{"id":17413,"date":"2018-07-30T10:14:53","date_gmt":"2018-07-30T17:14:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/?p=17413"},"modified":"2018-07-30T10:14:53","modified_gmt":"2018-07-30T17:14:53","slug":"sh-flashback-little-gods-by-tim-pratt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2018\/07\/30\/sh-flashback-little-gods-by-tim-pratt\/","title":{"rendered":"SH Flashback: \u201cLittle Gods,\u201d by Tim Pratt"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>I didn\u2019t manage to post last week\u2019s planned <cite>Strange Horizons<\/cite> Flashback story, and in the past, falling behind has been the beginning of the end for this project; I don\u2019t get the week\u2019s story posted, and then time passes, and eventually I accept that I\u2019m not going to continue the project, and then a year later I pick it up again and give it another try.<\/p>\r\n<p>This time, I\u2019m going to try something different: I\u2019m posting the story I had scheduled for this week, and I\u2019ll try to come back and post the one scheduled for last week soon.<\/p>\r\n<p>Part of the problem is just my usual kinds of procrastination and not-getting-things-done-ness, but I confess that another part of the problem is political; I re-read these stories that we published, with my enthusiastic consent and often my editing, five or ten or fifteen years ago, and I\u2019m more aware now of the ways in which they don\u2019t always live up to my political standards, in which they might hurt readers who read them now.<\/p>\r\n<p>The way I want to handle that is to (a) evaluate whether I think the story is nonetheless worth linking to (the answer has always been yes so far), then (b) if so, link to it with a content note, so that y\u2019all can make an informed decision about whether you want to read it. But in practice, if there\u2019s a political issue or even a potential political issue that I\u2019m concerned about in the story, I tend to shy away from posting about it, which means I delay and delay and eventually put the project on hold again.<\/p>\r\n<p>But I\u2019m gonna try to push myself to post anyway.<\/p>\r\n<hr width=\"25%\" \/>\r\n<p>So here\u2019s this week\u2019s <cite>Strange Horizons<\/cite> Flashback story:<\/p>\r\n<dl>\r\n  <dt>\u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/fiction\/little-gods\/\">Little Gods<\/a>,\u201d by Tim Pratt (illustrated by Mark Precious)<\/dt>\r\n  <dd>A story about the goddesses and gods of little aspects of life, and about grief and loss. (Content warning for someone being killed with a gun, and for a man having an impulse to hit a woman and throwing a heavy object at another woman.) (Published in 2002.) (5,200 words.)<\/dd>\r\n  <dd><blockquote><p>\u201cLittle things get little gods. It's only natural.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote><\/dd>\r\n<\/dl>\r\n<p>(See also the full <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/pages\/strange_horizons_flashbacks.html\">list of Flashback stories<\/a>.)<\/p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\r\n<hr width=\"25%\" \/>\r\n<p class=\"centered\"><strong>SPOILERS FOLLOW<\/strong><\/p>\r\n<hr width=\"25%\" \/>\r\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\r\n<p>This is not the first Flashback story about grief, and it won\u2019t be the last; dealing with the loss of a loved one is a theme that often works very well for me.<\/p>\r\n<p>Especially when it ends with a step toward healing. As with various others of the Flashback stories, what I love most about this one is the ending; the final scene still makes me cry.<\/p>\r\n<p>I could critique various aspects of this story; if I were editing it today, I might ask Tim to make some further changes. But I think I\u2019m not going to start listing flaws. On the whole, I still like the story quite a bit.<\/p>\r\n<hr width=\"25%\" \/>\r\n<!-- <p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jed.hartman\/posts\/[url]\">Facebook post<\/a><\/p> -->\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17413","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\/17413","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=17413"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17413\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17414,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17413\/revisions\/17414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}