C L Moore

Vintage Season with C.L. Moore

I read Vintage Season and Song in Minor Key, these stories threw me a bit, considering how expansive Star Wars and How dense Dune is. I understand that they are short stories, but what threw me most is how they had me picturing a time in the past rather than the very distant future. It is more obvious in Vintage Season, but more nuanced  in Song in Minor Key, the way Smith is remembering his life on earth had me imagining a simple house on the prairie in the U.S. Midwest. It was only with the description of his gun and his life on Venus that brought me back to a more futuristic mindset. Both of these stories seem very romanticized, from the visuals, to what it is these characters want in life. There is no epic quest as I imagined there would be, although the way that Vintage Season ended certainly changed in its scale, from a story of a man, Oliver, finding love with a time traveler, to the destruction of his town by a meteor, Oliver contracting a plague virus from that meteor explosion leading to his death and finally his home being dynamited in an attempt to contain that plague. I thought this climax reached an epic scale of fallout from the events that transpired in the story; considering how innocently it seemed to start, even though I had a rousing suspicion of these time travelers from the very beginning, the story did a good job to quell that with the budding relationship between Oliver and Kleph. I thought it was pretty amusing too, I think Kleph toyed with Oliver until the very end, since she knew exactly what was going to happen in that timeline, maybe she had genuine feelings for him, but she had to have known he had to die, otherwise she would have taken him with her or stayed to help him in that time. I really enjoyed how this story built to its conclusion, I was caught completely by surprise and the fact that protagonist died in a failed attempt to warn people of this plague and visitors of the future made it all the more satisfying. No present wrapped in a pretty bow here, just some cold hard futility.