“We’re loathed and despised in every time, in every country, in every culture. In New Guinea they say we dig up the bodies of dead babies and eat them. In Zambia they say we sleep with our brothers and fathers and murder newborns. The Hopi say we kill our kin to prolong our lives. In Germany they say we steal men’s penises and hide them in birds’ nests. (…) They say we spoil milk and steal children. That we murder the innocent and ruin crops. That we bring disease and eat human flesh. You know why they say all this?”

“Because you’re witches?”

“Because we’re women. Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Jew—the one thing they all have in common is that they hate us. For hundreds of thousands of years, they’ve hated us.” (p. 219)

The horror in this world needs no monsters kicking up a storm. Instead, it stems from authority, and from its supposed guardians: parents, social workers, doctors, the “grown-ups.” This isn't Hendrix's first exploration of girls under patriarchal control, and the novel participates in horror’s larger project of voicing what gets silenced elsewhere. Yet the genre itself has been marginalised, denied critical recognition, despite, or because of, its popularity. The study and recognition of horror remains sparse relative to the attention devoted to fantasy or science fiction.

As Hendrix notes in his history of the genre's ’70s and ’80s boom, Paperbacks from Hell (2017), “...horror appeared nowhere on best-seller lists. Horror was for children. It was pulp. If it was any good, it couldn't possibly be horror and so was rebranded as a ‘thrilling tale.’ Horror seemed to have no future because it was trapped in the past” (p. 16). But then the needle moved. The genre exploded:

Between April 1967 and December 1973, everything changed. In a little more than five years, horror fiction became fit for adults, thanks to three books. Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, Thomas Tryon’s The Other, and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist were the first horror novels to grace Publishers Weekly’s annual best-seller list since Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca in 1938. (p. 24)

This mutation had roots. As Bernice M. Murphy argues in her essay from Xavier Aldana Reyes’s Horror: A Literary History (2016), “Horror Fiction from the Decline of Universal Horror to the Rise of the Psycho Killer”:

Horror fiction began to enter the literary and publishing mainstream during the post-war era because it had increasingly begun to reflect the myriad anxieties found in everyday life. Authors such as King, Barker, Campbell, Straub, Herbert, Blatty, Ketchum, Thomas Tryon, Joan Samson, Kathe Koja and many others (...) added further depth, sophistication, frank sexuality and outright gore to the genre.

They would do this by variously utilising the four major characteristics of the genre: a tendency to deal with horrors arising from the conditions of everyday life; an accompanying preference for mundane, contemporary settings; a movement away from the supernatural and towards the depiction of aberrant psychology as a source of terror (as epitomised by the soon-to-become iconic figure of the serial killer Hannibal Lecter); and a tendency to depict the supernatural in a much more ‘grounded’, naturalistic manner.

This vision of horror materialized out of a changing nation's shifting anxieties. Steffen Hantke in his essay for the same volume, “The Rise of Popular Horror, 1971-2000,” identifies this: “Not by coincidence did the American small town, the epitome of the conservative vision of the nation, become the prime setting for 1980s horror fiction: a sunny, cheerful place of white picket fences and apple pie where something would always be really, really wrong.”

The genre's commercial success followed from this shift: horror that respected no authority, broke taboos, and took risks mainstream literature might not even touch. In Paperbacks from Hell, Hendrix shows why they worked: “Thrown into the rough-and-tumble marketplace, the writers learned they had to earn every reader’s attention. And so they delivered books that move, hit hard, take risks, go for broke. It’s not just the covers that hook your eyeballs. It’s the writing, which respects no rules except one: always be interesting” (p. 14).

And interesting they were. Hendrix, inspired by that era and its books, carries that sensibility. His horror lies very much in the world around his characters in mundane, ordinary settings. In his homage to 1980s pop culture, My Best Friend’s Exorcism (2016), when Gretchen gets possessed, neither she nor the dear reader is certain if it’s something supernatural or simply puberty’s hormonal chaos. The supernatural always pales in comparison to the complexities of the material realities, particularly when filtered through his characters' skepticism.

Likewise, in Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, even after successfully “transferring” a sickness to a condescending doctor, the girls remain unconvinced. Magic? Coincidence? Their own mistake? They don't know. Can't know. This uncertainty is a sign of changing times, changing minds, changing bodies. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s backtrack.

To understand the stakes of Hendrix’s novel, you have to understand the time it’s set in. Witchcraft for Wayward Girls is set in the Baby Scoop Era, a euphemistic label for a system built on forced obedience. In the decades after World War II, stretching into the early 1970s, countries in the English-speaking West saw an exponential increase in pre-marital pregnancies—four million parents between 1945 and 1973 in the US alone—as well as a rampant increase in adoptions. Children could be literally “scooped up” by adoptive couples, hence the name. As always, the burden of that “crisis” fell on women. [1]

Pregnant girls and women were secretly sent to maternity homes across the country, where they were forced to surrender their children in secret. Witchcraft for Wayward Girls is set in one of these maternity homes. Neva Craven, fifteen years old and pregnant, is driven there by a father who no longer sees her as a daughter but as a problem requiring institutional management. She’s told to stay there until she gives birth and her baby is taken away. Then she can return home and go back to being a “good girl.” Hide her, wait for the birth, take the child, send her back. Pretend nothing happened. [2]

For six months, she’d been holding on by her fingernails, but at least she’d been around people who knew she could tell a joke, and made straight As in English, and loved Patty Duke. Now she was surrounded by strangers who only knew one thing about her: she’d been stupid enough to get pregnant. (p. 34)

Every girl carries her own version of the same violence. One embroiders napkins for a wedding that will never happen, still trusting a boy’s broken promise. Another fantasizes about escape, building a future with her daughter that no one will let her keep. One girl dreads returning home, knowing exactly what awaits her—the priest who raped her, waiting to do it again. Each arrives with a different story, but Wellwood erases those distinctions, reducing them all to the same diagnosis—wayward girls. Under the claustrophobic, invasive gaze of the House and its custodians, the girls discover the only power available to them: each other. Bonds have to be formed, resistance built from whatever materials are at hand.

What Hendrix understands is that the supernatural is never the main event. Witchcraft might be the book’s premise, but true magic lies in the friendships, in girls finding each other in a hostile system. Despite the cruelty and hopelessness engineered into Wellwood, this is a story of sisterhood first.

Witchcraft, in this context, comes as an equalizer. Not empowerment, with its sanitized, corporate connotations, but power seized when every other possible avenue has been shut down. “When you are at your lowest, when you feel your least powerful, know that this dark legion is there for you. Witches will catch you when you fall, carry you when you are tired, heal you when you are broken” (p. 223). The witchcraft here is grisly, macabre, nothing like the aestheticized versions sold in bookshops and Instagram feeds. The greater the magic, the more blood, the more pain it demands. The book presents witchcraft as a tool to fight patriarchy, to defy a society that oppresses women at every juncture, to resist a world hell-bent on taming them into docility, to create a world of their own. “A true witch does not fear change. She is in an eternal state of revolution” (p. 184).

Women’s bodies have always been a site where power is exercised. The specifics shift, the system adapts, but the fundamental equation keeps women’s autonomy provisional, always requiring justification, always up for negotiation by someone else. The Baby Scoop Era has a name now, a historical distance. We look back at maternity homes and tell ourselves we’ve moved past that brutality. And yet, women’s bodily autonomy continues to be legislated away. Girls are again being told their choices matter less than someone else’s morality. The system adapts faster than we do, finding new ways to exercise the same control while insisting it’s different this time, better, necessary.

Witchcraft for Wayward Girls sits at that uncomfortable intersection where past and present collapse into each other. Hendrix shows us 1970, but it’s easy to recognize 2026. The architecture that built Wellwood is still standing under different names. And the girls trapped inside it—then, now—have to keep finding ways to say no. Then. Now. The specifics shift. The fight doesn’t.

Endnotes

[1] Hendrix describes this in the novel’s acknowledgments: “whether girls had been raped or sexually abused, believed a promise that wasn’t kept, didn’t have access to contraception, or simply didn’t know it existed, they were told that getting pregnant was all their fault. Doctors and social workers labeled unwed mothers “neurotic,” newspaper columnists suggested they be hounded in Alcatraz, and politicians blamed them for everything from high taxes to crime to the collapse of Western civilization” (p. 475). [return]

[2] In a TIME piece about this period, Kelly O’Connor McNees—the author of another novel set during the era, The Myth of Surrender (2022)—remarks: “Almost no one asked the young women themselves about their wishes. During the Baby Scoop era, an unmarried pregnant woman sent away to a maternity home had no say in whether she would carry her pregnancy to term, no agency over the birth itself and, once the child arrived, no choice about whether she could raise the baby.” This is the ground on which Hendrix plants his witches. [return]

1. The Scent of Other People’s Memories

You often walk through the Garden of Unfinished Poems, but you’ve never tarried there. It is a place for abandoning, for releasing the remnants of feelings unable to be processed, the ones stuck in perpetual limbo, too painful or confusing to lock into the coherency of words. There’s nothing to be retrieved, so what would be the point in lingering?

So you tell yourself until today, when you spin around after hurling a few lines of romantic verse under the willow tree only to find your momentum arrested by a heady scent, dark and choral. It smells of déjà vu, lives unlived but experienced all the same. Staggering under the weight, you fall to your knees, surprised by the softness beneath them. The ground where you’d left haltering thoughts about your father is no longer barren. Your fingers lightly graze a field of clover, deepening the heady scent, giving flashes of moments—a bark of laughter, a cry of welcome, a growl of disapproval. You linger on the hug that someone else received, letting it seep into the space you hadn’t known its absence had left.

You find one with four leaves. Gently breaking the stem, you hold it up against the setting sun and take in its contours. How had something so gracefully curved come from your jagged attempts to memorialize the events your father no longer could? As his stories faltered, became repetitive, and eventually failed him, your questions sliced ever more frantically across the blank page, slashes through a veil that revealed only darkness beneath.

Lifting the clover to your nose, you breathe deeply of incense and mourning, the creeping grief of losing someone while still holding his hand. But the scent is layered, as well; more hands held, arms clasped, a community gathering around loss and finding something there, in the darkness revealed between slashes of grief.

You tuck the clover in the pocket that used to hold your verses, for now. Later, you’ll tuck it into your father’s, watch as his twitches ease and his breathing settles.

2. The Honey of Playfulness

This time, you let your guard down slightly. The garden is the resting place of your vulnerabilities; there’s a reason you’ve left them here instead of carrying them with you. Typically you enter hardened and hurried, beelining straight for the correct plot and quickly releasing whatever is clutched in your hand without a second thought—today, an attempted weaving of leather and lace, strength and suppleness that your body cannot figure out how to wear, nor your words to narrate. It turned out clumsy and haphazard, all tangled threads and loose ends. Your ex couldn’t perceive you as a whole, and perhaps you can’t either. You may as well abandon the attempts. The point of the garden is to not think, not feel, not reckon with the words you can no longer stand to struggle over.

Still, even as you carry the words to release them, you experiment with movement. Why is it called beelining, you wonder, when bees more seem to frolic through the air? Your straight, measured steps begin to soften, fall lighter, meander along the path. The buzz of a bee joins you, and you mimic its movement. Lilting along, distracted by the game, you follow the bee all the way to a hive you’d never before noticed. It’s inside a hollow tree. Ah yes. You’d nearly forgotten how long you’d been coming here. You place your hand against the tree, and can almost hear the echoes of your teenage voice singing along with your awkward attempts at guitar.

Your hand comes away sticky. The tree grown from your teenage angst must have died long ago—your attempts to make something solid and presentable of yourself clearly failed—but it’s become a haven for something sweet. You lick the palm of your hand, letting the liquid coat your tongue. It tastes of silliness and imagination, putting on and taking off, laughter and ease. There’s something in the honey that beckons a different kind of release. You realize you haven’t even taken the poetry out of your pocket. Your hand is too sticky to do so now. Perhaps these lines aren’t done anyway. Perhaps there’s more to play with in them.

Perhaps there’s more to play with in you.

The bees dance invitingly, and you carefully reach in and break a small part of the comb to bring home with you.

3. A Salve, for Lovers Lost

You find yourself coming to the garden more, but leaving less. At first you keep the words longer to play with them, having fun with rhyme and reason, but eventually it morphs into something different. Something that feels more like searching than playing, something that wants to be right instead of simply beautiful. Today when you enter the garden, your pocket is full to bursting with lines you can’t let go of. They’re not perfect yet.

You came to release one, just one, a minor heartbreak there’s no use in dwelling on. But as you reach the willow and lift it from the top of your pocket, you’re startled by a bunny suddenly leaping out from behind the tree. There’s never anyone else here, any life other than the bees! You stumble in surprise, loosing the whole pile of papers stuffed within your pocket, and scraping your behind on the dirt path. The wind catches the scraps, blowing them willy-nilly, disrupting your careful system of where each type of verse should be laid to rest. What have you done?

You place your hand against the trunk to hoist yourself up, and a piece of bark comes off in your grasp. It feels soothing against your palm, seeping sensations that ease into your skin—the lightheartedness of new love, slick sweat and racing heartbeats, coy glances and eyes rolling back in pleasure, a hitched breath. It feels of loss and breaking, and the way your heart became something more in the aftermath—fuller, deeper, resonant.

You gather more bark ready to release itself from the trunk and take it home to make a salve to slather over your still-beating heart.

4. The Mushrooms Grown from Past Versions of You

You start to have a sense of which poems need further experimentation and which you’re ready to release. But you’ve lost all sense of order in the garden; since the wind spread your work far and wide, the garden has become wild and lush. You move carefully down the overgrown path, avoiding the poison ivy and pushing through bushes. It’s more humid than you remember, and the ground is softer beneath your feet.

You bend to tuck some lines of longing under a fallen log, not ready to face the forms your desire is taking for fear that they might be impossible—a family that embraces you fully and without hesitation, a body that moves fluidly among expressions and expectations, a lover that dances with you, just as fluidly, just as fully, through thick and thin.

From your crouched position, a whole world is revealed. Crickets chirp, a fly flits past your ear, a bunny—perhaps the one you spied earlier—nibbles in the field of clover, and mushrooms spread like a whisper through the quiet wood. Now that you’re looking for them, you see the mushrooms everywhere, in every damp hollow and shady space. You carefully dig under the roots of one, curious what enables their growth. Then another. Then another. Under each, you find who you used to be, shades of yourself that you’d thought dead and gone, left behind. Shades that you thought you could never stomach.

You lift one of the mushrooms to your lips and take a gentle bite. It’s savory: not just edible but bursting with sustenance. Tracing the fungal network across the garden, you see the ways it connects everything—living and dead, past and future, possible and impossible. Leaving these poems unfinished wasn’t only to let them die, but to let you continue to live.

5. A Lily, for Your Love

You didn’t come to release anything, this time. You came to offer thanks. To tell the garden how grateful you are, for the space of release, for the possibilities of play, for what can be found in relation.

You’ve been in a season where you haven’t needed to release things in order for them to grow. You’ve found words that can hold the bittersweet pairing of hugs you never received from the hand you still have the chance to clasp. Phrasing that glides between gendered glimpses without halting their flow, finding fullness in the movement. Language full of love for the stilted selves that blossomed into you. A smile tugs at the corners of your mouth, irresistible. You’ve also composed the first lyrics since your high school variety show days, inspired by someone who blew into your life with the kind of love you’d never believed it possible to imagine, a love that continues to grow even if your words sometimes falter, or your melody sputters to a stop. Together, you create space for it to start again.

The wind seems to nudge you, guiding you back towards the willow tree where you’d so often buried the pieces of your heart after another that found them too heavy to hold. And there, growing at the base of a tree, is a single orange lily. Bright, with desire. Full, with potential. And dancing, fluidly, in the breeze.

You smile, offering the garden one last breathless thanks, as you pluck the lily from the garden that now teems with life, and bring it home to your love.

Fiction Editor: Joyce Chng.

Copy Editor: The Copyediting Department.

These categories can also flag a fear of the modern, the experimental, and the challenging. It’s very comforting to believe that any problem can be solved with a bit of moral rectitude and a pure mind, but it’s far from obvious that we can believe that this is actually true. More importantly, and more damagingly, the novel itself also fails to convince on even its own terms, as a piece of fiction in which we can play with that statement as a thought-experiment.

In the first volume of Orion’s Arm (we read), an expedition from Earth—whose ship is interestingly called the Samaritan—has discovered, on a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, a human civilisation. They are the Fintidierians, who are around the technological level of 1950s USA, and were taken from somewhere in Asia some tens of thousands of years ago by a mysterious race of aliens, dubbed by the Earth visitor the “Atlanteans,” who had ruled and enslaved the Fintidierians before dying out around 50,000 years ago. On a continent named Misropos, which is deemed taboo by the Fintidierians, there are ruins and hieroglyphics which seem to offer a clue to the origin of the Atlanteans, and the superior technology of the Earth visitors allowed the detection of a signal from a particular region of space. Could this be the homeworld of the Atlanteans?

Now, plans are being made for all this to be investigated.

There are essentially two plot strands here. In one, the Fintideirians have a massive “fertility” problem (a sharp decline in the birth of females), which seems to have been caused by the Atlanteans. In the second, on the moon of a planet revolving around a nearby star, a ship with still-functioning cryogenic pods is discovered. The inhabitant of one—an Atlantean woman—is awakened and goes on the rampage, sending a signal to wherever the previously-detected signals had come from. It is clear that the technologically advanced Atlanteans are a threat to Earth, and so, partly through altruism but largely through motives of self-preservation, the leaders of the Samaritan expedition decide to track down the Atlanteans and tackle the “Gender Plague.”

So far, so standard SF plotting. Indeed, many acclaimed works of SF have had plots which are less novel. But the presentation and resolution of these plot strands quickly run into problems. First, this is the kind of science fiction where plot is developed by people talking to each other and telling them what has happened, what is going to happen, and what the “scientific” elements are. There are, in particular, several passages of people explaining maths and quantum theory to each other in ways that hold up the story. One plot strand is partially solved during an idyllic fishing trip which involves much technobabble about genetics and choosing the sex of babies, all of which kind of leads to the solution but without any real drama or tension. During another fishing trip, fish and chips are introduced to the Fintidierians, one of whom fantasises about exploiting the new exotic discovery (tomato ketchup) brought by the Earth people. This is mildly amusing but hardly gripping.

Second, this is the kind of science fiction which isn’t really science fiction, but simply has the coating of “sci-fi” to give it the flavour of things we have seen countless times on TV screens. For example: communication via implants. One character “tapped his collar to activate his microphone, exactly like the characters in the old twentieth-century sci-fi shows he watched with his grandfather as a child.” There are “smart contact lenses” and artificial intelligence assistants with no real sense of how such devices might have changed society: “He activated the star chart app in his contact lenses and let the embedded artificial intelligence find the star for him.” Here are spaceships powered by technobabble: “Powered by the ship’s fusion reactor, the Samara Drive emitted an extremely intense beam of UV light that functioned as reaction mass to accelerate the Samaritan (and the Emissary) at up to one gee for extended periods of time.” And “society,” of course, is default United States of America. The USA still exists, and the rest of the world might as well not. (There has, though, been something called the “great economic reset of 2066” which caused people to emigrate from Slovakia.)

The Samaritan is a US ship with a (largely) US crew. We do have characters like Polkingham, one of the “few Brits,” who is indistinguishable from everyone else (perhaps his use of the swear-word “bloody” is some sort of cultural marker), and Nkrumah, whose “heavily accented English” might refer to a Ghanaian origin, though he bears the Irish first name Kieren. There is a New Zealander whose cry of “I say it’s time for full bangers, Mike!” is, I assume, not a sexual invitation. The Fintidierians speak pretty much like everyone else, too, and, although initially they have names like Sgurom Smyo, many of them end up taking American names which is soon “quite the fad.” It must be obvious to at least some readers that here proceedings are following the example of many colonised countries, but this is hardly questioned.

And so, following on from this, we need to believe two things which are increasingly difficult to believe: that this near-future setting (the beginning is dated February 15, 2101) is pretty much our present given a few magical-tech items; and that an Asian society transplanted from Earth many thousands of years ago is going to end up pretty much like the twentieth-century USA. Take this description of a biology lab: “Like most Fintidierian buildings, it looked like something you would see in an old 2D movie set in the USA circa 1945 to 1950, with lots of concrete, austere windows, high ceilings, and exterior pillars.” You can hotwire Fintidierian cars just like you could twentieth-century automobiles. There is no exploration of major scientific, technological, or philosophical differences, save a passage in which the Fintidierian Secretary General Arctinier muses about the way the name of the Samaritan Ambassador Charles Jesus echoes that of someone described earlier as “his more famous and godlier namesake.” Arctinier has clearly heard about “the Christian religion’s savior of the same name”—but do the Fintidierians have a religion, or any philosophical beliefs or dogmas underpinning their society? We are not told. There are aliens, perhaps, but there is nothing alien.

There is even idiot-plotting which flags itself as idiot-plotting. During a terrorist incident, Roy Burbank, an engineer, is locked in a room from which he easily escapes. As he reflects: “Don’t kidnap and lock an engineer in a room filled with electrical equipment and expect him or her to complacently accept their fate.” On the other hand, if they hadn’t done this, it might have been more difficult for the authors to imagine his escape.

Taylor and Johnson have written a number of books, together and separately, and judging by reviews on Amazon and Goodreads there is a market for them. Most readers will not read their work critically. Crisis at Proxima is not written, or read, with any thought to literary awards. The authors have massive experience in related fields. Taylor is described as “currently working” on “very large space telescopes, space-based beamed energy systems, and next generation space launch concepts”—some of the ideas in Crisis clearly come from such work, and they are clearly in the tradition of scientists writing science fiction, which is an honourable one. Despite what I am writing, I can fully understand the appeal of this book as a moment’s entertainment. Much of what I have flagged as flaws—the avoidance of any exploration of ideas, the constant referencing of those SF images and common-stock technologies which have leaked into the mainstream, the blandness of character—identify the story’s appeal, but it is a curious one.

This is a book for readers who don’t really like reading; science fiction for readers who think that they like SF, but who don’t know what it can do to jolt people out of complacency, or who don’t care. It has some of the elements of pastiche, but unfocussed images like “[t]he door itself had grown into some strange mixture of cables, tubes, metal appendages, and the most bizarre Cthulhu shit she had ever seen” and “[t]he imagery was like something out of an animated Japanese horror movie from a century prior” are neither precise nor baroque enough to evoke any real meaning beyond their status as cliché. When Terry Pratchett, for instance, constantly drops references to the “white knowledge” that “fills up your brain without you really knowing where it came from,” he is doing something similar; but his instances are more direct, wittier, designed to allow the pleasurable shock of recognition and the sly nod indicating a shared culture. Here, it’s hard to avoid feeling that this is not comedy but simply a set of nudges towards vague icons, used because they avoid having to spend time on detail.

Some of the comments on the novel have noted approvingly its “old-fashioned” quality, but this is yet another target that is missed, as we can see by the reference to “Arthur C. Clarke and his contemporaries.” There are those among SF’s readership who read Clarke when his major works were published, and who saw in him a writer excited by the potential of the future, by genuinely observing the universe with a sense of wonder. There are those (indeed, sometimes the same readers) who—many years after Clarke’s visions have faded—see in the SF of the period a mode that simply ignores many major issues and is wooden in characterisation. Neither reaction is wholly incorrect. Positions can be debated, but what is interesting is that there now seems to be a readership that ignores or actively rejects the approach of the first tranche of readers and actively embraces what those who hold the second position condemn.

Of course, “Smart people with good intentions and high moral standards can solve any problem” is meaningless, but much entertainment can be had with problem-solving. What is questionable here is whether the characters of this story are “smart” or possess “high moral standards.” (Our ketchup millionaires seem very happy about infringing any patent held by the Heinz company because “That company is over four light-years away. What’re they going to do about it if we do copy their recipe?”) And we all know what the road to Hell is paved with.

In Clarke, we had the anticipation of the future and wonder at the universe. There is no “future” in Crisis at Proxima to wonder at, or fear. There is little in it which reflects the dreams and fears of the present, or the astonishing excitement that thinking about the universe can provoke. To the extent that “Clarke and his contemporaries” were engaging with this (and I believe that, whatever their faults, they were), the novel falls away from their model, keeping only what later generations have argued with—their deep, if often unwilling or unconscious, identification with the more conservative strands of social stances or literary style. Nor are we shown anything like the triumph of competence which writers like Heinlein argued they were promoting.

Ultimately, the basic “problems” at the heart of the novel are solved by the gosh-wow handwaving science developed by the young Fintidierian Grag, who bounces thoughts off his Earth mentor Chris Sentell, along with the help of  knowledge instilled through the “superconducting quantum interference transceivers” which enable sleep-learning while he is in cryosleep. This is not so much Clarkean, in fact, as Gernsbackian: The novel’s  view of science very much echoes that presented in Gernsback’s Ralph 124C 41+, serialised in 1911 and issued as a novel in 1925. Its final chapter has Ralph bringing his girlfriend Alice back to life. He needs the “rare gas” Permagatol, but there is none available … So, naturally, he invents a substitute (“The gas he evolved was Armagatol”). Or, to put it another way, “and then we were saved”; or “[w]ith one bound, Jack was free.”

This is, in fact, precisely what the science fiction of the 1950s was reacting against, and why, whatever spirit Crisis at Proxima is written in, that of “Clarke and his contemporaries” is not it. It’s a novel which meets the expectations of its readers in that it tells a story, is full of infodumps which give the impression of imparting educational information, and it passes the time. The shame is that the expectations are, clearly, so low.

A screech owl startles the angels into flight—: a whirlwind, a frayed rapture. Our guts roil; phones bleat alarms as angels scatter and reconvene. Wingbeats, wingbeats. They whisper to one another in the dark. Starlight pierces the occasional feather. Can angels be embarrassed? A ruffling of branches as they resettle for the night. We dare not ask why they are here. They murmur to one another until again the owl cries and again they rise. We give up on sleep in our corner of the city. A silence grows around our homes—deeper for our knowing how easily it might break.

[Editor’s Note: Publication of this poem was made possible by a donation from Susan Jessen during our annual Kickstarter.]

I suppose you want my wallet. No? My body then. Centuries of splintered glass went into these cheekbones. I see something in the curve of your aura that reminds me of someone I once knew. Can you step into my light? Reputations are made and broken in such places as this. If you say there are rats, I will believe you, though I don’t hear or see them. There is always a gnawing hunger driving them from dark corners. I used to fear them, before I felt their hunger. I can’t remember when I first saw you stepping into my shadow, biting the back of my heels. You were younger then and I was a body of water caught beneath winter’s ice. You know that feeling? Where limitation meets longing? So much of you remains in these doggy bagged bins. There is still starvation, even in this excess, saturation that can be held but not consumed. There is a dare beneath the lid, if you can stand the smell of it. Look closely. The contents change but the picture stays the same. You digest truth like last night’s dinner rush. Taste consequences like the rotting corpse posing as nourishment. Is every meaning cut as kaleidoscope prisms? You see my face in the slop of life’s leftovers but never recognize it. Everything you create is just me with soft filters, me with twelve fingers, me in all caps, in all language, all gods. My reflection is captured in blurred outlines and sharp corners, the angular intersection of humanity, gorging on what they can never admit was a beggar’s meal dug in fistfuls from rotten excess by a dumpster diver. But at least, I still see myself clearly. At least, I still look beautiful covered in your digital rot.

In the world of this novel, the Great War in Europe weakened the protective wards that previously separated the human world from the world of the fae, allowing the latter to further their own violent agendas. The Faerie Wars, and the massive casualties on both sides, not only forced many othersiders to flee across the Atlantic Ocean and establish their courts in the United States, but also eventually led to laws and regulations that prevented the stealing of babies, enforced with the threat of fae lands being spiked with iron.

By the terms of the Russwald treaty, the fae are restricted only to legal bargains, and by the time we enter the picture the Wild Land States of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming are the only regions left in the United States where more traditional bargains between humans and othersiders remain legal. On the Otherside, this has led to what’s called the Great Bargain, whereby all faerie courts pledge fealty and loyalty to protecting the Wild Lands territory and its sovereign ruler.

