TOP 30 STORIES, DAY 6 // ETHICS COMMITTEE

I’m sharing a bit of my creative process via 30 of my favourite stories as the shorteststory.com/engine campaign runs!

This story makes the list because it combines two of my favourite types of Shortest Story with ruthless efficiency.

Some of my stories are more like observations or inner monologues that are funny, or rhetorical, or revelatory, but don’t actually have a plot. And some of my stories have a very interesting plot, but there’s no… hook, or punchline. They conclude in the way a traditional story does.

“Ethics Committee” does both, and with barely a wasted word. It’s phrased as a series of rhetorical questions that one by one, reveal a story that you come to realize took place before you got here. The questions come full circle by the end, with a punchline that makes you read back up toward the beginning to put everything together.

I’m proud of how efficiently it does that, and how it brings together a dose of science fiction, horror and comedy in such a tight package.

Toni Morrison

"I tell my students, ‘When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else."

Rest in Power.

Murasaki Shikibu

Art by velvetcouch (tumblr, society6)

Around the year 1000, an aristocratic Japanese woman wrote The Tale of Genji which some consider to be the first novel ever written.  It is groundbreaking as the first example of a work of fiction which explored the inner thoughts and motivations of characters.  The author’s exact name is unknown, but this she is generally known as Murasaki Shikibu and she is believed to have been a member of the Fujiwara clan.  The Tale of Genji is set at the Heian court where Murasaki served as a lady in waiting to Empress Soshi.  

The teenage Empress Soshi was a great fan of literature and she served as a patron to numerous female writers.  At the time, Chinese was the intellectual language of Japan.  Murasaki and other Heian female authors wrote in kana, a written form of Japanese.  These popular works were instrumental in the development of formal written Japanese.

Although she is best known for The Tale of Genji, Murasaki also wrote The Diary of Lady Murasaki and Poetic Memoirs, a collection of 128 poems.  

Octavia Estelle Butler (1947 - 2006) 

Octavia Butler was an American science fiction writer. A multiple-recipient of both the Hugo and Nebula awards, Butler was one of the best-known women in the field. In 1995, she became the first science fiction writer to receive the MacArthur Fellowship which is nicknamed the “Genius Grant”

Octavia E. Butler, often referred to as the “grand dame of science fiction,” was born in Pasadena, California on June 22, 1947.  She received an Associate of Arts degree in 1968 from Pasadena Community College, and also attended California State University in Los Angeles and the University of California, Los Angeles.  

During 1969 and 1970, she studied at the Screenwriter’s Guild Open Door Program and the Clarion Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop, where she took a class with science fiction master Harlan Ellison (who later became her mentor), and which led to Butler selling her first science fiction stories. (X)

“Who am I? I am a forty-seven-year-old writer who can remember being a ten-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an eighty-year-old writer. I am also comfortably asocial—a hermit…. A pessimist if I’m not careful, a feminist, a Black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive.”

Octavia E. Butler, reading the self-penned description of herself included in Parable of the Sower during a 1994 interview with Jelani Cobb. (X)

To learn more octaviabutler.org

“To survive,   Know the past.   Let it touch you.   Then let   The past   Go.”  (X)