What do you think?
Rate this book
No Flight Without the Shatter
From the wondrous mind of Brooke Bolander, the author of The Only Harmless Great Thing, who "shares literary DNA with Le Guin" (John Scalzi).
After the world's end, the last young human learns a final lesson from Earth's remaining animals.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
After the world's end, the last young human learns a final lesson from Earth's remaining animals.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
32 pages, Kindle Edition
First published August 15, 2018
25 people are currently reading
254 people want to read
About the author
Brooke Bolander
30 books236 followersBrooke Bolander writes weird things of indeterminate genre, most of them leaning rather heavily towards fantasy or general all-around weirdness. She attended the University of Leicester 2004-2007 studying History and Archaeology and is an alum of the 2011 Clarion Writers’ Workshop at UCSD. Her stories have been featured in Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Nightmare, Uncanny, and various other fine purveyors of the fantastic. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Hugo, Locus, Theodore Sturgeon, and World Fantasy awards, much to her unending bafflement. Her debut book with Tor.com Publishing, THE ONLY HARMLESS GREAT THING, is scheduled for a 2018 release. She is represented by Michael Curry at Donald Maass Literary Agency.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 59 reviews
August 20, 2018
“We were many too, once,” she repeats, barely a whisper. “I really am sorry.”
this is an imaginative, elegiac story, a missive from the place between being and not; a signal from the space between the final breath and whatever comes after.
in this space, a group of endlings assemble, briefly, as oddly-matched housemates; tiger, rhino, dodo, shrew, pigeon, predator/prey alike, where they say goodbye to the world, telling their stories before being ushered out on a noah’s ark-like vessel into the sunset of extinction.
there is also one human among them; an orphaned girl named linnea who has a choice - to join her found family on their journey or to stick around a bit longer.
it's a very solid story. bolander’s writing is as strong here as in The Only Harmless Great Thing, and it draws the reader in and keeps them pinned.
she writes animals in captivity so wonderfully sorrowfully well:
They capture a few of the young birds alive and send them back across your waters. The last will be put on display as a public attraction, a curiosity kept in a dank, dark little chamber at the back of a shop. She will huddle into herself, feathers fluffed to ward off the chill of this gray place so far from her tropical homeland. The people who pay their pennies to see her will laugh at how round she looks, how plump and silly and vacant-eyed.
it’s a very moving story; poetic, thoughtful, emotionally resonant.
that's all i'm saying: "short review for a short story" goal intact!
read it for yourself here:
https://www.tor.com/2018/08/15/no-fli...
come to my blog!
October 10, 2018
I'm on a run of reading a bunch of Tor.Com's original short fiction and I'm sad to say this is the worst of what I've read so far. There was no real story here just a bunch of metaphors clogged together all screaming the same social message over and over and over again. I'm not against the topics the author wants to address but I hate it when a message overwhelms the story as I felt happened in this one. If an author puts little effort into the story or characters then I have zero incentive to invest in either myself.
Some day soon, when the ice across the ocean turns to hungry waves, all the rest will follow, sliding beneath an oil-slick surface as warm and empty as a mortician’s handshake.
Quite the metaphor. We all see the message here.
Those newly-hatched smokestacks on the horizon will slide beneath feather and skin and subclavius muscle with a hypodermic’s lethal care, a payload of jaundice injected with a belch and a billow, and the resulting buildup of toxins will ensure nothing bigger than a botfly ever darkens your horizon again. Your decay will smother the world, a dead bird huddling over an empty nest.
I've well and truly got the message now.
“Once upon a time,” Auntie Ben says, seated beside Linnea’s bed, “there was a cage. But that cage is rusted all to hellfire and back now, and the men who built it are bones in the dust so dry not even a dark-flanked yearling would stop to take a sniff. Nobody remembers a damn thing about those men. Nobody remembers their chickens, their guns, or their stupid cage with the concrete floor. But they remember us, my little naked joey, sharp-toothed pride of my pouch. We were beautiful and strong. Our stripes left long shadows across their minds. There were plenty left to remember us, but who will be left to remember your kind?”
