Annotation: Skywriter's "Torn Apart & Devoured By Lions" · 4:31am Jan 10th, 2014
Another color annotation: "Torn Apart and Devoured by Lions", available free here, This is by Jeffrey C. Wells, whom you may know from Tales of the Starbuck Avenger, Skin Horse, or "Princess Celestia Hates Tea". It's the opening story of Machine of Death.
Same color-coding as before, but I'm coloring "telly" speech tags maroon (pomegranate?), as they get the same kind of criticism as adverbs, and I added four more annotation categories at the end:
red = adverb
maroon = "telly" speech tag
green = simile or metaphor
blue = an adjective, adverb, or verb that isn't literally correct (metaphorical)
lavender = body language
gray = mundane things
yellow = lions
bold = things that make the main character seem insane
underlining = things that show Simon has become a better and happier person
The first five are to compare how this story works to the previous annotation of the climax of The Last Unicorn. I added those last annotations to look at how this story works thematically. I used bold and underline instead of another color because those things overlap so often with other things. We're multitasking here, looking at use of telly language and body language, but also at theme.
STORY & THEME
Skywriter calls this a comedy, and it is funny, but it's also very serious. I love this story, but it's hard to explain why. It doesn't fit the usual pattern in which the narrative describes a protagonist facing and overcoming or failing to overcome an obstacle, and changing as a result. It describes the protagonist after he has already changed and overcome an obstacle which he was perhaps not even aware of. This change was unintentional. The "trigger event" happened seven weeks before the story, when Simon used the machine of death to find out how he would die.
The protagonist is admirable not for being a man of action, but for his attitude. The "conflict" here, if there is any, is between our assumptions about what is important and what makes us happy, versus what we really need. Simon's response to learning how he is to die seems insane to everyone, including himself; yet it is admirable.
It's a kind of story that's much more unusual than it ought to be: A celebration of a man's virtuous character, rather than his virtuous actions. There is no action within the story. It wouldn't be exciting to show the triggering event. The real story, as I read it, is this: Simon's problem appears to be that his life is boring. The real problem, though, was his attitude to it. Confronted with a gruesome destiny, he reacts by grasping it with desperate gratitude as a sign that his life will be exciting and unusual. Paradoxically, this hope makes his present life more exciting and enjoyable. He's always had the power to go back to Kansas. All of this happened before the narrative — you read the narrative to figure out what the story was.
This might not have been Skywriter's intent, but I think the story also has something odd to say about love. Simon loves the lions who will devour him. This reminds me of a story some historian told about the election of Napoleon III in 1848: He asked an old man whom he was voting for, and the man said, "I, I who lost one leg in Napoleon's terrible Russian campaign — whom could I vote for but the heir of Napoleon?" Somehow, being drafted into Napoleon's army, forced into a disastrous and poorly planned campaign which they lost, and losing one leg in the process, made him love Napoleon. (Perhaps my disposable minions feel that way about me. I imagine I could get attached to them, if they ever survived long enough for me to remember their names.) And there's some kind of love in even the most dysfunctional parent-child relationships. We seem to love people and things that give us importance, that put us in the center of a good story.
TELLY LANGUAGE, BODY LANGUAGE, & POETIC LANGUAGE
The story comes in four parts:
1. A telephone conversation. Almost no body language or metaphors.
2. Two office conversations. Some body language, one critical closing metaphor.
3. An awkward boss-employee conversation. Lots of body language to indicate how tense and awkward it is for the boss. A couple of similes, but humorous ones, not serious.
4. A descriptive interior monologue with no dialogue, hardly any body language, and most of the metaphoric language.
So body language is used when multiple people are physically present, largely to convey how they feel about each other. It's especially useful to indicate a tense mood, perhaps because a tense scene should have slow dialogue, and body language stretches dialogue out in time. We saw before that it's useful in action sequences, which should happen quickly, but require specificity about what is physically happening.
Poetic language (such as metaphor) is used in internal monologue, descriptive passages, and critical or concluding sentences. There are almost no blue annotations here, quite the opposite of The Last Unicorn, and telly language is sprinkled throughout, like seasoning. I think that's related to the theme. More about that after the story.
