Review
I bought this a few years ago when talking about Dark Academia and detective fiction with a colleague at UCL. I’d particularly been hunting for something that involved economists, but this was adjacent and seemed like fun: two novella-length stories inviting us behind the scenes to see how working in academia can be murder!
The first of the two, “Competitive Edge”, follows a physics department trying to iron out thorny issues like student demands and how to appoint a new colleague. Alongside is the desperate promotion bid by a precariously employed physicist in the team. The story proceeds by juxtaposing governance documents (who doesn’t like committee minutes?), news broadcasts, and a therapist’s notes to sketch out how and why someone is leaving some very bizarre death threats (if they are threats) around town. This is for anyone who’s ever idly thought, “What if that coffee was poisoned?” or “Could that boulder fall and kill someone?”
I loved the tone of this story, and the witty concept is really well executed. It fleshes out the pressures of contingent employment in a tight niche, what is incentivised or not within the HE system, and how trying to “job hug” (i.e. stay employed) can distract from the actual work of a researcher. It’s a true horror story of the industry, wrapped up with sociopathic local news anchors and a serial-dentist-killer subplot.
“The Optimization of Milos Kriska” takes place in a slightly more dystopian-than-life academic framework, wherein there is a more rigidly structured two-tier higher education system and authoritarian control over the system by which science is done. This might feel like it should be more of a horror story, of the two, but actually the fact that it is a not-quite-parallel universe makes it less horrifying. We can buy into the system on its own terms while chuckling quietly to ourselves that, “Hey, it’s not quite that bad.”
Instead, it’s an amusingly plotted whodunnit whereby a perfectly logical and almost-sanctioned murder (per the rules for how science is done in this universe) becomes a wholly different mystery entirely. I particularly appreciated the music PhD student doing a “ridealong” with the physics students to seek inspiration for his art, and his fixation on getting everything absolutely technically correct, which was a nice little dig at the academy’s desperate desire to attach the Arts and Humanities to scientific disciplines to make them seem more “relevant”.
Writing this review has reminded me to try to track down anything else that Eve Armstrong has written, and for anyone else looking for more, I’d recommend starting here: https://thenewstack.io/artificial-intelligence-the-work-of-ai-satirist-eve-armstrong/
See also
These lists capture other stories and characters that I thought of as I was reading this piece. I won’t explain why, to avoid spoilers, but they’re associations and not ‘if you liked this, then you’ll love…’ recommendations!
- The Examiner (Janice Hallett)
- Black Mirror (TV anthology)
Take a look at my short story collection featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies; order now! Or check out my academic work about detective and crime fiction (free PDFs available) right here.
Dominique Gracia 
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