Customer Reviews

Super Flat Times: Stories

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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

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.

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.

[...]There is an introductory piece and "fragment" before we even get to the first story in this book (which is almost more of a fractured kind of novel than traditional collection of short stories). I find the rest of it consistent with the beginning and completely necessary. I wouldn't trust the opinion of someone who only thumbs through books in the fashion described below anyway. This book is something to be read all the way through. It's even better the second time around and promises to age well and improve with many readings. Brilliantly insightful, painfully humorous, and meticulously well written to boot. Think Nathanael West meets P.K. Dick (Dick needs West's help w/his prose) and someone along the lines of Felipe Alfau or Adolfo Bioys-Casares (or later Borges, for that matter). Please, don't just breeze through a fraction of this (or any other book) at a Borders, or wherever, and walk away with the smug assumption you've skimmed the cream off the thing. Buy this book, read the hell out of it and feel good you're supporting an author who's actually living and working without pandering to the dummied-down tastes of a culture that, quite frankly, seems intent on descending into the kinds of conditions he so aptly and imaginatively describes. This is easily the "Winesburg, Ohio" of the future. Ours.

Almost impossible to explain. It's as if Burroughs and Edward Bond fell asleep too close to one another one night and gave birth to conjoined nightmares with a fanged sense of humor.

A new form of fiction is making itself felt here and there. It's called "slipstream" for some reason; the name comes from Bruce Sterling, one of the founders of cyberpunk. As the name might imply, slipstream fiction is notoriously hard to define. Even Sterling himself could only tell us that slipstream is the sort of fiction that "simply makes you feel very strange".

Clearly, certain kinds of science fiction lend themselves easily to this format, although a good many slipstream candidates come from more mainstream genres. One way or the other, though, "Super Flat Times" would seem to include itself in the slipstream idea. Frequently, while reading this collection, I felt so strange I could barely understand what I was seeing. Which could easily be my fault rather than Matthew Derby's, so let's see.

"Super Flat Times" appears to be a collection of Derby's previously published work, linked by a framing story explaining where these tales come from. The narrator of this framing story, a woman from a period some years after the age she describes, informs us that these "prayers" derive from air, the last breaths of a number of murdered individuals. Technology allows her to manipulate this air and learn that these victims lived and died at a time when the government tried to color the air, for reasons unknown. It didn't work - instead of coloring the air itself, the coloring agents solidified into chunks of floating clouds that blocked off the sun and made agriculture impossible. The only safe food left to eat was meat, processed to look and taste like fruits or vegetables or desserts. This weakened the population and made reproduction difficult, so the government took to collecting the egg cells of women, injecting them with chemicals to stimulate egg growth when the natural process proved ineffective. Meanwhile, other technologies arose allowing people to communicate with the dead, make more horrible wars upon the living, and God knows what else. Pretty complex stuff for a slim volume of disconnected short stories.

Now, here's the thing: Looking over that last paragraph, I notice there's a whole lot of interesting and even disturbing detail, but not much regarding what the book is about. I'm sorry to say that this is because "Super Flat Times" is exactly about not much.

I can imagine what Derby and/or his publishers had in mind. Clearly, these stories have much in common. Like other writers, such as Cordwainer Smith or Gordon Dickson, Derby constructed a future timeline and hung a number of stories on it, so that several of them refer to events covered in other tales. Several of them also refer to events or ideas never described, as you might find chapters in books on the War of 1812 that refer to the Whiskey Rebellion without ever explaining what that was. It makes the stories in "Super Flat Times" seem more real, since they share a common history.

Not bad. On the other hand, there's so much unexplained shared history in these tales that there's little room for anything else, especially any chance to identify or empathize with these characters. They suffer extraordinary pain and loss, but Derby didn't give himself enough space to make it real for his readers. Take "Father Helmet", in which a young man buys a device that enables him to prevent the accident that killed his father, only to realize that he misses the robot who raised him more than he ever thought he would. You can see that everyone in this story goes through misery and emotional torment, but when it's all over, everything is back to the way it was before. Eh.

I was left with a similarly lackadaisical sense in reading most of these stories. It's likely that Derby had that exact effect in mind. The characters and the world itself of "Super Flat Times" slog through life with that same ennui, and it's not at all uncommon in slipstream fiction. I maintain, however, that one can write engaging stories about characters who are at the end of their tether - Paul Bowles, among others, was good at such writing. For all his inventiveness, Derby has failed at that particular task.

