Sci-fi and Heroic Fantasy discussion

This is our discussion of the story:


"Four Days of Christmas" by Tim Maughan

This story originally appeared in Terraform.

This story is part of the The Best SF&F of the Year, vol 9 (2014) group anthology discussion.

★★
Four vignettes describing the lifecycle of a Christmas toy

Yeah, the concept was interesting, but it came off more as a commercialism-is-bad homily. We didn't spend much time with any of the characters or get to follow many of their decisions through to see the results (except in the broadly global way that the vignettes were connected). The most interesting section was probably the crane operator's, with the high stakes of a potentially dangerous task combined with his goal of showing the value of human vs. robot operators (kind of a futuristic John Henry story).

Well, I liked this story a good deal more than Andreas, and probably more than Hillary.

First off, it's very short and to the point. Has said, it's for quick scenes describing the lifecycle of the Christmas gadget, one of those pieces of holiday knickknacks that spend most of the year in a storage box and get hauled out for couple weeks in December. In this case it's a talking Santa Claus that connects to the Internet and uses facial recognition to wish you a Merry Christmas by name! Which is cute in its own right.

I like the opening section, describing two employees working to paint Santa. One finds the repeating "Ho Ho Ho..." sufficiently annoying to wear a facemask so it doesn't recognize her face and begin the greeting; the other finds the mask to hot and prefers to endure the annoying performance. Both are racing to meet their quotas under threat of losing their jobs. Even though it's only one page, I found I liked the character.

Then we switch to a shipping dock where another employee is racing against automation to protect his own job in loading the talking Santas onto a cargo ship.

And then we have the purchase, by someone looking for an inexpensive stocking stuffer/throwaway gift. A casual and thoughtless purchase of an object our previous characters had worked so hard to create. And yet the buyer it is also trying hard to conserve money and get home in time for the holidays.

The final vignette jumps to the future in a landfill, where scavengers look for useful metals following the apparent collapse of civilization. A sad and tragic dénouement to all that effort.

I don't think it's so much a anti-commercialism story as a anti-waste story. I found it effective.

★★★★