Description

It’s an old, old the King loses what passes for his mind and accuses his perfect trophy wife of adultery and prepares to have her put to death. Temporary insanity, right? Often in such cases, there’s collateral damage, and that’s the case in this story. But who, in a monarchy like Ararat, can oppose the King? Enter, Paulina, stage left, a sculptor with a hidden talent, a dea ex machina with her own ideas about how this story should end. “This novella is rather out of the ordinary. The king is quite obviously insane, dangerously so. The queen was more of a political accommodation than anything else and whatever affection might have existed between them is swamped by his madness and paranoia. He decides that she has been unfaithful to him and sentences her to be executed. Ordinarily, that would have been the end of it. But there is a sculptor in the castle who has decided to [bring] about a happier ending. The story is mostly about the sculptor, her history and interactions, as she quietly sets about change the course of events. Understated and non-melodramatic, which makes a nice change. One could make the argument that this is not even really fantastic. It is certainly a welcome change of pace.” Don D’Ammassa, Critical Mass, 4/18/21 L. Timmel Duchamp is the author of the five-volume Marq’ssan Cycle, which won a special Otherwise Award honor in 2009, and the founder and publisher of Aqueduct Press. She has published two collections of short Love’s Body, Dancing in Time (2004), which was shortlisted for the Otherwise and includes the Sturgeon-finalist story “Dance at the Edge,” the Sidewise Award-nominated “The Heloise Archive,” and the Otherwise Award-shortlisted “The Apprenticeship of Isabetta di Pietro Cavazzi”; and Never at Home, which includes a 2011 Otherwise Award- Honor List story, and co-author, with Maureen McHugh, of a mini-collection, Plugged In, published in conjunction with the authors’ being GoHs at WisCon. Her Marq’ssan Cycle consists of Alanya to Alanya (2005), Renegade (2006), Tsunami (2007), Blood in the Fruit (2007), and Stretto (2008). Her novel The Waterdancer’s World appeared in 2016, and the short novel, The Red Rose Rages (Bleeding) appeared in 2005. Her 2018 novel, Chercher la Femme, was on the Otherwise Award Honor List. She has also published the novella De Secretis Mulierum and dozens more short stories and novellas, including “Motherhood, Etc” (short-listed for the Otherwise Award) and “Living Trust” (Nebula and Homer Award finalist). In addition to her fiction, she has published a good deal of nonfiction. Since 2011 she has been the Features Editor of The Cascadia Subduction Zone. She was also the editor of Talking Epistolary Fantasies (Aqueduct, 2006), The WisCon Chronicles, Vol. 1 (Aqueduct, 2007), Narrative Encounters, Celebrations, Struggles (Aqueduct Press, 2010), Missing Links and Secret A Selection of Wikipedia Entries from across the Known Multiverse (Aqueduct Press, 2013), and co-editor, with Eileen Gunn, of The WisCon Chronicles, Vol. 2: Provocative essays on feminism, race, revolution, and the future (Aqueduct, 2008). In 2008 she appeared as a Guest of Honor at WisCon.

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