As ever, we’ve asked contributors to the latest issue to tell us a little about their favorite piece from this latest collection, preferably by a writer whose work they were previously unaware of. First up, Rae Bryant:
Elaine Chiew’s ‘Italo Calvino People’ is a smartly witted exploration guised as modern evolution, thoroughly marinated in social satire. It’s no longer enough to survive. We must conquer intelligence at a genetic, holocaustic level. Chiew reshapes this familiar discourse with creative rigor reminiscent of Vonnegut’s ‘Harrison Bergeron’ in a reverse sort of context.
‘They were Italo Calvino babies, so called not because they were the embodiment of magical realism, but because they were an experiment – in the spirit of Italo Calvino experimentation – riddled with hopeful optimism camouflaging a deep misanthropic belief that humans were flawed and needed to be perfected. And because they could read Italo Calvino at five.’
I will admit a sheepish acceptance of a Calvino baby, at first, as the text allows. ‘After the success of the series What to Expect When You’re Expecting…It became generally accepted that nutrition in the womb made for smarter babies...’ and so on, and at the basest level, who wouldn’t want a child who could read Calvino at five? The narrative conjures fantastic tension in this. As it progresses, the ideologies layer, forming moral challenges for the reader who has already bought into the ‘children reading Calvino at five’ bargain. The piece pushes the bargain into seemingly darker sub-topics that are truly the central foundations for the satire—species perfecting, Darwinian suicide, cryogenic DNA harvesting. For the piece to end with ‘holocaust’ is genius and resonant and gut-punching, because the reader has truly weighed the fetal perfection syndrome, that so many modern parents seem to be drinking like Kool-Aid, against nature as course. This is a well-rendered and biting satire.”