Bewildering Stories introduces and welcomes...

Jes Malitoris

Jes lives in Durham, North Carolina, where Jes earned a Ph.D. in 20th-century U.S. history from Duke University in 2019. Jes works in marketing for an academic press and writes “weird, melancholic, folkloric fantasy.”

“Imperfect Mechanisms” is a cautionary tale directed squarely at our era of supposed technological utopias. In a near future, contact lenses and even spectacles are no longer made. Everyone is encouraged to have their eyes scraped out and replaced with cold but mechanically superior globes. An improvement on nature? Or does it come with a loss?

In the television series Star Trek: the Next Generation, the actor LeVar Burton plays the character Geordi Laforge, who is blind from birth according to the permanent narrative but wears a “visor” that enables him to see light in far more wavelengths and detail than normal human vision. The visor is hardly esthetic; it looks for all the world like it was taken from the air filter of a truck or automobile engine. It makes the character very distinctive, but Geordi finds that he has cause, at times, to wish he had normal vision. “Imperfect Mechanisms” tells what he might see.

Jes Malitoris’s bio sketch can be found here.

Welcome to Bewildering Stories, Jes. We hope to hear from you again soon and often!