I'm misquoting a bit--I pasted the beginning from the intro to this reading of it, before I found the full text. That blogger had removed the original large fourth paragraph, which I think slows the opening down a lot and tries to drive the humor home with a mallet while adding nothing. I couldn't bring myself to add it back in. (I left those first two red "eventually"'s intact. You're welcome.)
“Missus Murphy, I will have you know that I am to be torn apart and devoured by lions.”
Simon Pfennig was fully aware of how strange he must sound.
He had no choice. It was too exciting not to share.
Eventually, the silence on the other end of the line was broken. “…Excuse me?” Mrs. Murphy eventually managed.
“I,” said Simon, “am to be torn apart and devoured by lions.”
“I’m sorry,” said Mrs. Murphy. “Weren’t you just talking to me about insurance a moment ago?”
“I was,” said Simon. “Now I’m talking about lions.”
“Oh,” said Mrs. Murphy, apparently unsure of what to make of all this.
“Did you know that an adult male lion can consume up to seventy-five pounds of meat in a single meal? And that said meal will often have to last him an entire week?”
“I, er, did not.”
“That’d be two whole meals, out of me alone!” said Simon. “I’m guesstimating a bit, because I am not made entirely of meat.”
“Well. Who is?” replied Mrs. Murphy, gamely.
“Exactly. For one thing, there’s the matter of bones. I’m not quite certain how much my bones weigh. Lions don’t eat bones; they leave them behind for the hyenas to consume. But, you see, that doesn’t matter as much to me, Missus Murphy. Because I am to be torn apart and devoured by lions, not by hyenas.”
“So you said.”
“I will be long dead,” said Simon, “before the hyenas ever get ahold of me.”
“Ah…hah.”
“Naturally, though, I don’t expect myself to last the whole two weeks. Far from it! After all, as you know, I am to be torn apart and devoured by lions, plural, not ‘a lion.’ And it is uncommon for male lions to travel together, unless they’re roaming the savannah in unwed bachelor groups.” Simon leaned back in his chair and studied the single fluorescent fixture mounted above his tiny cubicle, imagining it for a moment to be the red-hot sun of the Serengeti. “No,” he continued, “far more likely, I am to be torn apart and devoured by lionesses, a group of huntresses intent on bringing food back for their leonine patriarch.”
“I…see.”
“As you might expect,” Simon went on, “I’ve given this some thought, and I have eventually come to the conclusion that the word ‘lions’ doesn’t necessarily refer to the male of the species exclusively. Good news for me, you understand, because I must confess to harboring this romantic notion of how it will all play out.”
Mrs. Murphy smiled into the phone; you could hear it in her voice. “Just got your prediction today, did you?”
“Actually,” said Simon, “it’s been seven weeks now.”
“Oh,” said Mrs. Murphy.
“But, I’m sorry, you’re quite right. We should probably go back to talking about life insurance now.” Simon cleared his throat, straightened his tie and put his salesman voice back on. It was a good salesman voice, keen and enthusiastic, and it bore shockingly little resemblance to the one he’d been using his entire workaday life up until that day about two months ago, the day Simon now liked to call “Torn Apart And Devoured By Lions Day.” “Missus Murphy,” the new, exciting Simon began, “did you know that in the event of your sudden, accidental death, your family might incur miscellaneous costs of upwards of—”
“Ah, see, there,” said Mrs. Murphy. “I’m sorry, I was waiting for something just like that. I’m to kick off from colon cancer, lad, not a stroke or a heart attack or anything quick like that. Plenty of time to get my affairs in order.”
A common response, these days. Simon knew the company rote. “Many of our potential customers come to us with this same story, Missus Murphy,” said Simon. “Truth to tell, though you may believe that you know the circumstances surrounding your eventual demise based on your prediction alone, the fact of the matter is that the specifics can often be surprising. To both you and your loved ones.”
Mrs. Murphy chuckled. “Come now,” she said. “Have you ever heard of anyone crossing the street one day and getting hit by a runaway colon cancer?”
Simon had to admit that he had not.
