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.

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.

Some dude is saying It. Is. Later. Than. You Think.

Having to listen to that with a bell dinging between each of those words made me feel so tired.

We have been warned that if you frighten easily, turn off your radio now.

This reminds me of the time my four-year old niece said she couldn’t tell me a story she had just heard because it was so scary.

Dude has now instructed me to turn off my lights and I’m not going to do that for two reasons. One, it is daytime and two, he’s not the boss of me.

So the back story is this. We have a chemist and his wife Clare, who are living in the middle of nowhere. And he has an assistant.

This chemist is into experimenting on roses. I guess to make them....bigger? Or rosier?

He wants to develop the greatest rose in the world.

I mean the largest rose.

Actually he is not that into roses. He simply used this as a ruse to run away from the city with all its slick and evil ways.

Anyway, now in the present, Clare seems to be dead.

Because they killed her.

Hopefully ‘they’ refers to the worms, sorry Clare.

Okay so basically this is what has been happening. The chemist was putting some human hormone cocktail on the roses to make them grow faster. Then there was some left over. And the assistant asked what he should do with it. And the chemist said poop off I’m so busy all the time. So I guess the assistant threw the cocktail on the ground, where one may find so many worms.

Then Clare went out for a walk but actually she was walking all over a bunch of earthworms.

She somehow manages to sound sad and bored at the same time.

Clare is trying to tell the chemist that something is amiss and he keeps saying oh you women are so like women because you are women.

Some might call this misogyny. But I for one would have said the same thing in that situation. This of course does not make it not misogyny.

Sometimes I wish I knew what I was saying.

There was a roar like thunder which was possibly from the worms which is great.

Roaring, revolting worms sounds amazing.

Clare says the assistant Jackson is missing but the chemist doesn’t care.

It’s daytime and Jackson is still missing.

Even though it is daytime, there is so much fog that it looks like night time.

Anyway, the fog eventually lifts and they notice burrows in the yard which I guess were made by the worms.

The chemist however, has decided these are plough marks made by Jackson who went crazy, ploughed the yard and ran away.

I mean that’s one interpretation.

It’s not a very good one. But still.

It is at this moment that Clare decides to air her many grievances about their marriage.

The chemist continues to be an ass and then Clare says oh btw, she heard something outside.

The chemist just said that the sound she heard was the wind whistling through the cracks in her brain.

lol

I mean that was savage but also lol

Hark! Clare has been redeemed because now they both hear something!

I don’t hear anything.

In the most tedious way possible, Clare just said that there is something moving under the ground.

How can she see what’s happening underground though?

Never mind I don’t care.

I still can’t hear anything, which is disappointing because I thought the worms roared or something, no?

Now there seems to be holes all over the ground.

Clare has now fallen down one of those craters, bai Clare.

The chemist has finally seen one of the worms and it is 30 feet long and slimy.

He does not mention if it is in a state of revolt.

Clare has just been crushed by aforementioned worm.

So let’s summarize things so far. Clare and the assistant are dead. The worms are growing. And the chemist has probably lost interest in those roses by now.

The worms are coming up under the house and over the house.

There is a worm at the window lol

I don’t know why that is so funny.

This show has been unintentionally hilarious more than once.

Now the room is full of worms.

The chemist is being smothered by worms which is fine because he just keeps going on and on about the worms.

This guy sure talks a lot for someone who is being smothered by worms.

Oh stop saying worms worms and just die already.

Finally.

You know what? The worms sounded like radio static and didn’t roar at all.

*

Well that would have been hilarious if it hadn’t been so boring. I have always thought that these kinds of stories should start right in the thick of things and not worry so much about back story. This one may have been better served if we started right at the worms perhaps? And maybe just had one character? I did like the way the story was told, and I get that the poor production probably resulted in the repetitions sounding so...repetitive. Like maybe they were supposed to be an echo or something. I don’t know why I am making excuses for this show. Ultimately what I can say about it is the worms did not revolt or roar and I found that immensely disappointing. Hopefully we will listen to something better next time! Bai fam.

Editor: Joyce Chng.

Copy Editors: The Copyediting Department.

Accessibility Editors

https://archive.org/details/WeirdTales_OTR

First off, this one was recorded in 1932! Whaaaaat

There used to be a series called ‘Stay Tuned for Terror’ which was thought to be the first radio show to adapt pieces from the magazine Weird Tales. But there was a very short-lived series calle d Weird Tales that (almost) did it first.

Three episodes were recorded and promoted to various radio stations but the series never found a home. The thirties, if you will remember, were not a great time for America and that may have been one of the reasons why the series was shelved. Which is a shame because they apparently called in some character actors from Hollywood for this.

The only thing we have left of this series is the second half of an episode called The Curse of Nagana, based on Hugh B. Cave's short story "The Ghoul Gallery". From what I have read on the internet, it’s not very good. But that has never stopped us before fam! Besides this is some historical shit right here so we’re absolutely going to listen to it.

Ok first, let us see who is in it. The archive.org page says the cast includes Richard Carle, Johnny Harron, Florence Britton, Cyrill Delavante, John Ince, Pierre White and Lucille Amaya.

Not going to lie, I don’t know any of these people. I feel like saying I know who Florence Britton is, but I fear I actually mean Connie Britton. And I don’t know her either.

Here’s my seven-degrees-of-kevin-bacon type breakdown of how I know about these illustrious people.

Robert Carle- played a sugar daddy in Moulin Rouge, which I didn’t watch

Johnny Harron- featured in the movie White Zombie, which is also a metal band from the 80s that I used to listen to

Florence Britton- Not Connie Britton

Cyrill Delavante- Was one of the bankers (?) in Mary Poppins I think? And I have been to banks.

John Ince- Was in a movie called The Hole in the Wall which is also the name of a restaurant in my city

Pierre White- Google keeps throwing up info on some other Pierre White who is a chef? And I like to eat food. So there’s that.

Lucille Amaya- No information found from a quick Google search. Which is sad. And I am often sad.

So anyway, that wasn’t as interesting as I thought it would be, let’s listen to the show.

The credits say the music was provided by an Arabian Orchestra, so I guess this is supposed to be Arabian music playing? Idk, it’s very groovy.

This show is very much in the style of people just telling each other parts of the story.

So far we have one lady stabbed in the back, moaning, a scream, a crash and lots of fear.

One dude said ‘there’s too much noise happening around here’ for no reason.

A very hysterical man has just fainted.

Dudes there was this sound and someone said what in the world was that and someone else said why it’s Parker lying in a heap at the foot of the hall stairs WHY IS THAT SO FUNNY

Hysterical dude continues to be hysterical, which is a nice change from having the woman be hysterical all the time

So there is a dead body in one room, a strange entity in the gallery, a missing gun, and a skull so the logical thing for everyone to do is go to sleep I guess

I think plans are being made to follow the hysterical man who is not going to sleep

I hear dead people!

It’s actually a man going woooowoooo.

I guess it’s supposed to be a ghost.

I think the hysterical man and his wife are in the gallery? I don’t know what’s happening to be honest.

A picture is coming to life now and so is the skull.

That’s the one before skull I mentioned earlier.

The man called Parker, who was in a heap on the floor earlier, is giving us a running commentary of what is going on.

Hysterical man has fainted and his wife is attacking a painting.

Nagana, who is a dude, is still to make an appearance.

I’d forgotten about him. I mean there’s so much happening already.

Speaking of which! Here is Nagana making a beeline for the lady.

Someone just said ‘a white betrayer of the great god jakota.’ I don’t know what any of that means, but I feel like randomly calling people that from now on

Is someone singing?

Someone IS singing.

Now someone is laughing.

I think someone is going to get their heart sacrificed now.

Nope, they are not.

I guess the curse is over now?

Well that’s that then.

What was the curse actually? Whatever.

So the internet said this wasn’t very good and I’m inclined to agree. Maybe they didn’t have enough time to make a proper script but they went ahead and recorded anyway. Sometimes things like that happen. So anyway we have listened to a little bit of history and even though it wasn’t great, it was historical and that’s all that matters. Tune in again next time

where we will listen to something else and probably say, wow that’s racist! Bai.

Column editor: Joyce Chng

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department.

“Silence Starved and Swallowed” by Sydney Paige Guerrero from Fantasy 97, the first issue of Fantasy in this incarnation, is a devastating, darkly gleaming story about grief and sadness. Guerrero describes how our inability to put our emotions into words, to communicate our pain and vulnerability to those around us, can devour us entirely: “black holes start with swallowed silence.” Guerrero’s prose is both lyrical and visceral, and the way the story captures the impact of silence on grief and trauma feels piercingly true and real.

Seoung Kim’s “The Interrogation of So-ssang,” from the same issue of Fantasy, is an enthralling tale of love and magic at a royal court riven by intrigue and nefarious plots, a place where death and punishment lurk at every turn. A young girl is brought to serve the court, but when the courtiers turn against her and her mistress, she must find a way to freedom. 

Another exciting new addition to the world of speculative short fiction is Remains, a quarterly horror print magazine edited by Andy Cox and illustrated by Richard Wagner. The duo previously worked together on Black Static, among other publishing projects. The first issue of the magazine was released in January 2025.

“Her Little Ray of Sunshine” by Neil Williamson in Remains 1 is a tense and unsettling vampire story, where the horror feels more anchored in everyday depraved cruelty than in the supernatural. The narrator offers a cure to the vampires that seek him out, but it’s a cure that may not last very long. Williamson threads together horror with longing and sorrow in a way that gives this story real emotional depth.

One of my favourite stories in Remains 2 is “Doors of the Close” by Sarah Read, a devastating, twisted ghost story where the bonds of friendship are stretched and torn by a violent tragedy. Two friends are drawn to the same abandoned building, a place haunted by the reverberations of a terrible crime.

“Big Death” by Abi Hynes, also from Remains 2, is one of several great stories I’ve read recently that are infused with experiences from the days of COVID lockdown. In “Big Death,” the corpses are piling up at an eco-friendly mortuary. As the bodies are decaying together, something both transcendent and transformational happens to them.

COVID lockdowns also shape the fate of the characters in “Beak” by Ian Muneshwar in Nightmare. Nadia’s life has been turned into a living hell by what seems to be an infestation of elusive bedbugs. As the itching becomes ever more unbearable, she goes looking for a way to terminate the problem. From there, things take a decidedly unexpected turn. In this story, as in his unforgettable “Dick Pig,” Muneshwar displays his gift for intense, profoundly unsettling, slow-burn horror, where everyday life morphs into something both surreal and nightmarish. In “Beak,” familiar scourges like the isolation of lockdown, terrible landlords, and odd neighbours twist together with Nadia’s all-consuming obsession with the habits and physiognomy of bedbugs, and her desperate longing to find some kind of release and relief. 

There’s a similar strangeness warping the weft of the seemingly regular world in “The World Under” by Steve Rasnic Tem in The Dark. Beatrice buys a house, but it’s a strange place surrounded by an even stranger lawn. Though the house seems to soothe her anxieties, she can’t escape her worries about the job she doesn’t really like and the co-workers who may or may not be mocking her behind her back. There’s a party scene here that is a brilliant piece of quiet horror as reality bends and shifts, revealing the monstrous depths lurking beneath the house’s deceptively suburban exterior.

Something uncanny is also at work beneath the surface in “Till Earth and Heaven Ring” by K. S. Walker in Strange Horizons, a jaw-droppingly good tale about the fate of the slave ship Henrietta and the eighteen people who commandeer the vessel and set out to seek their freedom. It’s also a story about two men, Otto and Theo, and about the inexplicable, impossible hole in Theo’s side. The story is told through descriptions of artifacts in a museum exhibition: brief recollections; scraps of journal pages; and descriptions of paintings, photos, and sculpture. 

Another kind of uncanny magic is woven into the fierce and bloody “Paths, Littlings, and Holy Things” by Somto Ihezue in Diabolical Plots. Olaedo keeps giving birth to twins in a place where twins are thought to be a curse; the babies are taken away and killed to secure the safety of the community. She has already lost two sets of twins, and when she gives birth again, she has already resolved not to let anyone take her children away. Ihezue’s prose gives the tale a fierce, desperate edge as the story threads together horror and hope.

Horror and desperate choices also shape the fate of the characters in “Blood of the Idugan” by Lilia Zhang in Nightmare. In this gorgeous reimagining of Snow White, the lurking evil is even more twisted and depraved than a mere stepmother.

“Steel Holds the Heat’s Memory” by Rick Hollon in the latest issue of Kaleidotrope is another compelling fantasy tale, set in a world where magic and magic-infused technology is controlled by patents, and where the patent laws are enforced by menacing Patenters. Anyone wishing to be free of their influence and oppression must try to live free of any and all magic, but that choice alone puts people at risk. A nameless girl and her stage-magician father travel through this world with a powerful secret in their keeping: a way to make fire without patented magic. I love the story’s depth, its steely tenderness, and Hollon’s fascinating take on the practice of magic.

Books and storytelling are the magic at the heart of “Dekar Druid and the Infinite Library” by Cadwell Turnbull in Lightspeed. This is an exquisitely carved tale set in a tower that is also a library; neither the tower nor the forest that surrounds it seem to have any end. Dekar Druid, who spends his life among the books, finds himself drawn into the pages of a story in which one of the characters knows more about him than he knows himself.

A library is also at the center of “The Library of the Apocalypse” by Rati Mehrotra in Clarkesworld. It’s a grief-infused dystopian depiction of a Toronto ravaged by war and environmental destruction. While scavenging for supplies, a group of survivors-turned-found-family search for an elusive, ever-moving, very mysterious library. The library and its books seem to be doors to other worlds, and sometimes, people get lost in the stories they fall into. It’s a melancholy, magical science fiction story laced with both hope and sadness.

Magic and science fiction also blend in “Holograms and Gaslight” by Indrapramit Das in The Indian Express, where the world is haunted by uncanny hybrid monsters and beasts. The story is set in a near future much like our own, where the need for profit and technological advancement drives everything, no matter the cost in environmental destruction or human lives. Defying any easy, mundane explanations of the monsters’ sudden appearance, the narrator muses: “Were they shapeshifters desperate to enchant the dying world?”

Creativity and creation are at the heart of “Encore” by Wole Talabi in Omenana, a powerful science fiction meditation on art, memory, and consciousness. I love how Talabi blends descriptions of intricately imagined technology, a galaxy-spanning network of alien civilizations, and musings on the creation of art. There’s a moment of profound transformation and transcendence here, as a twinned artificial intelligence encounters something as old as itself, and must make a choice: to remain the same or become something else entirely.

Two other science fiction stories I read and loved recently are “The Starter Family” by Sage Tyrtle at Giganotosaurus and “Magical Girl Antifa War Machine” by Esther Alter, narrated for Escape Pod by Hugo Jackson, Jess Lewis, Serah Eley, and Joe Moran.

“The Starter Family” is a wrenching, dark fable about gender roles and expectations in a society where any deviation from the norm is punished harshly. All men get a starter family that is later summarily discarded in favor of a forever family. From childhood, Charles has been taught to follow the rules and do what is expected of him, no matter what his true feelings are, but after he visits the Starter Baby Store, things begin to unravel. The story has a similar claustrophobic vibe to Orwell’s 1984, where internalized oppression is just as terrifying as external, and where it’s almost impossible for people to even imagine resisting or rebelling.  

“Magical Girl Antifa War Machine” is all about resistance and rebellion. A group of friends are transformed by a mysterious object into shape-shifting, super-powered Antifa War Machines, driven by an overpowering urge to fight fascism on Earth and elsewhere. They are powerful, extremely hot, queer, and trans. Together, they proceed to tear up the world in order to destroy their fascist enemies. While this story does not provide anyone with an instant happy ending, the way there is kind of glorious. It’s a tumultuous, sharp, brilliant story that pulls no punches.

My final story pick for this column is the novella Starstruck by Aimee Ogden from Psychopomp. It’s the story about Prish, a radish with a soul, who loves Alsing, a fox with a soul, and how they go on a journey together when the stars stop falling from the sky. Does that sound peculiar? Yes, it does. But it’s also a warm and wondrous story about a world where star-souls falling from the sky turn all sorts of creatures and plants (even rocks) into persons. On one level this is a cozy and life-affirming story, but it’s a coziness tinged with darkness. As Ogden shows, life doesn’t always turn out the way we planned or the way we wanted, and it can be painful to settle for the life you have rather than the life you expected.

*

Fam, we are finally out of the darkness.

As in, somebody just said that. I think. I’m not rewinding that to check so whatever.

I don’t know what darkness they mean anyway.

Oh like actual darkness like darkness in sewers. 

Did you remember that there were townspeople in the sewers? I certainly did.

I certainly didn’t.  

Anyway, two dudes are talking and I have no idea what they are talking about. I was able to discern the words ‘kip’, ‘funeral dirge’ and ‘church’.

I think someone is ringing the church bell? For like humanity? Which is super-helpful,  I guess.

We have received word that whoever was in the tunnels is now out of the tunnels. Except for Jane Marshall.

Jane Marshall don’t hang out in sewers, I mean really dear.

There are still thirty or forty people down there and they are in some kind of trance? 

Or maybe it’s just a party idk.

Cut to two scientific fellows who are studying the mud. 

Did you know there is also something called a Mud Cookie which is a famine food made from actual mud.

Famine foods are depressing.

Back in the lab, the two scientific fellows have decided to let in some fresh air and sunlight.

Something is happening to the mud!

It has become completely solid!

Did I mention that the mud was not solid before? I should have mentioned that.

This is why the mud becoming solid is a significant development. 

The scientific fellows both said ‘of course!’ at the same time so something particularly fruity should be happening soon.

Cut to the mayor’s wife Mrs. Deverill looking for her husband who, if memory serves, just tried to kill her.

Some evil force has taken over him entirely. In other words, he is going bananas. 

How evil is the force that has overtaken him? Well, he is currently trying to get back into the town of Redlow. And I for one cannot think of anything more evil than that.

Mr. Deverill’s face is bleeding, and the soldier fellow who has stopped him is getting very upset about it.

Mr. Deverill keeps shouting ‘They need me!’, which is something people say when they are going bananas.

He has now killed the hapless soldier fellow.

Anyway, the scientific fellows have figured out that the sun is the answer to all their mud problems. Let’s hear the breakdown, shall we?

The rays of the sun are what is damaging the mud, not the heat.

This is not a scientific thing. This is a battle between the mud and the sun.

I did not see that one coming, fam.

If the mud wants to control the earth, it must destroy everything that was created by the sun. Which, I guess, includes the humans.

I mean it’s a hard sell but this actor is really giving it all he has.

‘Nature has turned this into a psychological warfare.’

Now that’s something you don’t hear everyday.

They have figured out that they need to burn through all the brain cells of the mud and they have decided to do this with some kind of infra-red lamps. They have to be careful though because the heat may make the mud replicate itself.

No pressure then, cool.

Mr. Deverill is trying to head for the sewers now.

There were “dead birds and things” in the back seat of his car.

Spookay!

The authorities are firing warning shots to keep other people from going into the sewers. Mrs. D is convinced that they are going to shoot her husband.

She is doing some soliloquy now which is very boring for me.

A soldier is hearing sounds from the sewer now.

Only the soldier seems to be hearing these sounds maybe he is also going bananas.

Oh I hear it now. It’s not very interesting though.

Now the infra-red lamps are ready and we are going to turn them on. Exciting times!

All the peeps from the sewers are coming out! Welcome back guys!

Mr. D is just running amok because as we mentioned earlier, he has gone bananas. 

He is like, now we can destroy the evil in us and the evil we have created! With the mud! Which is not a bad idea actually.

I will follow you, Mr. D.

Someone just screamed.

Woah, is something sizzling?

Now something is bubbling.

And I think Mr. D is dead now, aw.

He was a restless spirit for sure.

The mud is spreading! Which I guess means the lamps didn’t work.

Well at least you guys tried, that’s what’s important. 

Oh wait, the lamps are working now.

The mud seems to be shrivelling up.

Everyone just said YAAAAAAY. 

And to round everything off nicely, the people from the sewers have been saved, Mr. D is dead which is cool because no one liked him anyway, and Jane Marshall is in the hospital, which is where everyone wants her to be.

Remember when I said that everyone said YAY? Well there are a few wet blankets here who are like ‘what do we do when this happens again’.

Hey man, just take the win and be happy.

*

So as expected, a rushed final episode that tried to tie everything up and felt like one was running through a museum while the tour guide was trying to explain everything very quickly. Obviously we can’t be snarky about things made in 1966, so I will just say that I legit loved the idea of sentient mud. It’s a great idea. Everything else was meh but good effort from everybody. It’s just one of those stories fam, where we give them three thumbs up for effort. On the bright side however, this show has finally come to an end. Join us next time when we will listen to something else! Bai fam.

The road to publication has, for me, been fraught because I was not always at ease with the self and other—until I realized the power of fiction. Speculative fiction is a safe space that can, like any fiction, help us understand other perspectives. It allows for a different kind of writing with foundations to cultivate inclusive worlds.

In my article ‘The Rise of Black Speculative Fiction’ published in Aurealis #129, I share how, as an African Australian, I grappled with matters of identity—until I fell into writing black speculative fiction, which brought me out of the closet.

Writing Black people stories is my own reminiscence that I’m Australian and African, and it’s okay. I am many, betwixt, a sum of cultures. I am the self and ‘other’, a story of inhabitation, a multiple embodiment and my multiplicities render themselves in cross-genre writing.

As a reader, writer and an editor, I’m increasingly noticing black speculative fiction, and how it’s on the rise. In my prefatory essay published in Fafnir—Nordic Journal of Science, I ask myself and the reader, what are Black people writing about? And guess what, trends in black speculative fiction mirror my own clutching, my seeking to belong.

Increasingly, people of colour—once invisible in literary texts, fewer characters looking like them—are now finding empowerment through storytelling. In the Fafnir essay I stated:

Like any fiction, speculative fiction helps the reader to understand other perspectives, seeing the world through a character’s eyes, their world, psychological, physical, or imagined. In its qualities of “non-realistic”, speculative fiction comes with power inherent in the surreal or abstract: it offers a safe space in which to explore “realistic” themes – for example, racism, sexuality, social injustice, or whichever individual or societal dysfunction – that may be tougher for a writer or reader to tackle or relate to in their fuller constructs or reality.

In a form of subversive activism, speculative fiction empowers a different kind of writing with its unique worldbuilding that has, over decades, emboldened writers like Octavia Butler and Toni Morrison to write a different kind of story that’s also about writing oneself in. Morrison was compelled to write something she could relate to, and Butler finally decided to “write herself in” because stories of her time did not feature an “other” like her.

This theme on the politics of identity recurs in my fiction, and that of other Afrocentric writers seeking understanding of the self, seeking decolonization from western hegemony.  I didn’t understand my own feelings of disconnection, until I explored inhabitation and hybridity through speculative fiction.

This understanding boosts my own fascination, in particular, with white South African contributors to my book Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction by Bloomsbury Academic.

In her chapter, ‘A Gaze At Post-Colonial Themes That Re-Envision Africa’, South African author and editor of science fiction and fantasy Nerine Dorman, writes about her story “On the Other Side of the Sea, published in Omenana Magazine that pays attention to stories from Africa and the African diaspora. She speaks about her feelings of being ‘neither fish nor fowl’, and how she explores this in her fiction:

I intended this story to function on a literal and a metaphorical level, to discuss the way in which white people can let go of their preconceived notions of being somehow apart and superior, courtesy of South Africa’s apartheid legacy within the difficult changes inherent in a post-colonial society. The story was about a way for them to shed their hubris and accept that they are integral to rebuilding a land ravaged by the effects of institutionalized systemic racism. In many ways, this is my story about claiming an identity as an African, despite the cultural baggage that I carried with me for many years growing up, feeling neither fish nor fowl in terms of where I belong. I have no homeland to go to. That ship has sailed centuries ago. Africa is my home. This claiming of an African identity comes with a degree of personal humility, of acknowledging the painful past associated with my ancestors and an acceptance of moving forward, of being able to participate in a new cultural movement where I am but one small part in a greater community, no better or no worse than the next person. My ancestors’ sins are not mine, and I can be better than they were. (pp. 201-102)

Xan van Rooyen, an autistic non-binary storyteller from South Africa,  explores their own queerness in the chapter “Queer Imaginings in Africanfuturism Inspired by African History”. They write:

In this text, I use “queer” as a way of including all identities beyond cisgender, which describes those whose gender identity aligns with the sex they were assigned at birth, and heterosexual, which refers to those who are sexually attracted to people of the opposite sex. I personally prefer the word ‘queer’ as it allows for a certain fluidity of identity, and also implies acceptance of those who either don’t yet know which specific label best fits who they are or who eschew the rigidity of labels altogether. (p.120)

van Rooyen finds fascination with speculative fiction for its “what if” that challenges dominant hegemonies that have made them feel “less than.”

I connect with this sense of belonging/unbelonging, and how other people with perceived birthrights can feel entitled to question the identity of an ‘other’ who does not look, behave or speak like them.

Stephen Embleton, born in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, now resident in Oxford, finds captivation with cosmologies and languages, and says in Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction:

You don’t have to be Tolkien to create fictional languages, pantheons of gods, or cosmologies for fantasy worlds. But how people have told their stories, their histories and, most importantly, their traditional beliefs through the ages—in the variety of ways—shows the depths of the human (condition/psyche) in developing their identities. Finding our place in the world coexists with the philosophical seeking and scientific evidence necessary to rationalise where we are in the inner and outer universe.  (p. 24)

In inventing language, myths and folktales, Embleton finds his place, most at home, with fictional, fantastical cultures, albeit based on “the people and cultures, and real-world systems (political, familial and linguistic)” (p. 24) around him.

Authors are increasingly taking ownership to reimagine new ways of engaging with difference, whichever difference, casting a gaze on protagonists grappling with their own identities, and harnessing their own resolutions to whichever conundrums.

My own black speculative fiction, as does that of other Black writers, scrutinises the complex and diverse experiences of African and Afro descendant peoples—I talk about this in the Fafnir essay:

People of colour are increasingly leveraging the supremacy inherent in storytelling to craft revolutionary speculative fiction in stories of soul and claim: snatching their own power with fundamental philosophical questions and confronting themes that not only contemplate but demand different futures for Black people. Writers from Africa and the diaspora are pushing the envelope, even splitting it, to chart new and perilous (depending on who’s feeling threatened) fiction that tackles sombre topics. As writers like N. K. Jemisin, Nalo Hopkinson, Tannarive Due, Suyi Davies Okungbowa, and Tochi Onyebuchi increasingly become household names among speculative-fiction fans, along with the likes of Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, and Toni Morrison in their recognition in literary worlds, more writers of colour will join them.

 I playfully explore the dichotomy of the self and other in an essay, “Inhabitation—Genni and I” that appears in my book An Earnest Blackness in which I hold a conversation with myself:

Eugen: What language do you dream?

Genni: I dream in English, but it’s not my first language. I think in English, it’s never a translation. Swearing is another matter! When I’m cross, I curse in Swahili: Ng’ombe mjinga! Mbuzi nyangau!

E: Do you wonder about betwixt?

G: Loh! I’m surprised you ask me this question – you’re a scholar who’s an artist who was once a scientist. You write across forms: short story, poetry, novels, nonfiction. You write across genres: in a spectrum of literary speculative fiction. You’re an African who is now Australian, who once lived in the UK and writes for readers around the world – mostly in the US and the UK. With your dualities and multiplicities, between worlds across the self and other, you ask about betwixt?

E: I think I’m wondering about duality – does it fraction the self?

G: Let me tell you a story. I was born in a town at the foot of Mt Kilimanjaro. I inherited something from my African mother – her derrière. Please don’t laugh, I’m going somewhere with this. This bum, you know the kind you put a baby on your back, and it sits, you don’t have to hold it? Growing up, I really loathed my behind. But one day it dawned on me. I realised it wasn’t going to pack its bags, get a post code of its own. I was stuck with it, and it was mine. It’s funny how you change when you grow older, now I choose clothes that bring it out – it’s an asset. What happened is I accepted this appendage that was part of me, and that first acceptance was an integral acceptance of the sum of self.

As with this bum, we don’t get to choose our cultural or other multiplicities. As human beings, we are each individually situated in our unique relationship with the world, a relationship whose distinctive situation is not closed with respect to other cultures we experience.

Like you, as an African Australian migrant, I am a person who is experiencing hybridity, where my sense of ‘otherness’ is a result of immersion in multiple or mixed cultures – you wrote about this, Eugen.

The language I have inherited and matured underpins the meaning I assign to any text. My ‘lived experience’ is that of having roots in multiple cultures. This ‘difference’ that pervades the everyday in urban settings, as cultural anthropologist Renato Rosaldo makes clear in his discussion of cultural borderlands in modern cities, is integral to multiple identities and voices – the sum of who you are in ‘zones of difference within and between cultures’, never a fraction of the self.

E: But is duality conflicting?

G: It can be, yes. As an African Australian, in those early years, I grappled with matters of identity – I was trying to be African, trying to be Australian. No one came up to me and said, ‘Can’t you be both?’ I had to figure this out for myself.

And I guess this is how I fell into speculative fiction, that is, a fiction of the strange. In exploring my curiosity about myself and the world, in bending genres, subgenres, I found myself creating worlds where I didn’t have to ask the questions: What colour are my characters? What languages do they speak?

In speculative fiction, I can write a different kind of story only constrained by imagination, finding pleasure in destabilisation, crossing genre, resisting the parameters of traditional genre. This is how I engage with difference.

Black speculative poetry works this way too. It’s text that is flexible and immediate. It’s a safe space to explore Afrocentric text rooted in story, song, dance, rhythm that natural flows from my intrinsic self. It’s text that has a lot of hurt, as in pain, and a lot of healing—an acceptance of self, black is beauty, despite what the slave trade, colonialism, racism, social injustice might tell us.

Writing the self in is also about finding ‘like’ community, locating affinity with all their speculative fiction stories that write us in. It’s about seeing ourselves in their protagonists, and their quests to find some truth, or to belong.

Because, indeed, who are we to judge an ‘other’s’ identity?

In her chapter in Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction, writer Aline-Mwezi Niyonsenga—whose name is short for “moonlight” in Kinyarwanda, talks about Afrofuturism and exploring cultural identity as a process of becoming. She pays attention to the self and morphing identities through the application of futurism, with examples from her novellette “Fell Our Selves” published by GigaNotoSaurus. She discusses positionality and her hybridity as a      “woman of African descent, born in Quebec, Canada, to parents who immigrated from Rwanda.” She’s also a migrant who has lived in the US and is a first-generation immigrant to Australia. She uses speculative fiction to explore her cultural identity that “occupies an in-between space of all and none of these: Quebecois, Canadian, Rwandan, and Australian” and asks a stirring question:

When you occupy a liminal space, is your identity collective or individual? Is it worth exploring the self-determination of this identity through fiction?  (pp.140-141)

