| Title | : | As Good as New |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1466881038 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781466881037 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | ebook |
| Number of Pages | : | 32 |
| Publication | : | First published September 10, 2014 |
As Good as New Reviews
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Marisol was an award-winning playwright, but that hadn’t saved her from the end of the world.
it wasn't until today, when i (finally) sat down to reread this story for review, that i realized this was written by the author of
All the Birds in the Sky, a book i bought in hardcover because it was so pretty. this story is more "cute" than anything else, so it's not propelling me over to that book where it languishes unread on my shelf, but it was fun enough and it has some good lines.
marisol is an award-winning, but lapsed, playwright who forsook the theater for medical school, which seemed more meaningful at the time. when she was putting in a housekeeping stint for a wealthy gent to pay for med school, the world ended, and marisol found herself spending the apocalypse in a really swank panic room, with an endless supply of frozen food, and nearly every tv show available to watch, fancy-style. despite all this bounty, she finds herself watching 16 hour marathons of the facts of life, which seems therapeutic for her:
When Marisol let herself think about all the people she could never talk to again, she got so choked up she wanted to punch someone in the eye until they were blinded for life. She experienced grief in the form of freak-outs that left her unable to breathe or think, and then she popped in another Facts of Life.
these marathons are interrupted only by the giant quakes occurring in whatever is left of the world. after 2 years time, the quakes abate somewhat, and marisol decides it's time to check out the situation. she finds the world covered by white powder which she assesses as fungus, and she figures it's safe enough for her to be out there.
“The fungus would have all died out when there was nothing left for it to feed on,” Marisol said aloud. “There’s no way it could still be active.” She tried to pretend some other person, an expert or something, had said that, and thus it was authoritative.
she also finds a bottle which, when opened, unleashes a former theater critic-turned wish-facilitator named richard wolf, who takes one look around and says, “Oh, fuck. Not again.”
marisol is granted three wishes by richard, and she's savvy enough in the wish-granting-game to not use up all three wishes impulsively, and even manages to snag a fourth. she bides her time, trying to learn all she can from richard, and life continues much as it has until then - she watches more facts of life, she talks shop and watches plays with richard, she even writes another play as an exercise in mapping out how best to deploy wishes, for the purposes of saving the world.
pleased to finally have company, she takes advantage of richard's presence, and they have many funny and lively discussions about the state of contemporary theater, and the nature of performance, writing, etc.
including a nice remark about the nature of criticism that some should take to heart:
“I mean, I get why people want criticism that is essentially cheerleading, even if that doesn’t push anybody to do their best work.”
“Well, if you think of theatre as some sort of delicate flower that needs to be kept protected in some sort of hothouse”—and at this point, Wolf was clearly reprising arguments he’d had over and over again, when he was alive—“then you’re going to end up with something that only the faithful few will appreciate, and you’ll end up worsening the very marginalization that you’re seeking to prevent.”
there's also some nice snark about postmodernism, after marisol tells richard all about her award-winning play and he groans at it
“Sorry! I mean, maybe it was better on the stage; I bet you have a flair for dialogue. It just sounds so . . . hackneyed. I mean, postmodern Cyrano de Bergerac? I heard all about postmodernism from this one graduate student who opened my bottle in the early 1990s, and it sounded dreadful. If I wasn’t already sort of dead, I would be slitting my wrists. You really did make a wise choice, becoming a doctor.”
and additional snark about cliché, as marisol approaches her wishes systematically, studying all the possible ways things could go wrong:
The media server in the panic room had a bazillion movies and TV episodes about the monkey paw, the wishing ring, the magic fountain, the Faustian bargain, the djinn, the vengeance-demon, and so on. So she had plenty of time to soak up the accumulated wisdom of the human race on the topic of making wishes, which amounted to a pile of clichés. Maybe she would have done more good as a playwright than as a doctor, after all—clichés were like plaque in the arteries of the imagination, they clogged the sense of what was possible. Maybe if enough people had worked to demolish clichés, the world wouldn’t have ended.
