"Three Faces of a Beheading" by Arkady Martine in Uncanny Magazine, Issue 58, May/June 2024 by Arkady Martine Format: ebook
Source: supplied by publisher via Hugo Packet
Formats available: magazine
Genres: science fiction, short stories
Series: Uncanny Magazine Issue 58 May/June 2024
Pages: 22
Published by Uncanny Magazine on May 7, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo
Goodreads
The May/June 2024 issue of Hugo Award-winning Uncanny Magazine.
Featuring new fiction by Arkady Martine, Sarah Rees Brennan, Tia Tashiro, Eugenia Triantafyllou, Rati Mehotra, K.S. Walker, and John Wiswell. Essays by John Scalzi, Amy Berg, Dawn Xiana Moon, and Cara Liebowitz, poetry by Angela Liu, Ali Trotta, Nwuguru Chidiebere Sullivan, and Fran Wilde, interviews with Arkady Martine and K.S. Walker by Caroline M. Yoachim, a cover by Zara Alfonso, and an editorial by Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas.
Uncanny Magazine is a bimonthly science fiction and fantasy magazine first published in November 2014. Edited by 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2022, 2023 Hugo award winners for best semiprozine, and 2018 Hugo award winners for Best Editor, Short Form, Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas, and Monte Lin, each issue of Uncanny includes new stories, poetry, articles, and interviews.
My Review:
The actual Hugo ballots have to be turned in by midnight PDT on July 23, making this an absolutely fitting thing to post today. At this point I have read all the stories so that I could vote responsibly, but I’ll continue to post reviews until just before Worldcon opens, as no one will know what the results will be until then.
Although I had expectations of the author as I fell hard for A Memory Called Empire, I had no idea what this story was about. Now that I’ve read it, I’m still not sure I do.
That being said, the interview with the author, also in the same issue of Uncanny Magazine, provides considerably more insight into the story than reading the story did. At least for this reader. Your reading mileage may definitely vary.
Based on the author’s interview, “Three Faces of a Beheading” is intended to be an experimental fic, written from, not just several points of view but in several different styles of perspectives, from first-person to second to different variations of third.
As if that wasn’t confusing enough for the reader, all of those perspectives are drawn from Melissa Scott’s Burning Bright, originally published in 1993. It’s a story set on a planet known for its virtual reality games. The book sounds fascinating, it’s cheap in ebook, and I just threw it on the virtually towering TBR pile because I want to read it.
But I haven’t read it yet so I didn’t get the references.
I did sorta/kinda pick up that the intent of the story was to show – not tell but SHOW – how difficult it is for creators to create and expose their creations in the midst of a crisis and/or a repressive regime or both. It’s about just how rebellious and revolutionary an act it can be to speak your truth when your truth is considered subversive.
Howsomever, that idea also got a bit lost in the experimental nature of the thing.
The part I did get without the interview – because it’s an idea that always fascinates me and has always been professionally relevant – is that this story dives as deep as a short story can into the confluence of “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” and “History is written by the victors.”
That’s the message that came through clearly for this reader, the way that, particularly over time, the ‘accepted truth’ – which is not the same as the actual truth, even for selected values of ‘accepted’ and especially ‘truth’ – that those two concepts differ and outright diverge depending on who has the axe and which way they want to grind it. Which is exactly what humans do, as we rationalize so much that is either too difficult or too dangerous to believe even as we soften the edges or exaggerate the high points over time and distance.
Escape Rating C: I’m so tempted to say that an ‘Escape Rating’ for “Three Faces of a Beheading” is an impossibility – because I didn’t. Escape, that is. Instead I found myself grasping at straws as my thoughts tried to pull this one into a coherent whole that isn’t meant to be. At least not for this reader. Your mileage, again, may vary.
So far, my Hugo short story readings have not been nearly as entertaining, absorbing, or just plain fun as my novella readings. Based on the Hugo Readalong on reddit, I’m not alone in that, either. Howsomever, the three I have left seem to be the best of the lot, at least by consensus of that group. I hope they’re right because this category just HAS to get better!
