Tor.com, July 2023
“Detonation Boulevard” by Alastair Reynolds
“What It Means to Be a Car” by James Patrick Kelly
Reviewed by László Szegedi
Tor.com celebrates its 15th Anniversary and thus they are “reposting some gems from the more than 600 stories we’ve published since 2008.” This review contains only the two originals, written by my childhood SF writer heroes—it’s good to read them again.
“Detonation Boulevard” by Alastair Reynolds
The beginning is quite exciting as the writer sets the tone like a pro, starting a car race on one of Jupiter’s moons, Io. But the stakes don’t really seem to be too high at the same time, because of the friendly terms the heroine is with her opponents. The technical inventions like “ejection cockpit” or rescue drones mentioned aren’t too interesting either.
As the topos of racing has been overused in SF and action movies too much, the linear story plot couldn’t quite keep my attention. What made it different from other races was the surface of Io, being huge and hazardous all along.
The text itself is nicely written, though, with scientific descriptions of the unfriendly area, and some interesting thoughts about artificial human extensions and racing. But neither the plot nor the endgame brought any surprises.
It’s worth taking a good look at the illustration painted by Ben Zweifel, being a beautiful image of both the racing cars and the troubled surface of Io.
“What It Means to Be a Car” by James Patrick Kelly
Nice setting with talking cars in the near future, this felt like an episode from a fun SF TV show. But as the story progressed, I couldn’t help feeling I’d already seen this particular story in the 2017 Black Mirror episode “Black Museum.” The similarity is too much, and even though I realize our widely expanding culture in the 21st century opens up new territory on all fronts, we still cannot expect completely original material. But as I was reading this short story, I couldn’t get my mind away from “Black Museum.” Here’s a short list of story elements that are quite similar to both, trying to leave this current story as spoiler free as possible:
– The setting starts with a tour of a memorial property, a broken-down exhibit
– There is a tour guy; well. not a lazy human employee but a car with AI
– The tour guest has a troubled, hurt past connected to the person
– The continuous dialog format, from where we get to know what happened in the last decade
– Human minds uploaded to the cloud, organized by an evil corporation
And even though the resolution of the main conflict is not exactly the same as the one in the show, there are some close resemblances.
Thus, I felt disappointed reading this short story. Even though the text was much denser and more action-packed than the other original Tor story this month, I didn’t feel the same excitement and fascination as from Kelly’s previous stories, as in the case of “The Best Christmas Ever” which I even translated to my native language back when it originally appeared.
László is an SF enthusiast living in middle Europe, who also writes songs in the attic.