Bill -Bill_Wolfe wrote:...Read Alice B./Racoona Sheldon's (a.k.a. James Tiptree Jr.) 1977 Nebula Award winning novelette The Screwfly Solution for how this story should be told. Marvelous. Scary. Deeply disturbing.
Using the word Solution in the title to this story is vaguely annoying, though I can't put my finger on why.
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Bill Wolfe
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You answered your own question. Having memories of an award-winning story which shared both some plot or thematic elements AND a title with the word 'Solution', you were (a) induced to compare the two, and (b) pretty much forced to judge the shorter, newer, amateur effort as inferior. I had a story of mine with a title that was a punning riff on Norman Spinrad's "The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde" (itself a jokey version of the title of the political novel "The Last Hurrah") rejected in part because the title evoked memories of Spinrad's piece and the expectation that my story would somehow be connected to Spinrad's story (which, if I recall correctly, featured the motorcycle-riding(?) descendants of Genghis Khan's army...). (My title was "The Last Hoard of the Golden Hurrah".)
I liked the way the story left the human protagonist with a nasty moral/ethical dilemma: should she accept being a denizen in what would be essentially a 'wildlife preserve' for the last survivors of the human race, or do the 'noble' thing, and fight to the death? In the latter case, of course, the human race would become extinct, once and for all, so in terms of species survival rather than 'moral' obligation, she (and her fellow townsfolk-in-a-metaphorical-bottle) had a duty to survive, breed, and eventually expand. Having never read Sheldon / Tiptree's story, I judged the piece on its own merits.
As for the idea being cliched ... how many really original ideas have you seen? Most of sf and literature in general consists of ancient ideas and plot elements rearranged and dressed up with 'new' stylistic devices, 'modern' settings and technology, etc. And 'flat' characters -- hey, compared to William Shatner's James T. Kirk, the Joker (Nicholson or Ledger version) is kinda blah. What would have made them 'three dimensional'? Obsessive-compulsive disorder, an unnatural fascination with the mating habits of flamingos, and rebellious teenage children?
RM