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Welcome to our discussion of our chosen October, 2013, SF/F Novella:


The Man Who Bridged the Mist novella by Kij Johnson

Winner of the 2012 Hugo Award & Nebula Award for Best Novella

"The Man Who Bridged the Mist" is available free from the author's website : ( )

It's also included in the anthology The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume 6 or Kij Johnson's collection At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories.

I very much enjoyed this story. Like everything else I have read by Kij Johnson it is beautifully written and it feels fresh and original.

Many fantasy stories deal with kings or swordsmen. This story deals with someone building a suspension bridge...OK a suspension bridge over what I take to be magical "mist" but still. Kij's stories can vary significantly in theme, style and tone. This story is very different from Story Kit, Mantis Wives, Spar and Ponies and is a very gentle story.

I will say more about it later in the month but this is a story that I can see connecting with lots of people in different ways. It has enough plot for its pages but it is not "action packed" - I think it would appeal to and satisfy most readers of SF and fantasy - hence it winning its awards.

I enjoyed this novella as well.

Ben wrote: "Many fantasy stories deal with kings or swordsmen...."

This is one of those stories that doesn't fit neatly into our usual fantasy versus science fiction categories. Must be "speculative fiction". :) No magic or anything particularly supernatural, just a world that's not ours (nor a probable future.) Just a big river that churns up a tangible mist (I got to thinking about it more like foam), and some mist-fish that "swim" around inside it. Could easily just place this on some other planet in one of our ubiquitous space operas as well as declared a fantasy world. :)

I really liked Johnson's description of the boat ride over the mist. Sort of felt like skiing or windsurfing, sliding around the shifting surface, skirting the edges of rises and following channels.

I liked it as well.

Isn't this an Urban Fantasy? It feels like an end of 19th century engineering with the additional fantastical mist and its creatures. It doesn't seem to me like a scifi at all.

It was a little bit too much of the bridge technology descriptions for me - which made it more like a documentary of a suspension bridge. I saw a couple of those, so they weren't that interesting any more.

Also, this work needs a bit more of a story to get five stars. As it is, it is a bit too character driven. But the characters were absolutely worth the read.

The World building let me wonder if Johnson wrote more in this setting.

Additionally, you should read Ponies - just 3 pages of Johnson about Unicorns and freely available at

:)

There are quite a few of her stories available online for free links to most of them are here in this link if you scroll down to the contents of her collection. There is also a couple more on Clarkesworld.

As for whether or not this is urban fantasy - i dont like the urban fantasy label because it is basically is this fantasy set in a city - if it is set in a town then it is not really classed as "urban" - I cannot remember too fully how each side of the mist is described but I am pretty sure they are not city sized - however it feels more urban than say Lord of the Rings.

It is a gentle story, a story about a bridge and the impact it makes on different people's lives. Often fantasy stories are about quests or battles and I enjoyed the quieter pace of this story. It was not overly ambitious but it was successful I felt in doing all it did. It would have felt it couldnt have been stetched to a novel length but worked well in my view as a novella.

I agree Ponies is worth reading but would also suggest reading other work by her including Story kit (need to get her collection or Eclipse 4) and Spar which I was hugely affected by (its free on Clarkesworld).

Ben wrote: "As for whether or not this is urban fantasy - I don't like the urban fantasy label because it is basically is this fantasy set in a city..."

In the prevailing taxonomy, urban fantasy also seems to imply a contemporary urban environment. (I wouldn't call Lieber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser or Asprin's Thieves' World urban fantasy just because they take place in Lankhmar and Sanctuary.) There are so many fusion and genre-bending tales these days, it's hard to keep coming up with terms, from Steampunk to Gaslight Fantasy to simple alternate history. At some point the fine-grained micro-categories ceases to serve a purpose.

For me, because this is (superficially) a story about an engineering project, and the description of construction techniques has so much verisimilitude, I tend to think of it as almost hard science fiction. I say it's superficially about building a bridge, because it is really about creating a connection between two regions, two villages, and two people.

