I like to think that the part of Helen’s story I’ve told is about not fearing freedom. Freedom wasn’t something to take for granted in Helen’s time, nor is it now. Slavery was very much a reality of the Bronze Age, classical Greece, and even some parts of the world today. Other kinds of oppression are even more widespread. Little by little, we’re challenging and overcoming the attitude that people are things. It’s not easy work, and accomplishing it means that sometimes we have to become warriors, even when we’re told that it’s not the path we’re expected to follow in life. We do it anyway, because it’s the right path.
Helen would approve.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nebula Award winner STHER FRIESNER is the author of 31 novels and over 150 short stories, including “Thunderbolt” in Random House’s Young Warriors anthology, which led to the creation of Nobody’s Princess. She is also the editor of seven popular anthologies. Her works have been published in the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, Russia, France, Poland, and Italy. She is also a published poet, a produced playwright, and a onetime advice columnist. Her articles on fiction writing have appeared in Writer’s Market and Writer’s Digest Books.
Besides winning two Nebula Awards in succession for Best Short Story (1995 and 1996), she was a Nebula finalist three times and a Hugo finalist once. She received the Skylark Award from NESFA and the award for Most Promising New Fantasy Writer of 1986 from Romantic Times.
Ms. Friesner’s latest publications include Temping Fate; a short story collection, Death and the Librarian and Other Stories; and Turn the Other Chick, fifth in the popular Chicks in Chainmail series that she created and edits. She is currently working on the sequel to Nobody’s Princess, titled Nobody’s Prize.
Educated at Vassar College, receiving a B.A. degree in both Spanish and drama, she went on to receive her M.A. and Ph.D. in Spanish from Yale University, where she taught for a number of years. She is married, the mother of two, harbors cats, and lives in Connecticut.
Ms. Friesner’s proudest public-appearance moment came while serving as toastmaster for the 2001 World Science Fiction Convention in Philadelphia, when she took the stage as Rapmaster Toast and, yes, rapped before an audience of thousands. And at her age, too. She has promised her children not to do that again.
Maybe.