"San Diego Lightfoot Sue" is a 1975 fantasy short story by American writer Tom Reamy. It was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

Plot summary

In the early 1960s, a naive teenager from Kansas moves to Los Angeles, where he falls in love with a former prostitute.

Reception

"San Diego Lightfoot Sue" won the Nebula Award for Best Novelette of 1975,^[1] and was a finalist for the 1976 Hugo Award for Best Novelette.^[2] Publishers Weekly called it "smooth".^[3]

The story has been cited as an example of the idea that magic can be dangerous to the wielder if incorrectly performed (when the prostitute casts a spell to rejuvenate herself so that the teenager can see what she looked like when she was his age, she is "consumed by green fire"),^[4] and as evidence that Reamy was, if not gay himself, then "remarkably familiar with the gay idiom of the time".^[5]

References

External links

• "San Diego Lightfoot Sue", at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database

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