Bridesicle Entry

Had she really been able to effortlessly pull up memories when she was alive or was that just how she remembered it?           

Mira tried to imagine what this man could possibly say that would lead her to choose death over his company.

Mira had been in line a long time. It didn’t seem that way, though. It had only been, what, about an hour of life since she died?

Far too soon, Lycan said goodbye. He told Mira he would see her on Tuesday, and killed her.

            Not only is the idea of this story incredibly creative and interesting, what’s more is that the concepts are carried into the wit and intelligence of the language to an extent that is both satisfying an amusing to a reader such as myself. The very title of this piece, a word that made absolutely no sense in the context of our world, had me joyously slapping my knee once I understood how much sense it could make. The ingenuity that goes in to creating a world like this makes me wonder first whether I would be capable of realizing something as unconventional as this as successfully as McIntosh does. The next thing I wonder is what the process McIntosh went through in writing this consisted of. Did this word pop into his head, “bridesicle,” and a process of creating a world around it begin. Or more likely, did the process start with McIntosh contemplating the expanding role of science in affecting our lifespans, and this scenario play out as a possible future development of our world and how we would deal with such technology. A recurring question in our studies of science fiction is “what changes?” and at the same time, “what remains the same?” In the case of this story, we see the people as remaining the same, to a great extent. Hundreds of years after the time that is conceivably ours, the reader can completely understand the mindset and thought process of the protagonist in this scenario. We understand what gay is and how this plays into existing (and still existing) social dynamics. We try to understand the perspective of being not dead and dead at the same time, and we feel that Mira’s reactions and sensations are genuine to this situation that we will (likely) never understand. And at the same time, the whole world has been stripped from under us and been replaced by orange people, warehouses full of dead potential brides and transparent shoes. While it’s on my mind, having imagined a giant warehouse full of women in coffins, where are all the frozen men? Is there a similar process for women to choose to revive men or are the men unable to become a commodity so immediately as women and thus only revived by well-off families. Another thing that hasn’t changed seems to be the tendency to build families around the decisions of a man, and this process seems to realize this social dynamic to a greater extent than in our modern and progressive world. It’s as if with this new technological advancement comes a regression further into past and still existing stereotypes, as if the only way we know how to deal with something new is to fit it into the social molds, however archaic, that we are familiar with. As the world advances further, the people, too caught up in the new technology to consider its implications, regress further, and their minds, always opens to new invention, close further and further to new views of the world. While this theory requires more substantive backing than these initial postulations, I think that stories such as Lathe and Androids suggest similar trends in the advancement of their respective societies.

            Apart from the social implications that arise from this and any other great sci-fi story, this piece was just (as previously mentioned) quite well done. The only thing the quotes I chose have in common is their complete dedication to the concept of “bridesicle” that Will conceives, and their use of all the super cool and witty implications of this idea to its greatest extent. McIntosh succeeds in pointing out some excellent, humorous ironies, universally human feelings and jarringly insightful observations in the perspective of his protagonist, Mira. For these reasons, apart from all subjective implications, “Bridesicle” is simply a great story.