Saturday, November 12, 2011

New short story set on Mars: "For Love’s Delirium Haunts the Fractured Mind" by Mercurio D. Rivera


I just learned about a new short story that is set on Mars: “For Love’s Delirium Haunts the Fractured Mind” by Mercurio D. Rivera, published in Interzone #235 (July-August 2011), the magazine that has long been “the backbone of the British SF industry.” I haven’t read the story, but critic Rich Horton calls it a “particularly strong piece” in the October 2011 issue of Locus magazine:
Mercurio D. Rivera’s stories about the Wergen, an advanced alien race bound by chemistry to obsessively bond to humans, have been consistently interesting, and “For Love’s Delirium Haunts the Fractured Mind”, from the July-August Interzone, is a particularly strong piece. Joriander is a Wergen serving a human family on Mars as something of a guardian/pet for a young boy. He loves this role, but we see, over the length of the story, by observing the way his “owners” act, and his confrontations with his brother, how degrading it is. In the end, one is reminded of Robert E. Lee’s feeling that slavery is worse for the owner than the slave—and that, as bad as it is (especially morally) for the owner, it is far worse for the slave.
Reminds me of one of the characters from the RPG campaign Rebels of Mars (2009).

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