Back from a lengthy holiday break with some insights on the fascinating “The Very Pulse of the Machine”. The Jupiter moon of Io has long fascinated science fiction, and in this short story a first landing gone wrong offers a look at how its surface might look like. Or does it? As the pages unfold, it becomes increasingly clear that the protagonist is not as reliable a narrator as we might like. As the story progresses linearly, two separate and mutually exclusive interpretations for the events are presented to us, in such a way that it becomes impossible to decide which one “is real” based on the text alone. Swanwick pulls this neat trick off flawlessly, and in doing so presents us with an open text: each reader will have to make its own call on how the story ends.
“The Very Pulse of the Machine” deservedly won the Hugo Award in 1999, and is therefore available in a number of short story collections. At the time of this writing, it is also availabe in text and podcast format in at least two different places, at Clarkesworldmagazine.com and at Escapepod.org.
If I had to use one word to describe this story, it would be ambiguous.
Hamletic Tortoise 