“The Training Commission” is “a serial fiction newsletter by Brendan Byrne and Ingrid Burrington.” A little over 18,000 words in total, plus interviews (about which more below).
The writing
Good writing, good concept. Concepts, really—there are phrases scattered within that could be their own novellas.
Science fiction often entails gesturing toward an event or idea without filling in every little detail, making the reader work a little bit to catch up. Byrne and Burrington do a lot of this, dropping evocative phrases, sometimes elaborating on them later, sometimes not.
They also treat the climax this way: There is a major yes/no decision that is elided, seen only in retrospect. I liked it.
The presentation
I received it in my email inbox, serialized over several weeks. Having it serialized over email is cool in theory but I found it frustrating in practice—mixing my fiction into my metastasizing list of requests and anxieties didn’t make for a focused experience. I suggest reading it on the website.
One danger of doing technically interesting things in the presentation of a story is that you’ll lose the reader. The authors state as much in an introductory email:
As “fun” as it would have been to turn this into an elaborate puzzle where you have to piece together narrative hints to open encrypted files, we know that many of you are busy people who probably have just enough time for a newsletter but not for like, an alternate reality game. (Also, we are not game designers.)
That being said: we are doing something kind of tricky with disseminating the files.
Even that small tricky thing was enough to interrupt me. It involved downloading a special browser that allows peer-to-peer browsing, which in itself is not difficult, but I could only run it on my laptop, so I lost the ability to read the story on my phone during my commute. I finished the story a couple weeks after the final email was sent because that’s how long it took for me to find an uninterrupted stretch of time to sit at my computer.
The interviews
Central to the plot are some documents that turn out to be interview transcripts, and those are real interviews conducted with real people by Ingrid Burrington. The fiction links to these documents, as well as to a real news article, in a way that plays with the concept of a piece of fiction as a bounded work. It is both a way of expanding the fictional universe and of citing one’s sources.
William Comfort Anderson 