and marisol comes to a conclusion about the saving-the-world-by-wishes situation that is informed both by her writing and medical backgrounds:
This was pretty much exactly like trying to cure a patient, Marisol realized. You give someone a medicine which fixes their disease but causes deadly side effects. Or reduces the patient’s resistance to other infections. You didn’t just want to get rid of one pathogen, you wanted to help the patient reach homeostasis again. Except that the world was an infinitely more complex system than a single human being. And then again, making a big wish was like writing a play, with the entire human race as players. Bleh.
it's a cute story, but it delivers better on its theatrical discussions than as a contribution to post-apoc fantasy or wish-fulfillment narratives.
however, i think it would actually make a nice play, and if someone someday decides to grant me that station eleven graphic novel, this would be a nice inclusion, with its complementary themes of theater and the end of world. just a thought.
and now i can't get the facts of life theme song out of my head. great.
read it for yourself here:
http://www.tor.com/2014/09/10/as-good...
come to my blog! -
4.5 stars for this delightfully quirky fantasy short story by Charlie Jane Anders, free online at
Tor.com. Review first posted on
Fantasy Literature:
Marisol Guzmán, a pre-med student who decided that being a doctor was a better career choice than a playwright, is saved from the end of the world only because she’s housecleaning a mansion when massive earthquakes began. She ran into the mansion’s panic room, conveniently equipped with a generator and ample food and video entertainment. And there she stayed for two years, while the earthquakes gradually lessened.
When she finally ventures out of the panic room, she finds that every organic thing on earth has been destroyed, consumed by a manmade fungus that died off after its food supply was used up. Luckily for Marisol and our story, she finds a green bottle nearby, and in the bottle …“Wait,” Marisol said. “You’re a — You’re a genie?”
The natural thing for Marisol to wish for is to undo the extinction of life on earth, but a few stray words from the genie (“Not again!”) warn her to be careful about how she uses her wishes.
“I hate that term,” the man said. “I prefer wish-facilitator. And for your information, I used to be just a regular person. I was the theater critic at The New York Times for six months in 1958, which I still think defines me much more than my current engagement does. But I tried to bamboozle the wrong individual, so I got stuck in a bottle and forced to grant wishes to anyone who opens it.”
“As Good as New” is a highly amusing mashup of a post-apocalyptic cautionary tale, a primer on how to best use magical wishes, and a commentary on the importance of theater and the arts. A few touching moments and insights are juxtaposed with the humorous critiques of modern entertainment. Any uncertainties I had about the logic of this story were swept away in a wave of goodwill toward its creativity and humor. I enjoyed the way this played out! -
3.5 stars
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She was standing in a world of stinky chalk talking to a self-loathing genie. After two years alone in a box, that didn’t even seem weird, really.
In a post-apocalyptic world, Marisol, a playwright turned med student, gets to make three wishes.
Her personal wish-facilitator?
A former theater critic.
Marisol's quest becomes how to have her wishes granted without inflicting damage to mankind, or herself. She must use both her knowledge of drama AND her medical training (not to mention her keen insight into The Facts of Life) to avoid making the same mistakes as the previous wishers.
Oh, my! WWMGD?
(What Would Mrs. Garrett Do?)
This is the latest Tor short story, available to read for free here:
http://www.tor.com/stories/2014/09/as... -
Marisol got into an intense relationship with the people on The Facts of Life, to the point where Tootie and Mrs. Garrett became her imaginary best friends and she shared every last thought with them. She told Tootie about the rash she got from wearing the same bra every day for two years, and she had a long talk with Mrs. Garrett about her regrets that she hadn’t said a proper goodbye to her best friend Julie and her on-again/off-again boyfriend Rod, before they died along with everybody else.
