- This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
- Radicalized by Cory Doctorow
- Becoming Superman: My Journey from Poverty to Hollywood by J. Michael Straczynski
- The Golden Age of Science Fiction by John Wade
- Dracopedia Field Guide by William O’Connor
- Best Game Ever by R. R. Angell
- The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh
Sheree Renée Thomas to be new editor of Fantasy & Science Fiction
Tags: General
Sheree Renée Thomas will become the 10th editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
November 3, 2020
Sheree Renée Thomas has been named the new editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, taking over with the March/April 2021 issue. She replaces C.C. Finlay, who will be stepping down to devote more time to writing. Gordon Van Gelder remains the magazine’s publisher.
Fantasy & Science Fiction closed its online submissions form in early October in preparation for this editorial transition. The few remaining stories in queue will receive replies shortly. Thomas plans to re-open F&SF to submissions in January 2021.
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction was launched in 1949, and has been one of the leading magazines in the field for more than seventy years. For more on the history of F&SF, see its entry in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction or Wikipedia.
C.C. Finlay’s writing career began with frequent appearances in Fantasy & Science Fiction, publishing more than twenty stories in the magazine between 2001 and 2014, earning Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, and Sidewise Award nominations, along with four novels, a collection, and stories in numerous other magazines and anthologies. He guest-edited the July/August 2014 issue of F&SF, which included Alaya Dawn Johnson’s Nebula-winning novelet “A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai’i.” In January 2015, he was announced as the new editor of the magazine and took over officially with the March/April issue. His tenure as editor is the fourth longest in the magazine’s history, following Ed Ferman, Gordon Van Gelder, and Anthony Boucher. He was a Hugo finalist for Best Editor Short Form in 2020, a finalist for the Locus Award for Best Editor in 2020, and a finalist for the World Fantasy Award for editing F&SF in 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020. The January/February 2021 issue will be his last.
Sheree Renée Thomas is the award-winning writer and editor of Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (2000) and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones (2004), which earned the 2001 and 2005 World Fantasy Awards for Year’s Best Anthology. She has also edited for Random House and for magazines like Apex, Obsidian, and Strange Horizons. She is a member of SFWA, HWA, SFPA, and Cave Canem. Thomas is an author and poet with three collections, Nine Bar Blues: Stories from an Ancient Future (Third Man Books, 2020), Sleeping Under the Tree of Life (Aqueduct Press, 2016) and Shotgun Lullabies: Stories & Poems (Aqueduct Press, 2011). Widely anthologized, her work also appears in The Big Book of Modern Fantasy and The New York Times. She was honored as a 2020 World Fantasy Award Finalist for her contributions to the genre. Thomas will be the tenth editor in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction‘s storied history. Her first appearance on the masthead will be in the March/April 2021 issue.
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A Change at the Magazine
Tags: GeneralToday’s interview with Richard Bowes marks Stephen Mazur’s last official act as Assistant Editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
After the writers and contributors to the magazine, the editor and publisher tend to get most of the credit for making it happen. But the truth is we couldn’t complete any of our work without the constant effort of a whole team of people.
Stephen Mazur has been a key part of that team since December of 2009, or just over ten and a half years. During his first five years on the job, he was the first line of contact for writers submitting to the magazine. Back in those days — it’s just a decade, but surely it feels much longer — F&SF only accepted paper submissions. Stephen opened the mail and read all those stories, writing thousands of rejection letters and helping to discover some new writers along the way.
When I became editor in 2015 and we switched over to electronic submissions, Stephen’s role gradually changed until he became my second reader, providing thoughtful and detailed notes on anything we were seriously considering for the magazine. If you ever got a rewrite request or a rejection with more detailed comments in it, chances are that Stephen’s hand was in that process somewhere along the way. In that role, he became an even stronger advocate for new writers and specific stories, sometimes arguing with me to give something he loved another look. He often ended up being right and I bought several stories only because of his intervention. He brought a sharp eye for great storytelling to his work, and there are many writers who will never know how much he did for them.
He was also one of the magazine’s main points of contact for the writers we did publish, primarily by conducting our blog interviews with them. Although he was based in F&SF‘s business office on the other side of the country and was responsible for many things in that of the operation, which consumed the majority of his work time by the end, I could not have been as effective in my role as editor without him, especially early on when I was still learning the ropes. He did a lot to help me build up F&SF‘s social media presence, acted as a sounding board for me when I was thinking about upcoming issues, was always eager to generate ideas to promote and develop the magazine, and served as an excellent ambassador for F&SF at conventions and in other venues.