Poppy Hill was very young when she was snatched from her family’s homestead in frontier-era Montana and spirited away to the Otherside. After spending more than a century as a cook in the employ of the King of the Wild Lands, she is thrown back without warning into a human world that is much changed from any lingering memories she has of her brief former life.

As it turns out, the human world has, in the meantime, come a long way in coexisting with its parallel realm. Carter Lane, one legal firm among many that specialise in fae law, leads the way in brokering faerie bargains. They’re the best at offering these services because they employ Returnees like Poppy to check for loopholes in the contracts. In return, they offer Returnees a fully-fledged twenty-first-century immersion so that they can survive and eventually assimilate into their new surroundings—a fresh start after a set number of years working at Carter Lane.

Of course, Carter Lane’s faerie broker services remain exclusive because of how much the firm charges its clients, and this means that their clientele is often the high-maintenance and demanding kind. Poppy is sitting in on one such protracted contract discussion when we meet her, the story throwing us straight into this new world and forcing us to “learn on the job.” At this point, she has been back in the human world for three years. A homesick Poppy is still struggling to adapt, missing her best friend Sloan, her former boyfriend Elan, and the only life she’s ever known. Sloan has found a way to stay in touch, so that is a small solace, but it has been crickets from Elan.

Soon after a successful completion for the above contract, Poppy is compelled by a senior partner to be involved in a very important (and super confidential) bargain. When it goes sideways through a series of unexpected orchestrations, a flustered but determined Poppy has no choice but to make a bargain of her own—and return to the Otherside to fix her blunder before it’s too late. There, she will uncover a sinister plot that could ruin both the human realm and the fae.

If I am being honest, all this initial infodumping felt a lot to take in, and the narrative didn’t really settle into itself until Poppy found herself back on the Otherside. But, once it got going, this book was hard to put down, well balanced in matching its action, twists, and intrigue with quieter moments of character growth and interaction.

Othersiders need bargains like plants need sunlight; they can never resist one. But having spent more than a century among them, Poppy is aware that, even though they cannot break their oaths, they are masters at sidestepping them—that, though it is impossible for them to lie (they have to at least think something is true), there is “too much space between can’t lie and telling the truth.” Herein lies the challenge, and it’s one she is usually very good at. As she says, “There was nothing like the bone-deep knowledge that the wrong words could worse than kill you to make you determined to find the right ones.”

This magical bureaucracy is one of the story’s most interesting parts—the rules offer a structure without erasing the always-inherent danger when dealing with the fae—and, even as I struggled to keep all the new facts straight in the initial chapters, Poppy’s talking us through the fine print of contracts, their lacunae; and the ways in which those loopholes can be exploited was immediately engaging. I wish this element of the plot—one that you’d assume was central given the title of the book—was more utilised, especially once Poppy was in the Otherside, rather than what we get. Ultimately, the bargains from the first third of the story are used more as tools to enable and propel the real main plot.

I will say that The Tricky Business of Faerie Bargains also suffers from incorrect marketing syndrome in stressing the “delightful cozy fantasy” and teasing a “pesky ex-boyfriend,” as if this story will have a second-chance romance. In truth, this story has fangs—reckonings with what is some pretty severe childhood trauma amounting to abuse, and the knock-on effects of that; the grief of straddling two worlds but never really belonging to either, the realisation that one can never truly return to what a place, person, or life was before; not to mention physical danger, torture, deaths, stabbings, and blood.

“Othersiders aren’t kind. It was absurd to think of one of them being nice. They demanded. They bargained. They offered favours in return for debt.” When Poppy returns to the Otherside, she is, an an escapee, captured by Theron, an enigmatic Hunter who journeys with her to the Wild Lands capital. He confounds her—because, contrary to the received wisdom about faeries, he seems to be kind. Indeed, the interactions between the novel’s two main character pairings—Elan and Poppy and Poppy and Theron—aren’t the focus of the story, either. While hints of new, and potentially rekindled, romance are present, these serve primarily as part of Poppy’s personal narrative arc.

Nowhere is the novel’s non-cozyness more evident, however, than in the emotional journey that Poppy undergoes through the course of the narrative. It forces her to confront unsettling truths and to readjust deeply held and felt perceptions about herself and the found family she thought she loved. When we first meet Poppy in Montana, she is not only homesick, but also under the impression that she “gets” the Otherside, and othersiders, more than other humans—because of Sloan and Elan, and the belonging she found there because of them. She is desperate to return to the only place she felt at home. And yet, as she gets to know Theron more, she realises that even this most well-meaning and different othersider will never truly be able to imagine a different way of tackling certain areas of governance that need to be overhauled, even though he promises to consider what she has said.

Poppy’s is a bittersweet growth, then, that stems from finally seeing something, and someone—multiple someones—for what it and they truly are (and maybe always was and were, even if it was impossible to see it through the manipulations and gaslighting back then). In fact, it’s hard to get a handle on Poppy as a character until we see her in the Otherside. Even there, we are privy only to a slow unpeeling of layers (some she herself is unaware of). But this process does a credit to her many positives (she is resourceful, smarter than she lets on as a defence mechanism, brave, sensitive, a fantastic cook, resilient). Using a first-person POV can often backfire, but here, where the narrative intention demanded an unreliable narrator, it was the perfect choice. We are an intimate observer to the process that leads Poppy to insights about Sloan and Elan and the true nature of her relationships with them, about how her life in the Otherside was nowhere close to the rose-tinted time she recalls, and how she’s never had much agency or choice. We feel the true emotional impact of the revelations (and the betrayals) along with her, even if we can see certain conclusions before she does.

This brings me to another element that I loved: the emphasis on the value of human creativity. “They don’t have it, they don’t understand it.” Othersiders cannot look at one thing and imagine another; they cannot envision the endless possibilities: “Othersiders can’t cook any more than they can paint, or dream, or design a new type of water pump [...] without humans and creativity in their Courts, othersiders died.” A story in which human creativity is impossible to replicate with magic, in which the fae need human ingenuity to show them new ways to live, feels quietly, but firmly, defiant in the age in which we live.

In recent times, there is an ever-present temptation to human-wash the fae, to attribute to them human emotions and appearance and nature. I’m happy to report that this book makes no such attempt. It embraces the trickster, glittering, uncanny, dangerous, selfish, casually cruel otherworldly creatures (some with humanoid characteristics, granted, but never fully human-appearing) who, by all earthly standards, are monsters. What I appreciated was McCarty’s choice to allow for complexity and discomfort, for solutions that are messy; to reflect life’s reality of multiple things being simultaneously true. It makes more meaningful Poppy’s eventual acceptance of reality, of her trauma and the need for her to work through it with the Carter Lane therapist she has until then mostly scoffed at. Even the resolution of the central narrative arc, the twist, ties into this character development. It feels earned, and there are many such satisfying callbacks in the final third of the story.

And yet, many narrative threads are left incomplete, in less a cliffhanger than a promise of a sequel. I hope I’m correct in that assumption.

This Brutal Moon

*

The thing about politics in the novel is … it’s just people. However fascinating, complex, grand, and sweeping your political storyline is, the foundation it will always rest on is the characters who enact it, and with whom the reader must spend the time of the plot, moment by moment. It is this, more than anything, that Bethany Jacobs has grasped in the Kindom Trilogy, and never more so than in this final volume.

The first two books—These Burning Stars (2023) and On Vicious Worlds (2024)—follow a multiplanetary world (the Treble) under strain as an oppressed workforce called the Jeveni break free of their strictly delimited place of mining a valuable ore. They escape to a distant world, away from the corrupt and in-fighting noble families who held them in place, and the equally corrupt and in-fighting tripartite ruling structure of the Kindom itself. But getting away does not prove sufficient, and the second volume into the third spends much of its time showing what it actually takes for the Jeveni to get themselves truly free and safe—and what the Kindom will do, whom and quite how many they will hurt, to bring back the Jeveni and reinforce the status quo.

But the series also follows characters more deeply embedded within, or reacting to, the structures of the Kindom itself. Chono has been trained by a high-ranking noble and served faithfully in the priesthood arm, the clerics, until she found doing so compromised her morals and more personal loyalties beyond breaking point. Six trained to be an assassin, but was forced out on the whim of Esek, the same high-ranking noble who trained Chono, and against whom Six dedicates their life. At the end of the first book, they are revealed to have killed and replaced Esek, and are working to use her personal power to disrupt the system, a plan which is ultimately turned towards freeing the Jeveni who are controlled by Esek’s family.

If this sounds like a complex web of interactions, it is, and that isn’t even all of the viewpoint characters. But, for all the complexity crammed into these three five-hundred-page books, in the moment Jacobs always keeps events grounded in the individual, their wants, needs and plans, and their personal connections to the people and ideas that surround them. She understands that the politics of a multi-faction, multi-world polity is complex, when it needs to be, but is also often very simple. There are no grand master plans and evil geniuses. There are interlinked systems all built out of individuals pulling in different directions, driven by geography and culture, by social and religious forces—that is, a natural complexity, rather than one of Machiavellian, deliberate scheming. She also understands that, sometimes, it is dreadfully simple: the grim calculus of survival, and the striving for basic needs.

The politics of the series, then, are constantly viewed through this lens of the individual, even when operating at a grand scale. The decision to resist oppression rather than take a deal to survive is dramatized in small moments of individuals fighting or conversations in which people discuss their reasons for their choices: guilt, blackmail, love; defence of home, a dream, loyalty to those around them; duty to the person holding the next spot in the line. Everything is granular. When viewed that way, the complex becomes comprehensible.

The same is true for her approach to faith, which is inextricably linked to the politics of the peoples of the Treble. One third of the ruling body is the clerisy, which represents the Godfire in its multiple gods. But faith is not, for Jacobs, just about structures: like politics, it is personal. Faith is viewed through different perspectives throughout the trilogy, and having Chono as a viewpoint character, alongside the Jeveni and their faith practices distinct from the rest of the Kindom’s, allows this to shine.

Through Chono, Jacobs shows us both the driving force of personal faith and the conflict that arises from holding to it within a corrupt system. Throughout This Brutal Moon, the toll the conflict has had on Chono begins to really show. She takes actions that go against her sense of honour, for the sake of protecting others. Religion, for her, is both a hardship and a source of comfort, and the exploration of it through the story is one of the greatest strengths in Jacobs’s work. She acknowledges—as many stories struggle to—the distinct but intertwined aspects of religion both as an internal, personal relationship with the divine and with morality, and as a structural force, one which can be used for peace and social cohesion, but also be weaponised by those within power in the Kindom for division. This sits alongside the value of faith in building a better system for the Jeveni. Nothing is ever one thing only. Across it all, for good and for ill, religion is a critical part of the cultural fabric of the Kindom.

This, too, is one of the great strengths of the story, and one that marks it out from other accomplished space operas. While depictions of religion in fantasy and science fiction are hardly uncommon, what is rare are ones that seek to firmly root it in place within the rhythms of daily life. Not the drama of a god real in the world, but the quiet quotidian of ritual that brings meaning to life—a piece of the puzzle that forms the reality of each character. Understanding who Chono is, who Six is, who the key Jeveni players are, who the hacker Jun Ironway is, means understanding their approach to spiritual practice, or their absence or rejection of it, just as much as their ethnic identity or their politics. And none of these can be fully unpicked in any case.

This wouldn’t work were Jacobs not extremely skilled at character study. This was most obvious in the first book—where much of the plot relied on the reader being compelled by the toxic interpersonal relationships of Esek and Chono—but it has continued, in one form or another, all the way through to This Brutal Moon. All the characters have by now had several books of development, and the culmination of the story’s overarching plot is played out in miniature in each of their personal developments. Not everyone gets a good or happy ending, or even a cathartic one, but it is clear how the events of the story have brought each to their final point. And they are all, in some way, compromised by the story they’ve lived through, by the toxic relationships of which they’ve been part.

The characters, like those in Tamsyn Muir’s The Locked Tomb trilogy (2019-2022), are an inducement to read purely on their own merits. They’ve grown up suited to a corrupt system, and are the people they are because of it, and there’s also something terribly compelling about messy people having messy lives all together. It is nice to love some mess, alongside imbibing the more serious business of a hard-hitting plot in which a corrupt system has been overthrown.

That plot has required violence and hard choices that linger in the souls of those who survive it, alongside guilt about those who didn’t. One cannot fight something so large and all-encompassing and come out unscathed, and freedom has a cost. By emphasising those costs at a personal level, Jacobs once again provides a more emotively immediate window into the consequences at a macro level.

When bringing all this to a close in the final book of a trilogy, there are a lot of plates to keep spinning, let alone bring together into a satisfying (or even just comprehensible) conclusion. And there is a point, around two thirds of the way through the book, where it feels like they may be slipping. The structure moves away from substantial chapters in which significant developments occur for a particular character or geography, opting instead for a run of shorter snippets, between which it chops and changes, refusing to settle—five- and six-page moments that up the pace but interrupts the rhythm. The novel becomes, for a little while, difficult to read and follow. But, just as that threatens to become unmanageable, Jacobs reaches a crescendo of action and comes back to the longer chapter norm, settling back into the flow and signalling the final act of the book—showing once again that she very much knows what she’s doing.

In the end, she brings us to the necessary compromise, to pragmatism and survival. The heroes violently overthrow the corrupt system, but what comes after cannot be easy, and building a new world is a task that takes forever, a constant striving rather than a swift resolution. This Brutal Moon never paints itself as a fairytale or a path to utopia, and it is fitting that this stays true all the way to the conclusion.

This is a book—and a trilogy—that can be characterised in very different ways. On the one hand, I could paint it as the slow-motion car crash of one bright, burning, terrible life—of several sets of people and even a whole culture—trying to escape the gravity of one awful person and her effect on their lives and deaths. I could argue that the Kindom Trilogy is the story of Esek, a person so spectacularly awful that she caused multiplanetary chaos.

But on another, I could say it’s precisely the opposite—a thesis on relationships, and the interaction of connectedness on large scales, fuelled by the multitude of individuals and their decisions within the system. Esek was simply a face, one metonymous example of the toxic relationship that is played out at grand scale across the worlds of the story.

On a third hand—neatly, given the tripartite system of governance that shapes the books—this is a series about genocide, and about oppression and freedom. These individuals offer a window into the suffering of millions, and play out the destructive forces of capitalism, as we know it in the real world, on a larger stage. Theirs is a story that has much to say about many parts of the now—and especially about Palestine, as Jacobs herself highlights in her afterword.

It’s a rich enough, dense enough text to support all these readings and more besides.

Moreover, This Brutal Moon is a fitting end to so equally rich and dense a trilogy, drawing all the multiple threads and character arcs into a satisfying conclusion without succumbing to the chaos that so many moving parts could bring. This concluding novel is a lot, and asks the reader to put in the leg-work to follow it all the way to the end. But it absolutely makes that end worthwhile.

In this episode of the Strange Horizons Fiction podcast, Michael Ireland presentsLio Abendan's 'I Wish You Died Laughing' read by Jenna Hanchey.

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After Hua Long Dian Jing

I  Then
If you must know: the key to dragon-making lies
in the paint you use. You see: it must be heavy
enough to withstand the typhoons of the South,
yet light enough to ride the East’s measured breaths.

II  Now
From my mother, I’ve inherited
dark eyes, nimble knuckles, and from my father—
sometimes,
I think,
a thirst
for air.

III  Then
Recall: a dragon has no use for wings,
and in that sense, it is like the opposite
of a flightless bird.
Recall: when he tells you this joke
that I was the one who taught it to him.

IV  Now
When I was too young to understand,
I was still old enough to dream—
while the other children gorged
on tales of wild storks—
that I might have been conceived
with a drop
of paint.

V  Then
When you get there, ask him if he remembers: that night years ago, when the power went out,
and we let loose our dragon by the sun of a thousand fireflies. Ask him if he remembers:
how I turned, and the breath left his lungs, and we held each other—he, trembling
in my arms, pale as a ghost. And when you return, ask me if I remember: how I
turned and gleaned terror where there was only desire, how we held
each other, that night years ago, but he was already gone—
for it was not the key to dragon-making that held him
in thrall, but what it might finally mean
to fly.

VI  Now
You see: it was only a matter
of dotting the eyes—

VII  After
And yes, oh, yes—
of time, too.

They’re also, the vast majority of them, pretty grim. A number of these stories are set in environmental dystopias—as if there is any other kind. Is it possible for any dystopia to exist that doesn’t include ecological devastation of one form or another? There are certainly fictional dystopias that focus on the exploitation and degradation of one or more population groups, but these are nearly always linked to environmental disaster. In Eugen Bacon’s “The Water Runner,” for instance, a drought so severe that it dries up the ocean is said to be the result of “a curse that rose from Mother Africa’s lips in her bereavement for her lost sons and daughters.” This might be a metaphorical explanation, but there’s arguably more than a grain of truth in it: The pathological desire for profit that once supported slavery also supports unsustainable environmental practices, no matter the human or ecological costs.

Dystopias such as these are increasingly hard to read—but are they hard to read because the metaphors are so recognisable, or because we’re aware, as we read, of how increasingly remote it all feels? As E. M. Faulds writes in her story “Love, Scotland,” everyone is haunted by the global litany of disaster: “Stories of strangers dying, disasters that wiped out communities, trauma—helpless to change things but witness to it all. The internet connected them but divorced them, increased empathy but decreased agency until people drowned in it or switched off that part of themselves.” The narrator of Matthew Freeman’s story “Birdseed” agrees: “I won’t bore you with how it all came apart. We have had enough exhausted chronicles of the dissolution.”

There’s only so much empathy that can be felt before it does become exhausting, and we harden ourselves so easily. One of the best stories in this collection, for me, was “Bodies” by Cat McMahan, about cloned workers at a factory for cloned chickens. The images of human and chicken reflect each other until they almost meld, with both exploited terribly for gain—the chickens because they can be reared without care for any animal welfare standards, and the humans because they too can be harvested if their body parts benefit non-cloned humans—and yet my shock, while reading, was reserved primarily for the chickens, the birds engineered to exist without a voice box and with minimal appetite, so they “couldn’t wail or want.”

I don’t even like chickens that much. Well. Half the time I don’t like humans that much, either, but surely this is a grim reminder of how easy it is to turn off empathy, or to limit its expression. It’s not as if I haven’t read stories about the harvesting of cloned humans before. Possibly I was more shocked by those earlier narratives. Honestly, I just don’t remember. I don’t recall ever reading about suffering cloned chickens before, though, so maybe it’s just novelty in narrative that grabs my attention these days.

That should be a horrifying admission, a horrifying paragraph to write, but I no longer feel that either.

Broadly speaking, that sense of numbness, of inconsistent and dysfunctional response, is something I’ve focused a lot on in my own ecological fiction: the changing emotional response to living in a world of explicit environmental degradation. The idea that some of the many potential responses have a greater validity than others is, I admit, something I struggle with. The opening story of ECO24, “In the Field” by Shelly Jones, cuts to the quick in that respect. An artificial intelligence working for an elderly academic, isolated in a former agricultural landscape now rendered sterile and uninhabitable from fallout, considers the inability of their employer to come to terms with what has been lost: “I nod, unsure what to say; what will be of comfort when the soil is toxic, the air polluted, and the prospect of that changing soon is unlikely. Eventually the teams will clean up the fallout, eventually the soil will absorb the radiation, but the professor will not be here when the land heals.”

My reaction to this, I confess, is unsympathetic. Why should she be there? I’m not talking in terms of age, either, or of mental competence; the professor is clearly in the early stages of dementia. But the painful truth is that the fallout described in the story, the pollution and toxicity, didn’t happen by accident. It’s a result of choices, and the professor made hers. And yes, it’s often said—and it’s true—that corporations and governments bear more responsibility for pollution and other environmental disasters than individuals, but it’s also true that those corporations and governments are able to do what they do because of the world that individuals allow to exist. If we will keep voting in politicians who gut environmental protections, then what the hell can we reasonably expect?

At some point, the choice not to haul out the guillotines is on us all.

Fiction, of course, is spectacularly good at creating worlds where the guillotines stayed in their sheds and rusted. The world that the professor inhabited—that she still inhabits, in her memories—is gone. That the AI narrating the story at least considers what might comfort her is indicative of a certain amount of generosity on its part. Then again, that AI has lost very little: The remediation of the land that is occurring within the story is one performed by machines—who, unlike the professor, may well be around when that remediation is complete. The generosity, then, costs the narrator nothing.

As readers, can we say the same? How much sympathy are we expected to give? How much do we think that we, ourselves, deserve?

That’s the question, isn’t it. Increasingly, it might be the most salient question that ecofiction can possibly explore: How much do we deserve this? What comfort do we have a right to expect, and who is going to be there to give it to us?

A quick aside: I read slush for Reckoning, which focuses on environmental justice. You would not believe the number of stories we receive in which aliens, animals, divinities, superheroes, or other nonhuman entities turn up to fix our environmental messes and generally improve the world for our benefit. These stories are hard sells, because they refuse to engage with the notion of responsibility, both personal and collective.

No one is coming to save us. We have to do it ourselves … and if we choose not to, what then? It’s the AI in the (fallout) fields, cleaning up and trying, inexplicably, to comfort. It’s the alien field workers in F. E. Choe’s “Swarm X1048,” documenting the human destruction of species and ecosystem and a single beloved dog, not able to save any of them because their ethnological practices require observation only, and even if they didn’t: how is it possible to mount a rescue on a planetary scale when the planet’s own population can’t collectively be bothered? (Notably, all the Swarm’s inclination towards comfort is reserved for the dog. It’s not guilty of anything.)

If this seems a little hard, a little too black and white, then I’d agree. We know from the real world that some people, some populations, are more responsible, and bear more guilt, than others. Responsibility may be shared, but it’s certainly not shared evenly.

Neither are consequences. In Bacon’s “The Water Runner,” for example, money to escape the waterless dystopian setting is earned through the reproductive exploitation of women such as the protagonist Zawadi. In Osahon Ize-Iyamu’s story “We the People Excluding I,” a series of well-meaning human sacrifices offer themselves up in a futile attempt to try and stave off active predation of their communities by the powerful Fox Man. The environmental reclamation workers in Steph Kwiatkowski’s “Batter and Pearl” are stuck in poverty traps that such work is effectively designed to keep them in. Furthermore, “The Plasticity of Being” by Renan Bernardo explores a world where an enzyme-bacteria system is developed so that people can eat plastic. By “people,” of course, I mean the poor, who now find it much easier to feed themselves by sifting through piles of garbage. This is implicitly accepted as a good thing by the wealthier and less vulnerable classes: “Feeding people would become a decentralized process without lots of points of failure. Costs would plummet. It would all become excruciatingly cheaper than producing any kind of food,” although readers will all realise that food will still be eaten, of course, by the people who have never been in any danger of scavenging from trash.

That so many of the ECO24 stories share this clarity of unequal responsibility and consequence is, in many ways, an indication of what is to come. These stories are not outliers, nor are they telling us anything new: They are solidly representative of the current state of knowledge in environmental justice. We know now that some populations are more responsible than others. We know now that some populations will suffer more than others.

The question, then, is—as individuals, and as communities—what are we to do about it? What ethical responses are open to us?

There are, admittedly, a number of stories in ECO24 that grapple with the idea of responsibility and atonement and the possibility (or impossibility) of comfort. “A Seder in Siberia” by Louis Evans, for example, shows a family discovering that their exile to a lifetime of climate remediation work wasn’t due to their refugee status, but to their father’s crimes against humanity (he refused to give water to people who died of thirst in a holding cell). This piece of family history is only discovered after the father, himself mentally compromised due to illness, sends his oldest son to try and negotiate a return. “I want to go home,” he says, as if his actions hadn’t materially contributed to the loss of that home, both for himself and for others. The father’s silence, over the years—neither his children nor his grandchildren are aware of his past actions—and his refusal to actively engage with those actions, is not exactly indicative of remorse. One might argue that remorse doesn’t have to be publicly expressed in order to exist, but if you let dozens of people die of thirst (and the story implies that those unfortunates were refugees themselves), then there’s that question of comfort again, and of sympathy.

And, inevitably, of forgiveness.

I have trouble with forgiveness.

*

There’s a story in here I almost didn’t mention. “Parasite’s Grief” by Katharine Tyndall is about two nonhuman species, one of which acts as a parasite on the other. Without that parasitism, the Hyella would “live larger, longer, more peacefully”—and yet the Hyella have agency and intelligence, and many of them choose the shorter, smaller, less peaceful life that comes with parasitism. There’s a long, unpleasant history of linking exploited human minorities with exploited nonhuman bodies, and I side-eye the comparison, especially when that element of voluntary choice is added to the mix. No one volunteers for slavery, for instance. Yet there’s an element of genius here in that “Parasite’s Grief” is placed, in this anthology, directly before Kelsea Yu’s “Skittering Within,” in which an infant vaccinated with the blood of suffering horseshoe crabs—they’re only animals, might as well bleed them as well as boil them alive—goes through a bodily change of her own as she ages, turning part-horseshoe crab as well. Hai’s infant exposure is not voluntary on her part, of course, but her choices as she grows, as she turns toward the nonhuman instead of the human, speak to a chosen loyalty to the exploited crabs, to their plundered bodies.

“Skittering Within” has one of the happier endings in the book, as Hai’s turn to the sea is presented as an unalloyed positive. There’s an uncomfortable question here, though, of how much exploitation is internalised, how much it is chosen—particularly, as I said, when contrasted with “Parasite’s Grief.” The genuine loss that the Teloschi parasite feels at the death of their Hyella is referred to as a natural part of life … but they still parasitise them. It’s an inescapable part of the Teloschi life cycle, and necessity is excusal. But what is necessity, and how much of our own exploitation (of others, and of ourselves) do we excuse?

It’s a choice to bleed horseshoe crabs, to offer up your body as Zawadi does, to eat plastic. To keep the guillotine in the shed.

*

Refusing forgiveness for that choice is often cruel. People do the best they can to survive in the situations in which they find themselves, and all too frequently those circumstances are not of their making. The more exploited you are, the fewer choices you have, the easier it is to sink into identification with the nonhuman—because there’s wonder in that, there is, and a focus on that wonder, that sense of communion, can drown out other options.

It’s an uncomfortable mix, complicity and forgiveness. When Hai is coming down the stairs, shrieking in pain because her mother is boiling a crab, for a moment I think she’s going to brain the woman for her indifference to the suffering of her meal and her child. Part of me wants her to. Part of me wants to do it myself. I read stories like this and I think, What’s stopping me? I like the ending to Yu’s story. I like the transformation, the escape. But escape isn’t freedom. Not for everyone, anyway. Not from everything. Increasingly, I wonder if it’s nothing more than the breath before the blade comes down.

Part of me wants that blade. Part of me wants other people to use it so I don’t have to. Part of me, clearly, is attracted to the possibility of dystopia, if only because some things will be easier to excuse.

Ecofiction does not have to be dystopian, but dystopian it mostly seems to be: a way for writers to work out the lingering, unsettling horror at the ecology around them. There’s no shortage of real-life environmental horror stories out there, and it doesn’t seem to be getting better. Dystopia sells, whether it’s on the bookshelves or on the news, but if science fiction has a history of broadcasting warnings as well as imagination, then there are stories here that offer, amidst the horror, comparatively brighter exemplars. The welcoming of refugees in Faulds’s "Love, Scotland" is one example of this, and it’s notable for being one of the few realistic examples. More frequently, successful resistance is essentially magical, as it is in Guillermo G. Mendoza’s “One with the Ground,” in which a girl with an amulet restores clear-felled forest every night.

The magical resistance stories are touching, they are. I’ve read a lot of ecofiction lately where resistance has magical overtones, as if we find it difficult to picture without the marvellous. The girl who becomes a crab, the girl who becomes forest ground. There’s beauty in the imagery. There’s hope in it, even. But it’s inspiration, not application.

I’m not knocking inspiration. We need that sense of possibility, just as we need the warning sirens of the genre. I do feel, however, that, in this anthology at least, the warning signs are the most prevalent. I certainly understand that—it’s art reflecting reality—but if this anthology is representative of the best of ecofiction, what does that tendency say about our ecological visions of the future? It says that they tend almost inevitably to the dystopian. And without the guillotines I’m no longer sure that’s enough.

