Grist (sic) for the Mill

[ecosophia]

Rejection slips are among the enduring features of any writer's life. In fact, I fielded one yesterday. It was from Grist, a glossy pseudoenvironmental rag that caters to the overprivileged, and it was in response to the story I submitted to their "cli-fi" contest back in March. 

Mind you, this came as less than no surprise. I discussed the contest, among other signposts in the strange landscape of thought we've entered in the last few years, in a post over on my blog.  My comments on it were, ahem, far from sympathetic, and the story I submitted to the contest -- "A Modest Contribution" -- was of a piece with that:  I set out to follow the rules of their contest to the letter, while flatly contradicting the spirit thereof. I was a little sorry to get a bland generic rejection slip instead of a scream of outrage, but then one can't be too picky in this business. 

Over on the blog, however, I heard from another reader who'd submitted something in the same spirit and also got a rejection slip.  It occurs to me to wonder aloud just how many readers were as unimpressed by Grist's display of overinflated entitlement as I was, and reacted to it in the same way, by writing a story. If there are enough of us, you know, it might be possible to produce a short book -- or even a not so short book! -- and get it into publication. (And I might be convinced to invite new stories along the same lines, for that matter; you can read Grist's bellowing orgy of virtue signaling disguised as a call for submissions here if you happen to need inspiration.) 

What say you, fellow writers?  Do we have enough stories, in the jargon of a vanished age, to pub an ish? 

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I did not submit something to Grist, unfortunately, but I would be interested in submitting a new story, were you to open something up.

Also, I have no particular interest in reading the stories that did get accepted, but I poked around the website a little bit and came across an interview that, I suspect, summarizes the whole endeavor pretty well.

The title is:

"In this writer’s vision of our climate future, trans girls are the only survivors"

The summary is:

"The only survivors are trans girls who are taking estrogen, which, it turns out, allows them to breathe underwater. They emerge from the destruction as human-coral hybrids . . ."

The author's answer to an interview question about what a "sustainable and just" world would look like:

"Because of COVID-related manufacturing and supply chain problems, there has been a hormone drought . . . I don’t want this drought, I want the abundance, I want the access, I want everything for us. I want the water to be literally hormone-ized. I want it to be as abundant as oxygen."

[ecosophia]

Ahem. Yeah, that about sums it up...

[ecosophia]

I should probably add an additional line to my submission requirements:

"Stories should not expect readers to believe crass stupidities."

[(Anonymous)]

Well, then all the Grist stories are out...

[(Anonymous)]

Wait, that's -not- a parody??

[mo_drui_mac_de]

So...why aren't people who naturally produce estrogen in abundance mutating into corals?

Good Gods, that last paragraph beats out pretty much every toddler meltdown I've watched unfold...

[ecosophia]

The whole thing makes me scratch my head in disbelief. At least in theory, the whole point of the Grist contest was to come up with believable futures: that is, visions that might actually have some chance of happening. Estrogen supplementation does not alter the human body to enable it to breathe underwater, and human-coral hybrids are a biological impossibility -- check the respective chromosome counts sometime. If the point of this contest was to come up with futures that might actually happen, why is this story even mentioned? Virtue signaling?

[brenainn]

The last few years have left me scratching my head a whole lot. So many things that I wouldn't have imagined possible are now a thing. Satirical websites like "The Babylon Bee" seem to have been accidental prophets, or so I think. I've remarked to friends, on more than one occasion, that I sometimes feel like I'm walking around in the Matrix. Of course, the Matrix was just a modern sci-fi take on the ancient gnostic myth, so I can't help but wonder.

[mo_drui_mac_de]

It's virtue signaling, but it's virtue signaling that's so far past its pull date that it's hard to tell what leftovers were even stored in that tupperware dish at the back of the fridge underneath all the mold. It doesn't even make for a halfway interesting sci-fi story; it's just...incoherent whining. I mean, really--a future where only transwomen survived? How is that at all a hopeful scenario? Perhaps they think that coral budding and fragmentation will stave off the extinction of the human race, but, er...if everyone is dead except for the tiny fraction that has turned into coralfolx...humanity has perished. I'm pretty sure that doesn't actually fit the stated 'hopeful' qualification that Grist claimed to be going for.

