"My Name is Jim" by Bill Snodgrass compliments the emigre and outsider themes of [Steve] Carlton's story ["Emissary," also in Amazing Journey's, Issue 5] with a deftly scribed story of interplanetary proletarian prejudice. Like Carlton's story, Snodgrass's piece reaches toward the allegorical, but unlike Carlton, Snodgrass manages his exposition with good style and also manages to build a suspenseful story out of ordinary events, at least as ordinary applies to mining colonies on asteroids....

I believed the boredom, the toil, and the spiritual spleen as reflected through the first-person narrative POV. The concept of a "worker swap" that draws the story's protagonist from his underground job to a new position mining on the asteroid's surface was likewise an effective conceit and one that brings with it a nice irony, in that the "good" character, the protagonist, emerges from the underworld, while the story's ordinary, if not outright banal, villains dwell in light.

Hazing the new guy, the surface miners play a practical joke that has loathsome consequences. The thematic idea that petty crimes are no less sinful than ones we may see more obviously was effective. I liked many of the story's elements, but I found the piece noticeably impeded by the last two paragraphs: a capstone for the story's themes, stated so explicitly that the mood is nearly spoiled. Nearly. "My name is Jim", despite that last-minute peek behind the curtain, earns my thumb's up.

"Firebrand Fiction" is a regular feature of SFReader.com