Yeah, I got it! Protect the environment. Humanity bad. Though this one did add in a fresh message to piss me off: the megalomaniacal need for recognition. Fuck that! What is this obsession with legacy anyway?
Pretend you are the sea. Pretend you are a life-filled veil of green and gold and black and blue covering 70 percent of the land and most of its mysteries. Some day soon you will choke on refuse. A growing knot of bottles and bags and tires and zipties and rubber duckies and microbeads and bright plastic bric-a-brac will catch fast in your throat, suffocating all life from your deep places. You’ll bloat like a dead thing, an albatross chick’s belly packed tight and stretched grotesque with all the indigestible junk you’ve been fed. And when the last coral has withered—when the final whale has sung her question to an empty abyssal plain and there’s not even a hagfish left to mourn her passing—you will rise primeval, stinking of pig effluent and rotting fish, mercury and motor oil, an entire undead ecosystem marching on the cities of the coast.
Quite the visual. Sadly by this point I'm feeling a little bruised after being beaten so much with this giant metaphorical club!
Pretend you are the wind. Some day soon you will kill everything you touch, spreading a mushroom cloud’s poison seed from desert to delta to distant island. Death will fruit as heedlessly cheerful as any invasive species mankind has ever sown, unconcerned with distance or climatological delineations, and the world will slowly return to silence. All the world’s a graveyard. Like the last soldier in some grim and cautionary fairy tale, you are tasked with whistling past its gates forever.
I'm just grabbing random bits of the story now since it is all one of a kind!
“They cut the trees down, one by one, and my people soon followed,” she finishes. “Those hills are bare now. They know the meaning of silence.”
I could go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on about quotes like this but I'm sure you guys agree the repetitiveness gets a bit tiresome lol!
For me this was just a bad short story. One that was all message and no story and stuffed full of the type of self-indulgent ridiculously over the top metaphorical writing I loathe. Total dud for me!
Rating: 1 star.
Some day soon, when the ice across the ocean turns to hungry waves, all the rest will follow, sliding beneath an oil-slick surface as warm and empty as a mortician’s handshake.
Quite the metaphor. We all see the message here.
Those newly-hatched smokestacks on the horizon will slide beneath feather and skin and subclavius muscle with a hypodermic’s lethal care, a payload of jaundice injected with a belch and a billow, and the resulting buildup of toxins will ensure nothing bigger than a botfly ever darkens your horizon again. Your decay will smother the world, a dead bird huddling over an empty nest.
I've well and truly got the message now.
“Once upon a time,” Auntie Ben says, seated beside Linnea’s bed, “there was a cage. But that cage is rusted all to hellfire and back now, and the men who built it are bones in the dust so dry not even a dark-flanked yearling would stop to take a sniff. Nobody remembers a damn thing about those men. Nobody remembers their chickens, their guns, or their stupid cage with the concrete floor. But they remember us, my little naked joey, sharp-toothed pride of my pouch. We were beautiful and strong. Our stripes left long shadows across their minds. There were plenty left to remember us, but who will be left to remember your kind?”
Yeah, I got it! Protect the environment. Humanity bad. Though this one did add in a fresh message to piss me off: the megalomaniacal need for recognition. Fuck that! What is this obsession with legacy anyway?
Pretend you are the sea. Pretend you are a life-filled veil of green and gold and black and blue covering 70 percent of the land and most of its mysteries. Some day soon you will choke on refuse. A growing knot of bottles and bags and tires and zipties and rubber duckies and microbeads and bright plastic bric-a-brac will catch fast in your throat, suffocating all life from your deep places. You’ll bloat like a dead thing, an albatross chick’s belly packed tight and stretched grotesque with all the indigestible junk you’ve been fed. And when the last coral has withered—when the final whale has sung her question to an empty abyssal plain and there’s not even a hagfish left to mourn her passing—you will rise primeval, stinking of pig effluent and rotting fish, mercury and motor oil, an entire undead ecosystem marching on the cities of the coast.
