction–power, immediacy, value, and infectiousness.
When I had the idea to do this blog, I knew–knew–that the first author I was going to recommend was Cory Doctorow. I assumed that it would be Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. But then I decided that I was going to focus largely on shorter fiction, and I was left with a problem. Sure, I’ve told you that I’m going to make exceptions and include longer works, sometimes non-free fiction, sometimes non-fiction even. . . but to make an exception in the very first post seemed bad policy. If you can’t keep to a rule even once, it isn’t much of a rule, now, is it?
And then I remembered “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth”. A story which has never failed to make me cry, make me think, and make me proud to be a geek and former sysadmin. And I knew I didn’t have to break my rule for the first recommendation.
“When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth” is an end of the world story, told from the point of view of one of a very special group of survivors. The people we spend the bulk of the story with are the sysadmins of the hosts and routers that run the Internet in and near Toronto. And as the world they know disappears forever, they have to decide what to do about that responsibility, while still balancing their personal issues and needs. And dealing with the decreasing amount of information flow–and hope–coming in from the outside world.
The story is enormous: it sketches the end of a large part of human civilization. It is tiny and personal: it details one man’s reaction to crushing loss. It is true to my experiences as a geek, as a sysadmin, and as a father. And it is beautiful. I’m proud to put it forth as my first recommendation to you. If you like this, you stand a good chance of having similar taste to me. If you don’t like this, I’d be very interested in knowing why.
Doctorow’s website
Text of the story
Full cast audio
Buy in print from Amazon, as part of Doctorow’s collection Overclocked
Awards: 2007 Locus Award for best novelette
