Challenge 92
Gifts and Girls
No spoilers here; feel free to dive right in.
- Most of our stories — as well as the poem — have something to do with a gift or gifts. In only one or two will looking for a gift be a bit of a stretch. To cite the most obvious ones, let’s take Gaia, Made It Way Up, “The Black Star,” “Katt and Dawg on the Stairway to Heaven” and “Cold, Cold Heart”: what are the gifts, and what effects do they have?
- Two young girls hold the spotlight in this issue: Tala Bar’s Nim and Ian Donnell Arbuckle’s Kelly. They are worlds apart in age, circumstances and personality. As a mental writing exercise, interchange their points of view: what would be gained and lost by making Nim’s a first-person interior monologue and Kelly’s a third-person narrative?
Two supplementary Challenges:
- What is the “education” process that Allie’s father and Mr. Harbinger refer to at the end of “Company Man”? And Allie’s father says they’re losing too many of their children. What are they losing them to?
- In “Katts and Dawgs,” the Kannis society is said to be hierarchical and stagnant. The “katts’” society apparently is not, or at least less so. As an opening to a hoped-for sequel, how might you suggest that Roberto depict the shortcomings of the Kannis society, which Phydo has a mission to revolutionize?
Copyright © 2004 by Bewildering Stories
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