Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Charles Coleman Finlay's "The Political Prisoner" (novella, free): Description of a violent political purge

Think one of the Hitler's campaigns against Jews. Only, in this story, perpetrators are Jews. Victims are mostly Jews, though some especially hard treatment is reserved for visiting aliens called Adareans. There appears to be no effective government; it's a purge by the power seekers of "Intelligence".

Violence all through the story. Sometimes graphic violence.

I'm not familiar enough with Israel to say if any allusion is intended, though I suspect there might be.

Collected in.

  1. Gardner Dozois (Ed)'s "The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection" (2009).

Fact sheet.

First published: F&SF, August 2008.
Rating: B.
Download full text from publisher's site.
Nominated for Nebula Award 2008 in novella category.
Nominated for Hugo Award 2009 in novella category.
Related: Stories of Charles Coleman Finlay.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

You got it wrong! There's no Jew in the story, just some future fundamentalist Christian sect with people having Sovietic names (to be reminiscent of Stalin purges I guess)

Vasi