Interzone
Adbusters Magazine, July/August 2005
Podcast
Boy, it’s great to sell this one. I wrote it in a weekend while stuck in a hotel room in Montreal, while I was doing work for an ad agency. I’m afraid the ad business has a tendency to encourage a degree of cynicism…
The original title of this story was “From Heel to Babyface and Beyond: The Re-branding of Billy ‘Beetle’ Bailey,” but it got truncated during a couple passes through both my home workshop and the Gypsicon gang.
This stuff is over the top, of course, like all satire. But it’s successful because it’s played with a perfectly straight face, and because the story is thick with details that buttress the theme and keep the reader smiling and grimacing: the sponsored grade school classes, the worry about competing with 8th graders when you graduate to 7th grade, even the well-chosen character names. This is very well-crafted, very entertaining, very satisfying story.
Rich Horton,
Locus Magazine
The other standout is by the 2000 John W. Campbell Award Winner for Best New Writer, Cory Doctorow. “The Rebranding of Billy Bailey” is a very clever and funny story which takes an off-kilter notion and plays it for all it’s worth. Billy Bailey is a 6th grader who specializes in being a “heel”, or a class brat. The thing is, that’s a commercial decision: he has an agent, his Dad is his VP Operations, all his pranks are decided on the basis of how they will affect his media profile, etc. The story revolves around a prank which gets blamed on him unfairly, and which will affect his “brand”. Perhaps he needs a new brand? This is consistently funny, and the satire is consistently on target. I really liked this piece: in my opinion, it’s the best story so far by an already very promising new writer.
Rich Horton,
Tangent Online
I think the best short story Interzone published this year was “The Rebranding of Billy Bailey” by Campbell Award winner Cory Doctorow. I also discussed this story in the Locus essay mentioned above. It’s clever satire about school kids commercializing their images, and it works smartly throughout.
Rich Horton,
Duelling Modems
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