“I’m fairly certain that I’m destined to pass away peacefully in a hospital bed, lad,” said Mrs. Murphy. “All shrouded in white and surrounded by my family. Probably in some pain, too, mind, but there’s little helping that.”
“Missus Murphy, if I might—”
“Lad,” said Mrs. Murphy, “I have my fantasy, just as you have yours. And I am unwilling to cheapen it by banking on the possibility that the chips might not fall that way.” Her voice smiled again. “You clearly have one of your own. And I think that if you think about it,” she said, “you’ll understand.”
Simon thought about it. And he did.
“Well,” he said, after a moment. “Good day to you, then.”
“To you as well,” said Mrs. Murphy. “May God bless. And say hello to the lions for me.”
“Will do, Missus Murphy,” said Simon. There was a click as Mrs. Murphy disconnected the line, and then a low, steady drone. Dutifully, Simon’s auto-dialer started in on another number.
“Dude,” said Scott, the guy in the cubicle next door. “You gotta cut that out. Armbruster is going to be mighty horked if he ever catches you in the middle of that.”
Simon pulled his chair closer to his desk, fully intending to ignore his wall-mate, as per usual. After all, he had insurance to sell.
“You can’t let this Death Machine crap run your life, man,” continued Scott, heedless, as Simon waited for his line to pick up. “I mean, geez, look at you. Ever since you did that stupid prediction thing, you’ve gone, like, totally mental on us. With the suit, and the tie, and—”
Simon’s line picked up; it was an answering machine. Simon dropped his headset to his neck for a moment and rolled his chair back. “Customers can hear the tie, Scott,” said Simon. “Just like they can hear a smile.”
“Uh huh,” said Scott. “So d’ya suppose they can hear this little stain here on my shirt, too?”
“I believe they can,” said Simon.
“Wow,” said Scott, with feigned amazement. “Those are some really keen ears right there, Simon.” He snickered and spun his chair around a couple of times. “Dude, you have lost it, man,” he said.
Simon pulled himself back to his desk, replacing his headphones just in time to hear the answering machine disconnect. “To each,” he said, with measured patience, “his own.”
“I’m sorry, what?” said Scott. “I couldn’t hear you there, dude. Between my stain and your tie there’s just too damn much noise goin’ on around here.”
Simon just shook his head as the auto-dialer worked its magic again, preparing to serve him up another golden opportunity. It was hard to get too angry with Scott about his little jibes. After all, thought Simon, Scott was likely bored and a bit depressed and was probably compensating for it by taking his frustrations out on the people around him. But he was fundamentally a good guy. He just needed a life goal or two; it would fix him right up.
It had certainly fixed Simon right up. He himself had two life goals: (1) being torn apart by, and (2) being devoured by, lions.
And that had made all the difference, really.
The morning rolled on in a series of polite refusals, and soon it came time for lunch. Standing by the break room microwave, Simon marveled at how quickly the day was going. It was to be a short lunch; Simon had been thinking of ways to improve the company’s sales script, and since the auto-dialer gave him only limited opportunities to hash them out on work-time, he was thinking of devoting some of his break to the task.
“Hey, Simon,” said one of his co-workers, coming up from behind. Brad. Blue-eyed, fair-haired and a bit on the pudgy side. Simon and he had joined up with the company about the same time, and Brad had quickly latched on to him as a conversational partner. Simon didn’t mind; Brad was, also, a fundamentally good guy. “I’m’a head to Mickey’s in a minute. You want I should pick you up some fries or something?”
“Not today, Brad!” said Simon, twirling an empty little coated cardboard box in his hands, the erstwhile contents of which were now warming pleasantly in the microwave nearby. “Today I’m having Rosemary Chicken with Vegetables.”
“Rosemary,” said Brad, frowning. “Is that an herb or something?”
“Indeed it is,” replied Simon.
Brad thought about this for a moment. “So you’re eating herbs now?” he said, eventually.
“Yep,” said Simon. “It’s only polite, I figure. After all, you are what you eat. Right, Brad?”
“Well, I guess I pretty much gotta be a triple-stacker roast beef melt by now,” said Brad.
“Quite possibly,” said Simon, diplomatically. “But for me? No.” Simon smiled to himself, his eyes going distant. “No, Brad, from here on in, I intend to make myself exceptionally, even exquisitely, healthy. And, if possible,” he added, “herb-flavored.”
