No. 3 / May 2014 Ecdysis Masthead

Ecdysis No. 3 / May 2014

Jonathan Crowe editor Zvi Gilbert Jennifer Seely art Tamara Vardomskaya

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2 Some Twitter responses to a mass e-mail begging fellow SFWA members for a Nebula nomination in early January 2014.

EDITORIAL The Value of Awards

I’ll be honest: I have ambivalent feelings ess, or whether the wrong works or individu- about awards. als were nominated, or whether the wrong On the one hand, I find awards useful: works or individuals won, as so many fans when so much is published in science fiction seem to do every year. and every year, they serve to winnow No, the problem I have with awards is the wheat from the chaff. For the past few how much we talk about them, and how im- years I’ve made a point of reading as many of portant we make them. the award nominees as possible, even if I’m Which is to say: too much and too much. not in a position to vote for them. One problem with awards is that there But on the other hand, I find awards an- are so many of them. By my count there are noying. Not so much the awards themselves. I now more than thirty English-language specu- don’t spend time fulminating about the proc- lative awards (by which I mean Hugos and

3 Nebulas and Ditmars, not individual award and we end up talking about PR and proce- categories). That’s double the number of dure rather than art. awards that existed thirty years ago. And second, we end up being deluged This leads to the problem with awards by award consideration posts. season, which is that it’s awards sea- I need to be careful about what I mean son. Nominations for the Nebula Awards here, because there was rather a lot of argu- open about two weeks after the World Fan- ment on this subject earlier this year. It wasn’t tasy Awards are handed out. In other words, too long ago that it was considered the nadir there are only a couple of weeks a year when of taste to campaign for awards in this . it isn’t awards season. But campaigning is not necessarily what we’re This leads to a couple of things that, I’d talking about here. I don’t think there’s any- argue, aren’t always healthy for the field. thing wrong with mentioning that your work First of all, we’re constantly handicap- is eligible for certain awards. (And when the ping the awards, talking about who should time comes, you’d better believe I’ll be men- get nominated, who’s going to win, who’s go- tioning Ecdysis’s eligibility for the Best Fan- ing to get nominated or win and shouldn’t, zine Hugo.) Having a problem with eligibility

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The rise in the number of English-language awards in the field since the 1950s.

4 posts is about as silly as having a problem iour. Sometimes it’s passive-aggressive, pro- with the indexes Analog and Asimov’s publish moting award nomination and voting dead- at the end of each year for the purpose of vot- lines again and again to their loyal followers ing in their reader’s awards. without explicitly touting their own work. Amal El-Mohtar makes the valid point Sometimes it’s a little more blatant: that the people most likely to be shamed into “Nominations for the Retromingent silence are precisely the people who need to Awards are now open! Please consider my step forward and speak up: story, ‘A Mouthful of Mesohippus.’” “Only five days left before nominations No hand-wringing or tut-tutting about close for the Retromingent Awards. Don’t for- reading widely or behaving with dignity get: ‘A Mouthful of Mesohippus’ is eligible!” or integrity or what have you is going to “Last day to nominate for the Retromin- end the practice of brash, confident peo- gents! ‘A Mouthful of Mesohippus’! Go! Vote!” ple telling other people, often and obnox- “Thanks to all who considered my story iously, to vote for them. But, crucially, for the Retromingent Awards. Sorry to say it the hand-wringing and tut-tutting does didn’t make the final ballot. But online voting have an effect: it discourages the people starts next week for the Przewalski Awards!” who already feel silenced and uncomfort- Rinse, repeat. Some people have less able from ever talking about or taking shame than others. And it doesn’t take many pride in their achievements. of them to make awards season an exercise in I believe there is a difference between not- online cacophony. ing your eligibility and shameless campaigning. A part of this is because writers, by and And a big part of that difference is how often large, are an insecure and needy bunch and you do it. tend to crave recognition in any form. But it’s When you have dozens of awards, and also because we glorify the life of a writer (i.e., hundreds of eligible writers, what is perfectly Being a Real Writer™) so much that anything acceptable—even imperative—for a single done in the service of Furthering a Writing Ca- writer becomes a nuisance in the aggregate. reer, no matter how antisocial, is fair game. It’s the tragedy of the commons. If you follow And, despite their being famously dis- dozens of writers, even if each of them makes missed as glorified bowling trophies, awards only a single, perfectly valid post noting their can have an impact on their book sales eligibility for awards, it can be a bit over- (though that seems to be limited to the Hugo) whelming. and on their career (which is harder to quan- But it gets worse if a few writers start tify). Or so they believe. (Though it does ap- pushing the boundaries of acceptable behav- pear that winning a major award is a good

5 Clarke 93%

Hugo 92%

Nebula 92%

World Fantasy 86%

The percentage of novels that have won a major award that are in print in English right now (ebooks included).

way to ensure your novel stays in print; see Small wonder that it seems to take an the graph above.) award nomination just to get noticed. Publica- To be fair, it’s not like writers aren’t fac- tion in a professional market just won’t cut it ing long odds. More science fiction and fan- any more. Under such circumstances, it’s not tasy is being published than ever, in more ven- hard to see how things can get real Darwin- ues than ever before, and a lot of it is quite ian, real fast. good. No one can keep up with all the maga- But at the same time, all this online activ- zines and online venues publishing short fic- ity is probably not going to have any real ef- tion (I know: I’ve tried). The chance that some- fect. Adam Roberts worries that authors with thing excellent and award-worthy will be larger online footprints can dominate the overlooked is higher than it ought to be. award nominations. I don’t think he’s alone in For example. Because more short stories that belief. But the numbers don’t exactly are published than novelettes or novellas, be- back that up. cause most online publications won’t run Let’s use Twitter followers (as of 4 April longer fiction, the award-eligible pool of short 2014, when I did the math for this) as a stand- stories is simply enormous compared to other in for the size of an author’s fan base, since categories. Last year 568 of them were nomi- the numbers are public and easy to find, and nated for the Hugo, compared with 135 novel- compare it with the number of nominations las and 252 novelettes, but only three of those each Hugo finalist received last year. short stories were above the five percent cut- Note that two authors got on the final bal- off to make the final ballot. lot without any Twitter presence at all. And (I wonder how many of those 568 short while John Scalzi leads in number nominations stories received just one nominating vote.) and has the second-most Twitter followers, it’s

6 not proportionate: Scalzi has 6.1 times as many be sure, and he did eventually win, but he Twitter followers as Saladin Ahmed, but had only had 15 more nominations than Nancy only 1.6 times the nominations. Kress, who has 40 times fewer followers on The Hugo numbers reveal an important Twitter. Or to look at it another way, Nancy but overlooked truth: the nominating popula- had one nomination for every nine Twitter fol- tion is extremely small compared to the lowers, whereas Brandon had one nomination authors’ online fan base—it’s a tiny subset, for every 600 followers. one that must actively opt into nominating for Correlation? Not really. an award (and pay for the privilege). By that logic, , with nearly So while has tens of two million Twitter followers, should domi- thousands of social media followers, that only nate every non-juried genre award. I’m translated into 103 nominations in the Best frankly surprised he’s not on the Hugo ballot Novella category: more than anyone else, to this year; I can only guess that he declined the

Name (Nominated Work) Category Hugo Noms Twitter Ratio

Ahmed, Saladin (Throne of the Crescent Moon) Novel 118 9,565 1/81

Bujold, Lois McMaster (Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance) Novel 133 — —

Cadigan, Pat (“The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi”) Novelette 45 3,319 1/74

De Bodard, Aliette (On a Red Station, Drifting) Novella 73 4,168 1/57

De Bodard, Aliette (“Immersion”) Short Story 107 4,168 1/39

Grant, Mira (Blackout) Novel 138 12,803 1/93

Grant, Mira (San Diego 2014) Novella 90 12,803 1/99

Heuvelt, Thomas Olde (“The Boy Who Cast No Shadow”) Novelette 62 693 1/9

Johnson, Kij (“Mantis Wives”) Short Story 34 795 3/70

Kress, Nancy (After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall) Novella 88 1,497 1/9