Quite the visual. Sadly by this point I'm feeling a little bruised after being beaten so much with this giant metaphorical club!
Pretend you are the wind. Some day soon you will kill everything you touch, spreading a mushroom cloud’s poison seed from desert to delta to distant island. Death will fruit as heedlessly cheerful as any invasive species mankind has ever sown, unconcerned with distance or climatological delineations, and the world will slowly return to silence. All the world’s a graveyard. Like the last soldier in some grim and cautionary fairy tale, you are tasked with whistling past its gates forever.
I'm just grabbing random bits of the story now since it is all one of a kind!
“They cut the trees down, one by one, and my people soon followed,” she finishes. “Those hills are bare now. They know the meaning of silence.”
I could go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on about quotes like this but I'm sure you guys agree the repetitiveness gets a bit tiresome lol!
For me this was just a bad short story. One that was all message and no story and stuffed full of the type of self-indulgent ridiculously over the top metaphorical writing I loathe. Total dud for me!
Rating: 1 star.
August 16, 2018
Brooke Bolander is a name I've come to trust, and this new short story only adds more weight to said trust.
As an author she gives voice to those who can't reach her audience themselves - whether it be executed elephants, ignored minorities, a force of vengeance for the misused. This time, the last members of now long gone species lend their voices to a melancholy retelling of their last days.
Read it free here: https://www.tor.com/2018/08/15/no-fli...
As an author she gives voice to those who can't reach her audience themselves - whether it be executed elephants, ignored minorities, a force of vengeance for the misused. This time, the last members of now long gone species lend their voices to a melancholy retelling of their last days.
Read it free here: https://www.tor.com/2018/08/15/no-fli...
January 27, 2019
People who love long descriptive sentences and beautiful, sensual similes and metaphors (usually involving some sensation like an ache behind your breast bone, an emptiness behind your ribs, etc.) probably love Bolander's style much more than I ever will. I enjoy some of the imagery here, but find the description more purple and tedious than engrossing and beautiful. Good ideas. Lovely execution. Not concrete enough, lean enough, nor plain-speaking enough for me. I really don't understand the comparison to Le Guin either.
On the really bright side, the artwork for this story is by Victo Ngai, and I adore it, and basically anything Ngai does is pure gold, IMO.
On the really bright side, the artwork for this story is by Victo Ngai, and I adore it, and basically anything Ngai does is pure gold, IMO.
November 10, 2024
This is beautifully written – Brooke Bolander is unbelievably talented – but didn’t hit for me personally.
May 31, 2021
With language as beautiful and evocative as the frontispiece, Bolander slays her readership in this heartbreaking piece about extinction. My difficulty lay in the heavy use of metaphor and imagery - each sentence carried so much weight that by the end of the story I was exhausted.
When she does bother speaking, Linnea listens, hoarding every word against future silences. “Hatching is not the end of what lies inside the egg, only the end of the shell around it. There’s no flight without the shatter, and no flock without the flight. What we’re made of will go on. A fledgling in some other place and time will look up for guidance and maybe see the path we leave behind, even when all of this as it is”—she flutters her free hand at the darkened desert—“dries and blows away. Change is comforting, in that way.”
September 25, 2024
Very different to the last two stories I read by her. Apocalyptic, end of the world. A requiem for all the species we extinguished with our greed and incomprehension. We meet the Dodo and the Tasmanian Devil and other long gone animals. One human is there to witness it all, till the bitter end. And like she said, „it‘s.... all so.... dumb.“
Interesting. Not really my kind of thing, but full of deeper meaning, messages between the lines, maybe a little preachy. True, though. We just don‘t listen.
Here to be found for free:
https://www.tor.com/2018/08/15/no-fli...
Author‘s webpage: http://brookebolander.com
Interesting. Not really my kind of thing, but full of deeper meaning, messages between the lines, maybe a little preachy. True, though. We just don‘t listen.