Brad narrowed his eyes. “Wait a sec,” he said. “This isn’t the thing about being eaten by the lions again, is it?”
“It will always be the thing about being eaten by the lions, Brad. From here on in, until it occurs.”
“You’re obsessed, guy.”
Simon grinned. “Perhaps,” he said.
“Totally!” called out Scott from his corner table. He sneered at them around and through a mouthful of sandwich.
“Hey, shut up,” said Brad.
“Make me, fatboy,” Scott replied. Then he chucked a piece of onion at him.
“Little snot,” muttered Brad, picking the onion out of his hair. “Look, Simon,” he said, putting his hand on Simon’s shoulder. “Little friendly advice. You don’t have to be a Machine of Death slave like this. Don’t be trapped by it. Use it to free yourself.” Brad spread his arms wide, exposing his substantial midsection. “I mean, look at me.”
“Can’t not,” said Scott, swallowing his latest bite. “You take up our entire visual field.”
“Hmph,” said Brad, raising both his chins in a dignified fashion and turning his back to Scott’s table. “Look at me, Simon. Here I am, going to die in a car crash or something. So, I don’t worry about the roast beef melts anymore. I don’t worry about the soda refills. And I don’t worry about getting the chili and the cheese on the fries instead of going healthy and eating them without.” He smiled amiably. “You see?” he said. “Little changes. I know it won’t matter what I eat, so I eat what I want. And I’m happier for it.”
Brad shook his head, then. “But you, Simon. You’re thinking about this thing all the time now. It can’t be good for you.”
“I want to think about this thing all the time, Brad,” said Simon, earnestly. “I am looking forward to it. Like you wouldn’t believe.”
“For Pete’s sake, Simon,” said Brad. “Why?”
“Because,” Simon replied, his pale brown eyes as wide as the veldt itself, “it will be the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to me.”
Brad shrugged. “Suit yourself,” he said. “But I read in this self-help book my mom gave me that you shouldn’t sacrifice your now just because you’re looking forward to being eaten by a bunch of lions at some point in the future.”
“Don’t worry,” said Simon. “I’m not sacrificing my now. I’m happier, healthier, and more vital than I’ve ever been.” He smiled. “The thing is, Brad,” he said, “everything I do for my lions? It makes my life better too.”
There came the sound of a throat clearing from the door of the break room. Simon looked up.
“Pfennig,” said Paul Armbruster (Vice President In Charge Of Targeted Media Solicitation), leaning into the room. “When you have a moment. My office, please.”
Silence. Simon gathered his smile. “Certainly, sir,” he said, tossing the box from his frozen dinner into a nearby waste container and stepping toward the door.
“After lunch is fine,” said Mr. Armbruster. The tips of his moustache lifted in a tiny grimace, as though someone had invisibly popped by with an eyedropper full of lemon juice and given him a bit. “But soon. We need to talk about your…performance.”
Simon’s smile did not falter. “‘Performance’ in the sense of ‘how I’m doing relative to the quota’?”
“No,” said Mr. Armbruster, sucking on his tongue thoughtfully. “‘Performance’ in the sense of ‘Ooh, ooh, look at the dancing bear; now look, he’s riding a little unicycle.’ That type of performance. Specifically,” he added, “your performance earlier this morning, Pfennig.”
“Right,” said Simon, his smile still adamant. “After lunch, then?”
“Yes,” said Mr. Armbruster. “If you please.” He then vanished from sight.
The subsequent quiet was broken only by the noise of Scott sniggering quietly to himself in the corner.
Brad smiled at Simon, sheepishly.
The microwave went ‘ding.’
“Pfennig,” said Mr. Armbruster, motioning to the chair opposite his desk with one hand and taking a moment to fine-tune his rather heroic combover with the other. “Sit down, please.”
“You wanted to speak with me, sir?” said Simon, taking a seat.
“That is, in fact, why you are sitting in my office right now,” said Mr. Armbruster.
A moment passed as Armbruster sucked on his tongue again for a bit. Then he leaned forward and nudged a small brass dish out from behind a fancy little wooden desk clock and over toward Simon. “Malted milk ball?” he asked.
