Juarez Square and Other Stories

My Amazon review - http://www.amazon.com/review/RG7DX2UKQ10ZB/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

Life is hard in post-secession Texas. The great state has entered into a chronic depression, slavery and cross-border raiding has returned to the border lands and the remaining United States have built a wall of death to keep illegals from Texas from coming north.

This is a fantastically readable collection of stories that play out a melody of author D.L. Young's imagined future. It is not a pleasant future, and it seems like a big step back into the past as Mexican Don's purchase slaves and take their enemies into the desert for one last stroll. (“The Reader.”) Poverty and desperation force the forgotten people on the margins of life to make desperate choices in their efforts to flee north. (“Training the Fundies,” “Sanctuary City.”) On the other hand, there is an elite side of culture that can bring back the dead for the sake of fashion and can extend life indefinitely. (“The Giani Box,” “Last Goodbye.”)

Young is a talented short story writer. His stories don't waste a lot of time on wind-up, they reveal by action and dialogue rather than exposition, they place the reader in this future culture, leaving the reader wondering at times about things that the characters must know, and they generally wrap up the story in a logical and coherent fashion.

The stories were:

The Reader - Maharth is a brujo, who can read whether a person is lying, and a slave, kidnapped as a child from a border family. But was that the truth?

Training the Fundies - The last drone operator in Texas, and a Catholic, trains fundies on how to use drones. But for what purpose will the drones be employed?

Juarez Square - Diego is a gifted robot mechanic. When he makes a deal with the narco boss to keep the boss's distribution-robots rolling in Juarez Square, what will the consequences be?

Dumpside - A peon who mines the garbage dump with a fleet of robots forgets that where there is a strike there are strikebreakers.

Sanctuary City - What kind of degradation can the hope of emigration to the United States bring to impoverished Texan youths?

The Giani Box - Can Giani Versace salvage the career of a fashion designer

Ximena - Of love, politics and robot brothels.

Cotner's Box - Will a robot who can paint really be such a sensation?

Dogville - This narco picked the wrong girl to mess with.

The Jacob Seeds - You have a crop that will end world hunger, but your culture believes that trade is evil. How do you get the goods into the hands of a hungry world?

Last Goodbye - Regrets over the span of several lifetimes.

My personal favorites were The Reader, Training the Fundies, Sanctuary City and The Jacob Seeds. I thought the anti-libertarian culture imagined in The Jacob Seeds was a nice twist. I was left somewhat puzzled and unfulfilled by Dogville and Dumpside. All the stories were of high quality, and, more important, this Spanglish-speaking, fractured world was quite the attention-grabber.