He certainly succeeded at making us feel very strange, though, and even revolted at times. You might expect that kind of feeling in the stories of war, but it's all over everything here. In addition to the distressing interference with natural air, for instance, the government in these tales decides to round up children after a while, and when that proves ineffective, rounds up egg cells from live women. Men head out to the woods for games that shortly find them turning on each other in earnest. I mentioned that these stories purport to come from the last breaths of murdered people - wait until you find out how they died. And all of this is disturbing, to be sure, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, and it's certainly effective. It does not, however, make for a very satisfying set of well-told tales. Instead, it's a group of interesting details with little or nothing to cling to.

Perhaps "Super Flat Times" would read more effectively without the framing device, which leads the reader to expect some sort of conclusion or revelation or something. Left on their own, these slices of enervated life might allow one's interest to develop more naturally, and the common elements might pique more interest if not forced into a designed pattern. Even with my disappointment at the lack of forward motion here, the details stuck with me for a good long while. I just wish the stories had, too.

Benshlomo says, Oh well - maybe next time.

A collection of short stories - well, vignettes is perhaps a better term - recounting a fictional future. And while it was a fast, engaging read, very ... more » reminiscent of _The Handmaid's Tale_, it frankly made little sense. The writing was good... but there wasn't a lot there. Maybe this would be better for a book club so that there could be a discussion about it... because, I must admit, some meaning was definitely lost on me. It was interesting, though I would have preferred this idea to be presented in the more traditional novel form... I never have been one for short stories, after all.

Using irony and absurdity with the delicacy and dexterity of a brain surgeon wielding a scalpel, Matthew Derby has created a dystopian future that serves as a vehicle to magnify the human condition in all its open ugliness and secret beauty.

The book is ostensibly a collection of stories, but the stories blend into a depiction of a society gone terribly wrong and a world where people have abdicated all responsibility to their community. All of the stories share thematic elements and convey a continuity that sets this book apart from a mere collection of short stories and places it in a category all it's own.

The ironic, absurd, and often hilarious elements of the stories' setting serve to abstract us in such a way that the only things we can identify with are the human dramas and emotional states that exist regardless of external surroundings and circumstances. In each story, the nature of human interaction and relationship is examined and reduced to it's raw, primal state.

The stories remind us that when the SUVs are gone, and Cable TV is no longer working, when all the distractions are removed for our lives, all we truly have is each other and our inherent value is not based on our possessions or our social status but rather, on our ability to relate and feel compassion for our fellows.

The introduction to this book was mind-blowingly beautiful, both creative and moving. I had high hopes for the stories which followed, but ultimately I was kind of disappointed by this book. It took me a while to figure out why this was. The author is clearly very talented. His ideas are fresh, sometimes to the point of being bizarre; his writing style is very polished; and his work feels very innovative. It's just that it's hard to find anyone to like in his stories. Most of the characters are unlikable and pathetic jerks.

The stories do remind me a lot of George Saunder's writing style, in their quirkiness and pacing. But unlike many of Saunder's stories, most of the ones in this book don't really have...plots. Not that a plot is the only point of fiction, but I guess I just found myself wanting some rising and falling action, and if not that, a resolution - a sense of hope. I realize that authors must write the world as they see it, but the world he writes about feels utterly devoid of compassion, and this book just started getting depressing after a while. And though the stories were technically good, I got tired of reading the same thing over and over again. Depressing person, experiences some depressing events, thinks some depressing thoughts, the end.

One of the better stories in the book was "The Father Helmet". In this story, the main character is a young boy whose father has died. He lives with a foster father, who is kind of a robot. The boy uses a telepathic helmet to speak to his father - the helmet enables him with practice to speak into his father's mind before he died. Eventually he disobeys the warning labels on the helmet and uses his telepathic influence to avert the events which led to his father's death. His father comes back to life and his robot faster-father instantly disappears. But nothing feels right about the situation. His dad seems out of place; he doesn't belong in this world anymore. The kid misses his foster father and wishes he would have left well enough alone. "So you brought me back from the dead as some sort of experiment?" the father asks. "Sort of," the kid says. This story actually does have a happy ending, kind of. The dad leaves and the kid uses his helmet to bring his foster father back, who is happy that the kid finally appreciates him.

I think this story is the best example of the author's potential. It is not "precious" or "cloying" by any means, but there is still a sense of redemption and hope that make the story feel finished to me. It is dark, but there is a point. But this story was among the best. Many of the other stories just did not have plot arcs or any conclusions. They were just extremely detailed, vivid portraits of unlikable characters living miserable lives, sometimes ending in death, sometimes not. In conclusion, I think Matthew Derby is a really good writer, but I wish he would turn his talents toward writing more hopeful and enjoyable stories.

Derby's vision(s) are collected as a disturbing series of interwoven short stories that congeal into a sickly whole as troubling as any Burroughs or Burgess vision. Hard to look at, even harder to avoid looking at. Pass the A-1...