« The BDO HQ | Home | The Dervish House - Ian McDonald »
September 6, 2010
Somadeva: A Sky River Sutra By Vandana Singh
The second story in The Short Story Club (2) is Somadeva: A Sky River Sutra By Vandana Singh published in Strange Horizons. It's a story of an Indian man recreated as a virtual entity on a spaceship. Probably. The narrator is a story teller, and there are stories within stories. Then the story peels back to be a dream inside a story. Or something. There's a telling line in the story:
The fact that you can't wrest meaning from everything like fruit from trees--that meaning is a matter not only of story but of what the listener brings to the tale--all that is not something she can face at the moment.
So whilst the story was different and the language quite intriguing I wasn't really interested in trying to figure out what was going on and to wrest a meaning from the stories within stories. I'm sure some people will love analysing the short stories and discovering their purpose, the allegories or the messages, but I just wasn't in the mood for it.
More discussion over at Torque Control.