| Title | : | Six Months, Three Days |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | - |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Kindle Edition |
| Number of Pages | : | 33 |
| Publication | : | First published May 31, 2011 |
| Awards | : | Hugo Award Best Novelette (2012), Nebula Award Best Novelette (2011), Locus Award Best Novelette (2012), Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award (2012) |
Obviously these are the last two people in the world who should date. So, naturally, they do
Six Months, Three Days is the winner of the 2012 Hugo Award for Best Novelette.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Six Months, Three Days Reviews
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“What do you want to do today, Phineas?”
“I know, but what do you want to do?”
Charlie Jane Anders 2011 novelette, that later won the 2012 Hugo Award for best novelette, makes a distinction between Phineas and Ferb’s ubiquitous catchphrase in that Doug and Judy know what is going to happen before it happens.
Doug can see the future and for him it is a linear path, unbroken and unchangeable, he is tortured by his Cyclopean knowledge of his own demise. Judy, on the other hand, can see a myriad of paths to futures that could be. The two know their torrid, passionate relationship and how it will end years before it happens.
Or do they?
Anders playfully examines free will and destiny in this romantic short work and asks questions of this unique situation and then crafts a solution to the problem that is delicious in a Saturday Night Live sensibility.
The best scenes are between Judy and her best friend who analyze every possibility and dissect every interplay in a girl’s night in setting.
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Rating: 3.5* of five
The Publisher Says: NBC is putting Charlie Jane Anders’ Six Months, Three Days into production and we could not be more excited! Tor.com published the Hugo award-winning novelette in 2011.
My Review: "O wad some Power the giftie gie us/To see oursels as ithers see us!" --Robert Burns
That quote has always chilled me. I don't want to see myself as others see me, thanks. Burns's point is that we should not wish for that, ever, because the burden of knowing what another person thinks, sees, feels is quite impossibly heavy and unbearable. Think of how many times in this good life you've wanted not to know what you yourownself thought, felt, saw.
Imagine the painful self-censorship that someone like this has to use simply to navigate life! Stifling honest response, hiding sincere reaction, leaving so much unsaid, unexpressed.
My review is at my blog. I don't post full reviews here anymore because I have no further trust in a place that can censor speech that offends some, without warning, and then keep mum about what they've done in spite of being called out on it.
What they did to someone else, they can and will do to me. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but like relationships, the one unbreakable rule is: What happened last time will happen again without a lot of work on both sides to make sure it doesn't. -
Pretty good!
I really liked the idea behind the story. I thought it was executed well and it was well written. I loved the message BUT it just didn't touch me or evoke deep emotions. Overall solid and interesting.
It's interesting to see how the two characters respond to knowing the future. One is hopeless, resigned to their fate and asks no questions. The other is optimistic and tries to fight fate at every turn. The fact that they experience seeing the future in two different ways really affects their outlook on life. So I don't blame the one character for being so hopeless. I liked the ending. -
“The man who can see the future has a date with the woman who can see many possible futures.”
Thank you Ms. Anders for kindly putting a one-sentence synopsis at the beginning of thisshort storynovelette, and saving me the trouble. Actually, the story depicts multiple dates rather than just one. Basically, it is a story of the romantic relationship between two clairvoyants with somewhat different abilities. Doug can see the future, which appears to be set in stone, but Judy can see alternate versions of her future. Judy believes that Doug’s ability is actually identical to hers but he is too pigheaded to allow for bifurcations or alternative outcomes and thereby traps himself into a future that is inexorably heading south. After finishing the story I still don’t know if she is right. Doug does not seem to make any real effort to divert from the path of his projected future. The story examines the deterministic nature of fate and is perhaps an allegory of optimism vs pessimism. Having just finished reading it a few minutes ago I am hard-pressed to say whether I like this story. I certainly don’t hate it, and it kept my interest throughout but it lacks that mind-blowing quality that I look for in sci-fi/spec-fic short stories and does not connect with me on an emotional level. The ending is a bit so-what-ish to me.
Notes:
• Winner of the 2012 Hugo Award for Best Novelette. So what do I know?
• Read it for free at Tor’s website
here.
• I have to say the word novelette rubs me the wrong way for some reason; apparently, a novelette falls in the range of 7,500 to 19,999 words, shorter than a novella but kinda long for a story. I much prefer the elegant term “longish short story, but not all that long for God's sake”. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Quotes:
“You can know something’s coming from a long way off, you know for years ahead of time the exact day and the very hour when it’ll arrive. And then it arrives, and when it arrives, all you can think about is how soon it’ll be gone.”
“Because he will collapse all of her branching pathways into a dark tunnel.”
“You can’t understand something until you understand it”
(this quote works better when you read it in the context of the story!)
Illustrated by Sam Weber, edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden, "borrowed" from Tor's website! -
Q:
“I’m going to be a vigilante soothsayer,” (c)
Q:
Now that Judy’s seen Doug for real, she’s re-imagining all the conversations they might be having in the coming weeks and months, all of the drama and all of the sweetness. (c)
Much too much ado about precog relationships and vigilante soothsaying.
Q:
You know, you can know something’s coming from a long way off, you know for years ahead of time the exact day and the very hour when it’ll arrive. And then it arrives, and when it arrives, all you can think about is how soon it’ll be gone. (c) Ah, so sweet! I do think many non-precogs feel the same way about the fleetingness of it all.
Q:
“I saw many different hours and days. In one timeline, we would have met two years ago. In another, we’d meet a few months from now. There are plenty of timelines where we never meet at all.” (c)
Q:
“There are a million tracks, you know. It’s like raindrops falling into a cistern, they’re separate until they hit the surface, and then they become the past: all undifferentiated. But there are an awful lot of futures where you and I date for about six months.”
“Six months and three days,” Doug says. “Not that I’ve counted or anything.”
“And it ends badly.” (c)
Q:
Doug works in tech support, in a poorly ventilated sub-basement of a tech company in Providence, RI, that he knows will go out of business in a couple years. He will work there until the company fails, choking on the fumes from old computers, and then be unemployed a few months. (c)
Q:
And you know, I’ve seen some tracks where I get rich, I become a public figure, and they never end well. I’ve got my eye on this one future, this one node way off in the distance, where I die aged 97, surrounded by lovers and grandchildren and cats. Whenever I have a big decision to make, I try to see the straightest path to that moment. (c) What a challenge! -
Pretty awesome Cassandra story, only it's a mirroring between absolute future knowledge and possible future knowledge, the two characters having a fight over which is correct.
And who knows? Both might still be!
What makes this pretty awesome is that it's a romance. Both fall in love, he can see everything, including how they break up. She can see tons of futures and fights with him to change things and try to keep their love strong instead of breaking up in six months, three days. :)
The details make this strong, however. :) I was very much charmed. :) -
What would you do if you could see the future?
A young woman capable of seeing all possible outcomes of a situation meets a man who can see one definite future. But which one of them is right? They date, they fall in love ... like they knew they would ... for a while.
So what would you do?
I, personally, would fight. Some might call it self-delusion but if I saw someone being hit by a truck when crossing the street, I'd stop them (make them go later or something). Maybe it wouldn't change anything in the end, but I couldn't just shrug and say "oh well, it'll happen anyway", I'd HAVE to try.
And I don't agree that one has to destroy one's memories in order to be happy - memories are what shape us to a not insignificant point. So I'd rather not know about the future at all, especially when seeing what it does to Doug.
This is a very short story but as you can see from this review, it's packing a punch, making one contemplate a lot and feeling for and with the characters. By the way, I especially liked Martha - she was funny as hell. -
This was pretty interesting. An examination of how differently two people who can see their possible futures handle their powers, their conflict about destiny vs free will, and how powerless they can feel sometimes - I thought this was a fascinating take on the topic and that end was definitely surprising.
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“They are both going to say some vicious things to each other in the next hour or so. They’ve already heard it all, in their heads.”
I asked for a short romantic Tor before bed and I got... this.
Man who sees a single possible future hooks up with a woman who sees many possible futures. Because couples need new things to fight about.
This was long, frustrating, and sad.
Boo Tor Boo -
Imagine you not only knew who you were going to fall in love with, but you knew how and when it was going to end. Would you still go through with it? Would you even have that choice? Doug and Judy can both see the future, they both see how they are going to meet and how it will go wrong. The only difference is that Judy sees the future as a series of choices and paths, of options and opportunities. Doug sees a single path, no choices, no escape. Can they both be right?
Doug knows how they will meet, how it will feel, how it will end – after six months and three days – what they will argue about, every detail. There is no room for deviation from his path, his fate is set and he lives it exactly as he knows it will happen. After all, what's the point in fighting what you know must happen. Judy sees choices, but that her relationship with him will be an important one if she makes those choices. She also sees that the relationship must end. But, if she can only introduce some variables, she can prove him wrong. Prove that the future isn't fixed, that things could end differently. But Doug only ever sees one future, one path, one outcome. He knows he will prove her wrong.
A beautifully subtle short story of two people with different curses. He never takes risks because, what's the point? She feels she has choices, but she can see the outcome of those choices before she makes them. His fatalistic nihilism is always going to clash with her more optimistic, opportunistic, outlook. Of course they disagree over their two opposing views of the future. But how can both views co-exist in the same world – can they both be true? -
3.5 stars
A short story about two people who already know how and when their relationship starts and ends.
Liked it, especially the dialogue, which felt believable and real. Interesting question: do you bother getting involved in an interaction with someone, especially if you already know how it works out for both of you, or do you play it safe and avoid, or do you try to change the outcome? I'm surprised the protagonists weren't stark, raving mad, calculating every, tiny decision, every day. I like the ending--by the time I got there, I couldn't recall who was remembering incorrectly regarding the broken limb. I liked the headwind blowing the memories. -
This was the second time I've read a short story by Charlie Jane Anders.
The first one was “Rat Catcher’s Yellows”, included in the 2015 anthology
Press Start to Play.
While I liked the premise of that story, I just didn’t connect with it, for whatever reason. This can always happen with short fiction and doesn’t necessarily say something about the quality of the writing.
My second try is her 2012 Hugo Award winning story “Six Months, Three Days”. This actually won the award for Best Novelette. I’m not sure why that is. I would have categorized this as a short story. But I’m also not sure what the exact criteria is. So who cares what I'm thinking?!
This was a totally different experience to the first story I had read from the author. While I again liked the premise, this time I was drawn in immediately.
"Six Months, Three Days" is about two clairvoyants that fall in love with each other. Of course, they already knew this before they even met. And unfortunately they also already know how it will end.
But their powers are different. Or maybe they only think different about them? While Judy sees how any decision she makes will play out, Doug believes he doesn’t have a choice anyway.
This makes for an interesting thought experiment about free will, destiny and self-fulfilling prophecies.I was savoring the moment. You know, you can know something’s coming from a long way off, you know for years ahead of time the exact day and the very hour when it’ll arrive. And then it arrives, and when it arrives, all you can think about is how soon it’ll be gone.
I liked Anders' prose and thought the dialogue felt vivid and real. Which made this an easy accessible read. But it is not one that is easy to process. This story provokes a lot of thought and doesn’t always give the answers the reader longs for.
I rate this 3.5 stars.
Immediately after I finished reading I was thinking about rounding down to 3 stars. But it kept me thinking for quite a while. So I round up for now.
I can even see my future self giving this a 5 star rating.
That’s the thing with short stories. Timing is so important.
I think this story and I, we just did not meet at the perfect time. Is there anything I could have done about it? Is our path predetermined or are we the makers of our own destiny?
If you like to think about things like this, you should probably pick this up.
You can read it here for free:
https://www.tor.com/2011/06/08/six-mo...
Do you really have any choice now? -
An interesting and stimulating thought experiment.
I read this story right after finishing the amazing "
All the Birds in the Sky" and unfortunately it did not grab me in the same way. Something about the writing and the two main protagonists just didn't click (I did like Marva though). However, while I might not have enjoyed the actual narrative as much as I hoped (and I can't rule out that maybe my expectations where unreasonably high) the themes it touches and the thoughts it provokes are extremely interesting. Is free will just the way our brains interpret a deterministic reality or do we really have a choice? And whichever maybe true, do we have to spend our time with eyes on the future or is it possible to simply live in the fleeting moments of the here and now?
Obviously the book can't answer such profound philosophical questions for you, but if only for making you wonder and think about these topics, questioning things you might have taken for granted or never given a thought before, I would argue that it is worth reading. -
An excellent short story! Two people who can both "remember" the future get together. But one of them sees only one future, whereas the other sees a multitude of possibilities. Which of them is correct?
This brings up wonderful quandaries of quantum mechanics, self-fulfilling prophecies, and predestination, but it also deals with the characters on a very personal level. From the most intimate details of their lives to the unique quirks of their day-to-day, they feel solid, believable, and likable. -
Charming love story examining the notions of free will and destiny, the intersection of which create some sparks, not to mention some tears and maybe a broken bone or two :) Makes one think that being able to see the future could be more of a curse than a blessing.
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A Hugo winner, and pretty darn sexy:
"Doug knows that in two and a half weeks, those cucumber-smooth ankles will be hooked on his shoulders, and that curly reddish-brown hair will spill everywhere onto her lemon-floral pillows; this image of their future coitus has been in Doug’s head for years, with varying degrees of clarity, and now it’s almost here. The knowledge makes Doug almost giggle at the wrong moment, but then it hits him: she’s seen this future too — or she may have, anyway."
Lots of twists and surprises. I should reread it myself. And if you haven't yet -- well, you should. -
One of those stories I feel you ought to like more than I actually do. The concept of two clairvoyant lovers, one who think the future is pre-ordained and another who doesn't, is a brilliant framework for some insightful reflections about relationships. but somehow it just doesn't work as well as it should. I think it's partly because I found some of the writing a little mannered, but mostly because I just didn't ever engage with either of the main characters. In the end, I can appreciate the artistry of the story, but it didn't evoke a strong reaction.
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Maravilloso, simplemente maravilloso.
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Short story about the course of a relationship, with a dash of fantasy in it. The characters were interesting, although we get to only really know the female lead rather than her partner. The ending was actually terrific, as it let the reader take a breathe and imagine a happy ending for the couple.
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Cool concept, explored in a neat way. I enjoyed it, but characters are thin and I personally found the descriptions to be overly dependent on pop culture references and brand names.
It was nominated for a Hugo in the novella category (it's really a short story), but I think that speaks to how much those awards have become (or perhaps always were?) popularity contests. Charlie Jane writes for io9 and has a strong online presence, plus a compelling personal story. I like her online writing, but it is hard for me to see how this ranks as a top 5. -
The idea of the story was very promising, but not very well executed, in my opinion. I would have wanted more depth, both in the characters and in the concept of the story. Of course it is only a novelette, so this automatically makes it pretty limited -lengthwise. Anyway, I just felt like there was something missing. Meh.
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Dating is difficult enough as it is but imagine going on a date and being able to see the future... now imagine dating a person that can see multiple futures!
What a great concept in this novelette that I happened across on Tor.com.
Here's a link if you'd like to read it too, I'd love to know if you enjoyed it as much as I did!
https://www.tor.com/2011/06/08/six-mo... -
Short, but beautiful about two star crossed romantic partners who could see the future in entirely different ways -- one sees all the possible futures, the other only sees one future that has always come true.
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Sad wispy little story. I guess I gave it only three stars because it wasn’t long enough.
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Reading this felt like being mobbed by five years olds
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The opening line is, “The man who can see the future has a date with the woman who can see many possible futures.” I really like this setup, and the conflict it creates between the man who sees a fixed, unavoidable future and the woman who believes she has free will to choose from various possibilities. I love how Anders presents the characters, both of whom have known for a long time that this relationship was coming and how it would go, but who still stumble through the same awkwardness as the rest of us. I loved the details, like the game Judy plays with her friend, picking random destinations and predicting what would happen if they packed up and went there that very day. Anders’ characters are so very human, and the conflict between them — is the future really fixed (Doug), or can you choose your future (Judy)? — is thoughtfully explored.
The answer Anders gives to that conflict is simultaneously tragic and scary and hopeful, and felt right for the story. This is the first story I’ve read by Anders, but it certainly won’t be the last. -
Cool concept with intriguing unanswered questions. Two lovers with powers with which they have already seen there futures and believe it can't be changed,the guy only able to see one future and the girl being able to see multiple ones and choosing the best one.
Never realized having such a awesome power would be a curse, you already know your worse days, and now you get to relive it before it happens. All the conversations you ever do has already happened, how does one live such a life.
The whole story is based on an idea which is amazing just it leaves a lot to ones interpretation. Beyond that the characters are not developed and a lot of refinement is possible. -
This Hugo award-winning novella was a very pleasant surprise. Charlie Jane Anders fearlessy dropped me into her story and made me feel immediately welcome and involved. I wouldn't normally expect to be so taken by such immediate and sparse story-telling, especially in a science fiction story, but it really worked here... I especially enjoyed her attention to detail... How would a person who can see into the future really function in life? How would that person relate to other people, whether they shared the gift of premonition or not? I was immediately charmed and loved every moment of the story.
