author: Amal El-Mohtar
year: 2016
2016 Nebula Award for Best Short Story
2017 Hugo Award for Best Short Story
2017 Locus Award for Best Short Story
Seasons of Glass and Iron
…..why
It’s not a bad story or something. I kind of enjoy it. But it’s just …… that …. it’s not insightful. It has no interesting techs or magics. It’s …… a fairy tale, about lifting each other’s pseudo curse, escaping their mind locks at wish.
….. so what
I see no reason for it getting a treble (Hugo, Nebula, Locus).
I just don’t get it. I thought it would be a banger, seeing how many awards it got. But no.
Such a weird story, weird in an uneccessary way. The weird settings of the story do not make it any more insightful.
I hate to say this but …. his story isn’t really a better awardee for the Hugo Award than John Chu’s absolute “The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere” shit.
Awards are so fucking weird. This story isn’t about representation or some SJW shit, nor is it about the traditional good fantasy/sci-fi things. Really just a fairy tale, very suitable to be presented as a picture book for 6yos or something.
plot:
A princess was so beautiful that everyone wanted to get her. The Kings could make some princes from neighboring countries marry her, but the country was politically sensitive, and needed to treat each the neighboring country equally. So the princess and the King decided to lock her on a glass hill, and announced that any man that can go up the hill with full armor could marry her.
But the glass hill was very weird, very hard to climb up, so the princess had lived on the hill for like 3 years, without facing cold or starvation or whatever because of the magic hill.
One day a woman accidentally walked up the hill. The woman was married to a bear, a half-bear half-man actually, sometimes a bear sometimes a man. And after they’d married, the bear-man constantly abused her. One time she told her mom, and her mom told her to burn his bear skin (which was separated from his body when he was in man form???) to lift his curse. The bear found out, and told the women to wear his bear skin (?) and 7 iron shoes (one at a time of course) until they were all broken. This way his curse could be lifted.
……
Anyway, after spending some time together, and telling each other their stories, both decided that the other did nothing wrong, and they decided to go away together to whatever place.
The End.
Gonna give it a 2/5, because I see no value in reading it, or the reason that this story should exist.
But it’s not 1/5 bad, I still get like 30 minutes of peaceful time in reading it.