Lake, Jay (“The Stars Do Not Lie”) Novella 78 8,904 1/99

Liu, Ken (“Mono no Aware”) Short Story 38 3,194 1/84

McGuire, Seanan (“In Sea-Salt Tears”) Novelette 54 12,803 1/237

McGuire, Seanan (“Rat-Catcher”) Novelette 45 12,803 2/569

Robinson, Kim Stanley (2312) Novel 135 — —

Sanderson, Brandon (The Emperor’s Soul) Novella 103 61,902 1/601

Scalzi, John (Redshirts) Novel 193 58,389 2/605

Valente, Catherynne M. (“Fade to White”) Novelette 89 9,552 1/99

7 nomination. But as a thought experiment, if pants, the long-term harm to their careers from he were to get the same rate of nominations this gratuitous eff-you in the direction of sf per follower as Scalzi did last year, he should fans who don’t share their hermetically sealed have gotten more than 10,000 nominations for world view will vastly outweigh any short- The Ocean at the End of the Lane—more, in term benefits of notoriety. I’ve heard people other words, than the entire voting popula- speak of “Opera Vita Æterna” as the next “Eye tion of Loncon 3. of Argon”; there is even talk of reading parties. All of which is to say that the number of Another grievance for them to nurse. people likely to be influenced by a blog post It’s relatively easy to make mischief with touting an author’s eligibility for awards is the nominations. Sf fans and pros have always quite small. Broadcasting your had a bit of a nihilist streak: in 2000, award eligibility is not likely to one of the Nebula nominees for move very many votes in Best Script was a porn movie. your direction. Only a tiny But nominations and wins percentage of the people are two different things: it you’re asking to vote for took fewer than 40 votes you is actually capable to make the Best Short of doing so. Story Hugo ballot last But if I’m right, year, but more than 600 you ask, then what the votes to win. Whatever hell happened with the shenanigans took place Hugos this year? to get L. Ron Hubbard’s Two organized cam- Black Genesis on the Hugo paigns generated some con- ballot in 1987, in the end it “The Ocean at the End of the Lane” troversy. One aimed to get The finished behind No Award. Wheel of Time (the whole damn 14- Which is to say that these things book series, not the final novel) nominated tend to correct themselves in the final re- for best novel, thanks to a loophole in the sults. Meanwhile, all shenanigans like these WSFS rules. The other was ’s do is debase the value of a nomination, not the “Sad Puppies” slate, which managed to place award. seven of its twelve recommendations onto the As for The Wheel of Time, I see a lot of peo- final ballot, including a novelette by the nox- ple bemoaning its presence on the ballot be- ious . cause they see it as a juggernaut. A work like No one actually expects anything on the or Neptune’s Brood is, they be- “Sad Puppies” slate to win. For the partici- lieve, too “niche” to beat out a massively

8 popular fantasy series, especially when the value must have an award. And that a work voter’s packet will include ebooks of all 14 without an award is either not of value or of volumes: surely, an incentive for Jordan fans value, but unjustly treated. to sign up for supporting memberships. We might want to consider other ways of I’m not so sure. Hugo voters are proba- valuing work other than through the lens of bly in one of the following camps: (1) those being nominated for or winning awards. who have read all the Wheel of Time books and ❡ love them; (2) those who started reading the Wheel of Time books but gave up, disap- This issue started out with grandiose plans, as pointed, several volumes in; (3) those who a special look at the nature of awards in our haven’t read the Wheel of Time books by con- genre: at the value of awards (as I have done scious choice; and (4) those who haven’t read in this editorial), at the Nebula nominees, and the Wheel of Time books, but will love them at this year’s Grand Master, Chip Delany. It when they finally do. was maybe too ambitious: we didn’t quite get I suspect that the first camp might not be to as many Nebula nominees as we would large enough to overcome the votes of people have liked, but the Awards Weekend is less who gave up on the series or who have been than a week away as I write this so it’s time to actively avoiding it, people who are more lock it down. As a result, this issue lacks the likely to vote for No Award. Camp 4, whose Uncalibrated Weird and Eccentric Silliness existence is theoretical at best, will need to that I wanted each issue to have; I hope to rec- read something north of ten thousand pages tify that next time. of Extruded Fantasy Product in the space of ❡ two months. (I’m sure as hell not reading the whole damn thing.) Say hello to Zvi Gilbert, who I managed to ca- Don’t forget that in 2012, Jo Walton’s jole into writing something for us this issue. Among Others—surely a niche novel—beat out With any luck I’ll be able to keep cajoling him A Dance with . So don’t count out Mira to write for us. Grant, Ann Leckie or Charlie Stross just yet. ❡ Not that Robert Jordan or George R. R. Martin’s careers actually need an award. It’s Finally, heartfelt and joyful congratulations to an odd genre that believes that an extremely Ecdysis’s own Tamara Vardomskaya, who financially successful work also needs the im- has been accepted to the Clarion Writer’s primatur of an award to attest to its value. Workshop in San Diego! I look forward to her That, more than anything else, tells us about full report when she gets back. the value of awards: we believe that a work of —Jonathan Crowe

9 ANCILLARY JUSTICE AND ITS TRANSLATORS

I loved Ancillary Justice because of Steven to by the narrator as “he.” But I think that us- Brust’s Cool Theory of Literature: Ann Leckie ing this as evidence in the debate about and I find the same things Cool. Galaxy- whether the book is social-gender revolution- spanning and lavish planetary set- ary misses the point of the difference between tings. Rebellions against injustice. Multiple social and grammatical gender. minds. Medieval and shapenote singing. The Okay, let’s draw a distinction here, as I problem of bilingual thinking, which very understand it. Biological/psychological gender few writers other than Leckie approach head- concerns what your body is like/what your on. And a thorny translators’ problem. brain wants your body to be like. Social/ What made the book so famous in gen- cultural gender concerns how a particular cul- der circles is, of course, that Breq the narra- ture expects people with male/female bodies tor’s native language lacks gender marking, to look, act and have interests differently from and so she refers to all humans as what the other gender. And linguistic gender is Leckie “translates” as “she” (parents as grouping the nouns of a language into classes “mother” and children as “daughter”) and that have distinct patterns of agreement (on gets confused as to how humans distinguish the pronouns, the verbs, the adjectives, etc.) male and female. We do not actually know that are pretty much random. A language may, Breq’s own biological gender from the book by complete coincidence, toss male-bodied (Leckie has stated in a blog post that Breq has people in one agreement bin and female- a female reproductive system). bodied people into another (often along with Comparisons abound online to Ursula vegetables, furniture and mathematical con- Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness, where the cepts), or may have some other pattern such biological-gender-shifting aliens are referred as animate/inanimate, or not sort nouns in

10 society on this planet. Not what pronouns her character uses; these are just a coincidental code for English readers. If Leckie sells the Hungarian, Korean or Finnish rights for the book, translating it would be relatively easy, as these languages‘ pronouns never mark gender. But at the same time, the subversion of us readers wondering whether all the officers, pilots and emperors are really women or not would vanish, and the Hungarian readers would be missing much of the unique power of the book. Contrariwise, for the French, Spanish or Russian rights, the translator is going to cry for help almost immediately. Not only do these languages mark every noun for gender (and most military roles are default male), but Russian marks gender on every past-tense verb. Breq telling the story while concealing her own gender would be simply impossible. Again, the spice of subverting our expecta- any way at all, with one pronoun for all—but tions is lost. that has no relation whatsoever to what a soci- Of the world’s major languages, English ety speaking it expects of men or women. is actually near-unique in having gender on So English-speaking readers praise or pronouns (most of Chinese and Japanese are complain about Leckie’s linguistic-gender use out) but only ones referring to humans (Ger- of a single pronoun “she,” ignoring that this man and Hindi-Urdu are out), and not on is completely not new, and that what’s key is verbs (Tamil is out) . . . about the only other her erasing of social gender in the Radch cul- language I can think of is Malayalam. ture (as seen through the asexual Breq’s eyes; So, certainly Leckie is saying something there are hints, I think, that Radch humans in- new about gender: she’s telling us how anglo- terested in sex distinguish biological gender centric we are about it. quite well, but Breq finds it as incomprehensi- (But her agent should get on those Ma- ble and unnoticeable as any other fetish she layalam rights.) doesn’t share). That is what makes it like no —Tamara Vardomskaya