She seeks answers in remixing cultural identity in Afrofuturist literature, as do the following South African authors (de-identified in this essay) who shared with me their own struggles with identity:

~~~

I was born [in South Africa]. My parents were. So were theirs. I can literally trace my roots back to 1652.

 *

I battled with identify for many years... too Afrikaans to be English. Too English to be Afrikaans... And, of course, feeling I have no place in the land of my birth because of what my ancestors did and the colour of my skin. But not being wholly Dutch or French to consider a return to Europe... Besides, home and place is here. I love my country, its people. I don’t want to leave.

 *

Where does that leave South Africans whose ancestors were brought over from Asia? Are they not African, too?

 *

I still hanker for SA every day. I feel out of place in [country]... still... I have always felt included in the science fiction and fantasy space, only going where invited, and been mostly published outside South Africa. I am always grateful for my speculative fiction and fantasy family across the globe and cherish that inclusion and most importantly... open collaboration and honest discussions.

 *

On the whole, I am grateful for the inclusion I’ve received over the years from the African science fiction and fantasy writers who have encouraged me to embrace my African-ness.

 *

Being African is about how we live, what land cradled our bones and not so much of an accident of birth related to how we look on the outside.

Regardless of what others may think because of the colour of their skin, imagine saying “go home” to any of these authors, where would they go? Africa is what they know. They are African and have every right to represent South Africa.

And so, like me, they continue to write that clutching, that seeking to belong into the characters of their speculative fiction, finding empowerment through storytelling. As we encapsulate the self in the other through discerning speculative fiction, in time, we find ease with our differences, with our sums of many, our betwixts.

In “Tell Them a Story to Teach Them Kindness” in Lightspeed, B. Pladek (who wrote one of my favorite 2024 stories, “The Spindle of Necessity”) spins a darkly funny and crushing story about a future where human-created fiction has been outlawed. Only content produced by “curators,” prompting an AI writing program called RIGHTR, can be shared with school children, and every story has to follow strict guidelines. It’s an idea that cuts uncomfortably close to the bone in today’s world where AI is on the rise, book bannings are becoming legion, and many people seem intent on limiting and controlling the kind of information and fiction that children (and adults) can access. Beyond skewering the use of AI-generated, neutered fiction to educate children, Pladek twists and turns the story of Jude, the curator who is supposed to be generating this acceptable content, into a tale that is both complex and unsettling.

Cover of Lightspeed 176

Our present political and environmental reality also feels very close in “We Will Not Dream of Corals” by Mário Coelho in Reckoning. A famous (fictional) billionaire is found dead in the ocean, and corals seem to have found a way to fight back against the “lords of money” that are destroying the environment for profit and power. Coelho’s story has a surreal, sharp edge, and there’s a joyous rage in its biological revolution that I absolutely adored.

The devastation that follows in the wake of human hubris is brought to life in a different way in “Against the Grain” by Lindz McLeod in Hex Literary. Here, we meet a mammoth working in a mortuary, living her life in the strange world of people. She helps them pick out caskets and clean their dead, while also trying to navigate her own mammoth-sized loneliness. A sense of loss, sadness, alienation, and grief permeates this story. There’s a scene with a sabretooth tiger that brought me to tears.

 Another story that hit me right in the feels in all the best ways was “Numismatic Archetypes in the Year of Five Regents.” An ingeniously crafted fantasy story by Louis Inglis Hall in Clarkesworld, it’s an unflinching and harrowing look at the rises and falls of a city-state undergoing several rounds of violent political change. The story is told through descriptions of found coins, as if in an academic journal or museum catalogue, juxtaposed with the coinmaker’s (very messy and very bloody) account of what was happening as those coins were struck. It’s an inspired piece of storytelling where the world, the characters, and their relationships are captured with compelling and delicate precision. 

If you crave a story about the devil, a bailadora, jaraneros, and what happens when you sing “El Buscapiés,” you must read “Dead reckoning in 6/8 time” by Sabrina Vourvoulias in GigaNotoSaurus. It’s a glowing, raucous, hugely entertaining tale about family and magic, about dancing with the devil and trying to beat him at his own game. Vourvoulias’s prose is fluid, whip-crack smart, and funny, even in the darkest moments: “In most Anglo tales, when the protagonist pits themselves against this particular antagonist, they emerge wiser, wilier, maybe even a little damaged—but victorious. Latin American folktales aren’t so generous. My mother was a good bailadora, better than good, maybe the best ever to come out of Veracruz. The Devil must have had to pull out all the stops to defeat her, but defeat her he did.”

There’s always a price to be paid when you make a deal with powerful and sinister forces. In “The Inheritance” by C. T. Muchemwa in FIYAH, protagonist Taona takes on another kind of supernatural entity: a chikwambo, or money goblin. Muchemwa writes with vivid and raw verve as the tale turns from dark fantasy to horror. I love how the darkness deepens gradually in this story. As a reader, I was lured and charmed by the chikwambo, just like Taona, even when I should have known better.

Cover of FIYAH 33

In “Bokrug and the Boy” by Liam Hogan (narrated by Matt Dovey) in Cast of Wonders, another powerful and sinister force is at work: a Great Old One (of the Cthulhu mythos), who ends up in the company of a bullied, downtrodden, and very lonely eight-year-old boy. Hogan describes how, “[s]omething in Samuel’s stance, in his refusal to cry and run away as the taunts and handfuls of mud flew in, had snagged the water god’s attention.” There’s a wonderful push and pull in the relationship between the boy and the monster, as they both find themselves drawn together by something other than fear and loathing.

The people in the weirdly wonderful and unsettling “They Bought a House” by Osahon Ize-Iyamu in Nightmare also find themselves in the company of entities that ought to scare them out of their wits, or at least out of their apartment. Ize-Iyamu introduces the ghosts: “When Esie and Paul got up for work the first daybreak after moving in, they found ghosts hanging upside down from their curtains.” But what happens when you live with the ghosts and even eat their pancakes and beef curry? What happens when you try to leave those ghosts behind? 

Relationships are also at the heart of “Once, Now, Always” by Ire Coburn in Kaleidotrope. The story starts with a woman going back to her childhood home to see her mother. Returning isn’t easy, because the old place holds memories of an almost-but-not-quite-forgotten past. Deeper secrets hidden in old memories are revealed. In the end, there’s a fierce love hidden at the story’s heart, rather than the monster I expected.

A different kind of monster also haunts the home in “The Path She Sings” by Vanessa Fogg in The Deadlands. In a place where a strange mist turns the inhabitants of a community into zombie-like, undead beings, one man must now share his house with a wife who has turned into something other than the woman he married. It’s a horror story, but also a love story, and, as always, Fogg finds the quiet, heartbreaking cracks in the darkness.

“What Happens When a Planet Falls from the Sky?” by Danny Cherry Jr. in Apex is also a love story, played out in the intersection between two mirror versions of Earth, “two similar realities overlapping one another intangibly for 60 minutes a day.” Two scientists, one from each reality, meet, communicate, flirt, exchange poetry, and fall in love, knowing every moment could be the last time they see each other. There’s a lovely off-kilter, soft, and bittersweet vibe to this story that stuck with me.

Cover of Uncanny 62

Love turns into something more menacing in the wonderfully dark, quietly funny, and increasingly surreal “Men with Tails” by Rati Mehrotra in Uncanny. Haunted by her mother’s unexpected revelation that she “did away with” her first husband, the narrator scours her mother’s poetry chapbooks for clues. Things only get stranger from there: “Maybe I’ve been infected by my mother’s poetry,” the narrator muses. Mehrotra deftly captures the feeling of someone slowly losing their grip on reality as everything comes to a frightful, nightmarish climax. This story is a wild ride, but it also quietly captures the fraught, yet strong, relationship between mother and daughter.

My final short story pick is the razor-sharp and harrowing “Into Duty, into Longing, into Sparrows” by Nne Ukwu & Somto Ihezue in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Here a young girl is taken away to be married: “You are sixteen. A woman. This is what everyone says. A man comes for your hand. A good man. With six barns. This—they all say. — We will make you into a fine bride.” Tradition and society’s expectations squeeze the young girl from every side. The story tightens like a vice, until there seems to be no way out. But, as this story shows, a way might still be made, if you’re strong and fearless enough. 

I’ll leave you with two bonus reads:

• The Other Lives of Altagracia Sanchez by Felicia Martínez: “a time-bending family drama” that is both utterly beautiful and thoroughly dreamlike as two lives twine together, weaving through past and present and future. It’s a story quite unlike anything I’ve read recently. 
• The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar: “a mystical, revolutionary space adventure” set in a space-faring society that is built around a core of exploitation and inequality (sounds vaguely familiar, doesn’t it?). Samatar’s story is both devastating and hopeful and at times so beautiful it hurts.

Let's go!

Let’s start with a completely unreliable recap of our story and cast of characters.

There are the Wilsons who are dead, the mayor Hugh, his inappropriate wife Anna, a handful of assorted professors, an annoying doctor and poor Janet who is being plagued by the mud and the doctor. And sentient mud is eating the town.

The town has finally become a disaster area and people are being evacuated.

I don’t remember much about this story, but I do remember saying waaaay back then that they should evacuate the town. Of course, being a woman of color, no one listened to me.

There is no gas, no water, no electricity, difficulty getting phone lines, and looting!

If there was no internet and sentient mud was eating everything I would absolutely be looting.

I think the professor wants to get into the sewers. I can’t remember who this professor is but whatever.

He is taking the inspector with him, who has promised to run away the minute things look bad.

Cut to the annoying doctor and one another professor who have found the heart of the mud.

And by heart, I mean an actual beating heart.

The doctor is now saying that all the people who were admitted to the hospitals had the same symptoms, including depression.

It is this depression that makes these people do things which are completely alien to their personalities.

Is that a sign of depression?

I guess it is now.

Anyway, they have finally connected the depression, headaches, general strange behaviour and dead animals to the mud.

Don’t forget that it’s also eating the town you guys.

These dudes with their brains have decided that the mud is...

Hypnotizing certain people and the animals!

Not going to lie, I did not see that coming. At all.

Someone called Maggie has done the opposite of what everyone else is doing, and come into the town.

I think she’s here to see the mayor’s wife.

How weird it must be; you are trying to get your stuff together because you have to evacuate by 11 o clock because there is killer mud eating your town and someone called Maggie just drops in for a visit.

Maggie has opened the curtains in Hugh’s room and Hugh is crying ‘my eyes, my eyes’.

Maggie is the worst.

Now we are listening to two people? Lifting something? Pushing something? I don’t know what’s happening.

I think we are with the policemen who are trying to move the piano for an old lady.

Oh the building is shaking now.

Did it fall? I think it fell.

What was the point of that scene?

Anyway we are now back in the sewers which is filled with dead rats.

The inspector is encouraging the professor to put his ear against the wall ew don’t put your ear against a sewer wall wtf

They can hear someone breathing!

The sewage water is now a dirty green!

Is that a strange thing to see in a sewer?

They have spied someone in one of the sewer alleys.

I think it’s our old friend Janet HAI DEAR

There seems to be a bunch of people down there, like so many.

It is unclear why these two didn’t see this all these people before.

The professor has discovered there is mud all over the walls so he’s like come on let’s jooties.

You’re taking the people with you, right? Right?

We are now back to the wonderful world of Mud Hypnosis.

Did you know there is a song called Hypnosis by a band called Mud?

Here are some of the lyrics-

You're hypnotic when you touch
Your hypnosis is too much
And you burn me with your hypnotistic fire
You're hypnotic when you feel
Your hypnosis is too real
And I hope you're not a hypnotistic liar

*

I hate liars, but I especially hate hypnotistic liars.

It’s just an ok song.

Anyhoo, back to our story.

The mud is apparently trying to hypnotize humans off of the planet.

Why does it need to do this if it’s already swallowing everything?

That other first fellow professor has come to tell these guys about the people in the sewers.

You actually left them in the sewers wtf you guys.

Now we are back with Hugh and his wife.

Hugh is luring his wife into a dark room and it’s really taking an awful long time.

Hugh is now going bananas.

I think the post office has exploded?

Does this have something to do with the story or is it just a random post office exploding?

Seems to be a random post office exploding, cool.

Everyone is suddenly talking about the Earth’s core for some reason.

Are...are they blaming the earth’s core for all this?

Yup. The earth’s core apparently wants to kill everyone. THE EARTH’S CORE YOU GUYS

And the mud is the army of the earth’s core.

Wasn’t there a book about something like this? Or a video game?

We are now with the doctor and one of the assorted professors because the doctor is not leaving Janet down in the sewers!

They are cool with leaving everyone else there though.

He keeps trying to approach Janet but I think she keeps running away.

Who can blame her fam.

I think the mud is eating Janet.

*

This recap is very confusing to read, but also this episode was jumping all over the place. I’m not saying this show made a lot of sense in previous episodes. But it felt like this one was really flying by the seat of its pants. I for one had no idea hypnosis would be involved, or that the ultimate enemy would be the Earth’s core. Still, here we are. I know there is no real incentive to, but do join us next time, where we will be listening to the very last episode of this mind-boggling science fiction extravaganza.

Here we go.

Our opening scene consists of a dude, a nurse and a Janet.

They are in the old windmill and the mud is seeping in.

You may remember that the last time we saw Janet, she was running away from the hospital.

The dude, who is Dr. Richards, is relentlessly bombarding Janet with questions.

Janet is relentlessly not answering his questions.

She says she left the hospital because people kept coming and staring at her. Which does sound pretty awful.

Dr. Richards keeps insisting Janet is ill. Janet says that she is not ill, she just wants to be left alone.

This is very poignant fam #leavejanetalone

Now she is being questioned about the seven other patients who also went missing from the hospital.

Why would you expect a patient to know what is going on with other patients?

This is wust hospital I say.

Dr. Richards has given Janet a thrilling ultimatum! Go back to the hospital right now! Or it’s totally up to you!

I guess Janet is going back to the hospital.

I also feel like everyone decided this except Janet.

Janet also has a dead sparrow in her hand, in case anyone wanted to know this.

Something just exploded.

They are sealing all the caves with explosions.

Dr. Richards is adamant that the people sealing the caves go and deal with the windmill, but the person in charge of exploding things says they just don’t have enough blokes.

I only used the word ‘blokes’ because he did, and not because of racism.

You know why there aren’t enough blokes? Because there are currently five mud overflows happening right now, and all the blokes are busy.

Blokes.

Ok now I’m just being racist.

Everyone in town has been evacuated, right?

Because that’s what you do when there are five overflows of killer mud eating a town. Right?

Now we learn that Janet and the nurse still haven’t returned to the hospital.

Some other fellow says that once Janet gets back, she should be sent back to psychiatry, and Dr. Richards basically says ‘Pish, sir. I say bah!’

The rest of that conversation was too boring for me to pay attention sry.

Now suddenly a lady is on the phone reporting an accident.

Is that the nurse?

Meanwhile, the mud continues to do its thing.

Oh, NOW they’re thinking about evacuating people.

And that too only “if necessary.”

You guys are the worst at being in charge of towns that are drowning in scary mud.

Mrs. Deverill has suddenly appeared in the midst of all this hullabaloo with her very own emergency. And the emergency is that her husband is ...

Calling a press conference at 5 pm!!

This is an emergency because he has no authority to do this. But he’s doing it anyway.

Seriously. That’s the emergency.

Mrs. Deverill fears he is going to tell the press that the destruction of the town is inevitable.

Please excuse me while I rub my face in frustration.

‘The Slide’, you are making it really hard for me to love you right now.

We are now at the press conference where Mr. Deverill has put a scale model of the town on display. Because that’s what’s important right now.

How he managed to make this model while the town is drowning in killer mud, we may never know.

I have absolutely no idea what this man is trying to say.

I still have no idea what this man is trying to say.

Is he excited about dying in the mud?

Did he just run off saying ‘death is not finality’?

What the actual fuck you guys.

Oh wait, I think he came back.

He just said a lot of weird things that culminated in ‘the sun is no longer the creator’.

WHAT IS HAPPENING

I think the press conference, such as it was, is over.

I feel so tired.

Anyway, cut to Dr. Richards comforting Mrs. Luke.

The accident she called about was caused by, and I sort of quote but not really, Janet going berserk. And also by two stupid old people who sprang out of nowhere in the dark.

Use better words Mrs. Luke.

Janet tried to drive into these two people, changed her mind, swerved, crashed and then ran off with the people she had previously tried to drive into.

However, what is really blowing Dr. Richards’ mind right now, is the fact that Janet was carrying around a dead sparrow which she threw into the river.

What a roller coaster of emotions you guys.

The press conference isn’t over! Mr. Deverill is taking questions now!

I am not ready for this.

Basically the press is saying bro disaster is happening, and Mr. Deverill is like no it isn’t because he has gone bananas.

Someone has just asked the press to disregard everything Mr. Deverill said for the last hour.

You guys let him go on like that for an hour??

Cut to the evacuation of an apartment building where everyone on the top floor seems to be stuck.

We now receive word that Farmer Wilson has barricaded himself inside his house with his missus, and is shooting at the people trying to get to them.

You know, from a certain perspective, ‘The Slide’ is a story of one set of people bothering another set of people who just want to be left alone.

Now the scientists are talking at this clown show of a press conference.

You know what’s actually happening right now? An extensive recapping of events and whatnot so that the story doesn’t actually have to move forward.

That was such a tedious segment I can’t even tell you.

Cut to Mr. and Mrs. Deverill chilling after that amazing press conference.

Mr. Deverill is upset because of...corruption?

I think he’s saying that only Nature has the power to create and not anyone else.

I’m not sure where the corruption comes in though.

Mr. Deverill now has a stick.

He has destroyed the town model with this stick and run away.

Now we are back with the Wilsons who are still refusing to come out, even though the mud is about to eat them.

Mrs. Wilson is like, this is our house! We are never leaving! And Mr. Wilson is like but it’s so hot here.

This is really, really squeaky mud.

I hope it eats them.

*

This episode was frustrating and hilarious, just like so many things in life. What do the last two episodes have in store for us? Maybe something coherent happens in the story? Maybe an appearance by verbally abusive rocks? Plants that extensively quote things with no reliable source? Whatever it is, it will also be hilarious and frustrating fam. Just like life! Bai dears.

Innumerable imaginary presents, pasts, and futures, ubiquitous in our experience from early childhood, arm us with examples of success and failure, tyranny and liberty, prosperity and apocalypse, revolution and remaking vastly beyond the historical cases which were the sole food for thought that political minds of past generations (Hobbes, Locke, Machiavelli, Montesquieu) had to sustain them. Politicians, companies, grassroots groups, and community shapers, whether advocates for change or for the status quo, find their proposals held up for comparison, not just against what is and what one or a few rivals propose, but a spectrum of hypotheticals proposed by a population expert from childhood in judging world against world and future against future, challenged by the very play of storytelling to practice the art of predicting the consequences of a world-transforming change. The maxim that one should never create a political power without imagining what your opponents will use it for when they hold power rarely needs to be repeated, since crowds attendant at a rally or neighbors attending a Town Hall already know, and often share with each other, iconic names and terms which serve as shorthand for sophisticated arguments that social change A contains threat B: Alphas and Betas, Room 101, Princess Leia as resistance leader, open the pod bay doors please, HAL.

Science fiction means we fight our moral battles in advance.  No new technology, or even social experiment, appears without the company of a hundred prompt extrapolations of what its rollout (individual and mass) could do to us for good and ill, and most technologies are preceded by such stories. Cloning already had its Brave New World, CRISPR its Gattaca, Virtual Reality its Matrix, and robotics its Three Laws, well before the first news stories announcing the realities of these technologies, which were therefore met by immediate debate of their potential second- and third-order consequences. Fiction is not prophecy and rarely anticipates the exact consequences of a change, nor could or should it, since its function is to shape that change by complicating and broadening the conversation which in turn helps determine those consequences, like the time traveler from the future whose very presence makes it impossible not to change the future they came from. Had the 1700s written more science fiction, its authors would not have successfully guessed the effects of modern steel, mechanized weaving, lead-whitened bread flour, or Franklin’s lightning rod, but imagine how much more thought and attention would have attended their rollouts and how much faster the real effects could have been noticed, regulated, and improved, had their arrivals been accompanied by thousands of stories about aristocrats dueling with unbreakable steel toothpicks, fashions using a mile of fabric in one gown, leaded bread causing an epidemic of girls demanding celibacy vows, or cities that never burned accumulating centuries of architecture in a pile with the modern wings reached by a hundred flights of stairs. Such stories, simply by existing, prove persuasively that such innovations can and will transform our world, leaving the watch for how as an exercise to the reader. As more and more disruptive technologies hit us day by day, that reader’s task could not be more important—the reader who is, by now, our whole shared world.

The true political power of how fiction expands expectations is rarely recognized. The global dissemination of American police dramas has caused people in nations around the globe to demand their right to silence, a lawyer’s presence, and one phone call upon arrest, and police granting people those rights even in countries with no such laws, due to the power of shared expectation, and the willingness of people to act upon and thus create a slightly better world than we live in. Speculative resistance—a term coined by political scientist and science fiction author Malka Older—is the act of challenging status quo situations and status quo solutions by describing radically different alternatives, broadening the spectrum of possibility. When people are given options A or B, if someone raises a hand and describes Q, it becomes easier to ask for C and D. As an antidote to my way or the highway, speculative resistance can be as simple as thought experiment (what if governments paid for houses but people personally purchased roads instead of vice versa?), but the more robust treatments in full-on fiction are much more powerful, since characters and narratives increase enthusiasm and dissemination (this heroine is so cool, you gotta read this!). Stories describe how such alternatives might practically function, be achieved, change, go wrong, be threatened, be repaired, and be defended—models of action.

Hopepunk—a movement I have been happy to see my own Terra Ignota join—is one form of this, a movement positing that describing positive possibilities, “futures worth having” as Jo Walton put it, is an act of resistance in a present in which despair so often paralyzes activism—often intentionally-cultivated despair. Younger people coming to political maturity post-2000 have mainly been presented with futures A and B, where A is climate apocalypse and B totalitarian dystopia. Studies show people often transition straight from climate crisis denial to climate crisis despair, since it’s not real and it’s too late both offer the solution: do nothing. Hopepunk, and its kindred Solarpunk, Ecopunk, etc. use punk to advance the claim that even describing a worthwhile future—once the default celebrated by Golden Age SF covers and World’s Fair “Cities of Tomorrow”—is an act of resistance in a present saturated by dystopian and (post-)apocalyptic fiction, and by a twenty-first century news ecosystem, in which bad news is re-shared a hundred times more than good news, and pessimistic and cynical affects are often praised as savvy, hopeful or earnest ones dismissed as naïve.

I bring up Hopepunk not to make an argument for its special importance, but to point out that, for speculative fiction to have movements at all (Hopepunk), and vogues of interest (Cyberpunk), there has to be a community to have such movements: there has to be the conversation of science fiction and fantasy.

On the social side of speculative fiction, we are used to looking to Plato’s Republic and then More’s Utopia as the pioneers of fiction asking us to contrast our social mores and institutions with imagined ones. After More utopian writing saw a vogue in the sixteenth and especially seventeenth centuries, primarily in the form of religious writers describing how their ideal niche variant of Calvinism etc. could create a perfect city on an island, or a mountain, or the Moon. Such works were indeed powerful, generally wielding the arts of satire and the calling out of hypocrisy, but are also fundamentally different from what started pouring out by the thousands as science fiction and the fantastic became named and self-aware genres with the pulp revolution of the 1920s. Pulp’s taste for adventure fiction, for a crisis for our hero to endure or solve, encouraged speculation, not about what might be perfect forever, but what could go wrong, wronger, and wrongest, and what action might be taken in response. There is no agent of change in More’s Utopia or Plato’s Republic, no argument about how human action can channel rising tides. However absurd the solutions to pulp fiction’s problems (often a fist fight or handgun), action stories raised questions about action. They also raised community.

Debates over whether Frankenstein or something else marks the birth of science fiction tend to narrow down, either to efforts to define the furniture of science fiction (must it feature technology? must it explore the limits of the human? must it exclude the paranormal?), or about credit, who gets a portrait in the park and hall of fame with “First X” and a date. But just as a student asking “When did the computer age begin?” will be deeply misled by an answer citing Charles Babbage’s 1822 difference engine, if we think of science fiction as an intellectual technology whose mass-rollout has transformed the world in which we live and think, from one whose judgments and actions are informed by dozens of real and historical alternatives to thousands of speculative ones, Frankenstein (1818) is our difference engine, a century away from our Bell Labs.

The 1920s pulp magazines gave science fiction a name, an identity, an entry in encyclopedias, and a community of dedicated readers and writers who saw themselves as producing something distinct and specific (in a way Jules Verne and H .G. Wells, whose novels were published and shelved simply as novels, never did). It sparked a conversation. One story about robots would be read, and new stories about robots written in direct response, extrapolating further, the same way we might sit in a room chewing on a thought experiment and throw out suggestions for the next step and the next. Particularly in Astounding Science Fiction when John W. Campbell took it over in 1937, a letters column in the back published reader responses, whose contributors Campbell actively encouraged to write their own responding stories. Kids bringing new issues in to school would speculate with one another treating the stories and the letter columns as peers in the debate, which thrived in text and voice, and across space and generations. Light-hearted conversations about space rangers and blue aliens formed fertile ground for serious conversations about artificial intelligence or weapons of mass destruction, in which readers developed the skills of discussion and habits of thought which made SF the world-shaping intellectual technology it is today.

Many of the SF works people name first as having political power did not originate within imprint SF (that is within the books and magazines published and labeled as science fiction), but were written by mainstream writers dipping atypically for their own work into using SF’s tools. But if Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four responded to Huxley and Zamyatin, Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale to Orwell, Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games to them in turn, there was a reading community which received these works, discussed them, quoted them, adapted them into films, artworks, TV commercials, protest posters, and fan-works. And this was the same reading community, which used the same tools of debate, speculation, coming into school to chat about what you would do in such a world, or how X might change it, which also watched Lucky Starr Space Ranger, Have Space Suit—Will Travel, and Bladerunner. A world with a personal computer in each home would have been powerful, but not nearly so powerful as ours, in which those computers talk to one another through an internet whose community-forming power has reshaped politics and planet—just so, Frankenstein and even War of the Worlds were powerful, but it was not the same power as when a rally speaker quotes Orwell, Tolkien, or Star Wars knowing the whole crowd will know those shibboleths, and catch fire. "There will come a day when the courage of men fails, but it is not this day”—nothing from Frankenstein could be shouted across a crowd in 1820, or even 1920, and see the same.

This conversation is also a global one, and becoming more so. Until recently, it has been a strangely one-way conversation, in which innumerable works of Anglophone speculative fiction are translated and spread around the world, and responses are written in dozens of languages but almost never translated into English. The few exceptions were, earliest, French literature, and a few prize-winning exceptions like Umberto Eco; but recently, from the 1990s on, a slice of Japanese speculative fiction managed to ride the vogue of anime and manga and become the first pop culture translated en masse into English in 200 years. Recent proactive efforts, and moments such as Tor’s success with The Three Body Problem’s 2015 Hugo win, have also started bringing the global conversation into English—efforts actively organized by SF authors and editors who specifically believe in the value of that conversation, and work actively (often despite financial risks) to make it happen (much as in the 1960s-70s Osamu Tezuka took big financial risks to get anime/manga translated into English, with the specific activist goal of advocating for pacifism, environmentalism, and techno-utopian international collaboration).

Science fiction is part of our world, and is much more than the presence of stories with the furniture (robots, aliens, rocket ships, cyborgs) of the genre. It is the way we respond to changes and technology. It is a palette of reactions and discussions palpable in classrooms, headlines, and news rooms every hour, every day. It is one of the biggest differences between politics now, communities now, movements now, change now, thought now, and how Earth worked two hundred years ago. It is an intellectual technology, and nothing can roll back, unmake, or take away an intellectual technology once it disseminates—well, nothing but the things SF warns us might achieve just that (Orwell, Canticle for Leibowitz, Mad Max). But, of course, if B happens we could try C or D … or Q …

*

This episode is called Heartbeat. 

If the mud had a heartbeat, that would be nice.

Or if they find out that it has an actual heart.

And the heart has teeth.

And crippling anxiety.

Ok we have a recap provided by an English dude who understands our difficulties. Last time, there apparently was an explosion in a lab where they were experimenting with the mud. And there is an ongoing task of clearing them out of Hollymill Lane.

I mean, if you say so.

It’s Gomez. Not Go Mays wtf.

I don’t know who ‘them’ are. Or what Hollymill Lane is.

I also don’t know why in Resident Evil 2 Mr. X hates me so like what the fuck I didn’t even do anything.

MUD TO THE LEFT OF THEM! MUD TO THE RIGHT OF THEM!

ALSO TREES ARE DROPPING LIKE NINE PINS! 

Feel like the mud could have left the trees alone but this is not my story to tell.

After some talk between two guys about how the mud is just relentlessly swallowing the town, one of them suggests they evacuate.

A man called Wilson is listing his reasons why he will never leave, which are not very compelling reasons tbh.

Suddenly someone is poking around the remains of the lab and saying they should start using steel instead of glass from now on.

We are pleased to learn that this someone is Joseph.

Joseph is so Scottish that it’s not even funny you guys.

He is so Scottish like his Scottish accent has a Scottish accent.

Someone called Robert is saying ‘you have to tell them now!’

Tell who?

About what?

About the possible organic living matter in the mud!

So I’m not a doctor or anything, but doesn’t mud generally have organic living matter in it? Like worms and stuff?

And did you know that June 29th is International Mud Day?

And while there doesn’t seem to be any International Sand Day, July 12th is International Day of Combating Sand and Dust Storms.

Anyway, in their world, applying heat to the mud leads to the multiplication of the amazing organic living matter in the mud. And the mud changes colour and shape.

As far as I know, our mud doesn’t don’t do that. But as I said before, not a doctor.

After deciding that all this hullabaloo is probably because the mud is being pushed out from wherever it lives, Joseph comes to the conclusion that the mud is actually doing all this BECAUSE IT FEELS LIKE IT!

Now Mrs. Deverill has accosted Joseph who was going somewhere I guess.

Apparently she can’t sleep because she is worried about Hugh, who isn’t sleeping and stuff like that.

This is absolutely the right time to talk about this.

Also, who is Hugh?

Fam, Joseph’s Scottish accent is slowly changing like the mud.

Mrs. Deverill says that Hugh has become jealous and accused her of having an affair with Joseph.

Wait, is Joseph also Go Mays?

OMG HE IS

If he’s not Scottish then why are you making him talk...like that?

I feel like this actor keeps forgetting that his character is “Latin” and lapses into a Scottish accent because he likes to unnecessarily roll his ‘r’s.

This is called erasure of identity.

Ok fam, I honestly don’t know what’s happening right now.

Mrs. Deverill asked Joseph to tell Hugh they aren’t having an affair. And Joseph said poop off, I’m not getting involved. And then she said well I didn’t even want you to get involved because I respect my husband. And he said well that’s very nice. And she said well you’re vain and you can’t contain your personal feelings despite your scientific talk. And he said sorry bro I didn’t realize you were so sad in life. And she said I don’t want your stupid sympathy, I want your help.

I can’t figure out who won this argument.

I can’t figure out what any of it means either.

Thankfully, we have now cut to another scene.

A nurse from the hospital has just called Dr. Richards and said sorry to wake you but we’ve lost your young lady Ms. Marshall.

Like, those are the words she actually used. 

Now the nurse is like, listen bro. Everything in her room was ripped to pieces. Curtains, pillows, bedsheets and garbage all over the floor. 

Feel like losing someone’s young lady might be the bigger issue here Joanne.

Idk, this nurse just seems like a Joanne to me.

Actually I was just reading about JK Rowling’s latest TERF tweets and I loved how the people correcting her kept calling her Joanne.

I understand that this does not mean everyone is Joanne.

Anyway.

Apparently the hospital has also lost seven other patients because they are very good at doing that.

They have cut to another scene because frankly wtf Joanne.

So now we have that Wilson dude telling his wife, oh you don’t have to cook anything for me I’m not hungry and Mary is like leave me alone.

What if Mary is hungry? Why does this always have to be about you Wilson?

Now Wilson wants to evacuate, because his heart is ever-changing.

Mary is like why though, I like it here. And he says it’s because the place has changed.

It’s interesting how a more accurate description would be that everything is being swallowed by malicious, sentient mud but he’s decided to go with ‘change’ instead.

Wilson has now opened all the curtains because they were closed before I guess.

Mary said that the light hurts her eyes and so Wilson said hey let’s go to church!

The once pious Mary is now like, I don’t want to go to no stinkin’ church.

This is irrefutable evidence that Mary is possessed but nobody listens to me.

Cut now to Mrs. Deverill being accosted by some lady on her way home from church.

Mr. Deverill has apparently missed three emergency council meetings about the mud. And he refuses to ask the government for help. 

Mrs. Deverill has promised to speak to her husband about all this.

Ok I guess that scene is over.

Now Joseph Go Mays is talking to somebody about the beauty of England. 

He’s saying interesting things like “Everything here is so much richer!” 

THAT’S BECAUSE ENGLAND KEEPS STEALING EVERYTHING FROM EVERYBODY 

Sorry. As a citizen of a former British colony, I should know better.

Jump cut to Dr. Richards talking to the most unhelpful nurse in the world, Joanne.

Dr. Richards is just stunned by the state of Ms. Marshall’s room. I mean this was apparently done by the woman he hoped would regularly clean his house for free so we can understand his feelings isn’t it.

Now we are with Mrs. Deverill who is trying to talk to Hugh and Hugh is behaving like he is four. 

Mrs. Deverill has asked Hugh why he isn’t going for emergency meetings or asking for help. And he said poop off I can do whatever I want.

Then there was some other conversation I didn’t pay attention to.

Now we are in the lab and everyone is happy because they have proof that the mud is a living thing.

I forgot that the mud squeaks.

Just fyi the squeaking is not proof that the mud is a living thing.

It should be though.

Joseph has suggested they look at the proof again because maybe, just maybe, they will discover something else too!

OMG you will never believe what just happened guys.

They have discovered a heartbeat, which is so cool because the title of this episode is Heartbeat.

The universe really does speak to us fam.

Now some lady is talking to a bird.

Its name is BinkieBinkie. Or maybe just one Binkie. Or Pinkie.

The lady has brought Binkie to see Dr. Richards because Binkie is suffering, you guys.

The lady claims to have seen Ms. Marshall at the old Dutch mill. 

Dr. Richards is shook.

Dr. Richards and the lady have now set out for the old Dutch mill.

MEANWHILE! The science dudes are failing to convince Mr. Deverill about the impending mud danger.

Joseph has now resorted to making some very personal remarks about Mr. Deverill.

I don’t know why but Joseph just got mad and left.

We are now back with Dr. Richards who is digging around the old mill.

Dr. Richards is calling out “Janet, Janet darling” and it sounds like he’s trying to sing.

Why are you guys whispering now?

You do realize you were bellowing The Song of Janet a few seconds ago.

So I think they went down somewhere? And Janet was there and there was also a very loud heartbeat sound. And that was it.

*

Looking back, I see that my initial hope for this episode was that the mud would have a heartbeat and a heart that has teeth and crippling anxiety. Some of that hope has become a reality, but at what cost? It is still a hot hot day in this South Indian city. There is still a water shortage and most poignant of all, there are still more episodes of The Slide to come. Will you be there with me as I go where The Slide may take me? I totally understand if you won’t. Because as someone used to tell me back in the day, so many people will not be there also. Bai.

Here is a scene from the early Paleocene: a lush North American forest, 66 or so million years ago:

Scampering past the Baioconodon, a Mesodma climbs, squirrel-like, along an aspen branch, looking for food. Clambering headfirst down a woody vine, it rejects some dark, low-hanging berries among the dagger-leaves of Cocculus flabella, the moonseed. A Procerberus, a slightly larger animal sheltering under the vines, something like a large and aggressive shrew, barks in alarm and scurries away through the vegetation, its hiding place located. Moonseed fruit is not good food for a Mesodma; it grows quickly, climbing over the larger trees, using their height to reach the sun, so is plentiful, but the seeds themselves are toxic.

This is the voice of the nature documentary. It doesn’t just describe a scene; it explains it. Its animals are more subjects than characters.

The narrator created by the paragraph is one of us, a contemporary human, and—more precisely, since this is taken from a work of nonfiction, namely the paleobiologist Thomas Halliday’s enjoyably alienating Otherlands (2022, pp. 105-106), which descends readers episodically back through Earth’s history from a mere 20,000 years ago to 550 million years ago—it is a flash-frozen version of the consciousness of Thomas Halliday circa the early 2020s. This textual Halliday does want us to be immersed in the scene—hence the present tense to describe actions—but does not invite us into the consciousness of the animals under observation. They act, but we do not hear them think.

The closest novelistic equivalent of Otherlands that I’m aware of, at least for its first few hundred pages, is Stephen Baxter’s magisterial Evolution (2002), which tracks the history of primates in the other direction, from 65 million years before the present to 500 million years after it. Here is Baxter’s narrator describing a similar time and place:

Hesitantly, scrambling at the scaly surface of the branch, Plesi tensed, and leapt.

Plesi was a plesiadapid: she belonged, in fact, to a species that would one day be called carpolestid. [...] she looked something like a small squirrel, with a low-slung body like a large rat’s, and a bushy tail. [...]

Few animals of this time fed off leaves. In an equable world where tropical or paratropical forests spread far from the Equator, there was little seasonal variation, and here in Texas the trees did not shed their leaves regularly. In fact the trees loaded their leaves with toxins and chemicals to make them bitter or poisonous to curious mammalian tongues. (pp. 89-90)

This makes some more concessions to fictionality, most obviously in the abbreviation of a genus into a name, which gives Plesi an immediate injection of main character energy. But the explanatory tone is still present and correct (even, it seems, drawing on similar research), the narrator still reminds us that we look back on this far and foreign place from the present, and, for the most part, looking is all we do: we’re still observers.

That “for the most part” is critical, however, because Evolution is science fiction, and its primary area of speculation is the line between its human readers and its animal protagonists. The novel is clear from the start that it is telling stories about creatures whose species did, in the fullness of a very very long time, give rise to us, and as a result every so often it will foreground humanlike or proto-human qualities in its animal characters. After an encounter with a predator, for instance, Plesi has a feeling “deep within her cells,” and the narrator ventriloquises the unthought-thought for us: “I always knew it was too good to be true” (p. 95). At a certain point, of course, Evolution also dramatises the transition to sapience, and does so for my money in a compelling and memorable way. It then tells a few stories about hominids and humans and even those who come after us. But the transition I want to explore is not the line between human and animal; instead I want to look at the line between Halliday and Baxter. How and when do animals in SF stories become characters?

2.

This is obviously a broad question to which one column cannot provide a comprehensive answer. But the specific approaches of a few different works might be interesting nevertheless. The next step along from Evolution, for instance, is a novel such as Laline Paull’s Pod (2022). Set now or in the near future, it tells the tale of various inhabitants of the waters around an archipelago “somewhere in the Indian Ocean” (p. 3), and it has an even less objective documentarian for a narrator. Here’s a sample from the novel’s first chapter, introducing us to Ea, a Stenella longirostris, or spinner dolphin:

She knew she was valued for being a good hunter, but what Ea craved was to be normal. To spin like everyone else was the key to fitting in, and if she could only hear the music of the ocean like everyone else, she too would be able to tune in and do it. She was fast, healthy and wanted so badly to succeed—but she had never heard the music. Spinning was the Longi’s art form, it was dance, athleticism, most commonly just for entertainment and sport, but it also held a spiritual element. It was union with the ocean itself. (p. 5)

There is reality here, but submerged. The spinning of spinners is indeed thought to have performative, communicative, and competitive elements—but whether or not the dolphins themselves have a subjective experience of spirituality is not knowable by us. Ea’s imagined searching nature is presented as a way into her consciousness, a human-animal commonality; her youth, too, makes her approachable. Other characters have similar, if not always elegant, markers of familiarity. A lonely rorqual whale, for instance, is described as singing a new song that is “a radical departure from the popular and traditional power-ballads” (p. 15), a phrasing that absolutely encapsulates him as a musician, but is a little too knowingly cute for my taste. Other species to feature include a pod of tursiops truncatus, or bottlenose dolphins, who are the novel’s villains; a talkative remora that attaches itself to Ea for a period; a Cheilinus undulatus (Napoleon fish, or wrasse) who undergoes multiple environmentally driven sex changes; and another loner with whom Ea can bond, a tursiops called Google who has been raised and trained by the human (or “anthrops”) military, only to be unexpectedly and somewhat uncomprehendingly freed by a ferocious storm.

For our purposes, Google is a telling comparator to Ea, in that he is explicitly humanised—or, we might say, domesticated. It is uncomfortable to realise that the reason he is often the most psychologically familiar character in the novel is because he has been made that way. Brief flashbacks describe Google’s time in service, for which he has been trained both behaviourally and chemically, in the ways that real marine service animals are trained; and like them he is given tasks such as marking and retrieving objects from locations his handlers can’t reach. He is an exemplary performer, with one exception: he will tag an intruding human diver, but he will not harm them, for he sees humans as kin. Such purity of heart is a sharp contrast to the utilitarian behaviours of the humans who raised him, and so when that storm hits, we think it a good thing, but understand absolutely the simple sentiment that drives Google from that point on: “His world had gone” (p. 91).

Ea and Google are destined to be wild-card lovers, disrupting a tale of territorial competition, exile, and return. The Tursiops drove the Longi from their ancestral grounds, and what we are shown of their society is brutal: hierarchy and harems and rape. As in the portrayal of Ea as an individual, so with this portrayal of Tursiops society: there are seeds of reality, but they are grown into weirdly melodramatic structures that don’t entirely convince. Yet all the same there is a discernible logic. Paull’s first novel, The Bees (2014), played a similar game, imagining the stratified society of a beehive as a totalitarian state. In Pod, it becomes clear relatively quickly that Google is not the only example of humanity’s impact; in fact in both Pod and The Bees the inciting incidents of their narratives are, in ways not fully understood by any of the characters, human-caused ecological disruption, and the social structures are the way they are, in part, as a coping mechanism. The argument might be: this is an attempt to demonstrate what it is like to be subject species within the anthropocene, and if these characters seem not quite like real animals, then perhaps that is because, as with Google, we have made them that way.

It’s a provocative thought, and a noble attempt to dramatise the oft-stated truism that there is no true separation between the human world and the thing we call “nature.” And there are scenes and images from Pod that will stay with me—the Longi “shriving moil,” for instance, which is a frenzied and physical venting of dark thoughts and feelings that comes across as something between a confessional and a rave; or the remora, who reads like a very weird and creepy AI personal assistant; or the polluted sea, filled with “moults” that we recognise as decaying plastics. But the effect is undone in the end, I think, by the psychological simplicity of the characters: Ea the seeker, Google the paladin, and all the others, are just too easy to anticipate. This is done, surely, to give the reader something to hang on to as the novel oscillates between zoology and allegory; but in the end what it means is that its animals never quite convince as characters, and settle instead for being symbols.

3.

I said I wasn’t going to focus on the line between humans and animals, but most SF stories with animal characters also include human ones, and so the relationship between the two groups becomes relevant to my primary question. A case in point is Clifford D. Simak’s City—which, to digress briefly, has a typically delightful Golden Age publication history: eight stories originally published individually between 1944 and 1951, fixed up in 1952 with the transformative addition of diegetic forewords for each story (about which more below), and then a final story published in 1973, subsequently added to a revised 1980 edition, which is included in the current (2016) Gollancz Masterwork ebook edition, but not (for some reason) the most recent (2011) Gollancz Masterwork paperback edition. I had both Gollancz editions on hand for this column, and in either case City is perhaps most fully understood in the terms Sherryl Vint deploys in her monograph Animal Alterity (2010): as a complexly imagined future history sweeping from the space-age year of 1990 to ten thousand years hence, which demonstrates over and over that humans are incapable of truly thinking past the human-animal boundary, such that (pessimistically) “the only way to ‘overcome’ the human is by eliminating the species and starting again with the dogs” (Animal Alterity, p. 219), but which also and nevertheless provokes yearning in its readers for the better, dog-dreamed world it proposes—such that (optimistically) Simak’s fiction “prompts [readers] to embrace change more readily than can his humans” (p. 219).

That neatly summarises the book’s structure (beginning with stories centred on humans, and ending with ones centred on dogs or other nonhumans), its philosophy (as I read it), and its effect (at least on me). For the most part, it is not subtle. In the fourth story, “Desertion,” humanity is trying to adapt itself to life on Jupiter by placing the consciousness of test subjects in specially designed new bodies, known as “Lopers,” which can survive beyond the planet’s domed human settlements. But none of the subjects return from the Jovian wastes once they are transferred. Despairing, and unwilling to order anyone else to what he presumes is their death, Fowler, the head of Dome Number 3, assigns himself and his beloved dog as next in line for the procedure. After the transfer, the reason for the repeated mission failure becomes clear: it is simply that the new bodies are better in every way than the standard human offering, and nobody wants to come back.

“Our human bodies were poor bodies,” Fowler realises. “Poorly equipped for thinking [...] Perhaps even lacking in certain senses that are necessary to true knowledge” (p. 110). And the dog, Towser, has been liberated as well. This is not uplift, per se—Towser makes clear that he has always been trying to talk to Fowler, it is just that Fowler was, until now, unable to understand—but it involves the same expansion of horizons, and Towser is immediately certain that he will not go back. At the end of the story, Fowler joins him: an equality between human and animal that has only been accomplished by leaving both behind, and the sort of existentially bleak perspective on human capacities that appears in the work of later writers like James Tiptree Jr. and Peter Watts. (In such a context it feels a bit less essential than it otherwise might to point out that, before we get to the dogs, this is one of those Golden Age futures populated almost entirely by men, almost certainly imagined as white men. Be reassured that the handful of female characters appear no less and no more inadequate than their male counterparts.)

And so we look to the dogs. The first five stories begin with humans, mostly members of a single family lineage, the Websters; the last four, with nonhumans. A robot, Jenkins, bridges: he is initially a butler to the Websters, later a mentor to the dogs. Through a mix of biological engineering and assistive technology—notably, companion-robots to provide the dogs with hands—the Websters create a population of dogs who can express themselves and act more directly on the world (like Towser, they could, it is clear, already think for themselves), and the future they desire is one “when all the wild things would be thinking, talking, working beings” (p. 163), intelligent in their own ways. As the dogs begin to move centre stage, Simak grants them full interiority, the ability to empathise with other species, and a measure of self-awareness. Early in the sixth story, “Hobbies,” Ebenezer remonstrates with himself for chasing a rabbit into the path of a hungry wolf, leading to the rabbit’s death. One does, admittedly, question whether the rabbit shared Ebenezer’s belief that they both knew the chase was all just in good fun, but Ebenezer is at least clear that the rabbit’s demise is his and not the wolf’s fault: “To a wolf a rabbit wasn’t just something that was fun to chase. For the wolf had no herds for meat and milk, no fields of grain” (p. 145). More than that:

It’s the animal in me, thought Ebenezer. The old flea-scratching, bone-chewing, gopher-digging dog that will not let me be—that sends me sneaking out to chase a rabbit when I should be listening, out prowling the forest when I would be reading the old books from the shelves that line the study wall.

