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Transcript

Critical Friends Episode 21: On Style

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

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

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

[Musical sting]

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

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

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

Paul Kincaid: Yeah it is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul Kincaid: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So unpack that a bit for us, Paul.

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

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

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

[Musical sting]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul Kincaid: Yes!

Dan Hartland: It is. OK!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dawn Macdonald: And male.

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

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

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

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

[Musical sting]

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul Kincaid: Yes. I do, don’t I?

Dan Hartland: You do. Yeah. Which is …

Paul Kincaid: I love that word.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul Kincaid: Oh, yes, yes.

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

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

Dan Hartland: Great shout.

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

Dan Hartland: Was it the style, Paul?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dawn Macdonald: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dawn Macdonald: They just wanted to read them!

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

Dan Hartland: It is, yeah!

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

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

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

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

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: Is there anything we’ve missed?

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

Dan Hartland: Of course we have!

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

All: [laughter]

[Musical outro]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In this episode of the Strange Horizons Fiction podcast, Michael Ireland presents Natasha King's 'Aquarium for Lost Souls' read by Jenna Hanchey.

Subscribe to the Strange Horizons podcast: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠

Transcript

Critical Friends Episode 20: On Book Clubs

Dan Hartland: Welcome to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons criticism podcast. I’m Dan Hartland, and in this episode I’ll be ceding the floor for some very special guests; but more on that shortly. 

In every episode of Critical Friends, we discuss SFF reviewing: what it is, why we do it, how it’s going.

In this episode, and as part of our 2026 criticism special issue, Strange Horizons reviewer Tristan Beiter introduces us to the Ursula K. Le Guin book club he’s been taking part in for a couple of years. Alongside its other members, they discuss the book club as a forum for, and a practice of, criticism. How does it differ from the academy, from more formal venues, from fan spaces—and what kinds of critical activity and insight do those differences, equip it uniquely to deliver? 

The group—which also includes Emma Pernudi-Moon, Tymek Chrzanowski, and Jude Beiter—discuss what it has been like arriving at a particular reading of Le Guin’s work in the round, how being part of a book club has affected and influenced their reading—and what they’ve learned about books, community, and even themselves in the act of group reading. 

I found the whole thing such an interesting discussion. I think you will, too. So, let me hand over to Tristan Beiter.

[Musical Sting] 

Tristan Beiter: Hello, everyone. I’m excited to talk to you about the Ursula Le Guin book club that we’ve been doing. Let’s start by having everyone introduce themselves briefly. 

So I’m Tristan Beiter. 

Jude Beiter: And I’m Jude Biter. 

Tymek Chrzanowski: I am Tymek Chrzanowski.

Emma Bee Perudi-Moon: I’m Emma Pernudi-Moon.

Tristan Beiter: And we have, for the last two years, been engaging in an on and off, mostly over the summer, group read-through of the bulk of Ursula K. Le Guin’s work. 

We’d been talking amongst ourselves about the way that this book club has gone and how it’s shaped our experience of both her work in particular and speculative fiction more broadly. So where I wanted to start was by asking everyone to sort of chime in about what sense we have as a group about the book club as a thing that exists in the world, culturally and as an experience that we’ve been participating in. And how has that shaped how we’ve read Le Guin? 

I know one way into this is that, when we read The Left Hand of Darkness, we talked about our different experiences reading that book in a classroom setting versus in this setting. But I think we can address anything about how this has shaped our readings. 

Tymek Chrzanowski: Yeah. I mean, for me, the first thing that stands out about this endeavor of a book club is that it’s very … it gives a very concentrated direction to the reading. Like, normally, you know, I read a lot of speculative fiction, but it can be somewhat diffuse and move between different things in different series at different times. We’ll take large breaks, but when we have this sort of concentrated book club, for the three months or so in the summer while we’re doing it, it’s very focused.

And we’re moving through a lot of this material in a relatively short period of time and focusing on it, which gives a very concentrated look into it and really engaging with it. And, by the nature of having to, of bringing things to, a discussion with other people, you—I at least—find myself pulling on things to remember and bring up and discuss, more so than I do in just my personal reading as I’m just, you know, enjoying the story on its own.

It gives a deeper level of engagement. Because I want to have something coherent to bring to the group.

Tristan Beiter: That makes a lot of sense. Jude, Emma, how has this affected your reading, do you think? 

Jude Beiter: Yeah, I think for me, as like the primary place where I engage at this point in my life with literature is still school, the kind of different environment that is the book club as a place—where it’s still reading together, it’s still a communal engagement, and there’s still real serious discussion to be had, but there’s no expectation of “solving” the text or figuring it out—it’s just a matter of like, we come together to enjoy and engage communally in like a de-hierarchized or non-hierarchized space, which is very different from my experience in the classroom as an environment, where there are like definitive power dynamics at play and there’s an expectation to perform intelligence as a part of your reading—as opposed to the opportunity to just have the sentiment of like, “This was really emotionally effective for me” be a complete sentence in the space of the book club. 

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: Yeah, I’ll agree with that. I feel like it, for me, feels similar to a lot of focused, seminar-style literature classes I’ve had where we’re, you know, kind of diving deep on one topic or author but again without the aspect of performing being good at reading book! And the fluidity between, “here are all the serious ways I think about this as a dramaturge, here are the patterns I’m seeing” and “I think there’s a motif here—I truly do not understand it!” or being able to join the discussion, like, “I actually have only read half the book!” But I don’t need to pretend that I have in fact read the whole book as one might feel the need to do in a university setting where this is like rated. 

It is much more about, for me, the pleasure of finding patterns in the work and how that can kind of come together communally with everybody’s observations. 

Tristan Beiter: Yeah. I wanna second what you’re all saying. And I think, as I mentioned earlier, this really came up when we were talking about The Left Hand of Darkness, which I know both Jude and I, at least, have read in classroom settings specifically. And in those cases, the classroom ended up feeling like a much more combative space than a collaborative one. There was this sense that, if people had differing readings, we needed to come to a class consensus of what the … maybe not the right reading, but the best reading was, in a way that I don’t feel in the book club environment. 

And also where I feel like it’s easier to engage with different aspects of the text. Like, I know when I was in that classroom setting, I was really excited to talk about The Left Hand of Darkness’ structure, and its use of documents as a formal object; but because of the formality of the space you needed a higher critical mass of participants interested in any given aspect of the book in order to justify talking about it. 

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: And also, you kind of need to … there’s almost a justification for each book in a classroom setting. Like, “This is why we’re talking about this one.” And usually for Left Hand of Darkness, I feel like it gets overwritten as like, “Oh, this is … we’re talking about gender, guys! This is the sort of thing we have to get at from this book. This is the nut we have to crack of, like, how exactly is it working?” And also, interestingly for me, I feel like there’s an absence of worrying about or poking at the political efficacy of the book.

Of course, I’m very interested in looking at what the books are doing politically, but there’s less of a worry about is this strategy effective? And it’s more about kind of letting them be, I think, in a way—because they’re already, we have already chosen these books, they haven’t been chosen for us—to kind of follow the book club structure a bit. I think there’s something about it being one author that is also doing this, but I’m honestly not sure what that is. 

Jude Beiter: Yeah. I definitely want to second what Emma just said about the classroom space kind of labeling The Left Hand of Darkness as the gender book, and then the expectation that we would decide as a class whether or not this was an effective representation of gender non-conforming people. And in that space for me, as a gender non-conforming person, there was an expectation of like, well, “What do you say? Um, like, is this an effective representation of non-binary people?” And that kind of expectation to decide is absent from the much less combative and demanding environment of the book club. 

And so we could just have the discussion of, “She is doing this thing with gender” without having to worry about whether or not this is the most effective way to do it. We could just talk about what was actually happening. 

Tymek Chrzanowski: It’s interesting talking because, if I remember, as we talked about Left Hand of Darkness, we of course did mention genders—like, “Ursula is doing things with gender here”—but it was a fairly minor part of our overall discussion, as we followed threads as folks that are all fairly queer and enmeshed in gender as a construct and deconstructing that. Yes, this was written in the seventies. We see that there is something going there. She’s doing something with gender, but there are other things that are more interesting for us to talk about. So it did come up, but we didn’t feel obligated to focus on it in a way that a classroom might frame around it.

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: That’s true. Like, the whole kind of pseudo Cold War vibe that’s going on in the contrast culture, I feel like it’s so easy to overlook. 

Jude Beiter: We talked a lot more about that and honestly, I think we ended up speaking about gender more in relation to books where there’s less stuff very clearly happening. Like, when we read Earthsea, we talked a fair amount about gender in that context, and I just think there was more freedom in the space to kind of follow alternative threads. 

Tristan Beiter: Yeah, I think that’s a great point—that by being outside of the classroom justification, where something needs to be the Whatever book, we were able to sort of track connections across different works. 

I think your point about tracking the gender and sexuality relationships of Earthsea, which on the surface are such a small part of what’s happening in those novels, but in another way are super essential—like, Tenar was her first female protagonist. And I think that that question wouldn’t have come up necessarily in the context of reading The Tombs of Atuan in, like, a survey of children’s literature. 

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: I think it also—the having it all be focused on one author—removes the pressure of each book to sort of justify where Ursula K. Le Guin is an author that you should pay attention to and read, and that has these certain themes in her work.

Like, you don’t have to pull out every theme from every work. It’s much more, “Oh, we can kind of see a cumulative process.” Especially when you consider how many years that these worlds are unfolding over within the fiction and also in her own life, you get sort of this longer, whole tapestry of these things that the author keeps thinking about and returning to that I found enriching as a reading experience. 

Tristan Beiter: Yeah. There’s a long time between works like A Wizard of Earthsea and The Left Hand of Darkness and the latest stuff, things like The Telling or The Farthest Shore. 

Tymek Chrzanowski: Or even just like the big sort of almost-trilogy split in Earthsea and seeing the way that her … like, following this trajectory of these themes over the course of her career.

Tristan Beiter: Yeah. And I wonder as a related question to this: You mentioned, Emma, about Le Guin as a valuable author who is worth reading, and of course you get that when you encounter her in a classroom setting as well, or when you notice that the Library of America has been putting out editions of all of her work. But I was also thinking about that in terms of the book club as an object—since speculative fiction book clubs happen, but I don’t know about the rest of you, but for me, when I think of the book club, I think of like middle-aged people reading realist fiction as sort of the default model.

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: I think about my local library where I can physically see the book club kits in the mezzanine, and also see the people coming in to do their book clubs—and it is generally middle-aged to older women reading famous, bestselling, like you said realist literary fiction. Somehow the prototypical book club book that I have in my head is Joy Luck Club, I don’t know why that is. When I hear book club, that’s what I think of. 

Jude Beiter: As soon as you said Joy Luck Club, I was like, yep, that is the prototypical book club book! And I think for me, part of the real joy of this experience—and also part of where it has so much like critical value for me as a scholar—has been in taking up this mode that is associated with kind of realist fiction and being, like, “What if we make it a space for the speculative, choose to use the modality in a new way? What can we learn about speculative fiction that way?” 

And I think one of the things that I feel like I have learned about speculative fiction by borrowing this modality to engage with it—at least what I have learned about Ursula Le Guin—is how like deeply communal her novels are in their plots and in their structure. Even novels which have a clear main character—which not all of them do—have extended casts and emphasize community in ways that I don’t know that I would’ve noticed if I was not engaging with it in this space that was all about finding a casual community in reading.

[Musical Sting]

Tymek Chrzanowski: The communal reading and interpretation of these stories, and following a meandering path through them, feels very thematically appropriate for Le Guin. 

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: Yeah, I agree with that. And I feel like it also echoes with the idea of less pressure and performativity, the feeling of complete sentences—“Oh, I agree with that! I also noticed that!”—whereas in a classroom setting, that’s kind of not worth saying, that’s like taking up too much of your hour and a half—if you’re lucky!—discussion time. And, because of the reoccurring nature and the fact that we can have the discussions that kind of expand as we like, and we can return to material, as we focus on the book that we’ve just read, but we’ll often analyze previous works in the context of a new work. This creates this, I think, beautiful space for going-and-returning structure, which I think shows up a lot in her work. 

Tristan Beiter: Yeah, no, I agree. And I think, in the spirit of that, that sort of brings us to the other big thing that I wanted to make sure we talked about today, which is the beginning of the project—where we started not with The Left Hand of Darkness or with her first novels, but we started with Always Coming Home. Part of that—I was very open at the time!—was because I was hoping to find an excuse to read it, because it had been on my to-be-read pile for a long time, and I knew it had all kinds of interesting formal stuff that I was really excited about. But I think that it’s shaped this project maybe more than I was expecting when I suggested that we start there. And what we’ve been saying just now about community and circling back feels really in line with the thematics of that novel. And so I was wondering if other people had thoughts on how starting there has shaped their experience of reading her work. 

Tymek Chrzanowski: Oh my gosh, I’m so glad … I literally was going to bring up, that we started with Always Coming Home. It, yes, it’s so thematic and I feel like, again, in a way that makes a lot of sense as we talked about each set of novels, of books, that we read.

I feel like the specter of Always Coming Home always came up because it’s such an encapsulation of her work in such a good frame, I think, for engaging with it. 

Jude Beiter: Yeah. I mean, I think that Always Coming Home was such a beautiful starting point for this project. And the way that she developed this society within that novel … almost like, in a weird way, I felt at various times when we were doing the book club discussions about later novels, that we were engaging, not unlike the Kesh: This sense of, “Well, we’ll simply treat everything as though it is real.” Which I think is a foundational part of both Kesh society and how her speculative fiction operates. 

It’s not even the suspension of disbelief—just, like, throw out the concept of disbelief entirely. Just think it is true. And if you can do that, then you can engage with her works more fully. This kind of mode of storytelling as something really fundamental to the way people connect with each other, I think, is something that I really felt throughout the experience of this book club—of reading together as an opportunity to learn from people, as scholars and as people, all at once just felt very connected to how Always Coming Home operates? Like, both thematically and structurally. 

Tymek Chrzanowski: Yeah, and the freedom to pull in different things really easily I think also, yeah, mirrors that structure of Always Coming Home where it’s this sort of diffuse collection of things, this ethnologue with poetry and plays and longer narratives and little pictures of guinea pigs—where, you know, because we are a group of friends fundamentally communicating informally and over text, we can have like multi-threaded conversations where we’re kind of having multiple things going on at the same time. We’re referencing earlier works, but also completely outside things we wouldn’t necessarily pull on, pop culture connections, in a classroom or reference … talking about the internet posting  culture that exists around novels or characters. Like, I remember posting some things about, as we encountered them, memes of The Left Hand of Darkness and whatnot, and then having a larger conversation. That is part of what we’ve been doing in response to [the work] that feels very in line, structurally, with Always Coming Home. 

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: Yeah. And I didn’t join for Always Coming Home, but an exciting thing about the book club format is I can still feel its influence through all of your analysis of it, and of how it keeps coming up. So I feel enriched by this text, even though I haven’t had my own experience with it yet. But excitingly, it doesn’t feel like the classroom version of like, “You haven’t done the reading—quick, assemble something that looks like you understand it!” I can allow my partial understanding to be true. 

Tristan Beiter: Yeah. And I think, let me see if I can find my—there it is—my copy, as what you’re saying about partial understanding I feel like is also sort of endemic to both the book club form and to starting with that novel. 

I’m looking for a particular passage. If I can find it really quickly, early on, we get the very first bit where Pandora arrives. Pandora worries about what she is doing, and it ends, “Even if the bowl is broken (and the bowl is broken), from the clay and the making and the firing and the pattern, even if the pattern is incomplete (and the pattern is incomplete), let the mind draw its energy. Let the heart complete the pattern.” And I feel like, because we’re all talking together, because we’re all building on partial understanding and acknowledging the partiality of our understanding—since, in real practice in the classroom, understanding is partial, right? In real practice, when you write or read academic work, it’s not this totalizing, absolute knowledge of something, but it pretends it is—I feel like the book club form doesn’t require that we pretend that, and starting with Always Coming Home in part is about that, but also it’s just a really hard novel.

Tymek Chrzanowski: “Novel” in quotes!

Tristan Beiter: I definitely felt like it’s the one that, even after reading it really carefully and making notes and talking with everyone about it, I came away being like, “Yeah. Got some tiny fraction of what there is to get out of that book.” And I feel like that was also really empowering for me, having that right away be like, “OK, I don’t need to solve the book.” Because we started with an unsolvable book. 

Tymek Chrzanowski: It definitely feels like the sort of text you could return to over and over and over again and not plumb all of its depths. 

Jude Beiter: And the format allowed us to … like, I think the way we kept coming back to Always Coming Home in order to theorize the rest of her work through the lens of that book was really indicative of the way that we hadn’t solved it, and there was more to discuss and we all knew it and could admit it. And that allowed us to keep returning.

Tymek Chrzanowski: “Real travel is returning,” I mean, is the quote from The Dispossessed, yes?

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: Yeah. I feel like I also really … I mean, I’ve had an an English Literature background. Jude and Tristan, you have as well, obviously. And then, Tymek, you’ve been in some, some English Literature environments, like a lot of us, but I dunno, I feel like your linguistics training comes out a bit. But having that even little bit diversity of perspective being held as an equal way of knowing, or trying to, I found very valuable. 

And it’s kind of come into our daily life in a way. For context, Tymek and I are partners that have been together for ten years, but now he will read me Ursula K. Le Guin poems, or talk about things from Always Coming Home, as kind of part of the fabric of our daily life and connection, in a way that I think wouldn’t have come about without the book club in the same way. 

Jude Beiter: Yeah. I definitely feel similarly about the way that like Tristan and I as siblings talk about these books in a very quotidian, non-organized way. I feel like Ursula Le Guin and Always Coming Home come up constantly when we talk to each other about things in the world. And I think that this, that the informality of the environment of the book club, is part of what allows that seepage into really established interpersonal relationships—that she can just kind of like come in and join those relationships and those conversations and seep into daily life in that way. 

Tymek Chrzanowski: Yeah. Because the book club ultimately … Like, a big difference between the book club and an academic environment is, even if you are very passionate about the academics that you’re pursuing—you’re, you know, you’re in a class because you want to be, and not because it’s a requirement—even in that sort of best-case scenario, the structure of the academics is a little bit of an abstraction. You are engaging with it for reasons beyond merely your interest and passion. Whereas in the book club, this is a fully voluntary thing we’re doing with friends and we can engage at whatever level we want to.

So, fundamentally, we’re here because we’re excited and passionate about it, which breeds this deeper connection where we’re doing it because we’re invested. So we’re pulling on all of the things that we find most interesting. I think that’s part of the value of it, because it lets us bring … it lets these conversations continue to influence and affect our lives and perspectives beyond what might be in the classroom.

Tristan Beiter: Yeah, I agree. And I think related to that is that, even when we have given ourselves deadlines, right—like, “Oh, we need to have these books read by such and such date so that we can actually like meet and talk about them!”—it’s never work. For those of us in the discipline of English, criticism is work, right? It’s exciting work. It’s valuable work. It’s work I wouldn’t give up the chance to do for the world. But it’s still work. There are still these external pressures to produce a product that adheres to the rules of the university. 

And I feel like the book club has allowed us to sort of bridge fan excitement—because we’re all fans of speculative fiction—with a critical attitude that is certainly findable in fan spaces other than things like book clubs, but I find that when you go online and you’re on Bluesky and everyone’s microblogging, the way fan engagement works there are pressures that prevent criticism from the level of intensity it reaches when it’s work. And I feel like the book club, for me at least, has allowed me to sort of escape some of those tensions without making it back into work.

[Musical Sting]

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: Yeah, I really like the feeling of kind of living with and alongside these books that is created by the book club—and then the fact that it is a book club of friends, of people that know each other and interact outside of this—that makes them shared cultural objects in a way that can be, honestly, pretty hard to get with books outside of very popular children’s literature. 

Like, a lot of the time—Tristan, you may understand this—as a child who read many books, it could be sort of an isolating activity. There were all of these worlds and people and ideas that I was thinking about, then I had to find somebody else who had read the darn book! We’re definitely using some book club structure, but there’s also a way in which it feels to me like a friend/fan community similar to, “Oh, we all watch this TV show. We all kind of are trying to keep up with it in a certain way.” The ways that and movies are more readily shared in this kind of current media environment, and how it can be kind of hard to share a book because it can feel like a big obligation. Even if you read a book, you’re like, “Hey, I think this would be really meaningful to you.” You give it to someone and then they’re like, “Oh, I need to read this book. I need to commit to this project.” And this has a looseness to it that helps create a sharing, I don’t know. 

Jude Beiter: Yeah. I think both Tristan’s point about work and your point, Emma, about sharing and about the lack of obligation I really experienced through this book club—in part because there was always a fluidity of expectations. 

I happened to really dislike Le Guin’s short fiction in general, and so when we got to her books of short fiction, I was like, I very much felt like pushing my way through this would be work, and that’s not the point of this. I wouldn’t be sharing and engaging the same way that I have been with these novels. And so I simply won’t read them. I’ll step away from Tales from Earthsea, for example, and allow that space to exist uncorrupted by the pressure, by the sense of pressure and obligation, without me for a little bit. And then I’ll come back in when we get back into work that I want to read.

And I think that fluidity and that sense of “there is something about the enthusiastic engagement that is worth preserving,” even within the group, even at the cost of not actually participating myself, that I think really speaks to how resonant the community is.

Tristan Beiter: Mm-hmm. I wonder if that’s related to what I was saying about fan spaces. Like, larger fan spaces can be really energizing, but they also come with built-in FOMO, right? If you’re not going to the events, or if you miss the episode or what have you. And I feel like one of the things about the book club is that the intimacy of forming a book club and setting out to read things with a defined, relatively small group of people is that that stops being a problem. 

Tymek Chrzanowski: Yeah. And there’s not the … In a larger sort of fan place, there’s an assumption that you will want to or have consumed everything and know everything. Like, you know, the way that the internet is, where we all have access to comprehensive wikis, so you can all know the lore, sculpts a very particular, I think, attitude towards those things. 

Whereas, you know, here, even if you don’t read Tales from Earthsea, Le Guin’s work and the work of the book club here is that you still can participate and understand—because you have this through-line of understanding the themes and vibes and the history of the both diegetically in the world and also of her career, rather than like, “Oh, I have all the details of the lore.” 

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: Yeah. And she’s a very lore-resistant writer in the way that she builds her histories. 

Jude Beiter: I also think that the really rigorous critical engagement of the book club is part of what allows for that like fluidity. Also in that need to, that lack of need to, know all of the lore in the way of the larger fan space—because there’s not a distinction being drawn between the  serious and casual reader in the context of the book club. There is no casual reader and there also is no serious reader. There was just the book club reader.

Who steps into the space and for whom? “Here’s this really complex thought about the thematics of this book” and “that scene made me cry” are like equally valuable whole sentences, and that’s not always the case in larger fan spaces in my experience, where you can’t engage as deeply in the criticism. And so there’s an expectation to instead prove fanhood through literacy, through like lore literacy. 

Tymek Chrzanowski: I think that’s an interesting difference both against fan spaces, but also going back to academia. This ability to, as people have said, to be like honest of, “I don’t, you know, this one doesn’t interest me.” Or “I, you know, I tried and didn’t get through it.” And there’s not the shame and also kind of implicit—not implicit, often explicit!—failure to do the “proper thing” where you have like grades and things on the line. So that is another contrast with the academic there, is that it’s, you know, you can … this moving in and out is more accessible.

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: It’s non-evaluative. In a fan space, when you choose not to engage with part of the work and say, “Hmm, this isn’t really for me,” you might be saying kind of implicitly like, “This isn’t worth considering. This isn’t the important part of the canon.” Sometimes, even if you’re not saying that, it can get kind of taken that way, like in academia—kind of these ideas around what is worth engaging with, what has value.

And here, I like that we can step away from something or partially understand something, and not be saying anything about its value as a work of art or as an analyzable piece of literature. It kind of already has that innately. 

Tristan Beiter: Yeah, I think that’s a great point, and it makes me think about the sort of recurring microblogging discourse about whether or not to be a science fiction fan you need to read whatever. Usually that means like the men of the Golden Age: Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, et cetera. But sometimes you’ll see, more radically, claims that you do or don’t need to read anything older than five years old or what have you. 

Often, very often, on both sides of that argument you see things couched as like, “Well, Heinlein was a reactionary and so you can skip him, he doesn’t matter because he was bad” or “this novel can’t be skipped because it was so important to the history of the genre.” And you see these same logics in academia. 

Obviously Le Guin is a major author that has lots of scholarship on her and is often one of those names that people say you “have to read.” But I feel like, by forming it as a book club through this casual but intimate and intense engagement, we can sort of, as you said, opt out of those questions of value by saying, “We wouldn’t be doing this if it didn’t have value, but that doesn’t mean everyone needs to experience everything exactly the same way.”

Tymek Chrzanowski: I think there’s also something to be said, because we’re engaging with like big sweeps of her work—you know, last summer we did Always Coming Home and then just did all of Earthsea, and then this year we did most of her Hainish novels—we kind of avoid of that, like, “Oh, what you must read.” Because like when people talk about Le Guin, I think, what comes up is people will generally talk, in my experience, about The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. They might talk about Wizard of Earthsea, and probably, you know, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” will come up. But no one talks about Planet of Exile. No one talks about City of Illusions.

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: Which they should be because they’re wild, yeah!

Tymek Chrzanowski: But like, because we’re engaging with this in this … like, seriously, but also in this fannish way, and going in this broad sweep, I think we get to engage with some of these quote-unquote lesser works that are exciting and do interesting things, even if none of us were in love with City of Illusions.

But it does interesting things and you can see how themes in there and threads that get pulled on and plucked and mature across her work. Which is really interesting. Because you know, I think there’s a lot of the DNA of Always Coming Home in City of Illusions despite it not being, you know, I think nearly as comprehensively interesting, exciting, and innovative. The Prince of Kansas and his fortune-telling future loom is extremely Always Coming Home, and the Forest People, the Plains People that they encounter: They are really, I think, a prototype in some ways of the Condor People from Always Coming Home. And so you can see these threads and this maturation.

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: Mm-hmm. 

Tymek Chrzanowski: Which is really neat!

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: And I like doing that without the pressure to Understand Le Guin and put her together as a puzzle or, “Oh, we’re doing this to try to understand science fiction.” The lack of a larger goal like that is really useful to me. 

Tristan Beiter: Yeah, I agree. We’ve mostly actually answered the third question that I had about how doing the book club has sort of shaped our engagement with the rest of Le Guin’s oeuvre with the things that we didn’t sort of call out as touchstones. And so I guess I just wanted to see if anyone had any closing thoughts they wanted to wrap up with as we finish this up and also start thinking about next summer—if we want to continue doing this, since at this point we will have read most of her novels. 

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: Try it out. You can, too! 

Tymek Chrzanowski: Yeah, I would say it has been very interesting and valuable.

I think, you know, like I said, you could do this with other people, I’m sure, but I think Le Guin is a really great place and has a lot of things to offer. Like, I’ve independently because of this, read through her poetry. Currently I live in Portland, where Le Guin lived and worked for most of her life. There’s currently a little exhibition at the Oregon Contemporary about her life and her work, which was really interesting and cool to visit. Yeah, it’s been very valuable. I’ve come to really appreciate Le Guin as an author through this process. 

Jude Beiter: Yeah, I think that just having the … to kind of echo Emma, like, you can too! This is so valuable as a process method. No matter what your actual background in literary analysis and criticism is, just the work of sitting down and reading together has been such a valuable and engaging and caring activity. That has really been very enriching.

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: Also living in Portland, and with Le Guin’s relationship to Oregon as a place, I think that has also been very valuable to me. Because that’s not a thread I would’ve pulled or picked up on. But Tymek really got a lot of that, especially through the poetry, and how he’s been able to informally share that with me. So I think there’s something to … kind of getting specific with it in terms of place or cultural ties that you might share with other folks? 

Tymek Chrzanowski: Oh yeah. I would definitely say, if you have never read someone who’s really contemporary to where you are in space and time, this has been a really valuable experience for me as someone who largely grew up in Oregon and can recognize the particularities in Le Guin’s work that I think are connected to, you know, where she lived and grew up. It is worth looking for authors and also poets—other takeaway, more people should read poetry!—authors and poets and people that have done work where you are connected to, where you lived and grew up. I did not realize how exciting and powerful of an experience that can be before this.

Tristan Beiter: I definitely want to co-sign all of that and thank you all for talking through these thoughts about this experience with me. I look forward to continuing to talk about books with all of you. 

Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon: Yay!

Tymek Chrzanowski: Yay!

[Musical Sting]

Tymek Chrzanowski: Yeah. This is definitely a shout out for Tristan in particular for organizing this process and idea. It’s been great. [Laughter]

[Musical Outro]

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

Do dig into the rest of the Criticism Special. I’m off to form a book club. See you next time.

Transcript

Critical Friends Episode 19: On Cozy Horrors

Dan Hartland: Welcome to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons criticism podcast. I'm Dan Hartland, and in this episode I'll be joined by scholar of the gothic and co-host of the excellent However Improbable podcast, Marisa Mercurio, and the writer and stalwart of the Strange Horizons Reviews Department, Shannon Fay.

In every episode of Critical Friends, we more or less discuss SFF reviewing: what it is, why we do it, how it's going. In this episode, we'll be talking about horror, and perhaps specifically its cozy variety. From the gothic to the slasher movie, how might texts within this increasingly broad tradition be judged as a success? And what should reviewers do when a given example falls short?

We talk about Bram Stoker and Agatha Christie, terrifying board games, and the chilling deeds of marketing departments. And we ask where horror finds itself right now … and whether that may be a dead end. (Yeah. Sorry about that.) 

Moving on! First, and as always, we started with Marisa and Shannon's latest reviews for Strange Horizons.

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: Okay, so thanks both of you for joining me here! Because, as always, I'm look on the lookout—I'm always on the hunt, every month—for two reviews that seem to talk to each other. And we're fortunate that there's always several different categories and candidates for this kind of thing. But your two really stood out to me as ones that are almost sort of weirdly next to each other.

Because you both looked at two books, which are kind of, I don't know—I mean, I'm gonna call 'em cozy horror, but we can kind of get into the weeds of that and whether I'm right about that and what that might be and what these books are. But also they're both books that feature art and craft and how that relates to the horror tropes, but also some of the more fantastical stuff that goes on in both books.

And also they both talk about gender and those kinds of things, too, to varying degrees of success. And that's the other thing that made me think, “OK, we've gotta have this conversation.” Because both of these books, you sort of liked them, but you kind of also were a little bit disappointed by them. So I really want to dig into that too. 

One of the things that I think about a lot is how we can responsibly dislike books (and sometimes, you know, irresponsibly if we want to!). But, like, how do we talk about books that don't work for us. So Shannon, let's start with you and The Macabre, because this is almost the quintessential “it was fun, but also kind of disappointing” kind of book. Do you want to talk just a little bit about what The Macabre is, what happens, why maybe it's not kind of double thumbs up. 

Shannon Fay: Part of the problem of talking about this book is I feel like it was let down by its marketing—things from the cover, which has a very awesome little piece of art of a screaming woman. Her face is upside down. There is a little train of skulls at her feet, you know, the tagline’s about how a picture is worth a thousand nightmares. All great, evocative stuff. But this book is more of a kind of jet-setting magical adventure with some horrific scenes. But just because something has horrific scenes, doesn't make it horror.

And I do think the gruesome moments are well done and they do help drive home how high the stakes are. But it doesn't invoke kind of fear or a sense of dread, right? So it's fun in that sense. But it's one of those: If you go in expecting one thing, you will be kind of disappointed. 

Dan Hartland: We see this a lot in genre, right? The way in which marketing works against the text. A lot of what you talk about in The Macabre in your review is that it's a kind of heist? 

Shannon Fay: Those scenes, the fact that it's kind of episodic, is enjoyable, right? It's like, “We found a new magical painting. You need to go and neutralize it.” And so you have like kind of the crew, the plan, how are we gonna get close to this painting, how will we neutralize it? And so it’s an art heist where the art can fight back. And, you know, that is just so fun! There's lots of fantasy books where people get, like, sucked into paintings and have to deal with like, “Oh no, now we're in the world of the painting.” Always kind of a fun trope. So all that is good stuff, right? 

Dan Hartland: So where do you think it goes wrong? Because that's such a great … like, if you sold me that book, right? “Art Heist, but the art fights back.” That's great! What a tagline! But that's not entirely how the book is sold or how the book … or where the book winds up.

Shannon Fay: Yeah. Well, there is also a through-line of people dealing with grief. So, you know, the title in that sense is accurate. It does have to do … Right. These paintings are attracted to people who have suffered a loss and are often offering a kind of Faustian bargain of maybe restoring that dead one to the people they are, like, sucking energy from.

So maybe they felt by leaning into kind of that element, it needed to be more in the horror genre. 

Dan Hartland: That leads us, I guess, Marisa, to your book, your most recent review for Strange Horizons, which is of Slashed Beauties, which lives in a similar kind of space where the cover and the copy and all of that sort of sets up a set of expectations about what this book is gonna be. 

Marisa Mercurio: Yes. 

Dan Hartland: Which is kind of a kind of neo-gothic thing, right?

Marisa Mercurio: Yes, it’s absolutely a neo-gothic novel. It is set in 1769. Primarily, there are two different timelines. We switch perspectives back and forth from our narrator in the modern period, who is an antiques dealer named Alice, and she is hunting down these wax Venuses, which are kind of this obscure item, real thing—from the eighteenth century primarily—which were, if you can sort of imagine the very famous painting of Venus emerging out of the shell but lying down, a wax cadaver that anatomists could, and students could, take apart to learn about the human body without having to use cadavers. Because cadavers were really hard to come by legally, and there were a lot of ethical, moral questions, religious questions tied up with using cadavers. 

And so Alice, in the present day, is hunting down very specific wax cadavers, these wax Venuses, because there is this rumor that, in the eighteenth century, they would come alive and murder men who went wronged them. And we learn very quickly that this is all true. 

And so in the 1769 narrative, which is the one that I think is both more successful and more frustrating—because of the potential that it has and doesn't quite get there—we see how these wax Venuses come to be. And then we very belatedly see them go on their murder spree.

Dan Hartland: And where does, if at all, where does the kind of horror that we are either encouraged to expect—or, you know, deliberately signaled that we should look forward to—how, where does that come in? How does that manifest? 

Marisa Mercurio: I do think it's important to think about this novel as a gothic novel primarily, rather than as a horror novel. And while those two genres have a lot of overlap, and horror emerged out of the gothic, the gothic is doing some slightly different things. But that being said, a lot of those elements that we're seeing are—I mean, in the present day we have a coven of witches, so we have the supernatural throughout the novel—but a lot of what is horrific in the past setting, in the 1769 narrative, is honestly the day-to-day lives of these women, who are down on their luck in the eighteenth century. We follow a protagonist and she is essentially a jilted lover who's come to London from the country and who is swept up by this older—I say older woman, she's like, I don't know, not what we consider old, right, but she's older than our protagonist. And she says, “I'm starting a new brothel. Essentially, it's gonna be really high end.” And so she sweeps our protagonist up in that and lavishes her with gifts and perfumes and things, all in preparation to have her be part of this brothel.

So a lot of the horror is really coming from the human interactions, just the state of these women's lives, in that they are treated cruelly by this madam and by the men who are in her circle. And then we are introduced later to I think an inexplicably evil witch who is creating these wax Venuses. And then of course we have the murders at the end of the novel as well. 

Dan Hartland: Yeah, and this is something that I think we should sort of dwell on a little bit—you know, the various implications of this word “horror.” And, as you say, your book is a gothic horror with a significant emphasis on the gothic, and as you say that … I mean, I want to say kind of social horror, in a way that exists, certainly in Slashed Beauties.

On the other hand, what we have in The Macabre is—as you say, Shannon—that title, but also like the really striking cover, which is sort of full of red and skulls, and Slashed Beauties as a title suggests the slasher movie as much as anything else. So what is going on here? Like, with how these books are playing with our various expectations of horror?

Because there are so many—and I think actually the resurgence of horror in the last couple of years has been on multiple fronts—there are all kinds of things going on here, which don't have to cohere. But these books are playing in these kinds of sandboxes, and they're setting up all kinds of associations or expectations that, you know, they follow through to one extent or another. So, Shannon: talk to me a bit about how you think The Macabre approaches its horrific elements. Like, is it just a marketing accretion?

Shannon Fay: I mean, it's hard to say. There are certain elements that maybe if the book had invested more, could have really developed this as a horror novel. So maybe an earlier draft, right, was more horrific. 

When the main character, Lewis—so his ancestor, Edgar, is the one who created these paintings, and it's that kind of familial connection that allows him to neutralize these paintings—and when he gets sucked into the world of these paintings, oftentimes he is actually sent to the past and speaking to Edgar. It's a little ambiguous about how real these kind of scenes are—whether he's actually in the past, whether he is more of a phantom in the past—but they're very good scenes and we get to see Edgar, his mental state, break down over the course of his life as each of these paintings are at a different point in his lifetime.

And that has a very strong, kind of gothic arch to it. But the book doesn't really spend a lot of time with it, you know? And I was wondering if this is because race is a big part of the narrative, right? Lewis being a Black American man, and Edgar being a white British man but his direct ancestor. And there are novels, like the classic novel Kindred, where the Black American main character is sent into the past and kind of has to reckon with their white ancestors. And so I was wondering if maybe—you know, understandably—Jackson was like, “No, I don't wanna write that book.” Right? Those aren't, that's not what I'm exploring here, which is totally valid. But there's other ways; maybe you could have explored this subplot more. 

Dan Hartland: It's so interesting to me that of all of the sort of horror options available to the text, it does have this kind of, as you say, this kind of familial, this ancestral, secret, right? Which is—again, Marisa is the expert here!—but speaks to me of many gothic novels, where, you know, there's this … Yeah, and yet it does not follow through. 

And yet it is the thing that is used to sell the book. And I just … yeah. I mean, Marisa: Do you think that your book is aware of where it is sitting in the present kind of profusion of horror? Or do you think it is just the thing that it is and we shouldn't be reading it within this kind of broader context of, you know, “Oh, it's very popular at the moment, so maybe that will sell.”

Marisa Mercurio: Right. It's a very good question. It's also a tricky one. I mean, I think that the novel is absolutely aware of it and engaging directly with its gothic underpinnings. It is an historical piece in a time period in which the gothic novel was at its very beginning—just a couple years before the novel is set, The Castle of Otranto, which is credited as the first gothic novel, was published; and of course then you sort of see this explosion with particularly Ann Radcliffe at the end of the eighteenth century.

So I think it's very aware of the fact that it is playing in the, you know, proverbial gothic sandbox. The cover, as you mentioned, plays towards that sensibility as well. And I think what you had mentioned earlier, too, Dan, about the title is interesting: slashed beauties is … when I was doing some research on wax Venuses—which were a thing that I had been familiar with prior to reading the novel, but had never done a deep dive on—I did come across that term slashed beauty. So it seems that it has been applied to wax Venuses elsewhere. However, I think that of course it brings to mind a slasher, and I think part of that is this feminist—but I think is really more of a pseudo-feminist—novel, which is I think the reason the novel is being written. It is marketed as, “This is a revenge tale against the men who have wronged these women.” 

However, I think when you read the novel that really, that really falls apart, for various reasons. But I think, to me, what is problematic about the novel—and in conjunction with its marketing—is that it is trying to present itself as this very didactic feminist message, when in fact both the narrative doesn't fully support that.

And then the central item, the wax Venus, the novel is centered on is a lot more thematically rich and complex than the novel wants it to be unfortunately. So everything kind of gets flattened in a way that is really unsatisfying. 

Shannon Fay: I haven't read the book, but I really enjoyed your review.

Marisa Mercurio: Thank you! 

Shannon Fay: I enjoyed your um talking about how these anatomical Venuses is actually quite a step forward for science and a positive thing. And I also liked you touching on … kind of, this comes up on a lot of media: the men bad, women good.

Marisa Mercurio: Oh, it's exhausting!

Shannon Fay: And I was thinking, I was like, “Why does this bother me so much?” And I think what came to me is that it perpetuates the idea that women are on the earth to suffer. It also further, you know, enforces a strict gender binary. 

Marisa Mercurio: Absolutely. 

Shannon Fay: But it slots it into, you know, like sufferers and the people who cause suffering. Which just not a good way to frame the world!

Marisa Mercurio: Yeah. And to be fair to the book I do think there are some complex women, particularly this madam of the brothel who is probably the most complex character in the novel. But the novel is very preoccupied with that pseudo-feminist message of … well. I think actually this is the problem with the novel: It never becomes clear to me! I think it is all kind of muddled in a way that I'm not sure if the novel is trying to proffer this pseudo-feminist message, or if it is trying to do something more complex and subversive. Because it simply doesn't succeed at doing whatever it is it's trying to do. 

Shannon Fay: In The Macabre, the characters discuss a lot about colonialism. And, you know, I think it's done well within the characters, they do a good job of kind of literally embodying different sides of the issue. But I don't feel like the book really follows through on it. Unlike, say, a book like Babel, which from the title kind of tells you it's gonna be not just about linguistics, but—uh, spoilers for the Bible—that tower is going to fall.

Marisa Mercurio: I think there are a lot of other current examples of novels that are threading these interests in historical or present day structures and systems that are really interesting, successful; but there is a deftness to it that is required to be successful and that I wish … I think a lot of these novels just aren't proceeding with.

[Musical sting]

Shannon Fay: It is so much easier to talk about books that you just love right? Just open up a spigot and be like, “Oh, and this was good and this was good.”

Marisa Mercurio: Yeah, I find novels that are ones that I'm not enjoying, or I don't think are successful, much harder to write about and to talk about. 

Dan Hartland: But I'm so interested in this question of why these books aren't quite hitting the mark, because they're not the only ones.

So let's not pick on these, right? There have been several books Strange Horizons have reviewed in this kind of ballpark that the reviewers have found: “OK, this book has a theme, but there's something about the way in which it is being handled here.” And it's often in the context of the kind of horror trappings it's just not working. 

So I'm thinking of Racheal Chie’s review of Christina Hagmann’s Field of Frights, she said that about that book. Subham Rai’s review of The Demon by Victory Witherkeigh, he said that about that book. Ian Simpson on We Like It Cherry, by Jacy Morris, he said it about that book. Is there something going on at the moment?

I talked at the beginning of the episode about kind of quote-unquote cozy horror—which is definitely a thing, and I don't think these books are necessarily the sort of quintessential, cozy horror examples—but is there something happening in horror because of something about how they're handling the material?

Marisa Mercurio: Even though I wouldn't categorize Slashed Beauty really as cozy horror, I think there is perhaps some overlap there, because I think that the gothic is often relayed into cozy horror fiction—because of the aesthetics surrounding it and the aesthetics that we've created surrounding it. So, especially when it comes to like neo-gothic fiction, because I think that is weirdly cozy for people.

When I think of the gothic, these things are certainly present in the gothic, and I am absolutely guilty of wanting to spend time in a crumbling movie castle—Crimson Peak, the Guillermo Del Toro movie, comes to mind, which I don't know if it's a quote-unquote good movie, but is a movie that I enjoy. But to me, the gothic, when we're speaking to coziness, and maybe why this doesn't quite work, is because the gothic is so, I think, truly preoccupied with the nastier aspects of life.

So: the gothic being a genre that is preoccupied with a really harsh resurgence of the past, a reminder that progress is deeply fallible. And then you have things like sexual violence, incest, all kinds of the more horrible parts of life. And of course those things can coexist—you know, I think of, like, Dracula maybe. But I don't know if the goals of the cozy novel really align with the goals of a gothic, like a truly gothic, novel.

Shannon Fay: I worry it just comes down to marketing—that if you have a book that has … that's doing a lot of interesting, weird stuff, maybe it's just easier to position it as kind of unsettling and disturbing and horror and at least that way you can maybe get genre fans to buy in on it. I'm thinking specifically of The Macabre, where I compared it to The Rook in my review—and I don't know if that would still be a good comp, because it's been, you know, several years since even the sequel to that book came out. If you could position it as “if you like that book, if you like that kind of spy-thriller fantasy, you would also enjoy this book,” if instead it's like, “Well, there's creepy paintings” … Let's go with that. 

Marisa Mercurio: I absolutely agree that marketing is a huge problem here.

I also recently reviewed a book for Strange Horizons that was a gothic novel—again, that was a modern-day gothic novel that just didn't work for me. And I think a lot of that was because it was marketed as a gothic novel when it didn't really meet those expectations. And I think that for Slashed Beauties, there was a problem of, “This is a gothic novel”—which, true, I would agree with—and then, “This is a feminist novel” … and that is where I really tripped up. 

I think there are a lot of opportunity for feminist gothic novels. I think gender is inherently a topic that the gothic is interested in. I don't think you can separate gender from the gothic genre. But there are certainly more successful versions of that. 

Shannon Fay: So it's late in the podcast. But I do have a question, because I feel like my definition of gothic is mostly vibes based. And it sounds like maybe you have a stronger definition. 

Marisa Mercurio: Um, yeah. I mean, I think the gothic is rooted in a historical moment of the eighteenth century in which you’re sort of post-enlightenment, post-revolution, so you're dealing with the possibility … like, you know, everyone is sort of wanting to progress and think “Oh, we're so enlightened. We're so progressive,” and the gothic sort of comes in and it's like, “Hold up. Here's the past.” You know, there's the old adage, “The past has never really passed,” and that's kind of what the gothic is doing, to me—to sort of say, “Hey, maybe we aren't so civilized,” or that the occult or paganism or the supernatural can still infiltrate science.

I think I mentioned Dracula before and I'll mention it again because I think it's such a perfect case study of all these seemingly contradictory, dichotomous ideas of the past and the present civilization versus, you know, savagery—you might say the east versus west, science versus supernatural. I think the gothic is really preoccupied with those ideas, sort of untangling those complexities, but also making them butt heads and making people deal with that collision. 

Shannon Fay: I was wondering if cozy horror, and I know it's been hotly debated, but to me it comes out of maybe the thinking that horror needs to have existential dread, a nihilistic viewpoint—a hopeless genre in the sense of only the bleakest works can be called true horror—and people buying into that. And therefore, if they read something horror and it doesn't have those hallmarks, they're like, “This must be something else. It must be cozy horror.”

So I just think it comes from maybe having too strict a view of a genre and therefore needing to break it down more. 

Marisa Mercurio: Yeah, it was a matter of time. I think we had cozy, you know, whatever, whatever, whatever. You know, we have closed door romance, we have things that are not going to offend the sensibilities, so that it was a matter of time before it just, you know, made its way to horror—which is kind of … 

On one hand you do have this sort of, in terms of like mystery, Agatha Christie-like cozy novels, which still have death and murder and horrible things happening in them—which probably if they were published today would be labeled cozy. But on the other hand, it does seem contradictory to the very nature of horror to label things as cozy. 

Dan Hartland: I also feel like I don't want to kind of demonize our colleagues in marketing too much. Because, you know, they've gotta shift these books, and if they don't sell books, then fewer books will get printed—and that's a shame! So I agree that Agatha Christie was not marketed as cozy, but would be marketed as cozy now. That's probably fine? Like, in some cases it doesn't change the text.

Marisa Mercurio: Yeah. I wanna read a cozy novel every once in a while, too—like, absolutely. And I think from our perspective maybe as avid readers, we're coming at this with a much more critical lens about the marketing and the genre trappings, as opposed to your average reader who is maybe going to a bookstore like once a year and picking up stuff, or maybe uses their local library and is just like trying to get these pithy terms to be like, “OK, well I think this sounds like something I'd like so I'll check it out.”

Shannon Fay: Well, let me talk about a book that I think does succeed! So I recently read, uh, Marisha Pessl’s Darkly, and if you've read her book Night Film, this almost feels like a YA retread of that. But I love Night Film and I do like also this kind of YA version of that book! 

So in Darkly it's very much like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory—you know, how in the world of that novel, everybody is just obsessed with this candy maker and his crazy inventions and his process and what goes on in that factory. Well imagine that. But instead it is a board game maker.

So this woman—Louisiana Veda, I think is the character's name is—she was this eccentric board game creator, and these are very off-the-wall board games. You have to like cut apart the board. You really have to think out of the box. You have to like shine flashlights to create little shadows, and like they're, like, “Her games will drive you mad!” The winners disappear and are never seen again. People pay millions for an original Louisiana Veda! And so our main character, she applies for this brand new internship being run by the estate of this woman, right? And, you know, only her and six other lucky teens will get to go to the abandoned factory where these board games were kind of brainstormed and created! Again, very Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, right? There's all these people trying to get her secrets and the teens are tasked with tracking down a stolen game that could be dangerous for the people playing it. 

Like, I don't think this book has any really grand meaning. The characters talk a little bit about how—when they find out about some questionable things Louisiana did in her life—they do talk about how, say, male celebrities and creators get away with a lot worse, right? So there's a little bit about having to deal with your heroes, taking them off a pedestal. But for the most part it is like reading a version of almost a LARP or a RPG, where these characters are in this world where: What's a game, what's real, who can you trust? But I think it does a lot with the nature of fandom and obsession, which is also kind of the same beats as in Night Film, where three super fans—they're super fans of a director, the director's daughter commits suicide, and they want to kind of find out what happened and almost end up literally in the world of the film. 

So I enjoyed both those novels a lot, and both of them less about creative passion and more about fandom, but both having to do with obsession and the creative process. So those are books that I think, uh, kind of successfully tackle that. 

Marisa Mercurio: I'd also just like to mention The God of Endings by Jacqueline Holland, which is a vampire novel that is very preoccupied with art, as is Woman, Eating. So there are books out there that I think are interested in craft and art that are horror- or gothic-leaning that are a little bit more successful, they're out there.

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: What about these little books—like, as you said, the boardgame book isnot doing anything really sort of grand or you know, whatever, but it succeeds on its own terms—so in what way is that book better than The Macabre?

Shannon Fay: I think there's just almost a tactile detail to it, right? There is almost, you know, almost on the border of like, “Stop talking about this, please!” You know, you almost have to push the envelope as far as characters starting to describe the rules to this archaic board game, right? That doesn't really have to do anything with the plot, but has everything to do with the world. 

Dan Hartland: Yeah, it commits to the bit is what you're … yeah. Marisa—because I'm conscious that you've said that the two most recent reviews you've written for us were both of quote-unquote gothic novels and you dislike both of them and I feel responsible for this!—so are there any recent books that you did like that we should have asked you to review instead? 

Marisa Mercurio: Oh, well, first of all, you should not feel responsible! Because I think, you know, maybe we'll have part of this conversation later about what makes a book successful or not, but I always endeavor to feel that I am an appropriate person to be able to speak to the novel.

And so, as someone with the background of the gothic, I feel like I can have a place to stand where I can actually talk about it, as opposed to something that is like hard sci-fi, which is just not in my wheelhouse. But in terms of a novel like Old Soul by Susan Barker, which is a novel that came up this year and which is, I would maybe say, like a literary horror novel—it is about a demon—but photography plays a very integral role in that novel. 

So there is this female character who lives for decades beyond what a human should live. And she is making these really strong relationships with people. She comes by people, they strike up a really strong relationship. She takes a photo of 'em, they go wrong, the person goes wrong, and then often end up dead soon after. And the photographs, or the act of photography is absolutely integral to the novel. It is part and parcel of this character, and it is the mechanism through which the horror is happening in the novel. 

Whereas in Slashed Beauties, the wax Venuses are so much relegated to the end of the novel. They don't really even show up until past halfway through the novel, and then the murders themselves don't happen until the penultimate chapter. So why is it presented so much as a murder spree? Even bringing to mind something that happens a century later, Jack the Ripper, is not really what the novel is about in any meaningful way, and the present-day narrative doesn't really do enough I think with the antiques aspect—which is also something that I was really interested in—to sort of bring it all together. 

Because Slashed Beauties really has a premise that I'm very interested in. You know, it's set in the eighteenth century. It's a neo-gothic novel. It's about wax Venuses, I love medical history. And it also has an antiques dealer as the first protagonist, which—awesome! You know, but the threads just don't converge. 

Dan Hartland: There's that thing, isn't there, where sometimes a book can seem so likely to be perfect for us that when it isn't—it's got all these things that, in theory, we should really love, and somehow they don't cohere—we are more disappointed in that book than we would be in a book that was similarly unsuccessful, but didn't ever seem to be something we'd enjoy. 

So how do we navigate this? Marisa, you said, “Let's talk about what a successful book looks like.” Can we do that and can we also talk about how we handle books that don't meet that benchmark? 

Different reviewers will place benchmarks in different places. So some reviewers will have extremely high standards—not even high standards, they will have a set of criteria, right? And if a book doesn't meet those specific criteria, they will give it a pan. Other reviewers are much more sort of open and, “OK, let's deal blah, blah, blah.” How do you approach it when you come against a book that doesn't meet whatever you think a successful book is? How do you just be honest about that without, you know, kind of just being grumpy? 

Marisa Mercurio: I'm personally happy to meet books where they're at.

Like, I want to enjoy everything that I read. You know, I'll read schlock and love it and I'll read, you know, high art—whatever that might be, so the most literary of the literary. And to me it's all about meeting authors and the novels where they are. And I think that I have two major criteria from novels, which are maybe not exactly craft-related—you know, on a purely syntax level—but that is certainly part of it. Because I think a book can fall apart just on a syntax level if it doesn’t—even if it has a great premise—but my two major criteria are: one, I wanna be entertained, and two, I wanna have something to think about after I read the novel. 

And I think what often happens, I find particularly in a lot of current horror publications where the novels are not being deft enough with what they are trying to write about, is that the novels are prioritizing a didactic message over entertainment. In which case I probably in many cases agree with the message that it's trying to promote. But I just feel like I am being, um. Taught a message, I'm being preached a moral of a narrative, which I just simply don't want because I want to figure that out for myself.

And then, relatedly, I want to think about the novel afterwards. So if the novel is simply saying, “Men bad, end of story,” I have nothing to think about after the novel's over and it leaves my mind. 

Shannon Fay: I think what you said earlier, Marisa—about there's certain things where you're like, “No, I am the reviewer for this book”—and Dan, you were saying how is it tough when you have a book that on paper you're like, “Oh, this is made for me,” and then it disappoints you? Well, in a sense, like, yeah, I think a review from that point of view is valuable. Because there'd be other people who would say, “Hey, this sounds like it aligns with my interests.” And then they might still be like, “Well, I'm still intrigued by the premise, but now I can kind of adjust my expectations knowing that someone else who has a similar kind of affection for these things was kind of disappointed.” 

It is tough—like, for me, something that is tough—going in without preconceived notions. Like, usually with the review I'll have maybe read the barest summary. Maybe I'm familiar with the author's previous works and usually I'm excited. And usually I'm already like, ”Ooh, I am excited by this premise.” And it can be dangerous to be like, “Ooh, where are they going to go with this?”—and then either they go somewhere totally different and you're like, “Wow, I was so pleasantly surprised” or you're like, “But what a great premise and how come they didn't deliver on this?” Right? 

Marisa Mercurio: Right. I think other contributing factors to me are: who is the author and what work have they been putting out lately? So I think of someone who, like with this novel, I believe is their debut novel, I'm likely to treat it more as such—to say, “Does this project have potential?”

I remember several years ago, I reviewed Kay Chronister’s collection of horror short stories, and then she had The Bog Wife out this year. And I remember saying in those short stories, which I mostly liked, I said, you know, there's a couple that aren't as strong, but I think this is a really, really strong collection of a new voice. And then I loved The Bog Wife, which came out this year.

Shannon Fay: That potential was delivered on. 

Marisa Mercurio: Yes! And then conversely, an author who I think is very prolific and has a lot of good work, like Stephen Graham Jones—just to point to a really successful horror novelist who is doing a lot of work with just like super entertaining stuff, but also novels that are about ideas and deep concepts—I loved The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, so this maybe isn't a good example, but I would be more willing to say like, “Ah, this one, you know, compared to his other works didn't hit as well.” 

And then similarly, I think I'm really interested—probably just coming from a publishing background myself—in what presses are publishing. So if a book is being published by like Penguin Random House versus an indie publisher, I am a lot more likely to be like, “Oh, this indie publisher, maybe the novel isn't a ten out of ten, but it shows some potential and what they're acquiring in is really interesting to me.” So I wanna see more of that. I wanna see it succeed. I'm really excited about that kind of work. 

Dan Hartland: Yes, there are ways to contextualize our sort of disappointment. There are ways to admit to kind of negative feelings about a text whilst not enabling or not letting those feelings overwhelm a sort of a broader consideration of the book.

Marisa Mercurio: Yeah. I mean, when it comes down to it, a book is what's written on the page, and it's what the reader engages with. So ultimately, you know, if you think a book succeeds or not, some of those factors are gonna be stripped away. They can be things that you take into consideration, but at the end of the day, a book is, you know, plot, character, syntax. That kind of thing. 

Dan Hartland: Yeah. I think it was Will McMahon who on this show said—was it on this show or was it in one of his reviews?—who said, “Yeah, these are just words. It's just words on a page!” Right? That's all there is. And I do think that you're right, Marisa, when you say that some books just fall apart on the syntax level alone. Reviewers can struggle to know what to do with those kinds of books, as well. And sometimes it's easier to talk about a book's ideas than it is to talk about the fabric of them. 

Shannon Fay: With The Macabre, I've been thinking about one of the reasons why it left me kind of cold. I was thinking how if it was a case of you could put points into stats for this book, this would be a very even build. And I'm like, “Oh, if only, maybe if it had just like excelled in one thing, you know, I could have either championed it or known why my disappointment with it, what it's grounds for.”

Marisa Mercurio: Yeah, for sure. I really get that. I think similarly with Slashed Beauties, you know, the content of my review really is more about the thematic content and the messaging rather than the words on the page, because— although I did feel that the words on the page were also not successful and were, you know, the work of a not fully matured author—it's harder to sort of be like, “And I didn't like this sentence, and here's the sentence and here's the sentence.” It just feels so much more mean to say, “These sentences aren't working and they're hitting a lot of like, my pet peeves, like ‘This happened somehow!’” And I'm like, “Well, how?!” as opposed to sort of taking a larger idea? 

Shannon Fay: No, I just wanted to talk about the things that did tick me off in The Macabre’s characters!

Marisa Mercurio: [laughter]

They're supposed to be like spies. Like, you know, they work for different national entities. They have their own agendas. But they'll be things like, they'll say things practically like, “All right, I'll team up with you, but if I even think that you're gonna steal the painting for yourself, our partnership is over and I'll kill you.” Right?

And it's like, no, play your cards a little closer to your chest! This is, you know … it almost feels like we're at a point with genre fiction in particular where self-awareness is seen as a book being intelligent. You know, like if we acknowledge the reader's expectations—like having people outright say, “I will betray you if these things happen” because the reader's thinking they will betray them. But instead it just becomes so juvenile, right?

Dan Hartland: I'm really struck by, Shannon, something you said, which is that it's kind of a very even distribution of stats on this novel. Like, there's no spiky bits and you're both talking about kind of flatness. So flatness in terms of prose and style, flatness in terms of character: This links to the didactic quality that Marisa was talking about where a lot of novels right now just want to tell you. 

All of that speaks to me of safeness, and maybe that is a feature as well as a bug in so-called cozy or, you know, escapist—that's a very loaded term—literature, where the book is deliberately being flat. It's deliberately distributing its stats all in the middle, just to sort of stay as smooth as possible, reduce the friction. Does that sound like a reasonable … ?

Shannon Fay: Yeah, actually, and it does maybe solve the question you posed at the very beginning of this podcast. 

Dan Hartland: I can't say I planned it!

Shannon Fay: Some of the most vivid scenes, the most memorable scenes, are kind of … they interact with the painting. With Lewis, because he is inexperienced in the ways of magic, kind of things go wrong and people die horribly. And those are some of the most vivid, well-written scenes in the book. So maybe either an editor or a publisher or, you know, the marketing team read in and said, “This is the book’s strengths, you know, these are the scenes that make people feel something. We're gonna lean into that.” And maybe that's why it got hit with that genre.

Marisa Mercurio: That’s really interesting to think about, too, because what you're saying about flatness to me is contradictory to what horror is, right? Horror is a series of, like, stasis, stasis, stasis, spike, right? Big moments followed by like a sort of climax followed by a coming down and maybe multiple of those throughout a novel.

But that affective response is what we're looking for when we read or watch horror. And if it's not being delivered, then that becomes a generic problem for the novel.

[Musical outro]

Marisa Mercurio: I want to like stuff!

Shannon Fay: Yeah. It turns … it becomes a personal disappointment. Right? You know?

Dan Hartland: You're more disappointed in yourself than in the book at some point. 

Marisa Mercurio: Yeah, exactly! [laughter]

[Musical outro]

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

After our last episode, some queries were raised in various corners about how it is that so many speculative fiction criticism podcasts seem to be releasing in the same calendar slot each month. From A Meal of Thorns to Hugo! Girl, By the Bywater: It's a real pleasure to be in such august company. And even better to meet in our secret hideout deep below the surface of the earth every month where we plan our—

[Long censor’s tone] 

Not sure what happened there. Anyway. See you next time.

In this episode of the Strange Horizons Fiction podcast, Michael Ireland reads Parker Peevyhouse's 'The Orchard Village Catalog'.

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Transcript

Critical Friends Episode 18: On Fantasy and History

Dan Hartland: Welcome to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast. I’m Dan Hartland, and in this episode I’ll be joined by the reviewer—and newest member of the excellent Strange Horizons proofreading team—Cameron Miguel, and the scholar and critic, Nick Hubble.

In every episode of Critical Friends, we discuss SFF reviewing: what it is, why we do it, how it’s going. In this episode, we’ll be talking about fantasy in particular, and its relationship to history and history-writing. Is some sense of the recordable past baked into the genre? And, if so, with what effects?

We take in Tolkien and Virginia Woolf, Augustan Rome and the Yukon Gold Rush, and we ask ourselves how power operates through history—as well as what history even is. Most of all, though, we wonder: What can fantasy teach us about history writing … and how can it change it?

But we began our conversation with Cam’s most recent review for us. Fittingly enough, it was of K. J. Parker’s Making History.

[Musical Sting]

Dan Hartland: Okay, both. My job on this podcast, as I see it at the moment, is to put reviews and reviewers in conversation with each other, to try and give the reviews some more legs, to give the issues they discuss more airing. Just get the conversation a little bit wider.

Sometimes my job is super easy because some great reviewers put in some fantastic pieces that are talking to each other without even knowing it. And your two most recent reviews for Strange Horizons fall into that bracket: They just did their job for me. And Cam, I thought we’d start with yours, because what really struck me about your review—one of the many things—was that you started it by saying, “Look, guys, this, this book is just made for me.”

And what really struck me, was how your interests in history and language all aligned in this world that’s been built by K. J. Parker, in a book called Making History. So I just wonder whether you could talk us through what you think that book is doing, how its worldbuilding is working towards a sort of vision of how we interpret the past?

Cameron Miguel: Well, I’d say that the main way that K. J. Parker’s novella approaches the past is by viewing it as history being this malleable thing that can be shaped, molded, remade, subject to peer review, scholarship, reinterpretation—just re-analysis of all the evidence that we have. And I was rereading the novella in preparation for today, and there actually is a scene near the end of the story where the narrator discusses exactly that: How we know for certain that this group of people migrated, one million en masse to a different location, to settle this specific region. The narrator later goes on to say, “We know now that none of that is actually true and that a few of them were brought over as slaves and they multiplied, and they either overthrew or flat out enslaved the people who enslaved them, and became the settlers of that region.”

I really like how he played with this idea of history and our understanding of history—how everything that we read in books ultimately gets updated, revised in accordance with new knowledge that we learn. And it was really interesting for me, coming out of the academy not too long ago as a classicist, the ways that we constantly had debates about the classics and what they meant. And in my specific field, which was examining same-sex relationships and antiquity, there’s this predominant assumption of just how every ancient relationship would’ve worked. If you’re looking at same-sex male relationships, we rely entirely on Plato, we rely on Athens; but the problem is every city-state had its own culture. And we see how those cultures are different, but we still try and impose this one model on everything else. And I think it’s sort of hindered our understanding of the variance of sexuality, sexual behavior, and other things in antiquity—because we’re trying to impose an understanding of the world on them when we don’t even understand ourselves.

We know today that sexuality, gender, all of it is just incredibly fluid, inconsistent; but somehow we think that it’s stable and sturdy in the past, that they never bucked their cultural norms or had illicit relationships. Everything just perfectly fit into these models. I like the way that Parker challenged that.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. And we will definitely come back to the ways in which fantasy literature sort of calls on the past and sometimes reflects it well and sometimes doesn’t, and the kind of generic knee-jerk responses that fantasy sometimes has with how it deals with quote-unquote history.

But one of the things that interests me as well about how you characterize Parker’s approach to history is that the novella has this character, this dictator, right? I think he calls himself a “first citizen,” but actually he’s a prince, right? And he’s just trying to swap clothes to retain power—whatever it takes. And it’s this figure that is behind a lot of the most obvious misuses of history in the novella, right? He basically tells the academy, he tells all these historians, “Go away and write a history that suits me, that makes my power authorized.”

And that’s a really interesting grace note on what you’ve just said, right? Because yes, sometimes it’s misunderstanding that makes us misuses history or misinterpret history or miss out on the nuances and the valences of the past; but sometimes it is knowingly done. The novella, you talk about it being a meta-narrative of history. Can you talk a little bit more about how the first citizen’s kind of approach to power shapes that kind of historical record in the novella?

Cameron Miguel: I’m so glad you asked that because on my reread I was actually thinking, “Wow, this guy kind of reminds me of Augustus.” And as I got further and further, I said, “Oh, he reminds me a lot of Augustus. Uh-oh!”

Because again, in the academy there’s speculation—debate, even—about the influence Augustus had over not just politicians or the citizens, but also just the artists in the world. You mentioned, Prince Gugu, which is his original name, and then Gyges, if I’m pronouncing that correctly, maybe it’s Giese or something else. Not only does he tell them to write a history, in the narrator’s specific instance, but he tells them to build an entire city that they can just uncover and use to create an expansionist project of making Aelia—that’s the land in the story—far bigger, so they can eventually attack this other group called the Sasha.

And it was reminding me a lot of Augustus, because Augustus supposedly strong-armed Virgil into writing the Aenid. You got the Aenid, you got the Lea. I’m seeing parallels. There’s even an in-universe story called the Lea which tells the story of how these nobles from a fallen city traveled to Aelia and became the Aelians. I’m like, that’s, “That’s the Aenid. That’s just the Aenid! I really saw a lot of parallels between Augustus and Gyges and the way that they try and use power to form narratives that suit them, their pursuit of power.

Dan Hartland: There’s so much going on in this. I mean, did you say like it’s sixty-odd pages, this novella?

Cameron Miguel: Yeah, it’s about sixty-eight pages.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. And you are getting so much out of it, there’s so much going on. You know, the people in the novella, the characters of the novella, are using history, but also Parker is using history, as you say, calling on that kind of Augustan sort of thing. And Nick, that’s why it just seemed to me like I had to get you and Cam talking, because Cam in their review makes clear that this is a novella about history—and when you are writing about Alix Harrow’s The Everlasting, you start the review with history!

You say, “One thing we’ve learned”—and I’m not sure we have learned it, but you’re a hopeful person!— you say the one thing we should have learned is history is not a linear process, right? The Harrow, it seems to me, is doing similar things—there are academics that are told “you’ve gotta write this certain thing,” and there are old stories that are refashioned in order to authorize power and authority. So I just wondered what similarities, what differences, are you seeing in The Everlasting when you’re listening to Cam talk about Making History?

Nick Hubble: Yeah, I think there’s clear—I have to say, I’ve actually read Making History, given that it was only sixty-odd pages long.

Dan Hartland: So you two are just making this too easy for me!

Nick Hubble: Yeah, I mean, there’s a couple of absolutely direct parallels. One is that in both there’s a kind of … well, it’s more of a wannabe ruler in The Everlasting, Vivian Rolfe, and she’s a minister—the Minister for Defense or something at the beginning of the book. But in various versions—because they go backwards and forwards in history, and in that sense, it’s a different kind of book because they move backwards and forwards in history—and at various times she used to be the chancellor, she used to be the Prime Minister. She’s trying to run history so that she’s in power. And of course, part of the thing is you can’t control it quite that well, so, you know, it doesn’t quite work out.

But she says specifically at one point, she has a quote where she says, “I invented a lineage for myself, gave myself a name, a title, a birthright. Oh, don’t give me that. Look, how do you think any king gets his crown?” And that’s kind of exactly what Gyges is trying to do in Making History: invent this kind of past. So it’s the same kind of process.

We’ve also got the historian, and also they’re very also similar characters. The two historian characters, I don’t think the historian is actually named in Making History, but the one in The Everlasting is called Owen Mallory. And there’s also a sense that it’s kind of a play on Arthurian stories, because you’ve got Mallory, and when the historian goes back in it is all to do with writing the history of a famous knight who is a woman: Una (or Oona!). So it’s kind of like a gender flip to Arthurian romance.

But the point of kind of similarity in both cases is that the historians are not from the actual nation that the ruler is trying to manipulate. The guy from Making History is not actually an Aelian. He says at some point, you know, “And thank God I’m not,” without specifying exactly where he might be from.

And it’s similar, it turns out, in The Everlasting—that the historian is not actually from Dominion. (The country’s called Dominion, so the kind of politics of it are rather, you know, made evident, because they took about dominion and everlasting dominion and so and so on and so forth!) But he’s not from that country, it transpires, and also he looks different. At first it’s not such a thing, but gradually, as the novel goes on, you realize that this is a significant part in that part of the history of nation—that he actually looks different. He’s a different sort of size. He has very much darker eyes. He has kind of crinkly hair. I don’t … it is not explicit exactly how different he looks, but he clearly looks ethnically different to the people of Dominion. And he’s actually from the people they’re kind of conquering in, you know, ever expanding their empire.

So I think there are these two direct parallels, but then for the rest, you know, there’s a more general sense that we’ve both got historians who are at universities. There’s a little bit of kind of playing around with university politics in this, so that every time the guy writes the story of Una the Everlasting—which he doesn’t want to do on the one hand, but he does because it gives him a chance to go back in history and meet her every time—it’s not that he’s commanded to do it. He’s told to do it, to get tenure!

So it’s a kind of a nice sort of … it nicely satirizes how academia works. Which is—I can say as an academic, well, former … no longer a paid academic, put it that way—you end up doing things, obviously you do things, that you don’t necessarily want to do because you have to do them to go through the system, or you get told to do them, or it’s to your advantage in some way—and it kind of, it satirizes very nicely as well, the making history. Making History, I would say, is a funnier book than than The Everlasting in that sense.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. There’s something about—we’ve talked about novellas on previous editions of the show, and I wouldn’t want get sort of sidetracked again by the endless question, but! Satire seems to me something that a novella is particularly well disposed towards.

I think it’s really interesting to think about the academic side of it because that is in miniature a power structure, right? And it’s a type of power structure under which the historians are laboring and must to some extent or another pay due deference—certainly in order to advance within the structure, but also partly just to be able to do the thing that they want to do in the small space that’s left to them by said structure.

You quote, Nick, in your review, from The Everlasting, where one of the professors says, “If the history you were reading wasn’t filthy, then someone had censored the good bits.” Are both of these works also trying to get at this idea that Cam began our discussion with: this idea that history was a lot messier actually than … let me put it another way. The past was actually messier than this thing we call history. Is that something you find in the Harrow?

Nick Hubble: Yes. I think that that’s definitely the case. And that particular professor, although academically superior to Mallory, is actually in some ways one of the moral consciences of the novel. I think she also says at one point, “You can be a historian or a patriot,” to Mallory. “You can’t be both”—implying that actually, what he’s doing is, obviously, writing stuff for the greater glory of Dominion, rather than good history. And actually there’s several points where we see him exactly doing that—you know, sanitizing history.

There’s a kind of time loop thing in it, in that actually—although he’s supposedly interpreting and translating this ancient medieval text telling the story of Una the Everlasting—he’s actually writing it himself when he goes back into history. So he is kind of rewriting his own story continuously. But there’s a point where the Queen is supposed to have sent for her, when she was at prayer at some point, and she says something like, “Well, uh, yes, I will put off my God in order to, to fight for my destiny.” And then she, you know, tells him, “No, that’s not how it happened. I was completely drunk. And I told them to go fuck themselves!” And he thinks about it and he goes, “Hmm, well we don’t need to include all that detail in the writing.” I’m, you know, I’m paraphrasing!

So you said something … Una responded as she always had done. How he writes it. So it just nicely … it is exactly messier, more fluid, than the version that … I think another difference between the two stories, perhaps, is he, doesn’t … he kind of becomes more self-aware as the story goes on.

I think the narration of Making History is perhaps more self-aware from, from the beginning. So you get a slightly different kind of story in that respect. But the point of Owen Mallory becoming more self-aware is he gradually becomes aware that it’s actually … he himself is complicit, and in writing this history has to kind of contend with his own sanitizing tendencies, if you like, and that comes across very well across the length of the novel.

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: One of things that struck me as I read both your reviews—and as I’m listening to you now—is that there are so many echoes in these novels of prior fantasies that do similar things. So one of Harrow’s previous works was The Once and Future Witches, right? Which is, you know, in its title plainly a homage to T. H. White, who famously sort of did the Arthurian thing in this kind of fantastically rich, mixed historical setting: You know, you have Normans but also kind of pre-Christians, and also they play games that seem similar to what we might imagine a nineteenth-century student at Eton would have played. You know, there’s this great kind of mixture of historical periods in this one supposedly coherent world.

And it reminds me of this scholar, Irina Ruppo. She wrote this essay, “What’s Wrong With Medievalism?”, and she argues that epic fantasy plays a kind of game with history. There’s definitely game-playing in both of these. Like, Nick, you say that Making History is funnier than The Everlasting. But there’s no doubt that, from how you characterize it, The Everlasting is having fun, if nothing else, right? Like, it might not be funny, but it’s good fun.

Nick Hubble: It is funny. Sorry, it is funny. It’s just not … I don’t think it’s so self-consciously comic throughout, put it that way. Yeah.

Dan Hartland: So I’m just thinking of all these ways in which these books talk to each other, but they also talk outwards. The commonplace about fantasy is that it looks backwards to the Middle Ages—that it is, you know, kind of informed by medieval epic and all of that. And I think, you know, maybe the canonical statement of that—and pretty much every recent history of fantasy talks about it—but was W. A. Senior who wrote, I mean this is years ago, but in the Journal of the Fantastic Arts that fantasy looks back to medieval literature because it seeks, in a similar way to medieval literature, to confirm certain moral certainties, right? It is comfortable as a genre when ontologies are concrete.

There’s a lot of secret knowledge in fantasy. There are a lot of occult groups—you know, I think of China Miéville, or I think of the Aes Sedai in The Wheel of Time—and that’s fine because nevertheless they have the knowledge. It might be secret, but it is gettable. The use of history in fantasy can work towards that. It can work towards, “Oh, well this world has a past.” Like Tolkien: “I can literally tell you thousands of years of history of this world. That must mean it’s real.” But of course it kind of also isn’t, and this game with history is really interesting to me.

But Cam, you talked about Classical history, and it seems to me that recently certainly there’s been quite a bit of fantasy that draws on other histories, and I wouldn’t want to necessarily echo this flat assumption that fantasy is just European medieval. I don’t think that’s true anymore. What thoughts do you have about that, about this idea that these books … yes, they’re in dialogue with each other, but also they’re in a long tradition of fantasy being interested in history?

Cameron Miguel: I would say that history writing is kind of baked into the nature of fantasy, as you’ve already said. In fact, one of my thoughts was just about Tolkien and Martin, because these two authors create entire histories that go along with their stories, and they’re built into their narratives. That way, everything that shows up in the story has some sort of weight to it. It’s just this sort of way of confirming the truth of the narrative itself: If the narrator is reliable, everything that the narrator says is true because the narrator is reliable; so therefore everything the narrator has to say at the past, unless the narrator is being deceived, is therefore true.

And being able to have these concrete facts about the world helps you build up an understanding of what type of culture, what type of language types, of education systems that these people may be building, experiencing—and the ways that they just influence each other constantly. At least to me!

Dan Hartland: I think Juliet McKenna’s written—there’s an essay on her website—in which she talks about how she uses history to do exactly that, to like provide kind of texture and ballast and believability to the world. But what’s interesting, of course, is that these books—these two books, Making History and The Everlasting—make it absolutely clear that that’s not what history is, and that in fact it’s much more complicated than that and much more partial and much less reliable.

So is there an issue—and this is to either of you—is there an issue here where fantasy has come to rely on history and chronicle and the idea of building a world from a verifiable past when in fact, you know, those are not solid foundations in the way that the genre has sometimes assumed?

Cameron Miguel: Yeah, history is pretty messy overall. I think that fantasy narratives tend to rely a lot on the fact that they are narratives. And again, that they create the facts of the world straight from the author’s brain, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But when you look at history and fantasy and then history and antiquity—specifically Herodotus—you get a lot more plausible deniability in Herodotus!

Every tale that he tells you is prefaces with “supposedly” … “they tell me this is what happened.” “I wasn’t there!” “It could have gone down this way, but it might not have.” Whereas in fantasy, you’ll get, even with my own writing, details about someone, a specific person’s past—that’s their history, and how it led them to where they are currently—or a group of people, a nation’s, past, and how it led them to where they currently are.

Simply because it’s an easy way to communicate with the reader. A period where we don’t have worry about being plausibly deniable.

Dan Hartland: I think it’s Kari Maund, who is well known to fiction writers—fiction readers—as Kari Sperring, in the Encyclopedia of Fantasy who says something to the effect that, you know, fantasy and history are completely, she believes, completely interlinked, totally interrelated.

Some people, I think, might imagine that, “Well, fantasy is all made up and history is all real, right?” But there’s something actually that is … that’s not true of either. And this hybridity is part of what they are. They reflect each other in that way, that approach to history. You know, the sort of Lord of the Rings Appendices approach to history: The timeline, the absolutely irrefutable fact of it. It’s very seductive. It has a power because we kind of want to believe it.

I just wonder whether there’s something here, Nick, about identity—where we want to believe that Middle Earth has this verifiable past because it means that Aragon is definitely who Aragon is meant to be, and the hobbits are slot where they are meant to be. History gives us this illusion of “slotability”: I mean, is there a way that that really helps a fantasy world and also comforts a reader? Maybe? I don’t know what you make of that.

Nick Hubble: Yeah. I mean, I think that’s exactly true. I mean, one thing that comes to me is both Tolkien and Martin, who we mentioned, both actually do have a level of self-reflexivity. The Tolkien stuff is supposedly begun by Bilbo and finished a bit by Frodo, and Sam sort of tops it off in these three volumes of the Book of West March or whatever it’s called. Martin, in Fire and Blood—which is the source material for the House of the Dragon TV series—gives a historical narrative compiled by some archmaester who does sort of point out, “This actually might not be entirely true because, you know, the sources are in conflict and you know, and this stuff.” So they play those games, and obviously, yes, we do!

I mean, both of those books are immensely popular because they have that in-depth kind of history, but actually both of them are so big that they’re not internally consistent. And you know, we can read that because the level of scholarship into Tolkien, we can see that. And also because he changed it, so if you’ve got a second edition of The Hobbit—which I’ve got, because that was the one I read as a child, you know—it’s still got all this stuff about policemen on bicycles and stuff that at some point got taken out to make it more internally consistent. So you can reinsert that playful bit. And again, both of these writers are, when the mood takes them, playful as well, they kind of can’t help themselves.

So there’s that level in there. But I think the issue with these kind of fantasies—and I think it’s even true to an extent of somebody like Terry Pratchett, who’s more cynical and more trying to show his readers the kind of flaws in this kind of thing—there’s still a sense that they’re still in hock to history in some sense, to this idea of history, the idea of history itself that we can in the West—or in a country like England, that can trace a history back to, I don’t know, Egbert or whatever, who fought with Charlemagne and stuff, and then came, you know, Boedica and Alfred the Great and so on—there’s this kind of history which in some ways is, “Yeah, you can trace a history back, but also obviously it’s a myth.”

It’s a story and immensely powerful story. And I think all these fantasy versions of it, although they play off that, they’re also partly in awe of that kind of structure. So you can read Tolkien and Martin and Ursula K. Le Guin for that matter—I mean, you can read it from a kind of politically right, conservative kind of position. It’s not like the readership of all of these texts is kind of necessarily progressive or liberal or whatever. Whatever you want to describe the other side as! I mean, Joe Abercrombie, for example, has also done that kind of replay from an even more cynical kind of perspective.