“Don’t mind if I do,” said Simon, cheerfully helping himself to one.
Armbruster regarded Simon as he sat, there, crunching. “You understand,” he began, “why I brought you in here today.”
“I think so,” said Simon, swallowing his candy. “You’re about to tell me a piece of bad news.”
Armbruster sighed. “Simon,” he said. “I want to start by telling you that I’ve been really quite pleased with your new-found gumption and enthusiasm for selling insurance policies over the telephone. You show a level of dedication that is…well, let’s say, uncommon in these halls. You remind me a bit of myself when I was your age.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Simon.
“That having been said,” said Armbruster, leaning forward even further, “I need you to stop describing to our potential customers, in gruesome detail, how you’re planning on going to Africa and getting eaten by a lion.”
“Lions,” corrected Simon, politely.
“My point,” said Armbruster, “remains a salient one.”
“I see,” said Simon, biting his lip. “‘Gruesome’ detail, though, sir?” he asked, then. “I mean, I realize that I’ve been a bit chatty on the fact to some of them, but—”
Armbruster reached beneath his desk and produced a portable cassette player. He clicked at a button. “—organ meats!” came Simon’s voice. “Not as desirable as the muscle meats, mind you, which are frequently claimed by the dominant male of the pride, but certainly full of good, nutritious—”
Armbruster clicked the ‘stop’ button.
The clock on the desk ticked a handful of times.
“Well…yes,” said Simon. “I can see where you might—”
“I don’t know if I’m imparting the proper gravity to this situation, Simon,” Mr. Armbruster interrupted. “So I will make it perfectly clear to you that I have no desire to see Consolidated Amalgamated Mutual become known as ‘That Place With The Guy Who’s Always Going On About Lions.’ To this end, I am warning you that I absolutely, positively will not tolerate any further behavior of this sort. Do we understand one another, Mister Pfennig?”
“Mm hm!” said Simon, cheerily.
Armbruster narrowed his eyes at Simon. “Let me try this again,” he said, picking up a pencil in an attempt to add emphasis to his words. “We are talking about you losing your job with us, Simon. You don’t want to be unemployed in this city. Not in this economic climate. Trust me.”
Simon nodded brightly. “I understand, sir,” he said.
“You don’t seem like you understand,” said Mr. Armbruster. “I’m looking for a little solemnity or something.”
Simon pondered for a moment. “Permission to speak freely, sir?”
“This isn’t the military, Simon,” said Mr. Armbruster.
“Well,” said Simon. He gathered himself. “The thing is, sir, it’s really hard for me to get worked up at the prospect of losing my job, sir.” He raised a hand against Armbruster’s objection. “Now, I don’t mean that,” he continued. “I will try to restrain myself from talking about my lions to the customers from here on in. But if I can’t…?” Simon shrugged. “Well, another job will be on the way. After all, I have to fund my African safari somehow.” He smiled. “These are more than just idle hopes and dreams now, Mister Armbruster,” he said. “They’re part of my destiny.”
Armbruster regarded Simon for a moment, then shook his head. “You are a strange little guy,” said Armbruster. “If you were any less of a salesman, I’d be handing you your pink slip now and personally ushering your behind out of this building while I instructed Stacy to prepare an invoice charging you for the milk ball. But for every lion mutilation story I’ve got on tape, there’re two or more instances of you winning over a stubborn customer on attitude alone. And that’s the kind of attitude we need around here. Desperately.”
“‘Desperately,’ sir?” inquired Simon.
Armbruster tapped his pencil on the desk a couple of times. “I don’t know if I should even be talking with you about this,” he said. “According to the last Board of Directors meeting, Consolidated Amalgamated Mutual isn’t doing so well. It’s not bad,” he added, quickly. “But comparing our first-quarter sales to how we were doing two years ago, well, it’s sobering. To say the least. And that’s company-wide, Simon. It’s not just Targeted Media Solicitation. It’s across the board.”
