Fireworks in the Rain by Steven BrustA tale from the world of Steven Brust and Skyler White's novel The Incrementalists, a September 2013 release. The Incrementalists are an ancient conspiracy to make the world better -- just a little bit at a time. "Fireworks in the Rain" tells a story not found in the novel, and serves as an equally beguiling introduction to the Incrementalists and how they work...
Late last year I read Steven Brust's 14th book in his Vlad Taltos series and was quite taken by the story he wrote it was very cool and even with it being the 14th book in the series it read as a first! I went on in search for some more fiction of Steven Brust and came across the book that he wrote together with Skyler White The Incrementalists this sounded pretty darn cool as well. Luckily there was one short story already available!
The idea behind The Incrementalist is that there are people that are immortal, there are only a few hundred people who have this. But they all live with an higher motive that of helping mankind getting better. Because, surviving for over thousands of years does bring a lot of knowledge into play.
Fireworks in the Rain focuses on the Phil, who also plays part in the full length book. Ren, is on a short trip and Phil has to count out the days alone until her return. There is already something very interested in the first few sentence of the story "So I had to change the world. Trouble was, I didn’t know how. I mean, I knew, in the most general terms, what I wanted to do; but how to go about it stumped me." Changing the world one step at a time. There is one thing that Phil desperately wants to change, there are a lot of house on for foreclosure and execution sales. Due to people being unable to pay their mortgage. Phil wants to give these people a chance. So without really a clear plan, in the beginning, he sets out to do something about this. And this is much where the essence of the story lies. Steven Brust shows in very fine detail how Phil goes about planning to change the thoughts of a person, this was a lot of fun to read, the planning that went in there and how he executed it. All that is involved with the switches, scents etc, kind of reminded me of Inception a bit. Pretty cool.
I don't know whether I can call this "at the core" but there is certain seriousness to the story of Fireworks in the Rain. The reason of what Phil has in mind is something very human and emotional and plays in to something recent. It isn't just to have fun it really is to help. I was, to be honest, struck by this a lot of books that feature immortality are often hinted at a more humurous kind of plot twist of storyline, but contrary to this Fireworks in the Rain has a serious theme working in the plot line. However this didn't take away that the inner ramblings of Phil weren't without any jokes. I like Phil already and look forward to reading The Incrementalists. If you are in need of a quick, funny and addictive short story, read this one!
Fireworks in the Rain was originally posted at Tor.com
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