Here we discuss the short story Sandkings by George R. R. Martin. Also thanks to Devac for re-formatting the text.
Discussion prompt: say something about how this could be viewed as a commentary on society, religion, life, or whatever else. kleinbl00 had interpreted it in a way which I probably wouldn't have seen without prompting, so I'm curious to see what people say.
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First things first the book cover shown on his website reminded me so much of The Power of Lard that I played it on repeat while I was reading. I enjoyed the story - the pacing and ideas were great as well as the horror theme. The story seems to reflect society/clan/nation and worship but I ignored the bigger perspective i favour of world/society building games instead but then quickly throughout the whole damn thing I couldn't shake the feeling of a parallel between god and author. Not being an author, but having met a few, I'm fascinated by an author's inability to precisely direct their characters behaviour and situations. Of course not all authors are created equal but I've met some who say they don't (or can't! ) control their characters because they have their own lives independent of the author. Obviously Kress initially thinks he can control the little darlings but it becomes quite clear how little control he wields. This quickly dominated my mind and got me considering the psychology of writers instead.
That's the wrong way to look at it. As an author I've absolutely depended on this because it shows that I have enough of an unconscious understanding of the character that my conscious manipulations of their environment create unexpected responses. Basically I have to understand the environment enough to be able to predict its outcomes and I have to understand the character enough to have a latent understanding of her responses. You're basically making your conscious and your unconscious minds interact and the outcome is fiction. You can make your characters do whatever you want but it rings hollow - you're basically projecting your life experience with others on this construct in your mind and your subconscious, which has better access to your corpus collosum, sometimes offers up a different result than your cerebral cortex. I'm sure that terminology is a gross oversimplification. However, the trickiest thing in writing is getting out of your own way and when your characters start to surprise you it's like that moment when your camp fire finally starts burning without you blowing on it. Shit. Maybe I oughtta write another book.Not being an author, but having met a few, I'm fascinated by an author's inability to precisely direct their characters behaviour and situations.
That’s an interesting take on it. There’s definitely a creator/control theme there, but how people manifest that seems to vary. I myself couldn’t help but see a god/race theme there particularly with the colors of the mobiles. I also thoroughly enjoyed how the story was paced. I haven’t really read any GRRM before but I’ll have to look into more o his short stories—if he’s done any.
“Have you ever owned an animal that worshipped you?” I was probably nine the first time I read Sandkings. It's a story about an ant farm. I had an ant farm; a girl came over, picked it up, shook it and destroyed everything. The ants were dead two days later. I could see the tank in the middle of the living room, a tower in every corner, red mood lighting shining down in the empty darkness. And I could feel the wasted potential of primitive, tiny little worshippers going about their pseudolives driven to "artless and degrading" warfare through deprivation. it appears that no one has made the formal connection between Sandkings and Pikmin, the game that George RR Martin would have written if he were Shigeru Miyamoto. Suffice it to say my hardship with Pikmin is all the pikmin you have to kill to serve your own selfish ends. The formative thing that Sandkings left me with so long ago was the maxim, expressed by countless people, that power doesn't corrupt it shows the corruption that was already there. Kress is a terrible human being surrounded by terrible human beings and when he's allowed to express his terrible nature over the powerless he does so with gusto. But more than that, Wo and Shade - a sentient being selling his own larvae (his own "sperm") into servitude for money. In the end Kress gets it but there remains an infestation of insane aliens spreading out and taking over an alien world because the greedy are also careless. than an infant. The wars temper and control them in nature. Only one in a hundred reaches second stage. Only one in a thousand achieves the third and final plateau, and becomes like Shade. Adult sandkings are not sentimental about the small maws. There are too many of them, and their mobiles are pests.” Fundamentally, Sandkings was the first story I read that takes place in a universe utterly without empathy. People love pointing at Ellison's I have no mouth yet I must scream but the computer knows the suffering. It wants the suffering. Sandkings exists in a universe where the principle characters don't care about anything but themselves. The inspector? Willing to write anything off for money. The girl who loves puppies? She just projects cruelty in another direction. GRRM did a great job of going "there are monsters afoot and this is how they think" while also engaging the reader enough to care what happens to them. There's a very Poe-like transformation of Kress as soon as the white maw's psionic power hits overdrive. Echoes of Renfield. I think it's telling that the maws grow stronger even when fed poison. There's an allegory there. Once upon a time I curbsmiled a simp on Reddit back down to negative karma for getting mad at my criticism of Clarence Thomas. Four years later he founded /r/TheDonald. And when a bunch of antisocial geniuses code social networks, what we're left with is gamification of invective. We're all sandkings now.“Do not be absurd,” Wo said. “A first- stage sandking is more like a sperm