But it’s still … I mean it’s good for the writers, obviously, because they get big, big readerships—because it kind of appeals to everyone. But I think The Everlasting is definitely taking a side in that. It’s not kind of in awe of that kind of history. It’s trying to pull that history kind of apart and say, “You know, it’s part of the process of imperialism.” And so, in that sense, I think it’s different to this other version of, you know, the more dominant, if you like, epic fantasy kind of reliance on history.

Dan Hartland: And it’s interesting that you talk about epic fantasy specifically there. You know, we are painting with quite a broad brush here. I mean, I wonder whether there are examples in, you know, whatever you want to call other types of fantasy—the uncanny or the weird—where this kind of quote-unquote reliance on history is less pronounced, or maybe not.

I’m not convinced, for example—I mentioned Miéville earlier—I’m not convinced that the sort of the leading lights of the new weird—you know, Miéville, VanderMeer, and Steph Swainston—really kind of broke away from it as much as the New Weird might have liked to believe it did. But there are currently quite a few fantasists, I think, who are very actively trying to kind of dissolve that.

You know, I’m thinking of maybe Kai Ashante Wilson, you know? Sorcerer of the Wildeeps: You read Sorcerer of the Wildeeps and I don’t feel the certainty. This is an episode of Critical Friends, so we have to mention Vajra Chandrasekera, it’s not allowed for us not to. So The Saint of Bright Doors does this very explicitly—you know, deals with past and history and identity and how those things are built up over time in a fantasy setting—but is aware, you know, of what are the perils and the pitfalls of this.

Is fantasy able to sort of get around its own reliance on history? Because we started this conversation with The Everlasting and Making History both … I mean, basically the villains in those novels are trying to convince us that history is verifiably the truth. The villains are doing that, right? So that seems to me really important, because if fantasy as a genre isn’t escaping that assumption, we’ve got ourselves a problem. Do we feel like it is, it has, it can?

Nick Hubble: Well, I suppose that’s the question—you know, you’re right!—that’s the question we’re asking. But it’s kind of a big question!

Dan Hartland: Have a swing at it!

Nick Hubble: Having said all those fantasy texts are complicit, I mean, I think we have agency as readers. That’s what I try and tell people, and used to try and tell students at one point: you know, we have agency as readers, so we don’t have to necessarily … I mean, there’s also resistances in all those texts.

And that’s kind of what modern literary criticism is: You read for complicities and you read for resistances, and you try and sort of negotiate what you can out of that. But then, you know, like, I kind of grew up reading Tolkien, you know?! I can’t actually excise that from myself! There’s no way I can do that. And I must admit I like all those fantasy writers and Steph Swainston’s version of doing it if we go into the New Weird.

But yeah, I do think it is … on the other hand, if you ask me to be cold-blooded about it, yeah, it is kind of complicit. I mean, the other thing is the genre is evolving, so something like The Everlasting—which I think will be a (I’m sticking my neck out at the moment!), I think it will be a landmark thing—in a sense, it’s kind of fantasy where the actual goal of the fantasy is to escape from history in some ways, to escape from nation. And I think that’s probably the key? Well, one of the key things, because what it highlights for me, what the novel really highlights for me, is the relationship between fantasy, history, and nation.

It’s about, I mean, with, in this case, as I said, the nation’s called Dominion, so it’s like fairly clear. It’s a bad, I, you know, it’s a bad thing. And then when you think about all those. They’re always about nations. I mean, some are more cynical than others. Actually. The fantasy I was thinking about, which I don’t think we’ve mentioned so far is, is The Witcher, because I was trying to watch series season four, the Witcher, but, and that’s kind of quite cynical about nation, but the nations are still there.

But I think that is the key thing: Do we get away from nation? What would it mean to get away from nation? What would that kind of society be like? And that would possibly involve, it would involve not just going back to history and realizing things were a bit more fluid and messier than we thought; it would involve actually saying that should be the state we want, where everything’s fluid and kind of messy.

And it’s this sort of fixed hierarchies and binaries that you get in nation and history that have to be kind of opposed. I think that’s what Harrow’s doing in The Everlasting. She is actually trying to pull apart those kind of binaries and hierarchies at the same time as satirizing history and fantasy, and also kind of pulling it apart, but also homaging a bit to people like T. H. White and other twenties, thirties writers. She’s just recently written—Alix Harrow has recently written—an introduction to a reprint of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes, and those twenties, thirties fantasy writers were also kind of cynical.

I mean, some, something like Virginia Woolf’s Orlando is very cynical about history, although it kind of relates four hundred years of it. And it is about kind of escaping from the history, escaping from gender, as it were escaping from hierarchies. Similarly, Hope Mirlees’ Lud-in-the-Mist is another one that does that. There’s a number of fantasies in that period, and I suppose they are also key fantasies in the history of fantasy—and I think what I like about The Everlasting is it seems to be able to draw from a lot of these traditions and do something different with it that’s very, very contemporary, but pay respect to all of those things.

Dan Hartland: Cam, when Nick was talking—particularly when they were talking about nation and history and escaping from it—I was thinking about your review of Ley Lines. Do you remember this book?

Cameron Miguel: So I do remember Ley Lines. It’s such a weird little book!

Dan Hartland: Isn’t it? And your review of it really gets into the weirdness of it. And it’s a fantasy—it’s not an epic fantasy, but it’s definitely a fantasy, in the way that it is a …

Cameron Miguel: Psychedelic Odyssey is how the blurb described it.

Dan Hartland: I was gonna say in the way that a bad trip is a fantasy, but yeah! Psychedelic odyssey works, too. Yeah. But it looks like a western at first, it looks, you know, gold rush and saloons and all that stuff. But it’s not that at all, and it completely dissolves all of the kind of assumed …

Cameron Miguel: It’s Canada, so there are a few less guns!

Dan Hartland: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s kind of a Call of the Wild thing, right? It’s, it’s a Jack London White Fang thing. So my question … I guess the reason I bring that up is that this is a book that really does dissolve all of the silent symbologies of nation and history, and I mean—just so that people have … if they haven’t read this review, I mean—basically it starts out as a sort of cowboy thing, but before long they’re being chased by giant disembodied ears and noses and things. Right?

Cameron Miguel: Not even chased, more like just followed, casually menaced. But instead of ascending this mountain—coming back with their glory to get their bounty, whatever it was—they come back with this ear that’s just slowly floating after them. It’s not even doing anything. It’s just standing there, not even standing, just floating and it doesn’t do anything. But it gives this weird eminence that seems to have an effect on everyone and drives just pilgrimage to this dying town in the Yukon.

It is a really interesting book, especially because, while it deals with history, it seems like it’s more about examining the way our exploitation of the environment creates this death cycle where things progressively get worse and worse and worse. There was a book that came out a little while ago, everyone in the left political sphere was talking about, I think the name was Enshitification: How Everything Just Got Worse. And thinking about enshittification and then Ley Lines: Yeah, everything in this book just keeps progressively ratcheting up in a way of getting worse and then coming back to where it was, getting worse and coming back to where it was, but being in different locales and transcending time.

Dan Hartland: Which I think is kind of valuable because, if we think like Nick does—and I tend to agree that (I’m holding you to this, Nick!) fantasy is complicit in some way in this kind of deadening narrative that the past leads to the future in a sort of meaningful chain of events—there’s a danger that we become nostalgic for a time when things weren’t so enshittified.

Every schoolchild in Britain at one point was thrust a copy of a book called What Is History by E. H. Carr. This is a book that’s really easy to kind of roll your eyes at now—it’s a very kind of certain mid-century British thing. But it ends with a chapter in which Carr worries about nostalgia. He worries that Anglo-American historiography is not going to be open to all the new ideas it needs to be open to in order to escape this sort of dread gravity of, “Oh, things were better in the olden days.”

And I think sometimes fantasy can fall into that because it’s often construed as, if not set in our past, then certainly something that looks like it. Is that something we experience when we are reading fantasy or are there recent or older fantasies that we read that feel a bit more forward footed? Can it project forward or is it always going to be kind of a little bit backwards-looking?

Cameron Miguel: As someone who engages not just with reading but also with other forms of media, and who is in the comic book space and the film space necessarily by living in LA, in the friend group that I’ve built—the creator friend group that writes comic books, has people in the industry—I’ve noticed there’s this dramatic shift towards nostalgia in everything, a hatred for anything potentially new.

And I don’t necessarily blame them. Because everyone wants to go back to, “Back in my day when cartoons felt good”—because you were young and cartoons were great because you were a child! You didn’t have to think too critically about the story of a cartoon. But then you look at a kid and they’re like, “This cartoon rocks!” I know because I’m an educator—I see how these kids react to their cartoons—and not only are we becoming stuck in nostalgia, it’s going to create this sort of vortex where any type of new narrative goes. And it’s already happening. It’s just dismissed as woke or garbage or anything because it doesn’t live up to impossible expectations we have because of something we saw when we were younger.

Something that reminds me of this already is the discourse happening about the recent Predator movie, which is science fiction. But having watched the 1987 Predator film just yesterday, uh, because I watched Badlands and loved it, so of course I go all in on things. I was thinking, wow, “Badlands just takes the Yautja far more seriously than Predator 1987 does.” And I know people will come for me when I say that! But what I mean by “takes them seriously” is: It fleshes them out as a people. It gives them culture, it gives them history here, it gives them norms. Really interesting! And then the first Predator movie, you sort of just have this apex predator—as in the name—who’s trying to kill a bunch of commandos. And there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s a good film; but if you want something that takes its subject seriously, I think Badlands is a bit better of a film.

[Musical sting]

Nick Hubble: For all that I’m giving, you know, my sort of emancipatory readings of Making History and The Everlasting, they are also just narratives as well—I mean, “just”—but, you know: narratives, stories, novels all work, you know, on one level have to work as entertainment—and they do. They’re both very entertaining. I can assure everybody who’s listening! So, yeah, in some ways you don’t, you can’t, quite ever kind of escape from the circle, but maybe that itself is understanding it as a circle.

Because we can still … even nostalgia is not necessarily bad if you don’t think that history is linear. To get back to my starting point, if it’s not completely linear, then nostalgia is not necessarily bad because this doesn’t mean you’re necessarily just going back into the past. It can be nostalgic for the future in a way, as well. You know, there’s different ways that that can play out.

I think that the way to do that is to be kind of mentally agile. And I think that’s what both of these books do. They sort of encourage you to be mentally agile. So, you know, it’s not that you have to abandon everything from the past. It’s not that, you know, we don’t have to … I was saying that earlier with Tolkien. It’s not that we have to completely throw out Tolkien or you know, anybody else.

Dan Hartland: Do we think that we, that fantasy as a genre is—or at least parts of fantasy as a genre, I wouldn’t want to talk about, you know, all fantasy, that’d be silly—is it moving forwards? You know, where are we? It feels to me like a lot of the things that we’ve been discussing here—and we’ve been very circumspect and careful, you know, we’ve talked about medieval Europe, we’ve talked about the Roman Empire, we’ve not talked about today, right now—but I think a lot of what we’ve been talking about has, you know, urgent contemporary resonances. Is fantasy sufficiently conscious of all of this?

You know, we’ve been sort of bringing this forward, these complicities or these potential sort of areas where we might sort of break free. Do we have confidence that this is something that fantasy can do? Where is all this going? It seems to me that fantasy is really very current right now: In the end of year lists that are coming up soon, my suspicion is—partly because of romantasy, but also I think just generally—fantasy will be well represented in a way that science fiction might not be. Between the two of them, it feels fantasy is having a moment.

If that’s true, is that okay? Are we … is fantasy gonna look after us in this moment of its zenith?

Cameron Miguel: I mean, in the same way we don’t expect perfection from literary fiction, especially when it was the dominant genre, we expected just good art, I think fantasy is in a similar position. Fantasy has narratives that appeal to all types of people and some of those narratives deal with things that are current or don’t deal with things that are current at all. I think for readers that’s completely fine, but if the aim of fantasy itself is to be critical of how things currently are, it may not be prepared to meet that challenge.

I mentioned that I had reread Making History in anticipation for our meeting, and as I’m looking at Gyges, not only am I thinking about Augustus, but I’m thinking about the orange guy in the White House, and the fact that he just mobilized our biggest warship off the coast of Venezuela, supposedly to target drug cartels. You need missiles to target drug cartels?!

This idea of strong men, dictators or strong men—would-be dictators—who rely on lies and mixed stories that allow them to get away with committing crimes up the wazoo: That’s all Gyges decided to do. He even went as far as abducting the academics at the beginning of the story, just having his guards wrestle them out of their homes into that little crowded room, so he could tell them, “You guys are gonna make a city for me so I can go invade somewhere.”

Nick Hubble: Because we are living in fantastic times—I mean, we are not living, you know, in the sort of periods where … we are not living in this kind of rational, instrumental change period that would suit some of … science fiction and fantasy in some ways, I think, is a slightly false distinction because they quite often play off similar ideas as we know, and the boundaries are not hard and fast. But you can imagine there’s a kind of cold sort of … there’s a kind of Star Trek moment of optimism and enlightenment that is possibly not just not consonant with what’s actually happening in the world at the moment to us.

That’s why we—I think why we—are reading fantasy. But on that hand that makes it the field of contestation, and we don’t quite know how that’s going to play out. I mean, in some ways it’s quite exciting that fantasy is the dominant genre. I mean, who would’ve thought that, you know? That would’ve been, as recently as the nineties, considered absolutely ridiculous. The fact that that’s actually happened itself is just, you know, interesting. I don’t think we pay enough attention to it.

And perhaps, you know, that might be a way to go. You mentioned romantasy there, and I do, in the review, sort of discuss a bit where the Harrow is. I don’t think it’s really a romantasy-type novel, but it might attract some of that readership. You know, it’s kind of romance. Romance is a way of learning the world. It’s a way of getting agency. It’s a way of thinking about different systems of power or thinking about power dynamics in sort of interpersonal ways. As a critic, I feel we can work with that. As a reader, I feel we can work with that. So, I mean, therefore, that’s my optimism if you like.

Dan Hartland: I agree. We should be paying more attention as critics to what is going on there. But of course one of the critics, one of the notable critics, that has been is Cameron Miguel!

Cameron Miguel: So are you about to talk about The Entanglement of Rival Wizards?

Dan Hartland: We are.

Cameron Miguel: Is that what we’re doing?

Dan Hartland: We are!

Cameron Miguel: OK, let’s do it.

Dan Hartland: OK, let’s do it! So go for it. You reviewed this for us relatively recently. It was the last book before Making History that you reviewed for us. Yeah. That’s a romantasy book … and you loved it, right?

Cameron Miguel: Yeah, I’m big on romance. When I was growing up, as a child there wasn’t much representation of queer people in literature. At least there wasn’t much representation of queer people in literature that I was allowed to read as a little kid. I would certainly not recommend this book for little kids, either, but, as a grown adult now who has free will and choice, I chose to read this book, and of course I enjoyed it.

It has queer characters in it. It handles serious topics pretty well, including abuse and the way family members can deny abuse if it’s done by someone else; the way institutions abuse people, the way that academics play into institutions. And I was just thinking about The Entanglement of Rival Wizards when I finished discussing fantasy that’s not meant to or not able to meet the moment of being critical of power. I wouldn’t expect an Entanglement of Rival Wizards to challenge an invasion off the coast of Venezuela. That’s something that I do from Making History, and that doesn’t make an Entanglement of Rival Wizards bad. It just makes it a different book that appeals to a different audience.

Entanglement of Rival Wizards can challenge our assumptions about sexuality, gender, the nature of gender, culture, all of that. You can look at other books and how they target race and the superstructures that we’ve invented across the Western hemisphere to subjugate certain groups of people. There are certainly ways that books can be sophisticated, critical. All of it really just depends on what the author is going for.

Nick Hubble: You just have to have a slightly more agile way of thinking about it. And I guess that’s kind of what the culture—you know, the broader whatever-you-wanna-call the fan/critical culture embodied in something like Strange Horizons—is trying to do in some … I’m not giving it a conscious purpose, which is perhaps overdoing it, but it works as a kind of hive mind collective. That’s kind of trying to do something, something like that. So that would be my … I mean, maybe that’s just me! I would always want to try and find some optimistic take on things.

Dan Hartland: Critical Friends isn’t known for its optimism, so let’s try, let’s try!

[Musical outro]

Dan Hartland: Thanks for persevering through another episode of Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast. Our music is “Dial-up” by Lost Cosmonauts. You can listen to more of their music at grandvalise.bandcamp.com.

After our last episode, on hope in science fiction, friend of the show Abigail Nussbaum wrote to push back on the idea—sort of raised during our discussion of Forfeiture by J. P. Nebra—that forcibly displacing a population, quote, “for their own good” is a positive, hopeful storytelling choice. Ruthanna Emrys’s A Half-Built Garden isn’t perfect, Abigail says, but at least it recognizes that this would be—is—colonialism by another name. As Abigail notes, the prime directive exists for a reason.

Meanwhile, Paul Kincaid reflected on Paul March-Russell’s remembrance of he and our late colleague Maureen Kincaid Speller being baffled that anyone could enjoy the work of Becky Chambers. In his defense, Paul says, the world that Chambers paints is in fact far from hopeful—because it faces no obstacles and overcomes no challenges. PK writes that, because everything in those novels is predicated on everyone being so unutterably nice, everyone can afford to be nice to everybody else because they’re not putting anything on the line to get to that point. Paul emphasizes that building a community out of difference is not easy. And that hope might be found in the measure of discomfort those giving something up might be willing to experience.

And on that note, Roseanna Pendlebury on Bluesky found herself tending towards the belief that literature can’t, and generally doesn’t, change the world, or even really hearts and minds. She wondered if anyone has written about this more generally. Answers on a postcard! Zadie Smith in the NYRB comes to my mind, as does a collection of essays entitled Can Fiction Change the World?, edited by Alison James, Akihiro Kubo, and Françoise Lavocat.

As for changing the world … well. See you next time.

In the first part of episode 5 of Writing While Disabled, Kristy Anne Cox and Kate Johnston discuss some adjustments they'd like to see at science fiction conventions that would help create a more inclusive experience for all science fiction writers and fans, including moderator training, fire safety, a technology mentor-buddy system, and more.

If you prefer, you can watch the full episode with close-caption subtitles here.

Show notes:

• This episode was produced and hosted by Kristy Anne Cox and Kate Johnston, and edited, mixed, and transcribed by Kat Kourbeti.
• The theme song, "Funky - Upbeat Loop" by ispeakwaves, is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
• Want to send us a question? You can do so here!

Transcript

Kristy Anne Cox: Welcome. Let's start over again. Okay. Welcome to Writing While Disabled, welcome for reals. This time for real. And I am still Kristy Anne Cox.

Kate Johnston: And I am once again, Kate Johnston.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yes. And today we are going to talk about so many amazing things, but they're going to relate to convention spaces and ageism and disability, and whatever else comes up with those topics, right?

Kate Johnston: Indeed, yes.

Kristy Anne Cox: So, who are we starting with? We were gonna talk about... moderators. This is one of your questions I wanted to ask you about.

So we've talked about conventions and disabled audience members and disabled panelists.

Kate Johnston: Mm-hmm.

Kristy Anne Cox: What we haven't really talked about is moderating. So Kate, what are you thinking? How can we help out moderators?

Kate Johnston: Well, just kind of in general, regardless of who your moderator is, as the people who are running the con, also known as con runners, you should be giving your moderators some guidance so they understand what you are asking of them. 'Cause not everybody's been a moderator before, not everybody thinks they don't have imposter syndrome. There are people out there who are super great moderators who think they're terrible. There are people who are terrible, who think they're super great. So let's give them some guidance about where we wanna go.

For a lot of places, that guidance would be in terms of, why don't you have a sheet, or have this printed on the back of their name tent, of non-gendered greetings for your audience.

Kristy Anne Cox: Oh yeah. So for people who might be still learning those speech patterns.

Kate Johnston: Right? Then they don't have to come up with "they-dies and gentle-thems" all by themselves, because these are not necessarily things that everybody does. It's wordplay, and that's not what everyone does.

Kristy Anne Cox: It's also generational. You have a lot of people who are still learning how to navigate spaces that feel very different to them. And they are very different in how we talk about things. So having some of those terms on the back of your name card, that's a great idea.

Kate Johnston: It might be helpful to just break some stuff down. Like you don't have to go into the 87 different labels for stuff. If you just go, "oh, can I use the word queer for that? Yeah, I can use that for everything? Awesome." So there are ways to make it less prone to error, or upset.

Kristy Anne Cox: Or an access barrier.

Kate Johnston: Yes.

Something else for con runners to think about is that you may want to allocate more of your staff to rooms where we have disabled panelists, moderators, or the audience—basically every room—just to make sure we have enough room, we have enough space to move around, that they can help reset the room.

Because if you walk into a room where everybody's been in a circle and you don't have enough time, you aren't planning on doing that, and you have more people in your audience, it may not occur to the audience to just start rearranging chairs.

Kristy Anne Cox: Right.

Kate Johnston: And your disabled moderator may not be able to start rearranging chairs.

Kristy Anne Cox: So having like more modular rooms that the moderator could have more control over?

A big one for me is, can the moderator fit behind the table in their mobility device?

Kate Johnston: Yeah.

Kristy Anne Cox: Do they need to go up a step to get on a little platform? Is there enough room behind the bench for a wheelchair to move past the seating chairs?

I've been thinking about how we arrange the seating of the moderators themselves. Like, who to sit closest to the moderator and who to sit farthest away. And it's worth asking your panelists if they have a preference. I found it really difficult sitting directly next to the moderator in the last panel I was on, because I kept wanting to lip read and if I turn and I'm sitting right next to them, I felt like I was dominating their entire field of vision and no one else downstream—

Kate Johnston: Mm-hmm.

Kristy Anne Cox: —was getting any trickle down moderation.

Kate Johnston: Yep.

Kristy Anne Cox: Which was interesting. I wanted to be at the end for lip reading purposes, just so I wouldn't be blocking anybody while I'm fixated staring at their mouth.

Kate Johnston: At their face. Yeah. And there's something also to be said for, if you are a person who has special moderation needs, please tell your moderator in advance. Email them. We all have email. As far as I know, everything that I've ever done, we have everybody's email previous to the actual panel.

I've been on panels where, you know, the person next to me nudges me, and because I am a person who's very laid back, I will pose a question to a panelist and then let everybody in the panel address it if they would like. And somebody didn't like that, and they elbowed me and said, "are you gonna put me in, are you gonna moderate?" And you know, I've taught school. So what happened after that was that she got the question every time, it was just asked to her, and then she decided that maybe she was gonna keep her critiques to herself until after the panel was over.

Kristy Anne Cox: Please withhold your criticism of my existence until the end of the panel! I mean, there are different moderation styles. There's not necessarily one correct way to do it. Unless there is, and if there is, it needs to be written and given out.

So if you're in an academic panel and there are specific requirements that need to be met for moderators, like behavioral requirements or whatever, people need to know about that.

Kate Johnston: Yep.

Kristy Anne Cox: People need to know who they're moderating.

Kate Johnston: Yeah.

Kristy Anne Cox: Like, if the guest of honor's on my panel, I would like to know in advance.

Kate Johnston: Also know who your audience is, in relation to what your subject is. If you are at a panel where we're talking about academic subjects and we have citations and blah, blah, blah, I probably don't wanna hear from that guy going, "well, I don't really have a question, it's more of a comment", you know?

Kristy Anne Cox: In an academic panel, the people that are going, went there specifically to make connections that will further that work that they're working on, they're there to get feedback from their colleagues, and maybe get some more cross-referencing and maybe some collaboration. They need to do that professionally for their tenure sometimes.

Kate Johnston: Which means that Joe Schmo standing there going, "well, I just wanna be in the conversation to hear myself talk", may not be the person the moderator wants to call on.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah. That's a good way to frame it, that he wants to be part of the conversation that is maladaptively being addressed in the comments line at the end of the panel. I always think of what would be a good way for those individuals to meet that need and my best idea was, I want all those extra questions and thoughts on a bulletin board out in the lobby. So if I'm standing there waiting, I can read and feel connected to 'Guy in the Line with an Opinion'. I might even agree. And it could even be on technology, it could be a Discord group or...

Kate Johnston: That's what I was gonna say, is that I find those on Discord a lot.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah. Or the comments threads under a panel. It is very welcome there. And you know, that's kind of like when we were talking about what I had originally thought this podcast was gonna be about, and what it has kind of become, which is the place where we discuss science fiction issues that disabled people can have access to, so the Accessible Con Bar.

Kate Johnston: Yep.

Kristy Anne Cox: So Guy in the Line, I see you. I wanna know what you think about giant turtles in space. I just don't wanna know it in my panel about corn.

Kate Johnston: Yeah. Time and place really matter a lot.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah. So we talked a little bit about moderators. I wanna talk about people who have trouble with technology. Can you moderate if you don't understand how to use a computer very well? I don't know, 'cause we rely on email.

Kate Johnston: Well, it depends on what kind of comm accommodation everyone needs, and what they're willing to put up with in terms of having this back and forth go on. How would you assess how your participants need accommodation?

Kristy Anne Cox: I think there are a number of ways to handle it. Some of it is knowing who they are and how they frame things, because a lot of people with disabilities who need accommodations do not identify as disabled people, and do not think they need accommodations, and then inevitably you end up on the panel and no one can hear each other because we're all aging, but nobody wants to frame it that way.

And so I think the best approach is to assume that there will be accommodation needs, the low hanging fruit. Just go ahead and meet those for everybody anyway. So you come prepared with some of the simple, easy things like having the name cards for everyone. The green room prep time beforehand is good. Making sure the email thread people feel like they've had a chance to stay connected.

Some things are gonna be a little bit harder, so you can ask directly, does anyone have a mobility device? So a lot of people will tell you they have a cane, but they will not tell you that they're disabled, they won't do it on a disabled form. So instead you skip that and just go straight to "what mobility devices do you have?" Or "is anyone hard of hearing? Does anyone need a sign language interpreter? Does anyone need live captioning?"

Skipping the general vague question of "does anyone need accommodations" or supplementing it with the specific things that you know in advance are gonna be the things.

Kate Johnston: Can I get one step even nicer about that?

Kristy Anne Cox: Please.

Kate Johnston: They are both four letter words.

Kristy Anne Cox: Oh my.

Kate Johnston: But one is easier to deal with for people in denial, and that is changing from "need" to "want". "Would you like to have a sign language interpreter", which is not me saying, "hey, Deaf-y, get over here!" You know what I mean?

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kate Johnston: And actually, that's sort of that moment we were talking about earlier and we laughed, but it's like "disabled" versus "people with disabilities". And there are places, you know, at Dragon Con you could probably get away with Crip Corner, but not everybody—

Kristy Anne Cox: I like Crip as a term.

Kate Johnston: I do too. Yeah, I do too, but not everybody is going to say that.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yes. And a lot of people, that will bounce them right off, especially if they come with a guardian or a gatekeeper who is curating their disability experience. I'm trying to think of a way to say this— I'm not even gonna be able to get in the room if you have already said something offensive to my guardian. And some of that you can't avoid, but you can try.

Um, sign language.

Kate Johnston: I don't know that we've really talked about it. For people who have never hired a sign language interpreter before, it's a little bit of a fiddly process, but it's super great.

Kristy Anne Cox: When you did, how would you go about doing that?

Kate Johnston: What I did when I was going to Worldcon this year was I looked for sign language interpretation on Google, or via Google, and I picked kind of a middle of the road, like it was clearly affiliated with a bunch of universities, it wasn't just one person with their interpretation game, you know, sort of thing.

And then I ran into about the things you'd think from that level of organization. So it works the same way that characters work; if you've ever hired like Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck or whatever to come do your thing, it's a half hour on, half hour off. So if you want them there for an hour, you're paying two people, whatever that rate is.

Kristy Anne Cox: I did not know. This is all new information for me, because I'm afraid of Bugs Bunny and Donald Duck.

Kate Johnston: Yeah. Having been Minnie and Mickey Mouse, yeah, I've met you. I've met people like you. It's fine.

Kristy Anne Cox: I'm hiding in the blinds, just hoping that Winnie the Pooh won't come talk to me.

Kate Johnston: Well, and that's totally fine. Like, we're happy to just wave at you from over here. It's the parents with two year olds who are like, "no, no, go hug Mickey!" And the kid's like... (holds hands up) Yeah. That's just not cool at all.

So half hour on, half hour off. You need two of them. So if the rate is 150 bucks an hour, then you're paying 300.

Kristy Anne Cox: Okay. So for an hour, because you need—

Kate Johnston: Two people.

Kristy Anne Cox: You need two people, 'cause you're covering—you're paying them for a half hour break. Is that how it works?

Kate Johnston: No, they sign for a half an hour, then they sit down and the other person comes up and signs for the other half of the hour, because it's like playing tennis. It's very physically—

Kristy Anne Cox: Yes. Carpal tunnel.

Kate Johnston: Yes.

Kristy Anne Cox: So for me, my experience with finding an interpreter is all through growing up Mormon, where there's always a volunteer, and they are doing it out of love for the community and wanting to share, which is very different than hiring a professional. But again, these individuals tend to end up with carpal tunnel.

Kate Johnston: Yes, they do.

Kristy Anne Cox: Because they get overused, so.

Kate Johnston: And both of ours were young women, and they were frankly hilarious. They had a really good time. And then going into pay, you're not paying just for their time. You're also paying mileage, you're paying parking.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah.

Kate Johnston: You're paying anything else. Like they wanted an extra $200 to research, you know—

Kristy Anne Cox: Vocab?

Kate Johnston: Yeah. Basically because they knew we were gonna be talking about AI, so they wanted to be able to make sure that they could do the stuff, and so we paid for that too.

And so it's gonna end up being more expensive than you think but again, they had a blast. We all had a blast, it was super fun. There weren't that many people at the panel and so I could have felt, "oh, I wasted this money", but I didn't 'cause we had a really good time.

Kristy Anne Cox: You know, I always feel like cons are missing out on not actively recruiting from disabled communities that have built in communities. If you are running a con in Chicago and you wanted to include more deaf and hard of hearing people, you could actively be reaching out to these communities and then eventually end up with a pool of volunteers who might be willing to help you with that. But you can't ask people to volunteer if they're not included, or if they don't know about it, et cetera.

Kate Johnston: Well, and a lot of that has to do with the assumptions that people make. I had a friend of mine who was doing outreach for a small con in Minnesota, and Sage Publications is their local sort of (journal for) Arabic speaking and brown population, of which there's quite a number, and also some of the Hmong community and stuff like that, like, not diaspora brown people.

Kristy Anne Cox: Sage Publications is a publisher?

Kate Johnston: It's a journal.

Kristy Anne Cox: A journal.

Kate Johnston: Yeah.

Kristy Anne Cox: Okay.

Kate Johnston: And so my friend reached out to them and said, "hey, we are running this science fiction convention, maybe you would like to mention it in your publication so that the people who read your journal will know that this is going on, and they can participate if they would like".

And the answer back from the journal was, "we serve people of color" and that this is not any part of their community. And I'm just like... what?

Kristy Anne Cox: Huh?

Kate Johnston: Yeah. Apparently, they just don't think that there's gonna be a future, and they would like to not be in it. Okay.

Kristy Anne Cox: Well...

Kate Johnston: Yeah. You gotta meet people where they are, and those guys are nowhere. So, I don't know how we break into that community, but now I'm angry and now I'm gonna find a way.

Kristy Anne Cox: So this is something we didn't talk about before, but there is this feeling I have that there are certain groups of disabled people who other people still see as, "well, we would reach out, but we're worried they would come".

Kate Johnston: Yeah.

Kristy Anne Cox: You know what I'm saying? Like, "I would love to include more disabled people, but if I did, wouldn't they be in the same room with me?" Like, this attitude.

Kate Johnston: Oh yeah. I get that.

Kristy Anne Cox: Which, I mean, it's ugly. It's an ugly thing to even say out loud, and I don't know anybody who's like diehard into that, that I would like, keep in my life. But I feel that way when I'm thinking about how to include and involve more people.

Kate Johnston: Well, and I think there's also another perspective on that, which is, "I am a disabled person in this community and I am finding it hard to navigate this community, even though I've been in this community since I was 10 years old".

Kristy Anne Cox: This community meaning disabled, or this community meaning SFF?

Kate Johnston: SFF. And so not only are other people afraid that they might come, I'm a little afraid they might come too, because then they're gonna have the same problems I have dealing with the community, won't they? So I get it, you know, I think there's dread on both sides about that.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah. You know, the "what if they come", this is leading me to a completely—it's related, but it feels unrelated.

Kate Johnston: Yeah.

Kristy Anne Cox: So I wanna talk about fire safety.

Kate Johnston: Okay, go ahead. Oh yeah.

Kristy Anne Cox: So, "what if they come, what if we invite them and what if they come?" Okay. So if you are looking at your convention hotel, and it's the only place that you can find, it's the only feasible location, I think you need to be very clearly thinking about safety planning for disabled people in the event of a fire. And if you have individuals who will need to be individually carried out by firemen, and you have six of them on the sixth floor in one room and there's a fire, you will have fatalities. They just won't be able to get everybody out in time.

Kate Johnston: Mm-hmm.

Kristy Anne Cox: So if you're gonna have a gathering space for people with mobility devices who may need to be evacuated in the event of the fire, I think that should be on the ground floor.

What do you think?

Kate Johnston: I agree. I am worried that there aren't enough ground floor/disability rooms for all the people who need them. And actually having been a state employee, we had that. We literally had groups of people, every office got together and said, "okay, here are the things that we need for the people to be able to evacuate from the building, which thing are you willing to do?"

And I went from "person willing to help carry people downstairs" to "person who needs to be carried downstairs, but can also run a bunch of the organization", in the space of two years.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah.

Kate Johnston: And so yes, we have to make sure that people are coming from the place of their strengths and where to apply them, but yes, you're right. And I think that one of the things that we should think about in terms of young people who are now coming to cons, is they should be on that team. That should be one of the ways that they get into SF is that, "hey, yeah, we're Fire Team. I was Fire Team at Dragoncon, I'll be fire team at Gen Con, I know how to do this."

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah.

Kate Johnston: You know, "I am young and strong and those are my attributes right now."

Kristy Anne Cox: My dad's military and so when they did fire drills in his office, everyone was assigned, they knew in advance which person they were in charge of. And it's like, if there is an emergency, this is your partner. You don't leave the building without your partner. You go get them, right?

Kate Johnston: Mm-hmm.

Kristy Anne Cox: And so I like that, because someone was talking to me about possible technology mentors where like a younger person and an older person might be paired together, to have someone you could reach out to explain basic issues, you know? And maybe it's ageist of me to say that, but I think that there are a lot of people who are older who do have technology issues.

Kate Johnston: Mm-hmm.

Kristy Anne Cox: If you're not one of them, then you would be great. Maybe you would be a tech mentor, like, people can sign up to be a technology mentor, but maybe there's emergency evacuation mentor. Or not mentor, but yeah, I don't know. You know?

Kate Johnston: Yeah. Sure. You know, when I used to train horses, we used to say a lot about horses and dogs, "they need jobs". They are beings that need to have a use, they need to know what it is, they need to know how to do it, and they need to know when they've done it well.

Kristy Anne Cox: We domesticated them that way.

Kate Johnston: We did, but we are the same way.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yes, we are.

Kate Johnston: And I think for a lot of people, having that kind of job, it doesn't pay you money but it pays you in satisfaction and gratitude, and feeling like you are a part of something. That is so one of the things that we are missing as Americans, is feeling like we are a part of something. And if we can do something about that for our SFF people, we will feel more tied together as a group and as an organization. I don't know that this is gonna be a bad thing for us.

Kristy Anne Cox: No, that's a good thing. People—I think at the root of it, if it's not an academic con, they are going to cons to make friends, or to connect with friends, or to feel connected to a larger community, and it's about friendship.

And so a lot of what we're thinking about is how to facilitate friendships. I think that needs to be age informed, it needs to be disability informed, but yeah, helping people have a connection to others. I've seen a lot of different things we can do with that, but I really like the idea of finding ways to connect generational and clique differences, right?

Kate Johnston: Mm-hmm.

Kristy Anne Cox: So like, maybe you're military SFF and you haven't met anybody in speculative romance. Let's crosspollinate. That's what speculative romance is all about.

Kate Johnston: Mm-hmm.

Kristy Anne Cox: Well, I think we have time for one more question. Was there something else that caught your eye?

Kate Johnston: I really, really, really wanna touch on scheduling.

Kristy Anne Cox: Scheduling! Please.

Kate Johnston: Okay. So I've seen this go on a bunch of times and I just don't understand why it keeps happening. I understand that we have a hotel that has a lot of different sizes of meeting rooms, but when you have an author whose name everyone knows, and you have them scheduled in the tiniest room possible, you are asking for trouble.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah.

Kate Johnston: I saw, was it Joe Haldeman having a conversation with some other big, huge old science fiction guy, and I was just like, "why are we not in a ballroom?" Everyone knows who you are, we're not sitting around talking about the fabrication of O-rings for Challenger. Like, that's a five people discussion, fine. But no, these two guys talking to each other about science fiction? Yeah, and they're telling stories from like the Reagan administration? Everybody wanna hear that. And those that don't should go do whatever it is they wanna do in the small room, or go do crafts or whatever it is.

But we really need to think more clearly about that, especially since both of these men are 80 plus and that room was tiny, and there was not enough space for all of the mobility devices that needed to be in there.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah.

Kate Johnston: There were lots more people that wanted to be in that room and just could not, so that's one of them.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah. Well, and when you're planning mobility space parking lots, I want people to keep in mind that not everybody is containable in a rectangle. If you and your body have a limb sticking out, or something where you're gonna get bumped into all the time because you've been parked too narrowly, it's really good to have somebody there physically in the space moderating that. You want somebody on the elevators. Your job is to prevent other people from squishing too many wheelchairs onto this elevator.

Kate Johnston: Mm-hmm.

Kristy Anne Cox: And the other people will probably be other disabled people who are being pushed by someone who wants them in there.

Kate Johnston: Yep. The last two crowd control places that I've been to with an elevator that worked really well, they both had elevator operators. Oracle Park and the Masonic had elevator operators, and I know it's annoying and I know they sit in this little tiny room all day, but oh God, it made it happen so much better.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah. Well, I was gonna say if you end up in a room that is just not big enough, one way to include all of these overflow individuals is to have other rooms where they can sit and watch the same panel.

Kate Johnston: Yes.

Kristy Anne Cox: And then include them by specifically making sure you bring an audience question from each of those other rooms. I've seen that work very successfully in large church settings, and I've seen it in educational settings. Now, what you don't wanna do is end up saying, "this is the disabled room". Maybe you do wanna have a room that is accessible in a particular way, but you just don't wanna make people feel like you're herding them out of sight.

Kate Johnston: Right.

Kristy Anne Cox: Also a mother's lounge, or a parent's lounge.

Kate Johnston: Yes, I was gonna say that. Yeah.

Kristy Anne Cox: Where someone can go with their noisy or crying child if they need to nurse. That's another way to add excellent accessibility.

Kate Johnston: And then I have one other thing, 'cause this actually happens. It's happened twice now in the last two years. Please, please do not schedule all the brown people on DEI day. Don't do that. We actually know each other, we would like to support each other, and if I'm in panels all day but I can't go and see my friends be in panels all day, I'mma be mad. I'm gonna be so mad.

And also, all of the brown people will look at that and go, "well, clearly you didn't want us here for the other two days, so we're gonna leave".

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah.

Kate Johnston: And that did happen. You know, so if that's what you want and you're running the SF-KKK, okay, that's how you do that. But I would like to support not doing that.

Kristy Anne Cox: Remember that your panelists and your moderators also want to enjoy the convention. It's worthwhile for people on scheduling just to like, pay attention. "Hey, this person has six things in two days, maybe I should check in with them and make sure they don't just say yes to everything because they don't know how to say no."

Kate Johnston: Mm-hmm.

Kristy Anne Cox: But yeah, not putting everybody on the same day from a particular marginalization group is really, really important, because you're also depriving them of the opportunity to connect with other people and build community in solidarity with their group.

Which is another big reason people come to cons, is to meet their peer writers, the people you're gonna come up with, and you can't meet 'em if they're back to back.

Kate Johnston: And I think one of the things that we have been neglecting is that—and I know we do this at ICFA, but—we really do need to have like a ballroom with really good filtration, where everybody can just freaking mingle.

Kristy Anne Cox: Oh yeah.

Kate Johnston: There's not enough space to do that in. There's just not, and we never get enough time with people. And I swear to God, half the time that we're all, you know, freaking out and sad when somebody dies, is that we only managed to have two conversations with them in 35 years because everything was just all happening at once.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah.

Well, we are out of time. I guess for listeners and for our readers, I wanna say, cut yourself a little slack if you're making mistakes when you're learning how to do this. Disability as a community is a very diverse group of littler communities in a trench coat, trying to get into a movie theater where they don't want us to come in.

And a lot of it is trying to find a way to get all those groups to work together, which is similar in larger social justice movements, like disability justice. I think disabled people, it's okay to make mistakes as you're learning this stuff, but you also need to be open to listening and changing behavior.

So if you're listening to this and thinking, I made a mistake in running my local con, well, I'm more focused on "how can you do better?"

Kate Johnston: Yeah.

Kristy Anne Cox: What are your thoughts to wrap us up here, Kate?

Kate Johnston: Yeah, I would like to second that. Like, I'm less interested in blame than I am in "let's make the next one better than the one I'm talking about". That sort of thing. That's pretty much where I'm going with this.

And actually we have a ton more questions and answers to go with this, so you know, I'm fine with saying this was part one.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah.

Kate Johnston: And we'll pick up with part two next time, 'cause we can finish this.

Kristy Anne Cox: Well, let's wrap this episode.

So thank you for listening everyone. You can find more episodes of this on the Strange Horizons website. You can also search "Writing While Disabled" and look for either my name, Kristy Anne Cox, or Kate's name. You're going by LM Kate Johnston.

Kate Johnston: Yes, correct.

Kristy Anne Cox: And please feel free to share this with the hashtag #WritingWhileDisabled, and the hashtag #StrangeHorizons, and ask us any questions you have. We wanna hear your thoughts. We probably don't wanna promote your book, but we definitely wanna hear your questions about disability and science fiction spaces and writing.

All right, till we meet again.

Kate Johnston: All right. Excelsior!

In this episode of Strange Horizons at 25, Podcast Editor Kat Kourbeti sits down with long-time Strange Horizons contributor RB Lemberg for a conversation about their extensive work with the magazine, using poetry as a tool to refine short and long-form fiction, writing about the diaspora experience, and the comfort one can find in stories from perspectives outside one's own. Oh, and Ursula K LeGuin, of course.

Links and things:

• Want to leave us a happy birthday message? Click ⁠here to record an audio message⁠, and ⁠here for video⁠.
• Join our ⁠Patreon⁠ for early episode access, or donate through any other way to hear your name and message in our next episodes.
• Are you starting to read stories for SFF awards season? Consider our fiction and poetry archives as a good starting point, and let us know your favourite stories and poems of the year on Bluesky.

Episode show notes:

• Read RB Lemberg's work in our archives.
• Visit their website, their Patreon, or follow them on Bluesky.
• Buy Yoke of Stars, their latest Birdverse novella, which just won the World Fantasy Award!
• Pre-order We Will Rise Again, the activism anthology edited by Annalee Newitz, Karen Lord, and Malka Older.
• Find more links to their work, plus other interesting things, scattered through the transcript below.

Transcript

Kat Kourbeti: Hello Strangers, and welcome to Strange Horizons at 25, a 25th anniversary celebration of Strange Horizons. I'm your host, Kat Kourbeti, and it is my privilege today to welcome you to another episode that looks back at the history and impact of Strange Horizons on the speculative genres.

Today's guest, RB Lemberg, was first published in Strange Horizons in 2010, and most recently in March of this year, with everything from poetry and fiction to round tables and articles under their belt on Strange Horizons alone. RB is a queer bi-gender immigrant from Ukraine to the US. They are an author of five books of speculative fiction and poetry, many of which are set in a shared universe, a translator from Ukrainian and Russian, and an academic. RB's books of fantasy have been shortlisted for the Nebula, Locus, Ignyte, World Fantasy Award, the Le Guin Award for fiction, and many others. It's so great to have you here, RB.

RB Lemberg: It is so great to be here, Kat. Thank you so much for inviting me.

Kat Kourbeti: You are one of the people I think of as like Strange Horizons people, you know what I mean?

RB Lemberg: I'm so glad to hear this. It's probably my favorite magazine. I think Strange Horizons and Beneath Ceaseless Skies are my two favorite magazines in the whole world, so.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. I mean, I think there's few people who are so like, embedded in sort of everything that we do and all of the different departments we have. Like, you've kind of worked with everybody.

RB Lemberg: I have been very happy, privileged, and lucky to work with multiple editors at Strange Horizons across multiple departments. And so it's always such a delight to return to the magazine and to read the magazine, and thank you for this opportunity to interview.

Kat Kourbeti: It has been such a joy interviewing everyone on this podcast who has such different, first of all, different experiences with the magazine, but also different ways of coming into it, different genres and different formats that they write in. And it's all so varied, and 25 years is a long time, so there's been a lot of variety—

RB Lemberg: Oh, yeah. Oh yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: —in these interviews already, including your partner, Bogi, with whom I had a really nice chat about criticism and reviews and all sorts of things.

So I wanna hear about your work in general. First of all, you dabble in so many things. Your genre is predominantly fantasy, I would say.

RB Lemberg: You know, I love so many different things within the speculative realm, and I've even ventured beyond the speculative. But I think my heart is in the speculative realm, broadly construed, and I think within that very, very large space, fantasy is where my heart is primarily. But I've written everything: I've written science fiction, I've written horror, I've written slipstream, surrealism, things that people say are realism, but they're not really realism, essays, poetry, like really academic stuff, translations. I've really done a lot of stuff over the years and I think it's a feature, not a bug.

But yes. So I think I'm most known for my fantasy work, both within poetry and within fiction. I've written a lot of stuff set in my Birdverse universe, which is a secondary world with many, many cultures and languages and very queer, very trans, and have been running for a long time.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. We'll get to that one because I wanna hear all about it. First of all, like, you're a very curious person, you wanna find out all the things, you wanna analyze the things. In terms of format, because you've written a lot of shorts, you've written obviously novels, the poetry... what draws you to the different formats, would you say, and how do you decode if like, something that you've come up with— do you have an idea, when it starts forming in your brain and you're like, I think I want this to be that?

RB Lemberg: You know, it's such a great question and I don't know if I have a capsule answer to that. I feel—and again, I dunno if that's the actual reality of other people, but for a very long time I felt, "oh my God, other people can just focus on one or two things and you have the spread and things just happen. And what's wrong? What's wrong, RB?"

And then I started getting deeper and deeper into Ursula Le Guin's work. I mean, I've always been into her work since I can remember. Now I'm doing a lot of work connected to her actual poetry and some nonfiction that she's written, and the more I studied Le Guin's body of work and the more immersed I became in her body of work, the better I felt about my own spread, because she also did everything and she delighted in everything, literally everything. For some reason, when people think about her work, they think about novels and they think about science fiction, but she's literally written everything. And so it gave me a lot of solace to know that, hey, a lot of other people have actually done this, where you do a lot of different things and they feed each other.

So how do I know what is what? I don't, a lot of times. Recently I've just finished a short story that I sent out, and I've written at least three poems that I connected to the short story. I now teach it also, as a tool. I teach speculative fiction writing sometimes, and I tell folks about this thing that I use, which is poem outlines. I write poems to accompany the fiction that I'm writing, that help me disentangle plot and character development and emotions.

I have a few formal approaches about how to write poem outlines, and sometimes they just appear. But I think in terms of poetry, which is probably my first and truest love throughout my life, it works by lines. I am walking or doing something completely different—usually I'm in motion, Walking is usually how it happens—then the line pops into my brain and I have to write it down, and then the second line pops into my brain, and I have no idea where this is going... and then I start writing. Then I figure out where it's going, and here is the poem.

I also love epic poetry. I love the long form. I've written a bunch, mostly for Strange Horizons. I've written a whole bunch of very long poetry before I told myself "actually, these are stories! People should actually experience them as fiction as well." So I started doing more fiction.

I think my approach is fluid and it's really whatever comes, and things come and go and they morph, and as I said, sometimes I write about kind of the same idea or image I have in my mind. I would write a piece of fiction and I would write a poem and I would write another poem and I would write an essay about another thing that I'm thinking about. Once I've even written, like I've written with my latest Birdverse novella (Yoke of Stars), it was a dissertation chapter and it was a publication and it was like an academic publication and it was a whole bunch of poetry and it was a short story. And then it was an unpublished short story, 'cause I felt, "oh, it really needs to be longer". And then finally, it became a novella.

So I really think that my approach is fluid, and over the years I've not been very chill about this process, I'll be honest.

Kat Kourbeti: I mean, actually I would argue this is the chillest response I've had—

RB Lemberg: Thank you!

Kat Kourbeti: —from someone who does so much, and you're very prolific as well, which I admire immensely. No, I think it's super chill to just be like, "well, I'm gonna let it be what it is, and we're gonna find out. I don't know, I'm gonna try this."

The idea of poem outlines sounds fascinating to me and I want to try it.

RB Lemberg: Yeah, you should try it. So if you want to hear more, I can tell you, and I can tell everyone what I do.

Kat Kourbeti: I mean honestly, yeah! This podcast is very much like a little masterclass for listeners, so please teach me your ways.

So you have an idea and you're like, "I'm gonna outline it with poetry and see what comes out."

RB Lemberg: Yeah. There are many ways to do it. And I think what coalesced for me when I started—so it all began when Clarion West invited me to teach a workshop about poetry techniques for fiction writers. And I decided, "hey, I am gonna teach poetry outlines, 'cause I do them all the time", and I talk about them on Patreon, but I hadn't talked about them at that point outside of Patreon.

So I gave my students in the Clarion West class an exercise to write from a viewpoint of a character or two, and do either a boast or a lament, where a character either boasts about something they've done or laments. And everybody had so much fun and people really got into it. I think this one exercise where you write a boast or a lament, it really gets to the emotional quirk of character work. And because it's poetry, you don't have to stop yourself. You can be as over the top as you want to. You can write as purple as you want to, as outrageous as you want to, and nobody sees it too because it's for yourself, right? You don't have to publish it. You can, if you want to, but it's really just for you. So you can be as outrageously yourself as you want in a poem, or you can be as outrageously a character as you want.

And other poem outlines, again, it's an image. So a poem that I just wrote to kind of outline my short story, it was all about the vibe. It was all about the mood and the setting and the beautiful imagery that came to me that then I used, and some of it I didn't use. So in the poem, there was a tiny piano, and in this short story, there's no tiny piano because there was no room for tiny piano. But there was room for everything else I've stuffed into this poem outline, except the tiny piano, which is a bit sad. Maybe next year's story can have a tiny piano.

But I think poetry can liberate you. Poetry can really let you do, especially if you tell yourself, "I'm just doing it for me, this is really an outline, there's no perfection required, I'm not gonna revise it, I'm not gonna polish it. It's just for me to express how I feel about this piece." And then what comes out for me often is the truest, the most like vivid thing about whatever fiction I wanna write.

Kat Kourbeti: Hmm. It just kind of removes that critical voice that you might have that's stopping you because you're like, "oh, but I wanna come up with a perfect image."

RB Lemberg: Exactly. Just let it go.

Kat Kourbeti: Fascinating. I'm very curious to try that next time I'm sitting down to write something.

RB Lemberg: Oh, please tell me! Please update me. I'm very curious.

Kat Kourbeti: So yeah, so poetry outlines as a method of figuring out what an idea is and where you wanna take it. And has that ever helped you shape the story itself into like say, "oh, I think this is a short, for example, or is this something that's part of something bigger?" Have the poetry outlines actually helped you reign that in, in any way?

RB Lemberg: Yes and no. I think my own desire, sometimes the way I envision things, I want my process to be very orderly. I want to write every day, I want to have a schedule, I want to sit down and write what is in my plan. I have a plan, I always have a plan, I plan things out. And my creative brain is like, "No! Absolutely no, I will not do the thing."

It's a struggle between them a lot of times, where I somehow cling to this idea, this notion that things need—so if I've written a poem outline, it needs to unlock certain things for me. If it has not unlocked certain things for me, what am I even doing? But my process is actually a lot more iterative, and it's not at all orderly and it's not very linear.

So, when I write a poem outline, a lot of times it'll sit, it'll literally sit. There was a time when I was writing this novella in Birdverse and these two characters kept having dialogues and I've written, I dunno how many poem outlines I put on my Patreon, where they're just constantly in dialogue with each other and they argue about things and they're both very lyrical, and it's just endless dialogues.

And I don't think that went anywhere. I think that that just had to be, and it clarified a lot of things about my world and let me express what I was feeling. But in the end I was like, "actually that's their own private business. It's not actually going to be a book, or it's not going to be another additional novela." Like the things that I've written out in this one are just going to sit. And I have no idea, because maybe in two, three years I will return and I will say, "no, actually this is a novella, this is a short story, this is a book. I keep thinking about it, so maybe."

Sometimes my fiction process—again, "I have an outline, I know what I'm doing", I think over and over and then I conclude, "well, actually this outline, no, that's not where it wants to go." I just see where I'll trash the outline. My struggle as a writer is to let myself just do the process of discovery and accept that everything feeds everything (else). So if I write something about folklore two months later or two years later, it'll be incorporated into something else. Or if I write a piece of fiction, then I want to crunch some data, like, let my brain do the thing, let myself do the thing, and somehow it's a continuous struggle for me still. Still.

Kat Kourbeti: It's a good problem to have probably, just too many ideas and too much creativity in there, and too much curiosity about the world and about writing and stories. You also blend a lot of the fiction stuff that you do and the poetry stuff that you do with academia.

RB Lemberg: For sure.

Kat Kourbeti: Looking at it from, yeah, as you said, like crunching some data and like, "let's look at this actually, and what does this mean more broadly, and who else is doing it?"

RB Lemberg: Right.

Kat Kourbeti: What has that lent to your fiction and vice versa, would you say?

RB Lemberg: I really think that when I talk about it, it's years after everything has already cooked in my brain and it's coalesced and I can make a pretty picture out of the chaos, or the fomenting chaos that things actually came from. But a good example of this is a poem that's going to come out in The Deadlands, "Bay Nakht Afn Altn Mark: A Rehearsal", which is based on this modernist fantasmagorical play by Yiddish writer Yitskhok Leybush Peretz, which I've read many, many years ago in the Yiddish and then in English translation, and I realized, "oh my God, this play... it's a poem! A poem that is a play." The first time this play has ever been staged was in the 1920s in the Soviet Union, and they've rewritten everything to make it more revolutionary and more communist. And so I've read that and I've written a poem, I've written an article that's under review. I want to redo this play as a play, I wanna write a play based on the (original) play. I have started developing it. It's not developed, it might never coalesce.

Another example of something like this is actually Yoke of Stars, this novella that just came out last year and is now World Fantasy finalist. [Editor's note: it actually won the award! And a bunch of us were there to celebrate!] It's a Birdverse novella about a linguist and an assassin, and it's basically all about translation. People are there basically talking in a language that neither of them speaks as their first language. Both of them are exiles or migrants and they can't figure out how to communicate. One of the protagonists comes originally from a culture where they don't use verbs, and this idea has fascinated me since my graduate school days.

I've really iterated this idea from every possible angle, like what would it be like to come from a culture that does not use verbs, as most human languages do use verbs. Some use very few verbs, but most of them do use verbs. And so for this one, I was thinking, "well, it would have to be a culture where literally everything is different, because motion is different and their society is different, and the way they conceptualize relationships is different, and everything is different."

Of course then the idea of being in exile and coming to a completely different linguistic world, right? Like a completely different linguistic culture, which is more familiar to us, what would it do? What would it change? So these were both academic questions and very lived in questions for me as an immigrant and a person who is multilingual, and moves, you know, sometimes very uncomfortably between my various cultures and languages. And so this set of works, I feel it represents what it feels like to hop from one thing to another, and be so bothered by it that literally I need to write it in multiple ways.

I don't think I'm done writing about this, certainly not done writing about translations. So I feel my process is very messy.

Kat Kourbeti: But that's the thing though. You've touched upon a couple of things that I wanted to ask you about anyway, and one of those is the interaction of language, and as you said, the way you conceptualize the world. I mean, that is an ongoing kind of philosophy, isn't it, that a lot of people subscribe to that, like the language that we speak shapes how we understand ourselves and the world and relationships and all of that stuff.

So as a multilingual person working in all of these languages and keeping all of them fresh in your mind, it's very clearly impacted your fiction, because Birdverse in particular has an academic component, there's people who are studying, there's translation, there's all of these different cultures interacting... "How did it start?" I feel like is a really big question, but at what point did you go like, "ooh, actually I have an idea", and then this universe happened that kind of touches upon all of these things that you think about on the regular?

RB Lemberg: You know, it's such a great question, and thank you for all these really cool questions. Thank you.

I don't know if there's an easy answer. I feel like I was a world-builder before I became a writer and, I also for many years struggled with—I wanted to write and I dabbled in writing for years and years before I became a writer. And I think early in life, my fundamental struggle was with what language will I write this in? I couldn't find a home in any of the languages I tried.

During my early grad school years, I learned Czech and I started writing in Czech, and I wrote this kooky story about a portal fantasy with cats. And it was hilarious. I wrote it in Czech and I had some Czech friends who started laughing because of course I made all the grammatical mistakes possible, and they read it and they were entertained by my grammatical mistakes. But then they were like, "oh, I wanna know what happens next!" And they started writing me emails like, "we'll correct your mistakes, so please keep writing". And I don't know what happens next, I have no idea. I don't know.

So early in life, I think I had this overabundance of ideas and just no foothold in a language, which is really strange for a person who lives with so many languages, and studied a ton of languages. I studied a ton of very dead languages and loved it, and still dabble on and off. I have my very dead languages with me, and it's hard to keep all of them going simultaneously. It's not easy. I feel very sad at times, not always, but very sad at times because once I figured out, "no, it's actually English, I want to write in English," English has expanded—

Kat Kourbeti: Oh yeah.

RB Lemberg: —and it's taken a lot of space in my brain that I don't wanna give it. But it has, it has. So once I figured out that, no, it's actually English, the English choice has been helpful in so many ways, because I could do the grammatical gender experimentations that I wanted to do much easier in English than I could in my other languages, which have very rigid, morphologically coded gender systems. English used to as well, but it doesn't anymore. So I think finding English, as, yes, I'm gonna embrace this and I'm gonna write this, has really helped me.

But a lot of my Birdverse ideas certainly started before I started writing in English. I remember I went to Worldcon, my first con, years before I started writing, and somebody held a panel called How to Kill and Maim Your Characters. And I attended this panel and then I was telling my friends, I don't wanna kill and maim my characters, I just don't wanna do it. I remember spinning these ideas, like, I really struggled with "How to Kill and Maim your Characters" as a "you have to do terrible things to your characters" idea, and I remember that as a spinoff of those ideas.

I was in Berkeley as a graduate student at that point. I went back to Berkeley, I was telling my friends, "no, linguists should write articles". And this image came to me of a linguist, a queer woman, who is traveling to do field work and she's in the wood and she's about to meet these informants, these people she's never met before, they're magical people that are very different. Of course, every magic exists in Birdverse, but she's about to meet some Dream Way people. I didn't know the names back then. And she's waiting for them to come to this glade in the middle of the wood, and there's this bright sunlight piercing the canopy. It was just the sense of something miraculous, something wonderful is about to happen.

I remember this image so brilliantly, and for many years when people ask me, "well, where does Birdverse come from?" And I would say, "hey, this character, man, who is not in any book, then popped into my head when I was still a graduate student, wasn't writing any fiction, and that's where Birdverse came from. And she's not in any book." Well, now she is: this is Ulín, who is the protagonist of Yoke of Stars. So finally, there is something with her in it.

Kat Kourbeti: Wow.

RB Lemberg: But not about this particular field work. Still not about this particular field work, which was, I still don't know what the story is there.

Kat Kourbeti: Fascinating. I love that there was a moment though, for you, that there was a very distinct moment of, "oh, I think I have something."

RB Lemberg: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: And that sparked all of the things. Did you ever do field work like that? Like that character does?

RB Lemberg: No, I have not. So Ulín is an anthropological linguist. I mean, in modern terms, not in universe terms. She's an anthropological linguist and a lot of times I have a lot of trouble with anthropological linguistics. Its methods, its accomplishments, its history, its everything. And one day I will even publish something about this in fiction, but I personally did not want to do classical inter-linguistics, where you go out in the field and you meet people who are not like you, and you learn about them and you write about them. That did not ever appeal to me. I've done work with informants, but I tend to study my own groups.

So I think it's a bit different. The dynamics are certainly different, and I do less anthropological work. It's complicated, but again, I don't do that type of work and I have a lot of criticism of that type of work as a historical phenomenon, and so do a lot of anthropological linguists today, which is great, which is excellent.

Kat Kourbeti: The history of the field is not the best.

RB Lemberg: Exactly.

Kat Kourbeti: Cause there's a lot of kind of colonial aspects—

RB Lemberg: Yeah. Exactly.

Kat Kourbeti: —to it and to language and how you relate to the foreign language, and then you try to communicate and it's just, yeah.

RB Lemberg: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: I could see why, but at the same time, that makes it a very interesting thing to explore in fiction. So I can also see how you were like, "hmm!"

RB Lemberg: I have so many ideas, and many of them are large scale. So for example, the anthropological linguistics idea, I'm forever working on this book that really deconstructs it. The academic anthropological field work is not very savory, and I think the idea with Ulín's enterprise is that she's never been a mainstream person. She's never been a person coming from an imperialist or colonial culture, she's been an outsider and that has opened some doors to some more nuanced and interesting things.

And so a lot of times my work needs a larger scale because it's so nuanced, and it's not always a good thing, because it needs so much setup to actually get to the nuance of what it's doing, that it can be difficult for many reasons. But it's very worthwhile, I stand by it. I wouldn't change anything.

But for these big, anti-colonial ideas, which rely on so much history that's not US history—because I'm never writing about US history, I'm not from the US originally, so I want to lean into what am I getting out of stories that I feel I inherit, like the Russian Revolution, and the terrible and not so terrible things that happened during the Soviet regime, and how the Soviet regime treated a variety of minoritized people.

These are the questions that historically, if I go to a more close connection to what is happening in our world, that's where my mind tends to go to, or like the history of Jewish diasporas broadly construed, and constructing this very, very diasporic Jewish fantasy, which Birdverse is, which is not about any return to any place, but really about—we are diasporic, the exile happened, but we no longer even think about it. And what does that look like? What are these connections like?

So a lot of it is very big, and sometimes from all this big scale work, I wanna scale down, I wanna write a poem.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

RB Lemberg: I want to write a shorter piece.

Kat Kourbeti: And yet you still find ways to touch upon all these things in the shorter work. A lot of your poetry, a lot of your short fiction still kind of has components of Birdverse, or they're just fully in there, or expanding upon ideas and places and settings and characters and that sort of thing. So would you say that you're ever not thinking about Birdverse in some form?

RB Lemberg: You know, it would be really tempting to say, "I'm always thinking about Birdverse", but that's not true. I'm not always thinking about Birdverse. I'm thinking about it a lot, and probably every day. But my head is a very busy place. I'm thinking about a lot of things.

Kat Kourbeti: In the best possible way.

RB Lemberg: Thank you. Thank you.

Kat Kourbeti: I love to pick apart the brains of creative people on this podcast. It's pretty great. This segues very well into my next set of questions, which are about your Strange Horizons journey, which has been long. Gosh, I mean, 15 of the 25 years you've been part of this magazine, which is amazing! How did you first come across Strange Horizons in the first place?

RB Lemberg: This brings back memories, you know. Shweta Narayan and I, we've been friends for a very long time, but Shweta's introduced me to the magazine, I think, and I started reading it in 2008/9.

Kat Kourbeti: Okay.

RB Lemberg: And I was just starting to write for publication. I've deleted or destroyed everything that I've written before 2008, nothing survives. And then in 2008, my friends convinced me to try sending some of my stuff out, and suddenly I sold things. I think 2008 was the first year I published poems. I started writing short fiction, and I was reading Stange Horizons all the time because it was my dream magazine—and it remains, I love the magazine.

I was reading Strange Horizons all the time, and I sent a few works to Strange Horizons and I sold a short story, which was my first professional sale, and it came out in 2010. And since then, I've met a lot of people who sold their first thing to Strange Horizons, and that's one of the things I love about the magazine, that it has opened doors to so many writers who had their first pro sale in Strange Horizons.

So for me, that has been such a big milestone. It was a flash story that might now be reprinted. It was called Kifli, about a golem made of dishes. And finally, when Bogi and I also started talking, we talked about that story because Bogi told me that they thought that I was Hungarian because kifli is a Hungarian baked good. We were talking about the varieties of kifli, and can kifli have jam or can kifli not have jam? And it's just been such a funny conversation about Hungarian baked goods.

So yeah, Bogi was convinced I had to be Hungarian because of this story. It's such a funny story and it was inspired by dishes that I have, that my mom actually—

Kat Kourbeti: Specifically? There's something in there about purple flowers, like is that—

RB Lemberg: So the purple flowers is what the protagonist wants to have, but the plain white dishes is actually what they get. It's a story that's based on the plain white dishes that I've gotten at that time, and I still have them, and they're still known as "the golem dishes" because in transit many of them did break, and that's how kind of the idea for the story came from it. I am not a baker. It has very little to do with my life, other than this seed of 'dishes that broke in transit'.

But since then I've published a lot of work in Strange Horizons, but I think primarily poetry. There was a time when I was writing a whole bunch of epic poems that were narrative, and Sonya Taaffe was editing for Strange Horizons, and I mostly worked with her, although I've worked with a lot of other editors. I worked with Romie, I worked with Lisa Bradley, and a whole bunch of other poetry editors who've edited my work over the years. So I've published a lot of poetry in Strange Horizons.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. You really have.

RB Lemberg: Yeah, which is great. I think I've been really happy with how my work was treated in Strange Horizons and the readership that it got. Then I had some essays and round tables and this and this, so I've really been connected to the magazine.

A few years ago, I published a poem called Stone Listening, which was a tribute to Ursula K Le Guin, my friend Corey Alexander, who passed away, and to Sonya Taaffe as well.

It basically riffs off Ursula K Le Guin's Always Coming Home which has this character, Stone Listening, who is a healer, and I wanted to write about him. He's a minor character, but he's always fascinated me. And so that poem was then translated to Ukrainian by Mykhailo Zharzhailo, and I think it was my first poetry translation into Ukrainian. I was so happy. Now there's another was just published, but this was the first, so.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. I mean, that's gotta be very special.

RB Lemberg: It is.

Kat Kourbeti: To be writing in a foreign language and then get that poem translated into your mother tongue, and to be read by people back there... Ugh. That's beautiful.

RB Lemberg: Yeah. It was very touching, and remains. Every time my work is translated into Ukrainian or I do something with Ukrainian diaspora, it's just such a gift.

Kat Kourbeti: I did want to talk a little bit about Kifli. First of all, it delights me that this was your first pro sale, 'cause every time that I have another guest here whose debut we facilitated, it makes me so happy. So First Pub Club, high five, well done.

Because it's so emblematic of a lot of what you do, stuff that we've already talked about with your other work in general, and with Birdverse—Kifli has these themes of emigration, of leaving home, of the diaspora experience and of course Jewish culture and Slavic culture, the mesh that that is, or that it can be for a group of people.

I find that it's so cool, first of all, that your first pro sale encompasses a lot of the stuff you care about. I just wanted to hear a little bit about what you wanted to give to the reader as an emotional experience, as they read this story.

RB Lemberg: It's such a complex question for me because it was a very long time ago, and at the same time, that story is so dear to me and I love it so much. Ultimately it's a story about love, and it's a story about love that is problematic and messy.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, as mothers and diaspora daughters can be. I related to this a lot, which is why I wanted to ask you about it, 'cause my very specific experience resonated with this story a lot, cause I left home, my mom is of Slavic origin, and so it's very much like, ooh!

RB Lemberg: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: That whole thing where they're on the phone and it's like, "my mom listens; she doesn't listen." And it's like, yep, I felt that very much.

RB Lemberg: I love diaspora stories, and I think I've been reading so many diaspora stories for the same reasons I'm sure that you do, because they have this resonance, and I think a lot of diaspora stories are about food and love that is unspoken, because when you have this language barrier and often you have the distance barrier, it's very difficult to cross. And when you come into the American context, there's a lot of therapy speak: how you communicate and you develop communication. Hey, that doesn't always work, sorry.

Kat Kourbeti: It'd be nice, but...

RB Lemberg: Things are messy and complicated, and a lot of times diaspora stories are about food because food is how people express caring and love, and making traditional food is a very complicated thing, and sharing it is a complicated thing. And so this story I think was born out of the fact that I love food, and I love making food and sharing food, and yet there's no way to teleport it. And so in many ways my own family history, which is very complicated but also a very diaspora story, it all revolves around food that's been eaten and food that has not been eaten, and the food that was supposed to be eaten, but due to distance and migration was never eaten, and things like these.

I have a story coming out that also relies a little bit on some of these ideas of my own family history and the feels of uneaten food. It's a story that's coming out in the anthology We Will Rise Again that's been edited by Annalee Newitz, Karen Lord, and Malka Older. It's a great anthology, and my story in it is also a secondary world diaspora story. There's a moment where there's jam that grandma made and she passed away, and the jam is still sitting there. And the question is, who is going to eat the last jam? And it's a small moment in the story, but it is also a moment from my life, like, who is going to eat the last jam?

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

RB Lemberg: How will the last jam be eaten? That is definitely a moment from my own life, that I think brings together all these themes that I constantly write, because I constantly write about diaspora and I constantly write about exile. I think Birdverse is very heavy on thoughts of exile and migration, and leaving home or needing to leave home or being forced to leave home, and what home means anymore, and where are you gonna land and how are you gonna get there, and comings and goings.

That I think is very diasporic, but also very tied to experiences of the senses, at least when I write about them. So definitely food is a common denominator to a lot of diaspora. So it's not just to mine, because there's so much emotion around it that I don't think you can process in therapy. You can't taste—how can you explain the taste of the last jam? Or how do you explain the smell of this particular forest or that particular town or city, or village where you came from, when the words are in a different language, if they exist at all?

Kat Kourbeti: Mm-hmm.

RB Lemberg: These are complicated and very emotional questions, and I think they are at the heart of my storytelling because I'm constantly writing about comings and goings, and I don't think I will ever stop writing about comings and goings.

Kat Kourbeti: Those are the things that every writer has deep in their psyche somewhere, the stuff that matters the most that you're trying to pick apart, and you iterate trying to solve the mystery maybe, or figure out how you feel about something. And often maybe you can't, and that's kind of the point. And I always love like, writers who are conscious of it like, "yeah, it's the same question as I always have, and that's okay. We're gonna ask it again."

I relate to that whole thing with the last jam very strongly. I still have a jar of oregano that my grandfather picked when he was still alive. And I have not allowed myself to finish the oregano, it's just in the jar now.

RB Lemberg: Do you smell it sometimes?

Kat Kourbeti: Yes. Yeah.

RB Lemberg: Yeah. Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. And those are the things that like, yeah, like food and smells and the feeling of a place, and especially when you've left it, and even if you go back, it's not gonna be the same, cause the version that you left and the version that you loved as a kid doesn't exist anymore, because of course it doesn't. Places evolve and change, and in some cases violently, you know? So then you come back and you're like, "oh, right."

RB Lemberg: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: "Is this home? I don't know."

RB Lemberg: Yeah, yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: You know, what is home? So I feel all of that very strongly. All of these themes are the stuff that I love to read too, because like, will it help me decode how I feel about things? A ha ha!

RB Lemberg: I think yes, yes and no. Right? Yes and no. I think, as you said, a lot of my work is very iterative. I feel that it's iterative even though it's all very different, but I feel that it does come back to a set of questions that bother me, even though I've done a lot of academic work on very different things. But it does come back to the same fundamental questions of multilingualism and silence and not being able to express what's there, despite all these languages that are available and all those things that are available. The things that are really wedged in the heart, they're not really expressible readily by any language, because they're about the feeling and they're about other senses.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

RB Lemberg: Something that is not yet said, or if it's said in one way, it can then be said in a different way. And it mutates and it becomes something else, and it evolves and it comes back to the same thing. And then again, so there's a lot of iteration in my work. And so thank you, because I feel like you expressed it so beautifully, and I'm really happy that you have the jar of oregano still with you, because I don't have the last jam and—

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

RB Lemberg: Sometimes I want to, but also I don't want to because...

Kat Kourbeti: It's a big thing!

RB Lemberg: Yeah, it is a big thing.

Kat Kourbeti: Actually I do in fact still have a jar (of jam) my grandma made, but she's still alive, so maybe we hold onto the jam.

RB Lemberg: Yeah. Let's hold on. Let's hold onto the jam.

Kat Kourbeti: Um, hold onto your jam folks!

There's a lot about language and the inability to articulate quite what you want to in some of your other Strange Horizons stuff as well. You've also talked about, in the nonfiction portion, about the importance of like having folks from different backgrounds involved creating, say, an anthology, or editing, and even if they're not of different backgrounds, like how do you frontline those narratives so that we can maybe try and articulate these things that exist, these stories that aren't mainstream, as you said?

RB Lemberg: Right, right.

Kat Kourbeti: So what has your experience been, first of all, as an editor of anthologies? And then also being edited in English, whilst you're trying to really confer a different kind of experience to a mainstream audience?

RB Lemberg: Thank you for these questions. I think when I started editing, I started Stone Telling, the magazine, outta spite. I started outta spite.

Kat Kourbeti: Spite is great!

RB Lemberg: 'Cause somebody told me that the way I write is not gonna have an audience. And I became so enraged. I'm still enraged. I'm laughing, right? For many years, I'm like, whatever.

Kat Kourbeti: Sorry, I can't hear you over the sound of all these awards I'm winning!

RB Lemberg: Yeah, I mean, it kind of did go that way, right? But back in the day, I remember hearing this, and it was absolutely devastating. And at the same time, I became just so enraged by it that I wrote to Ursula K Le Guin, that very day when I heard this.

Kat Kourbeti: Wow.

RB Lemberg: I came home, propelled by rage. I'm not very brave. I do very brave things, but I'm not actually that brave, but I was propelled by rage and I wrote to Ursula's agent and I said, "I'm starting a magazine. I'm going to call it Stone Telling, based on Ursula K Le Guin's Always Coming Home, the main character, and can I have Ursula's permission to name the magazine after one of her characters?"

And the agent forwarded it to Ursula K Le Guin and she responded and said, "hey, by the way, if you want a poem, here's a poem you can consider for publication, and you have my blessing and et cetera, et cetera." And I wrote back and I said, "I've been your fan (since) back in the day, (when the) Soviet Union fell and suddenly I read these translations," and we corresponded.

I think then I started editing Stone Telling, and I wanted to publish bilingual poetry, and people immediately, when I started talking about it—this was back in the day of Livejournal—I don't remember anybody who was among the naysayers, but people came and they gave me what they thought was constructive criticism. And one person said, "how are you gonna publish bilingual poetry when you yourself don't know those languages? You know some languages, but you don't know all languages, so how are you gonna vet it?"

Kat Kourbeti: Okay.

RB Lemberg: I said, "I don't need to control every aspect of an author's work." This has shocked people and still when I say this, people are like "What? As an editor, you don't need to control every aspect of an author's work?" No, I don't. I actually don't.

I don't need to understand every word, I don't need there to be a translation of every word. I can judge the quality of the work if it's bilingual from the parts that I do understand. I can ask other people who speak that language to read the parts that I don't understand and help me. But I don't need to control every aspect of an author's work, because as an editor, that's what leads you to reject work that you've never encountered or it's just not in your reading repertoire.

We're shaped by the things we read. And there is, in America at least, translations often are not read or things are not translated. Even people who read translations widely and who know many languages, which is true for me, our repertoire as readers is limited. We are limited to what we've encountered before. So if somebody who is completely outside of your cultural traditional understanding brings you a story that you connect with, but you don't understand every aspect, for me as an editor, that's the moment when I say I don't need to control every aspect of a story.

I'm going to do my best to understand the story experience and whether or not its home is going to be in my magazine or anthology, but I don't need to control every single tiny bit. I don't have to agree with every idea, I don't have to understand every reference, I don't have to understand—if it's multilingual—every word. I have read a lot of excellent multilingual work, where I don't understand every word and that's fine.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. And I think we do a bit of that on Strange Horizons for sure, but we are kind of uniquely placed, especially recently because our collective is so global, where we have all of these perspectives in the editorial staff that are not coming from like an Anglospheric, hegemonic (place), where we just kind of read the same stuff. Everybody kind of comes from everywhere. And I think over the course of these 25 years we've kind of kept that ethos of, "we want to platform new voices and we want to add more diversity to publishing". The way in which we do it kind of shifts according to who's on the team, but the spirit is kind of the same, if that makes sense.

RB Lemberg: Yeah, for sure. I think one good example of that is actually The Truth about Owls, Amal El Mohtar's story that was reprinted in Strange Horizons, actually I think maybe 10 years ago, and that I still reread, where the narrator incorporates Welsh and in the end Arabic that is not translated. There is an Arabic sentence at the very end of that story that's not translated that I think is fantastic. And I love that story so much and I keep coming back to it.

And again, it kind of creates this multiplicity of possible audiences: who is going to connect to a story, (and) how? I think people who speak Arabic and whose first language is Arabic are going to connect to it, and it's going to be really revelatory to have untranslated Arabic in the end. But if you are a diasporic creator, but you don't speak Arabic, you still will connect to it because you understand that the narrator is reclaiming a part of her that she felt was not touchable before, and so that's such a powerful moment.

And if you're not a diaspora person, and you're monolingual, that gives you a sense of estrangement that maybe landing in a different culture and a different language gives you. The story works, and this is just one example, but I think that's what multilingual stories can do for you, is that they create for different types of readers, different kinds of experiences that are all equally valid and important and they're striking and artistic.

So driving towards a monoculture, and a monoculture of an audience that's always your audience and has to receive your work in one way, and there is only one way to receive a work... That, to me, is not what I hope for as a reader and a creator, because each person is different and each person is going to bring something different.

So if I write a very trans heavy work, or a work that is very immersed in non-binary experiences and what it means to be trans and/or non-binary migrating between cultures—and if you are a part of that, yay, that's gonna validate you and it's gonna resonate with you on a personal level, or maybe you'll say, no, my experience is very different. There's nothing like it. Hey, somebody else had this experience.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

RB Lemberg: But if you are not, then you learn something about people who are not like you, and maybe you see the world in a different way. So, there's not a monoculture, and definitely for Strange Horizons it has been one of the main reasons I love the magazine, is how much diversity, true diversity there has been in terms of storytelling and poetry, nonfiction, and the kind of editing you folks do, and the kind of production you folks do. So, hey, it's been really an amazing run, 25 years. It's been an amazing run.

Kat Kourbeti: I know. Yeah. It's... we're sitting on the shoulders of some incredible people who came before us. Like, no single editor or single department can say, you know, "we've just manifested outta nowhere". We have such a long history of folks who care about this genre so much and they want to build just a beautiful, diverse body of work, that just tells different stories and lets people tell different stories. Some of what you have written about, in your poetry, your short fiction, in your essays with us, the round tables you've done. We can only be as good as the voices that we get to tell their stories, you know what I mean?

RB Lemberg: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: I'm just happy to be here.

RB Lemberg: Well, I am so happy to be a part of this very rich tapestry of voices and works that you folks have showcased over the years, and it's a work of many, and I think that's what's so beautiful and so important about it. So I really hope that Strange Horizons continues forever.

Kat Kourbeti: We sure will try. Long may we continue!

Before I let you go, I wanted to ask a little bit about... just, I'm curious, I'm nosy. Here is the last portion of the episode where I ask you: what has it been like over 15 years submitting to Strange Horizons, being edited by different people, all these different departments... Have you noticed a change or an evolution or, what has your experience been like as a very long time contributor?

RB Lemberg: This is interesting because I think I've been in most, if not all, departments of Strange Horizons over the years.

Kat Kourbeti: And now on the podcast too!

RB Lemberg: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've been in so many different departments, but I think it's the Poetry department that I've worked most closely with over the years, that I really view as my home in many ways. Because whenever I want to point towards a poem of mine, it's pretty much going to be Strange Horizons, even though I've published a lot of poetry over the years, but I'm gonna point them to Strange Horizons, both for my work and for other poets.

Over the years, I feel that the Poetry department has been unquestionably an extremely strong and vital part of the community. Poetry comes and goes. Now there's a lot more venues, sometimes there's less venues. There were a few years when the venues were kind of slim pickings. Not a lot of venues were publishing things that I wanted to read, and there were not a lot of opportunities for submission. Now it feels like there is a lot, and there is a lot of very cool things happening in speculative poetry right now. So it ebb and flows, but I have to say that Strange Horizons has always been a constant.

I loved Sonya Taaffe's editing. She was my favorite editor in Strange Horizons for years and years and years, and I worked very closely with her. And I also love all the other editors who have edited for Strange Horizons over the years, and have selected extremely strong work. Lisa Bradley was a contributor to Stone Telling back in the day, and a friend, and we've co-edited an anthology, and of course she's edited my work. So I love her work, and not just because she selected some of my work. And the same can be said for Romie Stott, who has selected my work and has selected a lot of other very strong work over the years, and other folks.

So I feel that I can't really say that it was an evolution for me personally, but more like, "oh, I always love this magazine." Sometimes I connect with it more, sometimes I connect with it less, but I'm just so happy that poetry has been such a strong feature in Strange Horizons throughout its history, and always paid well, which I think is extremely important in a genre that did not always pay well.

And beyond speculative poetry, I think litfic poetry does not always pay, and it frustrates me to no end.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

RB Lemberg: Because I believe that we need to be paid for our work.

Kat Kourbeti: Shocker!

RB Lemberg: I know right? And it's shocking that outside of the speculative poetry domain, litfic a lot of times you will pay submission fees and they will sit on your submissions and you pay them fees to read your work, and I find that exhausting, to be honest. I really think it's not fair and it should not be a thing, but somehow it's been a thing. And Strange Horizons has always paid, has always paid fairly, has always had very strong editorial across its many, many domains.

And I've consistently enjoyed the work that I've read in Strange Horizons over the years, and especially so for the Poetry department that I always follow. So, I don't know if it answers your question about evolution, but it's just been a pleasure.

Kat Kourbeti: It being kind of like a stable force of good in your life at least, that is an answerm and it's a lovely answer.

RB Lemberg: I'm glad.

Kat Kourbeti: Because I don't often get to talk to people who have just had that kind of experience where they've worked with a lot of editors, where they've been submitting for a long time, and in all of these different formats as well. You know, we didn't even touch upon, really, your academic stuff—

RB Lemberg: Oh, yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: That has made it into Strange Horizons in some capacity, which is also very interesting. It's just, it's great to hear that it's been a good experience.

RB Lemberg: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: For all of this time, honestly.

RB Lemberg: Yeah. This month I've submitted—not this month, in this summer, I've submitted some poems during Lisa Bradley's reading period, and I just got an acceptance for a poem that's gonna come out which I haven't even announced.

Kat Kourbeti: Well, this episode is not gonna come out for a little bit...

RB Lemberg: Okay, good.

Kat Kourbeti: Maybe it'll be out already and if not, you can look out for it.

RB Lemberg: Yes. So it's called The Ghost of Mirror in your Machine, which is about AI and awfulness of AI.

Kat Kourbeti: Excellent.

RB Lemberg: And I was working on this poem and I just, I've—2025 has just been an awful year. It's just been a horrible, difficult, challenging year for so many people and for me, certainly. And so I've been laboring hard to try to get pieces outta the door, and I've sent a story to Beneath Ceaseless Skies and I've sent this poem to Strange Horizons, and in both cases, I felt like knowing that I can submit work to (BCS and) Strange Horizons has actually motivated me to submit it, because I don't know if I would otherwise.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

RB Lemberg: Because I've just been feeling so worn out and just burned out in so many ways. I keep writing, it's just the submitting part that I'm just so worn out by. And so having Strange Horizons just existing has motivated me to finish it and revise it. I revise it many times and submit it. And the same is true for the short story that I sent to Beneath Ceaseless Skies, because I feel very similarly about BCS, that my work has been there over the years and so it's like, okay, if I can only finish it, then I can actually submit to my favorite place, Strange Horizons and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, which are my two favorite venues.

So I was like, I sent them out and just the feeling of relief, of knowing that I don't care—I mean, obviously I care if the work is accepted or rejected, but I don't care as much about the rejection as I do about just feeling I trust these folks, I know these folks, they select good work. So, I can send it off.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. And to satisfy my curiosity, this is probably kind of like an out-of-scope little question, but as part of your Le Guin Fellowship, you've been studying SFF through your academic work. Obviously you're working on something and I can't really (get into it), but we'll be here all day if you want... Can you tell us a little bit about what you're studying in an academic sense?

RB Lemberg: Absolutely, yeah. So, my academic trajectory also shifted in recent years because I've done a lot of sociolinguistics and now I'm doing a lot of work in science fiction studies, which is new. Most publications are still in various stages of coming out, I'm still working on them because it's kind of a new turn, but as a part of my LeGuin Fellowship, I'm studying her poetry and I hope to publish a book about her poetry, but it's gonna be slow because she's written poetry for 80 years. She started writing it when she was five, according to her, and she worked until her very last day on her last poetry collection, which she sent back copy edits a week before she passed away.

So really, poetry, I argue, is kind of a frame to her whole life and creativity. And there's a lot of it, and there is a lot of very deep stuff that is not really anywhere else. So at this point, I've done two archival trips to the LeGuin Archives in Oregon. One was sponsored by the Fellowship, the other by some other thing. And I'm going to Portland a bit later, and I hope to connect to some of the folks from the LeGuin Foundation. I've been in touch with them.

I've also been a LeGuin Fiction Prize finalist with one of my Birdverse books, so I feel like I'm deeply in the Ursula K LeGuin legacy at this point, and I love her work, and obviously I knew her and in many ways her work saved my life. It's just so rich and so cool. However, because I can't just do one thing, even though I'm doing 70 things, I can't do just one thing. I'm also writing another book, about LeGuin's kind of connection to some of the Soviet era science fiction, and that also emerged from my archival work where I discovered some really cool things in the archives, and that is about the brothers Strugatsky and LeGuin. Without spoiling too much, it's going to be about missed connections between these authors who knew each other. It's great.

So a lot of very cool stuff that's very new to me, and all of it is long form, so it's gonna take a while, but I hope that it's going to be cool. I think it's cool.

Kat Kourbeti: It sounds very cool. We'll definitely look out for that whenever that gets finished. It sounds like it's a deep undertaking.

RB Lemberg: Yeah. The second one I think is going to be called, "LeGuin and the Strugatsky Brothers in Conversation". Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: Great. Fiction wise, poetry wise, do you have anything that's relatively recent or perhaps upcoming that you would like to plug or promote?

RB Lemberg: Sure. There's always something. So there's two Strange Horizons poems, one that came out in March that's called The Blanket, the Secret, the Dark. It's a prose poem and I'm very fond of it. And it's, I think, in the Aging Special Issue. When Romie told me, "oh, it's gonna be in the Aging issue", I was like, "oh, it really kind of is about aging, shoot. Shoot, I've been here for a while!" You know, it's been 15 years. Oh my God, you know, it really has been 15 years! So I guess it's warranted, but I really love that poem and I hope people read it.

And then I have this upcoming poem that I mentioned that may come in the fall, called The Ghost of Mirror in Your Machine. I hope people will read it. It's also a prose poem, so I think I've been on a little prose poetry kick with Strange Horizons.

And then We Will Rise Again, the activism anthology that I also mentioned is coming out later this year, and I'm so excited for it. I have a story in it, and I'm just so excited for this anthology. It's just really cool.

And I still hope that folks will read some of my Birdverse works, even though they're not fresh of the present 2025, but Yoke of Stars, my new Birdverse novella, is on World Fantasy ballot, and I so hope that people will read it. It's an unusual book, it's a bit off the beaten track structurally. I'm very proud of it.

Kat Kourbeti: Well, thank you so much for joining us. It's been an absolute pleasure.

RB Lemberg: Thank you so much. It's been amazing. Thank you, Kat.

Kat Kourbeti: And we'll look forward to reading your future work.

RB Lemberg: Yes. Thank you so much and hi to all the listeners. Thanks for listening and happy 25th anniversary, Strange Horizons.

Kat Kourbeti: Thank you so much.

RB Lemberg: Of course. Thanks, Kat.

​

In this episode of the Strange Horizons Fiction podcast, Podcast Editor Michael Ireland presents B Pladek's 'The Spindle of Necessity' read by Arden Fitzroy.

Transcript

Critical Friends Episode 17: On Imagining Hopefully

Dan Hartland: Welcome to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons criticism podcast. I’m Dan Hartland, and in this episode I’ll be joined by the outgoing editor of Foundation, Paul March-Russell, and the founding editor of the Harare Review of Books, Jacqueline Nyathi.

In every episode of Critical Friends, we discuss SFF reviewing: What it is, why we do it, how it’s going. In this episode, we’ll be talking about speculative fiction’s approach to hope and optimism. Where has it gone? How do writers express it? And what are its pitfalls?

We address the perils of realism, define the dystopian aesthetic, and discuss both revolution and reform. In particular, we discuss E. J. Swift’s new novel, When There Are Wolves Again, and Jacqui’s recent piece for us on Tim Weed’s The Afterlife Project, as well as her essay for our criticism special, “Collective Dreaming.”

But we began our conversation by establishing some context. What kind of mood is specfic in right now? And why?

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: We are here to talk about, I don’t know, hope or optimism, or the absence of pessimism, or whatever else within science fiction and fantasy. And you’ve both written for Strange Horizons recently on this topic, and I want to get to those reviews. But before we do, I wondered whether we could talk a little bit about the wider context: Where we’re at within the genre, but not just the genre—like, you know, speculative literature or the culture in general writ more widely—in terms of this dystopia/utopia spectrum. How pessimistic are we at the moment and how optimistic are we at the moment? Where are we on that line right now?

Paul March-Russell: I’ll jump in only because of my experience having been a Clarke Award judge—so, back in 2017, 2018, we had a huge slew of dystopian fictions. And certainly … I mean, some of which made their way onto the shortlists. So Emma Newman’s After Atlas in 2017, and Jennie Melamed’s Gather the Daughters in 2018. And El Akkad’s American War probably should be chucked in as well. We couldn’t sort of keep them off. But I think collectively—I think especially the 2018 judges, but I think all of us—got pretty tired of using yet another dystopian fiction.

But if we take the Clarke Award as a kind of … some kind of measure, some kind of standard, yeah, there does seem to be like a huge glut of dystopian fictions, a lot of which I think have also been influenced by TV shows like Black Mirror. And I think that kind of popularization of dystopian has really kind of pervaded the whole culture. And of course we can think about franchises—The Hunger Games and so forth—and it’s just got so tired to me, that I can begin to predict those kinds of narratives, where those narratives are going to go. I’ve never been a huge fan of dystopian fiction, you know, cards on the table: I don’t like 1984, I don’t like Brave New World; We, yes I do, but I’ve never liked the classics of dystopian fiction, particularly. But I do feel that we’ve got this kinda glut of dystopian fiction and a general kind of dystopian sensibility, a dystopian way of looking at things.

Whether that’s a particular kind of Global North preoccupation, as opposed to a Global South, I think is something we need to think about in this conversation. But it does seem to be that we’re in a really very annoying and very irritating (!) sort of dystopian phase, it feels to me.

Jacqueline Nyathi: I have to agree. I come to it as a reader, and unlike you, Paul, I’m actually really into dystopian section.

Paul March-Russell: Oh, good! [laughs]

Jacqueline Nyathi: I like the idea of it. I mean, I wouldn’t want to … I have lived through dystopia, I’ll explain that, but I like the idea of kind of looking at what could go wrong and kind of coming at problem-solving from that direction: If everything’s falling apart, what are we going to do about it? I like that. I find it sort of mentally challenging to think about what could happen.

And I do tend to find the other side of things, the sort of hopeful side of science fiction, tends to go a little too hopeful; it’s out there, it’s unrealistic. It does tend to be that way. But having said that, we do live in a world that’s very bleak. I mean, if you turn on the news, there’s so much bad news going on. So in that sense, I feel like if we’re going to be thinking about the future, then let’s think about solutions. Let’s be more hopeful. I know it sounds like I’m contradicting myself, but I enjoy dystopia; I just don’t think, if we’re thinking about the future, we should be focusing only on the sad stories, the bleak stories.

But then the thing is, like you say, in the last six years, but especially since the pandemic, it’s all dystopia now. I think of the I-don’t-know-how-many books I’ve read in that time—maybe a handful, like I can count on one hand, have been actually thinking about the future hopefully.

Paul March-Russell: Yeah, I mean, I’ll put my hand up as well: I’m complacent in this. At Gold SF we’ve published dystopian fiction—M. J. Maloney’s The Ghostwriters, The Disinformation War by S. J. Groenewegen—so I’m involved, I’m not an innocent bystander! And I mean, there are certainly great dystopia. I don’t want to, you know, rubbish the dystopian genre. You know, obviously we think of Octavia Butler and the Parable novels. When I was judging, I absolutely loved Johanna Sinisalo’s The Core of the Sun. I loved Nicola Barker’s H(A)PPY, which won the Goldsmiths Prize. So I think there are great dystopias and which do interesting things. But I think very often, you know where it’s going to go. That’s the problem.

And I think what bothers me is that narrative trajectory of, shall we say, the generic or the formulaic dystopian fiction. That is what bothers me. And the fact that, as Jacqui was saying, we do seem to have wall-to-wall dystopian fictions since the pandemic, and that really bothers me for the state of science fiction.

Dan Hartland: When Jacqui talks about thinking about the future, it strikes me that a lot of dystopia don’t. Because there are dystopias, right? And then there’s the dystopian aesthetic, right? And a lot of these kind of sad novels about how it’s all gonna get worse and worse and worse—you know, that old John Le Carré line, isn’t it, which is, “There is no future, it’s just the present getting worse and worse all the time” or something.

The dystopian aesthetic, all it wants to achieve—because that’s its stylistic sort of bent—is to lay up on top of each other examples of how bad things could get. And that kind of problem-solving that Jacqui is looking for isn’t there. It’s not a dystopia that’s a kind of experiment to see, “Well, what would happen, like if this stuff happened?” It’s kind of … I mean, some of them become subtypes of horror fiction more than of SFF because the effect that is being aimed at is just, “Oh, I feel really bad about all of this.” Right?

Jacqui, you wrote, in an essay for the Criticism Special in January called “Collective Dreaming,” that thinking about the future is meant to be a sign of our intelligence. And I just wonder, especially—and I do think the whole point of your essay was to say, “Well, there are alternatives to how we imagine the future and they exist in the Global South, a set of traditions that Anglo-American SF has for a long time marginalized,” and we can talk about that—I do think that there is something about how we are thinking about the future in the Global North right now which is very limited and narrow.

And this is one of the things that’s behind this profusion of dystopias, you know, this idea that we’ve got a problem in terms of how we are imagining futures right now.

Jacqueline Nyathi: Yeah. So I’ve actually read more SF outside of the Anglo-Western side of fiction, and I agree with myself that it tends to be much more thoughtful about the future and hopeful about what we can do for the future. But I maybe possibly went a little bit … I was a little bit too hard on Western SF. Because you do come across some hopeful stories in Western SF.

I think what you say about the aesthetic is the big thing. So even when I’m watching on Apple TV For All Mankind or Foundation—you know, that kind of thing—there are ways of looking at that sort of fiction and thinking about it as, “OK, maybe humans will find ways to deal with things,” and so on. So that is not aesthetically as dark as Black Mirror, let’s say. So it’s there! It’s just that you have to look for it.

I think I find a lot of the short fiction that comes out of the West is very dystopian, whereas, when people are writing kind of novel-length works, there’s a lot more thought about what they’re trying to put out. People are thinking about how humans will progress and it’s probably … In other words, I think I was a little bit too harsh, because I think, if you read a bit more of the longer fiction, you’ll find a little bit more thought has gone into thinking about the future and thinking about ways that we can solve problems.

But I do still think if you read outside of the Western, you’ll find a lot more about how humanity can survive. I don’t know if that’s when I should bring up The Afterlife Project by Tim Weed. That book is perhaps not really dystopian, but kind of extrapolating from where we are today: The climate crisis singularity happens, what comes next? And it goes into geo-engineering and so on. I won’t give you a summary just now, but that actually brings up something I really don’t like in Western SF, which is that you have the one person who survives. The one hero, that kind of thing.

And, in this case, this man doesn’t have any special qualities, but usually that hero has all of the qualities that make humans great and so on. And that hero may not save a day—because everything has gone and we’ve destroyed the planet and so on—but that one person that we’re all looking to, to maybe carry humanity forward or take maybe our knowledge into the future (which is what happens with this guy), is not a concept that we have in the Global South. We are not about the one hero. What is it? Neo in The Matrix or whatever. We’re not about that. We’re about how a community can go forward.

And I find that that’s not simply a … I’m talking about it from the African traditions, but I find it’s in Aboriginal or native Australian traditions and Native American traditions, that it’s more about how the community survives together and how we go forward together. So that’s the thing that I really dislike in Western SF: When everything gets so negative, and then it’s about the one person, the individualism, one person who survives, or the one person who tries to save the world. That’s the thing that I still find nags me.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. And in your review of The Afterlife Project, you do sort of pause over the fact that there’s this white guy in the future and, you know, everything is on him—and surprise, surprise, it doesn’t work! And I’m thinking about the work of Rasheedah Phillips or the work of Joy Sanchez-Taylor, all of whom have sort of looked at Global South traditions of fantastic literature and said, “look!” And shown us where the community exists.

And I wonder whether part of SF in the Global North’s problem is a crisis of the rugged individualism that has informed it, that these problems that we now face cannot be solved by the lantern-jawed omnicompetent man, just can’t be solved by one guy, however brilliant he is. Right? And so the texts that we are producing within this culture, within this tradition that has always had that assumption, are kind of really pessimistic—because they’re like, “The thing doesn’t work!!” Right? And we don’t know what to do with that.

Which does bring us, Paul, I suppose, to your most recent review for Strange Horizons of When There Are Wolves Again, which has this community thing built into it. And you were really struck by this book.

Paul March-Russell: Yeah, I was. I was actually chatting to Andrew M. Butler, the other day, and I was saying, absolutely, I could see ways in which my review could be shot down. I could see ways in which this book could be shot down. I still defend it! And I think I defend it because, as I think was saying earlier, and as Jacqui was saying earlier, there was a tendency—again, let’s think about Western science fiction, Global North science fiction—to be overoptimistic. You know, that kind of Asimovian, Heinlein, we-can-conquer-problems rugged individualism, yadda yadda. And I don’t think this book is. I think it’s a book which is cautiously optimistic. It knows parameters.

So there’s great bits where the character of Hester Moore reflects upon the current situation at that point of the narrative, or reflects upon their own life-story, and says, “Well, actually, all this could have been completely different, you know, if I take a different turning an entire set of other events could have followed.” So there’s always a constant awareness in the book that this is just one hopeful outcome, but it could have easily gone in a totally different direction with other kinds of repercussions. And there’s also that lovely sense of in the book that this is what we can do within these prescribed parameters. It’s not all about gloom and doom. But you know what? The polar ice caps are still melting. There’s still the sixth extinction there, there’s still this kind of colony of tech bros living somewhere in the South Pacific.

So the book never says, “OK, everything’s now sorted and everything’s now gonna be fine.” There’s a sense there’s a series of conflicts are staged throughout the course of the narrative, and those conflicts will continue after the narrative is over. This is an enduring process. But I think what’s important about the book is that it commits itself to the idea of process, that things can change, things can develop, things can go in different directions. It’s not about the given product, which I think is what dystopian fiction in its kind of generic, formulaic form tends to deliver. “This is how it is.” Winston Smith, he can have his little petty struggle, but you know what? He’s still gonna end up loving Big Brother.

That’s just not how history works! We know that, you know? We know that. So it seems to me that I would defend this book because it commits itself to the idea of process.

[Musical Sting]

Dan Hartland: I do wonder though, if—as we’re talking about this sort of focus on process—if there’s also something else going on. Because, Jacqui, in your review of The Afterlife Project, you were like, “Yeah, well, I can understand why Tim Weed, the author, wants to write a book about how we appear to be absolutely bent on the planet’s destruction.” But what is absent in the novel is any idea of, I think you used the word redemption. Which struck me as a really interesting word to think about, because it’s a lot more … it’s more emotive, but it carries more weight, than mere process. So the Swift book is absolutely about that, but it’s also about redemption. I dunno whether you wanted to talk a bit about how that absence of redemption in The Afterlife Project struck you, because that seems key to me to how you were reacting to that book. You were like, “There’s nothing here!”

Jacqueline Nyathi: It goes a little bit back to the single solitary man who’s going to carry humanity’s genes into the future. He is literally the only person who survives on the whole planet. So, I’m like, is there no way to make the story a little more hopeful, by bringing along a group of people, a community of people into the future? It’s like writing off all of humanity. And that’s the way I felt throughout the book, that Tim Weed was writing off humans completely. You know, there’s nothing we can do to save the planet or to save ourselves. It feels so much like he’s actually saying there is no need to save humans.

At the end of the story, there is a hint that other species—because now we’re so far into the future that there’s been evolution in the species that have survived—there are species that are on the verge of sapience. So a crow is sitting on the tree watching this man, and it’s intelligent, he has the impression that it’s intelligent. So the implication is that this man will die, crows will rise up and occupy our ecological niche, I suppose.

Why are we writing off humans to that degree? I don’t fully understand. Is there no redemption for us? Is there no way that we can speak up for … I know we’ve destroyed the planet. I understand this, you know, and I completely understand why he feels this way about humans. But I also find that this is more of a … I don’t wanna say Western, but more people who think in a scientific way are very quick to write off humans very quickly. It’s just humans, you know? They can disappear. It really doesn’t matter.

Dan Hartland: You’re absolutely right. I’m thinking right now of Ross Douthat of the New York Times, who recently interviewed Peter Thiel in his Ross Talks To Weirdos series of podcasts. And, he just asked Thiel. He said, “Well. We should save humanity, right? Like, we should make sure we carry on living, right?” Thiel tried to find every possible way he could to not answer this question, because his answer is basically, “Nah.” Fundamentally, as you say, Jacqui, there’s just this sense that … “Nah.”

And there’s a sense that it’s a zero sum game, right? You can either have the humans or you can have the crows. They can’t coexist—I mean, heaven forfend, right?

Jacqueline Nyathi: I don’t know if you’ve read Speculative Whiteness. I think that’s a very important book. So the people with money are making movies and Peter Thiel’s in the White House influencing American policy. And, you know, these people have a worldview, a complete worldview that they claim is based in science fiction. And it’s a certain kind of science fiction that they appeal to. It’s racist, it’s sexist, it’s ableist, you know, all those things. So this, this book is very revealing. It’s a monograph really. It’s a very short book. But I think everyone should read it, to help think through why our stories right now are as bleak as they are.

Paul March-Russell: I’d add into that David Higgins’s work on the alt-right and victimhood. I think that’s a really important book as well, a companion piece to Jordan.

Dan Hartland: The reason I think it’s so critical as well is because—I find myself saying this a lot in these episodes, but—I keep trying to center the material contexts of all these texts because, if we’re asking in this episode, “Should we be being more optimistic?” I think Carrol would say, “Yeah!” Because, unless we are, then the bad actors are going to take the other kind of SF and they’re going to use it to extremely bad ends … like, really bad, guys!

And that’s why a book like the Swift, Paul, seems so important to me, and why you argue in the piece … You start the piece with The Citadel, Gollancz’s kind of most-read book ever, which you say in part was responsible for the establishment of the NHS, right? Books can have an effect, and if we don’t write hopeful ones, then we won’t be hopeful.

Paul March-Russell: I mean, we go back to Said, in The World, The Text and The Critic, and Said emphasized that books are events in the world. They’re not just things describing the world. They intervene, and I think that’s the really important facet. Everything that Swift demonstrates in the novel is based upon real-world proposals now. There’s nothing made up here. You know, these are all proposals that are being written, being discussed. And she just says, “Look, let’s imagine a series of configurations.”

As I say, there are two what ifs, neither of which are totally implausible. And because of that we have a series of configurations and these don’t happen overnight, you know, it takes at least thirty years for these things be to begin to come together in the course of the narrative. And she goes, “Look, if you have these convergences, it is possible to take these proposals now and actually begin to enact them.”

And even though the narrative then travels another twenty years, by the time we get to 2070 they’re only still beginning. You know, it’s that they’re not completed. The process isn’t over. And I think that’s the thing. I think what she does is to show I think two things.

One is to show how things could be enacted bit by bit. There’s no grand master scheme necessarily. It’s just how things begin to slot into place based upon the immediacy of events, the contingency of events. And at the same time, I think it’s really important, as Jacqui said, we talk about the communities that come together in this kind of positive, transformative way. But she also looks at the communities that are also trying to preserve their current way of life, who don’t want to make that change. And she treats them sympathetically, it’s never a simple kind of, “We are right, they’re wrong.” And that is another feature I love about this book. It’s not a polarizing novel. It reaches out.

Jacqueline Nyathi: It’s interesting, because I just finished another novel, Forfeiture by J. P. Nebra. So I don’t know anything about the author—you know, where he’s from or anything—but in this novel, same thing: You know, we’ve destroyed the planet and so on. And then what happens is that in Indigenous cultures around the world—all kinds of places—send out a signal to aliens who have been here before and saw this planet and were completely amazed by how alive it was and how beautiful—so many species here and so on—and left a way for us to contact them if we need help. So these Indigenous peoples send this message to the aliens, and the aliens come.

They give us time, they give us a year or whatever it is to try and get things back in order or at least put things in place to clean up the planet, clean up the Pacific garbage patch and so on: Do this and do that, put in laws. Of course we don’t do anything. We fight. We find ways not to do it. We fight amongst ourselves and so on. And so, at the end of that time, the aliens decide to remove everybody from the planet. They have the means, they encircle every city, major city, on the planet and go and take everybody away.

But what they do—so here’s the redemption part—is that someone speaks to them and says, “But you know, are you writing off all of humanity? Is it possible to … because it’s not everybody who agreed with everything that was going on.” And then they’re like, “OK”; the aliens say, “Maybe we can kind of train up the next generation to value the planet and look after the planet.” So everyone’s going to go away and be put on an empty planet where they’re not destroying all the species. And then we’ll kind of teach the young people how to value and look after the planet and they can come back.

So there’s the redemption. I thought that was interesting. It’s also like, “Oh, all of humanity,” you know, but there’s something there.

Paul March-Russell: And again, I think it’s that difference between, again, the Global North and Global South, like you were saying earlier. And I think, you know, when I think of something like a subgenre like solar punk, I think of that’s very much as a Latin American movement in most respects. You know, when I think about it. And it does seem to me that immediately you do get a much more hopeful take because it’s coming from a totally different cultural outlook, which is also much more communal in its orientation.

Jacqueline Nyathi: And that’s with Asian fiction as well. Southeast Asian particularly I think is what I’ve read, and you get a lot of the same thing as well. You get—because they’re also thinking about not just humans, but other species—so how will they survive a alongside us, you know? So it’s much broader in its, um, outlook.

There are peoples who know how to live alongside other species. How about they teach the rest of us how to do that, or we find ways into the future that way.

Dan Hartland: And that’s what I like about the novel you just mentioned, Jacqui. There’s this idea that it’s not inherent to the human species that we behave in this way. It’s just a cul-de-sac that some of us have decided to get stuck down. Octavia Cade a couple of episodes ago was talking about how humans don’t have to change to not destroy the planet; we just have to accept that we’re like everything else on the planet, right? We just have to live in harmony—to use a terrible cliché—with everything else.

And that is what the Swift novel is very good at, which is it talks about human and non-human animals very often. Some of the most moving passages in the book—and some of the passages in the book I found very moving—were about animals and were about the natural world. She writes really well and I think that’s one of the ways in which it models what we could be doing differently. It kind of respects that, teaches us—a little bit like the aliens!—how to respect the world.

But what the Swift isn’t—and even Paul accepts this in his review—is radical. You say, Paul, it is radical because it sets its face against what we’ve been talking about, which is this kind of dystopian aesthetic that so much SF is inhabiting right now. But it’s not something like august clarke’s Metal from Heaven, which is like explicitly kind of leftist radicalism, right? It is much more a sort of … I won’t say it’s a centrist liberalism, but it’s definitely a liberalism, right? The way in which things change is they are reformed. The way in which laws are passed is, well, parliament does it. The society isn’t getting destroyed or there is no revolution. The system fundamentally kind of works. We have to correct it a little bit, but ultimately it finds the solutions itself. This too is fairly unfashionable in a lot of SFF and I just wondered whether we wanted to talk a little bit about that really. Is … is that good?

Paul March-Russell: I remember back in the late eighties, Terry Eagleton writing a review of David Lodge’s novel, Nice Work, and absolutely hating it and saying, “This is dreadful. Why are you not talking about capital and labor and so on?” And David Lodge is saying—who again is a liberal, centrist kind of writer, not un not unlike, I think, E. J. Swift—“That’s not the novel I can write, I’m not that person.” You know, I can write what I can write, you know, so there are definitely limits—limits that E. J. Swift imposes upon herself and, and there are limits I think that’s a kind of worldview the problem.

I would say it’s not so much … you know, we  get this old line about, “Oh, it’s so much easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, yadda, yadda, yadda.” But actually the real problem to me is actually how do we imagine ways to actually radically reform or revolutionize the world without actually ending up killing a whole bunch of people in the process, you know? And that seems to be the problem. Or destroying other people’s environments or destroying other species and so on and so on.

If you look at kind of standard sort of science fiction tropes—and this is true from H. G. Wells through to Kim Stanley Robinson—we often have this idea of, “Oh, don’t worry, there’ll be a scientific elite. They’ll appoint themselves, they’ll impose some kind of worldview. It will be fine.” You know what I mean? And that is, you know … folks, we’ve got a bunch of tech bros who’ve absolutely fed into that way of thinking and hey, look at the mess they’re making, you know?

I would come back to the idea that if we’re looking at a current political situation, for very good reasons—again, I’m thinking about the Global North, because unfortunately Global North is where I am—we’ve had a series of political disasters where people have lost faith in legal, constitutional politics. It actually becomes radical to say, “No, hold on a minute. The system can work if you act. If we can actually reenergize those institutions and those commitments.”

Not perfectly. I mean, there’s no idea this is a paradise by the end of this novel, in no shape or form is this grandiosely utopian or something. But it seems to me that to simply abandon legal, constitutional, democratic institutions and say, “Oh, don’t worry, folks, the scientist will sort it out … that ain’t gonna work, folks.”

From a kind of Marxist revolutionary position, this book will really annoy you. But actually it is reaffirming a faith in legal, constitutional, democratic institutions—that they can actually work, with a lot of nudging it has to be said, but it can work. And that I think is important.

Dan Hartland: One of the things that the interests me about the Swift kind of what we were talking about. Its perspective is very particular. We hear that China’s built a base on the moon, we hear that the US has “finally”—the word is “finally”!—split into three separate states. But we don’t get a lot about anywhere else that isn’t Britain. We hear a bit more about Europe, because one of the novel’s sadnesses is that Britain is still separate from Europe even in 2070. But it is very much a British solution to a kind of global problem, which is probably where I would … the shooting down thing that Paul keeps saying we could do if we wanted to, that’s probably where I would aim if I were seeking to shoot it down. Because it’s not a complete solution.

But on the other hand, as I’ve said, one of the things I really like about it is how kind of slim and economical it is as a book. And it wouldn’t be that if it had to do with the same thing for every country on the planet. It’s decided to do a particular thing. And what it does is, as Paul says, it says, “OK, this is the system we’ve got. This is the history we have. How do you get somewhere more positive without completely breaking everything.”

And that’s fine. But one of the things you wrote about, Jacqui, in your essay in the—which I reread for this episode, and you know, although you’re in the room, I’m going to embarrass you anyway by saying everyone should go and read the essay, it’s so good, I, loved going back to it.

Jacqueline Nyathi: Thank you!

Dan Hartland: Again, it’s called “Collective Dreaming.” It’s all about how we might imagine futures differently. But there, there was a line which really struck me—because I was reading it for the purpose of this episode—which was where you wrote, “For post-colonial societies, the apocalypse has happened.”

“How did we respond?” is your kind of rhetorical question. And it strikes me that Swift is saying, “How will we respond?” and saying, “Well, within a system.” But what do you make of that from a Global South perspective, Jacqui? Like, how did the post-colonial societies that experienced those apocalypses … How did they respond? You mentioned already, I think, that you’ve lived through an apocalypse, right? You’ve lived through a dystopia. So is that systemic response it, or are there other things as well?

Jacqueline Nyathi: So I am very much a “burn the entire thing down” kind of person. Because, first of all, what you’re saying about the Swift book, so you’re solving the British problem, but we’re on the same planet. And there are, I don’t know what the population of the UK is, but you know, there are billions of other people on the same planet. And I think that’s the mistake we have been making since we started talking about climate change. Which is that we can’t seem to—and the same thing with the pandemic, you know, it was, “This country has vaccines and we’re fine, you know, or we’re going to solve our problem.” The virus is literally traveling around the world on planes or whatever. It’s going from person to person! We are on the same planet, we have the same destiny in the end. So our little systems are not going to fix this problem.

The US doing whatever they’re going to do, or Peter Thiel, or the tech bros solving their little problem, you know, it’s not going to fix what’s wrong with us. And so I think probably, if I’m going to be a revolutionary about this, I think the time for that kind of solution is long past. And this is why we are where we are today.

So that’s the first thing. The second thing is that you can’t use the same systems to solve the problem that was created by the systems. So  if we’re—I know I always talk about capitalism, you know—so your tech bros are trying to do green capitalism and you know, let’s have Bill Gates saying, “Let’s have all these technical solutions, let’s take carbon out of the atmosphere.” And, you know, all these things are just going to create more problems.

So in the same way, I think political systems are not … I understand the impulse to kind of want to find a solution that doesn’t kill everybody or cause starvation and so on. I fully understand that. But I also think that, for those who don’t believe in a future for all of humanity, they’re not playing by the rules. So if you are going to try and play by the rules, you’re not going to get anywhere. They have the power, they have the money, and they’re thinking about themselves.

You know, a lot of the solutions that are proposed are—now I’m talking from the Global South perspective—are going to solve certain problems in the Global North. People are already dying from flooding in Pakistan and Bangladesh and Mozambique and Malawi. We’re already getting these ferocious storms every rainy season. All this chatter that’s going on in the Global North about fifty years from now, that’s not the reality that we’re living through.

So I’m very much of the opinion that trying to work through the systems that we already had is not going to work for the planet. I understand it may work for a country or a certain community, but it won’t work for the planet, and we’re supposed to be thinking, I think at this point, about all of humanity. We should have a much bigger perspective when we’re thinking about how to get to the future.

[Musical Sting]

Dan Hartland: And is that where, again, the “Collective Dreaming” essay comes in? Because where can we learn what these alternative imaginings of the future are or might be? Well, it’s in literatures which are not embedded within the assumptions that got us here in the first place.

Jacqueline Nyathi: Colonialism came to my country and destroyed a way of life. There’s so much to say about that, but it took almost a hundred years for us to finally get back on track. I’ll explain why I don’t really like the term post-colonial. It boxes us into a certain definition. We are more than post-colonial. There’s a long history before that. And then after that, of course, we had our dictator, and we have a long story to do with that.

So we had that apocalypse in terms of all the ways of living that we had, our ways of being. And then we then had this political destruction. I could tell you so many stories about living in Zim when there’s no power, no fuel, no water supply, no, you know, no food in the shops. You know, that’s another kind of apocalypse that we’ve lived through.

But here’s the thing: when we tell our story as Zimbabweans, we’re not there anymore. You know? We moved past that thing because humanity has a way of solving problems. So in Zim we have this saying that you always make a plan. Make a plan, make a plan. You always find a solution somehow, if you need to find a solution.

The thing is how to come up with that solution. So, as Dan is saying, in my essay I was saying one of the main things is not to think so narrowly. The tendency with Western SF is to think in Western ways, which is fine because that’s where they’re coming from, but that dominant way of thinking really narrows. And if we’re talking about power dynamics, the power is with Western people, the Global North. If everyone is thinking in that narrow way about the future of humanity, then you know, we’re not actually going to come up with the solutions we need for the entire planet. So how about we all kind of think outside of that or be exposed to other stories, other ways of living.

Let’s talk to native Australians, one of the oldest cultures in the world. How have they got to where they are today? You know what knowledge do they have about living with the land that could save us from oil spills and all the other things we do and so on. So those ways of knowing and traditional knowledge is what we can get a lot of ideas from: What are other people saying could happen? What other solutions could there be? Let’s let everyone participate in being a human on this planet. You know, let’s listen to each other.

Paul March-Russell: I find that deeply inspiring, actually. You know, I’m gonna have to think through a lot of that and I find that very, very inspiring.

I think, I think it’s worth to note that obviously E. J. Swift’s last novel, The Coral Bones, did have that kind of global perspective. So The Coral Bones is obviously a novel which is set in three different time periods, from the nineteenth century to about three hundred years into the future. It’s all set around the Australian coral reef, the Great Barrier Reef, and with, again, a very strong input from Indigenous cultures in there. So I think Swift is a very good example of a white Western author who will think globally about this. Here, she’s just trying to focus on one particular bit. I don’t think she’s in any shape or form inimical to that kind of global perspective, that global way of thinking.

There’s so much to what Jacqui just said, but one thing I’ll take away from it is that it does pose very direct questions about science fiction, and speculative fiction, and science fiction studies. It reaffirms to me that the current direction of travel in science fiction is not the Global North or Anglophone tradition. It is very much about science fictions, speculative fictions, from around the world.

You know, if I just think about foundation of the journal that I edit, the current issue—which will hopefully be in people’s laps!—starts off with an article on Chinese science fiction. The issue itself is a special issue about women in the Black fantastic. We have had special issues in the last five years about Indigenous science fictions. So it just seems to me that science fiction itself has to learn from these other cultures, and if science fiction is—we go back to the point I mentioned earlier—a literature of change or literature of process, then for it to be, you know, a change, full process, full literature, it has to learn from those other cultures. It has to. An Anglophone tradition that doesn’t learn from around the world, it ain’t much of a tradition ultimately, and it’s certainly not gonna have much of a future.

Dan Hartland: I think one of the challenges for science fiction will be that a lot of what … you know, Foundation was very kind to publish my review of Vajra Chandrasekera’s Rakesfall, which happily just won the Ursula K. Le Guin Award, and the point I make about that novel is, “It’s coming for you, science fiction.” This book, it’s going to dissolve all of the bonds that you think are holding your genre together.

And science fiction—or the Anglophone version of it, because we won’t get into that, the Anglophone thing that calls itself science fiction—has to be okay with that. Because if it wants to learn, because some of the things that those literatures are gonna teach us as, as Paul says, they’re gonna ask questions that require complete reconstitution of things.

But it does strike me again that the Swift kind of … Paul, you talk about it’s realism, right? And realism is a double-edged sword, isn’t it? Because on one level, we don’t want to go … Jackie was saying earlier, some SF is so hopeful that it’s not convincing. You know, Star Trek: The Next Generation doesn’t seem like a viable future for we are not gonna get there easily, certainly not by, what is it? Twenty-fourth century? No chance! But on the other hand, realism can be captured by all the assumptions that we’ve just been talking about, right? What is realism really? Is it just what is easily doable?

That question of realism seems to me key. But if books are an intervention in the world, Swift’s book is intervening at a point in British letters where even as limited a future as the book is building is necessary, because we’ve completely lost sight of every … you know, we began this episode with the dystopian aesthetic, which is baked into SF. And to be led out of that may require a kind of quite a narrow book, on one level.

I do want to talk a little bit—because I think we should, if we’re talking about hope and optimism—about hopepunk. Jacqui, you’ve, I think—I don’t know whether it was in the essay or in your review of the Weed—you say, “I love to read hopepunk, it’s great!” Paul, you say, and I quote, that hopepunk is associated with—quote—"moral platitudes and glib sentiments.” So I just wondered whether we could put these two together, because I instinctively feel that hopepunk is very vague a collection of texts, right? Like, I’ve heard Lord of the Rings describe as hopepunk. So I mean, at that point the kind of word becomes a bit meaningless.

On the other hand, it began with a call similar to the one we’re making in this episode, right? Which is that we’ve gotta think a bit more positively in many ways. Do we have any thoughts about that? Paul, do you want to defend yourself?

Paul March-Russell: Yeah. I mean, for me, the term hopepunk is actually … I never really knew what it really meant, you know? That people said, I say it, talk about it being platitudinous and whatever because when I’ve read pieces, that were talking about hopepunk they just seem to talk in very general terms. And I’m going, “Yeah, OK. What are you actually referring to here?” You know? And I think it’s tricky.

I’ll give an example. I remember—again, going back to my days of being a Clarke judge, you know—I absolutely loved Becky Chambers’s A Closed and Common Orbit. And I had conversations with Maureen Speller and Paul Kincaid who were like, “Why, what? How can you even like this book?” You know, they were like, “What? What’s he doing!?” But, you know, I found it emotionally engrossing. It actually moved me to tears at one point. And it felt that Becky Chambers is very much a kind of, doyenne of hopepunk in a way, a kind of emblem of it.

But then you look at Becky Chambers’s more recent novels and it may not quite be working out quite as hopefully as we hoped, when she’s gone into issues around population control and stuff like that. This … dodgy, shall we say? To say the least. So it feels to me that I don’t fully know what hopepunk’s really meaning. I can see it’s gesturing after exactly the kind of quality we’ve been talking about in this conversation, but I don’t think it really sufficiently captures it. And to be a little bit cynical, it’s not enough just to stick the suffix of “punk” onto something and then it suddenly becomes okay, you know?

But, Jacqui, you probably know more about hopepunk than I do. So how do you respond to Dan’s question?

Jacqueline Nyathi: Yeah, so I think you’re right, both of you, about it. It’s not very well defined, is it? Anything with hope in it becomes hopepunk, which doesn’t make sense because punk is about social disruption, right? So how is it … where’s the punk?

But the reason I have enjoyed reading hopepunk is because of the absolute obsession with dystopia. I’ve been looking for something that will give me hope for the future, that sort of reminds me that humanity’s worth saving, that kind of thing. So that is the literal reason why I’ll read hopepunk when it comes across my desk. It has not been important enough for me to say, “Oh, yes, this is the book that everyone should read. This is Good Hopepunk.”

The closest thing to it has been a book called Multispecies Cities, which I refer to in in the essay, because all of those stories are quite hopeful, and they’re about communities and about all the different species surviving into the future and so on. I consider that hopepunk, even though there isn’t any talk of revolution or, you know, how the world has got to that place. It’s just maybe the punk is the idea of dreaming outside of what we see in front of our eyes right now. Maybe that’s the punk part. I don’t want to be reading about the end of humanity all the time. I would like to think about what could, what else could happen.

[Musical Outro]

Paul March-Russell: This is from the very end of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, which is a conversation between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo.

He said, “It is all useless, if the last landing place can only be the infernal city, and it is there that, in ever-narrowing circles, the current is drawing us.”

And Polo said: “The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live everyday, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”

So there you go.

Dan Hartland: I’m never against some bonus Italo Calvino, to be honest. [laughter]

[Musical Outro]

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

After our last episode on form and length, William Henry Morris offered some further thoughts on novellas. In particular, he encouraged SFF publishers to re-embrace the short novel. All for those, and WHM’s newsletter is worth a follow. Although with novella, novelette, and nouvelle we’re already rich in terms of art.

Dave Hutchinson, he of the Europe in Autumn books, remembered workshopping his novel The Villages years ago and being unsure whether he could get it to novel length. Friend of the show Paul Kincaid apparently told him, “Think of it as a novella and just keep going.” Sage advice!

And finally, Strange Horizons reviewer Hana Carolina also got in touch to note that, “since Kindle Unlimited pays per page read, editing for clarity or concision effectively means cutting one’s own income. It restages once again,” she says, “the old conflict between quality and profit.” Always center the material in your criticism, gang.

See you next time.

In this special episode of Writing While Disabled's second season, hosts Kristy Anne Cox and Kate Johnston speculate about the impact of a space army made up of various species of dinosaurs, and make connections to disability and accommodations as they relate to the real life of disabled people.

If you prefer, you can watch the full episode with close-caption subtitles here.

Show notes:

• This episode was produced and hosted by Kristy Anne Cox and Kate Johnston, and edited, mixed, and transcribed by Kat Kourbeti.
• The theme song, "Funky - Upbeat Loop" by ispeakwaves, is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
• Want to send us a question? You can do so here!

Transcript​

Kristy Anne Cox: All right. Welcome to Writing While Disabled. I am Kristy Anne Cox.

Kate Johnston: And I'm Kate Johnston.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yes. Here we are at the Accessible Con Bar. We are gonna do a fun episode this time. And what is our topic, Kate?

Kate Johnston: Our topic is... dinosaur armies.

Kristy Anne Cox: Velociraptor dinosaur armies, and/or dinosaur related creatures that may not technically be dinosaurs, but might possibly be used in science fiction, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Kate Johnston: Yes.

Kristy Anne Cox: Readers, listeners, viewers, you are at a convention and you are going to the Con Bar to hang out after that amazing panel, but this is the Accessible Con Bar! You can hear everything. You can see everything. Eye contact is or is not a thing, depending on your preferences. This is the conversation you want to be included at, at those cons, but you can't.

Well, now you can. Here on Writing While Disabled Accessible Con Bar, Special Episode: Velociraptor Space Army. Shall we get into it?

Kate Johnston: We should. Welcome pilots, poets, and platypuses. Let's go.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yes, welcome plumbers and poets. Wait, no, you already said poets. Gosh darn it. What's a good contrast of plumbers?

Kate Johnston: No one ever uses poets. We can use poets twice.

Kristy Anne Cox: You know what? Welcomes are difficult for people, and for aliens.

Kate Johnston: Yes.

Kristy Anne Cox: So, Kate, you had a question to start us off, you said, "how does designing aliens help us think about accommodations?"

Kate Johnston: Yes.

Kristy Anne Cox: I think that's a really interesting question. Tell me what you're thinking along these lines.

Kate Johnston: I think about it in this framework: there are a certain number of things that a living being has to do every single day, pretty much, in order to continue the species. So ingestion, what are we putting in; evacuation, what's coming out and where's it go; and then we have sleeping and we have mating. I know for humans, you don't actually have to mate, but I think most people sometimes want to and then sometimes really don't, depending on who they're standing next to, often.

Kristy Anne Cox: Well, and in this context we might be doing animal husbandry in space, right? Like—

Kate Johnston: Or even animal wifery.

Kristy Anne Cox: Right? Artificial insemination in a zero G environment. There are a lot of things we could discuss, depending on if we're talking about dinosaurs as astronauts, or dinosaurs as animal companions.

In science fiction, I have seen dinosaurs or dinosaur shaped creatures used as animals. Right, a hoard of wolves, you release them on a planet, they eat everyone. You release them onto a spaceship, they eat everyone. I've seen a couple of things where they're mounts, usually planet side, and I haven't seen a ton of things where they're astronauts. So you were saying, why does it always have to be, we are higher than them, they're animals, we're humans. We are astronauts, they're mounts. Does that sound familiar?

Kate Johnston: Yep. It does. It does. And there's a few things I wanna say about that. One is that in the most recent episode of Love, Death and Robots, my friend Stant Litore has an episode where there are tyrannosaurs on a space station. They are used as mounts. It's a really good story, and it's the way that we usually think of them as mindless killing machines and yet the whole thing.

I think one of the reasons I'm writing the book that I'm writing is that if we think about parrots, which have little tiny brains, as being about the same intelligence level as of a four or 5-year-old— they can do math, they remember numbers, color, shapes, associative groups, they can do all sorts of inductive and deductive reasoning if you pose the questions to them correctly... Now, scale that up to a ton. How dumb do you think they really have to be? Because I don't think they do.

They are limited by not having handy hands, and that is something that we can, if we choose, augment with technology. So we can decide how these beings get to interact with their world, but I think the "they are just mindless killing machines 24/7" doesn't even explain how they would've evolved on this planet, because things that are mindless killing machines 24/7 don't. I mean, we don't have those things.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah.

Kate Johnston: There are things that kill stuff for fun, and kill lots of things, sure. Your basic house cat does that.

Kristy Anne Cox: Well, we have army ants. But they don't do it 24/7, right? They go on the march. Yeah.

Kate Johnston: If they have a reason to be traveling and that's why they're Sherman-ing their way through the jungle. You know, tyrannosaurs — if you think about a tyrannosaur as like kind of a big lizard, right? So, you look at a monitor lizard, a big one, something that's six feet long... Those things eat like once every two or three weeks, and the rest of the time they're doing stuff. Reptile stuff.

Kristy Anne Cox: Well, and if we had more bird direction, then they've gotta eat constantly. So it really depends on what animal analog we're using.

Kate Johnston: I think if you're a bird, for the amount of heartbeats that you spend eating versus the amount you spend doing other things, you don't— you spend a bunch of time on your nest and gestating young and, you know, having ant baths and stuff like that. Like they don't just eat and just lay eggs and poop. They have whole other things going on.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah. But they do eat a lot more than your average Komodo dragon in terms of meals.

Kate Johnston: Sure.

Kristy Anne Cox: I wanna go back to your question though, about how smart does the T-Rex need to be.

Kate Johnston: Yep.

Kristy Anne Cox: 'Cause I'm thinking about this like, big dumb animal paradigm versus the intelligent being who is our co-explorer of the universe as an astronaut, and then I guess the other end would be someone way above and beyond us so we can't possibly understand, akin to magic, whatever. Like a dinosaur, it depends on if we've uplifted them or not, right? Like, did we just bring them from their environments? Because then it's gonna be what environmental slot are they filling?

Like sheep don't need to evolve to be smarter, because it doesn't benefit them. It serves no survival advantage. T-Rexes, it really depends on their hunting strategy, and I'm not sure we're a hundred percent sure yet on hunting strategy, right? For T-Rexes? I mean, pack hunting animals tend to be pretty intelligent, pro-social behavior.

Kate Johnston: No, we don't have that information from the scientific community yet, which leaves a, you know, lovely and large space for fiction to inhabit.

Kristy Anne Cox: We don't think they're scavengers anymore. We used to think that T-Rexes were just straight scavengers, right? We're not there still.

Kate Johnston: No. I mean, they could run, they could swim. I think that there are some things that we don't think about in terms of dinosaur anatomy that we have yet to incorporate into the way that we think about them, because we are thinking about Barney and Jurassic Park, and those are not necessarily great representations of what we know about dinosaurs.

Like one of the things that I just saw go by me in Facebook the other day was, if you have a bird that has injured its foot or is injured in a way that you don't understand, you need to build up a little like donut of cardboard to sit the bird in because of the way it breathes. Birds and dinosaurs both had air sacks in their bones and in other parts of their body, and those are feeding air to their lungs. And if you leave them on their side long enough— and this also goes for dolphins— you leave them on their side long enough in a one G field, they're going to suffocate, because their air sacks on that side of their body can't inflate/deflate. So, we don't think of T-Rex in that sort of mode, and we should.

Kristy Anne Cox: So if you're a veterinarian, it's advantageous to be treating your dinosaur clients in a zero G environment, right? But if you're on the ground, you're worried about them suffocating if they lay down for too long, is what you're saying for a larger dinosaur or for any like Dromaeosaurid?

Kate Johnston: Possibly. We don't know. We'd have to find out when we grow them, whether they can do that. But it also means that we don't know, when you start looking at forced air pressure breathing units, what kind of—

Kristy Anne Cox: How would that pressure—

Kate Johnston: —does a dinosaur need? Ah-ha! Yeah. Do they actually need to have a space suit to keep all their stuff from just sort of exploding, the way ours does? Or is there internal skin, like where their skin is and how it's put together, is that strong enough to keep them from suffering a bunch of the things that happen to us in a zero G environment?

You could do this with bears too; bears have this really thick armor-like layer, of keratin under their skin, so it's really hard to like, slash a bear. That's why people shoot them and they don't attack them with knives, because it doesn't work very well.

So there's all of these things that we don't think about in terms of how do they live in just a regular thing? I mean, probably T-Rexes did not eat every single minute of the day because you just don't have that kind of prey available to you either. But if they eat once a week, then they're spending six whole days and probably 20 plus hours after that, doing other stuff. We dunno what that stuff is.

Kristy Anne Cox: I'm kind of thinking them in terms of lifestyle, and this is just in my head here, they're living like a tiger, or maybe they're living like wolves, or maybe they're doing something else. But I like those two analogies, 'cause a tiger has time to lay around. Lions have time to lay around and rest, it's part of their strategy. Wolves tend to keep it busy, they've got a more packed agenda. Oh, this is interesting. So we're talking behavioral, right? We're talking biological in space, 'cause like a lot of the issues we've run into with human astronauts were because body parts reacted in ways we did not expect when living in zero G environments for long periods of time.

Kate Johnston: Right.

Kristy Anne Cox: So body parts that dinosaurs have that we don't: so their bones are different, right? Eyeballs are different. Some of the marine reptiles have that bone disc, right? An ichthyosaurus fossil has the—

Kate Johnston: Oh, a sclerotic ring. Yeah, land animals have those too.

Kristy Anne Cox: I'm wondering if it would be advantageous or disadvantageous to do veterinary medicine in a zero G environment. I think the air sack leads me to say advantageous.

Kate Johnston: No. Unfortunately, I found out an awful lot recently about how the body reacts to a zero G environment and the answer in just about every way is poorly. One of the things that The Expanse did really well was that in a zero G environment, blood travels differently. So you have the problem with it stacking up over the wound and not actually clotting.

Kristy Anne Cox: Which is why they needed to get a ship with gravity to treat all the wounded.

Kate Johnston: Right. And so that's a thing. We don't know how that's gonna go.

Kristy Anne Cox: Well, we haven't had a traumatic injury in space yet, thankfully.

Kate Johnston: Knock on wood. Well, not that anyone survived, no.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah.

Kate Johnston: Yeah.

Kristy Anne Cox: All the way out there in space, at the ISS. Right, we haven't had a chance to do surgery there yet.

Kate Johnston: No. No, and I don't know that we're going to anytime soon, 'cause we don't tend to send up surgeons.

Kristy Anne Cox: Usually there's medically trained people though, like for that type of situation. In a crew, there's somebody who would be like—

Kate Johnston: No, there's not actually. This is why you have to have your appendix removed and your wisdom teeth removed, because they don't wanna have those types of things happen in space.

Kristy Anne Cox: Or like in combat. I'm thinking more combat medic type skills. I wasn't thinking like,

Kate Johnston: Sure. It's sort of a "patch you up and get you to the nearest thing". So these are things we don't know, and like we were saying earlier on, we have other issues like, we don't know what they needed to eat. You asked, did they need to have live prey? Like snakes, you may not need it to be alive, but you may need that corpse to be moved around so you think it's alive and that's why they strike, and that's why you don't use your hand to do that, you use a forceps.

So they may need to have the prey shooting gallery, when they make a hit, it delivers you a, a frozen embryo or something. So yeah, there's a whole thing about that. How long are they in torper after they eat? So if we all have like a dining room situation, a mess hall, and everyone eats and then they go down for their two hour nap afterward, what happens if you get attacked during dinner? You have to think about how you are going to rotate your army, how you're going to use when they are the most alert for their job.

Kristy Anne Cox: Well, if you have to carry that many chickens with you in space, let's just say they eat chickens, right? How many chickens per day does a Velociraptor need under these environmental conditions, with this workload? What is the method of transport? How fast are we getting from solar system to solar system or planet to planet? How much of your spaceship is just chickens? I feel like you're gonna need a lot of chickens.

Kate Johnston: A lot of chicken. I'm gonna eat every chicken in this way. Not only that, but if they're gonna be eating all those chickens, what's coming out the other end? And what is it in sheer tonnage?

Kristy Anne Cox: Well, do they have sphincter control? Like, ducks definitely don't.

Kate Johnston: No.

Kristy Anne Cox: So if we're assuming a duck situation, then you need velociraptor diapers.

Kate Johnston: A lot of cloaca-trons.

Kristy Anne Cox: So, cloaca-trons, is this like a little, uh—

Kate Johnston: I don't know. I just made up the word. So we can be anything we want, but yeah, it's something like a Roomba that would follow you around and just scoop your poop up.

Kristy Anne Cox: A Roomba? Hahaha! See, I think that's a terrible idea because from what I understand, we already have a problem of little floating mystery pellets in the International Space Station.

Kate Johnston: We do. Yes, we do.

Kristy Anne Cox: So it would just be that on a much, much larger scale, which makes their diet super important, 'cause you wanna keep the consistency— oh, this is going gross places. People, I'm sorry. Writing While Disabled, we're writing right now, we're disabled, we have no boundaries about what is and isn't appropriate.

Kate Johnston: But think about how many people in our audience have a disability that affects their digestive system!

Kristy Anne Cox: Oh my gosh. What is acid reflux like in zero G? Do we know this already?

Kate Johnston: Uh, we don't, and it's probably not good. This is already the reason we know that we don't want carbonated liquids in space because it tends to sit right up under that valve and just spew carbon dioxide and acid up your windpipe at you.

Kristy Anne Cox: So I can postulate on this a little bit because I have dysphagia, right? So after the brain injury, I lost full control of the part of your musculature that keeps you from choking when you're eating.

Kate Johnston: Lovely.

Kristy Anne Cox: I also can no longer hold my breath underwater without pinching my nose, which I thought was interesting.

So having lost those two very specific skills, I'm thinking in zero G, that would be even a bigger problem. We evolved to have our food generally pulled downward. Right?

Kate Johnston: Yep.

Kristy Anne Cox: What about birds? Because they have gallstones too, like parakeets, that little pouch where they grind up their seeds.

Kate Johnston: Yeah. Crop.

Kristy Anne Cox: Crop, yes. Do dinosaurs have crops?

Kate Johnston: We don't know. That's a soft tissue, and I don't know that we know that. We have found some gastrolids with fossils that make it look like, yes, there was probably a pouch here, which is where all these little rocks work, 'cause they're abnormally smooth, and we dunno why they would be there, but we don't actually know. And so yes, they might have crops, in which case there may be a little pebble dispenser somewhere on the ship, to keep everybody healthy.

Kristy Anne Cox: And then those little cuttlefish chew bone things that you put on the side of a parakeet cage that they need to chew to keep their beaks. Like dinosaurs with beaks need to have beak maintenance. Dinosaurs with claws need to maintain their claws.

So if I'm a dinosaur astronaut and I am on the deck of my ship, I think I need claw holes with a button at the bottom. What do you think? Because I think it would hurt to constantly be pushing human buttons with a claw tip.

Kate Johnston: Okay. I actually was thinking about that. So, here's that thing about the way animals think that it's not the way we think about things. So specifically velociraptors and other Dromeosaurs, wouldn't their keyboards and keys be sized to the end of their snout, rather than their claws? Because my cats will shove their face into the crack of a door and shove the door open, rather than reaching out a paw and pulling it open, because they don't think about their hands that way.

Kristy Anne Cox: Well, for opening a door, yeah, but I don't imagine snout typing is very efficient, right?

Kate Johnston: But it's what they've got and it's what makes sense to them. It's just gonna be a giant thing, or they're gonna have very few things that it does.

Kristy Anne Cox: That depends on who designed their spaceship.

Kate Johnston: Yeah, but they don't think about doing key typey things with claws, because they're really curved too.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah. Yeah. In CJ Cherryh's Chanur series, there is a human astronaut who is brought on to a ship of lion people, and he can't use any of their keyboards or devices because they have retractable claws, and they just kind of like push their claw into a hole until there's enough pressure on whatever the cone shape or whatever it is that it works. So he has to use an ice pick.

That's a disability. We're interrogating the way different bodies need different accommodations in different environments, and he is effectively disabled in that environment. Not because there's anything wrong with him, but because this environment is designed to accommodate people with five fingers and retractable claws that are a lot more sensitive, more nerve endings.

I don't know, 'cause Velociraptors and all the Dromeosaurids, their claws aren't being used for the same purpose as lions. How sensitive would their claw be? Because if you're ripping something—

Kate Johnston: That's good question. Like, parrots are really sensitive.

Kristy Anne Cox: But then meanwhile you have like ducks and other waterfowl who can stand on ice and sleep that way, and it doesn't hurt their feet, or at least enough to stop them from doing that. So I assume their little claws are also not that sensitive. I guess it would depend on the environmental needs that those claws evolved for.

So Velociraptors, they used their claws, we think, to kind of latch on a little bit while they were eviscerating them with the back claws, right? So if I'm following that through, what gear does my Velociraptor astronaut need? Does he have a vac suit?

Kate Johnston: We don't know if he needs one. This is where fiction comes in. You can go either way with that. You're just going to have to have an explanation, you know? You're gonna have to say he's wearing only mag boots, because even though he has claws, he can't dig into the side of the spacecraft. So he is wearing mag boots and maybe a sternum magnet, and then the claws, if you think about it, they can't do this— they cannot pronate.

Kristy Anne Cox: Viewers— Kate is moving her wrists down to the side.

Kate Johnston: Demonstrating that palm down is the way that Dromeosaurus joints looked. They could not rotate their hands very far inward so they could climb a tree, for example. They didn't have the clavicle and sternum construction that would make them strong in that direction.

Kristy Anne Cox: It depends on if these are uplifted dinosaurs, where they have some traits that have changed over time, or if they have prosthetic arms which, if you've got these short arms, the imagination for me goes to, they're holding cannons or they've got mechanical arms to do things. And I like thinking about prosthetics in the terms of disability, but I also like thinking about who designed the accommodations and do they suck because I'm imagining like, you're out walking on the hull of a ship in grav boots, some human thought this was a great idea to accommodate you, the Velociraptor pilot, but you're in grav boots and that doesn't work for you because your body is different and it really sucks. And then I'm thinking, why does it suck? Because he wants to pounce on the other astronaut and eviscerate him and he can't, he's stuck to the ship with magnetism, curses.

Kate Johnston: In the Dinosaur Space Navy story that I'm writing, I have a whole thing about choosing what your augments are gonna be because that tells you where in the army structure you're gonna go. But one of the intro moments that they're having during training is, one of the instructors is basically going, "if you wanna scratch your nose, get it all out now because the minute we put that canon on, you ain't doing that no more."

So yeah, there's a lot of that. I was gonna say, I had an ex who used to use her cellphone with her nose, because she had to have the phone so close to her face 'cause she had really bad eyesight, so she would just operate it with her nose because it was right there. So not all animals use things the way you might think they would.

Kristy Anne Cox: That is true. And I like the idea of exploring muzzle, 'cause I'm rejecting the idea of a muzzle keyboard based on me imagining these giant buttons, but maybe they would be using that like trace typing, like on a cell phone. So I'm imagining now, you're a giant T-Rex in a T-Rex shaped spaceship, and he is got what? A touch screen and he is texting his mom by tracing the words instead of pushing each button. Is that what you're thinking? Are you thinking individual?

Kate Johnston: No, I'm thinking of individual. Like, dromeosaurids weren't that big, and the end of their face is not huge. It's like the size of your fist. And so I can see, in the same way that dogs use those buttons.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Kate Johnston: Talk like that, like a dog.

Kristy Anne Cox: Okay. What about prosthetic arms? What if we gave our Dromeosaurus, let's say it's a Utah Raptor, we've rigged him up with fully cybernetic arms that are capable of typing on a human keyboard. Why did we do that? Because we're humans and we're thinking about everything from that perspective. I wanna think about why that

Kate Johnston: I didn't realize that if it's male, it's gonna spend the first week just scratching its crotch, right?

Kristy Anne Cox: The evolutionary purpose of itching, that's gonna take us down a whole rabbit hole.

Kate Johnston: Well—

Kristy Anne Cox: Don't scratch the rabbit hole, but,

Okay, so some human engineer has given you, a Utah Raptor, two amazing cyborg arms. They have canons built in, they can type on a human keyboard. What sucks about it? I feel like keyboards require you to look at a certain direction with a certain type of head and neck shape, right?

Kate Johnston: Have you ever talked to somebody with a prosthetic limb?

Kristy Anne Cox: Yes.

Kate Johnston: I would imagine that grafting something onto your bones never stops really hurting. It's a low level ache that you can just deal with, but it's always there in the same way that people with titanium knees, when they are in the winter, they can feel that inside their body.

Kristy Anne Cox: Readers and writers and listeners, I wanna hear from you. If you have a prosthesis and you have thoughts on this, I would love to hear your take on this.

Okay, so you're gonna have probably physical sensation of some sort, and it won't be like with an amputee where you have like the ghost limb, because we are adding an extra limb to you, or length that doesn't exist. It's not like your instincts are hardwired. It would be equivalent of like, wearing stilts, or like operating a surgical robot. So you're adding complications and length and dimensions. Your proprioception is off.

Kate Johnston: Right, and I would imagine that you would wanna be able to take them off at some point. Like you wouldn't want them hard wired or hard attached. You would want there to be an interface.

Kristy Anne Cox: Have you ever used that claw thing that you can get for disabled people? They market it as if it's for dumb people, but really it's for disabled people. It's like a claw, you wanna get something out of the top cupboard and there's—

Kate Johnston: Oh yeah, I have a clamp.

Kristy Anne Cox: So I got one out the other day and I was pretending in my kitchen that I was a Dakota Raptor, and I've got this claw and I could not get a can down from the top shelf to save my life, so I'm not gonna make it in the Space Marines. I am a civilian Dakota Raptor, clearly. But it's really hard to operate that. It's gonna take me hours of practice before I can do that. And that's just in earth gravity.

Kate Johnston: And that's using your actual hands. Imagine if you were trying to use your shoulder muscles to do this, which is what artificial arms do, that's how that's done. You open and close the grippers by how your shoulder is articulating. So that's definitely a thing to think about is like, how would you decide what nerve nodes, whatever you are going to map onto this prosthetic arm— and they're already using theirs, so you're gonna add new ones for them, and that'll be definitely a period of learning and experimentation for them to figure out how to use all this stuff.

And like I've said a gajillion times before, and I will continue to say it, they also have to deal with the fact that if they are in an environment where someone is building them augments, how are they going to keep up with the pace of technological change? Because there's always gonna be a bigger and better gun. And when you get out of the service, what happens? Do they take those away? Do they give you civilian ones? What happens? What kind of society do you come from and how well are they going to take care of you?

Ooh, ooh. Wait, I have one more design issue: in the Space Navy thing I'm writing, they're in a situation where there's a whole bunch of people of different species, the way the army works, and they're in a ship that is foreign to all of that. So they need to figure out how to navigate through this ship, and it has like lights and buttons and, you know, okay. But how do you know how to drive it? How do you know that when you push this button, it actually does this other thing? What does green mean to the people who built this? Our lights are not green and red because we're omnivores, they're green and red because they're parts of the UV spectrum that we can see clearly from a distance and are widely separate from each other.

Kristy Anne Cox: Well, and also because of the colors, we can see green being the predominant color in a forest environment or a Savannah environment, right, and red being the polar opposite. So the brightest and most easy to see, signaling danger the same way animals use red.

Kate Johnston: Well, but is it?

Kristy Anne Cox: Danger? I mean, blood is red.

Kate Johnston: Like animals aren't necessarily red when they're dangerous.

Kristy Anne Cox: Not always, but some of them are, right, like a bright red tree frog, don't eat it. If it's a green tree frog, I'm eating it every time.

Kate Johnston: Oh, you're gonna die.

Kristy Anne Cox: Okay. Haha!

Kate Johnston: But yeah, you can't necessarily make the same assumptions. You know, that purple button, what do you think it does? I don't know. It could give us all like self cut bangs. No one wants that.

Kristy Anne Cox: It's a bowl cut for everyone, but it's feathers this time because we're dinosaurs. Right?

Kate Johnston: Right. But like—

Kristy Anne Cox: Oh my gosh, do dinosaurs in the Space Marines get crew cuts on their feathers?

Kate Johnston: You know? Do you trim some of the flyers so they can't fly so they're not as annoying around in the spaceship?

Kristy Anne Cox: Can you imagine molting season? Like—

Kate Johnston: Yes!

Kristy Anne Cox: Okay. Ducks completely molt out their feathers seasonally. And I'm talking mallards. So twice a year they're shedding all their feathers. Those float around, even in this gravity. I feel like you're gonna be breathing down 24/7 if you're an animal husbandry tech on one of these, if they're like on a generation ship.

Kate Johnston: So one of the very highly, highly respected and decorated people on this ship is going to be the filtration team.

Kristy Anne Cox: Well, yeah, because there's gonna be poop.

Kate Johnston: There's gonna be poop, there's gonna be dander, there's gonna be whatever that powdery shit that comes off birds...?

Kristy Anne Cox: Bird powder?

Kate Johnston: Thank you.

Kristy Anne Cox: The technical term!

Kate Johnston: A scientific term called "poudre de avian"!

Kristy Anne Cox: There's gonna be a lot of things. And then food particles, right? And then you have everything the chickens produce. There's gonna be a lot of dust, you have chicken feed.

Kate Johnston: And I was thinking about people who may not have mates or their group on the ship with them. There would have to be like a room with all those rotating bristle things that you find in like cow barns, so that they could stand there and get scratched and stuff. That also helps get molting skin off. Because we don't know that they didn't molt their skin either. It wasn't an exoskeleton. Although it's fiction, you could do that.

Kristy Anne Cox: I wanna switch topics entirely to be sure we get to this, 'cause I think we're gonna run outta time. But can we talk strategy and tactics in different environments for your Velociraptor Space Army? Because let's say I'm breaching an airlock with my Velociraptor Space Army. Is it more advantageous for me to send in Velociraptor astronauts or human astronauts to kill all the space pirates in this space station? And why?

Kate Johnston: It depends on who built the ship, to start with. Because if the Velociraptors are too big to fit through the hallways, it's humans.

Kristy Anne Cox: Well, Velociraptors are smaller than us, but like, Utah Raptors are bigger.

Kate Johnston: They're bigger than we are, and they weigh a lot more than we do.

Kristy Anne Cox: Dakota Raptors, if they're real, are definitely way bigger. We just don't know if it's one species or two species mixed together in a bag.

Kate Johnston: But this is what I mean. Space strategy and tactics has far less to do with what we think in every way than it does, "what are the physics of this issue?"

Kristy Anne Cox: Okay. What if I'm on the planet, who's my infantry?

Kate Johnston: Depends on what you wanna do and what the terrain is.

Kristy Anne Cox: Okay. If I've got a just boring as possible, plain, two armies facing off on a plane, which is the baseline boring scenario. My infantry, I feel like armored T-Rexes feels like a good idea. I'm going to put canons in each of their hands and I'm going to armor them up very heavily and I'm gonna put a knight on the back and he's gonna have, I don't know, a tank launcher. Tell me what you think of my tactics.

Kate Johnston: What are you facing?

Kristy Anne Cox: I'm facing—

Kate Johnston: You know, if you're facing planaria, that's overkill.

Kristy Anne Cox: Let's assume I am facing a ground army, mixed units, and that this sounds like somebody who knows what they're talking about because I don't.

Kate Johnston: Okay, yeah. Basically, you wanna have bigger guns that fire farther from your opponents. But I can definitely see where if you've got a thousand pounds of very, very excited T-Rex, I think your tactics may go right down the shitter very quickly, because I don't know that they're going to have the ability to reject their instinctual impulses long enough to execute strategy on the battlefield.

Like, yes, parrots will rip you up six ways from Sunday, but if you have two parrots who don't know each other, they're not necessarily going to bond together to fight you.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah. They're not gonna cooperate.

Kate Johnston: No. And so I'm worried about how the cooperation of large animals goes because generally, unless they're doing it for themselves and it's their own family group, screw you and everybody. You can get horses to do it a little bit. Rhinos? Eh, not so much.

This is what I mean though, in space battles and as you just demonstrated in a lot of battles on land too, it doesn't matter what species you are, it matters what kind of armament you have versus what kind of armament your opponents have.

Because yes, you could be a big scary T-Rex with a giant gun, however, if you're going up against parasites that are specifically T-Rex, you're probably gonna come outta that with a bunch of parasites. You know, sharks are really scary and remoras hang out on them all the time.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah. You mean what, parasites are hanging on the T-Rexes?

Kate Johnston: Yeah.

Kristy Anne Cox: I'm thinking corridors, narrow corridors, like in these human built space stations.

Kate Johnston: Yeah. Not going to be good for T-Rexes.

Kristy Anne Cox: But they would be good for Velociraptors. Wouldn't those claws help them navigate better? 'Cause they can grab onto like walls and stuff and kick off with those powerful back legs. Wouldn't they be really good in zero G, close combat quarters if they could figure out how to— I feel like they would be wanting to bite you though, which would be less effective in a space suit like we've got now, like NASA's current space suits aren't designed to be terribly chewable.

Kate Johnston: No. And that the helmets are not designed to let them bite you.

Kristy Anne Cox: I wonder how much bite pressure you would need as a dinosaur to crack an astronaut helmet?

Kate Johnston: So it depends on where you're biting it. Like at the edge of the glass bubble, probably not a lot.

Kristy Anne Cox: I just wanna get to the chewy astronaut inside. I'd like to eat him. What skills do I need?

Kate Johnston: You need to rip the front of the suit open. We're like shrimp. You wanna eat the body.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah. So if we were just talking NASA's current space suit, I feel like they look pretty sturdy, but I don't know if they could take a Dromeosaurid claw to the rib cage. I feel like they're not designed for that.

Kate Johnston: They were not designed for that. You know who designed the first astronaut suits, right? And sewed them, mostly.

Kristy Anne Cox: Humans?

Kate Johnston: Well, no, the ladies from Playtex.

Kristy Anne Cox: Oh, really?

Kate Johnston: Because those suits have to be sewn together and it's like six layers, and every single stitch has to be airtight. Those ladies were already used to doing that type of construction. They basically said, "here's what we need". And they're like, "oh, all right, let's go."

Kristy Anne Cox: What about feathers in zero G? Like, let's say our astronaut only needs a helmet and the rest of their body is okay in space. Would feathers help them navigate zero g?

Kate Johnston: If they were in an oxygen or gas environment, yes, because you can use that. If you were in a zero G environment and you were trapped in the middle of a room, if you had a pair of fans, one in each hand, you would be able to flap your way to one side.

What about the four legged feathered dinosaurs? We don't have a lot of those. Most of them came from China. Microraptor and Anchiornis, they have four legs, all four legs are feathered. And I think those would be fantastic for the inside of the spaceship. And again, one of those things too is that this is a lot like D&D: not every dinosaur is a tank.

Kristy Anne Cox: Oh no. Yeah, we could talk combat roles.

Kate Johnston: Yeah, right. And it doesn't need to be, like Anchiornis and Microraptor would be great pilots. They'd be fantastic, but they would stuck at infantry.

Kristy Anne Cox: But I was gonna say, if we're stepping out of just straight dinosaurs, ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs as pilots, right? Because they're used to this underwater environment, they evolved to navigate three dimensionally instead of being a terrestrial gravity. More gravity bound, right, animals. So I imagine that they would make really great pilots.

I would think they would be good marksmen because sonar, right? Well, actually we don't know if ichthyosauruses and pleisiosauruses used sonar, but I mean, they had to find a way to find their prey. So I don't know that they would be very good at shooting things... Well no, maybe they would. I'm waffling on this. Would they be good marksmen?

Kate Johnston: Ichthyosaurs did not have echolocation.

Kristy Anne Cox: Also, they have eyes on the side of their head.

Kate Johnston: Rely on sight. Yep.

Kristy Anne Cox: But they're not flat faced like us.

Kate Johnston: We are also not ruling out that they didn't have like, the electrical sensory set up. So they had lateral lines like electric eels, and so they could sense the electricity of their prey in the water.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Kate Johnston: And that would not work outside of water.

Kristy Anne Cox: No. Well, in space, would you be able to sense electricity? No, 'cause the particles are too far apart, right?

Kate Johnston: Yeah, I think you need a medium.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah. I'm saying there is a medium, there are particles, they're just so far apart, they can't carry sound... I really don't know how electricity works.

Kate Johnston: Well, the interstellar medium is much more of a small—

Kristy Anne Cox: If I'm a giant electric ichthyosaurus, and I evolved in the asteroid belt, and I'm coming towards your spaceship...

Kate Johnston: Do I know that it's electric? Yes.

Kristy Anne Cox: You can sense it because electricity is surging through your spaceship and you're dying. Right? How am I doing that? Or am I not doing that? Because that's not how it would work because the interstellar medium, or the particles are too far apart.

Kate Johnston: I think as long as you don't start talking about the particles, you can get away with it in fiction.

Kristy Anne Cox: So we're hand waving it.

Kate Johnston: We're gonna hand wave that, yeah.

Kristy Anne Cox: I was like, "electric eels"...

Kate Johnston: I think it's a great idea. I'm willing to write the story, but it's definitely handwaving them.

Kristy Anne Cox: So, readers, listeners, tell me how do electric eels work if they evolved in the asteroid belt and they're about to kill Kate's spaceship? Please, I need to know the science, use your physics skills for good and not evil.

How much time do we have left? We have time for one more question.

Kate Johnston: I have one more comment though.

Kristy Anne Cox: Oh, go ahead, please.

Kate Johnston: It was the end of the in-space battles. It doesn't matter what kind of species you are, it matters what kind of ship you have. However, there may be things like cats are more likely to chase things, so you want them on picket duty. So they're looking for weirdness and the first thing they wanna do is go play with the weirdness.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah.

Kate Johnston: And so you want that, or dogs who will just point at it and go, there is weirdness right over there. Go, go.

Kristy Anne Cox: I feel like cat base would be recon too, like ambush predators in general would be good scouts.

Kate Johnston: Mm-hmm.

Kristy Anne Cox: And recon. Yeah, dogs and wolf like psychology, if that's their group psychology, that's more like the cavalry, right? Like you're highly mobile, quick, efficient. Is it wrong for me to compare wolves to cavalry?

Kate Johnston: I mean, horses might be offended, but how would we know?

Kristy Anne Cox: Horses are offended by everything.

Kate Johnston: Well, I mean, camels are worse. Camels are offended by, you know, air existing.

Kristy Anne Cox: Another thing that I wanted to talk about was mounts, right? So we've kind of gone into astronauts, but like if we're talking dinosaurs as mounts, as cool as it is, is there a practical reason for me to ride my Dakota Raptor into battle in zero G, alone while I'm drifting through a battle in space? Or while I'm working on my ship? Like why do I need a mount? Because I want to have a mount, so why do I need my mount in space outside the ship?

Kate Johnston: I have no idea.

Kristy Anne Cox: So emotional support reasons. Probably.

Kate Johnston: Do you have a communication system?

Kristy Anne Cox: I mean—

Kate Johnston: If you do, it can just talk you through it.

Kristy Anne Cox: He's the cutest Dakota Raptor you've ever seen.

Kate Johnston: I mean, the only reason I can think of is if you were placing something really big that you needed him to hold onto, or her to hold onto, while you welded it or whatever.

Kristy Anne Cox: Muscles. They're big muscular animals. So if I need to turn a wheel on a door... I feel like that's a thing that happens a lot in space, is somebody has a door on their airlock and there's a wheel for some reason, and you have to turn it, like an old submarine. I feel like muscles might be good, right? Like I can tie a rope to it, and then have him pull. If I'm too weak to turn that wheel, is that gonna help? Is his musculature helpful in space?

Kate Johnston: Maybe. This would again be related to, how does its body work? Because that rotating motion of an airlock wheel, that's a really weird motion and it's a really odd way of applying force to something. And I don't know that their shoulders or elbows or wrists are gonna do that very well. I think the articulated arms would help.

Kristy Anne Cox: Well, no, I'm gonna have him with the saddle on. I'm gonna put a bungee on, and I'm gonna hook it to, you know, different parts of the wheel, pull it a little bit, then hook it to a different part of the wheel, pull it a little bit...

Kate Johnston: If you've got enough room on either side of it, sure. I wouldn't use a bungee, I'd use something rigid.

Kristy Anne Cox: Well, yeah, obviously something like— okay, so if you're riding a jet pack in space, that's a useful tool. So he could basically be a jet pack if I strapped enough jets to him, right? Or would it be more efficacious just to strap them to a surfboard?

Kate Johnston: It's up to you. I just think that the amount of jet fuel you would need to move 1,200 pounds rather than 200 pounds is going to be an issue.

Kristy Anne Cox: So these are the problems that come when you start with an idea, because it's awesome.

Kate Johnston: Yeah.

Kristy Anne Cox: Then you try to figure out why it has to be that way in the world building.

Kate Johnston: Hi, and welcome to fiction writing! But yeah, no, I get that. And it's like that thing of, you know, you wake up in the middle of the night and you're like, "oh my God, it's such a cool idea!" And you wake up in the morning and you look at it and it says, "monkey, dumpster, mouse, scissors". And you're like, what?

Kristy Anne Cox: I know exactly what I meant.

Kate Johnston: Yeah.

Kristy Anne Cox: Writes a sonnet.

Kate Johnston: But seriously, this is something that we really have to think about. Like, when you have a ship full of Velociraptors, what do they do in their off time?

Kristy Anne Cox: Parkour.

Kate Johnston: You know, I dunno that they're playing pickleball, that's all I'm saying.

Kristy Anne Cox: Pickleball parkour.

Kate Johnston: Yeah. And then like, on my ship I have entire rooms that are just basically a big litter box.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah. So I think there's gonna be diapering. Unless we have uplifted their cloacas, I think there's gonna be extensive diapering, and I think it needs to have some kind of a suction system with a really good seal, because diapering is a lot more difficult in space.

Kate Johnston: Can I tell you one of the reasons why?

Kristy Anne Cox: Please do.

Kate Johnston: Because in space there is no gravity, and unfortunately liquid tends to move via capillary action in the absence of gravity. So yes, you can wear a diaper, but it doesn't mean that that's where the urine is going. Once you exude it, it's crawling along your skin.

Kristy Anne Cox: Okay. Uh, I'm— I'm dead. This, this killed me. It's crawling?! It's actively crawling?

Kate Johnston: Yeah.

Kristy Anne Cox: Like an amoeba?

Kate Johnston: Kind of.

Kristy Anne Cox: Or more like molasses downhill?

Kate Johnston: There's no hill, hun.

Kristy Anne Cox: Is this "in space, everything is—"

Kate Johnston: And it's not very thick, so yeah, it's crawling pretty fast.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah. This is, I feel like... the worst possible place to end this episode. We need a different topic for our last question!

Kate Johnston: Well, I can tell you how we know this.

Kristy Anne Cox: Oh my God.

Kate Johnston: Which is not helping.

Kristy Anne Cox: And I don't want to— yes, tell me! My curiosity is stronger than my despair.

Kate Johnston: We know this because many women went up on the shuttle before we knew that it was safe for them to not have periods at all while they go. And so now everybody just does a hormonal birth control and doesn't bleed up there anymore. But that's what we found out. They were like, "okay, no pads only tampons", because the space shuttle toilet is bad enough.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah...

Kate Johnston: Yeah.

Kristy Anne Cox: I wanna talk hatching in space. I dunno if we have time for that. Or do you wanna talk prosthetics? Is there something you wanna talk about?

Kate Johnston: Well, I wanna talk about the fact that we really, really, really, really, 1000000% do not know enough about reproduction in space to say anything about it at all. What we do have is we have several studies that put pregnant rats in space at various points in their gestation, and some of them gave birth in space and some of them didn't. But we have never actually taken, I don't think, one from the point of fertilization all the way through two weeks after birth, so we could assess the offspring.

However, we do have rats that were shot into space after fertilization but before birth, and then were monitored all the way through birth, and then the newborns were assessed and then they were destroyed. What they found was that about 30% of them were viable and looked okay. The rest did not.

Kristy Anne Cox: Congenital defects or...?

Kate Johnston: Yes.

Kristy Anne Cox: Or like gravity, I guess. I don't know what you would call them.

Kate Johnston: Well, but how do we know?

Kristy Anne Cox: Oh, that's true. We don't know. We don't know.

Kate Johnston: So they had very large heads. They had large eyes, often they were mismatched. A lot of them had what we would consider in adults to be spina bifida, so the tops of their spinal columns didn't close over the spinal cord correctly. There was a lot of failure to thrive.

Kristy Anne Cox: It's interesting because we do not know as an embryo starts diversifying its parts, we don't know if there's gravity triggers that are necessary.

Kate Johnston: Well, this is how we find out.

Kristy Anne Cox: Well, I mean, if the different sides of the body are no longer symmetrical, it's fascinating to think that gravity might be related to that.

Okay, so eggs though... hear me out. We know that there is a limit to how big an egg can be because shell size, oxygen through the membrane. We know that birds, having hatched a lot of ducks, they need the experience of hatching out of that egg to finish their development and not end up with major problems after hatching. And the ducklings that I helped get out of the egg ended up with leg issues very often. You have to be very patient and some of the ducklings will die in the hatching process, and it's very stressful, but that hatching is part of what they do.

We know this for butterflies too, right? They have to have the experience of fighting out of the chrysalis in order to fully develop. What if you're hatching that egg in zero G?

Kate Johnston: Yeah. That answer is, we don't know. We have done a bunch of studies in lizards and the news is not great.

Kristy Anne Cox: So no. I mean, egg rotation would be easier.

Kate Johnston: It would, but so you have all of these long termists and weird ass rich white guys who are like, "oh yes, we can just send entire populations into space, we're gonna live on Mars and blah, blah"... No.

Kristy Anne Cox: I heard about that.

Kate Johnston: You know, because you don't even know that sperm work in space, 'cause we don't know that for sure, but we absolutely do not know enough to say what kind of babies we can have, if any. The news is not great, so I actually think For All Mankind did a very good job with that, in saying that, "no, you absolutely need to be in at least some version of microgravity, one sixth or higher, in order to have a healthy baby".

I mean, we do help babies out. We have the cesarean section, they don't die. But it sounds like ducks do, it sounds like there are lots of animals who do. And I think the more variables we change about birth inputs, the greater the effects are gonna be on the resulting product. It's sort of like if you are a degree off when you send the spaceship, it's gonna be way off when you get where you're going.

Kristy Anne Cox: Right. And in medicine we are just within humans, still struggling with the differences between cisgender male and cisgender female bodies and why like, heart disease progresses differently, which is why being a veterinarian is like going to medical school a hundred different times, but in the same period, 'cause you have all these different species.

And so when you think of like, all the stuff that I learned about horses and about ducks and about cats and about dogs through my own experiences leads me to believe this is gonna be different for each species of dinosaur in ways that we'll find out when it goes terribly wrong.

I think disability would be a major part of those stories of uplifted astronauts too, because what are the ethics of uplifting somebody, right? You wanna have a velociraptor who's an astronaut, so you're going to increase their brain size. How do you decide whether or not they wanna keep their arms the way they are? Is it desirable to give them human hands? I mean, they never evolved that, that wasn't necessarily for their environment. Wouldn't that kind of be like somebody saying, I'm gonna give you tentacles and you're gonna spend the next three years learning to use them? Do you want that?

My answer would be no, because I don't wanna do physical therapy for three years to learn how to use tentacles right now.

Kate Johnston: Yeah. But if your choice was, you can either have stumps or tentacles...

Kristy Anne Cox: Well, that's different.

Kate Johnston: I know, but that's the trade off we give disabled people more often than not.

Kristy Anne Cox: Oh yeah.

Kate Johnston: You know, and we really don't think about that. And we should.

Kristy Anne Cox: Well, and the choice needs to be the bodily autonomy of the person, which I don't feel like that's there for uplift stories that I've seen, or like stories where humans have augmented dogs or cats or whatever species to make them just as smart as us. Generally humans are the ones driving all of that for the first, what, 80, 90% of the process at least. So the ethics there...

Kate Johnston: Oh yeah. Like, what if the dog doesn't wanna be uplifted? What if they don't want that? What if they're perfectly happy being what they are and who they are and how they are.

Kristy Anne Cox: I mean, there's a lot of disability related thoughts that readers, listeners, viewers, we're gonna leave you with these because I think we're over our time limit. But I want you all to think about disability related issues, dinosaurs in space, velociraptors in space, space armies, any of the topics we've talked about. Questions.

Kate, what do you want them to think about?

Kate Johnston: I want them to think about a story that I read and now I can't think of who wrote it or what the name of it is, but it's about a dancer, a ballerina, and she has this uplifted dog who basically, it can't talk, but it can say a couple of words, right? And it's her security. Basically all the new dancers are all augmented with genetic whatever, and so they have a perfect 10 turnout without destroying their knees. And so she is one of the very last of the original bio dancers, and she's been fighting this, and the rest of the story is, you know, do you fight this? How do you fight this? When do you stop?

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah.

Kate Johnston: And a lot of it is through the point of view of the dog.

Kristy Anne Cox: Oh wait, is the point of view character the dog?

Kate Johnston: Yeah.

Kristy Anne Cox: That's awesome.

Kate Johnston: Yeah. That's super great. Super great. I cannot think of the name of it, I'll find it and then we will get it into the show notes.

Kristy Anne Cox: Okay. So readers, viewers, we would love to hear from you on social media. You can use the hashtag Writing While Disabled, you can also use the hashtag for our publisher Strange Horizons, so it's hashtag Strange Horizons. And you can just converse, join the conversation with us. We will look for those comments and we could definitely revisit this topic again.

But Velociraptor Space Armies, I think this was pretty great. Thank you.

Kate Johnston: Thank you so much. And you guys have a great night.

In this episode of Strange Horizons at 25, Tim Melody Pratt walks us through their extensive oeuvre in the SH archives, recounts meeting their life partner through the magazine, and explains how it all intertwined together into a life and career bursting with magic.

Links and things:

• Want to leave us a happy birthday message? Click ⁠here to record an audio message⁠, and ⁠here for video⁠.
• Join our ⁠Patreon⁠ for early episode access, or donate through any other way to hear your name and message in our next episodes.
• Want to meet the team? Podcast editors Kat and Michael will be at World Fantasy Con, alongside Poetry Editor Vanessa Jae and Fiction/Articles Editor Joyce Ch'ng! Come to the first Strange Horizons Tea Party in years on Sunday at 11am, and celebrate our 25th anniversary with us.

Episode show notes:

• Read Tim Pratt's work in our archives.
• Visit their website, follow them on Bluesky, and check out their Patreon to read their monthly short stories.
• Buy Tim's latest book, Starfinder: Era of the Eclipse, or the one before that, The Knife and the Serpent.
• Find further links to Tim's work and other things mentioned throughout the transcript below.

Transcript

Kat Kourbeti: Hello Strangers, and welcome to Strange Horizons at 25, a 25th anniversary celebration of Strange Horizons. I'm your host, Kat Kourbeti, and it is my privilege today to welcome you to another episode that looks back at the history and impact of Strange Horizons on the speculative genres.

Today's guest is Tim Pratt, who has extensively published with us in the magazine's early days as far back as December of 2000, and has since gone on to win a Hugo Award for short fiction, garner many nominations for other awards such as the Astounding, the Rhysling, Nebula, World Fantasy, Sturgeon, Mythopoeic, and the Stoker, write and publish over 30 novels (!), and is now senior editor at Locus Magazine, among other things. It's great to have you here, Tim.

Tim Melody Pratt: It's great to be here. I love Strange Horizons. I'm happy to reminisce. Although 25 years can't possibly be right, because then I must be approaching 50, which that seems implausible. Just doesn't seem real.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. I'm really not sure about the uh, timespace continuum on that one. Yeah, questions and concerns about all of that.

But first of all, I gotta say, you are such a prolific writer. I saw on Bluesky earlier today that you calculated, you've produced 286 stories.

Tim Melody Pratt: I actually looked up that number, because I knew Strange Horizons was one of my earliest sales, and the first story I had in Strange Horizons was the sixth story I had ever sold. Number six. And so then I was like "well, I wonder out of how many", because I hadn't really looked and I knew it was a bunch, I would've guessed a couple hundred. And then I went to ISFDB, the Internet Science Fiction Database, and pulled their thing down, kinda looked at it and you know, I could be off by a story or two, but it's around that. Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: That's a great and crazy number.

Tim Melody Pratt: A big number.

Kat Kourbeti: But what is your secret?

Tim Melody Pratt: So this is my hobby, right? Writing fiction has always been the thing I wanted to do. I was an outlier among my friends in high school and in college to an extent, because I knew what I wanted to do. I didn't know if I'd be able to do it, but I've known from first grade as soon as I figured out, "wait, books are not just objects that appear, right? People make these. This is a job you can have." Once I knew that it was the job I wanted, and short fiction is my favorite. I love short fiction. That's how I came up in the field. Strange Horizons was instrumental in that, for my career. I published short stories; novels for me have always been— well, they pay a lot better. I like them, I enjoy getting to hang out with characters and in a world, but in turn, as an artist and as a consumer of fiction, I love short stories more. So mostly it's just keeping at it.

And then 10 years ago, I realized I wasn't really writing short stories because novels pay better, right? So I was doing a lot of novel writing and I really missed it. I was only writing stories if an anthology editor or magazine editor solicited me to write something. I thought, "this is terrible, I wanna center short fiction in my life again. How do I make it something I will actually do instead of just thinking, oh, I should do this?" So I started a Patreon, and I'm not gonna do a big plug for my Patreon, but in May 2015, 10 years ago, I started a Patreon promising to publish a story a month, because if I had people waiting for it, if I had people giving me money, then it would be a deadline and I would actually do it. And so I got back and I just uploaded, a couple days ago, my 120th story for that Patreon. I've never missed a month.

So yeah, of that 286, 120 of them are stories for my Patreon.

Kat Kourbeti: Wow. It's great to have something to keep you going, and to always meet that promise to yourself and to your supporters on Patreon. And I hope we can learn from you today.

Tim Melody Pratt: I still publish in the magazines and anthologies too. The nice thing about the Patreon is as long as my readers are happy, I can do whatever I want. I can experiment with stuff, I can do more experimental fiction, can use it as a test kitchen for characters I think I might wanna write novels about. And they seem happy so far. Most of them have stuck with me all this time.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. That's great. Ooh, and we can chat a little bit about that journey of, "here's a short story that might then become something else." But I do wanna talk about your extensive presence on the Strange Horizons sphere.

Tim Melody Pratt: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: You joined the Strange Horizons family very early. December of 2000 would've been like four months into the magazine's history.

Tim Melody Pratt: Sounds right.

Kat Kourbeti: So how did you come across the magazine in the first place?

Tim Melody Pratt: At the time I was really actively submitting stories. I had a story come out in a small, tiny magazine in 1999, and then I had a handful in like e-zines and stuff in 2000, before I had one published in Strange Horizons, which for it to come out in December means I submitted it months earlier. We did have an internet back then. It was different than the internet is now, but I knew a lot of young writers and a lot of people who have since gone on to be big writers. And I had my Clarion cohort— I went to Clarion in 1999, so we would all let each other know, "oh, there's a new market, oh there's a new magazine, they're looking for stuff."

And I was just writing a ton and had a ton of stories that I was sending out, 'cause I was just trying to break in. I wanted this to be my life and I was at the start, so I was generally pretty keenly aware of any new magazine that was paying decently, that seemed like it had legs. I mean, I wouldn't have imagined that Strange Horizons would still be standing 25 years later. Not anything against Strange Horizons, just what magazine from 2000, what e-zine, webzine, is still around? It's a very small list.

I was rapacious looking for markets and Strange Horizons turned out to be a very sympathetic market for me.

Kat Kourbeti: That's really cool. And what was your experience overall? You've published a variety of things with us. There's stories, there's poems, there's reviews, even. Do you have any stories to tell us from your Strange Horizons publication experience?

Tim Melody Pratt: Well, yeah, if I can maybe digress a little bit and give you a little meta, not just about the work but how I came to be sort of involved with the Strange Horizons sphere.

In March of 2001, so some months after I had first published something with the magazine, Strange Horizons hosted a brunch for Nalo Hopkinson, amazing writer, wonderful person, one of my favorite people in the field. Nalo was great. And I was living in Santa Cruz at the time, the brunch was in Oakland, and Nalo was gonna do a little hangout with people involved with the magazine, and then there was gonna be a reading and stuff, I think at Other Change of Hobbit, when it was still around. And they invited me because I was a contributor and 'cause I was vaguely in the area—you know, I was 90 minutes away, but I was close enough. I was down in Santa Cruz and I was like "well, do I want to go? Do I not want to go? I guess it would be fun."

I loaded up and I went up, and the brunch was held in the house in Oakland of a Strange Horizons staff member, their bookstore manager, and also a contributor who'd at the time written articles for the magazine—she went on to publish fiction there too—named Heather Shaw. And Heather opened the door to let me in. And, you know, this gorgeous, blue-eyed, incredibly harried woman opened the door, frantically running around trying to get everything ready and greeted me and welcomed me... I was just struck immediately. I don't know if it was love at first sight, but it was certainly, "I wanna get to know this person better" at first sight. And she barely noticed that I was there, 'cause she was hosting a brunch, right?

So we do the thing, we're running around, whatever. And it was a wonderful event, and Heather remained fascinating, what I could see of her, and I went home after the event and I went online and I read some of the stuff that she had written. She had an article on the same issue that I did about the works of Octavia Butler back in December, 2000. And so I wrote to Mary Anne Mohanraj, founder of Strange Horizons, who knew Heather and had been at the brunch and all that, and basically was just like, "so what's Heather's deal? Is she partnered up? Is she somebody that I could potentially ask out?" And Mary Anne was like, "as far as I know, you could ask her out."

So I wrote to Heather and I had read some of her work by then, so I was complimentary, and wanted to hang out. And eventually we did. We went on our first date to the Rose Garden in Oakland, and we read poetry to each other. I was 24, she was maybe 28. And, you know, I ended up moving in with her, I ended up living in that house where the brunch was hosted. Some years later, I proposed to her in the Rose Garden where we had our first date. We have now been married for—it'll be 20 years in October, and we have a kid who would not exist without Strange Horizons, a marriage that wouldn't exist without Strange Horizons, essentially the entire shape of my adult life.

How this relates more directly to Strange Horizons, Heather was on staff and she was friends with Jed Hartman, who had a long association with the magazine. She had been close friends for years with Mary Anne. By dating Heather, I was in this circle, right? I never got any special privileges though, let me tell you man—I got rejected a lot from Strange Horizons over the years. The stories they published are a tiny subset of the ones that I sent to them, believe me. But that's how I was so associated with it for so long. I would go to their tea parties when Susan Groppe was fiction editor and then later editor in chief. Susan was our pal, Susan lived around the corner from us. We would watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer together, right?

So Strange Horizons, a lot of those people—not all, 'cause it's a huge staff of course—but some of the people who were central in the early days were part of my social life and my social circle. And I was never on staff at the magazine, but I did contribute to just about every department.

Kat Kourbeti: I think this is the most incredible story we've had on the podcast so far. Holy moly.

Tim Melody Pratt: Without the magazine—honestly, if I had been like, "I don't feel like driving 90 minutes" that day in Santa Cruz, if I had just hung out and took a nap, which was my other option, uh, my life? Inconceivably different, I cannot even imagine where I would be. I really can't.

Kat Kourbeti: Goodness.

Tim Melody Pratt: Yeah, you think of those little moments in life, right? Those little turning points, and that was probably the biggest turning point that I can point to in my life. So thank you, Strange Horizons, I'm glad you existed.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. Wow. And to still be around 25 years later so we can hear the story...

Tim Melody Pratt: It's true. Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: That's incredible. First of all, meeting your partner already, in the field that you want to exist in, that must have felt like fate.

Tim Melody Pratt: It was fantastic. Certainly I had dated other people, (but) I had never dated a writer who was serious about it like I was. And you know, Heather has published a ton and she's done a lot more editing than I have. We ran a zine together for a while called Flytrap. The ability to entangle those parts of my romantic life and my committed partner life with my creative life was great. And she understands. We support each other creatively so much, we collaborate almost every year on a holiday story for PodCastle. We've been doing that for 10 years now.

Kat Kourbeti: Beautiful.

Tim Melody Pratt: It's great.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, that's really cool. I do think that having that supportive partnership, even if the other person's not a writer, is very important. But if they are as well, like they really get what is going on in your brain half the time when you're trying to problem solve or make something happen, and they can really be a part of that. And to know that you're collaborating on stuff every year, that's super cool.

Tim Melody Pratt: Yeah. We did one story a few years back that we collaborated on with our son. You know, he had an idea for a story and we worked on it together and published that, and then LeVar Burton did it for his podcast. He picked it up. So my kid has all these bragging rights.

Kat Kourbeti: When you've got talented parents, it comes with the package. That's awesome.

I noticed that a lot of (your) Strange Horizons oeuvre at the very least, has mythology themes and religious themes. There's demons and angels and crossroads and bargaining for things, and personifications of concepts, and also an entire series of poems about mythical beasts called The Bestiary.

Tim Melody Pratt: Yep.

Kat Kourbeti: Can you tell me a little bit about what drew you to those themes at the time, and was there an attempt to create a collective body of work, or was that just what you were thinking about?

Tim Melody Pratt: I was really a mythology nerd always growing up, and in fifth grade I had a teacher give me a copy of Edith Hamilton's Mythology, and from there I was off. I read just tons of world mythology, I was always interested in that stuff, was always interested in personification of concepts and people being avatars, right? People being more than what they were, (that) was something that always really fascinated me.

That first story that was in Stranger Horizons, The Fallen and The Muse of the Street, was about a fallen angel and a demon who basically tried to screw with one of the nine muses, so obviously I was doing a very pantheistic kind of approach, right? All the gods exist if you believe in them, that kind of thing, which is something I got from reading contemporary fantasy and mythic fiction. Like, I was a huge Charles Delin fan growing up.

(What) I really have always loved in my default mode, and honestly as a writer, is intrusions of the magical into everyday life. Because I love that juxtaposition of, "I've got my drip coffee maker and my smartphone, and now there's an entity in my house", 'cause why would they go away if they've been around forever? They're just going to adapt, they're going to change.

I also in college dated a woman who was a pagan, who was a devotee of Aphrodite and who was a firm believer in the presence of the magical everywhere. I'm a materialist, I'm a skeptic, but I still love this person dearly. We just have different worldviews. But she talked a lot about the presence of the magical everywhere in the everyday. She's like, "you don't have to knock wood for good luck, because now the spirits dwell in everything. Sure, they used to be in the trees, but they've had to adapt like pigeons to urban areas. You can knock on whatever, knock on a concrete pillar, there's something dwelling within it." Which was a worldview that I also wrote some poems about, I think not in Strange Horizons, but I wrote a little bit about her worldview, I think in Star*Line.

So that has been and remains an ongoing fascination for me, just ways to sort of interrupt everyday reality. And that's a lot of what my stories in Strange Horizons were. I won't jump ahead and talk about other ones.

Kat Kourbeti: I was going through different points in your Strange Horizons journey and I was just noticing how there was a pervasive (theme), and that always fascinates me with writers who keep coming back to something that fascinates them and that they're interested in. I think we all do that to a certain extent, whether it's conscious or no, but I think for you it was probably a lot more consciously, "I want to explore this, I want to see how that would work", maybe.

Tim Melody Pratt: Yeah, I would read mythology, or I would read Borges, I would read the Book of Imaginary Beings, I would read Gustav Davidson's Dictionary of Angels, which is an amazing book about angels and fallen angels. My first thought would always be, "what would it be like if I encountered one of them in the streets in Santa Cruz or whatever. How would that feel?"

In my fiction, I like to write about psychologically realistic people dealing with impossible things, that's really the thing that interests me. I think it's an interesting way to reveal character, because I'm a very character-driven writer. So what I like to do is make a character who I think is plausible, and then present them with something that's a real break with their understanding of reality, usually. Sometimes they know about magic already, but often I really like to do that abrupt confrontation with something impossible and unexpected, and then see what the character does. That's how I write, mostly.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, Little Gods—

Tim Melody Pratt: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: —struck me, 'cause that kind of captures that theme. It's about a man who loses his wife basically, and then in the process of grief becomes aware of this other cast of spirits and beings and gods that exist all around, that normally people don't see. It's a really moving and very powerful exploration, I thought, of grief and of how that particular person deals with that, but also I really liked the mundane personification of these gods and concepts that can exist in various pantheons and religions and spiritual beliefs across the world. That theme just keeps coming back in your work, which I find very interesting.

Tim Melody Pratt: Yeah. Some of that came from The Dictionary of Angels, which is fascinating because there were angels for everything. There'd be an angel of 4:00 PM on Tuesday. And so I had gotten to thinking about pantheistic belief systems in which there are tons of gods, and not even just, "oh, there's the family on Olympus". There could be a god of this particular bend in this river, something that has some magical powers, but it's not all powerful, right? But it has influence within its sphere. So I thought that was neat.

I had a really bad breakup and I was thinking about the messy, uneven grieving process and I thought, "wouldn't it be interesting to personify the stages of grief as deities? Like you're actually talking to the Little God of Bargaining, dealing with the oppressiveness of Little God of Depression..." And obviously the stages of grief are kind of simplistic. People do go through most of them, you just don't go through them in the progression, right? You don't go through them in order. And in the story I simplified and ran through them in order. But that's where that came from. I could have just written about somebody who was really sad about the abrupt, violent death of a loved one, but I'm a fantasy writer. So I figured out a way to externalize that.

And that story was hugely consequential for me. I think it might've been the first major award nominee to come out of Strange Horizons. It was a Nebula finalist, which launched my career in a lot of ways. Like my first story collection is called Little Gods; that was how I was able to sell it, because I had a story that had gotten some attention.

And that also, I like to think, helped raise the profile of Strange Horizons a little bit. Some of the people in SFWA, at the Nebulas, who maybe were less aware of this new magazine—'cause it was, what, 2002? So it wasn't a brand new magazine, but it was its first couple years—maybe some more people noticed it because of that.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, I think so. And it's interesting how the history of the magazine just—there's staff turnover of course, and there's some awards and there's a constant churn, but those kind of pivotal moments, like here's this... that's really awesome, that we were instrumental in that for you, and in so many ways, dear God!

Tim Melody Pratt: I always say me and the magazine came up together. Strange Horizons and I entered the field essentially at the same time, and we grew in prominence together. I got a lot more outta my association with them than they did with me, I'm sure. But we did, we sort of rose at the same time. And I would go—you know, they would have the tea parties at conventions (like) WisCon and stuff, and I would go and I would take part in that stuff. I would do the group readings. I believed in the magazine and I loved the magazine.

And as the years went by and the editors started to be people who I hadn't been to parties at their houses, once it expanded—this is good for the health of the magazine, but I became less centrally associated with the magazine, and I haven't published there in some years. Again, most of my short fiction these days is in my Patreon, I'm just not submitting a ton to magazines. If I were, I would still be submitting to Strange Horizons, 'cause I still think they do beautiful work.

Kat Kourbeti: Oh, thank you. Yeah. I mean, someday, maybe?

Tim Melody Pratt: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: Never say never!

Tim Melody Pratt: I'm hoping to. I have a story coming out in Uncanny later this year, which is a delight 'cause I don't publish much fiction in the magazines, and I'm like, I miss being part of that conversation. It's just finding time to do a dozen stories for my Patreon and then extra stories too.

Kat Kourbeti: And the novels, and your day job...

Tim Melody Pratt: And the occasional novel. Only one or two a year. Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. Only! My goodness. Give us some of that juice, please! Like, what's going on up here?

Tim Melody Pratt: Yeah. Don't have other hobbies. Sit in your house and type a lot. That sadly is the secret.

Kat Kourbeti: And would you say you're still writing about those themes, and those mythology things now? 'Cause I know you also write a lot of science fiction, like more "traditional", quote unquote, science fiction. What sort of themes are you drawn to nowadays?

Tim Melody Pratt: Yeah. About 2017, 2016, I thought it would be fun to write a space opera, so then I became a science fiction writer. I did a space opera series, The Axiom Series, that did pretty well. And then I did some multiverse stuff, which I was doing in Strange Horizons way back in the day, like God of the Crossroads, right, multiverse story. I was always interested in that sort of thing. Even back then, I did a little science fiction—Artifice and Intelligence is one of my favorite stories I had in Strange Horizons. It's about AIs, not in the sense of chatbot LLMs, but in the sense of true artificial intelligences. I mean, it's science fantasy, let's say, it's got ghosts and stuff in it too, but—

Kat Kourbeti: The line in that one actually, that a programmer summons a real ghost for that to be the "ghost in the machine", which is the AI concept of yore... I just thought that was a beautiful conceptualization again of something living, with the tech.

Tim Melody Pratt: Well, the collision of the modern and the ancient is something that I have a lot of fun with. That story was neat; Heather Shaw, my wife and I used to give each other little challenges to write stories, and we would give each other a content requirement and a structural, like a form requirement. And it would be like, "you have to write a story about goblins and it has to be in present tense" or whatever. Just something to put the net up and give you some constraints.

And I still remember that story, she said "six scenes, three AIs". So my rule was I had to do it in six scenes, and I had to include three different artificial intelligences. Probably it's the most successful story that I did based on that little game we used to play back in the day.

Though you did ask a question; in my short fiction, I still do a ton of mythic stuff. My novels lately have been mostly more science fictional multiverse stuff, space opera stuff. But my love for bringing magic into the everyday world has not gone away, and I would say the vast majority of my short fiction is still that sort of thing.

Kat Kourbeti: Fascinating. What you said about the game that you and your wife played, (is) an interesting thing about the inherent creativity that exists within limitation. How do you start your stories—here's the question within that: do you set yourself parameters for your short fiction, and you say "I wanna do this and this, maybe with a sprinkling of this"? I'm sure that there's a variety of situations, but is there like a process you go through when you generate ideas?

Tim Melody Pratt: Occasionally I will come at something with a structural constraint as my basic idea. There was a time that I wrote a story that was based on a daily gratitude journal. "Three things I'm grateful for", I did a story in the form of that. I did a story for an anthology that was in the form of a Kickstarter campaign created by a mad genius who wanted to destroy the world. So occasionally, you know, there will be some structural stuff like that.

There are other writers who do that better than me. Nick Mamatas often does really interesting formal constraint kind of stories. Another person who, as I recall, had some association with Strange Horizons.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah!

Tim Melody Pratt: So [shows phone to Kat]—this is my notes app with my "story stuff" notes, which as you can see, go back a while. So whenever I have a thought or an idea or an image or a "wouldn't it be cool", or I watch a movie and I think they didn't end it the way I wish I would have, or they didn't have a twist that I was hoping that they would, I will make a note. And sometimes they're a character in a situation, sometimes they are literally a line. I think I have one that just says "enragement ring", which I don't know what that is at all, but at some point it'll probably end up in a story. And so I just, I have these little things I jot down and every month I go and I scroll through it and I see if any of them are ripe or if I feel like any of them have become something that can be a whole story, or I'll take two ideas and I'll stick them together.

Like I had a little story note that was about "what if you went over to a guy's house to hook up with him and there was just a giant f***ing pit in the floor"—sorry, I don't know if we curse on this podcast. But you know, what if you hooked up and then you're snooping on the way to the bathroom and you open a bedroom door and there's just a huge bottomless pit, right? Wouldn't that be weird? And then I was like, "that's not a whole story." And then I had this other note that was about epistemology and eschatology and the end of the world and apocalypse. And if you're a materialist and you don't believe in the afterlife, then you can never know that you are dead because by the time you're dead, there's nobody to know that you're dead. Wouldn't the end of the world be the same way if everybody's gone? If there's no world anymore, nobody can know it's the end of the world. You can only know it's the pre-end of the world. And I'm like, I could have, as a freshman, gotten high and really talked about this for hours. So I jammed those together into a short story called The Pit and The Epistemologist, that I published on my Patreon last month.

Kat Kourbeti: Very cool!

Tim Melody Pratt: Yeah, I've been making up stories my entire life. I get ideas everywhere, I have more than I could ever possibly write. And sometimes they're novels and sometimes they're flash pieces and sometimes they're novellas. It all depends. Occasionally I'll have a really silly implausible idea that'll fall apart completely if anyone interrogates it, but I can get away with it for 800 words, right?

Like I wrote a story about Mothman, the cryptid, (who) appears as a herald of disaster, usually there's a bridge collapse. There was a bunch of fires in Russia. I was like, "this would be a useful alert system if you could clone Mothman, and you could have thousands of Mothmans distributed across the world, and then if they would start appearing and saying cryptic things and calling you on the phone and mumbling about various disasters, this would be great". It would give you some warning, right?

This is a stupid idea. You can't write a novel about it. But I wrote a flash piece about it!

Kat Kourbeti: I could stretch this into a novel. Here's my problem: I can't keep things short.

Tim Melody Pratt: Ah, sure.

Kat Kourbeti: To save my actual life. I come up with a concept that I only want to do a short story for, and before I even know it, I've written 8,000 words, I haven't even gotten to the bit that I wanted to write the story about, and I'm like, "oh no, I think it's another book".

So you tell me this—challenge accepted! I could write you an outline.

Tim Melody Pratt: My natural length starting out was novelettes, right? Gimme 10,000, 15,000 words. Those were harder to sell.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Tim Melody Pratt: So I trained myself to write 5,000 words, 3000 word stories. I would set myself this limit, and then I struggled, but I learned—that was really crucial for my development—to vary my toolkit. I don't always need 15,000 words. Like it doesn't really need this little subplot or whatever.

Kat Kourbeti: Okay. And because you do this at least once a month, if not more, is there like a shorthand you've developed for yourself in finding that crux of a story? The twist ending, the thing that will kind of give it its potent jab that will leave the reader thinking about it?

Tim Melody Pratt: Yeah. Well, when I went to Clarion in '99 one of my teachers was Tim Powers, who's an amazing writer. And Powers talked about "my lunch lady is a werewolf" stories, right? You have a story and it's about how you find out your lunch lady is a werewolf, great. Why? Who cares? Why is that important to the character? Why is that important to whoever discovers it? Why is it important to the lunch lady? What sort of thematic resonance or weight does it have, what are you trying to say? Are you trying to say something?

This is not Powers, this is me: are you trying to say something about the conflict between the wild and savage and the institutional constrained nature of school? You have to be saying something. So I will have a cool idea and then I will be like, "what does this have to do with anything? Like, why do I care?" And because I'm a character-driven writer, it's enough for me. If it changes something in the character's life or their point of view or their understanding of the world, that's enough for me.

So the classic thing to figure out, like what character you should write is, "who is going to suffer the most in this situation? Who's gonna have the hardest time?" If you send a person through a portal to another world, you can send a survivalist who is incredibly well-equipped with all of the material things that he will need to live in this fantasy world. But isn't it more fun to send somebody whose only skillset is making cupcakes? And then have them figure out how they can apply this skillset in a way that will keep them alive.

Kat Kourbeti: Ooh.

Tim Melody Pratt: It's just more interesting.

Kat Kourbeti: Love that.

Tim Melody Pratt: You can have The Cupcake Chronicles. That's free. That's for you.

Kat Kourbeti: Isn't there a T. Kingfisher book about a baker witch and her familiar is a sourdough starter? (It's called A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking.)

Tim Melody Pratt: Oh, yeah. That rings a bell.

Kat Kourbeti: It's absolutely doable. I can see that being a thing.

My other question is around all of these different formats that you've written throughout your career and still are; you started writing reviews pretty early on as well. Do you think that your reviewing has contributed to your fiction writing in some way? Or do you see that as a separate world?

Tim Melody Pratt: So when I went to Clarion, we critiqued each other's stories. And the reason you do that is not because your critiques as someone who knows nothing and is a new writer yourself are going to be really helpful for the other writers. If they are, that's great, that's a nice side effect. The point is to teach you to critique your own work. The point is to let you develop that toolkit so that you can turn it on your own fiction. That's why you do it. It's not a workshop to make people into editors, to edit other people's work, the point is so that you can do it to your own work.

So in the same way that that helped my writing, reviewing certainly helped my writing. And I'm not a critic really, I'm a reviewer, right? Like say, I liked this, this is why. Try to give you a sense of the sort of things I like and the sort of things I'm just irrationally biased about. Like, I hate science fiction novels that have a big time jump partway through. You know, if we're like, "now it's 30 years later", I get mad and it's irrational. There are great books that do it, I just don't like it. So I try to be upfront about that sort of thing.

But yes, by reading critically—'cause even if you are just kind of, "I like this or don't" reviewer, you still have to have critical faculties about it. It helped me see things, especially in my novel writing, that I was like, "that's a neat effect. I'd like to figure out how they achieve that". And the cool thing about books is it's not like a stage magician doing a trick where you can't see the wires. It's all on the page. Every single thing the writer does is just words on the page; that means you can figure it out. It might be hard, it might be subtle, but you can study the text and figure out every single trick that they pulled, every technique that they used, and then you can steal it and you can use it in your own work.

So reviewing helped me develop that kind of critical faculty and that ability to go in and pillage other people's books. There's so many writers I've stolen stuff from: Joe Lansdale, Joe Abercrombie, Joanna Russ, Connie Willis... Tons of authors have things where I can point to my work and say, "I got this because I stole it from them."

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Tim Melody Pratt: To be more generous, I noticed the work of other artists and figured out how I could incorporate those techniques into my own work. Van Gogh didn't own those wild brush strokes, they just came to be one of the defining aspects of his work. Yeah, so reviewing did help. Mostly, truthfully, it was a way to get paid to read books. I mostly reviewed books that I was gonna read anyway, and hey, if you wanna gimme some money, also, I can tell you what I thought about it.

Kat Kourbeti: And at what point did the reviewing turn into a more serious position with Locus?

Tim Melody Pratt: I worked at Locus before I was a reviewer. I started there as a lowly editorial assistant in 2001. Around August 2001 I started there, so I'm coming up on 24 years this year. I'm 48, so yeah, half my life. And I just told my boss, who at the time was the founder Charles Brown, "I would love to review." And he is like, "we have good reviewers". You know, "who are you? You are not qualified to review for us."

Because I was nobody. I had published some tiny small press stories at the time, I did not impress Charles particularly. But then there was—I can't remember what it was, if it was small press horror or if it was a poetry collection or something, 'cause I read that stuff anyway—he was like, "okay, you can review this, 'cause nobody else is going to", and then I did an okay job, so I got more gigs.

I've always been a very occasional kind of random reviewer for Locus, and in recent years I have not reviewed much of anything anywhere. But it's something that I enjoy, mostly because I like the chance, the excuse to sit down and think deeply about why I liked or disliked something that I read.

Now I do these little tiny paragraph long capsule reviews, like for my Patreon. Just free, every couple months I'll be like, here's what I read, because I don't have as much time. I'm doing books, I'm doing stories, so I have less time to review. But yeah, I do enjoy it. It was meaningful to me. And again, there were times early on when, like a review for Strange Horizons, that was how I bought baby formula, right? Like—

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Tim Melody Pratt: It was nice to have sympathetic markets.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, for sure. Since then has it turned into anything kinda longer form, with the nonfiction?

Tim Melody Pratt: No. I'm really not much of a nonfiction writer, truthfully, like I don't think I'll ever write a book about writing. I know a lot of writers do, and I've read tons of them and found 'em useful, but every time I think about doing it, I just think of all the things I don't know.

I did some teaching about a year ago at Seton Hill, the popular fiction MFA program, Nicole Peeler runs it, and Jaye Wells is one of the teachers there. Like they have just a ton of great professors and they do genre fiction, they do romance, science fiction, fantasy, mystery. And they asked me to come as a visiting professor and do a thing, and as part of that, I had to teach a three hour class to grad students, and I had to do this two hour talk, and that's some of the most long form writing about nonfiction work that I've done in years. I had to really sit down and be like, "okay, what am I writing about? What do I think about these things?" And I taught character-driven fiction and point of view, 'cause those are the things I'm a really big nerd about.

Kat Kourbeti: It was Arkady Martine that I heard this from, but she said that she got it from someone at Viable Paradise—but she once told me that every writer gets one thing in their toolbox for free.

Tim Melody Pratt: That might be an Elizabeth Bear line!

Kat Kourbeti: I think it's a common adage in the genre writing circles at least, but I first heard it from Arkady Martine and I told her thank you, because it can really help you recognise what you're good at. And I would say yeah, no doubt about it, your free thing in the toolbox is characters and point of view and that sort of thing. Like, you can really make people feel real.

Tim Melody Pratt: Thank you. People compliment my plotting and I'm like, I don't plot, I create characters and then I put 'em in a situation. I see what they do, if they don't struggle enough, I make the situation worse for them, or I take another character and I have them have diametrically opposed goals and I bang them together and see what happens. That's how I write a lot of my novels. Or I'll throw in a third character with a completely perpendicular thing and just watch them intersect, watch them crash, and just everything blows in different directions, and that's my plot.

Ray Bradbury said that "the plot is the footprints of your characters leave in the snow as they run to and from their various adventures", and that's always been my approach. In my short fiction, sometimes there's not anything you could even recognize as a plot. I have been told, as some people have noted about my work, but—

Kat Kourbeti: It depends on the length and it depends on a lot of things, right? What you're trying to do with something.

Tim Melody Pratt: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: Doesn't always have to have a arc or a beginning, middle, end in that sense.

Tim Melody Pratt: A lot of this stuff is very Western story forms, and there are other ways to tell stories. This is just the sort of conflict-driven thing where a character wants something and they have to overcome struggles to get it or not get it, or discover that it's not what they wanted at all, which is usually the better ending. It's a dominant paradigm in our culture, but it's not the only way to tell a story.

Kat Kourbeti: A hundred percent. And so then my question is about your poetry.

Tim Melody Pratt: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: 'Cause poetry is not the most common thing, I think, for a lot of people, especially in genre, and you've done a lot of it. What's your general approach to writing poetry? A lot of it is free verse, I think, from you that I've read. How do you think about poems when you're starting to write something?

Tim Melody Pratt: Absolutely. I love poetry. I was a fan of poetry from a pretty young age. In college I studied it a lot, I was a creative writing major. My thesis was not fiction, my thesis was a poetry thesis. I also was a TA for two years for a poetry class that was taught in the interdisciplinary studies department; it was a combination of Jungian psychology and poetry, because it was about going to the well of images that we have collectively in our culture and just as humans, and how you can draw on that stuff to get more power in your poetry. So that was great, it's taught by a guy named Jay Wentworth who's still around, and I hung out with him a couple years ago. Again, he was a great poet, one of my favorites, and he taught me a lot about how poetry works on a mechanical level, like how you make that stuff work. You know, enjambment and assonance, and I learned all of the metrical feet, like he taught me how to scan poetry, all this stuff that I had studied, but he was the first one who was really like, "this is how it works. This is how you disassemble the engine to see how the parts move." So once I had that tool set, it was just practice. And I have written tons of poetry, I've published a fair bit but I've written so much more than I've ever published.

And then I did some teaching, which is also a great way. When I was in college I did some teaching for mostly retired seniors, it was continuing ed stuff, and it was me and this other writer named Sean, who's—I cannot remember his last name, he was an Irish guy, Bostonian, Irish guy—and Sean would do the sort of like, "this is how you write from the well of your fury and this is how you dig into your childhood trauma to find the stuff to write about." And I would be like, "this is how slant rhyme works," right? He would do the passion stuff and I would do the nuts and bolts, "this is how you make this work," and that was how we divied it up.

But I love poetry. Like, I'm looking right now at my poetry shelf and there's so many writers I love, Sexton and Ellen Bass and Sharon Olds and just writers upon writers who did work that was so meaningful to me. And I still read a fair bit of contemporary poetry, I still go through the many used bookstores that we have here in the East Bay, and I'll browse through the poetry and pick things up.

Speculative poetry, obviously, just because almost everything I write has speculative elements. Even my thesis in college, about half of it had some sort of fantasy element. And often it would be material that I could have done a story about, or it would be material I did do stories about, but then I had a different way of accessing it. I actually won a Rhysling award from the SFPA for a poem called 'Soul Searching' that was in Strange Horizons, which is about a wizard who hid his soul away in an egg or a stone, so he could be immortal, but then he lost his humanity. It had been so many centuries, and in the story, it's sort of ambiguous: is this just a crazy person, is this a mentally ill guy who is telling these stories that aren't true? Or was he really a sorcerer whose humanity has gone away and he can't find his soul, he can't figure out where he found it?

And that was something I then wrote a book called 'Heirs of Grace' that had essentially that same premise. It was about a sorcerer who had lost his humanity by putting his soul away. That year I also won second place in that category in the SFPA, I think for a different poem that was in Strange Horizons. I can't remember, but that was cool. I still have the little plaque. What is it? The Nebulas are adding a poetry category?

Kat Kourbeti: Well there's a special Hugo this year, yeah, and we have two on the ballot. (In fact, one of them won the award!)

Tim Melody Pratt: I was thinking I need to write poetry again. I still write it some. I need to publish poetry again, now there's new worlds to conquer.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. I find it really interesting that you return to perhaps even the same source material or source idea, and approach it from a different angle for a poem.

Tim Melody Pratt: Yeah. Often the poem comes first. I'll try out this idea and be like, "oh, this is neat". God of the Crossroads, there's stuff in there that came up in tons of my fiction later.

Kat Kourbeti: We will link to all of that in the show notes for people to peruse. So then I suppose I wanna dive into the Beastiary collection of poems—

Tim Melody Pratt: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: That's on Strange Horizons. So these are all different mythical creatures that you're describing. Where did that idea come from?

Tim Melody Pratt: Jorge Luis Borges, Book of Imaginary Beings, a fascinating book describing mostly things that Borges made up. They're stories in a sense, right? They're prose and they're short, but they don't have any of the sort of shape of traditional stories. They just very poetically describe these strange, imaginary things. And I mean, also, I'm like an old D&D nerd. I would look at monster manuals and beastiaries, and I always thought that stuff was cool. I loved medieval beastiaries.

I was in Europe a couple years ago and I got to go to like the Prado and some of the museums in Spain, and my favorite thing is looking at people who painted a lion based on having had a lion described to them once. Or there's a great painting commissioned by a guy who went overboard as a cabin boy and got attacked by a shark, and he commissioned multiple paintings of this experience, and the people painting the shark had never seen a shark before, right? These are sharks with like nostrils just above the mouth, like just weird things. So that kind of thing always interested me, and cryptids. I love cryptids. I've written about Bigfoot, I've written about Mothman, I've written about Batsquaches, the Goatman... the stuff I find really interesting, like something that you glimpse and then you make up what it's about.

So I had been interested in mythological creatures and I'd written stories about Behemoth and Leviathan and stuff like that, and the one that I remember really well (A Bestiary: Engulfer) is about the Norse dragon The Corpse Eater, the one that gnaws on the roots of the world tree. There's a part in that poem where it talks about how every person is a world, there are monsters underneath the world... by the transitive property, right, there are monsters within you. And so dealing metaphorically, psychologically, with stuff about just being a person in the world and struggling with things through the lens of these mythological creatures—'cause this stuff, people make this stuff up, right? And there's a reason that we personify the danger of dying in a shipwreck. "Oh, there must be monsters. There must be a Kraken. There must be Leviathan." Or that we imagine the universe started as a droplet of water that had a fish swimming in it, whatever it is. There's some sort of psychological depth to this.

And so I would just take those images and really just reflect on what do they make me think about in my own life? I think there's one about Spiderwoman (A Bestiary: Ts'its'tsi'nako), about a figure that moves between two worlds, which is something that I thought about a lot.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. I like that first line, actually: "Imagine a woman, imagine a spider. Imagine the woman is a spider."

Tim Melody Pratt: Yeah. The sort of Spiderwoman imagery. You know, and looking back, these are not cultures that were my culture. Maybe I shouldn't have been quite so cavalier with them. I used to write a lot more about living religions than I do now, treating them mythologically, which in retrospect is not the most respectful thing. In my defense, I was 25 most of these times, and was just gobbling up everything I could.

But the notion of this mythical spider moving through different worlds as one, that's always been very powerful to me, because as an artist, you get to do that. As an artist, you can find a place in every strata of society. You are equally at home in a squat where people are super high doing a poetry reading that nobody knows about, as you are in the house of the chairman of the NEA or whatever. And I'm like a poor trailer park kid from Eastern North Carolina, but I've gotten to experience all kinds of things because I'm an artist. It's enabled me to have access to all these strata, and I belong in all of them. Some of them I'm more comfortable in than others, but as an artist, you belong and you should see as much of it as you can, because it enriches and enlivens your art.

So specifically that poem, that stuff was on my mind. I don't even know how much comes across in that poem about that, but that's the sort of stuff I was thinking about.

Kat Kourbeti: Generally speaking, I think that people should be able to write about cultures and places that aren't their direct experience as long as it's well researched and respectful and done well. I think that should be completely open for people to do. It's when that doesn't happen where you run into caricatures and harmful stereotypes and things that are just like, why do that? And I don't think that any of the poems that we publish certainly would do that, 'cause otherwise I don't think we would've taken them.

Tim Melody Pratt: Strange Horizons has always been good about this stuff, yeah. I don't think I did a particularly bad job, but I—as a person who it will not shock you to hear is not strictly gender conforming, seeing well-meaning people who aren't steeped in a particular culture or, say, subsect of society, still blundering around and doing stuff accidentally—I'm very aware of the things that I don't know. So I'm more cautious now than I used to be about that stuff.

There are probably very few religions that are really safely dead, right? There are still people out there worshiping Zeus and Aphrodite. But as (far as) Western sort of cultural history, I'm happy I can write about the fae folk, right? I have been to London once, but my forebears are from there; I have connections to Appalachia where a lot of those stories have transmogrified. So there are things that I feel more comfortable talking about than others, but no, I don't think I was particularly monstrous in writing about monsters.

Kat Kourbeti: You did write, what was that other poem? Making Monsters, from 2004. It just fascinates me that you kept coming back to the Beastiary concept. Did you submit each poem as a new thing? Like, "hey, I've got this new idea?"

Tim Melody Pratt: I think I had sent a couple and then was like, "oh, I think these are connected." And so then every time I wrote something that was like that, I was like, "hey, do you guys want this as part of the thing?" And I can't remember how many there were ultimately, but yeah, I didn't intend it to be a series, it was an emergent property. "Oh, I keep writing these poems about monsters. Wouldn't it be neat if we did them as a suite?"

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, I think I'm counting seven on this list. Yeah, that's not a bad number at all.

Tim Melody Pratt: That's good. Pretty solid. Could have done a whole book! I was so busy and I still am busy, but, oh, maybe someday.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. Do other works of yours that say, aren't strictly speaking in this collection, fall within that thematic scope?

Tim Melody Pratt: Probably. I would need to look at a list of my poems to say which ones, but yeah, I imagine there were times Strange Horizons didn't want something that it went somewhere else. Wouldn't shock me.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. So perhaps a book is not that far off. And dare I ask, what are you working on now?

Tim Melody Pratt: Well, right this minute I'm on deadline for a roleplaying game tie-in novel. My rule for taking work-for-hire jobs is, "would my 14-year-old self have been delighted by this?" And they are, truthfully, a lot of fun, and the fans are a ton of fun too. And it introduces my work to a lot of readers who might not otherwise read my work.

I did a Forgotten Realms novel back in 2012 and a thing I made up ended up in Baldur's Gate 3, in the video game, which I didn't know until somebody pointed it out to me. But a drug I invented in that book is a thing that gives you a little boost and then messes you up. That was fun, that's my immortality. But I have been doing some writing for a company called Aconyte that does gaming tie-ins, and I am doing writing for Paizo that does Pathfinder and Starfinder, so I have a long association with them. So right now that's the project, but that's due in a month, and after that's turned in, I'll take a couple weeks and play video games.

But then the next thing is a novel called The Jewel in the Comet that is a sequel to my book, The Knife and the Serpent, which came out last year, which is a multiverse space opera, kinky genderqueer adventure novel. I'm super excited about that. I have notes and notes that I'm really excited to turn into an actual novel. So that's the next big thing. Otherwise just yeah, writing stories.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. So is there anything super recent or something that's coming up soon that you would like to plug or promote?

Tim Melody Pratt: Knife in the Serpent is the latest, original thing. That was last June, I think, is when it came out. I had a series for Arkham Horror, the Lovecraftian Game, a trilogy called The Sanford Files. The second book, Herald of Ruin, came out last year, and The Twilight Magus, I think they just did a cover reveal for this week. And John Coulthart, the World Fantasy Award-winning artist, has done all the covers and they have this beautiful, uniform, very baroque look. It's the twenties, so it has this very art deco feel. I love the covers so much. So that's coming out, and then in summer I have a Starfinder book, so it's spaceships and elves. It's great fun to jam that stuff together.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. I've played a bit of Pathfinder. And I've definitely played Arkham Horror, so I will look all of those things up 'cause they're very relevant to my interests.

Tim Melody Pratt: They're fun. I'm a board game player, I'm a role-playing gamer from way back when, so when I got the opportunity to do that stuff for Aconyte, I was pretty excited to do so.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, I do like what you said: "would my 14-year-old self be happy to read this?" Such a big part of finding the joy in things, and writing what makes the most kind of inner you happy. Ah!

Tim Melody Pratt: Yeah. Absolutely. Ideally it should be fun. It's also work, I take it seriously.

Kat Kourbeti: For sure.

Tim Melody Pratt: These bills plump up the kids' college fund, which is coming. But yeah, I mean, I say no to jobs that I think won't be fun. Well, unless they offer to pay me a lot.

Kat Kourbeti: I think that's fair.

Tim Melody Pratt: You find a balance.

Kat Kourbeti: So thank you so much for spending some time with us and telling us all about your Strange Horizons journey, and my goodness, your marriage, your life. Thank you for being a part of Strange Horizons for so long!

Tim Melody Pratt: Thank you for being part of keeping it going. That's great.

Kat Kourbeti: Thank you so much, and we'll look forward to all of your future work.

In this episode of the Strange Horizons Fiction podcast, Michael Ireland presents Diana Dima's 'City Grown From Seed' read by Emmie Christie.

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Transcript

Critical Friends Episode 16: Length and Breadth

[Musical intro]

Dan Hartland: Welcome to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast. I’m Dan Hartland, and in this episode I’ll be joined by the novelist and critic Redfern Jon Barrett, and the reader and reviewer Nileena Sunil.

In every episode of Critical Friends, we insist on discussing SFF reviewing: what it is, why we do it, how it’s going. In this episode, we’ll be talking about length and breadth: those novels that feel too short or not long enough.

What’s behind that feeling we have that a text is lacking something, or that it’s overstretched? How can we read shorter and longer works on their own terms? And what the heck is a novella supposed to be, anyway?

We take in Margaret Atwood and P. Djèlí Clark, the perils of dragon riding and the loneliness of the deep space mission. And we’ll ask ourselves how we can meet works of fiction on their own ground. But also, how those works can help us get there.

We started our conversation with Redfern’s latest review for Strange Horizons.

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: Redfern, you recently reviewed If the Stars Are Lit for Strange Horizons and it was a really great review on a number of levels—

Redfern Jon Barrett: Thank you!

Dan Hartland: You’re welcome!—that I found to sort of really get under the skin of a book that kind of hadn’t impressed you, and you kind of felt bad about that, and you were checking yourself. You were like: “OK, why?” And, “Should I say so and if so, how?”

And I felt that tension really helped the review sort of expand itself and understand the book. But one of the primary criticisms I think you had in the book, and tell me if I’m wrong and go into more detail about it, is that I think you said it needed a … it would’ve benefited in your view from a good edit.

Like, there were a lot of elements in this book and they were kind of clashing. They were hitting against each other, they were working against each other, and kind of by the end of the book there had been so many things that nothing had sort of come through as the novel’s primary identity. It remained a confused book.

I just wonder whether you could talk through that with us a little bit. Like, what was it about reading that book that just felt so … uncontrolled, I guess?

Redfern Jon Barrett: Yeah, I think that’s a really good way of putting it. So I really feel quite a strong sense of disappointment when a book—I mean, it doesn’t have to even be a book, but any form of fiction—has this really, really compelling premise that it doesn’t quite unpack enough.

And this is the issue that I had with the novel. And this novel had some really, really great elements to it—which I think, you know, in a way adds to the disappointment when you really, really want it to get into the meat of what it’s proposing to do. And instead, it kind of glosses over that and doesn’t really know how to fully unpack it.

And in this case, with If The Stars Are Lit, I was really, really drawn into the idea of someone being trapped in deep space, alone, on a spaceship with a subconscious construction that looks like their ex-wife, you know? To me, that’s a really, really compelling premise—and part of what is compelling about that is imagining all of the psychology around that situation.

You know, everything from that sense of isolation to the fact that this … it’s called a gemel, this sort of artificial construction is, and it’s based on the protagonist’s subconscious, but looks like someone she was very close to—and yet is really neither, and I think that that is such a fascinating idea, and I think especially because the protagonist as well is queer. You know, it’s, that’s another element to it. And you know, I said in the review, I’m a huge fan of queer indie fiction. I think that it’s something that I really want to help elevate. So it was something that I was really excited to get into.

But unfortunately, the novel didn’t, as I said in the review, really get into that—only for about half of the book, really, it has this setting, maybe less, and we don’t really see the relationship develop between the protagonist and the gemel. We are told that they love each other, but we don’t really see how that unfolds between them.

And then it moves on, and then it’s no longer the two of them alone on the page—which really surprised me, because I was sort of waiting for more to happen from this scenario. And then it introduces the element that the protagonist is rescued by her real ex-wife.

And you know, that was kind of compensating: OK, well this isolated creepy premise is over. But now we have another potentially interesting premise. I mean, imagine if you rescued your ex to find that they’d fallen in love with essentially a hologram that looks like you! You know, that’s another fun thing that could be explored. But then that wasn’t really fully explored, either, and it sort of went into so many different directions that felt like they were explored only really on a surface level.

And yeah, ultimately that was just really disappointing. And it’s not the only novel to do that, you know—that’s quite a common thing, that something is sold on a particular idea, but then it doesn’t fully know what to do with that idea.

Dan Hartland: As you speak, I’m thinking, “Yeah. I’ve read novels of two halves like this as well.” Is it two novels here that have kind of been smooshed up against each other, do you think? It sounds as if the novel you were really interested in was that first half. Would you … in your head, would the more successful version of this book be a more in-depth treatment of that first half, with the second half either, you know, relegated to a sequel or just kind of pushed aside?

Or is there a way that this … smooshing … of the two ideas could have worked? What’s your preferred solution? Because one of the things we do when we read a book and think, “Ah, this hasn’t quite worked”—even if, you know, we know that it’s not for necessarily the critic to say, “This is what the book should have been”—in the back of our heads, just as readers, we’re thinking, “I wish it had been X.” Did you have that?

Redfern Jon Barrett: Yeah. I mean, I think when reviewing it’s really important to understand the difference between what you wanted to read and what the novel is, you know? And I think that part of reviewing professionally is understanding that a book might not be for you, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not for someone.

So that is something really, really important to hold in check, and I am hopefully not so arrogant as to assume that there’s not a way that the book could have been two very different halves that would’ve worked well. I’m sure that there are. But having said that, I think that some of the strongest works of fiction I’ve read that have a speculative angle and a really, really strong, strong hook do sort of stick with a singular premise and really dive into that.

And I’ve got three books in front of me that I think did that well or did it less well, which we can talk about later. But I really, really think that it would’ve been better off if the author had really chosen to dive into the psychological state of the protagonist—because, you know, it doesn’t have to be sympathetic. There’s so much you could do with that, because it’s quite narcissistic to fall in love with an artificial construction that’s based off your own subconscious. And that is something that could also be really interesting to explore, and the protagonist as an anti-hero could have been sort of further developed from that. But, you know, I’m careful all the while not to spoil the novel because I think that if people are into queer indie fiction, it is something that they should consider picking up. But I personally think that it would’ve been better just as a single novel. I don’t think it necessarily needed the other elements really at all.

That first half … like, at one point they discovered that the nearby planet, and I said this in the review, all of the messages—inbound and outbound messages—from that planet are fake. And that was really creepy as well, because they only heightened the isolation and like, “OK, so is everyone on the planet actually dead?? You know, what is behind this? And … I don’t know. Nothing really got resolved in a way that could live up to that potential.

Dan Hartland: As I say, in the review you, for me anyway, make the case that this is a classic instance of a novel having an awful lot of good ideas but not settling on any one.

As you were speaking, I was remembering there are two episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation featuring the perennially, unhappy in love chief engineer, Geordi La Forge, and in one episode he creates a hologram of the woman who designed the USS Enterprise, right?

Redfern Jon Barrett: Yeah. So I remember this!

Dan Hartland: Yeah! And he has to talk to the hologram to figure out the thing that he has to fix to make the ship go again. But in the process, he falls in love with this hologram. And then, maybe a couple of seasons later, the actual designer of the SS enterprise appears on the ship and she’s, like, “What the … have you been doing? What’s this hologram?!” And she doesn’t fit the kind of fantasy of the hologram that Geordi has, and the whole thing unravels from there.

I think they do have to talk to each other to find the thing to fix the ship to make it go again. I think basically it’s the same plot, just with a different character, but I think this distance between those two episodes is what gave them impact, that sort of two-season gap where, you know, you don’t hear about this character, but then suddenly, “Oh, she’s back and he has a hologram. Remember the hologram?!” is what gives that second episode its impact.

So yeah, it’s a trope that has precedent. But not only does the trope have precedent, your suggested treatment of it has precedent as well. Nileena, let’s bring you in here, because one of the things—and it will seem perhaps to listeners as if I planned this sort of discussion between two reviews, but I didn’t, it’s just that you handed these reviews in and then I’m like a parasite, just feeding off your work—but it was so interesting to me to read your review next to Redfern’s because it’s about a book in which there is isolation in deep space. It’s a book in which there are kind of messages from far away, which aren’t quite what they seem to be. It’s a novel, or a novella, where the main character does have an interaction with a kind of nonhuman intelligence and forms quite a strong bond with that intelligence.

And yet your reaction to this novella was almost—it’s not kind of the opposite to Redfern’s—but you wanted, where Redfern thought, “Hmm, this needs to be sort of shaved away, the edges of this, we need to balance it out, we need to rationalize the novel in some way,” you are like, “No, no, I need more of this. It would be great if this book were longer, if we had more time with these characters and in these settings, so that we can really understand them.”

The reason I say that’s not quite opposite to Redfern is because of course that’s what Redfern thinks. So you are both basically saying, “More please,” but within different kind of contexts. So your book was Orphan Planet. I just wondered whether you could talk a little bit about, as Redfern has, your experience of reading that, of getting into it and then finding that it wasn’t quite what you were imagining or looking for or felt worked.

Nileena Sunil: Yeah. So, with Orphan Planet, I felt like … So, for the most part, I did like the book. Like it was mostly a positive experience. But I felt like I also had a lot of unanswered questions by the time I got to the end of it.

So the premise is, it’s about this girl who’s stuck on a planet all alone. She’s like the only person except for this artificial intelligence. And she gets these messages, and I thought that was a really interesting premise. But also, first of all, I felt that there could have been like more psychological depth when it comes to the main character. Like, I felt at parts … I felt like she was too well-adjusted for someone who’s been—who has all her life been—the only person on the entire planet.

And also like, you know, what happened: why she’s there and what’s actually going on outside? There was some explanation for that, especially when another character comes in and she starts investigating what happened all those years ago—you do get to see some of it—but I also felt parts of it were … I mean, there could have been more of an explanation, because I still had a lot of unanswered questions.

So I felt either it could have really focused on this one character and the psychological aspects of it, or it could have expanded the worldbuilding a little bit more. But then I don’t know if that would’ve worked as a novella. It would have to be a little longer. So I felt like these two aspects could have expanded on either of these two things: either kept it super-focused on one character or explained more. But, even though for the most part I did like the book, I felt there was something missing.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, and that very much comes across in your review: that the setting is interesting, the character dynamics even have potential, but the novella just doesn’t give itself space. But I mean, would you say that you were left … unconvinced … by the setting or the characters?

Because you mentioned that the protagonist is just way too well-adjusted for this person that has basically grown up in total isolation, you know, sort of locked away from all human contact on this sort of barely-terraformed planet and yet seems fine with that. “That’s okay!” And so is that a problem when you are reading this novella and constantly in the back of your head you’re like, “Ah, is that really how this would work?” Is that what undermined your reading, just this sense that it hasn’t thought through its own setting?

Nileena Sunil: Yeah. There were parts where I did feel like that the character was … she was there on this planet basically since she was a baby and she grew up all alone. And I kept thinking, “OK, how, how did she turn out, like, even a little bit well-adjusted?!” I then kept thinking, “Am I overthinking it? Maybe, am I just supposed to suspend my disbelief for this?” But like, yeah—it was on the back of my mind all the time.

Dan Hartland: And it’s interesting, because in genre work, and in particular SFF, we are often told that suspension of disbelief is crucial to the reading protocols of approaching these kinds of text. But I always feel as if—I don’t know how you two think about this—but suspension of disbelief is a deal between writer and reader. It’s not something that the reader gives the writer: “OK, I’m just gonna suspend all my critical faculties and just let you write at me.” There is a responsibility on the writer, I think to enable you to leave some disbelief at the door again.

Was that your experience? That the novella just didn’t quite … help you believe in it?

Nileena Sunil: Yeah, I guess I did try to … like, to an extent I did try to suspend my disbelief, or, you know, just try to accept it or rationalize it in some way, but I felt like it didn’t do enough to let me do that.

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: Redfern, I’m conscious that you are wearing two hats in this conversation—because you are a critic, but you’re also a novelist. You’re a fiction writer. So this conversation is getting a little closer home for you, right? So, with sort of maybe half the critic hat and then half the fiction writer hat on, what are your views of that kind of suspension of disbelief? Because we’re all—both of you here are—kind of saying that you’ve read a text that hasn’t quite helped you stay with it, right?

Redfern Jon Barrett: I was just thinking that it’s such a complicated thing, you know, suspension of disbelief. It’s sort of in this gray area between being conscious and not.

You know, sometimes I’m more willing to suspend my disbelief for something I really want to believe in, or there’s some other aspect of it I enjoy, but it’s not completely in your control. Right? It’s sometimes you really, really want to believe in a work or a premise, but it just … you’re pulled out of it regardless.

But at the same time, I think we have different tolerances depending on how we’re approaching the novel. And, as a novelist, that’s something that is really, really at the forefront of my mind, especially when it comes to character and worldbuilding. So for Proud Pink Sky, for example—my novel set in the world’s first gay state—it was really, really important to me that I created a believable world, because I love worldbuilding and I’m so easily pulled out if there’s something incongruous or something unbelievable about a world.

So I’d spent so many years working on this gay state, and I have notes for everything from, like, the parliamentary structure to the political parties. You know, I had a whole Polari—the gay slang—dictionary at the end of the novel because I really wanted above all else to create a believable world for the reader that they could really, really get drawn into.

And I think that is something that as an author you have to constantly keep in mind: how, or try and predict how, is the reader gonna respond to this? How is this going to sound to the reader? And of course that’s always gonna be different and it’s not something that you can ever completely nail down, but it’s such a huge part of the process. And I think that makes me more disappointed, as a critic, when I read and something about the characters or the worldbuilding or the way the novel’s structured in this case just really loses me, really pulls me out of it. It’s such a disappointment.

And, you know, I had a similar thing with my review before that of Ken MacLeod’s trilogy. I loved the first two books. And then in the third, the worldbuilding just completely pulled me out of it and it felt ungrounded compared to what he’d done before, which I really felt was masterful. And I don’t know, I feel like there’s a particular soreness to that kind of disappointment.

Dan Hartland: I remember the MacLeod novel—your review of it, I haven’t read the novel—and yeah, that disappointment really shone through in that review: that you’d read the other two and that’s an even more egregious problem for a reader than the one we’re discussing here, right? Where you’ve read two previous novels in the trilogy and you’d be like, “These are amazing!” And then the third book comes along and you’re like, “Arrgh!”

Redfern Jon Barrett: Yeah! And especially when it’s the last one. If it’s the middle one, it’s kind of like, I dunno, I feel like less devastating somehow.

Dan Hartland: Well, I really enjoy second books in trilogies. I’ve got this thing for the hinge of a series, and you are right that sometimes what I like about them is that they are not perfect. They can’t be, because they’re that point of pivot. But yeah, you’re right: When the third book lets you down, it’s the final season of Game of Thrones, isn’t it? It sours the whole experience.

But one of the things that I’m also interested here is that worldbuilding is one thing, but the other thing that we’re talking about both of these books is—from the perspective of “need more of it” and also kind of, not “less of it,” but “more focus on it”—is that one of the things that isn’t working here is the psychology of the protagonist for both of you.

So there’s this worldbuilding, this sort of reams of notes on the parliamentary system of the world that never go on the page but inform everything that happens on the page, and therefore gives it some sort of verisimilitude to you; but also, the way that the characters are convincing and therefore you go with them through all this stuff. And if they aren’t convincing, then you kind of almost can’t.

And I wonder, Nileena … like, Redfern has said that they found the protagonist of If the Stars Are Lit kind of underdeveloped, or at least the way in which that character reacted to situations insufficiently developed, to really believe in, to use that word again. You likewise say that this character in Orphan Planet just doesn’t ring true: there isn’t sufficient trauma, if you like, expressed in how they react as you read the novella.

Were you aware of that affecting your reading, that kind of lack of conviction that you had in the character, or was it only something you realized later as you wrote?

Nileena Sunil: Yeah, I think it was there on the back of my mind as I read it, but I didn’t think … I wasn’t actively thinking about it for the most part. It was something that kept lingering in my mind as I read.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. It’s that what Redferm was saying, that conscious/subconscious thing. You’re not quite aware of what isn’t clicking, but you know something, isn’t.

I’m thinking about one of your old reviews for us, actually. So Redfern mentioned their review of the Ken MacLeod. I’m thinking of your review of the Indra Das book The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar. And again, that’s another novella, and you really enjoyed that book, but this is what interests me: At first you thought the same thing, that maybe the novella wasn’t developing the world enough and it wasn’t therefore delivering on the promise of its premise.

But you realize that that’s kind of the point of that book, and you say, “Indra Das might have created a world in which epic adventures and fantastical scenarios exist, but our point of view character exists on the fringes of the world.” And therefore you don’t get full immersion in the way that you might want … but that, because thematically that works for the novella, it’s okay.

Nileena Sunil: Yeah, it does. Yeah.

Dan Hartland: And that brings us to this idea of: when can a book—a novella or a novel—not give us what we want but still work, right?

Nileena Sunil: Yeah. So, from what I can recall, when I went into it, I was expecting it … So I had read another book by Indra that was like a lot more epic. It had like a lot more characters and a world and worldbuilding. So I was expecting something like that. So when I went into this, I was like, “OK, this doesn’t elaborate on a lot of things.”

We are told that there’s this vast world with dragons and all these adventures and all that stuff, but we don’t really get to see any of it. But as you keep reading it, I kind of realized, “OK, that’s kind of the point of it. This is written from the perspective of someone on the fringes of that world.” It didn’t really meet my expectations in that sense, but then I realized I did like what the book was doing. It was something very different from what I expected, but also it was something very interesting on its own terms.

Dan Hartland: And sometimes those are the best reading experiences, right? Where we go in thinking, “OK, we’re gonna get this from this book.” So when you go into Last Dragoners, you are thinking Dragonriders of Pern, right? You are thinking, “Oh, it’s gonna be this big thing and there’s gonna be, I don’t know, flying dragons and fire and all that stuff.” And then there isn’t.

And your first reaction, inevitably, to that is, “Oh, but we wanted the thing that we liked before! We liked the thing!” You sit with the book and you think, “Oh no, this is great.” And the surprise of that, the discovery of that, is actually really pleasant—and we wind up loving that book for pulling the rug from under us.

Have we … can we think of any others? Redfern, do you have an example of a book that, you know, hasn’t necessarily done what you would do or what you would’ve imagined this book would’ve done, but in fact has totally won you over? So we’re think … we’re talking here of two books that didn’t quite achieve that. How can a book not give us what we want—because books shouldn’t necessarily do that, right?—but succeed in that effort?

Redfern Jon Barrett: Yeah. It’s actually kind of a tough question. Because on the one hand that has happened, you know—of course I’ve read books that I really enjoyed that weren’t quite what I expected. But at the same time, coming up for a blurb for a book is its own skill, right? And if a book is completely not what you expected, then I think it’s kind of in a way failed to sell itself quite properly, if that makes sense.

I’m having trouble—I know it’s happened, but I’m having trouble off the top of my head thinking of a specific one. I think, as well, what you said before about having two hats with it, you know: one of the books that I have in front of me is, is Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor, which I love. But what I loved about that book is—and this was something that I completely didn’t expect from it—was, you know, it’s set with an older woman and a younger girl and they’re in this apartment and society seems to just be disintegrating around them. And we’re not told for most of the book why that is. It’s just really, like, the buses stop running, things just slowly sinking into disorder, almost as though the connections that tie us together as people and allow us to form society are dissolving. And later in the book, it kind of reveals that it’s an environmental catastrophe, which I was almost disappointed by because, I don’t know, I kind of just liked this idea of people losing their ability to connect with each other!

So I just finished a manuscript based on that exact premise! Because I wrote the novel that I really wanted to see. And that is that our empathy, our interpersonal relations, just stop functioning and society starts to slowly break down as a result. So that was really fun to work on.

Dan Hartland: The Lessing is a great example of a book that you’re investing a lot in, and it holds off its revelation, and then towards the end it almost just slips it in, right? Like, yeah: it isn’t almost materially relevant to your experience of the reading. But in your case, Redfern, you were like, “Oh, that’s the explanation,” and felt a little bit let down by that, right?

Redfern Jon Barrett: Yeah. Like, I mean, again, this is something that … I’m aware there’s a difference between what I want to see and what makes a book good. I think it’s an amazing book. I just really, really, really obsessed about the idea that, you know, our greatest strength—our ability as a species to form these connections and hold them to the point that we can live in cities of millions of people and not have just complete disorder—that the idea of that breaking down is one of the most terrifying things to me. And the fact that it has a different root cause I almost found as a disappointment from that book. And again, that’s why I was like, “OK, I’m gonna write a book where that is the root cause.” Again, it’s just a really complex thing, what book you want, what you expect to read. It’s a hard thing to express.

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: We are skirting around this idea of length here: Nileena wants more from the novella in question; Redfern, you want more from the first half of the novel in question. And we’re talking here about what the writer spends their words on and how many words they choose to spend. And then we’re also starting to talk about markets and how to sell a book.

And it seems to me that novellas are having a moment in the market. I don’t know whether you two agree. I feel we’re seeing more of them. You know, do we think that the novella has this problem specifically? Nileena, when you were reading Orphan Planet, did you just wish it was a novel? Would that have solved the problem? More words?

Nileena Sunil: I guess it depends on how the author would approach it if they wanted to change it in some way. I guess if you’re focusing it on the character and the psychological aspects, I guess it could still work as a novella, but then you’ll have to cut out some of the worldbuilding elements or some of the external elements, to an extent, if you want to keep it to a novella length. Or, if you want to just expand the world and let us know more about what’s going on outside the very contained environment of where most of the book is set in, for that, I guess you would need more words. It would have to be a novel in that case.

Dan Hartland: It’s a question of focus, right? Where the novella needs to be this very clearly targeted thing, where the novel has room for highways and byways and subplots and side characters. The novella’s secret weapon is clarity, maybe. So that’s why Last Dragoners worked for you, perhaps: that it knew, “OK, I’m gonna look at this very particular character in this very particular corner of this wider world, but I’m not going to stray into the wider world. I’m gonna stay here in this area of focus.” Whereas in Orphan Planet, you are almost missing the wider world, it needs some of that in order for its main story to work.

Nileena Sunil: Yeah. I mean, I think it could have still worked without much focus. If the worldbuilding is less, it would be fine, but there has to be more depth to the characters and the very contained environment. Or you can expand outwards and have a bigger novel where there’s like a lot more going on. So I felt it needed to be either expanded, like, depth-wise—and maybe make it more contextual or, you know, expand outward and make it a vaster world and explain a lot more of what’s going on.

Dan Hartland: The route that the book takes demands different things of it, right? So Orphan Planet is trying to be this kind of quite focused novella that is pretty fixed on its main character, but your problem is that, in your reading, Nileena, the main character lacks the depth to make that convincing. And the only way around that, if you want your character to be a little flatter or whatever, is to make the world more interesting. But for that you need to be a novel and lose the focus.

I’m really conscious of the problem that we have here being that we’re almost as critics—and, Redfern, you are a critic and a writer, so you are probably just telling yourself these things!—but, for Nileena and I, we are telling writers what to do! Like, we’re saying, “No, no, no, this is the thing!” And I’m convinced by what Redfern said earlier, which is that we need to take books on their own terms and we can’t decide what we think it should have been and criticize it on that basis. So. How do we achieve that, Redfern—since that was your idea, I’ll come to you! Like, how, if we come to a short book that secretly we wish was longer, how do we come to terms with that? And, if we come up to a door stop—like a huge thing—and we’re like, “Ah, I wish this had like fewer chapters,” how do we accept that that’s not what it is and write about it sympathetically?

Redfern Jon Barrett: Well, I think it ties into what both of you were just saying about … you know, obviously accepting books on their own terms, but also what Nileena was saying about, you know, there’s lots of different ways in which the novel could have worked. I think that’s a really interesting point, because, yes, you can have breadth and have that work really well. You can have depth and have that work really well. So it’s not like there’s just one direction that things can go in there.

I think it’s really when the novel feels dissatisfying based on what it’s trying to do. Because there are novels that I love that are just really focused on worldbuilding and, you know, the characters are a bit more just archetypes, but they’re there to really flesh out the world, you know? And then there are things that I love where we don’t really see much of the world. A lot’s implied, but the characters are so vivid and rich that that winds up really being what works about the novel.

And, just going back to novellas quickly, one of the other books I have on my desk in front of me is Coup de Grâce by Sofia Ajram—really embarrassed if I’ve mispronounced their surname. And, you know, I was really, really fascinated by this premise that this person is stuck in a never-ending metro system. And, you know, it’s found this purgatory-sort-of-space, and I didn’t know what to expect of it. And the novel continually surprised me.

It was really a reflection on depression and suicide. And, you know, I hadn’t read much about it beforehand, so it was something that really I wasn’t expecting—and, on its own terms, I think it did such a wonderful job. You know, it’s not how … it’s not a book I could have written, you know? I don’t think anyone but this author could have written this book. But you can see what it’s setting out to do and you can see how well it’s doing at that.

So I think it’s a real tough one when you have a book that you feel there should have been more from and could have been longer to go into it more, or a book that you feel that the words are kind of wasted and that it really needs a good edit down. Just coming to mind at the moment, one of my favorite books—and it’s almost a cliche to love this book—but you know The Handmaid’s Tale! I read The Testaments last year and I really hated it, because it just didn’t need expanding on. Like, Margaret Atwood did such an amazing job of encapsulating this incredibly claustrophobic world, this incredibly claustrophobic perspective—that’s literally claustrophobic because of the wings that the protagonist wears on her hood—and so much is just left to your imagination to imagine what’s happening in this world and what it is.

And then it’s just, “Oh, actually we’re just going to dump that all in another book.” And it’s just so unnecessary. And again, I feel like that failed on its own terms, but it’s such a subjective thing at the same time that it’s kind of hard to say why something fails.

Nileena Sunil: I kind of felt the same way about The Testaments. Like, almost exactly the same way!

Dan Hartland: Yeah, me too! So, I mean, we can end here on a note of harmony, right? We all hated The Testaments. You know, we were just talking about, “Maybe some novellas could benefit from additional worldbuilding.” Well, here is some additional worldbuilding that, you know, no one wanted. It wasn’t necessary!

Yeah, as you say, Redfern, it’s all so subjective and every text must be taken on its own terms because of that. You know, it might be the case that one book is saved by some additional work on the page—not just in the notes, but on the page, explaining how the world works and going into that breadth that Nileena was looking for, maybe, from Orphan Planet—and then there are other books which just … I mean, I don’t wanna say Handmaid’s Tale … of course Handmaid’s Tale hasn’t been damaged by the existence of The Testaments, but The Testaments exists, guys! Like, it must affect, in some senses, our backwards reading. And that’s a shame, isn’t it?

Redfern Jon Barrett: You can’t erase it from your memory. That’s the thing, you know: like, I haven’t read The Handmaid’s Tale since reading The Testaments, but I know that now there’s all this extra stuff there and it’s like, I can’t ignore it. So I think in a way it does impact the original text in a sense. And it’s actually sad to say, because I, I absolutely love Margaret Atwood. I’ve read every single one of her novels, she’s been a huge inspiration for me. But The Testaments was just … yeah, like you say, so unnecessary. And that’s the point: if a novel’s done its job well, it doesn’t need more.

Dan Hartland: And that’s what we’re dancing around, isn’t it? How do you tell as a reviewer whether a novella has done its, or a novel has done its, job and therefore is complete, doesn’t need more? And how, as a reviewer, do you approach the experience of reading a text which you feel does—that, for whatever reason, has an absence for you?

I was thinking again, Nileena, of another review you wrote for us. I’m really sorry to keep picking on your back catalog in this way, but you must be on the novella beat for us—because you also read The City in Glass, and I remember we had a conversation briefly about this over email because I read that book too and felt that it was super-well-turned. Like, the prose is just … you call the prose evocative, and I think that’s spot on. It’s quite long for a novella, but I think it still counts as one. It’s this kind of mythologized city and you compared Italo Calvino—which is pretty high praise!

It really worked, right? That book doesn’t need anything else, but it has huge gaps in it. There are whole passages of time that we don’t really know what happened in them. Right?

Nileena Sunil: Yeah, that’s true. I think in that kind of work, because it was meant to be this kind of a dreamy feel to it—it kind of felt like reading a myth—because of that, I think it kind of worked for me. Because you weren’t supposed to get down to the details of it because it’s like set in such a long span of time and has this almost mythical feel to it. I don’t know—it’s kind of hard to say what exactly works for this type of story, what does it, what might not work for another type of story.

But yeah, it did feel like—when you take everything considered—it did. I didn’t feel like, “Oh, this long period of time, I don’t know what’s going on.” It didn’t really feel that way for me because of the way it was written.

Dan Hartland: You’re absolutely right that the form fits the function, fits the style, fits the theme, and therefore there isn’t the gap. There isn’t a space that we’re feeling needs to be filled, even though the book is actually relatively short.

And that brings us back to this idea that you just kind of know as a reader when a book feels complete to you. There was recently a discussion across multiple podcasts about the novella. I think Roseanna Pendlebury—on A Meal of Thorns, I think it was—was talking about Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky, and mentioned that the first part of that book is basically the only part that she needed; that the rest of the novel could be discarded. That the whole of the novel is contained in the first part, which effectively is a novella. But then over on The Coode Street Podcast, I think Strahan and Wolfe took some exception to this and spoke about novellas more widely and what they are and how they work.

And I think the big issue with all of this is … I’m not sure there is a separation in some ways. Like, a novella is just a novel that is slightly short. I mean, we try to come up with these rules—“Oh, well it’s 45,000 words; oh, it’s 70,000 words”—for the purposes, it seems to me, of awards categories. But actually, as a text, we’re seeing more of these shorter novels, these novellas, but we just approach them as we would a longer work.

Right? They work or they don’t.

Redfern Jon Barret: Yeah! [Laughs]

Dan Hartland: I’m relieved! I’m relieved to hear that!

Nileena Sunil: So I told you that I read a lot of novellas when I need to review them. But otherwise, I tend to pick up whatever, see what’s my fancy at the moment. I don’t specifically think that I’m gonna read a novella or I’m gonna read a bigger novel.

I have read a few novellas recently, which did work well for me. I read Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher, which was like a fairy tale retelling, and I thought it worked quite well. It was a pretty short, self-contained story and, since it’s a fairy tale retelling, there wasn’t much extra worldbuilding required—because it treads like old ground when it comes to that.

Then I also read a few novellas that are part of a larger series, which may contain bigger novels. Like I read P. Djèlí Clark’s The Haunting of Tram Car 015, that’s like a part of a larger universe. And that worked well as a self-contained work. But also kind of got me curious about a lot of aspects of the world. But I knew it’s part of a larger series—so if I wanted more of the world, I could just go and read those books!

Dan Hartland: It’s interesting you talk about the, the P. Djèlí Clark books, because the word “novella” is Italian, and each story within The Decameron was a novella—so we are going back, with this kind of publishing trend towards novellas in shared worlds (the Singing Hills series as well is a similar kind of thing), we’re going back to the fourteenth century here. Like, you can pick a novella off a shelf and it’s part of a wider collection.

Redfern Jon Barrett: I just wanted to jump in a sec on what you were saying about the lack of distinction between novels and novellas. Because it ties into the third book that I have on my desk, The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin, which is another book that I love. I think it’s usually marketed as a novel, but if you look at the actual length of it, I don’t know how many words it is, but it’s definitely novella territory.

And you know, in general, I think there’s the same thing between the difference between novels and novellas, or the supposed difference, as there is between genres in general. You know, it’s actually much, much less boxed-in in reality than it’s made out to be in terms of marketing. You know, as a writer particularly, it’s really frustrating that these things are treated so separately.

And one of the things that I’m happy to see happening more and more is an acceptance of what’s termed crossover novels, which I actually think is a bit redundant because I think a lot of great novels since the inception of the novel have been crossover novels. A lot of books do not fit comfortably within a single genre.

And honestly, we don’t even know what we’re talking about half the time when we label a book in a particular genre. Like, where is the boundary between horror and thriller? Someone show me, you know? And it’s especially frustrating and difficult sometimes as a writer because you need to put your work in a particular box, and I think it just taps into this wider issue with the tension between creativity and marketing. How do you decide which box it goes in? You know, it’s quite arbitrary a lot of the time, and I think that applies to the length of novels too.

Dan Hartland: I hope that, at Strange Horizons, the reviews we write—although we’re based within a tradition of literature that is broadly speculative—we are aware of that. And we try to approach these books—and this is what we keep coming back to in this conversation—on their own terms, and try to put aside any kind of ideas about what a thing is or what a thing isn’t, and just see what it’s trying to say.

[Musical Outro]

Nileena Sunil: You mentioned that I might be on the novella beat. OK, there’s actually a kind of a reason behind it. I’m actually a little … like, while choosing a book to review, I’m a little scared of picking up a larger book because I feel like: “What if I don’t like it and I still have to push through just for the review?!” So I tend to choose like novellas, or shorter books!

Dan Hartland: How have I been doing this this long and not figured that one out?!? [laughter]

[Musical outro]

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

After our last episode, friend of the show Jonah Sutton-Morse got in touch to complain about my calling out the perils of podcast addiction. In response, I can only say, in all sincerity: Jonah, I hope you’ve listened all the way to the end of this one.

See you next time.

In this special episode of Strange Horizons at 25, Senior Podcast Editor Kat Kourbeti and Editor Michael Ireland welcome current members of the Strange Horizons Editorial Collective for a series of interviews to give you a glimpse behind the curtain of each department and to celebrate 25 years of this pioneering speculative fiction magazine.

A big thank you to Arturo Serrano, Proofreader; Dan Hartland and Aisha Subramanian, Senior Reviews Editors and hosts of Critical Friends; Hebe Stanton, Senior Fiction Editor; Romie Stott, Administrative Editor and Senior Poetry Editor; and Gautam Bhatia, Co-Ordinating Editor and Senior Articles Editor, for joining us for these interviews. Happy 25 years, one and all, and here's to many more!

Transcript

Kat Kourbeti: Hello Strangers, and welcome to Strange Horizons at 25, a 25th anniversary celebration of Strange Horizons. I'm Kat Kourbeti.

Michael Ireland: And I'm Michael Ireland.

Kat Kourbeti: And it is our privilege today to welcome you to another episode that looks back at the history and impact of Strange Horizons on the speculative genres.

In fact, today is our official 25th anniversary issue. So it's a bit of a special episode, actually.

Michael Ireland: Did you bring the cake?

Kat Kourbeti: I forgot the cake. Ah, I knew I was supposed to bring something to this recording so that I offer you cake virtually! Let's pretend I have cake and let's pretend it smells amazing.

So, yeah, so today is our 25th anniversary issue on the Strange Horizons website. Every department's doing a little something to celebrate, and this is our contribution. What a year it's been.

Michael Ireland: It has been a long one, but also very, very quick.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, it's surprising. We launched this particular bit of the podcast about a year ago, and I'm kind of astounded that we've only made it to 15 episodes of just this, because we're also doing so much else. So it's just been really difficult to cram it all in.

Michael Ireland: Yeah, no, we've implemented obviously bringing the fiction podcast back as well as this, and the Critical Friends episodes are coming out fast— uh, and I was gonna say Fast and Furious, but it's not Fast and Furious.

Kat Kourbeti: They're not so furious.

Michael Ireland: And then we've also got the Writing While Disabled episodes as well. So the feed has absolutely kicked off this year, and there's gonna be much more to come as well.

Kat Kourbeti: Indeed. Yeah. What's it been like for you? Like you joined us right before it all just kind of kicked off, actually, so how's this year been for you?

Michael Ireland: Yeah, so I joined, what, two years ago at this point? I'd say the last 14 months have been a bit of a wild ride for myself personally, because I think we first met at Worldcon, is that the first time we met?

Kat Kourbeti: In real life? Yeah.

Michael Ireland: In person? Yeah. And then since then, I think you're getting sick of my face because we have spent a lot of time together and that's been great. That's been one of the motivators for me as well, is that we spend a lot of time outside of Strange Horizons doing fun stuff together, a lot of experiences all around the world at this point. It's really nice to have that connection with you. I'm not sure if any of the other departments get the amount of fun that we do, especially with the amount of in-person events that we go to as well, but that's been a good motivator for me because I like to have that connection, to be able to stream ideas with you of things I want to do on the podcast, things that are going on outside of our (working) lives. And it's like I've gained a friend, as well as just a colleague within here, and that's been just, yeah, a lot of fun for me.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah!

Michael Ireland: Well, a lot of reflective things there, because it's changed my kind of perspective on what the space is, what the genre is, because I've always been more of a consumer, but since joining Strange Horizons and becoming a peer with a lot of my favorite writers and just getting to talk shop with them and understand what those are— like even the Strange Horizons at 25 episodes, I've listened to all these cheats that they've got, like a master class.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, thank you! That's what I've been saying. It's like it's a little masterclass, a little hidden lesson within each episode of just like, how all these people do what they do best and what we love them for.

But I'm right there with you in that this has been a fun year because of this great working relationship. You've helped bring the podcast to what I always thought it could be, but I needed someone to tell me it was possible. And so you just came in and you were like, "all right, well, what do you want?" And I was like, "well, I kind of want all these things." And you're like, "all right, so let's do it." "Okay, great!"

And we've been to conventions together, we've met all of these people, and yeah, at this point it is a little worldwide: we went to Seattle, we went to Belfast, which is in our country technically 'cause we're both based in the UK, and then a couple of other UK based things, Easter Con and whatnot.

So yeah, it's been a really great time, just having someone in the department that I'm not just texting across a time zone, you know. Being able to chat together and being able to reach you and being able to meet up in real life and just talk shop has been really good.

Michael Ireland: Yeah, with the way that we do things as well, I think it's the neurodivergence for both of us, is that we'll be having a conversation on Slack, a conversation on Discord, a conversation on WhatsApp, all at the same time, about different things.

Kat Kourbeti: The chat is across all of the apps and somehow it makes sense. Don't ask me how.

Michael Ireland: Yeah. But it's nice to have that, if there is something that crosses my mind, and the same with yourself, we've got the accessibility with each other to be like, "here's an idea, or here's a thing, or is this a problem?" And then we're there for each other immediately, and it's really nice to have that reassurance, to know that we're not just going through this...

Kat Kourbeti: In a void. Yeah. That often happens, I think, and I've had experiences like that even in my time on this mag, just because of everybody being like really disparate, where it's like, "all right, so we wanna do this... yes?" And then it can be crickets for a while, and then it's like, "yeah, okay, cool." "...Okay, great!"

It is a strength of this magazine that we are from all over, but there are challenges, and sometimes they're really felt, especially because in a department such as this, which is quite in flux and there's just a lot going on, not really being able to coordinate in real time as much was definitely harder, I will say.

But yeah, we've got a lot of really fun things on this feed now, and that's thanks to you arriving and pulling up your sleeves and being like, "all right, I'm ready, let's go."

Michael Ireland: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: So thank you for that. It's been a joy to listen to all of these new voices on the podcast, the narrators who have come in and are helping us bring all these stories to life that we haven't been able to in the last little bit, and then also just having all of the other stuff. The variable feed has been really fun and new, and not many podcasts really do that.

Michael Ireland: Yeah. I enjoy the fact that it does work, because I would challenge myself to try and see how we can make things work, that it does become enjoyable for us, because we get to do so many different creative things now where it feels like the podcast department is a (real) department. Even internally, it feels like we've had a voice over the last year, which is really nice, and people are engaging with us outside of our own department. Because obviously if you're just dealing with your own stuff within there, it's hard to bridge that gap between departments sometimes. But it feels like that has been a big strength of ours over the last year, just getting the ideas and things like that from the other departments, and I feel like that's just gonna keep growing stronger as we celebrate that 25th anniversary.

Yeah, it's been nice having that challenge for myself, you know? I never know if I'm gonna be able to do it or not, but the fact that I'm like, it's on the table, like, here's the things that you want to do, here's my ways of trying to work them out, that constant collaboration that we've got— because there's things that you will take charge on, there's things I'll take charge on— but we're never out of sync in that sense. Always checking up, making sure either of us needs a hand in either way, of being able to push and pull in the directions that we need each other, to make sure that we are keeping happy as well as getting nice new episodes out.

Kat Kourbeti: Busy, but also happy. Like, it's very important to enjoy what we're doing, A, 'cause it's a volunteer job and if it's not fun, why are we doing it? But I think that also translates to what the listeners are getting and hopefully it all comes through.

We've got some really nice interviews with current staff for you today, so instead of looking back at the contributors side, we've spoken to some people who are on the team right now, from all different departments, to see A, how does it all work and come together? B, how are all these people feeling about their time on the magazine and especially now celebrating 25 years, and just for readers and listeners to get a glimpse into what it takes to put this magazine together. Because there are so many of us, we are from all over, and that's what makes Strange Horizons what it is.

So we'll cue up some of those interviews for you now and we'll be back with you once they're done. Enjoy.

Arturo Serrano, Proofreader

Arturo Serrano: I am Arturo Serrano and I'm a proofreader at Strange Horizons.

Kat Kourbeti: And how long have you been on the Strange Horizons team?

Arturo Serrano: About a couple years.

Kat Kourbeti: That's cool. What's it been like being part of the team thus far?

Arturo Serrano: It is frankly an honor. During my interactions with the team, I have noticed that we have people from literally everywhere. And it is one of the few occasions when I have been part of collaborative efforts where I don't feel strange being the one from my country. Because I have been part of other editorial teams, and most of the times it has been mostly American people or British people, and I always felt like the one weird kid in the cool kids group. But at Strange Horizons, I can feel more relaxed, because the team is truly global and there is an atmosphere of true welcoming and acceptance of people from all origins.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, absolutely. I feel the same way. We all get to work together and see what everybody thinks and what we wanna build together. It's really special and really fun.

So what do you do as a proofreader?

Arturo Serrano: Each month, the team of proofreaders receives a series of assignments. The team of proofreaders is about half a dozen people, and we are split in groups. Each month, a number of proofreaders is put in charge of the stories, another is put in charge of proofreading the poetry, another team handles reviews, and it cycles every month. There is a style manual: we take as reference the Merriam Webster dictionary, we take as reference the Chicago Manual of Style, and we have developed a very structured process for marking the bits that need to be corrected, escalating that to the next highest person in the team. And it is also very structured in terms of deadlines, because all the articles and stories have a set deadline. We already know in advance when each article is set to be published, so that helps us distribute our workload over the month.

Kat Kourbeti: And do you have a favorite thing, a favorite sort of section to proofread?

Arturo Serrano: I like reviews, because when we review poetry, for example, it takes more effort to identify which variations in punctuation or spelling are part of the poetic intention instead of a mistake. Sometimes that happens with stories too, but with reviews, which are basically nonfiction in normal prose, it is clearer to identify when a mistake is a mistake.

Kat Kourbeti: I hadn't thought about it that way. That does present a challenge. Do you have to then communicate with the poetry editors or the poet directly, when that happens?

Arturo Serrano: We mark the article, the pieces that we consider might perhaps need to be corrected, and we escalate that to the supervisor of proofreaders. I don't know how often on their end they end up contacting the author, but I suppose it must happen on occasion.

Kat Kourbeti: I can imagine. Yeah. Just kinda like, did you mean this, is this intentional?

And what has your experience been like? The last couple of years on Strange Horizons have been quite eventful. We won a Hugo last year, we were up for another one this year, and to be part of that, has that kind of put a pep in your step? What has that felt like to you, to be part of this team right now?

Arturo Serrano: I think the practice that Strange Horizons has adopted and persisted in adopting, in naming the entire team in lists of eligibility and lists of finalists for awards, creates a stronger sense of belonging. When Strange Horizons is nominated, or is mentioned for any purpose, I inevitably get the feeling that some of that was caused by my effort. And I'm sure every one of the other departments gets that same feeling, because the magazine goes out of its way to recognize every single person who participates.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, I think we blazed the trail for that, for sure, and I'm glad to see other teams do that too now because it does take all of these people to do all this. It's a lot of work.

Arturo Serrano: It takes a global village.

Kat Kourbeti: It really does take a global village. Yeah. So I suppose the work carries on— are you working on anything this month?

Arturo Serrano: This month in particular, we are assigned reviews. I have already checked the posts for this week, so that basically leaves me free to do my other stuff until next week.

Kat Kourbeti: Okay. And what is your other stuff? What are you working on right now?

Arturo Serrano: I am a reviewer and editor for Nerds of a Feather. I am also part of the team at the Galactic Journey, I am finishing my degree in creative writing, I have recently joined the team of volunteer translators for Global Voices, and I am in the initial stages of planning my second novel.

Kat Kourbeti: That does sound like a lot of work, but it's all fun though. It all sounds like fun stuff. What are you working on in terms of the reviewing and writing about science fiction and fantasy?

Arturo Serrano: You mean at Nerds of a Feather?

Kat Kourbeti: Yes.

Arturo Serrano: There is mostly a degree of freedom that we give all the contributors in deciding what they want to review. Sometimes I browse lists of upcoming books and suggest them to the team, but it is never mandatory. Each member has their own specialties and their own obsessions, and we like to celebrate each one's obsessions because that way we get to hear about movies and books and games that are usually not mentioned.

Kat Kourbeti: And can you tell me what your novel is about? Is it in any way related to your first novel or is this a completely new project?

Arturo Serrano: Oh, it is different. My first novel was an alternate history. The second one, I'm planning a time travel story. I have this idea of a sort of "congress of centuries", a place where representatives of each century meet to debate how time travel is to be used, because in many stories of time travel one finds the problem that time travel messes up more than it fixes, and the story becomes the story of how to clean up the mess.

Kat Kourbeti: Yes.

Arturo Serrano: So in the one that I'm planning, there is this whole process of deliberation to try to use time travel responsibly, and to see whether it is at all possible to use time travel in a way that messes up as little as possible.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Arturo Serrano: I am still trying to figure out how to handle the complication that the characters are going to be replaced every time they do something. So how does one maintain a cohesive narrative?

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, the format will have to be, the structure even, less dependent on a specific character's journey and more the collective journey. It sounds like fun. I will read this when it's out.

Is there anything you'd like to say to the team of Strange Horizons and to the readers and the listeners? For our 25th anniversary.

Arturo Serrano: I love that this era of science fiction has been called the Rainbow Age of science fiction, and I especially love that Strange Horizons has positioned itself as one of the showcase examples of what makes the Rainbow Age what it is.

Kat Kourbeti: Thank you, that's beautiful. And yeah, thank you so much for taking time out of your day to give us a little message. Really excited to talk to one of the proofreaders finally, and to meet you, even though it's from very far away.

Arturo Serrano: Thank you for having me.

Kat Kourbeti: My pleasure.

[You can find Arturo's website, and ways to follow him, here.]

Dan Hartland & Aishwarya Subramanian, Reviews Editors & Hosts of Critical Friends podcast

​And here I am joined by the lovely Reviews team, who you might also know as the Critical Friends team. Hello friends.

Dan Hartland: Hello.

Aisha Subramanian: Hello.

Kat Kourbeti: Do you mind introducing yourselves and telling us a bit about what you do at Strange Horizons?

Aisha Subramanian: Do you wanna go first?

Dan Hartland: We always do this. I knew that was gonna happen. Like, we just defer to each other. Yeah, I can go first, but would you like to go first instead?

Aisha Subramanian: I could, but what about you? (both laugh)

Dan Hartland: I'm Dan Hartland, and I'm one of the Reviews editors here at Strange Horizons.

Aisha Subramanian: I'm Aisha Subramanian, I am also one of the Reviews editors at Strange Horizons.

Kat Kourbeti: And how long have you guys been with the magazine? A while, I think, right?

Dan Hartland: Yeah, I think it's 10 years. Is it? I think it is. I think we started in January 2015.

Aisha Subramanian: Yeah. 2015.

Kat Kourbeti: Wow.

Aisha Subramanian: Yeah. That's terrifying.

Kat Kourbeti: What's that been like?

Dan Hartland: Yeah... (both laugh)

Kat Kourbeti: Giggles.

Dan Hartland: The only viable response to that is laughter.

Well, of course we started in January 2015 with our late friend Maureen Kincaid Speller. So we were originally a trio, and Maureen was the senior one of the three, so she just told us what to do really, and we did it. And of course, with her passing, we kind of wanted to carry on in order to do the work that we think she would've wanted us to do, although I would not wish to presume that we've achieved that aim. She's probably like somewhere going, "oh, these guys!"

But yeah, so it's been, I dunno what your experience is, Aisha, but it does feel as if it's been a kind of, there was "with Maureen" and then there was... "not with Maureen."

Aisha Subramanian: Yeah, I think the dynamic obviously shifted quite a lot. As you've already seen, Dan and I both take being told what to do very well, and telling each other what to do is complicated. But yeah, I think I possibly felt more involved in some ways in like, the adminy decisions when Maureen was around. Now I defer to Dan for a lot of things, which is a bit unfair to Dan.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. I don't know why!

Aisha Subramanian: But it has changed a lot.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. I think it has. I think we had a plan when we started, which I think we followed through on. But because it was a plan that the three of us put together, it's then taken sort of some thought to fill in, and you can't—

Aisha Subramanian: Yeah.

Dan Hartland: —fill in the gap. The things we wanted to achieve, you probably remember them completely different. And if Maureen was able to answer the question, she'd remember them differently too. But I think we wanted to diversify the reviewer base even further. Like our predecessors, Niall Harrison and Abigail Nussbaum, had done great work in that, foundational work, really. Like we would've been nowhere if they hadn't done that stuff. But we sort of pushed that further.

We also wanted to diversify what was reviewed, and that is in terms of who wrote it, but also what they are writing. I dunno, did it get weirder? I would say that we're quite interested in the literary edges of all this stuff. We do a lot of core genre, but we'll also do kind of stuff that's really, not just curling the edges, it's just a screwed up ball at this point.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, but that's been fun though. I think as a reader myself of the reviews, it's been great to have that diversity of, not everything is the traditionally published novels that you will find in bookstores. There will be reviews of Japanese light novels and manga and even films. Like we're taking it to just like the story level of "everything is valid and your opinions are valid, and I wanna hear about them". And by extension, like, for me, I'm like, this is great because a lot of this stuff either I wouldn't have heard of, or it's perspectives I hadn't heard or seen before, and it's been really great to just have that, and have a market for it. It's been lovely to see that expansion actually.

Aisha Subramanian: I think part of the sort of commitment to weirdness and diversifying what we're publishing is also the literary edges of the genre, but also the literary edges of what you can do with a review sometimes. So if you're doing something formally very weird, or unexpected or just full of footnotes— because we do love a footnote— we're interested in playing around with that, and playing around with the forms, and seeing what we can do there. And that feels like that's something that Maureen really encouraged and that we tried to continue, and sort of play along with.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, I think so, I hope so. The form question is really important, I think, and as Aisha and I have hopefully already demonstrated humorously, I think if you pushed me to name our approach, it would be "consensual". Like we're trying to reflect a community as broad as possible within a department, and what we want is not to set a Strange Horizons review format. I'm sure there is— like, we are quite long, so we tend towards longer than shorter; we tend towards analytical more than we do summary. So there are sort of characteristics of the SH review, but on the other hand, if you wanna come and you write a review purely in footnotes, you can; if you wanna do choose your own adventure, please do; if you wanna do a "proper academic thing", you can; if you want to do something almost essayistic, please do. And we also publish almost reader report-y reviews too.

So hopefully what comes out of that is as polyvocal a blend as two editors can achieve, 'cause we're obviously bound by our own interests. We get loads of emails in saying, "can you please cover this book and can you please cover that book?" And we will offer books out that appeal to us to some extent, although hopefully also trying to think outside the box, but we also invite our reviewers to tell us what books they've been reading and what books they think we should be covering. So again, we try to plug the gaps. We try to be open.

Kat Kourbeti: And you've been doing criticism specials as well, which kind of really expand that just by sheer volume of words, which is great as well. Have those been fun to put together, stressful to put together, a bit of both?

Aisha Subramanian: Yes (laughs). Fun, stressful, both.

Dan Hartland: I would go as far as to say, I don't think it was our idea. So I think I'm right in saying we were just told by Gautam (Bhatia), "you're gonna be doing a criticism special now". And like just the one, like "you'll just do it one year, see how it goes. Like we'll just do that one special, like we do other themed specials". And we're like, okay. And then we did that one and it was like... "it's gonna be annual now."

Aisha Subramanian: Everyone kept sending us pitches for the next one, before we'd said that there would be a next one. So... kind of had to.

Kat Kourbeti: At least your work's done there at that point.

Dan Hartland: I will say that like, it's great because there is a kind of mini —and very mini— but there is a mini boom of spec fic criticism at the moment. So it's nice to be able to provide a platform for that, and also our reviews are, as I mentioned, they do tend analytical, so it's nice to have one issue a year where we can give people even more room than we usually give them to do that thing.

We've also tried to use the issue as a way of bringing new people in, giving that extra space, or using that extra space to persuade people to come and write for us. It's a bigger hook to catch people on. So yeah, it's been a really great way I think of affirming the reviews department whilst also expanding it at the same time. It feels like both, it feels like just an extension of what we do anyway. And also, something else.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, just kind of like a natural little annex, if you will. But yeah, no, I think they have been fun. Sorry to hear that there has been stress involved, but special issues will do that (laughs). I feel like every time I've worked on one, there's always just a lot going on at the same time. They are fun when the work is done, for sure. So we'll look forward to the next one, which I think is in January of '26, if I recall.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. We're trying to forget that, but I think so. Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: And what about Critical Friends, which you guys started as a new podcast on the main feed. It was the first step in diversifying our podcast feed, which now has four different shows on it, which is really fun. But how did that come about and what's it been like for you guys?

Aisha Subramanian: I can't remember why that came about really. I think it was just that we spent a lot of time, the three of us, talking about criticism and... why not have an audience?

Dan Hartland: Yeah, I think that's right. I think 'cause we just had an ongoing chat, where sometimes we talked about Strange Horizons, but most of the time we just didn't, and talked about other stuff. And at one point, I think one of us just said, "podcast?" And then someone else said, "podcast!", and that was it. I think Maureen was really keen to do it, especially keen to do it. Any opportunity to talk about books, she would just jump on.

The thing that always surprises me, I dunno about you Aisha, is when I get an email and I get them often, saying, "ah, I really enjoyed listening to that episode. That was great. Please do more." And I'm like, "Really? Are you sure?"

Aisha Subramanian: The one that weirds me out is when people who you know in real life listen to it. It's very concerning. I found out that my friend's nephew is a fan of the podcast and I was just... I remember your first birthday. That's ridiculous.

Dan Hartland: And it's nice to be able to, again, to talk about the different formats, like Critical Friends has had many different kind of models. It started as a three-way conversation, we've then had kind of interview episodes, we've then had guests, we've had themes, we've had just Aisha and I talking about a thing we've just read. And then the last couple have been, like the one we did on SF in translation, where I just get two reviewers to come in and talk to me about the things that they're thinking about. So it's just a really nice way of hopefully reflecting a little bit the kinds of conversation that the reviews we hope can start.

Because the review isn't— this is how I see it: a review is not the end of a conversation, it doesn't put the full stop on the reading. "Okay, that's what that book means. Next!" It's much more, "what do you think?" And so in a way, the podcast is a way for us to try and give the reviews some legs, to let them fly a little bit further. I dunno whether it works, but that's the idea.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, I think it definitely works. I was very pleasantly surprised by adding a new thing to the existing feed. At the beginning, I wasn't sure. "Oh, do we maybe make a new feed? We could create like a new account? Like, what should that be?" And then it was like well, I'm sure that the people who listen to the fiction and the poetry would be keen on this, and if they're not, they can skip that episode, whatever.

And actually it's helped to keep the feed going a lot of the time and B, like you say, brought new people in, because having those conversations where it's a little more loose and a little more casual and perhaps a little more approachable, and it's less of a scary thing of "let's talk about analyzing literature", you know, where a lot of people won't necessarily wanna do that and like, read a whole thing 'cause they maybe think they're not capable of understanding, or whatever.

It actually expands barriers, just kind of knocks them down and goes like, "we're just talking here, just talking about this thing that we read." And in fact, your first episode that was just like, "what even is SF criticism?" It's like, "well, yeah, actually, what is it? Great question!"

Dan Hartland: I feel like that's the question of every episode, we still don't know!

I'm really glad you say that thing about approachable though, thank you. Because I really hope that it is, because it can and should, in places and parts, be quite a high minded discussion, but I also think if it can be fun and accessible, then that is I think quite important, to use a word that does also sound forbidding.

Especially in some of the more recent episodes, I felt my role is "ask the stupid question", and see what comes back, because don't assume anything. Keep it at that kind of initial, "let's just poke around, let's poke this thing and see what happens." So yeah, that's great, thank you.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, no, thank you. And I'm glad it's going strong and more regular, and those new formats are fun. If anything, it's opened up my sort of, not expectations, but possibilities for what the podcast could be.

'Cause when I inherited the department, it was very much, "we just do the fiction, poetry, the way it is on the page, no frills, day and date, go". And after a certain point it was like— first of all the rhythm was relentless and very hard to keep up, but then also there was a sense of like, "is that interesting?" And not just for listeners, but also for the folks who work on the podcast, it's just doing that same thing.

And by injecting Critical Friends into that, it was like, that just means the podcast doesn't have to be what it's always been. We can think outside the box. And that gave us the opportunity to think about things like Strange Horizons at 25, which this interview is a part of, and once that project is over... new things. The sky's the limit really, and that reflects Strange Horizons, I think. We just kind of do whatever we feel, and sometimes that means we break new ground.

Aisha Subramanian: I think that is part of the whole— we occasionally call ourselves an anarchist collective, when people ask about the organization of the magazine, and that is how this works. And sometimes it does seem to work in ways that are surprisingly harmonious. I know when it comes to controversial moments in science fiction, most of us are pretty much on the same side of things. We mostly have the same broad politics, the same broad tastes, the same broad interests. So it's never quite chaotic, even though it is. It's conversational.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. It's very interesting, in fact, how the magazine seems to attract folks with the same kind of ethos without like explicitly necessarily asking for that. Like it's never in the volunteer calls, it's never, you know, "you must be of a certain persuasion or have a certain sensitivity to these issues in order to be a part of this team", but the people who say, "yes, I would like to be on this team" are people who see the work and they go, "I wanna be part of that, that sounds great."

And yeah, we don't always coordinate with each other, in fact the departments can be a little siloed— you know, we're all, like you say, anarchic, we all just do our work and we hope that we're building a similar or the same thing— but when we do, we all just seem to come together and be like, "I like what you're doing. I like what you're doing. Oh, that's great." It's really cool.

And what has this last year been like for you? We won a Hugo on the eve of our 25th anniversary year, and now it's been a full year of work since then. What has that felt like and been like for the Reviews department?

Dan Hartland: I think, especially when you're running the Reviews department, I'm very conscious that reviews aren't necessarily a weather making thing, right? So we help conversations happen, I hope, and we provide hooks for conversations to begin, I hope. But we're not like the Fiction department, right? We're not like the Poetry department. These are the places where the artists go to do their art, and then we're over on the other side throwing stones at it, right? On that level, I think any given year in the Reviews department is shaped by what stuff are you getting in, and what are you gonna make of that?

And I've found this year really interesting, because it has been so multiplicitous. There hasn't been— and someone will write in or whatever, but here's my thesis so far— there hasn't been a single book or text that you can say "that's 2025 right there, that's the thing that we will all remember this year for". There hasn't been really a single theme necessarily. I tend to think that themes last for longer than a year, but there hasn't been a trend or anything that you can say "that's 2025". And so what we've resulted in is a year of real kind of breadth of stuff, which has been great. We've had reviews of Jurassic World, and we've had reviews of obscure —that shouldn't be obscure— texts in translation that are really challenging.

So what it's felt like in the Reviews department is, "oh my God, we have to get three reviews of 2000 each out every week, wah!" But it always feels like that, so the other side of it is, I'd like to think that it's been quite a polyvocal year again.

Aisha Subramanian: Someone would need to sit down and actually count things, which probably won't be me, but I don't know if people are writing to us more or submitting more, but I get the impression that they really are. And I don't know if that's something that's come about around the Hugo as well, that there's possibly an audience of people who wanted criticism and saw us win the Hugo and were like, "oh, okay, this exists, maybe there is somewhere I would send work".

But I remember when we first took over Reviews, there were weeks when we were scrambling, and sending out emails to people who had reviews due to make sure that they got things in on time, so that we would have those three reviews. And I don't think that's happened for months.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, that's right. I mean, just to sort of peel the curtain back, we are scheduled a month in advance now, which is just, as Aisha says, that was unknown like—

Aisha Subramanian: It was such a luxury to even be a week in advance.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. Yeah. And for a lot of literary magazines, they're already six months in advance. Maybe it feels like, "oh a month? Really, they're running at that pace?" But for us it feels like, "oh yeah, we can sit back here." Because genuinely, Aisha is right, early years it was not just chasing people for outstanding reviews, but chasing people saying, "you don't happen to have a review, do you? Like, just like lying around, that you could give us...?"

Aisha Subramanian: "I know we gave you till like next week, but by any chance..."

Dan Hartland: Yeah, yeah. And so I do think, again, maybe it's partly to do with the mini boom. There are other places as well, there's like Ancillary Review of course, there's Typebar, there's Speculative Insight. So you get a critical mass and then the writers are thinking, "oh, I can write this stuff", and then they're looking for the platforms for it. Maybe that's part of it.

I'd like to think as well, as Aisha says that it's something to do with what we've been doing and people think, "oh, actually they seem cool". But who knows? All I can say is, yeah, we are really lucky, and we've always been lucky with the writers that we get. We wouldn't be here without them.

But yeah, the fact that we have more of them than ever as well is just, yeah, super double-plus good.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, no, it's been great. I'm glad that the Venn diagram of all of the factors has conspired to give you a lot to work with. It's probably all of the things, and that's great. Being able to see, say, someone's voice in a review that they might think, "oh, maybe I could also write a review, because if they can do it, maybe I could do it".

Reviewing obscure things that it's like— you know, I interviewed someone very early at Strange Horizons at 25 who wrote reviews of light novels because, and I quote, she "enjoys trash". And it's like, well, yeah, but trash is great though!

Dan Hartland: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: It's a big part of our media diet, and I think that it deserves a critical look, and it's great that we don't discriminate in that regard. And so yeah, a reviewer might see that and go, "yeah, you know what, I also like this other thing. Maybe I could send in something." And so I hope that keeps happening, because it's awesome.

It's awesome to see just what people think about stuff. A lot of the time it helps me personally like, pick out things to read I might not have thought about. Or, you know, looking at my TBR not really feeling inspired, and then I'll see a review and I'll be like, "oh yeah, actually, do you know what? I already own that, I'm gonna read that next." So great, and I hope that it keeps going.

Dan Hartland: I would really like to say one thing, and I think this was something that Maureen felt. Like, if you'd have asked Maureen what were the plans, I think she might have said way back in January 2015, in a way that Aisha and I might not have done at that time, but do now— she would've said, "I want to create the next generation of reviewers". I want to use and abuse Strange Horizons as a guerilla operation for breeding new reviewers, right? Just for growing them in vats.

I really think anyone that wants to write a review can email us. We really want new writers, and we take the time if they want help, or just publish the thing if it's perfect first thing. Whatever you are reading, we want to see it, because the whole point of this is that we need reviews always, and we will only have a sustainable reviewing culture if we have reviewers all the time. And I would say that's probably the other mission of the department. Yeah, we've still got the vats, they're still bubbling away.

Aisha Subramanian: But also criticality is a moral and ethical mission as well as a way of sustaining the reviews department. Which obviously is the main goal of creating more reviewers, but still, there's also an ethical component to it.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, exactly. I would say that the Strange Horizons Reviews Department is part of the wider Strange Horizons family, first and foremost— although absolutely 'cause we're this anarchist collective, our departments are semi-autonomous, they do their own thing, but I'm glad we all feel that we're also part of the family— but also it's then part of a wider, not science fiction, but literary critical community, and it's just part of that. And we would not demur from being a small part of it, but hopefully as Aisha says, the purpose is not just that we keep having three reviews a week, but that there is something underpinning that which is of wider value and gets wider audiences.

Kat Kourbeti: Well, thank you guys so much for taking the time and chat to me today, and really look forward to seeing all the lovely things coming from your team and the podcast, of course.

Dan Hartland: Thanks, Kat.

Aisha Subramanian: Thanks, Kat!

Hebe Stanton, Fiction Editor

Kat Kourbeti: I'm here with Hebe from the Fiction department. Would you like to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what you do at Strange Horizons?

Hebe Stanton: Yeah. Hello, I'm Hebe Stanton. My pronouns are they/them. As Kat said, I'm one of the Fiction editors at Strange Horizons, so I acquire stories for the magazine, I edit stories, work with authors, and do all that good stuff between receiving fiction submissions and getting them onto the website.

Kat Kourbeti: And how long have you been at Strange Horizons?

Hebe Stanton: Okay, so there were two parts to this. So I started up for Strange Horizons as a first reader in I think either 2020 or 2021. I did that for about a year, I think, so that was doing the first pass over the submissions that we get. And the editing team at that point promoted several of the first readers, and I was one of those first readers, so I've been doing this for— again, what is time? Time is a flat circle. Part of this was during the pandemic, so like when time did not pass— so, three or four years, I wanna say. Maybe. That sounds too long. Yeah, something like that.

Kat Kourbeti: In a relative sort of way, I agree with you. I think I joined the team in 2020 and... yeah, I don't know, man, it feels at the same time like a century and also like no time has passed at all. So who's to say? But yeah, you've had the experience of being a first reader as well, which is very interesting to jump from that to being one of the people who makes the decisions.

What was it like, first of all, joining as a first reader and learning what the process is and how to pick stories really, to send up?

Hebe Stanton: That's a good question. I had obviously been reading the magazine for about five years. So I feel like I already had a decent handle what a Strange Horizons story looks like. And obviously there's a lot of variation in what a Strange Horizons story looks like, but there's a vibe that you can sort of navigate by. Reading submitted short stories can be quite different to reading published short stories for a number of reasons; there's also the difference between what you like as a reader and what would be a good fit for the magazine, so there was that to refine through.

But really, yeah, it is just experience, just getting to know what you see a lot, very common sort of story shapes or story concepts, and refining as you go along. And of course, stepping up and being able to be like, "oh I can actually take the stories that I really like and... make them published!" That's a sentence. That has also been a joy as well, but I've enjoyed it all the way through. I wouldn't say that being a first reader was less of a meaningful thing to do than being editor. Like, they're just different.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, for sure. And we need those first eyes, because my goodness, we get a lot of submissions. I think it's great to have that bigger a team to be able to do all of that. And I can see a lot of the time, in the credits that we started to do in the fiction, that you are also the first reader. So do you go through the slush still yourself?

Hebe Stanton: Yeah, all of the editors obviously read the stories that the first readers pass up, but we also read from the general submissions, just to help out and, yeah. We all read all the things.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. So I know that we open up submissions just a few times a year, it's not always going. But what is that like, when the submissions are open and everything comes flooding in?

Hebe Stanton: Firstly we're usually only open for a very short period of time. We have a story cap, which for general submissions, it's usually a thousand. We've been playing a bit with what kind of stories get submitted this year, and the caps have been a bit different, but yeah, generally for general submissions anyone can submit to, it's a thousand. And yeah, it doesn't take us very long nowadays to hit that cap. Like, it used to be that you could count about three days of being open, now I think last time it was less than 24 hours.

I guess it feels quite intense, just because there is often a lot of people asking questions during that period that you sort of have to answer straight away because there's a time limit. But like also it's not a long enough period to feel like really overwhelming. You know, there's one day when we want to make sure that people are answering emails like, regularly and reasonably quickly, but apart from that I wouldn't say it feels that different to sort of normal business.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, okay, well that's good at least. And maybe that's the secret that we've figured out as a market, 'cause you hear some horror stories out there from other markets that I'm glad that we don't have that much of, like, say AI submissions and things like that, where it's like actually quite reasonable, maybe because of all this.

Hebe Stanton: I think I've said this in various places before, but because we have very short opening periods and we have that submission cap, and we're only open a couple of times a year, we're not a very good target for AI spammers, just because the return on investment doesn't make sense, you know? Like, you have to target really closely to know when we're open and that's just not the model that these people are operating on.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Hebe Stanton: Yeah, luckily we have avoided most of the onslaught.

Kat Kourbeti: So there's quite a few Fiction editors in your team. What's it like working with everybody across time zones and all of that? How does the cake come together, if you will?

Hebe Stanton: Firstly, time zone's always fun. We are quite distributed. There are some challenges that come with that, but like generally, I think certainly I've got used to thinking, "oh this person's on PST and this person's on ET, when can I expect them to be around and see stuff?"

I think the most interesting thing, in terms of having a range of people on the staff, is just to see what the different things that people prioritize or, what each of us is looking for in a story. And that's slightly different. I know Kat Weaver for instance, and also Aigner (Loren Wilson) I think, they're both very much looking at precise, elegant, streamlined language. And I can definitely admire that and I can go, "oh, this is a very tightly constructed story", but I generally lean more lush or ornate prose style than they do, and obviously we have different focuses in terms of what we like thematically.

Like I was saying earlier, there's an SH range, like, it's all in the sort of Strange Horizons range, but it's just interesting. You have to put yourself a little bit in other people's heads to be like, "this story isn't for me necessarily, but it might be for someone else. I should pass this up for someone else to look at."

Kat Kourbeti: So do you get to know each other's tastes only through seeing what they choose to publish, or is there a process through which you guys get to know each other to say like, "usually I look at this or my preference is this, so if you see anything like that, send it to me"? Is there anything that specific for you guys?

Hebe Stanton: So I think it's a combination. Obviously, we do see what each other publishes to some extent—we'll have at least two editors agree on a story that it should be published. We also have conversations about the stories that we're taking and the stories that we're considering. We'll often say "I don't like this because this particular thing bugs me in stories generally", or you know, "I enjoy this about this story".

And sometimes we have larger like, policy discussions? Like, what particular themes are we interested in seeing in the next year? Are there any specific things that we don't see very often in spec fic that we are looking out for, or are particularly interested in publishing?

So yeah, there isn't like a specific structural process. It's not like we have a little questionnaire that's like, "what do you like in your stories?" It's more just a process of working together, seeing what we all say about things, and having those conversations organically throughout the year.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, that's really cool. And what has this year been like for you? Especially since you were at Glasgow when we won the Hugo. And what has followed in terms of the attention to the magazine and perhaps the fiction that's being sent our way? Have you noticed perhaps a difference, or the same?

Hebe Stanton: I would not say actually I've noticed a big difference, because of those very short submission windows.

Kat Kourbeti: Hmm.

Hebe Stanton: Yeah. I mean, it was wonderful to be at Glasgow when we won our Hugo after, what was it, 10 years? And the energy at the con was just wonderful. Like, you know, so many people came up to me and said, "we've been rooting for you, we're really happy that the magazine has won." That was delightful, and it was delightful to see all this outpouring of love from the community.

I don't know that I've seen a huge difference in the year since in the quality of the attention the magazine is getting, because I think we've always had that kind of quality of attention, and people have always rooted for us in the community, I think. But yeah, it's always lovely to get recognition of the work that you do and similarly, I've seen quite a few of the stories I've edited and also stories that we have taken as a team, have been getting recognition of various kinds. It's really nice to see that you've helped shepherd something into the world, and get that attention on it.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, I think that's the most rewarding thing, when I've seen someone come through here, and maybe it's their first sale or among their first, and then you hear about them getting a book deal and it's like, "hey, that's great! I just read you here like, last year! That's amazing."

Hebe Stanton: One of the things that I really love most about doing this with Strange Horizons is the number of new authors we work with. It is always a delight to be able to accept somebody's first story, or first pro story, because I think new authors are often doing very interesting and exciting things that we might not have seen before, and it's just nice to be able to shepherd something great into the world that might not have had the same opportunity elsewhere.

Kat Kourbeti: Exactly. And like you say, the spectrum of what is a Strange Horizons story is quite wide, so a lot of things fit in there very nicely.

Can you tell us anything about the novelette period that just ended? 'Cause we don't often do longer pieces of work. So what led to that decision?

Hebe Stanton: I think we wanted to run a submission period rather than solicit, because that kind of seems like a nicer way to do things, and it's quite hard to place a novelette, so I guess offering that opportunity in a way that more people could access, I think was the goal behind that. But yeah, I'm really enjoying diving into the novelettes, it's a length that I vibe with. I think it's still got the sort of clarity and focus of the short story, you can still do some very striking images in a novelette, but there's a bit more space to expand on the characters, on the narrative, to tell a more developed arc. A short story's a moment, or very crystallized, very stripped down sort of form. Having a little bit more meat on the bones is also fun to work with.

I'm also excited for our Indigenous submissions period, which is coming up in November, just because I personally would like to see more indigenous stories, and also just in the world generally. I think that would be good, so I'm hoping to get some really interesting submissions.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. That's exciting. Since this episode is in fact being recorded the week before it goes out, I will put a link to the page with the information for folks to have a look at that. But I'm excited to see the fruits of your labor in the special issues, but also just in general. You guys do the core work that we are known for, and you're all great, so thank you so much for everything you do at Strange Horizons.

Hebe Stanton: Thank you for what you do on the podcast. I think the Strange Horizons at 25 podcast has been a really good way of highlighting what we all do.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, it's been a fun little look back. It's not gonna go on forever so it is, you know, just capturing the moment and looking back a little bit. But I'm glad that we get to do these for this little anniversary issue, and we'll see where time will take us.

But yeah, are you working on anything yourself outside of the magazine, like your own writing perhaps?

Hebe Stanton: Sporadically, I would say. I have a personal blog of reviews and science fiction criticism, so I'm exploring ways to get back into that and reenergize that.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, I do enjoy your reviews actually. They can be very cutting, which I appreciate. Honestly, I like a reviewer who doesn't mince their words.

Hebe Stanton: Thank you.

Kat Kourbeti: So everyone go check out Hebe's blog, and thank you so much for taking the time to chat to me, and all the best for the anniversary and beyond.

Hebe Stanton: Thank you very much.

Romie Stott, Administrative Editor & Senior Poetry Editor

Kat Kourbeti: And I am here with Romie Stott, who is a Poetry editor and our Managing editor. Hello!

Romie Stott: Hi. Although actually the title we came up with is Administrative Editor. I think it overlaps a lot with Managing Editor, but kind of at the same time that we got rid of the Editor in Chief role, we were like, we'll just kind of make our own titles.

And so Gautam was like, "I'll be the Coordinating Editor since what I do is figure out how the departments are going to work together", and I was like "I'll be the Administrative Editor since what I'm doing is a lot of paperwork."

Kat Kourbeti: Fair enough. I've always been a little confused by it because it's like, in essence, there isn't an Editor in Chief, but the responsibility is kind of like divvied.

Romie Stott: Yeah, and we've done that before as a magazine. There was a time when we ran with two Editors in Chief simultaneously. I actually wasn't there for that, that kind of perfectly overlaps with my little hiatus, where I was off in Italy doing all kinds of stuff, and then I came back and so, it actually works really well.

I mean, kind of in the same way with the rest of the magazine that since it's volunteers and since we're 25, we like to have everything happen in depth and with backup people, because sometimes you wind up having several months where you're, I don't know, working on a dissertation or doing caretaking for a sick relative or working on a novel that you have coming out. So as much as possible, we try and make sure that no one is indispensable.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, you've been with the magazine like a long time now, haven't you?

Romie Stott: Yeah, it has been a long time. I think I've been with the magazine for about half of the time that it's existed.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. On and off, and with gaps and all that, but still, big chunk of your life.

Romie Stott: I had time to be published by the magazine one time before I was on staff and could not submit anything.

Kat Kourbeti: Such is the fate of the volunteer, unfortunately. What has that journey been like for you? From joining in and seeing the magazine kind of change and evolve through this time?

Romie Stott: Well, you know, I've spent most of my time in the Poetry department, so more of what I've watched that's been interesting to me has been to see how things outside of Strange Horizons have changed. Strange Horizons was one of the first kind of web-first publications, where it wasn't like we were publishing print, then have a website on the side. The website's always been our real thing and our focus, and 25 years ago there really weren't very many places doing that at all. There were a few, and pretty much all of them have folded at this point. So it's more like when I look back, I think some of the other magazines that I thought of as really our peers that kind of peeled away, and then I think of the magazines that I think of as our peers now, which didn't exist then and kind of rose up.

Since I, at this point, I'm doing a lot of the logistics, when I'm talking with the editors of those magazines when we run into each other at conventions to be like, "oh, how are you handling this internally?" And it's kind of interesting because a number of them will quite openly be like, "oh, well we copied your model". I'll be like, "well, but you do it really differently than us." And they're like, "oh yeah, like we changed it in this way and this way and this way". And so I find that I'm often trying to bring in innovations that have come from them where they're like, "but we got it from you." And I'm like, "but we don't do that." And they're like, "but we perceived that you were moving in the direction of doing that". So that's more what I've seen is, those kinds of shifts in the landscape.

For example, when Strange Horizons started, having a big volunteer staff was pretty innovative, and it still is somewhat. But the model of "we're not gonna pay the editors" was a real political statement at the time, because we were just coming out of— you know, again, 25 years ago— we were just coming out of seeing over and over these scandals, where there were magazines or writing contests or things with submission fees where the editor was getting paid and the writers weren't. So it was just this vampire kind of publishing industry of, you're doing it for the exposure and you're lining the pocket of the person who's reading the submissions. And Strange Horizons was like, we're doing the opposite. Like we don't pay editors, period. We always pay writers.

And now it's kind of circling back around to, 'well, but it's not equitable, we need to be paying the editors because now you're privileging the viewpoints of the kinds of people who can afford to be volunteer editors". And that's been a big push from Clarkesworld and from Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and I really admire what they're doing in that space, but then also being somebody who's been around for this long being like, "yeah, but I know why we did it the other way", and I don't know that we're ready to abandon that.

Similarly, in poetry specifically, I think back to a lot of the magazines that I really miss that were doing only speculative poetry. I mean, Goblin Fruit, I miss so much, or like inkscrawl, I miss, like— there were a number of them that I read that are just not around anymore, 'cause the editors moved on to other things, and because it is still financially difficult to do this, and that was before you had Patreon and things like that. Being a donation funded magazine was really difficult before you had the infrastructure of Patreons and Kickstarters and that kind of thing. It's still difficult, but it was even more so.

It's also been interesting to see, like— I don't know, about 10, 15 years ago, we were still standing up for the idea that speculative poetry counted as literary poetry, that it didn't need to be just kind of doggerel. I know that there are people who really love the poems in the Lord of the Rings, but I know that most people just skip them, and I am one of those most people. And there was kind of this history of thinking of science fiction and fantasy poetry as being that, when what I and the other poetry editors at the time and still were seeing was, "oh, but the internet is so much a part of people's lives now, science is so much a part of people's lives now, but also, what are the mythic figures they're drawing on?" Mythology in itself we're willing to say is speculative poetry, but people are writing poems about Superman, and we all understand that that's culturally significant.

And so we were having to constantly stand up for the idea of "this is valid as literature, even though it has these science fiction and fantasy elements", and then there was the much harder fight of actually going to science fiction and fantasy readers and being like, "you should be reading poetry; it's not bad in the way that you maybe thought it was. There's a space for you and it's doing a different thing, and it can be opening kind of the emotional fantastical out to you." And I think we've been really successful about that, and it's the thing that I am most personally proud of Strange Horizons for, is the fact that we are publishing fiction and poetry and essays and book reviews.

So you might be showing up at the page to read a short story, but then you're like, "oh, okay, I'll take a chance on this even though it doesn't seem like my thing, because I'm excited by the little hook that's on the menu". And I think that in the same way that we help readers discover new writers and new voices— which is, again, so much a part of what we care about— I also feel like we're letting people expand into sort of sub genres and side alleys that they're like, "I'm not usually this kind of reader, but I'll check it out".

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, I mean it's a big part of what sets Strange Horizons apart from a lot of other speculative markets, because poetry is so much at the forefront of what we do. I certainly hadn't considered speculative poetry, like as a writer, as something that I could potentially branch out to or even try, really, 'cause I hadn't written poetry in a long time until I read some in Strange Horizons and I was like, "wow, that's so simple and so effective, look at all this stuff that people are doing!" Especially the stuff with the strange formatting and the strange interactive web elements. There's a lot of stuff that Strange Horizons really pushes the boundary of what you even think poetry might be, which is great.

And then to see things like the Speculative Poetry Hugo this year is just a great part of that journey of speculative poetry being really recognized, and I think there's even a bit of a boom in it right now.

Romie Stott: Yeah, and I mean, props to our web team and also to the poets who think it's possible, because yeah, sometimes we're publishing stuff that's in formats that we could not be doing in print. We've published poems where it's a spreadsheet that you can reorganize. We've published poems that you click and it animates and transforms.

And— hopping over to the administrative editor side, that's been a kind of continuing conversation, of how do we deal with the fact that we are technology forward and technology moves along. Like we've had to make some kind of internal rules about how long we'll support something, because it might be in a version of Java that we can't run anymore and it breaks. And like, how many attempts are we gonna make to repair it? Versus at what point do we say, "okay, this is just an archived piece and we'll describe what it was like, but we can't host it anymore". Because, you know, ideally we would have a permanent archive, but in some cases we run into kind of a technological limitation there.

And I'll say there are also some styles of poem that are harder for us to do than a print magazine. Something that I run into is, if there's a poem that requires very intense visual formatting, you know, the sorts of poems where it's like, "oh, it matters that it's forming the shape of a keyhole. Oh, it matters that it's forming the shape of a balloon", that is quite challenging to do on HTML because again, we are looking for maximum accessibility and people are reading on different size screens, and we are a volunteer staff and we're not running multiple versions of the website that like check, this is the version for iPhone and this is the— we have one version, 'cause we don't have time to make a bunch of versions and we just have to kind of do the best fit. We're also concerned about, is this still compatible with a screen reader?

So yeah, sometimes there are some poems that people send me that it's like, are you sure that you've thought about who's gonna be publishing this? 'Cause it's not gonna look like what you sent us. And people have been very like, "oh yeah, of course we know". It's like, "okay, just we might have to change some line breaks." Not because you were wrong, but because it's gonna run off the page.

Kat Kourbeti: I am fascinated by that, by the formats that might break because technology moves, because I certainly have been guilty of this where I've thought, "this will be here forever, right? Like, why would this not work after a while?" And then you see websites break because stuff needs to keep updating. So that's really fascinating and a little sad, but... what do you do right?

Romie Stott: Yeah, I mean, shout out to the Internet Archive. Like, there have definitely been websites that I've had to go back and be like, can you show me what it looked like in 2007, maybe?

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

And for yourself, poetry has been your love, and the thing that you still do for the magazine. What was it like taking up more of the logistics stuff as your journey brought you this way? Was that quite a challenge?

Romie Stott: Well, that was always a natural fit for me, like in my life outside the magazine, my graduate degree is in film, I'm a film producer. All of that stuff is actually closer to really what my aptitude is most of the time, and I sort of wound up stepping into it in a backup capacity with our previous Editor in Chief, Ness (Phin Rose), which is kind of why I was able to then bridge it when Ness stepped down, because I was already getting called in as a backup, I'll say partially by virtue of being based in the US. Like, we have such an international editorial staff, but legally the magazine is based in the US, the bank accounts are in the US, so you need to always have somebody in the US who can do things like physically show up in a bank if need be. Ness was also US based, but I was the backup, and it was partially because of having worked in the international film scene. I was normally pretty able to troubleshoot getting money to somebody in a country that we didn't usually get money into.

Some of the more exciting logistical times for that have been— there was one time I needed to get money to someone in Cameroon and we could not get money into Cameroon, but I could at that time get money into Nigeria, and I knew somebody who lived on the border of Cameroon who just like drove it in. There was another time that we needed, after a fund drive, somebody had just gotten some postcards from us, and the postcards were physically in like Washington, DC area, and we needed to get it into Australia, but it was during COVID and Australia had completely locked down international mail. You could not get mail into Australia for a while. But my cousin's brother-in-law was in the Australian government and was visiting him in Texas for Christmas, so I got the postcards to Texas, which were then handed off and hand couriered in the luggage of an Australian government worker back into Australia, who then put them into the internal Australian Post.

So it's a lot of logistics behind the scene like that, that I actually find really interesting. Like on a simpler note, one of the rewards that we delivered this year was a book that we did need to get into a war zone in Ukraine. But that just meant the postage was expensive, that wasn't actually that complicated. I'm trying to think of any other— oh yeah, there was a time when we had a reviewer who was based in Libya, and again, with international sanctions, I was not gonna be able to send any dollars into Libya. So we just had to kind of hold it in escrow until he was, I think in Germany, and then we could say like— it's stuff like that.

Kat Kourbeti: Wow. But it does sound like your background as a producer helped you troubleshoot there, 'cause that's a lot of what producers do.

Romie Stott: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: Oh, but that's kind of fun in its own way, right?

Romie Stott: It's actually my favorite part, like, it's not speculative, it goes into more like espionage thriller—

Kat Kourbeti: A little bit!

Romie Stott: —but it's like, it's pretty fun.

Kat Kourbeti: That is pretty fun. Oh, that's so cool.

So you've taken the helm of being the signature person now, but it's kind of a tandem role, right? Like the poetry still is something that you get to do.

Romie Stott: Yeah, with the rest of the Poetry department.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Romie Stott: We really are an even-handed staff within the Poetry department. I mean, all four of us are doing the same amount of reading and accepting and deciding how things run so, about three months of the year I'm very intensively being the Poetry editor, and the rest of the time I feel very, very confident about the decisions of everybody else. I mean, we're all around all of the time, but we make sure that it's something that gives us a lot of breathing room to pursue our own, other projects.

Kat Kourbeti: Which is great, and it also kind of gives the Poetry department its own personality— like we all, every department kind of does that, because it's all quite a equitable sort of thing and every editor gets to pick their own things, but it's really nice to know that you can count on your team.

Do you guys get together very much, virtually or otherwise? Or is it just kind of like texting, emails?

Romie Stott: I mean, I think we're all actually like very sociable and pleasant people, but like there, there is that sort of quiet bookish, scribbling in an attic, lowering down muffins in like a hand basket aspects to like being a poet. So we all, I think, are pretty comfortable with taking care of our own work, like the, a lot of the peace of it is just basically being like, I'm gonna leave you alone, you're gonna leave me alone. We actually like each other, but we also like that we are sitting quietly in separate rooms.

Kat Kourbeti: That is the quintessential image of the poet right there.

Romie Stott: Yeah, unfortunately we are completely that. Again, we're each pretty fabulous and fascinating in person. But I dunno, there is something nice about having a really quiet space, and also, again, not second guessing each other. If an editor accepts something, they've just accepted it and that's it. So knowing that you can say, "I like this kind of poem, send it to me", it's gonna go through. Nobody's gonna say, "well, but that's not my favorite". Doesn't matter.

And I think that's a lot of what I find exciting about it, is not just the fact of having less workload, it's being able to also enjoy the poetry in the magazine as a reader, because it's not stuff that I've fought over or worked over or had to like pick. It's somebody else whose taste I really respect a lot, said, "hey, read this". I'm gonna read that.

Kat Kourbeti: And then I suppose the other question is, what has this last year been like for the Poetry department, and perhaps you can tell us a little bit about the general attention the magazine has gotten in the last year, 'cause certainly since the Hugo win, but just, you know, also because it's our 25th anniversary and it's quite a long time we've been around... what has this last year been like for you?

Romie Stott: I definitely can't speak for the Poetry department as a whole on this, because again, we're very head down, get your work done, independent study, like as a team. I felt really glad to see the Poetry Hugo happen. It was fairly personally affirming because it was a poem I accepted, that won. So it's like, ha ha! The industry at large agrees that I am making choices that please the industry at large!

But it also, like, yeah, I already knew that was a good poem. They were all such good poems. It's like it's my job to pick favorites, but it's also so hard to pick favorites because there's so much exciting stuff that's out there, including a lot of the stuff I reject, 'cause we can only take so many poems. So it's also exciting to see those things then publish somewhere else where it's like, yeah, I knew that was good. Like we couldn't take it, but that poet's great. I think I would've been thrilled for anybody winning, because there's so much exciting writing going on, and it's also so encouraging to see people deciding to start writing poetry that didn't really think of that as possible for them.

And I think social media has been very good for poetry because it's so easy to share a poem, or to just like read your daily poem, like as a way to like pep yourself up. So I think poetry reading is really at a high right now, and I've been glad to see it because it's fun to play with language, and it's fun to think about how to intensify the way that you're expressing something, or how to say it in a way that's vivid, that's not a cliche, that gets to the heart of it. And I think a lot of those skills then translate back into prose writing very well, so it's really a virtuous circle. I think a lot of the writers that I like do both. There are some that do one or the other, but I think it's really common, so it actually feels much less siloed. It doesn't feel like, "oh, and here are the poets". It's like, "oh, and here are the poets who are, in many cases, the same people who are the fiction writers".

And I also like funny poetry quite a bit. This has been a year that I've felt that that's really been needed. When I see something that makes me laugh, it's such a relief. And being able to still have all the connections, just knowing that people are still writing and are still sending things in, and are still to see and treasure little moments. I think that's a very sustaining thing, as it was during COVID, and as it is kind of anytime we have political turmoil. Even if it is a sadder, angry poem, you know, the fact that you're responding with a poem is itself, I think, really beautiful.

Meanwhile I'll say in my personal life, it's just been a really hectic year. I've had a lot going on, but then I also— my first novel came out, Nothing in the Basement, and I've also been back and forth to New York a lot in development on a couple of stage musicals. One of them went up briefly in May, and then the other one, I'm actually about to head down on Monday to do another kind of preview of. So it's been a little bit of fitting Strange Horizons in around that, and my day job, and my family.

Kat Kourbeti: And all the creative stuff, but it's great that it's all going well. Very excited to hear about the musicals. Are they speculative in any way?

Romie Stott: They are, they're both speculative and I'm not the music writer and I'm actually not the lyricist, I'm just the book writer. So one of 'em is a 10 minute musical that went up in May that is called First, Contact, and it is about, that NASA has received a signal that they think might be alien, they haven't actually confirmed it yet. And they're like, "so everybody be calm, we're reporting that this has happened". But of course people are not calm, so it's about kind of a conversation that happens in a bar after that.

And then the full length musical, which is the one that I'm heading down on Monday to work on some more, is called The Lady Takes The Mic, and it's a musical that's actually about a failed musical from like 30 years ago that everybody's kind of reminiscing about in a piano bar. We just like setting things in bars! But Death and Cupid are also there, and everybody just kind of accepts that they're just bar patrons who are dressed like this essentially, but they do have supernatural powers and are able to do things like take us back and forward in time, or take us into what people are thinking.

Kat Kourbeti: Are we talking togas or?

Romie Stott: We're, we are! We're talking Death in like a, a big old—

Kat Kourbeti: Robe?

Romie Stott: Huge robe with a scythe that he does have to like, check at the coat check. We are talking Cupid with wings and little underpants, and like a little tiny gold bow that he treats like a purse.

Kat Kourbeti: Excellent. Oh, I hope I get to see that someday. That sounds delightful, and congrats on the novel also. It's a lot of work to get to that point.

Romie Stott: Yeah, it is a shorter novel, so it's a very easy, comfortable read. I kind of tell people, if you're looking for something for your book group, that they will actually finish in time, it's a shorter little novel.

Kat Kourbeti: I love a short novel personally, the same way that I love novellas— excellent length, 10/10.

Romie Stott: Absolutely. I think especially when you're kind of writing horror, and this is horror— it's nice because filler is not scary. No disrespect to Stephen King, who I love and who writes huge door stops. He could do it; I don't know that I could write something that stays scary for that long.

Kat Kourbeti: Absolutely. So, yeah, I mean— 25 years, uh, long may we reign?

Romie Stott: Yeah!

Kat Kourbeti: Do you have any hopes or wishes as we go into year 26?

Romie Stott: As administrative editor, what I'm always really looking at is just sustainability. So I'm just always trying to get revenue regularized, trying to make sure that we stay— I want us to keep the balance of being idealistic and being ambitious, but also not getting burned out. Because we could very easily churn through people because we can just say, "oh, well, but it's constantly evolving, we're constantly changing" and it's like, yeah, but we've made some great stuff that has then caused like mass resignations 'cause everybody's too tired. So unfortunately it's my job to kind of always push for the boring stuff, to be like, "let's just keep moving forward in a very smooth and predictable way."

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, I think I've been guilty of coming up with some great ideas, and then you're like, "yeah, but can you do that though?" And then I'm like, "hmm, she's right. No, I couldn't." I'm definitely the very excitable, you know, "shiny new idea, must explore it" kind of person, and then I don't think about future me who's gonna have to deal with the actual logistics of putting all that stuff together until it's all happening. And then I'm like, "oh no, I don't have the time for this."

Romie Stott: Yeah, I mean, same. So do we all, which is why there has to be somebody at the magazine to be like—

Kat Kourbeti: "Guys!" And I thank you for that. I think it's crucial to strike that balance and I do think that we're all working on some cool stuff going forward, but it is important to just keep in mind like that it is real people doing this stuff, and it does take time and effort and all of that.

Romie Stott: Yeah I think if I was picking my title again, it would just be Wet Blanket Editor. Wet Blanket editor, that's me!

Kat Kourbeti: "Will not blanket say yes to everything," and I respect that.

So thank you so much for taking some time out of your day to talk to me and to share a little bit about your experience of Strange Horizons, and look forward to seeing more of your edited poetry and all of the good stuff.

Romie Stott: Yeah, we have so many cool poems lined up. I'm so excited by everything that we have coming up. It's some really good things.

[You can find Romie's website here.]

Gautam Bhatia, Coordinating Editor

Kat Kourbeti: And I am here with Gautam, who is our Coordinating Editor, which is an unusual title. Is that your favorite title?

Gautam Bhatia: It is the title.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Gautam Bhatia: And just to give some background on that: when our last editor in chief, Ness, moved on a few years ago, we decided that it was more in keeping with the anarchic flat structure of the magazine to not have an Editor in Chief, but to divide up some of the administrative roles among ourselves.

So mine was that of Coordinating Editor, which means that the primary task is to make sure that the weekly issue is published, which is actually quite easy because the work is done by all the departments. I just have to read it once at the backend, make sure that there is nothing egregiously off somewhere, which has never been the case, and then just hit publish.

So that's about it. Other than that, the work involves doing the magazine's public facing tasks, liaising with award committees, getting into fights with the Hugo committee every year about the masthead, and just doing all of that correspondence. And in a certain way also, just mediating internal conflicts within the magazine, which again have been very few. It's not really been required, just a couple of times perhaps. And finally, to oversee the Fund Drive, to ensure that it's working and again coordinating basically, in the classic anarchist formulations, administration of things, and not a government of people. Just like that.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, someone has to pull the strings together, because there's so many of us.

Gautam Bhatia: But someone has to hit publish basically. Just think of it that way.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. Someone has to hit the big red button!

Gautam Bhatia: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: And that's not all that you do, because you never gave up your original position at the magazine, right?

Gautam Bhatia: Yeah, I joined the magazine in 2016 as one of the four new Articles editors, and then three or four years later, when at that time Ness was the head of the Articles department and Ness became the EIC, then I became, I guess we called it "Senior Articles Editor", just overseeing the department. And then when Ness moved on, I became Coordinating Editor, but I stayed on as an Articles Editor as well. So that's been nine years in that position.

Kat Kourbeti: Wow. Nine years is such a long time. It's almost half the life of the magazine, like, getting there. I think both you and Romie are among the longest serving folks, and so it makes sense that you're also overseeing things, because you've just seen it all basically.

Gautam Bhatia: Yeah, it's been a while. (laughs)

Kat Kourbeti: What's it like sharing that kind of managing, coordinating position with someone? I'm assuming it's a good thing to be able to share that load.

Gautam Bhatia: Yeah, for sure, because Romie handles the finances and I have no head for finances at all. I just know that we have a budget and that you have to stick to it, and that we need to raise money every year in the Fund Drive. That's about it, but the banking stuff is handled by Romie. And it's fluid, so if for whatever reason I'm not around on a Monday, Romie can publish, and does publish the issues. Sometimes, we correspond together in certain contexts. Like right now we are corresponding on a Japanese special issue with the Japanese editors, so Romie is telling them about the funding, finances, answering them about structure of the issue, things like that. So it's a very good thing to share that load.

I will say, I think that Romie's role is far more strenuous than mine, because handling the accounts I think is a lot more effort than hitting publish.

Kat Kourbeti: There is no hierarchy here—

Gautam Bhatia: Yeah, yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: And I feel like that's the point. It's just different. It's different stuff.

Gautam Bhatia: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: So in this nine year tenure, how has the magazine changed? Has there been a journey? Do you feel like you've seen things come and go?

Gautam Bhatia: One is when the staff keeps changing, because of course we have volunteer roles, right? Attrition is quite high, and understandably people have lives to live and capitalism, you never know when something comes along. But the magazine's core values have always, I think, remained constant.

I think our biggest point of pride's always been that we have been and continue to be many writers' first sale. So in that way, doing what we can to mitigate some of the gatekeeping that really, I think, taints this genre. So I think that's continued, and just making sure that we are progressive as a magazine and that we have no tolerance for racism, misogyny, any kind of anti trans behavior, any of that. Anti genocide, of course, it's also very important. So I think we've remained that and we've done that, and you know, (at the) last Hugo Awards spoke for Palestine from the stage.

So yeah, I think that's just been our consistent stand throughout, and the people in the magazine have always reflected that. I think the new thing that's happened during my time has been our geographic special issues. So from Palestine, to Mexico, to Brazil, to Nigeria, to Southeast Asia and so on. I think they do two things: one is that they let us spotlight to the English speaking genre world, areas, places, people that otherwise might not be spotlit, and then introduce new writers to people, but also they help us take stands on issues. A science fiction magazine has a very tiny scope for actually meaningfully intervening in the world, but when we can do something like a Palestine special issue at this time, that is something we can do. And so this geographic special issue lets us do something with respect to what's happening around us.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. It's been certainly a point of pride for me, since my joining the team in 2020, you know, putting a little bit of something towards the podcast part of it has been so much fun. And just, yeah, like you say, taking a stand in the current climate and especially watching others kind of not do that, it's been great to be part of a magazine where we all really care about this stuff here.

How do those ideas happen, for the special issues? Have you spearheaded any of them? Or do they come from other places?

Gautam Bhatia: So it really depends. For example, the Palestine special issue, one of our former editors, Rasha, was just lamenting, and rightly, the absence of focus on Palestine in genre space. And I said, why don't we do a Palestine special issue? And that's how it happened.

And one issue that I spearheaded myself and conceptualized was the extractivism special issue, Science Fiction and Extractivism. In fact, there's a personal story there that the person who is now the person I'm with, who at that time was not the person I was with, was the one who suggested Extractivism and gave me a bunch of readings, and the entire issue was actually conceptualized around the readings that she gave to me. So I acknowledge her in the introduction.

But otherwise, it was a democratic process, right? We solicit suggestions on the Slack for next year's special issues, because we have to fund them using the Fund Drive, the stretch goals, and then we just pick three or four and we go with them. So it's just a crowd-sourced set of ideas.

Kat Kourbeti: In which case the geographical diversity of the staff—

Gautam Bhatia: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: Helped with that, which is great. Super cute to hear that there's a little like, romance story hidden in the Extractivism special issue!

Gautam Bhatia: Yeah, actually, we had fallen out of touch for a few months for external reasons, and the day the issue came out, I emailed her and I said, "look, this is all inspired by our readings". And so we began talking again and we have never stopped talking after that.

Kat Kourbeti: I love hearing stories like this, and I love that this isn't the first or only time that Strange Horizons has fostered love in some capacity. I think one of the next episodes that will air in the Strange Horizons at 25 series is an interview with Tim Pratt, who met their wife because of a Strange Horizons party. I love hearing stories like this because it's just the meeting of people with similar ideas, and just how that can blossom into the real world. How lovely.

And also, yeah, I mean, I really liked that essay about the Expanse in that issue.

Gautam Bhatia: Yes!

Kat Kourbeti: Which is one of my favorite science fiction series ever, and just to see that kind of analysis on it? Fantastic. Highly recommend to anyone who hasn't read it. We'll link that in the description there.

Watching all of that happen over nine years and you've still been doing the articles editing stuff... What has that journey been like for you, going from volunteering as a writer to taking up more responsibility as an editor and then now, just adding on top of that plate?

Gautam Bhatia: I think it's been good. It's been so incremental. So I began by reviewing, just being a reviewer, 2014. So it's now been, I think 11 years since the time I submitted my first review to Strange Horizons. Abigail Nussbaum was the editor back then. And then I was added to the Reviews pool and I began to review more frequently.

In 2016, they opened up for Articles positions. I applied because I really enjoyed working with the Reviews department and just felt that this was the right place for me to be at. And then I spent three years in the Articles department, then two or three years as Senior Articles Editor, and then Coordinating Editor.

So it's just been this very slow process where I just learn more and more about the magazine and as my roles change, so it's never felt as if anything is rushed. It's always been very nicely paced.

Kat Kourbeti: That's great. And of course it's not just you running the whole Articles department either. You're sharing the load with more Articles Editors.

First of all, I mean, I love the stuff that you guys do in the Articles team. How does it complement and/or juxtapose what happens through the work of the Reviews team?

Gautam Bhatia: Yeah, I think on many occasions, Reviews and Articles deal with the same subject matter, but from a different lens and on a different scale. So one of my favorite articles that I edited was a cold pitch about Orientalism in the works of Guy Gavriel Kay, and for me that was very important because as a teenager, as a child, Guy Gavriel Kay was a foundational influence on me, and epic fantasy works.

Then at some point, unfor— this is why you should not follow your favorites on Twitter, because then you find out about their politics and this ruins the whole thing— so unfortunately, he turned out to be, have quite bad views on— and this is far before genocide, this is the mid 2010s, but of course at that time there was still like violence and there was still massacres that Israel was committing regularly in Gaza and in the West Bank. And his views were basically repugnant to me, and so I stopped reading him because... you can't do it. But then actually this essay really made me understand all the latent, not just Oriental, but anti-Arab undercurrents of Guy Gavriel Kay's work, which made so much more sense after that.

So while Reviews would be, you know, reviewing specific works, and sometimes of course Reviews also does more big picture things, we compliment each other in that Reviews is the focus, and then we are like the wide lens.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. I've really enjoyed seeing the analyses that come out of the articles and the kind of broader picture looks at genre, from all different perspectives and in all different kinds of situations. It's been great.

And how does the Articles department work? Like how do you divide the work amongst yourselves as editors?

Gautam Bhatia: Yeah, there are three of us right now. So what we do is that at the beginning of the year we divide up months amongst ourselves based on who is free when, and we take one month slot each in the Fund Drive, because we have no December issue. And then Samovar, the translated magazine, takes up three of the slots.

It ends up being roughly three to four articles a year for each of us, and then the columns, which come in regularly, and then it's up to us. So we can commission, we can take it from the cold pitch, that's up to us, each of us.

When I joined there was a mix of articles, conversations, round tables and interviews. Over the years, I think we have moved more towards an article focus, essay focus, and I personally like that. I think it gives you the scope to explore ideas in depth. And of course we still do interviews, we still do conversations. I personally enjoy articles and essays the most, so yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: And how would, like, a new person who would like to get in touch with you to perhaps pitch something, what's that process like for new folks entering fray?

Gautam Bhatia: Yeah, unfortunately our email addresses have been down for the longest time now, but they can always pitch us individually. My email address is on the masthead, it's just my name, Gautam dot Strange Horizons @gmail.com. I know that because I just had to disclose that for a US Visa application, so I had to write down the email address. So if they email me with a pitch, that's how they find us.

Kat Kourbeti: So with all of that said, you've watched the magazine's sort of both stay the same and also evolve over this time— what has this last year been like for you, as we celebrate 25 years, and you know, with a recent Hugo win and all of this stuff, what feelings does that evoke in you?

Gautam Bhatia: I think the longevity of the magazine is incredible, especially because our funding is entirely crowdsourced every single year. And when I joined, I think that we were already at that time one of the longest running online magazines, and now of course we still are because it's been nine years since then. So I'm just very thankful for just how long we've been around, and doing what we are doing and the way we're doing it. I think it's something that we never take for granted because in this world, in capitalism, like when the money will dry up, who knows, right? So just grateful for every single year and 25 years is, you know... yeah, hopefully 25 more and then 25 more, until the heat death of the universe, you know? (laughs)

But yeah, the thing again is that as the Coordinating Editor, it's pretty much the same thing year on year, so it's just like, you're grateful for surviving and thriving one more year. And of course doing new things and planning new things, and hopefully we'll have a book out at some point, things like that. So you know, tallying all those things is always a highlight.

Kat Kourbeti: It's been really fun seeing the response from people to stuff that we do, the whole time I've been here, but especially this year, I guess because you don't think about time until it just hits a milestone.

Gautam Bhatia: Yeah, yeah. It creeps up on you. Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: So it's just been really great to see how much what we do has meant to people.

Gautam Bhatia: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: And as a closing thing, we were recording this, I think a couple of days after your actual birthday, so—

Gautam Bhatia: Ah, yes. Yes.

Kat Kourbeti: Happy belated birthday!

Gautam Bhatia: Thank you! Thank you.

Kat Kourbeti: And so as we go into year 26 and beyond, what would you like to say to the team at Strange Horizons and to the readers and listeners who are reading and/or listening to this interview?

Gautam Bhatia: I think it's been a great journey, and I think it's important to just hold on to the really core principles and values that make us who we are, both for the team and for those who read us. And we'll always try and do that, as long as we're around, we always try and make sure that we hold fast to these principles in a world which seems to value them less and less, especially with the genocide on, something that you really feel that you're powerless to really stop. But at least in your own little sphere, it's even more important to make sure that we are continuing to articulate those principles and values.

Kat Kourbeti: Absolutely. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat to me today. It's been a pleasure.

Gautam Bhatia: My pleasure as well. Thank you.

[You can find Gautam's website here.]

​​Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, so that was all of the interviews that I recorded over the last week or so, just in advance of this issue. And it's been really fun to get to talk to everybody from all of these different departments, some of whom I'd never actually had a conversation with before. It was really lovely.

It's really fun to meet people from all over the world who are part of what you do. It's a strange experience, I think, for most people.

Michael Ireland: It is, it's a very strange place, but it is really nice that we do get to speak to the other teams, and get to see the faces and all the things that they enjoy as well, because we get to see all the amazing work that they put out. But it's really nice to just sit back and have a chat, and let them talk about how they've been doing it, and how they're doing.

Kat Kourbeti: And some of them for a very long time too. It's kind of astounding to me, how long each of them has kept going and then just how all of that feeds into this, which I hope that readers and listeners have also appreciated and enjoyed. And then, yeah, we have plans also going forward, both for this podcast and the podcast in general, and... outside the podcast, question mark? So tell the listeners where we're gonna be pretty soon.

Michael Ireland: So we have World Fantasy Con around the corner at the end of October, in the town of Brighton in the UK, and Kat and myself will be in attendance along with some other team members of Strange Horizons, and we may have an age old tradition coming back, which is... get your cups at the ready, get your kettles on your back (?), and fill a cup up, 'cause the Tea Party's back!

Kat Kourbeti: We're bringing the Tea Party back, that's right. A lot of writers that we've interviewed on Strange Horizons at 25 have said how big a part of their connection to Strange Horizons was, in the early days at least, of the Tea Party usually held at WisCon. And we thought, wouldn't it be fun to bring the Tea Party back?

And so with World Fantasy Con happening in our backyard this time in the UK, we thought we could do that. And so we're doing it, we're gonna have a lovely little social meetup, basically, it won't be structured like a panel or anything like that, but those of us from Strange Horizons who are going will be in attendance. We'll bring some lovely, delicious tea and maybe cake? I don't know, whatever I can find around Brighton, probably.

Michael Ireland: We'll bring the cake.

Kat Kourbeti: And so, yeah, so if you're coming to World Fantasy Con and you wanna meet us and also the rest of the team, I think Vanessa Jae from Poetry is coming, and Joyce Ch'ng from Articles is coming— and they're also gonna be in Fiction, I think, starting next year.

So please come and meet us and have a cup of tea and we'll have a lovely time. It's gonna be great.

Michael Ireland: It's gonna be a lot of fun. You'll get to see the chaos that me and Kat usually bring to these conventions.

Kat Kourbeti: Quite a bit of chaos. Organized, lovely, delicious chaos, but chaos nonetheless.

Michael Ireland: Yeah. I'm trying to put some of that on you, 'cause I know I bring the chaos and I'm like, "but Kat can't hold me accountable."

Kat Kourbeti: I will bring the tea this time. In fact, there's a lovely tea company that's Brighton-based that's my absolute favorite, and they have a big store opposite the convention hotel, and that is just destiny. It's just fate. I'll bring an assortment and it's gonna be delightful.

Michael Ireland: Perfect. And what does the future hold for the Strange Horizons podcast?

Kat Kourbeti: I mean, a lot of the same lovely stuff that we've been doing. The fiction will continue as it has, and hopefully with even more aplomb. We have new voices joining us, there's gonna be lots of lovely stuff happening. And we're not stopping this, even though I know I said initially September to September, but the fact is this wasn't enough, and I already have way more episodes recorded than I know what to do with, so we will do 25 episodes for 25 years, of Strange Horizons at 25.

So we'll finish that, wrap it up lovely in a bow and then— because this has been fun and because I've had a lot of authors say that this has been fun to listen to and that they'd love to come on, you know, people who were part of just the great big Strange Horizons family— I don't think we're stopping the interviews, it's just that we'll have to re-frame them, 'cause it will no longer be the 25th anniversary, you know, we have to let the podcast move along as well.

But there will be fun interview stuff as well, going forward. We're still looking for a new name for the podcast, so if anybody has ideas, send them to us. We're open to your suggestions.

And then we have some plans, which we're not fully ready to make announcements yet, because we have to figure out the timings and things... But I suppose suffice it to say that those of you who have been missing the poetry podcast can have something to look forward to in 2026. Vague announcement in the ether. Not announcement. Vague... just vague.

Michael Ireland: That's a teaser.

Kat Kourbeti: Vague teaser in the air.

Michael Ireland: We should have done it in rhyme.

Kat Kourbeti: Oh, no, God! I mean, can you tell I'm not really a practiced poet? We should have had Brandon (O'Brien)!

Michael Ireland: Yeah, I was gonna say, get Brandon on the phone.

Kat Kourbeti: Should have had Brandon write us a little something.

By the way, if you're listening to this and you were not present at the Hugos, watch the fantastic poem that Brandon used to introduce the Poetry Hugo with, because it's a delight and I really genuinely think he should be nominated for a Best Related Work Hugo next year, because oh my goodness, I cannot stress this enough, it was a thing of beauty.

Michael Ireland: So good. And he also— that was the introduction to (a poem from) Strange Horizons winning the Poetry Hugo.

Kat Kourbeti: We could not have known that, but yeah.

Michael Ireland: A nice little bonus for the 25th year.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. It really truly cemented Strange Horizons as one of the markets— speculative poetry has loads of homes for it, but we've been here for a very long time and championing this particular format, and what an amazing recognition that was. Just truly made me very happy.

So thank you for joining me today. As you like to say, "it's been emotional".

Michael Ireland: It has been.

Kat Kourbeti: And yeah, I look forward to everything else we're working on. It's been and continues to be a blast.

Michael Ireland: There's gonna be many more (things) to come from us, and the rest of Strange Horizons as we fly off into the future. Is that what we're doing? We're flying off?

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. To 26 and beyond.

Michael Ireland: To 26 and beyond. 26 is gonna be a good year, you know that?

Kat Kourbeti: I hope so. Yeah, I think so.

Michael Ireland: I mean that for 2026 and the 26th year for Strange Horizons, both of them. It feels like it's just still starting.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. It absolutely is only the beginning of, at the very least, what we are trying to do on this podcast. But we're also just on the general journey of the magazine, which continues to do great work all across the board. We have some great special issues coming next year. There's all sorts of fun stuff being planned that we just got funding for through the Fund Drive, so it's just gonna be a great year.

Michael Ireland: And yeah, if you're ever at any of the events or you ever want to talk to us, we make it fairly easy for us, where we're usually at all the conventions, at least myself and Kat. And we're on Blue Sky, I think that's one of the main ones as well as Instagram, that you're really gonna get all the updates about what's happening throughout the next year from Strange Horizons.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, you can obviously follow the magazine on both of those, those are our two main platforms. You can find Michael and me on there as well, and as he said, usually, the two of us will be at— not all the conventions, but possibly the big ones, you know, like, if it's UK based, we're probably there. If it's Worldcon and it's attainable, we're probably there. And if it's not us, someone from the team probably is. The good thing about being so global is that we're spread everywhere, and chances are someone from Strange Horizons is at your local con.

Michael Ireland: That's not, that's not a threat.

Kat Kourbeti: We are numerous and mysterious and you can't know which one of us are from Strange Horizons, but we are among you and, uh, you should know that.

And a big thanks, in fact, to everyone who's come out to talk to us at Seattle and other cons, who came to say hello, thank you and hey back, and it's been great to meet everybody. So we look forward to meeting even more of you. If you're coming to World Fantasy, please come say hi, and next year at other cons and stuff. And if not, on social media. Come say hey, tell us about your favorite episode. We'd love to hear about it.

Kat Kourbeti: Thank you so much for listening, and to all of our colleagues for taking the time to chat to us. A full transcript of this episode can be found on our website, Strange Horizons dot com.

Michael Ireland: Strange Horizons at 25 is a project helmed by Kat Kourbeti and Michael Ireland in collaboration with the Strange Horizons Editorial Collective. The music you're hearing now and at the beginning of the podcast was composed by Michael Ireland and Andrew Gorman.

Kat Kourbeti: Until next time,

Michael Ireland: —stay strange. (quietly)

Kat Kourbeti: Silly goose.

Michael Ireland: Yeah.

In this episode of the Strange Horizons Fiction podcast, Michael Ireland presents Malda Marlys' 'Of Flowing Stone, of Liquid Gold, of Justice, Ash, and Battle' read by Emmie Christie.

Subscribe to the Strange Horizons podcast: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠

Transcript

Critical Friends Episode 15: On Time-Pass

[Musical Intro]

Dan Hartland: Welcome to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast. I’m Dan Hartland, and in this episode I’ll be joined by the literary reviewer Sneha Pathak and the host of the remarkably good film criticism podcast, Going Rogue, Tansy Gardam.

In every episode of Critical Friends, I’m afraid we’ll be discussing SFF, reviewing what it is, why we do it, and how it’s going. In this episode, we’ll be talking about the kinds of texts which many don’t find worthy of criticism at all. How do we approach so-called ephemera books or movies or TikTok reels that are popular, populist, or popcorn.

We’ll discuss cosy fantasy and country house mysteries, gumshoe detectives and pirates of the Caribbean. We’ll have both Sherlock Holmes and John Wick. And we’ll try to figure out what it is we are doing when we spend time with a text that, perhaps only at first, exhibits few pretensions. We started that conversation, appropriately enough, with pulp fiction.

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: Sneha, you recently reviewed for Strange Horizons the new anthology from Blaft of Gujarati pulp fiction. And Blaft are doing great work in general in collecting, anthologizing, almost rescuing literatures that have been sort of marginalized or forgotten, whatever else, due to circumstances largely often beyond the actual control or quality of the texts themselves.

But you, in discussing this particular collection of Gujarati pulp fiction, use this phrase that really struck me and I wanted to unpack it more. And that’s this idea of “time-pass literature,” which you say is a very Indian concept, and I’d just be really interested to talk a little bit at first about why you use that phrase in relation to that particular anthology: what it means to you, and this idea that pulp fiction—and obviously pulp itself is an adjective with all kinds of connotations and implications—you connected with this idea of time-pass. What did you mean by that?

Sneha Pathak: So I don’t think that “time-pass literature” as such is a formal term or a formal category even here, but in Indian English “time-pass” is a fairly commonly used word, and that is something we tend to use both as a word as well as a verb and an adjective.

So, for instance, you’re sitting there, you’re doodling, and I come and say, “Hey Dan, what are you doing?” And you simply say, “Uh, time-pass,” and I’ll not ask you anything. Right? There’s no need to go into greater specifics about time-pass. So time-pass in that sense of a word can simply mean something which you are doing to pass the time.

In a more pejorative sense, parents can scold their kids—you know, they are spending so much, it’s time for you to study and what are you doing? Time-pass! Right? Passing the time, right, to while away your good days, not looking for a job or preparing for your exam. So one idea is that of time-pass as a verb.

And another would be I simply, you know, ask Tansy, “Tansy, how was the latest movie you watched, whatever the name was?” And she’ll say, “Uh, time-pass.” And I’m like, “OK!” She need not say anything more about it. I know, OK, it’s not something that I have to watch. So that word in itself is enough to convey a host of, um, let’s say ideas.

So when I was saying “time-pass literature,” that was the concept that I was trying to bring in, and comparing it with, or putting it in front of, “pulp fiction.” That idea came to me because of that one line which the translator had quoted or which she had said in the introduction, where she said that, you know, people asked her why was she wasting time with translating pulp fiction instead of proper literature or real literature? I’m forgetting the exact term.

So that was what sparked that idea and made me write or use the word time-pass literature, because I could imagine a lot of people read it, pulp fiction, especially during train rides or maybe plane rides—not so much today maybe where we have got reels and those YouTube shorts to do to, but before that, that would’ve been a common way of passing the time or time-pass. So it was from there that I used it in front of that literature to make it “time-pass literature.” That was what I was trying to convey.

This is the general understanding of pulp fiction: something which is not weighty, which is also sort of insignificant, good enough to pass the time when you have it. Something you would probably not necessarily recommend to anyone, or probably you would not even like to be seen reading or probably you would not even accept you read in proper social gatherings: “Oh yes, I read James Hadley Chase,” for example. You’d rather say, “Oh yes, I read Murakami.”

Dan Hartland: So, as you were reading it, were you were thinking, “Oh, I’m doing the time-pass thing here!” Was that—because I know some of the stories work for you more than others, and you have some really interesting things to say about particularly how the stories and how the collection approaches gender—but, as you were reading these, were you experiencing them in that way? Or do you think more that these are stories that have been experienced in that way and therefore were at risk prior to Blaft of just sort of disappearing?

Sneha Pathak: Because I was reading them with a certain aim in my mind because I was reading it to review, I was definitely not reading it for time-pass! Because, you know, I had to bring a certain seriousness in my reading.

Dan Hartland: Right, yeah, I’m sorry about that! I apologize!

Sneha Pathak: That’s quite okay! But I think I could actually that how a lot of people are, how the first audience, the original Gujarati audience, would’ve read it—how it is not something that would probably be a very serious occupation for them. That was something I could actually see and understand.

But when I was reading it, of course I was looking at the nuances, whatever I could write about. If I was reading it just for pleasure, maybe at least some of the stories I would’ve been, like, “Yeah.” And if somebody had asked me what are the stories like for some of them, I would’ve definitely said, yeah, “Some are good, others are just … yeah.”

Dan Hartland: And what were the qualities of the stories, of those stories that kind of counted for you as time-pass—what were the qualities? Because at some point … so one of the stories, for example, you say (I think it’s “The Coils of Fate” you mentioned), is particularly one that reveals the weakness of the genre.

And what I was really interested in was the breadth of genre in these stories, but also how each of the genres kind of emphasizes the adventure form of that. So there’s a science fiction adventure, and there’s an uncanny adventure, and that element of adventure seems key. But yeah, with “The Coils of Fate,” you were like, “Yeah, this one’s really long, which just makes it clear, the weaknesses.” So when you were thinking, “Oh yeah, this one is pretty time-passy,” what was it about them? Or was it something kind of a bit more ineffable?

Sneha Pathak: I think one of the things that probably may make it time-pass is the fact that it fails to grasp your interest as much as a non-time-pass thing would do. Also a sense of predictability in a way or repetitiveness, not necessarily in just that story, but in the general ideas that the story is telling. The way it is telling. So, for example, in “The Coils of Faith,” one of the things was that, because it was serialized and because it was a popular story, it must have been so, it had to—you know, like, in the age of Dickens and all, they had to come up with those plot points to keep on maximizing the number of instalments. In this case, it just happened that it was that the writer struck upon a formula, “OK, this happens, X kills Y, X is having a dream, and every dream is about a murder.”

So that just kept on, it kept on happening. Y gets murdered, Z gets murdered, A gets murdered, B gets murdered. So that sort of became repetitive after a while, and I was like, “OK, yes, I get it. This is what’s happening.” But again and again, it’s the same formula. So I would say the more formulaic the thing becomes, the more time-passing in a way it becomes—especially if it’s not doing something new with that formula. If it’s just a simple copy-paste of something, if it’s something that I’ve seen before, if it’s something I’ve heard before, if it’s something I’ve read before—or in some cases I can think of some movies, which will go unnamed, which seemed to make it worse—then it becomes nothing more than a time-pass.

Dan Hartland: Well, let’s name the movies! So, Tansy—

Tansy Gardam: Speaking of!

Dan Hartland: Yeah, let’s go to the expert of the bad movies! So, Tansy, the reason that you are here—other than the fact that you are in fact the expert on the bad movies—is that you’ve recently published with us a review of Jurassic World: Rebirth, which seems to me to speak to a lot of what Sneha’s just been talking about: predictability, the formulaic-ness of it all.

You frame the review by talking about, if you like, the movie as a commercial product, as being aware of itself as a thing in dialogue with an audience. And I wonder whether that, too, is part of what we’re talking about here. It’s kind of a product to be consumed to some extent, or at least it is more conscious of itself as that thing than as another piece of art.

Tansy Gardam: Yeah, I think Jurassic World is really interesting in that it has this entire meta-text on the Jurassic Park franchise. And the way I would describe Jurassic World is that it is a movie that has one thing to say, and that is: “Fuck you for buying a ticket.” It has a really strong ethos of, “You should have stayed home and watched Jurassic Park. Do you know how sick Jurassic Park is? Jurassic Park is so much better than the movie that you are currently paying to see.”

Jurassic World in particular has this weirdly hostile relationship with its own audience, and so Rebirth—which is the fourth in the Jurassic World franchise, the seventh in the Jurassic Park series—has a softer attitude towards the viewer. It wants to be like, “Hey, thank you for buying a ticket to watch a reminder of how good the movie Jurassic Park is.” But yeah, it’s very formulaic. It absolutely trades on what has come before.

I find it so funny that apparently the director, Gareth Edwards, was essentially told, when he handed in his first cut, that Steven Spielberg’s main note was, “Hey, can you cut all of the Jurassic Park references? Like, there are so many Jurassic Park references in this, dude, can you just chill?” And the number of them that ended up in the final cut really gives you an idea of how many there must have been in that first assembly. But yeah, they are increasingly insubstantial as a series, and that’s sort of what I would go to in that sense of time-pass: You feel like you are watching the same movie over and over.

I think that sort of acceptance of unoriginality in exploiting a popular property really results in a sense of just watching the same thing, churn and churn, throwing new ideas in. The problem with franchises is that they are essentially mining a non-renewable resource, and they can choose to completely change what they’re doing and go after something new, and that might get rid of what remains of their audience, or it might be what helps ’em survive. Something like Fast and Furious is a series that is gorgeous time-pass watch, because you truly don’t know what’s gonna happen next. You watch the first one, they’re lifting DVD players. You watch, I think it’s nine, they go to space! And that has been super successful for them as a series.

But that is also a series that is constantly attempted reinvention. You watch the first four films and they really don’t know what worked. They’re like, “Look, the first one was successful, I guess. Is it Paul Walker? Is it the cars? Is it Vin Diesel? And then finally, before they’re like, oh, it’s Vin Diesel. Huh.”

And yeah, that is entertainment that continues to be entertaining. Whereas once you get to the point of just rinse and repeat, recycle, you are left with something that has diminishing returns.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, there is this tension, isn’t there, between the comfort of formula—we want to watch Jurassic Park again, and, Tansy, I’m thinking of that essay you wrote for the Criticism Special in January, which was all about your relationship with Lord of the Rings and why you cannot recapture that.

Tansy Gardam: And oh boy, there’re gonna be two Hunt For Gollum movies to prove that.

Dan Hartland: Apparently there are, yeah!

Tansy Gardam: Apparently! Yep.

Dan Hartland: So we have this tension in our ourselves, but also more widely in the culture, of: we would love to get that thing that we had back, we want the comfort of the formula; but also at some point we become bored of it if does not do something new.

And I wonder whether … forgive me, Tansy, if I say you have made a career from being a critic of movies that some people feel do not deserve criticism, right? So these popcorn flicks, which actually have so much to say about them—and Going Rogue says it all with such wit and elan—are ignored, though, by large swathes of the critical community. They do not treat them with seriousness.

I wonder whether this sense of unworthiness is linked to this idea of the formula of comfort, of escapism. Were you conscious, are you conscious, of that when you do what you do?

Tansy Gardam: At the risk of sounding like a parody of myself, you have reminded me of the Hays Code and the initial justification for writing the Hays Code, which were these set of restrictions on the content that could be shown in films. And yeah, I’m not even paraphrasing massively to say that they basically say, “The kind of guys who go to movies are not the kind of guys who go to plays, are not the kind of guys who go to operas. They’re more like the guys who go to boxing matches. So because you have a lower class of people watching movies, you need to have stricter moral guidances.”

That was the idea behind the Hays Code—that you could watch a Shakespeare play and because you’re watching Shakespeare, it’s okay if there’s murder and sex and violence and all of those bad things, but in a movie, “Oh God, we can’t show that because these dumb-dumbs are gonna think that they can go out and murder and do violence and, you know, have sex! Whatever they want to do.”

And so I think that there is in many ways a hangover of that attitude. There is this idea that there is good art that can be complicated and can grapple with social issues and can depict those social issues. And there is popcorn entertainment. But if we’re talking pure numbers, popcorn entertainment is being seen by more people. More people are engaging with that. And when you have popcorn entertainment that is going uncriticized and no one’s engaging with the ideas that are within it, that doesn’t mean that it’s not having a huge impact on its audience.

So something like Bridgerton is being watched by a hell of a lot of people. It’s being watched as a guilty pleasure. It’s being watched as a time-pass. But it’s also being absorbed by massive audiences, and that is, for good or bad, the content that they’re consuming. And so, therefore, it does deserve the attention and the discussion of what it is actually saying and what it’s trying to say and whether or not it succeeds in doing that.

And so I guess that’s why I spend all my time talking about movies like John Wick.

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: In terms of that pulp fiction anthology, Sneha, is that a tradition that still exists? So, you know, we’ve got the popcorn movie, which feels very much like the inheritor of a certain type of pulp fiction. As you were reading that anthology, are there other means, modes, and genres—and it doesn’t even need to be SF, I don’t think—that do the same thing now? That have that same relationship to the reader and the audience?

Sneha Pathak: A lot of mysteries and thrillers, in some way: mystery and thriller fiction and also romance fiction, because that is taken as something that is … even in the popular fiction genre, there is sort of hierarchy where science fiction and fantasy still ranks slightly higher because you can always go and say and claim that—and rightly so—that, you know, they talk something about the human condition, which is what is considered to be a general parameter for a good fiction. It has to talk about something, it has to tell you something, or, discover something about the human code and the human condition.

So, in fiction also, I think romance fiction and mysteries and thrillers—because I read a lot of mysteries and thrillers, I consume them by the dozens really—I always do feel that, there is this … they are often taken as palate cleansers, is what I often come across in my corner of Instagram. I have a book related page on Bookstagram, right? And people who mostly read quote-unquote serious fiction, when they sometimes switch to thrillers industries, they say, “You know, it’s good as a palate cleanser.” Or a guilty pleasure, even, maybe. But yes, I do feel that mysteries and thrillers and romances are seen as something that are slightly—more than slightly—lesser or on a lesser pedestal than other fictions. That is something that I’ve felt.

And I also feel that, you know, as you were talking with Tansy about that feeling of nostalgia—trying to capture that nostalgia, that feeling of comfort zone—that is also something that I feel. I read a lot of mysteries and thrillers, especially mysteries, especially those written in that golden era—which they called when Agatha Christie was writing, for example, right? So you have a country house, a manor or a house, and you know you have a limited number of suspects and then a murder happens and there’s a puzzle and you solve that puzzle. So that is the kind of comfort that I look for when I’m reading those books. And in a way, when I read a lot of those books, somehow I do feel like yes, mysteries and thrillers are on a somewhat lesser pedestal, compared to more serious fiction that’s is talking about other things, maybe sadness or pain or whatever it might be talking about.

Tansy Gardam: But I find it super interesting that you sort of highlight that science fiction and fantasy does get the pass of, “Oh, it’s commenting on the human condition.” I don’t think you can write anything that is crime fiction without engaging with the human condition, without engaging what drives people to crime. And it’s so common for the idea of the literary mystery: It’s “I found a body in my bathtub, and this is actually mostly about my relationship with my dad.” It’s such a common thing to hide more serious literature in mystery or ultimately to actually hide a mystery in more serious literature to be like, “Hey, there is a reason to keep reading. I promise you’re gonna find out who did the murder.” And so yeah, that idea that that is the lower rank I find really interesting.

Sneha Pathak: Yeah, I suppose even there, like you said, literary mysteries: So there’s this genre, the mixed genre where we say “literary mysteries,” there are some who still rank higher because, you know, they’re a literary mystery. You have added that word, that mystical word, magical word, “literary” before it. So it has elevated it somehow. A pure mystery where you’re not necessarily going into the mind of the murderer or not going into, the who and why of the murder is for, let’s say, pure entertainment purposes. That is something which I’m reading not to know what was happening … not the knots of the relationships, the knotty relationship between the characters, but simply to enjoy or to find that solution to the puzzle: Who did it and why did it and how did it.

So they are still considered—I feel that I have experienced that, you know—they’re still considered slightly lower. But yes, if in some way, so for example, Mr. Ripley, because it goes beyond the mere crime being committed, that is still considered to be, you know, a classic of some sort. And I also find it very interesting how some novels and novelists, which must have been or would have been, I feel—or at least should have been—considered more “popular” in their times now tend to find a place in, for example, Penguin Classics or Vintage Classics. So that is something I find very intriguing, how tastes sort of change.

Dan Hartland: As you were talking, Sneha, I was thinking of Agatha Christie—a really good example of a writer who kind of exists in an unusual pocket, certainly in the kind of Anglophone world where— yep, she has the Vintage Classic, she has Penguin Classics, she has sort of canonical reissues, in scare quotes. But also, you know, really as well the literary establishment make it very clear that, well, “Agatha is OK, right? Like, yeah, she, kind of is allowed in, but maybe not too far into the room. Oh, and don’t let her bring anyone else in with her!”

Sneha Pathak: I was attending a lecture, this is a few years back. And the speaker, he somehow in the course of the conversation—now, I don’t remember exactly what he said, but this line stuck with me. He was a professor and he said, “Yeah, and I’ve got people who have read Christie throughout their life and then they come and tell me that, you know, ‘Oh, we have read literature.’” That was something stuck me and me. I was like, “OK, I’m never telling him that I’ve read a lot of Christie”: Bad secret, should stay buried. So there is this, of course, even though we claim that—I think in every Christie book that I’ve read I remember reading in the blurb—only the Bible and Shakespeare have sold more copies than her!

Dan Hartland: Yes, in science fiction there are a couple, maybe a couple more, authors who occupy this odd position. I think Ursula Le Guin may have kind of been fully let into the room by now, and rightly so. But people like Philip K. Dick, for example, again: Man in the High Castle, Penguin Classic, Radio Free Albemuth, very much not. There’s just this interesting, as you say, relationship and changing relationship with authors who were quote-unquote popular, but have lasted long enough that we have to accept they have some sort of value.

To revert to this kind of popcorn idea, I wonder whether “popular” is a pejorative. Because you were talking about Bridgerton has a huge audience, right? The MCU had—still has, but you know!—a huge audience, and these things are popular. It becomes very easy to presume that that is a bad thing.

Tansy Gardam: Absolutely. And also, just on that list of writers who sort of have acquired taste or acquired literary ambitions in their time, I’d absolutely throw Terry Pratchett in there, too: Really pulp to begin with, now you can get the nice hard covers. It’s the exact same book on the inside.

I think you often see a backlash of popularity, particularly when it comes to films that are sort of aiming at a higher audience. I think the kind of cyclical reaction to Parasite is really fascinating, in that sort of idea of it breaking through, becoming hugely popular, but also the cultural criticism of the sort of people who were suddenly tweeting about Parasite? More likely to be the Parks in that situation.

Popular is definitely wielded as a pejorative, but like you say, Sneha, Agatha Christie sold more copies than anyone other than God or Shakespeare. There is a reach to popularity, and there is a reason that things become popular, and we can’t just apply this to things that we like. This is as true of Agatha Christie as it is to E. L. James. There is an appeal to the content that they are producing—or rather the books they’re writing, let’s not turn everything into content.

I think there’s a lot, too, in the critical reappraisal of popcorn films from our youth. And some of that is nostalgia, a lot of that is genuinely nostalgia. Some of it is because a lot of those films were better shot than the movies we get now. If you compare the first three Harry Potter films to, I mean, even the last few Harry Potters without bringing Fantastic Beasts into it, you’re talking about a fundamentally different series and one that has a different attitude towards the visuals, towards actually kind of capturing a sense of magic versus—and I know that part of this is tonal—hitting the film with a sledgehammer.

I’m a huge fan of the Pirates of the Caribbean series. I will defend 2 and 3. I have defended 2 and 3! But 1 in particular is just gorgeous to look at and I can’t really think of any big sort of $150 million adventure films from the past few years, any really big films, that have that beautiful and rich a visual palette. And so there is some value in going back to those things that you’re nostalgic about and being like, why do I like that so much? Why is this a film that I can watch again and again and again?

So much of the streaming business model relies on you wanting to go back and rewatch Friends or wanting to go back and see every single Disney film, whereas a lot of the original content that those streaming platforms are producing are just one and done, out of your brain—like off it like a greased pan, absolutely no imprint on the memory. And so I’ll be really interested in ten, fifteen years, will people who are ten-, fifteen-year-olds now, will they be critically reappraising the things that they watched from this period? Or will they be going back to Pirates of the Caribbean?

Dan Hartland: I think you’re hitting on something there, which is perhaps worth unpacking further. Sneha mentioned—we’ve all mentioned—this kind of separation between art or literature and all the other stuff, right? But what strikes me is that if one of these kind of time-pass escapist pieces of literature or film or whatever else—interpretive dance—does its job, it is because it has mastered some technical basics, and in some cases more than basics, to enable us to escape on its eddies. If it were a bad piece of work, it would not be effective.

And again, in the pulp fiction anthology, Sneha, you read stuff that you’re like, “Nah.” And then you read other stuff, like there’s a story I think called “Hello,” which you think, “Yeah, this is great.” They only succeed if they are technically proficient at what they are attempting to achieve. I suppose there’s an interesting question here about not the difference between—not art and technical proficiency, because I’m not sure there is a line on that spectrum where we could usefully put a marker—but more on what it is that these things are doing. And one of the words that we often use is escapism, right?

The canonical critical statement on escapism is inevitably from Tolkien, and he said: “Escape is one of the main functions of fairy stories, and since I do not disapprove of them”—fairy stories—“it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which ‘escape’ is now so often used, the tone for which the uses of the word outside literary criticism give no warrant at all.” Right? This idea that escape is often quite a good thing. Like, if you’re trying to escape from something, you probably need to—for whatever reason, material, spiritual. And we accept that outside of literary criticism, but somehow the artwork that enables us to do this within literary criticism is demeaned.

Sneha Pathak: The funny thing is, for me, literature has always been a way of escapism in a way. Take it negatively or take it positively. There it is. And when I was growing up in the nineties, the internet was, you know, you did not have the internet! At least not in the way it is ubiquitously present these days. So we had, I had, very few books. You did not have that many books. You did not even know there were so many writers with so many books. So the first books that I read in English were those abridged editions—not the first books, but I’ll say I was ten, maybe, or eleven.

So those first novels that I read were quote-unquote abridged edition. And back then I had no idea what abridged mean, the word was not in my vocabulary, nobody told me. So I was reading novels! And I was reading abridged editions of say Oliver Twist or, uh, you know, Pride and Prejudice maybe. And I was reading them for escape. They were pure means of escapism for me. And they are classics, they are literary classics, right? But they offered me the same thing! You know, reading them was like, you have a cloak of invisibility all around you. There’s this warmth and you are there in a cocoon. And it sort of creates … you are untouched by the world around you as long as you have opened the pages of that book.

So it’s really funny how even serious literature can be escapist at times, depending on the reader. It’ll also, I suppose, vary from reader to reader, what sort of quote-unquote helps you escape. And even those of us who enjoy reading escapist fiction—let’s call it that—even we don’t like reading all the genres! I, for example, am not a fan of fantasy. I have tried reading fantasy, but I find that I’m unable to read fantasy novels. I can read mysteries and thrillers, yes. A little bit of science fiction, which is not very hardcore, yes. But give me hardcore science fiction or give me fantasy and I’m like, “OK, give me a … I mean, no! That’s not something that I can do.” So escape is also something that is different for different of us. It’s not a one size fits all sort of thing.

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: I would like to talk a little bit about all the various kind of mediums that we can use now. Becase you mentioned we can time-pass on TikTok now, and there are other—other than three-hour dinosaur films … Actually, it’s not a three-hour film. I’m being unfair.

Tansy Gardam: It’s bang on two.

Dan Hartland: That’s right! Other than two-hour dinosaur films or big anthologies of pulp fiction from Blaft, there are other things that we could be spending our time with—and I just wonder whether we would like to admit, just among the three of us, what the things are that we find ourselves passing time with.

Tansy Gardam: I’m terrible for audio books. I’ve really gotten into … I’m not sure if everyone has this option, but there is an app in Australia that’s attached to local libraries, and has a huge selection of audio books through that. So I’m able to do that without using Audible or anything like that. But yeah, free audio books, constantly got one on the go. And because I’m a craft person—I love making a little thing, I love doing a little task—and I feel like I’m multitasking if I’m listening to an audio book while I’m sewing or something like that.

What I’m actually doing is not properly absorbing the audiobook. I’ve done most of The Locked Tomb. I could not tell you much of what happens in that series, but, oh boy, have I listened to most of it. And yeah, I’d be interested to know, Sneha, whether you consider that, like … would time-pass on TikTok be eroding the concept? Would it be kind of a lesser version thereof? Or is it just a new mutation?

Sneha Pathak: Oh, I suppose it would be a new mutation, but to my mind, if there is a hierarchy of time-passing then time-passing on TikTok would be far lower than reading!

And the time before, when books were not so easily available, I’m sure everybody time-passed. Even then, maybe they chatted with their friends. Maybe they simply doodled. Maybe they simply stared into space and built air castles! But everybody did something which has probably morphed into something different. But I think, yeah, it’s, it’s just technology helping us time pass.

Dan Hartland: If I’m going to admit to time-passing on anything, it would be—and I’m afraid to say it, given that hopefully people are listening to this—it’s podcasts. My partner Anna is constantly saying, “Why are you … why do you have to have your earbuds in all the time?!” And it’s very similar to Tansy, I’m like, “Oh, well, I’m … I’m getting information in!”

Tansy Gardam: And if you don’t have your earbuds in, then the thoughts get heard.

Dan Hartland: [laughs] That’s right. That’s exactly right.

I’m making bread and I’m doing the podcast thing and I’m … and really what you’re doing is, is time-passing and podcasts seemed to me particularly well-suited to this because so few of them provide …

Tansy Gardam: Some are quality experiences, they give all sorts of critical experiences!

Dan Hartland: I believe, I do think that I derive value from that podcast habit! Yet I’m also conscious that I’m not paying the attention to some of the podcasts that I listen to in the same way that I would if I was sitting down with a book. Is that escapism? It’s certainly time-passes, but if I’m not really paying full attention, if I’m not giving my all to that text, I can’t really escape with it, right?

Tansy Gardam: There are plenty of books I’ve read that I couldn’t tell you what happens in them. There are some audio books where I could almost do them from memory. Now, it really depends on the time and attention that you are giving something and I think that’s where escapism does kind of deviate from time-pass.

Because escapism, I would say, is that you have been drawn away, that you are engaging actively with the text, whatever. Whatever that text happens to be, it is escape as opposed to passage.

Sneha Pathak: Yeah, I think I’ll agree with Tansy on this, because if something has provided me really good escape, I’m bound to, you know, tell at least one person or read that. But if something is just time-pass, I’m not going to, I’m probably not going to, recommend it to anyone—unless they specifically ask me something, what is a good time-pass or something, you know. Just for time-pass!

Dan Hartland: I was reading an article on Word on Fire by Holly Ordway the other day, and her position was really interesting on all of this. She was like, “Well, you know, like”—actually similar to what Sneha was saying about science fiction being seen as about the human condition, even if it’s got spaceships in it—she says, “if fantasy and science fiction really did encourage a flight from reality, maybe that would be a bad thing … but it totally doesn’t!” This escapism thing is in fact a full-on engagement.

It’s the opposite of just kind of whiling time away or doing something without value. And I wonder whether we are conscious, when we’re reading these texts as critics of them, of doing them justice. Like, if they do have this kind of value—the texts that we are talking about aren’t conscious of themselves as serious things in that sense, but they nevertheless have value—and so, as critics of them, how do we advocate for that? How do we approach them in a way that gives them the seriousness while not pretending that they are necessarily all the time serious?

Tansy Gardam: I have to use this opportunity to talk about of one of Australia’s greatest critics of all time passed away this week, David Stratton. He was known to most Australians as Margaret and David: There was a weekly show, which was him and Margaret going through that week’s releases. It was a half hour, it was on fairly prime time, incredibly wide-ranging audience. And every week they would talk about pretty much every release coming out that week.

And it was in many ways a product of its time. I cannot see a show like that getting greenlit today, but it meant that they would be talking about Fast and Furious 2 alongside Ken Park, and the questions of censorship in the country, and they would give them, if not necessarily equal weight, they would approach them on their own terms.

Margaret never gave a Fast and Furious movie under three-and-a-half stars, ’cause she just liked them. She enjoyed them and she acknowledged them for what they were. She also nearly got arrested for hosting an illegal screening of Ken Park. Almost all of this is from a show that was on at the Melbourne Comedy Festival this year, Refused Classification—you can’t see it anywhere else, but it was spectacular, I promise.

But yeah, there is a way to approach works on their own terms, you need to go in not expecting Ken Park to be Too Fast, Too Furious, and vice versa. You need to address them where they are, and I think that you do get a lot of bad faith criticism that doesn’t address things as they are, that approaches Too Fast, Too Furious, as if it is Parasite or vice versa. So I think it is really for us as critics and also as audiences to go to something knowing what it is.

Sneha Pathak: Definitely. I agree with Tansy on this one, that we need to have a different, as critics, we need to go with a different yardstick. We cannot really say that, “OK, I’m going to measure an escapist fiction with the same criteria that I use for, let’s say a literary novel.” That would be doing a disservice to both of them, I believe. And I think another thing is we need to be unapologetic about reading, as well as reviewing and watching, popcorn cinema or popcorn fiction, right? Let’s not be apologetic that, “Yeah, OK, of course I read that—also, I read this as well.”

So, if we are critiquing something, I’m assuming that we are going to be, to some extent, well-versed with what is good and what is bad in that particular genre. What are its limitations? What is the best that we have read, and what is the worst that we have read? And we probably use those to measure the current work against those things, rather than measuring it against some sort of generalized literary criteria.

Whatever I review, most of it’s … a lot of it’s serious, let me say, or literary fiction as well. So when I’m reviewing a literary novel or a novel which is not an escape, which would not be termed “popular” or “escapist,” then of course I’m using a different criteria for reading it as well as looking at it. But when I’m reviewing something that is pure escapism or purely popular, I’m not going to bring in that yardstick here. I think that does a great disservice to both the genres.

Not as a critic, but I think that a recent term which I have seen, with respect to the marketing, that a lot of books these days they market as a murder mystery or a mystery, probably because they sell, probably where the mystery is just a part of the entire book and the entire book is actually dedicated to something else. It might be more of a literary exploration of something else with a murder thrown in, but that gets marketed as a murder mystery. And then, you know, I suppose that kind of marketing also creates sort of bad faith among readers—and also makes you give the book a lesser rating because you go in with a different set of expectations, which you would not have had you not read the blurb, which claimed it was something different than what it was.

Dan Hartland: I’m really glad you brought the marketing idea in, because I think it is actually really super important for how both books and movies are framed. Certainly, there are pretty difficult science fiction novels that have not been marketed in that way and have been marketed with a big spaceship on the front. And the reception of those novels is therefore—maybe they sell a lot of units!—but the people who buy them, you know, kind of feel a little short-changed. And I am confident, Tansy, that you have examples of movie trailers that have done similarly!

But the thing that I pick up from this idea of approaching these texts in a different way is, of course we should, but also there may be grounds on which—and, Sneha, in the pulp fiction review and, Tansy, in your Rebirth review, you both do it—there are still ways that we can criticize these texts safely. So from a perspective which isn’t this kind of sniffy, “well this is nonsense” perspective, but from the perspective of “it was trying to do this and it didn’t.”

I’m thinking that recently there’s been a turn in fantasy towards kind of cosy fantasy. Perhaps the canonical cosy fantasy is Legends and Lattes, which I think we’ve mentioned, or I’ve mentioned, before on this podcast. Wesley Osam has done a fantastic … take-down is the only word for it … of that novel, where he takes it on its own terms. He’s like, “OK, this is what this thing is trying to do,” but finds a range of choices that that book has made which kind of undermine even its own project.

So I guess as critics, we need to be open to that, too: That these books are capable still of failure.

Tansy Gardam: Yeah, and definitely I think when we bring marketing into it, there is a real question, as well, not just in terms of how a book is marketed, but also how it’s initially sold to a publisher. Like you mentioned, these novels that have a mystery in them that are sold as murder mystery, but they really have a lot more going on: There’s a decent chance that they were written without that murder mystery and that the writer, upon finishing it was like, “Oh. Shit. How do I actually get a publisher to look at this? They’re looking for mysteries. I’ll chuck one in there. How hard is it to put a dead body in a pool?” And you do get that I feel with the cosy genres and other kind of buzzword ideas—you just bring a little bit of that in. It’s easy to put it on the cover.

And we are talking about judging books by their covers, but there’s an entire art to it to—cover design rather. And you end up with these things that are sort of … that show the thumbprints of where they tried to be molded into something more marketable. And you get it with films, you get it with television series, you get it with all sorts of media. The attempts to chase a trend. And I think that that is one that does need to be called out critically.

Like, this evening I saw Fight or Flight, which is yet another John Wick imitator. In my opinion, it’s one of the more successful John Wick imitators. (I would absolutely love to know why it was produced by the two John Wick producers, but it was not done by their production company.) But yeah, that’s something where you know what it’s trying to be. You also accept it as what it is, and that’s where you are critically engaging with something and it is chasing a trend. It’s doing it pretty well, but sometimes it can absolutely crash out. And so I think having that awareness as well as a reader is part of the reason that it’s so uncomfortable when you have people who are outside of a particular genre coming into that for criticism.

I feel like earlier this year in Strange Horizons, there was a metacriticism of critiques of Klara and the Sun that approached it as a lot of people who’d read other Ishiguros, or who were literary critics, coming in and saying, “Oh, Ishiguro is just really elevating this entire genre, this whole idea. It’s so new, it’s so original!” And it’s like: He’s playing with an idea that  is so set in the genre that it’s a cliche—and he does it beautifully, but to approach it like he has somehow deemed to go into science fiction and just make the place a bit more classy is just revisionist almost. And that’s where you need people who are actually engaging with a genre or a form to be the ones who are critiquing it.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. I think you were talking about M. L. Clark’s “Who’s Afraid of the SFF Novel” essay. Maggie was a guest on last episode, which was about hard times, and writing in them. And I feel like we’re talking here about reading in them, and what might make us feel slightly better during them!

So we started this conversation by talking about formula, right? In particular about the Blaft anthology. But then we’ve exploded it outwards. And it feels to me like we’re returning to this idea of formula—which, as Tansy comments on, maybe sometimes a given text has something injected into it to fit a certain trend or fit a certain mode which at that time is what people are using to time-pass. The example that jumps out to me is the recent plagiarism and romantasy thing in the New Yorker, which of course was its whole sort of own social media drama. But this idea that romantasy has become this thing with a set of tropes that almost every book in the genre or the mode or whatever you want call it—

Tansy Gardam: And every tag on AO3.

Dan Hartland: Yes! So it, so the romantasy books have to have these tropes, but also a lot of the romantasy texts have come from somewhere completely different again. And they’re having … I won’t say the serial numbers filed off, but they are being remodelled for a different model of publication. And this perhaps will cause trouble for romantasy. Currently it’s dominant, but we started this conversation by saying that ultimately formula exhausts itself. So do we see that as … is romantasy, cosy fantasy, what other elements of what we’re consuming right now, do we think may wind up in that way in kind of the next five, ten years? Where will we be not passing our time any longer that we are currently?

Tansy Gardam: I think you’re bang on that romantasy has a shelf life—possibly when all of the BookTok people discover that AO3 is free. But yeah, I think it’s become really common, partly because of the way that television is now made, that every series is eight episodes. There’s years between the seasons. There’s really no time to attach yourself to the characters, and there’s been a lot of pushback and people talking about going back to older series, the comfort of a lot of episodes.

That is, again, a case of formula. But the fact is you don’t really attach to characters in a sitcom if you’ve only got eight half-hours with them. You attach over twenty-two when they’ve had to fill an episode that is shot just on one existing set because they’ve run out of budget for the rest of the season. Those are the sort of things that people get really attached to and I can see that coming back into fashion in the next couple of years, that idea of a really long-running work—which is really time-pass, it’s about spending time with those characters, and I think that romantasy and just the absolute length of those books is kind of trading on that as well. It is the time spent in those worlds. And so I can see, almost counter to the TikTokification and the shortening attention spans, a return of longer-running stories. Or at least I’d like to!

Sneha Pathak: I think one trope that, or one formula, one trope that I think has been overdone—or done to death in my opinion, especially when it comes to those gritty mysteries and novels and even their adaptations and stuff that—is the figure of the detective, detached and with a storm going on in his personal life. Smoking, I don’t know, some sort of cigarettes or drinking himself to death. The figure of that solitary, I don’t know, very manly maybe? Does he come across as man?

Tansy Gardam: Oh, it’s always a man.

Sneha Pathak: Right? That kind of detective, troubled with the marriage on the rocks or probably something nasty in the past: I think that is something that has been hacked to death and that is something, probably, which is also coming to sort of a closure, although there are a lot of adaptations in which we see, or even original series, in which these kind of detective figures are—you know, that brooding atmosphere.

And on the other hand, are those which are making a comeback even in mysteries: I feel a lot of cosies set in cafes or you know, or cooking—

Tansy Gardam: Old people’s homes …

Sneha Pathak: Yeah. Even old people mysteries, I think there are cases where the mystery becomes sort of secondary in a way. And the relationship with characters and how they are doing that becomes primary. That is another thing that is coming up or has been coming up for the past few years, so setting in cafes or the detective, the amateur detective, is a bookshop owner or maybe, you know, they have got a bakery or there’s a lot of cooking going on.

And I wonder how long these are going to last, even the cosy ones, because after time, I’m sure boredom will set in if we get more and more of such characters. Because how many coffee shops or how many bookshop owners or how many, you know?

Tansy Gardam: By the fourth body in the bookshop, you’re like, “Baby, I think you might be killing these people.”

Sneha Pathak: Yeah. And how many … you know, there even are those cosies with some sort of magical element in them. I remember seeing a cover or something, which is a cat on it. The cat helps catch the criminal! So you know, there’s that genre!

Dan Hartland: The detective with the all the problems, I mean, has been such a persistent … like just, you know, I mean arguably even Sherlock Holmes fits that. So it is just a thing that you can’t get rid of.

Tansy Gardam: Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, which is a movie from the seventies that is about how that character is twenty years out of date already. You’ve got Elliot Gould wandering around like he’s from the fifties in the seventies, and he’s a man out of time. He’s just completely incongruous with the world. And that’s a movie that was made about fifty years ago.

Dan Hartland: And you have Rebus in the nineties, and then you just keep on going. You can’t escape. What is interesting is that you can see a parallel in fantasy with grimdark. Grimdark is very persistent, and Adam Roberts in his recent History of Fantasy says, “Look, why are we doing this? It’s not realism!” Like, you know, grimdark is a kind of reaction against, and perhaps the kind of tortured detective is an attempt to striate, the sort of silliness of the mystery, of the genre, with an appearance of realism or grittiness. But these things are so in themselves exaggerated that they, they’re just as fantastic.

Tansy Gardam: It’s, it’s Zack Snyder. It’s that idea of, you know, if this is dark and gritty and sad enough, then people will forget that this is man who dresses up like a bat to fight crime.

Dan Hartland: It’s an interesting seesaw between—as you say, Sneha—this tortured detective character, but also these cosy mysteries, and they are always in tension with each other, right? Because we kind of … yeah, we want both.

Sneha Pathak: Because we find readers for, and viewers for, both of them. So, you know, there is an audience for all of them—and probably, maybe sometimes even the same audiences consuming all of them! That is something which I find really fascinating.

[Musical outro begins]

Tansy Gardam: I am so sorry. My cat is about to knock my laptop off the table. Just one second … Um, observe the criminal.

Dan Hartland: Wheeee! Sorry. That’s not how you’re meant to greet great villains, is it? Sorry.

Tansy Gardam: [laughter] I’m so sorry! I can go back from the start …

[Musical outro continues]

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

A few pick-ups from our last episode on writing in Hard Times: Friend of the podcast, Niall Harrison, noted on Bluesky that any baseline for fiction, whether the optimism of the golden Age as we discussed or whatever we’re struggling with now, can be a problem. He cited Jonathan Strahan’s call for less fear of the future in SF. That’d be really nice.

On that note, kudos to Andrea Hairston, who at Worldcon seems to have inspired some of this. Kameron Hurley for one has said that, after Hairston’s Writing Is Resistance workshop in Seattle, she’s “done with sad defeatism.”

So: onwards! See you next time.

Transcript

Critical Friends Episode 14

Dan Hartland: Welcome to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast. I’m Dan Hartland, and in this episode I’ll be joined by the writers and critics Octavia Cade and M. L. Clark.

In every episode of Critical Friends, we’ll be discussing SFF reviewing: what it is, why we do it, how it’s going. In this episode, we’ll be talking about writing in hard times. How and why is speculative fiction written in contexts of defeat, despair, or decay?

We’ll discuss climate change and artificial intelligence, systems political, biological, and economic, and how SF might be, and yet sometimes isn’t, a key tool in opening up new modes of understanding. But we began our conversation by discussing the two most recent reviews that Maggie and Octavia have published with Strange Horizons.

[musical sting]

Dan Hartland: So Maggie, your recent review of the Ray Nayler book Where the Axe Is Buried was really—I mean, I’m gonna be honest here, I’ve simply plagiarized all your ideas for this episode of the podcast, because you start that review with a quote from the novel, and I can absolutely see why, it had all my bells ringing too. And the quote is:

She had believed that writing itself was an action. But she had stopped believing that: She had come to see her writing was nothing but empty words. A delaying tactic. Something to do to hide her own impotence in the face of unchanging, unconquerable, indifferent state power.

And you go on in the review to sort of meditate on that and talk about what it might mean to write and to read in a period where it feels as if you are losing, right? That something is wrong. Something’s rotten in the state of Denmark, whatever it is. And you talk about AI a lot in your review, but Octavia, in a recent review for Strange Horizons of The Flat Woman by Vanessa Saunders, talks about climate and there are many other fronts on which we could put our gaze to discuss, you know, writing in hard times.

So I really wanted to dig a bit deeper about, first of all, how you experienced that book as a reader and how you think Nayler was approaching writing that book, which is fundamentally—just as your review was—a meditation on the difficulty of creative endeavor at a time when it feels like the walls are closing in.

M. L. Clark: Terrific question, Dan. This reading was a distinct experience for me, perhaps, as opposed to other readers for whom this might be the first work of Nayler they experience. I have followed Nayler’s short stories, novella work, novel work for quite some time, and as a result, when I engage with a work that has embedded in it a sense of a writer reaching a breaking point, reaching a sense of futility with their own product, I can’t help but also think about the author behind it and their own long history of wrestling with a theme in ways that are more pragmatic and a little bit more on the side of … existential … I don’t wanna say despair, but certainly pause.

And that’s certainly what happens in many of Nayler’s stories is you have that existential pause. Here it is a heavier pause, I believe, than usual in his work. And that comes from the fact that the notion of AI that you mentioned in your introduction is not really the element causing the strain in the story. There are futures extending from the AI technologies that we currently have in place, but in the way that they are presented in Nayler’s work they’re simply an extension of a body of human creations that have served sometimes to uplift, but more often to oppress and isolate and estrange us from one another. And it is to that aspect of human behavior that Nayler seems to be speaking and in a way that he is wrestling with: A moment of defeat in the conversation, not the end of the conversation, but certainly there is a heaviness to this point in our history, even though it is obviously presented as being in the future.

We know that all science fiction is truly a commentary about the present. And so it does seem very much to be speaking to a present moment where we are in existential pause.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, you mention early on in the review that the book is a kind of question about whether writing can actually achieve anything in the face of, as you say, political systems that are accelerating our own ruin.

And I found this idea of a book that was uncertain of its own, if not value, then utility, you know, sort of agency in the world really interesting. And Octavia, I said at the beginning of the episode that I fully own up to just essentially stealing Maggie’s whole idea from their review for this episode. But equally, I don’t think I’d have got there if I hadn’t also at the same time read your piece, because it is a similar kind of meditation on a period in which defeat seems likely. And yet the novel is still written and the characters within the novel still fight.

The difference, I felt—and maybe you could talk a little bit about this—is that in Saunders’s The Flat Woman, there’s a sense … there’s almost a note of hope towards the end, where you say the main character of the novel starts to fight back, alongside nature. Because the focus in this novel isn’t AI. It’s climate, which of course you’ve written about more widely for Strange Horizons and elsewhere. I think also specifically of your review of The Mires recently, which has a hopeful note to end on because, in that novel, the community starts to rebuild itself too. So did you experience that sense of optimism in reading about difficult times?

Octavia Cade: Not so much, I’m afraid. Very much so in The Mires’ case—The Mires, I think, is fundamentally about connection, about building connection and resilience within a community. In The Flat Woman, that resilience comes almost from eschewing connection, at least with all the other human elements of the text. In The Flat Woman, this main character—and all of them are nameless, they’re referred to as, you know, the girl, the woman—identity is sort of stripped from. Most of these characters, they become cogs in this very industrial machine. And the only way to survive that really is by limiting the way that you connect with other people.

But the difference, I think, in The Flat Woman is that increasingly other people just aren’t worth connecting with. It’s a very depressing way to look at things. But nearly everyone that the woman meets throughout her life is looking to exploit her in some way, or is entirely indifferent or even takes pleasure in her suffering.

I mean, when her mother, the university lecturer is, is taken away for a show trial and the girl is still very young, she has an aunt. The aunt is not particularly maternal, so the aunt stays living in her own house, and she comes along to see her little niece and brings groceries pretty much once a month and leaves this preteen to just get on with it.

And this disconnection goes through her life. And really, the only way that the woman manages to fight back after she grows up is by accepting that part of her is completely non-human—that if she wants sort of resilience and empathy and sympathy in her life, she has to look outside, almost, the human community to find it.

And as someone who spends a lot of time thinking and writing about the human relationship with the non-human, I find that particularly fascinating. Because in some ways it is a different version of looking at the human-AI relationship. You know, how do we connect with something that is so fundamentally unlike us? In The Flat Woman, there is hope for the main character. But not that much for the world around her.

Dan Hartland: It’s interesting because the ending you describe is not dissimilar to the ending, in some ways, of Tchaikovsky’s Alien Clay, in which the main character—and others, but we’ll stick with the main character—is transformed by, in this case, the DNA (for want of a better term) of alien life on a planet.

The particular alien life on this exoplanet has evolved to essentially be symbiotic with all other types of life on the planet, so it becomes part of him and then transforms him into something very other. He still has his memories from his human life, but he is no longer entirely human, he’s something different.

And at the end of the novel, they get in the spaceship and they’re off to transform all the other human societies in the galaxy, which are also broken and have defeated their own sense of humanity. It’s an interesting link there because, as you say, both of those are sort of hopeful in a very depressed and despairing way.

Maggie deliberately shied away from using the word despair about the Nayler, but it’s there, too, and I’m really interested in this. Is there no other hope left for us in either of these novels than, “OK, well, we just have to completely change into something basically non-human in order to get out of this bind we’ve found ourselves in”?

Octavia Cade: I don’t think we need to change. I think we need to realize that we are basically non-human. We have a collective delusion, the human race, that we exist sort of as individuals, that we are “homo sapiens”; but if you look at us on a biological level we are a collection. In our individual bodies, we are a collection of species. I think there is about ten times as many non-human cells as human cells in the human body. There is about a hundred times non-human DNA in the human body than there is human DNA. We are a microbiome. We are fundamentally more non-human than human, and we pretend that we aren’t.

I think we try and separate ourselves from the rest of the natural world as though we haven’t evolved here—as though, you know, every part of our biology and psychology isn’t fitted. To the world we have around us. And then we try and change that world in really fundamental ways. And we think that doesn’t have an effect on our biology and on our identity, and it really does.

So I think this idea of connection with the non-human. Is really a more, a reinterpretation of ourselves in some way.

M. L. Clark: In the other direction as well, Nayler’s work has routinely highlighted the fact that we are part of systems, deep, deep systems, and that there is the conceit—itself a very Westernized conceit, it might be the greatest science fictional element of literature in our time—this notion of the self, being somehow disconnected from the broader systems that shape their behaviors as well as their outcomes. And in which we are constantly, whether we mean to or not, doing violence to one another in a tremendously far-reaching way.

We often don’t fully understand the way that our existences do harm to quite a significant number of other organisms, other parts of the load that we inhabit. And so that does seem to be the one place where we can imagine pushing back on utter despair, because there’s that continuity—when we return to that continuity, not just with the rest of the world, but also with the vast majority of our history.

We are living in a moment that’s a little bit more exceptional in as much as it is hyper-fixated on this notion of our exceptionalism. If we can get past that, if we can return to a much deeper understanding of ourselves in relation to, uh, the broader systems of oppression and possible aid that we have always belonged to, we can perhaps start to eliminate the extraordinary factor in our current societies that is causing us to do so much accelerated harm.

We will still always do harm. We will still always be in a game of push and pull. I think Iris Murdoch actually has something to say about it in The Nice and The Good, this wonderful quote about how we are always going to be part of systems of harm. And the best we can do is to coax weakness and inspire strength and to bring ourselves back to a deeper kindness of a place in the world.

But to get there, we do have to get over this mythologizing self that does seem to consume current movement.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. I’m so glad that you mentioned that the Nayler talks about systems, too, Maggie. Because I was gonna, I’m afraid, quote yourself back at you again. You’ve just mentioned Murdoch and you also talk about another philosopher in your review, Heidegger, and you talk about how the Nayler is a novel in the same way as, but in a different way as, The Flat Woman about escaping the system. But you kind of can’t, ’cause we are the system.

And I just wonder whether we’re tripping over here what we might be able to say in answer to the character that I quoted—or that you quoted and then I quoted you quoting in your review, Maggie—where she doubts the capacity of mere writing to achieve anything really. But we seem to be saying that actually we can write ourselves into different understandings, and that might be what we can achieve by doing this silly thing producing text. Rachel Cordasco, in the last episode of this podcast, talked about science fiction being a particularly systemic form of fiction, and I wonder whether that is also part of what writing a specifically science fiction novel might help us achieve?

M. L. Clark: I might want to speak first to the Heidegger because it’s an allusion here, but many people might not be leaping immediately to reading my review for context. But there is something that I tried to highlight in this piece and then other people have discussed as well.

Heidegger, in the essay that’s referenced, establishes a notion of technology that both was a beginning and an end to conversation. So when we talk about ends of conversations, it’s actually quite potent to think about how, from Heidegger on, some people have loosely used one interpretation of technology in that essay to determine how we talk about technology today.

And yet, if you do read the essay, you see that there are many ways to talk about technology, and some of them are more likely to give us pathways forward. If we only think about technology in a very limited modern sense—the computer technology of the industrial complex—we have only a certain view of our relationship to the revealed world. That is possible. If we go back to the other meanings of technology discussed in that text, there are ones in which I also put Ray Nayler’s work as a body of writing—because that’s a kind of artificial intelligence as well. We have been doing the work of technology and we have been using technology to serve deeper ends as a species for a very long time.

If we were to return to the other half of that conversation, if we were to not see technology in that one way that has been locked in in some ways since Heidegger’s essay, but to move into other ways of thinking and being, that might be the out. And so that’s where we have that opportunity to think about an endpoint as also an inevitable invitation to think about other pathways we could have taken and could take now.

Octavia Cade: Yeah. When you’re talking about sort of definitions there of what technology is, it reminds me of something I’ve been looking at a lot lately with some of my academic work: looking at how we see the time period that we are living in. I think the term that has come into most use at the moment is the Anthropocene. But increasingly I’ve been looking at the different ways of describing that. And I think my favorite one at the moment, the one that catches my imagination most, is the Necrocene. You know, the age of death, how we have developed this, and the connection between, I think, politics and the environment—which has always been there, this is not a new thing—and how the two interact with each other and how we engage with this idea of the Necrocene.

Because there is so much to it of blame, of responsibility, and it’s no wonder really we chose the Anthropocene. Because that is a concept that is far easier in a way to deal with. Beccause it promotes that idea of, you know, the humans as a separate influential species somehow disconnected from the rest of the world. It’s so much less confronting than this idea of the age of death which we have ushered in. So the problem of definition, and the opportunities of definition, are something that I find really interesting because they shape the way we think, they shape the way we approach problems.

If we talk about life in the Anthropocene, it is very different from life in the Necrocene, even though they are really both referring to the same time period. That’s something that I increasingly look for in I think the speculative fiction that I read. Many of the authors don’t exactly define it in that way because they’re, you know, they’re working in their own separate universes. But this engaging with the idea of a transformative world in practice and in definition, I think that’s something that works like The Flat Woman and again The Mires do particularly well.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. And you mentioned in both of those reviews, Octavia, but in particular in the review of The Flat Woman, that the way in which the texts are engaging in genre is interesting. The Flat Woman, you mentioned, fuses magic realism with science fiction to take both in a slightly different direction. And I mentioned that because it strikes me that in order to imagine our way into sort of different understandings of the ills that ail us, science fiction must reimagine itself.

I’m thinking here of Niall Harrison’s All These Worlds, which opens with this idea that “once upon a time in the west,” he writes, “there was a genre.” And that genre kind of knew what the future was gonna look like. It was gonna be spaceships and it was gonna be astronauts, and it was gonna be, you know, square-jawed men solving things, MacGyverishly.

And sometime around he thinks—I’m not sure this is right, but he thinks—sometime around the 1990s, everyone looks around and thinks, “Well, that didn’t happen.” Ever since, the genre has kind of been, “Well, what do we do with this stuff? We don’t got jet packs!” Both of these novels—and others as well, which maybe we can get on talking about—have to try to retool the genre that they are sort of in dialogue with, if not inhabiting, in order to do the work that they want to do—because science fiction itself is part of these systems that we are attempting to quote-unquote escape, right?

M. L. Clark: I do want to quote—because this is only fair, Octavia: Dan read a piece from my review, and I’d love to read a piece from your review—because this absolutely sang to me when I was reading it.

Liminality can be illuminating. It can also be untrustworthy; so much of climate change is linked with the existence and transgression of boundaries. How far can this water rise, how reliable is this coastline, what borders do we have to cross if we can’t live here? There are often no certain answers to questions like these, which can make the conversation more frustrating—especially as the answers to these questions are often couched in terms of threat and loss. No wonder there are those who are tempted not to have the conversation at all.

And so that speaks, I think, to the fact that science fiction—however we define it as well, speculative fiction perhaps more broadly—does provide the same kind of threat, to many people in our world, as discussion about many of these extremely important challenges. And in that way it is sometimes the most realistic aspect of our existence, because we are surrounded by those kinds of uncertainties.

I go back to the fact that speculative fiction is as long and storied an experience for us as the literature and storytelling. If we go back to perhaps the first science fiction story, the Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh walks into a long darkness. Some people have interpreted it as him walking through the stars or the depths of space, the dark unknown, or to find the afterlife and to be reconnected with Enkidu.

And so we can imagine people of that era also experiencing the liminality of the space in front of them, and the space they could see, but not quite reaching too fully and telling stories about it. So in some ways we talk about yes, needing to be … to reform this moment. But in some ways too, we are returning science fiction to what it was. We are returning to a deeper well of speculative discourse and language that has perhaps been more part of the human experience than this tiny window in which we’ve had science fiction as a commercial genre.

Octavia Cade: Yeah, and I think, too—looking back to what Dan was saying about Niall’s description of that so-called golden age of science fiction as, you know, astronauts and space jets and so on—there’s something almost comforting about that depiction of the future, the idea that technology will fix everything, that it will solve poverty and oppression, even if the stories in which it supposedly does this are quite limited in their applications. You’re talking about the square-jawed male character compared to the people these stories weren’t being written about. But that sense of certainty I think is comforting, but it’s also not very practical.

There is this idea that “in the future it will be like this.” But we have to get to that future. And the negotiations and the compromises that it takes to get there is something that it is difficult for people to deal with, because a lot of those compromises come with the prospect of giving something up. You know, if we do this, we can’t do that. Everything has opportunity cost. And I think that there’s something off-putting about that. We don’t like to deal with it.

The idea of that liminal environment as something untrustworthy, as something that is difficult to navigate, is something that has been with the human understanding of environment for millennia. You’ve just got to look at the history of how, say, wetlands have been understood and interpreted throughout the history of human dealings with nature. You know, they’re not land, they’re not water. They shift about, you go exploring in them. You lose your way all the time. They’re places of confusion and often disease and contagion. And that spreads into our understanding of the liminal.

There are, from a biological and ecological perspective, some really strong advantages to living on the liminal. Life there is exciting. It evolves in new and interesting ways. It’s often extremely biodiverse and so on. Which, you know, goes back to my tendency to make everything about ecology. This idea of living in the liminal, which so many of us are … it has opportunity as well as cost. It’s not just compromise, although that compromise never leaves.

There is the opportunity to insert the science fiction staple that is the sense of wonder into this element of an environment of confusion. And I think that’s something that the magical realist mash-ups with science fiction do particularly well. The Flat Woman does this, The Swan Book by Alexis Wright, as an Indigenous Australian author, very much does this as well. And that has some, I think I said in my review, some similarity to, The Mires as well: This idea that magical realism inserts liminality and confusion into the science fiction certainty, it critiques the genre in a way that it has not had enough of in its native form, I think. And I find that just really particularly interesting.

Dan Hartland: I just co-sign all of that. And I think both of you have touched on this idea that some of what we’re discussing here isn’t at all new. That literature has, since there was literature, been dealing with some of these questions. I think of the critic Edith Hall, who has recently written a book about the Iliad. She reads it in the—this is a quote from the subtitle of the book—in “the light of a dying world.” So any text sufficiently rich will be able to be read in this kind of context—and indeed was in some senses, in the Iliad’s case, written in an elegiac tone in the first place. You know, we have the ubi sunt that finds its way into genre of course mostly via Tolkien—where’s the horse and the rider and all that stuff.

But there’s something specific, I think, about the present moment, which is a little bit different: This idea of the Necrocene as you say, Octavia, or Maggie, as you say, the kind of AI moment (and I agree that term is so lazily applied!) that makes special demands on science fiction to kind of hopefully rethink itself in ways that then enable us to rethink ourselves.

I was reading recently—and maybe we could talk about a few other books that we feel might be in conversation with the ones we’ve sort of focused this conversation on so far—I was reading recently Julia, which is Sandra Newman’s 1984 retelling from the perspective of the titular character, Julia. And what I found so interesting about that first and foremost is that it works and it shouldn’t! You know, when I saw someone was writing 1984 again, I was like, “Please, please don’t, just don’t do that.” But what’s so interesting about it is that it contains room for hope in a way that 1984 doesn’t. Not in a facile way—effectively, the novel ends on a … it ends on a bum note, guys! It’s not a happy ending.

But it’s on a different kind of bum note that is somewhat more cyclical or somewhat more open to systemic change than the original. And I just felt that’s so now. That novel is written that way because it’s written now, and we just need to have that sense of systemic change. Because we’re so aware that it’s necessary, that Orwell was writing in a completely different context where he was essentially warning against a different type of change, a change to that sort of Stalinsit thing that he saw as such a threat. This one is aware that we are trapped in a system that means maybe Orwell was wrong. We got trapped anyway.

And I find this very interesting in present science fiction, because Julia isn’t really doing what Octavia’s talking about it. It’s not being liminal in any way, I mean, it’s so fixed. It’s basically a rewrite of a novel that already existed! But it’s still finding room for that escape hatch, that generic escape hatch, that systemic escape hatch.

Are there other texts we’ve been reading that we think might be doing the same sorts of things?

M. L. Clark: Oh, absolutely. While you were speaking immediately, I thought of Emily Tesh’s Some Desperate Glory, and I think that might be a perfect … I was thinking to myself, it’s the same year. It came out the same year as Julia. So, they’re both really … obviously the writing happens at its own pace, but they came out in a very similar moment. And in some ways when I was reading Some Desperate Glory, I was thinking about how it was pushing back on a few different audiences within genre. There is a pushback on a modality that emerges in Young Adult literature, even though it’s not intrinsically Young Adult. There are elements of it that push back on the kinds of stories that you get within YA, within a Western science fiction context. And at the same time there are elements of the first half of the story it’s telling.

For folks who maybe haven’t read it, the piece begins with a certitude. You are in a character perspective. She has been raised one way to see life in a certain way. She’s been given a certain story of herself and her culture, and then there is a turning point. And what really makes the work special is that there’s then another turning point. And another one. And so it’s not simply a story like The Secret History, in which you go up to a halfway point and then suddenly you get to see everything a second way. There are a multiplicity of stories that will emerge, or different inflection points that will emerge, in this character’s journey as they try to resolve or address all of the harm caused by having lived in the first story.

So there is both what you’re talking about with Julia, the idea of it’s coming from a rigid background, even though the rigid background is internal to this world, and yet the highly fascistic society that she grew up in is not one that can be fixed with a single turn in perspective, a single change in character. It instead involves work that continues. It involves recognizing that she herself will never be able to atone for or correct all of the mistakes that she has made, and there’s no saccharine, easy gloss on that aspect of her character as well. She simply has to live with the knowledge that, whether or not she was aware of it, she was a participant in a very harmful society. She caused harm. And many elements of harm that continue to exist in the world will be beyond her ability to solve or for anyone else to solve in the course for a lifetime.

So, even though it has many elements that you would find within a Young Adult story of a girl learning that her world is not what it was supposed to be or that she was promised, it has depth. Because it doesn’t stop, a little bit like Nayler’s work. It has a forever argument that keeps going, long after the individual character’s story.

Octavia Cade: There’s one that I read a few years ago, Always North by Vicki Jarrett, which really sort of engages in this idea of, of liminality, of pushback between two different types of thinking.

It follows the same character and … how do I say this without spoiling things? Isobel works basically for an oil company. She is part of the science that is actively engaged in ways of making the world worse, shall we say. She has no real ethical understanding of the work that she is doing and no interest in developing it and climate change impacts on the text in quite a significant way. And Isobel finds herself living in the crap-sack world that she created—which is on the one hand, you know, there is some justice there. But on the other, she’s quite an unpleasant character. She really never … she’s never actually really sorry for what she’s done. I think if she was to be able to go back in time in her own form, she probably wouldn’t act, you know, much differently.

But there is a second character, a polar bear—I think Snowball is its name—and poor old Snowball ends up being part of this sort of vivisection experiment. And it’s something very interesting about Always North that it is always interrogating the way that science exploits the non-human and also humans that it considers to be sort of lesser. You know, we see it all the time. Climate change may have an impact on this world, but some parts of it will be impacted more than others. Some populations will be impacted more than others, but they’re not “us,” so it somehow matters less.

I think it was Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything—I think I was, I’m pretty sure it was that book of hers that I was reading. She talks about attending this geoengineering conference about possible ways to start. Engineering the planet in which to limit the effects of climate change. But it was very much limiting the effects in specific places. It’s like, “OK, we can potentially mitigate the effects of climate change on places like Europe and North America, but the consequences of this is that it probably will get worse in places like Sub-Saharan Africa.” And the scientists are just, you know, merely going along. It’s just … “This isn’t some sort of really horrifying compromise!” And that is very much part of what is going on in Always North.

But through part of this experiment on Snowball, the polar bear, Isobel’s consciousness and the polar bear’s become overlapped and there is a sense of time travel when Isobel-within-the-polar-bear goes back in time to try and affect the things that Isobel is doing. And the polar bear is quite insane by this point. There’s some really fantastic creature-horror as it goes—you know, slaughtering everything in its path. And I’m all for that: Go the polar bear. But the way that the book engages with this idea of responsibility and blame and violent response and how sometimes it can possibly be justified, and how to live with yourself in the world that you’ve created, how to either take responsibility or how to completely eschew it.

Because some people do. I mean, many people do. Most of us do. We live, I think all three of us, in societies where we take up more than our fair share of carbon footprint per capita. And yet we still go along doing it. Because, to change, we would have to give up a lot of our standard of living. And are we willing to do this? To some minor extent, possibly, yes. But then we continue, we make bargains with ourselves. You know, I would very much love to visit the Great Barrier Reef, for example, before it dies—because it is one of the fantastic structures on Earth, one of the places of real marvel that is left in this world. And I’m aware that if I get on a plane to go and see the Great Barrier Reef, I’m contributing to its destruction, so I should not do it. But I find myself bargaining. You know, I don’t have children, I don’t have a car. Is that enough for me to cause this extra harm? Objectively, no. Probably not. Subjectively, I would probably, you know, if someone gave me a plane ticket tomorrow, I’d get on the plane, I would find a way to justify it to myself.

And I think the justification in science fiction at the moment is one of the really fascinating elements of the genre as it’s working today. This idea of negotiation, of justification. What are we willing to look away from? And the honest answer is quite a lot! And so I think that’s how we end up a lot of times with these really difficult characters who are often unpleasant to grapple with. That makes them really compelling in my mind, because they are, as you say, reflections of ourselves. We are existing in this liminal space, connecting with these often quite awful people. And I’ve been reading the Nayler, and some of these characters are not good people, most of them, in fact—you would not want to be friends with them. But you recognize their actions, you recognize what they’re doing. You think, in the same way, “I might probably be convinced to act as they are.” And it wouldn’t take much.

M. L. Clark: It is interesting. I might have a slightly different perspective because I did leave Canada to live in a space that would not be considered one of the greatest polluters, and yet it gives me that lens into how human beings are very much subject to the context in which they live. A lot of times I will encounter folks here in Colombia who will say, “Oh, Colombians don’t care about trying to pollute less with the traffic, the number of vehicles here. They’re gonna cause problems. They just, they just don’t care.” They’re saying this about their fellow citizens. And as a Canadian, I’ll say, “Well, Canadians didn’t really care either until there was a little bit of a reframing on a legal level to encourage people to use certain lanes or to incentivize certain kinds of other systems.”

So as much as we sometimes do have reason to castigate ourselves as individuals, it does require a deeper systemic uplift. Colombia is very special in many ways because it is definitely one of the few countries that is trying to disconnect from its oil regime at a time when even places like my country of birth, Canada, is still moving in another direction—despite the fact that there are horrific impacts on our environment every summer, well throughout the year, but we have very clear studies that are showing the direct connection between emissions and world outcomes.

But it’s not easy because there are many other human factors. So, for instance, changing the extraction economy means disrupting a tremendous number of people’s livelihoods. And if you don’t have a plan as a system collectively to address the number of people who need to be moved into different sectors and to have different outcomes, you’re going to be met with a very human struggle. And Colombia is more involved in that struggle than many others at this present moment. But it’s fascinating to see how hard that struggle remains. So we do have a lot to do to create a deeper, more systemic body of discourse around that. And there is a place, there’s absolutely a place for literature to be part of that conversation.

We can be creating narratives that allow us to move through the next problem and the next problem. I think it was Frederik Pohl who said that science fiction isn’t imagining the invention of the car, it’s imagining the invention of traffic. And so—I’m loosely paraphrasing—you have to imagine two problems out in science fiction.

And so here I live in a space that’s two problems out: Colombia is aggressively trying to shift to different green energy futures; and it’s not easy because there’s a lot of pushback, even when you start the process from a number of actors. But the gift of that is that, as Columbia and other places as well try to have those conversations, we can use those stories to help other countries when they decide to finally catch up and start working on this as well. They can anticipate these problems perhaps a little bit better and come up with solutions faster.

Octavia Cade: There is something interesting going on in Colombia at the moment, which has a correlation to New Zealand. There is a similarity there. In 2017, the New Zealand Parliament declared the Whanganui River as a legal person here. I think a couple of months later, the same thing happened to the Rio Atrato in Colombia. And again, the same thing happened about the same time to the Yamuna and Ganges River in India. And so this idea of giving rivers legal personhood—and it’s also happened in New Zealand to a mountain as well—is something, I don’t wanna say science fictional, but it’s something that recognizes that, you know, human values and human identity can be applied on a much broader non-human scale.

And I have yet to see, I think, really a science fiction that engages with the idea of the environment as a legal person. I think there have been many similar attempts in other countries of the world that have just been knocked right over while companies are still given the status of legal human beings. But this idea of story, I think is, is fundamental to that because humans are creatures made up of stories.

And when we recognize the stories associated with places as well as people, when those stories are so linked to the identity of those places, then it becomes easier to see them as, you know, deserving that legal status of personhood as well. And this idea of environmental personhood is something I find absolutely fascinating.

It seems like the science fiction concept: Not only are we granting this ecosystem personhood, but I think it also reflects in a way the growing understanding that as individuals we are ecosystems as well. The way that it reflects the idea between individual and ecosystem, between human and non-human is I think something that science fiction is going to, probably in the next decade or two, really begin to focus on.

M. L. Clark: One would hope. There’s a legal concept that emerges in a lot of South American discourse, so not just Colombia—I don’t want to fetishize any one nation-state in this context—but the notion of “Buen Vivir” is a legal concept that emerges quite a bit, the idea of a sort of holistic wellness that emerges.

It’s a legal concept. It’s integrated into thoughts about how do we develop policy without including overall wellness for ourselves as the society, as a community, as a culture. And that’s something that doesn’t necessarily exist in the vocabulary of a lot of Western policy making.

But it does exist in other discourses. So, when we also talk about the future of science fiction, I might go back to Gibson, who suggested that, the future is here, just not equally distributed. But in some ways that means that a lot of spaces outside the usual places in which we look for science fictional futures might actually be a little bit further along in some of these conversations. We have a tremendous amount to learn, not in a fetishistic way, but just from the fact that many conversations are going on concurrently.

And to go back to your point about violence and literature, Octavia, obviously it brought to mind a conversation that happened after The Ministry of the Future came out, when so many Western reviews were so fascinated, almost excited, almost frothing at the mouth that the idea of, “Oh, terrorism might be necessary. We might be able to shoot down planes because it will lead to greater good.” But a lot of the discourse tended to overlook the other kinds of violence when it was enacted by other countries.

So, for instance, when you’re talking about the possibility of protecting Europe and North America with certain treatments at cost to other parts of the world: That two-thirds world in Ministry of the Future after the heat wave—the horrific, really stunningly written heat wave in the opening scene for Ministry of the Future—India decides, “The rest of the world’s not going to help us. We are just going to go forth and do what we need to do, even if it means that when we protect our skies, we’re going to impact crops in other spaces.”

The idea of other countries doing the things that we take for granted as necessary in our own world is not part of the conversation. Even when we’re talking about violence, even when you have a lot of people who are excited about these possibilities, it’s still so narrow in scope. We still are so fixated by some of our cultural boundaries, and we need to be thinking just a little bit more holistically about the whole world being engaged in concurrent conversations, concurrent speculative thinking about how to go forward.

Octavia Cade: There’s a lot of, I think, continental versus island thinking in science fiction. Yes. And I say that as someone who was raised and who lives on an island, quite a remote one, relatively. There is a tendency in science fiction for New Zealand to be seen as this, you know, refuger at the bottom of the world: “When the apocalypse comes, let’s all go to the bunkers in New Zealand,” that sort of thing.

And it is quite easy to feel that sense of isolation, as an advantage. And so it impacts the ways that I think we look at the rest of the world. In some ways it allows us to be very selfish, because we don’t have to address some of the consequences of living on a continent in ways that other people do. We don’t have the land borders. I don’t want to sort of really underline that sense of refuge, but the horrible truth is that, you know, if climate change really ramped up tomorrow, we have a relatively small population and a relatively high level of food production. We could probably survive in many ways, in ways that a lot of continental countries could not.

There is that sense of not just of isolation, but of insulation that makes it hard, I think, in some ways to look at the compromises that continental countries have to make and not judge them, or at least judge them by different standards, I think.

Dan Hartland: That’s such an interesting point to make in this conversation. Because I, I speak from the UK, which I mean functionally has a long, long history of, particularly the English, thinking of themselves as an island state, which is of course absurd.

Octavia Cade: Because you can swim the English channel! Well, maybe not you and I. We couldn’t. But, you know, it’s ... it’s, yeah. Build a raft!

Dan Hartland: Exactly! Nevertheless, that channel may as well be a chasm, according to some Anglo-chauvinist thinking. And as you were speaking, I was thinking of, and this is somewhat unfair to the book, but I was thinking of a book that was recently on the Clarke Award shortlist, Extremophile by Ian Green.

It’s very interesting to me that most of the books we’ve been talking about today—about, you know, sort of writing in this time of death—aren’t really dystopias, they’re not like that sort of really … even the Julia book that I was talking about sort of undoes some of the dystopian elements of 1984. They’re not really dystopias in that sort of classic sense. They’re something else.

Extremophile is a pretty much a dystopia. It’s a future England—really a future London. Climate change has ravaged the country. And it’s a kind of attempt to make cyberpunk into some sort of … I don’t know, ecopunk or something. It’s not entirely successful in any of that. It’s a very good work of ventriloquism, it has that cyberpunk aesthetic and tone, but to what effect, I’m not sure. But it cannot escape—because, you know, it’s an island-thinking kind of book—it cannot escape a technological solution at the end. It’s a very slim chance of a technological solution. But nevertheless, it is a technological, “Oh, this might work.” It’s not a square-jawed man that does it. But nevertheless!

Then I was comparing that in my head as you were speaking, Octavia, with another book I recently reviewed for Strange Horizons, Archipelago of the Sun by Yoko Tawada, which is this wonderfully strange book that also takes place in a near-future, climate-ravaged Europe and very much is continental. The characters spend most of their time on a boat, on a ship—on a cruise ship, really—trying to get between the various countries. And the coastlines have changed and people aren’t sure whether the countries are where they used to be. And all of the characters in this liminality, this uncertainty, this adriftness, start to rethink their identities and they start to even rethink the languages in which they speak. And it does something with the time of death which Extremophile does not, almost because it is a novel in transit.

There are deep waters there that we, you know, I would love to plumb further—particularly as I think, when we are talking about giving personhood to rivers and mountains and elements of the natural world (natural world in scare quotes!), we come full-circle in the conversation back to where we started, which was with Ray Nayler. That book is so interested in a corporatized world, and of course we’ve long since accepted for some reason that corporations are, as you say, Octavia, are people. And yet if we’re talking about escaping anything, surely we wanna escape from corporations are people to rivers might be—actually, it might be better to say that (!).

Octavia Cade: I mean, I have not accepted that corporations are people.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. I’m still with you on the barricades! Yeah.

Octavia Cade: I have not! I find it extremely easy to accept that mountains and rivers are people.

Well, you were talking before about this idea of a novel spent in transit, through islands and continents. Molly Gloss’s The Dazzle of Day, published in I think the late 1990s, does that extremely well. The earth is a crap-sack—in the future, the earth is a crap-sack world, you know. Dust bowls and everything. And this group of Quakers decide to set out on a colony space mission to another planet, because they exist as an island in the North American continent. Basically, this small community of people whose land and way of life is consistently being encroached on, they see themselves being sort of overwhelmed by the continent around them, and they know that it’s not sustainable. So they set out on this generation-long journey to find another world.

And of course, as they travel in this generational ship, they are an island in space. But at the end, when they get to this planet and they are terraforming it to their own requirements, they are colonizing it with plants and animals from New Zealand. They have become the continent by the end because there is no island on that planet that is capable of opposing them.

I think there’s something quite fascinating about that, about how transition works in the way that we approach environment and that sense of ourselves as belonging to an isolated community versus belonging to a global one, the balance between that. She does it really well.

M. L. Clark: I haven’t read that one, but it does seem to tie into another thread that we’ve been carrying through this conversation.

With respect to certain tropes in science fiction and fantasy, there has been a longstanding desire to sort of clear out other people to sort of bring things back to a smaller society or smaller community—as if that would somehow give us more agency and a better path forward, as if the problems that we face could be managed if we just happened to be a lot fewer.

And it does sound like that kind of work is bridging and maybe pushing past a little bit the tremendous weaknesses of that trope, especially when it talks about our capacity for moral courage and moral imagination. Because if we’re thinking on that scale, we cannot come to solutions that are going to serve the world in which we actually operate.

I do think that what our role as a critic is, in terms of opening up that conversation—I think we’ve done some of that here—I would encourage maybe in thinking about all of these works, which are themselves trying to carry the argument forward, to just be cautious in ensuring that when we review them, when we talk about them, we are doing precisely that in the way that we speak of them.

So, if it is a work that is trying to carry conversation forward, it would be I think quite dangerous for a critic to come along and try to close or solve the conversation. To be able to carry forward the best of the argument that is presented in the book is maybe the best that we can do for our audience in general.

Dan Hartland: Yeah, I would say certainly that one of the concerns that I have about genre criticism—literary criticism in general, but since we’re talking about, spec fiction and science fiction and fantasy—is this sense that, “OK, I need to figure out how this book is science fiction, right? So I need to be able to fit it in to the framework and I might have to file an edge off here or, or, or create a precedent there.” I would plead with critics to yes, be more open to the idea that this is all very fuzzy and they are …

M. L. Clark: Liminal, I think somebody used that word!

Dan Hartland: That’s right! And there are related literatures and there is all kinds of play between them that doesn’t need to fit into this kind of progression, this sort of heritage, this idea of a family tree. We don’t need that, we just need the conversation.

Octavia Cade: When science fiction is open to these sorts of discussions, is open to the argument, is looking at stories that are open-ended, that envelop a number of range of perspectives, it becomes a much more lively and interesting debate. It becomes one which is more resilient, which helps us to understand the future and the present in a much more constructive and productive way. So yeah, the idea of the argument as necessary not only to genre, but to existing in the Necrocene is I think something that needs to be prioritized.

[musical sting]

Octavia Cade: Well, thank you to Strange Horizons as well. It is, I think, the only review outlet that allows me to blather on for two thousand words about a book and never says, “You have to stop here!”

M. L. Clark: I got to throw in Heidegger. How many places would let me throw in Heidegger?!?

[laughter]

[musical sting]

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

And while I’m here, a note on last episode, which you’ll remember was about SF in translation from small presses based in the US currently faced with an immediate funding crisis as a result of … well, shall we say, changes at the National Endowment for the Arts.

We were glad to see the episode prompt some discussion. In particular, a few kind souls got in touch to note that SFT is reviewed regularly by a number of folks at Locus. This of course is good! In the episode, Rachel Cordasco especially was expressing the need for features and essays, and a concern that recently those have dwindled. We hope to see more of that stuff. But it’s very good that stuff of other kinds is very much available. Stay critical, friends!

See you next time.

In this episode of Strange Horizons at 25, editor Kat Kourbeti chats to author Debbie Urbanski about her 2018 Strange Horizons publication and the 13 years of submissions it took to get accepted, writing in the gray areas between genres, and what it means to be artistically honest in your work.

Links and things:

• Want to leave us a happy birthday message? Click ⁠here to record an audio message⁠, and ⁠here for video⁠.
• Join our ⁠Patreon⁠ for early episode access, or donate through any other way to hear your name and message in our next episodes.
• Want to meet the team? Podcast editors Kat and Michael will be at Seattle Worldcon! Come to our Table Talk on Wednesday morning, or to our live episode recording on Friday evening, grab a ribbon, and tell us about your favourite Strange Horizons stories, poems, or special issues.

Episode show notes:

• Read Debbie Urbanski's story, Some Personal Arguments in Support of the BetterYou (Based on Early Interactions)
• Visit her website, or follow her on Instagram and Substack
• Buy her book, After World, or her short story collection Portalmania
• Read Andy Sawyer's Strange Horizons review of After World
• Find more links to her work and other things mentioned throughout the transcript below.

Transcript

Kat Kourbeti: Hello Strangers, and welcome to Strange Horizons at 25, a 25th anniversary celebration of Strange Horizons. I'm your host, Kat Kourbeti, and it is my privilege today to welcome you to another episode that looks back at the history and impact of Strange Horizons on the speculative genres.

Today's guest is Debbie Urbanski, who was published with us in 2018, and has since gone on to publish a debut novel, as well as a collection of stories. She has been long listed for the Otherwise Award twice, among other nominations, and has written short fiction for F&SF, Lightspeed, and so much more. It's great to have you here, Debbie.

Debbie Urbanski: Thanks for having me, and happy 25th.

Kat Kourbeti: Thank you so much. It's very exciting, because you don't really think about the longevity of a magazine in your day to day. You're just doing it to do it. But time ticks by, and it collects, and somehow... 25 years.

Debbie Urbanski: And it's huge, yeah, that you guys are thriving right now.

Kat Kourbeti: Oh, thank you.

Debbie Urbanski: Yeah. Really important. Fabulous.

Kat Kourbeti: Oh, I appreciate it.

Did you read Strange Horizons much before submitting to us?

Debbie Urbanski: Yeah, and I did go back to prepare for this. I was curious the first time I submitted to you guys, and it was in 2005. So I had submitted for 13 years before I got the acceptance.

Kat Kourbeti: Wow. Okay. Wow. It's so interesting how diverse the experience is of people on this podcast, because you really just get the whole gamut. So 13 years of submissions, that's a lot.

Debbie Urbanski: I got some really nice personal notes from various editors along the way, starting with Jed (Hartman). And then when the acceptance finally came, it was a rewrite, so like a conditional acceptance.

Kat Kourbeti: Interesting. Ooh, I wanna hear about this, 'cause I don't think I've heard very much in that vein from people yet.

So let's talk a little bit about the story first. It's called Some Personal Arguments in Support of the BetterYou, Based on Early Interactions. And it's kinda sorta a product review, kinda sorta a diary, it's a mixed bag. Can you tell me a little bit about the process of writing the story?

Debbie Urbanski: Sure. So I was interested at the time to experiment with form. The straightforward story wasn't really feeling like a good fit at the time, so I wanted to try writing something that was like a product review leaning towards essay, and there was a lot of stuff in my life that I wanted to explore in a fictional way too.

I was interested in like, what if the partner you're with is the right partner, but not perfect. Or you know, what if you really want your partner, but you want your partner to be different and the partner can't be. Kind of those situations and yeah, I imagined what if there was this other android, who could fulfill everything that your partner needs in your relationship?

Kat Kourbeti: It is "positive" ultimately, I guess, in terms of reviewing the product, but I think that there are some moments that there's doubt about whether or not it's a good product and/or perfect. 'Cause even the main character is a bit conflicted sometimes, but ultimately, I think swivels around, would you say?

Debbie Urbanski: Yeah. I was interested in the point of view of someone who thought this would be a good thing for their relationship, and I found that to be really heartbreaking as a human being, that this character couldn't be accepted for who she was. And she decides to kind of disappear, in a way, from her life and think her family would be happier without her, which is really sad, and obviously it's not a good product.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, like she keeps saying like, "no, I think it's great that people can choose to buy a better version of themselves and have it around and it can do things." But then at the same time, she's like, "hmm, I'm not sure about you marketing this to marginalized communities. Maybe don't do that."

So now that we've touched upon it a little bit, tell me about the draft you sent in and how was it different?

Debbie Urbanski: The revision ideas were really thoughtful. The big one was asking, it was Lila (Garrott) who I was working with, and she wondered why asexuality in particular, which is how the narrator identifies, why asexuality isn't considered normalized by that point. 'Cause she thought there's a lot of good work being done in the ace community. Is it taking place far in the future or is it taking place now in just an alternate reality?

I decided to try and address that through saying the technology developed really fast, making it more set in the present than in a hundred years from now. Because I agree, like a hundred years from now, hopefully we'll accept people as they are, fingers crossed, in relationships as well as in general society.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, I think that would've been my next question because I couldn't place when it was meant to be set, but I got a vibe of now because at the beginning it said, "you'd think we'd be able to go to Mars before we can edit our memories, but here we are," and it is in fact a little spooky that you wrote this in 2018, and now there's a lot of stuff being done that we really didn't think even back then we could do, and we can, and it's crazy how fast a lot of things have been flying.

So then you've decided to go ahead with those edits, but it didn't really change the themes or what you wanted to tell with the story.

Debbie Urbanski: No, and I think that's a sign of good editing, right? Where it still is your story, but makes more sense to the reader, more accessible. I think that would've been a distraction point. I think Lila was right. That wasn't really my intent to suggest the future will be just as hard as it is now for some.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, some of the phrases in there, you know, she says that she's of an older generation and "oh, well I'm not comfortable wearing the badge of my identity on my sleeve and doing all this pride stuff" basically—she doesn't say it in those words, but basically. It just really had me thinking about that and about the place of ace-spec people in the LGBT community and how, first of all, a lot of the time they're not welcomed by the LGBT community, which is nonsense. And at the same time it's about how you feel, right? And if you don't feel like you are part of that community, then perhaps trying to shoehorn you in there and just be like, "you're the A in the LGBTQIA"... If you don't wanna be a part of that, then where does that leave you as a person, floating in the world?

Debbie Urbanski: I think I was—I still kind of am interested in generational differences. I identify as asexual and I figured it out in like the 2000s, 2010s, which I think was a really different time. You know, it was a lot of Googling and just asexuality.org, pretty much. I was really struggling when I wrote this story with kind of the queer joy approach, which was great—I was really happy for those people. I just felt like, "man, I am in a tough situation right now in my experience. I can't get it to fit in with how other people are expressing their experience."

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. Leaps and bounds have happened since the early 2000s, even in terms of how we talk about things, let alone studies and research and so on. And these are themes that you touch upon in your other work, and we'll get to that in a little bit.

But just to kind of wrap up the Strange Horizons portion of the experience, of doing the edits and sending the rewrite in, and then that was probably that?

Debbie Urbanski: I came to genre writing a little indirectly where I grew up reading a ton of genre. My dad's really into film, like 16 millimeter film, so we watched a lot of old sci-fi movies. Then I got my MFA in poetry, went that route, but I still really loved reading genre and so when I started to write it, I was less confident than with the literary fiction world. It was really affirming and exciting for me to get to be in Strange Horizons.

Kat Kourbeti: And we do publish poetry also, so if you ever write any spec poetry, you know where to find us!

Debbie Urbanski: I went in my records, it shows I was rejected on some of my poetry as well, but they were the nicest rejections. The person recommended other places for me to send, which I thought was so generous. Yeah, kudos to you folks at Strange Horizons for caring about the people who submit.

Kat Kourbeti: Oh, for sure. A lot of the time our editors are writers themselves and so they know what that process is like and what it takes to send your work out in the first place. And especially I think in the poetry world, there's a lot of care to find the right venue, and these are the people who will know what other venues there might be. So that's great, I'm glad to hear that, but again, don't stop sending things. You never know!

I guess I wanna ask now a little bit more generally about your genre work. Where do you think you kind of land, genre wise, in your general work? Is it more sci-fi? Your novel is science fiction for sure, but then some of your short stories are more magic. So like, what's the vibe genre wise for you?

Debbie Urbanski: I like mixing things up a lot. I was interested in—I still am—horror more recently, and I think I like taking parts of genre that I love and try doing something different with it. So with my novel, for instance, post-apocalyptic fiction is one of my favorite genres. I don't totally understand why, it's like my comfort reading. Like I just, I'm really happy when I read post-apocalyptic fiction.

Kat Kourbeti: Yay. The world is over!

Debbie Urbanski: It's like a relief kind of!

I camp and hike, and I studied medieval history, so there's a nice intersection, I think of all those things in post-apocalyptic. You know, it's usually post technology and survivalist sort of stuff. I wanted to play around with that and try and write a really serious, realistic, super detailed story about someone who doesn't survive, essentially, for the novel.

Or for even the Portal stories, I wanted to write about people who aren't able to go through the portals. I really love portal stories too, just like traditional ones, or like The Chosen One stories. I wrote something for teens about the chosen person's friend, because I was thinking that's a really hard position to be in—

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Debbie Urbanski: To be in a supporting character role. What I like doing is mixing things and playing around.

Kat Kourbeti: And you said you had a sideways entry into genre writing, but would you say that's where you live now, in genre?

Debbie Urbanski: I think probably to the detriment of my career, I still am all over the place. So while I was working on the story collection, pulling it together, I was writing these experimental essays that are really tough to place. One of the essays is called The Constraints of Fiction, (about) just how I felt like everybody from editors to readers to reviewers was telling me what a story should look like, and how I kind of wanted to break out of that.

I have a good friend whose son died by suicide and I met him nine months after that happened, and I was frustrated that the only skill I had, which was writing, could do nothing to help my friend. So I wrote a story where I imagined, it's kinda like an essay story, imagined trying to bring his son back through writing, which of course you can't do.

So I'm still in this nether world, maybe intersectional world.

Kat Kourbeti: That's a good place to be. You say the detriment of your career, but at the same time, I think it's more honest to keep all of that in play because that's you, and what you're interested in and what you enjoy and what you think about. So it's not exclusive, I don't think. I think it's more artistically honest to play around with all the things.

Debbie Urbanski: That's a beautiful framework, thank you for that. Yeah, that's true. For my next project, it's a weird time 'cause I finished these Portal stories that have been occupying me, kind of about personal stuff, finished my novel, and it finally feels like I could write about anything, but I don't know what that anything is! And I've been—ugh.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, if you don't have something kicking around, you then just open the windows in your brain and let something else in.

Debbie Urbanski: Something will come, I think.

Kat Kourbeti: Something will come.

Debbie Urbanski: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: I believe it. You've also written a lot of different sort of formats. So where do you feel comfortable? Is it short fiction mostly, or novels? Or obviously a combination, but how do you operate as a writer, in terms of the length of things that you plan to write?

Debbie Urbanski: I wrote my novel because I wanted to have a story collection, that was my motivation, and I was trying to find an agent. And all the agents were asking, where's your novel? So stories are my first love for sure. Post-apocalyptic is my comfort genre, stories are my comfort place.

It's interesting that there's such hesitation in the commercial publishing world. I mean, my publisher was great and agreed to publish my collection. I'm so grateful. At the same time, there's not a big expectation for collections, and it's difficult to try and get them to the world. But I feel like stories are so perfect for our attention spans now, and to address all the stuff that's going on everywhere.

Kat Kourbeti: I find that really interesting. So maybe we can pick your brains about writing short and how you approach a short story, because it can be just such a personal thing to each writer, how the plot forms and how the characters form. Like in my case, I can't keep things short to save my life. I really wish I could, it's something I have to very consciously work at, as opposed to people like you for whom it's more of a natural sort of process. And I'm always fascinated with people's methods and with people's different ways of thinking about story.

So maybe you can walk me through sitting down and you're like, "I'm gonna write this story, I have an idea." First of all, do you outline it out first, or do you just kind of sit down and write and see what happens?

Debbie Urbanski: It's a bit of a chaotic method that I do, and I applied this to novel writing as well, which is probably why my novel took eight years to write. But I tend to write a little bit free association, in fragments or in chunks, and then I actually print everything out and then tear it up and then I reorder it on my floor.

Kat Kourbeti: Oh wow. Okay.

Debbie Urbanski: With the windows closed and kind of staple things together. You could probably see that in the Strange Horizon story a little— 'cause—

Kat Kourbeti: It is a little fragmented, yeah!

Debbie Urbanski: Yeah. And I'm interested in the order of things, changing that around, and my mind just doesn't think in a linear fashion.

Kat Kourbeti: Okay.

Debbie Urbanski: I think it would be easier if it did, but kind of what you were saying before, you need to be honest with who you are artistically.

Kat Kourbeti: Exactly.

Debbie Urbanski: My mind's like, it is just...

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Debbie Urbanski: All the things at once.

Kat Kourbeti: So going back to your Strange Horizons story then, because that is very fascinating: it is fragmentary in places, and that's why I said that it feels like a diary almost rather than a product review the whole way through, 'cause I think a product review would just be like, "here's what happened and that's my experience, five stars, everyone should buy one".

But this one has little snippets and little scenes and little thoughts even, that maybe don't have a specific incident, but it's like, "hmm, I was thinking this", and then there's another section. And you don't see that very much in short stories, not super often, like that many different little jumbled thoughts, but it made sense for this character. I didn't think, "huh, this is really scattered". I just thought it makes sense for this character to be having all of these different thoughts, because it's quite a difficult and emotionally charged thing that she's going through.

So would you say that is reflected in your other short fiction as well?

Debbie Urbanski: I think at one stage in the writing process, I'm sure, yes. Sometimes I do try and do the transitions more, smooth things over, or I go through phases where I don't want any breaks, so I try and have a single scene.

One thing I like about the story form is I think it allows me to play with form and not exhaust the reader to such a degree. One of my favorite stories I wrote was a bunch of dictionary entries, of words that I made up from the future, and the person's trying to write a dictionary and explain what's happening in the world.

Kat Kourbeti: Okay.

Debbie Urbanski: But that format was perfect for me because I got to have little definitions, and I got to include some(thing) personal, if I wanted, and kind of develop things as it goes through the alphabet.

Kat Kourbeti: Wow. Yeah, okay. Again, finding ways for that thinking to work with a format that you're making up. I feel like that is also perhaps coming from your poetry background, because poetry can be whatever you want.

Debbie Urbanski: That's great, yeah, that's super interesting.

Kat Kourbeti: And now that I know that you've done an MFA in poetry, I'm like, this is making sense actually, because you don't have to write a poem top to bottom, and it doesn't always have to follow a form. Some forms do, there's types of poems that do have rules you have to follow for it to make sense and so on. But not everything is.

I'm like, "ooh, but you're doing this with prose, that's interesting."

Debbie Urbanski: My gosh. Thank you. I'm gonna think about that more too, it's really cool. I don't write poetry actively anymore, could get a little melancholy about that, but I like thinking that it's still in my work.

Kat Kourbeti: It's kicking around in there because if it's something that you did so much for a long time, even if you stop doing it, I think it influences your method at the very least, if not the way that you even think, on a more minute level, in the phrases and the way that you think about language. Like, poetry can really make you think about the layers of language, if you will. It's part of you no matter how deep.

Debbie Urbanski: This is such a comforting interview. Thank you. I'll just write down some of these wonderful things you're telling me.

Kat Kourbeti: We're here to big up our writers. It's what we do here. We like to big up our writers and we like to see them thrive. And I'm happy that eventually, you got an agent and all that, but I was sad to hear—I was listening to another podcast you did with Scrivener, and in there you were talking about how you had to go through three agents in order to find the right fit for this book, and I suppose eventually everything else that you'll end up doing. And it really struck a chord with me, because I've had more interviews on this podcast and elsewhere talking to folks who have had similar experiences that are not often talked about in publishing.

The narrative tends to be, "I found my dream agent immediately and they believed in me and we were a perfect fit, and then they found me an editor and a publisher and it was so great". And we don't hear the stories that are about, "actually, it wasn't the right fit and it wasn't immediate and I had to work at it."

So I wanted to ask you if you have any advice for other writers who might be facing similar situations, who might not know what to do?

Debbie Urbanski: That's a great question. I will also say—so in addition to the agent, my novel is orphaned, which isn't often talked about either. That's when a publisher/editor buys your novel and then the editor leaves and you get reassigned to another editor. And I had to Google it when it happened to me, 'cause one of my friends was like, "oh no, like an orphan situation", but it's another thing that I think I wish we talked about more.

Kat Kourbeti: Absolutely. Yeah.

Debbie Urbanski: I do think using the writing community in any way you can is really helpful. For the past 15 years, I've formed my own writing groups and writing communities. I'm in one now of Simon & Schuster authors who are publishing at the same time, it's something we organized ourselves. And then I'm in an accountability group. So even if you're not part of that yet, you could reach out and find people through organizations, or read a short story by an author you like and send them an email. They've turned out to be good friends of mine sometimes, I've met people that way. That really helped me get through the disappointments and the length of time it took for me to get my novel into the world. More established authors could be very generous with their time or at least pointing in the right direction or saying like, yes, I've been through this. Yeah, I encourage people just to reach out or form their own community if they're not part of one.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, 'cause there's just so much that we don't consider as aspiring writers, or aspiring authors. We think it's gonna be a linear journey and then it's just up, up, up. But in fact, there's all of these bumps and all of these things that could happen that we're certainly not expecting when we start out, and then when it happens, sometimes it's hard to be prepared.

So I'm glad that you found a community, and I'm glad that there's a little circle formed, even of people at the same publisher, 'cause that's also important, to be around the people with a similar experience, exactly where you are right now, which can be hard.

So... I suppose the next question is, what's next? Are you thinking more short story collections? Your short story collection had a theme, and even if not every story is the same, premise wise, there is a theme kind of linking everything together. What about a collection of stories from your other publications, like stuff that's been out that perhaps is not about this one specific theme. Would you do a kind of more general one? Or do you believe in the themed collection?

Debbie Urbanski: I would love to have multiple collections out there, and then also to have a collection of my experimental nonfiction. But my editor and my agent both thought, in today's marketplace, that themed collections have a better chance of getting read. I have like 50 stories or something to choose from. I like them all, so I was not the right person to choose which ones went in the collection. My agent and my editor were a big help. Someday I would love to have another collection out there. I think I'm supposed to write a novel next, first.

Kat Kourbeti: Fair. And as you said at the beginning, I don't know if we were recording yet but you said that you're not sure where the next idea will come from. I'm looking forward to whatever that is.

Debbie Urbanski: I'm thinking whales or non-human points of view. I've narrowed it down. Or oceans maybe.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. One of the previous guests on this podcast, Jordan Kurella, one of his poems with us— orry, I think it was a story in fact—in which the character(s) is a plural, it's a first person plural point of view, and it's the Four Winds, which is pretty fun. We'll link that in the show notes also. I think we have a few on Strange Horizons that you could trawl for inspiration there.

My next question is, let's talk about the post-apocalyptic comfort novel that you wrote, in which I guess humanity is gone. Is that a spoiler to say?

Debbie Urbanski: I wanted it from page one to be clear.

Kat Kourbeti: Okay.

Debbie Urbanski: Yeah. So hopefully not (a spoiler).

Kat Kourbeti: And then the narrator is this AI that's telling our story, or the story of the book. So can you tell me a little bit about how that is the comfort, and where the idea came from for that?

Debbie Urbanski: I will say my book is probably not comforting to most people. I just talked with the animal rights book group who had read it, and they had a really interesting read on it. For them, I think it was more comforting 'cause they were very non-human species centered, and the earth ends up okay in my book, so I do hope that balances out a little bit of the bleakness.

But yeah, I was reading a lot about extinction and started thinking about other species' extinction. It was in a great book called The World Without Us. I like reading nonfiction too, and so that one, it's a scientist journalist who kind of describes in great detail what happens if we all disappear. And a scientist mentioned, humans are gonna go extinct eventually. I just took that as a thought experiment. AI came in a little bit later as a narrator, because the book was really fragmented like we were talking about, that's how I think, and one of my agents wanted a cohesive whole around all the fragments.

Kat Kourbeti: Interesting. Yeah. I think something else that you mentioned in that Scrivener podcast episode was how, because you work with all of these fragments and then you bring it all together eventually and you move things around and you shuffle—I find that very interesting because of the non-linear aspect. Because even in a book like this where you aren't telling a story—there is a narrative and a through line, but the drafting and the formation of it doesn't have to be that from the beginning—and I think that's a mistake that a lot of writers make at the beginning of trying to put something big together, where they're like, "oh God, I can't write from the beginning to the end!" and they freak out and they stop.

And I say "they", I mean me—I've done this. So it's just fascinating to see how this method is in fact just embracing the natural discovery of things, and then putting them in an order that makes sense, and taking it from there.

Debbie Urbanski: I find when something's not working in a story, it's often form related for me. Like I haven't found the form yet or the point of view, or the structure. So that's really how a big part of my revision is. Sometimes it is me taking like a 15,000 word piece and reducing it to 1500 words, and it works much better.

Kat Kourbeti: I just made a face, dear listeners who can't see me. I was just like, "what?!"

Debbie Urbanski: Yeah. I highlighted the stuff I really thought was working, and then I just got rid of the rest of the stuff and it became like, this lyric essay.

Kat Kourbeti: Huh!

Debbie Urbanski: Which is a form I like too.

Kat Kourbeti: That's cool because again, you're just not constrained. I feel like a lot of us go into writing and we think "I've read books, I know what books are like, or I know what a short story is because I've read a bunch of them, so I guess I'm just gonna like, do that". I suppose it goes back to what we were saying earlier about being artistically honest: if it's not quite doing what you want it to do, saying what you want it to say, if it follows that form but it's not working, then what are you doing even? So I'm learning from you here.

This is why this podcast is in fact a free masterclass for me and also anybody else who wants to listen to a bunch of writers talk about the way that they do things. Which is why I like to pick people's brains about how they do stuff.

So then at the end of the revision, you've put the whole thing together, you've formulated the structure and everything and it's final. And then come the editors and the agents and everybody else who asks you to rework what you've already spent a lot of time like, reworking. What is that process like? Or what was it for this book, anyway?

Debbie Urbanski: I think along the way I always had to ask myself what my goal was, and it was to get a book published, and I was interested in working with a Big Five publisher if the opportunity arose, to see what that experience was like. I think I'd be very comfortable at a small indie experimental press, but I thought, okay, I'll give it a try.

One of my agents who I was just with briefly, wanted humanity to survive in the end, not such a bleak ending, or I heard a lot of "make it more like Station Eleven", and those comments I knew, you know, maybe it would've helped sell the book, but I just... Station Eleven already has been written. I'm not interested in providing another Station Eleven to the world.

With my current editor who I really love, his approach was trying to put in footholds or just making things more accessible. He did think of how we do have a reader and we want the reader to finish the book. Honestly, that's not how I think. I wanted the book to be difficult for the reader, just 'cause of the material. So we found this compromise that still felt really true to my book.

The orphaned version that didn't work out, there is a version floating around where I had to take away the AI narrator and put a human narrator. So I did one big rewrite, but then I was like, no, this is not my book anymore.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. Is it a challenge? Yes, and the mileage will vary from reader to reader and whether or not they find comfort and/or if they like the premise that it starts with. But it's just so interesting to hear about editors and the people involved in the creation of this book, just not quite getting that and there being a version that's very different. But I'm glad you didn't have to compromise that, because it is very much at the heart of this book that there isn't a human narrator. That's the point. And then, yeah, how did the narrative voice of the AI narrator form in your head as you were writing this?

Debbie Urbanski: I knew I wanted there to be some kind of development over the novel. I was interested in a narrator who didn't know something and then learned something by the end. So my first try, the AI narrator didn't know how to tell a story, so was struggling trying all these different methods. There was a page in hieroglyphics at one point and my editor pointed out this is not very interesting for the reader to read, in a nice way. We don't need to read someone who isn't a good writer or who can't write. It's not pleasurable.

We decided that the shift was going to be the narrator understanding or developing more feelings for affection, caring for the person that they're writing about, which I think happens to all writers, right? As we spend time with our characters. Or actually it happens to everyone all the time, like when you spend time with anyone, generally you're gonna start caring for them more.

So yeah, that's how I settled upon the voice. I did read some books about AI and my husband's a programmer, so just kinda, I thought about how an AI might describe a room, and they're not gonna just describe humans in a room; they might resort to counting things or describing the temperature, or the body mass index of people instead of...

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. So that's what find fascinating, like the practical implications of having a narrator who doesn't have a person's, you know, the way you notice things will be different and the way you describe things will be different. And so in practical terms, how that manifests in a voice is fun.

Was it fun to play around with that sort of thing?

Debbie Urbanski: It was really fun, yeah. I love having a particular point of view, or even an extreme point of view. Sometimes in my early work, I tried if I was in a situation to write the story from the other person's point of view, or the person who's hard to relate to their point of view. I find that a lot more fun than someone we already know or someone you understand. It's a good way to understand someone you don't, to write a story from their point of view.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, I do find the (novel's) premise distressing, but at the same time like, it is about examining problems without man in it, if that makes sense. So like, how is the world then changed or like, how can it bounce back from what we've done to it?

I read a great self-published book, I think, and I forget how I came across it, but I remember at the time of reading it that I was first of all, engrossed, and second of all, fascinated with some of the world building in which the premise was "orca whales are telepathic and they open a portal under the sea—they want to open a portal under the sea so they can leave."

Debbie Urbanski: Whoa.

Kat Kourbeti: And they're finding it really difficult because of sonar and other stuff that's like polluting the water and they can't talk to each other and they can't hear each other. And somehow the human narrator is affected by what's going on with the orcas and plot happens. I think it's called Exodus 2022, which I think gives you an idea. I read this way before 2022 and when the year came by, I was like, "huh, what if all the whales left?" You know, just like... (bye!)

But that book really asked those kinds of questions of like, "you've been in charge of this planet and you've botched it, so like we're outta here." And the presumption that we are at the top of the food chain, quote unquote, at the top of the hierarchy of things on this planet and how that's just such an arrogant view of the world and us, and instead of being part of something, we are placing ourselves on top of it.

While that book, I think takes in fact quite a downturn in terms of how the planet does, in comparison to yours—

Debbie Urbanski: Sure.

Kat Kourbeti: —but those were the questions at the heart of it. And reading about your book, I was like, oh yeah, those are the questions that we have to ask now, because we are at a precipice. We really are at a turning point and have been for some time, but especially right now.

Debbie Urbanski: Yeah. Like what are we trying to save when we're talking about climate change? Often it seems like we're prioritizing humans, which might seem obvious to some people, but I think there's another point of view where all living creatures are super important. How could we save more?

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. Would you say that you write solar punk at all? Or that sort of sci-fi?

Debbie Urbanski: So my understanding, someone was trying to describe that to me. Is it usually hopeful? Does it tend to be?

Kat Kourbeti: I guess so. So solar punk tends to envision positive outcomes from now, but like where a turning point might—how can we reverse things or how can we find positive solutions to climate change and/or human society. Like how we've structured the world is harmful, (so) how can we envision alternatives that might not be that?

But I do think that humanity does play a part in it, so definitely not this novel.

Debbie Urbanski: Yeah. I've had some interesting discussions about the place of hope versus hopefulness in the future. There's a lot of both activists and regular people who find it really important to keep a positive outlook about the future, and hope. And I totally get that and I'm really glad those books exist, but I also feel like it's important, like with Portalmania and asexuality, to show both queer joy and also what happens when it's really difficult. I did feel like I wanted to show an extreme situation with extinction to hopefully get people thinking (about) what's at stake.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, absolutely.

So the most recent thing from you is in fact Portalmania, which at the time of recording I think just came out.

Debbie Urbanski: Yep. Two weeks ago today.

Kat Kourbeti: Ooh. We'll put a link in the show notes for everybody to go check that out. And I suppose this might be a hard question to ask and feel free to refuse me, but do you have a favorite child from within this collection of short stories?

Debbie Urbanski: I thought you were mentioning about actual children!

Kat Kourbeti: No, I would not presume to ask you this!

Debbie Urbanski: I have two children.

Kat Kourbeti: No—among the several children included in this collection of short stories, is there something that you know, is dearer to you or something that captures that artistic honesty we've been talking about?

Debbie Urbanski: There's a longer story called The Dirty Golden Yellow House, and that's the most recent story I wrote. So there's not a lot of agency given to the women, intentionally, in the book. Just that's how I was feeling at the time. But this was the first story where I felt like, okay, I'm gonna let the female character be able to do something, and maybe it's not the right thing, but she's gonna do it. And it's an angry story. I also let myself be angry about a lot of stuff in there, so it ranges from like, reviews online about my stuff that got into the personal, which was yucky, to just our inability to talk about certain topics.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Debbie Urbanski: I got a lot outta my system in that story. It is something that had been building, and it was like this big release to write it, which was nice.

Kat Kourbeti: Oh, that's very cool. Yeah, there's a big power in how the fiction can be therapeutic and an avenue for catharsis for writers. We do call it "cheaper than therapy." Although... is it?

Debbie Urbanski: Oh man. Yeah. Never do your hourly rate as a writer. Right?

Kat Kourbeti: Let's not examine the actual math, how much that costs per hour. We're just not gonna go there.

I'm glad that did that for you. And we'll check that story out and the rest of the collection linked in the show notes and in the transcript on the website.

Thank you so much for joining us! Where can we find you online?

Debbie Urbanski: So I'm on Instagram. I post photos of portals occasionally, it's been my latest project. It's @debbieurbanski, and then I'm on Substack, I think it's Debbie Urbanski there too. And I have a website, Debbie Urbanski.

Kat Kourbeti: Search for Debbie Urbanski and we will find you!

Thank you. Thank you so much for spending your time with us and all the best in your writing journey. We can't wait to see what else you come up with.

Debbie Urbanski: This has been such a great conversation, so thank you, thank you so much.

Kat Kourbeti: Thank you!

In this episode of the Strange Horizons Fiction podcast, editor Michael Ireland presents Angela Liu's 'Time Is An Ocean' read by Emmie Christie.

Subscribe to the Strange Horizons podcast on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠.

In this episode of Strange Horizons at 25, editor Kat Kourbeti talks to Mary Robinette Kowal about the fractal nature of story structure, how writing is really kind of like cooking, and the joys of writing to please the teenaged version of you.

Links and things:

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Episode show notes:

• Read Mary Robinette's work in our archives.
• Listen to the audio of the Portland Strange Horizons 10th Anniversary Reading event on her website.
• Buy The Martian Contingency and pre-order Apprehension/Red Star Hustle (part of a Saga Double with Sam J Miller)
• Follow Mary Robinette on Instagram or visit her website to sign up for her monthly newsletter, The Mary Robinette Gazette. Both places abound with talking cat content!
• Find more links to her work and other things as you read the transcript below.

Transcript

Kat Kourbeti: Hello Strangers, and welcome to Strange Horizons at 25, a 25th anniversary celebration of Strange Horizons. I'm your host, Kat Kourbeti, and it's my privilege today to welcome you to another episode that looks back at the history and impact of Strange Horizons on the speculative genres.

Today's guest is Mary Robinette Kowal, whose first publication with us was in 2006. She's a celebrated author with multiple Hugo Awards, the Nebula and Locus Awards, the Astounding Award, as well as an audiobook narrator, and a puppeteer. She also has a rather famous talking cat, Elsie. It's great to have you here, Mary Robinette.

Mary Robinette Kowal: It is nice to be here.

Kat Kourbeti: So welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for joining us. You write in a lot of different genres, you work in a lot of different fields. I'm always really fascinated with writers and artists who do all the things. As I've said on this podcast before like, these sorts of careers fascinate me. So I'm super excited to talk to you today about your career, and how Strange Horizons came into it.

Mary Robinette Kowal: I was reviewing some of that, like prepping for this, because it's been a minute.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. That's why we're doing this podcast is that, we realized that it's been 25 years—

Mary Robinette Kowal: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: —and that really made me go, "a what now?" And going back through the archives has been just tremendous.

Mary Robinette Kowal: Yeah, you doing that made me realize that I'm 20 years out from my first sale. That is math I had not done.

Kat Kourbeti: Well, you don't think about these things. You keep moving forward until such time as there is something that requires a flashback.

Let's talk about your work in general. What genres do you write in? Because it's so varied, what would you define it as?

Mary Robinette Kowal: I write all over the map. So I come out of puppet theater, and puppet theater tends towards the fantastical just because we can. I've read science fiction and fantasy growing up, so I tend to write in all the genres that I enjoy reading. I'll do hard science fiction, soft science fiction. Historical fantasy, contemporary fantasy, contemporary science fiction, weird slipstream stuff. I'll do all of that. I will very occasionally dip over into horror, but I don't do a lot of that because I'm not comfortable reading it. It's not a place that I enjoy putting my brain for a long period of time.

With puppets, when people ask me what style I do, I'm like, if it's a dolly, I will wiggle it. And with genre, I feel like if it's a story, I will tell it.

Kat Kourbeti: Which I appreciate immensely. Yeah. I relate to the whole horror thing, like I appreciate it and I can read it in short bursts, but not fully, which is very strange for me because a lot of my compatriots from Greece, like, folk horror is all they write. And I'm like, no, thank you.

Mary Robinette Kowal: Yeah. And sometimes I'm okay with it, like you know, Dan Wells' "I'm Not a Serial Killer", totally fine. Sometimes there's a piece of short fiction, like when Ellen Datlow is editing something, she's one of those editors that I have always loved what she selects, but I have to be real careful even in short form with her.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. She has a knack for some great stories, but they won't all be in my wheelhouse personally as well. Yeah, definitely.

Mary Robinette Kowal: Yeah. Live rent free in my head.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. Not always in a good way either.

Mary Robinette Kowal: We had rats living in our attic rent free, and I didn't like that. So it's often like that with with horror.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Mary Robinette Kowal: But all of the other forms, like one of the reasons that I like puppetry and also gravitate towards science fiction and fantasy, is because they both feel like the theater of the possible. Looking at the what if. And I like looking at what's possible. Possible doesn't always have to be a bad outcome. Sometimes possibility is, what if we imagine a good outcome? And that's shocking, especially in today's age.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. Nowadays, that's brave, for sure.

I work in theater and I write about science fiction theater, and a lot of the time the art form lends itself to sci-fi and fantasy, especially because you invite the audience to imagine anyway, and so the shorthand is already established. The minute someone walks through the door, they're already imagining something that isn't on stage, really. And that always fascinates me, how well that works together with genre.

Mary Robinette Kowal: Yeah. It's great.

Kat Kourbeti: So how has your approach to genre writing and to the various lengths and formats, how has that evolved during your writing journey?

Mary Robinette Kowal: When I first started off, I describe it as, I could write a really good beginning and a really good middle, and a really good ending to three completely different stories that happened to have the same set of characters. So structure was the thing that I had a really hard time with. I understood how to communicate with an audience, I understood character. Again, coming out of live theater, the structure is provided for you. So your job is to figure out the character and how that character inhabits the world. Your job is to communicate with the audience. And those things translated shockingly well to writing, but structure was like, whoa.

So I spent a lot of my early career trying to figure out structure. A lot of my early stories I outlined heavily because I was trying to figure it out, even in short form. And as I get deeper into my career, the thing that I'm enjoying is that I've internalized a lot of those lessons, and that frequently I can just write it without having to think about it.

I can just chase the emotion, which allows me, I think, to have an experience that is more comparable to what the reader is going to experience. 'Cause the reader's not thinking about structure, the reader's thinking about the emotion, the ride. And that's the way I wanna be able to write.

Kat Kourbeti: Oh, that's awesome. And was that like, a very... structured way of learning that?

Mary Robinette Kowal: Yeah. Actually it was. When I was an intern at the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta, Georgia, my mentor had me doing a style called tabletop puppetry, which is—you'll learn that the terms in puppetry are extremely complicated: a tabletop puppet is a puppet that is worked on a tabletop. I know, it's really confusing there. But it looks like an unstrung marionette, and so my job was to walk it around the table. And you're doing it by yourself, so you're doing this thing called a swing step, which again, very complicated: you swing the leg and you step, swing step.

What my mentor had me do was walk the puppet around the table for about 45 minutes while he talked to me. And what he was looking for was the moment when I was able to start carrying on a conversation with him, without watching the puppet, and have the puppet continue to walk smoothly, because that's the point when I have internalized how that motion works. And then he had me turn around and do it with the other hand.

And what I took from that is that you can practice techniques individually, and take time to internalize something because the goal is to not have to think about technique when you're on stage and acting. You just wanna think about the connection with the audience, you just wanna think about the emotions, you wanna think about the art, and not the technique. And so what I have been doing very consciously with my writing is, if I wanna try a new technique or if I want to push myself on something, I'll put everything else into easy setting, and then focus on that one area.

I will sometimes do exercises that are just to practice. Today's a day where I'm gonna think about sensory detail, so I'm gonna bank a bunch of sensory details. There's a exercise that I got from CL Polk, which is for anxiety—five things you see, four things you hear, three things you touch, two things you smell and one thing you taste. And I'll be like, I'm just gonna bank the details of this room.

And then sometimes I'll do things where I think, I just wanna practice dialogue today, and I will just write a back and forth between characters. Sometimes I think, I'm just gonna practice finding the story, and so I'll run myself through exercises for that. So I've been doing that, trying to internalize things, and when I sit down to write now I make a choice about, is this going to be a day where I'm going to outline and plan the structure ahead of time, or is this gonna be a day where I'm gonna see how much I have actually internalized and just try to free write?

Kat Kourbeti: Do you identify then as a plantser, best of both worlds?

Mary Robinette Kowal: Yes. I'm also an ambivert.

Kat Kourbeti: All the things, both the things, all the time.

Mary Robinette Kowal: Yeah, I write science fiction and fantasy. I just—

Kat Kourbeti: Ooh, too complex Mary Robinette. Now, come on.

Mary Robinette Kowal: I know.

Kat Kourbeti: And you also write a lot of different lengths, or you have done in your career generally. I find that witchcraft, personally, and I would like you to tell us your ways, or rather, how did you find moving from one to the other? 'Cause you started in short fiction and then you gradually went longer, I think.

Mary Robinette Kowal: Well, this is a yes and a no. I actually started with novels, but I didn't publish any of those.

Kat Kourbeti: Uh-huh. Okay.

Mary Robinette Kowal: In fact, my first Strange Horizons story is a scene from my first novel. There's a couple of sentences in there that I'm pretty confident I wrote when I was 16, 'cause it took 10 years to write that first novel, which no one will ever read.

Kat Kourbeti: But I guess we've all read a bit of it.

Mary Robinette Kowal: You've read a bit of it, yes. You have read the bit that is not starring my D&D character in a plot that is the combination of A-Team and Battlestar Galactica from the eighties, but not the good parts.

Kat Kourbeti: Gotcha. That's fair.

Mary Robinette Kowal: I hadn't learnt structure yet. Yeah.

So for me, I think that story is story, and that writing techniques are fractal, that techniques that work on a sentence level, work on a scenic level, work on a chapter level, novel level, series level.

Again, coming out of puppetry, one of the things that you're taught is that there are principles of puppetry, and once you know those principles, you can pick up any puppet and at that point, it's just learning the technical tricks of that specific figure. What I find with writing is that it's the same thing. Once you understand kind of the principles, the sort of underlying science of it—for people who are not puppeteers, it's like the book Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. Once you understand, "oh, this is how these things interact", then it's just a matter of adjusting. So using cooking as an example: if you've ever looked at a recipe and it's "oh, but that's gonna make too much food", so you cut it down, the proportions remain the same. It's just the amount of ingredients; you don't need as much flour.

So when I see people moving from novel to short story and having problems, or from short story to novel, what I see happen is that they keep the amount of ingredients, but they don't keep the amount of proportion. This is why you'll read a short story that is really the opening chapter of a novel. It's got novel pacing, but if they were keeping the same proportions—let's say for ease of math, a hundred thousand word novel, and your first chapter is like 4,000 words. That's, what, 4% of that novel? So when you go to short fiction, you can't write 4,000 words of opening. But that's what people will do. What you need to do is you need to write "4% is that opening". And that's where people start to have problems.

So if you've got—again, for the ease of math, because I'm a writer and not a mathematician: if you've got a 10,000 word story, that means that your opening is about 400 words, which is about two pages.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Mary Robinette Kowal: Little over two pages. And that's not what you see when you watch people make that transition. The same thing goes the other direction, and this was where I had a lot of problems when I started publishing novels is that, I would stick the landing and I would get out, because I was writing a short story ending and I wasn't adjusting the amount of ingredients that I was putting in. And so all of my endings felt rushed, and it took me a while to figure out why that was happening.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. I find a lot of the time people are used to the opposite thing where it's like, they think in long form kind of pacing and everything else, and then it's the condensing that they find trouble with. So it's interesting that it also works the other way around.

Mary Robinette Kowal: I know people who can write short and cannot go longer, but it's both directions.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Mary Robinette Kowal: But when you get into the heart of what it is, both of them work. And the other thing is, you can be often a lot more adventurous with short fiction because you don't have to sustain it, because it's not something you're gonna experience for a long time. Continuing in the vein of cooking, if you go to a restaurant, there are times when the appetizers are so interesting and then the entree is like, meh. And I honestly think it's just because with the appetizer there's a little more room to take risk, because you aren't going to be eating that flavor for an entire meal. So you can do something a little bit bolder, you can spend a little more money on ingredients that are a little pricier. And that's, I think, similar to what happens in a short story. It's like, yeah, I can do this thing where I'm gonna really play with form, I'm gonna write the entire thing in second person, plural, future tense. And it's great for short fiction. If you've tried to read a novel that was written that way...

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, I don't think I could. Yeah.

Mary Robinette Kowal: You have to be really on top of your game to start doing that kind of thing. And so that's the sort of things that I think about when you're moving between short fiction and long fiction. It's like, what are the tools you get to play with? In long fiction you get to have all of the ingredients, it doesn't matter. I am making a savory dish, but am I gonna put in a little bit of vanilla and sugar? Indeed, I am.

Kat Kourbeti: Play around with it. See what happens. Yeah. Adjust the flavors. I love that metaphor.

Mary Robinette Kowal: A little bit of vanilla and sugar, by the way, will really make your spaghetti sauce sing.

Kat Kourbeti: I've never put vanilla in mine. I think I might try. I've definitely done cinnamon before, 'cause where I'm from in Greece, it's commonly like, a little pinch will really zing things up. So yeah. Vanilla next time.

Mary Robinette Kowal: I'm gonna try cinnamon. Cultural exchange.

Kat Kourbeti: I love that!

Mary Robinette Kowal: While we're talking about writing.

Kat Kourbeti: And I'm learning about writing. This is kind of a little masterclass all in itself.

And so would you say you have a favorite format or something you're drawn to more nowadays?

Mary Robinette Kowal: No.

Kat Kourbeti: Fair.

Mary Robinette Kowal: Yeah, it's very much the, what am I not doing right now?

Kat Kourbeti: I think that's completely fair. And if anything, I really appreciate the modular nature of your approach to writing, because that then makes any format approachable. It's not like you're confined or trapped by anything. You're just kind of like, yep, that works, what do I wanna tell today? So that's fascinating.

So now let's talk a little bit about your Strange Horizons story, which—

Mary Robinette Kowal: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: Was this your first pro sale? Or almost? Maybe, almost.

Mary Robinette Kowal: It's almost. I think my first pro sale was actually to an anthology.

Kat Kourbeti: Okay.

Mary Robinette Kowal: So I think this would've been my second pro sale.

Kat Kourbeti: Alright. Still early days though, yeah.

Mary Robinette Kowal: Yeah, it's very early days. The thing that I like about Strange Horizons... So first of all, let me set the stage.

Kat Kourbeti: Yes, please.

Mary Robinette Kowal: Kids these days. When I started writing and started submitting things, it was still, you had to send paper manuscripts in the mail. And if you wanted to publish online, all the established professionals were telling you not to do it, that no one took it seriously. But I'm like reading this stuff out of Strange Horizons and it's amazing fiction. It was also a very simple submission process, and I was like, they're doing interesting things. Like the fiction is interesting, it's challenging, it is often approaching genres in different ways than I had been seeing.

So I was extremely interested in Strange Horizons, and sent in a story. That is not the first one I submitted to Strange Horizons, but it is the first thing that was accepted there. Oh, actually that is my first— sorry, I just looked at my, that's my first pro publication. It may not be my actual first pro sale, but it's my first pro publication.

Kat Kourbeti: Ooh. That's awesome.

Mary Robinette Kowal: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: I have a list of authors on my spreadsheet for this podcast for "First Pub Club", so you're a member of that, which is neat. It's so cool.

Mary Robinette Kowal: Yeah. So I was very fortunate when I was starting that the places I was selling to, everybody was kind, which is not always the case. But it was such an easy process. And I had been a little intimidated.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. As a new writer as well, I'm sure.

Mary Robinette Kowal: But yeah. Just being able to do everything electronically, I cannot stress how exciting that was. In fact one of the side effects of Strange Horizons existing and doing such good work— there was a magazine, Shimmer Zine, that ran for a while, and Beth Wodzinski and myself and a couple of other people put that together, and people were telling us not to do an online component and we were able to point to Strange Horizons.

And so because there was so much pressure to have print, we wound up doing a hybrid approach, where it was print and an online magazine, but it was because Strange Horizons existed that we felt brave enough to venture into that space.

Kat Kourbeti: Wow. Yeah, it's interesting how the tables have turned.

Mary Robinette Kowal: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: 'Cause now people start zines all over the shop, and thinking about print is unthinkable for a lot of people, 'cause it's just, it's expensive, it's difficult. Where do you sell it? How do you distribute? It just becomes this whole big thing.

And just the evolution of the field has just completely upended that expectation.

Mary Robinette Kowal: Yeah. Because if you can't—like now when I'm looking to go sell something, I still love Asimov's and F&SF because I grew up reading them, but I really think twice before I send them a story, no matter how much I love them, because they don't have an online presence that is in any way accessible.

Occasionally they will cross post something, but I'm like, this story goes to a very small, like, I can't point anyone to it. 'Cause once it's published, once that print thing is off the newstands, that story just doesn't exist essentially.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. And it's such a shame that like, that has to be a consideration for you as a writer. You have to think about "how many people will be able to even read my story". That's wild.

Mary Robinette Kowal: It's so different from where it was.

Kat Kourbeti: My goodness. And so what was your experience like with the submission? So you sell a story, and then what happened? Did you have to edit it down quite a bit or was it more or less what you sent?

Mary Robinette Kowal: Please remember that we were talking about things that were 20 years ago.

Kat Kourbeti: Absolutely.

Mary Robinette Kowal: What I remember about it is that I was surprised at how few editorial notes there were.

The ones that I got—I think Jed Hartman was the one who was editing me—that they were mostly questions. Which I have now learned that the best editors just ask you questions, and give you room to figure things out. It was, as I said, very gentle, super easy process. I should have gone and looked in my email archive, to really be able to answer this. I think that we just did one round, that he sent me some questions, I answered them, I sent them back. And then, there's the copy edit stuff later.

But yeah, it was very easy.

Kat Kourbeti: That's really nice to hear. I think not much has changed in that department in 25 years. I think that's the general approach we still have, which is let the story work for itself, and if we can prod it a little bit, then great. But otherwise, I don't think our editors are in the business of fully changing a story, or really guiding it with a heavy hand, if that makes sense.

Mary Robinette Kowal: If you're buying a story because you like the story and the author's voice, the more you insert yourself, the less it becomes the thing that you bought.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. Tell me a little bit about the background. We touched upon it a little bit that this may or may not have been part of your first novel.

Mary Robinette Kowal: It was definitely part of my first novel.

Kat Kourbeti: So tell us a little bit about that. However much you want to share, without retreating into yourself again.

Mary Robinette Kowal: Into the past!

So I was an art major in college and Portrait of Ari—in hindsight, I think one of the reasons that it sold was that the piece that I pulled out of the novel was a piece that pulled the most on my own personal experience. That was not the only thing I submitted to Strange Horizons, because I did submit things after that too, but I think that what was going on with that one—it begins very late at night in an art studio, and Ari and her boyfriend, whose name I can't remember, are in the studio, and he cuts himself with an X-Acto knife, which is a thing that actually happened a lot when I was an art major, and every now and then, like a friend of mine got really bad cut. I never got a really bad cut, but I had some that frightened me, because what you're doing is you're drawing the knife towards you when you're cutting a mat, and if it slips, you can go right into your thumb, where all of the connectors are.

And so I had a couple that were—this is the thing that's happening, this is the catalyst. I did not know at the time that was "the breaking of the normal", I didn't know that was an event story, I didn't know any of that stuff. This was one of the stories that I accidentally backed into and I'm like, "wait, what happened? That's a good story. All three pieces match, huh!" But it is an exploration of trust, what happens when someone mucks about with your memory, and you don't remember it, but you just, there's something that is no longer comfortable.

I know, but in the version that is on Strange Horizons, it is up in the air exactly what's going on with Ari. It's pretty clear that she's probably not exactly human. I know, because she comes out of my novel, that she is an alien who can... I was 16—because this makes so much sense—she's an alien who can shapeshift to be either a cougar with the option of adding wings, so a winged cougar, no wings, human with wings, human with no wings, halfway in between, with or without wings.

Because that's exactly how biology works.

Kat Kourbeti: Yes.

Mary Robinette Kowal: And that's also exactly how convergent evolution works on different planets. It's very real that way. And of course also, she could heal things with her mind, and you can really see that in the way I approach the healing aspects of this scene.

So yeah, there's a lot of my teenager in that story. You can tell what I was reading, you can tell what television I was watching, But you can also see this is my experience as an art major. And I think that was the thing that actually made it.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. There's a real lived-in approach to how you deal with the injury and the art stuff, you buy into it very easily as a reader, because you can tell that it comes from like a real place of knowledge and experience.

The alien cougar wing thing... frankly, even (with) that being in the background, what's on the page is so delightfully vague. She could be anything. On my first read I was like, "oh, maybe like an angel or like some kind of being that has these healing powers, or a fairy or like any sort of thing like that."

But that vagueness does leave that room to really wander. 'Cause yeah, the boyfriend, I think his name is Tom. You don't remember it 'cause it's very like, "eh, his name is Tom."

Mary Robinette Kowal: No, no, no. You don't understand. She is a cat, his name is Tom...

Kat Kourbeti: Oh no. I see.

Mary Robinette Kowal: I am a hundred percent certain that's why I did that. 'Cause I was being so clever, 'cause I was 16.

Kat Kourbeti: I see what you did there.

Mary Robinette Kowal: Just to be clear for people, because I don't want anyone to think that I published this when I was like 18—I started writing this when I was 16, and worked on it for 10 years. Finished the novel version when I was 26, and then somewhere in there stopped writing for about a decade. So I published this in my thirties.

Kat Kourbeti: Wow.

Mary Robinette Kowal: And was willing to let people...

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. Okay, so here's a couple thoughts I have though, based on this information: first of all, I love that this comes from teenage Mary Robinette, with everything that means. 'Cause there is something unfiltered when you write as a teenager, you just write what you love. And I think a lot of the time we tamp that down as writers in order to write what sells or what people might wanna read, whatever your impression of that is. And my mission, for example, as a writer, is to return to that kind of joy that I had as a teenager.

Mary Robinette Kowal: Yes.

Kat Kourbeti: To write for her, not for 35-year-old me who's like, "but what should my first novel be? Is it significant? Is it doing something? Is it saying something about the world?" And I'm like, I just wanna write a story that's fun, that's got all the feelings and the themes and the stuff that I loved engaging with back then. And if other people love it, great. And if they don't, whatever. It's a difficult thing to achieve.

Mary Robinette Kowal: So, I think it is because we have been trained, especially people who grew up in Western education, that there's either a right or a wrong. Test answers, essays, even classes that aren't pass/fail, it's like there's a right answer. And when you get into theatre and storytelling and communication, there's not always one way to do things. That's actually a thing we say: there's not a single way to hold a puppet. You're constantly shifting your grip. And I feel that way: whoever is writing something, that they have different ways of approaching it because their brain is different, their background experience is different.

But the other piece of that is that I think that the storyteller is only half of the story. I think the reader is supplying the other half. We are dependent on the reader to build the worlds in their head. We describe stuff, we can't describe everything that's in the room. So we are dependent on those readers, they're our collaborators.

So I think the thing that again, I accidentally did with 'Portrait of Ari' was because I left the right amount of vagueness, and because Tom is my POV character, he doesn't know. And so the reader is in the same spot, but the reader is left with their memories while he is divorced from his. So I think that what happens there is that I am leaving room for the reader to put more of themself into the story.

This is one of the things with live puppet theater in particular, is that the puppet only exists because of an agreement between the performer and the audience member. The audience member agrees that for the duration of the show, they're going to believe that puppet is alive. And so one of the things that puppets do better than actors do is die. Because when you put the puppet down and you step away from it, it has gone back to being an inanimate object, and you've also killed a tiny piece of the audience because they've inserted themselves into that. So I think that also happens in the story, and I think that was the thing that I did accidentally in those early days.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. I totally agree. You definitely do in this, and I love that there's a through line with the puppetry in the writing. And a hundred percent on when the puppets die, the lifelessness, it's so much more than a human could achieve by staying still. The effect is super felt. Love that.

Mary Robinette Kowal: I'll talk about puppets at any opportunity. So I just insert it into everything I'm talking about basically. That and cooking.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. I think cooking is a fantastic metaphor that a lot of people can more or less relate to, even if they don't do a lot of cooking, because you've (probably) done a little bit. With puppetry, you've probably watched something, so there's definitely an experience as an audience member.

But it's very interesting to hear it from someone who's done the puppetry and those techniques and what that can teach you, because it's just an aspect that most of us don't really get to do. That's really cool.

So that's then 'Portrait of Ari', which is only two and a half thousand words, but it packs a punch. And I will say that has brought me back to something you have become a really big proponent of, which is the MICE Quotient. And you mentioned a little bit earlier that "oh, this is an event story".

So how big a part is it now, when you sit down and you write? Do you think about that sort of thing consciously, as you're sitting down and saying— (MRK nods) Okay, yeah?

Mary Robinette Kowal: I do tend to think of it often. It depends on if I'm on a planning or pantsing day.

Kat Kourbeti: Sure.

Mary Robinette Kowal: On a planning day I think about it at the beginning.

Often what I'll do is I will throw some ideas at the page and then I'll ask a series of questions like, is the character navigating or trying to get someplace? Then I probably have a milieu story. Do they have questions? It's an inquiry story. Are they uncomfortable with themselves or trying to change some aspect of themself? That's a character story. Is something wrong with the world? Did normal break in some way?

And so I will use it often as a diagnostic tool to help me decide what to leave out, because that is often the harder thing, and it helps me move the story in a kind of consistent direction without bogging me down in necessarily needing to answer all of the things right at the top when I'm starting.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Mary Robinette Kowal: And sometimes when I write myself into a corner and have to go back and fix it, the MICE Quotient is very useful because I can say, okay, wait a minute. What's happening in this scene? Alright, so originally the scene was a milieu scene, but it doesn't work, because plot hole. So what other milieu, what other environmental hazard navigational things can I bring in, or solutions can I find here? And that will often help me find solutions that don't make me like, have to toss the entire thing out. I can just (make) ingredient substitutions.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. Back to the cooking.

Mary Robinette Kowal: Yeah. Back to the cooking. It's like "ah!"

Kat Kourbeti: There you go. Yeah. You have to bring in some acid to cancel out the too much salt, et cetera, et cetera.

Mary Robinette Kowal: Exactly. I think, again using the cooking metaphor, when I started figuring structure out, I really wanted someone to just give me a recipe. And then as I've gotten more comfortable, first it was, oh, now I'm comfortable with this recipe, and so I can swap my ingredients. And then, now I can start doing more adventurous recipes. And now it's like, I can go into a kitchen and cook improvisationally.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Mary Robinette Kowal: Someday I'll get to molecular gastronomy, but for writing.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, anything that just plays with complex things in really small scales. Would love to see that from you.

A big thing that you're famous for on the internet is all of your writing advice and the MICE Quotient stuff, and you also are a seasoned podcaster with Writing Excuses, where you talk about this stuff at length. What part has that played in your writing journey, would you say?

Mary Robinette Kowal: First of all, I love doing Writing Excuses. We are in our 20th season.

Kat Kourbeti: Ooh.

Mary Robinette Kowal: I joined in season six, so this season is me, Howard Tayler, Dan Wells, DongWon Song, and Erin Roberts. And what I love about it is that when we are talking about writing, it means that I have to sit down and go, "okay, no, wait, how do I actually do that?"

The really exciting things are when we're talking about a form that I'm not familiar with, and I have to sit down and do a little bit of homework and think, okay well, how does that work? And then I come into the room and I'm like, okay, great, ready to podcast! And one of the others will come up with something that is so brilliant, that my brain will just blip outta the podcast for a second and I will go solve a problem that I've been banging my head against with in my own fiction. And I'll come back, I'm like, oh, I haven't talked for a while. Which is why I still listen to the podcast sometimes 'cause I'm like, I zoned out there 'cause I got excited.

That's the thing for me, that it's given me a lot more conscious tools that I can use. One of the ways I think about it is that doing the podcast, talking about it, teaching on my Patreon—means that I have to have my kitchen in order. Because I need to be able to reach for something immediately so that I can show it to someone. I'm inviting somebody in. And left to my own devices, that stuff would be scattered everywhere. And I'd be like, wait, what do you do in the middle of a story? Eh, I'll fix it later.

And now I can be like, what do you do in the middle of the story? Oh, I just had my hand on that. So that's I think one of the biggest things, is it keeps the tools closer to hand. I also think that one of the fastest ways to internalize something in any field is to teach someone else.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, definitely. And it applies to, yeah, every field generally. So a hundred percent.

Mary Robinette Kowal: If I can explain it to someone else, chances are that I am beginning to understand it myself.

Kat Kourbeti: So that's a big part of your presence online for sure, and probably career in general, is the teaching. And it's been really cool to see people join your cohorts or your Patreon or whatever, and then come out with their own books and their stories and things like that. Like actually seeing it work, is really cool.

Mary Robinette Kowal: Yeah. In the Writing Excuses newsletter, we do Success Stories.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Mary Robinette Kowal: I knew that people listened to the podcast, and I'd had people tell me, "oh, thank you so much, it really made a difference". But the success stories, like the one that we just published, she was like, "yeah I knew that I wanted to write and then I stumbled across Writing Excuses", and now her debut novel is coming out from like one of the Big Six. I'm like, we helped. Wow.

But it's very cool, and also the philosophy that I have as a teacher, and all of us actually at the podcast have, is that our job is not to make someone a brilliant writer. Our job is to help them be the writer that they were always going to be, but to try to remove as many of the obstacles and hopefully help them level up faster and with fewer tears. Can't promise no tears.

But I've taken writing workshops where what the instructor wanted to do was to make you into a version of them, that there was one way to write. And I don't think that's true. I don't think there's one way to write, I don't think there's one type of story to tell, and that's again, like one of the reasons I like Strange Horizons, because that is the kind of fiction you all do. It's not one kind of story, it's not one way to tell it, it's not one sort of voice. It's all of it.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Mary Robinette Kowal: And that's just, it's just beautiful.

Kat Kourbeti: Oh, thank you. Thank you so much. It is what we do. Very well put, yeah.

Mary Robinette Kowal: I was trying to remind myself of things about Strange Horizons, I checked my website 'cause I was like, when did I publish what?

Did you know what we did for the 10th anniversary of Strange Horizons?

Kat Kourbeti: There was an ebook, I think? [Editor's note: Actually that was for our 15th anniversary!]

Mary Robinette Kowal: The 10th anniversary, there was a nationwide celebration where different authors would do readings. We organized a reading in Portland, where we had six Pacific Northwest authors who came to a coffee shop, and we would have two people read and then coffee and conversation, and then two people read. And the audio of it is still up on my website.

Kat Kourbeti: Oh my goodness. That's amazing. Oh wow. I'm sure that people would love to listen to that, so we'll link it in the show notes. Thank you for that. Thank you for keeping it.

Mary Robinette Kowal: Yeah. It was Ken Brady, Tina Connolly, Brenda Cooper, me, Jennifer Linnaea, and Tamela Viglione.

Kat Kourbeti: It's a great lineup. Wow.

Mary Robinette Kowal: Yeah. So I just ran across that, I'm like, holy cow. The things that I find.

Kat Kourbeti: When you're such a good archivist though, you just gotta keep the things and put them somewhere and that's it. So thank you so much for holding onto that, cause that's the sort of thing that would absolutely go lost if somebody hadn't recorded it and put it on a website.

So thank you so much for your wisdom, your knowledge, your beautiful cooking and puppetry metaphors and analogies, and for spending your time with us. Is there anything forthcoming or recent that you'd like to plug or promote?

Mary Robinette Kowal: As we are recording this, I am about a month out from The Martian Contingency, just came out. That's the fourth book in the Lady Astronaut series. So if you would like hopeful fiction set on Mars in 1970 that's available for you. And it will work as a standalone even though it's book five.

And then in October, I'm very excited, I have a novella coming out from Saga, and I dunno if you remember the old Ace Doubles, but they were books, it had one novel on one side and another one on the other side, and you flipped them over. So Sam J Miller and I have a Saga Double coming out: I have a novella called Apprehension; Sam's is called Red Star Hustle. They're both exploring the idea of noir in science fiction, but in different directions. Mine is like, Hitchcock in space!, and his is like, Chandler in space!

Kat Kourbeti: That works!

Mary Robinette Kowal: Yeah. I'm excited about that. That comes out October 21st.

Kat Kourbeti: That's fantastic. Thank you. Yeah, we'll look forward to that, and we can find you on social media as well. And where can we find your beautiful talking cat? Except for behind you over there, napping.

Mary Robinette Kowal: Besides that, Elsie does actually have her own Instagram account, and YouTube— no, her YouTube is mine, and I cross post everything onto my Instagram, because I know what people want.

Kat Kourbeti: Listen, we're here for the cat stuff.

Mary Robinette Kowal: Look, I know where I stand in this. So Elsie is on Instagram as ElsieWants, which is constant. If you can't remember that, the easiest thing to do is to head to my website and sign up for my newsletter, because every month when I send it out, it's got classes, what I'm reading, what I'm crocheting, but it also has Elsie's Corner.

Kat Kourbeti: Thank you so much, Mary Robinette, and have a lovely rest of your day.

Mary Robinette Kowal: Thank you. And happy 25th Anniversary to Strange Horizons.

Kat Kourbeti: Thank you so much!

Strange Horizons at 25 is a project helmed by Kat Kourbeti and Michael Ireland, in collaboration with the Strange Horizons Editorial Collective. The credit music was composed by Michael Ireland and Andrew Gorman.

Until next time, stay strange!

Transcript

Critical Friends Episode 13

Dan Hartland: Welcome to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast. I’m Dan Hartland, and in this episode I’ll be joined by critics and reviewers Rachel Cordasco and Will McMahon.

In every episode of Critical Friends, we’ll be discussing science fiction and fantasy reviewing: what it is, why we do it, how it’s going.

In this episode, we’ll be discussing SFF in translation. Why do we read it? Why don’t we read it? And, in the face of a number of in some cases urgent challenges, how can we ensure it reaches ever larger audiences?

We began by discussing the immediate spur for our conversation.

[Musical sting]

So I guess we are all gathered here, the three of us, to talk about SF and translation via small presses. But there’s a reason for us doing that, which is not great.

Will, you emailed me a few months ago now and said, “This thing is happening. It seems like a thing that we should do something about,” and I agreed. Do you want to just talk a little bit about why you emailed me, what about?

Will McMahon: I would say, if anyone out there is unaware, my and Rachel’s country has been taken over by a kind of gang of fascists. This was a long time coming and I won’t get into the background, but a friendly correction is: it was barely over a month ago, ’cause that’s how the speed of these things go. Feels like the accumulation of years.

But yeah, basically at the beginning of May, a series of nonprofits, small presses, and literary magazines in the United States received a very bizarre email from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, saying that their grants from the NEA, the National Endowment for the Arts, were being terminated because they did not fit with President Trump’s priorities. And those priorities were listed in just kind of a stream-of-consciousness chunk that included things like AI proficiency and veteran services. And anyway, kind of the upshot of that is that there’s a few dozen literary arts organizations in the United States who have lost funding pretty much effective immediately.

And, when looking at the initial reporting, something that was very striking was that they were disproportionately presses that fund the translation of international literature. And it’s not that big of a leap to connect that to the kind of inward-looking nationalism of the kind of reactionary government of the day.

So, I think that’s the situation—and what we can do about it or why we’re talking about it, maybe we’ll all get into. Yeah.

Dan Hartland: I’m amazed it’s only a month because I get so used to not replying to emails in good order that thought it must be at least eight weeks! As you say, it’s also a function of the amount of stuff that gets thrown at us, which is why I was really keen when you emailed to do something about this ... just with whatever platform we have at Strange Horizons Reviews to give some focus to this at a time when it’s quite hard to sort of know where to shine the spotlight.

And of course, Rachel, the reason that then the first—literally the first—person that I emailed after getting that message from Will was you is because you’ve established yourself—you are going to object to this, I’m sure—but you have established yourself as the expert on SF in translation. See, you are objecting already!

Rachel Cordasco: No, no expert!

Dan Hartland: Well, your website, SF in Translation, your reviews at Strange Horizons and elsewhere, you’ve just ... you read a lot of this stuff. So I emailed you straight away, because I wonder whether you could talk a little bit about the SF in translation ecosystem and why, if we are looking at the future health of small presses, that this will impact upon SF in translation.

Rachel Cordasco: Yeah. While Will was talking, I was thinking of what I’ve been kind of complaining about for a long time. You know, I started SF in Translation, the website, in May of 2016, so next year will be ten years. And, as with all things that people kind of start and get involved in and then get excited about, I jumped into it and was like, “Oh my God, look how much there is.”

Like, there is a ridiculous amount that is actually available. You just need to be able to get it. But then, as the years went by, I saw the rise up to 2017 into 2018—I guess between 2017 and 2020, honestly, which was interesting—there was a definite rise in the amount of SF in translation that I was kind of capturing and seeing what was being published.

Most of this was because of Lavie Tidhar, and Francesco Verso, and the Apex Book of World SF. There were five of them. Francesco has also done a lot with Future Fiction, putting out all kinds of anthologies. Haikasoru, which I’m still crying about, which is one of the greatest publishers of Japanese SF in translation—they shut their doors a couple years ago and, and we have really suffered for it. I know most people don’t even know what that is, but you know, I miss it ‘cause it was amazing! And then Kurodahan Press, which did the same thing, also shut their doors the last couple of years. So there’s been a steep decline that I’ve noticed actually since 2020 in short fiction, in long, just across the board.

A lot of this is because these presses … so I put together a list of the presses that are based in the US that publish SF in translation. None of them focus exclusively on it obviously, but there are eight. So there’s Europa, Graywolf, Two Lines, Deep Vellum, New Directions, Wakefield, Restless, and Open Letter.

And all of them are, yeah, small, independent presses. Their thing is translation. But you know what is probably going to be cut first? Speculative fiction, because it’s the least read. I mean, if you’ve got like, I don’t know, Elena Ferrante versus Yoshiki Tanaka, people are not going to go for the Yoshiki Tanaka, unless they know who he is. They’re going to go for the literary fiction. They’re going to go for what they know.

Honestly, if you’re even reading translated fiction … If you’re reading, okay? That’s great! If you’re reading fiction, that’s amazing. If you’re reading translated fiction, that’s even better, you know? So by the time you get … I mean, SF and translation is so niche that you can’t compare it to the world of literary fiction.

Speculative fiction is always about what it means to be human, but in a way that’s thinking about the planet itself, everyone, it’s thinking about our place in the universe. It’s a lot more specific like that. And seeing all of these books across these different publishers and across the years shows us that it’s so important to read internationally because, at least from the US I mean, the news is very sparse when it comes to international news. I don’t really know much about what’s going, I don’t know anything about what’s going on, in Italy. I don’t know what’s going on in Korea. I don’t know, you know, if I just turn on the news, I’m not seeing anything. I would have to go to specifically to like the world news and it’s like clips, you know?

But I feel like when you’re reading widely and you’re reading in translation, and you’re learning about how other people are seeing the world, I mean, that’s only a good thing. And yeah, like Will said, it breaks through that parochial, inward-looking approach. And I honestly think the SF world in the US is very inward looking, which is very surprising, and so this helps kind of break us out of that.

And that was a big rant, so I’m sorry!

Dan Hartland: No, there’s so much good stuff in there! I think I’d really like to get a little bit actually into the science fiction community in particular and how it relates to these works in translation, because I think you are right that they are seen as “something else” sometimes. But before we did that, I did want to quickly circle back, because you were right to circle back yourself to what Will was saying.

Because of course, everything you’re saying about the importance of reading widely, the importance of reading in translation in, uh, in order to be more aware and more informed and more empathetic brings us right back to what we were saying about the gang of fascists. And it tells us something of why they might want to withdraw by fiat over a million dollars worth of funding from exactly the presses that are publishing this stuff.

You know, Will sent me the Publisher’s Weekly piece about this and, of the presses you mentioned, several of them are mentioned just in the PW piece. You know, Deep Vellum is mentioned, Open Letter are mentioned, and these presses that—you’re right—SF should be looking to, should be relying upon, for providing this service to the literature are now at serious risk.

I wonder whether we should get into—because this is Critical Friends, so we are critics and we are meant to be able to expound upon the virtues and values of literature—I wonder whether we should briefly pause, rather than take for read the value of SF in translation. You know, Rachel’s just done a great job of advocating for it. Will, I wonder whether you wanted to talk about your relationship to these kinds of texts and why for you it was “ring the alarm bell, this is happening” as soon as you, you saw that piece.

Will McMahon: Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think that when they talk about this—not just this situation, but literature in translation, and in the genre—critics really rightly point out that it is almost uniquely parochial. The percentage of published literature that’s in translation in the English language market, three percent, is significantly lower than even other major language markets. And that’s really—at least in the US, which is the dominant English speaking country in the world (sorry, Dan!)—is, you know, easy to tie to that nationalism of course. You know, we’re the home of Hollywood, of New York. You know, “everyone wants to read our stuff.” And, you know, narratives of where—whether it’s the origins of science fiction where everyone wants to talk about Hugo Gernsback or maybe some older English authors, but English—there’s kind of this, um, kind of Anglo-chauvinism. And even beyond that, I think it’s just … there’s so much out there. It’s very easy to just be like, well, I’m just gonna keep reading the people that I like and know from my country or my language.

And I think that that leads to a literature that can be overly self-referential, overly kind of self-iterative, where we just kind of recycle the same—whether it’s plots or ideas or tropes or cliches. And innovation is measured by how much of a twist you put on them or, you know, a new perspective to the old thing. And that’s not to say those things aren’t valuable, but there are literatures, there are perspectives, out there that read as far more fresh. If you can encounter them!

And I think I would say that if you have—obviously there is, like Rachel was talking about, a small readership that specifically seeks out literature and translation—but if you have a speculative fiction reader that maybe you read it here or there, but you know, you’re mainly in kind of the core of the English language field, you are benefiting greatly from the fact that these translations are happening—because a lot of the writers you are reading are drawing from this.

I had a great conversation last year at Readercon in the US with Jeffrey Ford and Sofia Samatar about how both were very influenced by the work of Roberto Bolaño, and particularly his short fiction. Now, in the US that was translated by New Directions, which was not receiving NEA grants. But I looked up several of Bolaño’s translators and they were receiving the NEA translation fellowships that are also being cut. So, you know, we’ve got a very good Sofia Samatar novella up for the Hugo this year and, you know, you want to talk about this is work that’s having a very large impact on the English-language field that might not be there, or wouldn’t be the same, if not for this ecosystem of literature in translation. And so I think that it’s something that we should do more of, but what’s already happening is a really key engine of innovation in the field.

And I just did want to tack on that I’m doing the podcast on my end from Rochester, New York, and last week I reached out to Chad Post of Open Letter, which is based out of the University of Rochester, just to get a little more background from him. And the first thing he said when I told him what we were doing was, “Oh, have you talked to Rachel Cordasco?” So I think we’ve got the right people here or one person is the right person!

Dan Hartland: We have Rachel, that’s all we need!

Rachel Cordasco: Yeah, you’re too kind.

Dan Hartland: So I wanna co-sign everything you just said, Will, and I want to dig even deeper.

So Rachel, you mentioned that in all your reading of SF in translation—and then also just sort of as Will was saying about basically Anglophone SF, right?—you perceive a kind of strange relationship.

So at Strange Horizons, we do what we can—I’m sure we could do more, I’m sure we could review more texts in translation, but we try for all the reasons we just talked about—but there is undoubtedly a perception that it is its own thing, that it’s not as integrated as Will is correct in saying it actually is.

So can you talk a bit more about that—how you perceive the wider community of SF to kind of receive or not receive SF in translation?

Rachel Cordasco: I think Strange Horizons actually does the best job, honestly. I’m not just saying that because you’re here, you really, you really try to make a big effort and, you know, I’m honestly super impressed whenever I look through each edition and I see  people like Will—and I mean, there’s so many other people I can’t even think of all of their names—who are reviewing SF in translation.

I’m seeing a lot of it and then I look at Locus. They have Ian Mond who does most of the reviews for SF in translation, but he only does so much. I’ve been in contact with them for years and I’ll send them something. I believe Locus was the one that published my kind of grand review of the ten-book series Legend of the Galactic Heroes, which was, you know, huge. But then, I emailed them last year about something; I don’t hear anything. You know, I emailed them about something the year before; I don’t hear anything. There’s no kind of contact.

And I’m not saying that I need to be the one, I’m just saying I’m not seeing the kind of coverage that they actually used to do, honestly. They used to have a page, Jeff VanderMeer used to do a ton promoting SF in translation, and Lavie and everybody: They used to have a page where they’d kind of have a paragraph of what’s being written interesting in Bulgaria, what’s interesting in Portugal, what’s interesting in Bosnia. And I love that. Give me more, you know! But I’m not seeing so much of that anymore.

[Musical Sting]

Dan Hartland: What’s behind that?

Rachel Cordasco: I think, and I’ve talked to some people who are kind of like, “Well, why would the SF community in the US kind of promote what isn’t itself?” Like, it’s going to, it wants to promote itself. It wants to, everybody wants to, do what’s kind of promoting themselves.

I think there’s such a massive market of English language SF that the ugly stepsister is, you know, the SF in translation. I hope I didn’t offend anyone! But why are we going to, you know, promote something that’s coming out of Italy or promote something that’s coming out of Croatia, when we’ve got all these other people, all these very established people here?

I guess what bothers me is the fact that there’s the talk of, you know, “We are, look at us, we are so diverse and we love everybody and look at our Hugo Awards.” That’s my huge ... I mean, I wrote an essay that I put on my site that’s pretty like, you know, it’s like me being pretty bitter! And, I know no one wants to be reading like a bitter essay, but I was just like: Just because, you know, Cixin Liu won something once and Han Kang won something once, and then ten years ago, Thomas Heuvelt won something. that doesn’t a world prize make!

And we can go into the whole thing, which there’s another big lift again this year of trying to get a translation category in the Hugo Awards. If you look at all the other awards—the French awards, the German awards, the Dutch awards, the Italian awards—they all have a translation category. And, you know, you’ve got, again, another person, Neil Clarke, who has done so much to bring short SFT to English language readers. Most of it is Chinese, you know, it’s not a broad range, but it’s a lot. I mean, we are not wanting for Chinese SF and it’s thanks to him, he’s done a lot of that. But he and other people think that it’s a bad idea, because it would ghettoize certain things and keep them on their own instead of them being like eligible for like other, bigger awards or something.

And you know, honestly the question is a question of visibility: Nobody is gonna know what’s out there if nobody knows what’s out there. And I can tell you, I wish my website was the place everyone went. Like, you wake up in the morning and you go to Rachel’s website. That’s not how it works. So how are they gonna know what’s available? And these awards are a huge way of promoting that and saying “some random people that you don’t know said that these books are awesome.” And you’re like, “That book is from a country that I never even knew they wrote SF!” or something. And so then you go look it up and then you say, “This looks cool!”—and that’s it, you’re in.

You know, even if it was just one year, just one year, one translation category, one year! And then, cut it, you know? You’d get like ten more people who’d be reading it. But everybody’s had a reason why it’s not a good idea.

Will McMahon: So I think it’s interesting talking about … You know, we have to this point been largely talking about the English language and translation. So you might get the idea, there are two languages in the world: There’s English and there’s Translatio or whatever. But obviously, you know, the spectrum is the rest of the world.

I mean, good call-out on Clarkesworld doing really great work. And I think they have, I think a year or two ago they had like a Spanish-language submission window. I know they’ve done a number of other things, too. But, when I was talking with Chad at Open Letter and kind of asking him what he saw, the kind of carry-on effects of this—because the NEA grant funding isn’t the majority of any of these presses’ money, but it is a significant chunk—he suggested that in addition to potentially being one or two fewer books a year put out—and right now they only put out ten a year, so that’d be a pretty significant cut—they’d have to look for alternate sources of funding. And there are countries that will on the other side fund translation into English.

And then there’s increased market considerations, where it’s like, “Well.” The people who buy translated literature are not a monolith. Something translated from French is likely to sell more than something translated from Slovenian or whatever, right? So, even if you can cobble together enough money to say, “OK, we’re gonna keep up the translations,” the world narrows, right?

Like Chinese science fiction has entered the English-language market—partially, not as much as maybe it should, but, but it has kind of staked out a bit of a reputation, whereas, you know, for smaller languages it’s even more of an uphill battle.

Rachel Cordasco: Yeah. But like I said, it’s always been a struggle, I guess, with a lot of these languages. If the government is not … if there’s not funding from their governments to publish here—like, you know, Romanian, let’s say, they’ve got such an amazing world of speculative fiction that has made its way into the US but in strange ways, and only because of funding that dries up and then comes back and then dries up and comes back—you’re, you’re gonna get less and less.

But you know, like I say, the two major Japanese publishers of SF in translation: They shut down. I mean, feel like it was just yesterday, but it may have actually been three or four years ago. Haikasoru was VIZ Media, and VIZ Media was like looking at all of the things they do, and it’s like: Manga sells, but SF in translation, not I guess selling as much. So let’s just cut it.

Dan Hartland: You know, more and more I’m trying to center this kind of, these sort of, material questions in my criticism. I don’t know if I do very well, to be honest, because I prefer the abstract! But it strikes me as so important to acknowledge all of these material conditions in terms of the texts we get and how they reach us. Which of course this whole episode really is about, and I find it really interesting, that historical arc that Rachel’s painting for us—that maybe in the early 2000s, you know, like you say, we had people like Zoran Živković, who I think is great, winning the World Fantasy Award.

Rachel Cordasco: Very much. Yeah. He really deserved that.

Dan Hartland: Yeah! Awesome, awesome author. But that kind of focus has dissipated in recent years, and I can’t avoid the conclusion that it is because people felt their job had been done a little bit.

Rachel Cordasco: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm!

Dan Hartland: Right? “We did it.” You know, “We gave one of these guys an award. What more do you want?!” And critics, too, are I’m sure guilty of that. You know, this idea that, well, we reviewed one once and, you know, we did a big thing and a splashy thing and now we’ll just go back to normal. Whereas what we are aiming for is a kind of more integrated approach rather than this consistent, “Oh well, we looked at that special thing a few years ago and now we can just revert backwards.”

And I think this is because—for me, the reason this is important is because—I agree entirely with what Will said about this is how we get new ideas. This is not to say though, right, that as critics we should be wholly positive about all works in translation.

So we are in this episode advocating and saying, you know, please go and read this stuff, support it, because they are losing other forms of support. But as critics, we also need to be able to say, “Okay, this one is good. And this one isn’t.” And I wonder whether there’s a tension there for us, because we are simultaneously saying how important work in translation is in the general, in the aggregate.

So how do we then go about this, when we find a book that isn’t quite so good—and Rachel, I think pretty recently you’ve published with Strange Horizons in, in this way—when we come across a specific work in translation that just doesn’t work for us? How do we handle that?

Rachel Cordasco: I mean, you know, how many emails have I sent to you where I’m like—it hasn’t been many, but it’s been a few!—where I’m like, “This book is bad. What am I gonna do?” Because it’s really hard to write.

I mean, I could unleash, but like, what’s good about that? Who’s that gonna benefit? You know, that’s just a screed. Like I think SF translation is honestly held to a higher standard. International literature is held to a much higher standard. And what’s interesting is that I feel like the percentage that’s good, like just a kind of objectively good, is actually higher in the amount of international literature we get, because things have been vetted so many times.

Dan Hartland: And this is where the material context comes in, right? The bar is higher.

Rachel Cordasco: The bar is so high. Like, first you need to get published, right? Then you get published in your country, then someone needs to make the decision to translate it. Then you have to translate it. Then you gotta get it published again, and then, you know, by the time you get it in the hands of the readers—believe me, I am the first one to be like, this translation sucks, you know?—but I rarely come across bad translations.

I just have to say it’s like the translators feel like they have an extra burden on them because the most annoying thing to hear is like, “This reads kind of like English, but not really.” No one wants that. So the translators, often writers themselves, are really going above and beyond making the translation sound. As you know, what people want is for it to read … they don’t wanna know that it’s translated. They wanna just read it. And they wanna enjoy it. And these translations are done very well, these translators are very high quality. And the publishers are choosing high quality translators. You’ve got Open Letter, you know at the University of Rochester, I think they have a program, and a bunch of other places around the country have translation programs, where you can get your degree in translation.

I feel like it is a very high bar. But yes, I recently read a couple of books in translation that I really wanted to like, I really did. The translation was perfect. The translation was excellent. These translators have translated books that I’ve loved in the past. So it wasn’t them, it wasn’t the quality of the translation, it was the story. I’ll let you go for a long time before I say, “OK. That’s just, we’re not going there.” And you know, sometimes you get to a book where you’re like, “This is … what are you doing? You’re just rambling. You’re all over the place and it’s not working and I feel like you just wasted my time.” And I get real mad when I feel like a book is wasted my time.

But it’s just so rare. And all I really read is SF in translation, so I can tell you. You’re absolutely right. We shouldn’t say, “Well, it should all be published. It’s all good. Everybody should love it. End of story.” It’s like any other thing. There’s high quality, there’s low quality, there’s stuff that gets through for one reason or another. There’s stuff that other people will say … I’ll just give one more example and then I’ll shut up.

A few years ago, another critic, I don’t even remember who it was, and I both reviewed a work of Japanese, kind of classic SF—almost like a Stanisław Lem type. It was surreal, you know? It’s like science fiction and then it’s like, you know, inward science fiction. It’s the mental and the universe and everything, and I just thought it was really fascinating. I’d never read anything like it before. I took it for what it is. And I thought the translation was excellent.

And the other critic was like, this sucks! Because, you know, “I don’t like this about it. I don’t like that about it. I don’t like this about it.” And then the great international literature reviewer Michael Orthofer I remember put up a tweet and said: “Hold on! So-and-so said this was great, So-and-so said this was horrible, what?!”

And I said, “Well, we’re approaching it … I was approaching it very textually. They were approaching it kind of culturally, politically.” They wanted the book to be what it wasn’t. I was approaching the book as it was, not how I wanted it to be, which is very hard sometimes. You want a book to be a certain way and you’re disappointed; but, you know, you, that’s what you get. Sometimes you get a book that two people think is completely different.

But like I say, I just think the quality is really great and people don’t realize that.

Dan Hartland: Yeah. I mean, Will, I don’t know what you make of this question. I mean, one thing that that struck me as Rachel was speaking was, when I’m reviewing a work in translation, I am intensely aware that I can’t really rate the quality of the translation, except in so far as it feels natural. The prose feels natural, you know, in terms of … I suppose by quality, part of what I’m talking about is the accuracy. Is this the book? And of course, that’s a whole other thing we don’t need to go down.

Rachel Cordasco: Yeah. You can’t know.

Dan Hartland: But, when you read as widely as Rachel does—and we try, Will!—you can’t be an expert in the cultures from which every single one of these texts is coming. So you do have to read in a very open way, I hope. But there will nevertheless still come—even if you read as openly as possible, and even if you let the translation speak to you and don’t worry too much about this, that and the other—there will still be books that maybe don’t work for you. So, yeah, I don’t know whether you’ve had that experience, Will, and what you think the critic’s role is when it comes to, “Yes. in aggregate. But what about the specifics?”

Will McMahon: Yeah, I think the bigger picture answer is that the way we get towards a more global perspective on, literature as English-language readers is by making sure every discussion of literature and translation doesn’t feel like an advertisement, but to kind of treat it equally—as, like, I’m just gonna engage with this like I would with any book. Now obviously it’s not really like with any book because you’re saying the cultural context or kinda the history of the things that people would have reading in that context.

I read a lot in translation—or, I don’t know, I try to read a lot in translation, I’m actually just in general a slow reader, so that’s always been a struggle—but I vaguely tilt myself towards Latin American literature and, and originally, Spanish language, but far from exclusively. So I try, and especially if I’m doing a review, to understand something of the context.

One of the best books I read last year, coming out of one of these affected small presses, Transit Books, was The Novices of Lerna by Ángel Bonomini, originally published in the 1970s in Argentina, a beautiful short fiction collection. Some of the stories didn’t work great for me, but it was really only a couple. Overall it was, just really scintillating prose, really fascinating ideas. But, you know, also all the narrators of all the stories, or almost all of all, were men, and had like pretty, just in general, a pretty reductive and objective view of women. And I noted that in my review for the Ancillary Review of Books, which also does a lot of reviews in translation.

But just put it in the context of, you know, this is not particularly surprising for an Argentine man in the 1970s, just like it wouldn’t be for an American man in the 1970s—or frankly today. But I think just kinda like noting it, if you understand something of the cultural context, you do need to be a little more careful around those cultural elements.

Oh, and I just want to append, because especially in this discussion, I should really be noting the translator’s names as well: That one was translated by, uh, Jordan Landsman. You know, you gotta talk about style and prose, and I think you just have to, in that case I think you have to say Bonomini’s prose, as rendered by Landsman, right? You know, this version that I am reading.

[Musical Sting]

Dan Hartland: Will, you just mentioned Ancillary Review of Books, and we should mention that the editor there and our friend, Casella Brookins, is the person behind what Rachel was talking about, which is the potential award for translated work Hugo. Rachel was talking about the pushback there has been against that, even though I agree entirely that it’s a chicken and egg situation here: It’s really hard to argue you can’t have a Best Translated Hugo because no one reads best translated work, because then the cycle just never stops.

But I guess, Casella’s work there—and I, I know Rachel, you are working really closely with him on it as well—brings us to this other question that jumps off my kind of poor critic idea: “Oh. What do you do when you’re reviewing a book? It’s so hard!” What can we do as critics—as readers, as engaged citizens!—to improve the lot of SF in translation? The obvious answer is just read more about it and write more widely about it. But at this time of potential, in the US, crisis for SF in translation—and every single one of the publishers that I have contacted for review copies and just to let them know we’re doing this thing, have responded immediately, which with all due respect to my publisher friends, is not common, so my suspicion is they feel the urgency also—what can we do?

How can we help, you know? What is it that we should be looking towards in terms of the future of SF in translation?

Rachel Cordasco: Well, I would like to put the burden on—and I know that, you know, this is just me talking, everyone can roll their eyes and ignore it—but I can tell you that I get very few notes. I don’t know why this is hard. Put a sticky out. You work at one of these publishers, put a sticky on your laptop and it’s just got my email. Anytime you’re going to be publishing a work of SF in translation, just let me know. I mean, no one tells me!

So, you know, that’s part of the work that I’ve taken on to do myself, which is to hunt for it. But why should I have to hunt for it?! If you just … I mean, I will literally splash it across my, my website. I’m finding things out months later. This is not like my full-time job. I’ve got some time where I’m able to focus, but you know, I’m doing twenty-five million other things, three young kids and a part-time job. And I’m trying to keep all this going! But, like you’ve said, you know, my website has a purpose. It’s a very specific purpose and I have a number of people—I’m not on all the different social media sites, whatever—but I have a certain number of people that have followed me for years and they look to me to aggregate this stuff. So all I’m saying is, if people let me know what is coming, I can distribute that widely, not eight months later when I suddenly find out, you know?

But if people will just tell me, come to me, and just email me: “Guess what? We’re publishing this, end of story!” You know, “Look, this is coming out.” I’ll be like, “Great!” And I’ll put it on there and you know, I know people do go to my site. So people will go to the site and they’ll see it and I will then ask you, Dan, or I’ll talk to World Lit Today, or I’ll talk to Words Without Borders. I will help distribute that knowledge of what is coming out, what exists. I should email people more. I should, of course I can review more. I can do more, you know. But I’m saying there’s some stuff they can do, you know, that would help.

Dan Hartland: Rachel, I would like to submit for the consideration of our listeners that in fact you could not do more! There is no more that you can do as a single human being!

Rachel Cordasco: When my children are in college, I’ll do more! But until they’re in college, you know, we all have a limited amount of time. I’m trying because I love this. This is like this what, this makes me very happy.

Dan Hartland: We do all have a limited amount of time and resource and that is why step one—which is what you’ve just told us and which is so important—is use the platforms we have already.

Rachel Cordasco: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Dan Hartland: We have them, and we can use them more, and people can reach out to them more.

I mean, I do think that one of the functions of what we’ve been talking about—which is this slight-slash-increasing separation between “core” SF (and I put that in scare quotes) and SF in translation—one of the functions of that is that the people who are publishing SF in translation don’t automatically think of us when they are promoting their books—which is fair because some people just don’t reply about this stuff! And it is about, as a magazine, reaching out to these publishers and saying, “Please, please, we define speculative fiction very widely. We set out to have a global perspective on the literature. Please, please, please tell us about this stuff and do some of the work to integrate the cultures a bit more.” I guess that’s something that I will commit to doing!

Will McMahon: Yeah, I think the, the critic’s role is that we could be meaner towards English-language work.

You know, and I say that jokingly. I don’t want to over-blow this, I mean there’s some amazing work coming out of kind of Anglophone literature, though that itself is now very internationalized, which is one of the very positive things that I have been going on in the field. When I was talking with Chad from Open Letter and we were talking about this book I’m reading from them right now, The Fake Muse by Max Besora, originally in Catalan, and it’s very mosaic and crazy and shifting. And you know, he said to me like, “Oh, and you know, that makes me think: I just bought this book on a friend’s recommendation and it was Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera.” You know, friend of Strange Horizons! So there is some really phenomenal stuff obviously happening.

But I do think that in the Anglophone genre and at least kind of the mainstream conversation, whatever that means—I don’t know, the Hugo scene or whatever—I think that there is not nearly enough discussion of style. I think in kind of the English-language speculative fiction that’s getting put out, especially in short fiction, there’s a lot of experimentation in form, but it feels like not quite as much in style and—and I think especially in the novel field. I think that there’s a couple of dominant styles in kind of quote-unquote mainstream science fiction and fantasy in the English language.

And I think it’s just kind of taken for granted. It’s the water and a lot of the discussion—and, I’m not talking specifically about critical discussion—is just about like the ideas, the characters, the plot, and, you know. None of those things actually exist, right? The only things that actually exist are the words. It’s just a string of words. I actually was just reading the recent reissue of Ursula Le Guin’s essay collection, The Language of the Night, which is very good if you can wade through the four different introductions and prefaces and whatever that they’ve tacked on over the additions.

But there’s one essay I was just reading, and I forget the name of it, where she’s complaining about the kind of lack of good criticism in science fiction. And this was in the 1970s where she was saying, “If you’re a concert violinist, someone will tell you if you’re second rate. But if you write science fiction, people are just gonna buy it. And then, you know, it’ll drop off the face of the earth after, you know, the first printing or whatever.” And I, I do think that this has probably only gotten worse as we’ve gotten out of … like, newspaper reviews are dying. Criticism is kind of moving off to its little online silos, and then there’s the ascendancy of Goodreads and the reader as consumer.

And if we shift what we’re talking about and if as critics at least are able to broaden the conversation just a little bit to be talking about what exists and what is possible when it comes to style and how these stories are being told, I think that just makes a very natural opening to frankly the much more expansive possibilities that are out there in the translated literature.

And, you know, hopefully we’ll just make things better in general!

Dan Hartland: And it links back to what Rachel was saying about the higher bar, right? So we’re reading these SF in translation texts and we are aware that the bar is so much higher for those books getting published. Yet somehow, perhaps some of us in the critical discourse aren’t making those bars visible.

Rachel Cordasco: So steps, right? Moving forward, keep doing what we’re doing. I think maybe other things to do: continue to reach out to publishers, continue to stay on their radar. Continue to kind of engage, find ways of engaging readers. You know, I tried to do, and totally didn’t work, and people could have told me this if I had asked! But I tried to do an informal best best SFT novel, best SFT story. And I did like a Survey Monkey or something and people game it and mess it up, you know? But it was a way to try to engage people. Sometimes I’ll on social media do trivia and I’ll say, “What do you think was the most published language this year in SF? Was it Spanish? Was it Korean?” And people are like, “Ooh, what a question!” And then, and then I’ll point them to my spreadsheet and I’ll say, “Here’s the spreadsheet, you can look at all of the charts and you can see kind of what was big this year.”

And then the question becomes, why was Korean surrealism so big this year? Why was French horror so big last year? Keep lists. Keep lists of the things that you wanna write about. And then send them, you send them to Strange Horizons, World Lit Today, Words Without Borders. I have to say, World Lit Today has been more responsive to me than a place like Locus, because they’re really, really trying to, capture international lit, which pulls in SF. And Strange Horizons, which focuses on speculative fiction, you’re capturing the translation.

And I think there is also, only so much you can, because the pool of readers is itself quite small—readers, period. And so I’m starting to not care if people’s eyes glaze over. I talk to people at my kids’ school. They say, “What do you do?” I say, “Oh, well, let me tell you!” And I talk to people, if I’m talking to people at a grocery store and they say, “What do you do?” I’ll say, “Oh, I’m a freelance writer, but you know what I write about?!” And I’ll tell ’em. And if they seem kind of bored, you know, maybe a few days later they’ll be like, “Oh, that’s interesting. Maybe I’ll look it up.”

It’s a lot of talking, it’s a lot of word of mouth, it’s a lot of pushing forward, you know, and waiting for the next wave—because I can tell you, there was a wave of interest in SFT in the seventies, there was a wave in the nineties, there was a wave in like the twenty-teens, and it’ll come back again. It seems to be pretty consistent generationally, because every generation has people. There’s always going to be a generation of people who raise this up. I just need to keep contacting as many people as I can, because this is what I love and I want everyone else to love it.

If you look at the long, broad sweep of history, I feel like it’s really positive, honestly. Things always come around.

Will McMahon: Yeah. Things I would just point people towards: We’ve mentioned Open Letter several times, one of the publishers affected. Anyone who’s interested in the situation as it’s happening now and what these presses are thinking and what the future might hold, I would really strongly recommend the three-part podcast—The 3% Podcast is the name—the podcast put out by Open Letter. They did a three-episode series last month, with Chad Post as the host, and he brought in a number of people for each episode from the organizations affected. And that was really informative and I think they had some really fascinating discussions.

I mean, one thing about the scale of the problem here: We’re talking about it like it is this huge blow to literature and translation, but that is such a small market. We’re talking $1.2 million a year, these direct NEA grants. You wanna talk about all these arts councils and translation fellowships, but you could endow that for $25 million, right?

This is pocket change to, say, the Big Five publishers and, frankly, considering how much they benefit from this work, both directly—like, you have an author that breaks out with one of these small presses, pretty soon they’re gonna be getting published by Penguin Random House or Macmillan—but also indirectly, like I said, it, this is like the fertilizer keeping Anglophone literature relatively healthy. It would be nothing for these large publishers to endow an independent organization that just kept up these grants. The danger is when you’ve got kind of these individual donors, right—like, the Elizabeth Koch situation.

So, yeah, I think it’s interesting to look at, and people are thinking about how these nonprofit small presses aren’t nonprofit just because they make no money, but because they’re also like doing things like Rachel was saying, they’re attached to translation programs. They’re trying to do things, put things out into the field. So I think supporting them in that—and then, the last thing is read. People should read more work in translation. I don’t want it to sound like homework, right? It’s the same thing that I think genre readers often have when discussing like quote literary fiction (which is not a coherent category anyway): It sounds like kind of stuffy or like eating your vegetables, which I don’t like. (I like vegetables if you cook ’em right.)

But, you know, this stuff is great. It can be wild, it can be off the wall. I mentioned I’m reading The Fake Muse by Max Besora, translated by Mara Faye Lethem from Open Letter right now: This thing is insane. The text is littered photos of giant hamsters shooting lasers out of their eyes and it’s kinda like a zine and there’s all this wild like typography, it’s just a blast. Some of the best science fiction, short fiction I’ve read recently was from a Bolivian writer, Liliana Colanzi. Her collection, You Glow in the Dark, translated by Chris Andrews for New Directions, is dark cyberpunk, really good. This stuff is great, right?

So this isn’t, “Do it because it’s good for you,” but because it’s good. We wanna support these presses, do it because this stuff is great. And I think, when we’re talking about being too inward looking or not looking at the rest of the world, the biggest sin there is against ourselves. We’re missing out on so much great literature when we’re not engaging with the rest of the world. Literature is a conversation. All art is a conversation. And if we cut off who we’re talking to, that conversation is just gonna be less interesting.

Rachel Cordasco: I’m so glad that Strange Horizons does so much to promote SFT. It’s been really great talking to you guys. Thank you so much.

Dan Hartland: Honestly, thank you. Really appreciate it.

Rachel Cordasco: Thank you. I’ll talk to you guys later then.

Will McMahon: Yeah. Bye. Thanks.

[Musical Outro]

Rachel Cordasco: I, yeah, just keep working and staying positive is really my suggestion.

Dan Hartland: Rachel, it is entirely not on brand for this podcast to end on a note of optimism, but thank you.

Rachel Cordasco: Oh, I’m glad I could bring some, because I’m, sometimes like, “Oh, everything just sucks.”

All: [laughs]

[Musical Outro continues]

Dan Hartland: Thanks for listening to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF Criticism podcast. Our music is “Dial-Up” by Lost Cosmonauts. You can hear more of their music at grandevalise.bandcamp.com. See you next time.

In the third episode of Writing While Disabled, Kristy Anne Cox and Kate Johnston sit down with author Donyae Coles for a frank and candid discussion around adjusting one's life and writing processes around one's disability, finding support to help with the tasks that become difficult, and how genre can lend itself to telling disabled stories authentically.

If you prefer, you can watch the full interview with close-caption subtitles here.

Show notes:

• This episode was produced and hosted by Kristy Anne Cox and Kate Johnston, and edited, mixed, and transcribed by Kat Kourbeti.
• The theme song, "Funky - Upbeat Loop" by ispeakwaves, is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
• Want to send us a question? You can do so here!
• Buy 'Midnight Rooms' by Donyae Coles here.
• Find Donyae's short fiction linked on her website.
• Follow Donyae on Bluesky and Instagram.
• Find Kristy on her website here.

Join the Strange Horizons 2025 Fund Drive!

• Contribute to funding our next year on Kickstarter and get awesome rewards like signed books by your favorite authors, ebook copies of the magazine, a special iron-on patch, your name in the credits of a poem, artwork or review, and much more.
• Read the 2025 Fund Drive issue.

Vote for Strange Horizons in the Hugo Awards

• We have two poems, a novelette, and the magazine all on the ballot! Get your WSFS and/or virtual Seattle Worldcon membership on their website, and you can cast your vote now.

​Transcript

Kristy Anne Cox: Welcome everyone, to Writing While Disabled. Very excited to be here today with the fabulous Donyae Coles, and also with our co-host Kate. We're gonna go ahead and introduce ourselves. My name is Kristy Anne Cox. I have been working on the Writing While Disabled series for a while, and I also have some short fiction out.

Turn over to Kate for your intro.

Kate Johnston: Hi, I'm Kate Johnston. I am a writer and editor and now an anthologist living in currently Oakland, California. I also have ADHD and some other stuff. So it's one of the reasons I am here doing this.

Donyae Coles: Hi, I'm Donyae Coles. I am an author and artist. I live in Minnesota. Midnight Rooms is my debut novel and I've also written a number of short stories. I have ADHD, and I'm here to talk to you all today.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yay. I also have ADHD, so this is like the ADHD fan club today. Okay, good.

Donyae Coles: ADHD high five!

Kristy Anne Cox: ADHD high five! Disorganized, walking away, forgetting what we're doing.

Should we start with the book? Midnight Rooms. I do not have the physical copy of the book to hold up, but I'm gonna describe this cover for you.

So we have this beautiful young girl holding a fawn with a cup of tea, a really intricately colored teacup with butterflies, and it's haunting, it's beautiful, but also creepy. This is on a black cover. This is a novel, and this is Donyae's debut novel, which you can find at your local favorite bookstore. I really like this cover.

Donyae, can you tell us about this book?

Donyae Coles: Yeah. So it's a gothic horror novel. It's a true gothic horror, and what I mean by that is it is everything you loved about the gothic, here it is, in the modern world— only it's not the modern world, it's Victorian England. But it is about a young woman named Orabella, who has been raised by her aunt and uncle because her own parents have passed away some years back. And she's getting older and they're like, "you can't just live here forever." And a man, Elias, comes and says, "I have proposition for you. Come be my wife. I will take care of you. I need a wife." But he does not actually explain why he needs a wife. That's not made clear to her, or anyone about why this man would need a wife. And she is whisked away with the idea that she's going to be taken care of and she's going to live this lovely dream life. And there's dreaming, but it's not exactly the fairytale that she had in mind.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah. So nightmare elements.

Donyae Coles: Yeah. And it's been described as a fever dream quite a bit.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah, I saw that review. All the reviews I read were very, very warm and complimentary, and they sounded terrified.

Donyae Coles: Good. That's the point.

Kate Johnston: Yeah.

Kristy Anne Cox: That sounds amazing. I have not had a chance to read it yet, but I've got it on my Kindle and I'm very excited.

Usually we start by doing our methodology questions, so shall we jump right in?

Donyae Coles: Go for it.

Kristy Anne Cox: All right. What does your writing space look like? Where do you write?

Donyae Coles: Here, this is where I write. I didn't write Midnight Rooms in this space because I had just had a major upheaval in my life. So I used to have an office. So a year ago if this interview was happening, same computer, but behind me, instead of my bed, you would've seen easels and bookcases and art supplies because it's all in one room. But now it's my bedroom.

Kristy Anne Cox: Just for our viewers or readers who aren't seeing this, could you describe, are you sitting at a desk? It looks like you're in a bedroom.

Donyae Coles: I am in a bedroom. Behind me is a bed. I am sitting at a desk. You cannot see this, but I'm sitting at a desk with a desktop computer, standard keyboard. It actually glows, it's very nice. Not my nicest, it's just normal keys, but I've been thinking about switching that out for typewriter keys again.

Kristy Anne Cox: Oh, yeah.

Donyae Coles: By the by, the typewriter keys make you more cognizant of what you're doing. I guess we can talk more about that in the accommodations you make for yourself.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah. Yeah.

Donyae Coles: That's why I've been thinking about switching them out. Actually now I've said that I should just go ahead and buy 'em off Amazon. I should just go ahead and do that.

Anyway. This is a desk, it's a very normal desk. This is actually not my usual desk, this is a secondary desk I had because my usual desk was too big and it would not fit in this room. So on this desk is the PC, like the actual tower, a screen, a couple crystals and stuff that I like to have around, and just a lot of clutter to be honest. And a lamp. It's a pink lamp.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah. You said crystals?

Donyae Coles: Yeah.

Kristy Anne Cox: Can we see one? [Donyae shows one on camera.] Ooh!

Donyae Coles: Is this how they do it on the TikTok, with the hand behind?

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah. Are you superstitious about them at all? 'Cause I have crystals back here for luck, and I'm very superstitious about it.

Donyae Coles: I don't like to use the term superstitious, but yeah, I do think that they be doing stuff.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah.

Kate Johnston: That was a question that I had. How does your workspace reflect the mind space that helps you write?

Donyae Coles: It's just my space. I think that is the important thing is just, my space. This is space that I occupy, space that I own. And I think that's a really important difference for me because now, this is all I do right now. But prior to this, I worked in an office, I worked for the state of Pennsylvania, so I was at a computer all of the time. And sure, I put little trinkets in my cubicle and I personalized it a little bit, as we all do so that we don't lose ourselves— lose our mind in the great cubicles.

But that wasn't my space, whereas this is my space. This is my chair. And I went through— especially after I moved, because I couldn't bring the chair that I wrote Midnight Rooms in, so I had to get a new chair and it was a process of going through four or five different chairs and cushions to find one that I could sit in that worked well. And I don't know if it was just— this is probably a couple of things, but I am a fat black woman, so like, I need the space in my chair. Important.

So that for me is just, this is just my space. These are my crystals that are at my workspace. This is my little dream doll at my workspace. This is my keyboard. This is my little drawer seats that I'm keeping for reasons I don't understand right now, but will become clear to you at some point in time.

I have books here like, to my left are three bookshelves, three mid-size bookshelves. One brown, two pink, full of books. They are full, like shelves overflowing, full of books. So it's just that reclamation of space, and that allows me to be just free with my thoughts, because I'm in my space and I don't believe in thought crimes. So you know, it allows me to have these thoughts that some people would be like, "oh, that's terrible". And I don't mean I'm having intrusive thoughts, I mean like, "I'm gonna kill this guy, and this is the horrible way I'm going to do it".

Kristy Anne Cox: Fictionally.

Donyae Coles: Yes.

Kristy Anne Cox: Fictionally, yes.

Donyae Coles: If he keeps talking to me about—

Kristy Anne Cox: But also there's some neighbors around here that we could fictionally... fictionally.

Donyae Coles: Actually, I really like my neighbors. My neighbors on the one side are also writers. I live next to Sam Richard from Weirdpunk Books and Joe Coach, are my neighbors. That's awesome. They're awesome, but they're also having dark thoughts.

Kristy Anne Cox: Well, that's our job. I'm hearing you say that the objects around you have personal meaning and that is empowering. And you have a door you can shut.

Donyae Coles: That is super important. But my door being shut is really just about— and it's funny 'cause I like, wrote about this a little bit for something else. There's an anthology on motherhood and horror movies that is coming out that I'm part of. But I talked about it, because the door being able to close and being able to be like "this is now..." [gestures with hands like delineating space, pushing outward] is not really about my disability or my comfort level. It's just to be like, "children, I'm done with you now."

Kate Johnston: Yeah. I wondered about that. Cause how well do you deal with background noise?

Donyae Coles: So that is touch and go. I am usually pretty okay, but if I've been going too much during the day, like a day like today where I've been outside and I've been doing a ton of things, especially—I've been doing a ton of things for the last couple days because both of my sons had birthdays within a week of each other, so I've been outside, I've been running around. So during this kind of time period, my sensitivity to sound is going to go way up, and I will start snapping at people. And then my daughter comes in and she is like, "all right, it's time to turn off the big light. You don't need that anymore." My daughter's 19. So, yeah, I do have a little bit of sound sensitivity.

It's funny because I didn't realize that's what was going on. But I, one day I sat down and I was listening to music—I generally listen to music while I write—and I was ready to fight someone when the song was playing and I was like, this is one of my favorite songs. And it was, it's The Running Free by Coheed and Cambria. And I was like, ooh. And I turned the song off and I got better. And I was like, that's so weird. Because that is one of my favorite, I can listen to that song on repeat, but if you catch me on one of these days, one of these timeframes where I'm overstimulated, I have no more patience, I can't handle whatever it is... absolutely not. I gotta turn it off.

Kristy Anne Cox: You turn off the light sometimes though? Do you write in the dark?

Donyae Coles: Yes, I do turn off the light. I don't write 'in the dark', 'cause I just don't, I think I have a little weirdness. I'm always worried about insects, but I live in the frozen north now, so I'm hoping that fear goes away. But what I use to accommodate that—so I have a bedside lamp, which is behind me up against the back wall, and that has three settings on the bulb. So I will turn that one on and then turn the overhead light off if I'm having a really bad day. I have a little, they're called sunset lamps.

Kate Johnston: Yeah.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah.

Donyae Coles: And I have one of those on my desk, like a USB powered one that's plugged into a USB port. It provides like a little bit of light, just so I can get around and navigate the space around me. And then if I really need to do something where I'm like, "I need a brighter light", like I knit— if you see me on the internet, you see me knitting. So what I'll do is I have my pink desk light has a very bright bulb in it, but it's adjustable. So I'll put that, and I'll adjust it downward so it's just focused on what I'm doing.

I will also use that light if I'm drawing at my desk and I don't want the overhead light, but the light in the background's a little too far away for me to like really be able to see what I'm doing because my eyesight is poor—it's not like blind-poor, but it is not great—then I will use that light. So I have the use of lamps.

But yeah, I will turn off this big light. This big light is actually only on right now because I was doing this, the video.

Kate Johnston: Do you ever seek out non-home workspaces, like coffee shops?

Donyae Coles: No, but that has to do in part because I write on a desktop, as opposed to a laptop. I have a laptop right now. It's really funny, I'm going with a friend outside to write next week, I think. We were just talking about it, and I do have a laptop, but my son is using it for school right now, so it's segued into being his laptop.

So when I go out, I'm going to try and use my iPad and the pen feature to write on, but I don't really write outside the home, and it is one where in the situation I was in previous, I did not leave the house, period, ever. And like, that's a whole thing. And now, even though I go outside more, I can't drag my computer with me.

Kristy Anne Cox: I was gonna say, it sounds like the way you're controlling your soundscape and your lightscape is accommodative for you with the ADHD, like when you're getting overstimulated or when you're having different situations within ADHD from day to day, that you're using your sound and your light to help. Is that accurate?

Donyae Coles: Yeah, and I think the thing about the ADHD for me is, and I don't know how true it is for everyone, but I find that mine is really hormonal controlled. I am not in control of the kind of day I'm going to have when it comes to that, my ovaries are.

I could have a day where I'm outside like all day, and then I come home and I am still good to go. Everything's fine. I am on point. And then I could have a day where I have to take the trash out one time and I'm losing track of everything. It's just really all dependent. So it is constantly fluctuating inside of those kind of parameters.

Kristy Anne Cox: We were gonna ask about accommodation, so that kind of segues into that. Like, what other accommodations do you use as part of your process?

Donyae Coles: I was talking about those key caps and I am gonna change them back, 'cause I don't hate these, I like them a lot. But like, the keyboard I have is a clicky keyboard. I've got the loud keys, so when you're typing, you really hear that sound. I think these ones are blue caps, in case anybody's wondering. So that is a way to keep me like, "keyed in". My keyboard also glows, which is not something I've always had, but having the glow also helps because it makes it this novel thing.

So here's the thing. I go through a lot of keyboards, because I type so much. So the keyboards wear out. This one that I have now, I have it set so it changes color, like a flow state of changing color. But the ones that I really like can be set so that my actual typing changes the colors of the keys.

Kristy Anne Cox: Oh, like when you hit it, it changes color, that particular brand does that?

Donyae Coles: It makes a light effect that happens, and I'm not always paying attention to it, but it is a thing that keeps me drawn into the process. So it's like the light and the sound become their own sort of stims that help me stay in the process of what I'm doing.

So this is like one of those keyboards that you can swap out the keys and the caps as they wear out. Because again, I was running through keyboards like crazy, so it was like a lot of money every time I had to repair it. The ones that I was using before had typewriter keys, which are the round keys, and I like this. This one has normal keys in the sense that they're the square keys, but they have cats on them, so they're very cute. And that's another little trick, have tools that you're really excited to use.

I learned that actually from art. Like my visual art, because if you are excited about using the paint or the paper or the pencils or whatever, then you are more likely to use them as opposed to stuff that you're using just because it's there. But I also found that having the round key caps, my typing got really precise, because the space between the keys is different, but in a good way.

Kate Johnston: I was gonna ask, did you take typing in school?

Donyae Coles: I did take typing in school, but I failed it. I failed it every single time. I did terrible. I think about that all the time.

Kate Johnston: 'Cause that's something that happens to those of us who either didn't take it or didn't cotton onto it very well. We tend to type really hard.

Donyae Coles: Yeah, I do type hard. Okay. So a side note about the typing, because I think this story is hilarious and I wanna tell it because it's so freaking funny. One—this is not the story I wanna tell, but since you brought it up, I did take typing 'cause I am of the nineties. And I felt it terribly. I could not learn to type for anything, and I did not learn to type until AOL chat rooms. That is what taught me to type. Like that tactical, "I need to communicate"—

Kate Johnston: Yep.

Donyae Coles: —Like process, is how I learned how to type. And then I had to get really good at typing to get a job, 'cause again, I worked for the state.

But when I moved to Minnesota, I went to interview for this one job, which was for the sheriff's department up here, in fingerprinting, 'cause I'm not gonna work for the sheriff's department, but I was like, "but fingerprinting is okay".

So I went to go take this, and the lady was like, "oh, there's a typing test." And it was like the most ridiculous, weird thing, 'cause the typing test was just a free website. So I'm like, whatever, okay, I'll take your typing test. And she's like, "don't worry about it. It's not that serious, you know, just however you can do it, doesn't matter." And I was like, okay. And she's like, "I'll be right back".

So she walked away and I did my typing test and I was like, "there's a problem with the website. I had to start over." And she was like, "oh, it's fine, don't worry. I usually let people go two or three times. So if you need to go do it again, that's no problem." And I was like, "that's very sweet of you, but I don't need to do this again."

"Oh, what, how did you do?" She pulled my score. She was like "oh my God! You... you definitely passed." And they took me to my interview and they looked at the score and they're like, "oh, you're a typing pro!" And I was like, "yeah, that's how you get a book out!"

Kristy Anne Cox: Right? You're hired, this isn't even a typing related job.

Kate Johnston: I had a really stupid typing test for the state of California, and it was another one of those free sites, and it was one of the things where you couldn't backspace.

Donyae Coles: Yes. I was like, what?

Kate Johnston: Yeah, you just had to keep going, which drove me insane. And she was like "yeah, you can do it multiple times." I'm like, "oh no, because by the fourth time, I'm gonna be able to do this by heart." And yeah, I got further than anyone had ever gotten with zero mistakes and, yeah. The whole thing.

Donyae Coles: I was like, because the state of Pennsylvania also has a typing test, right? So I had already done type, but that was like a serious closed thing. Then you got a paper to type all the, you gotta, yeah.

Kristy Anne Cox: The keyboard, the program, all of this affects your writing, because it either slows you down or it speeds you up. Maybe it forces you to work harder to enter each word. Like, when I have to put in more calories to type in a word, because I'm, I don't know, the keys are farther apart or whatever, I find myself writing fewer words.

Is that the same with you guys?

Donyae Coles: So let's talk about software. I did not have this when I was working on the earlier drafts of Midnight Rooms, so this is something I discovered later. I use a program called StimuWrite. It's available on itch.io, I think it's free, and then the theme packs cost money, I don't remember. It's made by another writer, her name is Eve Harms. I'm just name dropping all the homies today. It's a software that she made that is just a no frills writing program with fun backgrounds and emojis.

So like, as you reach a writing goal—let's say I have mine set for low numbers, right? I like quick things. So like, as you write 200 words, it'll have an emoji explosion on the screen and then every time you type, a bunch of emojis come up. There's sounds that you can put in, like they have their own built in typing sounds and stuff. I obviously don't need that 'cause I already have a keyboard that does it. There's no spell check, there's no grammar check, there's nothing being changed. So you know when you're in Word and you type and it'll be like "you actually meant to type this." And I was like, I said what I said! There's none of that. It is just the words you wrote.

Now, that copy that I write in that... full of errors. Full, just absolutely steadily full of errors. But I can just put that in a document and then I have the basis for my first draft and it'll keep me going, especially when I'm still trying to figure out the story. And I find that using that program, it will make me write because of all of the interaction that this program is having with all of my different senses, right? Like my sound and visual. But what I also found was, and I don't know if it's just because it's taken out of Word or what, but when I'm in that program I am not so fixated on getting the perfect sentence. And it allows me just to get the idea around whatever I'm writing, around that scene, and find my way into the story. So I use that program for a lot of the initial writing, and then I copy and paste it into Word because I have to, because that is the industry standard. I have to use Word.

What also I found, and I don't know if this is available on the web based program—'cause I know some people just use the free web version of Word, I don't know if it's in there. Google also has this, but it's not as good. There's a diction option, that you can just talk to the thing. And again, there's gonna be mistakes in that, that you're gonna have to go back and you're gonna have to edit, but you should be editing anyway. You should be editing. But on days where the typing is not really working out, I might be like, now it's time to talk to my computer.

And I will use that to just get those basic ideas down and those overall concepts down. You know with the ADHD, part of the thing is your thoughts run really fast. So with the diction, that is instantaneous. As soon as the thought comes in, it is out my mouth and we are off to the races, as opposed to the process of actually typing it. So if my thoughts are running really fast, especially around something that I'm trying to work on an idea or process for, that has been a real lifesaver.

Thank you Microsoft Word for that feature, I really appreciate it. If you could gimme more of that and less of that Co-pilot stuff, that would be great.

Kristy Anne Cox: So voice dictation works for you?

Donyae Coles: Yes.

Kristy Anne Cox: What's your process overall? You talked a little bit about your first draft.

Donyae Coles: So the first step is the idea, right? Whatever the idea is going to be. And I actually keep those ideas and I use Google Keep, like the Keep notes app on your phone. It's web based. I learned that trick from somebody at FIYAH Con. I have a folder full of various ideas, various notes. Anytime I get an idea that I'm like, I wanna put this with this idea, I add it to that note.

So everything starts in one folder that says Story Ideas, and they're color coded. And then when that idea becomes larger where I'm like, "okay, I'm really getting to choofs this thing", then that idea gets its own folder with whatever its call sign's gonna be. The Sunken, The Adored is the name of my next book, so that has a folder called TSTA. And that is where we start putting in all of the concepts, all of the ideas, all of the notes, pictures. I don't do Pinterest boards, I don't do mood boards. I do this folder and I upload all the stuff that I see that I'm like, "this is a thing that pertains to this. This is an idea I have. This is a comp title."

And I make notes about that. These are my characters. That's one note. These are the themes that this book is playing in. That's one note. This is this work that work is in conversation with. That's a note. And I keep all these notes. There is no organization in that because it's organized by date. And that is amazingly freeing because then this process of note keeping does not become its own mini process. I don't get wrapped up in any sort of "this needs to be organized alphabetically, this needs to"— no, it's in the pile. And when I need to find something, I have to search it in the search bar. Okay. Done.

So then we start drafting. Usually nowadays (my draft) starts in the StimuWrite app where I start writing out these ideas, and then I copy and paste each day's writing session into the Word document that is the rough draft of the book. So the first drafting is the rough draft, and that is a mess. It is awful. But I usually take at most about 30,000 words to really get the feeling of the book, and how this is gonna work and what I really wanna say here. Sometimes that first 30,000 words gets deleted. But I'm getting better in my craft. I'm getting more comfortable with my own style and deeper understanding of how I work, so we have not been seeing the first 30 k deletion in a while, so yay.

So I get to the end of the first draft, or the rough draft, and then that's done. Then I have to go back and make that rough draft readable. Now at some point in the rough draft, sometime within the 20-30 K range, I will have switched from using StimuWrite to just writing directly on the document because I have found the thread of the story, and that allows me to really start crafting the sentences closer to the form that they will appear in the final draft. And so I'm writing directly by the end of the rough draft in the Word document, that will eventually be the document that goes on to my agent and my editor. And so I finish the rough draft, I usually let it sit for a week, work on some short stories, work on nothing. Then I go back and I start editing.

Now, at that point I know a hundred percent how the story ends up. So I have to make sure that everything that is at the back end is supported by the front end, which is a process in and of itself. This is a difficult process with the ADHD because the memory is bad, which is why I usually have in the note app a note that is started at some point during the rough draft, that is "things to add when we do our first edit". And it's just a bullet list of different stuff that I need to go back and make sure exists.

Sometimes this stuff is pretty easy and I can just do a find-and-replace around a keyword or a group of keywords to get me to the right part of the document. And then I could just be like, "ah, here you go. I knew I talked about this thing here." Sometimes it's a little bit difficult and I have to just kinda remember what I'm doing. But I also during this process understand it doesn't have to be perfect.

This is not actionable advice for anyone who is not already at this traditional publishing stage of their career. But if you are there and you are in your first round, the work doesn't need to necessarily be absolutely stunningly perfect when it goes to your editor, because you're going to get it back like twice, and then you're going to get it back two more times after that, and then again three more times. You're going to get that work back and every time you get the book back, it just gets cleaner and cleaner.

And even with Midnight Rooms, there was stuff. By the last pass page, there was nothing to correct, but even with the first level of pass pages, I found stuff that I was like, "oh God. Yeah. How did this get so far?" that I had to be like, "oh, we just need to rewrite this line." And they weren't big things. It was just like, I need to rewrite this sentence, it got moved to the wrong place or whatever. And I say that because, especially with the ADHD, especially with that neurodivergence, just knowing that "oh, this is coming back to me," 'cause it's hard to have that conversation with yourself and convince yourself that it doesn't need to be perfect, so that you can get to the next stage, but it truly does not need to be a hundred percent perfect. It will be a hundred percent perfect when it goes to print, but you have seven more read throughs before it gets there.

Kate Johnston: I was gonna ask you if you used an outline and your description is so pants, that it's a skirt.

Donyae Coles: There is an outline actually! (laughs)

So no, I do a lot of pantsing, because I gotta let the story tell me, I gotta let the story guide me. But there is an outline at about—okay, when I sold The Sunken, The Adored, the outline came before the book because I sold that on proposal. So they had to have an outline, they had to know where this thing was going, what was gonna happen. So I had to make the outline before the book was done. But the other book I sold in that same deal, which was What Kills You, that book I just wrote and the only time when I started to outline it, I was like maybe 50, 60,000 words into it. Like I was far into that story.

And the reason any sort of outline around that book exists, and the same thing with Midnight Rooms, was because I was at a point where I was like, I have to connect two parts, and I need to know what happens in those two parts without having to write those two parts because I had to figure that out. So my outlining process, if I'm not selling it on proposal, like if I'm just writing, the outline itself will not start really appearing until I am pretty far into a book, like halfway through. And it is just so I can be like, these are the things that happen. These are the things I want to make sure happen. This is me trying not to be incredibly long-winded about what's gonna happen, but I'm still writing a hundred K words.

But that's where I outline. I think there is this kind of draw to be like, "oh, I'm both of these things. I'm the combination of the pantser and the plotter", but I'm not. I'm still really pantsing because even with an outline, I will write that out and just be like, "nah, I got a better idea."

Kate Johnston: Yep. Yeah. Oh, that's the thing. An outline is still just a guide. It's never the thing that you have to absolutely hue to, because if you wanted to do that, you'd be writing academic stuff.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah.

Kate Johnston: And don't get me wrong, in fiction, I love me a good footnote, but it's not required.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah. And an outline can also be a diagnostic tool instead of a planning tool. Or you can be like, there's something wrong, what exactly is it? Or it can just be a way for me, for memory, I'm trying to remember the sequence of events correctly, particularly if I'm layering in clues or I'm looking at a relationship arc and I wanna make sure that I had enough buildup for each of the satisfying steps along the way. An outline really helps me see if I'm missing any big scenes or pieces.

Donyae Coles: Sometimes that outline is just a map that you draw after you get most of the way there.

Kate Johnston: Yeah. And the thing to remember there is that the map is not the territory.

Kristy Anne Cox: I don't know if I'm following you. The map is not the territory... Okay. You're saying it's literally not a piece of ground. Now I'm with you. Now I'm with you.

Kate Johnston: It's that old thing of, the map may show that this is 200 feet away. It doesn't show you that it's straight up a cliff.

Donyae Coles: Yes.

Kristy Anne Cox: Gotcha.

Kate Johnston: Yeah. But one of the things we do talk about and mostly because, oh my God, I need this—is permission. And I think that what a lot of younger writers—not chronologically, but young in their craft—what they really need to hear is, "yes, you can do this funky, weird thing that you have to do in order to put out 10,000 words. That's fine. Go do that. If it means that you have to do this after eating 12 chocolate chip cookies and standing on your head for five minutes, fine, do that then."

Kristy Anne Cox: That's what I mean about superstitious for me. There's this book called, not the War of Art. Wait, there's The Art of War, which is the original, it's the War of Art, and I don't actually like the book, but there's this one part where the guy is, he's collected all these different tchotchkes from his trips in places, and he has lined them up because they remind him of interesting places he's been. And I was thinking about what we draw energy from, and your process can be as arcane and weird and mystical, or as boring and routine as you want. It can change every time, every story might require a different process.

Donyae Coles: So what I have to say about that is I think that is a really big, important piece, especially when you're working with neurodivergence, and this is something that I really learned with visual art, especially after I was medicated and I was like, wait a second. A lot of the advice you hear is "you have to show up. This is how you do it. You have to show up every day. You have to sit down every day and the work will come for you." And I'm like, "that's never gonna work, 'cause lots of things can come. Do you know what it's like up here? I can sit in front of a blank screen for hours, okay? I don't know what y'all be looking at."

And I didn't realize (it) until I was medicated, because I got to this understanding about the process and about repetition and showing up and what that actually means, 'cause of visual art. I was like, "oh, this needs to be realigned", because what happens is the same advice is given for visual artists. "If you wanna be an artist, you gotta show up every day. You gotta do art every day, whether you feel like it or not. You gotta sit down and paint, baby."

And I tried that advice, but what I found that was happening was I would have days where I could do a beautiful piece of artwork, beautiful, post it online, everyone's like, "oh my god, girl", right? And then the next day, apropos of nothing, couldn't draw a circle. And I didn't understand why that was happening to me. I have ruined so many pieces that I was working on because I tried to follow that advice to show up every day and to do art whether I felt like it or not. Just do it every day. But when I got medicated, I recognized very quickly, like day one, that suddenly I could do art whether I wanted to or not. I could draw whether I wanted to or not. I had all of the skills that I had struggled with—that I could only access sometimes—all of the time, as long as I was medicated.

I realized that the advice that I was being given, that this is stuff you have to show up every day, that is not for the neurodiverse ring. That is a neurotypical brain that can do that. Mine don't work like that. Mine is paywalled behind my attention. I can't access it. I can't just be like, "I'm gonna sit down and paint and it's gonna be beautiful as it was yesterday." No, it will not. It will be garbage, because I can't access those skills.

And the same thing happens with writing. I cannot access those skills every single day. There are days where I am completely on top of my game and I can hyperfocus and I can get 50,000 words done in a day. Not 50,000 words, maybe 5,000 words done in a day. And there are days where I can get five words done. Because I don't have that, I don't have that focus. I can't tap into the story. I can't do the things that I need to do. And that's okay. That is fine. There's nothing wrong with that being the reality. I just need to know that that's the reality.

And I think more people who are dealing with neurodivergence have to understand that that is the reality. And the secondary reality is, a lot of times we're using our writing as our hyper-focus emotional thing that we do. That's our daydream. So when we get medicated, we cannot do it. We have a different relationship for writing, which is why I write at night. Which I guess is the secondary accommodation: my meds wear off at night.

Kate Johnston: When it's quiet, the kids are in bed, ain't nobody coming to bug you. The night is your time.

Donyae Coles: Exactly. Yeah. I have a couple, I have a writing group that I write with. I used to write during the day too, I used to run sprints with a friend of mine, but I'm not able to do that now because my son is homeschooled. But I write at night with a group, we run tomato timers, the Pomodoro method. And I only do this with this group, I don't do this in my normal, I'm not doing all that. But we run these Pomodoro timers at night, and I will write from six to like midnight with them. And if I don't have to do anything in the morning, I will write until three, four o'clock in the morning nonstop. No problem. I get a second wind at 1:30, which I think is also part of the neurodivergent brain, 'cause a lot of us are night owls. A lot of us really start coming online, and we've got that delayed sleep phase stuff. So I think that's a little bit of the neurodivergence too.

But yeah, that's one of my accommodations.

Kristy Anne Cox: I wanna ask you a medication question, if that's okay. So like, when you talk about this set of complications and problems that come with not being properly medicated. So sometimes writer's block is: you need proper medical care and access to the right medications and it takes time to get there, right? But sometimes it's about adjusting to a new medication and figuring out what your cycle is, how your brain works with the extended release version versus with all the other different versions you're trying.

So let's say you've got a medication that's working for you, for health and everything, and now you're trying to rewrite your writing routine into that. I think it's really helpful to pay attention to exactly what you're talking about. Is this the time of day on this new medication that I should be drafting? Or do I need to wait until it's starting to wear off? Is the medication gonna help me get the rest of my life done, so I've got everything off of the plate before I write? Particularly with hyper-focus medications, 'cause I take one for ADHD where it's like, I have three good hours, but I'm gonna be writing a particular type of prose during those three good hours. If I wanna write brooding melancholy poetry, that's a different time of day. It needs to have worn off a little bit more, if that makes sense.

Donyae Coles: No, it makes perfect sense. So like, about a year ago actually, I had the worst March. I got really sick, and during this time period my doctor changed my meds, 'cause she wanted to try me on something else. I take the extended release version of Guanfacine, which I know does not work for everyone.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah.

Donyae Coles: So she switched me to standard release version but more often, because on the Guanfacine I was on, I was only getting I think six hours of focus time, which is what I call normal brain time. I would take it and it was wearing off as I was moving around or whatever. So she switched me to the standard release, take twice a day. I had an allergic reaction to that.

Kristy Anne Cox: Oh.

Donyae Coles: It's really weird because I'm fine on the extended release, but I can't take the standard release. I had to go to the ER. It was wild. So it was like a weekend, they had to take me off of the medication because I had this allergic reaction, and then we had to wait for my doctor to get back into the office so that she could look at what was going on and then reorder my medication. But now we've ordered all these different pills, so the insurance is giving us a hard time, so we gotta fight with them, et cetera, et cetera.

So during this time, I go off my meds, as one does. And that had been the first time in a really long time that I had—or not a long time, but like in over a year that I had been without. I had been consistently taking meds, I take my meds every day. You shouldn't just go off of the meds that are helping your brain. So then I had a little bit of withdrawal, and that was not fun. And then I started to get over that and I started to feel better, but I was like, "I'm back to not being able to function. Like, this is not good. Like, how did I make it this long, people? How are my children still alive? What is going on? I'm struggling." I have due dates at this point, like I have deadlines and I am on the phone with my agent like, "look, you gotta talk to these people, because I'm having a medical emergency." And he's great. He took care of everything. He's wonderful. He completely understood. And it's not my fault.

But it is important that I had a deadline during this, because what happened was I got back on the correct medication, but at that point it already walked outta my system. Yeah. So then it took time, it took like a solid two weeks for my meds to come back, and I was struggling with this assignment I was doing. I could not write it for anything. It is a nonfiction assignment. I wrote a card deck on numerology, it's called Everyday Numerology, it's available now, it's really pretty. But I could not focus, I could not concentrate on doing, and this is spiritual work that I'm doing.

And I could not focus, I could not get it. Even with my medication, I couldn't get it until one day I woke up, took my medication, I felt it kick in. Like as soon as it kicked in, two weeks later, I was like "oh yeah, this is, I'm back now." This is again, I'm at baseline, at normal again. But from that experience I learned—I was like, I can't. I used to be able to do this kind of work, like just normal, 'cause I used to write about spirituality all the time.

But I learned this like, oh, this is how this affects my writing. This is how this affects me. This is how being in that state, that unmedicated state, I have to wait for that hyperfocus, 'cause I can't do anything else otherwise. I have to wait until my brain says, "you can have a couple drops of inspiration now". And I think that's so important 'cause you have to learn that, but unfortunately you only learn that through error.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah. And readers, listeners, if you're new to a medication, it can take two to six weeks before you start seeing those changes. And that whole time is an interruption of your process. So it takes years to find the right psychiatric medication. Cut yourself a break. If you're struggling, if you're struggling during that process, you've got good reason to struggle.

Kate, what were you saying?

Kate Johnston: Especially first timers, they think that, oh, my doctor knows everything. First mistake. And they are going to prescribe the absolute right thing and I'm gonna be fine. No. Like, even getting medicated is this long sort of train of, is this working well? It's working well, but I can't do the things I need to do, so we need to do something else. And because it's like a 90 day cycle of getting on and off, this is going to consume your life for four to six months until you really find a thing that's gonna work for you. And yeah, there are a lot of things that are going to flow down the river in that time.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah. This is part of the reason why disabled writers and neurodiverse writers often take longer to progress in our careers, because we have all these interruptions and they might involve big process changes, and that involves reinventing the wheel for yourself sometimes. And it's frustrating, it's demoralizing. You have to keep on top of the positive thinking, because you can think "I've lost my gift". And it's like, no, you need the extended release.

Donyae Coles: And you know what, I do wanna say one more thing, and this is not directly about the medication, but it is about what you just said, Kristy, about how it takes us longer. Because if I hadn't had an agent who was gonna field all those phone calls and send the emails, that would've been a much different situation. Because there were times earlier in my career, not with fiction but with other stuff, because I did a lot of nonfiction work for a long time, where I would just be unable to function. And I didn't know at those times. I had no idea, because I'm late diagnosed, so I didn't know what was going on. I thought I was just lazy. Especially jobs that I would get where I didn't feel immediately qualified, because I had never done them before. But obviously if I got the job, I was qualified.

Kristy Anne Cox: This is writing work, writing jobs?

Donyae Coles: This is all writing stuff, but I would get these gigs and I would just freeze up and I didn't know why, and it is because of the Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, which I suffer from. But also that causes—like I have trouble like sending an email. That was one of the things that when I got medication, finally I was talking to my doctor and they were like, how are you doing? And I was like, "today I sent an email in 15 minutes!" And they were like, "oh, that seems like a lot of time". And I was like, "it used to take me two hours".

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah. That's a big deal.

Donyae Coles: But like, I had a legitimate medical emergency around my medication where I had to be taken off, and if I at that time had not been able to just send a text to my agent and say, "hey, this is going on, please deal with this," I would have lost those gigs, because I would not have been able to communicate for myself that I was having this problem. And I know a lot of people are like, "why not? Like you're having a medical emergency, you should be able to just send an email." 'Cause I can't, I don't have a reason. If I had a reason, I would be able to solve the problem, but I don't.

And the reason I'm saying this, and I'm being so candid about this, is because I know I spent a lot of time earlier on in my career, beating myself up for opportunities that I lost. But the reason I lost those opportunities at that time was because in those moments I did not have the kind of support that I needed. Obviously getting an agent is not easy. That is not simple. But like, babes, if you got a friend who can send an email, have them come sit with you and get in your email and just respond to people, and send those emails that you are nervous about sending. They don't need to understand publishing, they don't need to understand writing. They just need to be able to sit down and go, "I'm so sorry, I'm having a medical emergency. Please gimme a two week extension," or whatever. I talk to people all day, every day who are just afraid to be like, I need an extension. And nine times outta ten they'll give it to you, because you're the talent.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah.

Donyae Coles: The whole thing runs because you showed up. But that, I think, is like an accommodation that people can give themselves: get a friend. They do not have to be a writing friend, they do not have to be a publishing friend. They just have to be able to type, to help you.

Kate Johnston: I have a friend who did a bunch of that for me in Minneapolis, when I lived there. So a lot of the talking to publishing people and stuff, she would just do for me.

Donyae Coles: Yay. Yeah. I have a friend who sends emails for people because it's just too much, and you have your own baggage with those. You feel like a failure. Your buddy, however doesn't. They can just send an email.

Kristy Anne Cox: Donyae, for our readers and listeners who may not be familiar with Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, could you briefly explain what that is?

Donyae Coles: Yeah, so it's just like a outsized sense of bad feelings around rejection or perceived rejection. So I used to think I just had imposter syndrome, and I bet a lot of people who are neurodiverse just think, I just have imposter syndrome. Because that's what you're told, that the reason why you are like sabotaging your own stuff, and why you are ruining your own day is because you feel that you're inferior. No, you have Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, okay?

So you are worried that this person is going to reject you and it's gonna cause you to feel very bad. And this is not in your head. It is in your head because that's where the feelings are coming from, it's your brain. But like you also, when you are rejected, right? And rejection here is just someone having a negative reaction to something. So you said something, and it didn't come out right and your friend's like, "Hey, that wasn't cool". That is rejection. That is a kind of rejection that's going to trigger this.

That's actually a really good example, 'cause this happens to me all the time. So you say something, it doesn't come out quite right, and your friend's like, I don't like that. It's not, I don't like it. And then you feel like, oh my God, you've ruined this friendship. This person now hates you, they're never gonna talk to you anymore. You are incredibly embarrassed, you're incredibly guilty, you feel like you wanna die. You are sick to your stomach. That's where I feel a lot of my negative feelings. It's in my stomach, getting shaky, your face is hot 'cause you're really embarrassed. It's just a whole physical manifestation. And all your friend said was, "I didn't really like that". Which is very reasonable and everything.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah. Yeah.

Donyae Coles: And then you are now in a position where you think you've ruined everything. The person you're talking to has moved on because that was a little blip. It means nothing.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah.

Donyae Coles: You have had an outsized reaction to a sense of rejection.

So there's debate about where this is coming from. I think it's a little bit of nature and nurture. I think that we are a little bit more prone to have these, 'cause we are—or neurodiverse people, ADHD, autism, PTSD, that whole thing—we do tend to be very sensitive as a base. I see this in my own kids who would never have had any real negative things ever said or done to them, and they're still crying 'cause they dropped a pencil and I'm like, "guys!"

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah.

Donyae Coles: "That's you being a lot." So we're already sensitive as a base, but then I think we get a lot of negative feedback.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah.

Donyae Coles: Especially when we're growing up. But that is what Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria is. So it will cause you, when you are doing writing stuff, to sometimes sabotage yourself and convince yourself that you can't do the thing. And so you do stuff like, don't answer your emails.

Kate Johnston: Yeah.

Donyae Coles: Because you are afraid of having that interaction that you are already perceiving as being negative. And it might be, right? They could be like, "we're firing you". Which I mean is fine, but it's also not the end of the world.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah. It's also very typical of ADHD. So if you're listening and you have ADHD, this is something to look into and see, just consider if it fits your symptom set. For me it triggers irrational sudden suicide ideation. So if I make a mistake in a conversation in particular with someone that I really care about and I think I've upset them, I'm gonna go straight from that zero to catastrophe thing, and then I know I'm gonna have suicide ideation. So now that I know that's gonna happen, I can plan for it and be like, this is the script I'm gonna use for myself. This is the self-care I'm gonna plan.

Like when I go to a convention, I plan for a day off in the middle to have a meltdown, because I know I'm going to say something on a panel, somebody is gonna react in a way that I feel has ruined my reputation. I'll never write again, I'll never speak again, I should never be allowed in public. And I just need to have a meltdown the next day. And it doesn't matter if those feelings are logical, they're symptomatic, and I know they're gonna happen. So preparing for them is an accommodation.

Kate, do you ever have rejection sensitivity?

Kate Johnston: Yes. I just think I hide it really well.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah.

Kate Johnston: I have a hard time both honoring that and continuing to live in society. Especially living in Minnesota where my experience of being black in Minnesota was horrific, and I hated it. Every minute of it. And so there's a certain point of rejection sensitivity I don't get to have, or I'd spend my entire life just being insane about it. So yeah, there's a lot of that that I just internalize and probably is the source of a bunch of physical maladies that I'm not sure about.

We will find out in the next year as I am no longer working and doing the things that I wanna do and not having to deal with other people. We'll see whether things get better, but I don't know.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah. Shall we move from process to the deep questions about disability or science fiction or whatever we're gonna talk about. You guys ready?

Donyae Coles: Yeah.

Kristy Anne Cox: I know Donyae, we talked briefly about writing neurodiverse characters when it's not explicitly on the page.

Donyae Coles: Yeah.

Kristy Anne Cox: How do you approach your neurodiverse and disabled characters?

Donyae Coles: So I don't think I ever like explicitly say. Like, I know I definitely didn't say it in Midnight Rooms, and I'm not gonna explicitly say anything in The Sunken, The Adored because it's the 1800s! Like, black girls can't get diagnosed with ADHD and autism now, right? In the year of our Lord 2025, right? We are still out here struggling. Like even for my own diagnosis, it was a process of multiple doctors, of facing humiliation and being told that I just need to get my stuff together.

So that's a process of: I'm writing historical gothic, I'm writing historical horror, and it would be wild to be like, "yeah, she's a little attention deficit". So you have to just write those characters. You just have to say like, "this is what is happening. This is how this person is perceiving the world," which creates, by its very nature, a very close point of view which I—now I'm gonna be a little bit craft-y.

That close point of view is both because you need to have that to understand that nature, but it is also a metaphor for living like that, where this, whoever you are, you're your whole world. People who have neurodivergence are often isolated. We often deal with that. Just as a reality, we often do not understand the points of views of others in so much of, not "I don't understand when someone's like, my feelings are hurt". That's not what I mean. What I mean is like, you see someone do something and you're like, "I don't know why they did that. I don't know why they didn't like that. I don't know why they had that response. That is not how I would've responded." And there's no one to explain that to you. You just gotta figure it out.

So in writing these characters I am taking that approach. I didn't realize I was taking that approach when I started, 'cause I wasn't diagnosed. I just thought this is how the world worked. But now I know. So it was interesting actually to get into the editorial process in that, because now I've got people reading my work and they are redlining. And I remember I got an edit back that was like, "this is not how people act". Like it was that comment. And I was like, "I would have done that. That is how I would've acted if faced with this problem". Not saying that this particular character is doing all the things that I would have done with my life, right? She is not me. We make lots of different choices. I made all of her choices actually because I created her.

It was that moment that I was like, "oh, I'm gonna have to like address this directly with my editorial staff to be like, hey, actually you have to understand, this is what's going on."

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah.

Donyae Coles: When you're not explicitly saying things like that, you are gonna get—I don't read my Goodreads reviews, but I know these things exist—you are gonna get people who are like, "I don't know why this person did this. I would not do that. People don't act like that." And they see that as a flaw in the text as opposed to, this is how this person is acting, so maybe you have to accept that sometimes people act different than what you are aware of.

Kristy Anne Cox: There's a really ugly feeling to being told that your reality is not realistic.

Kate Johnston: Yeah.

Donyae Coles: Absolutely. Absolutely. It stayed in my memory because it was such a jarring moment. I know you like the book! You bought the book, you paid me money for it. So I know it's not like you saying that this work is wrong, right? So then there's that rejection sensitive piece, right? Because now I've been able to rationalize it. I know that this is not a statement about the work itself. This is a statement about the understanding of what is happening from the outside. And that kind of changed how I was processing some of these edits. And I had to sit down and be like, "hey, so have you heard of fawning?"

Kristy Anne Cox: There's what people find believable. That's like a whole rabbit hole we could go down for an entire podcast, 'cause I feel like a lot of our work gets rejected because the people reading it or the gatekeepers don't find it realistic because it's outside of their experience, and it doesn't feel believable to them.

And that works at a lot of different marginalizations. And when you're multiply marginalized, you're coming at this with a lot of different intersections of identity. It can feel more and more unbelievable to your typical editors, which I believe editors in general, and the agents in the industry, are still largely white women between I think ages 25 and 45. We're getting more diversity now, but still, if the majority of the readers are primed to understand one set of experiences, then you get rejected more often right off the bat.

And then you get feedback, right? Like workshop feedback and peer feedback.

Donyae Coles: I don't go to workshops.

Kristy Anne Cox: But a lot of people, that's where they're getting discouraged and giving up because somebody told them somewhere that what happened to them wasn't realistic.

Donyae Coles: It can't happen this way. What I will say in addition to that, so one: my editorial staff is actually all black women. Outlier! But I will say that I don't think in general any work should have to explicitly say, "this is the thing that is going on in this person's brain." I don't think that it is necessary. I don't care. I don't care if it's ADHD, autism, schizophrenia. It does not matter, unless the story is explicitly about dealing with or living with or handling those conditions. I don't think that it matters at all to tell the reader this is what is going on with this person's mind. Because you, the reader, are reading their experiences and you should be accepting their experiences for whatever it is.

So if this person is having hallucinations and that's part of the work, you just gotta accept that. It doesn't matter why it's happening, it doesn't matter if it's a hallucination from schizophrenia, it doesn't matter if it's just like temporary psychosis. It does not matter unless that story is about that thing. You know what I mean?

And when you come into a work and you're like, this person has ADHD, then you expect the work to be that, and that puts it in inside of a certain context. It's like, no, the context is the work, that is all the context you need. If you didn't need to know that explicitly, you didn't need to know it. If you needed to know it, the author would have put it in there. They didn't tell you for a reason. Accept it. I'm brutal that way.

Kate Johnston: Yeah, no, I love that though because there are pieces that I have left information out on purpose and I get a lot of reviews just going "I needed to know that". I'm like, clearly you did not, 'cause you still alive and you read it.

Donyae Coles: You read it and I told you what you needed to know to get through this.

Kate Johnston: Yeah.

Donyae Coles: And I also think explicitly not saying, this is what is going on in this person, that is the experience, right? That is an authentic experience to living with neurodiversity or any mental health thing. Most of us go through life like that for a variety, especially if you are otherwise marginalized, right? If you are black or you are femme, if you are any of these other things, chances are you're walking through the life, living day in and day out with this as your worldview. This is your perspective, this is your understanding, and you have absolutely no idea why you are living like that, until you randomly see a TikTok video one day.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah. And then, it can also be the opposite, where you are so incredibly medicalized that you have a million diagnostic labels and, you know, Turtles All the Way Down is a really good example of a book where I feel like—so John Green is the author— and it deals with OCD, and it deals with the type of OCD that I have. And because it's a lot of her [Aza, the protagonist] is in and out of like doctor's offices and she's dealing with the actual OCD, she does use a lot of diagnostic labels. But I still run into people with OCD who are like, "I didn't find that realistic". And I'm like, "there are different types of OCD. And the type that she has is the type I have. Doesn't sound like it's the type you have."

There's a TV show where a group of autistic young adults are living together and having experiences. And there's a lot of people in the commentary who are autistic saying that this is not a realistic portrayal of autism, because those are differently autistic people. So some of the pushback we get is from within our own communities.

Donyae Coles: Yeah.

Kate Johnston: Yep. Yep.

I have one question that comes from the internet. Because I went and looked through some reviews of Midnight Rooms—

Donyae Coles: Okay.

Kate Johnston: And this question kept coming up. So now I'm gonna ask you: is there gonna be a sequel?

Donyae Coles: People were asking that? I didn't know people were asking that!

Kristy Anne Cox: They are now.

Donyae Coles: Okay, hold on. Wait a second. I need a moment to process this because I had no idea. I thought what you were gonna ask me was what happened at the end? Was he lying?

Kristy Anne Cox: Don't ruin it. I'm not, I haven't finished yet!

Kate Johnston: There was some talk about that. Like, "the ending left me wanting more, so where's the sequel?" And I was like, okay.

Donyae Coles: I didn't know people were asking that. My publisher didn't say anything. Let's give people what they want.

Kristy Anne Cox: Give them what they want, yes!

Donyae Coles: Is there gonna be a sequel... So I would say this: I'm not going to say never. I am going to say that you get some more information about the universe that this takes place in, in The Sunken, The Adored. Another book that happens in the same universe. It does not involve the same characters, but if you have read Midnight Rooms, there will be things that come up that you're like (gasp!)

Kristy Anne Cox: When is that coming out?

Donyae Coles: That is currently slated, I believe, for the summer of 2026. So probably July 2026, is probably when that would drop.

Kristy Anne Cox: Okay. All right. So readers, you can definitely check that out. The Sunken, the Adored, when that comes out. The original book is Midnight Rooms. Midnight Rooms. This is my marketing. The more often you repeat the word, the more— Donyae Coles, Midnight Rooms.

I did have another question for you about horror. Is it all right if I ask you a scary question?

Donyae Coles: Yeah, go ahead, please.

Kristy Anne Cox: Do you, as a horror writer, feel that there are unique ways to get at disability and at the lived experiences of disabled people, through horror? Like, what tools does horror give you, if any?

Donyae Coles: I think there are. So, I say this with the caveat that I don't think the genre has been kind to disability in a lot of ways. I think that it has taken a very probably stereotypical approach to disability, because the way that it usually is handled is the horror is the disability.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah.

Donyae Coles: "This is a metaphor for losing your leg", you know what I mean?

Kristy Anne Cox: Exactly. Yeah.

Donyae Coles: Or the other kind of way I've seen it done is that like, "oh, this person isn't susceptible to whatever is happening, because they're on antipsychotics." Yay, it's a superpower now (sarcasm). And I also don't think that is necessarily the best way to go about this. But I do think that horror itself gives a way for people to kind of, not necessarily grapple, but really dive into the process of examining disability and its impact on the lives of the people who are living with it, right?

So I have ADHD, and my disability is in my brain, right? It is in my head. It is in the way I perceive the world, it's is in the way I move through the world, it is in the way I operate, the choices I make, how I interact with other people, right? And I think that it can be examined in those ways. Like, horror really provides a really beautiful and unique way to explain those experiences.

Because let's be real, when you are living with a disability, it's not all sunshine and roses. Like, it's not the end of the world, you keep on living, right? That's the living part of living with a disability. But there's stuff you struggle with. There's stuff you have a hard time with. And I think horror can be used to examine those spaces and bring them to new light. Especially if you do not have a primitive view of what horror is, right?

So a lot of people are like, "horror is just the scary stuff". It's the stuff that's scary and it's bloody and it's gory, and like sure it is, but there's also the process of transformation. You can also really dive into understanding beliefs, and understanding your place in the world, and how you move through the world. And coming to terms with big feeling concepts like grief or trauma, those are big ones.But even like joy and ecstasy.

The story I just had published in Nightmare, the name escapes me, but this is like the last one I had published in there. Go find it. But that one's about like ecstasy and release, like you can discuss these really big feelings in horror and not in a sense of "and now everyone lived happily", but through the construction of the form, right? That's what I like. I'm a body horror girlie.

But I do think that this genre has a unique and beautiful way that you can really explore disability and that effect on the self, and that effect on the self through society and reverse, in a way that is non reductive, in a way that is non stereotypical. But I also think that those stories in a lot of cases must be—I don't like to use the term but I can't think of a better one—but like 'own stories', right? You have to be the person writing it. You cannot just be a casual observer, because your observation is always going to be tainted by the grief it caused you.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah. There's a big difference between a story where it's somebody else's madness, and it's interesting to you as a concept, so I'm gonna write a horror story, as opposed to your processing your own experiences. Oh, there's a lot of people who write through bad dreams and that turns into a story, who write through PTSD or through hallucinations, and then pull out of that. Horror stories that they're telling. And that's very different than using them as the monster when that's not your lived experience. Is that kind of where you're going?

Donyae Coles: Yes, 'cause you're making disability the monster, when it's not your lived experience, nine times outta ten, you're gonna be like, the scary thing is surprise disability or racism, right?

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah.

Kate Johnston: And actually the new super ability right now is queer. I'm seeing a lot of stories come through the transom that are "I clearly wrote this as a heterosexual pair of people doing stuff, and I'm just gonna change the gender of one of them because it doesn't really matter". And I'm like, uhuh.

Donyae Coles: But it matters.

Kristy Anne Cox: It does matter.

Kate Johnston: It does. It matters a lot.

Kristy Anne Cox: Well, Kate, did you have another deep question before we wrap up?

Kate Johnston: I think that possibly the story you were talking about was The Ascension of Magdalene?

Donyae Coles: Yes. Thank you.

Kate Johnston: Okay.

Donyae Coles: I dunno why, I love that story. I have no idea why my mind just blinked probably.

Kate Johnston: It happens. But I did this wonderful piece of artwork for you.

Kristy Anne Cox: Oh. I can see your background.

Kate Johnston: Lemme turn off my background.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah. If you turn off your background we should be able to see it.

Kate Johnston: Oh, now you can see the cat in the background.

Kristy Anne Cox: There's a kitty.

Donyae Coles: Yes.

Kristy Anne Cox: Alright, let's see this masterpiece. Midnight Rooms.

Kate Johnston: Yeah.

Kristy Anne Cox: Kate is holding up a notebook with the new cover art for the new edition of Midnight Rooms. It shows a door opening, but it's also, it could be a book.

Kate Johnston: Yeah, it could be all sorts of things. I don't know. I'm not an artist.

Donyae Coles: That's really funny because there are doors in the book when you read it, but one of the cut scenes that the editor was like, "no"... I wrote this piece—and I think about this all the time, so it's like I should have fought for that more—but I wrote this part where I was explaining that the way that she thinks is like all of these things that's happened, all these experiences, they go behind these doors in her mind and she shuts them, and then she stops thinking about them. Like, her parents are behind one door who have passed, the treatment of her aunt and uncles behind another door of these tea parties, and she shuts them until she needs them again.

Kristy Anne Cox: The idea that this character has stuff behind doors that when the door is shut, she can't remember, that's so ADHD. Like the doom piles, like the whole thing where if you don't physically see something, you lack the object permanence to remember it exists.

Kate Johnston: Yes.

Kristy Anne Cox: That's really convenient for a horror story, because you get jump scared more often by your own stuff.

Donyae Coles: Then she's in this terrible situation and people are telling her, "no, the thing that you think happened isn't what happened. You're wrong. You are mistaken." And then like, how does she know? How can she trust herself when she doesn't remember anything? Because her memory's bad.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah. Yeah. And then it becomes a therapeutic technique too, where eventually you're working through stuff and you're learning to control that. My therapist is like, "imagine a book and you've shut that chapter. You're not there anymore. That is a chapter in the past." But I'm like, "that's great. I wish that was something I could do right now." I'm not there yet, but in fiction, right? This is the way we process this too.

Donyae Coles: Yep. Writing your fiction is, it's literally gone. It's literally the last chapter.

Kristy Anne Cox: It's the therapy method that we do because we couldn't have medical care. We became writers.

Kate Johnston: Pretty much. But I'll do the one thing that will help you a little with serotonin. I generally don't read horror, but in the prep for this interview I read Sometimes Boys Don't Know. Oh my God, that is creepy AF, that's great.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah.

Kate Johnston: Yeah. I really liked it.

Donyae Coles: Thank you. Love that little story. I think it's so fun. I think the thing that throws people off about it is because it's played straight. It's played a hundred percent straight. That is a girl who's absolutely in love, absolutely. Hundred percent.

Kristy Anne Cox: Readers, if horror doesn't really do it for you, I would recommend you take a look at the broad diversity of horror that's available, because there are so many sub genres and it is likely there is one out there that will help you with your serotonin hit. People have different needs, and it is a broad genre, but an excellent example is Midnight Rooms by Donyae Coles. Midnight Rooms, which you can find at your local bookseller or online at a bookseller of your choice.

Kate Johnston: And the audiobook exists.

Donyae Coles: Yes. It is available in ebook, audiobook, and physical book. The paperback is coming out this summer.

Kate Johnston: Excellent.

Donyae Coles: It is available anywhere fine books are sold, or even not so fine books. So all of the websites, your local indie team get it. Get it from your library, I don't care. Yeah, as long as you get it.

Kristy Anne Cox: If you are wanting to support an author's work and you cannot afford to buy the book right now, one great way to support them is to call your library and ask them to stock that book, because then they will order it in and that helps the author build fans in that area.

Also your school library, your kids' school library, if you call and you ask them to stock this book—

Donyae Coles: Not this one. They'll not stock this. Okay. But I do have a YA story, it's in All These Sunken Souls, which is a black YA anthology that came out in 2022, I think. Or maybe 2023. Anyway, it's not important. It's called All These Sunken Souls and that one you can request your children's school library carry.

Kristy Anne Cox: Excellent. All right, we should wrap up. Thank you for joining us. This was an excellent discussion. It was delightful having you.

Donyae Coles: Thank you so much. I loved being here. This was an excellent discussion. I had such a great time.

Kate Johnston: Yay.

Kristy Anne Cox: Thank you again for Writing While Disabled, everyone. Hopefully we'll see you online, please join us with the hashtag Writing While Disabled, or hashtag Strange Horizons.

And you can ask us questions, which we may or may not reply to, but we'll enjoy seeing. Thank you.

In this episode of the Strange Horizons Fiction podcast, Michael Ireland presents Ariel Marken Jack's 'Sister, Silkie, Siren, Shark' read by Emmie Christie.

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