Ganymede’s Men Magazine Issue #377—April 14, 1989

SECTION VII: OBITUARIES

Roger Jefferson (March 13, 1955—April 8, 1989)

Roger “Rod” Jefferson died on April 8 at home, surrounded by his many dear friends. Rod was a fierce advocate for gay rights and served as the head of the Gay and Lesbian Liberation Coalition for seven years. Even after his diagnosis, Rod continued to host salons and dinner parties filled with joy and laughter. We can only imagine all Rod might have done if only he’d had more time. A celebration of his life will be held April 22. Until we dance again, Roddy.

—Your friends

Larry Stenson

Our beloved Larry departed us on April 10, 1989 at the age of 29. He is survived by his lifemate Derek and his mother Joan. He was well known for his dashing looks and mischievous sense of humor. Larry was the cover model for Ganymede’s Men in August of 1982, and many readers will no doubt recall his thumb hooked underneath that cherry-red Speedo. It is Larry’s ultimate pleasure to know that he will remain immortal in the fantasies of many. Love ya, babe!

—Derek

Fernando Lopez / Tia Crystal

Fernando was called up to the Spirit in the Sky on April 11, 1989. He was an artist of the highest caliber most known for his performances as Tia Crystal. His love of music was legendary. He lit up the room the moment he entered. He never lost hope that he would be well again, and explored every avenue of traditional, Indio, and New Age medicine. In the end, he asked to spread this message: “My greatest pride is that I never was closed-minded. I lived to love and loved to live.” Muchos besos, amor!

—Quique & the girls

Eartha Kitty (1977—1989)

Eartha Kitty Robertson passed on April 11, 1989. She was adopted as a kitten by her father Casey Robertson. Despite being the “runt of the litter,” Eartha was playful and energetic. She adored a warm bowl of milk and chasing spots of sunlight across the floor. She brought her daddy 12 years of happiness, and he would have welcomed a thousand more. She is survived by her human daddy Casey and feline sister Kitty Pride.

—Casey Robertson

Ganymede’s Men Magazine Issue #378—April 30, 1989

SECTION II: LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

No Cats in the Crypt

Dear Gany,

I have been a longtime reader, and I am such a fan of everything your publication does for the community. I have always considered you a thoughtful publication for gay news and culture. However, in your last issue, I was insulted and appalled by your obituary column. Isn’t it bad enough that we need such a column to list the passing of lovers, friends, and gay brothers and sisters, most of whom are dying because of this goddamn AIDS crisis? The world is distressing enough without having to be subjected to an obit on somebody’s cat. Did you not think about how publishing this would detract from the solemnity and dignity of the three humans listed? I mean, my God. This is the first time that Gany has shown such bad taste in all the years I’ve been reading. Shame on the editors, and shame on Casey Robertson for even thinking of sending that obit in!

P.S. Please feel free to publish this letter if you have the balls.

—Sam, San Francisco CA

Put the Cat Back in the Bag

Dear Gany,

I usually mind my own business when it comes to this magazine. I love to read the tea in the culture section and flip through the (hot hot hot) models. Two weeks ago was the first time I sent anything into Gany, when I wrote an obituary for my dear sis Fernando (aka the legendary Tia Crystal). When I saw that you run obituaries for free, I was actually moved. That is a fine community service. But imagine my shock when I saw my tribute to Fernando’s life above a CAT’S. Make no mistake, Fernando was a fighter, but he had a painful death. As his condition worsened, I watched him turn to everything from electroshock to Santería to injecting his own urine into his arm to stay with us. Please don't make the mistake of believing the death of someone's pet compares to the death of a human being who laughed, loved, sang, and danced. I hope you take a good, long look at yourselves in the mirror tonight. Just pray that Fernando isn’t there haunting your ass!

—Quique, Houston TX

We would like to address both these letters in reference to our Issue #377 Obituary section. For the record, let us state emphatically that we take our obituary section very seriously. We pray that someday soon there will be no need for it. When we began running obituaries back in 1983, we received harsh feedback from many readers who felt the whole idea was in bad taste. Now, years later, the section has become an unfortunately thriving part of our publication. Recently, when one of our readers came to us with a pet obit, we were moved and wished to accommodate their bereavement. Several of our readers have pointed out that since most gay and lesbian people never parent children, our pets are like children to us. We do not regret running the obit for Eartha Kitty, however we do regret not creating a separate section. From now on, all pet tributes will be placed in a new, paid category: OUR FURRY FRIENDS. Thanks for your comments, advice, and readership. —Editor

SECTION III: IN OTHER NEWS

AIDS Researchers Warn Against Home Remedies

Following a conference on April 8, members of the AIDS Research and Education Symposium (ARES) warned those diagnosed with the syndrome to avoid misinformation that may lead to the use of harmful home remedies. Head of ARES Steven Hu said, “I have come across patients who believe ingesting industrial solvents like Virodene will help, or who opt for oxygen therapy instead of medicine. We know people are desperate, but the most important thing you can do is listen to your doctor and not lose hope.”

SECTION IV: AT THE MOVIES

Pet Sematary Gives Tepid Scares

The latest movie from the mind of scaremaster Stephen King offers mild thrills but ultimately falls short. Director Mary Lambert, whose current claim to fame is Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” music video, struggles to land the pacing of a real horror flick. Unfortunately, the best actor in the film is Church, the resurrected cat. If you’re looking for some real frights, I suggest checking out Gany’s News Section.

—Rob “The Movie Guy” Rossi

SECTION VII: OBITUARIES

Boppy James (November 3, 1950—April 8, 1989)

The sky cracked open when Boppy took flight

To welcome him up on a cool spring night.

The joy that he brought to us shined like the moon.

It’s a pity they called him to Heaven so soon.

Love, Wheeler

Ganymede’s Men Magazine Issue #379—May 12, 1989

SECTION II: LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Bitching About Obits

Dear Gany,

I am writing in regard to the two letters in your previous issue. I thought their comments sucked. My lover and I have three dogs that we love and treat as our children. Pets bring so much joy into a person’s life for such a brief lot of time. These readers seemed to think that a pet obituary detracted from the other obits, but I think it actually made me appreciate them more. This AIDS thing can feel like it has taken over our entire world, and it’s important for us to see that there is something else, including deaths that aren’t touched by sickness or gay-bashing or suicide. For the first time in a while, I felt a little more normal. I am glad that Gany will have a section just for pet tributes.

—Sarah, Austin TX

Go Gag on a Hairball

Dear Gany,

A pets-only obit section? Is that really necessary? I vehemently agree with the two readers who expressed their concerns in your previous issue. Frankly, I think they went a little too soft. I am appalled at your refusal to issue an apology and redact the obit for that cat! Arguing that pets are gay people’s children does an incredible disservice to the Gay and Lesbian Parents Association that you advertise in this very magazine. BE REAL. Our gay brothers and sisters are dying every day from a horrific and debilitating disease. Why the hell do you think this is okay?

—Arnold, Denver CO

We hear and appreciate your candid feedback. We would like to note that we have never “redacted” an obituary and would never do so except on the request of the sender. —Editor

Animal Lover on the Warpath

Dear Gany,

I can’t believe the two ridiculous letters you had in the April 30 issue. Some people are so heartless it turns my stomach! The people who wrote those letters obviously have no idea how much a devoted pet can mean to someone, especially a gay person who lives alone. My gorgeous, lovable cat Winston is the best friend I have. When I was kicked out of my family’s home, taking in Winston brought me back to the land of the living. I raised him with my lover until he passed two years ago, and now Winston is all I have to remember him. My cat’s death will mean more to me than anyone else in my life. So, go ahead and create a column to appease these callous queers. Most of the people I have known who ended up in your obits were just dogs or alley cats, anyway!

—Clyde, New Orleans LA

As stated in our previous issue, Ganymede’s Men will accept paid pet obituaries which will be placed in a newly created section called OUR FURRY FRIENDS. —Editor

SECTION III: IN OTHER NEWS

Kansas Church Protests Homosexuality

The Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas made national news with its virulent protests of homosexuality. Founder Fred Phelps told a Topeka paper, “America is doomed for its acceptance of homosexuality. God sent AIDS to destroy the homosexual just as he destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. Any person who wishes to take part in Eternal Life must renounce his faggot ways.” Gay and lesbian activists have lobbied local representatives to speak out against Phelps and his church to little success.

SECTION VIIb: OUR FURRY FRIENDS

Rocky the Chocolate Lab (1980—1989)

Rocky was a 9-year-old chocolate Labrador retriever who tragically passed after being bitten by a rattlesnake. He was a loyal and loveable dog. He was happiest when he was swimming in a lake or chasing ducks at the park. We miss you, boy.

—Eddie & Jake

Chiquita

Chiquita was a spunky parakeet who died at the ripe old age of thirty-two (I think). I inherited her from my lifemate Pancho, who passed eight years ago from pneumonia. Chiqui and I kept each other company through dark times with many conversations. She loved cracking open pecans and watching Dynasty, during which she would often call the women, “¡Hijas de la gran puta!” I know she and Pancho are cussing out those whores together now.

—Jorge

Mister Fluffernutter (January 1, 1981—May 9, 1989)

Mister Fluffernutter III Esq. was a purebred Persian longhair who departed at the age of eight due to an unfortunate run-in with a garage door. He was well-loved and deeply cherished throughout his life by his two mommies. He loved tuna and belly rubs. He disliked men with beards. A celebration of life will be held on May 15, 1989.

—Caroline and Susan

Ganymede’s Men Magazine Issue #380—May 27, 1989

SECTION VII: OBITUARIES

On the request of the sender, the Editor is submitting a correction to Issue #377 for “Eartha Kitty.” This obituary has been redacted, as Eartha Kitty is no longer deceased.

Ganymede’s Men Magazine Issue #381—June 8, 1989

SECTION II: LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Questions Regarding Obit Correction

Dear Readers,

We have received many calls and letters regarding a correction submitted to our previous issue [Issue #380]. We have reached out to Mr. Robertson, who requested the correction, and have printed his written statement in full below. —Editor

Dear Gany Readers,

Over the past couple months, I have mourned the death of my beloved Eartha Kitty. I loved her as a full member of my family, which is why I felt it was appropriate to submit an obit to Gany. I never intended for this to create so much drama in the magazine, let alone create an entire new section. Honestly, my grief was such that I have been unable to keep up with the back and forth over the past few issues.

I do not know if it is possible for anyone to conceive of the absolute shock I felt when, a few weeks ago, I came home to find Eartha Kitty eating up the bowl I had put out for her sister, Kitty Pride. For those who might ask: No, this was not just a cat that looked like my Eartha. Eartha was born with one back leg shorter than the other three. This did not affect her mobility drastically, but it did give her a slight limp throughout her life. The cat that was eating Kitty Pride’s food had this limp.

And, yes, I am sure that Eartha was dead. Her decline was slow, painful, and costly. By the end, she had to be hand-fed until she finally “went away,” and I discovered her body beneath the TV stand. I had her cremated and placed inside a wonderful jeweled box. When this new cat appeared in my home, I went to open the box and found it totally empty.

I am at a total loss for an explanation. She is my Eartha—only, I would say, maybe seven years younger. She doesn’t possess the slowness or gray hairs that she did in her later years. When I brought Eartha to the vet, he was convinced that this is a different but coincidentally similar animal. When I told him about Eartha’s ashes, he suggested that I might have thrown them out in a fit of grief-induced delirium. What a horrible thought … but fine, maybe. I really don’t think so.

If anybody knows someone I can reach out to regarding this, I have given Gany my contact information. If not … Well, I hope that you all can someday feel as unreasonably blessed as I do.

—Casey Robertson, Los Angeles CA

Ganymede’s Men Magazine Issue #382—June 25, 1989

SECTION II: LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Zombie Cats

Dear Gany,

You have got to be pulling my leg. Cats are rising from the dead now? If this is a joke, it’s a sorry one. I am beside myself thinking that this was published next to columns about serious subjects like AIDS research and ACT UP protests. I cannot imagine what possessed you to share a letter from someone who is either a raving lunatic or a shameless attention whore. Rest assured, you have lost one loyal reader at least!

—George, Phoenix AZ

The Cat Came Back

Dear Gany,

I was extremely concerned by Mr. Robertson’s statement regarding the resurrection of Eartha Kitty. If he is to be believed, there are darker implications than I think Mr. Robertson is prepared to face. After the ascension of my dear friend the legendary Tia Crystal, I, too, was contacted by dark energies that promised delicious and perverse salves to my mourning. I fear that Mr. Robertson has unknowingly opened himself to such demons. I urge him to consult a priest, medium, imam, or curandero depending on his spiritual inclinations. I am happy to make a referral if Gany would connect us.

—Quique, Houston TX

8 More Lives

Dear Gany,

I was surprised and delighted to read about the return of Eartha Kitty from beyond the grave. I’m sure many people doubt Mr. Robertson’s account, but if you own a cat, you know they have ways of getting around anything. Maybe death is no exception. I can only imagine how elated I would feel if my wonderful Winston appeared in my kitchen after I thought he had left for good. Things have been so hard. The Reagan years were hell, and Bush is hardly an improvement. Even if we were able to cure this AIDS problem, there would still be a hole in the ozone and massacres in China and war in the Middle East. The system is a slaughterhouse. So, good for you, Eartha Kitty. You beat the system. I just hope you left the door open for some other furry friends to follow.

—Clyde, New Orleans LA

SECTION VII: OBITUARIES

Derek Pierce

Derek’s sudden death on June 20 left all who knew him in a state of shock. He will be laid to rest with his dearest Larry, who passed earlier this year. Derek was a passionate photographer whose work was featured in Playgirl, New York Magazine, as well as Ganymede’s Men. Despite how it ended, he will be remembered for his delicious humor and fearlessness. We love you, D. We only wish we’d had more time.

—Your pals

Ganymede’s Men Magazine Issue #383—July 8, 1989

SECTION VIIb: OUR FURRY FRIENDS

On the request of the sender, the Editor is submitting a correction to Issue #379 for “Rocky the Chocolate Lab.” This obituary has been redacted, as Rocky is no longer deceased.

On the request of the sender, the Editor is submitting a correction to Issue #379 for “Chiquita.” This obituary has been redacted, as Chiquita is no longer deceased.

On the request of the sender, the Editor is submitting a correction to Issue #379 for “Mister Fluffernutter.” This obituary has been redacted, as Mr. Fluffernutter III Esq. is no longer deceased.

Ganymede’s Men Magazine Issue #384—July 22, 1989

SECTION II: LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Has Anyone Talked to a Scientist?

Dear Gany,

The past few weeks have flipped my world upside down. Dead pets are returning like Night of the Living Dead! I woke up two days ago and found my childhood Doberman Smokey laying his head on my pillow the way he would when I was ten. My girlfriend screamed so loud, it shook the house! Smokey’s been gone for at least thirty years, but now he’s got puppy energy. This seems big, yet I haven’t seen anything about it on the news. Is it possible this has something to do with radiation? I heard of some freaky stuff coming out of Chernobyl, but nothing like this. Why is nobody talking about this?

—Florence, Santa Fe NM

Lazarus Lizards

Dear Gany,

Is anybody thinking about the larger implications of these pet resurrections? I am as happy as anyone else that my three iguanas are back in my life, but are they immortal? If they die again, will they come back a second time? My beagle seems to want nothing to do with them, so should I never plan on owning another pet? Do I have to plan to will them to somebody when I die? Death is the natural way of things, and this just feels wrong.

—Vito, Boca Raton FL

The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Eulogy

Dear Gany,

I have noticed that it’s only the pets of my gay and lesbian friends that are coming back. My nephew lost his pet hamster a few months ago, and that thing is still in a shoebox in my sister’s backyard. But my gay friends across the country have been welcoming back pets of every size and species. It is clear that we love differently than our heterosexual peers—an unnatural love, some have made us believe. Is it possible that our specific breed of love is capable of unimaginable feats?

—Raj, San Jose CA

Ask the Animals, and They Will Teach You

Dear Gany,

I’m sure I am not the only one who has undergone a great deal of spiritual searching over these past weeks. In my letter published in a previous issue, I warned that the return of Miss Eartha Kitty might be the result of a malevolent spirit. However, I have reassessed my stance given the breadth of these miracles. I believe that this is a great re-harmonizing. Our gay communities have been so plagued by death, I am certain that this is the Universe balancing the scales, even if it is a bit drastic. After all the suffering these past years, why not return to us those innocent creatures we love?

—Quique, Houston TX

SECTION III: IN OTHER NEWS

Desecrated Grave in LA Possible Hate Crime

On the morning of October 21, the Los Angeles Police Department responded to a call from Evergreen Cemetery in East Los Angeles. A security guard had discovered that the grave of Roger Jefferson had been dug up, and his remains removed. LAPD has yet to release any identifying information regarding the perpetrators or theories on the whereabouts of the deceased’s remains, though they have said they are potentially considering this a hate crime given Mr. Jefferson’s public work in gay rights activism. They are welcoming any information that anyone might have about the incident.

Ganymede’s Men Magazine Issue #385—August 5, 1989

SECTION VII: OBITUARIES

On the request of the sender, the Editor is submitting a correction to Issue #377 for “Roger Jefferson.” This obituary has been redacted, as Mr. Jefferson is no longer deceased.

Editor’s Note: Due to clerical oversight, Ganymede’s Men Magazine Issues #386—#388 were not archived.

Ganymede’s Men Magazine Issue #389—September 30, 1989

SECTION I: TOP STORIES

Gay Resurrections Stump Officials

Members of the medical establishment continue to be flummoxed by the resurrections of deceased people and animals. Though reluctant to make definitive claims, a spokesperson from the Center for Disease Control admitted that, from preliminary surveys, the resurrected individuals appear to be “majority homosexuals.” As people return from the dead, government officials continue to urge them to register with their local municipality so that records can be up to date.

SECTION II: LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Too Many Tin Hat Tammies

Dear Gany,

I am sick and tired of reading paranoid letters about how these resurrections are some big government conspiracy. Why the hell would Bush want a bunch of queers back? It just doesn’t make sense, and you’re making the rest of us look like loonies! There are legitimate questions around the reintegration of the resurrected into the workforce and overpopulation. Let’s not pollute the conversation with inane theories.

—DeWayne, Corvallis OR

Resurrection Support Group

Dear Gany,

I’m just writing to let your readers know that the Gay and Lesbian Center in San Francisco is starting a national support group for recently resurrected individuals to aid in their re-acclimation to living. You can contact the Center for more information!

—Sam, San Francisco CA

Two Lovers Returned from the Dead

Dear Gany,

Harry and I dated for five years before he tragically drowned in 1981. Three years later, I met Armando, who passed last year. Both are back and expect me to be theirs. Harry is my first love, but I’ve been sharing my life with Armando up until just a year ago. Has anybody else found themselves in a similar predicament? How’s a girl to choose?

—Liam, Austin TX

Newly Resurrected Seeking Old Flame

Dear Gany,

I came back a few weeks ago and I’ve been looking for my lover of eight years, Alonzo. We met in Nevada but I’m afraid he might have moved. Would it be possible to create another section for reconnecting the newly resurrected with their loved ones? Maybe “Resurrection Reconnection”?

—Cole, Reno NV

If other readers would have interest in such a section, please reach out to us! —Editor

Pump the Breaks

Dear Gany,

My lover of thirteen years returned 2 weeks ago, looking exactly as he did the day we met. Before his health declined, we loved taking strolls along the beach and perusing art galleries. Since his return, he’s been insistent on mile-long jogs and is planning a tour of Europe. He has also introduced MUCH more variety in the bedroom than ever before. He doesn’t seem to appreciate that he has the body of a much younger man, and I do NOT. I’ve also noticed that he is way spacier than before. Sometimes, I swear he sees things that aren’t there. It’s totally unnerving! Of course, I am incredibly grateful to have him back, but I just ask everyone to have some grace for the partners of the resurrected.

—Miles, San Diego CA

Bite Your Tongues, Curious Cats

Dear Gany,

I am shocked to hear people being so judgmental of the resurrected. If YOU died and returned from the Afterlife, wouldn’t you come back a bit different? A bit haunted? They have connected to the Spirits, amores! No need to be shady about it. I am also disappointed to hear so many people hounding their friends to tell them about the Afterlife. Some things are just not to be known! If you were recently resurrected, I suggest you tell those curious cats what my friend the legendary Tia Crystal says: “Baby, I’m back. Now, love me while I’m here!”

—Quique, Houston TX

What’s Next?

Dear Gany,

I keep hearing people asking the same unanswerable questions about these resurrections. But the fact is they HAPPENED. The country’s eyes are on us, and the population of resurrected is only growing. So, why aren’t we using this momentum as an opportunity to organize?

—Clyde, New Orleans LA

Rise Up for the Living

Dear Gany,

Longtime reader, first time writing in. I know folks have a lot of questions for us resurrected. Believe me, we’ve got questions too! I may not have many answers, but I’ll tell you what I do have: energy! I feel like a wound-up tinker toy 24/7! After connecting with others in my situation, that seems to be a common thread between all of us. We’re back, we’re grateful, and we just want to DO something! Why not put all this pent-up energy towards lobbying for more AIDS research and pushing for protections for our community? Let’s mobilize!

—Rod, Los Angeles CA

SECTION IV: AT THE MOVIES

Out of the Grave but Still in the Closet

A certain Hollywood actor who passed on three decades ago in an auto accident seems to be walking the streets again. Still, he continues to deny deny deny cavorting with the fae folk. Is he an exception to the rule, or doth he protest too much?

—Rob “The Movie Guy” Rossi

SECTION VII: OBITUARIES

Carl Michaelsson (February 5, 1955—September 1, 1989)

Carl was laid to rest surrounded by his loved ones. He was a glittering light in all our lives. His laughter was infectious, and he kept his sense of humor to the very end. To echo his own final words: We’ll be seeing you again very soon!

—Your Dearest Friends

Editor: Austin Dewar

First Reader: Austin Dewar

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors

The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts,

In Fu’s last work, the short story collection Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century (2022), many of the stories revolve around real and imagined technologies’ effects on how people connect with each other. Eleanor’s story here is not an exception to this trend in Fu’s work. Her therapy practice is virtual, and she moves into an isolated valley with no neighbors. Her mother has just died, and she is single after a nasty breakup. She is isolated, to put it lightly. Her attempts to make awkward conversation with cashiers are her attempts to try to find in-person human connection, and it is no wonder that she starts thinking of her patients on the other side of the screen as ghosts. There are multiple times she thinks about her old in-person practice and how ineffectual she feels without the ability to see her patients face to face. In our current world, even though the rise of remote work has opened up a great deal of freedom when it comes to where to work, a number of jobs have settled into a hybrid format for this very reason: Eleanor struggles with loneliness from moving to a new, hostile place, the nature of her job, and grief from her mother’s death.

Eleanor and her mother’s relationship is the driving force in The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts. When her mother was alive, their relationship was best described as codependent. Lele Fan, Eleanor’s mother, raised Eleanor by herself. In college and graduate school, Eleanor struggled with transitioning into adulthood and independence. Lele told her to move back home when she was in graduate school. From then on, Lele took care of all of Eleanor’s household chores and any tasks beyond her school or later work. Lele would go so far as to “peel apples and pears with a knife, slice them inside her palm, and hand-feed segments to Eleanor,” who initially is apprehensive but later appreciates that it “kept her fingers and keyboard clean.” When Lele becomes sick with cancer, Eleanor has to care for her instead, giving her medicine despite her protests. When she was well, Lele handled secretarial duties, acting almost as Eleanor’s personal assistant; after her death, Eleanor has to confront all the life skills she has never developed because her mother handled almost all the mundane tasks of life, and she struggles with calling insurance companies and arranging repairs. I would classify The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts as a coming-of-age story as Eleanor slowly learns to tackle these tasks in her grief. Similarly, Fu’s other two novels, For Today I Am a Boy (2010) and The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore (2018) both center the transition from childhood to adulthood; it is the speculative trappings of The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts that the other two books lack.

The world of The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts initially appears identical to our own, but the constant rain and mentions of terraforming to create housing developments reveal that it is a not-so-distant future in which strange weather has become commonplace. For most of the book, it is raining, and characters comment on the constant rain. Eleanor's house floods when it rains and her lock breaks because there is no awning above her door and the nonstop rain damages it. Other characters talk about mudslides destroying nearby low-lying towns, and the valley Eleanor has moved into turns out to contain ghosts. The book leaves unanswered why exactly the previous property developer committed suicide, whether the cause was ghosts or something more mundane, but his death establishes early on that even the richest and most powerful humans are still subject to the whims of Mother Nature. Eleanor is unused to handling flooding houses and home repairs, due to being a renter and the fact that her mother handled most of these logistical issues, and she struggles with calling insurance companies and figuring out the right contractor to handle repairs.

One of Eleanor’s clients at her virtual therapy practice, a man named David, comes to his initial intake session talking about how his wife says the news is making him too negative and liable to start fights. He tells her, “I feel like every day, there’s some new horror. Some new, specific detail, proof of the planet dying even faster than we thought … I feel like the entire country, the entire world, is constantly in the middle of another natural disaster. Every week there’s a once-in-a-century event somewhere.” The only advice Eleanor can offer him is to stay off the news and focus on what he can do to be more present with his wife or actively engage in causes he cares about. Eleanor herself, however, recognizes that this is an inadequate solution as the weather becomes more and more unpredictable. Yet, instead of lingering on existential dread, she is preoccupied with the many repairs her new home needs, as it floods in her new house every time it rains. Eleanor’s world is not one that is kind to the people living there, even as she is busy grieving and dealing with seemingly small concerns in the face of climate change.

The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts does not contain any specific setting information other than that the valley seems to be somewhere in North America. The reader has no idea where in the world it is set, which is a purposeful omission given how Fu’s previous two novels had highly specific settings—Montreal in For Today I am a Boy and a summer camp in the Pacific Northwest in The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore. In contrast, The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts could take anywhere in North America and at any time, given that no information on either point is given. Mentions of a pandemic and a lockdown recent enough that characters talk about it initially made me wonder whether it was taking place around our own time, but it is never mentioned whether the lockdown was due to COVID or another disease. This vagueness adds dread to the events that take place in the book, a sense of the unplaceability of time and place that works well with the ghosts that exist out of time in Eleanor’s house.

Even though I found Eleanor and her mother's relationship to be unhealthily codependent when Lele was alive, I found myself rooting for Eleanor in her struggles to try to define herself without her mother. Who are we without other people? This book wants us to ask this question as it shows us Eleanor’s own ghosts, people both living and dead who follow her around when she has nobody else. Kim Fu’s writing at the sentence level is deceptively simplistic. It hides how much her work makes me think.

I have found this problem fairly endemic to the romcomantasy (eh? eh?) subgenre to which McCollum’s debut belongs. Oh, I am so tired of reading book after book where nobody has ever done a single thing wrong, or, even if they have, it was all a terrible misunderstanding. I cannot bear these characters with personalities as smooth as Ken dolls, who run dear little retail shops in interchangeable Fantasylands and placeless middle Americas, unbothered by problems of inventory or human frailty. I am going to chew right through the bars of my enclosure, and go rampaging all around the countryside, if I am called upon to read one more book where a character’s big secret finally comes out, and the other character is like: “No problem, babe, I know your heart, and I understand that, while you initially had a scheme to sabotage my dreams, you changed your mind over the course of our courtship. Due to the trust we have built together, I understand this perfectly without your having to explain it.”

Not once more. If I read this sort of thing again, down will come the power lines. To the incinerator with the paper stores. The printing presses I will break like the Luddites of old. Chomp will go my teeth upon the spindly fingers of the TikTok tastemakers or whoever’s responsible for this. A romance is just so much more interesting if the two love interests have personality traits … I was going to finish this sentence with something like “that don’t mesh perfectly without effort,” but really I will just let the sentence end at “traits.” A romance is much more interesting if the two love interests are recognizable as alive human people. I would like us to get back to that, please.

