In spite of those obstacles, Maynard’s fragmentary “Dinosaur” is subtler than Swirsky’s. Swirsky writes her story during the Obama administration, a time of LGBT rights ascendant, with the Obergefell decision still two years in the future. Maynard, in contrast, writes during the Trump era, with LGBT rights being rolled back. Any other author would have bedecked the fictional assailants with MAGA hats, or Pepe the Frog t-shirts; Maynard, with perfect naturalness, avoids them.

Let us look at the passage that treats of the beating, containing a list of offensive slurs. It is a matter of common knowledge that the narrator is saddened and infuriated by those terms. Swirsky is an LGBT sympathizer; from her, the verdict is understandable. But that Maynard — a sympathizer of the Sad Puppies, someone who dismisses oppression as “hurt[ing] someone’s fee-fees” — should have his narrator react in the same way! This might be seen as an attempt by a conservative to pretend sympathy with those he oppresses; others (lacking all perspicacity) see it as a transcription of the Swirsky; others still, as influenced by Heinlein.

The Swirsky text and the Maynard text are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer. It is a revelation to compare the “Dinosaur” of Jay Maynard with that of Rachel Swirsky. Swirsky, for example, wrote the following:

… all those people who — deceived by the helix-and-fossil trappings of cloned dinosaurs — believed that they lived in a science fictional world when really they lived in a world of magic where anything was possible.

This notion, that the world of science fiction excludes magic, written by the experienced and genre-savvy science fiction author Rachel Swirsky, is a commonplace. Maynard, on the other hand, writes:

… all those people who — deceived by the helix-and-fossil trappings of cloned dinosaurs — believed that they lived in a science fictional world when really they lived in a world of magic where anything was possible.

For Maynard — whose sole claim to fame is that he cosplays as the protagonist from Tron, a movie that reenacts obviously magical storytelling tropes using the very thinnest veneer of scientific justification — to claim that the existence of everyday objects such as fossils and DNA molecules excludes the possibility of the fantastic seems an especially brazen irony.