{"id":15178,"date":"2016-01-08T10:38:00","date_gmt":"2016-01-08T18:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2016\/01\/08\/15178.html"},"modified":"2016-01-08T10:38:00","modified_gmt":"2016-01-08T18:38:00","slug":"sh-flashback-in-the-cold-by-ke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2016\/01\/08\/sh-flashback-in-the-cold-by-ke\/","title":{"rendered":"SH Flashback: “In the Cold,” by Kelly Jennings"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

During my twelve years as a fiction editor at Strange Horizons<\/cite>, we published over 500 stories. Now that I've been away from the magazine for a couple of years, I'd like to do a sort of a retrospective, posting links to some of the stories (one story at a time), with brief comments.<\/p>\n

I'm still working out how best to present these stories. I think in each post I'm going to give a brief non-spoilery description along with the link, and then give some further discussion after a spoiler warning; my hope is that you'll go read the story before reading my full comments.<\/p>\n

Without further ado, here's this week's Strange Horizons<\/cite> Flashback story:<\/p>\n

\n
“In the Cold<\/a>,” by Kelly Jennings<\/dt>\n
It's about a girl on a wintry colony world; it's about responsibility and leadership, and hard choices; it makes me cry every time I read it. We published it in early 2012, and I feel like it didn't get nearly as much attention at the time as I'd hoped it would. (3,000 words)<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

SPOILERS FOLLOW<\/strong><\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

I find this story heartbreaking. I love the character of Nicola; I'm sad about the heavy responsibilities that she knows she'll have to bear; I love the dynamic between her and Hugo. I normally loathe no-win scenarios, but I find this one very compelling, and devastating.<\/p>\n

Although I've never asked Kelly about this, I think that this story can be read partly as being in dialogue with “The Cold Equations.” (As well as standing well on its own.) I don't want to turn this into a discussion of “The Cold Equations” (and I hope that if any of you comment, you won't focus entirely on this comparison), but I wanted to note that I like “In the Cold” a whole lot more, partly because it has an entirely different focus.<\/p>\n

I also like that this story includes a bunch of other stuff going on in the background. The barely-surviving colony; the broken weather-control system; the generational issues; the backstory with the loss of a couple of other colonists in a previous storm; for such a short story, it has a lot going on.<\/p>\n

But mostly I love it because it pulls me in, makes me care a lot about the protagonist, and then rips my heart out. “I promised him we would come.<\/i>”<\/p>\n

Mostly I prefer happy endings (or at least hopeful ones, or at least bittersweet ones) to really sad ones, but I'll always make an exception for a story that can make me cry the way this one does.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

During my twelve years as a fiction editor at Strange Horizons, we published over 500 stories. Now that I’ve been…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-short-stories","category-strange-horizons"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15178"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15178\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}