Here to be found for free:
https://www.tor.com/2018/08/15/no-fli...
Author‘s webpage: http://brookebolander.com
August 21, 2018
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.
~Joni Mitchell
I rarely read short fiction, especially that which, like No Flight Without the Shatter, reads like an exercise in obtuse and weird, stitched together with pretty prose.
But this one gave me some powerful feels.
On the surface the narrative explores the last days of Linnea, the last human on Earth and her aunties, the ghosts/human embodiments of three extinct animals--a thylacine, a dodo, and a passenger pigeon.
For me, the girl and her aunties were metaphors. The girl, being humanity; that portion of human kind that possesses a conscience, aware of the short-sighted destruction it has wrought on other species. Hers is the melancholy of those of us who care--those who don't believe humans are the center of creation but instead just another animal on the planet--suffer daily. It's a melancholy given powerful urgency in light of recent events in American politics.
Her aunties being the ever-present reminders of what greed has taken from the planet. They remind me of Prince Nuada's statement in Hellboy, the Golden Army.
We die and the world will be poorer for it.
The story speaks of humanity's inability to change, which I see as the inability to be more than atavistic, hungry creatures, destroyers of worlds, etc., and instead something far-seeing and wise.
A lovely cautionary tale, or a lamentation for beautiful things lost.
They’ve done their best, her aunties. There’s a gulf between them that no ship can cross, but they’ve tried very hard, and they love her despite her humanity. Linnea gropes for words, a shape to fold her feelings into. Her voice sticks like a rusted pump drawing up dust from an empty well.
“If I call,” she says, “will you come back?”
They watch the question drift to earth together. Auntie Martha sighs, soft as eiderdown, and wraps her arms around Linnea.
“Oh, little squab. Little naked thing.”
June 2, 2019
Poignant and beautiful in its sadness.
January 27, 2022
“We weren’t very good at this,” she repeats. “And we took everybody else with us. But we weren’t all bad. We had potato crisps, and ice cream, and we built farmhouses and wrote songs and told stories. Maybe next time will be okay. Maybe we’ll turn into something better at changing once we fly.”
love brooke bolander short stories. love getting thrown into a deep end of gorgeously inventive prose + "what the fuck is going on" and then watching the answer to that unpeel very very slowly until i'm in tears ✌️ <-- in tears
how do i sell this without spoiling it. patching the premise together is half the pathos of it. if you care about conservation and animals that have gone extinct and also about humanity and storytelling you should read it here online for free. what if the world's last human girl was raised by three aunts who definitely Aren't human but love her even though they have every reason not to. i'm a shell
Read
November 14, 2018"Pretend you are the land. Pretend you are a place far away, the last vibrant V of green and gold and tessellated rock before the sea and sky slither south unchecked for three thousand lonesome turns of a tern’s wing. Once upon a time the waters rose to cut you off from your mother continent, better independence through drowning. Some day soon, when the ice across the ocean turns to hungry waves, all the rest will follow, sliding beneath an oil-slick surface as warm and empty as a mortician’s handshake."
An anthropocene lament, and a reversed Noah's Ark, with the last individuals of all the species we so heedlessly destroyed preceding us into the flames and the darkness. In a way it reminds me of Dunsany at his most fabulist, particularly Fifty-One Tales, into which I've been dipping again of late. There's the same sense of the vastness and horror of time, the impermanence of all things and the crimes of humanity. But even at his bleakest he surely never imagined we would raze quite so much, so thoroughly or so soon. It's free to read on Tor.com, though I'd advise not doing so if you're feeling remotely fragile.
An anthropocene lament, and a reversed Noah's Ark, with the last individuals of all the species we so heedlessly destroyed preceding us into the flames and the darkness. In a way it reminds me of Dunsany at his most fabulist, particularly Fifty-One Tales, into which I've been dipping again of late. There's the same sense of the vastness and horror of time, the impermanence of all things and the crimes of humanity. But even at his bleakest he surely never imagined we would raze quite so much, so thoroughly or so soon. It's free to read on Tor.com, though I'd advise not doing so if you're feeling remotely fragile.
