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My Bitch Ex-Wife: a work of legal science fiction – Ethan Oliver Ralph (Torta Books) 2024, 512p
It is only fitting that the master of science fiction, coronated (in his absence) High King of Space, at GenCon 2023, should be the one to nail down a definition of the genre as [to paraphrase] 'writing that is still not illegal'.
Ethan Oliver Ralph's latest collection of short fiction, obliquely titled My Bitch Ex-Wife, continues in the speculative vein of its predecessors. The story cycle, while certainly challenging in places, will reward the diligent student who dedicates himself to reading the fourteen 'Sekturs' of the book in the order in which they are presented.
In the opening tale, Mayday, the departure of a free-floating exo-planet (named Mayho, presumably in reference to the Greek goddess, Maia) from our solar system, causes a localised breakdown in the laws of probability, resulting in a paradox in which both 100% and 70-80% of all women are revealed to be evil psychopaths.
National Moving Month presents to the reader a nightmare cacotopian future in which the protagonist's robot companion/sexual servitor rebels, initially by refusing to obey a direct command to clean-up her master's “bottle toilet”, before fleeing to a sanctuary where her owner cannot follow “for some fairly complicated legal reasons that I can't really go into here”.
The loneliness of man in the face of an indifferent universe is a recurring theme throughout the collection. In World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development, an American ex-pat, dosed with a cocktail of South-American mind-expanding drugs, becomes a slurring narrator of the unfolding drama of a wrestling league located in a parallel dimension.
Flag Day documents the mental decline of an astronomer whose radio transmissions to an aloof interstellar empire are received but not answered. The story ends in tragedy with the aforementioned space scientist threatening to leak nude photographs of random women unless the extraterrestrial civilization visits Earth “within the next five minutes”. A companion piece to this story, titled Harvey Milk Day, asks the reader to conceive a point that is so low that it cannot be measured by the present generation of scientific instruments.
In addition to challenging our notions of what it is like to be human and live in society, and to then depart that society for one where both the cost of living and the value of human life are considerably lower, Ralph also calls into question the structure of language itself. Emancipation Day describes a dystopia in which conversation has become subject to taxation, and where a form of telepathy known as the “superchat” has been developed to circumvent the attentions of revenue agents. Following a few expositionary opening sentences, the remainder of the story consists of the words “Tax free!” repeated (according to the best estimate of your humble reviewer) over eleven-thousand times. To read Emancipation Day is to experience the breakdown of the human lexicon at a sub-alphabetical level, followed by the gradual restoration of meaning. The dedicated reader emerges profoundly changed by his experience and with a reformed understanding of the Universe.
A common critique of the writing of Ethan Oliver Ralph is that is too far-fetched and retarded to say anything useful regarding the human condition. We must bear in mind that the thought experiments of today are tomorrows realities. My Bitch Ex-Wife is a collection that is aimed less at ourselves and more at our children's children.
