Review: _The Short While_

[jducoeur]

Time to bring The Review of Obscure Books out for once -- this one's definitely less-known. I picked up The Short While some time back (I probably backed the Kickstarter). I got around to finishing it tonight, so let's give it a look.

tl;dr -- quiet, personal-scale speculative fiction, less about the "science" and more about how people and cultures evolve. Not exactly gripping, but quite good.

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This is a pretty big graphic novel, well over 400 pages, and doesn't follow simple conventions. It's not all comic-book style -- much of the book is more illustrated text, interspersed with straight-up comics, as fits the story of the moment.

It's very, very personal. It's the story of Paolo and Colin, who enjoy a sweet, loving relationship until the day that tears them apart, following their story both before and after.

It's set in the future, although how far isn't at all clear, nor very relevant. (I'd say at least fifty years, but beyond that it's hard to say.) Thirty years ago, the Administration, a somewhat brutal totalitarian regime, finally fell. Since then, people have been slowly figuring out how to put the pieces back together.

This isn't a "post-apocalyptic" story -- it's not interested in being anywhere near that melodramatic. It's clear that a lot of people have died, the weather isn't great, and the technical underpinnings of our current time have largely decayed, but it's by no means a hellscape. Folks are filling into the buildings that are left, and figuring out where to rebuild; they're repurposing the leftover tech, including taking old sexbots and putting them to better uses. Communities rise and fall, not because of cataclysmic drama but just because People.

That's the world that Paolo and Colin live in, and there's nothing all that weird or bad about it to them -- it's just life. The story is more about their relationship; both of them somewhat complicated men, but whose love works until trauma finally drives a wedge in between them.

The story is told quite elliptically, often taking a detour of a dozen pages to talk about their youths, or their parents' history, or their other lovers, or the backstory of the past decades. It's less like a carefully-constructed novel, more a story being told about some friends, filling in the relevant details as they come up.

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It's a very good book. One of the pull quotes calls it a "thriller", and I don't agree -- while that key moment is a bit horrifying (and the trauma of it recurs through the story), this is a much more contemplative story than that word implies.

The world-building is fascinating -- really not very interested in fancy science, more about how people pull together and rebuild after things somewhat break down. The most interesting ideas are mainly about culture, reminding us of how complicated that always is, never falling into neat boxes. (Even the nasty Administration gets rather more nuanced as we learn more about it.)

It's a smart novel, and it expects a lot of the reader: there are a lot of characters and a lot of backstory, not all of it spelled out explicitly, but it makes sense as the story wends its way down the months and years.

Obviously, heavy on the queer content -- our protagonists are gay, and the majority of the other folks they spend time with are as well. That's not even remarkable here: queer phobias seem to have taken a back seat in this future culture.

The main content warning is for physical violence (the trauma at the center of the tale); there's also a bunch of implied horrors in the backstory, albeit mostly at a remove from our main characters. This is a world pulling itself together after some very bad times, but those times still resonate.

Overall, worth reading if you'd like something quiet and thoughtful -- notionally science fiction, but about the people far more than the gadgets.