Super Flat Times: Stories

Rating:
Summary: A fascinating mirror of our own humanity.
Review: A good collection of short stories may be the hardest thing to produce in literature. Either some stand out from the rest, or the whole of them are mediocre. But the only successful sets are those that stand by themselves and yet combine into a cohesive whole. Super Flat Times by Matthew Derby is a unique and satisfying example. In this future imperfect, we see memory fragments - some short, some long - that reveal a world torn apart in transition. Transition to what? Even the narrator does not say. From sound weapons to meat popsicles to father helmets to roller coasters designed to kill, all the glimpses of those who did not survive the 'super flat times' provide understanding to those who did. Points of comparision include Brave New World and 1984. However, Bradbury's Martian Chronicles is the nearest cousin to Derby's brillant imagination. Yet the characters in Super Flat Times are not exploring a new planet, but rather the warped reality of their own homes and families. The work as a whole is less than 200 pages, perfect for two reasons: it's blessedly to the point in this age of 600 page meandering monoliths, and because you will finish it once you start, the reading won't take the whole night. Here's hoping Matthew Derby continues to imagine, because I will follow him wherever his thought goes.

Rating:
Summary: Harsh fragments woven into a dense, scary future...
Review: A good collection of short stories may be the hardest thing to produce in literature. Either some stand out from the rest, or the whole of them are mediocre. But the only successful sets are those that stand by themselves and yet combine into a cohesive whole. Super Flat Times by Matthew Derby is a unique and satisfying example. In this future imperfect, we see memory fragments - some short, some long - that reveal a world torn apart in transition. Transition to what? Even the narrator does not say. From sound weapons to meat popsicles to father helmets to roller coasters designed to kill, all the glimpses of those who did not survive the 'super flat times' provide understanding to those who did. Points of comparision include Brave New World and 1984. However, Bradbury's Martian Chronicles is the nearest cousin to Derby's brillant imagination. Yet the characters in Super Flat Times are not exploring a new planet, but rather the warped reality of their own homes and families. The work as a whole is less than 200 pages, perfect for two reasons: it's blessedly to the point in this age of 600 page meandering monoliths, and because you will finish it once you start, the reading won't take the whole night. Here's hoping Matthew Derby continues to imagine, because I will follow him wherever his thought goes.

Rating:
Summary: Mystery Meat
Review: Derby's vision(s) are collected as a disturbing series of interwoven short stories that congeal into a sickly whole as troubling as any Burroughs or Burgess vision. Hard to look at, even harder to avoid looking at. Pass the A-1...

Rating:
Summary: Super Short Stories
Review: It's Matthew Derby's world, and we're soon to be living in it.

I'm not sure what this new genre of writing will be called by the reviewing elite, but I'm going to scoop them with the term "future realism". Classify Derby with fellow future realist Ben Marcus (who it appears Marcus studied with at Brown), and his mastery of language and story structure is on par with what Marcus is producing.

This collection of intertwining stories reveals to us a world just slightly forward and to off the left of ours: things have changed slightly, subtly, and for the worse. Meat is the only edible product left, and the children are rewarded for their behavior with chocolate flavored meat cubes, leaving the parents to wonder why they are withholding the treat at all, when, in fact, everything is made from meat. Weapons have settings like "most hurt," synthetic clouds crash into skyscrapers and women have adhesive flaps over their ovaries, so the government can harvest eggs and control procreation.

All this is handled with both an overt darkness and wonderful sense of humor that keeps the stories from becoming repetitive. Gears shift from lively and bright to absolutely desolate from narrator to narrator, fleshing out the world as a whole, believable place.

Derby's language, sentences and story structures are fantastic. I found myself rereading passages again and again, and laughing out loud.

My favorite book of the year thus far: I couldn't wait to get home from work and finish it.

Rating:
Summary: Has Franz Kafka Returned?
Review: Matthew Derby is an author of disturbing short stories. His stories abound in non-sequiturs that scintillate and jangle the reader's senses. He examines ideas and notions that could easily be attributed to Franz Kafka, Phillip K. Dick or Kurt Vonnegut.

Super Flat Times is about a Kafka-esque future that bends the mind to incredible new shapes as you work to absorb the implications and play of this author's mind. It is also a stunning collection of author Derby's work, which has been published in a stellar array of current magazines.

The future that Matthew Derby envisions in this grouping of stories is that of a failed technology, which casts his characters in various modes of survival and relating of their history. There are six stories from the years 5 through 50, another six stories from the year 51 and another six stories from the years 52 through 59.

This future world is precisely and intricately created, drawing the reader into a maelstrom of conflicting emotions about the story, characters, ideas, notions and perhaps their own sanity. Is this good literature? Is it good reading? Is it worthwhile?

It is a thrill ride for those that like to read and are willing to cast aside conventional notions of what comprises writing and the resulting read.

Matthew Derby has a future...bright and shining, a new star in the authorial night sky.

A book for readers, a fine collection of short stories and, perhaps, the most successful tease you could read. Twenty-one tales or fragments that are sure to challenge and perhaps please

Rating:
Summary: A fascinating mirror of our own humanity.
Review: Using irony and absurdity with the delicacy and dexterity of a brain surgeon wielding a scalpel, Matthew Derby has created a dystopian future that serves as a vehicle to magnify the human condition in all its open ugliness and secret beauty.

The book is ostensibly a collection of stories, but the stories blend into a depiction of a society gone terribly wrong and a world where people have abdicated all responsibility to their community. All of the stories share thematic elements and convey a continuity that sets this book apart from a mere collection of short stories and places it in a category all it's own.

The ironic, absurd, and often hilarious elements of the stories' setting serve to abstract us in such a way that the only things we can identify with are the human dramas and emotional states that exist regardless of external surroundings and circumstances. In each story, the nature of human interaction and relationship is examined and reduced to it's raw, primal state.

The stories remind us that when the SUVs are gone, and Cable TV is no longer working, when all the distractions are removed for our lives, all we truly have is each other and our inherent value is not based on our possessions or our social status but rather, on our ability to relate and feel compassion for our fellows.