Short Story Monday: The Crow Procedure

For Short Story Monday, hosted by John at The Bookmineset, I read The Crow Procedure by Stephen Marche.

This is a science fiction story that takes place in a future where nature in North America is confined to a nation called Iiyiyuushii, in what used to be Quebec. This is a Cree nation, where nature is sacrosanct, the opposite of the world around them. This is a world with nanobots performing high-level plastic surgery, turning people into part-animals in a time when the natural, unmarked human body is so rare that the patient offers to pay his doctor to see a specimen, as in a freak show.

But this world, for all its differences to ours, still has the same problems. What would you do to save that which you hold sacrosanct? If you were only 4 years from retirement, would you rock the boat by letting a younger co-worker convince you what you were doing is hypocritical? Marche frames these questions in a very interesting manner.

Before this story, all I knew about the author was that last year he wrote a scathing critique of Toronto's now mayor in the Globe and Mail, and received a huge backlash for focusing on Ford's weight. The irony is the part about the candidate's weight was the nice part of the article.

I don't know if Marche is strangely fascinated by the human body, but his descriptions of the body of the patient were amazing and interesting. Nice to see him using his powers of description for entertainment.