Super Flat Times: Stories [Paperback]

Matthew Derby (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 2003

With a heightened sense of the boundless possibility and lurking doom that Orwell and Huxley once envisioned, Matthew Derby's stories provide a glimpse into an intricately imagined world: a world in which clouds are treated with behavioral serum, children are handicapped by their ability to float, and all food (including Popsicles) is made of meat.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Derby's unnerving, audaciously intelligent debut collection of satirical short stories is set in a future in which everything that could go wrong with current technologies does. The result is a brutal world in which language itself has suffered severe and systematic violence. Derby's characters can barely form or remember words, and the government controls what can and cannot be said. The era in question begins with the Super Flat Times in which mass executions are followed by the state's taking control of human reproduction. A foolhardy experiment has created battalions of "hard, dark, permanent clouds" that have made agriculture impossible, and Derby's glum, meat-fed characters no longer know the "joy of eating." In fact, there is no joy whatsoever, only a wan longing for the past. Think Orwell, Huxley, and Atwood, although Derby's bold cautionary tales are stylistically much stranger, more on the order of George Saunders and Tom Paine in their syntactical fracturing and intrinsic alienation, even as they are unique in the searing intimacy of their grim prophecies; weird, edgy wit; and the morbid fascination they evoke. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

"...a lofty achievement that combines...unexpected humor and brilliant language..." -- Oregonian, 7/20/03

...a hilarious, horrific, fascinating world...the resemblance to our own is as artful as it is unnerving. -- Joanna Scott, author of Make Believe and Tourmaline

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Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Back Bay Books; 1 edition (May 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316738573
• ISBN-13: 978-0316738576
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.8 x 8.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #826,818 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Has Franz Kafka Returned?, July 7, 2003

By 

FictionAddiction.NET - See all my reviews

This review is from: Super Flat Times: Stories (Paperback)

Matthew Derby is an author of disturbing short stories. His stories abound in non-sequiturs that scintillate and jangle the reader's senses. He examines ideas and notions that could easily be attributed to Franz Kafka, Phillip K. Dick or Kurt Vonnegut.

Super Flat Times is about a Kafka-esque future that bends the mind to incredible new shapes as you work to absorb the implications and play of this author's mind. It is also a stunning collection of author Derby's work, which has been published in a stellar array of current magazines.

The future that Matthew Derby envisions in this grouping of stories is that of a failed technology, which casts his characters in various modes of survival and relating of their history. There are six stories from the years 5 through 50, another six stories from the year 51 and another six stories from the years 52 through 59.

This future world is precisely and intricately created, drawing the reader into a maelstrom of conflicting emotions about the story, characters, ideas, notions and perhaps their own sanity. Is this good literature? Is it good reading? Is it worthwhile?

It is a thrill ride for those that like to read and are willing to cast aside conventional notions of what comprises writing and the resulting read.

Matthew Derby has a future...bright and shining, a new star in the authorial night sky.

A book for readers, a fine collection of short stories and, perhaps, the most successful tease you could read. Twenty-one tales or fragments that are sure to challenge and perhaps please

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Super Short Stories, April 28, 2003

By 

Tom D. (Detroit, MI) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Super Flat Times: Stories (Paperback)

It's Matthew Derby's world, and we're soon to be living in it.

I'm not sure what this new genre of writing will be called by the reviewing elite, but I'm going to scoop them with the term "future realism". Classify Derby with fellow future realist Ben Marcus (who it appears Marcus studied with at Brown), and his mastery of language and story structure is on par with what Marcus is producing.

This collection of intertwining stories reveals to us a world just slightly forward and to off the left of ours: things have changed slightly, subtly, and for the worse. Meat is the only edible product left, and the children are rewarded for their behavior with chocolate flavored meat cubes, leaving the parents to wonder why they are withholding the treat at all, when, in fact, everything is made from meat. Weapons have settings like "most hurt," synthetic clouds crash into skyscrapers and women have adhesive flaps over their ovaries, so the government can harvest eggs and control procreation.

All this is handled with both an overt darkness and wonderful sense of humor that keeps the stories from becoming repetitive. Gears shift from lively and bright to absolutely desolate from narrator to narrator, fleshing out the world as a whole, believable place.

Derby's language, sentences and story structures are fantastic. I found myself rereading passages again and again, and laughing out loud.

My favorite book of the year thus far: I couldn't wait to get home from work and finish it.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Harsh fragments woven into a dense, scary future..., April 23, 2003

By 

Christopher Betche (Jeffersonville, Indiana, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Super Flat Times: Stories (Paperback)

A good collection of short stories may be the hardest thing to produce in literature. Either some stand out from the rest, or the whole of them are mediocre. But the only successful sets are those that stand by themselves and yet combine into a cohesive whole. Super Flat Times by Matthew Derby is a unique and satisfying example. In this future imperfect, we see memory fragments - some short, some long - that reveal a world torn apart in transition. Transition to what? Even the narrator does not say. From sound weapons to meat popsicles to father helmets to roller coasters designed to kill, all the glimpses of those who did not survive the 'super flat times' provide understanding to those who did. Points of comparision include Brave New World and 1984. However, Bradbury's Martian Chronicles is the nearest cousin to Derby's brillant imagination. Yet the characters in Super Flat Times are not exploring a new planet, but rather the warped reality of their own homes and families. The work as a whole is less than 200 pages, perfect for two reasons: it's blessedly to the point in this age of 600 page meandering monoliths, and because you will finish it once you start, the reading won't take the whole night. Here's hoping Matthew Derby continues to imagine, because I will follow him wherever his thought goes.