September 28, 2018
Short and sweet - stunningly elegiac, beautifully written. Not sure how I'd describe it to anyone else, but if you like the sound of a sideways, lyrical look at humanity's destruction of the world, give this a go.
August 15, 2018
Oh hey, did you see that crushed pulpy mess of purple and red on the floor?
That's just my heart after it's been squashed into nothingness by this story.
I just. Brooke Bolander is SO FRIGGING GOOD at writing stories that make you want to cry a Spongebob-esque sweater of tears but at the same time give you a shred of hope that things don't always have to be awful, that even in the worst timelines there are things worth loving, worth saving.
READ THIS PLEASE AND SUFFER
BUT ENJOY THE SUFFERING. ENJOY IT IMMENSELY
I DID
That's just my heart after it's been squashed into nothingness by this story.
I just. Brooke Bolander is SO FRIGGING GOOD at writing stories that make you want to cry a Spongebob-esque sweater of tears but at the same time give you a shred of hope that things don't always have to be awful, that even in the worst timelines there are things worth loving, worth saving.
READ THIS PLEASE AND SUFFER
BUT ENJOY THE SUFFERING. ENJOY IT IMMENSELY
I DID
August 15, 2018
Absolutely staggering prose in a tight little story of eco-horror.
September 10, 2018
"Chance of survival: less than one percent."
"Silence. Total and absolute."
Reading this invoked the exact same reaction as did listening to Carl Sagan speak of his fears for humanity's future in the final episode of Cosmos, "Who Speaks for Earth?" There was the same desolation and the same sense of hopeless, pointless waste that could have been prevented again and again but for humanity's stubborn refusal to learn.
Also refreshingly, this story managed to avoid turning into a preachy diatribe on how awful humanity is. The narrative wasn't exactly free from blame; indeed, it placed the responsibility for the state of the world exactly where it belonged. That's just not where the main focus was. This wasn't so much an attack on the human race as a eulogy for its victims—for the species that were hunted or crowded or poisoned into extinction, for the barren hunk of inhospitable rock that used to be a living, breathing planet.
And it is powerful. From the fiery horrors of the Earth's last gasps to the tenderness and love between the last surviving human and the animals who raised her, all of them among the first species to be driven to extinction by humans... all were used in tandem to deliver the biggest emotional wallop.
As bleak as the meat of the story was, it also ended on a hopeful note, . While it's left ambiguous what comes after, there's an implication that all is not lost, and that maybe someday, somewhere, there will be a chance to do it better.
"Silence. Total and absolute."
Reading this invoked the exact same reaction as did listening to Carl Sagan speak of his fears for humanity's future in the final episode of Cosmos, "Who Speaks for Earth?" There was the same desolation and the same sense of hopeless, pointless waste that could have been prevented again and again but for humanity's stubborn refusal to learn.
Also refreshingly, this story managed to avoid turning into a preachy diatribe on how awful humanity is. The narrative wasn't exactly free from blame; indeed, it placed the responsibility for the state of the world exactly where it belonged. That's just not where the main focus was. This wasn't so much an attack on the human race as a eulogy for its victims—for the species that were hunted or crowded or poisoned into extinction, for the barren hunk of inhospitable rock that used to be a living, breathing planet.
And it is powerful. From the fiery horrors of the Earth's last gasps to the tenderness and love between the last surviving human and the animals who raised her, all of them among the first species to be driven to extinction by humans... all were used in tandem to deliver the biggest emotional wallop.
As bleak as the meat of the story was, it also ended on a hopeful note, . While it's left ambiguous what comes after, there's an implication that all is not lost, and that maybe someday, somewhere, there will be a chance to do it better.
