This series focuses on stories that are both well-written and do something that I find interesting from a technical perspective. This week is a party in the CIA U.S.A.
It’s not often that I read a story that seems to really understand the U.S.A. The immensity, the diversity, the neighborly love, the isolation, the xenophobia…it’s all hard to wrap a story around. I mean, sure, you can throw a couple of guys in a car and have them drive across the continent trying to fill the voids where their souls should be with empty pleasures, but that’s only a narrow sliver of the American experience.
I thought American Gods did a great job at the novel level, and I have to hand it to the Scandinavia and the World webcomic for doing a surprisingly thorough analysis of the American character in a single strip. For short stories, though, I think American Shadow, by Beth Cato and published in Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, is the best I’ve found so far. On one level , it’s about the struggle of a girl to rescue a friend’s benevolent family kappa while still grieving her imprisonment in the Japanese internment camps. On another level, though, it’s also a touching evaluation of the costs and benefits of the baggage (both emotional and spiritual) that emigrants brought with them to the U.S.A., as well as what the U.S.A. gave back to them.
When someone says the phrase “United States of America,” that phrase has a widely agreed-upon meaning, but that meaning is always evolving. This story is a glimpse of a piece of that evolution. It’s only one glimpse of one small piece, but I think it helps us understand the whole, and it does so while telling an engaging story. It’s worth a read.