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hrj"Wakulla Springs," Andy Duncan & Ellen Klages (Tor.com 10/2/13)
This is a story rich in lush prose and vivid characterizations. It has an overwhelming sense of place and time -- over the multiple places and times it covers. At its backbone is an American Family Saga in miniature, walking us through key social changes of the mid/late 20th century as the shifting background to a center-stage focus around characters and doings at the Wakulla Springs resort in Florida. As I’ve mentioned before, I'm an enormous fan of incluing as an expository technique and this story uses it to good effect. I know it's not everyone's thing, but when I find myself thinking, "Oh, wait, that character is related to this character that way!" and then scrambling back to review the text, it just gives me shivers. I love the multiplicity of braided themes: water and those at home in it, the importance of tradition and continuity, and the way we move away from and return to our place of origin. Connections.
The introductory material before the story led me to expect something a bit more overtly fantastic. The story shimmers with a very, very subtle magical realism. Subtle to the point where if one were to have the slightest doubt of the reliability of the narrator, it would be plain ordinary literary fiction. (Very good literary fiction.) There's a possible hallucination regarding a talking chimpanzee. An assertion of the nature of noises in the dark. Lurking shadows never seen straight-on. Superstition and folk-magic traditions are a strong theme in the setting, but not in an overtly fantastic sense. They fall in the realm of goodluck pennies and headache charms. Genre expectation leads me to watch constantly for those lurkers in the shadows, but not until the last paragraph of the story is there any suggestion that they exist outside my expectation. The characters themselves never directly intersect the fantastic elements (to our knowledge) nor do they have any influence on the course of the plot (unless by some means too veiled to notice). On the whole I give the story good marks for atmosphere, characterization, and writing. Not so much for plot--it’s more of a slice-of like type. But in the end it’s hard for me to consider it an sff story. It's hard even to consider it a solidly magical realist story.
This is a story rich in lush prose and vivid characterizations. It has an overwhelming sense of place and time -- over the multiple places and times it covers. At its backbone is an American Family Saga in miniature, walking us through key social changes of the mid/late 20th century as the shifting background to a center-stage focus around characters and doings at the Wakulla Springs resort in Florida. As I’ve mentioned before, I'm an enormous fan of incluing as an expository technique and this story uses it to good effect. I know it's not everyone's thing, but when I find myself thinking, "Oh, wait, that character is related to this character that way!" and then scrambling back to review the text, it just gives me shivers. I love the multiplicity of braided themes: water and those at home in it, the importance of tradition and continuity, and the way we move away from and return to our place of origin. Connections.
The introductory material before the story led me to expect something a bit more overtly fantastic. The story shimmers with a very, very subtle magical realism. Subtle to the point where if one were to have the slightest doubt of the reliability of the narrator, it would be plain ordinary literary fiction. (Very good literary fiction.) There's a possible hallucination regarding a talking chimpanzee. An assertion of the nature of noises in the dark. Lurking shadows never seen straight-on. Superstition and folk-magic traditions are a strong theme in the setting, but not in an overtly fantastic sense. They fall in the realm of goodluck pennies and headache charms. Genre expectation leads me to watch constantly for those lurkers in the shadows, but not until the last paragraph of the story is there any suggestion that they exist outside my expectation. The characters themselves never directly intersect the fantastic elements (to our knowledge) nor do they have any influence on the course of the plot (unless by some means too veiled to notice). On the whole I give the story good marks for atmosphere, characterization, and writing. Not so much for plot--it’s more of a slice-of like type. But in the end it’s hard for me to consider it an sff story. It's hard even to consider it a solidly magical realist story.
