{"id":3652,"date":"2009-12-18T12:00:55","date_gmt":"2009-12-18T17:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=3652"},"modified":"2009-12-18T12:00:55","modified_gmt":"2009-12-18T17:00:55","slug":"the-science-fiction-of-cancer-itself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=3652","title":{"rendered":"The science fiction of cancer itself"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m currently reading Lorrie Moore’s stunning short story collection, Birds of America<\/i>. This morning on the train, I read “People Like That Are the Only People Here,” which I’d actually read once before, I think in my freshman fiction writing workshop. It can be a tough story to get through because of its subject matter, pediatric cancer, but it’s a masterful work. (It won the O. Henry Award for Moore in 1998.) Here’s a small bit:<\/p>\n

Sifting through the videocassettes, the Mother wonders what science fiction could begin to compete with the science fiction of cancer itself — a tumor with its differentiated muscle and bone cells, a clump of wild nothing and its mad, ambitious desire to be something: something inside you, instead of you, another organism, but with a monster’s architecture, a demon’s sabotage and chaos. Think of leukemia, a tumor diabolically taking liquid form, better to swim about incognito in the blood. George Lucas, direct that!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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I’m currently reading Lorrie Moore’s stunning short story collection, Birds of America. This morning on the train, I read “People Like That Are the Only People Here,” which I’d actually read once before, I think in my freshman fiction writing workshop. It can be a tough story to get through because of its subject matter, … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[16,12],"class_list":["post-3652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-books","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3652"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3652"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3652\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}