{"id":1960,"date":"2021-11-24T21:10:19","date_gmt":"2021-11-24T21:10:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=1960"},"modified":"2021-12-31T16:31:23","modified_gmt":"2021-12-31T16:31:23","slug":"la-befana-by-gene-wolfe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=1960","title":{"rendered":"La Befana by Gene Wolfe"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><strong><em>La Befana<\/em><\/strong> by Gene Wolfe (<em>Galaxy<\/em>, January-February 1973) opens with an alien called Zozz arriving at a human settler\u2019s household on Christmas Eve. There Zozz waits for the man of the family, John \u201cBananas\u201d Bannano, to come home. <br>Once Bannano arrives there are several conversations that run in parallel about (a) the family\u2019s emigration to Zozz\u2019s planet (b) the mother-in-law, who goes into the room next door to avoid Zozz, and (c) a story about a witch eternally dammed to look for the baby Jesus\/Messiah.<br>The last line draws this together somewhat with (spoiler) the mother-in-law saying she\u2019ll only have to search until tomorrow night.<br>This is either a simple idea complicated by the various lines of conversation (in one or two places it\u2019s hard to work out who is talking to who), or I missed the point. Either way, I suspect it is a slight piece.<br>* (Mediocre). 1,450 words.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>La Befana by Gene Wolfe (Galaxy, January-February 1973) opens with an alien called Zozz arriving at a human settler\u2019s household on Christmas Eve. There Zozz waits for the man of the family, John \u201cBananas\u201d Bannano, to come home. Once Bannano arrives there are several conversations that run in parallel about (a) the family\u2019s emigration to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[89],"tags":[21,490,531,203,90,532,12],"class_list":["post-1960","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gene-wolfe","tag-21","tag-490","tag-birth-of-christ","tag-galaxy","tag-gene-wolfe","tag-planetary-settlers","tag-short-story"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1960"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1960\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2254,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1960\/revisions\/2254"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}