Results 1 to 4 of 4
"The Coma-Contra Affair"
Dear comrades,
I invite you to read my short story, "The Coma-Contra Affair".
"The Coma-Contra Affair" is a radical revenge story which addresses themes relating to the national liberation struggles in Central America which came to a head during the 1980s. This story envisions the aftermath of an alternate progression of history wherein utopia and dystopia seem to coexist.
Biorgina is a 47 year old Sandinista militant who regains consciousness in the year 2016 after a gunshot wound to the head inflicted in 1986 by a Ronald Reagan and Oliver North-backed, cocaine-peddling, School of the Americas-trained Contra comandante leaves her comatose. With the help of Dr. Delgado and psychotherapist Ivan Moreno, Biorgina makes a miraculous full recovery and learns that, after the Sandinista and FMLN victories in Nicaragua and El Salvador, national liberation movements spread throughout the region. Bolstered by the spread of Communism to Latin America, the Soviet Union is now the dominant world superpower. In the Union of Central American Socialist Republics, public transit, health care, food, and housing are free. But all is not a bed of roses. Biorgina also learns that the man who nearly killed her has been granted asylum in El Norte, where after the Second Civil War of 1995-2001, the country has emerged as a settler-state enclave of crazed gun-hoarding white sociopaths surrounded by towering anti-immigrant walls, where an underclass toils on Hispanic and Negro Reservations. It is into this fortress Biorgina must go if she wants justice to be rendered.
I love the concept but the execution... well there's a lot of telling and not enough showing - you delve into exposition a lot, too much really. It's clearly a bit of wish-fulfilment but I thoroughly enjoyed it. Keep writing.
Modern democracy is nothing but the freedom to preach whatever is to the advantage of the bourgeoisie - Lenin
Thank you for reading and for the fair criticism, GiantMonkeyMan. Are you talking about the exposition-exposition (i.e. with info on Bluefields) or do you mean to say you find the action and denouement too expository for your tastes?
I think, particularly with a story dealing with a wildly different history than our own, that exposition is needed and you need to establish the setting however sometimes it felt awkward. Here's an example:
“You a time-traveller?” the driver questioned with a raised eyebrow. “Nobody pays for anything in the Union of Central American Socialist Republics. Been that way since 1992. You know, when the A Cada Cual Según sus Necesidades Act criminalized monetary transactions?”
I bolded the section I thought was unnecessary and made me pause. A taxi driver might indeed joke about her being a time traveller but it seemed odd to have him mention the specific law, particularly without any prompting. And you do that sort of thing often with a character explaining an aspect of the setting but going into far too much detail, in my opinion, for the dialogue to feel natural.
There's another example outside of dialogue:
Moreno sucked in a wisp of air through his teeth, gasping silently. He knew the man she spoke of: Jorge Peterson-Gonzalez. A US-backed right-wing militarist who had been trained at the School of the Americas, in the state of Georgia. The man with the wart-covered face was infamous in the Union of Central American Socialist Republics (UCASR). After fleeing to the United States in the immediate aftermath of the Sandinista triumph over the Contras in 1990, the Nicaraguans tried in vain to win his extradition. Following the unification of the Socialist People’s Republics of Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Belize, and Panama, the UCASR continued to push for him to be brought to justice, but to no avail.
I almost feel like everything after the first sentence is redundant since you have the two characters discuss the individual in question right after the paragraph. It's also confused because you opened the section of the story from Biorgina's perspective but this whole paragraph seems to be from Moreno's. I guess I'm just not a fan of an omnipotent narrator and I prefer developments and exposition to be less obvious. I understand the desire to explain the world you're creating and how difficult it can be to avoid the 'infodump', particularly in a short story, but I feel you've got to try and make it natural, unobtrusive and smooth. Hope you get what I'm saying and take this as the friendly constructive criticism it's intended to be.
Overall I am general a fan of alternate history and I loved the idea of a fifty year old woman infiltrating a fascist state and gunning down a load of right-wing Evangelicals - it's a brilliant image.
Modern democracy is nothing but the freedom to preach whatever is to the advantage of the bourgeoisie - Lenin
