We are slaves to technology and in Steven Millhauser’s short story “The Other Town,” the nation seems to comment on our TV-dominated lives. In the story, a strange little tale is told about two towns that are exactly alike in nearly every way. They are separated by a small swath of woods that could easily be walked through to the other town. The two towns are described abstractly as the town that has people living there and the town that appears at first sight very empty, but really there are the guards and the replicators. These are individuals whose job it is to make changes to the other town in order to match the main town. It is as if the main town was copied and pasted night next to the original…
In addition, there’s a sense we all have, an elusive but still quite definite sense, which might be called an intuion of absence: the absence of people living in homes, working in stores, conducting the daily life of a town. For of course no one lives in the other town, which exists solely to be visited by us.” (134)
The job of the replicators clearly necessitates “watchers” in the main town, people to record every change and report to the replicators what adjustments must be made. But why? What is Fantastic about this story?
There is no clear beginning, rising action, climax, and denouement. What Millhauser excels at, rather, is raising fascinating and startling questions. For on the surface, “The Other Town” appears to be little more than whimsy, but in our current digital age in which many of us live entirely separate lives–lives in a digital Other Town–it is perhaps it’s a reflection on our lives.