There’s a review of Russell B Farr and Nick Evans’ soon-to-be-published anthology The Workers’ Paradise over at As If. My story ‘Right to Work’ gets a good rap. Reviewer Simon Petrie says:
“In Cat Sparks’ “Right to Work”, June is a seventy-year-old tea-lady at a hospital who finds a stray teenage girl, “too wired” to even realise she’s lost. “Right” is a story filled with powerful understatement, with less attention to backstory than the preceding two pieces, and I think it’s stronger for that: it’s a story which places you very much in the moment, and even the minor characters have a sense of life and depth to them. As with “Adjudication”, too, it’s fiction with enough of a dark sense of truth to be disturbing. “
(snip)
“The stories in Paradise aren’t uniformly strong, but I don’t think I’d label any of them as undeniably substandard. For my money, the most successful stories here are those by Brown, Sparks, and Burrage, each of which deals unflinchingly with the social injustice evident in our present-day labour market, and “Rapturama” which I’d say is the pick of the more light-hearted treatments of the issue.”
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This review is particularly interesting to me because I came very close to pulling this story from the book in the proofing stage. Upon rereading my story, I became concerned that it wasn’t all that interesting. That it was a bit too subtle to be engaging… or something. I decided against removing the story because I didn’t want to do the dirty on a fellow small press publisher & stuff up Ticonderoga’s page layout so close to press. But I seriously considered it. Petrie is now the second reviewer to respond favourably to Right to Work. I guess it goes to show that sometimes authors aren’t the best judge of their own work. Or something…
6 Comments
Wooty congrats on the excellent review!!!!
And you’re right. All a writer can do is their best work at the time. What is made of that work is up to readers.
Yeah. And I guess this response is better than the more common reversal. You know, when you write something you reckon is shit hot & then no one else responds to it.
Oh, that’s just galling. Or worse, they tell you polysyllabically exactly why it *isn’t* shit hot.
Gruesome!
Seriously, Cat, I think it’s the best story of yours I’ve read.
But then, I like subtle SF. 🙂 And I found it very engaging, too. It had a Connie Willis vibe about it. Only Australian. And Sparksish.
Good to hear someone else agrees with me!
well, thank you, Tansy… (Hmmm… thinking maybe she hasn’t read many of my other stories…)
I liked it too. Glad you didn’t pull it 🙂