Dream Machine (A Short Story) by Su-Yee Lin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This surreal short story is a reprint from "Day One" magazine that is available as a Kindle Single. The story is about a factory in an industrial part of Shanghai that seems to make metal objects / shapes, the purpose of which no one seems to understand. The protagonist is - at the start of the the story - the newest of the half-dozen employees who work at the plant. The story has a sparse feeling that ranges from the fact that the characters are designated only with a single letter to the fact that we really don't get much indication of the broad and bustling city of Shanghai in which the story is supposedly set.
It isn't easy to convey a world that isn't quite right - seemingly like the world we are familiar with, but just a little off. I thought the author did a good job of this.
I enjoyed this story immensely. I thought the author used strategic ambiguity nicely. There are a few ways I believe one could reasonably interpret this story. If you are the kind that needs to have iron-clad clarity, that might be a bit aggravating. [If you've seen the Christopher Nolan movie "Inception," and you liked that it left an open ending, this story is for you. If you insist that there is no ambiguity to the ending and that the top definitely toppled or didn't, you might not enjoy it as much.]
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