(Modern Fantasy) In the Azores islands, as the world’s last snake woman heads home from her bookstore and gets ready to reincarnate herself, she reminisces about the excavation of Knossos, which she had known in its glory. (6,710 words; Time: 22m)
Rating: ★★★☆☆ Average
"As Tender Feet of Cretan Girls Danced Once Around an Altar of Love," by Julian K. Jarboe [bio] (edited by Jane Crowley and Kate Dollarhyde), appeared in Strange Horizons issue 10/16/17, published on October 16, 2017.
Mini-Review (click to view--possible spoilers)
Pro: The story takes places in two times: during our present and back in the 1930s during Sir Arthur Evans’s excavation of Knossos. Isadora actually lived and loved in ancient Knossos for a while, so her thoughts go back there a lot.
Evans made an awful mess of the site at Knossos (he built a fanciful reconstruction using original materials), so it’s no surprise she wants to stop him, but to her horror, her own memories of the time are so faded that she too has little more than a fanciful reconstruction. Ultimately, she does nothing.
In the present, this seems to make her hesitant about reincarnating yet again. Is it worth it to live forever if the past slips away? Ultimately, she decides to do it anyway, and the story concludes.
Con: There’s no plot to speak of, no characters we care about, and the story just goes on and on and on.
Other Reviews: Search Web, Browse Review Sites (Issue 10/16/17)
Julian K. Jarboe Info: Interviews, Websites, ISFDB, FreeSFOnline
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Evans made an awful mess of the site at Knossos (he built a fanciful reconstruction using original materials), so it’s no surprise she wants to stop him, but to her horror, her own memories of the time are so faded that she too has little more than a fanciful reconstruction. Ultimately, she does nothing.
In the present, this seems to make her hesitant about reincarnating yet again. Is it worth it to live forever if the past slips away? Ultimately, she decides to do it anyway, and the story concludes.
Con: There’s no plot to speak of, no characters we care about, and the story just goes on and on and on.
Other Reviews: Search Web, Browse Review Sites (Issue 10/16/17)
Julian K. Jarboe Info: Interviews, Websites, ISFDB, FreeSFOnline
Follow RSR on Twitter, Facebook, RSS, or E-mail.
I liked the idea of this woman from ancient Greece joining the excavation on Crete, but I fail to see how the present day incarnation in the Azores connects to the previous times.
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