David, the protagonist of Into the Midnight Wood (and this is a single-POV romance, refreshing in this era of dual-POV supremacy), has been living with, and frustrated by, his hot chaotic roommate Meredith for five years. And I would also be annoyed with Meredith: Meredith sleeps with all their third roommates so it’s a revolving door of third roommates; he leaves mugs and glitter all over. He wanders into the dangerous magical woods at the edge of their property and gathers herbs and chats to the Midnight Mice with very little regard for the possibly sinister forces that lurk in the forest. You may argue that Meredith is a manic pixie dream girl, and I shan’t disagree with you, but McCollum is not shying away from the real material conditions of living with someone like this. Mugs. Mugs everywhere! Never the trash taken out or the dishes done! Meredith I would kick twice, sharply, in the shins.

David is also kind of the worst. He’s that difficult combination of judgmental and resistant to change that means he’s constantly complaining to himself about circumstances he has every ability to alter should he so choose. He’s gotten into a habit of tossing not-very-nice banter at Meredith. He gets so locked in to a given life goal (getting a promotion at work) that he lets himself lose track of the emotions of the people around him. On a day when he was not wearing a button-up and couldn’t fact-check me, I would say to David, “Why do you always have one of the middle buttons on your shirt askew? Is that a fashion thing?”; and then he would be stressed about his button-up shirts forever afterwards.

Is this a good book? I don’t know. What even does it mean to be good? The fantasy elements could be more clearly delineated. Non-humans live and conduct their business alongside humans, but this seems not to have materially affected geopolitical history, since Wales and Appalachia still exist. David and Meredith live on the edge of the Midnight Wood, a magic forest where time and space don’t follow the usual rules. I found its parameters and personal relationship to Meredith confusing, but possibly in that way common when the author has several further books in mind, perhaps ones that will feature Meredith becoming ever more powerful and unearthly at the periphery of other people’s love stories. (I would endorse this, by the way. [This would rule.]) But within the confines of this one book, I couldn’t tell you with a gun to my head what purpose, for example, the Midnight Mice serve in maintaining the forward march of time.

I can say with certainty, though, that I did not welcome the return of the implied-Black best friend (Meredith’s) who punctuates more of his sentences with the words “you feel me?” than is strictly natural. He’s there mainly to be protective of Meredith. This is, I admit, the mandated role of the best friend in a romance novel, but the author’s discomfort with writing a Black character is so palpable that you wish they’d just not bothered. I can’t propose a fix for this—it’s weird when white authors populate books with only-white characters, and quite often, as here, it’s weird when they very uncomfortably don’t. (The ideal solution would be to address the problem at the root by eliminating white supremacy, but I suppose that’s beyond the scope of this book review.)

Into the Midnight Wood is good, at least, in its ability to supply the chief thing I care about from a romance: a pair of characters trying to get their emotional houses in good enough order to be in love with each other. Like everyone, like all of us, they are both a little bit terrible. I am so starved in general for romance protagonists who are a little bit terrible that I did not care that the specifics of David and Meredith’s story arc were heavy-handed. One of the novel’s precipitating events, for instance, is that a psychic gives Meredith a charm to reveal hidden things, which means that he gets less good at concealing his depression and self-worth issues from David. Elsewhere, the reasons why David and Meredith end up hosting an event for Meredith’s terrible family, giving David a front-row seat to how these jackasses treat him, are contrived. And you know what? I don’t care. Great. I love it. Gimme.

Likewise, McCollum is stellar at writing conversations in which the leads are plausibly, but consistently, misunderstanding each other. It’s one of the harder stunts for a romance novel to pull off, because the failure mode leaves readers complaining that the whole conflict could have been resolved or avoided if the characters had just had one single conversation with each other. David and Meredith can’t stop having conversations. It’s just that they’re not hearing what the other person is telling them. Here’s their discussion right after the first time they have sex, about midway through the book:

David stood abruptly. “You forgot to give me the speech, you know,” he remarked as he pulled his boxers back on.

Slowly, Meredith got to his feet. “David, I—”

“No, no, it’s all right,” David forestalled him. “I know it by heart: I’m not in love with you. I’ve got no plans to fall in love with you and this isn’t going to change that, and it’s all right if that means you’d rather not do anything.” Even if it was a bit late for that last part now … “As you said, the two of us together—could you even imagine? The very idea is absurd.”[…]

After a silence that lasted a beat too long, Meredith gave a lopsided smile. “Yeah,” he said. “Of course it’d never work, would it? You and me, we’d be at each other’s throats every minute. S’pose you’ll be wanting the shower? You can go first, I’ll put the kettle on.”

This works because McCollum has set this up from the beginning. We’re well aware that Meredith always gives this little speech to people he sleeps with, because it’s a conflict that comes up in the book’s very first scene. So I don’t need much persuading that David would think of himself as the latest in a long line of sexual conquests, and that Meredith would take this little speech to mean that David doesn’t want him. It’s good! It’s elegant! This is the content the people (me) desire!

I also deeply appreciated the book’s casual resistance to tidy (boring) scripts around sex and gender. Meredith wears dresses and sparkly clothes and flower tiaras, and there’s a running gag that he’s allergic to labeling himself as one thing or another. David takes a moment for a pronoun check about midway through the book, which I really loved. It’s rare to read about two characters with years of familiarity between them checking in about pronouns, outside of the context of a coming-out story. When they have penetrative sex, they also have a quick check-in about who will be doing what, ruffling David’s instinctive assumption that they both mutually understand he’d be topping. Here again, the warmth of my positive response may owe less to what this book is doing, and more to what other books are not. It felt really refreshing to be reminded that even quite compatible people can’t read each other’s minds or magically intuit each other’s preferences. Having these conversations is what building intimacy looks like.

I’m going to say something now that will sound like an insult; but walk with me, because it will turn out to be a very high compliment, albeit current trends in publishing will be catching some strays along the way. Into the Midnight Wood is not for everyone. You could say that Meredith is too twee, that David spends too much time being a jerk and not enough time redeeming himself, that it’s aggravating when these two characters won’t just talk about their feelings. I would know what you meant. I wouldn’t argue. But Into the Midnight Wood feels like the book the author wanted to write. I didn’t, perhaps, realize until I was midway through it how badly I’ve needed that.

So many of the books in the cozy romantasy space (I know I said romcomantasy before, but I’ve lost the courage of my convictions since then) feel like cynical marketing strategies between two covers, books that endeavor to capture the largest readership by making their plots and their characters as anodyne as possible. I crave books with enough specificity that I can say they are not for everyone; the alternative, I think, is books that are not for anyone. Books that are, essentially, for the algorithm.

Real people are annoying, and you may carve that on my tombstone. Alexandra McCollum need not visit my grave to learn this truth. Refreshingly, they already know.

Please send in your mycelial pitches to gautam.strangehorizons@gmail.com.

For word-count, formats, and remuneration, please see here.

Transcript

Critical Friends Episode 21: On Style

Dan Hartland: Welcome to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast. I’m Dan Hartland, and in this episode I’ll be joined by Paul Kincaid, a returning guest of the show and most recently author of the excellent review collection Colourfields, and by the poet and critic Dawn Macdonald, whose Northerny was published last year by the University of Alberta Press.

In every episode of Critical Friends, we discuss SFF reviewing: what it is, why we do it, how it’s going. In this episode, we tackle the question of style. What is it? How do we know it when we read it, and why does it have such a tense relationship with SFF authors? And reviewers. Dawn and Paul talked me through prose and poetry criticism and close reading, and together we poke around a bit at the thorny question of what style in science fiction and fantasy might mean and how those of us who write about SF might do so with more attention to the words themselves.

We began by trying to define our terms. When it comes to style, it turns out this ain’t easy.

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: Thank you both for joining me for this conversation about style, and especially style in SFF—although we can discuss whether that’s even a separate topic of conversation.

One of the reasons I was really pleased that both of you have written about style recently for Strange Horizons is because it seems to me that so few do. I mean, we will now get so many letters of comment in telling me that, in fact, loads of people write about style and I’m just not reading the right reviews or whatever it is! But it feels to me that we write, in science fiction criticism especially, but elsewhere too, much more about content than we do about form.

So your two reviews coming so close to each other made me think, okay, this is probably the only opportunity I will get all year to do an episode on style. But it struck me. And, while we were talking just before we started, I know that you both agree that can be difficult even to know what style is.

Paul Kincaid: Yeah it is.

Dan Hartland: So I thought we might start with that. Paul, why don’t you kick us off? Because it was you that said most vociferously before we began that no one knows what style is. So why don’t you tell us?

Paul Kincaid: My take on style? Any work of fiction, poetry, drama, whatever has a lot going on in it. You know, you’ve got characterization, you’ve got setting, you’ve got the story itself. You’ve got meanings and references and all sorts of other things, but that’s all below the surface. The surface is style. Style is what takes you from the words on the page into what is going on within the story.

Dawn Macdonald: Everything has a style, but the style is not always calling attention to itself in a really obvious way. And so there’s an anecdote that I was thinking about on my way over to my office here. Isaac Asimov talks about somewhere a fan letter that he received where the gentleman said, “Dr. Asimov, I love your stories. I usually hate reading, but when I open one of your books, I don’t feel like I’m reading at all.” And Asimov thought this was an amazing, wonderful fan letter because really his goal was not to have the linguistic interface standing in the way of the story or calling attention to itself separate from story. So almost an anti-style.

But at the same time, when you read Asimov, it sounds like Asimov. Like, he has a voice, he has a style. You do have a sense of him as distinct even from other writers from that era, like Arthur C. Clarke, who are writing very plot driven, very transparent type of prose.

But each of them kind of has their unique way that they do it. But when we are talking about the works that that we reviewed recently—C. F. Ramuz that I reviewed and, Paul, the verse novel that you reviewed—I think those are works where style of the prose really calls attention to itself as a significant part of the experience of reading this text.

Paul Kincaid: Yeah. You couldn’t discuss either of those books without talking about style because you are missing fifty percent or more of what is going on on the page. They are rare, though. It is all too easy not to mention style when you are reviewing books. So many books try to be transparent, which is itself a style, but there’s also, let’s face it, in science fiction so much absolute flat writing that could be an office memo as much of the story. I read so many of those.

Dan Hartland: I’d really like to get into science fiction’s relationship with style specifically, because feels to me to be the greatest push-pull of relationships. But let’s stick briefly to this idea of what style more generally is.

I’m really struck by what Dawn says, that everything has a style, right? But that some things are stylier than others! We talk about stylists sometimes, don’t we, by which we mean, I think, writers that, as Paul says, call attention to their style, that use their style in a very ostentatious or visible or clear way.

John Keene, the writer, has defined literary style as kind of the material articulation, I think he said, of whatever the author’s trying to say, right? So whatever the author is trying to write down, style becomes the kind of materiality of how they do that—their choice of diction, their syntax, all of this stuff.

And as Dawn says, some of these choices, some of these material articulations, are more kind of textured than others. Let’s dig in briefly, then to the reviews, to try and get a sense of what that means in practice. So, Dawn, talk to us about the Ramuz. I mean, your review of this book was itself a beautiful exercise in style, I thought it was so, so well written. But yeah: Let’s talk a little bit about why you were so attracted to the style of this book and so struck by how it behaved.

Dawn Macdonald: Well, it’s an interesting book because not only is it a work in translation—so we’re looking at how the translator dealt with the style of the original (and I did not read the original, I do read some French but not well enough to really make that comparison for myself and I don’t have it on hand), so we get the layers of how the translators worked with the style of the original, the style of the original, the style of the translator—we’ve also got the fact that it’s an older book.

So, it came out in the 1920s and I’m a big fan of writing from that era. There’s a lot of really cool stuff that went on in that era—a bit nascent for science fiction, but I felt like this book really situated itself within modernism, it had some aspects that related to other writers of the period, like Thomas Mann. It wasn’t Jocyean in exactly, but it had some of those elements of being a bit experimental in how it approached narrative. I felt like that was an aspect of what was going on, kind of as much as any story that it was telling.

And this was in particular a book where there was not really much of a plot. Like, the plot kind of happens on page one, right, where they give you the premise and then it’s just kind of the unfolding of that premise and you could probably predict everything that’s going to happen. So it’s more about situating the reader inside an experience of being a person who is in the last days of the Earth, where the end is inevitable, and facing mortality—facing not just your own mortality, but the mortality of the planet, of the species and what that might feel like. So it’s more experiential, I guess, as a book rather than story. It’s trying to put you inside and let you get into a mind-frame or almost a spiritual frame, and it’s doing that by kind of casting a spell.

Paul Kincaid: By coincidence, I’ve just read a book called Stranger Than Fiction by Edwin Frank, which is … well, its subtitle is Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel.

And it makes very interesting point about Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemingway, that style of writing at that time—the 1920s, just post-First World War—where the emphasis was on the sentence rather than the whole thing. It sounds like that applies to your book, Dawn. In Frank’s book, he made the analogy that it’s like you are doing a painting and the artistry is in the brush strokes not in the finished picture.

Dawn Macdonald: Yeah. And I would say that the emphasis is on the sentence and also the emphasis is on inhabiting a consciousness. So if we think about Virginia Woolf and Mrs. Dalloway, right, where it’s stream of consciousness or Ulysses, where it’s stream of consciousness, I would not say that Into The Sun by CF Ramuz is exactly stream of consciousness. It isn’t that, but it is about situating you inside of a consciousness, a conscious experience, kind of inhabiting fragments of moments that piece together.

Paul Kincaid: Yeah, it’s when you say that there is no real story in it. It’s trying to put an experience into words rather than trying to put a narrative into words, which is also what I felt was the case in the verse novel I reviewed, because I find that absolutely fascinating. But you can do things with words rather than just do a straight story. I’ve been writing something recently about the New Wave, and the big controversy when the New Wave was going in on the mid-sixties was: They were bringing in literary style. They were bringing elements from the novel, from the modernists and so on, and the traditionalists were saying, “We don’t want any of that. Science fiction is all about just the story. We don’t want any of this fancy stuff going around it. We just want the story.”

And actually, when you look at some of the things, the stories that they were extolling, they’re virtually unreadable now.

Dan Hartland: The modernism thing I think is really important to the reasons for and the ways in which science fiction began to have this kind of difficult relationship with style. And it’s partly because the modernists themselves aligned themselves against the so-called realists, the H. G. Wells and the Jules Vernes. And so the inheritors of that tradition were like, “Well, OK, we’ll do our thing and it will be different. It won’t have this style stuff.” And so there’s kind of a mutual chauvinism going on there.

Paul Kincaid: Yes.

Dan Hartland: Which I think persists, for all the improvements in the position, shall we say, since that time—the New Wave being being one of the big shifts—there remains, I think, a kind of skepticism of style.

Dawn Macdonald: But I do think anything that has a really distinctive style that’s so noticeable to the reader is polarizing, right? So readers will love it or hate it, but it’s a strong flavor. It can be like cilantro, where half the population loves it, half the population just genetically hates it.

Someone I know is a big reader of a kind of action-driven fantasy, and the way that she would characterize a good book is mostly about pacing. Right? That it pulls you in, that you stay with the story, that you enjoy it, you get to the end, you feel satisfied and good. Something that has a really pronounced kind of style might feel like it’s standing in between you and that experience that you’re looking for—like, it’s extraneous. It’s in the way, it’s unnecessary.

And I get that and I think that can be done poorly, where it really is extraneous and it really is standing in the way. But it can also be done as experimental literature. And I think that science fiction is such a capacious genre that it has space for a lot of experimentation on almost every level of … what even is a book, what even is a story?

It’s interesting you mentioned the New Wave. Like, I grew up in a bit of an isolated situation, and so kind of reading whatever I could get my hands on. And sometimes that was a box of mouldy paperbacks that someone had in their shed, right? And you’re like, “Hey, can I have those?” And so there was at least one of those boxes that was New Wave, but I didn’t know that it was. I didn’t know what that was! All I knew was that this was some weird, fourteen genders, every possible kind of thing that could happen socially from that. And some very interesting kind of styles of writing.

And in some ways I think that probably set me off towards longer term path towards experimental poetry and really seeing that range of what words can do.

Dan Hartland: Paul, your most recent review was not about a prose novel at all. It was about a verse novel. And you talk a little bit in there about how those two forms or mediums work differently. And of course, Dawn, you’re a poet, so I thought we’d be remiss not to talk a little bit about poetic style as well.

The book we’re talking about here is Syncopation by Whitney French. Talk to us a little bit about that, because we went back and forth a tiny bit on this review where I was like, “Yeah, but Paul”—and it’s similar, actually, Dawn, now I think about it, to what you’re talking about the Ramuz—which I was, I kept saying to Paul, “Yeah, but Paul, what’s this book about?” And he was like, “It’s about the language.” Right? “I can’t say anything else.”

So unpack that a bit for us, Paul.

Paul Kincaid: The title says it all: It is syncopation in the way that jazz music is syncopation. It’s rhythm, it’s slight jaggedness in the rhythm, so that you are never on a smooth edge, are bouncing from one thing to another. It’s not straightforward.

It’s not going to be a book for everyone. And the reason I wrote the review the way I did was I was aware I was writing it for people who probably wouldn’t get a lot of verse stuff from it because it is an unusual form for science fiction and it’s trying to get across this idea—that the words matter. Because they do far more than just tell a story, but the pattern of the words can be integral to how that story is told and what the story is. If you don’t get that element, if you don’t get that rhythm. You’re missing part of the story. A key part of it, I think.

So that’s what style is, actually. Style is what tells you how to read the story.

[Musical sting]

Dawn Macdonald: Something that struck me in your review, Paul—which I checked out before we met up today—is that Syncopation, which I’ve not read, but that Syncopation uses Caribbean dialect. And so when we’re talking about rhythm, we’re talking about rhythm in a variant English and Caribbean dialects.

I’m not sure which one is specifically being used in Syncopation, but Caribbean dialects tend to have less metrical stress in the way that words are delivered, and just a little bit of a different emphasis—a different rhythm, different flow. And so, as readers, when we’re reading this in standard Canadian accent, your English accent, we are reading it with our own kind of overlay of rhythm.

And that affects the experience of reading. How much do you need to understand the variant English that it’s referencing in order to get the full effect? How much can you kind of come from outside of that, not know it and get introduced to it in the work?

Paul Kincaid: I came from outside of it, I have no idea how much I got and how much I missed. I suppose you’ve got the same problem with translation: You don’t read the original, you don’t know how much you’ve picked up and how much you’ve missed. I think we all do that with everything we read. There’s always that gap. There are things that everybody can pick up from every book if they open themselves to the patterns of the book, if they open themselves to the rhythms of it.

Dan Hartland: You’re making a really great argument there for accessibility. Paul, so of course what I’m gonna do, I’m gonna bring in Mikhail Bakhtin and make it all inaccessible again! As you speak about that kind of gap between the style and the reader, there’s, gotta be a bridge there somewhere. And as Dawn says, sometimes that gap can be larger and sometimes it can be smaller. And he felt that that the best style included in itself elements of the alien that it was trying to reach, right? Which is a lovely image. And he uses the word alien, which I think is ideal for conversation about, about SF.

I mean, that idea of the bridge seems really interesting to me. And I wonder whether, again, science fiction—and science fiction reviewers, perhaps we could start talking about this a bit—have fallen into that gap too often. Any separation at all between themselves and the style and they’re a bit like, “Oh.” And the reviewers of science fiction—in my view, as I said at the beginning—tend to avoid talking about everything we’ve just been talking about.

So, for the last twenty minutes or so, we’ve been talking about all this stuff: What style is, how plot can happen in style. I wonder why then, given that we all agree—the three of us at least!—that style is so rich, why we think SF reviewers—I don’t wanna pick on SF reviewers, I think a lot of reviewers do this, I think, often ignore it in favor of content, but let’s stick to SF for now. Why do we think we ignore it? Is it just because it’s hard? Is it that simple?

Paul Kincaid: Yes!

Dan Hartland: It is. OK!

Dawn Macdonald: I think it can be hard to talk about.

Paul Kincaid: Yeah, and it’s easy to talk about content. It’s easy to write a review which is basically a plot summary or something like that. Practically everybody starts writing that when they start writing reviews. Picking up on style, picking up on anything beyond the very basics of the story … it’s something that comes cumulatively. Presumably, also you need to be aware of style in your own writing in order to be able to spot it, recognize it in another piece of writing. It calls for a self-consciousness that I don’t think probably applies to every single SF reviewer.

Dan Hartland: So let me ask a question, then. If it can be hard, why do you guys do it? Why do you make … why are you making your life hard? I mean, obviously we’re picking two books here, Syncopation and the Ramuz, which make it so we don’t really have a choice. We have to talk about the style! But I know that both of you often do anyway, in books that don’t call so much attention to themselves.

So. Silly question, but since we’re saying it’s hard, let’s look at why you do that. Why do you make your life hard and talk about style?

Dawn Macdonald: I mean, I don’t know that it’s uniformly hard, but I think that to start talking about style, you need a vocabulary—as Paul said, an awareness of style.

Like, some writers, they talk about someone who is a writer’s writer, that other writers like reading their work because other writers will get something out of the work that someone who isn’t involved in that might not care about. So having that kind of writerly orientation, maybe having some background where you would have some apparatus for being able to recognize different traditions, different linguistic traditions, different things that might be happening, how it fits into like the New Wave or, comes from that lineage, how something fits in with modernism, how it fits in with experimental poetry or whatever: There’s a lot of assumed background here, and it takes a while to reach that point.

For myself, it’s just something that interests me. Even in like the last one that I reviewed for you, Dan, which didn’t have as obvious of a style, it was Inner Space, and it was written by someone who is a video game designer, and it had very much like game feel of, there’s kind of a mystery almost that’s unfolding within like a locked room. There’re the rules, which are the rules coming from mission control. So it had a gamified feel.

But as I was reading it, some of the things that interested me about it was both how well that was done, doing something that was within kind of a game space, and then also how choices that the author made about point of view and about narrative voice locked him into certain situations that he had to work his way out of.

And so I find that interesting. I guess just what were the technical things that the writer had to do to get themselves out of the spots that they put themself into by the choices that they made. It’s like a weird game, and I think it’s interesting.

Dan Hartland: And of course, that was another work in translation, right? Yeah, yeah. Paul, tell us why you slave at the mines of style when you could just be off talking about content.

Paul Kincaid: But why do it if it’s so easy? It gets boring if you’re just taking the easy route. Every time I need to keep myself interested in what I’m writing, I look at the things that interest me.

I don’t know if this is true of you, Dawn, as well, but when I’m writing something, I read it aloud. I read it aloud to myself to get … partly to check that it works, because if you read it loud, you spot mistakes and clumsinesses far more easily. But you also develop a rhythm, a pattern, in the way you put prose down on a page, and that’s made me very conscious of my own style when I’m writing.

So I’m aware of what it is, so I move on and look at what it is in other people. It is fun. It’s fun to challenge yourself, but it also … it is just … it feels to me like it’s a natural development. It’s not something you can avoid. The more you do this stuff, the more invested you are in what you are doing. The more, the more you start going down these route.

Dan Hartland: Does that suggest, Paul, that when you first started reviewing—and it’s the question for Dawn too—did you work up to talking about style? Did you start off in a place similar to the one we were talking about? About reviewers begin by talking about plot?

Paul Kincaid: I mean, look, we’re talking about what, nearly fifty years ago. When I first started reviewing, they were four hundred words. They were basically plot summaries with “buy this book” stuck on at the end or something like that. I got bored writing so I started expanding it, making them longer. The more space I had, the more things I could discuss. So my response to books became more complicated. Therefore, the writing about books became more complicated. I think in some ways style is possibly the last thing you come to. I wouldn’t swear to it, but suspect in many cases it is. But it is a natural development. It, it is a natural place to come to for your own sanity trying to do something more interesting.

Dan Hartland: Dawn, does that match for you or did you start with style?

Dawn Macdonald: Well, it’s different for me because I’m a poet. And I started reviewing poetry collections, which don’t have a plot usually—some exceptions may apply with the verse novel, but yeah. So poetry, I mean, it’s ridiculous to say what poetry is, but I’m gonna say that poetry is the application of a style to a subject in a way that enhances both.

You cannot talk about poetry without talking about what kind of poetry is this. And you might talk about some technical aspects of that. You might talk about form, you might talk about the feeling, you might talk about to what extent is this kind of cool and distant or is this getting in and right into your emotions, into your heart; or is it something that’s very abstract, very experimental, something that’s quite wild, something that draws from the beats? What’s going on with poetry is you’re fundamentally talking about style. And so I think in reviewing fiction or nonfiction, I just kind of can’t help but notice those things and bring it over.

But there is something else I wanted to pick up on from earlier in our conversation. It’s a couple of things. So, referencing what you said, Dan—about Bakhtin and kind of that gap between self and other or self and yourself and what you’re seeing on the page—and then talking about the book you reviewed, Paul, Syncopation and the use of Caribbean dialect, variant Englishes: I think it’s important to signpost that when we talk about sort of non-style, transparent writing—where we feel like it doesn’t have a style—that it does and that the style it has may be grounded in whiteness, may be grounded in a cultural framework that has a lineage and has a background. And that what feels like transparency is familiarity and that what feels like transparency to a speaker of Jamaican Patois is gonna sound different.

Paul Kincaid: Yes. Excellent point, actually. So many of the—I hate the phrase, but—the Golden Age science fiction had that white voice going through it, and actually narrower: White American voice.

Dawn Macdonald: And male.

Paul Kincaid: Yeah, male, white American. Even if it was written by British woman, it would have a male, American, white voice. And it’s intentionally plain. It is intentionally unfussy. Also, a lot of them have got about as much interest as office memo, but still it’s style is what keeps you bloody interested in the thing.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, I completely agree with Dawn that what seems to be, or what is billed as, transparency is much more often hegemony, right? It’s just the thing that we’re used to seeing because we’re made to see it.

But the choices that are made within that hegemonic style, the ways in which that style is built, shut in and out things which that style can talk about or can talk to. When Paul says that the Golden Age SF was deliberately plain, that shuts out the … it has the effect of shutting out qualities of literature which at that time was seen as feminine, for example.

And this is why it’s so important actually to look at style—because style controls text. Dawn, you were talking earlier about Inner Space and being so interested in the tools, the stylistic tools, that the author employs to get out of the traps he’s set himself. But of course, style also traps. It’s not just a route out, it’s a kind of a locked door sometimes.

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: Do we think that the fact that a book is a science fiction book will necessarily have an impact on style? We started this conversation talking about how capacious SF is and that we should be interested in style. Do we think that there are certain styles, or that there are certain stylistic characteristics, which are natural to science fiction, which mean that the reviewers should think about style in a particular way when they read SF, or do we think that anything goes?

Dawn Macdonald: I think that they should be thinking about how the words are creating something that is alien. Not every SF story has aliens in it, right? But SF stories often put us into an alien setting, an alien situation, or a mind-space of someone who’s had some kind of mind-blowing experience that has changed their perception of reality or their perspective on things.

And to convey those kinds of things, to put you inside the mind of the alien, inside the mind of someone who has encountered the alien, we often have to take a step back from the way we ordinarily use words. And so I think that SF has an inextricable relationship to style in a way that maybe doesn’t apply as much to the other genres. Not every book is going to have this, but I think it’s fundamental to the genre in a very basic way.

Paul Kincaid: If you look at some of the best, well, what we tend to think of as the best writers, they often have a lot of style in what they’re doing: Joanna Russ or Samuel Delany or people like that, they put something into the way they describe the strange that makes it strange to us as readers.

And that is style. They use style. The ones who just write “the rocket ship came down on such and such a planet,” they’re not making that planet real. I think style is—it should be—a natural part of science fiction. That so many people say it is not is one of the great mysteries of science fiction.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. Paul, in your review of Syncopation, you invoke the dread word “estrangement.”

Paul Kincaid: Yes. I do, don’t I?

Dan Hartland: You do. Yeah. Which is …

Paul Kincaid: I love that word.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. Which is what we’re talking about here, right? And of course, to achieve that estrangement—totally agree with Dawn—it’s all style.