11 Of Genre Interest: Two Mainstream Novels

There have always been books that, while not George Eliot and Patrick O’Brian, as well as strictly science fiction or fantasy, have been nonfiction like David Graeber’s Debt or, well, categorized as of genre interest. Locus in- anything by Francis Spufford. And at the cludes “associational” books, usually main- “Nonfiction for SF/Fantasy Readers” panel I stream books by genre authors, in its forth- chaired at SFContario 3 in 2012, we all fell like coming books listings. Jo Walton’s reviews on wolves onto Charles C. Mann’s 1491. Tor.com (some of which are collected in What Genre readers do read outside of genre; I Makes This Book So Great) included books by think that whatever we find in genre that tick-

12 les our fancy, that makes us want to read the Hild, on the other hand, is a historical genre on a regular basis, can be found outside novel and a fictionalized biography of a real the genre as well. person, but it’s set in a time and place so far Two novels ostensibly outside the genre removed from us—seventh-century Britain— have made their way onto this year’s Nebula that it might well as well be another world. ballot: ’s We Are All Com- One thing historical fiction and sf have pletely Beside Ourselves, a novel about a in common is worldbuilding: the brick-by- child who was cross-fostered with a chimpan- brick construction of verisimilitude. An intri- zee, and Nicola Griffith’s Hild, a biographical cately constructed secondary-world fantasy novel about Hilda of Whitby. They were writ- novel and an intricately researched historical ten by sf/fantasy writers whose body of work novel can, I suspect, send the same reader also falls outside the genre. They were pub- down the same rabbit hole. lished by major publishers through main- Worldbuilding is probably why we file stream imprints: Hild, for example, was pub- the Jean Auel novels with the science fiction lished by Macmillan’s Farrar, Straus and and fantasy, and why ’s Giroux, not Tor. They are marketed to main- Shaman is up for the . stream, not genre audiences. In the case of Hild, Griffith has had to do So do they belong on a genre award bal- some extrapolation as well: there are gaps in lot, or was room made for them because they the historical record, especially about Hild her- were written by One of Us? self, that she has had to fill, and some things I’d argue that they do belong on their (for example, the role of the gemæcce) that own merits, but for different reasons. she has had to invent. Interspersed with the The affect of We Are All Completely Beside strange are resonances of the , such as Ourselves is resolutely mainstream, and its fo- a rhyme that I could have sworn was contem- cus is the inner life of the protagonist, Rose- porary, that remind us that this is our world. mary Cooke. But at its heart is a speculative At the same time, it’s full of Anglo- core: it asks what might happen to a child who Saxon stuff that would not seem out of place was raised with a chimpanzee—and what on the fields of Rohan: Hild has the affect of a might happen when that chimp, a sister in all Tolkien novel, set in the real world. but blood and species, was taken away from In the end, though, the question is not her. The book examines themes of animal intel- whether or not a given book is sufficiently ligence, animal rights, memory and guilt, but skiffy, but whether or not it’s of interest to the what’s especially fascinating for the sf reader is genre reader. In neither of these cases is there the extent to which Rosemary has uncon- any question of that. sciously taken on chimp-like personality traits. —Jonathan Crowe

13 CONTRAST WITHOUT CULTURE CLASH: The Golem and the Jinni

For last year’s SFContario I proposed, and ideas from your family of how much of the then attended, a panel on the immigrant expe- old and new cultures you want in you. rience in speculative fiction (drawing from Helene Wecker’s The Golem and the ’s “The Paper Menagerie” and oth- Jinni is a novel of immigration that we’ve ers). Although it was admittedly a biased been wishing for. Even though it is set in New audience, everyone in the packed room York City of 1900, and emphatically of that wanted more portrayals of the immigrant ex- era, Ellis Island renamings and all, it is a perience in fiction, from the stress of paper- novel of quite timeless beauty. work and learning a new language, to negoti- It is most explicitly a novel of contrasts. ating two cultural identities, trying to leave The Golem and the Jinni. Earth and Fire. Sea- your past behind, or not, and having different born and born of desert. Jewish culture and

14 Arabic (the majority of the latter Syrian Chris- ways torn with angst over their two heri- tians, a welcome shift of perspective for peo- tages, and children of strict Chinese parents ple who may unthinkingly equate Arab with always have to fight with them over their Muslim, although there is a fascinating Mus- modern friends. You can’t speak lim character as well). Female and male. A your home language if you want to speak maker of bread and a worker of metal. One English. You can’t be a real American, or Ca- longing to serve and pass as human; the other nadian, if you are also this. refusing to be bound by any human foolish- Bullshit that has destroyed reams of in- ness. One has never had a past, while the tangible heritage and damaged countless peo- other cannot remember a crucial section of it. ple’s psyches. And in elegant language Wecker braids And the wonderful thing about Wecker’s together the plot, twist after novel is that she doesn’t buy twist, flashing between char- into this lie. Her characters acters and times, until every- and cultures—Ashkenazi Jew- thing fits together in an al- ish, Maronite Catholic and Or- most unbelievably perfect thodox, Syrian Muslim, white knot. There were times when Anglo-Saxon Protestants, reading it that I would some- men and women, lapsed athe- times wonder what this or ists and the devout alike, Yid- that character was there for— dish and Arabic and English, but by the end, it paid off, all, even the villains, drawn with every character serving with love and sympa- their purpose in the central thy—meet, and stay proudly story. themselves, and take on some- And the contrasts be- thing new as well, and create come greater than the sum of new beautiful things, and em- their parts. They do not clash brace the power of and. The in a struggle for dominance, but become some- Jinni’s alloyed sculptures, and the Golem’s thing new and beautiful. braided challahs. It’s not a clash, but the best I said at that panel that what I hate kind of immigration story. most about too many culture-clash stori- And that is why, if I were voting for the es—indeed, what I hate most about so many Nebulas, my vote goes to this book. I want it culture-clash stories in real life—is that they to become a classic. I want there to be more always assume that one culture has to win like it. and the other has to lose. Half- are al- —Tamara Vardomskaya

15 2013 Nebula Short Nominees

Short Story • ‘‘The Sounds of Old Earth” by Matthew Kressel (Lightspeed, 1/13) • “Selkie Stories Are for Losers” by Sofia Samatar (, 1/13) • “Selected Program Notes from the Retrospective Exhibition of Theresa Rosenberg Latimer” by Kenneth Schneyer (Clockwork Phoenix 4) • “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love” by (Apex, 3/13) • ‘‘Alive, Alive Oh” by Sylvia Spruck Wrigley (Lightspeed, 6/13)

Novelette • “” by Christopher Barzak (Lightspeed, 6/13) • “The Waiting Stars” by Aliette de Bodard (The Other Half of the Sky) • “They Shall Salt the Earth with Seeds of Glass” by Alaya Dawn Johnson (Asimov’s, 1/13) • “Pearl Rehabilitative Colony for Ungrateful Daughters” by Henry Lien (Asimov’s, 12/13) • “The Litigation Master and the Monkey King” by Ken Liu (Lightspeed, 8/13) • “In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind” by Sarah Pinsker (Strange Horizons, 7/13)

Novella • “Wakulla Springs” by and Ellen Klages (Tor.com, 10/13) • “The Weight of the Sunrise” by Vylar Kaftan (Asimov’s, 2/13) • “Annabel Lee” by Nancy Kress (New Under the Sun, Arc Manor/Phoenix Pick) • “Burning Girls” by Veronica Schanoes (Tor.com, 6/13) • “Trial of the Century” by Lawrence M. Schoen (lawrencemschoen.com, 8/13; World Jumping) • Six-Gun Snow White by Catherynne M. Valente (Subterranean Press)

16 “Selkie Stories Are for Losers”

