Challenge 263

Meme Thangs and
Dei ex machinas Under the Sea

Claës Lundin makes a lot of local references in drawing comparisons between the 19th century and his imagined 24th century in Sweden. That’s fair: the names needn’t be a handicap; readers can imagine the same or similar changes taking place almost anywhere.

However, what do you think Lundin’s purpose may have been in imagining an amusement park at the bottom of the Baltic Sea? Nautical eco-tourism already exists in the 21st century, but theme parks are still on dry land.
There may or may not be a similarity between Chris Harris’s “Songs From the Wood” and Andy West’s “Meme.” If so, what might it be?
What do you think might be the moral in Chris Kuell’s “The Smell of the Deal”? Why might the reader consider the deus ex machina ending justified?
Write us a continuation of Glenn Gray’s “A Day in the Cornfield, part II.” What do you think those “thangs” from the sky are up — or getting down — to? Is this story a variation on Peter Woodruff’s “The Thing in the Pond”? Or might it head in another direction?

What are Glenn Gray’s techniques for presenting “stage dialect” without a specific locale? Are Karl and Stew really country bumpkins, or do they act rationally?