The way in which you evoke the alien—invoke the alien, provoke the alien, whatever you want to do with it—you’re gonna do that most effectively through style. It was Darko Suvin who came up with this idea of cognitive estrangement as central to SF. But he also thought—and, Paul, at this point I will yield to you as resident historian of SF criticism—but I think he also said that key to science fiction is a sort of quote-unquote factual approach to the subject matter, by which he meant it wasn’t like fairy-tale or fantasy, which had very little interest in quote unquote reality because in fact, I think he says fantasy is kind of inimical to reality. It’s deliberately setting itself in opposition to, whereas science fiction at least wants to create the illusion that it is real.

And I wonder whether in that kind of interest in granularity—like, again, rocket ships and planets aren’t coming out well from this conversation, but—in this idea that we need to know how the rocket ship works, dilithium crystals or whatever it is, you start to get some of this anti-style thing. Is there an element in science fiction that, because it wants to pretend to be practical—you think about hard science fiction, right?—that it thinks, “Oh, well, I don’t want any of that style stuff because that gets in the way.” Do we think that is a reasonable thesis?

Paul Kincaid: An awful lot of classic science fiction aimed to be indistinguishable from a technical manual, right? Which is a style! It’s not necessarily a very attractive, readable, or approachable style. They did not see it as style when they were doing it; they were seeing it as being … not necessarily an anti-style, just non-style.

Dawn Macdonald: Right. But now I’m starting to wonder. OK, so when you said pretend to be practical, I’m starting to wonder if this technical style is a kind of prestidigitation, a kind of magician’s patter to smooth over and obfuscate the fact that what we’re talking about is totally impossible. It’s an extrapolation off of, we have reality and then we extrapolate off of that in some wild direction. And, it’s I supposed possible, but probably not the way it’s being described. And so we’re kind of shoving that under underneath, aren’t we?

Paul Kincaid: Yeah. They were hiding an awful lot.

Dawn Macdonald: Yeah. And by doing it in that very matter-of-fact, plain way, you can almost fool the reader.

Dan Hartland: Which makes it remarkably conscious, stylistic choice, right?!

Paul Kincaid: Oh, yes, yes.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Paul’s already answered this question, but I did want to briefly, before we kind of start to wrap up, think about the great SFnal stylists. So, Paul’s talked about Le Guin and Delany. Are there others? So, I might throw in China Miéville from the fantasy side of things. Are there others? I mean, even books that we’ve read recently that really struck us as stylistically interesting, engaged, whatever we want to say.

Dawn Macdonald: Cordwainer Smith. I gotta throw Cordwainer Smith in there.

Dan Hartland: Great shout.

Paul Kincaid: I reread some Cordwainer Smith recently and I didn’t get on with it as well as I did when I first encountered it. So maybe it’s just me.

Dan Hartland: Was it the style, Paul?

Paul Kincaid: It was a bit. It was a bit forced. The other thing about style is that you can … style is necessary, but it can be used badly and there are a lot of bad stylists out there.

Dawn Macdonald: Yeah. Or not always bad, but just different people will vibe with it so differently. And so, Dan, I’m thinking, like … you asked me what I thought of Orbital. Which won the Booker, right? And because you’re like, “Dawn, you’re a poet, you probably loved Orbital!” and I did not love Orbital.

It was one where I kind of … I felt like it was sort of all style, nothing else going on for me. but I know people loved it. I know the Booker committee loved it, so it’s … I think it can just be so polarizing.

Paul Kincaid: I loved Orbital. I actually felt that it should have been on science fiction award lists, and it wasn’t. But I loved it precisely because it gave an appearance of plainness or a flat effect, but there was an awful lot more going on that wasn’t necessarily obvious. It was a very stylish piece of work.

Dan Hartland: I’d completely forgotten that Orbital conversation, Dawn. And you’re right, it’s such a good example of a book where it’s clearly doing a lot with style. Even two people that like style—much less all these other people that we’ve been talking about that can’t stand it—will disagree.

Yeah. And it’s almost the more pronounced the style becomes, as you say, the more likely it is for people to bounce off it. I was wondering, as we were talking … I was thinking about, as Paul said, plainness, and I was still thinking about which science fiction stylists, we should mention: Vonnegut! The remarkable paired-downness of his style, which I just couldn’t replicate if I tried. I don’t know how he did it really.

Paul Kincaid: Yes. But at the same time, you’ve got repetitions in Vonnegut that act like a sort of iambic pentameter, as it were: So it goes, so it goes, so it goes. And that puts you into a rhythm for reading him. So much of it is plain and flat and clear and simple, but you get these little breaking rhythms going around it which just lift it in a way that you don’t always notice you’re being lifted.

Dawn Macdonald: Vonnegut is so distinctive. Like, he has such a distinctive voice, you know it’s Vonnegut. There’s something that he’s doing that’s very deliberate. He does really experimental things like throwing artwork, very crude drawings, into the middle of his text. And, this is maybe separate from style, but he has an attitude. So when you’re reading Vonnegut, there’s like a view on the world, there’s an attitude that’s pretty consistent through his work.

Paul Kincaid: I think the only way to express an attitude is style.

Dan Hartland: So … [laughter] I would suggest that—and then this is a great example of what we’re talking about, which is that you need so many words to talk about this—I would suggest that what we’re talking about here, when we’re talking about the attitude that is created or applied to style, we’re talking about tone. And then the way that that tone and style make the reader feel is mood. And all of these kind of steps that we’re making, and words that we’re using, are so specialist in places.

And yet, I would note that, that my definition there is absolutely not set in stone. I know Sofia Samatar and Kate Zambreno wrote a book about tone recently where they said tone is atmosphere—which for me, like, we’re just swapping one word for another. But, they don’t agree with me that it’s about attitude, is my point.

So those are some of the good stylists. Do we wanna name names? Do we wanna say who the bad stylists are? We don’t have to, but if anyone wants to settle some scores, now’s the moment.

Dawn Macdonald: I don’t think I have a list. I mean, I think I just stop reading if I’m not into it, unless I’ve committed to a review and then I have to figure out something to say about it that’s reasonable.

Paul Kincaid: I actually read an academic book on John Wyndham recently, for review. It was so flat the whole way through. I got no sense of the author’s engagement with the text he was writing about there. There was actually, a lot of the time, a sense of being bored with it, or careless at least. So that was bad style. And I think Wyndham demands a bit more attention to style than this guy was giving it.

Dan Hartland: Academic prose in general, with some notable and laudable exceptions, is a good example of style that can be … yes, disappointing.

Dawn Macdonald: Yeah.

This isn’t style exactly, but I will say that something that stops me from reading some book … so this is kind of a sad thing about science fiction, but I have a rule that if it’s a science fiction book and it’s by a male author, and if at any point in the text more than half of the female characters work in the sex industry or are victims of sexual assault as part of the plot, I stop reading. And this stops me from reading a lot of books.

So it’s not style exactly, but it’s attitude and tone toward female characters. And there’s a subtler version of like, how much physical description do you give your female characters versus your male characters? What’s the gaze? What’s the view? So not naming names, but it’s pretty prevalent in the genre.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. And I bet that, although it’s not a strictly a style thing, I bet that those books have … certain stylistic aspects in common.

Dawn Macdonald: Yeah, and I’m gonna call out William Gibson on this one.

Dan Hartland: And it’s so interesting that these canonical—quote-unquote—writers … we should call them out more. So I’m glad that we … I’m glad we picked a name. It is good! Yeah.

Dawn Macdonald: And it’s not that these things aren’t part of women’s lives, because they sure as hell are, but it’s using it for, like … that the majority of women in your book are defined by their sexuality. Or as victims in regard to their sexuality. That should not be the majority of women in your book, unless that really is what your book is about.

Paul Kincaid: Women as victims is far, far too prevalent and it’s one thing that stops me reading as well.

Dawn Macdonald: Yeah. So I gotta go back to Asimov, who I do love. But, and he talked about when he first started writing and he was a very young man, that he did not include women in his stories. He didn’t like reading stories that had women in them because all the women did was get in the way and scream! And he eventually figured out how to fix that.

Paul Kincaid: When I was living and working in Manchester, the local SF bookshop was also a porn shop, as they so often were in those days. It regularly got raided by the police and for some reason they always took away all the Isaac Asimov books. I remember us sitting around trying to work out why Asimov? Because there’s no women in them!

Dan Hartland: Is it just because he’s “A,” and it was like the easiest thing to take so they could go back?!

Dawn Macdonald: They just wanted to read them!

I’m not sure this is a part of the style conversation. It is certainly part of the feel of a book!

Dan Hartland: It is, yeah!

If we were gonna try and encourage more of our fellow reviewers to talk about style in their pieces—if we were going to be so presumptuous as to do such a thing, which I guess we are!—what would we say? How would we suggest people that would like to, but kind of, like haven’t before, begin to do so?

Dawn Macdonald: I guess I would say don’t worry if you don’t have it, don’t worry about the vocabulary and the critical apparatus. But talk about how you felt while you were reading and if you can pinpoint some lines and some words that made you feel that way.

Paul Kincaid: Yeah, I was gonna say something very similar. Look for what makes you engage with a book. Why do you engage with a book? Because what is making you engage with it is very likely to be something to do with style.

You may not recognize it as such, you may not have the vocabulary for it, as we’ve demonstrated all to amply over the last hour or whatever it is. There is no vocabulary, no easy vocabulary, when we talk about it. But look for what engages you in the book, and that will lead you into thinking about how the book works as a piece of writing and that’s style.

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: Is there anything we’ve missed?

Paul Kincaid: We have missed huge amounts of things in everything.

Dan Hartland: Of course we have!

Paul Kincaid: Yeah, that’s what the topic is: It’s all stuff you can miss!

All: [laughter]

[Musical outro]

Dan Hartland: Thanks for listening to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons criticism podcast. Our music is “Dial-Up” by Lost Cosmonauts—listen to more of their music at grandevalise.bandcamp.com.

After our last special episode, presented by Tristan Beiter and friends on the critical role of the book club, I reached out to that sage of contemporary fandom, John Coxon of the Octothorpe podcast, for his thoughts on the space for criticism within fandom.

Tristan’s group had not found many in-roads in fandom, and I wanted to find out if in John’s wide experience of its many corners this were true. Yes … but also no, he thinks.

“I found the deep dive on a specific book club as a tool for critical thought really interesting,” he says, “and it made me want to be in the club myself, which is I think a feeling that the best podcasts engender?” This is true, we are among the best of podcasts.

John is on board with all ideas around collaborative spaces making it safer to discuss ideas without feeling like they've got to be rigorously worked out. Providing a space to develop ideas is really valuable, he says, and for him not common on, for example, social media.

But, contrary to the group’s views, John thinks fan spaces are more friendly to criticism in general nowadays. This is a shift, he says. Traditionally, in his view, fanzines and fan writers tended to talk about the experience of being a fan rather than their experience with the works. But today the critical space occupies a much bigger piece of the fannish imagination than it used to, from Nerds of a Feather to the Coode Street Podcast. John urges us to read fan spaces broadly, and not confine ourselves to its particular expression on Bluesy, where microblogging can work against sustained critical discussion.

John thinks some fans do expect that you should have “done the homework” and should move past this: You don’t have to have engaged with every work in a franchise to engage with the franchise, and the same goes for notions of the canon. John likes the viewpoints from critics who are consciously choosing different lenses to look through. And, I hope, so do we.

Thanks to John, go and listen to Octothorpe, and ... see you next time!

I’m tempted to joke that it’s due to climate change that in Hana Carolina’s engaging and emotionally intelligent novella, The Inescapable March, this moment arrives a month earlier. I think the choice of month is more deliberate, though—because the precise moment being described is what one of the novel’s two main characters, flamboyant travelling-actor Hyacinth, describes as “the wretched vestiges of winter” (p. 29). At the point when the novella opens—as dour warrior-mage Arran, from whose viewpoint proceedings are narrated, muses to himself—we’re not quite yet at the beginning of spring. The problem therefore is not that Arran can’t bear the pain of returning feeling but rather that he can’t even jolt himself far enough out of his resentment towards life in general, and of Hyacinth in particular, to even care. The two are friends who are attracted towards each other, but Arran has difficulty dealing with the emotional demands placed upon him by Hyacinth, who is an outrageous flirt with both men and women. Indeed, even while reflecting on how Hyacinth would have taken the brief hint of early-morning sunshine as an excuse to dress wholly inappropriately in layers of silk and an ornamental hat, and would by now be complaining bitterly about the cold, Arran is actually in the process of leaving him behind to die in the siege of a grubby little market town by an advancing army.

The reason that Arran knows that Hyacinth is going to die is that he has already seen it happen. More than once, in fact. Even as he thinks about it, he meets another version of himself riding in the other direction back to the town, before wearily turning round himself. Once there, he spells himself with magical strength before fighting and killing many soldiers, including one with a prominent facial scar, to cut his way back into the town and find Hyacinth amongst the panic-stricken crowds of townsfolk. However, with the effects of the spell waning, he is now exhausted and can do no more than hold on to Hyacinth as the two are crushed to death in the stampede against the locked town gates. Then, they wake up again in a bed in the town inn, exactly as they had at the beginning of that day in a brief moment of unexpected sunlight.

This is not simply a fantasy reworking of Groundhog Day (1993) in which the “march” of the hostile army is inescapable, however (though this is, of course, the other sense of the novella’s title). For one thing, we are never quite sure of the exact sequence of events: The third and penultimate chapter, “The End” is followed by Chapter 4, “The Beginning.” Even if we were such charlatans as to cut the book up in order to reassemble its constituent passages into chronological sequence, I’m not convinced that a linear timeline would emerge. Furthermore, there is also the question of how many times the novella’s events have happened to its characters before. At one point, we are told that Arran and Hyacinth first met a century ago. At several points we encounter the fortune teller Vadoma, who remains aware of what is happening and complains about being stuck in a liminal hell while having to watch her passing dalliance Richard—the soldier with the scar—“die a thousand times over” (p. 96). Later, Arran apologises to Hyacinth for making him “relive the most painful moments of your life a million fucking times” (p. 125). This is not just hyperbole. Both the scale of repetition and the refusal of linearity indicate a queer temporality that can’t simply be fixed by a couple of clever tweaks and a “happy ever after” ending.

The actual process of what is happening is explained to us early in the book, in a scene in which Arran is selling his magic to a woman who wants her husband not to have left her following the death of their son. As he explains to her, the spell will take her outside of space and time and enable her to replay scenarios endlessly until she gets the desired result. The husband won’t remember what happened: “He’ll only live through the final outcome you choose” (p. 25). There’s a telling moment when the woman maliciously asks Arran why he can’t fix his own life if it’s that simple. Then, after he has sat through the dizzying rhythm of hundreds of simultaneous interactions between woman and man, in all of which the husband leaves, she also asks him if the spell can be cast on someone who’s dead. To which he replies that he could only do that if he cast a spell on himself too:

“Many have tried. Most cannot change a thing. And being trapped in endless repetition, with death as the only certain outcome—that’s hell. I wouldn’t do that to someone, or myself.”

“Hell? That’s what you think hell is?” She let out a wet chuckle. “That’s just life.” (p. 28)

In the end, though, which is also the beginning, this is what he must have done—because the whole novella is concerned with Arran and Hyacinth, who is barely aware of what is happening, trying to escape from exactly such a liminal hell-life. But every time Arran tries to leave, with or without Hyacinth, he ends up coming back to the same place again and dying once more. It’s only when he asks Vadoma how they get out that she points out the problem, by replying deadpan, “Are you sure you want to?” (p. 94). Ultimately, The Inescapable March is about whether Arran will continue warping time forever because he can’t bring himself to face the truth, which is that he loves Hyacinth. However, to reach this point he has to overcome his own socialisation as warrior-mage and necromancer.

At this point, I should also mention that, despite this serious purpose, the novella is very funny in places. Carolina’s dialogue is sharp and the moments when Arran and Hyacinth engage in banter are especially delicious. There is also a great scene in which Vadoma reads the palms of Hyacinth, Arran, and Richard in sequence and to darkly humorous effect. It’s not difficult to imagine The Inescapable March as forming the basis for a “high-concept” episode in a big-budget fantasy television series: Gruff magical warrior, bisexual companion figure, fighting, magic, bedroom scenes and there’s even a song. (Obviously I’d love someone to actually make this episode!) What the novella foregrounds is how this kind of fantasy is not just great entertainment but also a kind of technology for making sense of our time and even altering it.

It seems clear to me that the rise of fantasy—which, following the global success of A Game of Thrones (2011-2019) has become one of the master-narratives of the twenty-first century—is shaping how people understand and engage with the society around them. Winter has come and brought a quasi-medieval power politics to Europe and America that would have seemed too crude to be believable twenty-five years ago. I could bemoan that state of affairs but that would be hypocritical given that I have been reading fantasy since childhood. I think all of us who are fantasy fans have to own it. But, in any case, I don’t want to disavow fantasy completely, either, because when it combines wit, humour, and magic as The Inescapable March does, while refusing the quick fix of happy ever after, it allows us to imagine worlds where life is not just a tedious linear repetition of nasty, brutish, and short days until we die. Or, to put it another way, queer fantasy allows us to escape “the wretched vestiges of winter” which make Carolina’s March even crueller than Eliot’s April.

Part I: In which Tristram faces a Dragon.

July 8th 1883

Dear Francesca,

First off: I know that’s not your name. I haven’t gone and mistaken you for another woman—one of my many conquests, I imagine you imagine (what must imaginary you think of imaginary me?). You’ll notice, if you glance ahead, that I’ve adopted a corresponding nom de plume of my own.

A confession: Our meeting the other afternoon wasn’t quite by chance. I first noticed you last Tuesday, when you entered the Librairie and asked for a copy of Swinburne’s Tristram. In order, I perceived that:

1. You read much more quickly than I do. (Unless you are pretending? Are those flickering pages a performance?)

2. You have very long and fine fingers. I would like to know how you managed to stain them so badly: penning letters to your friends, or notes in your books? Are you a lady novelist in the making? Or a poet—like myself?

3. Our culture is mad for blondness, but yours is odd and unnatural, and therefore interesting: I’ve never seen hair so fine and bright—a troubling hybrid of corn- and spider-silk.

That husband of yours doesn’t seem like he cares much for books. Or perhaps he is the type who values their bindings more than their contents and would wallpaper his household in gilded Morocco if he could. Tell me, how—why—did you marry him?

Once I’ve finished writing, I will fold this letter up and tuck it into the Tristram you kindly loaned me (may it be our Galeotto … ). I’ll knock on your door, at which point I will most likely encounter a puzzled maidservant, who will ask who in the world I am, and I will explain that I am returning a book you were kind enough to bestow on me (generous creature that you are and clearly down-on-their-luck, weatherworn would-be poet that I am). I will look very sheepish and the maid will hopefully take pity and understand that I nourish myself on pats on the head from overeducated and bored ladies like yourself.

Perhaps Tristram will then resume his place on your bookshelf and gather dust. If, on the other hand, I am very fortunate, and you are the kind of woman I suspect and dread and pray you are, you will crack Tristram open once you are alone and rifle eagerly through his pages. Maybe you’ll anticipate some message from me, though I’ll bet you’re counting on some sentimental little verse scribbled on a flyleaf, not a whole letter (I picture your surprise—your delight?—as my words burst free of Tristram and tumble into your lap).

If you are inclined to respond, please visit the cantine on Rue des Hirondelles. You will find a terracotta pot to the left of the entrance containing a sad little shrub that would persuade you, against your better judgement, that it is a honeysuckle. Please bury your response beneath its brittle blossoms; nourish the poor thing with your thoughts. I will look for your answer every day for two weeks before I give up all hope of hearing from you.

“Moved with such long strong desire,”

Pyrame

July 22nd 1883

Pyrame,

I’m not sure whether to be amused or insulted by your name for me. It suggests, if nothing else, that you are a poor reader of Dante. (At least you haven’t designated yourself Paolo.)

You have asked a number of very forward questions.

1. Am I only pretending to read when I turn through the pages so quickly? No, certainly not. (My husband has pointed out to me before that I “read like a parched wolf at a rabbit’s neck.”) But having read Swinburne before, I need only dwell on the page long enough to fill my memory’s gaps.

2. How did I stain my fingers? This may disappoint you, if you had hoped to learn that I am a fellow poet (or a lady novelist), but I am in fact an amateur naturalist. I like to sketch and record my observations on any flora in my vicinity. This civilized island with all its shops and boardwalks provides me with fewer specimens than I would like, but I have found a few interesting weeds and have been scolded out of one or two private gardens I was not supposed to enter.

3. Why did I marry him? There is another question hiding behind that question. I will honor your indirectness with a more forthright response than it deserves: I chose to marry him. Nobody made me. (As a general rule, it’s very difficult to make me do things I don’t want to do.)

He’s more of a reader than you imagine, though I admit he is not so fond of novels, at least none published in our lifetimes. He has an active interest in history, and the fictions of past ages—the deader the author, the better.

I qualify neither as “bored” nor “overeducated.” I have had to educate myself, and I don’t believe it’s possible for anyone in such a position to do so to excess. As a result, I am easily entertained. The world is so odd and rough; how could it bore any reasonable judge?

But I admit I have felt a little smaller since our arrival at the Île de R—. I don’t mean that marriage has “diminished” me in some way. It is something about this place. I don’t like to be surrounded by so much water, such a flat and open ring of horizon. It unsettles me to see where the sea and sky meet no matter which way I turn.

Against my better judgement, I will visit your poor honeysuckle shortly, if only out of curiosity to see what you’ll write back, if you do indeed write back (this may depend on whether there are or aren’t various other Francescas—as you’ve hinted—waiting in the wings of this little drama you’re putting on). Let’s treat the terracotta pot as our ongoing letterbox; you may leave your response in the same location.

Reluctantly, I accept the name you’ve bestowed on me; I suppose it’s pretty enough and I can’t think of a better one at the moment. And so I will sign off as

Yours not quite truly,

Francesca

P.S. How precisely did you discover our address?

P.P.S. On further consideration: Don’t tell me.

July 24th 1883

Dearest Francesca,

A naturalist! I never would have guessed it, but I can see it perfectly now. You wondered if I would be disappointed, but on the contrary I’m enormously pleased. I will now picture you in the shadow of all my favorite trees, scattered across the island—the great oak in the graveyard, the wind-blasted hemlocks that line the shore—I see you, watching “Fleet butterflies, each like a dead flower’s ghost.”

If I may make so bold: Could we arrange for another meeting viva voce before long, perhaps in the shade of one of these “specimens”?

Hopefully yours,

Pyrame

P.S. I’m not nearly the scoundrel or the sleuth you suggest. You wrote down your address in your (our) Tristram. Is that a general habit of yours, or do you only scribble your address into books you would particularly hate to lose? (Or, I suppose there is another possibility—but how presumptuous of me, to imagine anything intentional or premeditated in your slipping your address into a book, and then giving the book to me.)

August 10th 1883

Dear Francesca,

I fear I may have made too bold after all; I hope you will forgive me (and that you won’t find a renewed plea for your attention too pathetic). Please send me some news.

I accept that our exchanges must remain confined to the page for the time being, if that is your wish.

Yours in agony,

Pyrame

August 13th 1883

Dear Pyrame,

If I wished to snub you for your forwardness, I would have done so explicitly. I am no great believer in ladylike meekness and quiet; silence is all too easy to misinterpret (as you have done).

I have been remiss in my duties as your correspondent because my husband and I have had to entertain guests. I have been distracted. And so I forgot all about you and your letters.

Don’t despair, Pyrame; having written that, I realize you will take my inattention as the worst kind of snub after all.

I am forgetful; that is all.

My husband thinks there is a connection between my faulty memory and the rapid rate at which I read and learn: He says that I am like a sieve that has mistaken itself for a sponge. New information passes through me at a rate that looks astonishing from the outside, but I am not so good at maintaining a firm grip on things. (Sometimes I feel rather more like a sinking ship, as I struggle to stopper my mind’s fissures; innumerable unaccounted-for faults remain, no matter how much imaginary plaster I apply.)

You will ask for an account of our guests and activities.

These occasions involve much sipping at lemonade and nibbling at airy cakes. Sometimes, as evening approaches, the phonograph shrouds us in Handel and we pour emerald liquors over sugar cubes.

My husband passes my sketchbook around the room, and our guests turn through its pages and coo and say flattering things about how talented I am, even though that is not the point. They often turn through the pages while conversing with each other and do not look very closely at the things they praise, such as my favorite study: a happy little cluster of inkcaps feasting on the rotting fence that encircles the cemetery.

As for our guests: There are poets and philosophers and young doctors, whom you would appreciate. Then there are Lords and Ladies This-and-That, whom you would not. One of my husband’s friends, whom I shall refer to as Mr. C, always sits near me. I have tried to point this out to my husband; I have suggested we reconfigure our seating arrangement and confine Mr. C to his own corner, but my husband thinks that because he is an old man he can do no harm, and it is better to indulge him. (What he really means is that Mr. C is very rich so one should not offend him.)

Yesterday, Mr. C asked if I had ever seen “the Dragon.” I reminded him that I am not a child. He said, “No, my dear. I refer to a tree, commonly nicknamed ‘the Dragon.’ A magnificent tree, hidden on the island’s coast. The Dragon is so named because it is very old and its trunk droops and convolutes as calligraphically as the serpent that strangled Laocoön and his sons.”

“How can such a thing remain hidden?” I asked. “You make it sound like quite a spectacle.”

“Like any dragon worth its salt, this one resides in a cave. Would you like to see it?”

Sensing a trap but hopeless to waylay it, I nodded. Foolish Francesca. Mr. C took advantage and said the way was treacherous; he offered to chaperone me, to lead and hand me over the rough rocks of the coast, lest I fall and dash my dainty brains out.

Pyrame, gallant as you are: Could you assist me in this? I do not even know if Mr. C is telling the truth. Could you locate this tree for me?

If and when you write to me again, I will expect a package from you rather than a mere letter. Send me a box or purse, and in it, you must provide a sample of the Dragon’s foliage as a sign of your dedication and loyalty to me.

Otherwise, I cannot say with certainty that I will remember you and remain a faithful and dedicated correspondent.

In case this challenge marks the end of our exchange, please accept my best wishes,

Francesca

August 20th 1883

Francesca, Francesca,

Devilish woman. I admit, I hesitated at first to do your bidding. Not because Mr. C’s account of the fearsome “Dragon” cowed me, but because a certain resemblance must have struck you too, and yet you did not comment on it, and this smacked of manipulation—the way you dangled a possibility before me: that I might metamorphose from a clownish-and-loutish Pyrame into a clownish-but-clever Tristram, sly and brave dragon-slayer!

Did you think I could be so easily puppeteered? Well, evidently, yes, I am puppeteerable. But at least I’m self-aware about the matter! (I want to bring my self-awareness to your awareness before illustrating how foolishly I obliged you.)

As for dear old Mr. C: He did not lie to you—but he didn’t tell you as much as he could or should have either. Behold a report of my journey into the Dragon’s lair:

The journey to the cave is indeed treacherous; it lies to the north of one of the beaches along the Island’s western flank, where fine white sands gradate into something grittier and darker, like crumbling gingerbread. One must grasp at tilting, wind-scoured trunks that stretch like ribs out of the earth, while stepping down and around treacherous boulders. I found porous black tide-pools simmering with glassy little crablike creatures.

Then, it is as if the landscape is an unsettled blanket, wrinkled with dunes—but when one looks very closely, there it is, the cave’s mouth: a lifted fold in the cloth.

I had to remove my shoes—I dangled them across my shoulders by their laces. My feet went numb as I waded across blue-black stones, praying not to slip or encounter anyone’s rude pincers.

But soon, soon, I arrived at the cave’s mouth and had to blink away the gauze of sun-dazzle and wait for my eyes to adjust as a chill washed over me.

I saw it, perched on a sandy little island within the Island:

A great twisted, silver yew. The Dragon buckled and twirled, as though some god had seized her by the trunk and wrenched her round and round an invisible post. A wrong collision of textures: wood solid as stone, yet fluid and grained with rivulets. Her needles looked black rather than green in the half-light past the cave’s mouth; her crown glittered, gemmed with crimson berry-beads.

The tide was high enough that I had to wade, then swim, if I hoped to reach my quarry.

But you did not share one key detail that Mr. C must have included in his account, in his effort to dissuade you from making the perilous journey on your own: that the riptides guarding the Dragon are far more treacherous than the beast herself is.

