“She Commands Me And I Obey” pt 1
by
The first part of “She Commands Me And I Obey” is now live!
I’m going to briefly say that this story is sort-of dedicated to my mother. In the last eight or so years of her life, she became an enormous Blues fan. The hockey team, not the music. She regularly bought season tickets and took various grandkids with her to the games. And this was, of course, during the first several years I was working on Ancillary Justice.
But it’s only sort-of dedicated, because my mother would not have particularly appreciated or enjoyed some aspects of the story, and I suspect she’d have been unamused at a dedication to her being put at the top of it. So I haven’t. But I’ll say here that I partly wrote it for her, and I also thank her for bringing me to the hockey game so often.
If you can, and haven’t already, please consider donating to Strange Horizons so part two can be unlocked ASAP. If you can’t, or already have, or have decided against it for whatever reason, do please tweet or blog–about She Commands, or about some other SH story you love, or just about SH.
And never fear being left hanging. Now the first part is up, I am determined the second will be, eventually. For now, let’s see how the fund drive goes.
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Obviously based on the Mayan ballgame. So it’s jarring to me to have “the Hundred” be a central aspect; I’d be happier if it was the vigesimal “Four Hundred”. It wouldn’t take changing anything; it’s clearly a symbolic number, not a literal one, either way.
I know, it’s nitpicking, and not even based in the internal logic of the story. Sorry. Just saying.
Yep, absolutely Meso-American ballgame time. I was, of course, thinking of the “Four Hundred” and decided to go with a single hundred. It is, as you’ve noted, really just a symbolic number. But don’t be sorry–the things that bug us, as readers, are what they are.