Vol. 9 No. 1, 2019

The Cascadia Subd uction A LITERARY Z QUARTERLY on 2019 X Vol. 9. No. 1 e ESSAY 2018: A Year of Clarification by L. Timmel Duchamp FLASH FICTION Astrolabe by Raquel Castro POEMS Ocean Guardian chosen by Ursula Whitcher you’ve entered the twilight zone & Miss Ambivalence IN THIS ISSUE by Gwynne Garfinkle X GRANDMOTHER MAGMA “i delight in what i fear”: Margaret Stermer-Cox Margaret Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Andy Duncan DUST LANES Short Fiction Reviews by Karen Burnham BOOK REVIEWS People Change by Gwynne Garfinkle AfroSFv3 edited by Ivor W. Hartmann Tentacle by Rita Indiana “If your takeaway…is that The Cascadia Subduction Zone sounds really interesting, you’re not wrong—it’s a wonderful journal filled with thoughtful and insightful Alphaland criticism.” by Cristina Jurado h Niall Harrison, The Guardian, May 12, 2016 FEATURED ARTIST Margaret Stermer-Cox $5.00 Managing Editor OL O Arrate Hidalgo V . 9 N . 1 — 2019 Reviews Editor ESSAY Nisi Shawl 2018: A Year of Clarification Features Editor by L. Timmel Duchamp H 1 L. Timmel Duchamp FLASH FICTION Arts Editor Kath Wilham Astrolabe by Raquel Castro h 6 $5.00 POEMS chosen by Ursula Whitcher h 10 you’ve entered the twilight zone Miss Ambivalence by Gwynne Garfinkle h 11 GRANDMOTHER MAGMA “i delight in what i fear”: Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle reviewed by Andy Duncan h 8 DUST LANES Short Fiction Reviews by Karen Burnham h 12 BOOK REVIEWS People Change, by Gwynne Garfinkle reviewed by Arley Sorg h 14 AfroSFv3, edited by Ivor W. Hartmann reviewed by Cynthia Ward h 17 Tentacle, by Rita Indiana reviewed by Nisi Shawl h 20 Alphaland, by Cristina Jurado reviewed by Kathleen Alcalá h 22 FEATURED ARTIST Margaret Stermer-Cox h 24 Subscriptions and single issues online at: To order by check, payable to: www.thecsz.com Aqueduct Press Print subscription: $16/yr; P.O. Box 95787 Print single issue: $5 Seattle, WA 98145-2787 Electronic Subscription (PDF format): [Washington State Residents $10 per year add 9.5% sales tax.] Electronic single issue: $3 In This Issue Cover banner collagraph of the Cascadia subduction zone by Marilyn Liden Bode y 2018: A Year of Clarification by L. Timmel Duchamp the notion of epistemic shift back in The abandonment of a common world the 1970s, reading Michel Foucault’s leads to epistemological delirium. The Order of Things, which illuminated — Bruno Latour the idea by contrasting a list of things A few years back, I suffered from a ter- categorized together in the sixteenth rible sense of falling out of synch with the century with such a list from the sev- world around me. That sense was crystal- enteenth century. The change, in the lized by a Tiptree story that suddenly held underlying logic of not just political 1 a new meaning for me. In that story, one reality but also of knowledge itself that John Delgano, caught up in a time-travel Foucault describes swept through every accident, moves in his space suit at a less area of French life. Before Foucault, his- than glacial pace in relation to the world torians typically assumed that by bring- around him, falling, over the centuries, ing rational thinking into the world, the increasingly out of synch. “These days,” scientific revolution was responsible for I wrote gloomily, “I consciously strive to such changes throughout Western Eu- change with the world, but as age takes its rope3 (rather than being one aspect of toll, I know that if I live long enough, I’ll the shift). Later, I read Francis Barker’s inevitably fall too far behind to have even The Tremulous Private Body, which looks In early 1991 it had the illusion of being part of it.” (Letters to at the epistemological shift that occurred dawned on me that we Tiptree, 89) in seventeenth-century England, focus- had undergone a discursive I delivered that conclusion a couple ing on the de-realization of the body. shift of such magnitude of years before the cataclysmic political Barker’s book in turn helped me think that many of us felt we events of 2016. Those events appear, in about shifts that had taken place in the had been stripped of the early days of 2019, to be instances in US in my lifetime. our voices;…. For me, i a cascading series. At times — when, that In early 1991 it had dawned on me this was characterized 1 is, I forget just how unpredictable his- most prominently by that we had undergone a discursive shift tory actually is — this cascade of events the depoliticization of of such magnitude that many of us felt seems to portend cataclysmic failure. processes and structures we had been stripped of our voices; some In that same essay I wrote about that had been previously people