August 31, 2018
What a pleasant surprise here! This shortie was captivating and thought provoking, leaving me stewing in the dark message Bolander portrays here till I am left profoundly saddened by the fate of our characters. I simply love authors that can invoke emotions and feelings to this level, so bravo!
This little gem has been a sort of palate cleanser for me, clearing my mind of previous reads and opening it up for my next set of books. It is intense and stimulating, yet left me feeling refreshed. This is a tremendously worthwhile read, and will probably take most folks less than 20 minutes to absorb (even being careful).
So when you are done reading whatever you are into now, stop and take a moment with this short story and enjoy! While somber and dark, this work will leave you feeling a new appreciation for writers of good short stories.
This little gem has been a sort of palate cleanser for me, clearing my mind of previous reads and opening it up for my next set of books. It is intense and stimulating, yet left me feeling refreshed. This is a tremendously worthwhile read, and will probably take most folks less than 20 minutes to absorb (even being careful).
So when you are done reading whatever you are into now, stop and take a moment with this short story and enjoy! While somber and dark, this work will leave you feeling a new appreciation for writers of good short stories.
December 29, 2019
this is one part fantasy, one part sci-fi, one part bittersweet post-apocalyptic musing on humanity having killed our planet. sad, sweet, important.
August 11, 2020
A humanidade continua a destruir o planeta a cada minuto de cada dia. Rios são poluídos, florestas são devastadas, animais são mortos. Somos parasitas de nosso próprio planeta. Mas, David Attenborough, um famoso biólogo e apresentador de TV já disse em um de seus vários programas que apesar de o ser humano ser finito e passageiro, a Terra continuará a existir depois que a Era do Homem tiver acabado. E esse momento pode chegar em um prazo acelerado se essa destruição persistir e não fizermos nada a respeito. Nessa bela narrativa, Brooke Bolander narra o alvorecer da humanidade representada na figura de Linnea, uma jovem e inocente menina criada por três tias que representam os últimos animais que restaram na Terra.
Bolander tem uma escrita poética linda. Fiquei encantado com o ritmo e o encadeamento de palavras que ela faz. Experimentem ler em voz alta as frases dela. Percebam como existe sonoridade e ritmo nelas. Ao mesmo tempo não é uma leitura fácil. Aos leitores que sentirem dificuldade com o texto, não se intimidem com isso; releiam. Eu precisei ler pelo menos umas três vezes porque a cada nova leitura algumas passagens ficavam mais claras para mim. É desafiadora, mas vai te recompensar ao final com momentos belos. Em alguns momentos mais para o final, cheguei a me emocionar com a forma como tudo chega ao fim. Vejam esta passagem por exemplo (tradução livre feita por mim):
"você é a terra, e você lê a mensagem alto e claro: uma missiva vinda do lugar entre ser e não ser; um sinal do espaço entre o sopro final e aquilo que vem depois."
A narrativa é feita a partir de dois pontos de vista: o da própria Terra e um em terceira pessoa com Linnea. O ponto de vista da própria Terra é uma espécie de segunda pessoa e com isso eu trago para vocês outra característica desse conto da Bolander: o simbolismo presente em vários momentos da narrativa. Não quero contar os símbolos porque é legal a gente pegá-los enquanto fazemos nossa reflexão, mas um deles eu gostaria de comentar porque é algo que eu deduzi a partir da minha percepção. Linnea é criada por três tias: Marta, Rose e Anne. Podemos entender essas tias que a criam e a ensinam como as três fiandeiras também. As fiandeiras da mitologia grega, responsáveis pela vida dos seres humanos. E nada mais propício para as fiandeiras do que estarem presentes nos momentos finais dos seres humanos. Brooke Bolander foi uma descoberta para mim e não é à toa que ela tem sido muito elogiada por vários críticos de fantasia por onde ela publica. Pretendo acompanhar seus livros e contos sempre que possível.
