Currently Reading - The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection

2. “Hatrack River” by Orson Scott Card

Not science fiction. Folkloric fantasy of colonial American magic. Not only for the author, but also its romantic and thoroughly uncritical depiction of colonisation and frontier settlement in action am I suspicious. Card’s story “The Fringe” in the previous year’s collection also featured a sort of guilt-free, post-apocalyptic frontiership, so it seems this may be a recurring theme of his.

The story itself is a young girl using her magical talents, alongside a whole lot of fate, to assure the birth of a seventh son of a seventh son against the malevolent forces that seek to murder him or at least assure he will not be born a seventh son. In doing so she binds herself to a duty of continuing to be his magical protector.

Am fairly sure this story forms the initial segment of Card’s novel Seventh Son.

Opinion in summary: nope. At more length: if I wished to read a tale of the magic of a seventh son of a seventh son, I would read Pratchett’s Equal Rites from the same year.