*WARNING: POSSIBLE SPOILERS*
Source: The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection, ed. Gardner Dozois (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2008), pp. 90-100; originally published in The New Space Opera, ed. Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan (New York: EOS, 2007).
A piece of advice for new writers I keep hearing recently is to look at published SF&F short stories and analyze them in detail to learn how they work -- i.e., plot, tension, characterisation, the function of each “scene,” and so forth. I am on the right track with this blog, then.
In analysing Elizabeth Bear’s “Tideline” I learned a great deal about the role of setting in an SF short story. The success of Bear’s story, I felt, resides in the limited focus of its immediate setting, while the wider backdrop is sketched in just enough to give the reader a fair sense of the state of the characters’ world. Bear’s attention to sound patterns, rhythm, and metaphor also proved instructive.
With Ian McDonald’s story “Verthandi’s Ring,” similar criteria apply for its success, but the scale (or, reach) of their implications is quite different. “Verthandi’s Ring” is one of those stories that catches your attention the first time you read it, in a way that you know it does something wonderful and enticing, even profound, yet you can’t quite pin down precisely what that something is, at least initially. “Verthandi’s Ring” is one of those stories that needs a second reading. That is when the pieces fall more securely into place, the narrative becomes clearer, and its artistry unfolds like a flower opening up to the morning sunlight.