Which suggests the question, why did Johnson include the "mist" at all? Would the story have been much different if it had simply been a wide river?

G33z3r, I had the same question.

Is the mist added to heighten drama, with the assumption the reader wouldn't get the same sense of life & death stakes from an "ordinary" bridge?

(For me, I think the mist does help add to the stakes. I think a bridge over "ordinary" water could also be dramatic enough to satisfy me, but I might look for more action in the writing...)

Is the mist meant to draw attention the power and mystery of Nature, again with an assumption that the reader tends to take this for granted in the "real world"?

This fits in with the ecological themes in much of Johnson's work, and with the even greater mystery conjured up by the decision to explore the "ocean of mist."

I liked how the sheep were part of the story, remembered even though displaced by the bridgework. (I think of the trend of naming housing developments after whatever bit of nature was destroyed in the making of them.) It's one of those subtle details that, even as the whole arc of the story has the reader rooting for the bridge to be completed, questions whether it's worth it.

Does anyone have any favorite examples of writing-about-engineering/construction projects? This novella reminded me of the bridge and tunnel building in Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion.

Hillary wrote: "Does anyone have any favorite examples of writing-about-engineering/construction projects? "

That was exactly, why I thought this novella to be classified as Urban Fantasy - it is part of urban development.

I think the mist is needed to understand the character development of the Ferry family - the heroic effort which wouldn't be so heroic if they were "only" crossing some river.

And I don't see it as a scifi work at all - otherwise the strange and mystic feeling of Rasali when to safely cross the mists would be explained in a scientific way and not be left open. The whole mist has more of a magic touch for me - more than would be suitable for scifi.

I view pretty much all SF, fantasy and horror as well as most slipstream and some magical realism as Speculative fiction and more or less leave it like that unless a book is in dialog or needs to be considered in connection with books that have treaded similar ground in the past.

There are people who say they like SF but not fantasy or the other way around or want their SF to be hard or mundane etc but for most of us the positioning does not really matter. Take a story such as Shirley Jackson's - The Lottery - this could be seen as SF, fantasy, horror or something else entirely.

To me this is quite different in ambition from say Silently and Very Fast that we did recently - that was brimming with ambition all of which it succeeded but in some way at the cost of being 100% entertaining and with a fair amount of effort needing to be put in. This was very gentle, very easy reading and did not feel short of substance but equally did not stretch to do much more than tell an undertold story and tell it in a realistic way.

I liked how women in the world seem equally important as the men - it is not the case that men are in all the positions of power.

I am from rural highlands of scotland and I lived through the construction of two very important bridges that completely changed way of life for locals. One of these bridges was the Skye Road bridge - previously the island was only accessible by boat and many of the locals got across for free as the people operating the ferries didnt always charge them - everyone would need to pay to cross the new bridge.

I think the "gentle" description says something essential about this novella. A lot of Johnson's stories have this tone. (Although some, like "Ponies" or "Spar" definitely don't. One of my favorites from At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories, "26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss" seems to strike a middle ground in terms of tone; that story also has a central mystery that could be compared to the mist here.)

In many ways, I think the gentleness comes through the way conflict is treated -- instead of two inexorable, opposing viewpoints, there are a range of reactions, and characters react in different ways internally without necessarily doing anything "dramatic" externally. In many ways, this seems more realistic and opens up some under-used possibilities for fiction. (Speculative fiction could certainly play a role in helping us explore possibilities beyond zero-sum games.) On the other hand, in this particular story, I might have expected a little more violent opposition; of course, selling the community on the bridge is meant to be part of our narrator's skill set.

I can strongly recommend people to check out her other stories - to me she is one of the most important writers of short stories in the genre although her output is little more than a dozen stories, like Ted Chiang she has achieved a lot of acclaim, regard and love on the basis of a fairly small output of stories.

I am yet to check out her novels but would be interested to know what people think of them.