Too fast, he told himself. We came up too fast. (pp. 145-146)

These dogs have, like Paull’s oceanic cast, been changed by humans; but at this stage, they know it, own it, and grapple with it. And when one of the last humans encounters these independent-living dogs, his determination is that they deserve a free chance to maximise their capabilities, and that the way to ensure that they do is to remove the few remaining humans from the board entirely, and allow them—essentially—to un-domesticate themselves. “A new way of thought and life [...] must not be tainted by the stale breath of man’s thinking” (p. 179). The story’s tone here does become more subtle, conveying two entwined themes. There is a sense of lament that humans have failed (failure being cast in terms of retreating from the wider universe, of failing to follow their dreams and outward urge), and, alongside that, an equally pervasive sense that such failure was inevitable, that humanity was flawed and dogs must have their chance.

The most important dog character in the book—really, the most important character full stop—describes “Hobbies” like this: “Man, in this story, is treated with a certain tenderness [...] at once a lonely and pitiful creature, and yet somehow glorious” (p. 142). This character does not exist within any of the stories, however. The voice is that of the Editor, the author of the forewords mentioned above. These frame the stories as a myth-cycle that is part of the heritage of some even further-distant Dog society (he uses a political capital letter that does not appear within the stories themselves). The Editor is a brilliant addition that unifies the book. Sometimes Simak has some metatextual fun with it; the eighth story is introduced with a preemptive and not entirely wrong critique that it is “too clever in its assembly of material, [it] works the several angles from the other tales too patly together” (p. 217). The Dog-scholars whose debates about the veracity and meaning of the tales are frequently cited are called Bounce and Rover. But it is also a portrait that is missing from the rest of the book of a fully independent, sophisticated dog mind, in no way beholden to humans, who through his reactions and misapprehensions helps us to imagine a more completely shaded-in Dog society.

“Killing,” the Editor writes, “is a process, usually involving violence, by which one living thing ends the life of another living thing” (p. 6). In the introduction to the second story, the idea of interplanetary travel, indeed the whole idea of other planets in space is dismissed as “impossible,” and must be “an ancient story-teller’s twist on the cobbly worlds” (p. 40): Dog science has led to a different understanding of reality, the nature of which won’t be clear to readers until much later in the book. The introduction to “Desertion” advocates for a charitable interpretation of Towser’s character, against critics who see his portrayal as demeaning for his loyalty to a human master. And to return to “Hobbies”—in which the last humans cede the stage, remember—the Editor proudly states that it cannot possibly have been composed by humans: “It has the deeper emotional value, the close attention to ethical matters which are stressed in all other Doggish myths” (p. 141). From outside the text, City is still critiquable as an instrumental use of animals—that is, one designed to enable us humans to see ourselves afresh—but it is one of the most effective such uses that I’ve read.

4.

When the Websters begin their work on dogs, they do it in part to ensure there is a backup plan. Grant Webster tells his dog, Nathaniel, that humans may come to ruin, “and if they do, you have to carry on”; Nathaniel solemnly accepts the responsibility (p. 95). Clifford Simak wasn’t the only one thinking this way at this time. On the other side of the Atlantic, Hackenfeller’s Ape, a short and acerbic novel by Brigid Brophy, was published only a year later than the fixed-up City, and includes a similar exchange. In what appears to be a very near future (relative to 1953), Professor Clement Darrelhyde sits in London Zoo, next to Regent’s Park, waiting for the chance to observe the mating behaviours of the titular (fictional) species. A bit of a sad sack, and also not too optimistic about the prospects of the human race, Darrelhyde struggles with his tendencies towards anthropomorphisation, and as part of a one-sided conversation with the male ape, Percy, finds himself echoing Webster: “When my species has destroyed itself, we may need yours to start it all again” (p. 27). An understandable sentiment, writing in the shadow of the bomb, although today perhaps the unconscious confidence that it will only be themselves that humans might destroy seems quaintly optimistic. And Percy is no Nathaniel: he is “exhausted by the attempt to understand” (p. 27), and no reassuring cross-species communication occurs.

Into this situation comes Kendrick, a government man who has purchased Percy from his private owners for the purpose of sending him into space in a rocket, to gather invaluable information about the physiological effects of such a journey—Anthropithicus hirsutus africanus being more nearly human, we are told, than any other primate. Darrelhyde is appalled. He spends the middle part of the novel questioning the moral legitimacy of this action, and decrying its technical legality, to a variety of indifferent or unhelpful individuals: his sister (surely it’s better to send the monkey than a man), a journalist (initially interested, but won’t publish because their paper’s editorial line is that space is the next big thing), and a researcher (it’s evolution in action, old boy, survival of the fittest and all that). Desperate, Darrelhyde obtains the help of a thief, and resolves to break Percy (and his co-habitee, Edwina), out of the zoo before launch day.

When the unlikely duo succeed, the focus shifts to Percy’s perspective, experiencing his first freedom for a long time:

Leaning clumsily on his knuckles, he crossed a path; then in a second he was airborne again, vaulting up another wall and up, on to a still higher roof. Exercise brought it back to him that he had once before enjoyed this athletic liberty: but the landscape that now lay beneath him was less monotonous than the jungle and seemed, as his vision penetrated the misty moonlight, more fruitful of mischief. (pp. 83-84)

To be clear: what we have here is a normal animal, albeit of a nonexistent species. There is no uplift or modification; Brophy is just straightforwardly writing Percy with conventional narrative interiority, memory, and personality. And he does get up to some mischief. Up until this point Percy has been a secondary character, his reactions to Darrelhyde mentioned in passing, but here he takes centre stage for several pages, visiting various species around the zoo, exploring, playing a few tricks. It perhaps lands as easily as it does because Brophy also plays a Simak-like trick with her narrator. A witty disclaimer at the start sets the scene, archly reminding us that while the characters are fictitious, Homo sapiens as a species is not. And then, every so often within the text of the story, a documentarian-naturalist voice emerges, but not to describe Percy and Edwina: rather, it describes the humans, in a way that suggests it does not count itself as one of them. The novel’s first few pages are as alienating, in their way, as Otherlands. “Radiant and full-leafed, the Park was alive with the murmuring vibration of the species which made it its preserve,” we are told. Panning across the landscape, the narrator observes that “scuffles and hoots gave evidence of courting rites” and that the ingenuity of the species “outstripped the beaver”; and, more critically, that this unnamed species is “the only species which imprisoned other species not for any motive of economic parasitism but for the dispassionate parasitism of indulging its curiosity” (pp. 3-4). The zoo is not in fact much better than the rocket, in this logic, and Percy’s escapades—and his clear joy in them—are the emotive keystone in an argument that really we should just let animals be.

In Pod and City, humans act on animal characters with impunity; in the former for their own benefit, training Google as a military tool, in the latter both for their own benefit and also, explicitly, for the benefit of the acted-upon species. In Hackenfeller’s Ape, the recruitment of Percy as an unconsenting astronaut is comparable to the treatment of Google, but more interesting are Darrelhyde’s aspirations, which are not cruel or invasive, and are dramatically more modest than those of any other human character in this column: he merely hopes to write “a couple of sentences, packed and precisely descriptive” (p. 12) about Percy and Edwina’s sexual behaviour, to become a minor but essential footnote in future work. But Brophy’s narration makes clear that within a zoo even this is an oppression; Darrelhyde demonstrates his progress when, at the moment he eventually gets his chance to watch the couple in the act, he averts his eyes.

5.

Lee Mandelo’s dense and sceptical novella Feed Them Silence (2023) includes at least one character who I suspect would appreciate the uncompromising assertion of animal rights in Hackenfeller’s Ape. Riya is a climate researcher, and the wife of the novella’s protagonist, Sean, a middle-aged neuroscientist who is planning to use an experimental interface to access the sensations and thoughts of one of the planet’s last remaining wild wolves. They argue about the ethics of the experiment. Their perspectives may sound familiar by now.

“And you can call those wolves collaborators or ’mutual subjects’ all you like, you’re still using them as objects of study. Which is, well, whatever, but it’s gross to pretend anything otherwise.”

“That’s what you think about my whole field, the subject-object power dynamic stuff. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t producing good and important data—”

Riya interrupted, “Focusing all your resources on these individual animals to determine what makes them so special distracts people from addressing the systems that killed all the other goddamn wolves in the first place, but we’ve had that argument before too.”

Sean closed her jaws around her canned venture-funding interview responses, things like, observing the behavior of the animal is insufficient without understanding of the interior being. (pp. 6-7)

While Sean’s interview response is surely one of the justifications for the kinds of animal characters that appear in the books I’ve been discussing, I suspect Riya would find them cloying. Imagine an interior being, the argument in favour will go, and readers can imagine themselves “being-in-kind,” as the phrase in Feed Them Silence has it, and good outcomes will follow. Maybe. But maybe not. In an essay about the genesis of the novella, Mandelo cites with approval Donna Haraway’s rejection of “the fantasy” of getting inside an animal companion’s brain, and accordingly in this story Sean is doomed to failure. The experiment is meant to be pure observation, riding alongside a chosen wolf subject, Kate, and recording her experiences over the course of an autumn and winter. Of course pure observation is impossible.

There is, therefore, no godlike documentarian narration to be found in Feed Them Silence, and—in a mark of further respect for, or perhaps testing of, Haraway’s position—no independent entry into Kate’s perspective. She exists as a character in the novella, but always translated for us by Sean. Right from the start it is clear how incomplete this will be: in their first session, Sean’s sensorium struggles to process the “more-than-human” (telling phrase) input from Kate. “Chemical saturation bowled over Sean’s distancing protocols,” punctuated by just enough moments of “startling recognition” (p. 13) for the possibility of true understanding to feel tantalisingly possible. Soon she is going with the flow, telling herself that she will process the observations post-hoc: “Words were for after the feed cut her loose from the rush of being something else” (p. 19). Pronouns collide; sometimes Kate does something, sometimes “she” does something. Physiological responses start to overlap. It becomes a kind of addiction, and when Sean tries to rewatch video taken during earlier sessions, she experiences severe cognitive dissonance. “Memories of herself experiencing their warm, simple camaraderie ran aground on the sight of an animal recorded by a field camera, another form and creature entirely separate from her” (p. 40).

The true, if not entirely surprising, sting of Feed Them Silence, however, is the revelation that not only is Kate affecting Sean, but—as Riya predicted, in defiance of all understanding of how the equipment is meant to work—Sean has been affecting Kate. (It is not entirely surprising because the slow-motion collapse of Sean and Riya’s relationship—an at-times suffocatingly earnest but authentically painful depiction of unevenly desired and offered intimacy—has set us up to expect this parallel. To the last page I was unsure which relationship was more important to Sean.) When the sponsoring company, which plans to use the implants for entertainment purposes, realises what is happening, they immediately shut down the programme, laying claim to almost all of the captured data, and to Kate herself, whom they unceremoniously euthanise ahead of an autopsy.

The ending is no less brutal for the fact that you can see it coming. It echoes Brophy, who also dispatches her animal protagonist to make a point about human use of animals, but goes further, insisting that we value Kate’s consciousness not because it is like us but precisely because it is not. Feed Them Silence is about our real-world relationships with animals, but it also functions, surely deliberately, along the lines of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora (2015) or Joanna Russ’s We Who Are About To… (1977), as a call for imaginative honesty when imagining animal consciousness. As the novels I’ve been reading in this column show, it’s possible to say meaningful things while imagining animals that are not much like their real-world counterparts. But it’s useful to be reminded that reality is played with the net up.

Editions used

Evolution by Stephen Baxter (2002). Gollancz 2002 (London, UK). Hardback. ISBN: 0-575-07341-1.

Hackenfeller’s Ape by Brigid Brophy (1953). Faber & Faber 2023 (London, UK). Paperback. ISBN: 978-0-571-38129-6.

Otherlands: A World in the Making by Thomas Halliday (2022). Allen & Unwin 2022 (Dublin, Ireland). Harback. ISBN: 978-0-241-40574-1.

“The Companion Species Manifesto” by Donna J. Haraway (2003). In Manifestly Haraway by Donna J. Haraway, University of Minnesota Press 2016 (Minneapolis, MN, USA). Paperback. ISBN: 978-0-816-65048-4.

Feed Them Silence by Lee Mandelo (2023). Tordotcom 2023 (New York, USA). Hardback. ISBN: 978-1-250-82450-9.

“Being in Kind”: Studying Animal Intimacies for Feed Them Silence by Lee Mandelo (2023). Tor.com, 14 March 2023. Available online at: https://www.tor.com/2023/03/14/being-in-kind-studying-animal-intimacies-for-feed-them-silence/

Pod by Laline Paull (2022). Corsair 2022 (London, UK). Hardback. ISBN: 978-1-472-15660-0.

City by Clifford D. Simak (1952). Gollancz (London, UK). Paperback. ISBN (2011): 978-0-575-10523-2.

Animal Alterity: Science Fiction and the Question of the Animal by Sherryl Vint (2010). Liverpool University Press 2010 (Liverpool, UK). Hardback. ISBN: 978-1-846-31234-2.

(KAC): Hello, and welcome again, readers, to Writing While Disabled today! I'm here with the fabulous Claire Light, on Zoom. Claire also writes as Jadie Jang. Hi Claire, how's it going?

(CL): It's going great. Thanks for asking. Excellent.

(KAC): Readers, Claire lives in the San Francisco Bay area, and uses she/her pronouns. She's a writer, a cultural worker, and an activist. She co-founded Hyphen magazine, an annual Emerging Artist Festival called APAture, and the Disability Justice League, Bay Area. She also works with the Kearney Street Workshop.

Monkey Around is her debut novel! Monkey Around is written under the pen name Jadie Jang. It’s a contemporary fantasy that came out in 2021, with Solaris Books. Her short fiction collection, Slightly Behind and to the Left, came out in 2009 from Aqueduct Press, written as Claire Light.

So, Claire! Welcome to Writing While Disabled. Thank you so much for being here with us!

(CL): Thanks so much for having me!

(KAC): Would you mind telling us a little more about yourself and your work?

(CL): I think we kind of covered it there. Is there anything in particular you'd like to know about?

(KAC): What exactly does “cultural worker” mean?

(CL): A cultural worker is a term we use hereabout, in the Bay Area. People who work in arts and culture, people who use arts and culture as their tool to promote representation, to promote social justice, to promote particular causes. Art, artists and writers, teachers, arts administrators, arts funders, people who also work in culture, in media and in humanities. Promoting the creation of culture. Not merely studying the culture but promoting the creation of culture.

(KAC): Also preserving it, or holding space for it?

(CL): Right. The emergent artists festival that I helped create, it's actually an Asian American and Pacific Islander American Emergent Artist Festival, APAture. I co-founded Hyphen magazine, which is an Asian American music culture magazine.

(KAC): Thank you. May I ask, what disability communities do you identify with?

(CL): I have chronic illnesses, plural.

I'm a spoonie. I'm someone whose illnesses cause fatigue, limitation on the amount of energy you have. I have to pace myself. I have to ration my energy. I'm house-bound a lot, and I spend a lot of time not really doing very much, because I've run out of spoons, or units of energy. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is the most debilitating illness I have, but I also have several less debilitating ones.

(KAC): And those disabilities make travel difficult, conventions difficult.

(CL): Yeah.

(KAC): How do you break that down for people who don't have it?

(CL): It’s very difficult. On a really fundamental level, more or less healthy people are used to reaching for energy and always finding it. Even when you’re tired, you don't feel like doing anything, you’ve had a long day, and you come home, your partner says, you haven't taken out the garbage. You don't feel like it. But it has to be done, because the pickup is tomorrow. Maybe your ass is dragging the whole way, but you to pick yourself up, get the garbage taken out. Yeah. It's impossible to truly understand what it's like to reach for that energy, and have it not be there. Not to be sick, not to feel unwell, not to feel tired even, necessarily, but just to reach for the energy to do an ordinary thing, and have it not be there, and not be able to get up out of the seat. It’s really fundamental, basic building blocks level. You reach for the basic human wherewithal to do normal everyday tasks, and it's not there.

(KAC): Yeah.

(CL): So, that's what the illness is like. It’s a lot more complex than that. There's a lot more to it. You go way out of your way to avoid reaching that point, which is what the rationing of energy is about, and what the pacing yourself and spending a lot of time resting is about, to avoid reaching a point where there's something that you have to do immediately, you reach for the energy to do it, and it’s not there.

(KAC): You don't want to hit the brick wall.

(CL): Yeah. You have to prioritize.

(KAC): Yeah. Ok, let’s get to the book.

(CL): Yeah, absolutely.

(KAC): Readers, I am holding up a copy of Monkey Around. This is a colorful cover. It's got pastel swirls. You can see a person running across the word ‘around. ’A fox up in the top left. A big cat, down here on the left. Very colorful and bright. I really like this cover.

(CL): I love the cover.

(KAC): Yeah. Is that the San Francisco Bridge?

(CL): That's the Golden Gate Bridge. The person who's running has a staff and a monkey tail.

(KAC): It’s just a lovely cover. Would you tell us about this book?

(CL):  The book is an urban fantasy, about a female Monkey King living in San Francisco. She’s like myself, Chinese and white, and she has all the powers of the Chinese Monkey King. For those who don't know, the Monkey King is a character from a classic Chinese novel, Journey To the West. The Monkey King is probably the most well-known and popular mythological cultural figure in the Sino-sphere. A classic trickster, neither good nor bad, chaotic and destructive.

(KAC): Why did you go with Monkey King instead of queen?

(CL): I didn't want there to be any ambiguity. I wanted people to be very clear that this is a female Monkey King, the Monkey King character. It is not some, some queen of the monkeys from something else.

(KAC): This is the archetypal character.

(CL): Yeah. Yeah.

(KAC): How did you decide how much of the original character to bring into the story?

(CL): I decided I wasn't gonna do Journey to the West in San Francisco. I was going to take a female Monkey king with all the monkey king's powers, put her in the middle of my life, my community, and see what she did with it. For fun, give her a supernatural murder mystery to figure out, and leave it that.

(KAC): And it's not just a murder mystery. It's also a romance.

(CL): Yes. There's a little bit of a love triangle in there. I love urban fantasy, but so much of it is just so problematic.

One of the things I love about urban fantasy is that so much of it is woman-centered now, professional women in contemporary urban life, and how they approach power dynamics. Urban fantasy does a fantastic job of reiterating that in these supernatural ways. But what's problematic about it—is that the romances, I love love triangles, but there's always this love triangle between the woman and an alpha male on the one hand, and a lone wolf on the other. She has to choose between these two like, very dominant men. She's physically weaker than the two males. I didn't want that. I wanted to take that structure, and work with it differently. So, I gave her more power than anybody. I mean, it's not hard to do. The Monkey King is more powerful than everybody else. But she is defeatable by her psychology because she's got so many issues.

I wanted to go into that whole bizarre problematic issue with alpha males in urban fantasy, and say, you know, that's not always the power dynamic in women's lives. What do you do, when you are a really smart, really strong-minded woman in the world? And you come up upon men who, on the one hand, don't want to dominate you, but on the other hand, they're kind of intimidated by your power. That's another power dynamic that nobody ever talks about.

(KAC): Yeah. One struggle with a powerful character can be, how do I give this character obstacles that are gonna feel meaningful? Then, even if you're superman, you have a limited amount of time in which to save people falling off buildings, right? You have to decide where you're gonna put your time. Is that kind of the constraining factor for this character?

(CL): No, it's not about time. She can stop people from hurting her, she can protect other people. But that's it. That's all she can do if she wants to live a life.

One of the other things I hate about urban fantasy is that the female central character is almost always police or some kind of investigator-enforcer type person. I wanted her to be an activist. She’s a leader in her community. Not because she's like a dominating enforcer-type of person, but because she has natural leadership qualities. People look to her for help. She gathers people, she gets people to work together. She's not wrangling power dynamics as somebody who's weaker, she's wrangling power dynamics as someone who could easily overpower everybody. But that won't get her what she wants.

(KAC): And that won't play well because of who she is.

(CL): Yeah.

(KAC): So, you're doing a lot with shape shifters in this book. A lot of our readers are going to be familiar with werewolf stories from a more western framework, or they might be thinking [of] Mystique from the X-Men, right? What type of shape shifters are you describing in this book?

(CL): Well, they're similar to Mystique. In Asian cultures, there tend to be multiple creatures who shift into multiple shapes. They're extremely powerful tricksters. Tricksters are agents of change. They create change by throwing everything into chaos. Then it lands again, reorders itself somehow. You have to be flexible to cause change, you have to be. So, there's flexibility inherent in the shapeshifter. They're natural metaphors for code switching, which immigrant communities have to do.

People in immigrant communities, in urban centers, have to code switch. Not just between the mainstream culture and the culture of their communities. Asian communities, especially traditionally, have been situated between white and Black communities deliberately, to be a buffer zone, to buffer the white people from the scarier dark people. So, you have a lot of immigrant communities, and marginalized communities abutting them. Then a lot of times, you'll have marginalized communities like queer communities, who are relegated to black area of town, the Latinx area of town. Because the wealthier white people don't want weirdos having their bars and their clubs in the nicer parts of town. So, you'll have little islands of different types of marginalization. Disabled resources will end up in the” wrong side of the tracks,” because people don't want to see people wheeling in and out of a disabled resource area in their wheelchairs and [in] their, nice part of town. So, you'll have these islands of marginalized communities in larger ethnic enclaves and BIPOC areas. You've got a lot of code switching happening in a lot of different directions.

There's just a lot of crossover. You'll have a lot of very particular dialects, interesting dialectical lingua francas that will arise just in those particular areas. You've got a lot of code switching, and code switching itself is an agent of change.

A lot of stuff going on in these cities never gets depicted. Immigrant narratives tend to focus just on the one community, one story, the parent-child culture clash story. Getting out of that and writing an urban fantasy is a way of pulling away from that trope.

(KAC):  Well, I love how you do that in Monkey Around.

I wanted to ask you about writing as an Asian American author, about stereotypes that you are trying to push back against in your work. What things would you like to see more of and less of?

(CL): I don't really think too much about stereotypes. I mean, that one stereotype that Chinatowns, ethnic enclaves, are a piece of that other country brought into [this] country, you know, I hate that, but you know, you don't have to think about fighting against stereotypes if you're thinking about representing your people as you know them. You don't have to worry about the stereotypes, you're just putting the truth out there and it's ... it is what it is.

In thinking about it right now. I guess there's a stereotype of Asian women being  submissive, and quiet, and da-da-da-da. Which is, of course, not my experience at all. Asian-American communities in San Francisco are basically run by women. The organizations are mostly run by women. There's just a shit ton of fierce, incredibly talented, incredibly smart and outspoken women in these communities. All I had to do was make up some characters who were kind of like the women I know.

And then, the stereotype of Asian men as also being kind of submissive, kind of sly, and untrustworthy, and all that stuff, you know, again, all I had to do was just represent them as I know them. Although Todd is kind of sly and untrustworthy, but that's because he is a trickster. And of course, I myself have collaborated a lot with my counterparts in the Latinx community in San Francisco. So, I deliberately included several representatives of that community in this book. I brought in the gang element because impoverished immigrant communities have to deal with the gang element. They have to deal with organized crime. But also, because it is a representation of the  kind of demimondes that the supernatural exists in. If you talk about, like, the supernatural being underground, you have to talk about the criminal underground as well. You don't have to go out there and do the opposite of stereotypes. You just show what you see.

(KAC): I love what you're saying here because it connects to what you were saying earlier too about community building and relationships. A lot of times, people will approach writing a character who's different from them, like, I'm gonna sit in a room alone and I'm gonna imagine what that would be like. I'm gonna do all my research, and I'm gonna be very careful not to make these specific mistakes. You're talking about a completely different approach. I'm part of a community, and the characters are gonna feel true because they're based on all these real people that I know. I like the way that pushes against this writer stereotype anyway, that the writer is this solitary hermit living in a cabin on a lake. I love the idea of a writer as a social being. Is writing a connective act for you?

(CL): Oh yeah, absolutely. It's 100% part of my practice. My practice involves writing, it involves teaching, writing, presenting the arts, you know, advocating for other artists, advocating for a variety of people in a variety of ways. It's not like, different careers. It's like the whole practice, it all works together, and if I remove any one piece of it makes the other pieces harder. Not being able to work—I did have to finally quit working, and go completely freelance, because of my illness. But, that has actually taken me away from a lot of the source of a lot of what I write. What I'm writing now is kind of drifting away from that kind of activist space, but it’s all part of the practice. It all works together. Yeah.

(KAC): Do you find that writing about a character who is connected to others is therapeutic because it reminds you of what that felt like? Is this kind of like, wish-fulfillment for us? We wish we could be out of the house, but COVID. We want to do more, but medical conditions keep us isolated.

(CL): Yeah. Yeah. No, it's 100% wish-fulfillment. I mean, I, I think that is why I ended up doing this.

I have a lot of reasons. I wanted to represent my community, and all that stuff, but I wanted to write urban fantasy because I started reading Urban Fantasy in 2013. A friend introduced me to it, but I started, I really got into it because it's this incredible wish-fulfillment at a time when I'm becoming physically incapable of, you know, anything at all.

And there are these people, going out there getting bitten by werewolves, and getting sucked on by vampires, and becoming superheroes, you know. All of their hurts healed, suddenly they're stronger than everybody. They're part of a pack, or a seed, or a coven or whatever. It's a total wish-fulfillment for somebody with a chronic illness or disability that keeps them away from the world.

Part of the wish-fulfillment is, I'm an immortal supernatural being, who’s incredibly powerful, and who could heal myself instantly. And what I choose to do with my immortality and my supernatural incredibleness is to go back to doing what I was doing because I loved it, you know.

(KAC): Claire, you and I were on a panel about Disability Justice a while back. I feel like a lot of people don't understand the difference. Like, why do we need disability justice when we already have disability rights activism?

(CL): Ok. Disability justice is a framework for understanding disability activism, for understanding Disability in the first place, but also understanding how Disability fits into the mainstream of society.

The ten principles of disability justice make it clear that it's very intersectional. It centers the most affected, which means the most marginalized. The folks who are in leadership and disability justice circuits tend to be both BIPOC and queer. So the disability justice spaces are very BIPOC friendly, very queer friendly.

(KAC): Yeah, they're intersectional and they are intentionally diverse.

(CL): Intersectional, anti-capitalist. It's a radical framework. Let's just be straightforward about that.

It's anti-capitalist because, and I want to emphasize this with people who aren't familiar with it, the protestant capitalist notion of human value is what rules our lives right now. And that notion is one of utilitarianism, your value is in your utility. It's in your productivity, it's in your labor. There's no inherent human value in humans.

That's what allows capital punishment. If a person's value is in what they produce, and if what a person produced is, you know, murder and mayhem, then they're of no value. Their life is of no value. There's no inherent value to them. Yeah.

So, disability justice is pushing back against that notion that we can evaluate lives at all, much less that we can evaluate lives within a capitalist framework of a body's labor and productivity being the essence of its value or a body's monetary value being the essence of its value.

(KAC): What about a writer's value being how much writing they got done? So many of us hang our identities on writing. I'm a writer. Tortured, because we haven't written anything lately or we didn't finish it or we haven't written enough or we don't write every day or whatever the thing is that we're obsessed about, right?

(CL):  Here's the thing, and this is what I tell everyone—this is problematic in various ways. But I believe this: a writer is somebody who writes. A writer is somebody who writes, that's it. A writer is not somebody who has written. The importance of the name writer is in the present, in the practice, not the product. Now, this is problematic for disabled people because you can't always write. But I want people to recognize that thinking about writing, thinking about your projects, thinking about writing itself, reading about writing, processing your process—a lot of those things are part of writing. When you can't write, you are still writing if you're processing your work in your mind somehow. But it is true, if you're not doing any of those things, you're not working on things at any level, you're not writing.

It's really more a question of what, what do you need to value yourself? If writers need something finished and ready to publish, or something published, to value themselves as writers, there's a reason for that, you know, and it's not just about capitalism, it's not just about product. It is also about the fact that writing is communication. To write is to communicate things to each other, communicate stories, communicate ideas to each other. And if you haven't finished the piece of writing, if the writing is unfinished because it hasn't been communicated to somebody, if writing is not out there for people, then the communication has to be finished.

So, while there's that problematic, product-value issue in there, which absolutely plays in, you know, draws from and plays into the whole issue, there's no way around it. There's absolutely no way around it. If the only person you're communicating is with yourself, that's worthwhile. But writing really takes flight when you're communicating with people, when part of a broader conversation.

(KAC): I need to know the secrets, Claire. Can you tell us all the secrets of how to write good?

(CL): How do we write good?

(KAC): How do we write good? What is your writing process like?

(CL): For one thing, my process changed radically when I got sick. I had to change it completely. So, it used to be, I didn't plan what I was gonna write. I'd get an idea. I'd sit down and just start digging until I found something, and it opened for me. That’s very, very labor and focus intensive. I developed a very good, solid attention span, the ability to sit down and focus intensely on one thing for a long periods of time. And then I got chronic fatigue syndrome, you know, the illness that prevents you from doing. You know, the cruelest possible illness for a writer, and I couldn't do it anymore.

I just hit a wall and I couldn’t write for three or four years. And then I thought, maybe I should try this whole outlining thing. I decided, alright, I'm gonna outline a novel, then I will write the novel. I will write the outline scene by scene, so that if I get a flare up in the middle of something, I can walk away from it for weeks or months and still come back and pick up where I left off, because I've got the schematic.

I'm also gonna write it scene by scene, and not include any scenes that are boring. This is difficult. I mean, obviously, nobody tries to write boring things. One of the things that is difficult is the connective tissue between the scenes that you really wanna write but you have to get your character from, from A to D. So, B and C may not be that interesting to write, but to get to D, you kind of have to write that stuff, the connected tissue stuff. So, you have to slog through scenes and stuff like that, especially if you're pantsing. If you don't have a plan, you don't know where it's going. You have to write through B and C to understand what D even is.

Well, guess what? When you plan everything out in advance, you don't have to write B and C. You don't have to slog through B and C, because you already know where D is. You know where Z is, and you know where P is. So, you can backfill a little bit, to let everybody know what happened between A and D. If you know where you're going, you don't need B and C. So, I said, I'm not going to slog through any scenes that I don't want to write. I'm only gonna write scenes that are fun for me to write. Because I don't think I can make myself write slogging scenes with this illness.

Monkey Around is very cinematic, because I learned outlining from a writing for stage and screen class I took in college. Which I enjoyed very much! So, when I went back to outline, I was thinking of it in terms of scenes, rather than story beats. Because that's how I was trained. I didn't put in very much of the novelistic connective tissue, which you can't see in your mind's eye.

(KAC): What do you mean thinking in terms of scenes?

(CL): See, literally things that you can see, visual scenes, like something that you can see happening in the movie in your head. One of the big dangers of fight scenes or any kind of physically active action scenes is continuity. There's a lot of problems with continuity. If you can't see it, you have somebody pick something up with their right hand. The next thing you know, it’s in their left hand, or they've dropped it, or it's disappeared or whatever. They fall onto their side, or they fall onto their back, and the next thing you know, they're face-down on the ground, and it's like, wait, how did this happen?

(KAC): But you're approaching it visually.

(CL): I approached Monkey Around visually. I launched into writing an outline in the way I have learned writing for a film; and you have to approach writing a film with a screenplay entirely visually.

(KAC): Do you think your experience as a gallerist impacts the way that you're framing these things visually in your mind?

(CL): No, I don't think so. Those are different parts of my mind.

The thing is, that while I can see in things in my head, there are, from what I can tell, from Twitter, from discussions I've had, there are three possibilities.

One, there are people who see stories when they're reading or when they're writing, really vividly, great detail. There are people who see them kind of vaguely, they're occasional vivid things, kind of like Plato’s cave, and that's me. And then there's people who can't see things in the mind at all.

I have to really work hard to see things in that much detail. I figured that because I used to draw and paint when I was younger, but I knew almost, immediately, that I did not want to be a visual artist. Even though I have a knack for rendering things. I struggled with it a lot, and I didn't want to become a visual artist, because I have an eye, but I don't have a visual imagination. So, I can see things. I see them. I could see compositions. My imagination is narrative, and it's aided by the ability to see things. But I have to work really hard to see things. I imagine a scene before I see it.  Then, I make the effort to see the scene after I've imagined it so that I can make the scene better. But I don't see the scene as I’m imagining it, I don't see it very clearly.

(KAC): Got you. I'm thinking I need to focus more on learning how to break things down scene by scene like that. Also, because I really struggle with my chapters getting too long.

(CL): My chapters still get too long. I write way too long.

(KAC): Yeah.

(CL): Well, I’ll have a chapter where the scene is like, five thousand words long. It just goes on and on.

(KAC): I have a very similar issue. So, what's your secret to editing? What's the methodology?

(CL): I am really good at what I call compression editing, which is just taking paragraphs, passages that are porous, and I press all of the air out of them like a sponge. I mean, you literally have to find the pores in it. You have to go through it, word by word, line by line and I do a compression edit and every project, every project, every short story, every novel, everything you do a compression edit.

(KAC): What do, how do you know what a pore looks like? And what's part of the air?

(CL): Right. I'm lucky because a number of work experiences in life enabled me to do this. Straight out of college, I was an editorial assistant at the small press. Another one was working as an editor for Hyphen magazine, and also writing for other magazines where you have a word limit.

So, you write something, you put everything down that you want to put down, and you've got a 3000-word article for an article space [of] 1000 words.

(KAC): Yeah.

(CL): So, you have to tell the same story, telling 3000 words in 1000. You have to go through it, and you just ruthlessly cut things out. You're still trying to convey the same complete story, less information, but the same story.

(KAC): Yeah.

(CL): So, there are some paragraphs which are extraneous; mostly it's going through and noticing. Over-writers like me and probably like you, repeat themselves in various ways.

(KAC): Yeah, sometimes in the same sentence. Just to make sure that you're understood: so, you cut out all the ways that you repeat yourself. I didn't need two sentences to say this, it says the same thing. A lot of people don't know how to do this. You just have to push yourself to learn how to do it. You just go through it, and you cut everything down, make it shorter. Most of what we say can be said much shorter.

(KAC): Yeah,

(CL): Thoreau said, “not that the story needs be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.”

It takes a lot of work because we think as we talk, we think as we write, and it doesn't always come out in the most compressed manner. You'll spew an idea, and then another idea, and then another idea, and then you realize all the ideas can be compacted into one anyway. So yeah, compression edit. You go through it, word by word or line by line. I'm gonna take out 5000 words, or I'm gonna go through this and I'm gonna take out 10,000 words. You know, it's like …

(KAC):  Readers, Claire is making a squishing motion like she's compressing a sponge. And the sound effect is the sound of a sponge getting squished. It's very evocative.

(CL): You know, I've been recently teaching this in my classes. I’ll give people a writing exercise and give them 15 minutes to write, put their pen down in the paper or their fingers down on the keyboard and don't lift them up, then I’ll call time. Just to make sure they have a lot of material.

Then, I'll have them count their words, and rewrite it so that they halve the word count. And then, have them read it, then rewrite it again to halve the word count. Have them read it, halve the word count again. Then, I'll tell them to double the word count. Three times.

So, down to like two or three sentences, doubling the word count back. Once they've gone through that three times: ok, this is down to the absolute essence of what you were writing. Then, it's like, oh shit, what's important? I cut all of this stuff out because it was extraneous; what, of all of the stuff I cut out, is important to put back in? Once you get into the swing of it, you know, it isn't that hard, but it's hard to learn, because everything that comes out of your brain is gold.

(KAC): It definitely feels that way in a first draft, or at least, in a good first draft for me. Like everything I just said is brilliant and I can't bear to cut a single syllable. But what I've had to do is, instead of saying, I'm gonna cut this to ribbons, what do I need to cut? I’m saying, what are the bare bones? If I could only keep 10 sentences, what would they be? OK? Now, if I can only keep this many words, what would they be? And when I've got that, then I can build back up, out to the word count, choosing the pieces I'm gonna put back in. I’m like, trying to trick myself into not noticing that I'm cutting beautiful words, you know.

(CL): Oh, yeah. I took kill all your darlings to heart a long time ago. The moment I notice that I love a passage I’ve written, I immediately cut it.

(KAC): Oh, really?

(CL): Oh, yeah.

(KAC): How do you survive?

(CL): I rewrite it. So, if I see this beautiful passage, and I think, oh, that's so gorgeous—immediately rewrite it. So that all the poetry is gone. Get rid of it. Yeah. Yeah. If, plot-wise, it's essential, then I rewrite it. If it’s plot-wise, not essential, I just cut it.

(KAC): Well, it's effective, because this book is amazing.

(CL): Thank you.

(KAC): So, then, at the end, when you've written it, you can go back, and you can put in a little bit of that.

(CL): Put it back in. Yeah, you can always put it back in. That's why I save everything I cut.

(KAC): Yeah.

(CL): And you know what? I've never gone back and kept it in.

(KAC): I often do this thing where I cut because I'm just, I'm too OCD today. I'm gonna describe this leaf for 25 pages and I can't do that. So, I'll write the scene and I'll put in parentheses (beat of beautiful description) and move on. Then, I don't let myself come back and do it until I've got the structure complete, because the problem is that my overwriting throws off the pacing.

(CL): Yeah.

(KAC): If I can land the pacing and the structure first, then I know, OK, there are ten places in this chapter where I'm allowed to put in some beautiful language.

(CL): Actually, that’s completely the opposite for me. I worry about the beats after I've written. I have to get everything onto the page first. I only put something beautiful and poetic down when it occurs to me in the moment.

Also, sometimes, I’ll be like, wow, this is really, really plain language. Let’s spruce it up a bit, I'll sit there and think, what kind of metaphor can I put here? Sometimes I'll do that. But generally, the overwriting happens in the moment when I'm generating, and then, and then afterwards I'll be like, OK, where are the story beats? What can I cut out to get at the story beat? Where is it, you know?

(KAC): Yeah, yeah.

(CL): Where is it buried under all this fat; you know? Yeah.

(KAC): Are you doing any of this longhand? What tool are you using?

(CL): I don't write longhand anymore because I started getting trigger fingers. I now have carpal tunnel, but I started getting trigger fingers in my forties.

(KAC): What are trigger fingers, exactly?

(CL): Trigger fingers. It’s a little bit similar to carpal tunnel. There's a, there's a ligament or tendon in your fingers. It goes through a little tunnel here.

(KAC): Claire is pointing to the base of her fingers, readers.

(CL):  Yeah. Right down here, the pads at the base of your finger. The ligament can thicken. So, when you bend your finger down like this, it pulls through the tunnel and then when you try to straighten your finger, it gets stuck behind the thickened part, stuck behind the tunnel.

(KAC): It limits your mobility?

(CL): Yeah. Yeah. Your finger will get stuck, and then to get it back out, you have to, like, jerk it up, and it hurts. They're better now. But I had trigger fingers in these four, for about two, three years.

(KAC): What tool are you using now?

(CL): Just my computer. I still carry a notebook around with me, but I never use it.

(KAC):  Is it an ergonomic keyboard? A laptop? (Claire holds up keyboard) Oh, that is an ergonomic keyboard.

(CL): Ergonomic keyboard, which I put in my lap. I have a laptop up on a stand, and I have a monitor over here, also up on a stand. Two monitors up on stands. In the bay area, there are tech startups always going out of business. You could always get an Aeron chair for $200. So, I have an Aeron chair.

(KAC): Oh, very fancy. So, you write at your desk in your office in your house?

(CL):  Yes.

(KAC): What about on your phone? Do you ever write on your phone?

(CL): I will take notes on my phone when I think of an idea when I'm out and about. That's what I used to write in my notebook, but I don't do that anymore. I will talk to my phone.

(KAC): Voice dictation?

(CL): Voice to text, into my notes app. I've tried doing voice notes, and I don't like the transcription. The transcription is just full of ums and ahs, and it’s a literal transcription. So, it's not very useful. You need so much time cleaning it up. So, I just do voice to text, mostly if I go and work in cafes sometimes.

(KAC): Google Notes? Is that the app that you're using?

(CL): No, it's the Apple app. I have an iPhone. It's the Notes app.

(KAC): Do you have any other adaptive devices that you use when you're writing or accommodations that you use?

(CL):  No, I've tried because I'm kind of working on a new thing. It’s a secondary world fantasy, and it requires a lot, a lot of world building. So, I'm constantly getting the world building ideas. I started this whole thing out on voice memosum on my Apple iPhone and transcribing it and transferring it into text was such incredible hassle, I just never did it again. Yeah. So, I only type, that's all I do. And to be perfectly honest if I'm too tired to type, I'm too tired to think.

If I have the brain energy to think, then I have the brain energy to sit, sit up and type.

(KAC): So, you don't ever write from bed?

(CL): No.

(KAC): No. So, what about writers who have similar disabilities to yours? Do you have any specific trick for writers with those disabilities to get their writing done?

(CL): I strongly recommend the outline. I strongly recommend you take a class or get a book on how to outline, how to plan your writing, because the biggest challenge for me was keeping everything in my head. With pantsing, you have to keep everything in your head because it's not all planned out. So, you have half-formed ideas, and you have to keep them in your head from one day to the next. They're half formed, they're not writeable yet. You have to keep the whole thing in your head because you don't have a schematic for the whole thing.

I'm using Plotter for my new secondary world fantasy. It's an app that does actually interact with Scrivener. I use Scrivener as well. Plotter gives you an actual physical outline where you can do things chapter by chapter or scene by scene, depending on how you want to do it. It also gives you a number of schematics from different schools of thought on how to plot out the novel.

(KAC): The basic plot skeletons, from all these theories of writing.

(CL): Yeah. Yeah, which is really great. They're all there. So, they will plot it all out for you, they'll tell you what goes into each chapter, then you just use that as a crutch to plot out your entire thing. They also have really great notes. There's a timeline, there's an outline, there's notes, there's characters, there's places, and there's text. I'm using the characters and I'm using the notes really extensively right now for world building.

I recommend people with my illness to spend a little bit of your precious spoons learning Scrivener, and then learning Plotter. If you are the type of person who thinks linearly, Plotter is good. If you're the type of person who does mind maps, you could try Scapple.

(KAC): What about when you have an interruption? Do you have a ritual to get back into the flow?

(CL): I don't. I mean, I have my daily ritual, to like, sit down and ... (Claire holds up coffee travel mug).

(KAC): “There's coffee in that nebula?”

(CL): Are you a Star Trek fan?

(KAC): Yes!

(CL): OK. This is from Star Trek: Voyager. It's a quote from Janeway. When they were running out of fuel, they found a nebula that had that dilithium in it. And she said, “there's coffee in that Nebula.” OK. So, I've got my big thing, I make my pour-over coffee, and I get my little—

(KAC): Is that a shot glass?

(CL): A little shot glass. I get a little shot glass full of dark chocolate covered almonds, and I stay here with my coffee and my dark chocolate covered almonds, and I start working. I don't need anything more than that, if I have the spoons. Some days it takes me longer. Some days it takes me shorter. Usually I'll sit, and I'll read my emails, and I'll check Facebook and Twitter I'll read, Reddit for a while. And then I'll start working. When I'm ready to work, I sit down and just start working.

(KAC): Readers, the magical coffee mug has Janeway’s red Captain's outfit from Voyager and it says, “there's coffee in that nebula.” Now I've got to go find that episode and re-watch it.

(CL): Yes. It's in the first season. I got this from an Etsy store called Adopt a Tribble. You can adopt Tribbles from this Etsy store, and you can also get magical coffee mugs. This one is amazing because, um, I don't know what it is about this thing, but it keeps your coffee hot for hours.

(KAC): Everybody needs an excellent beverage container.

(CL): I've also got a Starfleet Academy water bottle.

(KAC): What practical writing advice have you found the most useful?

(CL): Oh my God. I have so much practical writing advice. There's so much. What did you have trouble [with]?

(KAC): Write every day. A real writer writes every day. But for me, the key has been flexibility. I don't know, from day to day, what my symptoms are gonna be. What my impairments are gonna be. How many spoons I'm gonna have, how much pain I'm gonna be in. I don't know how articulate I'm gonna be that day. If I have slurred speech and aphasia, that is just not a great day to write lyrical prose. But it might be a great day to nail down the beats of a scene or to outline the structure, right? So, the advice that's worth the most for me is to be really flexible about using different methodologies on different days to fit the accommodation needs that I have on that day.

(CL): Well, when people say writing every day, I think some people take it too literally. I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about writing every day. People use the term dailyness to mean consistency. Write Consistently. Time-wise, write consistently. You build a practice. Because remember what I said earlier, a writer is someone who writes. It's about being in the present. Writing has to be a present practice for you. That's all it means.

I don't tell my students anymore that you have to write every day. I tell my students writing has to be a present practice for you. If you have a consistent present practice of writing, everything that you do in life tends to work into the writing, and the writing tends to work into everything that you do in life. The goal is to have your life be a practice and your writing be part of that practice.

(KAC): Yeah. Yeah.

(CL): Yeah.

(KAC): And you don't mean just sitting down to draft a story, you mean, like, all of your writing, right?

(CL): Everything. Story ideas, looking around, refreshing your mind's eye or your mind's mind. refreshing your mind by going outside. Self-care so that you don't get carpal tunnel. Removing yourself from your usual writing spot or writing somewhere different to get a new perspective. Input, getting enough input from the world, so that you have material to work with, all of these things. If you have enough time, and enough energy to write, [but] you're finding yourself stymied, you're not getting enough input. That’s a particular problem for people like us, who are housebound a lot of the time. And for the world right now, because of the pandemic and people being housebound and isolated from each other. You have to have, uh, a vivid, interesting life, you have to live all the parts of your life, you can't output without input. Garbage in, garbage out, you know.

(KAC): Yeah, yeah.

(CL): So, yeah, your, your writing life has to be a life. You have to have a full life practice to be able to. write. Yeah.

(KAC): This is the antithesis of “I must go into an isolated cabin by a lake and write alone for a year as a hermit while my mother makes me lunch and does my laundry.”

(CL): That's what I was about to say! Thoreau’s mother made him lunch, and brought him laundry. He was not isolated. Lunch and yeah, he was on a friend's property!

And anyway, while there is a place for retreats, that place, for everybody, may be different. For me, I can't listen to music when I'm writing, because I need to hear the rhythmic language. I can go out to a cafe and have a lot of ambient noise around me that I need to block out. That helps me a lot. When I'm in the generating phase, it helps me a lot to be out somewhere where I have to block stuff out, for some reason. Sometimes it helps me be more creative, but I also end up overwriting a lot because I can't really hear myself talk.

When I'm doing a compression edit, I have to be in a quiet room. I have to hear the language. I have to hear the rhythm of the language when I'm doing certain types of revision, not story revision, but like, language revision.

I have to be in a quiet room by myself. And there are times when I'm doing story revisions, I have to be not in a quiet room, so that I can hear things, focus on the whole.

(KAC): Yeah.

(CL): Yeah. So, I think a lot of the stereotypes about writers are people just misunderstanding.

(KAC): Or insisting that this is a universal thing whereas you're describing different parts in the writing process, and you need different things, you need different environments.?

