This week’s short story for the Torque Control Short Story Reading Club is Trembling Blue Stars by Richard Kadrey.
The story is a conversation between and cosmonaut and his ex-lover. It starts in a deliberately confusing manner and eventually reveals what’s happened. It’s a conversation which reads like a real post-breakup conversation – substitute space for a foreign country and aliens for another obsession. For a moment I thought it might degenerate into an argument with nowhere left to go, but it recovered and surprised me.
There’s brilliant sentences and language in the story. The start is so great I’m going to quote it here:
I was sitting at the counter, drinking espresso and smoking Gauloises at the Hellas Basin Cafe on Rozhdestvenka Street in Moscow.
The day before, we’d been riding the veer, ferrying supplies to an ASEAN research facility deep in the Oort Cloud. It was pleasant to be back on Earth. During each veer run, when time-space turned psychotic and the heavy rad poured in, we would go null and let our guests do the driving. These petit morts moments were necessary for deep space travel. Dying wasn’t such a bad thing if you knew that cigarettes and strong coffee would be waiting for you when it was over.
Nice.
I also particularly like:
“I think you love your alien more than ever you loved me.”
Followed shortly by:
“I didn’t stop loving you. I just loved the stars more.”
When I reached the end I wanted to go back to the start and read it again.
It’s probably a story which is divides readers depending on their taste for the style, but it was my kind of thing. Stylish, cool and with a surprising upward lurch of emotion at the end.
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