Dessert Is Served in Three Minutes! - Anton Eine - ★★★★.½
AUTHOR: Anton Eine
TRANSLATOR: Simon Geoghegan
GENRE: Sci-fi Short Story.
RATING: 4.5 stars.
In a Nutshell: Anton Eine strikes again! A satisfying futuristic sci-fi short story with great plot, pace and punch. Best of all, it is free! Much recommended.
If you still haven’t read Anton Eine’s deliciously quirky sci-fi short stories, you don’t know what you are missing! Here’s a good free way to make amends.
This little 15-page story comes to us from the first person narration of Chef Lukas Larsgaard, who is busy in the kitchen preparing a twelve-course tasting menu for some very special guests. This is a make-or-break event for him, and the stress of ensuring perfection is making him quite short-tempered. His assistants are cool and calm, but they don’t really get the pressure, do they?
Does the story just stop at a chef stressing over a professional commitment? If you know Anton Eine’s stories, you know that is IMPOSSIBLE!
I have enjoyed this Ukrainian author’s works since about three years now. He writes in various genres, but I feel he is at his best in his core genre of science fiction. His imagination and his writing skills work in tandem, resulting in a magical and impactful short fiction experience. Almost all of his stories have hidden twists. Most of the twists don’t come at the end but are revealed almost casually in between the narrative in such a way that our whole experience of the work changes at that point.
This story too has all the hallmarks of an Anton Eine sci-fi – it is quick and unusual, it springs an unexpected surprise after about a third of the tale is done, and it ends at a point where you *hunger* for more. I would have loved a little more details at the end, but the current ending is also good enough.
The main narrator seems to be an incarnation of Gordon Ramsay from Hell’s Kitchen, so his aggression and his propensity for abusive language irked me at the start. But once the hidden details came out, I kind of understood why he was so short-fused.
The story packs in quite a lot for its length, with enough action, atmosphere, backstory and suspense to keep the reader hooked. Initially, I thought it was going the way of 'Post-Molecular Comfort Food', yet another brilliant Anton Eine sci-fi work. But the reveal showed that Eine had very different plans with this new tale. The common point is that both the stories have a chef as the central character and plenty of food references, but this one didn’t make me hungry as I had no clue about most of the dishes and ingredients mentioned! 😂
As with all of Eine’s works, this one is also a translation. I found the translation mostly good, but there is a little repetition in the initial quarter and in the bad words that the chef doles out to his team. I won’t dock off points for this because it wasn’t that major an issue.
Definitely recommended to all short fiction lovers who like futuristic or dystopian tales with a dash of sci-fi.
If you still aren’t convinced about Anton Eine’s writing, you can still try this story out because it is available for free almost everywhere. (Except for Amazon India – sigh!) I bought my free copy from Kobo. Check out which site works for you for this freebie using this master link:
Want to try more of this clever author’s clever stories? Please try ‘Human Kind’ – one of my favourite sci-fi story collections.
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