gave up trying to talk about things epistemic breaks and shifts, particularly understood as political. that mattered to them, while others, like a couple of those I have myself experi- me, went back to the drawing board. enced during the course of my nearly seven decades of life.2 I first encountered Only later did I perceive that that shift wasn’t simply a matter of altered mean- 1 I wrote about this in my second letter to Al- ice Sheldon. Both of my letters to her can be ings of words, but that the very ground found in Twelfth Planet Press’s Letters to Tip- of truth and knowledge had jolted be- tree (2015), eds. Alexandra Pierce and Alisa neath us. For me, this was characterized Krasnostein. most prominently by the depoliticization 2 Epistemology refers to ways of knowing and of processes and structures that had been knowledge practices. Epistemic shifts aren’t necessarily “good” or “bad,” but they are dis- previously understood as political. From ruptive, altering language (most obviously the vantage point of 2019, I now view vocabulary, and sometimes even syntax) and also has frequently meant losing hard-won thus our shared store of ideas shaping our insights that I found it impossible to “trans- consensual reality. (When this occurs with- late” into the newly altered language and cat- in disciplines, it’s often called a “paradigm egories of thought that constitute such shifts. shift.”) For someone like me, each shift that 3 Following the example of my advisor, I looked has occurred since my intellectual formation for the logic in late medieval ideas and be- has made it necessary to re-think almost ev- havior that had been previously taken for an erything. The recurrent process of reconfigur- irrational farrago of superstitions. Foucault’s ing my thinking has had the salutary effect argument provided a theoretical basis for re- of making me excavate and even question my jecting the “progress” narrative that assumes basic underlying assumptions, an effect that knowledge is a simple accumulative, inevi- can be exhilarating as well as frustrating. It table process. Cont. on p. 2 n Clarification this shift as the finalization, as it were, of hasn’t-yet-happened is the soil in which (cont. from p. 1) neoliberalism’s stamp on our shared re- we can root our efforts to create another ality: the very logic of our thinking and world than the one mainstream dis- political grammar had altered irrevoca- course assumes is the only one possible. bly. Though this shift unfolded over the If the events of 2016 had indeed been course of the 1980s, I experienced it as a the beginning of an epistemic shift, the shocking rupture. hope that drives radical resistance (i.e., Interestingly, I have come to think not the “resistance” now being claimed that 2016 did not mark such a rupture. by the DNC) to Trump and everything This conclusion gives me heart, first be- he represents would have grown increas- I believe that we may be cause such ruptures are impossible to ingly tenuous and to a certain degree moving toward a shift in the ways in which we avert and can never be reversed, second impossible, given that such ruptures usu- think about what the because it allows me to escape the help- ally re-form language and other forms world and life itself is. less sense of being caught up in a cascade of communication in such a way as to More bluntly, I believe that failure, and finally because I believe that demand new figurations of resistance. I the survival of our species we may be moving toward a shift in the don’t mean to suggest that new figura- depends on our making ways in which we think about what the tions are necessarily a bad thing; but such such a shift…. world and life itself is. More bluntly, I a demand can wrong-foot and derail even believe that the survival of our species massively supported struggles. Stuart Hall depends on our making such a shift, and describes such an instance in his account thus if I am to imagine a human future of the miner’s strike against Thatcherism at all, I must be hopeful about the pros- in the UK, massively supported across pects of such a change. multiple political lines, “which was fought Bruno Latour astutely insists that the and lost, imprisoned in the categories and 6 prominent events of 2016 are expres- strategies of the past.” sions not of a “rise of populism,” but, The difficulties many of us had ar- rather, of “the panicky desire to return to ticulating dissenting views following the H 7 the old protections of the nation-state,” rupture of 1990/1991 instilled in me a 2 a desire most news media have refused chilling sense of how this would work.

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