He sighed, deeply, and tossed his pencil back into the little cup on his desk. “It’s this damn Machine of Death thing, Simon,” he said. “We’re in the uncertainty business, here. All we’ve got to offer the world is protection against the frightening, unpredictable future. You give the people something, anything, to latch on to, something that gives them a sense of control—even a false one—and suddenly, well, they don’t need us anymore.”
“I’m sure we’ll come through this all right,” Simon volunteered.
“Oh, I know,” said Armbruster, pushing his chair back and rising to a stand. “I know. We weathered that damn ‘no-call list’ thing all right, and I suppose we’ll pull through this, too.” Armbruster rounded the desk and patted Simon on the back; Simon stood, sensing his cue. “But to do it,” said Armbruster, “we’re going to need all our salesmen giving us one hundred and ten, or perhaps fifteen, percent. Can you do that for me, Simon?”
“Yes, sir!” said Simon.
“Good,” said Armbruster, ushering him to the door. “Now get back out there and sell us some policies, all right?”
“Will do, sir!” said Simon, disappearing out the door.
“And NO LIONS!” added Mr. Armbruster, calling after him. But if Simon Pfennig had a response to this, Mr. Armbruster did not hear it.
He sat back against the corner of his desk for a while after Simon had gone, listening to the whirr of the air-handler and the steady ticking of the clock.
“Wish I were looking forward to my heart attack like that,” said Mr. Armbruster.
[/hr]
Night. Home. Simon stood at the sink, washing the last few remnants of tonight’s dinner of lamb and parmesan orzo out of his good dishes. In fact, Simon only had good dishes, nowadays. He had long since donated the bad ones, and even the slightly dodgy ones, to the local thrift shop. The window over his sink was open to the cool night air, and the crickets outside yammered excitedly among themselves, unable to contain their enthusiasm that evening had arrived again, right on schedule. The dishes had been a bit crusty, as they had been left sitting for several hours, and it felt good to Simon to get them all cleaned up. Easier, perhaps, to have tackled them right after dinner, but Simon had run out of time to wash them before his show had come on the television, and the show took clear precedence because it happened to be all about lions tonight. Simon had, naturally, enjoyed every minute of it.
And Simon knew how ridiculous this all must seem, this arrangement of his entire life around the concept of being Torn Apart And Devoured By Lions. Particularly ridiculous, he felt, was the poster (lionesses, of course) he had tacked to the ceiling—preteen-girl style— right above his bed, so it’d be the last thing he saw at night every night of his life. The lion-themed comforter, too, he knew, went a bit beyond the pale. But really, honestly? The whole thing. Ridiculous.
And, as always, Simon had to conclude that there really was no choice.
It was just too exciting.
The dishes done and dripping in their wire rack, Simon moved on to an invigorating workout on the shiny new exercise bicycle he’d purchased at the mall, and from there on to a relaxing shower. Thusly cleaned up for bed, Simon dressed himself in his lion-print pajamas, snuggled down beneath his leonine blankets, and waited for sleep to come. And, as ever, the last sight that greeted him before he finally shut off his bedside lamp was of his lionesses, all in a row, waiting patiently for him and him alone.
At night he dreamed of them, low and tawny, their eyes luminous in the charcoal African dusk. He welcomed them to him like he might a lover, inviting them in to the limits of his light, inviting them to feed.
“Come, beautiful ones,” he whispered to them as they circled close. “Come.”
The alternation between gray (mundane) and yellow (lions), and the overlap between gray (mundane), bold (crazy), and underlined (improved), are key to this story. Each scene ends at or near an underlined passage, because each scene shows how his obsession has changed him for the better. Many of the underlined passages are also in bold, indicating where those things that make him a better person also make him seem crazy to others. Many of the gray passages are also underlined, showing that his new attitude affects every part of his life. The clustering of gray, yellow, bold, and underlined text suggests that you can't partition the magical from the mundane, that what makes something special is how you approach it, not what it is. He seems crazy to us because he now takes the kind of pride in himself and his everyday life that we usually reserve for "special" things, but it's we who are crazy for not doing so. A very Buddhist message.