Stephen is moving on to a writing-related job outside of publishing. His new employers will find themselves very lucky to have him. I suspect that he will come to think himself lucky too, as he can go back to reading fiction just for pleasure again. But the magazine, and I, in particular, will miss him. Please join us in wishing him good luck in his future ventures. Thanks, Stephen.
C.C. Finlay, Editor
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
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Interview: John Possidente on “Red Sword of the Celiac”
Tags: General
Tell us a bit about “Red Sword of the Celiac.”
It’s the story of a book reviewer who gets an unattractive assignment that turns out to be not what it seems. Their discovery arc seems to include a slightly cynical but essentially loving whirlwind tour through two decades of overused SF tropes. It might be allegorical. Or symbolism. It might not. Also, there’s a cat.
What was the inspiration for this story, or what prompted you to write it?
This one started with the title (which was nice, because coming up with titles can be a real pain). I was chatting in too much detail with someone about the symptoms of their celiac disease–because everything is interesting if you’re a writer, right?–and the phrase popped into my head. “The red sword” sounded like a fantastical euphemism for the gut pain celiac can cause. It also sounded like the title of an old pulp novel. I’d just finished reading Breakfast in the Ruins, a book of essays by Barry Malzberg, and suddenly I had the idea to write a review of that nonexistent pulp novel (which of course was the third in a trilogy). Borges and Lem rolled over in their graves, and here we are.
Was “Red Sword of the Celiac” personal to you in any way? If so, how?
Only in that I had enormous fun looking back on all the stories and novels and films from those times and choosing which tropes to include. Lots of fond memories.
Why do you write?
I want to say, “because it’s fun,” but that seems flippant, because sometimes it’s hard work. Mostly I think it’s that the ideas, the characters, the stories assemble in your head, and you get excited about them; it would feel like a waste and a shame to leave them there, uncommunicated. Showing a story to somebody and seeing that they enjoyed it, that’s a great feeling. The collaboration between the text and the reader–finding out that someone got something else out of it, a meaning entirely different from what you intended–that’s delightful.
What are you working on now?
Too many things. I tend to jump around between projects, depending on which one I’m excited about–which is a terrible, horrible, inefficient way to work and I don’t recommend it to anybody, except that Ray Bradbury said that’s how to do it, to write where your passion is. I guess he did okay, so maybe it will work out for me.
“Red Sword of the Celiac” appears in the March/April 2020 issue of F&SF.
You can buy a paper copy of the issue here: https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/toc2020-29.htm
You can buy an electronic copy of the issue here: https://weightlessbooks.com/authors/elizabeth-hand-authors/the-magazine-of-fantasy-and-science-fiction-march-april-2020/
You can subscribe to the print edition of F&SF here: https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/subscribe.htm
You can subscribe to the electronic edition of F&SF at the following links:
Weightless Books (all formats): https://weightlessbooks.com/format/the-magazine-of-fantasy-and-science-fiction-6-issue-subscription/
Amazon US (Kindle edition):http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004ZFZ4O8/
Amazon UK (Kindle edition):http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B004ZFZ4O
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Interview: Elaine Vilar Madruga on “Elsinore Revolution”
Tags: General, Interviews
Tell us a bit about “Elsinore Revolution.”
It’s not one of my most recent stories. I wrote it almost a decade ago. Back then, I was studying for my bachelor’s degree in theater arts, and Shakespeare’s plays had a direct impact on my whole creative process. I had one of those moments of epiphany that light up a specific creative process, an exercise of forces a writer willfully obeys through the birth of writing. I not only wanted to write about Shakespeare and his work in the science fiction mode, but I also wanted to go deeper, down a dark rabbit hole, in an attempt to find a story that spoke of circularity, eternal recurrence, and an eternal wheel that binds writers—and their characters—to the creative machinery. What moves us when we write? What program ties us and conditions our art? Are we really independent as creative entities? These were the questions that at that time obsessed me. Then, I found a point, a character to circumscribe my story: Ophelia, no longer a victim of her circumstances, nor a deranged maiden, nor a suicide victim with flowers around her neck, but a rebel, a revolutionary body, a virus within the power machinery. And all of a sudden everything was written.
What was the inspiration for this story?
My writing examines the anthropological and philosophical reflection that revolves around art and the process of creating it. It’s almost an obsession. Although this word at times has negative, almost pathological, connotations, obsession is the precise dimension that has always catalyzed my work. The writer always works on the basis of obsessive stimuli, which sometimes serve as nightmares, or at least as recurring methods for the beauty of fear. I wanted to write a story about revolution and rebellion, about how a rebel can be a “virus” in society. Also about how the society, the machinery, usually deals with eliminating an anachronistic, discordant, and dissonant element, which presents a danger to the already established natural rhythm. In addition, there was Shakespeare’s imagery. Also, the human in his stories has always seemed concomitant with the notion of the fantastic—as long as we understand the fantastic not as a supernatural element, but one adjacent to the real. At the crossroads, at the moment when I, as a writer, take a step and enter the dark play of references, my principles of creation and, specifically, the engines that surround this story are established.
