"The Man The Man Who Bridged the Mist" is third on my list of recognized shorts from The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2012 that I'm attempting to dissect. I'm seeking what the author did right, so as to know how to fix what’s wrong with my own work.
I'm not happy with this dissection; too much by example and too little about the author's choices, but I need to finish this and move on to other projects.
For each story, I try to answer the following questions to help me in my own work:
Why is the story good; why might it have been awarded/bought.
How does author:
- do character/alien descriptions
- put the reader in the protagonist's skin
- evoke emotional truth/reader emotion
- depict character emotion
- create mood
- handle EDACE (Eric Witchey's analysis tool, which I'm employing in a truncated fashion)
"The Man Who Bridged the Mist" by Kij Johnson was originally published in Asimov's, October-November.
