By Jack Remiel Cottrell (Canterbury University Press, 2025)
For me, one of the joys of a tramping trip is having the time to read at the end of each day, and using that time to actually read instead of scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and letting the world’s digital noise work its way into my dreams. But one of the problems of a tramping trip is that the moment I start to read after walking all day, my eyelids get heavy. Solution: short stories.
With this in mind, I slid The Emotion Dealer by Jack Remiel Cottrell (Ngāti Rangi) into my pack this summer. Jack is known as a writer of flash fiction, ultra-short pieces that, when done well, have the concision and depth of poetry, but with a plot. Here, he jostles present and future so that dystopia bleeds into both. A character asks ‘Who do you hate?’ as a Turing test to weed out the bots on a dating app. A “disinformationist” peddles lies for a living, because, after all, “truth has a PR problem”. A parent erases half a decade of his digital offspring’s life, rolling the child back so he can retry the work of parenting in aid of a better outcome. All of them bite-sized, all of them dense with what consumes us in this, the strangest of times. – LW
