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altheaann

altheaann

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A Creature of Moonlight
Rebecca Hahn
Saffron And Brimstone: Strange Stories
Elizabeth Hand
Captain Vorpatril's Alliance
Lois McMaster Bujold
Snow in May: Stories
Kseniya Melnik
Moon-Flash - Patricia A. McKillip I read the sequel to this book (The Moon and the Face) in June - and wow, this book is just so much better. Even if I had read them in the proper order, I'm pretty sure my opinion would be the same.
'Moon-Flash' is a simple, short book, but carefully crafted, emotionally touching, and with subtle social commentary.
Kyreol is a young woman of a primitive society. Her people live along the banks of a river, their world circumscribed by a cliff face upstream and a waterfall downstream. No one has ever ventured beyond these limits. Time is measured by the Moon-Flash, an event given religious significance - a time for betrothals and ritual.
However, Kyreol has always been more curious than others of her tribe - and when she meets a strange Hunter in the woods, she sets out, with her childhood friend, Terje, leaving her betrothed behind, to see what might lie beyond the boundaries of her world... and to try to discover what might have happened to her mother, long-since-disappeared.

What Kyreol finds is that her people have been living 'protected' by a high-technology society - almost like an ethnological museum exhibit. Even the most sacred event of her people is simply a technological phenomenon of the wider world.

It's an interesting discussion - although McKillip doesn't romanticize the 'simple life' of the primitive people too much - and neither does she paint them as wide-eyed innocents (they are intelligent, resourceful, and quickly adaptable) - she does make the point that in a more sophisticated society, something may be lost. In this case, she hints, it may be the precognitive(?) dreams of the people of the Riverworld. But even so, does any society have the right to hide things from another, denying them knowledge, and therefore, choice?