Bolander tem uma escrita poética linda. Fiquei encantado com o ritmo e o encadeamento de palavras que ela faz. Experimentem ler em voz alta as frases dela. Percebam como existe sonoridade e ritmo nelas. Ao mesmo tempo não é uma leitura fácil. Aos leitores que sentirem dificuldade com o texto, não se intimidem com isso; releiam. Eu precisei ler pelo menos umas três vezes porque a cada nova leitura algumas passagens ficavam mais claras para mim. É desafiadora, mas vai te recompensar ao final com momentos belos. Em alguns momentos mais para o final, cheguei a me emocionar com a forma como tudo chega ao fim. Vejam esta passagem por exemplo (tradução livre feita por mim):
"você é a terra, e você lê a mensagem alto e claro: uma missiva vinda do lugar entre ser e não ser; um sinal do espaço entre o sopro final e aquilo que vem depois."
A narrativa é feita a partir de dois pontos de vista: o da própria Terra e um em terceira pessoa com Linnea. O ponto de vista da própria Terra é uma espécie de segunda pessoa e com isso eu trago para vocês outra característica desse conto da Bolander: o simbolismo presente em vários momentos da narrativa. Não quero contar os símbolos porque é legal a gente pegá-los enquanto fazemos nossa reflexão, mas um deles eu gostaria de comentar porque é algo que eu deduzi a partir da minha percepção. Linnea é criada por três tias: Marta, Rose e Anne. Podemos entender essas tias que a criam e a ensinam como as três fiandeiras também. As fiandeiras da mitologia grega, responsáveis pela vida dos seres humanos. E nada mais propício para as fiandeiras do que estarem presentes nos momentos finais dos seres humanos. Brooke Bolander foi uma descoberta para mim e não é à toa que ela tem sido muito elogiada por vários críticos de fantasia por onde ela publica. Pretendo acompanhar seus livros e contos sempre que possível.
January 27, 2024
A short story that poetically tells the story of the end of the world through the stories of land, sea, and air. Of extinct animals, including the Dodo, the Passenger pigeon, and the Thylacine. It's all very metaphorical and impressionist.
And possibly the sort of thing that will annoy some people because the point it is making - humans fuck things up - has become the song of the now. The background music to the modern world and we've got so bored of listening to it that it is just ignored or it is muzak to some people. Some people deny hearing it at all. Or think it is a fictional tune designed to drown out their mechanical moneymaking smoky fossil fuel tunes. And in a way it is boring and heavy handed, but it seems to me that no one is listening, apart from a few people and they're condemned as terrorists and lunatics.
So it seems to me Brooke Bolander is perfectly entitled to write a story like this one. I liked the style of it and the language. It made me want to read more of their work. General all round weirdness is perfect as far as I'm concerned.
I've read a lot of dystopian fiction recently. When you live in the probably beginnings of an actual dystopia then that's not surprising. When everything looks like the end of the world then write about the end of the world. I'd like a little more optimism, but it is hard to believe in utopias from the point of view of 2024.
But this feels optimist whilst at the same time being an elegy to a dying world.
And possibly the sort of thing that will annoy some people because the point it is making - humans fuck things up - has become the song of the now. The background music to the modern world and we've got so bored of listening to it that it is just ignored or it is muzak to some people. Some people deny hearing it at all. Or think it is a fictional tune designed to drown out their mechanical moneymaking smoky fossil fuel tunes. And in a way it is boring and heavy handed, but it seems to me that no one is listening, apart from a few people and they're condemned as terrorists and lunatics.
So it seems to me Brooke Bolander is perfectly entitled to write a story like this one. I liked the style of it and the language. It made me want to read more of their work. General all round weirdness is perfect as far as I'm concerned.
I've read a lot of dystopian fiction recently. When you live in the probably beginnings of an actual dystopia then that's not surprising. When everything looks like the end of the world then write about the end of the world. I'd like a little more optimism, but it is hard to believe in utopias from the point of view of 2024.
But this feels optimist whilst at the same time being an elegy to a dying world.
