{"id":15279,"date":"2016-05-27T09:05:00","date_gmt":"2016-05-27T16:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2016\/05\/27\/15279.html"},"modified":"2016-05-27T09:05:00","modified_gmt":"2016-05-27T16:05:00","slug":"sh-flashback-the-red-bride-by","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2016\/05\/27\/sh-flashback-the-red-bride-by\/","title":{"rendered":"SH Flashback: “The Red Bride,” by Samantha Henderson"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A new entry in my almost-weekly-again Strange Horizons<\/cite> retrospective:<\/p>\n

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“The Red Bride<\/a>,” by Samantha Henderson<\/dt>\n
A bedtime story told to a human child by an alien slave. (Published in 2010.) (1,800 words.)<\/dd>\n

The story of the Red Bride is a slave's tale in slave speech, which I do not generally hold in my head around humans lest my face betray me, so I must shift words around from one meaning to another like stones on a reckoning-board, each stone taking meaning from a square where another stone was a moment before.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n

(See also the full list of Flashback stories<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

(I'm still behind on posting Flashback stories, but if all goes well, I'll catch up next week.)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

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 <\/p>\n

I love the gradual revelation in this, as we come to understand step by step what's going on. (And I feel like gradual revelation is particularly hard to do well in such a short story.) And I love the small ways that the protagonist's character is gradually unveiled as well. I can imagine a story with this story's general form and plot that would consist simply of the protagonist telling a story and then at the end saying “Oh, and by the way, that story was an analogy and now we're going to kill you all,” the end; but I think this story does a much better job than that hypothetical one, by providing a great deal of nuance, subtlety, and even pathos in a compact space.<\/p>\n

I'm also intrigued by this story's use of analogy, suggesting human analogies as a way to make alien concepts accessible for both the human-child listener in the story and the real-world reader. Something about the flavor of those analogies reminds me of “The House Beyond Your Sky<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A new entry in my almost-weekly-again Strange Horizons retrospective: “The Red Bride,” by Samantha Henderson A bedtime story told to…<\/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-15279","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\/15279","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=15279"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15279\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}