Current Life Situation: Lucrative Work-Assignment, Stable Marriage-Union, Model Son. After daily work-duty, take Municipal Transporter to Metro-Sector T—Genome Modification Center—and receive Target Sequence Update. Then hurry home. Find Model Son (name Theo) at study-station, solving math problem concerning volume…
The challenge of this piece is to suggest in less than 1,000 words, with a bare minimum of info dumping, enough context for an unfamiliar speculative world to be satisfyingly authentic. In this story, a lot is omitted about setting and the history of the future—likewise, almost nothing is known about any people other than the three-person family of characters. Are they representative of their society? Are their habits and dynamics universal? Is this a world where everyone has a food synthesizer and genetically deselects “undesirable” traits? Only the rich? What are the economic and political circumstances of this society? And what about nature? The characters go to a holographic park and the narrator says that birds are extinct. Are there “real” parks? Have all species disappeared from the face of the Earth? What is the state of the natural world? Ideally, the absence of so much fundamental information creates a sort of “negative” energy that is part of the story’s power current.
GREG HRBEK is the author of the novel Not on Fire, but Burning, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and an NPR Best Book of the Year. His short fiction has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Tin House, and numerous literary journals, and in The Best American Short Stories anthology.
