Inspired, at least in part, by this: https://www.wired.com/2008/01/dayintech-0104/
and https://allthatsinteresting.com/radium-girls.

Bolander reminds us to learn from history. Also she makes her elephants even wiser than they really are, giving them a resonant pourquoi story and some representation as sentient beings.

I'd say it's more poignant than wrenching. There's just enough remove to make it powerful, but not too hard for those of us who are more sensitive to read.

A work of sweet literature.
( )

Hell of a first page. The rest is good, too, although the language gets a little too ornate at some moments. ( )

A story about stories and storytelling. ( )

Summer 2019 (Hugo Award Nominee 2019 - Novelette);

A powerful and sinister retelling of the radium girls, both with women and elephants who speak a form of ASL (and have their own acknowledged society/representation in the World Playing Field). This story is told in three recurring section, by three female voices (one female human in the future, one female radium worker & matriarcal elephant in the same period of the past).

It's tightknit, which I deeply approved of, but I felt at times that it was too slow for a story only around 100 pages. I need more gold, faster, and deeper. I love best the mythic sections of it. The story of the oldest matriarchal elephant who chased the world to discover The Stories was the part I best beloved of all this story and will take with me from it. ( )

It was just too confusing for me. ( )

Touching, charming, horrifying, humbling ... so many feelings wrapped up in this story. Beautifully written, I particularly enjoyed the elephants' point of view. ( )

This is a very powerful story, but it is not a happy one nor is it an easy read. I enjoyed very few parts of this book (all the parts I properly enjoyed were the ones narrated by the elephants and telling their stories) — the rest of the book was too raw for me to say I "enjoyed" it. However, it is incredibly well crafted, and it's worth reading for a lesson in how to write a novelette if nothing else.

CWs: animal abuse & death, graphic description of radiation poisoning, some other violence ( )

The Only Harmless Great Thing: Prepare yourself for anger and depression.

It is a fine novella you created here, Brooke Bolander. I golf clap in honor of your book and simultaneously accept your apologies for making my soul cry bloody snot tears of angry sad mad.

Not for the weak of heart! Serious.
In this alt-history novella, the horrifically sad history of Topsy the Elephant (electrocuted for entertainment and ticket sales) is merged with the history of the Radium Girls. In this reweaving, the women poisoned by radium in watch factories of the early 20th century have begun replacing their cancer ridden work force with trained elephants. These enslaved Elephants can taste the poison they are ingesting and do what is possible to avoid the whip.

Mixed throughout the novella are vignettes of Elephant history, passed down pack stories, and lore. Along side those are a loose plotline of Humans negotiating with modern Elephants to be pushed to poisoned reservation lands. These lands are offered as penance for past Human crimes, but are a different kind of poison. Humans continue to be fucking assholes. ( )

Loved it - http://www.susanhatedliterature.net/2018/01/the-only-harmless-great-thing/ ( )

Could not get beyond page 10. Was so confused. Maybe my patience for this writing style is just abnormally low, as a lot of people seem to love this book. To be fair, I also tried to read it in several small moments when I had a chance to read. Seems like it needs a good 30 minutes of cleared reading time to crack into (and maybe finish — it's pretty short). ( )

A sharp, beautiful kick in the pants. Gorgeous, vicious, and utterly original. ( )

Oh, humanity, SHAME ON YOU.

This is a shamefest of shameful shenanigans, from Radium Girls to massive mistreatment of elephants...

But unlike us and our own grasp of history, THEY WILL REMEMBER. :)

I've read a few of Bolander's stories and they all struck me as hardcore. In the sense that they hit hard and make you feel it in your gut and gonads, barely letting up long enough to go for another sucker punch.

Let's face it. We don't look at the crap we do to ourselves very well. Narrative restructuring for our lives has made it almost impossible to see the truth for what it is. So let's write more stories that SHAME us for the immortal monsters that we're becoming, shall we? Break through that immense narrative wall.

Ah... but... and here's the really shameful bit... people don't want to hear how bad they're being. Pointing fingers is what they do best, but those fingers never land on ourselves.

