Rae Lori, $1.01, ISBN 978-1310189548
Sci-fi Romance, 2015
Rae Lori’s City of Simplicity needs to be a far longer story.
Set in 2025—wait, that’s just two years away—humans are no longer allowed to feel emotions. Emotin is a liquid that helps keeps emotions at bay, and this is something Citizen 52701 uses every morning so that she can be a proper and efficient law enforcer.
Thing is, her beloved husband is one of the renegades that want to topple this cold regime, and since this is a romance, I’m sure we all know where this one is heading.
This is a pretty standard sci-fi story that equates emotionless state of mind with dystopian tyranny, but because of its length, nothing really comes close to being well developed.
Worse, the author opts for a happily ever after kind of ending, instead of a happily for now one, which makes the story feel even more unbelievable because success comes way too easy here.
There are some elements here that do work for a short story. While the lack of suspense may not be a good thing in longer stories, here the happy ending is a forgone conclusion from page one, which is fine as a short story doesn’t have room for slow build up of drama.
However, these elements don’t work for a story with such a plot. The heroine doesn’t work, and that means 50% of the story is a dud from get go. Why is Citizen 52701 still allowed to be an enforcer when she’s so darned terrible at keeping her emotions at bay? The very concept of our heroine in that capacity makes little sense, and completely undermines the story right from the start.
There are also other cheesy throwaway things that only make me chuckle at how absurd they are, such as how our heroine can’t go over a certain body weight or she would be “terminated”. Why? I understand that fatties may be a liability in, say, a society where everyone is expected to work in the mines or something, but in this setting, that body mass thing makes little sense.
If the setting had been fleshed out better, then perhaps everything will come together with better clarity.
Then again, for that to happen, this one needs to be longer, much longer in length.
I guess that, in the end, this thing isn’t a good idea in the first place. Sending it back to the proverbial oven for a more thorough baking would be a better thing to do.
