Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

26 Jan 2022, 10:30 a.m.

Rebecca Fraimow, A Writer To Watch

Rebecca Fraimow is a scifi/fantasy author whose work I appreciate.

I'm not alone. In the Hugo Award nominations for Best Short Story published in 2020, Fraimow's "This Is New Gehesran Calling" was ranked 14th. That may not seem like a big deal, but note that this was the highest-ranked story that was not available to read for free online in a web magazine -- it was only available in the anthology Consolation Songs. Given how much easier it is for a free online read to gain buzz and get read via recommendations, this is reasonably noteworthy.

Want a time-dilation-type story of merchant skills, personal connection, and change? “Suradanna and the Sea”. Want Jewish humor and dealings with the supernatural? Read or listen to the Yudah Cohen stories. And for diaspora memories and reconnections and a shoestring media project, "This Is New Gehesran Calling" is itself worth the price of the anthology. Many of her stories foreground queer characters and relationships. She often portrays characters reckoning with a realistically lived-in world, reacting to the consequences of their own and others' actions. Fraimow is an archivist at her day job, which comes through in particular in the intertextual plots of "Romeo, Revisited" and in "This Is New Gehesran Calling." She gently attends to how we preserve, revisit, and make meaning from art and historical records.

She's been publishing short fiction for a decade and I look forward to what she'll write in the next decade.

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