This was pretty much exactly like trying to cure a patient, Marisol realized. You give someone a medicine which fixes their disease but causes deadly side effects. Or reduces the patient’s resistance to other infections. You didn’t just want to get rid of one pathogen, you wanted to help the patient reach homeostasis again. Except that the world was an infinitely more complex system than a single human being. And then again, making a big wish was like writing a play, with the entire human race as players. Bleh..
A quick and fun post-apocalyptic tale with a nice spin on the three wishes storyline. I like how Marisol arrived at what to do with her wishes and the rapport she had with Richard (I kept picturing Hugh Laurie when he was talking).
“Thank you for opening my bottle. I am pleased to offer you three wishes.” Then he looked around, and his already dour expression worsened. “Oh, fuck,” he said. “Not again.”
“Wait,” Marisol said. “You’re a— You’re a genie?”
“I hate that term,” the man said. “I prefer wish-facilitator. And for your information, I used to be just a regular person. I was the theater critic at The New York Times for six months in 1958, which I still think defines me much more than my current engagement does.
I was a little lost on some of the theater references though *shrugs*
The ending was predictable and felt somewhat rushed but overall I enjoyed this very much:)
Read the story here -
I fell in love with that cover, do you see that shit.... it's pretty cool looking. Brings The Imp by Robert Louis Stevenson to mind, for me!
Unfortunately this short was mid-ground for me... for some reason the Genie, Richard, reminded me of Duckie from "Pretty in Pink":
Which while I love him in this huge teenage nostalgia way, doesn't lend itself to a whole lot of seriousness. I think this is a brain fail though, I just don't know.
It was okay. -
Hmm, Anders seems to think about the end of the world a lot.
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I really liked this one. 4.5 stars, rounded down to 4, because all the talk about plays and play writers went right over my head. I'm sure it makes the story deeper, but I just really wanted to see what the three wishes were. And they were really pretty awesome. Great MC. Very smart, took her time to figure things out and do it properly. Highly recommended!
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What fun! Great take on a genie in the bottle story which unfolds after the apocalypse. Though the story is quite short, Anders really manages to create a well realized protagonist, as well as inject quite a bit of humor and fun in a story of the apocalypse. Neither an easy feat.
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After a global catastrophe, Marisol is the only survivor on Earth. After some time, she encounters a genie in the bottle.
This is a short story by Charlie Jane Anders available for free on Tor.com:
As Good as New -
"[...]clichés were like plaque in the arteries of the imagination, they clogged the sense of what was possible."
Gorgeous free short story, full of sparkling wit, charm, and even some deep thoughts, delivered with a humorous tone:
https://www.tor.com/2014/09/10/as-goo...
It's especially relevant if you sometimes think of how complex the world is and how difficult it would be to figure out how to actually effect a positive change that wouldn't inevitably cause some unintended negative consequence. Or if you sometimes wonder about the deeper purpose of fiction and art. -
A great and funny post-apocalyptic story.
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Marisol got into an intense relationship with the people on The Facts of Life, to the point where Tootie and Mrs. Garrett became her imaginary best friends and she shared every last thought with them. She told Tootie about the rash she got from wearing the same bra every day for two years, and she had a long talk with Mrs. Garrett about her regrets that she hadn’t said a proper goodbye to her best friend Julie and her on-again/off-again boyfriend Rod, before they died along with everybody else.
I expected a little more from Charlie Jane Anders. Partially due to her Hugo-Award winning status, but mostly by its premise. As Good As New was a play on the three wishes trope, featuring a rather clever apocalyptic backdrop.
All that was fine and good, and I had tremendous fun with it. Not only was I surprised by how accomplished Anders was (in this work and in books like her 2016 science fantasy novel,
All the Birds in the Sky, winner of the Nebula Award for Best Novel,) but by the ease of her prose. Her seemingly effortless work made the thirty-two pages, or sixty-plus paragraphs, fly by in no more than thirty minutes.
I couldn't get enough. Learning about Marisol and her various quarks, misgivings and regrets, alongside her newfound rapport with genie, Richard Wolf, made for some truly captivating reading.
