Convincing individuals of the reality of the state is, therefore, a difficult task. We can never experience the state as an individual. It was a choice that would not have been possible if productivity had been considered. I was intrigued by the bourgeois desire to invest what would have been a tremendous amount of money at the time in machinery that was less productive than skilled labour. Interestingly then, what caught my eye were the gigantic, inefficient machines that seemed out of place in the rural landscape. The most important energy source for the steam engines that fueled the industrial revolution was waterpower, so the first factories were in rural areas. When I was studying in England, I once visited the site of the Industrial Revolution and was puzzled by it. Marx’s concept of “formal subsumption” in capital indicates nothing less than the mechanisation of the body, and the concept of “real subsumption” means the voluntary submission of the subject to this mechanisation. Machines were devices that demanded the transformation of the body. In the early days of capitalism, the bourgeois obsession with machines was well known. They take ages.’Īll that labour pays off with fantastic stories that only hint at the iceberg of work beneath.Of course, from a historical perspective, this push for automation is nothing new. His last word in the book are: ‘Short stories are misleadingly named. Flynn says some were almost novels, honed back to sharper short fiction. It is the kind of behind-the-scenes peek that shows the craft and care in every very word of these experiments. At the collection’s close, there is an ‘Afterword/Acknowledgements/Blame Apportioned’ detailing some of the origins and ideas for each of the stories. The titular Here be Leviathans set in a de-extinction theme park for macho company men had the humour and potency of early George Saunders stories.Īnd like Saunders, Flynn makes it look light when there is some heavy work. The latter story could have been a thriller or a horror film, but the paring back to a 50-ish page story removes the flab and makes it a taut short story.Īs a collection Here Be Leviathans rips though genre and tears up the short story rule book as Flynn capers into any subject he likes. That retired airplane seat in 22F is better off returning to nature than encouraging more fossil-fuel travel, and even the ravaging pandemic in The Straits of Magellan gets a voice to tell humans they are reuniting with their world whether they like it or not. By the story’s close that bear narrator has us thinking that humans need to understand their interdependence with ecosystems or they will bite us back. The story Inheritance somehow convinces us that a blood-lusting bear actually did the right thing by eating a teenager. While Flynn knows interesting characters are at the core of good short stories, he uses those colourful first person voices to distract us from a creeping up of plot and as a way to create empathy with the natural world. Read: Book Review: Mammoth by Chris Flynn It’s the kind of ear for dialogue that deserves a bigger audience and could have equally been published in Playboy (which in the US has published Margaret Atwood and Roald Dahl) or a pulp publication like Amazing Stories. It makes for solid laughs as the older platypus tell their young puggles (Jayden and Kai, of course) to get to their rooms or debate the merits of artworks. It’s hard to pick a favourite narrator (a retired airplane seat, the supportive hotel room, a Shakespearean simian sent to the stars) but the intellectual bogan platypi (though they would point out that they prefer the Greek plural platypodes) in the story Monotreme are the clever observation.īecause they have overheard their lab technicians talking they’ve developed language skills as confused as the Australian intellectual – at once showing off big ideas but finding it necessary to undercut them with swearing and casual larrikinism. From sabretooth tigers to a vengeful bushfire, Flynn stretches the first person to be almost everything but humans. While some of the stories are offcuts from his meaty previous novel Mammoth, Flynn clearly relishes the chance to slip his skin and play other characters. Bestselling short story collections are an oxymoron but Here Be Leviathans isn’t searching for readers as much as stretching the form. The other beauty of short stories is that they fly under the radar, so a writer feels like they can dance without a marketing department watching them.
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