“Six People to Revise You” by J.R. Dawson in Uncanny Magazine, Issue 62, January/February 2025 by J. R. Dawson
Narrator: Erika Ensign
Format: ebook, podcast
Source: supplied by publisher via Hugo Packet
Formats available: magazine, podcast
Genres: science fiction, short stories
Series: Uncanny Magazine Issue 62 January/February 2025
Pages: 19
Length: 51 minutes
Published by Uncanny Magazine on January 7, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo
Goodreads

The January/February 2025 issue of Hugo Award-winning Uncanny Magazine.

Featuring new fiction by Scott Lynch, J.R. Dawson, Tia Tashiro, Tade Thompson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Rati Mehrotra, and AnaMaria Curtis. Essays by Nicholas Whyte, Ai Jiang, A.T. Greenblatt, and Suzanne Walker, poetry by Kaliee Pedersen, Mari Ness, Shankar Narayan, and E. N. Díaz, interviews with Scott Lynch and Rati Mehotra by Caroline M. Yoachim, a cover by Maxine Vee, and an editorial by Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas.

Uncanny Magazine is a bimonthly science fiction and fantasy magazine first published in November 2014. Edited by 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2022, 2023 Hugo award winners for best semiprozine, and 2018 Hugo award winners for Best Editor, Short Form, Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas, Betsy Aoki, and Monte Lin, each issue of Uncanny includes new stories, poetry, articles, and interviews.

My Review:

Why would you ask a whole bunch of other people, most of whom don’t know you well, or at least don’t know you well NOW, for their input into everything about yourself that you should change? Another question, why would the process to change someone start with asking people who are, mostly, at best, casual acquaintances or frenemies, how a person they may not like should change.

What does that say about the society that does this? And why would a person submit themselves to it?

Those are just some of the VERY thorny questions being asked in “Six People to Revise You”, the second in this series of Hugo nominated short works reviews.

You’ll notice that I’m not asking why the person at the center of this story – or any person in this story or anywhere else – would submit themselves to such a process AT ALL. Because the answer to that question seems both obvious and rooted in human nature in general.

No one needs an SF story to tell them that they might be better off, or more successful, or happier, or fit into their society better, or be more comfortable, or WHATEVER – if they just changed a few important AND intrinsic things about themselves.

Our families, our friends, society at large and the whole entire internet press upon us every single day that our lives could be “better” for some very nebulous definitions of better if we just “got with the program”, whatever that might be.

So the story isn’t about that. It also isn’t about the mechanics of how this gets done. It sounds like brainwashing or programming or deprogramming or handwavium or all of the above. The methods don’t matter in this context.

What matters is the result. The way that the process of “revision” seems to blunt the personality. Smooth down all the rough edges. Take away individuality. And possibly – and insidiously – freedom of choice through self-censorship. In the way the process of “revision” takes away individual choice through self-erasure, it reminds me a LOT of the short story “Thickly” by Dorothy de Kok in Writers of the Future 42. The results are very similar even though the process is different.

From one perspective, this is a story about someone (specifically in this case the unnamed first-person narrator) asking a whole lot of people she only sorta/kinda knows which parts of herself she should change to become a happier and more successful person. The answers are mostly self-serving on the part of the people being asked, and are frequently unkind at best. (That the system itself is set up this way is extremely weird – at best.)

But this isn’t a story about what she SHOULD do. (Personally, I think externally applied SHOULDs are the devil, and that’s absolutely true here.) The story isn’t about listening to what other people think even though it is about just how insidious those external voices are.

Instead, it’s a journey of self-discovery. Because the ultimate discovery isn’t about who she should be, it’s about the good and the joy she’s brought into the world by being the person she already is. A perspective that’s delivered by one lone voice among the six people who are supposed to be “fixing” her future course who knows her and cares about her as the person she is.

Escape Rating B: Like my previous Hugo Review of “The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For”, the story, as a story, has more than a few holes and weirdnesses built in. In this case, the gigantic hole is that the reader has no idea what the process of revision really is, how it came to be, what people think it’s intended to do and what it actually does.

We can infer a lot from what we have, but it still feels like handwavium on the technical side and smoke and mirrors on the results side. Or something like that.

And it could be that’s exactly what’s intended, that the reader is supposed to put their own interpretation into the process and its results. It feels like the actual intention of “revision” is to program social outliers into behavior society finds more “acceptable” – all of which needs to be in scare quotes. Because those types of purposes lead to some terrible “greater good” scenarios.

That the narrator doesn’t do it after all, that they realize that how they are is how they’re meant to be and that they’re happy as they are as much as any human is happy as they are allows the story to lead on a hopeful and dare I say it, happy, note. But the questions the story asks are troubling – especially because we are all being programmed, every day, by the masses of information and misinformation and high decibel outrage and meaningless consumerism we’re flooded with every single day.