With that said, you'd think something was amiss; that some devious overlord might fly in, wielding a bloody sythe. Or, at the very least, that Anders was harboring some epic twist. You'd THINK SO, wouldn't you?
Maybe she did, maybe she didn't. Perhaps the ending was an intellectual perversion of the three. Check it out for free at Tor.com to decide for yourself.
http://www.tor.com/stories/2014/09/as... -
Silly story about the end of the world, genie in a bottle, the three wishes given, and the importance of live theater. What did I miss? Good frozen dinners. Binge-watching old TV shows. . . .
I liked it. 3.5 stars, rounded up. Gosh, 2014 story! Well, better late than never....
Story link:
https://www.tor.com/2014/09/10/as-goo... -
'"People had the wrong idea when I was a theatre critic, too; they thought it was my job to promote the theatre, to put buns in seats, even for terrible plays. That was not my job at all.”'
Yeah, I hear ya. There are some that think similarly regarding consumers who write book reviews.
Another Tor short, read it free here:
http://www.tor.com/2014/09/10/as-good... -
A Tor.Com short story - a retelling of the Genie in the bottle with the three wishes in a post-apocalyptic setting.
Quick, easy read. -
Day 22 in my 24 Days of Shorts
The panic room had nice blue leather walls and a carpeted floor that felt nice to walk on, and enough gourmet frozen dinners to last Marisol a few lifetimes. She only had the pair of shoes she’d brought in there with her, and it would seem weird to wear shoes after two barefoot years. The real world was in here, in the panic room—out there was nothing but an afterimage of a bad trip.
This was really funny. It wasn’t perfect, and the ending was a bit of a fizzle, but overall I really enjoyed reading it.
read it for yourself here:
https://www.tor.com/2014/09/10/as-goo...
My 24 Days of Shorts
1.
File N°002 by
Sylvain Neuvel
2.
File N°247 by
Sylvain Neuvel
3.
Skinner Box by
Carole Johnstone
4.
The Weight of Memories by
Liu Cixin
5.
A Fist of Permutations in Lightning and Wildflowers by
Alyssa Wong
6.
If at First You Don't Succeed, Try, Try Again by
Zen Cho
7.
Meat And Salt And Sparks by
Rich Larson
8.
Seven Birthdays by
Ken Liu
9.
Where Would You Be Now? by
Carrie Vaughn
10.
Old Media by
Annalee Newitz
11.
Nine Last Days on Planet Earth by
Daryl Gregory
12.
Sweetlings by
Lucy Taylor
13.
An Unexpected Honor by
Ursula Vernon
14.
Hell is the Absence of God by
Ted Chiang
15.
A Love Story by
Samantha Hunt
16.
The Lake by
Tananarive Due
17.
Ghost Hedgehog by
Nina Kiriki Hoffman
18.
Finnegan's Field by
Angela Slatter
19.
Among the Thorns by
Veronica Schanoes
20.
Rag and Bone by
Priya Sharma
21.
The Mothers of Voorhisville by
Mary Rickert
22.
As Good as New by
Charlie Jane Anders
23.
Twixt Firelight and Water by
Juliet Marillier
24.
The Christmas Show by
Pat Cadigan -
Lovely.
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Yikes...I don’t want to be mean, but this truly wasn’t for me! 😂 Luckily, it was short and free!
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This was a joy to read. I have got to get around to reading All the Birds in the Sky.
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I listened to LeVar Burton read this story. I usually don't listen to audios, but how can I say no to LeVar? He was excellent! He made the story so much fun.
Thank you Sarah for sharing this story with me and the audio! -
This was a three star story, but I am adding a star for that GORGEOUS graphic!
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Quirky and pretentious, this is a short story about a woman who finds a genie and his bottle after the end of the world and sets about trying to make things right. I wasn't impressed with the writing (here we have yet another author who doesn't know how to correctly punctuate dialogue), and the overall tone was both bland and affected. The MC's best friend's name was Julie for the first half, and Julia for the second, and there was even one spot where we were suddenly inside a non-POV character's head for one sentence. Editor?
