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"Six-Month Turnaround" by Bill Morgan (non-sex romance).
Vance: 8, 3, 3
"Six-Month Turnaround" by Bill Morgan (morg105829@hotmail.com). Guest review by Vance (vance@sirius.com). Most of the stories on this newsgroup are romances -- in two different senses. First, of course, they're stories about love, at least in some of its manifestations. But also, like medieval romances of knights in armor, or hard-boiled novels of lonely detectives, they're stories that engage us by showing characters doing things that, at least in our dreams, we would like to do ourselves. "Six-Month Turnaround" is no exception: it's a love story, and also a fantasy of a more exciting life. What's unusual for a.s.s.m is that the fantasy isn't about sex, but business. We're used to impressively endowed characters who do everything right in the pursuit of great sex, and are richly rewarded. Here we get wealthy, clever, and honest young people, who shake up a moribund company, do everything right to make it profitable, and live happily ever after. As Morgan warns in his head note, there is fairly little sex; but there is a love story. The male lead is Cliff, the manly Howard Roark figure who steers the company to success; the female lead is Sandra, his assistant at first, whom he soon promotes to treasurer and bedmate. Gradually we learn that she is not only smart and beautiful, but a compelling natural leader -- and even the owner of the company! But despite these advantages, she was evidently unable to act to change the company, until Our Hero came along to lead her. I don't remember seeing *quite* this variant of the female-submissive fantasy on a.s.s.m before. (And if you think this theme is incidental, read the last two paragraphs.) The authors of our sex stories usually do some preaching, mostly implicit, about the right way to live, not limited to matters of sexual technique. (This is probably inevitable in a romance. Even Friar Dave, one of our best, does rather more of this than I need.) It's not surprising, then, that this story preaches quite a bit, implicitly and explicitly, about business. There's a lot about detailed methods, with numbers; I'm no businessman, but it seems to me that Morgan gives his characters too many easy victories in this regard -- for example, a change in accounting practices that instantly yields millions in free money. More seriously, there's a strong dose of business ideology, particularly the belief that what's best for the corporation is what's best for everybody. If this is not the sort of fantasy that turns you on (and the scenes in which the workers are shown to accept this, even as they lose their jobs, are not exactly compelling), this story is probably not for you. Still and all, it's a fairly well-sustained long narrative (at least until the preposterous incidents start piling up toward the end), and I give it an Athena of 8. Venus and appeal to reviewer are both low but nonzero -- let's say 3. If your fantasies, though, happen to run to reduced operating expenses instead of hot throbbing flesh, your mileage will certainly vary. Ratings for "Six-Month Turnaround" Athena (technical quality): 8 Venus (plot & character): 3 Vance (appeal to reviewer): 3 |