August 5, 2019
A deeply affecting short story with themes of sudden apocalyptic change and the wildness it will bring, in human and beast. A collection of the world’s last remaining animals, a young woman named Linnea, and the preparation for the end. The narration shifts from 3rd person to second person throughout as the author puts the consequences on the reader. The camera is out of focus for much of the story and it can be a challenge to follow a plot thread, but I can say without a doubt that the writing is beautiful, sadly stunning. The metaphors and imagery are powerful and I found myself stopping at the breaks to reflect on what I had just read before moving on.
At only about 25 pages, this story is for those looking for an enigmatic snapshot, a shifting diaspora of finality.
For all my reviews: https://paulspicks.blog
At only about 25 pages, this story is for those looking for an enigmatic snapshot, a shifting diaspora of finality.
For all my reviews: https://paulspicks.blog
October 24, 2018
A huge fan of The Only Harmless Great Thing, I was not as enthralled in this short story.
Bolander's writing is enjoyable and creates lovely poetic imagery.
It was an intriguing but perhaps, a little hazy, story.
I not sure what would have improved it.
Ultimately, a worthwhile read.
Especially for the following quote,
“Hatching is not the end of what lies inside the egg, only the end of the shell around it. There’s no flight without the shatter, and no flock without the flight. What we’re made of will go on. A fledgling in some other place and time will look up for guidance and maybe see the path we leave behind, even when all of this as it is”
Bolander's writing is enjoyable and creates lovely poetic imagery.
It was an intriguing but perhaps, a little hazy, story.
I not sure what would have improved it.
Ultimately, a worthwhile read.
Especially for the following quote,
“Hatching is not the end of what lies inside the egg, only the end of the shell around it. There’s no flight without the shatter, and no flock without the flight. What we’re made of will go on. A fledgling in some other place and time will look up for guidance and maybe see the path we leave behind, even when all of this as it is”
January 7, 2022
3.5🦄🦏
Lead me to a rabbit hole of white rhino and dodo images.
'Hatching is not the end of what lies inside the egg, only the end of the shell around it. There’s no flight without the shatter, and no flock without the flight. What we’re made of will go on. A fledgling in some other place and time will look up for guidance and maybe see the path we leave behind, even when all of this as it is”—she flutters her free hand at the darkened desert—“dries and blows away. Change is comforting, in that way.'
Lead me to a rabbit hole of white rhino and dodo images.
'Hatching is not the end of what lies inside the egg, only the end of the shell around it. There’s no flight without the shatter, and no flock without the flight. What we’re made of will go on. A fledgling in some other place and time will look up for guidance and maybe see the path we leave behind, even when all of this as it is”—she flutters her free hand at the darkened desert—“dries and blows away. Change is comforting, in that way.'
February 1, 2020
Pro: This allegory about the end of the world has an unexpectedly hopeful theme.
Con: It depicts a future that’s far more grim than anything science currently postulates.
The story appears to carry the message that the extinction of all those species was a terrible thing, but I'm not sure very many people would disagree with that message today.
Con: It depicts a future that’s far more grim than anything science currently postulates.
The story appears to carry the message that the extinction of all those species was a terrible thing, but I'm not sure very many people would disagree with that message today.
September 22, 2018
One of the most bizarre, yet thought provoking short stories I've read in a while. Found this author quite by accident, and now I'm actively hunting down her other work.
Full review to come.
Damn, what a story!
Full review to come.
Damn, what a story!
September 23, 2018
A story about endlings. Endings. And new beginnings. Haunted and haunting. I think I will remember this one for a long while. Read over at Tor.com
https://www.tor.com/2018/08/15/no-fli...
Most certainly one to return to.
https://www.tor.com/2018/08/15/no-fli...
Most certainly one to return to.
August 15, 2018
Breathtaking. Heartbreaking. Absolutely gorgeous.
August 20, 2018
I wasn't sure how this was going to end, but it was ultimately satisfying.
August 21, 2018
Maybe I just didn't get it?
August 28, 2018
a haunting eulogy, both sing-song and hammer-heavy.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 59 reviews