I don’t often link to short story reviews. For one thing, they’re a lot less common than novel reviews, and probably play a much smaller role in convincing people to go find the story in question.
But every so often, one pops up that says, yeah, you know that thing you were trying to do with your story? Bullseye.
At least for this reader. (Warning: spoilers for “Kingspeaker.”)
It’s nice to feel, every once in a while, that you’ve hit your target.
The reviewer phrased it quite well–I hadn’t thought to class it in the same (but kinda inverted) “whoa bizarre ritual” category with “His One True Bride” but it totally makes sense. (also makes me think of Propp in terms of function vs. function inverted in fairy tale plots). I recall enjoying reading “Kingspeaker” the first time I read it; perhaps I’m due for a revisiting! 🙂
My stories are generally less bizarre — one is tempted to say “squamous” — than Dar’s. 🙂 But I think he’s right, that there’s a category of stories which are about fantasy-religious practices that look unusual to a modern American, and that most of those stories set out either to criticize or valorize the practice in question. When I sat down to write “Kingspeaker,” I explicitly wanted to make it a story that did neither, but was simply about figuring out how to live and operate within the confines of the kingspeaker’s role.
The awesome thing is that Scott Andrews is going to podcast the story — partly because first-person narration often works well that way, but partly because it will subtly highlight the importance of voice and speech in the narrative. I love having an editor who thinks that way.
