★★★☆☆ Three Faces of a Beheading, by Arkady Martine
I'd probably have liked it better if I understood it
Three Faces of a Beheading
Arkady Martine
I'd probably have liked it better if I understood it
Arkady Martine's Three Faces of a Beheading is a finalist for the 2025 Best Short Story Hugo. You can find it here. It ends with a link to an interview of Martine (who is Dr. AnnaLinden Weller, but I will refer to her as Martine here). You need to read the interview to have any hope of understanding the story. That said, I read the interview and did not understand the story, so my advice is of little value. What I got from the interview is that Three Faces of a Beheading is not necessarily intended as something that can be understood in the conventional sense of the word. Martine, seeking to escape writer's block, kind of went wild on it. So it's more like a desperate writer's flailing than an attempt to tell a coherent story.
One of the things I didn't understand was who was telling the story. It is told from the point of view of a gamer who is also, perhaps, a proscribed dissident. Much of the action takes place within a role-playing-game based on Byzantium. (Martine, in her day job, is a historian who specializes in Byzantium.) There probably was a plot knocking around somewhere down there in the depths of the story, but I was too confused to make it out.
That said, there were some striking moments that made the story worth reading (if not awarding a Hugo), even shorn of comprehensible context. One of them was the beheading mentioned in the title, which is how the story begins.
So, yeah, kind of fun, frustrating, challenging. Good luck.