What do you think?
Rate this book
The Weather
In the middle of a barren wasteland, a small town goes through the motions as if nothing's changed. Lolly has school, a part time job, a senile grandmother that needs looking after. But everything has changed, and Lolly's always one storm away from facing that.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
20 pages, Kindle Edition
First published March 23, 2016
1 person is currently reading
50 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews
April 24, 2020
Lolly doesn’t feel anxious, for herself or her mother or the storm. She knows staying home will give her a stomachache, because she’ll sit around smelling Granny Ma’s rotting flesh and rotting ointment and the house will creak and squeak with every breath of air. But when her mother’s face and shoulders are covered in smears of burn cream that haven’t been rubbed in properly, Lolly knows she’ll cave to the smallest request, because her mother doesn’t even take the time to check and see if the cream’s rubbed in, and Lolly won’t bother to tell her it isn’t.
this tor short was a bit disappointing to me. i'm generally a fan of unusual apocalypse/winding-down stories, especially when they're set in impoverished smalltown locales. this story had a promising start, with a girl named lolly who lives in one of these impoverished smalltown locales with her mother and her unwell granny ma where they are awaiting the arrival of a storm while others in their already-dwindling town are choosing to flee instead. the nature of the storm is unspecified, but tension is built up around its previous appearances, where details and consequences are hinted at in a pretty satisfyingly teasing manner, the grandmother's physical and mental symptoms are described in an equally teasing and vague manner, and there are flashes of tech-allusions familiar to readers but less so for our lolly, who interprets her granny ma's mumblings about "followers" and "rebooting" as madness: It’s normal, nonsensical Granny Ma talk and Lolly pays it no mind.
the problem is, teasing is only fun for a while. eventually you want more than just vague hints, and this story never delivers the goods on that.
which fact is made even more frustrating by the sheer amount of detail we are given in utterly inconsequential matters:
He puts a candy bar on the counter and Lolly waves it under the bar-code scanner once, twice, staring blindly at the image of milk chocolate pieces with white chocolate centers. A streak of fluorescent light catches across the metallic candy wrapper, cutting the chocolate image in half and blurring the bar’s name.
i would love some of that detail brought to, say, the larger themes of the story, not just this one candy bar.
it's a shame, because there's some good writing here; good descriptions and mood-setting atmosphere, but it just didn't cohere into a proper story for me. i need more than just a few scattered anecdotes from questionable sources mythologizing the town's history within the context of the larger broken-down world. i need cause/effect/words/an ending way more than i need painstaking description of the bitchy lady betrothed to lolly's convenience store-owner boss who doesn't like lolly because she tried to charge her for her purchases at the store that one time.
maybe this was an authorial choice, to focus so tightly on the quotidian instead of the fantasy elements, but it didn't work for me. every time there was something interesting, she backed off from it to focus on more wacky granny ma utterances, which became tedious: Granny Ma is muttering something either vulgar or about a poodle.
there's a solid kernel here; it just got covered over in meh.
as it is, it's probably a 2.5 for me.
read it for yourself here:
http://www.tor.com/2016/03/23/the-wea...
come to my blog!
this tor short was a bit disappointing to me. i'm generally a fan of unusual apocalypse/winding-down stories, especially when they're set in impoverished smalltown locales. this story had a promising start, with a girl named lolly who lives in one of these impoverished smalltown locales with her mother and her unwell granny ma where they are awaiting the arrival of a storm while others in their already-dwindling town are choosing to flee instead. the nature of the storm is unspecified, but tension is built up around its previous appearances, where details and consequences are hinted at in a pretty satisfyingly teasing manner, the grandmother's physical and mental symptoms are described in an equally teasing and vague manner, and there are flashes of tech-allusions familiar to readers but less so for our lolly, who interprets her granny ma's mumblings about "followers" and "rebooting" as madness: It’s normal, nonsensical Granny Ma talk and Lolly pays it no mind.