(CL): Yeah.

(KAC): Some people who write beautiful prose listen to music the whole time they're doing it. What I'm always telling people is like, um, I love every part of the writing process. I love it. Absolutely love it. There are times when parts of it are a slog, but it's not because I hate that part of it. I love that part of it. But there are times when that part is a slog. I think you have to push through anyway, but I love every part of the writing and if I didn't, I wouldn't do it. I cannot spend this much time doing something I hate.

(CL): Yeah. I thought for a long time that nobody could do something that they hated. I have a friend who hates the process of writing. She's a writer, she's a professional writer. She hates the process of writing and I've talked to her about it. I'm like, but you can't possibly, like, you hate it sometimes. But, and she's like, you know, I always hate it. I hate it. I hate every part of it. I hate it. I hate it. I'm like, why do you do it then?

(KAC): Yeah.

(CL): And she said, because I love having written, I love having the product.

(KAC): Yeah.

(CL): Everybody is different. For me, being present in the process is a really important part of my daily life. And, and it's possible because I love the process. I really do. I love it. The more that I do it, the better I get at it, the more I love it. Being in that moment, being in the zone, feels like being connected to some sort of essence of life, some sort of … like being plugged directly into energy, into electricity, you know?

(KAC): Yeah.

(CL): It makes me feel alive and I love it. Some people hate it. Some people fucking hate it. I don't get that. But yeah, everything is different for everybody. It's different for absolutely everybody. There are no generalizations, but we talk about process because sometimes we'll hear a bit of process advice that works for us.

(KAC): Yeah.

(CL): And you know, most of the time, most of the process advice I hear doesn't work for me, like morning pages, I fucking hate morning pages. Oh, I hate morning pages. I took a class where she tried to make us do for three weeks. And I said I'm never doing this again. Never.

(KAC):  Wait. Mourning pages?

(CL): This is Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, which a lot of people swear by. Morning pages is a part of the process where you keep a journal next to your bag. First thing in the morning, you write a certain number of pages, and basically, what you're doing is writing all the garbage out of your head. Stuff that you write in your morning pages, you're not supposed to keep, you're not supposed to read it over, supposed to use it. You're writing all the garbage out of your head so that you can go out into your day, into your creative process. I hated it. I hated doing that. I did not feel clear afterwards. Writing for me is manifesting. When I write something down, I'm taking something that's nebulous in my mind and I'm turning it real.

(KAC): Yeah.

(CL): I don't need to spend five pages writing it all out. But some people do, and there's nothing wrong with that.

(KAC): Wait, do they write the pages before they brush their teeth though? So, do they have morning breath the whole time that they're writing?

(CL): I think they're, well, (Laughs) I think they have morning breath while they’re writing their pages,

(KAC): Do they pee first?

(CL) (Laughing): I don't know.

(KAC): I need the details here. Like, are you still sweaty from sleeping or do you maybe rinse off a little? Is everything you write in the morning pages about sweaty cranky, smelly characters? Who've really got to pee?

(CL): You’re not doing your creative stuff. You're writing garbage, like whatever is going on in your brain. Like you wake up and you're like, oh shit, I've gotta, I've gotta take out the garbage. I forgot to take out the garbage. Oh my God. I forgot to clean a cat litter, oh my God. Today is gonna be the worst day.

(KAC): Oh, Gotcha.

(CL): You're getting all the garbage out of your head. That doesn't work for me.

(KAC): There's another similar methodology or framework, where you're imagining a pump and you have to pump it a few times to get the brown water out of it, before the water runs clear.

(CL): Yeah.

(KAC): I have one more specific writing question. What about our readers who are feeling discouraged right now? They feel like maybe they've lost their gift. Things have changed, their disability has changed, and they're trying to find their way back into writing again, or maybe just to feel good about writing again. Do you have any encouragement for them?

(CL): It's a different thing for everybody. What the discouragement is, is a different thing. One way to handle it is just do the opposite of what we do. Even if it doesn't get you running again, it'll get you out of your head space for a second, change things up. Number one, change things up.

Number two, reconnect with people, reconnect with your community. Reconnect with the source, what makes you feel. Reconnect with the things that make you feel you’re part of the world, in whatever way you can. Reconnect with the people and the communities that make you feel the most you. And don't just do it once. Start making the practice of it.

(KAC): Yeah. That doesn't sound like advice for someone who has lost their gift. That sounds like advice for someone who has needs that have been neglected for too long or not met for too long.

(CL): Well, that's how you lose your gift.

(KAC): If you can take care of yourself, then you'll find your way back into doing the things you love again.

(CL): Yeah. I don't believe in writer’s block. I don't think writer's block is a thing. I think writers are people who get depressed, who, who have problems, who have issues. You have to figure out what is the source of your depression, what is the source of your issue? And deal with that. I don't think it's particular to writing. I think it's particular to humanity, and if you're not writing, it's because, most likely, there's some depression, there's something along those lines going on. You gotta figure it out. Yeah.

(KAC): Yeah. That's all really good. Is there anything else that you would like to share with anyone reading this interview?

(CL):  So, the Monkey Around series is probably not gonna be continued to be published, so I'm probably not gonna continue to write it, but I did have grand plans for a supernatural disability and a human disability to appear in the series. The new secondary world fantasy has a disabled protagonist.

(KAC): So, we can look forward to that in the future!

(CL): Hopefully!

(KAC): Well, readers, please check out Claire's work! You can find Monkey Around wherever fine books are sold. And remember, that's written under Claire's pen name, which is Jadie Jang. Her short story collection, Slightly Behind and to the Left, that's written as Claire Light. If you want to find out more about Claire and her work, you can go to Claire's website.

Disabled and Neurodiverse readers, we would love to hear your thoughts. What writing advice do you have for other Disabled writers like you? Please join the conversation on social media with #WritingWhileDisabled and #StrangeHorizons.

Claire! Thank you so much for sitting down with me today. I really appreciate it.

(CL): Thank you for having me.

I would now like to share something which has nothing to do with speculative fic, horror, or sci-fi etc. I was looking through some old issues of Maclean's magazine from around the sixties. I was not ready for the sheer volume of laxative ads that basically made up the entire magazine! There were laxatives for normal people aka white men, for older men who work in offices and have moustaches, for women above 60 who feel “headachy”, for young women who “have been constipated since marriage”, for children with sour stomachs, and for people who have had a laxative but still feel like they haven’t “evacuated completely”. I probably shouldn’t have shared all this here but fam I was shook. And now, for something completely different, episode three of The Slide!

I have somewhat refreshed my memory and am fully excite for all the shenanigans from this sentient mud.

This episode is called “Analysis”. Not very exciting but anyway here we go.

In the archive.org descriptor for this, it says that a lot of vintage BBC recordings were lost, possibly because the BBC just didn’t bother to record them. I remember hearing that some recordings were destroyed in a fire, but others just turned up in random places, like old biscuit tins etc. Which feels like something I would do to be honest.

Mr. Sorenson the irresponsible cave guy is being chewed out by a police inspector because two men have died due to a harebrained scheme. I’m guessing it was Mr. Sorenson’s harebrained scheme.

I vaguely remember this and also fellows just wandering around caves when they were supposed to be rescuing people.

The inspector raises another good point, re why were you descending into the bowels of the earth when there were earth tremors.

I’m not an expert or anything but that seems like something you shouldn’t be doing.

Some other fellow called Bernie (?) has broken his leg also.

Mr. Sorenson just said that potholing isn’t just a sport, it’s an important scientific survey. But Google says that potholing is just a sport. One of you is lying.

Now the Doctor is yelling at Mr. Sorenson because let’s face it, he is not putting safety first.

And Ted, the mysterious old man is also missing somewhere in the caves. All in all, a fun day for everyone.

Bernie is convinced that he saw Ted down there, but why would Ted go down there? How did he go down there? Who is Ted? So many questions.

The Doctor recommends that they seal the caves and I have to say I agree with him.

Mr. Sorenson is against all this because he’s Mr. Sorenson.

I wonder why it’s called potholing.

I’m not invested enough to actually find out though.

A professor has called Mr. Deverill back from London but I can’t remember who either of these people are.

The professor is telling Mr. Deverill about how there is more mud spewing out and they have been up half the night trying to put it all back in the fissure.

Why are you doing that though?

If a volcano is spewing lava we don’t try to put the lava back in, no?

Is that a bad analogy? Idk probably.

So it looks like once they put some mud in, some more comes out. See, I told you it was a bad idea.

The mud has already dried and is as hard as concrete, so can’t really clean it up now which is great.

And two new fissures have been discovered.

Maybe y’all should move.

The Americans have also reported tremors near Chicago.

Maybe don’t move to Chicago then.

The professor is shocked that the mud sample they collected has grown to three times its original size, which frankly seems a little rude.

Now we have cut to Mrs. Deverill who has been told to leave the tap running.

Someone is mentioning all sorts of chemistry words, reminding me of all the times I failed chemistry in school #sad.

The mud apparently only swells in its liquid state and they are all stunned by this.

I am not stunned because I’m getting bored now.

Mrs. Deverill has now been told to turn off the tap. Whatever will happen next??

All these dudes are like Mrs. Deverill why don’t you leave us to our manly scientific duties.

They didn’t actually say that of course- they said “you must be tired” and “your husband must be home by now”.

Small particles are now floating off the mud YAAAAAY

The Doctor has entered and is telling everyone about all the dead animals.

He’s taking an awful long time to essentially say “hey guys there’s dead animals everywhere”.

The Chilean (?) professor is saying that the same thing happened in his country after the 1960 earthquake.

Could all of these things possibly be connected?? I JUST DON’T KNOW!!

The water in the tank has turned green and that is apparently very shocking? I’m like whatever.

I think Mrs. Deverill is screaming now.

No, it’s someone called Miss Marshall. I don’t know who that is.

She is obviously struggling with some feelings.

Mrs. Marshall wants to be left alone, the sun is hurting her eyes and she doesn’t want the injection they are going to give her.

I feel like all of us want and feel these same things.

Also she doesn’t want to sleep.

You’ve lost me there Miss Marshall.

I guess she is in a hospital.

They have given her an injection but apparently injections aren’t working on her.

I think the nurse is telling Miss Marshall she can’t sleep with her eyes open but like who are you madam, the sleep police?

Some sound effects are happening and I don’t know what we are supposed to make of them. Fear? Annoyance? Hunger?

Ok now I think we are at one of the fissures where they are trying to clean the mud.

Stop putting it back in omg!

Mr. Deverill says he finds it all invigorating, possibly because he’s not doing any of the digging and his house wasn’t eaten by sentient mud.

Mr. Deverill has also admitted he doesn’t like people, thus firmly establishing him as the villain.

Now it looks like the plants are also dying.

Mr. Deverill seems happy about this too because maybe he was bullied by wayward petunias as a child.

A man has now come across a woman sitting in the dark.

Is this that farmer guy and his wife?

Yes it is.

Mary is apparently not scared any more because she has started bonding with the slide and it’s making her feel better. Slide is the mud? And is bonding the right word here?

Meanwhile! The professors have discovered a white powder on the mud.

It’s chalk!

No! It’s salt!

Someone has now come in saying they have been digging up seashells all morning.

Not like at the beach on a nice day but from the mud.

Now they are going to try putting heat in a container? To break up the mud?

I mean ok, if you want to.

Now I think that Doctor has gone to see Janet but she’s like whatever bye.

Someone called Joseph has dropped Mrs. Deverill home and she has invited him in for a drink and then she asked why he isn’t married OMG NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS.

Leave Joseph alone, he has to go back to the lab to do manly and scientific things.

Mrs. Deverill just said “did she hurt you” and Joseph said yes and she was like haha see I know all about you and he goes she was my wife and she died giving birth to my son I’m so dead right now.

Although I don’t think she died during childbirth to hurt you wtf.

Mrs. Deverill is adamant that he should have some sex because that’s what his wife would have wanted.

Wild conversation.

Now the Doctor has come to see the farmer, because Mary is acting bananas like all the other hysterical ladies.

The farmer just said “Imagine it doctor! Me! Being scared to meet the darkness!” and I wondered what kind of person would say that.

We now enter upon an argument between Mr. and Mrs. Deverill because Mr. Deverill gave an interview where he said bad things about Joseph.

Suddenly Mrs. Deverill is like Oh Hugh let’s get away from here, just you and me, what is happening.

It’s a roller coaster of emotion, fam.

Mr. Deverill is complaining about his eyes hurting, which I guess is significant.

Did I mention they are fighting again?

Now two men with very large working class accents are talking.

They are about to partake of some whiskey because they are very naughty.

Suddenly, the sound of wah’ah.

Meanwhile! The professors are doing that heating the mud thing.

The white powder has been analysed and it is salt.

Didn’t you guys already know this?

I think they just realized the mud has the ability to multiply in its liquid state and that it has organic stuff in it.

I thought mud generally has organic stuff in it but what do I know, I am not a manly scientific man.

So this guy Robert who was heating the mud has been hurt I think and the mud is going all over the place and squeaking like a rubber duckie.

*

That would have been a cliffhanger ending if this episode had actually been interesting. Since it wasn’t, it’s just the end of an episode that felt like it was about eight hours long. I remember liking the first episode, and thinking the 2nd one was just ok. This was super-boring. I am mainly here for the sentient mud, even if it does squeak like a rubber duckie, and there was hardly any mud action happening. And I keep forgetting who everyone is.

Fam, I hope to see you all in the new year and that you will continue on this journey with me, because this show is seven episodes long and who knows what will happen in the future. Bai dears.

Mawaru Penguindrum

That the ghost killed the girl in the horror movie’s spooky opening is not surprising—what kind of girl it was, that’s the amazing part.

There is a lot of well-deserved celebration of the fact that, after decades of Anglophone SFF being translated into dozens of languages, we’re finally getting more non-Anglophone SFF translated into English. As we celebrate the two-way-ness of what was long a one-way conversation, it’s worth zooming in on examples why getting SFF from other countries is so valuable. One great example—a feature which has long fed Western anime/manga fandom and its less-high-profile cousin, the fans of Japanese live action zombie movies and Godzilla-type costume monster dramas, is narrative unpredictability.

Japanese SFF, and especially horror (where so much is about suspense and expectation), often offers an exciting freshness to Western readers/viewers, because the stories are less predictable to a Western audience. This, in turn, is because they draw on a different narrative tradition. This is an asset any work in translation from a different culture benefits from. To give the crudest of examples, like many American kids I grew up on Europe’s fairy tales, in which things always happen three times (three bowls of porridge, three nights at the royal ball, the first dog has eyes the size of saucers, second dog, third dog etc.), so the first time I read a collection of Navajo children’s stories in which, instead, everything happens four times, it was very surprising. Freshness is appealing, so when 1980s US zombie movie fans popped their first fansubbed Japanese zombie flicks into their VCRs, even films a Japanese moviegoer would consider totally unexceptional could elicit “Whoa! What?! That’s not where I thought this story was going!” That is powerful.

Some specific examples will help. You are probably already thinking of Japan’s religious and folklore traditions, with its Buddhist, Shinto, and animist ingredients—of Japanese temples, monk exorcists, or shapeshifting fox spirits (kitsune)—which are indeed delightful tools for populating a story, just like elves or griffins. This tradition is far too often oversimplified in Western discussions, which ascribe to Japan an idealized homogenous animist sacredness-of-nature attitude (much as often happens with Native American cultures’ stories). It’s better to think of Japan (and indeed of Native Americans) as having a whole bunch of awesome old stories, many unfamiliar to other audiences, whose transformations in modern fiction are as different as the works of Diana Wynne Jones and H.P. Lovecraft. Some modern Japanese fiction certainly uses traditional folklore creatures, or traditions of monastic and spiritual practice (Tokyo Babylon, 1990-3, is a great example), or Japan’s fascinating afterlife bureaucracy (as in the infernal office comedy Hozuki’s Coolheadedness, 2011-20). But all these specific creatures and fantastic elements are not what I mean by narrative freshness.

More important than any particular ingredient (nature spirits, afterlife figures, hopping vampires), ready like any folklore creature to populate manga pages and RPG monster manuals, is that Japan’s religious, folkloric, and literary traditions bring a palette of different narrative formulae and assumptions (like Navajo stories’ 4x instead of 3x), which can make something feel surprising by how it works, not what creatures are in it. So, plenty of Japanese fiction about flying saucers, Greek myths, Star Trek-type Space Federations, and D&D elves can still have a stimulating freshness because they mix these ingredients with a different narrative tradition, and different narrative logics.

I’ll start with ghost stories because the examples are extra clear, and then zoom out.

We are not looking at a folktale, but a folktale’s logic. In a Western horror story where humans disturb some dormant entity (wake a sleeping dragon, open the sealed tomb, build a shopping mall on an ancient graveyard, awaken the ancient killer swarm), the entity will lash out and harm/kill (A) unnamed bystanders, (B) the characters who did the violating/breaking/trespassing, and (C) people who are bad (the traitor, the villain, the profiteer etc.). On the other hand, characters who weren’t the original violators, and whose actions are earnest and heroic throughout the story, are spared. In such a story, the threatening entity is an instrument of Providential comeuppance, so there is a sense of good and bad people generally getting what they deserve, and things like purity, courage, or love earning salvation. We also do write stories where the bad guy triumphs or the hero dies, but these are inversions, and are powerful because they invert the unspoken pattern. In contrast, Japanese-written dormant-entity tales tend to depict the entity lashing out more indiscriminately, sweeping in like a flood or biological-level threat, and often killing good characters and/or sparing bad ones in ways that are shockingly unexpected if one expects Providential logic.

Concrete examples:

#1: In the American haunted house film Thirteen Ghosts (2001 version), which happens to be on my desk because someone recommended it on Twitter last week, an ambitious ghost hunter traps a family in a house full of captured ghosts to complete an ancient spell, but the only characters killed by the ghosts are (A) unnamed hired minions in the opening scene, (B) the villain, (C) his greedy lawyer, (D) a sexy female traitor who is seduced by and helps the villain, and (E) a psychic whose attunement with the ghosts takes him somewhat beyond the limits of the human, and who helps the villain for money but refuses to help the heroes without the offer of money. The kids and the adults whose actions are selfless (helping others)—not selfish (for cash)—survive.  One named innocent person is killed early on, but this turns out to be the work of a live human murderer/traitor, not the ghosts.

#2: In the first Jurassic Park film (1993), the threat is different, but the Providential formula is identical. Humanity has unleashed dinosaurs, but the people they actually kill are (A) the unnamed hired employee in the opening scene, (B) the villain, (C) the “bloodsucking lawyer,” (D) Mr. Arnold, who we see being sullen and smoking (a signal of impurity in ’90s movies), and (E) the professional game hunter whose attunement with wild animals and bloodstained hands take him somewhat beyond the limits of the human. The kids and those who courageously help them survive, as does the maker of the park, whose touching speech about how he created the park because he wanted to bring something real and powerful to kids, after making his money on the deception of a flea circus, brings him in alignment with ideals of truth, generosity, and purity. That the two least tainted people who die—the nameless employee and Mr. Arnold—are the only Black characters is no coincidence, given America’s long, racist tradition of associating Blackness with impurity and Whiteness with purity and Providential favor.

#3: The episode “Demon Cat” from the anime Ayakashi Classic Japanese Horror begins with a completely innocent, named young bride suddenly dropping dead on her wedding morning. The grudge-born demon who slew her then kills all the other members of the household (servants and relatives) who knew about the crime which spawned the grudge; but the demon spares the actual perpetrator of the original crime, who is left to face a lonely old age, as well as the two servants who did not know about the crime, and who take seriously the warnings of the exorcist and do as he instructs, without doing anything particularly heroic to rescue anyone else.

Ring

#4a: The influential live action Japanese horror film Ring (1998) begins with the death of a named and extremely sweet and demure teenaged girl who gets caught up in the curse through no fault of her own—she is very chastely dressed, quiet, and in all ways an ideal of a modest sweet teen who is doing everything right. Thereafter, the characters killed by the vengeful ghost are all complete innocents who stumble on the curse by chance, while the two people actually responsible for the ghost’s rage (the profit-seeking grandfather and the murderer) get no visible comeuppance. The protagonist and her son are not saved by their earnest, kindly efforts; they only survive by choosing to become complicit with the curse.  When American and other Western horror fans first got a hold of this movie, their minds were blown by how unexpected the twists were. It was one of the big turning points in the growth of the West’s Japanese horror fan community, which is not as flashy and visible as anime fandom but still substantial.

#4b: The 2002 American remake The Ring was a huge financial success, due largely to keeping the complicity twist which is the heart of the story, but it had the teenaged girl who dies in the opening scene be immodestly dressed, with many stylized attributes of an unlikable teen girl (complaining sullenly, using lots of slang, saying “like” way too much, biting her nails, believing conspiracy bunk off the internet), and establishes her as lying to her parents to conceal a sexual relationship she is having with an older, college-age boy. As the film progresses, those individuals responsible for the ghost’s grudge are tormented toward suicide in an act of direct revenge, not left to a long old age; and the other major character killed by the ghost—whose Japanese counterpart is earnest and supportive throughout—is shown smoking, being a deadbeat/slacker, having an inappropriate relationship with a younger woman, and at first refuses to believe the protagonist about the curse: more than enough impurities to make him an appropriate, rather than an innocent, victim. The complicity twist remains, but the Western horror axiom that those who suffer must have done something to deserve it is restored.

The logics of such Japanese haunting stories are not Providential in the individual judgment sense as the American (Christian-influenced) ones are. People who did everything right still die, and not through human betrayal or epic acts of self-sacrifice to save another, but because personal purity does not protect you from the wrath of what has been unleashed. Humanity as a whole has transgressed, disrupted something, like making a hole in a dike or kicking a hornet’s nest, so humanity as a whole is attacked. If any part of humanity is to be spared it is not because they are pure and therefore chance makes the bad guy trip and the good guy reach safety, it is because they are wise enough to take the threat seriously and take the correct survival steps (smoke the wasps to sleep, patch the dike right away, chant the sutras correctly, fulfil the ghost’s command).

Transitive guilt—suffering because of something someone else did, or something all humanity did—is not a common narrative in modern Western literature. Even in stories which focus on the idea of humanity transgressing and disturbing forces man was not meant to touch, the suffering still usually falls mainly on the guilty: either actual villains or characters tainted by culturally-criticized impurities, such as sexual impurity, selfishness, greed, smoking, etc. Stepping beyond ghost stories, when the magical-realism-esque anime Mawaru Penguindrum establishes our young teen protagonists living alone, shunned by society because their parents were guilty of an atrocity, the Western viewer expects a solution of forgiveness and welcome, in which either those who did the shunning realize they were wrong to punish innocent children for their parents’ crime, or the innocent children find a new community: we are surprised when the solution is that the kids must take personal responsibility for their parents’ guilt and let themselves be destroyed by it in an act of self-sacrifice. This different logic of purity and culpability, in which individual personal purity in the Western sense does not help you in the face of collective and transitive guilt, on the family scale or human-species scale, operates in all sorts of genres, from space opera to romance, and can often make Japanese stories feel surprising, fresh, and different—sometimes dismaying, often compelling—to those who come to them from a Western media consumption background. This too is part of the appeal of anime and manga, and indeed of Japanese live action works like J-horror.

Rather than Providential, we can call these stories ecosystemic. Many Japanese tales posit what we might call an ecosystem of unseen or seldom-seen beings, which saturates both wild and urban places. There are several terms for these (yokai, ayakashi, kami), and are described in lots of different ways in different tales, sometimes like elves or brownies, sometimes more like giant invisible organisms which, like microorganisms, naturally dwell in various places and only cause problems when things go out of whack (like when the bacteria in your guts are messed up by antibiotics and make you ill, or the bacteria that live all over your body at all times get into a cut). Some tell tales of trickster spirits approaching humans, but many describe such beings as generally unconcerned with human existence until disturbed by human activity, or especially human emotion, which has great power to affect the (super)natural world. Many who read the Tale of Genji (eleventh century) are baffled by the sequence in which a man is haunted by a ghost of a woman who is still alive and doesn’t know she’s haunting him, but it’s an ecosystemic disruption: the grudge of a murder victim and the grief of a still-living jilted lover are equally powerful emotional disruptors of a supernatural ecosystem sensitive to such disruption, so the emotion becomes/possesses/takes-over/mutates a natural spirit, as a superhero comic might have radiation turn a frog into a frog monster, or too many courses of antibiotics might cause a mutation in the microbes in your gut. Human actions which offend natural things, like the destruction of an ancient grove, or abusing a cat, can also create grudges which turn natural spirits into monsters. In both Ring and Ayakashi's “Demon Cat,” those trying to solve the haunting spend part of their time trying to figure out whether the source of the haunting is actually dead or still alive, since seeing a haunting monster doesn’t tell you whether you’re looking for a grave, a recluse, or a really annoyed cat.

In Satoshi Kon’s acclaimed film Perfect Blue, a singer/actress is being pressured into taking a very sexualized role in a TV series, and is haunted by a specter of her ideal sexually-pure stage self. For the Japanese viewer the suspense is whose internal grudge about this transition from pure to sexualized has become the spirit: hers, a fan’s, or someone else’s? For Western viewers unfamiliar with The Tale of Genji and the idea of being haunted by a living person’s emotions, the film feels like a trippy rollercoaster of WTF. Similarly, in the anime Le Portrait de Petit Cossette, an antiques dealer is haunted by visions of a murdered girl, whose portrait hangs in his shop. Is the ghost the girl’s soul trying to reveal the truth about the murder? Seeking revenge? Love-sick and trying to bring a lover with her to the grave? As the story develops we see two different Cossettes fighting in visions; is the portrait itself somehow a different being, an idealized version of Cossette in which her imperfect true self is trapped? None of the above! It’s all the spirit of the antique chest of drawers under the painting, which was traumatized by witnessing the murder (an example of a tsukumogami or household-tool-spirit)! The logic of how souls/spirits/haunting works is simply different, in ways that are refreshing after so many Providential tales.

Japan’s SF writers often draw on these ecosystemic models when inventing aliens and space phenomena, mixing them with elements from Western SF. Some approaches are straightforward, as when the SF romantic comedy Urusei Yatsura bases many of its aliens on specific classic folklore monsters. Or consider the timeloop horror series Higurashi: When They Cry, which imagines an SF bio-contagion origin to legends of local gods and demon-like oni.

Parasyte

Others are more bio-systemic. Tezuka’s Phoenix posits not only that many historic tales of folklore monsters actually described alien visitations, but that multi-species space empires have a natural life cycle like individual organisms, and a species called Moopies exists whose effect is to trigger those species which contact it to go into decline: lifespan-limiters, the telomeres of the galaxy. Gunbuster has the alien enemies in its Starship-Troopers-like Earth vs. space-monsters war turn out be the giant antibodies of a living galaxy, pursuing humanity as our white blood cells pursue bacteria. The alien invasion series Parasyte (1988-95) and the zombie apocalypse series I Am a Hero (2009-17) both also have their classic horror threats be biological processes designed to renew the Earth; and while no classic folklore beings appear in them, such folklore provides the source material behind the refreshingly surprising progression zombie => superzombie => many-limbed zombie made of several merged zombies => giant beautiful hive mind meat tree thing => human forest. The author of Parasyte wrote in his epilogue about how he ended up toning down the ecosystemic side of the story in his finale, because in the years he was writing so much new focus on environmentalism had surged that it felt like he could no longer write the bio-cleansing narrative he had imagined without it feeling like too much of an environmentalist commentary. Despite the environment being at its core, his alien invasion as originally conceived was shaped more by The Tale of Genji, and the tales transmitted through the seventeenth-century ghost story parlor game Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai, than by the urgings of Greenpeace.

Also fruitful for describing the contrast between Hollywood’s personal, Providentialist, and purity narratives and these Japanese ecosystemic transitive-guilt narratives is to use Elizabeth Minnich’s terms, intensive vs. extensive evil, which she discusses in The Evil of Banality (2017). In both fiction and nonfiction, we are very used to stories about evil that is concentrated in a single actor who makes an evil choice from which bad consequences occur: the wicked witch, the greedy uncle, the violent assailant. Even in narratives about huge systemic problems like climate change or income inequality, our dramatizations tend to center the evil on a bad guy: the greedy capitalist or secret cabal. We are less good at both thinking about and narrativizing extensive evil, wherein real evil is caused by the innumerable small complicities of many people, which are the collective causes of real evils like gentrification, plastics pollution, etc. In the US-made environmentalist animated kid’s film FernGully (1992), forest fairies save their forest from loggers by convincing a few specific loggers of its value, and by defeating a personified human-pollution-monster-demon. In the similar but Japanese-made Pom Poko (1994), the tanuki forest spirits try to convince the population of a town to stop destroying their forest using a combination of pranks, illusions, and direct appeals, but the human encroachment has no leader, and the effort fails, forcing the tanuki to adapt to living in trash cans and city gutters. In Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke (1997) the monster is the forest spirit, transformed into a dangerous, contaminated form by the harm it suffers at the hands of greedy humans. Stories of extensive evil, in which the threat is not a single villain, nor even a man-made pollution monster, but systemic structures of harm in which we are all complicit, offer tools to think through real-life problems, which are rarely fixed by defeating one villain.

If there is a cultural generalization to take from all this, it isn’t about Japan, it’s about the West: that we should think more carefully about our own inherited narrative formulae, and about how many times we want to tell the story where the ghosts/dinosaurs only kill the villain, the greedy lawyer, the nameless Black employee, and the sexually active woman. Similarly, how many stories do we want to tell in which big, societal problems are solved by defeating a villain without the rest of us changing our ways? A glance at US politics right now shows vividly the many harmful effects of Providentialist thinking: from welfare or disability legislation which presumes poor and disabled people need moral correction and thus punitive levels of poverty or restrictions on food stamps (usable for high-effort dry beans but not step-saving prepared meals), to attitudes toward capitalism which insist the market sorts for moral virtue and refuse to acknowledge the existence of systemic inequality, to attitudes toward abortion and sexual assault which insist that, if something bad befell a woman, it must be her fault, her impurity. Such attitudes have many sources, but they certainly aren’t helped by exposing people a hundred times a year to stories where one villain is the problem, or the threat-of-the-week kills the woman in the crop top while the modest virgin lives.

Similarly, we know how hard it is to get people to acknowledge our complicity in extensive evil and make systemic changes, as Pom Poko challenges us to do. We prefer the narratives in Marvel’s Iron Man (2008) where we just have to wait for the nerds to invent clean power and save us all, or in the Hitman games (2000-ongoing) where clean cold fusion power already exists, we just need to defeat the sinister cabal keeping it secret. Even the personified pollution monster of FernGully gives us an intensive evil to defeat that humanity unleashed, but can be defeated once and for all without acknowledging our complicity, or doing the hard work needed to change the social systems that make it hard-to-impossible to escape the small acts (buying plastic, driving cars) that advance the evil.

Pom Poko

Narrative variety broadens thinking. Every time translations give us access to new cultural traditions, the thrill of “The ghost did what?!” is also a window on what is formulaic in the media we’re used to, where so often Fortune favors the plucky and the pure. We don’t want to imitate Japanese narratives wholesale (cultural appropriation = bad!), but comparing the US and Japanese versions of Ring, or comparing Pom Poko and FernGully, indeed comparing any translated media to the narratives we’re used to, can help us see that even the brief characterization of a character who dies in the first scene of a story genuinely does advance ethical and even metaphysical claims. This can give us fresh ideas for stories, from powerful plot twists, to awesome aliens, to narratives that question, instead of reinforcing, some of the Providentialist thinking and discomfort with acknowledging extensive evil that so saturate the media that we consume.

Editor: Gautam Bhatia.

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department.

The kanji for "manga" from the preface to Shiji no yukikai (1798), via Wikimedia Commons

Mitfreude is the joy of sharing joy with friends.

Sometimes you have a friend who’s passionate about a topic—lizards, the Basque language, regency hairstyles—and you sit and ask, “What’s so cool about [topic]?” and a delightful hour later you’ve tasted the topic’s awesome history, examples, taken delight in your friend’s delight, and forever after when that topic comes up you smile, and get the context, and look forward to telling your friend about the cool thing you heard. And (most important!) your friend has not pressured you to get you to buy a pet lizard, learn Basque, or start wearing regency hair to work every day, they’ve just shared the fascinating energy of why find that thing so cool.

This essay is that conversation—sharing the niftiness without the pressure—for anime and manga and how they and Western SF fandom have shaped each other for the last seventy-five years. The aim is mitfreude, to share the niftiness of this media world, and hopefully some vorfreude, the joy of anticipating future joy, for example, looking forward to a party or a holiday, preparing for a convention, savoring the smell of something in the oven, or, in this case, knowing that, forever after reading this, you’ll get more richness out of every time somebody mentions anime and manga, because you’ll smile thinking of your lizard-loving friend.

So …

Once upon a time an atomic-powered robot boy dodged censorship to talk about racism, and fifty years later Japan issued the first legal birth certificate granting citizenship to an AI. Once upon a time in a small Japanese town flourished Earth’s glitteriest, rose-petal-y-est, most gender-bending form of theater, and ninety years later a comics shop owner in Cambridge, Massachusetts, exclaimed to me, “Girls are coming into the store now! There were none before!” And once upon a time kids gathered in the streets of Tokyo to hear a storyteller with hand-drawn illustration cards narrate a battle between a crime boss in a robot suit and a thousand-year-old superhero from Atlantis, and fifty-five years later a Japanese-built surgical robot took life-saving samples of my intestines.

Enjoying anime and manga has a high learning curve: you need to invest time learning their visual vocabulary, and many of the best works depend on knowing earlier tropes and patterns. But anyone can enjoy the history of anime and manga, how these media have shaped science, medicine, genre fiction, gender, and how—as twentieth century English was rising to dominance through music and TV around the globe—anime and manga managed to become the biggest body of modern media that gets translated into English instead of the other way around.

For readers of fantasy and science fiction, this makes anime and manga a precious point of global access: every year hundreds of English SFF works are translated into other languages, but only a trickle gets translated from other languages into English, so we’re stuck in a one-way conversation. Only rare treats like Ken Liu’s 2014 translation of Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem let us see what other parts of the world are doing … except Japan, since hundreds of Japanese SFF works have been coming out in English every year; they just happen to be comics or animation. Only a small portion of them are SFF, but any SFF reader can enjoy hearing a summary of some of the innovative things Japanese SFF is doing, especially with its favorite topics: robots/AI, reincarnation, supersoldier/military tech, gender bending/flipping, ESP, and fantasy or horror based on the ethical logics of Shinto, Buddhism, and East-Asian folklore and philosophy.

Anime history is also deeply entangled with science fiction fandom and fan history. While US anime and SFF fandoms have grown very separately, and many of us, for whom a 5,000-person Worldcon is enormous, are overwhelmed by the very idea of a 30,000-person anime con overrun with six-foot foam swords and bubbly catgirls, on Japan’s end the development of anime, from the 1960s through the 1990s, was closely shaped, enabled, and at points even rescued by Japan’s science fiction convention fan community, one long centered around novels, D&D, and familiar SF works like Star Wars. The history of that fan community, and the ways anime-centered fandoms developed because of it but separated from it, shows how fans organizing around works we love can have impacts both more powerful and more unpredictable than we often realize.

So, meeting some fun history and SFF concepts, those are our goals, plus some mitfreude, and the vorfreude of knowing that, forever after reading this, you’ll get more richness out of every time somebody mentions anime or manga. And hopefully this essay will also mean that the next time you know young people who are getting into anime, and their parents say, “I don’t understand this thing! Is it good for my kid? Is it dangerous for my kid?”, you’ll be able to give a useful answer.

Why People Got Excited by Anime/Manga, the Short Version

The cover of Black Jack

The quick answer to “Why are so many people into anime?” (i.e., Japanese animation) is that, in live-action TV, sets and costume costs mean it’s way cheaper to set stories in the here and now than in another century or on another world, incentivizing realist and contemporary shows (hence so many sitcoms set in LA or New York). In animation, setting doesn’t matter: a medieval castle or a New York apartment cost the same to draw. Since, from the 1960s onwards, Japan has produced tons more animated television than any other country (reasons below), Japan was pouring out genre TV (science fiction, fantasy, historical fiction) for decades, while in any other country you were lucky if there were three or four genre shows per year. Additionally, many anime shows had complex, ongoing storylines even in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, years when the writers of shows like The X-Files, Gargoyles, or Star Trek faced desperate uphill struggles to convince networks to even let them have two-part season finales, and genuine long-form shows like Twin Peaks and Babylon 5 were rare treasures. The live-action situation has changed in recent years, since the on-demand model gave us a lot more long-form TV narratives, and cheap special effects plus the giant budgets of media megacorps (Disney, Netflix, Amazon) mean we get a lot more genre TV now. But if you feel like we’ve recently entered a golden age of TV storytelling, that golden age hit Japan more than fifty years ago, and is the reason many people found anime and fell in love with anime.

The quick answer to “Why are so many people into manga?” (i.e., Japanese comic books) is that Japan produces a staggering volume and range of comics (the second-biggest producer on Earth after France), and they target a much wider demographic range than Anglophone comics. Japan produces comics for girls, for moms, for middle-aged men, for retirees, for newlyweds, for young kids—in the Anglophone world such demographics may have a dozen comics aimed at them, but Japan produces hundreds. At its peak, the manga industry accounted for 40 percent of all printed material in Japan (including books, newspapers, and magazines), and it is still above 30 percent. There are manga about everything, and I mean everything. There’s a manga of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs (Mari Yamazaki, 2013-17), a manga of the BBC Sherlock TV series (Jay, 2012-ongoing), a manga biography of the current Dalai Lama (Tetsu Saiwai, 2010), and a Manga Guide to Microprocessors (Michio Shibuya, Takashi Tonagi, Office Sawa, 2009). There are memoir manga, like the LGBTQ+ memoirs My Brother’s Husband (Gengoroh Tagame, 2014-17) and My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness (Kabi Nagata, 2016), the Hiroshima survivor manga memoirs Barefoot Gen (Keiji Nakazawa, 1973-87) and Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms (Fumiyo Kono, 2003-4), and the alcoholism and mental health memoir Disappearance Diary (Hideo Azuma, 2005). There’s Black Jack (Osamu Tezuka, 1973-83), about an unlicensed genius surgeon who bucks the corrupt medical establishment, and the more realistic Say Hello to Black Jack (Shuho Sato, 2002-6) about growing up inspired by Black Jack but having to face real medical corruption without being an impossible genius. There are sex-ed manga, both the “I’m thirteen and my body is changing!” type and the “We’re newlyweds but both virgins, how does ejaculation work?” type. There are enough foodie manga to fill a building, from the competitive wine identification manga Drops of God (Tadashi Agi, 2004-14), to the 100-million-volume-selling Oishinbo (Tetsu Kariya, 1983-2014), about a food reporter whose overbearing gourmand father swears his worthless son will never understand the true spirit of miso soup! I have a whole shelf of manga featuring Cesare Borgia, ranging from the boy’s love romance Cantarella (Yuu Higuri, 2005-10), to the action fantasy Pilgrim Jäger (Toh Ubukata and Mami Itoh, 2002-6), in which, at Savonarola’s execution, he curses two dozen Renaissance celebrities to have superpowers, which they must use to battle the ghost of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola which is possessing the Duke of Urbino to prepare the earth for the resurrection of Demon Lord Cesare. There are a lot of different manga, so, when they started coming out in English, many comics readers found the range of topics revolutionary in a market dominated by boys’ superhero titles.

The manga translation boom was especially revolutionary for female and LGBTQ+ readers, because—while women have always read comics—there are a lot more manga for girls and women than the Anglosphere had been producing. To give a sense of scale, while there are many wonderful Anglophone lesbian manga, Yuri Network News, an ongoing manga review list run by Erica Friedman which only reviews lesbian romance manga aimed at female readers, usually reviews a new title every day. Thus, when the first wave of shōjo (girls’ manga) came out in English c. 2000, it triggered that moment when my comics shop owner exclaimed that girls were suddenly coming into his shop in force. There are also tons of manga with queer and gender-questioning themes (reasons below). Their commercial success in turn caused companies like Marvel and DC to think about women as a major target market for the first time, enabling titles like Squirrel Girl and the new Miss Marvel. So, those who like the strong women and girl power we often get in comics-adjacent media today can thank manga publishers like Tokyopop and VIZ, who took the gamble on introducing the English-speaking world to shōjo.

The answers to “Why did Japan start producing so much comics and animation?” and “Why did they start being translated?” are long and rich, and center on World War II, post-war reconstruction, and post-war censorship. But the roots of manga (and anime) go back through street performance and pre-war graphic media to Japan’s long tradition of ink-drawing, picture scrolls, and especially woodblock prints, like the iconic Hokusai wave. Technology and alphabet also played a big role. The phonetic alphabet dominant in Europe worked well with a Gutenberg-style movable-type printing press, which separates text (lead type, generic and rearrangeable) from image (wood blocks or engravings, each unique), but the thousands of pictograms used in written Japanese worked much better in the older method of carving each page as one big wood block, which makes mixing combination text with image effortless. Pre-Gutenberg European printing had used this method too, producing one-block-per-page works like illustrated sermon books, which gave semi-literate priests ideas for sermons by combining short bible quotes with images of saints or stories familiar from icons and cathedral walls, but post-Gutenberg cheap printing required confining illustrations and words to mutually exclusive spaces on the page, and generally meant that pictures cost a lot more than words. Thus, Europe was the exception in segregating text from image, while in Japan a free mixture of text and image thrived so long that it endured even as industrialization brought in moveable type presses for newspapers and other cheaper media. By the early twentieth century, Japan’s thriving manga industry included flashy fliers, illustrated pages within prose works, stand-alone art prints and books of prints, newspaper-type humor or gag strips, and short serial story comics of many sorts. They also targeted a wide range of readers. For example, pre-war magazines for housewives often included short comic books as a kind of mini-pamphlet inside the magazine issue, designed for a mother to read with her children, with jokes for the kids but also the kinds of jokes and social commentary for adults that one often finds coexisting within the kids’ content of the best cartoons. And then …

The Decade Without “Frivolous Literature”

Cover of the first volume of Showa: A History of Japan

During World War II—which for Japan lasted more than a decade, from 1931-1945—materials grew scarce and information control escalated, so printing and publishing were severely squeezed, climaxing with a war-long ban on “frivolous literature,” which meant anything that was not for the war effort. Children’s literature effectively ceased production, except for war stories celebrating how one’s elder brothers had just bravely died. In addition, Japan’s school system suffered severe cuts and breakdowns, with kids working in factories, teachers going off to war, classrooms bombed, textbooks nonexistent, etc. You can imagine the cultural starvation, a generation growing up without books, without fun characters and worlds of imagination, without shared story time at school. Shigeru Mizuki—a major manga author and collector of ghost stories—describes in his brilliant memoir Showa: A History of Japan how even the games he played in the street with other kids became starved of every theme but playing soldier. The weakened school system also meant kids fell behind in reading level, especially in their memorization of the kanji characters (pictograms) which are essential to written Japanese. The war’s end continued the infrastructural disruption, as the surviving members of extended families moved together into the few houses that weren’t bombed out, and towns and shops struggled to even stock food. And then …

I’ve read the story many times, in the autobiographies of authors, animators, doctors, activists, roboticists, politicians, all kinds of people of that unique generation: the ruined house, the rubble-crowded streets, the lost parents or elder brothers, the walk of many miles to the next town since the train tracks were all gnarled ruins, the shop where neighbors elbowed each other to get bags of rice or shirts, and there upon a low shelf just at child height, and brilliant as a rainbow cutting through the overcast gray sky: a book, with a bright red cover image of a grinning boy, a puppy, a pirate, a rocket ship, an alien, all with a cheery title and the message unmistakable: this is for you. They bought them. Brought them home. They shared them with friends and siblings, every child in the neighborhood gathering to read the bright red books over and over until the spines gave out and the individual pages came apart, and they kept reading them, and rearranging them, and drawing them, copying characters, making their own. In memoir after memoir, I’ve seen people struggle to express the sheer soul-filling joy of finally having stories after years without. Stories for them. And they could read them, even if they’d fallen behind reading level, because comics are incredibly good at catching kids up to reading level. This is because of the pictures which offer clues and context, tools to remind you of vocabulary or help you work out meanings from roots. And this is why so many second language programs recommend practicing by reading comics. Within a few years, those little red adventure manga had kids back up to reading speed, shaping a generation for whom the arrival of adventure fiction manga became a joyous symbol of rebuilding, creativity, peace, and hope for a new and different future beyond fascism, nationalism, and war. For Yoshihiro and Okimasa Tatsumi who walked those long miles to buy manga, for ghost-story loving Shigeru Mizuki who lost an arm in the war and had to re-learn to draw from scratch, for Keiji Nakazawa who saw a painted rainbow on a billboard shining like a colorful beacon through the ruins of Hiroshima, manga, whose pictures transcended the barriers of language and literacy, felt like the medium that could best express their hopes for a new, more cooperative international future.

Cue the post-war manga boom.

Our Key Terms: Manga and Anime

The front cover art for the book Gankutsuou written by Mahiro Maeda

Let’s iron out some vocabulary as we move forward.

The word manga (漫画) is usually literally translated “whimsical pictures” or “impromptu/improvised pictures.” It came into use late in the 1700s, growing in the 1800s. It referred at first to ink drawings, paintings, and prints, especially Japan’s celebrated ukiyo-e prints, which were mass-produced artworks (stand-alone or sets) costing about the same as a restaurant meal, which depicted fun subjects like famous beauties, actors, theatrical scenes, landscapes, anthropomorphized animals, travelers’ views, ghost stories, romantic scenes, or pornography. Hokusai and Hiroshige are the best known ukiyo-e artists internationally, though both come late in the tradition. In time, manga also came to encompass comics generally, both the kind you find in newspapers and the kind you find in comic shops. In English, just as “gelato” has become a loan word meaning Italian-style ice cream, so “manga” has become a loan word meaning Japanese comic books, but in Japanese manga remains the blanket term for all comics. If you ask an American, “What’s your favorite manga?”, they’ll name a Japanese comic like Naruto or Sailor Moon, but if you ask a Japanese person they’re likely to answer Calvin and Hobbes or X-Men.

Anime (phoenetic アニメ, an abbreviated transliteration of animation) is likewise both a Japanese word (derived from English) and a loan word. In English, French, etc. ‘anime’ means Japanese animated TV and film; in Japan it means animation generally, including Bambi, Toy Story, or the animated Moomin, Babar, or Asterix.

Anime and manga are not genres, they are media, just as radio is a medium, television is a medium, opera is a medium, or prose fiction is a medium. As media, they encompass many forms (long, short, episodic, stand-alone) and many genres. Just as some radio plays are fantasy, some live-action TV is fantasy, and some operas are fantasy (Hello, Wagner!), so some anime and manga are fantasy, while other anime or manga might be science fiction, crime fiction, chick lit, cooking competition, all sorts of things.

Anime and manga are closely associated, partly because their audiences, art styles, and creators overlap, but also because many anime are adapted from manga, just as many live-action movies are adaptations of comics. But some anime are original stories, or based on novels, historical events, film or TV, or classic literature, like the many anime versions of the sixteenth-century epic Journey to the West, or the anime Gankutsuou, which is a hybrid of The Count of Monte Cristo with Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination (1952). Just as only a minority of Western books become movies, only a minority of manga become anime, but such adaptations make a lot of money, constituting such a big part of authors’ and publishers’ incomes that the two industries are financially interlinked. Video games are also financially interlinked with anime/manga, as are Japan’s live-action TV industry and light novels—a type of Japanese YA for tweens and teens, averaging 50,000 words and often serialized—so franchises in any of these media (anime, manga, video games, live action, light novels) are often adapted into one or more of the others, just as Star Wars has novels, comics, games, and animation as well as live-action films. Occasionally in Japan (though this is fading out) one encounters the thesis that anime (in its Japanese sense of animation broadly) should be considered a sub-category of manga, because manga means whimsical pictures, and if it can include both Hokusai’s wave and a twenty-six volume comedy about the cutthroat world of international competitive bread-baking, why shouldn’t it also include whimsical pictures that move?

This original etymology—whimsical pictures—came to be vital to censorship battles in the 1960s-70s, but before we get to those we must have robots, gender-bending stage musicals, and a very busy god.

Robot Boys and Princess Princes

The color cover page for the Ambassador Atom

The staggering range of manga today is half a descendent of Japan’s tradition of wide consumption of art prints and whimsical pictures, and half the fruit of a deliberate project in the post-war boom to expand beyond kids’ adventure comics, and to prove that manga as an art form can do anything.

In the decade after 1945, the precious trickle of kids’ adventure manga became a torrent, pouring out in multiple formats, including whole-volume graphic novels and manga magazines. Newspapers and general magazines also ran manga, usually four-panel gag strips, often about office life or kids at play (think Dilbert, Peanuts, or Cathy), which are rarely translated, but, for many, were the quintessential form of manga. Gag strips plus comedy or adventure manga aimed at younger boys dominated at first, with themes including escapist adventure (pirates! detectives! aliens!) and technological utopianism and international collaboration, especially in partnership with the USA, which in the post-war occupation loomed large in Japan’s expected future.

Osamu Tezuka (1928-1989) is known today as the God of Manga, because of his staggering influence through 700 separate series (150,000 pages of comics). Young Tezuka was shaped by a mother who loved storytelling and glittering musical theater, and by a father who made a point of exposing his kids to foreign films, including live-action and animated works like Princess Iron Fan (1941) and Bambi (1942), which young Tezuka watched eighty times. And he was shaped by the war. Not quite old enough to be a soldier, he worked in a factory, drawing manga on paper scraps and pasting them in the bathroom for peers to see. He witnessed first-hand the firebombing of Osaka. In 1945, he began college and manga publication at the same time, and he was still in medical school as he dazzled a generation with his fat, colorful books: New Treasure Island (1947), Lost World (1948), Metropolis (1949), Nextworld (1951), Kimba the White Lion (1950-54), and his most famous creation Atom aka Astro Boy (Ambassador Atom, 1952). These were fast-paced, funny, with plucky boy heroes, Disney-esque animals, and SF themes. They were more often tragedies than triumphs (the treasure is lost, the robot or alien dies) not what we expect in kids’ books, but that was what the post-war generation needed.

Censorship in Japan was fierce in the wake of the war, overseen both by government and the American occupation. It effectively forbade discussing the war and its causes (racism, fascism, genocide), so much so that it would be decades until Japanese newspapers could print the words “atom bomb.” Kids who were five or ten in 1945 lived in a world of shattered streets, food shortages, and missing families, and no one would talk about the causes. But the government didn’t bother censoring kids’ SF comics. Here Tezuka could draw a mushroom cloud, or soldiers fighting an alien war on a made-up planet. He could draw his hero Atom lobbying for robot civil rights, joining Black activists to help American robots lobby for citizenship, fighting anti-robot hate groups in KKK robes, and thwarting the anti-robot genocidal dictator Hitlini. Piles of burning corpses would be censored in most books for kids today, but for kids who had seen actual corpse-piles burn, this was the tool they needed to process their experience, and start considering the future. Atom—named for the hope that atomic power would be used for peace and not war—was created in an imagined 2003, in a techno-utopian future with flying cars and field trips to the moon, whose global peace is fragile, frequently threatened by fascism or weapons of mass destruction, and maintained through global collaboration led by the scientific community, an image of the future which inspired thousands of young readers to work toward such a world. Memoirs of today’s Japanese peace activists, scientists, environmentalists, medical reformers, civil rights activists, and progressive politicians are packed with references to drawing inspiration from Tezuka, and Astro Boy and similar works are credited with sparking Japan’s dominance in the robotics world, leading to the creation of my surgery robot.

The adventures of Atom and other Tezuka boy heroes were foundational works of shōnen (for boys) manga, but now, enter upon our stage a prince, resplendent in a sequin tuxedo, accompanied by the princessiest princess you can imagine, in a pink hoop skirt and rhinestone tiara, surrounded by glitter roses and backed by a Vegas-worthy chorus line. This is the seed for the gender-bending core of modern shōjo (for girls) manga, which would in turn revolutionize gender expression in comics, SFF, and beyond around the globe.

As a child—in the decades just before the war—Fumiko Tezuka (b. 1909) often brought her young son Osamu to see the Takarazuka Revue (founded 1913), a unique theater company centered in their home town, which performed lavish melodramatic and romantic spectacles with plots adapted from world literature, history, and, later, anime and manga, with all the roles played by women—an inversion of all-male Kabuki and Noh theater. Takarazuka performers specialize in either male or female roles, with those who perform as men (otokoyaku) adopting male dress, language, and pronouns even off-stage. Tragic-romantic historical dramas are the favorite topic, and star otokoyaku Yu Todoroki’s roles include Che Guevara, Cyrano de Bergerac, Abraham Lincoln, Julius Caesar, Jay Gatsby, Oedipus, Yuri Zhivago, Martin Luther King Jr., the Edo-era Emperor Go-Mizunoo, Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind, and Luigi Lucheni the anarchist assassin of Empress Elisabeth of Austria. Watching the stage explode with sparkle-petals at the kick-line finale of War and Peace is an unforgettable experience. Takarazuka bends gender all over, advancing ideals of hyper-feminine femininity and feminized masculinity, and its exaggerated division of the male and female roles reinforces the same gender binaries the cross-casting subverts. The male-performing otokoyaku are intended to appeal to women as non-threatening masculine ideals (making them common objects of romantic crushes from both straight-identifying and queer-identifying female fans), but all performers are expected to retire young and marry, following the company’s founder’s intent that girls’ time on stage be training to become “good wives and wise mothers.”

Front cover art for the book Metropolis (1979 reprint)

Tezuka’s manga was forever saturated with this gender-bending: Metropolis, focusing on an androgynous robot inspired by the image on the movie poster of the Fritz Lang film; Nextworld, featuring cross-dressing in both directions by androgynous elfin creatures from Australia; Astro Boy, bending gender in robot designs. And, in 1953, Tezuka crystalized the pattern in his first work for girls: Princess Knight (Ribon no Kishi) depicts Sapphire, who, due to a mistake in Heaven, is born female-bodied but with both a male and a female kokoro (heart/soul), and raised as a prince in a kingdom where women cannot inherit. Sapphire has romances with girls while in male dress and with boys while in female dress, while wizards and witches try to pressure Sapphire firmly into one gender role or the other. The series forever injected Takarazuka theater, with all its sparkles and gender-weirding, into the DNA of girls’ manga, and to this day recognizably Takarazuka-theater-influenced gender-bending appears to greater or lesser degrees in practically every manga/anime for girls. In later decades, the princess-prince genealogy of shōjo was further strengthened by Riyoko Ikeda’s Rose of Versailles (1972-3), a French revolution romance focused on Oscar, a girl raised as a boy to take on the family’s duty of being Captain of the Royal Guard; and again by Revolutionary Girl Utena (1996-7), a fantasy deconstruction of prince-princess archetypes, both of which, in addition to Princess Knight, were in turn adapted into Takarazuka plays, revitalizing the gender-bending stage which originally inspired them.

The gender-bending themes in girls’ manga, along with shōnen ai (male-male romance stories aimed at female readers, for whom a fantasy gay romance avoids the stresses of family/marriage/career/motherhood pressure), made the arrival of translated girls’ manga in the Anglosphere a revolutionary moment for many LGBTQ+ people (female, male, and non-binary alike) who found in anime/manga the queer conversations they hungered for. Soon, yaoi (sexually explicit shōnen ai) and yuri manga (lesbian romance) were translated too, but even without them, shōjo (girls’ manga) contained so much gender examination that its translation had an explosive impact on the gender expression of the generations which had access to it. In fact, so much specific gender questioning vocabulary developed among Anglophone LGBTQ+ anime/manga fan communities that I have often seen miscommunication between anime-consuming and non-anime-consuming SFF fans when anime-consumers forget that eighteenth century French costume as code for genderqueerness isn’t intuitive outside the anime/manga bubble. Manga which examines realistic LGBTQ+ issues is a tiny trickle amid the torrent of more fantastic stuff, and gay manga aimed at male readers are outnumbered at least 100 to 1 by boys’ love (shōnen ai) intended for female readers; but even the trickle of realistic stuff acknowledges the influence of the girls’ manga tradition on Japan’s gender conversation, as in the acclaimed Wandering Son (2002-13), which looks at a transitioning elementary school student whose process of self-discovery is aided when the class puts on a school play of Rose of Versailles and debates whether to cast a boy or girl as the girl-raised-as-a-boy protagonist. So saturated is the influence that even shōnen (boys’) manga now often has Takarazuka-esque queer characters and gender-bending as a common theme.

Proving Manga Can Do Anything

The cover of the manga Black Blizzard by Yoshihiro Tatsumi, published by Hinomaru Bunko.

By the 1960s, the post-war manga boom faced growing pains, some shaped by that very term: whimsical pictures. As the kids who had read manga in the rubble became adults, the writers too became interested in writing about more adult themes: sexuality, violent crime, prostitution, suicide, etc. The changes were visual as much as topical: while Metropolis and Nextworld had angry mobs and violent deaths, they were bloodless and cartoony, and constantly defused the dramatic moments with humor, returning to the whimsy of whimsical pictures. Not so these new experiments, which aimed to plunge deeper into drama, and into cinematic visual complexity.

Film—especially as theaters spread in the post-war reconstruction—had had a revolutionary influence on manga’s visual style. Tezuka, and other early manga artists like ghost-story loving Shigeru Mizuki, whose father also imported foreign films, had developed what is called the cinematic style. In the old comic strip style, typical in newspaper gag strips, each panel in a sequence showed the figures in the same framing from the same angle (Lucy in the middle of the panel with the football, Charlie Brown approaching from the right, then falling toward the left, etc.), In the cinematic style, each panel was framed differently—a close-up, a dramatic angle from above, a zooming action shot with the background blurred into streaks of motion, the gun reflected in the adversary’s eye—just as a movie did. Pushing this further, artists like Yoshihiro Tatsumi (whose autobiography begins with trekking far to buy Tezuka’s Nextworld) tried writing atmospheric works, like his 1956 Black Blizzard, with multiple wordless pages devoted to struggling through a blizzard, or moving through shadowed space. It was this phase that developed one of the signatures of manga in contrast with most Western comics: their willingness to spend many pages setting the scene and depicting landscape, environment, or mood, paving the way to such experiments as Kengo Hanazawa’s I Am a Hero (2009-17) which devotes ten full pages to two seconds of action as a zombie rushes toward a door, or Kentaro Miura’s Berserk (1989-2021) whose thirty-fourth volume has forty-six straight wordless pages at the climax of a fantasy battle, and works like Jiro Taniguchi’s The Walking Man (1990-91) and Yuichi Yokoyama’s Garden (2011), both of which are nearly-wordless, plotless tours of space.

But as whimsy gave way to atmosphere and drama, many objected that these new works were definitionally not manga anymore, and that they were bad, licentious, violent, and harmful to the youth (paralleling similar fears about comics in the West). Figures like Yoshihiro Tatsumi launched the gekiga movement—dramatic pictures instead of whimsical pictures—advanced in a manifesto of 1959. Popular yet controversial mature manga magazines like Shadow (founded 1956) and Garo (1964-2002), written for direct sale as well as the booming industry of manga rental shops, drove debates over whether manga must be whimsical and/or for children, whether comic books must be funny, or must be for kids. Reporters condemned manga with too few words, and schools or parent groups tried to ban or exclude works without a certain quota of text per page, since a low ratio of words to image was associated with mature and controversial themes.

Cover art of the first manga volume, Phoenix: Dawn, 2009 reprint

Meanwhile, Tezuka himself was still pouring out manga, and had declared it a personal project to prove that manga can do anything. He set out to write manga in every genre he could think of, trying experiments intended to gain international respect, like his 1953 versions of Crime and Punishment and Cyrano, but, despite their ambitious cinematic experiments with panel layout and point-of-view, they were not dramatic or atmospheric, packing many panels per page and many words per panel, and consistently defusing serious moments with jokes or gags, manga’s mandated whimsy. Thus, for a time his comics became the exemplars of what the new movement was not, until he himself launched a mature manga magazine COM (1967-72), which debuted mature works (his and others) including treatments of sexuality, drugs, and revenge, and the beginning of the mature version of his masterwork Phoenix (1967-1989), an effort to rehabilitate the Buddhist axiom that “all life is sacred” in the wake of the genocides of World War II. COM and other gekiga magazines also hosted the debuts of some of the first feminist manga authors, who would go on to be major influences in the 1970s, with works like Rose of Versailles and the gender-fluid alien drama They Were Eleven (Moto Hagio, 1975). By the late 1960s, post-war censorship had also eased up, so the themes of genocide and war crimes which earlier works had touched on delicately via science fiction or allegory could at last be overt, beginning the tradition of powerful anti-war manga masterpieces such as the Shigeru Mizuki’s war memoirs Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths (1973) and Showa (1988-9), Tezuka’s analysis of Nazi radicalization Message to Adolf (Tezuka, 1983-5), and horror master Hideshi Hino’s deconstructionist Panorama of Hell (1984).

The battles between censorious critics and experimental artists pushed magazines to define their demographics and maturity levels strictly, facilitating manga crystalizing into its four recognized branches: shōnen manga aimed at boys, shōjo manga aimed at girls, seinen manga aimed at mature men, and jōsei manga aimed at mature women. All four are produced and consumed by all genders, and plenty of adults read the kid titles, but the magazines all market themselves as one of the four categories. Boys’ (shōnen) comics dominate, with their action and adventure, so much so that, while the top girls’ (shōjo) magazine Ciao sells over 250,000 copies a month, the magazine most often purchased by girls is a boys’ one, Weekly Shōnen Jump, which sells 1.5 million per month; at the same time, enough boys read girls’ manga, such that there is a charming manga Otomen (Aya Kanno 2006-2012) about the stresses of boys afraid to admit to peers that they enjoy girl stuff.

Of the fifty-six manga series which have sold over 50 million copies, forty are boys’ (shōnen) titles and eleven men’s (seinen), while two are for younger kids (Doraemon and Sazae-san), and only three are girls’ (shōjo) manga (Boys Over Flowers, Glass Mask, and Nana), while the highest-selling women’s (jōsei) title, the music school romance Nodame Cantabile (2001-9), has 37 million copies in print, less than a tenth of the 490 million copies of boys’ mega-hit One Piece (Eiichiro Oda, 1997-present). These four macro-categories encompass all genres—there are vampire stories, police stories, first contact stories, and Cesare Borgia stories in all four—but the dominance of action-oriented, male-coded comics make them what most people think of first, especially because they dominate the translation market even more than they do the manga market, thanks to manga’s bigger-bucks partner: anime.

Whimsical Pictures That Move

A still from Momotaro

Early twentieth century manga had a fascinating half-sibling, an even more accessible form of entertainment which thrived before the war, and especially during and afterward, in towns whose shattered infrastructure made plays, TV, and radio hard to access. Kamishibai paper theater was performed at small, mobile kiosks in parks and on street corners, much like a Punch and Judy show, but instead of puppets kamishibai used a series of illustrated cards shown within a frame, like a cardboard TV set, sequential still images accompanying a spoken story. Kamishibai mainly targeted kids, and performers made their money selling candy, but kamishibai for adults were also used to disseminate news, especially during the war. Kamishibai image cards were in color and hand painted, purchased by performers from suppliers who commissioned them from artists—often from artists who were also manga creators. Popular kamishibai existed in multiple copies, and the most popular were adapted into manga, like Golden Bat, the tale of an ancient Atlantean superhero whose nemesis piloted the first giant robot suit (which would have so many descendants in Japanese SF). These were a huge medium, viewed by hundreds of thousands of people, though in small groups scattered over many parks and squares across Japan. It was as a kamishibai that ghost-story-collecting Shigeru Mizuki first developed his most beloved series, Kitaro, which collects so much otherwise unrecorded oral tradition that the series itself is celebrated as an archive of Japanese folklore. When a manga publisher agreed to adapt the kamishibai, Mizuki’s art was so rough (he lost his dominant arm in the war) that the editor gave it to a different artist, and it would be years until Mizuki developed the work himself—an indicator of the competitive and cutthroat nature of the post-war manga world.

Between the theatrical roots of ukiyo-e prints, the influence of cinema on manga boom, and the legacy of TV-like kamishibai, manga artists naturally wanted to make their whimsical pictures move. The very first strip dates to before 1912, a three-second fifty-frame strip of a boy in a sailor suit drawing the characters “moving picture.” Professional comic shorts aired as early as 1917, mainly making use of cut-out drawings rather than cell animation. During the war filmmakers created animated propaganda, mostly for children (unlike the USA which produced many war cartoons for adults), and in 1945 made Japan’s first animated feature film Momotaro: Sacred Sailors, sponsored by the Imperial Japanese Navy. At the war’s end, animation saw use in advertisements (its first use in many countries), then televised shorts broadcast in 1960, and the mixed live-action/animated Instant History series in 1961-4. By 1961, three Japanese animated feature films had appeared in American movie theaters, telling stories of great cultural importance in Japan like the sixteenth-century Chinese epic Journey to the West, but whose East-Asian roots were actively disguised in their US localizations. The visual component of animation was crossing national barriers as its makers hoped, but heavy-handed localization meant that the words, tales, and ideas struggled to travel with the images.

Just after this, the permanent shape of Japan’s animation industry was set—for good and ill—by Osamu Tezuka, whose dedication to creating a moving pictures industry made him even more a founder figure for anime than he is for manga. After a (charmingly campy) live-action Astro Boy TV series in 1959-60, Tezuka founded an animation studio, Mushi Productions, and pitched an Astro Boy animated series which ran from 1963-6 on Fuji TV. Determined to advance animation as an art and industry, Tezuka offered the series to the wary network at well below cost, pushing himself and his staff to inhumane hours (accounts describe bleeding fingers and sleeping under desks) and supplementing the loss from his manga income. Astro Boy TV was a hit, launching mass demand for animated television and sparking Japan’s global fame as a mass producer of animation, but it also established the “curse of Tezuka,” that Japanese TV channels expect animation to be impossibly cheap, driving the poverty-level pay and grueling schedules which have haunted and harmed the industry ever since. Japan today pours out stunning animation, but this labor of love is as exploitative of those who love it as academic adjunctification or severely under-funded school systems are of teachers, and premier anime directors constantly lament their inability to break free from the pattern.

Animated Ambassadors

Anime’s big presence in the USA (still the biggest market outside Japan) as well as in Europe and South America is not coincidence, but the result of a deliberate campaign, one which took decades to grow from trickle to torrent. From the first, Tezuka was determined to spread Astro Boy internationally, specifically to America. This was part of the dream of manga (both still and moving) to become a medium of universal communication, and carry the political messages in Tezuka’s work (international collaboration, pacifism, environmentalism, tolerance, and anti-racism) to the powerful victor nation across the sea. Tezuka included English-language signs in the backgrounds of street scenes in the show, both to appeal to Americans and to communicate Astro Boy’s ideal of a collaborative global future (think of the Chinese signs in Bladerunner). Within three months of the show’s Japanese debut, he succeeded in getting NBC to run it in the USA, but they made many edits—removing episodes, censoring serious content, removing all written Japanese, and changing the character names, including giving Atom his English name, Astro. They also refused to let any stories cross multiple episodes, cutting down the more ambitious stories so they could rerun them in any order. Other European-language markets (French, Italian, Spanish) quickly picked up some anime as well, but the political and cultural ambitions of anime/manga makers focused on building bridges with the triumphant West, so Korea did not air Astro Boy until 1970, and China until 1979.

So, in the 1960s and 1970s, a trickle of anime—all marketed at children—began to appear in English and then other European languages (roughly a dozen films and shows per decade), but with the Japanese-ness filed off, so kids who saw Speed Racer (1967-8) or Tezuka’s gender-bending Princess Knight (1972) (under the title Choppy and the Princess) had all hints of Japan intentionally erased.

Then, a miracle occurred.

Mobile Suit Gundam Complete Collection 1: Anime Legends

You’re six years old, you’ve just got home from school, and your parents have let you plop in front of the TV. The antics of a cartoon cat and mouse give way to the antics of animal puppets, and then after a short ad for spiral cookies, dawn breaks over a sparkling space station as a voice-over explains that, in the year since the rebel attack crashed an asteroid into the Eurasian megacontinent, the combat zone has spread past the near-Earth-orbit space colonies and is approaching the lunar colony, whose residents are racing to repair our damaged space warship before they are overwhelmed by the enemies’ superior ability to use the precognitive and telepathic abilities which awaken in humans outside Earth’s gravity well. Mind. Blown. Plot! Conflict! Worldbuilding! Ethics! Tech! Twenty-five rapt minutes later: What was that? How did the TV do that? Will it do it again? The lucky little ones who glimpsed it glue themselves to the TV set after that, struggling to articulate to their parents why cartoon hour is suddenly much more important than it used to be.

In many ways the miracle was laziness. Demand for cartoons went up, Japan had cheap animation, cartoons were for kids (sigh), and networks could cut costs by not bothering to make so many changes, so some localizations were edited less. In Italy, for example, kids’ minds were blown by the space colonization World War II commentary Mobile Suit Gundam (1979-80) and by the gender-bending Rose of Versailles TV (1979-80) which aired under the title Lady Oscar in 1982. In the USA, a close equivalent was Star Blazers (1979-1984), a version of Space Battleship Yamato (WWII in space designed for Star Wars fans), which was the first broadcast anime that got to retain its ongoing storyline. It was hard to catch all episodes, and networks often scrambled the order, but if one human appetite burns hotter than starfire, it’s the desire to find out what happens next in a good story.

As such kids grew up, the memory of those mind-blowing phantom glimpses of complex narrative caught in cartoon hours turned into small but energetic 1970s fan communities sparking in Europe and the Americas (Brazil is huge!) who studied Japanese, imported books and laserdiscs, produced fanzines, and made their own translations, circulating manga by Xerox and fansubs by VHS. They collaborated with SFF fandom, and horror fans who were importing Japanese zombie movies and monster movies. They contacted Tezuka and other authors and directors, and over time energetic fan organizers like Frederik Schodt and Helen McCarthy came to be welcomed as the international partners who would, over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, help the whimsical pictures that could do anything escape the confines of the TV children’s hour. This legacy of fan collaboration remains so strong that when I, as an undergrad, fell in love with Tezuka’s Black Jack and created the first English-language website dedicated to him, TezukaInEnglish.com, Tezuka Productions in Japan reached out to me (a kid!) to share materials and partner to spread his messages to the world.

Cover of the Japanese volume 1 of the manga series Fruits Basket by Natsuki Takaya, published by Hakusensha on January 19, 1999. Cover by Natsuki Takaya.

The 1980s saw an increase by an order of magnitude in the number of series translated abroad (a hundred, not a dozen), and in the narrative sophistication of what was coming, feeding the growth of anime fandom, parallel to SF fandom, as a community, a market, and a power. College and high school students started hearing the word anime. Frederik Schodt’s defining Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics (1983) introduced the medium, with a history and translated samples of seminal works. With landmark successes like Akira (1988), Ghost in the Shell (1995), and Sailor Moon (1993-7), companies began marketing to Westerners who wanted anime/manga because they were Japanese. Manga translation piggybacked on the new interest in all things Japanese, with VIZ releasing its first English-language manga in 1987, and really starting to make money with the 1995 release of the martial arts comedy Ranma 1/2. When in 2004 Tokyopop released Fruits Basket, the first long-form girls’ (shōjo) manga in English and an instant mega-hit, Western anime fandom—with girls frequenting comics shops and convention centers filled with big foam swords—had solidified.

The newborn international manga market, in the Anglosphere at least, focused on teens, until the 2008 economic crash, when shrinking allowances meant teen titles started selling less reliably, while grown-up serious literary collectors continued to purchase lovely trade paperbacks, redirecting the translation market toward grown-up titles and classics. The twenty-first century also saw a blossoming of serious books in English about anime and manga, mainly written by figures strongly shaped by the fan world, like Paul Gravett, Brigitte Koyoma-Richard, Thomas Lamarre, Jonathan Clements, Fabienne Darling-Wolf, Jason Thompson, Gilles Poitras, Timothy Perper, Martha Cornog, Natsu Onoda Power, Jennifer Prough, and many others who practiced in print the fan-born tradition of thinking critically about works we love.

But as international anime fandom blossomed, on the Japanese side these same decades had their own complex saga of turmoil and rebirth.

Publishing: A Dream Shaped by Money

Animage 1997 cover

Note: Some of us love nerding out about how publication history, economics, and fandom shape each other, but if you are not interested in that, you may want to skip ahead two thousand words to the next big section headed “The Themes of Japanese SF,” where the fun thematic discussion of ESP and ghosts and such resumes. Or you can join us as we look at how art is born of cash and tribulations.

So, anime costs orders of magnitude more to produce than manga. Manga is ink on paper made by a small team, and any given publisher is publishing several magazines, so each publisher has a few eggs in many different baskets. Anime has big materials costs and big teams, so any given studio is only making a couple shows at a time, with all its eggs in few baskets. This means manga experiments a lot more, and endures economic crashes better, while anime’s few-baskets model means every experiment is betting the house.

In the later 1970s, science fiction fan communities were surging globally with the influence of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Trek, and Star Wars, and Japan’s anime fan communities had strong overlap with its SF convention community, since many science fiction stories were being told in manga form. Japan’s movie world could rarely afford to attempt ambitious live-action space opera like Star Wars, but they could make monster movies (tokusatsu films) like Godzilla, marionette shows (think Thunderbirds), and animation. No culture could watch Star Trek and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) without wanting to reply in kind, and in a nation with fond memories of the cardboard kamishibai shows, many considered animation the natural form for SFF film. Live-action—they argued—could never create visuals as spectacular and fantastic as animation, which could create anything from a battle among a thousand moving ships, to a sunrise over Africa, to a hologram of Versailles being pierced by the shards of a station folding itself inside out to turn into a giant rose blossom of crushed spaceships. And, if you think about it, advances in 3D effects mean that today’s SFF blockbusters actually have more animation on screen than Who Framed Rodger Rabbit, they just make it look real. Enthusiasts centered around magazines like Animage (founded 1978), a general animation magazine, covering works from the US, France, Russia, Brazil, the world. Animage also channeled fan funds into advancing animation, inviting young aspiring directors to publish stories in the magazine intended to imagine ambitious films they might make. Animage launched the careers of fans who would become prominent animators, including Ghost in the Shell director Mamoru Oshii, and Hayao Miyazaki, director of the Oscar-winning Spirited Away (2001).

SF cons themselves became also a center of anime development, especially DAICON, the Osaka version of Japan’s main science fiction fan convention, which travels like Worldcon, and awards the Seiun Award, Japan’s Hugo. In 1981, and again in 1983, DAICON created (with student directors and fan funds!!) ambitious animated sequences for their opening ceremonies, fanworks featuring (without permission) familiar characters such as Ultraman and Godzilla, but also Star Wars ships, the Enterprise, War of the Worlds Martians, the exo-armor from Heinlein’s Starship Troopers (1959), the Death Star, 2001’s Discovery One station, Klingons, and cameos by characters from Conan, Narnia, Tolkien, the Pern books, the works of Michael Moorcock, and Thunderbirds. Momentum inspired ambition, and in 1987 the DAICON animation team transformed into a pro studio, Gainax, and made Japan’s most-ambitious-to-date animated film Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise (1987), and then the OVA success, Gunbuster (1988-9), which starts with the expected schoolgirls and giant robots but builds into a time dilation story worthy of Astounding magazine. Lavishing money on images of complex ships and robots moving in ways even Star Wars couldn’t match, these films, and other projects like the ambitious Galactic Petrol Lensmen anime (1985), were a reply to George Lucas: you dazzled us with puppets, but look how much more detailed the tech can be in animation! The goal: convince the world that animation should be the global medium of the imagination.

The 1980s also gave us a new term: otaku (おたく, オタク, or ヲタク), which developed within Japanese fandom as a term for an enthusiastic nerd/geek/fan. One can be an otaku of anything (jellyfish, trains, historical clothing, film stars), but the word’s fandom roots mean that otaku by itself makes most Japanese people think “anime otaku,” and many English-speakers have adopted it to mean an anime/manga fan. In Japan, a middle-aged woman who reads a little romance manga, or the buyer of the manga biography of Steve Jobs, would not be considered an otaku; rather stereotypically, otaku is very like the Western stigmatized nerd: male, geeky, lonely, always on his computer with his virtual anime girlfriend, and surrounded by his collection of expensive figurines. This stereotypical otaku will also, shortly, save the day.

1987-91: The Quadrapocalypse:

Four terrible blows hit the anime/manga world in short succession in 1988-1991. The biggest was the 1991 collapse of the bubble economy, which took investment capital with it, resulting in many studio collapses and far fewer shows being made; but this was prefaced by three earlier disasters. In 1989 the God of Manga Osamu Tezuka died unexpectedly of cancer at the age of sixty, ending his investment in experimental animation. The same year an infamous serial killer who, because of his large VHS collection was dubbed the “Otaku Murderer” brought sudden stigma to the identity, and squeezed clubs and conventions. A more complex blow fell in 1988: the release of Akira, one of the most acclaimed SF anime of all time (drawing on themes explored in John Wyndham’s 1959 The Chrysalids/Re-Birth and 1973-9’s UK TV show The Tomorrow People). Despite its brilliance, Akira did not break even in Japan, but was saved by making big bucks internationally, especially in the USA. This was good (go anime ambassadors!), but had the dire side-effect of making studios ferociously eager to guarantee a US deal before they would make any show, and aiming at America where “cartoons are for kids” incentivized making the least innovative kinds of anime.

Thus, just as anime fandoms were growing abroad, anime contracted in Japan itself, with more network executives overseeing the (un)creative process. Toy, game, or merchandise tie-ins also brought in cash (think Pokémon, 1996), but stifled innovation as the creative process was increasingly overseen by a Production Committee, including representatives from the toy company, the game company, the manga publisher, the US licenser, and one or more other funders, all there to guarantee their investment, not to take risks to advance the animation art. Oddly, one place one could still innovate was porn, sold directly on VHS, a fallback funding method to guarantee a certain minimum of sales. This yielded oddities like the 1990 film adaptation of Hideyuki Kikuchi’s acclaimed SF novel A Wind Named Amnesia, in which a serious and ambitious post-apocalyptic SF narrative is trundling along when suddenly the female lead rips her clothes off for a startling sex-scene-out-of-nowhere. Most porn was merely porn, but some was (and is) ambitious and original SF with sex shoved in to break even.

The other fallback ingredient, and our last technical term, is moe (萌え), a word which describes something between an aesthetic (like goth or noire) and a formula. Moe anime/manga feature young-looking characters with tons of male-gaze fan service, and usually a stock palette of archetypes: the bossy girl, the quiet cool girl, the big-breasted klutzy girl, the childish girl, and the sweet neighbor girl (think of the stock types in a boy band), often with a generic brown-haired protagonist boy (a stand-in for the viewer) whom all the girls crush on. Character designs vary (oh, this time it’s the klutzy girl who has the pink hair!) as do settings and stories (alien, cyborg, tennis whizz, etc.) but the types remain. Moe crystalized largely in the early 1990s, and had fiercely dedicated fans, so if one makes a moe show, one is guaranteed a certain minimum of sales, enough to keep the studio afloat. In rough days, the moe otaku became Japan’s most stable domestic funding source for anime. Thus, every time the market takes a big hit (after the 1991 crash, in the 2008 recession, after the 2012 tsunami) studios fall back on making less innovative work and more moe (thanks for saving the day, moe fans!). While most moe is vacuous, but just as porn can be a vehicle for serious SF, sometimes writer teams bend over backward to cram a great story into moe, like the time loop SF horror mystery Higurashi When They Cry (2002-ongoing), or the puzzle-piece SF slice of life The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (2006, whose true genre *spoiler* is that of Bester’s 1950 “Oddy and Id” and Jerome Bixby’s 1953 “It’s a Good Life”).

The development of moe was part of a bigger change. In the aftermath of the quadruple apocalypse, Japan’s anime fandom started to split from science fiction fandom, as it became less about responding to Asimov and George Lucas than about anime itself. The magazine Animage covered non-Japanese content less and less, and was overtaken by Newtype (founded 1985), a fanzine for Japanese anime fandom specifically. YA themes surged, and by the time Mamoru Oshii—the ambitious young director whose career Animage had nurtured in the 1980s—released his cyberpunk masterpiece Ghost in the Shell (1995), its very grown-up cyborg heroine Major Motoko Kusanagi no longer appealed to the readers of the very magazine which had worked to make such a film possible; even in Ghost in the Shell’s release month, Animage gave the cover story to the slender moe-esque tween bodies of Gainax’s Neon Genesis Evangelion (on this see Carl Gustav Horn’s phenomenal essay in the back of the Dark Horse edition of Seraphim: 266,613,336 Wings). The days when a fan-made anime mega-crossover included not only Ultraman and Godzilla, but Narnia and Pern were gone.

1995-7: Death and Rebirth

So, for five years the anime world struggled, until 1994-6 saw such an explosive outpouring of innovative anime that, if you ask a fan to name a classic favorite, odds are better than 50/50 that it came out in or very close to 1995. What caused the rebirth? Partly, Godzilla had retreated into the sea—the economic crash had recovered a bit, so there was speculative investment capital available again. But there was also artistic desperation. Anime was dying—or so it seemed to ambitious creators nurtured by Tezuka and DAICON, and now strangling in the coils of production companies. Rather than let the dream die, anime makers scrambled, cheated, even lied, and the burst of anime masterpieces around 1995 all shared the characteristics of (a) established directors using clout or trickery to take more artistic liberties than production committees usually allowed, and (b) being funded in weird ways which evaded artistic oversight.

The primary cast of Revolutionary Girl Utena, illustrated by Shinya Hasegawa based on designs by Chiho Saito

When Ikuhara Kunihiko (of Sailor Moon fame) made his gender-questioning masterpiece Revolutionary Girl Utena (1997)—he literally met some rich men in a bar and lied about how anime is funded to get them to write a check (see the interviews in the Rightstuf US release). Neon Genesis Evangelion tapped into toy sales, but as director Hideki Anno (of DAICON origin) pushed the story in innovative directions (examining mental illness, suicide, and theology) he became so evasive about oversight that even the voice actors had to threaten him with physical violence to get him to explain the plot (Utena’s Anno avoided this by locking himself in a room to hide from his own staff). When cash-strapped Evangelion was a hit, Gainax was so desperate to squirrel away every penny that their financial directors were convicted of tax evasion. Escaflowne (1996) tapped manga money in a novel way for its experiment, by running two manga in conjunction with the anime, one in a girls’ magazine from the female lead’s point of view, one in a boys’ magazine from the male lead’s, while the anime alternated, challenging the old shōnen/shōjo divide. The innovative Gundam Wing (1995), which revitalized mecha and also experimented with adding female-targeted content to a male-targeted genre, was enabled by a toy company mandate: make a giant robot that can turn into a plane!; for comparison, imagine if the Jurassic Park film had been green-lit on condition it would advertise the jeeps. The artsy space bounty-hunter series Cowboy Bebop (1997-8, recently remade by Netflix) was enabled by another a toy mandate—make something with a space ship we can sell models of! (imagine 2001: A Space Odyssey being born from such a promise), and the equally innovative Trigun was animated in 1998 by Madhouse thanks to the money they inherited from their mentor Tezuka, manga proceeds intended to continue his dream of making ambitious anime even if it couldn’t fund itself. All these creators and more, stifled by five years of squeeze, found ways to stretch the funding system, and the commercial successes of their experiments got investors trusting anime again.

The 1994-7 rebirth kicked off a wave of anime creativity (strengthened by the coalescence of international anime fandom, and the cost-saving transition from cell animation to computer-colored animation) which thrived until the next challenges (the 2008 economic crash and 2011 tsunami). Then was repeated the patterns (fewer experiments, so much moe), but the first constrained patch after the quadrapocalypse had already made the regenerated anime world of the late ’90s and ’00s very different from that of the 1980s. It was now much more its own world, an internal conversation. Ghost in the Shell which responded so directly to Neuromancer and Bladerunner, Trigun with its mature characters and golden-age-esque SF worldbuilding, these were outliers, as were the wholesome family narratives of Miyazaki’s Ghibli films. Most anime was now in conversation with other anime, and aimed at kids, teens, and otaku—Japanese and international—already steeped in the medium’s internal conversations. More and more of the best of anime’s creative and innovative works were now inward looking, deconstructions of the (now vast!) range of earlier anime works, whose brilliance is hard to understand unless one levels up watching a dozen older titles first.

The Themes of Japanese SF

Tatami Galaxy DVD cover

The gradual split between Japanese SF fandom and anime fandom that happened over the 1980s-90s means the average Worldcon attendee is correct to feel that 95 percent of anime is not the same fandom as Worldcon’s fandom, but concealed within that is the 5 percent born from SFF-convention culture. And on the manga end, because so much Japanese literature is manga (40 percent of all printed material!), that if a Japanese person reads Bester or Le Guin and gets an SF idea, frequently they decide to write it as a manga instead of prose. We are at last getting translations of Japanese SF novels like the Groundhog Day-like Tatami Galaxy, the space opera Legend of the Galactic Heroes, and Project Itoh’s quasi-utopia Harmony, but if our SF fandom truly wants to welcome global voices—from China, Nigeria, Finland, Francophone Canada, etc.—when it comes to Japan, the novels can’t be separated from the large portion of Japan’s SFF that happens to be in anime or manga format. This doesn’t mean all SFF fans should try consuming anime and manga, it simply means that all SF readers can benefit from summaries of what’s been going on in the SFF anime/manga world, a world born from those kids who read of robot heroes in the rubble after WWII, and have spent seventy years trying to send their replies back across the barriers of ocean, culture, language, and medium.

What are the biggest themes in Japanese SF? In brief:

Genderplay is one: princes disguised as princesses disguised as princes disguised as princesses, and a genealogy gender-revolutionary, mostly girls’ (shōjo) fiction sparked by the sparkly princess-princes of Takarazuka theater, which passed via Princess Knight and Rose of Versailles into innumerable stories, notably one of the 1995 masterpieces Revolutionary Girl Utena, which adds supernatural elements to produce a fairytale deconstruction of a kind fascinatingly unlike its Western counterparts. This genderplay also touches boys’ titles, and SF. Tezuka’s Metropolis had an ambiguously-gendered robot at its core. The recent hit Land of the Lustrous (2012-ongoing) focuses on non-binary gem species often compared to Steven Universe. And Moto Hagio’s They Were Eleven (1975) contains an alien species which chooses their sex at adulthood, but where younger children are usually required to become female; one member is striving to be accepted into an equivalent of Star Fleet because outstanding achievement is the only path to being allowed to be male.

ESP is another: telekinesis, sixth sense, telepathy, etc. explored as serious non-magical phenomena, which has remained a topic of fascination in Japan up to the present, despite largely fading out of interest in the West. In Japanese media, the ESP concept blended with folklore beliefs about individuals with spiritual powers, so Japanese ESP stories often jump from bending spoons to banishing ghosts without pausing to explain the logical link. Since ESP hasn’t been taken very seriously in Western SF for some time, Japanese ESP fiction has new sciences to mix it with, exploring questions of whether a powerful ESPer can create micro-black-holes, manipulate Earth’s orbit, or edit DNA at levels we didn’t know about when ESP went out of vogue in the West.

Japanese SF also looooooooooooves its robots, has loved robots since the days of Astro Boy and kamishibai cardboard theater. While Western SF also loves robots, the palette of standard questions such stories explore is different, focusing on robot civil rights, robot consciousness, the ethics of robot disposability, sentient weapons, and the first-contact-like barrier between biological and digital life—such themes that are present in Western SF, but not core default questions one always expects in robot tales, which in the West tend to look more at labor. To give a micro-example, Asimov’s laws of robotics focus on preventing robots from harming humans, and early robot fiction often depicts anxiety about labor uprisings or labor replacement, stand-ins for American anxiety about revolts by the poor and working classes (and, historically enslaved workers). When Tezuka heard about the concept of Robot Laws, his first impulse was that they must mean laws protecting robot and AI civil rights. So, “Robot Laws” in Japan means Astro Boy striving against anti-robot racism and battling hate groups, using robots to explore anxiety about racism and genocide instead of about labor. These twin tendencies established patterns which have ricocheted forward to make robots code for different concepts in the histories of Japanese and English SF.

Works drawing on Japan’s folklore tradition and its metaphysics constitute another major element. Shigeru Mizuki is the founding father of this genre. There are stories about folklore creatures like mountain gods, raccoon-like tanuki and their magic shapeshifting testicles, Japanese hairy vampire monsters, and Betobeto-san, the invisible creature which causes that weird feeling when you’re walking along at night and feel you’re being watched (the correct solution is to step aside and say “Betobeto-san, please go on ahead,” and he will, relieving the feeling). There are also great stories about Japan’s spiritualist and exorcist tradition, which, just like Christianity’s exorcist tradition, is both living practice and an object of great historical fascination and fantastic imagination. And there is the grand cosmic universe of Japanese horror.

The cover of the first volume of the manga Requiem of the Rose King by Aya Kanno, published by Akita Shoten.

Another of my personal favorite themes in anime/manga is work set in what one might call Bizarro Europe that is the wealth of Japanese historical fiction (mostly shōjo) about events like the French Revolution, Joan of Arc, ancient Rome, my shelf full of Borgia manga, etc., which tend to transform and make new things out of familiar history in very different ways from what one produces when one had to learn these things in high school. Works like Requiem of the Rose King (2013-2022; what if Richard III was a gorgeous intersex heartthrob?), Versailles of the Dead (2016-20; don’t let them know the queen is a zombie!), and Thermae Romae (2008-13; time travelers teaching Rome how to build a Japanese bathhouse!) transform history in ways we just don’t think of, as you can guess from the fact that there is a glittery Takarazuka musical about MLK. If you ever read Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study In Scarlet or Valley of Fear and got to experience his wildly over-the-top fantasy version of nineteenth-century America, appropriated and transformed as bizarrely as Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado transforms Japan, you’ve tasted what it’s like to see your own culture and history turned upside-down by another, and if you found that experience enlightening, manga/anime has a warehouse full of even more fantastical Europes and Americas.

And there is more modern history—seeing the other side of World War II. Just as WWII and the Cold War have an enormous footprint in Western SFF, replayed in space operas, superhero rivalries, the Star Trek galaxy, and Middle Earth, so Japanese SFF replays the same, but from Japan’s perspective, which is very different from the West’s we triumphed over Nazis! The difference can be summarized by a moment when I was discussing the ending theme song of Gundam Seed (2002-3) with Jo Walton, and said, “The lyrics are about young men going off to war and—” and I was interrupted. “Dying?” she tried to finish. “No, committing atrocities and surviving and having to live with it.” The common anime/manga perspective on the war, shaped by God of Manga Osamu Tezuka, ghost-story-loving Shigeru Mizuki, and those kids who hiked through rubble to track down little bright books, is fiercely critical of both sides of Japan’s WWII experience: America for its pretending-it’s-not-an-empire imperialism and use of the atomic bomb, Japan for its hyper-militarism, aggression, lies (faking enemy attacks to justify the invasion of Manchuria and other things), its racism, xenophobia, and complicity in genocide, and its leadership’s willingness to throw away the lives of its men. Played out in fiction, this shapes many war narratives without a right side and a wrong side, in which both/all major sides are guilty of atrocities and war crimes, and both/all sides contain both selfish aggressors and passionate idealists. So many key conflicts are within individual factions (mimicking the process of Japan’s military party seizing power), and the challenge for the heroes is to try to find or forge some faction actually worthy of respect, and work for peace. Manga works also look specifically at the post-war occupation and Cold War, in works like Captain Ken (1960-1) which looks at Japanese Mars colonists surrounded by a larger population of American Mars colonists resisting cultural assimilation, Area 88 (1979-86) which looks at 1970s Middle East proxy wars, Code Geass (2006-8) which imagines a world dominated by three rival superpower empires Britain, China, and the Eurosphere. And some offer us a Japanese analysis of more recent conflicts, as in Gundam Wing (2005-6) which comments on China’s treatment of pacifist Tibet, Gundam Seed and Gundam Seed Destiny (2002-5) which explores America’s response to the 9/11 attacks, and Gundam 00 (2007-8) which looks at the US war in Afghanistan—sequels to the original Mobile Suit Gundam (1979) which commented on World War II.

Also worth a mention is the My (Girl)friend Is a Weapon of Mass Destruction genre, an important crossover between the interests in robots and WWII, or more specifically the bomb. Astro Boy had tragic friendships with robot bombs as early as the 1940s, in one case befriending an alien-made planet-killer bomb, in another trying to help Earth deal with a whole civilization of self-replicating robots who built a happy city on the bottom of the Pacific not realizing every one of them is a nuclear warhead. This is similar to the Robocop or Terminator trauma of coping with being a living weapon, but the focus tends to be a sentience not simply coming to terms with (a) being created in order to destroy, but (b) being created for mass destruction, on the nuclear bomb or planet-killer scale, and often (c) being disposably created to be destroyed in the process of detonation. One occasionally sees this in Western SF—notably the sentient bomb in the 1974 film Dark Star—but the disposable side is far more common in Japanese SF, influenced by many narrative traditions, especially the traumatic disposability of the WWII soldier. In more recent anime, the walking WMD is usually also a magical girlfriend, or occasionally boyfriend, and while any genre has vacuous examples, more serious ones like Saikano or Trigun dive deep into the intersecting ethics of artificial life and mass-destruction tech.

The front cover art for the manga Trigun written by Yasuhiro Nightow.

As we heed recent calls to reexamine the triumphalist and often pro-imperial narratives which saturate early Western SF, those problems (as well as American exceptionalism) become much easier to see and analyze when juxtaposed with Japanese fiction willing to vociferously condemn its own side, as well as to dive deep into the ethics of weapons of mass destruction, and to call out the bad sides of Cold War America and its European allies. There is also pro-militarist manga and anime, including some very troubling stuff in recent decades, influenced by the global nationalist and authoritarian surge which has its manifestation in Japan as it does in the USA, UK, Australia, Hungary, etc.; so Japan’s current political debates about its Self-Defense Force—between those who still favor pacifism and those who want to create a full military—are tellingly visible in military SF. The fact that the same medium that produced Mizuki’s fiercely anti-war Onward Toward Our Noble Deaths (1973, TV adaptation 2007) also produced Strike Witches (2007-ongoing; aliens vs. sexy magic girls with cute animal ears whose flight prosthetics turn them into anthropomorphized WWII fighter planes) synthesizes very well how the range of Japan’s fictional digestions and examinations of WWII is as wide-ranging as the West’s, and offers a valuably different range of narratives.

Conclusion: Mitfreude

So, that’s what anime/manga are, and why people enjoy them. Is it all good? No. Is it all bad? No. Is it all full of hyperactive catgirls? No. Their quality is as wide-ranging as that of film or novels, with teen action series as their financial backbone, a lot of responses to World War II, colonialism, and other travails of the past two centuries, plus lots of gender-bending and some strong veins of SF. Some SF manga/anime is vacuous ridiculousness, like Space Dandy (2004) or All-Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku Nuku (1990-1/2002-3), but some are major contributions, like Fumi Yoshinaga’s Tiptree-award-winning secret history Õoku: The Inner Chambers (2004-2020), or Naoki Urasawa’s profound Pluto (2003-9, a mature reworking of Astro Boy) and his 20^th Century Boys (1999-2006) which (like Brian Fies’s Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow?, 2009) looks at the trauma of growing up on golden age SF which promised that by the year 2000 we would have robot butlers and field trips to the Moon, only to reach the real Y2K still in our very mundane-feeling present. And Japanese SF in general has accorded much greater development than the west to several major themes, including AI civil rights, complicity in genocide, ESP, and environmental custodianship.

Manga and anime are a deep plunge for the unfamiliar, since you need to consume dozens of series to learn the tropes before you can enjoy the best; but their SFF world is part of our SFF world, and hopefully now you can enjoy both the mitfreude of delighting in others’ joy, and the vorfreude of looking forward in future to hearing a friend say, “there’s a cool new SF manga that did X!” and welcoming it as a thread in the tapestry of global fandom.

Editor: Gautam Bhatia.

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department.

Maria Haskins

My two most recent quarterly short fiction roundups have focused on science fiction and fantasy, respectively, so this time around, it’s obviously time for horror. Ghosts, monsters, murder, death, haunted houses, various kinds of supernatural mayhem, body horror, the frights of the unexplained … Horror comes in a multitude of flavors.

One of my recent short fiction favorites in the genre is “Cecil and the Dismemberment” by Errick Nunnally in Nightlight #615 (narrated by Jarvis Bailey). It’s a nightmarish, exquisitely gory, bone-chilling tale about Cecil, who finds himself adrift in his own life with no real prospects or purpose. He’s standing on a subway platform, down in the tunnels, when he finds the first body part: a twitching eyeball. Likely, he would have just left it alone, if it hadn’t been for the telephone call and the unknown voice imploring him to pick it up. And once he’s done that, well, all he has to do is find the rest of the body. It’s a gruesomely awesome body-horror tale, and Nunnally perfectly captures Cecil’s descent into an ever-more surreal and gut-churning darkness. The story is part of the new anthology Blackened Roots, “a groundbreaking anthology celebrating nontraditional zombie stories from the African diaspora,” edited by Nicole Givens Kurtz and Nightlight’s Tonia Ransom.

A body is taken apart and reassembled in a different way in Fernanda Castro’s gorgeously crafted “The Inside is Always Entrails” (translated by H. Pueyo) in The Dark, where a daughter toils away over the corpse of her taxidermist father. He might be dead, but she still shares the house with him, and his presence still permeates her life and memories. Castro’s visceral story cuts to the bone, quite literally, as the daughter works on her father’s body. Every step of the taxidermy process is a step in the process of grieving him, of grieving the missing parts of her own life. In the end, it might also be a way to set herself free.

“Mother’s Teeth” by E. L. Chen, also in The Dark, is another horror story where a child is dealing with the aftermath of a parent’s death. Here, a boy is visited by a shadow every night, and the shadow brings his dead mother’s teeth, to tap on the window, and it brings his mother’s voice, to whisper his name. It’s a ghost story and a monster story, and also a haunted house story because the boy’s home contains a darkness of its own.

Haunted house stories are one of my favorite kinds of horror. I particularly love how different writers can infuse these stories with such a range of moods and voices, exploring a variety of horrors. One of the most moving and painfully beautiful ghost/haunted house stories I’ve ever read is Steve Rasnic Tem’s “Memoria” in The Deadlands. Here, a man has become a fading ghost in his own house and his own life. “During the untold hours, he is all memory and imagination. If he has a body, he is unaware of it.” Tem weaves together memories and forgetfulness, life and death, and the very real horrors of aging, in a tale that is aching with dread, grief, and a sorrowful tenderness. Not every ghost story makes me cry, but this one did.

In M. Bennardo’s quietly unsettling “The Number of Ghosts” in Kaleidotrope, we find ourselves in a very old haunted house filled with ghosts and their stories, because “all any ghost wants is to have its story told.” But it’s hard for the living to listen to so many stories, and to believe there could be so many dreadful fates in one house. And yet, the owner of the house, who has to carry the burden of these stories, must find a way to live with them.

Another haunted house story I’ve read and loved recently is A. C. Wise’s devastating and supremely harrowing “The Dark House” at TOR.com where a multitude of lives, and deaths, are tied to a strange house and the mysterious photos left behind there. And in “The Bleak Communion of Abandoned Things” (narrated by Kitty Sarkozy) at PseudoPod, Ariel Marken Jack puts an almost tender spin on a haunted house tale. Here, a woman welcomes and even seems to bond with the haunting presence in her new house. It’s a story that explores our yearning for companionship and belonging, and how some relationships can both comfort and consume us.

Relationships, in all their complex, fraught, funny, and horny glory are also explored in A. V. Greene’s “The Monster Fucker Club” in Apex. Yes, that is an A+ title, but it’s also a wickedly sharp, darkly funny, and truly thoughtful tale about a group of young friends who are all in relationships with some kind of monster: a she-wolf, a dead guy in a mirror, that cryptid in the woods, a faceless monster in the choir room, and so on. They are all just kids, really, maneuvering their way through adolescence, school, and everyday terrors like school shootings, an abusive youth pastor, and tornadoes. I love the way Greene captures the bond between the club members, and how all of them, just like most teens, wonder and worry about being normal, even as they keep hooking up with their monsters: “Was this another fucked-up part of growing up that no one bothered to warn you about? Did everyone have a monster and just hid it better than we could?”

The woman in Orrin Grey’s gruesome and deeply unsettling story “The God of the Overpass” in The Dark also forms a relationship with the enormous and implacable creature she glimpses after a car accident kills her boyfriend. This terrifying monster/god haunts her steps from that moment onward, but it does not just inspire fear. It also inspires a twisted, and supremely powerful, devotion. There’s a grand, dizzying cosmic-horror vibe to this tale, with a monster, or god, born from the concrete and asphalt spanning the world.

In the fierce and compelling “Chupa Sangre” by Tre Harris Salas in Apex, the relationship between a dog-devouring monster stalking an American neighborhood and a family of Mexican immigrants goes way back into the past, bringing an abuela’s long-hidden secrets to light. It’s a story about monstrous deeds, perpetrated by monsters and people alike, and about the terrible things we might do in order to survive and protect those we love in a hostile world.

The monsters in the harrowing and heartbreaking “They Say” by Matt Dovey in Nightmare are all too familiar to many of us: “They surround us both in the school car park, enough of them that numbers don’t matter, their shadows snatching the hot sun from our faces. Boys stalking like hyenas; a pack mentality of cruelty and fear.” Every line in this story quivers with fear and desperation as a group of children are hounded and bullied for who they are, what they are. What is left of you when you try to placate your tormentors, when you do everything to convince them you deserve to live?

In Gwendolyn Kiste’s “All the Ways to Hollow Out a Girl” at PseudoPod (narrated by Rose Hofelich and first published in the anthology Horror for RAICES), the bullies and tormentors turn to murder: “It’s almost noon on Friday when the neighborhood boys murder me again for the third time this week.” The narrator, and the victim of the boys’ cruelty, is a girl who can’t die. Or rather, she doesn’t stay dead. And once the neighborhood boys realize this, they take advantage of the situation to the fullest. It’s a brutal read, but what I love about it is the way Kiste sticks to the girl’s point of view, how deftly she pencils in a whole life lived in the shadow of a blessing that is also a curse, and how she finds room for both revenge and maybe redemption in the end.

Gillian, the narrator of “Primal Slap” by Keith Rosson in Nightmare, is dealing with a different kind of daily hell. There is the soul-crushing contempt for her rich family, a family she has left to protest the way they make their money, profiting off war and weapons. There are the everyday indignities inflicted on her at work, by her insufferable co-worker Jeffrey, by her well-meaning boss, and by the struggle of trying to survive paycheck to paycheck. Also, there’s Thurman, the ghost boy that follows her around, holding his head in his hands. It’s a story that tightens its grip like a vice, building up the pressure until the only escape is a raw, ragged, primal scream: “Regrets, humiliations, resentments, your inadequacies. All of it leaving you. A comet of entropy you’ve cast out. Scream.”

Revenge, punishment, and retribution can make for powerful horror, as is the case in “Chainsaw: As Is” by Gillian King-Cargile in PseudoPod (narrated by Melissa Hofelich). Dustin, the narrator’s cousin, has died in a bloody, gruesome, and completely unnecessary chainsaw accident, and now the question is, what do you do with a chainsaw that just killed someone? “The 911 people didn’t take the chainsaw. That’s the thing that surprised me the most. That and all the blood.” I love the way this story unfolds, the way the truth of what has happened is revealed bit by bit, and I love how the woods, the Pine Barrens, and the Jersey Devil haunt the tale from start to finish.

The horror of the unexplained, the lack of logic and reason, is a fundamental part of the horror genre. H. V. Patterson’s neatly titled “Unexplained” in Flash Fiction Online is a surreal, profoundly unsettling tale that twists the mundane and everyday ever deeper into horror. The story begins with the sudden and inexplicable loss of a finger: “One second: I have ten fingers. The next: I have nine.” Patterson then follows the thread of that inexplicable event into some decidedly harrowing territory.

In the gruesomely gory “A Little Seasoning” by Neil Williamson in IZ Digital, inexplicable horror comes in the form of a strange kind of salt, the “magical ingredient” that Tom and Hutch inherit from the suddenly deceased Rafe. In life, Rafe was something of a master chef, and while Tom and Hutch don’t know what the mysterious substance they find in Rafe’s old grinder is, they do know it makes everything taste irresistibly delicious. Sure, Rafe warned them against using too much of it, but like any fans of good food, they just can’t stop themselves. Their lack of restraint has gruesome consequences, transforming both Tom and Hutch and compelling them to both eat and cook things they would never have consumed otherwise.

There’s more food- and drink-related horror in the horror-comedy “Good to the Last Drop” by Mike and Anita Allen at The Sudden Fictions Podcast (narrated by R. B. Wood). If you’re familiar with Hellraiser and Clive Barker’s Lament Configuration Puzzle Box, you will likely get a kick out of this twisted tale. Paola is tired of her co-workers mocking her baking skills and their loud complaints that even the coffee she makes is so bad it makes them barf. All she wants is someone, anyone, to show her the appreciation she deserves ...

For a final horror treat, check out “Recipe for a Zombie” by Eden Royce at Nightlight #613 (narrated by Tonia Ransom). I love this darkly humorous take on zombie stories, giving us precise directions on how to create a zombie servant. You just have to be careful and follow the recipe’s directions to the letter ... Like “Cecil and the Dismemberment,” this story is part of the anthology Blackened Roots, edited by Nicole Givens Kurtz and Tonia Ransom.

*

So bear with me now. This show was written by Victor Pemberton, who wrote the episode called Fury from the Deep for the fifth season of Doctor Who. That particular episode, which is now missing, was based on The Slide. The Slide also stars Roger Delgado, who would go on to be the first person to play The Master in Doctor Who. It’s just a wondrous bouquet of knowledge, fam.

To recap, this town has been hit by a series of Earth tremors which seems to have culminated in malevolent mud vomiting all over the place, which is amazing. I think some weird things have happened to certain people too? But we don’t care so much about that, we are here basically for the mud.

So the MP Hugh Deverill has just gotten a call in the middle of the night telling him all about this amazing mud.

Fam, MP Hugh Deverill is played by Maurice Denham, and this conversation could have been straight out of one of his Maigret radio plays, Lucas waking him up in the middle of the night to say there’s been a murder, him mumbling, it’s the same energy.

So the mud has been coming out of a fissure and going down a hill and it's about to hit someone’s farm.

Hugh’s wife is saying there is no hill there, the area is flat as a pancake whaaaaaat.

I love these kinds of revelations, it's like pop rocks going off in your mouth.

Now cut to some dudes trying to pick away at the mud but it apparently has become like stone which is so mysterious you guys.

A police inspector has said the mud looked filthy, like what comes out of a volcano.

Does he mean lava?

Would you say lava looks filthy?

Well whatever it was, it was bubbling and moving and making offensive noises.

And by offensive, he means ‘slithering and squeaking noises’.

I have never found those sounds offensive because I am not a liberal snowflake.

Fam, the mud is apparently green.

How does green mud look like lava?

I understand that I should probably just let all this go and I am sorry.

The dudes who are investigating the mysterious mud are just so baffled by it fam.

I am baffled that green mud somehow looked like lava and that’s all I’m going to say about it I swear.

Everyone is getting handsy with the mud because no one thinks it could be toxic or whatever. Because it was the ’60s.

Hugh Deverill wants to know why the mud is being like that, and the scientists are saying a bunch of stuff which basically means they don’t know.

They are now going to start investigating but they want it to be super-secret.

I guess it’s just cooler that way, no?

Anyway, cut to a dude shooting rabbits with his dog. RIP poor rabbits

The doctor is also with him. I feel like we encountered this doctor in the first episode no?

Mickey the dog has returned with a blackbird instead of a rabbit.

Is the bird dead? I think it’s dead.

But there are no bullet holes in it VERY MYSTERIOUS

Apparently, when we weren’t here, the doctor saw something fall from the sky so it must have been this selfsame blackbird.

Do you guys have only the one blackbird over there?

Cut to an inspector talking to a Mrs. Luke.

After a very long time, we understand that Mrs. Luke saw Ted in Hollymill Lane, which is where the mud is I think.

Ted is the homeless old guy from the first ep I think so.

So Ted seems to have been heading to the crevasse, and Mrs. Luke stopped him but felt something was wrong. And then he turned to her. And his face was yellow and old. And his eyes were strange. And he told her to go away.

I mean it was more interesting when she said it.

And Ted killed a wood pigeon? I think?

Now cut to those other guys who found the blackbird and now they are saying it’s a wood pigeon.

Or Is this another bird apart from the blackbird?

Wait, have they found a bunch of dead wood pigeons?

Where is the blackbird anyway?

Ok now they are hiding from someone.

Why are they hiding though?

It’s Mary, wife of the rabbit-shooting-dude, walking into the forest.

Maybe all this is exciting if you’re actually there?

Cut to two scientists in a school lab I think.

If there was any doubt as to whether the scientist named Gomez was “Latin” or not, let the record show that he just said “We Latins are known for our excitable nature”. Which, as we all know, is something only a true Latin would say.

Earth tremors have now been reported in the north! But don’t worry, the scientists have already discovered something important.

They have discovered that this is all part of a pattern.

Was kinda hoping for more than that guys.

The pattern is first the tremors were in the seabed, then in the south, and now they are in the north.

How is that a pattern?

Also there is no way to predict where the next tremor will hit.

How is any of this information helpful right now you guys.

In other news! Someone took a mud sample and it has burnt a hole in that someone’s briefcase.

So this bright green solid mud, which also has streaks in it, is the exact same thing that Scientist Gomez saw after an earthquake in Chile.

Cut to a hospital? And a nurse is saying that Ms. Marshall has been moved because she is delirious and bothering the other patients.

I think Ms. Marshall is that one lady who was hanging out with the doctor in the first episode.

“Is she still delirious?” “Well apparently. But it’s so terribly difficult to tell!” What does this even mean fam.

Ms. Marshall has just been lying there mumbling.

How is this bothering the other patients?

You know what just happened? She opened her eyes, said life it’s life, and closed her eyes.

Again, I guess you had to be there.

Cut to that rabbit-shooting-man digging a hole in the night because his dog Mickey died.

Aw that's sad. RIP Mickey.

So apparently, there are a bunch of dead animals everywhere and the doctor is like maybe your wife did this bro wtf

The doctor wants to know why all these animals are dying and he said “I want to know why and for what reason”, which both mean the same thing but we won’t hold it against him because he is in the grips of strong emotion.

Now a Scottish man has run up to them, saying he is looking for the doctor.

He is from a group of people who have been exploring nearby caves and then I think someone fell inside a cave?

This night is fraught with so much emotion.

Cut to Hugh’s wife, who was just passing by the school in the middle of the night, so she decided to go in and have a chat with Gomez, who is working there.

Now she is telling Gomez how her husband doesn’t love her wow ma’am where are your boundaries.

You better not behave inappropriately with Gomez he just wants to live his life and has enough problems being Latin and all.

Gomez is telling her to go home.

And at this opportune moment, someone has come rushing in saying that the mud is moving all over the place again.

Now we are with the doctor in the cave, looking for that person who got hurt.

The Scottish man is showing the doctor cave paintings, because this is absolutely the right time to do this.

Now they are looking at stalagmites which are a gorgeous green.

Dudes aren’t you supposed to be helping someone who is hurt or something?

Now we are back outside to the squeaky mud which actually sounds like a bunch of birds.

The mud seems to be burning everything in its way.

Meanwhile in the cave, they have finally found the injured dude near a waterfall, I think he broke his leg.

The injured guy is like, “Where have you blokes been??” and I’m like, bro they were just sauntering around looking at cave paintings and stalagmites and not caring about you at all.

Also, the second dude who was down there is dead now, so really nice going you guys, you are the worst.

So here’s what happened. Remember that old guy Ted? He seems to have wandered into the caves, and was being weird, and Keith who was that other dude, he was like hey wtf you are being weird also my friend just broke his leg. But Ted continued being weird so Ted and Keith got in a fight and they both pitched over into the waterfall.

Also the water in the waterfall isn’t water, it's the squeaky mud?

I don’t know how that would work but there it is.

*

I didn’t enjoy this episode as much as the first one. There was a lot of jumping around and I couldn’t remember who everyone was, which is totally my fault. And I had way too many questions, which is so unseemly in a woman.  I’ve also been thinking of how Hugh’s wife just kind of wandered into the school lab in the middle of the night because why not right? Anyway, let us hope things pick up a bit in our next refreshing instalment of this potentially amazing show. Bai.

Somewhere in the vicinity of two hundred and fifty million years in the future, or in 1930 if you prefer, the Fifth Men—that is, the fifth descendant variety of humanity imagined by Olaf Stapledon in Last and First Men—become acutely aware of their place in time. They are a long-lived and high-minded people, and although they feel a duty to the future, they come to feel an equal responsibility to those who preceded them. “With meticulous love,” we are told, “they would figure out the life stories of extinct types,” from the brontosaurus to the American (p.208). Such reconstruction, “not merely as abstract history but with the intimacy of the novel” (p. 208), becomes an obsession for the Fifth Men and provides a convenient bridging device for me. This second instalment of Depth of Field is going to be about the imagining of deep time across the patchwork landscape of SF traditions: the aeons to come and the strangeness they may hold. Yet here are the Fifth Men indulging in the type of historical recreation that I discussed last time, an entire species of Gaustines!

2.

To restate a more substantial point from the last column, the time behind us can be as hard to grasp as the time ahead of us. Deep time stretches in both directions, and before heading out into the wilds of the future, it's worth briefly considering the established vastness of the past, as laid out in a book such as Marcia Bjornerud's 2018 monograph Timefulness, which offers, in wonderfully lucid and occasionally playful prose, a geologist's take on how we can and do create narratives about events that take many times longer than a single human lifespan to occur.

After an engaging tour of how we know what we know about the deep history of the planet—the mechanisms used for geologic dating and how they built up the accepted 'atlas' of the ages, epochs, and periods of the past—Bjornerud's segue to the debate about how and when to define the start of the anthropocene, and how to think about where we go from here, feels freshly shocking. Geology is founded on an assumption of uniformitarianism, a belief that the processes of the future will be like those of the past, that may no longer hold true. In fact, she writes, when thinking of the near future, we are “in a position strangely analogous to that of pre-nineteenth century geologists who had no guidelines for understanding the geologic past” (p. 131). She builds to a longing and science-fictional peroration to advocate for “timefulness” as a way of thinking, riffing on Kurt Vonnegut's suggestion that the US government should include a Department of the Future that would ensure all citizens are “time-literate”. She contends that such an office “would set in motion a realignment of priorities in all aspects of society” (p.175), with improvements ranging from better pay for public school teachers (“whose work represents an investment in the future,” p.176) to an electorate primed to reward legislators who deliver long-term, truly sustainable initiatives.

Fundamentally, Bjornerud argues that a timeful mindset “requires one to shed the illusion that there is only one version of the world” (p.179). She discusses projects intended to help us more confidently project ourselves into the future, such as the ongoing performance of John Cage's “Organ²/ASLSP (As Slow as Possible)” at Halberstadt Cathedral in Germany that is due to end in 2639; one imagines she would be sympathetic to a novel such as Ian McDonald's Hopeland (2023), which includes a similar musical performance and a similar project of helping its readers to think over a longer time horizon than they otherwise might.

Simultaneously, however, Bjornerud notes that the further out from now that you go, the more confident you can be about at least some future milestones. She runs through some examples. In about eighty thousand years' time, the Earth will reach the point in the Milankovitch eccentricity cycle at which its orbit makes another ice age possible—although the actuality will be dependent on greenhouse gas concentrations. In two hundred and fifty million years (at around the time of the Fifth Men) plate tectonics will unite a new supercontinent, preemptively christened “Pangaea Ultima.” In two billion years, the sun's increasing luminosity will vaporise Earth's oceans, which aside from the direct inconvenience, will likely also slow the progression of further continental drift. And in five billion years the sun will become a red giant and engulf the Earth. For Bjornerud, timefulness is also a guard against the existential fatalism that such a long-range perspective might provoke. For me, the long-range perspective in itself can be a bracing test of how fully we can shed the illusion that there is a single version of the world.

3.

Olaf Stapledon's preface to Last and First Men is explicit that this is his project. “To romance of the far future,” he states in a preface, “is to attempt to see the human race in its cosmic setting, and to mould our hearts to entertain new values” (p. ix). The astonishing achievement of the novel is that ninety-three years after its publication, its vertiginous logarithmic accelerando from two years to two billion years in the future does still unlock some mental doors, at least for me. Stapledon's future is not always (not even very often) one that I would wish for; but as it meditates on life's purpose and potential ending, it conveys a compelling sense of possibility. In his essay, “Thoughts on the Modern Spirit,” probably written around the same time as Last and First Men, Stapledon writes of a “unique ecstasy of disinterested admiration” that arises from contemplating the nature of the universe and the place of humanity within it; that ecstasy animates the novel.

So much so that in writing about it, there is a great temptation to report, as though it were actual history, and catalogue and comment on the strangenesses depicted. The detail of the First World State, for instance, a few hundred years from now. It is a place of great material wealth and physical capability—its inhabitants all have private aeroplanes, rarely work more than four hours per day, and live to be almost two hundred years old—that is entranced by a “worship of movement”: “the individual's conduct was determined by the obligation to produce as much motion as possible, whether by his own muscular activity or by the control of natural forces” (p. 62). Or the bravura depiction of alternate evolution on Mars that leads, ten million years from now, to a protracted conflict between the Second Men and cloud-based intelligences that can, but do not always, form a group mind; the distinction between the Martian public mind and Martian individuals carrying remarkable resonance, these days, with the gestalt mood that emerges on social networks. Or the development of the Fourth Men, perhaps two hundred million years from now: great brains, twelve feet in diameter, housed in specialist buildings, dominating the world around them via machine servants, and who ultimately design the more noble Fifth Men we met at the start of the column. On and on it goes, until we reach the eighteenth and last human species: massive, “both more human and more animal”, in which different individuals may be reminiscent of different contemporary species, but share a common “upward-looking astronomical eye” (p. 255) on the top of their heads, who live in groups of ninety-six composed of multiple male sexes, female sexes, and sub-sexes, and who, through an advancement of the obsession of the Fifth Men, are able to project their consciousness back through the aeons in order to dictate the history of humanity via Olaf Stapledon, so that he can publish it as his first novel.

(Pause for breath.)

But this litany, as enjoyable as it is (albeit not half as enjoyable as the original pure strain: you should read this book), is also something of a dead end. Taking the predicted history too literally leads to, for instance, Gregory Benford's surprisingly snippy introduction to my 2009 Gollancz edition of the book (dated 1987 and probably reproduced unaltered from the 1988 St Martin's Press edition), which complains about Stapledon's evident “smouldering dislike” of America leading to a “completely wrong” portrait of the near future because he clearly believed that “the United States could never be a positive influence”. It is true that the opening few chapters, which describe a succession of nation-state wars, the destruction of Europe, and an American-Chinese standoff ultimately leading to the formation of the First World State, are less interesting than what follows. But that's not because they bear no resemblance to actual history, nor is it due to a specific anti-Americanism, nor even due to the fact that all of Stapledon's nation-state portrayals are uncomfortably essentialist (his depiction of China, while perhaps not as xenophobic as some other contemporaneous writers, is still built around a guiding “eastern mysticism”). They are less interesting than what follows, I think, because they are closer to conventional novelistic narrative, and as such simply much more familiar.

Stanislaw Lem, in a 1970 essay translated and published in English in 1986, makes another version of this point: the opening chapters of Last and First Men are weak, he suggests, because they are predominantly examples of what he calls “technical imagination”, extrapolations that take place within a recognisable frame consistent with our own understanding. The later chapters are strong because they are dominated by what he calls “culture-construction”, in which the nature and potential of humanity itself becomes a variable, opening up a richer and stranger canvas in which all sorts of configurations can be depicted with a refreshing lack of implicit judgement about their value systems, because they are not necessarily traceable to us. Lem takes advantage of the accomplishment to diss everyone else in a way that I wouldn't endorse (“compared with this book, which is almost 40 years old, SF is one great step backward”), but the idea of culture-construction is without doubt a rewarding frame within which to read Last and First Men, one which sees it not as a particularly spectacular future history, but as a tool to enable particular ways of thinking, particular states of mind, by foregrounding not the technological mastery that its world-shaping descendent species ultimately achieve, but the ontological anxieties that Stapledon builds into each of them. What haunts me about the Fifth Men, for instance, is their conclusion about the futility of religion: “Though the love which had misled them was itself a very lovely thing, yet they were misled” (p. 206). I don't know whether that's an expression of despair or grace, but I do know that it draws force from being a revelation from intelligences that have reasoned out their own distinctive form of timefulness.

4.

What counts as deep time? When does the far future start?

Stapledon uses the latter term, and, perhaps following him, so does The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, whose entry focuses on stories set in what might be paraphrased as evening times, either of the Earth or the universe. Perhaps if you can pin a date more precise than the nearest million years on it, it's not the far future. Meanwhile, “deep time”, as Noah Heringman discusses in Deep Time: A Literary History (2023), may have been popularised in the 1980s by writers such as John McPhee in narrative overviews of geology such as Basin and Range (1981), but the concept is obviously older. Heringman dates it back, via novels such as Ballard's The Drowned World (1962), not only to early geology (although the contemporary phrase used about Hutton's work was “abyss of time”), but to Hindu, and other, cosmologies that situate recorded history within a vaster frame. His interest in “the qualitative dimensions of deep time as an imaginative experience” (p. 3) feels relevant to my exploration here, albeit in the opposite temporal direction. Perhaps any duration that makes a human life feel infinitesimally small is deep time.

And perhaps a couple of recently published data points may be of interest. Gollancz, the publishers of Paul McAuley's Beyond the Burn Line (2022), describe the novel, which is set approximately two hundred thousand years from now, as taking place “in the deep future”; in contrast Orbit, the UK publishers of Annalee Newitz's The Terraformers (2023), which is set a mere sixty thousand or so years from now, describe it merely as “an exploration of the future”. On Stapledon's timeline, both of these novels take place before he's even got to the Second Men, and in such light, both novels—though in many ways  fine and stimulating—can't help feeling a little limited. Both books are divided into segments that skip forward a generation or two in order to show change in their worlds. Both books position themselves geologically: Newitz specifically refers to “the end of the anthropocene”, whereas McAuley's “burn line” is the trace of its start. And both extend the definition of “people” beyond the human, to include a variety of uplifted animals or artificial intelligences.

And both books avoid true strangeness. Beyond the Burn Line is initially the tale of Pilgrim, a scholar's apprentice burning to complete his late master's work and uncover the truth about mysterious “visitors” to his world: whether they exist at all and, if they do, what they mean. The world he lives in is (to our eyes) comfortably familiar, a pseudo-Victorian gaslamp world that frequently recalls actual British scientific history, albeit with the not insignificant difference that its inhabitants are sharply-dressed descendants of raccoons. But their scholars are gradually re-discovering a theory of evolution (“the theory of selective change”, p. 14) and constructing a geological history (reporting evidence of “the great flood which had destroyed the terror lizards; the cleansing fire which had put an end to the wickedness of ogres”, p. 14). McAuley's prose is calm and his plotting is meticulously controlled, which allows the unsettling juxtaposition of the animal-fable quality of the story and the vasty nature of the scientific questions that lie behind it to speak for itself. Put another way, Beyond the Burn Line generates an evocative timefulness, not least through a wondrously graceful ending, but it doesn't construct culture so much as recreate it.

And the same is true of The Terraformers. If McAuley is on one level re-staging and investigating nineteenth-century British imperialism, then Newitz is doing the same for twenty-first century American capitalism. The Terraformers is set tens of thousands of years further down the line than, say, their first novel Autonomous (2017), but in a similarly rapacious world, and one where everyone talks like us. (One character tells another: “you're in your feelings, my friend”, p. 145.) So The Terraformers, while a more vivacious and eyeball-kicky read than Beyond the Burn Line, is also not a particularly strange book, unless you count the underpinning slowness of the capitalist structures that administer the terraforming of Sask-E over tens of thousands of years without any noticeable evidence of instability. Everything about Sask-E is commercially determined in a familiar way: every plot of land is destined to be sold for one kind of development or another, and every intelligent being living there, which accounts for almost all the characters we meet over the course of the three linked novellas that make up the book, has been designed, grown, and decanted for a purpose, and is a form of corporate property.

As with McAuley, many if not most of the beings are not baseline human, a reality that is very elegantly indicated by the novel's second sentence which, if it was the first sentence, would be one of the great first sentences in SF: “There was some kind of person—possibly Homo sapiens—tending a fire at the edge of the boreal forest”. Unlike McAuley, who takes the personhood of all his characters as read even if, politically, they may experience limitations, in the world of The Terraformers there are divisions set up between those beings who count as persons and those who do not. One of the major subplots of the novel is to question, and in most cases, break down those divisions, and Newitz is very good at most of this process: good at presenting different types of person; good at depicting intimacies; emotional and physical, between them; good at relationships at both personal and societal levels. But towards the end of the novel it's difficult not to notice that the top-to-bottom artificiality of Sask-E has enabled Newitz to stack the deck slightly in favour of the arguments that they (and I) agree with. Personhood for animals is a lot more straightforward when you're on a planet where there is no such thing as a baseline animal.

McAuley and Newitz are at quite different stages of their careers: the former has published over 20 novels across a four-decade career, the latter three, starting in 2017. Still, these two novels really do make an interesting pairing; perhaps the resonances suggest something in the ether. In quite consciously echoing periods of actual history, both novels turn their settings into theatres, staging relevant plays for the benefit of their contemporary readers. I liked both books, but preferred McAuley, who at least provides hints to think about the nature of that facade, and ultimately gives those hints a textual payoff. For Newitz, the thousands of years of time necessary to set her story on a plausibly terraformed planet are made less estranging by mechanisms such as extreme longevity, and as such The Terraformers deliberately avoids conveying not just strangeness, but the sense of smallness we might seek in reading about the far future. (It is a novel about the strength of people's agency, not its limitations.) But both novels, after all, are set only on the uppermost slopes of the abyss of time.

5.

The same can't be said of Sunfall, a collection of linked stories by C. J. Cherryh, first published in 1981. “It was simply old, this world”, a prologue informs us. The sun has “turned wan and plague-ridden” (p. 5) we are told, and it is dying “its eons-long death, in glorious flarings of radiations [...] it brought days of strange color” (p. 57). Taking that at face value, the sun may be declining towards its red giant phase, and so we may be talking now of billions of years in the future, not mere tens of thousands. The collection is saturated with background exhaustion. In the opening story, “The Only Death in the City”, we are introduced to what remains of Paris, now and for thousands of years a vast sealed edifice in which its inhabitants hide away from the sky, yet with many levels layered in dust, and vast and enviable libraries unused. And somehow, those who die have started to be reincarnated, infants with “haunted eyes [...] waiting on adulthood, for body to overtake memory” (p. 6) The resulting lives are “a curious mixture of caution and recklessness”:

Caution, for they surrounded themselves with the present, knowing the danger of entanglements; recklessness, for past ceased to fascinate them as an unknown and nothing had permanent meaning. (p. 6)

They are, in other words, a timeless people, rather than a timeful one. They offer each other advice such as, make many friends, to ensure that whatever configuration of souls you are reborn into, there will always be someone who is glad to see you. And never set strong patterns, lest you be doomed to re-enact them for eternity. But it's as hard to make a story out of this sort of society as it is to set one in an achieved utopia, and so into the stasis comes a spark of change, a new soul, who grows into a man who falls in love with an old soul. It does not go well. It ends in death, as do many of the stories that follow: small finalities in a world that is itself dying.

All of the stories evoke a similar mood in their opening pages. Each takes as its subject a different city: in London, ghostly presences trouble “senses deceived by the radiations of the dying star and the fogs which tended to gather near the Thames” (p. 21). Moscow “lived through the final ages wrapped in snows, while forests advanced and retreated” (p. 56). New York has hypertrophied into “a single spire aimed at the clouds [...] it grew into its last madness [...] a latter-day Babel aimed at the sullen heavens” (p. 94). Each city is a last redoubt, each running down in its own specific way; such grand melancholy is mesmerising, and yet also becomes the collection's limitation. As with McAuley and Newitz's novels, true strangeness is in short supply. As each story moves from scene-setting to plot, it becomes clearer that Cherryh's intent is to showcase an idea of the essence of each place. Paris is decadent ennui; in London, we spend the majority of the story with a young woman detained in the Tower of London, where she is visited by ghosts of English monarchs, all (funnily enough) dating from before the date when the story was written, none from the billions of years leading up to its present. In Moscow, a hunter faces down a wolf. In New York, construction workers go on strike. The relationship between plot and place feels superficial, and the relationship between plot and time feels downright dissonant: the dying sun is used to explain Paris's reincarnations and London's ghosts, but nothing else about the way the characters live, think, or act feels different enough to our contemporary world (or recent past). These are not just stories about timeless people: they are an attempt at a kind of timeless tourism.

The entirety of Sunfall is reprinted in the 2004 Collected Short Fiction of C. J. Cherryh, along with an additional story, “MasKs”, set in Venice. It is longer than any of the other stories, but earns that length; it also has many of the strengths and weaknesses of its compatriots. The almost-cliche imagery that Cherryh attaches to Venice, and builds her story around, is masquerade: a young woman has to work out how to escape an impending arranged marriage that would seal an alliance between her family (noble but poor) and one from Verona (common but rich), and her hopes hinge on a compelling harlequin she meets during the festival. But three things about the story make it an interesting ending for the book. First, only one of the original stories had a female protagonist; the choice of another one here has an undertone of Le Guinian writing-back-to-revise, the more so because, second, it is also only the second story that does not end in death. In fact, the protagonist is explicitly told at one point, “You can end, or you can begin” (p. 169); and she chooses the latter. The third interesting feature is the very selection of Venice, surely one of the least likely cities to achieve a timeless eternal existence, notwithstanding the fact that this version of it is equipped with “immense sea gates” (p. 144), and “the newest pilings float, rather than rest, in the accumulated detritus of ages” (p. 145). Even in 1981, the same year that Sunfall was first published, Kim Stanley Robinson was drowning Venice. So, setting and protagonist fit together here: both offer a promise of active renewal that the earlier Sunfall stories deny.

6.

Somewhere between Stapledon's desire to unlock our minds and Cherryh's deep-time-as-vibes lie C. M. Kosemen's All Tomorrows and Ryu Mitsuse's 10 Billion Days and 100 Billion Nights. The former is a short book, self-published as an ebook in 2006, still available on the author's website (and still in need of a copy-edit). Its profile comes primarily from a video dramatization released in 2021 that has received at the time of writing approximately thirteen million views on YouTube. The appeal is its creativity: sometimes it feels like an exhibition catalogue, or a role-playing sourcebook, but along a timeline that describes the rise, fall, and renewal of the human species over billions of years, Kosemen inventively imagines over three dozen distinct types of human descendant. No recreations of familiar cultures here, then, and Kosemen is an artist by training, so the description of each descendant species is accompanied by an illustration, in a physiologically creative style I can only describe as 19th-century zoology by way of 20th-century surrealism.

The descendant species are the result of extreme biological manipulation following the conquest of humanity by aliens known as the Qu. In an attempt to build a perfect society, the Qu create and subsequently abandon descendants ranging from Mantelopes, bred as “living recorders” (p. 26) and (reminiscent of some of Newitz's characters) equipped with full sentience but not the ability to express it, to Temptors, in whom sexual dimorphism has been grotesquely twisted such that “females were beaked cones of flesh some two meters tall, rooted in soil” (p. 32; the illustration for that one is quite something). One of the more memorable descendant species is the Colonials, whose world had resisted the Qu and who as punishment are remodelled into “quilt-like fields of human flesh” (p. 36), intended to subsist on the waste products of Qu civilisation and forced to watch without ever being able to act. Some of these descendants recover a degree of civilisation; many are ultimately wiped out in a subsequent age by a machine war, prosecuted by mad uploaded minds known as Gravitals, desperate to recreate humanity's golden age.

There is a sharp disappointment in store at the end of the book, however. On the final page, we learn that Kosemen's narrator, like Stapledon's, is speaking to us from the even further future, having recreated the history of humanity as an instructive lesson. The Qu and the Gravitals, it turns out, are intended to be seen as opposing poles, the former seeking an idealised future while the latter strives for an idealised past; but what matters in the end, to the historian, is that they are both wrong and that what readers should return to and focus on is “the very life you lead at the moment” (p. 111). This is not so much timefulness as a kind of time-blindness: a deliberate turning-away from the confronting transformations displayed in earlier sections.

Mitsuse's novel builds to a similar plea to consider the importance of the present, but in a considerably more nuanced fashion, which is quite something for a novel in which Jesus and Buddha engage in numerous laser battles. It achieves its effect by inverting Sunfall's approach. In place of a textually ancient setting filled with too-familiar characterisation and plots, we are offered considerably more adventurous characterisation in what is textually a considerably less distant setting. First published in Japan in 1965 and 1966 as a series of short stories, fixed-up into a novel in 1973, and translated into English in 2011 by Alexander O. Smith and Elye J. Alexander, 10 Billion Days … may open with an omnisciently narrated prologue that recapitulates the birth of life on earth (“the result of two billion years of long, long toil was about to make itself apparent”, p. 11), and may end with a slingshot that promises the titular aeons, but the majority of the story takes place over at most 10 million days. This puts it a shorter distance into the future than even Newitz—only a few tens of thousands of years—but Mitsuse’s characters are forced to grapple with cosmological-scale events in a way that Newitz’s are not, with the result that Mitsuse ultimately does better at conveying the largeness and strangeness of such events than any of the authors I've discussed, save Stapledon.

Initial historical chapters introduce four central characters. Plato, tracking rumours of Atlantis across North Africa, finds his consciousness entangled with that of a specific Atlantean, Orionae, a witness to the fall of the society a few thousand years earlier. Prince Siddhārtha, in Nepal, is granted a vision of a cosmic war that hovers behind the mortal one threatening his current life, and in an encounter with Asura—who his teachers insist is “the very essence of evil in the universe” (p. 99), although it turns out there is rather more to her story—begins to grapple with a universe that seems to be structured by unavoidable cycles of destruction. And on the plains of Golgotha, Jesus of Nazareth is executed, but as the astronomer Judas watches in bafflement and horror, he hears snatches of dialogue from the earlier stories leak through a rift in the sky, revealing that we have been glimpsing the same struggle from different angles, and that it has to do with the role of an alien Planetary Development Commission in the shaping of earthly life. This much takes us to the half-way point of the novel: the remainder shifts thousands of years into the future, and depicts reincarnated cyborg versions of Orionae/Plato, Siddhārtha, and Asura, awaking at intervals and trying each time to understand the nature of the reality they have awakened into, while engaged in a running battle with Jesus, who has been recruited by the enemy.

There are moments of deadpan absurdism in this scenario that made me think of a writer like Lavie Tidhar: “Siddhārtha walked on alone, acutely aware that so long as Jesus of Nazareth was at large, he could be walking into a trap” (p. 205). But the backdrop is empty and melancholy. When Siddhārtha first awakes, he walks down a wide concrete road. “It lay forgotten, the wind its only traveler [...] the kind of barrenness from which no life could ever hope to revive” (p. 164). He finds a downed spacecraft with a display depicting colliding galaxies, and then a ruined city behind an immense shieldwall. In his second awakening, Siddhārtha, Orionae/Plato, and Asura cautiously explore a [Rendezvous With] Rama-like abandoned construct, dusty and mysterious, evidence of another failure by the Planetary Development Commission, and home to “a civilization whose story of destruction had begun after history had already ended” (p. 227). There are some descendants of humanity—as Earth's environment worsened, humans initially adapted into a communal body, and then uploaded themselves—but nothing like the variation on display in, say, All Tomorrows. All is twilight, albeit a twilight punctuated by the aforementioned laser battles. At the very end, only Asura remains:

A sudden feeling of tremendous loss descended upon Asura. Now she must face the truth of her situation—wherever she turned, however she advanced or retreated, she would be alone. There was no way back to what had been, and in front of her stretched another ten billion days and one hundred billion nights. (p. 276)

We don't see those billions on the page, but they loom large in the reader's mind. That choice underlines, I think, how Mitsuse only shares part of a goal with Stapledon. He certainly aims to make us feel the smallness of humanity's place in a cosmic setting, and he certainly succeeds. He is not so interested, I think, in persuading us to entertain new values—but not in the directive carpe-diem fashion of Kosemen. Rather—as indicated by the choice of protagonists, and the traditions of thought they represent—I think Ten Billion Days … is an encouragement to reflection, to think about the values we hold in our lives, where they come from, and how meaningful (or meaningless) it might be to live by them, even if we are brief candles destined to be snuffed out. It's not Stapledon's unique ecstasy of disinterested admiration; it is more a kind of mental bridging technique like the ultra-long musical compositions mentioned earlier. In other words, it's a reminder that there is more than one route to timefulness in fiction, which is good, because I agree with Bjornerud that we need all the timefulness we can get.

Editions used

Timefulness by Marcia Bjornerud (2018). Princeton University Press 2018 (Princeton, NJ, US). Hardback. ISBN: 9780691181202.

Sunfall by C. J. Cherryh (1981), in The Collected Short Fiction of C. J. Cherryh (2004). DAW Books (2004). Hardback. ISBN: 9780756402174.

Deep Time: A Literary History by Noah Heringman (2023). Princeton University Press 2023 (Princeton, NJ, US). Paperback. ISBN: 9780691235790.

All Tomorrows by C. M. Kosemen (2006). Self-published. Available at: http://cmkosemen.com/books.html [accessed June 2023]

“On Stapledon's Last and First Men” by Stanislaw Lem (1970). Translated into English for Science Fiction Studies vol. 13 (1986), pp272-291.

Beyond the Burn Line by Paul McAuley (2022). Gollancz 2022 (London, UK). Hardback. ISBN: 9781399603713.

10 Billion Days and 100 Billion Nights by Ryu Mitsuse (1967). VIZ Media LLC 2011. Hardback. ISBN: 9781421539041.

The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz (2023). Orbit 2023 (London, UK). Paperback. ISBN: 9780356520865.

Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon (1930). Gollancz 2009 (London, UK). Paperback. ISBN: 9780575082564.

I was born in the fall of 1979; not sure what generation that makes me, but I’m definitely an eighties child. A nineties teenager maybe but an eighties child. Jason Donovan lightened up the summer of ’89.

For a while, the eighties were looked back upon with a mild degree of embarrassment at hair bands, Voguing, Eastern European terrorists, whatever Prince was up to, Michael Jackson’s face, and the best, worst, and campiest fantasy ever recorded on film and anime.

Conan the Barbarian. Dragon Ball Z. Red Sonja. Fist of the Northstar. The Labyrinth. Berserk. The Princess Bride. Akira. The Barbarians and The NeverEnding Story and the list goes on, and on, and on …

The eighties were a decade of wild experimentation in the shadow of mutually ensured destruction. Unsurprisingly, pop culture was rife with nuclear fantasies. A decade of decaying urban spaces inspired Escape from New York, LA, and Robocop.

I’m glad to see that forty years later, the eighties are making a comeback. I see kids raving about The Weeknd, but all I hear is every 80s soundtrack ever. Stranger Things resurfaced the 80s and Metallica’s Master of Puppets in spectacular fashion, and of course: Steel Panther. I feel like a child again. A child with bills.

But beyond the mainstream surface, the legacy of that glorious epoch where bad meant good and awful meant worse, is alive and strong in another genre of music: Heavy Metal.

What is more natural? Just look at the basic structure of a power metal song:

I mean: Dragons. Devils. Whoaaaa! From visuals to lyrics and soundtracks, heavy metal, fantasy, and anime are caught in a feedback loop of epicness and none more than, wait for it, The NeverEnding Story.

What prompted this here paean was the godawful film adaptation of Stephen King’s mind blowing Dark Tower series, The Dark Tower featuring Idris Elba and Matthew McConaghy. I hated that movie. And then I realized: it’s The NeverEnding Story.

• The Dark Tower is a movie about a fatherless brown-haired Caucasian teenage boy who magically enters a fantasy world of his imagination through a magical house. Events in the fantasy world have an impact on our own, and a vaguely defined nothingness created by dying belief in the fantasy world’s reality threatens its destruction. To save this fantasy world our adolescent must thwart the imminent destruction of the world’s core. And
• The NeverEndingStory is a movie about a motherless brown-haired Caucasian teenage boy who magically enters a fantasy world of his imagination through a magical house. Events in the fantasy world have an impact on our own, and a vaguely defined nothingness created by dying belief in the fantasy world’s reality threatens its destruction. To save this fantasy world our adolescent must thwart the imminent destruction of the world’s core. And I mean, they even both save a blond love interest. It’s uncanny.

It happens all the time. Movies with the same plot spread over decades. Honest Trailers rightfully equated the plot of X-Men: Days of Future Past and Terminator 2. James Cameron’s Avatar movies manage to be Dances with Wolves, The Last Samurai, and The Jungle Book all at the same time. No big deal, except I started thinking, digging, and realized, dude, The NeverEnding Story is actually everywhere … in metal!

Could The NeverEnding Story be the most metal fantasy movie of all time?

Surprisingly, a lot of evidence actually supports that.

Let’s start with Atreyu, an American Metalcore band out of California formed in 1998. Originally called Retribution, they changed their name to Atreyu, after, you’ve guessed it: Atreyu, the hero native to Fantasia in The NeverEnding Story.

From what I gather, that’s the only reference to the film. Full disclosure, I’ve never listened to Atreyu’s music until today. I remember them thanks to their name, not their music, so I hopped on YouTube to find a song I could recommend.

Sadly I can’t. It’s actually hard to believe how bad Atreyu sucks. Like most Metalcore bands, the various elements that comprise the somewhat ill-defined genre don’t coalesce very well, and Atreyu don’t stand out from other similar American bands like Papa Roach, or sadly, Crazy Town (remember “come come my lady?” Yes, them). They are no Bullet for my Valentine is what I’m saying, so take your pick out of any of the few songs hyperlinked if you care enough to waste an hour only to forget a band.

Second, Beatdown Hardcore band Nasty, released the song Fantasia on their 2015 album Shokka, dedicated to the fantasy world at the heart of the story in the least expected way possible.

See for yourself:

Atreyu and Falkor before their untimely encounter with Nasty.

“Got into my head!
Falkor is caged and Atreyu is dead!
Atreyu is dead!

Dead! Brain fucking dead!
And Bastian doesn't care he's playing Warcraft instead!
No hope!
Fantasia turned black!
Brain fucking dead!”

Shokka is a pretty great album as an old school fan of hardcore, incorporating elements of thrash verging on death metal. And those into the New York hardcore scene like Cro Mags and Sick of it All, will feel all the feels with that of thrash-crossover bands like the one of a kind Suicidal Tendencies. I’m so into this album, my wife just threw a sock in my face to catch my attention. I’m doing research for Strange Horizons, is my defense.

Finally, the world renowned Nu Metal band Korn titled their 2019 album The Nothing, after The Nothing in the film. Korn frontman Jonathan Davis chose the title as he was still struggling with the death of his estranged wife Deven Davis. Jonathan had said: “I was struggling with the thing that’s chasing me—that's always freaking with me. I tried to give it a name and it just fit.”

I hadn’t listened to The Nothing or to Korn for a while and boy am I glad I wrote this article. The Nothing is Korn at their best. The bagpipe intro The End Begins sets a great tone, and the follow up Cold is fantastic as is the rest of the opus.

On to anime now, and the delightfully retro yet unbelievably original, Finnish disco Power Metal band, Beast in Black. There is no way for me to describe their music other than if Manowar and Abba had a child, while Judas Priest and Survivor have a child and then those children meet, and they have a child. That child is Beast in Black.

I discovered them on a flight with their 2019 album From Hell With Love. My go-to on any plane is to find the heavy metal playlist. There they were with one of the kitschiest covers I’d had the pleasure to see. And that opening song Cry Out For a Hero[1]! I was rocking so hard other passengers started looking over my seat to see what I was listening too. I felt like I was rediscovering metal, that something I thought had been swallowed up by the nineties steamroller had laid dormant and awakened. And then the lyrics:

“On this godforsaken planet
Smoke and death in the opal mines
Nuclear war-torn cities fill your sight
Oh, it's a world of sadistic killers
Men are tortured as they die

Is there a savior
Who can turn the tide?”

I knew this world. I knew it very well. I couldn’t be certain but by the second hook:

“All our lives are on the line
We need a hero—Hero!
The seven scars and fists of fury
He's the chosen one
The savior of the people - Hero!”

I stood in the presence of the Hokuto no Ken, Kenshiro, the Fist of the North Star himself.

Set in a post-apocalyptic word, ruled by warlords whom radiation had turned into gigantic mutants, Kenshiro, under the training of his master Ryuken is one of the three practitioners of the old Chinese art of Hokuto Kung-Fu, destroying your enemies from the inside out by hitting their vital points. Made heir to the legendary art after the presumed passing of his adoptive brother Toki, and the failings of his other adoptive brother Raoh, Kenshiro is a kind and gentle boy. He is more concerned with the love of his life, Yuria, and somehow bringing back plants and turning the barren wasteland into a garden again. He is forced into his heirloom when a friend from a rival school of Kung-Fu, the Nanto Seiken master, Shin, kidnaps Yuria, inflicting Kenshiro with the seven scars that define him and leaves him for dead.

Hokuto no Ken is my favorite anime of all time. Easily one of the most unapologetically violent cartoons ever made, it is so much more than that.  Driven by a profound spirituality, ecological message and concern with love in all its forms, romantic, brotherly, empathetic, kind and fierce in the belief that it can change the world. Listen to the metal AF theme song Ai Wo Torimodose (I will bring back my love).

I had to look into Beast in Black more and had them on a loop for several weeks after that. It turns out the band’s fascination with anime did not stop nor start with Fist of the North Star. Indeed Beast and Black appear to have dedicated a significant portion of their song-making to exploring the various aspects of the anime classic Berserk.

Set in a medieval Europe-inspired dark fantasy world, the story centers on the characters of Guts, a lone swordsman, and Griffith, the leader of a mercenary band called the “Band of the Hawk.” Guts struggles with destiny itself and is constantly resisting the pull of predetermination while Griffith chases his dream of ruling his own kingdom, despite his lowborn origins. Berserk definitely falls into the grimdark category of fantasy, with complex characters, sometimes unbelievable cruelty; fans of Game of Thrones would love it if they aren’t already watching. Central to the story as it progresses is the will-they-won’t-they relationship between the star crossed lovers Guts and Casca, a young female warrior and estranged companion of Guts.

Beast in Black pay a beautiful homage to both Guts and Casca and the recently deceased creator of the Berserk series Kentaro Miura with the song Broken Survivors, speaking to the harrowing experiences of both characters who struggle with their love for each other and the weight of their destinies.

“I’m facing my past tonight
A friend lost in darkness
Your hate, my confusion
The crossing of blades
Unifies our fates

How can our love be wrong
No it can't be
Something that feels so strong
Melting two hearts of stone
Broken survivors on their own.”

I cannot overstate how good Beast in Black are. Their songs speak to better days. Days where head-banging metal warriors rode the plains, mighty and armored in blood.

Last but certainly not least, the British glam metal band The Darkness close this here exercise in futility. Famous for the smashing hit “I Believe in a Thing Called Love,” off their seminal album Permission to Land. The band’s career has suffered from ups and downs and the curse of never quite living up to their first, explosive success.

This is totally undeserved in my opinion. While some albums are less impressive than others, The Darkness has consistently released great music since, and their 2021 opus Motorheart is excellent. Their singular style of self-deprecating glam is so British they are truly in a league of their own, proud heirs of AC/DC and Queen. There are only two bands that have never disappointed their fans: AC/DC and Slayer. You can add The Darkness to that list.

Enter the 1980 British fantasy cult classic Hawk the Slayer.

Hawk the Slayer is a traditional epic fantasy movie as you could expect from the era. It is simple and full of tried and true clichés of the genre, which fans of Terry Pratchett’s earlier work and film adaptations such as The Color of Magic will recognize, and maybe even embrace.

Many argue that the movie aged poorly. I will argue that it was never very good to begin with, with poor production value and poor effects even at the time. In that light it has aged wonderfully. If bad wine stays bad, isn’t that a good thing?

The story is a simple one, exploring the rivalry between two brothers, Hawk and Voltan, fighting to gain control over a magical sword. We know that it’s magic because the hilt glows emerald green. It seems enough to inspire fear in the hearts of miscreants.

I suspect many a British youth of their day hold a special spot for Hawk the Slayer in their hearts, much as American kids now turned old still worship The NeverEnding Story despite how poorly it has aged as well.

References to the film appear twice in the bands discography. “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now,“ the lead single from their 2012 album Hot Cakes, starts with a quote from the movie. Voltan’s son Drogo addresses Hawk thus:

“I am no messenger, but I will give you a message. The message of death!“

A pretty great threat, if eventually empty.

The references are clearest on The Darkness’ 2015 album The Last of our Kind. Both the album title and the title track are directly inspired from the following quote in Hawk the Slayer, delivered by Hawk himself:

“The ones we seek are the last of their kind. Gort. The giant from the mountains at the edge of the world. Crow. An elven bowman from the Silver Forest, now burnt and blackened. And Baldin, a dwarf from the Iron Hills.”

The song’s lyrics are a straight nod to the above quote and the themes explored in the movie:

“We have sat like this just waiting for their arrows to blacken the skies

Many times before and we will again God willing

I am honoured to have served alongside men who inspire defiance

Sometimes I tire from the fighting and the killing

We are survivors

The ones left behind

Defenders of the legacy

The last of our kind”

In the words of the band’s lead vocalist Justin Hawkins:

“The lyric of it is inspired by that film Hawk the Slayer. It’s kind of a swords and sorcery thing. Anyway, Hawk the Slayer, there’s this bit where it’s a little bit like The Hobbit, he’s got a few friends around him; one is a giant, one is an elf, one of them is a dwarf with a hearty appetite and he’s really handy with a whip and there’s a guy who has lost half his hand and is a great crossbow enthusiast.

It’s just about going to battle with the baddie and the elf is lamenting the fact that when they go into this battle, if he is killed, that’s the end of his entire civilization. These baddies have wiped out his whole family and it’s just him, he’s the last of his kind. So, it’s kind of inspired by that.

When you finish an album and you’re sort of getting ready to show it to the press, it does feel like you’re about to pop your head up and charge into battle. I was trying to make it into a song that’s about being an elf that’s going into battle and releasing an album.[2]”

This all the space I have to cover the topic in this column, but there must be many, many more. Do you know of any yourselves? Leave a comment if you do, I’d love to listen.

Heavy metal is the law.

[1] Someone had the brilliant idea of playing the song to clips of Hokuto No Ken https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_dnLnHYQhQ&ab_channel=WeaselII

[2] https://loudwire.com/the-darkness-last-of-our-kind-exclusive-track-by-track-breakdown/

Editor: Gautam Bhatia.

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department.

KAC:  Hello and welcome to Writing While Disabled, readers! I'm here with the multitalented Sumiko Saulson for an interview via Zoom, which means you are reading a lightly edited transcript this time. So, Sumiko, welcome to Writing While Disabled! 

SS:  Oh, thanks for having me here! 

KAC:  Thank you for coming. Readers, Sumiko lives in Oakland, California, and uses either they/them or ze/hir pronouns. They are a fictionist, a poet, and a comic artist. They write Afro-surrealist and multicultural horror. Their most recent book is The Rat King: A Book of Dark Poetry. You can look for their work on their website sumikosaulson.com, including the novel Happiness and Other Diseases, various short story collections, and audiobook versions of Sumiko’s work. We'll put links for you at the end of the interview.

Sumiko, would you mind telling our readers more about yourself and your work? 

SS: Yeah, sure. I'm Sumiko Saulson. My last name, Saulson, is an Ellis Island Jewish name. My great-grandfather Charles Saulson was asked to change his last name because a better-known relative with the same name had come into the country before him. He said: “If my first name isn't good enough for you, then I guess my last name isn't either.”

My first name is Japanese, but I'm not: my mother is African American, and she had a best friend named Sumiko. Her other best friend was named Diane or something like that—so I am glad that I got this name and not the other one! They used to hang out on Hollywood Boulevard with a tambourine, and they would panhandle for money to get into clubs—people called them ‘the Mod Squad.’ 

KAC:  What is the ‘Mod Squad’? 

SS:  The Mod Squad was a television program back in the late Sixties, when I was born. It was about a young, hip, multicultural police squad—they have copaganda for every generation. That's why they called them that: one of them was Asian, one of them was white, and the one that was Black was my mom. 

KAC:  So, ‘mod’ means ‘modern’ in that context? 

SS:  Yeah, ‘mod’ is short for ‘modern.’ In England, Mods were young, hip people who rode around on Vespas and stuff. I was born in 1968, so I wasn't actively involved in any of those things. I know my mom went to a Deep Purple concert, though, so I got to hear Deep Purple when I was in the womb. I guess that counts as participating in the Sixties! But my earliest memories are…

KAC:  ...the Seventies, right?

SS:  I mean, my earliest memory is of trying to walk up some stairs as a toddler, which may have been in the Sixties, but I don't think that's relevant!

The earliest political memory I have is the end of the Vietnam War. I remember people in my neighborhood, some young men in bell bottoms, high-fiving each other and talking about the end of the war. I think that happened when I was six, in 1974.

KAC:  I was born in 1978. One of my earliest political memories is the Mount St. Helens eruption. We used to live right by it, in Idaho, and we could see the ash raining from the sky.

SS:  I remember that, yeah.

KAC:  Let’s go back to your work. What exactly do you mean by the term ‘Afro-surrealism’?

SS:  Well, if Afrofuturism is futuristic stuff, Afro-surrealism has to do with things like the landscape of the mind, similar to magical realism. The most famous author associated with it—who I am a massive fan of—is Toni Morrison. When you read Toni Morrison, she uses a lot of magical realism while verging upon the horrific. In Sula, it's never said that Sula is a witch—but when she returns to town, the birds begin to die and crash into windows…

KAC:  Since Surrealism is a more psychological genre, not everything is meant to be interpreted literally. Is that the same in Afro-surrealism? 

SS:  Yes, but in Afro-surrealism you also have folklore elements woven into the stories. Many writers from the African diaspora come to magical realism by merging folklore with realism.

KAC:  Would you place that in SFF? Or halfway between literary fiction and SFF?

SS:  Well, there's this idea that things are either speculative fiction or literary fiction. But stories can exist simultaneously in both spaces.

Look at Toni Morrison's Beloved, for example: it's a ghost story, specifically in the Southern Gothic tradition. One trope of Gothic horror is that of architecture as character, and the house in Beloved is a character—established right at the beginning. 

Southern Gothic horror traditionally dealt with the oppression of people in the Americas. People who were indigenous to the Americas or who were brought here in slavery were frightening to their oppressors. There were stories about being cursed or haunted by African Americans and Native Americans. And in this story… well, you can't really spoil Beloved, but… 

KAC:  Yeah, we're gonna spoil Beloved.

SS:  Spoiler alert! Beloved is based on a real story. An African American woman murdered her daughter, but she was charged with destruction of property and not with murder, because back then African Americans were valued as ‘three-fifths’ of a human. In Toni Morrison’s story, the woman killed her daughter to prevent her from being returned to slavery, and now she is haunted by the daughter's ghost. It is Southern Gothic horror, but that does not mean that it's not literary fiction. It exists simultaneously in both spaces. People want to distance themselves from speculative fiction, though. 

KAC:  Yeah. And even if they write it, they're like: “It wasn't SFF! It was literary!” And I'm like: “Well, can't it be both?”

SS:  Yeah, people don't want to be associated with it. Wuthering Heights is a ghost story, but we still treat it as literary fiction because literary fiction is considered to be a serious genre. It's ridiculous because many things that are seen as literary fiction were considered popular fiction when they first came out. 

KAC:  Yeah. In grad school, I wanted to work on Poe for my MFA. Poe is one of the old white guys within the Western canon, but he's at the very edge because he wrote horror and speculative fiction. To the rest of the world, Poe is one of our literary geniuses. He is one of the most widely translated authors of all time; more people have written papers on Poe than on almost any other literary figure. But I would get a lot of pushback: “Why don't you pick one of the more reputable, more serious authors?” Do you think it's an American thing? 

SS:  I can’t answer that, but I am glad that you brought out Poe. He was one of my first favorite writers. When I was in seventh grade, I used to hang around in the library, reading tons of Poe. He is also the father of speculative poetry.

KAC:  Yeah. Did you read “Al Aaraaf,” in that library? 

SS:  No!

KAC:  It's a poem about two fallen angels who are cast out of heaven because they fell in love. They fall down to earth, and it's not clear if they become demons or not, but it's very much like a paranormal romance story. 

SS:  That's beautiful. 

KAC:  It is. And then he wrote so many pieces that are straight up like nightmares he had. And I love them. The way they speak to truth is unique to the supernatural lens. 

SS:  Yeah, and as a person with a mental illness, writing something as a horror story or as horror poetry is an easier way to connect with readers. There are many things that I have experienced because of my mental illnesses that are tough to talk to people about—such as tactile hallucinations, which are scary. 

KAC:  I get some of those, too—when you feel like someone's tapping on your shoulder. 

SS:  Someone’s touching you, but they're not there.

KAC:  Breathing on the back of your neck.

SS:  Yeah, exactly. When that Kevin Bacon movie came out—Hollow Man—I had some creepy tactile hallucinations! I thought that there was an Invisible Man with me.

KAC:  That would freak me out too!

SS:  Yeah, it was terrifying. Sometimes, writing fiction is the only way to get your experiences across to other people—and these experiences are caused by your own mind.

KAC:  I mean, that's something Poe wrote about, too. He believed madness was genius and genius was madness, right? He was an incredibly gifted poet. But we're supposed to feel ashamed if we write the kind of poetry he wrote.

SS:  You mean, the kind that rhymes? 

KAC:  Well, not even that, because he wrote formal poems too! But I mean, if you wrote a poem about a ghost, for example…

SS:  Oh, a poem about a ghost!

KAC:  If he were shopping that poem around today, he would get rejection letters telling him: “You might want to limit that to genre magazines.” 

SS:  It's almost like there's this world of poetry and this world of speculative fiction, and speculative poetry is just a little Venn diagram slice in the middle of it. And you know, I don't think anyone's gonna be making as much money as Stephen King writing horror poetry, but when you think about it, Edgar Allan Poe did not make that much money in his life. He worked as a journalist. 

KAC:  Yeah.

SS:  Most poets—poets in general—self-published, or they published on small presses. Poe published his poetry in newspapers. Poetry has never been connected with getting rich and famous. It’s always been associated with being broke. Maybe someone reads you after you're dead. So why wouldn't you write horror poetry when you think about that?

KAC:  This works well as a segue into talking about Disability. For our readers, could you tell us what Disabled and neurodiverse communities you identify with? 

SS:  So, I have bipolar disorder with psychotic features. Psychosis refers to things like hallucinations: audio hallucinations, visual hallucinations, and tactile hallucinations. At one difficult period in my life, my hands started writing notes to me, and I did not feel like I was the one writing them. I felt like another person was writing notes to me with my hand. 

KAC:  That must have been terrifying. 

SS:  Yeah, it was scary. Back then, my father had died of cancer, and my mother was not going into remission after nine and a half years. Then, I had a long-term relationship come to an end. There were just a lot of stressors, and that started happening.

I also have post-traumatic stress disorder—which is connected to traumatic things that happened to me in childhood—and a history of chronic pain related to endometriosis, which is when your ovaries decide to be evil. During your periods, instead of all of the uterine lining going out of your body as it should, some of it goes back up into your fallopian tubes, comes out of them, and sticks to different organs inside of your body, creating these little clumps of tissue called endometrium. These clumps that have stuck to your materials start bleeding inside of you, which is painful, like ulcers. It hurts a lot. 

KAC:  It’s unbearable. 

SS:  Yeah, it is. I was diagnosed with stage four endometriosis at 19 years old, which is early. 

KAC:  Yeah.

SS:  When I was 21, I had laparoscopic surgery. I had an ovarian cyst three times as large as my ovary removed. And I had to have another one the size of a softball removed right after I turned 40. 

KAC:  It's essential for readers to understand that endometriosis, polycystic ovarian syndrome, adenomyosis—these issues that deal with the uterus or ovaries haven't historically been taken seriously by the medical establishment. For example, I have endometriosis, adenomyosis, and polycystic ovarian syndrome, and it took me twenty years before someone would even do laparoscopic to confirm it. People won't take it seriously. 

SS:  You know, I was born in 1968, and I had my first period in 1980, when I was 12. At that time, they had just started to acknowledge that menstrual cramps were real and not psychosomatic. What happened was that Advil was approved for over-the-counter use for menstrual periods. It had been used by medical doctors to treat people with heart conditions because it dealt with the muscle tissues, and the heart is a big muscle.

So cisgender men dominated the medical field for years and years, and just gaslit people who had menstrual cramps, telling them that it was all in their heads. Endometriosis also got acknowledged because of in vitro fertilization, which became a thing around that time. 

KAC:  Yeah.

SS:  People with endometriosis usually can’t get pregnant because of the issues with their fallopian tubes, but they respond well generally to in vitro fertilization. That was the economic incentive for admitting that endometriosis was a real thing. It sucks that endometriosis had to become something that made a lot of money before being acknowledged as a real thing—yet they still do not acknowledge it as a disability. In my case, I ended up out on disability for mental illness.

KAC:  Yeah, me too. And you know, I think it's important to talk about this in the context of this series because we're talking about writing while Disabled. We're talking about who is Disabled, and the umbrella is big. Most of us are likely—if we're not already disabled—to become disabled at some point in our lives as we age. But there are still Disabled people who can't find a community because no one will acknowledge their disability.

I got fired from my job because I couldn't be at work for two or three days a month consistently. I had all the paperwork from my doctor, I had all the history of surgeries on my uterus and ovaries, but they fired me anyway. These situations are not in the past. It's still going on now. 

SS:  Exactly. It's still taboo to talk about periods. I mean, they have cute commercials on TV with Charmin bears talking about poop on your butt. But you can't talk about a period! For some reason, you have to use a euphemism. 

KAC:  And you can have all those ads for erectile dysfunction, but you can’t talk about menstruation. Slightly more than half the planet has had a period at some point in life. But for some reason, we can't talk about period pain, endometriosis, or PCOS. You know in the past a lot of these issues used to be categorized as hysteria, right? Women’s hysteria.

SS:  Yeah, that’s true.

KAC:  It’s the same attitude, and you’re not just getting that from cis, male doctors: I would run into it with female doctors whose periods weren't that bad. So why was I complaining? I must be exaggerating.

The point I'm getting at here, readers, is that your identity as a Disabled person doesn't necessarily look the same as someone else's. Some people get assigned to that disability at birth: it was evident from birth that they were disabled in a particular way. Some people are injured later in life, other become ill. But many people can never get a diagnosis because society gaslights them into thinking they're not Disabled. 

SS:  Yeah. When I was 19, I had this doctor who said I was being uncooperative because she wanted to give me a vaginal exam, and I was in extreme pain and could not tolerate it. She was like: “Well, we’re gonna have to give you a sonogram because you're being uncooperative.” And that's how I got diagnosed—because they looked and saw the ovarian cyst.

KAC:  In my case, it was both endometriosis and PCOS. But again, I didn't get that diagnosis until they had to do surgery on my uterus for adenomyosis. They were in there taking care of uterus stuff, and suddenly, they were like: “Oh! Your ovaries have been decorating!”

SS:  Yeah, I didn't get diagnosed until they went to operate on the cyst. They put me under, looked in my belly with a lap, found something they didn't like, and then gave me surgery. I woke up with a bikini line incision with staples in it. It was rough. I was in the hospital for three days, I think. When they made me walk down the hall, it hurt so bad. And you know, I wasn’t young, because when I woke up, I saw Tiananmen Square on the news. 

KAC:  You know, I remember once reading the submission requirements for a magazine. One of the things they wrote on there is that they didn't want any more pregnancy horror, or miscarriage stories, or uterine-bleeding type stories. I remember being furious. Maybe those editors were overwhelmed with that, but that is such a part of my Disabled life experience. To be told that my story isn't worthy of even sending in. It hit hard for me. Do you ever think about these things? 

SS:  Well, it’s hard not to write about that stuff when it is your lived experience. You're processing it, so you're writing about it. If that magazine got so many of those stories, it goes to show that as an experience, it's very common. 

KAC:  Yeah. And if you're reading this and have any of these conditions we're talking about, you’re welcome in my Disabled communities. 

SS:  Yeah, you're not alone. 

KAC:  So, both Sumiko and I have some more stigmatized disabilities that usually qualify as ‘invisible.’ Since my brain injury, I do have sporadic episodes of cognitive impairment—for me, it's kind of like being drunk or being high. Sometimes I get facial blindness, where I can't recognize my family members or myself in the mirror, and sometimes I forget my name. I get disoriented, and there's always this devastating moment when someone realizes what’s happening to me and I see their face falling: “Oh, I thought you were smart, I thought you were witty and clever, but now I don't think of you as my peer anymore.” Which is super frustrating because it's sporadic. You wouldn't feel that way about someone just because they got drunk and said some things in a slurred voice once, right? But there's a stigma around certain mental illnesses and cognitive impairment, even within Disabled communities. 

SS:  That's for sure. When people saw me talk to myself, it did change how they thought about me. 

KAC:  They don't treat you the same, afterward. 

SS:  That's true. And you know, because I'm African American, there are additional problems. There's a lot of stigma about mental health treatment in the Black community, so many people are not getting help. But there’s also a bunch of stigma from the macro culture which assumes that if you see a Black person talking to themselves, they're high on crack. Yeah, I'm on drugs—the drugs that they're prescribing me for my medical condition.

I mean, look at Sandra Bland. If you’re a mentally ill person who’s Black, your chances of being viewed as potentially dangerous… 

KAC:  …are higher. And that's for every interaction with first responders. That's for every interaction with doctors who have power over you. You know, like how quickly you're seen in the emergency room. 

SS:  Yeah, exactly. I've had friends worried about doing a wellness call because someone might get shot by the police. That’s a problem for Black folks. 

KAC:  Yeah. It's a big issue.

So, I think that many Disabled, science fiction, and fantasy communities want to include more Disabled people, but then they look around and realize that everybody who came to be in their Disabled safe space is white. They assume that they’re the only ones who want to come when the truth is that brown and Black people are more likely to become disabled in our society because of systemic racism.

SS:  Right. 

KAC:  So don’t blame the people that are missing. Think about what you are doing to make that space safer for them. Do you have advice for people on that?

SS:  I'm just gonna say this: if they don't know any gay people that are Disabled, and they don't know any Black people that are Disabled… then they don't know enough Black people or gay people, because just as many of us are Disabled as any other group. The real problem is that they only know two Black people. 

I'm not trying to be harsh here, but if you only know a small number of people from a particular community, that's the real issue. 

KAC:  People need to outreach. 

SS:  Yeah. When you do something to make people know that they're welcome in a space, then you will see more of those people in that space. 

KAC:  Your organization must communicate to the participants at your convention that they will be safe.

SS:  That's true. When people who are genderqueer come in, and they see pronoun badges there, then they know that they’re welcome. If there’s a bathroom with a gender-neutral sign, and you're a non-binary person, that will make you feel safer. And as far as being a member of the African American community goes, there's a vast legacy of people to acknowledge. Big names like Octavia Butler, you know?

KAC:  What about a code of conduct?

SS:  Yeah, if they have a DEI Committee, that will help. At DisCon, in Washington, D.C., they had monitors that people could report to if they had any issues.

When there’s a convention in a diverse area, but the convention's not diverse at all—that really makes me raise my eyebrow. Like, don’t you talk to people in your community? If you don't have enough people from a marginalized community, why don't you go to schools and invite educators and students? 

KAC:  You can go to the local universities, local bookstores… 

SS:  What about librarians? 

KAC:  Libraries, community colleges, high schools… there's a lot of untapped resources. People assume there's no one there who likes science fiction and fantasy because they're not showing up at the con. Well, maybe they didn't hear about the con! 

SS:  Yeah. With the pandemic, many things have gone online. There are lots of hybrid conventions now, so there’s no reason you can't have people from different parts of the country. But if you're trying to get more diverse members of communities from other locations, then you should let them know that they can apply to appear from online, as well. 

KAC:  So, we're talking about recruiting multiply marginalized Disabled people into SFF communities. For example this year, at WorldCon in Chicago, the elevator situation was problematic.

SS:  Yeah. 

KAC:  When looking at a hotel space, organizers need to think about those who are going to struggle the most getting from floor to floor. What’s the traffic going to be like? Where are the scheduling panels? A more considerable percentage of the fanbase is Disabled than I think people realize. 

SS:  Once, at a convention, they had me on a panel about disabilities. One of the guests was someone who was hard of hearing, and there were no microphones! Luckily, she did have an interpreter that showed up later. There have been complaints about accessibility with online and hybrid conventions as well—that’s another thing that people need to be aware of. 

KAC:  I think they're accessible to a different group of Disabled people who don't get invited to in-person cons. A lot of neurodiverse fans and authors got to go to WisCon for the first time through the virtual con interface. But at the same time, there were many old-time con-goers for whom the technology was too inaccessible. So, it's like balancing both of their needs. 

SS:  It also makes it more accessible for people who can't gather in person because they're immunocompromised. And Covid is still actually a thing. 

KAC:  Yeah, very much so. Anyway, I’m excited about these virtual and hybrid cons. I hope they get better! 

SS:  For example, at one convention, they gave us transparent masks, so people could read your lips. That's a fair approach to ensure that people can be masked and still have their lips read. 

KAC:  Yeah, when people are planning conventions or workshops, they have to plan for twice or three times as many Disabled people as they think are gonna come. A lot of the people that need those accommodations don't identify as Disabled, but maybe they still have a mobility device, and can't go up and down the stairs. They may not check a form that says ‘I need mobility assistance,’ but there will be a big queue at the elevator. 

SS:  People assume that anyone who has mobility issues is gonna be in a wheelchair, but you know, some people have canes and walkers—my mom was in a walker for several years. 

KAC:  And there's a limited number of wheelchairs, canes, and walkers that can fit into an elevator. 

SS:  That’s true.

KAC:  So, these are all issues that we have a lot of room for improvement in.

You know, I did want to ask you about how other people treat your specific disabilities in SFF and in writing communities. What questions do you get? Is there anything that you find yourself wishing that people knew about bipolar disorder? Or your other disabilities?

SS:  First of all, people need to be careful with infantilizing people and crossing boundaries they shouldn't. One time, I showed up someplace, and I was looking a little out of it. Suddenly, someone started touching and trying to fix my hair! You don't get to touch Black people's hair just because you feel like they're having a bipolar day!

KAC:  Yeah.

SS:  I think people with mental illnesses are infantilized, and Black people are infantilized, and the two things come together. It's like a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup. 

KAC:  But you could not sell that in a store. 

SS:  Yeah, no one’s gonna buy that.

KAC:  And then you have non-binary bodies, AFAB bodies, where if people perceive your gender presentation in a certain way, they're going to treat you very differently, right? 

SS:  I think people need to understand—and I tell this a lot to my partner, who is a white non-binary person—that presenting in a masculine way for a Black person means that you could get shot like Tony McDade. They'll treat you differently, but you’ll still have to deal with systemic racism.

KAC:  Yeah.

SS:  People will treat you like you're dangerous. It's a lose-lose situation. 

KAC:  Yeah, it truly is.

Do you have a question you're tired of being asked about your disabilities? Like any pet-peeve questions that people ask you? 

SS:  One thing that gets on my nerves is that people believe that if you get on medication, you're cured. That's bullshit. It does not work that way. But people are like: “Did you take your meds?” And you took your meds, but you’re also dealing with a zillion stressors making you sick.

KAC:  Yeah. And they can't understand that if you're on your meds, and bad things happen, your meds are not gonna work as effectively. People can relapse while they're on the meds that they've been taking for years. They have to change their meds, get them adjusted, and deal with things that would make even someone without a mental illness have a nervous breakdown.

SS:  It's not like meds make it so that things like death don't affect you anymore. 

KAC:  Yeah, you can still have grief and all these other problems in life that cause people to have emotional responses. 

SS:  Exactly.

KAC:  The other side of that coin is people who are like: “Well, don't take your meds!” They say: “If you want to write, you can’t take your meds because your mental illness is your superpower,” or, “I read in an article that the part of the brain that causes depression is the part that we write with. So that's why I went off my medications!” And I'm like: “Honey, no.” 

SS:  Let me put it this way. If people go off their meds, and that's their life choice, I don't need them preaching that at me. But I'm not down for that cause. When I wasn't on my meds, it was hard to meet deadlines. Sitting around talking to yourself, missing a bunch of deadlines, to me, is not an ideal life.

KAC:  Yeah. I have OCD, and one of the things I'm worried about is that I'm secretly a serial killer, but I'm so good at being a serial killer that even I don't know about it. It’s patently ridiculous, but I will still lose hours in my preventative rituals. Without my meds, I could write something unforgettable. Or I could just spend two weeks trying to make sure that I never murdered anybody.

SS:  Yeah, exactly. I'm not diagnosed with OCD, but I have had paranoias where I was sitting there writing a book, thinking that I could kill people by writing. When you get paranoid, you start randomly associating things in ways that make sense to your mind.

KAC:  Yeah.

SS:  And I hate to say this, but when I was in the middle of psychosis, and I had voices in my head, I sat there and predicted a whole bunch of things that ended up happening. I started thinking that I was telepathic, or that I was reading minds. 

KAC:  Yeah. 

SS:  When you're really psychotic, and you're dispersed, you’re still receiving information, so the thing that you think you understood telepathically is just something that entered your consciousness on some other level.

KAC:  And that can be dangerous. So, if you're reading this, I want you to know that it takes time to find the right medication mix. 

SS:  If your medication isn't working, you should discuss it with your psychiatrist. See if your psychiatrist can find something that will work better for you. 

KAC:  What I want to say to our readers, is that you can indeed have challenges and gifts you wouldn't have had otherwise with your disability. But Writing While Disabled is about learning to include those things in your life without being embarrassed to talk about them.

So, we've talked a little bit about how multiple marginalizations and disabilities interact with each other in complicated ways. Could you talk about how that works for you in writing spaces? Do you have trouble sometimes parsing what's going on in terms of which thing is the problem, or do you know what it is, and it's just complicated? 

SS:  No, it's usually pretty obvious what's going on. For example, if somebody says that being non-binary is a sign that I'm mentally ill, while that is both sanist and transphobic, the central problem is the transphobia. And if a trans person is also saying something ableist, they're obviously not cool about being an ally to people with mental health issues.

KAC:  Does it change the way you respond? 

SS:  Well, advocacy for myself and others is very ingrained in me. My mother was Black and had a disability; her father was diagnosed with schizophrenia after returning from the Korean War, and she worked with him and other Disabled people in her family. So, I will advocate for myself as a Disabled person. However, as a Disabled person, I feel it's sometimes easier for people to gaslight me because I have a mental health condition. 

KAC:  Yeah.

SS:  You know, when people are treating you in a way that is really ableist and sanist, but they're gaslighting you about it, it's hard to know whether or not you're being paranoid. It's difficult, because my disabilities have to do with my emotional functioning. 

KAC:  Yeah. I've noticed that the more marginalized someone is, the more they get pushback. Like, if you're navigating a convention and you're Disabled, but you don't have any other marginalization, you still have a lot of privileges. You will have a different experience than someone who is there with a bunch of different marginalizations. 

SS:  I know what you mean, and it does make sense. Let's take fatphobia, for example. I have to deal with people's fatphobia and how it's used toward me as a person who is non-binary. But also, if people perceive me as a woman, then I have to deal with sexism and with how that affects me. There's also a lot of racial associations having to do with size, many of them rooted in classism. You know, the idea that we're all on welfare, eating junk food. 

KAC:  Yeah.

SS:  One time, I was at work, and this guy started trying to have a conversation with me about how I shouldn't eat fried chicken because it has trans fats. And I'm like, “Why are you trying to start a conversation with me at my job about my diet—which is none of your business—and talking about fried chicken—which is stereotypically associated with African Americans?”

KAC:  Yeah. And that happens in SFF communities, too.

Well, what do you want to be asked about on panels? What panel do you wish they would ask you to be on? 

SS:  I've never heard of a good panel about the complexities of mental illness. If you are mentally ill, and you're someone like me who's been having tactile, visual, and audio hallucinations, and you decide to write horror, you’re gonna be writing some things that are really convincing because you experienced them. But at the same time, if you're actively hallucinating all the time, you're not gonna be able to function very well as a writer—in my personal experience. 

KAC:  Yeah.

SS:  I have to be mentally stable enough to write. Sometimes, I get to a good place where my meds are working well and I am functioning on all cylinders. I sit there and just pour out novels and stuff, and everything is working great. I might have ideas and thoughts in there that occurred during a time when I was sick, but I don't think that I could have written them then. So, I feel like you have to be stable to do things like organizing your writing and meeting deadlines.

KAC:  I have many different mental health diagnoses, so depending on which one is kind of in ascendance that day, I have to switch genres: today I can write poetry, but I can't follow a plot line. 

SS:  Yeah, I experience that as well. 

KAC:  Yeah, you write many different genres—nonfiction, fiction, poetry, comics. Are any of those genres particularly conducive to certain brain states for you? 

SS:  Writing comics is something that I do a lot when I'm grieving. I have done little comic books right after someone died. Because people die, and I get writer's block, and I can't concentrate, and I'll just be sitting there drawing. So I do a lot of drawing. Sometimes, I take stories that I've already written and I illustrate them. 

KAC:  Yeah, that can be a productive way to engage your creativity with a different part of your brain.

SS:  Yeah. For sure!

KAC:  And poetry is something that I do when I experience anxiety. So, leaning into the brain state you're in can be really helpful for many people. 

SS:  For sure. 

KAC:  Do you tend to go through phases with your genres, then? Or is it kind of different day by day? 

SS:  No, I don't go through phases. It is different day by day. I am always writing poetry, though, even when I'm in the middle of doing other stuff. I have created a file where I just put all the poems I write.

When it comes to short stories, usually, if I see a call for submissions that interests me, then I'll write a short story for that call. If it gets rejected, then I'll take it, and I'll rewrite it, and submit it a couple other times, until hopefully, it finds a home. You know, the thing about writing something tailored to a call for submissions is that it increases the chance of you getting an acceptance letter because you're actually giving them the story that they asked for. But the downside is that sometimes it's hard to find a home for it because you have written it for a specific project. Usually, you have to do rewrites. 

The thing that is most difficult for me to do, no matter what mood I’m in, is novels. Right now, I'm working on the fourth novel in a series where I've already got the first three books in the can. That's giving me plenty of time to get it done well. 

KAC:  Yeah.

SS:  I think poetry is close to my heart because it's something I've been doing for so long. I was writing and selling poems when I was in third grade, and I got my poetry published professionally when I was 19. It's like when you're into a certain genre of music or something like that—it becomes part of your identity. 

I've done a lot of spoken word poetry, so part of my writing process for poetry is to read it out loud and hear how it sounds. That's a comforting process for me. 

KAC:  I love that, too—that’s also part of my process.

You know, I wanted to ask you about some of the poems in this collection. So, The Rat King—this is a poetry collection, but a lot of these poems have strong narrative threads. Was there a point when some of them might have been short stories instead of poems? 

SS:  For the most part, no. The only one that was gonna be a short story at one point is the title story, “The Rat King.” If you read it, it's a ghost story about some homeless people who froze to death out in the cold—and they're stuck together like a rat king. ‘Rat kings’ are rats stuck together by their tails, which is a rare occurrence. In medieval times, people were afraid of them—they thought they were monsters. 

KAC:  But they’re just animals in distress. 

SS:  Yeah, animals in distress. I decided to use that as an analogy for how homeless people are treated and vilified. I have been homeless, like many other people with bipolar disorder. It's actually not at all uncommon, and so that's the story I wrote. 

KAC:  I thought it was a powerful exploration of those themes. And while I was reading it, I was thinking: “Wow, how did you decide?” Did you write it both as a poem and as a short story, to see which one worked better? Or did you just feel it had to be a poem, and then it worked?

SS:  Well, let me put it this way. When I was in third grade, I would sit around and tell scary stories to my brother, who’s one year younger than me, and other kids. The stories were about the ‘smelletons,’ which were skeletons, but they still had organs and stuff on them.

KAC:  Ooh! Creepy! 

SS:  So I had this whole series of stories that I made up as I told them. And it’s the same when I’m writing a poem now—like telling a campfire story. 

KAC:  Yeah, I love that. 

SS:  But when you do a short story, then things start to become more complicated, and sometimes, it can weigh you down. With “The Rat King,” I was just taking notes on things I wanted to write about, and I thought I would make them into a short story. But then, I decided to have a book with just poetry—so I wrote that as a poem. 

KAC:  The Rat King is a self-published collection, correct? 

SS:  Yeah, it's on my imprint, Dooky Zines. 

I'm a comic zine maker. Zines are a very punk rock thing that I have been doing since high school. They're similar to poetry chapbooks, where people hand-stitch them by hand. 

KAC:  Yeah. We had to do that in my undergrad poetry class.

SS:  My first two books of poetry were like that. I had a punk rock fanzine in high school called Sex Kitten, and I was so proud of myself. My dad was proud of me, too, because I went and got a fictitious business license for my zine! I was getting ads for it and stuff.

KAC:  I was doing something along those lines, too, at that age.

SS:  I used to go down to the copy shop and xerox my fanzine, writing the columns on a computer, printing it with a dot matrix printer, and then gluing it down, on the table, by hand. I had a matrix of dots that I put over the photos so that they would print like newsprint. I would copy a bunch of them and cross-staple them. This was the punk rock zine scene: you had these little crafty things made by hand. 

KAC:  But they're online now, so where can our readers go if they want to read one?

SS:  If they want to read a fanzine? Well, here in the Bay Area, there's the San Francisco Zine Fest and the East Bay Alternative Book & Zine Fest. So they're not just online. I make mini zines—about as big as maybe two postage stamps—and sell them at conventions for a quarter. Anyway, if you go to the East Bay Alternative Book & Zine Fest website, they have an online library of zines. 

KAC:  Yeah. Sounds like a road trip, everybody!

SS:  Yeah! Zines are a whole culture. It's not just in the Bay Area.

My comic zines are online on the Dooky Zines website, so if you go there, it'll show you how you can purchase one. 

KAC:  You've also traditionally published some of your collections. Can you tell us the difference between those processes and what it was like negotiating contracts as a Disabled person? 

SS:  Yeah, sure. I have an anthology that's traditionally published, Black Magic Women. It’s an anthology of stories by Black women, all related to magic. The year before, Linda D. Addison, Kinitra Brooks, and Susana Morris had just come out with Sycorax’s Daughters, so I pitched my book as a less academic version of that. 

You know, I do something called the Black Women in Horror list. I had put one out in 2013, then a new version in 2017. The idea was to put another one out in 2018 and to release a companion-like anthology, so I pitched that to Mocha Memoirs Press.

I had been in a contest called ‘The Next Great Horror Writer Contest’ through Horror Addicts, a small press publisher that puts out horror anthologies. The contest had fifteen horror writers competing for a contract at Crystal Lake Publishing—that was the grand prize. 

KAC:  Cool!

SS:  Yes, it was. But at one particular point in that contest, unfortunately—trigger warning—my ex-boyfriend died. That weekend, I turned in the wrong manuscript for a short story. I had been in fourth place, dropped down to ninth, and finished in sixth. However, I was producing work throughout the contest, including a new and improved version of that particular piece that I had turned in the wrong version of.

Anyway, I thought: “I didn't win, but I bet that I could pitch this book to Mocha Memoirs Press.” So I went and did that. I was like: “What if we did a book with Black women from my list of 100 Black Women in Horror?” That was my first editing work—and I was red-marking the crap out of stuff. I was serious about doing a good job. Not everyone was impressed by my editing, but that was the first anthology I edited, and it’s something that I will always be proud of. 

KAC:  Yeah.

SS:  Many writers highlighted in that book are doing very well now, and I feel partly responsible for that. They’re talented people, and I wanted to make sure that they were getting some exposure by including them.

So, Anne Rice was friendly with a lot of budding horror writers, and I was one of them. I told her about the book, and I took a picture of her while I was signing a copy and giving it to her. She promoted it on her page, and it ended up being number one in the horror anthologies category on Amazon. Everybody was so excited and happy, and every day, all of these authors from the book were posting about it on social media. It was a great experience for everyone involved. 

KAC:  And you got to make that happen. 

SS:  Yeah, with my wonderful publisher, Nicole Givens Kurtz. Later, I pitched Happiness and Other Diseases—it’s the first novel in a series. 

KAC:  Oh, it’s a novel!

SS:  It's a horror romance. The protagonist, Flynn, is a young man with bipolar disorder. He’s been having disturbing dreams that are starting to manifest in reality in various ways—he’s waking up with cuts and bruises from his nightmares. But no one believes him, because he's mentally ill.

KAC:  The first one is out?

SS:  Yeah, the first one’s out on Mocha Memoirs Press. 

KAC:  Well, readers, if you're looking to read that story, I'm going to put the link to the website at the end so you can go there and find it.

I wanted to ask you about how Disability intersects with science fiction. Do you think about Disabled themes when writing, or do they come up because you're writing from your own experiences? 

SS:  That's a very complex question. I had to stop and think for a while there, because I'm predominantly a horror writer, and you asked me about science fiction. However, I wrote a story that first appeared in Scierogenous II—an anthology of sci-fi erotica—which was inspired by my experiences with alters, or alternate personalities. I wrote “The Mysterious State of We-Ness” because of my personal dealings with my mental health situation. I'm very proud of that piece. It's also super queer.

The protagonist is Sheila, a secretary in a near-future San Francisco, where after the tech boom people are living very modular lives. She picks up a Weebot, which is an implant that rewires your brain to create an alternate personality. People started treating these things as pets, then as assistants, and finally as companions—you know, having sex with them.

Sheila decides to get a companion, she implants the chip, and it matures in her brain. She names the chip Angelo. Angelo can exist as a hologram that she sees, and he eventually gets a silicon suit that he can wear and run around in—but he predominantly exists in her body. So he's a trans man, sharing her same body. One of the fun things about science fiction erotica is that you can lean into a lot of character development because it is about relationships and how people interact.

With Happiness and Other Diseases, I was processing things about my mental health. Having a bipolar protagonist was intentional. The title is a reference to bipolar disorder, specifically to the attitude that a person who's bipolar is only experiencing emotions as a result of a chemical imbalance. People don't usually have to think about it if they don't have a mental health issue. 

KAC:  Yeah. You ask yourself things like: “Are these my emotions? Is this a chemical thing going on in my brain? Are my feelings real? Is it me, or is this my disease?” 

SS:  That's what the title Happiness and Other Diseases refers to: this angst over asking yourself if you're really happy or if it's a disease symptom. In the story, Flynn becomes involved with a demi-goddess—and as is often the case in these paranormal romance stories, there's a whole bunch of things that are super toxic about the relationship! He's happy because he's in the relationship, but the relationship is dangerous. In the beginning, he has a succubus trying to suck up all of his emotional energy and drain him dry, and the person he is dating is the half-sister of the other character trying to kill him. But then, he's got a whole bunch of self-esteem issues that are related to how the world treats him because he's got bipolar disorder, and this makes him co-dependent and open to being in this kind of dangerous relationship.

KAC:  Do you feel like the genre you're writing in lets you reach that human story in a deeper way? 

SS:  I definitely feel like that! I mean, one of the reasons that I love Wuthering Heights is because it is about human nature. And even though, over time, it has come down to us as a love story, it’s actually about all the things that are wrong with the human condition. 

Wuthering Heights is a love story about a man of color. His adoptive father did not think him good enough to be with his biological daughter, so now this guy enacts revenge on them all because he's angry. There's a lot of stuff going on, and I wanted to write something similar.

In Happiness and Other Diseases, I talk about mental illness and how your self-esteem is eroded when you're told that you're only valuable if you can work. That's part of the narrative that the protagonist is dealing with. It also deals with psych drugs, and how they can negatively impact your libido and ability to perform sexually.

KAC:  When you're writing a story, it sounds to me like you're thinking intertextually. Where does your writing process start?

SS:  You mean, how do I get inspired? 

KAC:  Let me rephrase. Could you walk me through what you do when you sit down to write? 

SS:  God, my writing process starts with a lot of daydreaming. It's not as structured as what you're suggesting. With my first novel, Solitude, I just started getting ideas. It was way back in 2011, and I was in vocational rehab, getting training to return to the workforce as a computer tech. I was in my car, listening to music, and I started to daydream about this story in my head. The music contributed to the writing process, and it was a Disturbed album—what is it called? Oh my God, Indestructible or something.

In the story that I ended up writing, everybody disappeared from San Francisco except for a few people; they were all trying to figure out what the hell happened and where everyone else was. I started coming up with the characters for the story, and I wrote down their descriptions in a notebook the way you would if you were playing Dungeons & Dragons. 

I just started writing these characters, their situation. I figured out what world they were in. And then they started to go on a quest to discover where everyone else was.  

KAC:  So, did you outline?

SS:  Not exactly? I had a notebook, and I had a page for each character. Then I turned it upside down and backwards, and I wrote plot points on the other side of it. So, first I decided who the characters were, and then I decided things about the environment. Finally, when I got a third of the way into the story, I decided who the villain was going to be—because I still didn't know!  

KAC:  That sounds to me like it's halfway between outlining and discovery writing. Does it sound right? 

SS:  If ‘discovery writing’ is ‘pantsing,’ yeah. 

KAC:  ‘Pantsing,’ yeah. I've heard it called ‘gardening,’ too. 

SS:  Yeah. The characters tend to drive the story, so the planned part is who the characters are. By the time I get to writing, it's like discovering something based on who those people are.  

KAC:  Yeah, you know what they want. 

SS:  Right. 

KAC:  At the start of the story, do you know what kind of ending you want? 

