Still another warm Italian night, still not quite recovered from that woozy post-Worldcon feeling, but I had to jot down a few words about Brooke Bolander’s Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies; the Hugo-nominated short story which this year lost to Amal El-Mohtar’s beautiful Seasons of Glass and Iron but which remains a highly recommended — and recommendable — reference point for me.

It’s a story that’s better experienced than explained, so any analysis on my part will just be enthusiastic gloss. But I will say that the one thing that strikes me about it — and, crucially, keeps me returning to the story for sloppy seconds, thirds, fourths, etc — is that it actually feels like a pop song.

A really, really good one. (More Grimes than Britney.)

I’m a child of Barthes so I don’t want to get into whether this was intentional or not, but the feeling it transmits is the same. There is an instant emotional hook — the rape of a celestial being — which then proceeds in literal ‘beats’ (the bullet-pointed, inexorable march of delicious revenge) and then offers up the ultimate, redemptive kicker: in the many times that I’ve re-read it, the appearance of the title line in the story has resulted in joyful tears.

Above all, this is a sign of well-constructed fiction, and the self-consciously bite-sized nature of Bolader’s story only makes it all the more amenable to the pop song metaphor.

That’s certainly how I will experience it, over and over again.

Fluke or not, I’m happy we have it out there in the world. Do give it a whirl.