not entirely a wasted day

Yesterday, I upgraded my work computer to Windows 7. That makes it sound like I chose to do it; I didn’t. I was scheduled and given instructions to do it at a particular time but then had to actually do it myself. It went OK in that I didn’t lose anything, but it did take about five hours, all told, during four or which I couldn’t use the computer at all.

So far I’ve had all the annoyance of losing most of a day of work and having re-set everything to the way I like it, as well as having to get used to new versions of not only the OS but also all my Office programs. Blah. I’ve found one new features I like so far: they’ve added the ability to have a Powerpoint slide zoomed to fit to the window, so it can be as big as possible and still all visible. (Or maybe it was there all along but not so obvious in previous versions. The new Powerpoint seems to make better use of screen real estate in general; it doesn’t keep popping up a right sidebar that obscures part of my slide. Also, the new Powerpoint offers a feature I have missed: you can have two separate sessions open at once, so if you have two monitors you can see two files at once, one on each monitor. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, the new Excel still only lets you have one window open – as many files as you want, but one window so you’re stuck using only one monitor. This makes it more difficult when you have to update from file from another.

There was another side benefit to the upgrade. I couldn’t do any work on my computer and, since half of the people here are out for the Carnaval holiday (the schools are out, so even people who aren’t fond of Carnaval take family vacations) I didn’t have any meetings or anyone I needed to talk to. So I brought my Kindle in and read Some of the Best From Tor.com, a collection of short stories first published on Tor’s website. As usual with an anthology, I liked some stories and wasn’t crazy about others – in general, the ones I liked less struck me as a matter of individual taste, not lack of quality. That is, they were good, just not for me. My favorites included Michael Swanwick’s “The Dala Horse”, set in a post-apocalyptic Norseland; Charlie Jane Anders’ “Six Months, Three Days”, about how to live your life well even when you can see what’s going to happen; and “A Clean Sweep With All the Trimmings”, Damon Runyon with aliens and sly commentary on why sexism can hurt you. But then…

Then I got to the final novella and the reason I’m writing a review: Harry Turtledove’s extraordinary “Shtetl Days”. This one is important; it’s literature that matters. On one hand, it’s a nifty trick, in that Turtledove managed to write an alternate history where the Nazis won without being completely depressing (if you don’t spend too much time thinking about the backstory, which is admittedly difficult). The heart of it, though, is about being human, about who you are as opposed to who you’re told to be, and about why even quiet resistance to oppression matters. It’s also about being Jewish – specifically about actually living a Jewish life, but also because the concept that the way you live makes you who you are is central to Judaism. This is what might have happened if Sholem Aleichem lived a century later and wrote SF.

Now I want Turtledove or someone to write a companion piece about the Gypsy side of the story, which is briefly alluded to in “Shtetl Days”. I know what it means to be Jewish, by which I mean much more than being born to Jewish parents. I’d love to know what it means to be Rom in the same way. (It might be technically difficult to set up a living-history Rom village in the same way, though, as I suspect part of what it means to be Rom is to live on the move, with your extended family as the only constants. I suppose they’d pretend to be newly arrived each day, in the way that the town in “Shtetl Days” has one-day pogroms, with everything cleaned up and back to normal the next day. And once you’d written that story, the two groups could get together, combining with French and Polish undergrounds, and eventually stage a rebellion. I’m not sure that even the weight of a novel would have more impact than this one original novella, though.

ETA: I forgot to mention that the e-book anthology “Some of the best from Tor.com” is FREE. You can get it for Kindle at Amazon or read the stories online at Tor.com.