“A Windmill in the West”
This story is a thematic riff on one of the author’s favorite topics: colonialism. An American Soldier has been dropped somewhere in Australia to guard a borderline in which everything to one direction is the property of Australia and everything in the other direction is the property of the U.S. Aside from the political irony, there is a literary irony even more fascinating: it is interior monologue-style tale set almost entirely within the soldier’s mind (though told from the third person) with purposely limited interaction between him any and anybody. The irony is the claustrophobic effect it produces even though the soldier is a portrait of man almost unlimited freedom as the only human soul within a vast expanse of desert.
“The Fat Man in History”
The ending of this story reveals that it has along been a commissioned governmental report. The narrative seemed to be a standard dystopian nightmare about a world gone so crazy in the wake of a political revolution that being fat was commensurate with being considered an enemy of the state. Focusing primarily on one fat man named Finch, the story seems to be moving along the trek of Finch’s role as Secretary of the underground insurrectionist group “Fat Men Against the Revolution.” The final passage changes everything, however, with a revelation that ironically upends all assumptions about what was really going on. Hint: it’s not just a big fat rat, but big fat mole rat.
“American Dreams”
This story is constructed upon a series of ironies, but the central one is its thematic foundation; an extension of Baudrillard’s theory of the simulacra that also contains foreshadowing of the coming of The Truman Show. A man spends five years of his retirement hidden from the rest of the community behind a wall building a perfect scale-model replica of not just the town, but the locals populating it. It is only revealed to the public after his death and quickly becomes a tourist attraction filling those locals with dreams of riches. But the American tourists who come to see the little magic model town don’t like how things have changed in the wake of time moving on. The inevitable result is that the townspeople are forced to replicate the reality of the model in order to keep the American tourists spending money. The simulation has become the reality and the reality has become the simulation.
"The Chance"
The irony here is almost of the Twilight Zone variety. Can a political revolutionary at odds with the beautiful lies acting as a façade over ugly ideological truths ever be happy with being a beautiful woman herself? Shouldn’t someone dedicated to exposing the ugliness of the truth also be as brutally unattractive? That question is posed and ironically answered when a beautiful revolutionary gets the chance to live out her dream of a genetic reboot which deprives her of that beauty and makes her physical features more aligned with her political vision.
“The Last Days of a Famous Mime”
One can certainly argue that the central irony in this story is that the mime’s lose his fame and eventually his life when he takes too much to heart a single voice in the wilderness criticizing his act. The mime proves spectacularly effective at instilling terror in his audiences and the critic asks, quite simple, what is “the use of invoking terror in an audience.” The mime falls from grace trying to respond accordingly to this criticism rather than remaining true to his artistic vision. That all this leads to his public suicide is ironic, to be sure, but just as surely one must ask if there is not a great irony at work here: could a mime ever really become that famous?
