The Evolution of Science Fiction discussion
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Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 58, March 2015
Short Stories
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August 2024 Short story: "An Ever-Expanding Flash of Light" by Timothy Mudie
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Is there anything to this story besides the lengths someone will go to to save his partner? There are only a few well-worn tropes: hibernation, time dilation, space opera boot camp, inscrutable aliens, but there's nothing new with any of them and they don't intersect in interesting ways. I find myself searching for a point which doesn't seem to exist.
Mostly in agreement with Ryan. I feel like the story can be summed up as: (view spoiler). The boot camp and aliens are tangential asides. The most generous take I can give is that it's about how the universe will always find a way to kick our asses no matter how technologically advanced we think we are. We may as well accept this and enjoy the moment.
The woman seems accept the inevitable from the start, while the main character goes to all these impossible lengths to try to fix the situation. The “light cone” described in the penultimate section of the story and referenced in the title seems to be important, but I haven’t figured out exactly how. Is it just a way of expressing a fatalistic view of life?
I thought it was supposed to represent the wide range of possibilities in life, but that doesn't really seem to fit the story's main theme, so maybe that's wrong.
I looked up the Wikipedia page for Light Cone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_coneIt feels like - in the paragraph that Stephen refers to - the author has copied some of this page with minor edits, in the manner of a secondary school student who doesn't understand the concept well enough to write it in their own terms. Saying that the flash of light is "simultaneously moving into the future and past" belies the fact that this is a thought-experiment about causality. It's like the author glanced at and misunderstood the diagram on the right. No one is claiming that light actually travels into the past (unless I'm the one misunderstanding!). The past light cone is the cone of historical events from which light can conceivably travel to the "flash point".
Perhaps I'm being judgemental but the more I mull over this story, the less impressed I get!
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It reminds me of some military sci fi, where the focus is on the soldiers and their thoughts while the aliens are just "others." We only get glimpses of Tone's 5 tours through space, and never learn what the aim or goal of space travel is for these earthlings.
At least it was a short story, not an entire novel!
Natalie wrote: "I did choose this story quickly."No worries! I find I sometimes get just as much out of reading and reviewing a terrible story as I do a good one. In this case it made me brush up on light cones, which I haven't thought about since university. I appreciate your work choosing and moderating the stories. I hope that negative reviews don't come across as ungrateful.
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