There's an aspect of science fiction that bugs me: I call it "gotcha sci fi." This is where you have a story wherein everything is completely normal or understandable and then they throw a left-field bullshit ending at you and say "gotcha!" The Carnival is a great example. The paradigm is so familiarly dumb that I've fallen into the trap myself.

But it's not useful. The whole point of science fiction, in my opinion, is to explore ideas through metaphor. Throwing a "what if?" at the narrative allows you more latitude to examine social mores or philosophical experiments than if you must abide by the rules of society and physics. No one benefits, from my perspective, when a substandard story is justified by a substandard deus ex machina at the end in order to go "gotcha!"

With that said, Stephen King will often burn out the last of his creative energies from a novel on a short story. He writes them in a day or two as a way to unwind from the long hard burn of a book, gives them very little thought and throws them at the wall to see what sticks. Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, if I'm not mistaken, was the story he wrote after Cujo. It stands to reason that The Jaunt is his leftovers from Firestarter. As such it shouldn't be judged too harshly.

I still hated it.

The kernel of this story is there's an entire industry whose safety is purely and wholly dependent on its passengers being unconscious during travel and they have so few protocols in place that a 12-year-old boy thwarts them by holding his breath. I mean, FFS. I'm willing to accept all the parameters of the storyworld. I'm willing to deal with the tortured narrative structure (which is an editor's trick to hide the fact that there's nothing going on). But I just can't conscion a major tragedy provoked by anesthesiologists with lower intelligence and training than the average flight attendant. It's disrespectful to the reader and a cheat to the idea.

It's lazy fuckin' writing.

That Hell-bound Train follows the classic "deal with the devil" trope in which either man triumphs over evil by being clever or succumbs to evil by thinking he's clever - Aarne-Thompson 332, to be exact. I grew up with mexican folklore variations of this - the "godfather death" paradigm wherein the doctor sees Death's back turned and pours his own candle full of oil, so that Death offers his grudging but proud approval of the deceit. The watch is a lazy device; most iterations of Godfather Death involve more of an active deceit.

Once again, however, I'm glad to have read them both, and sincerely appreciate you organizing this. I can pretty much cover both of next week's stories from memory; I'll point out that Flowers for Algernon was adapted to the movie Charly which I have not seen, but there it is.