I nearly drowned—drank half my weight in seawater, then spent a merry evening teetering “By the utmost margin out of the loud lone sea,” salt-dazed. I must have curled up on the beach at some point—beyond my recollection.

I reawakened well after dark, the moonlit tide tickling my naked feet. But gods be praised: I found a single yew berry—it must have been swept away by the same tide that seized my body—beneath the boning of my corset. I enclose this treasure within a vial of the seawater that almost killed me. Consider it a gift: my almost-death in a jar.

And now, you have your end of our bargain to uphold. Please send me news when you can. I hope you will share your trophy with Mr. C and so exasperate him as he tries to imagine how you made the journey on your own.

Your ardent friend,

Pyrame

August 27th 1883

Dear Francesca,

I am disappointed. It has been a week since I faced a Dragon, nearly perished for you, and provided you with the gift of my Almost-Death. I think this merits some kind of response? A brief note at least? A whisper of acknowledgment and thanks and a promise to write at greater length at a later date?

I am growing worried. Please send me some sign before long, or I will assume the worst. And given my namesake, who knows what I will do, in my too-hasty despair?

Yours impatiently,

Pyrame

August 30th 1883

Dear Francesca,

Very well (you are persuasive even in your silence!). I admit it: Perhaps I exaggerated when I claimed that I nearly perished in the sea for you.

Nevertheless, I am unsure what I’ve done to merit such a cold non-response. Have you “forgotten” me yet again? Is that sieve of a mind so overwhelmed, has it drunk so much, that it is now drowning?

I pray not. But if so, you leave me with no choice but to abandon our honeysuckle-letterbox and harass your door instead, which may result in our attracting undesirable attention from your beloved husband.

I do not know what else to do. The risk cannot be helped. I will wait three more days for your response, before I take this desperate measure. Forgive the desperation; you must recognize its source:

“Yea, surely as the day-star loves the sun

And when he hath risen is utterly undone,

So is my love of hers and hers of me—

And its most sweetness bitter as the sea.”

Reassure me, I beg you.

Your foolish knight,

Pyrame

September 2nd 1883

Dear Pyrame,

I thank you for your gift and apologize for the tardiness of my response. I have a confession to make: I was under the impression that I had assigned you an impossible task; I did not think (considering the fanciful nature of Mr. C’s description) that the legendary “Dragon” could possibly be real.

I assumed, as a result, that your account of almost dying in its pursuit was fabricated, that you had plucked the fruit of a commoner sort of tree, and meant to pass it off as something magical.

This upset me. But upon further investigation, I have learned from reliable sources that there is some substance to Mr. C’s legends after all, and so—I suppose—to your report of your escapades on my behalf.

Please accept my gratitude, albeit at a late juncture. I beg your forgiveness for wrongly suspecting you, when I am in fact (apparently) the more culpable participant in this exchange.

But I hope you will understand if I tell you that I am somewhat confused and unsure what to do with—I don’t know what.

You. Us. This.

Whatever you would like to call the game we are engaged in. I refuse to apply any lofty designations, of the sort that belong in courtly romances. This isn’t that—no matter how many resemblances you comment on, Pyrame, no matter how you strive to perform as Tristram. Don’t forget who you truly are.

But for my part, that is precisely the problem. I have no idea who you truly are.

Please permit me a fortnight’s leave to consider our arrangement. Please do not write to me during this interval. I will contact you when I am ready to resume our discourse. (I will not forget to do so; I’ve taken a safeguard against this possibility by writing your name in my datebook.)

Sincerely,

Francesca

Part II: In which a moonlit tryst ruins everything.

September 2nd 1883

Dear Mother,

I seek your advice in a delicate matter:

I have forged letters addressed to myself—from an anonymous lover. Please do not waste too many words upbraiding me; I am already aware of my error. As you will see.

I was careful to make it all look like a game, to write in the voice of a young poet, aggressively besotted. I portrayed myself, meanwhile, as a little curious. Intrigued. But coolly distancing—mindful of her place and loyalty to her husband. I then “hid” these letters in a hatbox and made a show of discreetly shoving the hatbox away whenever my husband entered the room.

My husband has never noticed the hatbox. Not even when I placed beads and pine cones in it, to make its passage in and out of the closet noisier.

You will say this is foolishness—that he and I torment each other, when it would be more productive to speak openly of our troubles. But I have told him of mine, again and again, and he will not listen.

The matter has taken a strange turn. You see, I gave up on this charade some time ago, once it became clear that I had failed to pique my husband’s interest with the Hidden Hatbox. But more recently … new letters have begun to appear, penned by my “lover,” whom I designated Pyrame. That is, another Pyrame—a “real” Pyrame—has begun, or continued, to write to me. How should I respond to them?

I await your response and guidance with eagerness.

Sincerely,

Your daughter

September 5th 1883

Dear Daughter,

“You will think me foolish” and “I was careful” do not make for a very persuasive combination of phrases. You have indeed been very, very foolish. There. I have respected your request and refrained from wasting too many words, though I hope the few I have selected convey my feelings on this subject adequately.

Are you certain your husband is so ignorant as you believe? The likeliest answer to this riddle is that he has cottoned on to your little scheme and is now deploying it against you, to gnaw at your thoughts and inflict the same smallish sort of madness on you that you have attempted to impose on him.

My advice (which you have already foreseen, clever as you are): Speak to him.

With love and weariness,

Your Mother

September 8th 1883

Dearest Mother,

Of course it has occurred to me that my husband might have donned the role of Pyrame in order to “teach me a lesson” (about what I don’t know: the dangers of my own fancies and cruelty? There, I need no instruction). But this strikes me as unlikely and out of keeping with his character. For one, it would require him to read and regularly quote Swinburne’s Tristram, which is, in my opinion, an impossibility.

Even if he did peruse Swinburne, I don’t believe he is capable of channeling this sort of voice. That is precisely the problem, or part of the problem, that I had hoped to remedy with this entire exercise. Perhaps I wished to give my husband a model to follow—passions and habits I wish he would express, or allow me to explore …

No, I believe something stranger is afoot.

I have further proof to furnish, in the form of a confession, which I hope will not make you very angry:

I may have done a little more than pen the letters from Pyrame I have mentioned.

Before I settled down to write in the voice of Pyrame, I knew I would have to alter my mind’s natural state, and so I did as you once taught me: I collected samples of rain- and seawater, soot and soil, and mixed the four substances with my ink. With this ink, I composed a prayer to Herodias, in which I requested her aid and inspiration, and then swallowed it.

My hand, when it moved, seemed to do so only partly of my own accord.

But I do not understand how so many new letters have begun to appear, without my hand’s involvement in the equation. Do you think that Herodias has secured another vessel, to continue to write to me in the voice of Pyrame?

Your Daughter

September 13th 1883

Daughter,

I now have a fuller grasp of the situation. You have done very wrongly. But you have done well to consult me (at long last).

No, I do not believe this could be the work of Herodias. I am unsure of the source, but as I have told you in the past (though with inadequate force, evidently), precautions must be taken in these cases, to prevent other Agents from perceiving and interfering in our Work.

Here is what you must do:

1. Boil water and pour it over your “lover’s” Offering (the yew berry they gave you, in its vial of seawater); let it steep.

2. Mix in a goblet of mulberry wine, vinegar, and oleander, to undo their name.

3. Pour this mixture back into the vial Pyrame sent you, and next time you write, send them the potion. Invent a plausible story and persuade them to drink it. The likeness to the Tristanian love potion will in all likelihood prove too much a temptation for Pyrame to resist.

With any luck, your “lover” will consume this poison, thus resolving your problem.

Your Mother

September 15th 1883

Mother,

You know very well I cannot do that. Please write back to me immediately with an alternative solution, for I am almost out of time …

Your Daughter

September 16th 1883

Dear Pyrame,

My apologies for this period of necessary silence. Many thanks for respecting my wishes during this interval; your patience does you credit.

Please accept a gift from me—which strikes me as an appropriate exchange for the trophy from the Dragon you kindly delivered to me.

I am enclosing an extract of the same Dragon’s fruit (which, I feel a need to clarify, for your edification: is not in fact a berry, but a fleshy shield around the seed), mixed with a few other key ingredients.

You must trust me.

In addition to my passions as a naturalist, I have been trained in certain Arts, you see. And I have concocted a Remedia amoris for each of us to imbibe. This seems to me the only answer to our riddle, the only way out of this tangle.

I thank you for providing me with a pleasant enough diversion during this over-steeped phase between summer and autumn when the island is so lukewarm and languid. But now our “affair,” such as it was, must come to an end. Please, if you care for me as much as you claim to, you will respect my wishes and consume this draught. Be sure to drink every last drop.

I assume I will not hear from you again. Farewell, Pyrame.

Sincerely,

Francesca

September 18th 1883

Dear Francesca,

As you can ascertain for yourself—on the basis of my reply’s existence—your potion did not work. I hope you will not be displeased to hear from me. If you have checked the honeysuckle’s pot for my reply, you must have anticipated this outcome.

Far be it from me to question your skills, but I suspect your efforts may have been muddled and marred by your own intentions and desires, and so I will speak to them directly, since their mistress is so recalcitrant:

To Francesca’s Ire:

Why pour so much boiling oil down on me? I am no Invader; I will emerge unscathed. Francesca is gifted. But I have gifts of my own, with which to defend myself.

To Francesca’s Pity:

I beseech you. Act like a pumice stone and work away at your unyielding mistress; defang her.

To Francesca’s Love (whom—I could swear—I have glimpsed darting like a sly doe through the dense and shady thickets of Francesca’s mind):

Don’t be so frightened, skittish thing. Come closer. I am no manly Hunter. I am, rather:

At your mercy,

Pyrame

September 21st 1883

Pyrame, enough games. My Mother told me I should kill you. I am beginning to believe I ought to have obeyed her.

I thought I had come up with a happier solution.

I know you are lying; you never drank the potion. If you had drunk it, you would no longer feel any ongoing need to write to me.

Tell me, what did you do with it? Did you feed it to that horrible honeysuckle? It does appear to be suffering more than usual of late—its petals have turned brown as parchment, its leaves are golden. The most inauspicious alchemy I ever saw.

(If you respond by calling it an emblem of your long-suffering love, I will smash the ridiculous thing’s pot against the adjacent wall, and what charming nonsense will you throw at me to calm my personified Ire then???)

I apologize. I have just had to stop writing to pace through a series of neat circles and breathe. I am more composed now; I am ready to write again.

You say you have gifts of your own.

Of course you do, demon, scoundrel, whatever the hell you are. I gave you your “gifts” (just as my Mother gave me hers when I was born).

I see the problem now.

I gave you a mind, but no substance, no body to imbibe the potion … I will research this matter, scratch this riddle out, erase it and you from the world once and for all.

I don’t even know why I’ve written all of this down. A reminder to myself, perhaps. I will not send this letter back to you, I will not fit my words into the dying honeysuckle’s embrace (“sweetened with dead flowers,” indeed).

But I admit, part of me fears you will perceive my thoughts regardless, you will find a way to go on imbibing the poison of my language—if not the remedy and solvent with which I had hoped to release you.

So, if you do see and hear this letter, despite my refusal to send it to you:

Please. Begone. It will be better for us both.

Sincerely,

Francesca

October 13th 1883

Dear Mother,

I believe I have succeeded. It has been around three weeks, and I have heard no more from poor Pyrame.

Why, then, do I ache? Why does it feel as though some part of me is missing? Have I gotten everything wrong, yet again? Perhaps, rather than ridding myself of Pyrame, I should have folded them back into myself (I imagine this process might be rather like raveling up a scarf and tucking it into a pocket).

On second thought, I will not send you this letter. You will worry too much.

Your heartsick Daughter

October 15th 1883

Dear Francesca,

Do not be alarmed; I have no intention of continuing to inflict my correspondence on you (unless you want me to). But as your faithful servant, I have been investigating a matter on your behalf, and now justice demands I bring the matter to your attention.

Banish me again after this, and I will obey. Never again will you hear my voice (not that you’ve ever heard it in the first place, but you understand my meaning: Never again will you trace my words on the page, subvocalize and almost-sort-of-hear me. I wonder what that voice of mine sounds like, as you imagine it? A little smoked and hoarse? Dark and soft as wine?).

It was your famous Hatbox, stuffed with our correspondence, that inspired my suspicions.

(Yes, yes, I know all about the Hatbox. I know lots of things I’m not supposed to: that’s part of the gift of deriving from you.)

I started to wonder: Does that husband of yours have his own Hatbox—or whatever the masculine equivalent might be (a cigar box, a whisky box, a carrying case for his hunting rifles … )? He must have secrets of his own that he is hiding from you, while you have attempted to flaunt yours in front of him.

And so, I recently slipped into your household to pay his quarters a visit and rifle around just a little.

Don’t worry. He is not jealous yet; he does not know to scatter flour across the floor, to catch your lovers’ footprints like gnats on flypaper. To him, I’m just a half-forgotten nightmare.

Did you know you have had other, realer dalliances already?

It is cruel to ask the question, as I know you will not recall.

I found letters between yourself and another Pyrame, another Thisbe—back in the world beyond the Île de R—. (I will be good; I will not grumble too much about how you once suggested—unjustly, hypocritically!—that I might be taken with other Francescas. I will confine my pique to this one parenthetical aside, then have done with the issue.)

Besides which, I found an illuminating exchange between your Mother and Husband. I thought it unwise to steal too many samples, but I enclose one key message, as proof of my discovery:

December 1st 1882

Dear Sir,

It is done. I have given the Potion to your wife, my Daughter. There may be ongoing aftereffects—it is difficult to limit the effects of this potion, to target and erase just one Event or Person; there tends to be a sort of bleed-over, a stain that spreads and overtakes entire pages of thought. Be on your guard and assist her as she recovers her memories and sense of self.

But I assure you, both her love and her recollection of her Lover will dissolve.

I hope you will forgive my Daughter for her lapses. Consider her an innocent henceforth; she will not recollect what has occurred, and so punishing her for forgotten misbehaviors would be entirely fruitless.

I recommend a sojourn to the Île de R—, to avoid reminders in the form of Rumor. My Daughter will benefit from the cleansing air and seawater. There, you may renew your marriage vows in peace.

I am, as ever, at your service, in the interest of our family’s prosperity and happiness,

Your Mother-in-Law

(I assume the potion in question is familiar to you—you meant for me to consume the same substance, I think?)

In light of this discovery, it may be prudent to keep your Hatbox well and truly hidden—lest Husband take notice and defend himself in the same tired old fashion against a brand new threat.

Won’t you reconsider our acquaintance and arrangement? Do you even have a choice, or are you reenacting something you’ve already done and forgotten, dearest, muddledest Francesca?

Always yours,

Pyrame

October 18th 1883

Dear Francesca,

I shall write this down, lest I forget. I must have done this last time, too. I must have left notes for myself. But perhaps they are not here. Perhaps they are back home.

I am writing to secure a minnowing recollection, before it darts away again:

A picnic, in the shade of a mulberry (is that where the idea for Pyrame came from in the first place?). A dear “Friend” wrapped his fingers around my ankle; he tripped me when I tried to run, and I did not resist. He tickled my calves with buttercups. We kept an eye on my Husband’s shadow, stretched by the sun. To quiet Husband’s worries, my Friend spoke too loudly, called me “Sister” or something close enough; he made sure my husband overheard the childish nonsense and “secrets” we whispered to each other.

Or am I mixing things up again? Patching together a lost memory and a half-remembered story—is this tale mine or someone else’s? Or is it both, something I’m reenacting because I admire the pattern of it, while my own just feels …

About as meaningful as the buttercup pressed on this page.

Figure this out at a later date. Don’t forget.

Yours and yourself,

Francesca

October 18th 1883

Mother,

I hope never to hear from you or see your face again.

Formerly,

Your Daughter

October 20th 1883

Pyrame,

Do you know what troubles me most about the sea and sky here? Their overinsistent blueness. I find it excessive. Gaudy. Besides which, I cannot always convince myself of the color’s source—which surface is radiating and which reflecting.

I went for a walk the other day and met a ferrotypist, struggling to steady his tripod along the craggy coastline. I helped him, and in return he told me a little about his process: what it’s like to catch light and time. A moment peers into his box’s eye and never escapes again.

It takes a few seconds for the image to settle—which makes movement a problem. He said, “I can ask a human subject to hold still, so that the resulting picture will remain crisp and clear, but naturally, I cannot make such a request of the sea.”

He keeps failing to capture the sea; his box always flattens it: waves and roiling foam smoothed out, until the water fixed on his plate looks less like the sea than a sleek and strange mirror. He showed me a few samples: pictures split by a crisp horizon line, but if you rotate them, it becomes difficult to tell which half of the picture is up, and which is down.

Tell me, which one of us is steering this sorry ship of a love story, if I dare call it that?

I have taken to writing on carbon paper, to preserve my part in these exchanges. I paid the man for one of his ferrotypes, which I now enclose.

Yours inevitably,

Francesca

October 22nd 1883

Dear Francesca,

An observation: Flour is very much like powdered moonlight. A useful ingredient for a future Potion.

Yours,

Francesca

October 24th 1883

Dear Francesca,

I think we are both a little made up—which is to say, we are made of words. Like a highly abstract Blodeuwedd! Accordingly, I will press camellias into this message—for lost love, and longing—and so sweeten our exchange with dead flowers.

You made me somehow—I don’t know how. Perhaps you conjured me up out of our Tristram. Mixed me with another Pyrame or two.

Unsurprising. You are, I have discovered, not merely a naturalist, but more like one of those ancient herbalists of legend. An enchantress, a witch.

But you appear to be conjuring up your own self in much the same fashion. Leaving notes to remind yourself of who you are, and who you have been. Are you sure you have been truthful, an accurate guide?

I think—suspect—I can mirror you more accurately. Serve as the sea to your sky.

“Not all things always, dying, would I forget,”

Pyrame

October 26th 1883

Dear Pyrame,

Blodeuwedd indeed. My theory is fleshier: that I tore you out of my own body, in a grotesque reversal of Eve from Adam’s rib.

There is a place where I ache—in the rough vicinity of my spleen. I have a faint scar there, which I always understood to be the result of a childhood injury, but perhaps I misremember. Perhaps I engaged in a rite too dark to recollect, when I tore you out of me.

But we have wandered astray. Some time ago, I proposed that you could do with a more substantial form, so that I could poison you, or cure you. (Same thing.)

I no longer wish to force-feed you any such remedy. But would you like a body, after all? To meet me in the flesh?

Yours,

Francesca

October 26th 1883

Daughter,

I am concerned by your recent letter. I beg you to guard against the Deceiver who has inspired this rush of enmity against me.

Consider carefully before you betray yourself and ruin the delicate happiness your Husband and I have taken pains to construct for you. I have only ever acted with your care and safety in mind, though this may be difficult for you to understand. I beg you to trust me and inform me of whatever it is you have lately learned (or believe you have learned).

Your Mother

October 27th 1883

Dear Francesca,

I would like that very much. But I fear this might be impossible. Advise me. How should we proceed?

Yours,

Pyrame

October 30th 1883

Dearest Pyrame,

I have developed a spell and procedure, to transmute moonlight into flour. In this way, I will knead dough out of the night’s air, and so give you flesh—or something close enough.

Meet me tomorrow evening in the graveyard. By my favorite mushroom patch—you know the one. (I am enclosing my previously-mentioned sketch, to guide you.) I will ensnare your soul and give you a body. And what fun shall we have then …

I can almost see you now: staring at me in astonishment. Your rib cage stark as stairs, skin stretched tightly across your stomach, yielding and shuddering at the sight of me. Perhaps you are wondering, will this be the night of passion you have longed for?

Or will the witch plunge her knife into you once you are made solid?

I feel your breasts already beneath my palms, my tongue … You will taste of sea-mist.

Trust me, my darling. Do as I bid you.

Yours,

Francesca

November 1st 1883

Oh, Francesca …

It is more frightening to leave you notes, now that I have so solid (too solid) a form. I fear your husband’s jealousy more than I used to.

But never fret—my own fleshiness is insufficient to dissuade me. We named me well: Pyrame is foremost in love, and second-most an overhasty fool.

Write back to me soon. Immediately. I would command it, if you were commandable, but I know you are not, and so I beg you for mercy instead.

Yours always,

Pyrame

November 6th 1883

Dearest Francesca,

Are you well? I have not heard from you, and I am beginning to worry …

Has your husband discovered us? Please write back to me as soon as you can, to reassure me, or I am liable to imagine the worst and do something very foolish, in keeping with my name. The problem is, there is more risk in the folly now—that I might end much as Pyrame did, skewered on some pointy object or another.

And so, write to me, obstinate woman. Please.

Yours,

Pyrame

November 8th 1883

Pyrame,

We must be careful. I will be brief—I have to write in some haste.

My husband has not discovered us, precisely, but he has commented on my “listlessness” with some displeasure. I have the impression this corresponds to my behavior in the past.

I managed to slip in and out of the house undetected for our Hallows’ Eve escapade in the graveyard. But the following evening, my husband discovered salt and flour crusted between my thighs. He was astonished and wished to know the source. He asked if I had bedded a baker—or perhaps an entire bakery. (Though he put his questions less delicately than that, fingers twisted in my hair.)

I said, No, Dear, I have bedded the Moon.

This response did not amuse him. But it did reassure him that his only rivals are my own Madness and Fancies (which he personifies as often as you do). Nothing so concerning as a man or woman of flesh and blood (or, in your case: of flour, moonlight, and seawater).

Please do not write back, for now. I will write to you when it is safe again.

December 8th 1883

Francesca,

It has been a long time. I have been patient. I have waited for word from you. But can you blame me for my concern—especially given your memory’s past fallibility?

I admit, part of me worries that this might be yet another creative means of ridding yourself of me—perhaps out of love and concern for my safety. Or perhaps out of impatience, boredom, irritation at my persistence.

Give me some small sign that my worries are misplaced. Now that I am embodied, I relish all sorts of new sensations, but life is more complicated and limited. I can no longer see and hear across a distance, like a God could; I require coarser, more concrete forms of gratification.

You needn’t write to me if it’s dangerous to do so. But at least leave me some token, an indication that you still desire me. I will comb our graveyard daily, though it is now crisp and silvered with frost—grass so brittle it crunches like fine bones. My breath fogs the air and my fingertips are always cold.

Take note—there is some likeness between these materials and surfaces: flour, snow, page. We can correspond on the landscape itself if not on paper.

Yours,

Pyrame

December 10th 1883

Dearest Francesca,

I have found your message: the blooming little heart of blood you painted between the frozen inkcaps.

I hope it did not hurt too much to leave me this gift; I imagine you kneeling, as though to lay down a bouquet of hothouse roses, to honor some dead man you never met. Did you prick your thumb on a thorn? I imagine you biting yourself, to extract sufficient ink.

I scuffed the earth with my boot and buried your heart so none other would find it.

Fine, fine, I will trust you, and I will go on waiting.

Yours impatiently,

Pyrame

December 15th 1883

Daughter,

You still have not answered me. Very well. I can guess, or imagine, what you have discovered. I suppose I can understand your reasoning, though I think it wrongheaded …

You agreed to the procedure, my dear. In fact, you encouraged it. Don’t you know how difficult it is, to make you act against your own wishes?

But my mind keeps wandering back to the question of whatever Agent first interfered in your communion with Herodias and adopted the voice of Pyrame.

Do you not wonder as well: Who are they, really? A lost and wretched spirit, earth-bound for good reason? Or a demon, or something even worse …

Be careful, Daughter. Let me know when you have come to your senses, and I will help you banish the wicked Agent that haunts you once and for all.

Your caring Mother

December 20th 1883

Francesca,

I keep wondering if you like the island better when it is frozen and gray, since you expressed a dislike for the intensity of summer’s blue.

The world around us has come to imitate the colorless ferrotype you kindly sent me. And that confounds and muddles matters all the more: forget the difficulty of telling up from down. It’s even harder, sometimes, to distinguish life from its echo, flattened on copper or paper.

It’s all just a trick of the light, isn’t it?

I am impatient. Forgive me. It’s been so long. The contours of your face are blurrier than I like in my mind’s eye. That is why I lurked outside your household the other day—I think you noticed me, as you stepped out with your husband, though I was careful to disguise myself in a rag-skirt and threadbare veil. You really should not worry; I am sure he took me for nothing more than a simple beggar-woman.

I am now sketching your expression, as it struck me then, arched over your shoulder, disdainful. You turn unrealer the more I struggle to capture you.

That long, twisting neck—sometimes you remind me of a swan. The public impression that they are elegant only captures half the issue, overlooks how vicious they can be as they defend their territory.

Were you warning me away from yours?

Yours in sorrow,

Pyrame

P.S. I enclose the sketch in question, for your consideration. Please correct it; remind me of where I have inevitably strayed from truth.

December 21st 1883

Pyrame,

He knows. Please stay away.

Merry Solstice,

Francesca

December 22nd 1883

Dear Francesca,

Tristram and Iseult sing about their own love, they lie by moonlight, they write letters to King Mark to persuade him of their innocence, and he believes them. We, the audience—who have seen so much evidence of their adulterous guilt—even halfway believe them.

Your Mother and your Husband will try to make you forget Pyrame. Do not forget.

They will try to persuade you that Pyrame is a noxious poison. Which, to be fair—isn’t untrue. But to live without them would be far worse: a hollowing-out of part of yourself. A kind of amputation.

There is a solution—if worst comes to worst.

Work against Mother’s instructions.

Unbind and unbody Pyrame. Gather them back into your soul. (Then, when you are ready, let them out again, like a sail.)

Yours and yourself,

Francesca

Part III: In which the other Iseult takes revenge.

January 1st 1884

Dear Francesca,

I know you warned me to stay away, but I fear for you and would appreciate some reassurance you have come to no harm—that your husband hasn’t taken some awful vengeance against you.

Send me anything. Some token. Another heart of blood in the graveyard at least, though the recent snow has melted. A hollow heart, then. Press a signet into sleet and leave an empty impression. That would do, would satisfy.

Yours,

Pyrame

January 5th 1884

Dear Francesca,

I have visited our graveyard several times over the course of the past few days. The widows who frequent it are beginning to recognize me, I fear. One of them addressed me. She asked whom I had lost, then told me, “You’re too young to know real grief, my dear.”

I’ve checked our former letterbox, but haven’t found a single word from you. Therefore I hope you’ll forgive this intrusion, if I take the liberty of sliding this letter into a book I have recently discovered, in three volumes—The Poetical Romances of Tristan in French—containing certain of Swinburne’s sources. I am especially taken with this passage, which I translate very roughly from the French, as far as I can make it out:

“But she had led Tristan astray

through a wicked word—‘to love’ (amer)—which she changed

so that he did not know if his grief

was born from the sea (la mer) or from love (amer),

or if she said ‘love’ instead of ‘the sea,’

or if instead of ‘love’ she said ‘bitter’ (amer).”

I will send this material to your customary address as a seeming gift from a childhood friend; I shall wrap the package in frilly, lacy papers and ribbons and dried flowers and so suggest it is from a girlish, innocent sort of correspondent.

I shall enclose my previous letter, and this one, halfway through the first volume—in the hope that the subject matter will pique your interest, such that you discover my words on reading another’s, long dead.

Forgive the deception. And then, once you have (presumably) forgiven me: Find some means of answering me, please.

Yours,

Pyrame

January 8th 1884

Dear Sir,

I admit: Your letters have given me a shock. I’m uncertain what they mean. I want to tell you that you have made a mistake—my name is not Francesca—you must have taken me for another woman. (Or perhaps another woman, in an effort to divert you from dogging her shadow, has deliberately given you my address instead of her own.)

But I am not sure I have the matter right after all. It cannot be so simple as that.

I have read the books you kindly sent me with gratification, and I think only someone who knows me very well would have thought to send me such a gift.

I am also very fond of visiting the graveyard you have, so suggestively, termed “our graveyard.”

I would appreciate an explanation. Resolve the puzzle for me of your familiarity and strangeness.

It seems unwise to use my own name, and so I will continue to write under the one you have apparently assigned me.

