Monday, December 28, 2015

"Weighing Shadows"

Lisa Goldstein is the National Book Award-winning fantasy author of The Red Magician. Her stories have appeared in Ms., Asimov’s Science Fiction, and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and her novels and short stories have been finalists for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards. Her novel The Uncertain Places won the 2012 Mythopoeic Award, and her short story “Paradise Is a Walled Garden” won the 2011 Sidewise Award.

Goldstein applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Weighing Shadows, and reported the following:
I was delighted to discover that page 69 actually deals with an important part of Weighing Shadows. Ann Decker has been recruited by Transformations, Inc., a corporation that travels back in time and makes small changes that grow larger as the years pass. A few things start to make her suspicious about the corporation's real aims ­­ the higher­ups don't seem to care about the lives of the people they come in contact with, and then someone dies on one of her voyages. On page 69 she's in ancient Crete, where she meets a more senior agent of the company, Meret Haas. Meret has grown very disillusioned with the company, and she points out problems Ann doesn't yet know about, then tells her about a covert organization of agents opposed to their policies. "I've been with the company longer than you have, and I've seen some disturbing patterns," she says. "In nearly every case I know about the company's sided with warriors, with patriarchies, with hierarchical societies. Have you ever wondered why matriarchies have pretty much disappeared from the world? People say it's because they can't possibly work, but you know that isn't true ­­ you've seen Kaphtor. A peaceful, prosperous, flourishing society that existed for thousands of years."
Visit Lisa Goldstein's website.

--Marshal Zeringue