Challenge 958

Sez Who?

In Rado Dyne’s Taking Joy for a Spin:
1. Is Joy’s official secondary occupation as the mining team’s courtesan necessary to the plot? If it were omitted, would her relationship with the captain be changed in any substantial way? Could Joy’s role be played by a male figure? If not, why not?
2. How can the team’s home planet, Atlantis, disappear suddenly, without warning? A black hole’s event horizon would have been visible on approach, and it would have swallowed the whole solar system. Is the planet’s disappearance ipse dixit, i.e. narrative magic?
3. Does the disappearance of the team’s homeworld cause the plot to overstep the Dead Narrator guideline?
In Heather Pagano’s Faier Forest: In Celia’s family, all the women are “cursed.” By whom? And what is the curse, exactly? Has anyone in the family done something to deserve it?
In Charles C. Cole’s Farmington:
1. Does Eulie’s speech defect actually exist? If so, what is its name? How can Walton speak normally and yet easily understand Eulie?
2. What is Susannah’s function in the play? What would be lost if her character were omitted?
3. How can one write such a story without being both Eulie and Walton at the same time, or at least having a very erudite knowledge of cinema?
In Mike Acker’s I Wonder: What worldview does the poem imply? Predestination? Reincarnation? Transmigration? Something else?