the problem is, teasing is only fun for a while. eventually you want more than just vague hints, and this story never delivers the goods on that.
which fact is made even more frustrating by the sheer amount of detail we are given in utterly inconsequential matters:
He puts a candy bar on the counter and Lolly waves it under the bar-code scanner once, twice, staring blindly at the image of milk chocolate pieces with white chocolate centers. A streak of fluorescent light catches across the metallic candy wrapper, cutting the chocolate image in half and blurring the bar’s name.
i would love some of that detail brought to, say, the larger themes of the story, not just this one candy bar.
it's a shame, because there's some good writing here; good descriptions and mood-setting atmosphere, but it just didn't cohere into a proper story for me. i need more than just a few scattered anecdotes from questionable sources mythologizing the town's history within the context of the larger broken-down world. i need cause/effect/words/an ending way more than i need painstaking description of the bitchy lady betrothed to lolly's convenience store-owner boss who doesn't like lolly because she tried to charge her for her purchases at the store that one time.
maybe this was an authorial choice, to focus so tightly on the quotidian instead of the fantasy elements, but it didn't work for me. every time there was something interesting, she backed off from it to focus on more wacky granny ma utterances, which became tedious: Granny Ma is muttering something either vulgar or about a poodle.
there's a solid kernel here; it just got covered over in meh.
as it is, it's probably a 2.5 for me.
read it for yourself here:
http://www.tor.com/2016/03/23/the-wea...
come to my blog!
July 6, 2019
Well written and atmospheric, but baffling.
May 4, 2019
Another entry in the Tor collection that is an intriguing enough vignette, but isn't really a story. Three generations of women live in a house in some sub-optimal future, the world and society sketched as the kind of rough-and-ready, everyday harshness of an existence so many people in history have learned to live with, without ever filling in the details - perhaps somewhere between 1930s Dustbowl, Gibsonian sprawl and Mad Max outback. Mother and daughter are securing the house against a coming Storm ( although it is not the ecological disaster we expect ) while Granny Ma wanders around in her dementia, reciting social media references from her youth that may as well be Aramaic to her grand daughter.
November 2, 2018
This was an interesting short story with a real twist, as I didn’t understand what the weather or the storm was until the storm teased throughout the story finally arrived. It definitely made sense to call it a storm but I was surprised nonetheless. That was well done. I suspected the storm was something unusual and as there are hints aplenty that the setting is a dying small town out in the desert in a post-apocalyptic setting (one in which things like wi-fi and social media are either antiquated concepts or nonsensical utterings to the young people) I would have been disappointed if it had not been something weird.
I liked how the story focused a lot on the minutia of everyday life, of the protagonist caring for her grandmother, of the trials and tribulations of her awful job manning a register at a convenience store, of chores around the house, things that are relentlessly mundane in an apocalyptic setting, making the aforementioned storm even more surreal yet also grounding it somehow.
I do wish some of the loving detail lavished on the mundane aspects of the main character Lolly’s life had been applied to the storm itself. The reader gets visceral, very tactile descriptions of Lolly running a cash register or rubbing ointment on Granny Ma’s back, but when it comes to the storm itself, it feels strangely distant, unfinished almost, definitely lacking the minute levels of detail of the other aspects of Lolly’s life. I think that is a missed opportunity.
I liked how the story focused a lot on the minutia of everyday life, of the protagonist caring for her grandmother, of the trials and tribulations of her awful job manning a register at a convenience store, of chores around the house, things that are relentlessly mundane in an apocalyptic setting, making the aforementioned storm even more surreal yet also grounding it somehow.
I do wish some of the loving detail lavished on the mundane aspects of the main character Lolly’s life had been applied to the storm itself. The reader gets visceral, very tactile descriptions of Lolly running a cash register or rubbing ointment on Granny Ma’s back, but when it comes to the storm itself, it feels strangely distant, unfinished almost, definitely lacking the minute levels of detail of the other aspects of Lolly’s life. I think that is a missed opportunity.
