My favorite stories from January and February look at conformity, assimilation, diversity, and connection from various angles. “Six People to Revise You” by J.R. Dawson (published in Uncanny Magazine Issue 62) is a challenging but ultimately heartwarming story about the people who love (and fail to love) us and about whose feedback we should listen to. “Tell Them a Story to Teach Them Kindness” by B. Pladek (published in Lightspeed Magazine Issue 176) is a smart, engaging story about literature, generative AI, and what it means to be a reader. “A Heap of Petrified Gods” by Adelehin Ijasan (also published in Lightspeed Magazine Issue 176) follows a person who migrates to another country and brings their family god alongside them. It’s a moving story about what immigration can demand from you.
“Six People to Revise You” by J.R. Dawson
Liz is a self-described “queer, complicated mess.” They are considering a medical procedure called Revision that would change their personality. In order to do the procedure, you need to ask six people in your life to fill out a form, noting what they would change about you. Specifically, you need to ask:
A parent or guardian
Someone who has known you since childhood
A mentor or teacher
An employer or coworker
A spouse, partner, or close intimate friend
Someone who does not consider themself a loved one
“Six People to Revise You” follows Liz as they ask these six people to fill out the form. It’s a disheartening journey. People write that Liz is “too sensitive” and “could do with a little more confidence.”
Liz’s mother writes, “Liza’s life would be much easier if she was happy with her given gender. That’s my biggest wish.” After seeing their mother — and what their mother would change about them — Liz narrates, “And that night, I will probably think of a thousand things to say beyond that. But right now, I’m just dead inside.” This hurts to read but resonates powerfully with me. I’ve definitely walked away from conversations with my parents feeling dead inside, and I’ve heard friends use the same language to describe the same conversations. The story is written in first-person, so we actually come across Liz’s mother misgendering and deadnaming them before we learn Liz’s current name and pronouns.
I’ve worked in fields that try deeply to be “person-centered.” Liz’s journey toward the Revision procedure is the opposite of that. The process appears to value other people’s critical input over what Liz wants to change about themself, and it seeks input from the wrong people — from people who Liz isn’t close with, people who aren’t especially loving or caring, and even people who may have hurt or harmed Liz — rather than from Liz’s chosen family and close friends who love and care for them. The procedure seems to be prioritizing and centering what’s comfortable and easy for other people rather than for the individual going through the procedure. It’s an exaggeration of the many ways our society can prize conformity rather than honor diversity.
Ultimately, “Six People to Revise You” by J.R. Dawson is about valuing individuality and diversity above conformity and uniformity, and I found the ending heartwarming and inspiring. It is a disheartening journey there, but the ending is worth it.
There’s something about this story that makes it feel vitally important to the present moment. These are hard times, and this story encourages readers to find people who build you up and choose to be gentle, genuine, and true to yourself amidst it all. I recommend this to my trans siblings out there as well as to anyone who sometimes feels like they are too much, too messy, or too complicated.
“Tell Them a Story to Teach Them Kindness” by B. Pladek
Jude Towers curates stories for classes at Milwaukee Elementary, but not stories written by actual people. Jude has to use RIGHTR, a generative AI tool, to make the stories. It’s part of an effort to make sure the stories students read are “100% unique” so that students “can’t use bots to write their essays for them.” Jude, who used to work as an acquiring editor, isn’t happy about this, so he sneaks in stories by real authors such as Ursula K. Le Guin and James Baldwin.
The story is structured in a modern epistolary format: it’s a series of chat logs between Jude and one of the teachers they work with, emails between Jude and the principal, posts on internet forums, and more. I thought that structure worked really well for this story. It was engaging to read, and the “negative space” (the information and scenes we don’t see directly) felt particularly poignant to me.
The story raises serious concerns with how generative AI tools can be used in problematic ways. For example, the school wants all of Jude’s RIGHTR stories to steer clear of politics, but that is itself a dubious and political choice. Additionally, Jude is instructed to make sure that the diversity of characters within stories (along axes of race, gender, religion, etc) exactly matches the population’s demographics. The principal writes to Jude, “I know you’re a Transgender but don’t let that tempt you to put in more than 1 every 100 stories. Recall you people are less than 1% of the population!” I understand the impulse to make sure our stories accurately reflect the population, but that level of rigidity can prevent students from learning about and appreciating diverse voices and it can make it so that students from minority groups rarely if ever get to see themselves reflected in stories they read.
The story doesn’t just criticize generative AI. It does acknowledge that it can be used to make individualized, captivating, and comforting reads. One of the teachers at the school messages Jude, writing:
I remember when I was 11 and the first chatbots came out. I spent hours on them, telling myself stories. I really liked dragons. I generated endless fantasies about me flying away with them. it was such a comfort.
The teacher later asks: “why would you ever read something that wasn’t fit exactly to you?” There is something we should be able to value about fun, comfort reads tailored exactly to the reader, but that’s only a portion of why reading is valuable. “Tell Them a Story to Teach Them Kindness” lifts up what’s special about literature and reminds readers that reading isn’t just about entertainment or information but also connection, understanding, and empathy. In this story, Pladek illustrates how there is something beautiful about participating in a community of people who write and read together, about how people can relate to stories created by other people.
As a reviewer, I found this particularly impactful. WordPress now seems to have an AI Assistant feature that can summarize, expand, and change your tone. But the reason I write these reviews isn’t to simply churn out content but more because I love the experience of forcing myself to grapple with what other people in our SFF community have written and then because I feel inspired to squee about, share, and signal boost those stories. Using AI tools to write this review would fundamentally interfere with why I write these reviews. There’s something fundamentally human about literature, and this story does a great job capturing that and lifting it up.
Overall, I love the thoughtfulness with which this story handles reading, writing, and generative AI. If you are interested in AI or if you care about reading, check out “Tell Them a Story to Teach Them Kindness” by B. Pladek.
“A Heap of Petrified Gods” by Adelehin Ijasan
This is a beautiful, heartbreaking story about migration and assimilation. When the narrator moves from Lagos to a foreign country, their mother insists they take their family’s personal god with them. It’s a god of happiness who can help teach their family’s language and share about their cultural heritage. However, in the new country, the narrator needs to bargain with the consulate officer for the privilege of a residence permit, and the officer wants things like language, memories, and “my special brand of humor.”
I loved how the narrator had to bargain by giving away abstract nouns like language and humor. It’s a playful conceit that works perfectly in prose fiction, and it’s also a poignant commentary about the things you can lose through migration and assimilation. It also underscores the greed behind imperialism and the individual and cultural losses that can accompany that greed.
In order to stay in the country, the narrator has to give more and more, and each act of giving makes the next one less unthinkable. Ijasan writes, “At every visit, it had been easier to give more and more of the past while embracing this new world.” It hurt to see the narrator give away more and more of themself and their culture, and I wanted them to work out another solution, but each choice felt believable and inevitable.
I imagine this story is likely to resonate with folks who have immigrated to a new country, but I haven’t done that and this story still resonated with me in surprising ways, so I’d honestly recommend this to anyone. I should note that “A Heap of Petrified Gods” is quite short (just over 1,500 words — about the length of this post), so go check it out now!
