Short stories offer the chance to explore a variety of ideas in a variety of ways. In THE HISTORICAL LAMENTATION CLUB AND OTHER STORIES, M.T. Rizzo takes advantage of that opportunity, offering up 7 stories linked together by their dim view of human nature and lack of optimism for our collective future. The title story, written in a play-like format that is mostly dialogue, presents a broad-ranging conversation between deceased historical figures including Lucrezia Borgia, John Adams, Ivan the Terrible, and Marcus Brutus—who all complain bitterly about the way they’ve been treated by history. In “Weather Wars II,” a future society can control the climate, leading to voting campaigns to make one area’s desert climate more lush. “God’s Justice” combines immersive virtual reality with the collapse of the United States into several successor states, including the Christofascist Republic of Canaan, where the technology is used to punish. Other stories feature human colonists bred specifically to populate other planets whether they want to or not, an ancient mystery cult dedicated to producing good kings, and a future that slowly grows tired of virtual experiences.
The ideas are uniformly interesting, and Rizzo writes with energy and efficiency, which makes reading a quick pleasure. But these stories are more like extended explorations than actual stories. Many have no real plot at all: the title story is essentially a single joke (bitter historical personages complain about how they’re remembered) that goes on for dozens of fairly repetitive pages, and “Weather Wars II” spends most of its energy explaining how climate choice has resulted in chaos. The weakest story here, “A Simple Guide to Establishing a Populist Authoritarian Government,” doesn’t even offer a character, let alone a plot; it’s just a relatively lazy rumination on how easy it is to engineer the conditions for a fascist takeover of even the most democratic of societies. If it blows anyone’s mind, that person has never once read a news article.
The strongest story here is the one that comes closest to actually having a character with an arc: In “Arxana and the Making of Civilized Man,” young Prince Teeman of the Kingdom of Thelea is fourteen and struggling with hormones and adolescence. Dispatched to a remote island to be transformed into a good ruler by the goddess Arxansa (an experience Teeman’s father went through and endorses whole-heartedly), he is really just a confused teenager who fears that his newfound sex drive is a disease that will ruin him. His journey into the mystery cult is initially very interesting, but, as with many of these stories, the ending is rushed—and Teeman becomes something of a footnote as Rizzo pays more attention to the big-swing concepts than the character.
There’s a lot to dig into here, and this is a quick read that will leave readers with plenty of food for thought and discussion. As compelling fiction, it doesn’t quite hit the mark; but as a collection of ideas, it’s worth exploring.
In THE HISTORICAL LAMENTATION CLUB AND OTHER STORIES, author M.T. Rizzo explores big—and often very clever—ideas. Unfortunately, a lack of interesting characters and abstract plotting result in stories that feel more like lengthy sketches.
~Jeff Somers for IndieReader