I think this novella works best for those of us willing to take our share of the blame. Or at least get angry enough to start pointing a few extra fingers at some random folk and hope it sticks. :)

Is the story fun, otherwise? Sure! Pretty awesome text that's like poetry and being inside an elephant's head. :) Oh, wait... :) ( )

I finished *The Only Harmless Great Thing* this morning, after I woke early and couldn’t fall back to sleep. Imagine if during the period where radium was still painted on the dials of warplanes to be seen at night, elephants were introduced to replace radium girls because of their ability to endure more radiation. And also we discovered they speak a coherent language that can be translated into english. It is not a full narrative story, but a series of scenes and images, some that fall flat, and some that soar. Best of all, there are a few moments where I began to question whether or not humankind had any chance of redemption at all, or whether the world would be better off without our ratcheting little culture-brain. ( )

Read all my reviews on http://urlphantomhive.booklikes.com

The Tor.com Ebook of the Month club was recently brought to my attention, and this was January's pick so I wanted to give it a try and went into it without any prior knowledge. Imaging my surprise when one of the narratives is from the POV of an elephant.

What unraveled was a wonderful short story, which was part alternate history where elephants have taken over the jobs after the unfortunate Radium girls start dying, part social commentary.

In the beginning I was afraid that three different narratives in one novella would prove to be too much, but in the end I thought it was just fine. Very interesting, I would definitely like to read more by Brooke Bolander. ( )

So, signing elephants. This story is a bit too American to me. Cannot finish reading.

An alternate history novella where elephants reveal that their sentient ability and are now socially involved with human culture. The story is weird and not very engaging. It is well written and has interesting ideas though. ( )

No matter what you did, forty or fifty or a hundred years passed and everything became a narrative to be toyed with, masters of media alchemy splitting the truth's nucleus into a ricocheting cascade reaction of diverging alternate realities.

The premise of this book sounds wacky if you try to explain it to someone: in an alternate reality where elephants are sentient, they are hired to replace the Radium Girls after it comes out how dangerous it is to work in the factories. The book alternates between elephant myths, a former Radium Girl hired to train them, and a researcher in the future, negotiating with the sovereign elephant tribes. But Bolander makes it work, and how. It packs a lot into its short length; it's about history, and labor, and our treatment of animals, and even Disneyfication. Sometime when I read contemporary short science fiction and fantasy, I complain that I want more science fiction specifically, and sometimes I complain that when there is sf, I want the sf elements to be more than props, and this story gave me exactly what I wanted on both accounts.

Unlike the other Hugo nominees, this is the only novelette to have been published independently as a book. By Tor.com. Like a novella. All the others appeared in magazines, online or otherwise. Except this is not entirely true: the Connolly and Gregory below may not have been published in paperback, but they were published as independent pieces of fiction on the Tor.com website. So that’s five of six novellas and three of six novelettes published by Tor.com. Anyway, during WWI the US used women to paint glow-in-the-dark radium on watch-faces and the like, and many of them died from, or were disfigured by, cancer. Bolander has taken this historical fact and run with it. In her story, elephants were involved – and were smart enough to be communicated with using a special sign language – and an attempt by the US to train elephants to work with radium instead of young women results in the death of a nasty piece of work supervisor and the public execution, by electrocution, of the elephant responsible for his death. This is juxtaposed with a near-future narrative in which a young woman wants to genetically engineer elephants to glow in the dark as a warning of the nuclear waste buried beneath land which will be bequeathed to them. None of this last narrative makes the slightest bit of sense, but it’s presented as if its the anchoring narrative thread. Another thread is told from an elephant’s POV and, well, it doesn’t really work. Or feel necessary. There’s a really cool story somewhere in The Only Harmless Great Thing but the way it’s been presented doesn’t to my mind do it any favours. Too much of it is unnecessary – and while I’m all for writers being clever, in fact I both relish and admire it, the cleverness here lies in the narrative set in the past, which are handled well, and not in the near-future narrative or the elephant POV ones. Which is a roundabout way of saying that The Only Harmless Great Thing really didn’t work for me. ( )