June 12, 2016
This felt less like a short story, than the blocking for a longer book. It had an interesting twist on the post apocalyptic genre. There was a delightful contradiction between the mundane aspects of the girls life and the preparation for the "the storm." I really feel there is a great story buried in these pages, but it is just not there yet.
December 21, 2016
Very disappointing. And honestly, pointless.
November 5, 2018
A bit confusing - would work better as part of a longer novel than as a self-contained short story.
April 25, 2016
If I were to rate this short on pure enjoyment I would give it 4 stars. It had elements I really love in a story, but with some consideration it's faults hold it back and in the end I just wanted more detail.
August 17, 2016
This definitely had potential, but ended up feeling unfinished.
August 26, 2018
★★★★☆ (4/5)
A selection of my favourite passages from the book
• A woman comes in, her skin the color of caramelized onions and her hair a dark cocoa pulsing with yellow highlights. The flesh of her face is stretched taut, as if she’s pinned all the wrinkles back behind her ears, except for the crow’s feet at her eyes, which are more like sparrow’s feet
• There are two rusted nails sticking out of her lips like she’s some kind of bucktoothed vampire. Spotting Lolly, she pauses in hammering and tilts her head to the other end of the board she’s nailing over the porch window. Taking the cue, Lolly goes to hold up the board as her mother plucks out a fang
• They carry two apiece, one under each arm, and Lolly can feel the splinters planting in her flesh. She starts to count them, then starts to count the number of hammer swings it takes to get in a nail, then starts to count the more violent bzzzts of the zapper. Anything but counting the numbers of boards and windows
• and if you don’t catch the disease fast enough, something in their dead brains will click to life long enough to say ‘this one isn’t getting sick’ and then the storm will overtake you, because if it can’t have you, it won’t leave you breathing
A selection of my favourite passages from the book
• A woman comes in, her skin the color of caramelized onions and her hair a dark cocoa pulsing with yellow highlights. The flesh of her face is stretched taut, as if she’s pinned all the wrinkles back behind her ears, except for the crow’s feet at her eyes, which are more like sparrow’s feet
• There are two rusted nails sticking out of her lips like she’s some kind of bucktoothed vampire. Spotting Lolly, she pauses in hammering and tilts her head to the other end of the board she’s nailing over the porch window. Taking the cue, Lolly goes to hold up the board as her mother plucks out a fang
• They carry two apiece, one under each arm, and Lolly can feel the splinters planting in her flesh. She starts to count them, then starts to count the number of hammer swings it takes to get in a nail, then starts to count the more violent bzzzts of the zapper. Anything but counting the numbers of boards and windows
• and if you don’t catch the disease fast enough, something in their dead brains will click to life long enough to say ‘this one isn’t getting sick’ and then the storm will overtake you, because if it can’t have you, it won’t leave you breathing
April 28, 2021
A girl who works in a store to support her ailing grandma faces a storm. But not just any storm...
Honestly I didn't get the beginning at all. Things remain mysterous and muddy right up until the storm hits - and it's not what you think. I loved that it gave you enough to work out the world after that without needing to spell out every little thing.
Honestly I didn't get the beginning at all. Things remain mysterous and muddy right up until the storm hits - and it's not what you think. I loved that it gave you enough to work out the world after that without needing to spell out every little thing.
January 29, 2025
TW: Graphic pandemic poverty.
I read this in the Best of Tor dot com 2016.
Life for the Boomers great-great-grandchildren. I liked this story a lot. Particularly grandma and her notebook. The ending was open but satisfying.
I read this in the Best of Tor dot com 2016.
Life for the Boomers great-great-grandchildren. I liked this story a lot. Particularly grandma and her notebook. The ending was open but satisfying.
