Apprenticeship, vulnerability, wigs, shipwreck, & watching wisdom grow
September 8, 2020 3:17 AM   Subscribe

“I didn’t ask you to meet me here to reminisce,” said Suradanna. She turned the guest-cup upside down and placed it carefully on her desk, signaling that business negotiations were about to begin. “I want to hire you.” "Suradanna and the Sea" by Rebecca Fraimow (published 2016) is a fantasy novella that -- as the author puts it -- "features trade routes, magical fertilizer, and one girl's centuries-long effort to impress a woman who is already in a committed relationship with a boat."
posted by brainwane (8 comments total) 20 users marked this as a favorite
 
Oh. Yes please.
posted by Made of Star Stuff at 6:18 AM on September 8, 2020 [1 favorite]


I found the amount of time she had to wait around--what, at least hundreds of years?--to be sad and infuriating.

I'm glad the captain came around eventually--I guess only when she had nothing else left--but still. I felt to some degree this story was just killing time until the lady came around. Sigh.

But I have issues with waiting these days.
posted by jenfullmoon at 6:33 AM on September 8, 2020


I think that that feeling is deliberate, and I think it highlights what the captain was saying if Suradanna at the end. Suradanna lived many exciting and fulfilling lives, doing what she wanted to do and remaking herself in myriad ways. Yes, she always wanted the captain to come around, and maybe she sometimes thought she was just waiting around for that to happen, but she wasn't. She didn't, in point of fact, need any constant but herself.

The slow moving ecological catastrophe was a nice touch in a story set over hundreds of years.
posted by Made of Star Stuff at 1:00 PM on September 8, 2020


: D : D : D This story is the work of my friend and former housemate! I missed this piece, so it's a real treat to come across it on Metafilter. Becca is a wonderful writer as well as a gem of a human. Thanks for the post, brainwane.
posted by prewar lemonade at 4:11 PM on September 8, 2020 [1 favorite]


Very nicely written.
posted by domdib at 4:53 AM on September 9, 2020


I think that that feeling is deliberate, and I think it highlights what the captain was saying if Suradanna at the end. Suradanna lived many exciting and fulfilling lives, doing what she wanted to do and remaking herself in myriad ways. Yes, she always wanted the captain to come around, and maybe she sometimes thought she was just waiting around for that to happen, but she wasn't.

Well, she was and she wasn't. Sure, she was absolutely getting up to new identities and businesses and locations and whatnot, so she wasn't sitting idle. But she's literally hoping for hundreds of years on a person who to some degree would be relieved if she's gone? Oy.

I think it just hit a bit close to home, even though lord knows I will not be waiting around for life with someone else to begin for hundreds of years because then I'd be dead.
posted by jenfullmoon at 11:33 AM on September 9, 2020


I liked this! And thank you for posting it, brainwane. I never would have come across it on my own.
posted by librarylis at 6:37 PM on September 9, 2020 [1 favorite]


Glad people either liked it or found it worth thinking about.

A complete list of published fiction by Rebecca Fraimow (since ISFDB is incomplete here): ("Shaina Rubin" and "Further Arguments" have their own thread.)
posted by brainwane at 6:48 AM on September 15, 2020


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