REORDERING TENSE AND MOOD possible mood: Kenneth Schneyer’s “Selected A short story, by SFWA definition, has to cram Program Notes from the Retrospective Exhi- its meaning into less than 7,500 words. What bition of Theresa Rosenberg Latimer” we can glean from the choices of SFWA for weaves together the curator’s telling about La- their favourite shorts this year is that you can timer’s past, his or her knowledge of the pre- cram more meaning in—if you play around sent, and the SF-trained reader’s conclusions with time. that no, that’s not how it was. While Rachel Although there are no stories Swirsky’s “If You Were A Dinosaur, My on the ballot this year, none of the six stories Love” nests ifs upon ifs upon ifs, striving to are told linearly. Sofia Samatar’s “Selkie Sto- escape an all-too-plausible-in-our-world real- ries Are For Losers” shifts back and forth be- ity. She makes explicit in the grammar the en- tween the protagonist’s past telling about her tire underlying conceit of speculative fic- mother, her present and her relationship with tion—of fiction, period: that it is all a what-if- her only friend, and general statements criti- not embedding our terrible facts. cizing selkie stories. Sylvia Struck Wrigley’s We live our lives one instant after an- “Alive, Alive Oh” jumps space and time be- other, so an author’s decision to tell stories in tween the narrator’s recollections of Earth a different order is marked and relevant. In and her life on the new planet with her daugh- “Sounds,” the choice is organic: the narrator ter. Matthew Kressel has “The Sounds of Old is an old man, living in his past and facing all Earth” show us a grandfather’s past memo- material objects he knows becoming nothing ries interweaving with his present as the but memory. In “Alive,” as the grieving Earth’s destruction looms. mother narrator’s tale swings back and forth, And the last two stories on the ballot contrasting all she had in Wales with all she play not only with tense but with real versus lost on G581, food, sea, her best friend, at last

17 the pendulum reaches its maximum arc as we A SHORT, SHARP SHOCK learn her very memories and stories made her What must a short story do to get noticed in a lose her daughter and there is nothing left for brutally competitive field? her. And the shifts of “Selkie” come almost Often, by provoking a visceral response. every other paragraph, a troubled teenage girl I’ve been following the Nebula nominees trying to sort out the parallels between her for four years now, and I’ve been struck by lost mother and her friend/infatuation’s fam- how often the stories resort to shock, horror ily, the jump cuts’ pace building and building and terrible things done to small children. until the breathless piled-on clauses of the last The 2010 Nebula ballot featured three sto- sentence. ries that did nasty things to children: Adam- Perhaps “Program Notes” is the most Troy Castro’s “Arvies,” in which the only peo- gimmicky of the stories, but the unusual nar- ple deemed to be alive were those who hadn’t rative choice leaving so much to the reader yet been born; ’s “,” a par- made it my favourite. It’s the Doctor Watson able about the cruelty of children, seen effect: the reason we love Sherlock Holmes sto- through the eyes of the eponymous, fantasti- ries is that we all think we would have no- cal creatures; and Felicity Shoulders’s “Condi- ticed more, were we in the good doctor’s tional Love,” set in a medical facility for chil- place. But my bet would be on the wrenching dren whose genetic modifications have gone irrealis of “Dinosaur” to win. wrong. And then there was Jennifer Pelland’s So—avoid chronological order and you “ of New York,” a 9/11 story in which too can get a Nebula? World Trade Center jumpers experience the The strong hypothesis is doubtful: fall again and again in the afterlife. among the novelette nominees this same year, I needed a hug after reading that batch several cleave quite close to events told just as of stories, let me tell you. they happened. However, being a writers’ In 2011 the Nebula ballot had two stories vote, the Nebulas more than the Hugos tend about children facing experimental treatment to reward the “technical merit” score and (“Mama, We Are Zhenya, Your Son” by Tom high-difficulty moves: unconventional use of Crosshill and “Movement” by Nancy Fulda), time requires impeccable skill applied to fit the creepy and powerfully flinch-inducing “Her into less than 7,500 words far more meaning Husband’s Hands” by Adam-Troy Castro, and than the words’ compositional sum. the tear-jerker that went on to sweep all the If it’s for a good reason. Because in the awards, “The Paper Menagerie” by Ken Liu. end, each writer did have to do one draft after It began to seem as though the road to a another. was paved with the blood and —Tamara Vardomskaya tears of small children.

18 Last year’s ballot featured Leah Cypess’s eventual winner, Aliette de Bodard’s “Immer- “Nanny’s Day,” a story in which nannies sued sion”—but it wasn’t gratuitous. for custody of the children they were hired to Let me be clear: provoking an emotional take care of; reading it, I couldn’t help but feel response is the opposite of a bad thing. It’s that my amygdala was being deliberately what a story is supposed to do. It’s when it poked at. Some horror was present in several seems gratuitous that I start pushing back. other nominees—the body horror of Helena Now it’s possible that the gratuitousness Bell’s “Robot” and Cat Rambo’s “Five Ways I object to is only a problem in the aggregate. to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain,” the loss In other words, an individual story that deliv- of identity on multiple levels explored by the ers a gut-punch is not objectionable; it’s when

“The Sounds of Old Earth”

19 you read five to seven stories in one sitting, that I’m still not quite sure what’s going on each of which delivering its own gut punch, here. Nor am I sure that I’m supposed to. that the pattern becomes apparent. (For the record, I adore non-traditional For example, the one short story on the forms of storytelling, and perk up immedi- Nebula ballot that I read when it first came ately when I see an example of it.) out was Rachel Swirsky’s “If You Were a Di- But, as Tamara discovered with the nov- nosaur, My Love”: at only 979 words, it was elettes, the majority of the short stories on the very short, and so I was done before I realized ballot evoke the small and the personal. (I sus- I had started; also, I absolutely love Rachel pect this reflects the tastes of a good part of Swirsky’s work. And of course I was gutted. the SFWA membership: these are the sort of And it surprised me not at all to see it on the stories that tend to show up on the Nebula Nebula ballot: it had provoked a strong emo- ballot but not the Hugo ballot.) tional response, and, as we’ve seen, such sto- More precisely, the small and the per- ries tend to end up on the ballot. But absent sonal are the lens through which the wonder the context of the rest of the ballot, I didn’t is perceived: the existence of selkies, the loss have the same wearied response I’d had to of the Earth, the colonization of a dangerous previous years’ stories. new world through the small dramas of fami- It occurs to me that a short, sharp shock lies and the perceptions of individuals. might well be a necessary thing. Small wonder, then, that when a short, Short stories don’t have a lot of room to sharp shock needs to be delivered, it is done build character or setting, and they certainly so at that familial, personal level. don’t have the room for plot. All they have —Jonathan Crowe room for is the point they’re trying to make. That doesn’t mean that their point must A LOUSY YEAR FOR SPACE BATTLES be made directly, without subtlety, or indeed Judging by what the SFWA members have that the amygdala must be subjected to the Ta- chosen as their favourite novelettes of 2013, ser at all. this is a year about small, intimate relation- It may mean that traditional narrative ships. There are no world-changing sen- may not be the right way to make that point; sawunda tales spun out in under 17,500 see, for example, Ken Schneyer’s “Selected words here; every single one of the stories Program Notes from the Retrospective Exhi- zooms in on one to three characters, and the bition of Theresa Rosenberg Latimer,” told main transformation is of them, not the world in the form of a series of descriptions of pieces or their society. of art, replete with discussion questions. It’s The closest thing to a change or rebellion the opposite of a short, sharp shock: so subtle happens in Aliette de Bodard’s “The Waiting

20 Ancillary Justice “The Waiting Stars” “Wakulla Springs”

Nebula Nominees “Selkie Stories Are for Hugo Nominees Losers” “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love” Six-Gun Snow White

Hugo and Nebula nominee overlap

Stars,” Alaya Dawn Johnson’s “They Shall Christopher Barzak’s protagonist of Salt The Earth With Seeds of Glass,” and “Paranormal Romance,” the witch Sheila, is most of all Ken Liu’s “The Litigation Master facing the same problems that many modern and the Monkey King”; in these, the actions women face today, of a mother criticizing her of the lead characters may promise a change lifestyle choices and trying to set her up with in the world concerned. Or may not. The Liti- a lover totally wrong for her, only to have gation Master dies not sure whether his ef- love potential come from an unexpected an- forts had any effect whatsoever. Bodard’s gle—except that Sheila herself is a love spell Catherine and Johnson’s Tris and Libby step specialist and her ill-suited suitor is a were- into an uncertain future, leaving many secrets wolf. Although the story drops hints that of their universes unsolved. there is a changing world of magic and The three others are left with even more becoming reality, the ending affects hardly open questions. Sarah Pinsker’s story “In Joy, any lives but Sheila’s, and is told with light, Knowing the Abyss Behind” has very little Sex and the City-style humour. SF in it at all, and what is there is mostly left In Henry Lien’s “Pearl Rehabilitative for the reader to imagine. The novelette fo- Colony for Ungrateful Daughters,” an arro- cuses instead on the heroine’s relationship gant, self-absorbed teenager barely shows any with her husband of many years. change of her attitude, and it certainly does

