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Comment by c22 | Hacker News Reader

I kept waiting for the punchline but it just kept digging in the same vein. I'm not sure what else there is to gain from the text beyond the core gimmick.

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As a man, I found it made me feel a bit uncomfortable, but that is maybe kind of the point. I like speculative fiction, when it makes you re-evaluate your preconceived notions, and it did that for me.

From your choice of words and the fact that you wrote, I would gather that the story didn't leave you indifferent. So it achieved something.

What do you understand as "gimmick" and how could a "punchline" for that story look like for you?

It didn't make me feel uncomfortable. It felt like it was trying to make me "think" but it ended up philosophically hollow. Not sure what punchline I'd have wanted, but I prefer to be surprised.

I guess overall I have no complaints except that it could have been shorter. It seemed like it was building to a conclusion that never coalesced, which is okay for short fiction, but this one was sorta a slog.

Short stories tend to be a little more gimmicky than novels.

Yeah, I guess I prefer when the gimmick takes more than the first couple paragraphs to land.

I think the system was revealed a little too early, and someone like me will try to decide what the system is right away, rather than patiently waiting for the author to fully explore the idea. So it does feel a little long, but I'm not sure it's a flaw. I have felt the same way about gimmicks in other well-regarded and much longer writing (400 page books that give away the whole thing in chapter 1), but here it seems balanced enough. Part of why it felt too long to me was just because the people in the story are boring, although I think that is also intentional.

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