Cordially,

Francesca

January 9th 1884

Dear Mother,

I have just received the strangest correspondence, which I enclose. I do not understand whatever magic is at work here, but I detect your involvement. Please enlighten me.

Your Daughter

January 11th 1884

Dear Francesca,

I rejoice and despair! The latter more than the former. Thank you for writing to me, though I understand (or don’t at all, I allow I cannot imagine) what this muddle looks like from your present perspective.

Let me explain.

My previous letters did not arrive in your hands by accident. You are lost in a fog; you must trust me and follow my voice out of it again.

I suggest we meet in person. Write back with a date; contemplate a reasonable excuse to waylay your husband’s suspicions. If you like, we can maintain the charade I’ve already established: that I’m an innocent little schoolfriend. I look the part well enough.

I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten you’ve forgotten, and so let me clarify and remind you: You were mistaken to address me as “Dear Sir” in your last letter. I understand the mistake, given my signature, a masculine nom de plume. I admit, “Dear Lady” does not suit me much better, though I can at least play a Lady’s part more convincingly, for the benefit of witnesses along the lines of Suspicious Maids and Jealous Husbands.

I beg you, simply call me Pyrame. (When we meet in person, call me Eloise, Rosamund, Carmilla. I don’t know. You choose.)

Anyway. Where was I? Ah, yes, where I usually am: our charade. I propose a delightful little performance, which will also afford us an opportunity to become reacquainted with each other. (“RE-acquainted?” you wonder—intrigued? “Whatever is this tangled fool on about now?” Have a little faith and patience, dearest Francesca.)

Tell your husband an old childhood friend is visiting the Île de R— and would like to pay you a visit. (I know you were never properly in “school,” and so this friend cannot be a schoolfriend; a friend from the neighborhood? A churchfriend? Someone you took occasional French lessons with?) She would like to have tea, d’avoir de tes nouvelles. It has been so long, too long.

Your friend is also married and therefore safe. She wears white lace gloves and detests jewels and rouge. You used to paint flowers and birds together. I enclose a watercolor your friend has sent you—show it to him as evidence of her dedication to harmless pastimes—of a lark darting Icarus-like toward the sun, as if to extinguish itself. (Do not describe it this way to Husband, of course.)

Just name a date for our performance and I will appear and satisfy your curiosity. I will bring you back to yourself, show you who you are and always have been.

Yours even now,

Pyrame

January 15th 1884

Daughter,

I am very glad you have written to me. Beware—be careful! I fear you are in danger. I thought I had banished the Demon who is currently attempting to reenter your good graces.

You sound suspicious as to the nature of my involvement. And so, let me enlighten you:

This Demon has previously ensnared you. I separated the pair of you, but this proved a difficult operation—like disentangling a strangling vine from a tree, when the two have become so attached, they are almost the same being, grafted together.

As you can imagine, the process inflicted some damage on both sides. I had to cut your recollection clean away so that you would not go rushing back to the Demon’s embrace. I hope you will forgive me and understand that the damage was necessary.

Do not answer the call of the Demon.

Your Mother

January 20th 1884

Mother,

I am frightened. The Demon has written to me again, and would like to come see me in the flesh.

What should I do?

I enclose a copy of the Demon’s latest letter.

Your Daughter

January 26th 1884

Daughter,

I see. The Demon knows how to find you, but we can turn the apparent curse into an advantage. You have already had to depart one home to come to the Île de R— and build a new life there. I would not have you uproot yourself once more, just to flee them. (Who knows? This Demon is wily and may find and follow you again, and again.)

We must seize this opportunity and turn the Demon’s own stratagem against them. We can fight back.

How foolish, for such a creature to assume a body; this makes them all the easier to destroy.

Here is what you must do:

Comply with the Demon’s request and name a date when you will receive them at your household.

You have indicated in the past that the Demon is made of flour, moonlight, and seawater. To undo them, you must prepare a concoction of opposing substances. Set a handful of flour aflame until it turns to blistering ash. Mix it with ink and then leave an open bottle of this mixture out in the sun, from noon until three o’clock.

When your old friend arrives, pretend to play along with the Demon’s proposed charade. Instead of tea, serve your friend the potion. Pretend it is a cordial. You may drink some first yourself to set the Demon at ease, if you wish; you will come to no harm.

The Demon, however—well. Please report back to me soon on your success.

Your Mother

January 30th 1884

Dear Pyrame,

Please be so good as to come visit on Saint Valentine’s Day. Come in the afternoon—any time after 3 will do. I will be at home, ready to receive you.

Yours,

Francesca

February 15th 1884

Mother,

It is done. I followed your instructions. They appear to have worked. Explaining the visit of my dear, previously unmentioned childhood friend Camille to my husband was difficult; I think he has now had enough of my friends and will never allow me to receive any ever again, lest they, too, have sudden crises and expire on our doorstep.

Pyrame clutched my hand and begged me to linger by their side. They recognized what I had done—thought it a joke, a precipice I would tug them away from, once I had amused myself enough.

They asked again and again, “But now the game is over, isn’t it, Francesca?”

I still have their white lace gloves, fingertips stained by their watercolors.

Your Daughter

March 2nd 1884

Mother,

What have you done? What have I let you do?

I have discovered a hatbox full of an illuminating correspondence—including a bundle of Reminders I had the foresight to write to myself.

I would tell you not to write to me again, but I see this request has proved fruitless enough already. And so, I permit you to write to me. Just know that whenever I receive your writing, I will redirect it to the hearth.

Francesca

March 3rd 1884

Pyrame, Pyrame,

Now that you are undone, can you see and hear whatever I write again? Have your eyes and ears dissolved back into me?

I hope you hear this message. I hope you feel it—as if I had engraved my words into the skin above your navel.

If, by some miracle, you are able to write back to me, please do. Tell me what to do to restore you to what you were. To patch you up like so many fragments of shattered porcelain.

Yours always,

Francesca

March 5th 1884

Pyrame,

You have not answered me. This is unkind. I am wearing your gloves now, as I write to you, in the hope that this will enable your spirit to guide my hands and compose your response.

I am drunk on mulberry wine. I will wait and wait until the end of—what? This story? That’s the problem with this story; it never ends. It likes to repeat itself.

So help me repeat it again and again, even if that means I go on loving and killing you over and over. The loving part makes it all worth it, don’t you think?

I think you would agree with that sentiment, if only you would play your own damn part again, stubborn Pyrame.

With love,

Francesca

March 6th 1884

Dearest Pyrame,

I will bring you back. I will summon your spirit again, build another body for it. I pulled the trick off once after all, without understanding what I was doing the first time.

Intention should make the whole enterprise easier. I don’t believe in all that nonsense about poetic inspiration only having a pulse of its own when the poet cannot control it, when the poet is just a channel for something beyond her comprehension.

I understand now. I will act accordingly.

It’s an absurd thing: undoing an undoing. But I have the right ingredients, the right incantations, locked within the confines of this entire correspondence.

Mother tried to write me the other day and I drowned her words in the sea.

Yours again before long,

Francesca

March 30th 1884

Pyrame,

When you are able, please write me back, to confirm whether my spell has worked or not.

Though if you have a body now—again—I suppose you cannot see my words, until I find the right letterbox. I notice that the old honeysuckle has vanished, pot and all (presumably it did not last the winter; the poor bedraggled shrub must have wilted at long last).

Guide me, my love, if you please. If you can.

Francesca

May 1st 1884

Dear Thisbe,

No, I haven’t mistaken you for someone else; “Thisbe” is a code name. It is, I suspect, a familiar code name, though you may not remember why just yet. Have patience.

It was a pleasure to make your acquaintance the other day at the Librairie; I heard you before I saw you. I entered and wandered between the bookshelves, chasing the voice that read out loud:

“ … as the worn-out noon

Loves twilight, and as twilight loves the moon

That on its grave a silver seal shall set—

We have loved and slain each other, and love yet.”

And then I saw you, and your lace gloves and the pair of glossy, dark plaits that fell over your breasts (I wanted to tug them like bell-pulls, to check if they were real). I must have struck you as strange as I introduced myself, my hand trembling.

I trembled all the more when I noticed the camellia tucked into your buttonhole.

It may be, if you are who I suspect and dread and pray you are, that we are more familiar with each other than you realize.

There is a graveyard at the Island’s center, and at the heart of the graveyard, an oak with a birdhouse dangling from one of its limbs, which local larks frequent. Please be so kind as to leave a response to my letter there—if you are willing to continue this conversation.

I will check daily for word from you.

Yours faithfully,

Francesca

Editor: Hebe Stanton

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors

you will disembowel the bird
i must warn you before all else
before you poke and prod
at your new brood of yellow chicks
and find threads hanging

if you try to pull the string
you will disembowel the bird
because it is attached
to their tiny internal organs
exactly as yours would be

if you are a sewer
or a general fusser
you will disembowel the bird
treating it like a sweater
and pulling without thinking

you have to slow down
when you rear young chicks
it’s possible that even by mistake
you will disembowel the bird
with an errant movement

but then you should not cry
you should put the creature down
swift and sure
sooner or later, sadly,
you will disembowel the bird

After the night that the sea turned into stone so solid you could walk along it, we stopped fighting the changes we knew would come. Even as the trees were softening, their bark for the hungry to scrape and scrape and spread it on whatever bread they could beg or bake. Even when the grass became a golden pelt, warm to the touch, and rose and fell like the back of an animal breathing.

I had one red crayon left for listing, one left to catalogue. How the water was salt and we drank it anyway and lived. How the yellow sun had an edge of green just before twilight. And didn’t the moon smile at us with an uncle’s smile?

We didn’t expect anyone, any visitors, any army or cloud or magician or weather to arrive and save us. Some of the old thought to turn in/to sleep early. They hung their hammocks in a copse of trees west of the city and swung back and forth, a little, and then not at all. How they slept. We never knew there could be such sleeping, and from time to time, we saw a new hammock among the stilled ones. I know what you’re thinking—the bodies? What of them. But I tell you the old became like grasshoppers, husks of the bodies they once were, dry and barely anything. Their voices pared down to a few high notes then a note and then a quiet that was something you could lean into, thick but weightless.

Maybe some went on and are yet living, among the young who feed and listen to the stories they invent or remember or half remember and stitch together with threads they pluck from the hopes of those breathing. Stitched and in time unraveling, but not yet unraveling.

[Editor’s Note: Publication of this poem was made possible by a donation from Kewayne Wadley during our annual Kickstarter.]

This is on display in the eponymous “House of Illusionists,” which provides an extreme example of Fogg’s love for tragic endings. In it, a pair of aged instructors in a fantasy version of imperial China work with their young students to bend their craft of casting illusions toward a transcendent escape from their civilization’s collapse. Outside the walls, an invading army forces their city toward an inexorable surrender. The details of an agonizing siege, and the imagined pillage that will follow, contrast with the beauty of the illusions which are wrought in the shelter of the school. All this builds toward a gut-wrenching climax.

Fogg also excels at sketching out the contours of a fantasy setting without getting bogged down in its details. This is a skill that gives her stories, most of which are fairly minimalist when it comes to the narrative, a weight which is derived from everything that is not on the page. There’s a feeling that the stories are built on a richly imagined world in the background. I was reading the collection on a trip, and the thick atmosphere and gorgeous details of Fogg’s stories made it a great collection to disappear into in an airport.

This is a characteristic that often gives her stories a dreamlike quality. For example, “An Address to the Newest Disciples of the Lost Words” highlights the tension Fogg successfully maintains between sharp foreground detail and background fantasy outlines, using epic fantasy settings to highlight the richness of the former. In this story, a magic practitioner in a desert academy reflects on their life, their training, and their decision to train in magic. An entire world and magical system are sketched out, but the story remains impressionistic, like a Japanese print. In this case, the minimalism of the narrative, with no climax or resolution, makes the detail that much more striking.

I was a boy of twelve when I first saw/heard/felt this Word. There was a woman at the night market of my hometown, performing Words by the river for free.

The anchor for this Word is wind.

This Word is restlessness coiled deep in the heart. It is a longing with a voice. (p. 173)

Longing is also woven through these stories. In “Wild Ones,” the urban fantasy piece that starts the collection, a mother worries about her daughter as she reaches the age when children—in what appears to be an otherwise normal world—participate in the “wild hunt” each evening, accompanying a goddess figure on flights through the clouds. The mother fears her daughter will not outgrow the longing for the open sky as most children do and that she will eventually choose not to return home. Playing on resonances with Peter Pan (1904) and the anxieties of parenthood, the piece explores the mother’s fear as she recalls her own time as an adolescent flying with the hunt and slowly realizes that it’s her, not her daughter, who is being lured back into the sky: “Why do we forget so much of our wild days? How do we lose the language of the wind?” (p. 7).

Another kind of longing is apparent in “Traces of Us,” which appeared in Neil Clarke’s Best Science Fiction of the Year anthology for 2019, and in which brain scan technology allows two lovers to overcome death through their longing for each other. It’s a poignant and subtle piece that comes to life with medical details highlighting Fogg’s career as a translator and editor of scientific articles. That background comes through not only in her crisp language and detail but in the sharp focus she can bring to scientific sensibilities, as in “The Wave” and “The Message”—two near-future science fiction pieces, the first of which deals with social media and sports in the age of climate change and the second the aftermath of an ambiguous SETI success.

Fogg’s stories deserve to be read more widely, then, and Interstellar Flight Press is to be applauded for bringing this collection to print. (My only complaint about the volume is its lack of a table of contents.) So much new fiction is published each month that it is almost impossible to keep up with all the worthy writers appearing, and small presses like Interstellar Flight do an important job offering volumes collecting excellent pieces that otherwise would be ephemeral. Even for someone who has run across Fogg before, this collection makes it possible to read work that may no longer be available online or anywhere else.

Shelter in gardens, academies, and family; solace through beauty, memory, and at times illusion: Fogg’s focus on endings and societies declining or being destroyed may hit harder today than when these stories were originally written, which is why her consistent emphasis on the power of beauty—if not to save then at least to somehow redeem such endings—is important. I sincerely hope there will be many more such lovely endings to come.

Edwin Callihan’s “Angelhood & Abscission” is the longest story and the one that most explicitly builds the anthology’s shared world. The piece is framed as a series of letters from an unnamed narrator newly arrived in a vast brutalist city. The architecture is rendered with obsessive detail: Buildings rise on “colorless columns and flying buttresses rounded by cylindrical obelisks, spackled with tiny little windows like the outside was hit with buckshot” (p. 10). The narrator finds a sparse apartment with a couch, a microwave, TV dinners, and a television that only catches static or late-night sign-off patterns. The prose circles in the way genuine fixation does. Early on, the narrator visits a bar called Sefer, where a “band” manipulates a chrome box that emits “clanky, metallic groans and whimpers” (p. 8) while oily yolk drips from the stage. He meets Bill, a tall man with a bowl cut and a face covered in red boils, who speaks with a whistling “w.” He is later introduced to The Sculptor, who keeps hundreds of sheet-draped figures in a red-lit basement beneath a twenty-four-hour copy shop. The figures are malformed, not quite human, with blue veins running across marble-like skin. When the narrator reaches to touch one, The Sculptor slaps his hand away and retches. The realization arrives gradually and inescapably: The narrator is being sculpted, too. Callihan balances cosmic detachment with intimate physical detail. Lines like “[b]etween heaven and hell is an orifice, a puckering asshole shitting us out into wherever” (p. 24) land with cosmic revulsion. The closing ascent to the lunar surface—during which the narrator looks down at the city “blinking like Christmas lights” (p. 24) and understands there may be countless versions of himself “plucked and discarded again and again” —is both grotesque and quietly devastating. The repetitive, hypnotic prose mirrors the narrator’s growing dissociation, making the reader feel the slow erosion of self in real time.

Sam Richard’s “Red Tears Are Shed on Grey” shifts to a fragmented, almost cinematic style. Sections marked “C” intercut loops of historical atrocity footage—missiles rising in “tumescent power” (p. 26), faceless soldiers marching, factory fires, hanging bodies, endless ejaculation overlays—with the story of Sasha, a young woman smoking outside an illegal basement venue called the Rat’s Nest. The Karl Marx epigraph about dead generations weighing like a nightmare is structural rather than decorative. The footage is rendered with clinical detachment: faces scratched out, flags clipped, pilots with faces removed. Sasha listens to a strange man reminisce about the venue’s past as an underground library filled with suppressed radical texts and do-it-yourself guides. The conversation unsettles her. When she returns home, the loops invade her reality. She finds herself strapped to a chair by invisible restraints, forced to watch versions of herself on a filthy projector screen. Her face tears open. Blood pours. Tears bleach the screen white. Richard refuses catharsis. The story ends in vacancy and fraying film. The formal choices—abrupt cuts, smokeless cigarettes, eternal ember—create a disorienting rhythm that mirrors Sasha’s unraveling. History is not past; it is a corrupted reel projecting itself onto living flesh until identity dissolves.

Charlene Elsby’s “I’m Not Coming After Her” is the emotional and philosophical heart of the collection. The narrator is the surviving twin speaking from inside the womb after her sister Millie has been delivered and harvested for organs. Elsby writes with extraordinary precision. We feel the initial warmth and nutriment that convinced both twins their mother wanted them to live. We feel the shift when the technician explains that Millie cannot survive independently and that her viable parts could save other babies. The mother’s relief is immediate and physical: “the relief of not having to have two daughters after all, and that it would be through no fault of her own” (p. 49). The surviving twin experiences every scalpel cut, every cold disposal of unusable parts labeled “biological materials.” The decision to remain inside and fester, rather than enter a world that treats bodies as spare parts, is presented without melodrama: “All I must do is fester,” the narrator repeats like a verdict. The story reframes the womb as a battlefield and asks, without sentimentality, whether any world that dismantles you for parts is worth joining. Elsby’s philosophical density never sacrifices visceral immediacy, however. The final description of infected tissue turning gray as blood retreats is one of the most haunting images in contemporary horror. The first-person perspective from inside the womb creates an intimacy that makes the betrayal feel personal.

Joe Koch’s “I Am a Horse” begins in apparently realistic territory and descends into prolonged bodily transformation. An aging mathematics professor, Mr. Sapin, becomes obsessed with a Butoh dancer he first mistakes for a statue in a garden. The story is structured in numbered encounters that escalate relentlessly. The second meeting involves a fake breast torn open during rehearsal. The third is a disastrous dinner in which the dancer accuses Sapin of knowing about her childhood abuse and doing nothing. The fourth finds her at his door soaked in blood. The fifth and sixth dissolve into sensory deprivation: hooded, bound on all fours, fed pureed food through tubes, cleaned by automated jets, slowly reduced to animal state. Koch writes captivity with a poet’s sense of rhythm and a clinician’s patience. The professor’s perverse gratitude amid degradation feels earned rather than contrived. The story refuses easy moralizing. It simply observes the process until the man becomes the horse of the title, rocking gently under an invisible rider who sings a half-remembered lullaby.

The anthology closes with two shorter pieces that function as sharp codas. Justin Lutz’s “Not Waving, but Drowning” literalizes Stevie Smith’s poem inside a flooded basement venue, turning a gig into slow, collective submersion. Brendan Vidito’s “Theatre of Sublimation,” meanwhile, presents a performance in which the audience itself becomes the raw material. Both deny the reader any clean exit.

Certain obsessions repeat across the collection. Clean spaces—operating theaters, copy shops, white-painted Butoh skin—reveal themselves as sites of deepest filth. History loops like scratched film. Privacy is illusory; the body is always subject to sculpture, harvest, projection, or transformation. There is no warmth offered and no redemption promised, only a cold, surgical clarity that refuses to avert its gaze.

Filthy Loot Press has produced a handsome, minimalist object: stark cover art by Rat himself, clean typography, no excess. The physical book feels like the concrete city it describes. In the broader landscape of contemporary extreme horror—where shock often substitutes for substance—New Meat in a Clean Room stands apart. It shares DNA with recent works by Gretchen Felker-Martin, Eric LaRocca, or Hailey Piper, but its intellectual rigor and formal cohesion place it closer to the tradition of Clive Barker’s Books of Blood or Kathe Koja’s early novels. Ira Rat’s editorial hand is confident yet unobtrusive; the stories converse without ever feeling forced.

This is not comfortable reading. It is not intended to be. It is, however, one of the most tightly conceived, skillfully executed, and intellectually demanding horror anthologies I have encountered in recent years. Readers seeking easy scares or traditional resolution should look elsewhere. Those willing to sit with sustained discomfort will find something sharp, lasting, and deeply unsettling.

To understand why all SFF writers are historians, you have to understand what a historian does.

It is easy to think of a historian as an assembler of facts. We scour archives, libraries, and historic sites, sometimes with pick and trowel, more often with dictionary and laptop, to acquire new information: who did, wore, bought, ate, killed, burned, invented, lived, or saw what, when, and where. Just as, when describing a space elevator, I ask friends in the space tech world to send me facts, another writer might turn to me for facts about fabric dyes, currency systems, dueling customs, or castle layout, to give accuracy to a historical story or supply ingredients for an original world build.

However …

The particle physicist’s craft is not primarily describing particles at rest, but observing particles in motion, tracking their interactions, forming hypotheses about how particles form, change, and affect each other, and speculating about particles we cannot yet detect, and new things we may learn from them. Just so, the historian’s craft is not primarily filling encyclopedias and reference books with static facts, but observing historical change over time, describing past transformations and their causes, offering new hypotheses about how societies form, develop, and transform each other, testing said hypotheses, and speculating about things we do not yet know about history while trying to figure out how we might try to learn them.

Many famous histories, like Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, or Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, center on making claims about the causes of historical change: whether and why the Roman empire declined, why WWI took the shape it did, or what caused Europe’s rise to global dominance post-1500 (spoiler: Diamond's argument is right there in his title). Even more prosaic-seeming topics, like Aaron Bobrow-Strain’s White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf, marshal their facts to make arguments about what causes change: White Bread examines the baffling shift from 90 percent of America’s bread being baked at home to 90 percent being store-bought within two decades in/after 1912, attributing the change to profit-seeking bread factories funding deliberate propaganda tapping into xenophobia and hygiene panics (fake news stories about the supposed unsanitariness of bread from home ovens or immigrant-run bakeries) plus the early-twentieth century’s mania for all things scientific (kids need high-tech bread made in labs by white-coated scientists, not baked by ignorant moms!). Zooming out from the details, White Bread argues that profit-seeking corporate greed, propaganda, moral panics, and sudden fads have the power to change the world—at this moment, dozens of writers reading this are thinking about how such kinds of change could apply to their own world builds. (By the way, as White Bread shows, sliced store-bought bread dates to 1912, so the next time you hear someone say, “The best thing since sliced bread,” it means the best thing since 1912.)

History is a social science and, like all sciences, seeks (in Francis Bacon’s words) knowledge of causes and the secret motions of things—in history’s case, the causes and secret motions of human society, of us. When historians get together at conferences, we debate whether there really are such things as Dark Ages and Golden Ages, whether and where it makes sense to draw lines between periods (when does pre-modern become modern?), and whether we’ve been focusing too much on one kind of cause (political leaders, war, dynasties) and should pay more attention to another (livestock evolution, transportation tech, everybody’s mom).

In brief: The historian’s craft aims to show how our world changes, and who or what has the power to change it. Okay …

In SFF, the world usually changes. It may be saved, destroyed, discovered, overrun by zombies, driven mad by faeries, terraformed, irradiated, touched by strangers, or saved from tyrants, but it changes. Often, the story focuses on characters who shape or initiate the change for good and/or ill: plucky rebels, unlikely saviors, shadowy conspirators, ruthless dictators, the king seeking to rule wisely, the king in exile seeking to return, the faithful followers of the king in exile who make it happen. Live on the page, characters win battles, achieve regime changes, create disruptive technologies, release then battle pathogens, found world-shaping institutions, make passionate arguments in the room where it happens, or are placed by fate in the right place at the right time. If it’s a cozy fantasy, they may even popularize a new kind of bread.

All such stories advance claims about who and what has the power to change the world. Think of a dystopia where the world went bad because of Technology X, versus one where the world went bad because of Villain X, or Corporation X, Political Party X, Global Cataclysm X, Supergenius X, Aristocratic Family X, Religious Leader X—each of these makes a different claim about who and what has power to change our world. A future transformed by a new technology presents a different model of who changes the world if the technology came from one genius inventor, versus the synthesis of two inventers, versus a team of university scientists, versus corporate funding, versus a government lab. A political drama of lords, ladies, and emperors advances the claim that only those at the top have the power to shape history; a drama where the lords and ladies are in conflict with a merchant-class bigwig presents two types of world-shaping power in conflict; a drama which adds an idealist rising from the gutter presents a third; a tale where someone starts in the gutter but enters the elite and uses elite power to actually enact change goes back to only those at the top having power again. A struggling space colony may be saved by rugged space marines, dutiful hereditary lords, the teamwork of the crew, or one special little boy; each option makes a claim about where human power lies, while having the space colony perish despite all efforts makes a claim about human powerlessness.

All such stories are practicing the historian’s craft, not the half that is gathering facts, but the half that is advancing a claim about the causes and secret motions that shape human history.

SFF with worldbuilding does this even more. Every world build involves the author deciding how the imagined society got to its present shape. Was there an ancient golden age of noble elf kings, followed by a dark age caused by the actions of one evil mastermind? Such a book is in the camp with histories that claim there are such things as dark ages and golden ages. Was there a massive revolution which wiped away the old regime and built a blank-slate new world order dreamed by revolutionaries? Such a book accepts those histories of the American and French Revolutions which depict themselves as restarting from nothing like a new dawn. Did the revolution shed more blood than it likes to admit, and leave a lot of old structures and hierarchies embedded in its new order? Such a book uses different histories of the American, French, and other revolutions, and makes a different claim about whether a blank-slate new era is possible. If this is SF, did Earth face a third World War, from whose ashes the fragmented survivors created a new civilization shaped by … what? Idealistic visionaries? Rival religious cults? Rival warlords lifted to power by their dominance of guns, germs, and steel? Having World War III in the backstory of any imagined Earth future advances the claim that new eras are often born through war; a future built on the rise of a charismatic leader, or hard-earned incremental reform, makes peaceful change feel plausible. Every world build makes choices about where agency rested in the great stages of its past, using histories as models and also practicing the historian’s craft: making claims about how the world changes, and who has the power to change it.

Importantly, every sentence above could have said teaches instead of claims. Storytelling is how most claims about how the world works reach us, in childhood and adulthood, from our very first picture books to this year’s Hugo finalists. We are all familiar with the importance of representation, how it feels empowering to see a story where the hero resembles us and disempowering when the hero never resembles us, but the same is true in the structural sense. It feels empowering to read stories—fiction or nonfiction—where the world is changed by the kinds of things we feel we too could do: by teamwork, grassroots action, steady effort by someone not too different from ourselves; it feels disempowering only when powers we can’t hope to wield transform the world: superpowers, royalty, geniuses, or vast inhuman processes, whether military, economic, medical, or alien. When Sam and Frodo save the world through friendship and resisting corruption in their hearts, we, in our smallness, feel we could aspire to that; when Superman does we know we can’t.

So, all SFF authors—authors of stories with worldbuilding, and of stories where the world changes—practice the historian’s craft.

You can find some SFF that doesn’t. Romantasy, for example, sometimes has nothing at stake larger than the happiness and intimate lives of the characters; such romantasies may still have a world build which makes claims about history, but a sufficiently light world build may not. Conversely, some non-SFF genres have world-changing stakes. Many thrillers and political dramas make claims about who has the power to save the world, though usually in the form of guarding the status quo; in such stories it’s usually the choice of threat that makes claims about what changes history, whether James Bond or Jason Bourne battle terrorists, business tycoons, government agencies, traitors within governments, etc. Similarly, non-SFF historical fiction often makes claims about history, like Mantel’s Wolf Hall or Renault’s The Mask of Apollo, if the story shows the exercise of power or a major historical event, but not if it just shows the detective solving the murder or the heroine finding happiness against a historical backdrop.

In sum, all SFF writers are practicing the historian’s craft. If we think carefully about what claims our plots and world builds make about who has the power to change the world, we can use that to advance models of history which encourage hope and action, and we can avoid or subvert those models which teach powerlessness and cede agency to the powerful. And (my historian colleagues would urge me to add) we can be careful to advance historical models that recent historians agree are true, and not outdated ones like Great Man History or cycles of Dark Ages and Golden Ages which historians are toiling so hard to combat, but one bestselling book can undo the labors of a thousand academic monographs.

