“Upside Down Frown”

2022 Thompson, Jarred. “Upside Down Frown.” Fiyah Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction, no. 22 (Spring 2022): 82-98, with a note on the author on 99.

The story is set in a future that has overcome the climate crisis  where, under the Department of Happiness, everyone is being given a “social cohesion electroceutical,” a cranial implant that monitors the neural network and alters it to avoid distress before it occurs. Also, each decade the Department provides every citizen with a “life report” with details of how they should act “to reach and maintain their happiness” (84). The protagonist works in the Museum of Affect that depicts the past at a time that the Department has decided to eliminate it because the past contains “too much emotional baggage” (87). She puts on a final exhibit on the History of Happiness that presents happiness as based on exclusion, the creation of an Other. Queer, male South African author.