TY - ABST T1 - “Upside Down Frown” Y1 - 2022 A1 - Jarred Thompson KW - Male author KW - Queer author KW - South African author AB -

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.

JF - Fiyah Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction VL - no. 22 ER -