If I had to classify this story genre, it would be as yet another tired iteration of the Christian apocalypse heresy, except the reward for the plucky survivors in this case is even more dubious and unlikely than in the Marxist version. Instead of the proletariat rising up to feast on strawberries and cream, it's troubled teens transitioning towards dinoflagellates and reefs! I suppose my real question is...why coral? Is it because in this author's mind, since transwomen are the Good People™ who are spared the apocalypse, they must also be destined to heal the poisoned oceans simply by virtue of being the extra specially special people that they are? Good grief...

[(Anonymous)]

As someone who's had to deal with them, I can say that you're seriously overestimating the Wokesters attachment to reality if you think they don't think this is possible....

[(Anonymous)]

The really scary part is that this is one of the more plausible stories....

[avalterra]

Jaw meet floor, floor meet jaw.

[(Anonymous)]

Here's a link to the interview mentioned above.

https://grist.org/fix/ada-m-patterson-broken-from-the-colony-imagine-2200-climate-fiction/

[(Anonymous)]

So the writer seriously overestimates hurricanes as well: no matter how bad, a hurricane will not sink Barbados...

[ecosophia]

Barbados gets hurricanes all the time, so you'd think that the writer would have noticed...

[walt_f]

I had a disturbingly similar story in mind about "transplants," as in trans plants, people who identify as plants and live on sunlight and soil (or attempt to, with ambiguous success). I thought I might write about their noble (and of course upliftingly successful) struggle to end their unfair exclusion from salads. Now it appears that wouldn't have gone nearly far enough in absurdity to have been seen as satirical at all, not when lined up next to trans coral living happily in the estrogen sea.

[(Anonymous)]

I also had a similar story in mind and almost submitted it. I'm so glad I didn't: I don't think I could've mentally handled them actually publishing it!

[ecosophia]

Oh my. Please, pretty please, write that story.

[walt_f]

I recognize that tone! It's the "I want you to do something I know could get you in big trouble!" voice.

Tell you what, I'll pass the concept along to my writer friend, Mia Pseudonym, and see if she can oblige.

[ecosophia]

Please let Ms. Pseudonym know that I'd be delighted to see her story, and also to take care of the details if it needs to be watered and transplanted into a bigger pot. Or if she does...

[robertmathiesen]

This reminds me of the Breatharians, who aspire to live on air alone, without consuming any food or drink. (One of my former students hung with some of them in Latin America for a number of years.)

[ecosophia]

There was a fine little scandal in Seattle back when I lived there. A well-known Breatharian was in town to give a talk on Breatharianism. He was spotted chowing down in a local Indian restaurant. His response? "I say I can live on air, not that I do..."

[(Anonymous)]

This idea reminds me of the short-lived 70s sci-fi spoof series called Quark, which included a character named Ficus who was (supposedly) half plant and half human. He looked completely human, but indulged in some plant-like behavior. One episode features him "pollinating" with the human daughter of an evil emperor (who is of course outraged that his daughter should be doing such a thing). I loved the show. So the trans-plant idea is already out there!

[walt_f]

I remember that scene! I didn't watch the whole series, but I caught that episode. "Now, we wait for the bee!"

Ficus, Audrey II, Delvians, Ents, Trees of Cheem, Plant Men of Barsoom, the Veeglian plant-vampire (who as a precaution was buried with a steak through his heart) in a very short story by Damon Knight, and other sentient plants in fiction, all evolved as sentient plants. I don't know of any who decided to identify as plants. Many fewer of fiction's sentient plants have attempted to, ahem, cross-pollinate with humans, Ficus being one of them, but that's kind of a different issue. To be fair, though, magical (or otherwise) transformation into literal trees was a trope in genre fantasy for a while, there was a rather bizarre scene along those lines in A Journey to Arcturus, it occurs in an alien ecosystem in Speaker for the Dead, and of course there's the old myth of Baucis and Philemon. So, yeah, the idea certainly is out there.

[ecosophia]

For that matter, I had the Great Old One Shub-Ne'hurrath turn someone into a tree in the last volume of The Weird of Hali -- one more genre trope among the others...