That, I think, is why we have a lot of red text, little green text, and almost no blue text (though to be more sure, we'd need somebody to annotate another Skywriter story to compare). Poetic language makes something seem less mundane, whereas there's something homey and un-epic about the mediocrity of telly language. This story is about transcendence within the mundane, or argues that there is no such thing as the mundane. Simon's life can't be elevated by comparing it to something grander. Simon contains grandness within him, adverbs and all, now that he believes his life is grand.
Cool, I was looking for a non-audio version of this when you mentioned it yesterday, but I couldn't turn it up. Will take a look at the Goodreads version, and then your annotation.
Fantastic! I'd love it if someone did this with Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream.
1701275 Thanks for volunteering!
Why not pick a section of that story & do that yourself?
1701286
You'll plug it on your blog if I do?
1701301 I'll post a link to your blog on my blog if you do.
1701306
Excellent! Going to start on it now.
1. I only recently found out about this story (I'm terrible, I know) and I have to just say that it's absolutely amazing. I love it to pieces.
2. I think you did an excellent job with the analysis. I certainly agree with you that the transcendence of the mundane is a definite theme, and that the writing bears it out.
3. There's another theme in the story, actually, that I think you might have missed. It's clear from little side-comments that just about everyone has gotten their prediction and it's also clear this has affected the world very little. Everyone has adapted to this new information as minimally as they could, and then continued with their lives as if nothing had changed. As a result, the story's tinged with a bit of satire as it speaks about the enormous elasticity of the quotidian.
4. Simon reminds me vividly of His Imperial Majesty Joshua Norton the First of His Name, Emperor of These United States and Protector of Mexico. They both seem insane, but you can't help but wonder if they found a secret plateau of sanity on the other side of madness.
Words fail me. Somehow it seems horribly unfair that, armed with the same 26 letters of the alphabet and the occasional comma or period, Skywriter does that to the English language. It would be as if the Star Trek episode where Kirk fights the Gorn, we would see our hero, Captain Kirk finally stagger out into the sand with his primitive cannon... only to have the Gorn emerge driving a Panzer MK V.(1)
(1) Not to imply that Skywriter is, in fact, an alien with access to advanced technology, but the facts speak for themselves.
1701308 Well, that nets you a watch. I'd love to see a deep analysis of that story! No one seems to regard it past it's cult status in my experience, and I think it needs more of a critical eye.
1701415
Hey, thanks!
Right now, I'm just touching on the ending, but write can do more. I can even make a few posts about the game adaptation.
1701336
I'm not quite sure I'd agree with this. Certainly Simon is the only character making big life changes because of it, some of which seem fairly dumb. Assuming you've got no employability worries because you have to be able to afford an African safari you can die on? This is classic probabilistic fallacy. The probability of being torn apart and devoured by lions is clearly higher when you're on an African safari than otherwise, but if you already know it's going to happen, the probability of going on an African safari during your life is itself so low that it's not at all clear that the most likely place for it to happen would be on safari.
P(A|B) != P(B|A)
And on that subject, this guy's supposed to be involved with insurance, and yet he lacks basic probabilistic understanding? Skywriter, why you write unbelievable characters? Seriously, I thought you were supposed to be good or something.
Back to my point. Nobody goes to Simon's extreme, but both Brad and Mrs. Murphy indicate that they've made behavioral changes based on what the machine has told them. I actually found Brad's comment on the subject very amusing:
Except that's pretty much exactly what Brad is doing! He's decided that he can overeat to his heart's content because it won't impact how he dies—as if the only point to any action is the impact it will have on your manner of death. This is so nonsensical it gave me a moment of cognitive whiplash when I read it. Brad is sacrificing the associated health and comfort of not being obese (something I am, shall we say, particularly aware of) because he's looking forward to a future of that not being his cause of death.
No wonder Consolidated Amalgamated Mutual is in the tank, if they're hiring people like this to peddle their insurance. Scott's the only one left with a shot at decent probabilistic reasoning, and he's sitting up in his cubicle, flinging food at the other chimps in the cage with him. Someone should have a word with HR.
1701306
Whelp, it's finished.
Thanks for this! It's neat to see it all broken down like this, although I do cringe at the adverbs a bit reflexively, since I keep getting told I shouldn't be using them. But this was the topic of another post.