November 25, 2018
As others have pointed out, this felt like the beginnings of a great novel. By itself, the story is a (well-written) mess that ambles about before an abrupt and unsatisfying ending.
January 16, 2019
Has potential. Was surprised when it ended so quickly and abruptly.
December 22, 2019
LOVE this story. I like how vague it is. Mysterious and atmospheric. I can't wait to read more from Smith. You can read this story for free here: https://www.tor.com/2016/03/23/the-we...
May 5, 2021
The Weather, as the title suggests, was not what I expected at all, but came as a scary surprise. Tension was built slowly but inescapably towards the shocking end, which answered just as many questions as it evoked new ones. I only wish this would be made into a longer story, as I would love to find out more about the characters and circumstances that led to this finale.
May 6, 2025
Li aqui.
Achei um climão muito bom, muito intrigante, mas não entregou o que prometeu. A explicação do que era, afinal, essa tempestade foi tão anticlimática. Sou muito a favor de final aberto, mas se o que vier antes for satisfatório. Nesse, acho que o texto se apoiou no fim e não entregou fim.
Achei um climão muito bom, muito intrigante, mas não entregou o que prometeu. A explicação do que era, afinal, essa tempestade foi tão anticlimática. Sou muito a favor de final aberto, mas se o que vier antes for satisfatório. Nesse, acho que o texto se apoiou no fim e não entregou fim.
November 5, 2016
That was deeply disturbing and sad, the way all zombie stories are--spoiler alert, the incoming "storm" is actually a rambling zombie hoard. It's clear pretty early on that the story's world is some sort of post-apocalyptic setting, but it wasn't until the very last scene that I understood how. There was no indication until then that the weather referenced and fretted over was anything but some kind of actual weather. Admittedly, I assumed it was some sort of unnatural weather--I spent most of the story wondering if it had something to do with nuclear fallout--but weather all the same.
It's short enough that I don't feel robbed by spending so much of my reading time confused, but that ending really made up for a lot. Christ, that ending. That was perfect and shattering.
It's short enough that I don't feel robbed by spending so much of my reading time confused, but that ending really made up for a lot. Christ, that ending. That was perfect and shattering.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 4, 2016
This felt kind of like how Jericho was trying to be… Small town, apocalypse, making-do while still retaining those small town concerns regarding gossip…
Anyways, I liked it. And I liked it more for not reading spoilery reviews ahead of time.
Read it for free here.
Anyways, I liked it. And I liked it more for not reading spoilery reviews ahead of time.
Read it for free here.
April 2, 2016
A short story about the future where zombies exist and ordinary dread is just an everyday thing. Works well as a short vignette, but doesn't offer much new on a very saturated topic. Might be interesting to see an expansion of the story if the social media commentary actually ties into the overall narrative.
May 18, 2016
the entire story felt unfinished
so many details that didn't lead anywhere
felt like I was reading the premise of a much longer story
many inconsistencies
like Lolly and her mother board up the windows for the storm, but eventually end up crawling to the roof with the storm underneath them, but if they are on the roof wouldn't they be IN the storm?
so many details that didn't lead anywhere
felt like I was reading the premise of a much longer story
many inconsistencies
like Lolly and her mother board up the windows for the storm, but eventually end up crawling to the roof with the storm underneath them, but if they are on the roof wouldn't they be IN the storm?
December 5, 2016
This incredibly short story, has many interesting, yet just sketched out ideas. It also has a nice narrative voice and interesting characters. Unfortunately it reads as an incomplete draft, as a set of notes for something that could turn into a good story. I can tell that the author is definitely very talented, and I am eager to read more of her, but this story needs some more work.
March 28, 2016
Wanted more
June 14, 2016
This one didn't provide enough details to feel like a fully fleshed out story. I'm not sure what exactly was going on here.
December 23, 2016
This is like a little snapshot of an interesting world, but it ended just when things really started. I did enjoy the flip of social media obsessed grandma and completely tech illiterate teenager.
Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews