Adam-Troy Castro

Writer of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and Stories About Yams.

 

There Was Never Any Possibility of Trump Attending the Dinner

Posted on February 26th, 2017 by Adam-Troy Castro
The White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner has always been a terrible idea.

 

At its worst it’s demonstrated just how cold and unfeeling the Administration is: i.e. the “comedic” film of Dubya looking for weapons of mass destruction in his office, while actual, you know, human beings were dying by the score for that wild goose chase.

 

At its best — Colbert’s year — it’s been a place for accomplished satirists to speak truth to power, but at its worst, it’s been a place for Administrations to pretend that they like being satirized, by approving only those comedians who can be trusted not to say anything controversial — most egregiously, Rich Little. (Boy, those Eddie Cantor impressions!)

 

Once in a bloody great well it’s been an occasion for greatness, as when Barack Obama went and did his shtick while keeping silent on the knowledge that, even as he spoke, the raid to get Bin Laden was under way.

 

But it was never going to work this year. You can’t have a “Ha ha ha, we’re all going to show we can laugh at ourselves” event when the President is a guy with no discernable sense of humor who goes ballistic when anybody makes a joke at his expense, and when the speech he would have to give as last word would not be a series of identifiable jokes so much as a series of vicious slurs directed at a profession that he will accept only as sycophant or enemy. Can you even imagine Trump’s monologue at this thing? Another reference to the size of his crowds, another rant to the effect that they’re all a bunch of traitors and liars.

 

This was not just a likelihood; this was an absolute bloody certainty. You can’t have what amounts to a celebrity roast when the guest of honor won’t permit anyone to make jokes about him, and when his response will amount to an entitled “Fuck You All.”

(And yes, by the way: I know that, before his Presidency, Trump permitted himself to be roasted on MTV, once. And before agreeing to attend he demanded — and, scandalously, received — full veto power on the things the performers were allowed to mock him for. The color of his hair, yes; whether his hair was real, no. The way he talked, yes. The idiocy of the things he said, no. Standard-issue jokes about how rich he was, yes. Any jokes about his string of bankruptcies, his massive debt, his business practices, his racism, no. He demanded that his roast be content-free. And then he got up and excoriated Rosie O’Donnell. That was not a roast. That was a massage. You want to know what a megalomaniac this guy is? With the power to demand a Rich Little, someone whose jokes will land with the impact of a light spring rain, he still refuses to attend the Correspondent’s dinner; he knows, too well, that he cannot afford the possibility that any of what got said might land with the impact of truth.)

Tags: , , , , , , , | Category Commentary, Life Wisdom, Politics

Story Excerpt: “Shakesville”

Posted on February 19th, 2017 by Adam-Troy Castro

A story by Adam-Troy Castro and Alvaro Zinos-Amaro,, March/April 2017 Analog.

The bed is overcrowded with Me again. There is a Me to my left and a Me to my right and another Me curled in a fetal position at the foot of the bed; and there are others passed out with exhaustion in their floor, wheezing the raspy breath of sleep. Several other versions of Me sleep with the silence of the dead; others snore like buzzsaws, coughing or murmuring or muttering words of infinite frustration at the blind stubbornness of Me, the one at the center of all this, the one who lies in his bed wishing that they’d all go away and stop trying to get Me to listen to them.

 I cannot hate them because they are Me — at least not any more than I am sometimes moved to hate myself — but as I lie on my teeming mattress listening to the ones in the bedroom and the ones in the hallway and the ones sleeping in shifts in the kitchen and the ones in the living room and the ones in the closets, as I breathe in the communal stench of over fifty unwashed versions of Me exhausting my air conditioner’s ability to cope, as I listen to the half-dozen insomniac versions of Me arguing ad infinitum over the precise shape and form of the disaster about to ruin the rest of my life, it is hard not to want Me to be gone.

One of Me, the one who first explained the peculiar physics behind my predicament, identifies himself as a probability theorist. He is by a considerable margin the most annoying little prick of the bunch: he has thin little lips and watery little eyes and an offensively ridiculous toupee that sits atop his head like a turd recently dropped by a seagull. He is forty years older than Me and one of the few who’s developed a smoking habit. Despite the oppressiveness of the atmosphere in here, he persists in lighting up his noxious orange cigarettes and turning the precious air all around us to toxic haze. Even worse, he is even more than the others absolutely convinced that he’s right: and though he’s suffered more than one beating at the hands of the more brutal versions of Me who are even more repulsed by him than I am, he persists in keeping that awful nasal voice of his going from the moment he wakes up in the morning to the moment he finally succumbs to exhaustion at night I don’t want to consider the unlikely series of events that would lead up to Me someday becoming just like him. But he has his uses, and one of them was on the first day all these versions of Me invaded, when he explained what was happening to us in the most concise terms imaginable. He was the one who told Me that the fifty familiar strangers who had just rung my doorbell, who had waited for Me to open it and had then marched through the threshold, were not of equal legitimacy. Though they looked like the Me of tomorrow, the Me of five years from now, the Me of forty years from now, the Me who I could aspire to and the Me who I desperately needed to avoid becoming, and though they all claimed to have traveled here from their own particular versions of my future to offer vitally important but mutually contradictory advice, though they are all only projected duplicates who do not need to eat and drink and eliminate wastes, one of the fifty is more real than the others, since he reflects my true future and all the rest are merely flawed reflections created by an error in chronal translation. I did not have to reconcile the paradoxes. I just had to understand that the rest of my life depends on figuring out which Me is giving Me the proper information.

“Because if you don’t,” he said, on that first day, while the forty-nine other versions of Me all nodded or grunted or gibbered in abject agreement, “you are doomed to absolute disaster any day now.”

Find the rest of the story in the March / April ANALOG.

Tags: , , , , | Category Excerpts, Science Fiction, Writing

The Retired Spy Says No To That One Last Job

Posted on February 12th, 2017 by Adam-Troy Castro

Originally published on Facebook 12 February 2014.

Story idea: protagonist bearing scars of many past brushes with death is relaxing on his private island beside a gorgeous woman who is clearly crazy about him. …A boat pulls up and it’s an acquaintance from the old days. There’s a crisis, and only protagonist can deal with it. Protagonist says, nope, sorry. I’m out of the game, permanently. You should have used the time between my retirement and now, to hire and train some new people. His old acquaintance says, this is the last time. I promise. Protagonist says, nope, I’m happy here. Go away. The acquaintance from his old days goes away. Protagonist’s girlfriend says, you looked tempted for a moment. Protagonist says, naaah, I have a good life here. I think you just saw gas.

 

In the headquarters of the evil villain, a henchman runs up to the boss to report that somebody has tried to recruit the protagonist for one last job. The villain says, does it look like he succeeded? No, the henchman says. It looks like he’s staying on the island. But if you want, we can send a fleet of assassins in speedboats to kill his girlfriend and blow up his house. Just to be sure. The villain considers this. No, he decides, why would I expend valuable resources attracting the attention of a guy who has been able to smash evil conspiracies like mine on multiple occasions? If he manages to escape the net, that’ll just get him mad and lead him right to me. Let him grow fat and tan in the sun. He has nothing to do with me. The assassins are not sent. The private island is not blown up. Our protagonist does not become part of the story.

The old acquaintance from our protagonist’s agency days returns back to the office and says, oh, well, I tried. Let me see who else we have on the roster. Hmmm. This guy would do just fine. The new agent is briefed. The new agent is sent on the mission. The new agent is not a old protégé of our protagonist. He is not killed because the protagonist refused to get involved. He is not captured and does not require a rescue that only our protagonist can provide. He is perfectly capable himself and he pulls off the mission quite handily, with no real complications.

Our protagonist lies on his island reading the newspaper. He sees a story in the international pages about an explosion leveling an island off the coast of China. This looks like a horrible terrorist plot being foiled. He idly wonders whether this is what his old acquaintance in the agency wanted to recruit him for. It certainly bears all the indicators. A brief, very brief, expression of regret crosses his face. And then he says, who am I kidding? I did my bit for king and country, and I’m getting just old enough that if I said yes I might have gotten killed and not defused the ticking bomb in the nick of time. It’s probably for the best that somebody else took care of it. And besides, this one last job thing is always bullshit. Because they just use it to get you hooked again, and again, until you’re the grizzled old mentor who gets killed in the first five minutes. Just look at my friend Ethan Hunt, from the IMF. The Dude was happily married to the love of his life. He took that one last job and now she has to live under an assumed name, shadowed by bodyguards, for the rest of her life, while he grows older taking one more one last job after another. That’s bullshit. I don’t need that crap. I’m not indispensable. That’s what they have new trainees for. He grins and pours himself another drink.

Tags: , | Category Humor, Movies, Mystery, TV, Uncategorized

 
 
 

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