SS:  I usually don't figure out what kind of ending I want until much later. I use the three-act-play structure: I spend the first fourth of the book setting up the story, the middle half is where the plot happens, so by the time I’m three-fourths of the way in, I know for sure how I want it to end. But there have been times when I wrote myself into a corner—I looked at what I had written, and I knew that I had to do certain things… 

KAC:  …that you didn’t want to do.

SS:  Yeah, things that made me cry—but that was the only way I could write a good ending. That said, at a certain point writing gets to be just like an exciting adventure that I’m on, and if I'm having fun, then the story is better, too. 

KAC:  How about editing that story? How many rounds of editing did you have to put it through before it was the way you wanted it? 

SS:  The first story I wrote was the one that needed the most extensive editing. It was so hard. I enlisted the help of a friend who was an editor for a college newspaper. I was still learning about structure and pacing, so there were a whole bunch of rewrites that consisted of me writing additional material for the book because there was not enough action and too much infodumping. 

KAC:  What about your books now? What's your editing process like? 

SS:  By the time I wrote Happiness and Other Diseases, I had gotten used to working with beta readers. I had a team of twelve beta readers giving me feedback about it, so by the time it went to the editor it was clean. 

KAC:  But did you do your structural edits first? Is that like a separate round of editing? 

SS:  Structural edits?

KAC:  Like, where you're noticing if there's a plot problem, if there are missing scenes, if there's an incomplete character arc…

SS:  Let me put it this way. It took me three months to write my first book, and five months to edit it. Five painful months!

KAC:  Oh, no!

SS:  But by the time I wrote Happiness and Other Diseases, the editing process was no longer painful, and there were no structural problems at all.

There were continuity errors, though. For example, I ended up talking about the protagonist’s dad—but he did not grow up knowing his dad. I changed it to his grandfather so that the story could make sense again.

KAC:  So, as you progressed, as a writer and as an editor, you've gotten to the point where you don't make as many structural errors, and you don't need to do extensive structural work. 

SS:  Yeah, my first two novels were much more painful to write, to the point that in the middle of writing my second book, I just said, ‘fuck this,’ and I started writing a new, much more fun novel, which ended up being my third book: Warmth. By the time I finished writing that third book, I had gotten a better sense of how a plot should flow. I also made sure that the word count was the same as the word count for a traditionally published manuscript, even though at that time I was self-publishing.

So I worked extensively with beta readers, and it took a long time, but it was worth it. The process of doing all that made it so that going into book three, I knew a lot more about the process of writing. 

Honestly, I feel like writing is how you learn to be a better writer. It's one of those things that you learn from doing, and it's a shame when people tell beginning writers that they should give up because something they wrote wasn't that great: you get better by doing it. It’s how you improve.

KAC:  Do you write in an office? Do you have a specific room?

SS:  I sit right at this desk and write on this computer. 

KAC:  So, describe the room you're in for our readers. Is this your kitchen? 

SS:  No, my kitchen's back there. I live in a studio apartment. 

KAC:  So you’re writing in your living room.

SS:  Yeah. Living room-slash-bedroom. It's both those things in one.

KAC:   Are you using a laptop? 

SS:  I am using a laptop. 

KAC:  Do you ever write longhand? 

SS:  I do my outlines longhand, but the rest is all typing.

KAC:  Are there any specific apps or accommodations or tools that help you write—like dictation software or time management apps that you use regularly?

SS:  Well, there's some thesaurus.com…

KAC:  That's an accommodation for many people, I would say! 

What about when you have to take a break from writing for medical reasons? Let's say you go for a time without writing. Is it hard to get back into a project, and is there something you do to get back on the horse? 

SS:  So, when I was in outpatient therapy treatment, I had to be in the hospital. I made a comic book called Dreamworlds, but it took me a long time to get back to writing novels again. One great thing that I discovered, though, since I do my writing on the computer, is that writing doesn’t have to be a linear process. You can write a scene, then write another scene before it—as long as you do a good job of editing afterward. I usually try to get into a mindset that allows the story to flow. But because of the time away from the story, I had to get back into it. I also read my books earlier in the same series to make sure that everything was consistent.

That hasn't been a challenge with short stories because I've been able to write them consistently, even when I've been sick. In an average year, I will probably write about one short story per month in the 5000-word range. I look for submission calls and end up answering about twelve submission calls in a year.

Usually, I’ll put out a collection every two or three years, with stories whose rights have returned to me as well as stories that I never ended up publishing in the first place.

KAC:  Earlier, we talked about how your identity gets so tied up in your writing, and then you get into this crisis of: “Who am I if I'm not a writer anymore?” I’m thinking specifically of many people struggling with writer's block. They start to feel like they've lost their gift, like maybe they'll never write again.  Do you have any advice for those tortured souls? 

SS:  So, personally, I'm always able to write—but I do have to start. If I haven't been writing for a long time, I have to do the same thing I did when I first decided to be a writer: give myself permission to write badly.

In other words, the part of me saying that everything I do has to be great is the part of me that gives me writer's block. Getting out of writer's block means getting the perfectionist out of my head.

I give myself permission to write things that are not great, because otherwise I get stuck editing in my brain, and nothing comes out. I have to tell myself: “Editing is a thing. You can have a crappy first draft and edit it, you know?” So, I think that giving yourself permission to write a rough draft—just absolute garbage—is the best way to get out of it.

But when you're not writing, it's easy for impostor syndrome to kick in, too. Impostor syndrome tells you that everything you do is terrible. It makes you feel like you shouldn't be writing. My solution is to read bad books or books that made a lot of money but are not that great.

KAC:  They can be so inspirational!

SS:  Yeah! You can be like: “Okay, this book got published, and it isn’t that great or whatever, so maybe it's okay for me to write a book that’s not great!” 

KAC:  Yeah, maybe this one doesn't have to be the next Great American Novel. 

SS:  Yeah, the part of me that wanted to write the Great American Novel—I had to get over it entirely. 

I decided to be a horror writer because horror is a genre that people talk crap about anyway. And the idea that with everything you write, you're competing with Toni Morrison? That's not true! Toni Morrison wrote wonderful, amazing stories, but I don't have to be as good as her to be a writer.

KAC:  There’s only one Toni Morrison, but there's also only one you. 

SS:  Yeah, exactly! And I should tell my stories—the stories that I want to write.

I'm happy to be friends with Anne Rice—I love her writing. But when I read The Witching Hour for the first time, I thought: “This has got more ‘begat’s in it than the Bible! What's up?”

KAC:  I'm always like: “Yeah, you're human, too! Look at this!” 

SS:  Well, her writing advice was: “Don't take writing advice, do what you wanna do.” 

KAC:  Have you ever heard writing advice and thought: “That's the worst writing advice I've ever heard,” or “That writing advice is not going to work with my disabilities”?

SS:  Yeah. Like, the writing advice that you have to write every day…

KAC:  Oh, no!

SS:  …that does not work with my disability. But it did force me to recognize that every time I write an essay-length response to a post on social media, that's writing. Bipolar people do that a lot, unfortunately. So yes, I’m writing every day, but it’s not a book—and maybe I don’t really need to.

KAC:  Oh my gosh, I do that too! 

SS:  Maybe it’s your day for writing a book. 

KAC:  I wrote 1000 words, but they were all on Facebook! Because a man was wrong on the Internet!

SS:  Writing a certain amount per day is not the best thing for me, because if I get depressed, I'm not going to be writing. If I can get to where I'm feeling good, I can write 5000 words. Some days, though, I will write 150 words, then spend four hours staring out into space. I sit there, trying to formulate a thought as time goes by—then suddenly it’s time for lunch.

KAC:  Okay, so what about the advice that does work for you? What's the best writing advice you've found that works with your disabilities and your writing style? 

SS:  “Write the book you want to read.” Toni Morrison said that. I should look up the exact quote…

KAC:  Yeah, I’ve got it here, on my wall. The quote is: “If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.” 

What advice would you give to readers with similar life experiences to you who want to be writers? They want to do what you're doing. What would you tell them? 

SS:  Well, when I was starting out as a writer, I thought often about 15-year-old me, and wanting to make that person happy. But I also thought about other people who exist at the same intersections of multiple marginalizations. I felt like I should stand up for them—like I would stand up for myself when I was younger. 

KAC:  That's powerful. Are there any last thoughts you want to share with anyone else reading? 

SS:  Well, Rappin' 4-Tay—a rapper that I know—often says: “Get in where you fit in.” Sometimes, I worry that the things I think and write are too disturbing, which is part of why I write horror—because I feel like in that genre I'm not going to be judged.

“Get in where you fit in.” If you find that you write in a certain way, and it makes sense to you, write that. Finding a market for your writing and getting in where you fit in is a good way to navigate the world as a Disabled writer. I have PTSD, and disturbing images are something that I experience personally, but in the horror genre, they make a lot of sense. 

And another thing: we all hate rejection letters. We all do—but try to remember that just because someone didn't pick your story, that doesn't mean it isn't good. People are looking for specific things, and sometimes your story doesn't fit what they have in mind. And also, you can edit it again. I have edited things and found nice homes for them—so don't give up. And if one of my stories doesn't get published, then in two years, when I get the other stories back, I'll just put them all in a collection, and then it'll get published, too. 

KAC:  Well, that's excellent advice. Thank you for letting me ask you all these questions. I appreciate it—and I know our readers are gonna get a lot out of this interview. 

SS:  That's good. I'm glad to hear it. 

KAC:  Readers, you can find more of Sumiko’s work at sumikosaulson.com, at their comic zine imprint, dookyzines.com, and at your local seller of fine books!

Disabled readers, how do you get your writing done? We’d love to hear from you! You can chat with us on Twitter with #WritingWhileDisabled and #StrangeHorizons! The other Writing While Disabled interviews are on the Strange Horizons website—please check them out, too!

1.

Ah, the light of other days:

Once (not so long ago), as I was wandering around Brooklyn, I sensed for the first time with such clarity that the light was coming from another time. I could define it quite precisely, the light of the 1980s, sometime from the beginning of the decade, I think it was from 1982, late summer. Light as if from a Polaroid picture, lacking brightness, soft, making everything look slightly faded. (p. 50)

There is no slow glass here, capturing 1982’s photons and releasing them back to the narrator; but in an important sense the narrator is still literally encountering the light of late summer 1982. His job, at this point in Georgi Gospodinov's hypnotic, haunting novel Time Shelter (2020; trans. Angela Rodel 2022) is, despite what you may initially think, not to design filters for Instagram, but to be a collector for his enigmatic, magus-like friend and colleague Gaustine, recognising and capturing not just the light but the smells, sounds, objects, and stories of different periods when they manifest in the present day. If the future is here, but unevenly distributed, then so is the past.

What he collects is subsequently used to enhance Gaustine’s clinic in Zurich, which recreates different versions of different twentieth-century decades in different rooms, providing therapeutic environments for those who no longer find the present tolerable, largely people with encroaching amnesia—a literalisation of some of the more sensationalist descriptions of residential care “dementia villages” such as the Hogeweyk in the Netherlands. The 40s occupy the ground floor, with a basement to recreate World War Two bomb shelters; then as you climb through the building you climb through the 50s, 60s, and 70s. The attic is reserved for the 80s and 90s: as yet sparsely populated. It is not a museum. There are no actors; any inhabitants are reacting genuinely. The inversion of Thomas Mann’s International Sanatorium Berghof—with the rooms, rather than their occupants, becoming symbolic—is acknowledged in the text, although Switzerland is apparently also chosen as Gaustine's venue because of all places in Europe it is the one least marked by the twentieth century, and therefore most easily inhabited by different eras, a quality described as “time degree zero” (p. 43).

A handful of case studies relating to European traumas of the twentieth century demonstrate how the therapy works, when it does. An elderly woman who arrives with a “blank face” and “empty gaze” (p. 75) is brought to life by a room containing a heavy wooden radio, of a kind she remembers from her urgent evacuation from Bulgaria to Germany in 1944. More branches of the clinic open up: in the Sofia clinic, two men, Mr N and Mr A, strike up an acquaintance, realise that behind the iron curtain, the latter had been an agent reluctantly surveilling the former, and are able to process some of the implications of that connection. Sometimes, however, the treatment is only palliative. “On a warm June evening in 1978” (p. 101), the narrator re-encounters his father watching that year’s world cup final. For a brief moment, “We don't know how a match that ended forty years ago will end [...] everything is possible” (p. 103); but ultimately his father’s forgetting is too advanced.

In a time when, the narrator observes, memory loss is the fastest-spreading disease in the world, the concept of re-creating past times soon leaves the confines of the clinic and becomes commonplace across Europe. “Imperceptibly people in native costumes began to take over the cities”; modern clothes are not banned, but will get you dirty looks. It’s easiest to go along to get along. “The soft tyranny of any majority” (p. 122). This retreat into the past is the result of a loss of belief in the future, and is framed as both ecological—as Gaustine observes, it is likely that the first era named for humanity could turn out to be its last—and socioeconomic. Before too long politicians are participating (“the European Parliament began to resemble some German New Year's special from the 80s” [p. 122]), with the debate framed in terms eerily familiar from real-world political debates of the last half decade: “when you have no future, you vote for the past” (p. 124). But in Time Shelter, voting for the past is literalised. Each European country will hold its own referendum to decide to which decade of the twentieth century they would like to return. Two countries outside the Union petition to participate: Great Britain is denied, but Switzerland is accepted.

This big-picture idea is intoxicatingly, distractingly fertile. It’s a good thing for the novel’s sake that Gospodinov takes the time to show us in detail what the referendum might mean for one country, his native Bulgaria. His narrator (who is a version of the author) returns to Sofia to observe the process. The airline that flies him there and the car that meets him there are old and worn, but not yet through choice. It's April, but autumn in his mind: he walks through old haunts, remembers old lovers but doesn't dare contact them, remembers student nights that he wishes he could forget. The referendum, we understand, is something of a lie from the start, because the past is always with us and always personal. But the fervour in the body politic is undeniable, and immune to such sober considerations. “It’s as if,” the narrator observes, “some people think that bringing back the recent past will also automatically take them back to the age they were then” (p. 155). There are advocates for every decade (the narrator would probably pick either the 30s for the literature or the 60s for “the vague feeling that I remember that decade in detail” [p. 159]), but two leading camps have quickly emerged. The Movement For State Socialism argues for a return to the mature communist state of the 60s and 70s; against that, the Bulgarian Heroes lobby for recreating the earliest allowed decade, right at the start of the century, which they claim as a peak of Bulgarian nationalism. The rallies of both groups are LARP fantasias involving a lot of hired extras, enacted with assistance from an old theatrical friend of the narrator. Even before the referendum the past is changing the economics of the present, the friend observes, creating new jobs as well as bringing back old ones. But the result of the referendum is dark. Following a statistical tie, the forces of nationalism and communism declare an alliance, “the fatherland fathered anew” (p. 212). The narrator rushes to catch a departing flight; the borders are closed two days later. “I had already lived through what was to come” (p. 213), he notes.

It's a brilliant, tragic section that anchors Time Shelter’s antic thought experiment. The situation in other European nations is only sketched, albeit with delicacy and some wit. A common thread is that countries don't choose what observers expect them to choose: “that which looked good from the outside did not look quite the same from the inside” (p. 232). For instance, very few people, it turns out, actually want to live in the 60s; average times are better for living in than revolutionary ones. The 90s are also under-favoured, turning out to be “a second-place dream” (p. 247) for most nations; although most of the Balkans are drawn there, albeit with a clause that their time will start only after the end of the wars. The largest bloc that emerges is for the 80s, in a spine running through France, Germany, Austria, and Poland. Switzerland, that bastion of neutrality, chooses the date of the referendum itself, providing a new clock for the rest of Europe to set its time by.

Gospodinov is not done with his readers yet. The new situation is only metastable; locals rebel against the national majorities, and Europe fractures further, becoming “a chaotic open-air clinic of the past” (p. 254), where road maps are suddenly time maps. But the experience of being in that Europe is largely left to readers to imagine; instead, from this point on the narrative becomes increasingly impressionistic and metafictional, and somewhat Gene Wolfean, as the narrator struggles against his own encroaching amnesia, and his ambiguous relationship with Gaustine. He becomes acutely conscious of the layers of his local times, and how he interacts with them:

I observe the world shut up in a room from the seventeenth century, with Wi-Fi from the twenty-first century, writing on a wooden desk that is at least one hundred years old and sleeping in a bed with metal head- and footboards from the nineteenth century. I try to play out the past that lies ahead. [...] Forgive me, O God of utopias, the times have mixed together and now you don’t know whether the story you are telling has already happened or is yet to come. (pp. 264-5)

It is enough. Time Shelter left me feeling very strange, the way living in any time can make you feel, if you’re paying attention.

2.

When science fiction novels mess with time, they usually do it via time travel, not the sort of time-recreation used by Gospodinov, which can make it all the more provocative when recreations do appear. I don’t mean The Truman Show-style performances, in which the protagonists are unaware of their circumstances but achieve conceptual breakthrough at the story's conclusion. I mean in particular stories containing Gaustines: stories in which characters deliberately stage the past for a purpose, and in doing so provide commentary on that past and its persistence. Their purpose is not always as benign as providing shelter.

Take, for instance, Ada Palmer’s monumental, fascinating, strange series Terra Ignota (2016-2021). It is presented as the work of a contemporaneous narrator who aims to reconstruct for a presumed posterity how and why a political crisis shook their world: “a narrative of events of the year 2454,” as the cover of each volume states. Crucially, in this future the world society has been explicitly and carefully designed to prevent any majority of any kind ever dictating to a minority, to stabilise the kind of fracturing that courses through Time Shelter's Europe. “Sooner or later,” wrote the narrator of Time Shelter, “all utopias turn into historical novels”; well, Terra Ignota is a story about the work of building utopia that is framed as a historical novel. The narrator writes in a self-consciously archaic style, the text peppered with dialogues with Enlightenment thinkers and glosses on ancient Greek stories, even as it describes a world of flying cars and space elevators.

One key part of the rationale for this voice is revealed towards the end of the first book, Too Like the Lightning (2016), when two characters are led to “an old town chateau” (p. 298) in Paris. Up to this point, the taboos of 2454 have been described to us more than they have been experienced. The narrator, for instance, tells us that this considers itself to be a “post-gender” future by vigorously insisting that it is no such thing, and applying gendered pronouns to every character even as those characters tend to use “they” in their own conversations with each other. Similarly the mere existence of another character, a “sensayer,” a type of spiritual and ethical counselor, is indicative of how private and personal religion has become. But it is in Paris that we first feel the full force of these social norms, because within that chateau is a historically flavoured cross between a sex club and a temple. “Our members,” says one employee, “come here for a few hours to escape to a more courteous and enlightened society” (p. 304); the proprietor describes it as “a bubble of the eighteenth century” (p. 318). Dazed, the protagonists watch as “men and women of both sexes paraded in the most elaborate gowns and wigs and coats and tails” (p. 316): strongly gendered clothing that is almost never seen in the outside world.

The proprietor herself, Madame D'Arouet—the name a tribute to Voltaire—appears as a “precise, stylised ideal” (p. 320), in a grand wig, jewellery, gown, and heavy white-and-rouge makeup. She is the Gaustine of this setting. She has a purpose, and it aligns with the narrator's earlier insistence: she argues that gender has not been, as the world believes it to be, surpassed, and that the false belief that it has makes its lingering presence that much more toxic. So she provides a safe space—with, she claims, the awareness and consent of world powers—in which gender, and other forbidden topics, like theology, can be explored. Drawing on Rousseau, de Sade, and Diderot, as well as Voltaire, she argues for another kind of history-therapy, one that reveals and domesticates that which might otherwise remain suppressed.

Everything she says is true, and incomplete. It turns out that she has not been using history as therapy, or not primarily: she has been weaponising it. Her chateau is not a shelter, it is a laboratory. To the outrage of the sensayer, it turns out that there are individuals who are not just visiting the chateau, but who have been raised there, raised “to think inside this box” (p. 328). And to the eventual outrage of many more people, it turns out that Madame D'Arouet has been entrapping, manipulating, and directing world leaders, through the lure of gender and other concepts, for her own ends, over decades. It's not obvious to readers (or at least was not obvious to me) on their first visit to Madame's chateau whether it is a parodic exaggeration of history, or only feels such because in the rest of the novel such excesses have been strikingly absent. But either way, it makes history present in the text in a way that few other science fiction novels attempt.

3.

Alternatively, Gaustine may remain behind the curtain, and the focus might be on his subjects. Further in the future than Terra Ignota, and drawing on the deeper past—a sort of readerly dolly zoom—is located Robert Silverberg’s 1985 novella Sailing to Byzantium. It has a fine and wrong-footing opening:

At dawn he arose and stepped out onto the patio for his first look at Alexandria, the one city he had not yet seen. That year the five cities were Chang’an, Asgard, New Chicago, Timbuctoo [sic], Alexandria: the usual mix of eras, cultures, realities. (p. 394)

The casualness of the second sentence draws you in efficiently: oh, there are five important cities, oh, that's quite a list of places, oh, it's a “usual mix.” And before that, the first sentence establishes the confidence and cosmopolitanism of the protagonist: “the one city he had not yet seen.” This is, we think, a man who knows his world.

We are wrong. The narrator, it turns out, has the prosaic American name of Charles Phillips and, like the residents of Gaustine's clinic, he is partially amnesiac. He knows he is not from this time: he believes he has been transported from 1984 to the fiftieth century, but cannot remember how or when this occurred. The world, and humanity, are changed utterly from his expectations. The continents have been rearranged, and humanity has homogenised, with echoes of Eloi: every citizen he meets is “short, supple, slender, dark-eyed, olive-skinned, narrow-hipped, with wide shoulders and flat muscles” (p. 396), and they all seem youthful, adolescent or early twenties at the most, regardless of how long they have actually lived. Charles is travelling with one particular member of this society, Gioia, but fairly early in the story she leaves him without explanation: most of the rest of the narrative involves his pursuit of her from city to city, until he understands why she left. It’s a little melodramatic, and obviously a rather one-sided tale, but in the end it works, which is to say we come to understand the tragedy and the promise of being Charles Phillips.

But before that: the cities. They are not like the rooms in Gaustine’s clinic, or Madame’s chateau, or even like post-referendum Europe, not least because the rationale for their selection remains obscure. But they are authored, on behalf of the citizens like Gioia and the “visitors” like Charles: created and destroyed in an unending cycle. For the citizens, Charles muses, “the past was one borderless timeless realm” (p. 404), a source of diversion and novelty, not so much therapy as theme park, sparing no expense; or perhaps like going to the cinema: “a different show every day: not much plot, but the special effects were magnificent and the detail work could hardly have been surpassed” (p. 406). Of course, authenticity is a question mark. Charles wonders what would happen if they recreated late twentieth-century New York, perhaps relocating Times Square to the Bronx, or installing “temporaries” (essentially, non-player characters who populate the cities: one step further on from the hired actors at the Bulgarian political demonstrations) who speak with Southern accents. And when Charles visits other cities, he considers the motives and approaches of their builders, as in the case of Mohenjo-daro:

It was an oppressive city, but not a squalid one. The intensity of the concern with sanitation amazed him: wells and fountains and public privies everywhere, and brick drains running from each building to covered cesspools. [...] Perhaps the citizens had redesigned the city to suit their own ideals of cleanliness. No: most likely what he saw was authentic, he decided [...] If Mohenjo-daro had been a verminous filthy hole, the citizens probably would have recreated it in just that way, and love it for its fascinating reeking filth. (p. 432)

Charles, one feels, would be at home debating worldbuilding choices with Game of Thrones fans, and more broadly in our current media ecosystem in which fictional worlds are franchised and their preservation (or not) is at the whim of corporate masters. When Charles attempts to visit Timbuktu, he finds it being dismantled by robots, with no citizens anywhere to be seen. The robots are immune to persuasion or argument, and will not let him stay: “this is not a place any longer” (p. 436), they insist. After further encounters, it is eventually revealed that Charles himself is part of the artifice: not a time traveller after all, but a made thing, more advanced than the temporaries, but for the same purpose, to enliven the world for citizens. That’s a step further than either Gaustine or Madame.

4.

The primary speculative conceit of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize- and Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning novel The Underground Railroad (2016) is probably now widely enough known that it needs little introduction. The historical network of anti-slavery safe houses and escape routes is reimagined with literal trains and literal tracks and literal tunnels, and it carries the novel’s protagonist, Cora, from state to state after an initial escape from a Georgia plantation. Each location is rendered unflinchingly.

The first stop, an unnamed town in South Carolina, seems initially to offer as much freedom as Cora could hope for. Black people are still property, it’s true, but of the US government rather than individuals, and it seems like a technicality, since they are not used as slaves. They can take jobs and earn money; move around freely, and buy their own things; and perhaps most energising for Cora, they can take classes, study, and learn. On her arrival Cora is treated well, given a medical exam, and helped to settle. She initially finds work as domestic help, but before too long a new placement comes up, and she is sent (not invited) to work at the new Museum of Natural Wonders as a “type,” becoming part of their Living History display, a series of rooms containing tableaux vivants.

There are resonances here with the staged demonstrations in Gospodinov’s Bulgaria, but these historical recreations have yet another purpose we have not encountered yet: not therapy, not coercion, not leisure, not simply illusion, but, ostensibly, a form of education. In fact they are consolation for their presumed white audience. In “Scenes from Darkest Africa,” Cora sits at a cooking fire with flames made of glass shards, or retreats into a thatched hut when audience scrutiny becomes too exhausting. In “Life on the Slave Ship” (set, scathingly, in a room with “soothing blue walls” 110), Cora has to play-act “a kind of apprentice” (p. 110), an African boy helping the crew with various tasks. And in “Typical Day on the Plantation,” she sits and works a spinning wheel. She and a couple of other Black people are the only actors in the setup; white people are represented by wire-and-plaster figures with wax faces.

Sometimes Cora meets visitors’ gazes, challenging them to see beyond the imposture. “It was a fine lesson,” she thought, “to learn that the slave, the African in your midst, is looking at you, too” (p. 126). Re-reading The Underground Railroad for this column, Cora’s action was also a reminder that we never enter into the perspective of a patient in Gaustine’s clinic, or of one of Madame's casual attendees. Cora is in this sense more like Silverberg’s protagonist, placed into a scenario for the benefit of its viewers, and even more than Charles in Mohenjo-daro or musing about a possible New York, she has the standing to question those scenarios. In a measure of the relative comfort she feels in South Carolina, Cora challenges the curator (the museum’s Gaustine) about the plantation room, since that is the area where she has first-hand expertise. Mr Fields acknowledges some apolitical imperfections. He agrees, for instance, that it is uncommon for spinning wheels to be used outdoors in the way shown. But he attributes these to a lack of space and a lack of budget. “Would that he could fit an entire field of cotton in the display and had the budget for a dozen actors to work it. One day perhaps” (p. 110). One doesn't have to struggle much to imagine what Mr Fields would do with the powers and budget available to Silverberg’s future curators.

The broader narrative cunning of the museum is revealed in how it is framed when Mr Fields is explaining it to Cora: “Like a railroad, the museum permitted them to see the rest of the country beyond their small experience, from Florida to Maine to the western frontier” (p. 109). That key phrase, like a railroad, contrasts it to the larger structure of The Underground Railroad, which also hopscotches from state to state and scenario to scenario, and which, crucially, uses inauthenticity to the exact opposite end than the museum. Because this is the secondary speculative conceit of the novel: despite a shared underlying reference year of perhaps 1850 or so, the places Cora visits frequently diverge from the reality of that time, condensing and critiquing a broad and persistent system by bringing forward elements from the relative future. It transpires that the medical exam Cora was offered on her arrival in South Carolina was not neutral. The staff at the shiny new hospital—which opens, significantly, at the same time as the museum—are not only deliberately infecting Black patients with syphilis to understand its disease course (a premonition of the Tuskegee syphilis experiments of the 1930s) but are carrying out involuntary sterilizations of Black women (as happened to over 60,000 Black and other minority people in the US over the course of the twentieth century). Futures, as Cora observes, are not just lost but stolen. In Cora’s next stop, North Carolina, Black people themselves are made illegal (as was the case in Oregon in the late nineteenth century), and every Friday sees executions in the town park. And so on.

There is a sense in which Whitehead’s America is similar to Gospodinov’s post-referendum Europe, as a place where inhabitants have chosen—and here, much as Cora's gaze made me think of the subjectivity of Gaustine’s patients, I think of who got to vote in that referendum, and who might have been excluded—to live in different times. The railroad map is a time map. By this point, while being cautious about simplistically linear narratives of progress, we might even start to ask to what extent political maps are always time maps: the US is already a patchwork, for instance, from voting restrictions to the overturning of Roe. Perhaps it’s not always helpful to frame these actually existing inequities as lingering from “the past”; but sometimes I think it is. The contrast can be a reminder that victories are often provisional, and require active maintenance; and an inspiration that change is possible, because if it’s been achieved in some times and places, it can be achieved in others. And more immediately—turning back to the book at hand—Whitehead’s undeniable great achievement is that he has, through his layered and scrambled recreations, given us a novel about the horrors of structural racism that never becomes only a museum to gawk at.

5.

This is the start of a new column. Its premise is to explore ways of talking about the breadth (and depth) of SF at a time when it is no longer really tenable to talk about a single history of SF, because so much is being shared about the histories of different SF-writing communities: to find ways of moving across the sorts of patchwork landscapes described in the works discussed above. I suspect each column will start, as this one did, with a keystone text that inspires further exploration; but we’ll see. The goal, as I hope is clear from the discussions above, is not to claim lines of influence, because they are no longer clear, if they ever really were (among other things the process of translation is itself a kind of time machine that scrambles impact); nor is this about trying to construct a new Sacred Timeline where all SF history is part of a single narrative, or about writing definitive takes on this trope or that parabola. It simply seems to me there is value in trying to find resonances between SF of disparate origins, present and past, known to me and new to me: to move between different shelters.

Editions used

Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov. Weidenfeld and Nicholson 2022 (UK); ISBN 9781474623025

Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer (Terra Ignota 1). Head of Zeus 2017 (UK); ISBN 9781786699480

The Best of Robert Silverberg: Stories of Six Decades by Robert Silverberg. Subterranean Press 2012 (USA); ISBN 9781596064720

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. Fleet 2016 (UK); ISBN 9780708898390

Maria Haskins

My previous Short Fiction Treasures column was all about science fiction, so it’s only fair that the theme this time around is fantasy.

One of my favorite types of fantasy is old fairytales reimagined and reinvented. A prime example of spinning a brilliant new tale from old threads is “A Princess with a Nose Three Ells Long” by Malda Marlys in Fantasy Magazine. Marlys takes the Norwegian tale “East of the Sun and West of the Moon” and turns it into a story of Dagrun, a headstrong troll princess who grows up in “a castle flanked by fjords, so very far from everything that the winds rarely raised its banners.” The troll queen, Dagrun’s mother, has orchestrated a royal marriage for her daughter, but the troll princess has other plans. Marlys’s prose has the perfect lilt and melody of an old-school fairytale, even as she finds a delightful new perspective on both trolls and princes, and a different happily ever after.

Also in Fantasy Magazine is the exquisitely crafted “The End of a Painted World” by Sam Kyung Yoo, a story set in a world where there is powerful magic in ink and paint, and where paintings can both come to life and risk destruction and death. I love the way magic and art are twined together and woven into the very fabric of this world, and I love the story’s emotional depth and lyrical power.

The most recent issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction is a great read. One of my favorite stories from this issue is Tade Thompson’s “The Sweet in the Empty,” a gorgeously wrought tale that has the rich texture and delicate shimmer of history, folktale, and legend. There’s a mysterious oasis, an abducted child, and a father who was once a celebrated warrior, setting out on a perilous quest to rescue the son he once lost. Thompson deftly draws you into the lives of his characters and into the landscape and societies of Ethiopia and the Arabian Peninsula in ancient times. He tells his tale with restrained, yet well-honed, emotional sharpness. It’s a tale well worth savoring.

Another one of my favorite stories in this issue of F&SF is E. Catherine Tobler’s “Remembered Salt,” an exceptional and wonderful story about a sentient house (with legs) that has lost its resident witch and is now flying through the skies, emptying itself of its contents while trying to remember its past and its purpose. There are shades of Oz, Baba Yaga, and other tales here, as Tobler delves deep into the complexities of companionship and loneliness. It’s a story with a unique protagonist and a unique point of view, and Tobler infuses it with a surreal and wistful soulfulness. There’s a quiet depth here, as the house, and we, find a new understanding of home and belonging.

In “Bride of the Gulf” in khōréō, Danai Christopoulou braids history and legend, myth and memory together into a compelling tale that gave me goosebumps at the end. A young woman in Thessaloniki is haunted by fragments of emotions and memories she cannot fully comprehend. The story’s narrator soothes her with a song, but old memories, and a very old story, still breach the surface. Christopoulou anchors the story vividly in the present day but allows magic and history to poke through the fabric of reality, revealing the hidden truth beneath.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies publishes “literary adventure fantasy,” and in a recent issue, I thoroughly enjoyed the marvelous “Discreet Services Offered for Women Ridden by Hags” (how can you not love that title?) by Stephanie Malia Morris. Morris spins a tale of monsters and magic and a fractured family, set in Washington, D.C., in the early 20th century. Bernice is the woman offering the discreet services in question, following in her mother’s footsteps as she helps women who are “ridden” by hags, AKA soucouyants. When Bernice’s sister Angélique turns up on Bernice’s doorstep, the sisters’ troubled past, and the fate of their mother, comes back to haunt the present. It’s a captivating tale about the costs of magic, about living with monsters, and about the monstrous things people are capable of doing. The scenes when Bernice confronts her mother and her sister are magnificent in their depictions of the magical powers at work and the emotional devastation that follows.

Also in Beneath Ceaseless Skies is “What the Mountain Takes, What the Journey Offers” by Jae Steinbacher, a quietly profound and beautifully layered novelette about coming to terms with your ancestors, the gods, and your own life choices. It’s a story that made me think of Ursula K. Le Guin as I read it. Ilhani sets out on a long journey and a difficult quest to find a remedy for their wife’s ailment, knowing full well that any remedy will require sacrifice: “Petitioning Mother for help always comes at a cost, but what choice do I have?” Steinbacher weaves a compelling tale, and an intriguing world, with profound depth.

“A Timely Horizon” by Karen Lord in Sunday Morning Transport has a similar contemplative, quietly compelling vibe. Here, we find ourselves in a world where humans have found a way to pass on memories and insights not just through time, but between alternate timelines and worlds, by communing with trees. In their life, each person receives a seed and when that seed is planted, a tree grows. That tree can then tell the story of your life, such as it is and was and might have been. It is an exquisite and thoroughly intriguing story. I love Alina, the story’s protagonist, because she has such a rare calm and maturity to her, and I love the way this story finds a heart and a soul in its slow unfolding.

Podcastle is a fantastic place to find excellent reprints and excellent original fantasy fiction. One of my recent favorites is “Wapnintu’tijig They Sang until Dawn” by Tiffany Morris (narrated by Samantha Loney). Here we meet Pi’tawgowi’sgw, a creature from Mi’kmaq legends that finds herself alone in a dramatically changed world where she must learn to adapt and survive. Morris has a beautiful and incisive way of interweaving descriptions of nature with the thoughts and sensory experiences of Pi’tawgowi’sgw, making for a powerful prose that glimmers: “The sky was filled with diamond shells, husks of voices glittering in the vast blanket reflected on the water.”

“Yung Lich and the Dance of Death” by Alex Fox (narrated by Eric Valdes), also at Podcastle, is a darkly funny take on necromancy in the modern world. Yung Lich is a recently resurrected man looking to get attention for his mixtape (on CD), but it’s not easy to make a living (?) as a musically inclined undead. Yung Lich is also part of a necromancer’s devious plan, but he might not be the pushover his resurrector imagined. I adore the ingenious setup and the understated sense of humor in this story.

The afterlife is a proven fertile ground for fantasy fiction. In “Miz Boudreaux’s Last Ride” by Christopher Caldwell in Uncanny Magazine, a bargain with the dead gets the domestic and dynamic duo Davion and Tommy into serious, Hitchcockian trouble. Caldwell has a wickedly masterful touch with characters, dialogue, and the craft of magic as he spins a tale of a desert town called Paloma Negra, and what it might take to undo a messy old knot of spellwork. (This story is a sequel of sorts to “Femme and Sundance,” published in Uncanny in 2021.)

Elou Carroll’s fierce and inventive “You Row and You Burn” in The Deadlands also involves the afterlife: “The best thing about being dead is no longer needing to breathe. The worst thing about being dead is, well, being dead.” The story’s recently deceased protagonist is hunted by the Ferrymen, those who ferry the dead from the world of the living to whatever lies beyond. No one is supposed to leave the boat in those waters, and, according to the rules, there is no way back, but what do you do if you don’t want to be dead?

One of the most devastatingly beautiful pieces of fantasy fiction I’ve read recently is “The House of Linear Change” by Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe in Lightspeed. Here, the world surrounding the narrator is not solid, and every object might turn, or be turned, into something else: “It is very easy for a thing to change. I know this because I am a thing, too.” The world twists and turns and changes constantly, and there’s a fluid power and beauty in Ajeigbe’s masterfully expressive prose.

Another story with a strong and resonant voice is Jordan Kurella’s “The Wreck of the Medusa” in Apex. Kurella tells a wicked and passionate tale of love and lust, pirates and monsters, set aboard a cursed ship. There’s a bold and lusty edge to this story that captivated me from the first paragraph: “What I saw last night, reflected back from the depths, was not my face. Not the one I see in the grime of The Medusa’s portholes, nor in the glint of a blade before I thrust the knife into my bread (or into another man).” There’s a great monster hiding in the depths of the ocean surrounding the cursed ship, but what haunts the tale even more are the monstrous deeds that humans, lovers and enemies both, are capable of.

“The Words That Make Us Fly” by S. L. Harris, also in Apex, is an evocative story about a young man named Prentiss, and about the magic and transformative power of Words (with a capital W). In Harris’s story, magic can be wielded by writing or spray-painting Words on walls and buildings. Prentiss was supposed to learn how he might wield this magic, but he has lost King, who was supposed to teach him, and he has lost his friends, and now he despairs. Harris captures Prentiss’s desperation and anguish, and the joy and freedom of tapping into the power running through the veins of the world, and yourself, in brilliant detail, turning this into a captivating and heartrending story.

I love stories like this, stories that imbue the seemingly everyday, regular world with magic and transformative powers. Another great example is Pedro Iniguez’s “Magic Lucha” in Worlds of Possibility. In Iniguez’s story, Julio, a young boy with a traumatic past, goes to a lucha libre tournament in Oaxaca with his abuela. At the arena, Julio ends up witnessing a clash, not just between the luchadores, but a magic battle between his grandmother and a very wicked witch. I love the way this story finds hope, healing, and a sense of community in the dust and sweat of lucha libre.

A father brings home a magic door in the harrowing “La Puerta” by Ren Braueri at Cast of Wonders (narrated by J. M. Bueno). To the delight of his two children, the door can lead to many different worlds and places, depending on when it’s opened and who opens it. At first, this seems like a rare gift and opportunity, but the door eventually leads to disaster. It’s a compelling story about a family, and two siblings, torn apart by guilt and loss, and I love how it goes beyond the tragedy into a place of hope.

“Hers” by Fernanda Coutinho Teixeira in Strange Horizons is set in a time and place that feels only too real and familiar. Beatriz is a young woman seeking an abortion, but she is not allowed to make her own decisions about her body. Instead, she ends up trapped in a system intent on making her go through with an unwanted pregnancy. But Beatriz is not as powerless as those around her might think, and when she decides to stay pregnant, she becomes more powerful than anyone imagined. There’s a wonderfully surreal and phantasmagoric edge to Beatriz’s transformation, and I love the way she is endowed with the power to not just endure, but undo the injustice inflicted on her.

I am a big fan of stories that blend fantasy and horror, and a great example of such a story is “Rattenkönig” by Jenova Edenson in Diabolical Plots. Three friends head out on an ill-fated road trip and from the get-go, Edenson gives us that terrific sense of foreboding you get in a horror story where you know, and even the people in the story know, that they ought to turn back. I won’t give away the plot on this one, but it’s an unsettling, twisting, ultimately devastating read, taken from Diabolical Plots’ special telepathy issue, Diabolical Thoughts.

Another story that straddles the line between horror and fantasy is Monte Lin’s “The Dream Market” from Translunar Travelers Lounge: “You begin this dream in the middle, as always, knowing that the merchant is named Nihtcargast and sells nightmares.” Here, memories and trauma surface and take shape in the realm of dreams and nightmares, but in the dream market, trades can be made. Nightmares and memories can be traded and exchanged for something different, maybe even a chance at healing and understanding. I love how Lin captures the terrifying and unsettling weirdness of nightmares, making the market disturbing and scary, while also, eventually, turning it into a place where change and restoration are possible.

Hallo my dearest Strange fam, wishing all three and a half of you an auspicious and prosperous 2023, I hope it hasn’t been too terrible so far. Today, we continue on our journey through the BBC sci-fi stories of the past, with a radio drama called The Slide which came out in 1966. It was Victor Pemberton’s first science fiction story, and was apparently rejected for the Dr. Who series before finding its way to becoming its own radio drama. Maurice Denham and Miriam Margolyes are both in it, and frankly, that is why I’m listening to this. I think it’s about an earthquake in Southern England? Which is not that interesting for me honestly. So here is The Slide, Part One, Moment of Silence. Come on, Maurice and Miriam!

They didn’t mention Miriam Margolyes in the opening credits, probably because of 1966 sexism. Or maybe she doesn’t have a very big role.

I don’t like either of those scenarios.

We open with a Ken and a Janet climbing a hill, admiring the town and the air and other such things.

Someone called Hugh Deveril built the town and went from sweeping to building aforementioned town just so y’all know.

Ken doesn’t like him. Anyway nobody cares, Ken.

Wow so before they get married, Ken says he needs to fix Janet’s political views #feminism

Why does that sound painful?

Now Janet is hearing something but Ken and I don’t hear anything.

She’s hearing that it’s super-quiet. So Janet technically didn’t hear anything either.

She’s like omg it’s so quiet look at the grass Janet grass is generally quiet.

She means the grass is not moving. Ok, we’ll allow that.

Apparently there is no breeze and no birds but Ken has pointed out that you can see the English Channel which I guess is practically the same thing.

Janet is like fuck this, I want to go home, I’ve had a headache for a week.

I heard that “having a headache” was once code for constipation.

Now Janet is complaining that the sun is too bright because Janet just wants to complain about everything today.

Now we are in a meeting in the aforementioned town called Redlow I think. A dude is talking about how he took the farmers’ lands and gave them homes.

Although the farmers probably already had homes on those farms.

I’m guessing Deveril is the bad guy.

He claims that Redlow used to be a swamp and he has now brought them into the future before the future. Yes he said that.

In a shocking turn of events, none of the local farmers agree with anything Deveril is saying.

By the by, all the main characters seemed to have posh accents while the locals talk like that guy from Mary Poppins.

Anyway, Janet has fainted.

You really don’t sound well, Janet.

Conveniently, Ken is a doctor.

Janet just said that it’s too late but I think we can all agree that it is never too late for proper hydration and a high-fibre diet.

Ah, here comes the earthquake.

It’s over now.

A constable has just received a shocking phone call about a crack in a road.

Not sure if that’s shocking after an earthquake?

In my youth, we used to use crack as an insulting term of endearment. Like, “why are you such a crack,” or “are you a crack,” or “look at you standing here like a crack.” So this whole situation is taking on a new dimension for me you see.

Everyone is saying that it’s impossible to have earthquakes in England.

Is it really?

“Between 200 and 300 earthquakes are detected and located in the UK, by the British Geological Survey annually.”

And to add insult to injury, I also see that the British Geological Survey has recorded about 13 instances of earthquakes happening before 1966 with the earliest one being in 1382.

Anyway, that crack lol in the road is a whopping 100 yards long.

Janet has concussion but they don’t know how she got it because she went down before the quake started.

Maybe that’s when she got the concussion? Whatever I don’t care.

Can Janet foresee earthquakes? I SURE HOPE SO.

I haven’t heard Maurice or Miriam yet #sad

Oh Mr. Deveril is Maurice! Wow, he’s missing that gravelly tone he had in Maigret.

Someone who I think is supposed to be a scientist just said that the tremors were a degree 6, which I think is something he just made up.

Maybe the Richter scale didn’t exist in 1966.

“The idea of a logarithmic earthquake magnitude scale was first developed by Charles Richter in the 1930's” wtf you guys.

I guess this would explain that whole ‘earthquakes never happen in England’ school of thought.

An actual cravat was occurred in the earth’s crust.

I know it’s supposed to be crevasse but this is my column so I can do whatever I want. And it’s funny. I see now that it is not funny.

Anyway, so there’s all this major devastation and stuff but Deveril has just said he wants everything up and running ASAP.

Everyone is telling him to check with Whitehall first and he, like me, is saying that he can do whatever he wants.

What is Whitehall?

I’m not that invested in finding out.

A professor, who I have to say seems like kind of a dick, has just said that these tremors were not unexpected.

Just wanted to keep that info to yourself, did you?

He didn’t say anything because he knew it would happen someplace in Southern England but he didn’t know exactly where.

What the actual fuck, bro.

Check this out fam! Some time ago, there were strange explosions in the English Channel. Now they have happened in this village. And Ken said they could see the English Channel from that hill! COULD THERE BE A CONNECTION.

A Chilean professor named Gomez has now been added to the mix because he has been studying these things but mostly because he’s a suspicious and mysterious foreigner.

Deveril is like I won’t allow this dangerous person into my country dammit!

You know why? Because Prof Gomez is a pacifist.

Apparently Gomez might seduce the entire farming community into engaging in pacifist terrorism BUT NOT ON DEVERIL’S WATCH HE WON’T BY GOD.

Enter Prof Gomez because Deveril is not as hot as he thinks he is.

Now, for some local colour, we are listening to a folksy woman watching television and engaging in conversation with a folksy dude.

Their dog is barking and driving folksy dude bananas and folksy woman has suddenly slipped into a reverie, saying that the dog is going to die soon anyway.

Wtf folksy woman.

Folksy dude is now heading outside to inflict some low-level animal abuse on said dog wtf don’t do that!

We are now listening in on someone called Old Ted, who is unconscious with concussion but has no visible injuries and is breathing like he has terrible asthma.

Old Ted is opening his eyes!

Old Ted has closed his eyes.

But we have no time for this scintillating drama because now, we are listening to Prof Gomez explain how he discovered two large cracks lol in the English Channel.

Are the cracks lol moving from the sea to the land?

Now Ken and the constable are taking Old Ted to the hospital.

They see mysterious lights near the crack lol in the road!

It’s folksy dude looking for his dog.

So the good news is he found the dog and managed to jump across the crack lol to safety. The bad news is that now Old Ted is missing.

Weird sounds are happening now.

Ew, it sounds like indigestion.

Fam there is a bunch of mud slowly creeping out of the crack lol whaaaaaaat

The mud is going to eat everyone, isn’t it?

I don’t hate this idea.

The show seems to be over but where was Miriam??

She was the folksy woman! Oh wow, she sounded really different.

Despite my smarminess, I have to say I liked this. Unlike a lot of the American radio sci-fi which tends to go all over the place a lot, the British shows seem to be a little more focused. Just a little though. This one is pretty good so far, in my opinion. Do join us another time, when we will find out more about the mud and the crack, lol. Bai.