Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

One Shot
By Rowan McBride
Four stars

An absurd sci-fi premise serving as a thin excuse for a terribly fun erotic novella. McBride’s writing is good enough so that it didn’t seem cheap, and she is thoughtful enough that Nick Carlyle’s dilemma is haunting. This story actually reminded me of the “Uglies� books, a series of teen-girl YA books by Scott Westerfeld (why did I not notice that these were by a man when I read them to my daughter?).

In some parallel America, a super-flu-shot has been invented, but it offers some interesting (and entirely illogical) possible side effects. You just might grow 4-7 inches after getting inoculated; or, if you’re really unlucky, you just might shrink. Oh, and you’ll never get flu again.

Regardless of the fact that the plot seems to be an excuse for some nifty sex scenes between Nick and Riley Jameson, it is actually rather more than that. It is a commentary on modern corporate and cultural values, in which physical attributes, height, beauty, play an untoward role in career success and upward mobility. McBride takes us inside that paranoia, and then throws emotional gasoline on it with this flu-shot nonsense. And it pretty much works, even if, for the most part, we can see the denouement coming from a mile away. There is one nicely nuanced surprise that won me over: the intangible part of each of us that makes up part of what others see when they look at us, when they know us.

I really enjoyed this.