Not all Pianos in the Woods
I finished Fireflood 2 nights ago night. Really good book, if somewhat difficult to read. It’s a collection of short stories, all on the subject of outcasts from society; either those who are for their own reasons, or those who have been actively cast out by society. It was pretty depressing, but there’s some very powerful work in there.
One story was about a woman captured by the government and forced to work identifying spectra with some kind of device. She lives in a kind of forced labor camp, fed through cannulae in her ankle while she sleeps in a coffin-sized cubicle, her only break being daily sessions with an exercise machine. We don’t get a lot of other information about her place or situation; she’s almost entirely blind, her eyes having been replaced by machines that allow her to detect the spectra as part of her work. Her only pleasure comes from rubbing her eyes in her cubicle at night, causing swirls of color. This however causes the devices in her eyes to malfunction and affect her accuracy in spectral identification. After determining what has happened, the people running the installation “fix” her eyes so that she gets a painful electric shock when she tries to touch them. The story ends with the unnamed woman lying in her cubicle, deprived of her only source of pleasure, unable to cry.
I’m reading The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman now, the second book in the His Dark Materials now. I like it.
Wow, that story about the woman seems awfully creepy!