Short Story Club: "Stereogram of the Gray Fort, in the Days of Her Glory" by Paul M. Berger

I just realized that I haven't posted anything about this week's Short Story Club entry, "Stereogram of the Gray Fort, in the Days of Her Glory" by Paul M. Berger.This is largely because I don't have a great deal to say about it.

This is another "After the magic apocalypse" story, only this time the magic apocalypse takes the form of a return by conquering armies of Elves. The story is set a couple of generations after the human resistance was crushed at the Gray Fort, which was the final holdout of the human resistance, and recounts the visit to the fort by an Elf who fought in the war and his new human bride. Thanks to elven magic, the happy couple shares part of their consciousness, and each can access part of the other's feelings.

The stereogram of the title is a split picture of the fort, rendered as two sets of abstract colored lines that, when one picture is viewed by each part of a joined couple, resolves into a 3-d picture of the fort. Putting the "magic" in "Magic Eye," I guess. It's also a reference to the structure of the story, in which the same events are recounted once from the elf point of view, and once from the human.

I ended up being unimpressed with this, and I'm not sure exactly why. Mostly, it's that I could see exactly where it was headed from about the point where the brain-sharing thing was explained, and knew it exactly by the time she picked up the dagger. The shift in perspectives was not that much of a revelation, and the whole thing unfolded with a sense of inevitability rather than a sense of wonder.

But again, as I say, I'm not really sure why my reaction to this is a jaded "Meh"-- it's not like there's a huge glut of psychically linked elf stories on the market, and as a technical matter, it's well done. Berger also deserves credit for having a return of magic without turning it into a My Awesome Werewolf Boyfriend kind of story.

It's just... Something about the way it all unfolded wound up feeling, for me, more like the completion of a checklist than a compelling story. Remark about technology making humans weak, check. Remark about our world being too amazing to be true, check. Change in perspective making "courtship" seem really creepy, check. One of linked couple able to hide thoughts and plans from the other, check. And so on.

I'm not sure there's any single story out there that combines all these elements, but I've seen all of them before, many times. There are bits here that feel lifted exactly from things like Steven Boyett's Ariel, Guy Kay's Tigana, and other books, and while the combination is new, all the elements still feel too familiar.

In the end, this is a well done story, but I wish it had put some more twists on the basic after-the-magic-apocalypse framework, or something. As it was, it was just a little too predictable.