Six Months, Three Days by Charlie Jane Anders

In her Hugo-winning story, 'Six Months, Three Days' (Tor.com, June 8th, 2011), Charlie Jane Anders demonstrated that she had a facility with literalized metaphors. When done well, however, science fiction's literalized metaphors can offer the best of both worlds, exploring both a universal human truth and an SFnal concept.

It's a device that can be used in indelicate ways, as evidenced by any number of works in which aliens, mutants, and supernatural creatures are used as stand-ins for a variety of marginalized groups, from Native Americans to AIDS sufferers. Rian Johnson's recent film Looper expresses the limited options that lie before children raised in poverty and unstable environments through time travel, which assures that the film's protagonist, a mob assassin recruited as a child, will one day kill his older self, and one day some time after that, be killed in the same fashion. Joe Haldeman's The Forever War (1974) takes the frequent observation of soldiers returning from a war abroad that the peaceful, untouched society to which they've come home seems alien and unfamiliar, and realizes this effect through time dilation, which returns the book's narrator to a humanity altered by hundreds of years that have passed him by in his faster-than-light deployment. Science fiction is often the genre of literalized metaphors its fantastic tropes can be used to make concrete what in reality is only an abstract.

Six Months, Three Days by Charlie Jane Anders