Tag: rich horton

Locus (Rich Horton) on “The Weight of a Blessing”

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Aliette de Bodard’s ‘‘The Weight of a Blessing’’ (Clarkesworld, March) tells of a mother’s last visits with her daughter, who is being exiled. The point of the story is the slow revelation of the reason for this exile. The mother is a refugee from a planet torn by civil war. Her culture was trampled, in essence, and she’s made a life on her new planet, married and divorced a local man, tried to fit in. But her daughter has rejected all this and embraced a culture she never knew, and has protested the way the dominant culture of her new planet has, in essence, rewritten history. All this reads to me as a fairly straightforward allegory of Vietnam/US relations, post war. It’s well done and challenging, but despite the offworld setting and some technology that allows speaking with a version of dead ancestors, I wasn’t excited, science-fictionally. Still, one can’t deny its engagement with important contemporary issues.

Uh. Interesting. I didn’t see the main point of the story being the revelation of the reason for the exile (which is pretty self-evident about halfway through, I think? For me, it’s quintessentially a story about ancestors and memory and what memories mean and how they’re passed on), but I suppose everyone takes something different away from a story 🙂

Erm…

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Remember when I said selling two different stories to two different Year’s Best was a first for me? I spoke a little too soon…

Sean Wallace just let me know that Rich Horton wants to reprint “Scattered Along the River of Heaven” and “Heaven Under Earth” in his Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2013. That’s four freaking different stories to three different Year’s Best anthologies…

*faints*

If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll be off to do some massive squeeing….