21 not affect the external world. The chief attrac- found this story, taken as a whole, the most tion of that story is voice, and the resulting memorable. puzzle of how much of the narrator’s tale is As with the short stories, on seeing a pat- true and how much is exaggeration; she lost tern like this, I am wont to ask why. With the my suspension of disbelief at the idea that stereotype of science fiction being a genre of one would both work athletes for fourteen big ideas, and the stereotype of fantasy being hours straight and not feed them; to quote an- epic with worlds hanging in the balance, why other character in the story, “It cannot be have SFWA members this year selected small, both.” Perhaps because of the narrator’s voice personal stories with nary a clash of armies and her presuppositions, I found the setting among them, even if the expanded length of thin and difficult to believe, despite the glam- the novelette would have allowed for such our of its main conceit. (And I do hope his scope? forthcoming works in that universe explain With the usual disclaimer that this is just why he wantonly mixes Chinese and Japa- one year and one data point, I would specu- nese terms and names.) However, given sev- late that this is a reminder that what matters eral weeks to brood over it after reading all most in any story is the people. And so writ- the nominated novelettes in one stretch, I ers who had managed to successfully craft

Women Nebula nominees, 1989–2013

100%

80%

60%

40%

20%

1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013

22 real characters, memorable characters, man- What surprises me is how much lan- aged to surpass those who may have gotten guage—dialect, diction and voice—plays a space battles going without us caring a whit role, and how much I’m a sucker for it. For about any of the participants. lack of a better, smarter, or more sophisticated But then, it may have just been a lousy way of putting it, history should sound, well, year for space battles. historical. —Tamara Vardomskaya It’s not just a matter of doing the re- search: all the research in the world won’t mat- THE VOICE OF HISTORY ter if the narration and characters speak in a I mentioned last issue that, because I was modern voice, or even the detached, blood- trained as a historian, I have a somewhat am- less Default Voice of . biguous relationship with It needs to sound authentic. Verisimili- and . As must also be the tude must extend to language. It’s what case when physicists read hard sf, I have to makes something like ’s Cry set the plausibility bar much higher. Murder! In a Small Voice both so marvellous What, then, do I make of the Nebula no- and so infuriating: however opaque Elizabe- vella ballot, where four of the nominees use than diction may be, it’s intoxicating: like a history or alternate history to some extent? stout you have to take in small sips. Two of them plant tales in new and On the other hand, alternate history writ- different historical contexts: Veronica ten in Default Voice fails to convince: it reads Schanoes’s “Burning Girls” grafts the Rum- like a hastily written history paper; it fails to plestiltskin onto the very real Trian- immerse; it’s a left-brain exercise. gle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which killed 146 But I’m rambling, and moreover I’m not garment workers in March 1911; Catherynne talking about the Nebula novellas. M. Valente’s Six-Gun Snow White does just My point is that if “Burning Girls” didn’t what you might expect from the title: set the speak in the voice of Polish Jewish immi- Snow White story in the Wild West. grants, or if “Wakulla Springs” didn’t open in The third, ”The Weight of the Sunrise” the voice of African American children in by Vylar Kaftan, is an alternate history that fo- 1930s Florida, neither story would be as con- cuses on an encounter between an Inca em- vincing or powerful. Those voices evoke pire that never fell, and the British colonies in memories, folklore and history: they speak the throes of the American Revolution. And about race and status, ethnicity and privilege. the fourth, “Wakulla Springs” by Andy Dun- They don’t exist in a vacuum. can and Ellen Klages, begins in the Florida of (And just try and imagine Six-Gun Snow the 1930s and spans several generations. White—or anything else Catherynne Valente

23 has written—in Default Voice. It’s unimagin- is much more involved and effective, and am- able: with Valente, voice is inextricable.) ortized over many stories. Absent that world- But what happens in the absence of that building, a single, standalone story must voice? “The Weight of the Sunrise” is by no come across as as a bit thin. means a bad story, but its diction tacks much Language borrows from our own cul- closer to the Default Voice. The prose is lauda- tural experiences. The problem is that it tends bly clear, the story effective, but it’s somehow to privilege not only the familiar, but also less vivid. Is this because it’s alternate history, English-speaking history at the expense of a subgenre that has to work a lot harder for other cultures: we know what archaic speech me to like it? Is it because it’s an imagined and regional dialects are supposed to sound non-anglophone culture? Aliette de Bodard’s like in our native tongue (translations, in my Xuya universe is both, but the worldbuilding experience, tend to sound like the period and language they’re translated into: a modern translation of Verne or Zola sounds modern; a Victorian translation sounds Victorian). It’s a challenge, to be sure. No one said history was easy. —Jonathan Crowe

“Wakulla Springs”

24 SAMUEL R. DELANY, SFWA GRAND MASTER A Celebratory Constellation, version 1.0

To speak of Delany’s impact on my reading reading most of it with pleasure. His criticism life, and on my life in general, is to court hy- has broadened my appreciation of literature perbole. “The single most important . . .”; “I and para-literature (science fiction, pornogra- would never have been . . . without . . .”, “He phy, comics); his memoirs and social essays taught me to . . .” have offered a complex commentary on my He is too all-encompassing to be merely society and my own movements through it; an influence. I’ve been reading his work for and his fiction has both conceptual depth and more than 30 years, and re-reading and re-re- surface delights.

25 But mostly, he is fun to read. His prose is about science fiction, where he came up with elegantly and profoundly worked; and the or amplified a number of points about how we product of that labour is a sheen and rhythm read science fiction that now feel like estab- that I find both beguiling and pleasurable, lished tenets: that “science fiction”—like any and that I don’t think gets enough notice other genre—is a series of protocols of reading when discussing his work. that demand training (which many people don’t understand as they start to read sf); that ❡ there are margins of meaning in sentences that I’ve thought about the first lines of this Hugo- appear in science fiction unlike other and Nebula-winning short story many, many (e.g., the famous line, “Her world exploded,” times. which has both a mundane-metaphoric and science-fictional-literal meaning). Lay ordinate and abscissa on the century. Then cut me a quadrant. Third quadrant ❡ if you please. (“Time Considered as a He- In recent years, Delany has written a book lix of Semi-Precious Stones,” 1968) called About Writing (2006) where the good What metaphors, reinforcing the story’s seems to be the enemy of the best; that is, he long, strange title. We can unpack them: time is doesn’t seem interested in merely readable or considered a plane, not a line; it is graphable in good books and is using as a metric not co-ordinates; our path through it a two- whether a given work is publishable but dimensional shape. What language: unfamiliar whether anyone will want to read it in ten words which have their own music: a dactyl years. [ordinate], an amphibrach [abscissa]. Then the This is intimidating. metaphor twists in only the second sentence: ❡ “cut” me a quadrant, like a piece of cake. What follows is a funny, stylish story of Delany writes and publishes science fiction, a thief in a future (2075) solar system, as he historical fantasy (sword and sandal type), traces a helical path that curves and inter- memoirs and letters, mundane fiction, pornog- sects, crossing the police, the criminal under- raphy, literary criticism, social critiques, and ground, politicians, and artists. comics. Among other types and subtypes. I hope some day someone publishes se- ❡ lections from his notebooks which apparently Delany’s impact on the science fiction field is he has been keeping since he was a teenager. also enormous, from his award-winning nov- ❡ els and short stories, to his critical writings

26 The front cover of Dhalgren (1975): An enor- Delany that most. Still, I must confess: I have mous sun looms over the wreckage of a city; never been able to read Delany's early trilogy, silhouettes of skyscraper skeletons. Three The Fall of the Towers. I just bounce right off of small figures in the foreground, under a it. It has sat on my shelf for, well, the better streetlight; looking cocky and dangerous. part of two decades. I think I have read every other major piece ❡ of prose (and most of the minor ones, too). Authors I read or reconsidered after Delany’s ❡ championed them in his critical writing: Theo- dore Sturgeon, , Tom Disch, Mar- I ran a mailing list on Delany’s work for ilyn Hacker, Vincent Czyz, Ron Silliman. years. It’s still active although there is little traffic currently. The most fun we ever had on ❡ the list was when an Italian gentleman was I was one of those 15-year-olds: I read Dhal- translating Dhalgren, and we would hash over gren (and re-read it, and re-re-read it) and it certain difficulties in the text and how, exactly, rearranged my brain and the way I saw the to translate them, with the closest textual world. I evangelized it to all my friends, and analysis, widening into discussions of the so- bought copies at the local used bookstore cial milieu of seventies America as reflected in (“City Lights” in London, Ontario) and gave Dhalgren. them to my nearest-and-dearest—at least the We even found some typos, which, if ones I thought were sufficiently “cool” (what- you know how much work Delany puts into ever that meant to me—a bookish theatre- creating an error-free text, made us feel, well, and science-fiction-reading nerd) and who useful. would get something out of it. ❡ This phase lasted until my freshman year at college. I first read the novel Triton (1976), later re- I think . . . one of my friends read it. titled Trouble on Triton, when I was far too Maybe. young to understand the book’s feminist cri- tique of the self-deluding (male, heterosexual) ❡ protagonist. It was easier to observe and work Over the years I’ve collected quite a bit of De- through the societies depicted in the novel— laniana, including some obscurities, such as a though I did so somewhat inchoately, not hav- piece in the New American Review, the paper- ing the vocabulary—the way the free but back anthology Quark, the comic book Empire, surveillance-heavy society of Triton, with its and so on. I am proud of having read more unlicensed sectors where no laws applied,

27 body modification, strange styles of dress, and speak a single language (and have social and sexual freedom, contrasted with a structures so very much like our own). glimpse of regimented, warlike Earth. The best sf example of this in Delany’s The glitter and strangeness of the text work is Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of still caught and fascinated me. Sand (1984). Worlds have different cities and It took some time and exposure to femi- geosectors where they speak different lan- nist ideas in university (including Russ’s Fe- guages and have different cultures and cus- male Man) until I understood what Triton was toms, and this in a universe of 6,000+ inhab- “about” and why the protagonist, Bron, was, ited worlds full of humans and nonhuman well, an asshole. This dilemma—adolescents sentients, so that the world of the story is a reading an adult novel and not understand- mosaic of cultures, cultural adaptations, cus- ing—is referenced by Jo Walton in Among Oth- toms, different denotations and connotations ers, which made me smile with recognition. of language, and behaviours. And of course it isn’t, really; the complex- ❡ ity of this enormous universe is an illusion cre- Delany is aware of the size and complexity of ated by/through the text, generated in the our single world, and can properly extrapo- reader’s mind from a few indications in glit- late to multiple worlds, at least with the tex- tering prose. Few sf writers sustain the illu- tual allusiveness necessary for fiction. One sion as well as Delany. would think that within the sf/f genre this ❡ would be a common trait, but it's not: too many books are (still!) written where planets Delany is notorious for his belief that plot, —or even entire empires—are monocultures, characterization, and all the reductive ways

28 that people speak about fiction are abstract desire, though with appetite rather than sex. constructs that do not clearly get at what we In Nova, one protagonist hands the other a experience when we read or when we write: candy that he doesn’t want any more, and the words, one by one; words that collectively other pops it into his mouth immediately and form the experience of reading. The older I enjoys it -- something that doesn’t happen in get and the more I read, the more I start to un- our society even between intimates. But in a derstand this. world where no-one needs to eat, and sick- ness is mostly a thing of the past, mores have ❡ shifted. In Stars, the society of the protagonist I remember then trying to explain the eats cloned human flesh and cloned intelli- book [The Mad Man (1994)] to an older, gent alien flesh, and are disgusted by the straight friend who knew some of De- thought of eating a slaughtered animal, with lany’s SF. He looked horrified. Why he bones inside. seemed to think would anybody ever want ❡ to read that. (Matthew Cheney, The Mumpsimus) At age fifteen (and again at age thirty, or forty-five), Dhalgren opened a world of possi- I have only read his pornographic works once, each (The Mad Man, Hogg, Through the bilities about the place of sex, stream-of- Valley of the Nest of Spiders, The Tides of consciousness, conversation, and social dy- Lust aka Equinox). They can be difficult and namics in literature that seemed both artfully off-putting—though the prose is often beauti- constructed and maximally mimetic. It’s not ful and striking—there are a lot of, well, particularly the book’s notorious graphic sex cocks in various orifices, and sexual acts that scenes that were (and are) revelatory to me— are outside the comfortable, shading into the though the casualness and humour within painful, the ugly, the difficult, the unpleasant, those intimate acts still resonates with me or just the strange and “disgusting.” Delany when the titillation has faded, somewhat— bringing these acts, characters, and situations but how Dhalgren positioned the shiftings of into the realm of discourse is a radical act, desire and especially sexual desire within the and the discomfort and disgust that we experi- context of daily existence, and made this ence reading it is as much part of their in- work within the complex textual web of the tended effect (I believe) as the performance novel. That is: desire is part and parcel of the art of Marina Abramović, the comics of R. life of (the) Kid(d) as he drifts around the city, Crumb, the paintings of Francis Bacon. but no more so (and no less so) outlined in Even in his sf, social mores are hinted at words than his talks with his girlfriend, a that touch on these distinctions of disgust/ long monologue by a famous poet, urination,

29 thoughts before sleep, awkward conversation on what he is thinking (particularly his at a dinner party, sitting and smoking hash, a thoughts at an unconscious level, bringing his therapist visit, or taking a bath—shifts or dou- mental talk into consciousness), and the subse- blings in consciousness as experienced from quent scene where he reads books for the first moment to moment in a way that I recognize time (in an extremely rapid way as the com- from my own experience of living and that puter network sends the information into his I've rarely, if ever, seen in art. mind) -- the excitement of a series of rapidly Delany once commented on Dhalgren that changing and dissolving mental processes, it was a book where everything is foreground, and the gain of knowledge is delineated with and that seems to me the way we experience painstaking detail on the page and a rush of our own lives, as minute-to-minute, second-to- energy and excitement. second, foregrounding the impulses of our It begins: own bodies, thoughts, and desires. A pedal voice—“. . . stupid, stupid, stu- To capture that shift and flow in a textual pid . . .”—that had begun sometime in artifact—and to sustain that juggling act for unremembered childhood whenever almost 800 pages, among the many other he'd been asked questions he couldn't an- things that book is doing (for example, com- swer, that had continued whenever he'd menting on the experience of the American ur- been asked questions he'd had to answer ban experience of the seventies with burned- “no,” and that had finally come when- out cities, rapidly changing post- ever he'd been asked any questions at all counterculture gender roles, racial tensions), or even had to ask them, suddenly be- is an act of artistic genius that still widens my came audible. A tiny voice, still it had in- eyes and makes me shake my head. sisted as relentlessly (and as unobtru- ❡ sively) as his own heartbeat.

One of the greatest scenes in all of science fic- There is something about this careful, tion, I would put forward, is one near the be- precise delineation of mental states and how ginning of the novel Stars in my Pocket Like they change, rapidly or slowly, that resonates Grains of Sand where almost nothing happens. with me as, well, true; as well as necessary In it, a human male, Rat Korga, who has and beautiful. been reduced to slave status by means of a ❡ neurological process, is suddenly connected to a computer network. The process by which Delany’s book-length essay of a rock-band his thoughts and feelings are changed by the commune in the sixties, Heavenly Breakfast feedback loop of the computer commenting (1979), is a snapshot of a very interesting time

30 in the counterculture—the winter of 1968 in gotiate our own social contacts. New York. ❡ His Hugo-winning memoir of his preco- cious adolescence and early adulthood, The Atlantis: Three Tales (1995) is an underappre- Motion of Light in Water (1988), has the den- ciated book within Delany’s oeuvre. It con- sity and clarity of his best prose, while medi- tains, yes, three stories of the most careful and tating on identity, art, madness, and all the beautiful mainstream prose in a kind of sus- complex emotions that we encounter as we penseful hyperrealism. The first story is grow up. As well, it is a story of colour and drawn from the history of Delany’s family complexity set in and around that most com- and imagines his father coming to New York plex and rich of American cities, New York, for the first time from the American South, from Harlem to the Lower East Side. and meeting the poet Hart Crane, though that did not actually happen. The second and ❡ third stories are also hewn from the material Delany politely but firmly insists on the com- of Delany’s life: a story of modernist art and plexity and diversity of race, sexuality, and sexual drive, and a story of an encounter in gender in science fiction and literature, both Greece when Delany traveled there in his 20s. in his critical works and his fiction. Living, as ❡ we do, in a racist society where it is easy not to be troubled if you are straight and/or In just about every piece I read by Delany— white and/or male, and where it’s often especially most of his non-fiction—there are tempting to not react to the latest outrage, this passages where I am confounded by the intel- quiet corrective has sat on my shoulder and lect on display, the observational brilliance, whispered useful words when reading and the casual profundity, the intricacies of the ar- when looking at the world. gument and the human and warm views. De- lany’s willingness to work at his prose, to re- ❡ fine every piece of it so it fits as well as it can The essay Times Square Red, Times Square within its sentence and within a larger argu- Blue (1999) discusses the pornographic thea- ment, is why I do not hesitate in calling him a tres of the old, pre-Giuliani Times Square, and genius. Our sf genius, whom we are very ramifies from that discussion to make some lucky to have. broader points about the social web and inter- I have turned over and thought about class contact through both sexual and other pieces of his work hundreds, thousands of means within a big city. These insights have times. And will for the rest of my life, I suspect. shaped my view of how my friends and I ne- —Zvi Gilbert

31 The Day I Saw Delany

On January 31, I saw Samuel R. Delany give a Then Delany himself took a seat behind talk to a standing-room-only audience at the the microphone, holding a comb-bound bun- University of Chicago, where he was spend- dle of typed paper in refined, soft-looking ing the winter term as Critical Inquiry guest hands that belied his age, and told us he was lecturer. A forehead like Turgenev, a beard going to read us a paper “about the life of a like Tolstoy, with a smile dancing in its snowy gay black writer, me.” cascade, he made sure to say hello to every in- Some interview questions, he said, excite dividual arrival, before the flood of eager visi- me. Some evoke uneasiness, discomfort. Not tors made it impossible. the ones about sex or other private things. The audience ended up quite a varied What troubles me are questions about art, mix, men and women (and who knows, ones the interviewer should be answering, maybe genderqueer), of all ages from early not asking. “What do you think will be your twenties to over seventy, all colours and races. legacy?” “I am an artist, not a scientist, and I couldn't help thinking as I looked around only provisionally a scholar. What I have the room that this was far more diverse than given you, I have no way of knowing. . . . The the science fiction conventions I've been to. notion of legacy is absurd; I’ve seen enough They came for Chip Delany. change in seventy-plus years. . . . Legacy is at The introducer mentioned how Delany’s best a silly notion, at worst an evil one. I want appointment as CI guest lecturer was greeted my students, and my daughter, who has re- with excitement at the unusual choice. He cently finished medical school and is married said that it is especially appropriate that De- to a warm and loving husband, to become lany resist the series of previous CI guests, for good people.” he is a theorist of seriality; perhaps he doesn’t He told a story of the tour of Greece and belong in this series or any other; perhaps he Turkey he had done in the 1960s, with two belongs in many series. Delany works intersti- straight male companions, who “all had a tially, in sutures and margins. Interpenetra- much better time than they would have if the tion rather than collision. The worlds he imag- third member of their trio had been straight.” ines are often broken. Instead of high castles In the Tuileries gardens after midnight he met in the sky, you have Nevèrÿon’s Bridge of Bernard, a Senegalese medical student and Lost Desire. son of a tribal queen, “so a genuine African

32 prince.” In the course of a cordial affair, Ber- nard and his rooming-house friends provided for Delany and his travelmates a delicious din- ner for six, a sheet of plywood on their knees for a table, covered with a billowing white linen tablecloth and fine china and crystal wine glasses. It was only on the way back that Delany’s companion, completely oblivious to having been hit on throughout the meal, said, “That was a great dinner . . . they were all gay, weren’t they?” “None of the writing I published about that time or during that time was related to my sexual life, except as coded.” That was be- fore Stonewall; you could get into real trou- ble. He had many, many sexual encounters on that tour, most of them pleasant and friendly. That helped in Athens, with “the two Greek sailors my older British roommate brought home one night, who raped me,” he said, al- most casually (to my quiet shock and likely and downs in creativity were entirely my that of many other listeners). In context, the fault. No, they had to do with how much vast majority of his thousands of sexual en- money I had . . . apparently, I’m an artist that counters ranged from pleasant and helpful to responds remarkably well to patronage.”) He at least sexually satisfying, unlike, he pointed had read Harold Brodkey’s “The Story of My out, heterosexual encounters which have a so- Death,” which gave medically impossible in- cial script that invariably ends in breakup and formation about the author contracting AIDS, betrayal. and Delany flung it across the room. Brod- He turned to another remembered inter- key's memoir begins, “I have AIDS; I’m sur- view question, asking what was his life like prised that I do.” In response, the first sen- when he was writing The Mad Man (1994). At tence of The Mad Man is “I don’t have AIDS. the time, he was receiving his first steady pay- I’m surprised that I don’t.” check teaching at the University of Massachu- I’m a people-liker, he said in response to setts at Amherst, which produced a flurry of an audience question that avoided the “leg- creative work. (“For years, I thought my ups acy” pitfall by asking about reciprocity from

33 his admirers. “Some writers are not; some are, ‘I love humanity, but god, I hate people.’ I love humanity, and I love people. I used to think, when I was young, ‘Smart people are those who know the exact same stuff that I do.’ I grew up and realized that ‘Smart people are ones who know stuff that I don’t know’— and suddenly there were no stupid people in the world. Everyone is interesting. A critique of one of my memoirs pointed out that Den- nis, my partner, was homeless for six years and has no formal education, so ‘What do they talk about?’ I showed it to Dennis, and he replied, ‘Tell him we sing show tunes to- gether.’” As I listened to him, I wondered whether to mention Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders (2012). At Chicon 7, attending a panel with Nick Mamatas and Cat Rambo on “Put- ting the Personal in SF,” I asked about feeling awkward writing about sex. Mamatas, with about what happens to you sexually is a way his characteristic sarcasm, replied: “Read Sam- to be complicit in murder . . . I can tell you uel Delany, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spi- that I’m really into fellatio, but I don’t like ders. That’s the bar. If you’re below that, anal that much, except at certain times. I don’t you’re okay.” lose a bit of my dignity if I stand up and say And then it came up when another mem- things like that. . . . We must throw out the no- ber of the audience asked about the coded tion that there is dignity to be preserved. It’s a mentions of homosexuality before Stonewall: behaviour to fight the murder machine.” “Is the choice to write science fiction related And that changed my whole perspective to your impulse to code, and to your can- of what it means to set the bar such that if dour?” you’re below it, you’re ok. The candour I exhibit here, Delany re- I doubt I will read Through the Valley of plied, is not about SF; it’s about AIDS. Can- the Nest of Spiders, but I now understand bet- dour is post-1982—some of the writers and ter why it exists. gay activists realized that “being secretive —Tamara Vardomskaya

34 Letters of Comment

Ecdysis welcomes letters of comment. Send time I discovered the films of Pier Paolo Paso- yours to [email protected]. Letters are lini: here were stories that were not only com- lightly edited to correct typos, punctuation, pletely different literary and commercial spelling mistakes, and the error of their ways. works published at the time, they were also radically different to the stuff you find in Congratulations on the first two issues of genre magazine today. Tamara’s quite right to Ecdysis. I hope you start a revolution. As roll her eyes at the dodgy accents in “A Mar- someone who adores the idea of fanzines but tian Odyssey” but look at the form! It’s a sim- remains frankly unimpressed by the fanzine ple stringing together a series of culture we currently have, I completely under- speculative set pieces. The protagonist de- stand your desire to reclaim the form. If scribes what he saw to his international col- fandom can rediscover the traditional leagues who then comment upon what the fanzine thanks to Colony Drop, why can’t we? protagonist saw based on their expertise in I loved reading Tamara Vardomskaya’s biology and engineering. These aren’t charac- piece on Silverberg’s Science Fiction Hall of ters . . . they’re lenses and each lens is im- Fame, Volume 1 as I just finished reading it bued with reserves of theoretical knowledge for the first time myself (after close to ten that bring out certain aspects of the phe- years in the field reviewing books and making nomenon. I find it incredibly sad that this tech- comments that inspired affable goon Chris nique has from use, forced out by the Garcia to describe me as “that McCalmont need to provide “proper” characterization bastard” in your second issue). I read Silver- and “proper” plot where “proper” is defined berg’s anthology after a long period of disen- according to the values of an entirely differ- chantment with the field; I don’t like most of literary tradition. Watch Pasolini’s Salò or the novels that win prizes, I don’t like any of Porcile and you’ll discover films that are the short fiction that gets published and I’m weird, incoherent, obscene and clunky be- deeply confused as to what it is about my cause they were made to a set of aesthetic cri- fondness for the hard SF writing of Greg teria that somehow never caught on. To dis- Egan and Stephen Baxter that’s supposed to cover golden age SF after reading a lot of make me interested in YA fantasy novels. contemporary SF is like discovering a secret Reading the anthology was a bit like the cultural history buried beneath the New

35 Wave propaganda. I guess what distinguishes mer all the time until there was no chance at me from a lot of golden age SF fans is that all of that shared experience. The myriad of I’m not content to read Asimov and Heinlein, interests covered by Fandom today is great, I want their methods applied to the science but it also means no shared experiences be- and society of today. tween many of those groups, like filkers, fur- Funnily enough, this is precisely why I ries, writers, artists, etc. When I found fan- tend to struggle with most fanzines: I don’t dom, there was also a peer pressure to not want fanzines that are nostalgic for the age of only read SF, but to also have a copy of what the Enchanted Duplicator, I want fanzines you’ve read; otherwise, there’d be no proof that draw on the past only to better confront you’d actually read that book. (If I had copies the present and if that makes me a bastard of all the SF I’ve read over the years, I’d need then so be it. a bigger apartment.) As the interests spread —Jonathan McCalmont wider apart, and become balkanized, is there any blanket community called Fandom any Is contemporary sf as monolithic as you seem more? Our interest in SF has gotten to the to be implying? While I suspect that several point where we simply can’t insist that any- forces, from market imperatives to writers’ one has read even a significant percentage of workshops, have had a homogenizing effect 75-80 years of the literature in this genre, or on the field, none of us can ever see the seen that same amount of movies and TV. whole field at once. The oddball voices aren’t And with the disappearance of the shared ex- always the most prolific, the most noticed, or perience, I think the fandom itself may fade the most rewarded at awards time. away, too. I have those great SF Hall of Fame Thank you for issue 2 of Ecdysis. No hate mail books, and as much as I enjoyed them, suffi- from me, I’m pleased that you’re still produc- cient time has gone past that perhaps we ing your zine. Please keep it up! More com- need a new set of them to reflect the 50+ ments from me begin with the next paragraph. years since those originals. When I first Seventy or more years ago, science fic- started reading SF, I liked the anthologies, tion was a shared experience. There was a but they aren’t as common as they used to good chance that anyone who considered be, so it may not be possible to read the best themselves a fan had read all SF books and of the short stories. I think you’d enjoy Cliff magazines, and had seen all SF movies (and Simak’s works; I did because they weren’t the later, TV shows). Fans then has seen and read 700+-page bloated novels you see these it all, and could compare notes. As time went days. Simak’s works were full and detailed sto- on, that good chance got slimmer and slim- ries in less than 200 pages. Simak was a pro-

36 fessional journalist, so he knew how to tell a too busy with a ton of other projects, and his story in the least number of words, and you own zines, too. An excellent letter column, but can see he applied the same idea to his SF. no further comments from me. As I’ve picked up an interest in steam- And, with that, my thanks for another is- punk, I have the first two of Mike Resnick’s sue. Please do keep them coming. books, but just don’t have the —Lloyd Penney money for newer books these days. To have famous historical characters show up on occa- When I first read Piper’s Little Fuzzy, I mar- sion in your writing reminds me of some of the velled at the economy of words; as someone more popular episodes of Murdoch Mysteries, who balks at multi-volume series and has a which is another of my current interests. hard time with books longer than 500 pages, I Dinosaur erotica . . . I had heard of this, appreciated that. But I don’t miss the “shared mostly because the most mystifying things experience,” largely because I never actually show up on Facebook. We often say that had it: I never got much involved with fandom whatever we can think of, someone will make in my late teens and early twenties because some money off it, and I think this is a prime there didn’t seem to be much overlap be- example of this. tween Winnipeg fandom at the time and the Ah, look at that motley crew at the top of subset of science fiction of fantasy I was page 29. (You said “Excellent!” in your head, deeply on about back then. didn’t you?) The one on the left, that Garcia As for the photo on page 29: not that we fella . . . getting a loc from him means a lot, he met then, but I remember seeing you in the doesn’t respond to a lot of zines, usually being audience at that panel. Small world, no?

Oh, Look! Back Issues!

No. 2 (February 2014) Reading the Science Fiction Classics! Dinosaurs!

iBooks (17.9 MB) • PDF (6.2 MB)

No. 1 (December 2013) Clockwork Fish! Pacific Rim ! Snakesploitation Movies! iBooks (15.2 MB) • PDF (6.9 MB)

Past and future1 issues available for download at mcwetboy.net/ecdysis 1 Some conditions apply. Future issues only available in the future, or to time travellers who never like being told the rules.

37 I enjoyed Ecdysis #1—you’ve obviously put a relevant blog posts into an article telling the lot of thought into what and how you want to whole story from blow-up to cool-off. publish, and I’m looking forward to the prom- “The Opera of Pacific Rim” was brilliant. ised future issues. I’ve read a couple of other articles on opera On a technical note, I’m commenting in SF fanzines recently (there must be some- based on the PDF version. I don’t have a Mac thing in the area), one of which brought up or an iPad, so iBooks is obviously off the ta- the fannishness of opera fans and another ble as far as I'm concerned. I don’t think it's that was more or less a straight opera review, just sour grapes when I say I think it’s a mis- but this was the first time I’d been called on take tying the primary version of your zine to to thing about the essential operatic nature one company’s proprietary software. Of of an SF blockbuster. I also loved Tamara’s re- course, I could be wrong, and in 5 or 10 years peated injunction to “Go. Play. And do bet- we may find ourselves scrambling to try to ter.” A phrase that I’ve seen repeatedly that I convert PDFs of older zines into iBooks for- think is applicable here is “tyranny of real- mat. In the meantime, however, I’m very ism.” There’s a place for realism, and there much a fan of landscape-oriented PDFs—I are works that benefit from the application of think it’s about the closest thing we’ve got to realism, but that doesn't mean that realism is a universally machine-readable, conveniently the right tool for every dramatic problem. person-readable format. I loved the data graphs (I'm But enough about format. On to con- weird like that.) It’s interesting how, once you tent: I think you’ve hit the nail on the head as know what to look for, the Australian World- far as the advantages of blogs, Facebook, cons are obvious. Twitter, etc. for spreading breaking news and —Jason Burnett the need for fanzines to find a different niche if they’re to survive. I think besides the I fully expect most people are reading Ecdysis synthesis/evaluation functions you mention, in PDF format (which was derided as a proprie- another good fit for fanzines is in tary format not that long ago, if I’m not mis- collection/anthologization. This can serve the taken); to be honest my main interest in using purpose of extending the useful lifespan of the proprietary iBooks format is because the blog posts (e.g. if you’ve reviewed a series of authoring tool, iBooks Author, is so damn movies individually on your blog, once the se- easy to use, and because its default templates ries is concluded it would be good to then are meant for tablets, which is the target read- collect the reviews in a single issue of your ing platform. I use my iPad in portrait mode, fanzine) or of providing a handy guide to a myself; portrait vs. landscape may well be a fannish controversy by collecting excerpts for matter of taste.

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