Temperament – A Novella by K. Aurum
Publisher: Self-Published
Genre: Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Contemporary
Rating: 4 Stars
Reviewed by AstilbeThe stroke took his hand. The implant gave it back. Then it kept going.
Jon Finn was a violinist before a stroke stole his right side and his voice. The experimental device his doctors offer is a quiet miracle: it restores his hand, his speech, his playing. His recovery astonishes the hospital. His bowing has never been cleaner. He and the woman he loves have never fought less.And, note by note, word by word, he is vanishing.
The implant doesn’t take his life. It takes his self: smoothing the edges, finishing the sentences, choosing the notes he used to reach for. Everyone sees a man restored. Only Jon feels his own wanting drain away.
Spare, unsettling, and quietly devastating, Temperament is a debut novella about identity, illness, and the hidden cost of being made better; a story that grows shorter and quieter as its narrator disappears.
Written by a practicing physician, it lingers where medicine can’t answer: when everything you can do remains, and only the you is gone, is that still you?
Sometimes science fiction is about asking questions that many people would rather ignore.
The author did an excellent job of exploring the ethical implications of using a artificial intelligence for medical purposes. Whether or not readers agree with the conclusions certain characters came to didn’t necessarily matter. An intelligent argument could be made for many different points of view, and even the ones I didn’t personally agree with still followed a logical and understandable path from one assertion to the next. This is the sort of discussion I’m drawn to when reading this genre, and it was handled smoothly here.
It would have been nice to see more clues added earlier on in the storyline about what was truly going on with Jon’s cognition. As much as I enjoyed being able to come up with my own theories about what was happening to him, this would have been an even stronger piece of work in my opinion if the author had spent more time developing the beginning and perhaps allowing a bit more of his opinion of how the final scene should be interpreted to bleed through, so to speak.
The deliciously ambiguous ending was what encouraged me to select a four-star rating for this tale. I appreciated the fact that it could be interpreted in multiple ways. While I don’t want to influence how other readers understood those last few sentences, their ability to be understood from so many different points of view reinforced my own assumptions about what was happening and made me shudder in a good way.
Temperament – A Novella reminded me why I like speculative fiction so much.
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