1702009 Wait, aren't you going to comment on story and theme and what you were thinking when you wrote it?
E.g., am I crazy? 
I have to say, my favorite story from that thing is this one, even though it was my first thought.
The TESTS one also amused me a bit, doubly so as no one realized that the machine itself tested them, and by delaying tests, it might be the machine that killed them.
1702090
It's a beautiful analysis! And it makes me sound an awful lot smarter than I actually am.
Mostly, what I thought about regarding the story was this:
"Okay, absolutely everyone is going to be writing the inevitable Depressing Ironic Stinger de Maupassant-like stories given the premise. So how can I make my story stand out from the crowd of people vying for a space in this anthology? I will do the opposite! I will write a happy, non-ironic story with no stinger whatsoever. How do we make a MoD story happy? Let's take a guy with a crushingly mundane life who has it improved immeasurably by an outrageously-exotic and exciting death prediction. What's a crushingly mundane job? Selling things over the telephone. Ideally, no actual things should be sold, to make it even more pointless (thus, insurance). What's an outrageously-exotic prediction? Getting killed by lions in a really dramatic way, but it can't just say 'lions' because there's too much ambiguity. It has to be specific. Should it be 'torn apart by lions' or 'devoured by lions'? How about both? Sounds good. Now I'm going to write a story."
I can't say that all that stuff about alternating types of lines to advance my themes isn't happening. But it's happening at such a subconscious level that I'm afraid I don't have any useful insights to offer. Most of the time when I'm writing a story it's just a matter of what feels right and what doesn't. But the fact that I didn't go into the piece with all this stuff in mind in no way makes this analysis, or your hard work on it, invalid in any way. This is art. I would argue that interpretation is the point of art, and you are doing exactly what I want you to be doing, which is to say, looking at my art and both feeling and thinking things about it. So, no, you're not crazy[1].
[1] At least, not for doing this.
1701467
To further the irony of Brad's comment, the eventual truth (not seen in this story) is that he dies in a car crash as a direct result of spilling a bunch of fast food all over himself while he's eating-and-driving.
Simon got into the insurance business by being out of work and answering a classified ad in the paper. So no, he's not a born insurance man.
Consolidated Amalgamated Mutual is a doomed company, clearly. Their first mistake was creating a company name without a noun in it.
1702153
I am replying to this post.
(I can't think of anything useful to say in response, but just wanted to acknowledge that I read and appreciated it.)
1702153
It is a cute story. I'm reading through the whole thing, and it is definitely one of the better ones; it was nice to see the more hopeful ones in there. I liked the one about sending messages back in time as well, as well as the one about the inventors and how they disappeared and two of them didn't even want to get tested. TESTS was fun. I liked this one as well, and I was thinking about it pretty much right off the bat. Though my thought for that story was a bit different.
I did enjoy that he came to the same conclusion that I did though - nothing could be a reasonable cause of death.
This has mostly made me realize how poor I am at wielding metaphor and simile. I'm not going to say I don't use it. I will say I don't have any awareness of my usage of it. Terrible flaw, that.
1702153
I distinctly remember reading and liking this story when I got the book at launch, and years later, it is one of the few that really kept with me, along with Almonds and Starvation. I had no idea it was actually you that had written it.
Also, it always left me with the impression that Simon's life would be progressively worsened by the lion obsession, and that he would die in poverty or such because his life was essentially Torn Apart and Devoured by Lions.
1703364
Aw what fun is that?
This story is pretty nice in concept. I remember being really intrigued by this same concept when Big Fish brought it up, just as a little thing to show how offbeat the main character was for being intrigued and not horrified at seeing how he'd die. But here everyone's completely cool with what they saw and... I'm interested to discover just how exactly this all came about. Looks like I might have to read more of Skywriter's stuff.
1702009 Not quite the right place for this, but:
Read this here for the first time, thoroughly enjoyed it. I think it works fine without the paragraph BH says he left out, though I don't know what it was. Wanted to let you know.
Also, you and BH can hold me to this: I'm going to have to do one of your fimfics now.
1925715
Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it!
Hey Bad Horse, I apparently never commented on this post, but I really enjoyed this style of analysis and decided to give it a try on a ponyfic here.