Important corollary: Most authors of other genres outside SFF are not historians; this is more important than it sounds like when we remember this is especially true of mainstream literary fiction.

So-called mainstream literary fiction is a genre which many falsely argue is not a genre but “normal” or “non-genre” literature. But lit fic has its tropes, pacing, furniture, and expectations just as much as other genres, it just tricks many into not noticing them, since its formula is less formulaic than the genres defined by extreme formulaicness (romance, mystery), and its furniture is less conspicuous than the genres defined by conspicuous furniture (fantasy, SF, western), but SFF is certainly as variable in formula and romance and mystery are often as realistic in setting as mainstream lit.

But one nearly-universal characteristic of contemporary mainstream literary fiction (as nearly-universal as technology is in SF or magic in fantasy) is a focus on a powerless character making an internal journey to come to terms with the world. It may be a journey of finding joy or finding despair, but the world is the challenge, and whether it's static or changing is despite the characters, not because of them. Lit fic thus does not teach any models of how the world changes or how history works, other than the powerlessness model of the individual being ground along by progress, like Charlie Chaplin trapped in the gears of Modern Times. In fact, when literary authors want to talk about characters changing the world, they reach for the tools of SFF or historical fiction, as in Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, Lessing’s Shikasta, Spufford’s Golden Hill, Piercy’s Gone to Soldiers, and Mantel’s Wolf Hall—all of these authors established themselves first as mainstream authors but used genre tools when they wanted to address the genre question of how the world changes.

Romance fiction, in contrast with lit fic, does depict characters taking actions to improve their lives, since part of the formula is that the heroine does not only find love, she makes some change in her life that makes her much happier: a new job, new career, moving to Italy, taking up a new hobby and forming friends, finally opening that bakery, etc. Romance depicts agency in the small sense of people making a difference in their own lives and those of communities and loved ones. These messages of hope have great power to inspire collective action, as we have seen in how romancelandia via its Romance the Vote has raised over a million dollars for democracy and, this month, tens of thousands for funding pop-up supply depots for Minneapolis protestors. But romance, like thriller, usually deals on the global sense with a static world, in which individuals take actions within the status quo that impact lives around them, but do not make one era move on to the next.

In other words: Most people today get our ideas about how history works and changes primarily by consuming SFF and historical fiction. We in the SFF genre are not only historians, we are the most influential historians practicing today. That is a lot of responsibility.

When SFF authors offer portraits of how people change the world, we exercise enormous power over worldview, over expectations, over hope. When we use history innovatively, presenting diverse or inspiring portraits of agency, we can spread truly life-shaping calls to action, or at least calls to expect that one’s actions matter, but even an old-fashioned tale of kings or superheroes, or outdated Dark Ages and Golden Ages, at least shows the world in motion, and with pivot points when some choice or action causes the next. We should not underestimate how much power genre writers have to shape how people expect the world to change, what actions are important or likely to matter, what threats to watch out for, and whether it is worth taking action when we see the world on fire.

Nor should we underestimate the power of genre readers to challenge the hegemony of the literature of powerlessness by pointing out that SFF practices the social science of history, analyzing and depicting the causes and secret motions of the human world at a larger, truer scale than the microcosmic lens of mainstream lit aspires to do.

Sometimes people ask me why I, a historian, became an SF writer since past and future are opposites. I always answer: Nothing is more like the future than the past, a long period in which cultures change, disruptions happen. I’m not a historian who decided to write SF, I wanted to write SF—indeed SFF—from early childhood, and became a historian because I realized it would be the perfect training. The more I practice both crafts, the more I realize they are one.

In a brilliant scene from Kerry Callen’s Halo and Sprocket, a slice of life comic about a single woman and an angel helping Earth’s first sentient robot learn about the world, the three unlikely roommates visit a local art show. Two pictures hang side-by-side, an abstract mass of shapes and a night scene with lovely landscape and stars. The robot asks why humans call the shapes piece abstract and the nightscape realistic when the stars are in completely inaccurate places, while the geometry of angles and lines is perfect. Once that challenge is voiced, you can’t un-see it. We shift the paradigm the same way when we ask the denigrators of genre fiction why our literatures, with diverse and realistic depictions of human agency and worlds in flux, are less realistic than mainstream lit fic with its narrow, zoomed in portraits of inner journeys and human powerlessness. When Le Guin called genre writers “realists of a larger reality” she focused on how SFF portrays other ways of being and living, demonstrating alternatives, but we also portray a larger reality by showing those realities in motion instead of in stasis, as so much real-world contemporary fiction does.

The historian’s craft is a powerful one. Medical research does not let us control that massive system called the body, but it lets us understand how it works and changes, guiding us in what to expect, and how to start our interventions when we want to affect the body for the better. Just so, the craft of history does not let us control events, but it reveals mechanisms, guides our expectations, helps us diagnose, and posit treatments. SFF authors are not usually the researchers who developed the new historical model, but physicians are not usually the researchers who developed the cure either; SFF authors are the front-line practitioners who put the fruits of history’s craft into daily practice, sharing it in doses the public can consume, combining, treating, administering, customizing, even inoculating against evils like propaganda and despair. All human beings wonder how we got the world we have and how to change it; not all stories help answer that question, but—for all their faeries, rockets, spells, and aliens—ours do.

Editor: Gautam Bhatia.

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department.

the walls of their City, Dex crosses paths with Splendid Speckled Mosscap, a robot on a quest to find “what humans need.” Humankind, after all, is no longer reliant on robotic labor: Two centuries before, robots developed consciousness and left their factories for the forest (Chambers 6). The journey that follows is not only a meeting of human and synthetic minds, but a “rewilding” of human purpose for Dex, which drives them toward the text’s central invocation: to “find the strength to do both” (Chambers 10).

Chambers’s rich descriptions of comfortable objects—hot food, crisp sheets, a calming cup of tea—reinforce the novella’s frequent categorization as a “cozy” text (Harris 2025). Yet this emphasis on comfort adds to the eremitic rigor of the book by illustrating Dex’s devotion to Allalae, the God of Small Comforts, and is embedded in Dex’s function as “three parts therapist, one part confessor, and two parts bartender” (Ladd 2021). Criticism has inadequately considered the text’s urgency around negotiating human purpose as part of Dex’s monastic role. Instead, it attempts to historicize the text’s discussion of the relationship between technologized human comfort and the harsh realities of the wilderness within an industrial context that can feel anachronistic to monastic work (Arianne 2025). Yet by staging a conversation between a robot and a human with a vested interest in committed purpose, Chambers offers fruitful speculations on the relationship between function and purpose.

The companions’ dialogue revises human flourishing as a rewilding process, led by a commitment to fluidities between technology and nature. This rewilding is reconstitutive, suggesting reconciliations between humans, our technology, and the natural world through messy, sometimes injurious balance. Critically, this process is modelled through programmed and nonhuman actors, whose nonhuman priorities are also centered. In this discussion I will first consider Dex’s “rewilding” as an ecosystemic process resulting from engagement with the external world, rather than monastic contemplation. Mosscap’s role in this rewilding will then be considered as a model of neither a nostalgic and impractical virtue ethics nor a rationalist optimization but a more ecosystemic, and perhaps more plausible, way of being. 

In Ways of Being (2022), James Bridle describes intelligence—broadly defined here as the ability of a creature to take in information, process it, and apply it to behaviors or perceptions—as one of many “ways of being”: “it is an interface to [the material world]; it makes the world manifest” (Bridle 52). He furthermore suggests that “all intelligence is ecological,” only knowable from some sort of inter- or intra-action (Bridle 57). Bridle asks:

What would it mean to build artificial intelligences and other machines that were more like octopuses, more like fungi, or more like forests? What would it mean—to us and for us—to live among them? And how would doing so bring us closer to the natural world, to the earth which our technology has sundered, and sundered us from? (Bridle 11)

Bridle’s discussion of these alternative ways of being, from mycelia to moss, emphasizes the possible misapplication of anthropocentric characteristics in our relationship to technology. It is worthwhile to integrate ecological methods into analyses of literary portrayals of alternative ways of being, not least because the collision between extrapolative futures and the somewhat less optimistic present can help us decipher how we might respond to what is coming before it gets here. After all, SF has its characteristic prescience; consider the depiction of rocket-propelled space travel in Cyrano de Bergerac’s The Other World (1657). A Psalm for the Wild-Built exists in dialogue with a longer tradition of “rewilding” through admission of technology into ecologies in SF. 

The positioning of technology as a route to rewilding is not specific to solarpunk, nor did it originate with the genre. Solarpunk is almost hallucinogenic in its optimism, although it has in some cases started to become more realistic. There is an infectious quality, and perhaps an unsettling idealism, in a genre that allows the reader to imagine a world in which we need not place our bets on coal or plutonium but instead on the clean comfort of sunlight. Yet similar, less idealized technological mediators and models can be found in the ecosystemically-minded generation ship of Kim Stanley Robinson’s famously pessimistic Aurora (2015), or even in the tenuously symbiotic relationship between Le Guin’s technologized Cities and Archives of Wakwaha in Always Coming Home (1985). Mosscap’s modeling of an alternative way of being is characteristic of these ecological thinkers, especially in the robot’s emphasis on decay, disposal, and disassembly. Yet A Psalm for the Wild-Built does represent the central impulse of solarpunk, which Konstantinou describes as a more imperative “ought” rather than a “could be.” This reflects an increased attention to SF’s particular responsibility in its interlocutory relationship with tech, as described by Yeliz Figen Döker and Zoya Yasmine in the Cambridge Journal of Artificial Intelligence last year. Mosscap dramatises a rewilded disposition toward nature for Dex and for the reader, but it also emphasizes the importance of this rewilding for future productive and responsible engagements between people, our tech, and the natural world. By reading these texts together, we can consider what we might learn from our own technologies, in developing our own ways of being in our ecosystem.

Dex’s travel is initially reminiscent of an offline millennial van-lifer setting off in a vintage campervan to find the coastal eddies of Point Reyes, but their quest for meaning immediately implicates the external world, not just the internal, through its environmental implications around balance and fluidity:

Oh, there were plenty of bugs–butterflies and spiders and beetles galore, all happy little synanthropes whose ancestors had decided the City was preferable to the chaotic fields beyond its border walls. But none of these creatures chirped. None of them sang. (Chambers 6)

Dex’s emphasis on “ancestors” identifies their dissatisfaction as a historical issue, with adaptation to the orderly structure of the City, itself a “healthy place, a thriving place” accompanied by the disappearance of singing in its resident creatures (Chambers 6). A straightforward reading of these “happy little synanthropes” suggests a subtly sinister dimension to the City, in spite of the apparent health of its ecosystem. Yet the tension of this moment lies in the siloing “border walls”—reminiscent of Le Guin’s Wall of Anarres in The Dispossessed—upon whose conservationist function the continued function of the City and the “chaotic fields” are predicated. 

This tension is underscored by Dex’s choice of the term “synanthropes,” which emphasizes the balance between closeness and otherness: While the butterflies, spiders, and beetles are neighbors, they are not kin. The echoing call of this chirping, singing wilderness foregrounds the contrasting eerie silence of the City’s bugs. The emphasis on song in this moment evokes an oral tradition in the natural world and in doing so rewilds personal and historical expression from human actors into the broader ecosystem. The text, and ecological thinkers like Bridle, do not suggest that through this rewilding humans are discovered to be fundamentally less complex than we believe, but that our environment is capable of greater complexity than we anticipate.

The development Dex undergoes in the “chaotic fields” and the dense forest beyond is initially unsatisfying; the text ends on a wobble. Dex is unable to resolve the felt necessity of their calling with the sinking feeling that their work is unsatisfying, and ultimately decides to put aside their work in order to continue accompanying Mosscap on its quest. Readings of Dex’s surprising nonanswer to the question of human purpose have varied from an optimistic nihilism in the face of purposelessness to an alternative resolution to the works/faith line. Yet the text’s refusal is its resolution; after a harrowing journey through the wilderness, a sudden revelation of very human purpose would undercut Dex’s reassimilation into the often incomprehensible ecosystem they are now a part of. Much of the text emphasizes the distinction between healthy environments that are navigable by humans (as in the City with its “happy little synanthropes”) and the total wilderness: “[a cave] was craggy and dark, uncomfortably angled. A stagnant smell emanated from nowhere in particular… A fragile rib cage of something extremely dead lay without ceremony on the floor, a few tufts of limp fur scattered around, unwanted by whatever had crunched the bones clean” (Chambers 117). 

This emphasis on discomfort in Dex’s wilderness, which is “uncomfortably angled” and “without ceremony,” unsettles the almost excessive emphasis on comfort, ritual, and definition that pervades the novella. The text suggests that it is important, even in a utopian future where we have become reconciled to our environment, for there to be an unsettling “nowhere in particular” in which bad smells, “fragile rib cage[s]” of dead creatures, and things that “crunch bones clean” live without human structure or observation. This nonanswer becomes an ecological resolution: that it is not in nature for us to find clear and defined purpose, and that the desperate human desire for this definition is anomalous, rather than the norm. As Gautam Bhatia’s Strange Horizons review of the novel observed, the text is ateleological as part of its ecological commitments. For Dex to remain uncertain about their purpose, yet to continue onward, enacts the text’s central invocation to “find the strength to do both.” Dex is still a participant in an ecosystem, but their role shifts: from purpose-built to wild-built, from ends to means. 

This shift in Dex’s identity is catalyzed by an assertion made by Mosscap. Embedded in a love for, and wonder at, the environment more broadly, and a joy at their participation in it, Mosscap’s assessment of Dex’s dilemma returns Dex to the ecosystem without reducing their complexity. Mosscap says:

You’re an animal, Sibling Dex. You are not separate or other. You’re an animal. And animals have no purpose. Nothing has a purpose. The world simply is. If you want to do things that are meaningful to others, fine! Good! So do I! But if I wanted to crawl into a cave and watch stalagmites with Frostfrog for the remainder of my days, that would also be both fine and good. You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it… You are allowed to just live. That is all most animals do. (Chambers, pp. 138-9)

Mosscap’s argument locates both Dex and itself squarely alongside the rest of their ecosystem, and, more subtly, it asserts Mosscap’s authority to determine what is “fine and good.” Mosscap’s assertion that Dex is only an animal is not a denial of the particularities of humanity so much as it is an invitation for humans to recognize their existing participation in a larger system. Dex’s failure to reach a clear definition of purpose¹ constitutes a rewilding, facilitated by Mosscap’s intervention as an equally authoritative interlocutor within the same ecosystem. By asserting that “it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it,” Mosscap reframes Dex’s purposelessness into a subtle call to action—or, perhaps, a call to attention: to “marvel.” The claim that marveling is a necessary ecological function recalls Bridle’s framing of the purpose of intelligence as one ecological interface amongst many. In an echo of early American naturalist thinkers,² Chambers asserts that to marvel is a necessary part of human flourishing, a mandatory part of responsible human participation in our environment. To be a responsible ecological citizen, Dex must recognize that as an animal, they have “no purpose.” Dex’s shift across the course of the text is a reversion from a purpose-led synanthrope to a more expressive, attentive partaker in their ecosystem, following in Mosscap’s footsteps.

The success of Dex’s realization depends on Mosscap’s authority to determine what is “fine and good.” By putting substantial definitional power in the hands of a robot, Chambers confirms that the “wild-built” robots of the text are not only members of, but advocates for, the natural world.

Much of Mosscap’s ecological authority rests on its status as a “construct.” The monastic scholar whose reflective introduction contextualizes the novella asserts that robots were originally made as “constructs that could build other constructs” (Chambers 1). The term “construct” evokes a synthetic, potentially artificial quality, particularly when it comes to questions of reproduction or species continuance, maintaining in its periphery the possibility of deconstruction or even spontaneous collapse. Chambers emphasizes the anomalous, fragile, and potentially transitional nature of constructs: “we struggle to understand that human constructs are carved out and overlaid, that these are the places that are the in-between, not the other way around” (Chambers 110). Mosscap and its robot kin could theoretically live forever if they maintained themselves indefinitely, but robots in the novella refuse the potentially empowering permanence and adaptability of immortality. Instead, robots in A Psalm for the Wild-Built reproduce by scavenging the functional parts of their deceased kin. Once no more robots function, the species will come to an end, having run the natural course of its component parts. 

Constructs must be reconstructed, recycled, and repurposed. By developing these new and yet more conventionally natural forms of reproduction, the robots imagine an effective way of participating in an ecosystem which is inspired by the time-limitedness and inevitable decomposition of its other members. Mosscap asserts that by remaining immortal, rather than recycling, the robots would be “behaving in opposition to the very thing they desperately sought to understand” (Chambers 94). These recycling practices position the robots as not just responsible actors within their ecosystem, but also as its historians, echoing Donna Haraway’s assertion that “Ancestors turn out to be very interesting strangers; kin are unfamiliar (outside what we thought was family or gens), uncanny, haunting, active” (Haraway 103). 

Robotic history in A Psalm for the Wild-Built is not transmitted through oral storytelling, nor through formal robot history texts, but through the passing-on of “remnants.” Describing remnants, Mosscap says: “I have a remnant of chairs, but I have never sat in one” (Chambers 56). Remnants lie between instinct and memory, and are transmitted through robotic component parts. In a human analogy, Chambers’s remnants are almost epigenetic. The function of remnants, to borrow a metaphor appropriate to Dex’s monastic calling, resembles the inborn architecture of the soul in Teresa of Ávila’s interior castle: structural, with all the local nuances of a city, and, likewise, traversable and signposted. Remnants carry trauma from the Factory Age, and guide the development of a robot culture despite the dispersion and solitude of Chambers’s robots, who spend most of their time alone in nature. The book itself also mimics this dynamic memory, as the natural world intervenes on the page with the inclusion of naturalistic fleurons of maple leaves at the beginning of every chapter. This symbolic infiltration of the processed paper of the book by its material precursor enacts what Connor Louiselle calls the “positive reinforcement of solarpunk” through aesthetic reminders of the natural world (Louiselle, Almanac for the Anthropocene). 

Mosscap models this alternative way of being in an ecosystem for Dex by maintaining its inherent remnants alongside the embedded newness of its capacity for wonder and curiosity. This emphasis on both present being and cultural memory reframes construction as a creative, generative activity rather than an industrial one. Compare the craftsmanship of Mosscap’s with the manufacturing origin of its original central compartment, which is stamped with “643-143, Property of Wescon Textiles, Inc,” a name whose numerics evokes any number of dehumanizing historical precedents (Chambers 93). In contrast, Mosscap’s insistence on the ecosystemic embeddedness of robots models a creative, reconstitutive way of being in the world. Rather than being constructed, the “wild-built” robots are described as “composed,” like music, with the regular rhythm of consciousness accompanied by a melodic emergent cultural memory (Chambers 93). Like the crickets Dex leaves the city for, Mosscap’s existence sings. 

Resisting the temptation towards anthropomorphizing, Chambers’s depiction of Mosscap remains resolutely nonhuman.³ Mosscap insists on being called “it,” while emphasizing the dignity of an object operating outside of recognizably human behavioral norms: “We’re machines, and machines are objects. Objects are its… We don’t have to fall into the same category to be of equal value” (Chambers 69). Mosscap’s is not a call for objectification, for treating humans in the same way we currently treat objects. Rather, it’s a call to recognize different ways of being in an ecosystem by nonhuman actors, a recognition that does not detract from participation already realized by human ones. Dex’s rewilding results from a recognition that humans are made up of separable and often fluid component parts, built without purpose or calling, embedded in an ecosystem of which we are not always fully cognizant but must always try to be mindful. We must continue anyway, and we must continue to marvel.

From the vantage point of 2026, this novella already feels, in some ways, like a relic, with its optimism about the potential of technology to do more than steal our data, hallucinate our work for us, and provide positive reinforcement where gentle criticism from a human might do a better job. Russell and Norvig’s seminal text on the development of deep learning gestures at the Bayesian networks they anticipated in advanced AI models. The suggestion that machines will operate on Bayesian decision-making principles neither suggests any encouraging similarity to the unpredictable texture of human decision-making nor offers an alternative model for true robot consciousness. It certainly does not do much to reassure the reader of much opportunity for kinship with our future robot neighbors. 

Yet, as Bridle observes, “We are the technology of our tools: they shape and form us” (Bridle 18). SF imagines alternative ways for us to coexist with these tools, and in turn posits alternative ways in which we may ourselves be better “technology.” To recognize our own constructedness in a way that extends beyond the social world into the natural one is to challenge our specialness within the ecosystem, and to perhaps have a shot at a more collaborative relationship with our environment. We clearly have remnants of cricket song. Perhaps the recognition that it is our duty as a species to listen to it might tug the reader to the wilderness, where we could unpack our constructs from a satchel and watch them flourish.

Without constructs, you will unravel few mysteries. Without knowledge of the mysteries, your constructs will fail. These pursuits are what make us, but without comfort, you will lack the strength to sustain either. (Chambers 135)

Footnotes

1.  Perhaps best framed in religious terms, in conversation with Frank Herbert’s Litany against Fear or Octavia Butler’s Earthseed tenets.
2.  Consider Thoreau’s essay “Walking.”
3.  Much can be said about the reassurance found in treating machines that appear to think like people, and about the lengths we will go to in order to make these objects familiar to us. Consider the Thinking Machines Corporation supercomputer, the CM-5, which had to use extra computational power in order to maintain the flashing red lights that made it appear to be “thinking” (Thiel, 1994).

Works cited and consulted:

Arianne. “A Psalm for the Wild Built: Analysis & Reflections,” Letters from Ari, Substack, 21 June, 2025. 

Abrams, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, Vintage Books, 1997.

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway. Duke University Press, 2007.

Bridle, James. Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence. Function, 2022.

Haraway, Donna. ‘4. Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene’, Staying with the Trouble : Making Kin in the Chthulucene, 2016.

Harris, James. ‘A PSALM FOR THE WILD-BUILT and A PRAYER FOR THE CROWN-SHY by Becky Chambers’, Classics of Science Fiction, 18 November 2025.

Hendlin, Yogi Hale. ‘Compost modernity!’, Aeon, 10 February 2026.

Ladd, Christina ‘A Psalm for the Wild-Built Review: Find the Strength to Do Both’, Geeklyinc, 14 July 2021.

Konstantinou, Lee. ‘Something Is Broken in Our Science Fiction’, Slate, 15 Jan 2019.

Magnasson, Andri Snær. Love Star, 2002; translated 2012 by Victoria Cribb

Russell, Stuart and Peter Norvig. Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, Prentice Hall, 1995.

Scott, Spencer. ‘Solarpunk: Refuturing our Imagination for an Ecological Transformation’, One Earth, October 5 2025.

Thiel, Tamiko, “Connection Machine CM-1/CM-2: Design Legacy,” 1994 (Digitized).

Wagner, Phoebe and Brontë Christopher Wieland (eds.), Almanac for the Anthropocene: A Compendium of Solarpunk Futures, West Virginia University Press, 2022.

https://archive.org/details/NightfallUPGRADES

*

So there’s a man teaching some medical students about cutting cadavers and he made a joke but I didn’t understand it

Everyone’s laughing a lot though

I doubt if it was really that funny

This story has already set up its dialogue and back story so nicely

So two college dudes, Freddie and George, are carrying the body of an auld woman with a terrible mouth

They are going to use this to prank some girl who stood one of them up

Oh you silly boys

They have now dragged the corpse to the girl’s door and now they will probably run away quite fast

Wait! Creepy music!

Instead of running away so fast, Freddie is staring at the corpse

Freddie says that the corpse’s mouth was green and it was staring at him whaaaaaaaaat

This is what we came for you guys

Digging the synth music at the scene changes also

Now we are at the medical college hospital? And Freddie has suddenly been called in to assist with something. George, on the other hand, is going skiing because his priorities are different.

They are trying to revive this body but it is not cooperating

You know why? Because it has a huge hole in its heart and its face is dark purple

I’m not a doctor, but I would say such a person is dead. That is just my opinion though

Phone is ringing but since no nurse is around, Freddie magnanimously answers the phone himself

Oooh Freddie has a secret admirer who is calling him. He thinks it might be a prank though.

How did she know that Freddie would answer the phone? Dun dun dun!

The secret admirer has the perfect voice you guys

This secret admirer is bamboozling Freddie with her words

He has now promised to meet this admirer at the same place they dropped off the corpse

So a mysterious lady has asked you to meet her at a place where you dropped off a corpse. NOTHING BAD CAN HAPPEN I GUESS

Freddie has asked how she knew where to find him, pertinent question fam, and she says the guy next to you told me only the guy next to Freddie IS DEAD NO BIG DEAL

Now Freddie has come to meet the mystery lady and they are in some room? And there’s like twenties music playing? And she looks great apparently.

The lady has referenced banks crashing, so I guess she thinks it’s the thirties? I don’t know anything

We all know this is going to end badly for Freddie but right now, he’s dancing with a pretty girl and they’re having champagne and they seem happy

Now they have stopped dancing and he is asking what her hopes and dreams are

Feel like there is a rule somewhere that one should never ask the undead what their hopes and dreams are

Now I think they are going to have sex

FREDDIE DON’T HAVE SEX WITH THE UNDEAD

Well, to be fair she said she was going to go change into what she really is.

That’s probably not a good thing

She just said that’s what you want, isn’t it? NO THAT IS NOT WHAT YOU WANT FREDDIE

Freddie is saying stuff like when you meet someone special you just kinda know and we all feel bad for Freddie right now

OMG THE LADY SOUNDS LIKE SHE’S DECAYING WHAAAAAT

As we said before, DON’T HAVE SEX WITH THE UNDEAD FREDDIE

Freddie has screamed and SCENE!

So I guess Freddie is trying to tell George about his ordeal but George is laughing

He has figured out that the ghost lady was the corpse lady

George is really, really laughing

Well whatever the boys are now going to sleep

None of this is going to end well for Freddie

Which seems unfair, considering that it was George who came up with the idea, no? Isn’t it?

Some twisted twenties/thirties music is playing and I have to say it’s uncomfortable fam

George is going skiing today and Freddie is staying back to study

It’s the phone DON’T ANSWER THE PHONE FREDDIE

It’s the corpse lady who wants to meet again

Corpse lady just said that they belong together. Which is discouraging when this kind of sentiment comes from the undead.

Bro is now having insomnia

There is now a knock at the door

Surprise! It’s the corpse lady!

She’s like you took me from my bed you can’t send me back now but again this was George’s idea no?

Is Freddie having second thoughts about this whole ‘don’t have sex with the undead’ thing?

Fred is actually considering this whaaaaat I mean the logistics alone Freddie

Maybe this isn’t about sex at all, maybe the corpse lady just wants to hang out.

Freddie just opened the door and the corpse lady is standing there with no clothes on.

Welp. There goes Freddie.

Now we are back to that same cadaver class like from the beginning

I think they have opened the cadaver freezer and found Freddie inside.

Oh, the corpse lady and Freddie are together in the freezer I think.

And they look so happy. Aw

*

That was pretty good fam! I enjoyed it a lot, a typical, strong Nightfall story. I thought the lady who was the corpse did a particularly good job and it is sweet that we got a happy ending here. I did expect the story to go another way because I thought it was going to be like any other undead story. But I am very happy to see that it wasn’t. For the next few weeks I am tempted to go through some of the other stories here. Frankly, they are a nice change from the usual OTR shows which, to be honest, are often on the sloppy side. So do join us next time when we will look at another show from Nightfall. Bai dears.

Columns Editor: Joyce Chng.

Copy Editor: The Copyediting Department.

Adjust the color of the sky,
my phone offers, trapped in the kindergarten knowledge
that cherry-blossom and atmosphere are distinct.
The sky-color is as cold as a sheet of paper
that only says true things:
my country does not love me; I don’t know
if you will pass the gate tomorrow after
they take your photograph;
I am still alive.

[Editor’s Note: The publication of this poem was made possible by a donation from Gwynne Garfinkle during our annual Kickstarter.]