Eleanor Arnason at Strange Horizons

Strange Horizons this week is devoted to Eleanor Arnason, with a short story, "The Grammarian's Five Daughters"; a poem, "Song from the Kalevala", and interview. Arnason fully deserves the attention, just as she deserves the attention for her magnificent stories "Potter of Bones" and "Knapsack Poems", the latter of which I wrote about recently.

The story at Strange Horizons, "The Grammarian's Five Daughters", was published in 1999 in Realms of Fantasy, and is an amusing fairy tale with parts of speech in the place of fairies. It's an efficient, clever, and amusing story, though it would have been particularly nice for Strange Horizons to get a new tale from Arnason for their showcase. (I'm sure the editors would agree, and given the choice of reprinted Arnason or no Arnason, I'm happy with a reprint.)

The poem seems minor to me, but the interview brings up some notable comments on gender and sexuality in Arnason's work, as well as her frustration with hard science fiction that is set in a far future where today's science is still the basis of knowledge.

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