I'd heard good things about this story, and it's even better than I'd heard. I love the voices of the different characters, how different they are from each other, and how much they illuminate. The elephant POV is particularly well-done. The ideas are tied together well; the social commentary is well done. Just everything about it is great. ( )

I knew about the Radium girls and this one riffs off that. I had also read about the elephant (Topsy) killed using electricity. Some sources describe the incident as part of the war of the currents (AC vs DC) but whatever else these are real things that happened. This takes those incidents and wraps them together with elephants having learned a type of sign language and the concept of Elephant stories and it becomes an interesting tale of complicated politics and strange bedfellows who are all being exploited. It does take the concept that in reality some lower-waged workers are treated no better by management than animals, and honestly I find it hard to disagree. It also asks if taking revenge really does improve some people's lives, the women all die horrible deaths, often waiting for monies owed and it's hard to see that en exploited elephant mightn't one day take revenge. Even into the future of the story things remain bleak.

It's a story that made me think and I'd be interested in more by this author, but I'd need something quite sunny afterwards.

Provided as part of the Hugo Award packet. ( )

This book is well written and I'd be perfectly fine if elephants outlived us considering we're doing a pretty terrible job of taking care of ourselves. But it still made me really sad. ( )

This is a grim story, but in its own way a beautiful one. Now, those who know me know I don't do grim. At all. Except on the rare occasions that I do.

You may know the story of the Radium Girls. In the early part of the 20th century, young women were employed painting glowing numbers on watch faces, using radium paint. Yes, radium. Yes, it's radioactive, enough to be really dangerous, especially if you work with it constantly or accidentally ingest it.

Who would be so careless as to ingest it, you ask? Well, see, the women weren't told it was dangerous; they were told it was perfectly safe. And of course the best way to get a good point on your paintbrush to paint those fine, exact numbers, was to put it briefly in your mouth every so often.

They all got very sick and there was a big lawsuit, and they died. There are books about the Radium Girls

This is an alternate history, in which after the employment of young women painting radium onto watch faces ends in that lawsuit, the company didn't give up. Instead, they bought elephants who weren't working out for the circuses. One aspect of this alternate world is that in the 1890s, elephants and people began developing an elephant sign language. This helps make employment of elephants in factory jobs more or less possible. And the elephants, being much larger and stronger than slim young women, take significantly longer than the young women to get sick from radiation poisoning. It's still a much worse idea than what happened in our timeline, where eventually the litigation and the bad publicity made it just not worth the effort to make them in any significant numbers.

And I'm really getting off track with this.

The story follows a former "radium girl" named Regan, who is slowly dying of the radiation poisoning, but in the meantime working with the elephants to teach them to paint watch dials; Topsy, a former circus elephant sold to US Radium after she killed a man who was "teasing" her with a lit cigar end; and Kat, a scientist who, years later, is working on a way to keep the now-buried radioactives safe forever with a warning system that will not fail, erode, or cease to scare people off.

Her solution will involve the willing cooperation of the elephants. The elephants have no obvious reason to cooperate with humans, of course, so Kat has to find an argument to persuade them.

Interspersed are stories from the elephant matriarchs, future and past.

It's a fascinating and absorbing world and story. Highly recommended.

I received this story as part of the 2019 Hugo Voters Packet. ( )

I am a big fan of Tor.com publishing but this book is just not my cup of tea. Radioactive elephants...I dont know but the author has quiet an imagination. ( )

A rather odd mix of the radium girls, elephants and Disney. There’s two intertwined stories: a WWII thread with elephants taking over from the radium girls, and a future thread dealing with nuclear waste and the need to keep warnings going for millennia - and elephants again.

The link between the two stories is Topsy the elephant, executed in WWII for killing one of the foremen at US Radium, and her story produced by Disney and distorting elephant-human relations ever since.

Strange, and I’m not sure if I liked it or not.