The main character, Marisol, isn't too bad, but we don't really know much about who she is, beyond a few labels. The descriptions of her weird plays didn't help much, either; those just made me feel like she was trying way too hard to be an artiste. And Richard, the genie... Almost immediately, he's described as looking like a Jew, and then Marisol refers to him as a "self-loathing" genie. I went back and reread how the character was introduced, and I couldn't see anything that indicated self-loathing. So either the author was relying on a tired stereotype, or she was telling the reader about the character, rather than showing (which isn't great, either).
I didn't quite understand the wishes. I mean, I understood what they were, but Marisol's second wish pretty much eliminated the need for the third (and fourth) wishes, so I didn't really understand why she made them the way she did. I got the feeling that she was just trying to show how clever she was. She wouldn't make stupid wishes like all those other wishers of the past. She was too smart to do the things that would lead to apocalyptic results. Well, good for you, Marisol. But you basically wasted two wishes. She had all the time in the world to think about how to overcome any loopholes or paradoxes, so you'd think she would've been able to come up with something better... or at least a little more interesting. (Technically, she wouldn't have had a lot of time, but we're operating under the assumption that frozen microwave dinners have infinite viability. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't want to eat those after a few years, no matter how good your freezer was.)
This review is threatening to overtake the story itself, as far as word count goes, so I'll just end it here. Not terrible, but not great, and probably pretty forgettable. I'm sure there are better genie stories out there.
Quotable moment:Maybe she would have done more good as a playwright than as a doctor, after all—clichés were like plaque in the arteries of the imagination, they clogged the sense of what was possible. Maybe if enough people had worked to demolish clichés, the world wouldn’t have ended.
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ko-fi | |Sometimes, Marisol thought she had a duty to stay in the panic room, since she was personally keeping the human race alive.
This short story offers a refreshing and charming take on the Genie who grants three wishes story. In spite of its short length
As Good as New depict a great combination of humour and thoughtfulness. By setting the Genie story in a post-apocalyptic world the author manages to raise the stakes of the protagonist's wishes. The Genie of this story is unlike those I've read/seen before...
Entertaining and clever, you can read it for free on Tor:
https://www.tor.com/2014/09/10/as-goo...
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This was a new wrinkle on the "genie in the bottle" story and I enjoyed it immensely. What would happen if the world underwent an apocalypse and the only ones to survive were yourself and a genie...who also doubles as a film critic?
I think you end up with a wonderfully done short story which was read masterfully by Levar Burton (my hero/idol).
Quirky, fun, and surprisingly introspective, "As Good as New" was a very good short read. -
Alternate take of the three-wishes spiel...
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Best short story I have read all year.
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As Good as New was a clever short story that combined the unlikely elements of an apocalyptic disaster, a genie-in-a-bottle and playwrights into one story. Marisol is a pre-med student who cleans houses for extra money to get through school when a devastating earthquake occurs and she is lucky enough to be in a mansion that has a fully stocked safe room. Two years go by and she leaves the room to find the world ravaged by a fungus and improbably discovers a genie who used to be a theatre critic. Granted the typical three wishes, Marisol realizes she needs to plan the wishes carefully and a talky battle of wits occurs. The narrative was very meta in how the story played out, in relation to the criticisms that the genie mentioned in how he critiqued plays in the past and it all tied together in a pleasing way. (Actual review 4.5/5)
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This story was pretty interesting! I like the concept and how it plays on the classic story of 3 wishes from a genie, and how it even mentions the character considering all of the old stories. I just have some pretty big qualms: the character watches TV for years when the entire world has been apocalypse-d; no WAY she would still have power. And she also stays in this "safe house box" but, uh, how is she able to get food and water? Shower? Go to the bathroom? So yeah, not too realistic, but still thought provoking.