Do you often write at very short lengths, and what challenges and opportunities does it present to you as a writer?
I consider myself a writer of brief texts who has turned to longer fiction and novels as her main mode of expression. Put another way, I’m a poet who writes narrative and a playwright who writes poetry. Short texts are, for me, particles of beauty and horror the writer must be able to reflect, as a bird in flight, on the purity of the text (and its silent impurity). A short story is always an exercise of forces, which allows to handle such essential notions as synthesis and seeks well-rounded stories—sufficiently stand-alone stories to reach a reader with only a few pages. It’s a method, if so desired, of facilitating dialogue with an imaginary interlocutor. Without a doubt, shorter fiction is a challenge. It demands ease and concretion as well as vivid yet hazy characters, full of the power of words to condense a story that, in addition, sheds light and casts shadows.
Who do you consider to be your influences?
Faulkner and Saramago, Rimbaud and Sartre, China Miéville and Samanta Schweblin.
What are you working on now?
This week I’ll start writing the third volume of my trilogy El trono de Ecbactana, a science fiction series that has occupied much of my time. It’s a story about the beauty and ugliness of being human, about its cancers and its allures. In addition, I’m working on a collection of short stories where the real and the fantastic are mixed, and a science fiction novel with the provisional title Chinatown, whose axes of meaning address human trafficking. I’m trying to combine narrative with poetry and dramaturgy, because I suffer from a certain degree of textual hyperkinesia, which makes me feel dissatisfied with a single genre.
Anything else you’d like to add?
I write from Cuba and Canada, two countries that organize my creative discourse—two countries that are polar opposites and constantly force me to move and change my expressive resources. Somehow I feel this metamorphosis, both spatial and symbolic, is my axis of creation. I believe in the mutable. And what changes and breathes.
“Elsinore Revolution” appears in the January/February 2020 issue of F&SF.
You can buy a paper copy of the issue here: https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/toc2001.htm
You can buy an electronic copy of the issue here: https://weightlessbooks.com/authors/kelly-link-authors/the-magazine-of-fantasy-and-science-fiction-september-october-2019/
You can subscribe to the print edition of F&SF here: https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/subscribe.htm
You can subscribe to the electronic edition of F&SF at the following links:
Weightless Books (all formats): https://weightlessbooks.com/format/the-magazine-of-fantasy-and-science-fiction-6-issue-subscription/
Amazon US (Kindle edition):http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004ZFZ4O8/
Amazon UK (Kindle edition):http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B004ZFZ4O
The author’s latest book, Los años del silencio, is available for purchase by clicking on its image.
This interview was conducted in Spanish and translated by Toshiya Kamei, who translated “Elsinore Revolution” into English.
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Editor’s Note for January-February 2020
Tags: GeneralHappy New Year and welcome to a new issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. We start the year with “Chisel and Chime” by Alex Irvine. It’s a tense, high stakes fantasy novella about the relationship between art and power. Max Bertolini created the cover that illustrates this story.
And there’s more great fantasy in this issue. Matthew Hughes returns to the world of Baldemar, the wizard’s henchman, and gives us a taste of the “Air of the Overworld.” Albert E. Cowdrey has a supernatural mystery to solve in an old L.A. hotel with “Falling Angel.” Corey Flintoff returns to our pages and visits a bucolic university town for an “Interlude in Arcadia.” Auston Habershaw gives us the lower class’s view of a familiar fairy tale with “Three Gowns for Clara.” And Melissa Marr makes her first appearance in F&SF with “Nameless,” a Red Riding Hood inspired tale about a feminist utopia invaded by “wolves”: hopefully, you like swords and rage.
Our science fiction offerings are just as diverse. Essa Hansen makes her short fiction debut with “Save, Salve, Shelter,” a dark story about one woman’s effort to save as many animals as she can for the exodus from a ruined Earth. Michael Cassutt brings us “Banshee,” a more hopeful tale about transhumanism and space. Elaine Vilar Madruga, a talented young Cuban writer, delivers the “Elsinore Revolution” and an evolving view of Shakespeare in a translation by Toshiya Kamei. Julianna Baggott turns “The Key to Composing Human Skin,” a story about familial bonds and change. And Rahul Kanakia demonstrates “The Leader Principle” in a story that cleverly updates “The Man Who Sold the Moon” for the twenty-first century.
Enjoy!
C.C. Finlay, Editor
Fantasy & Science Fiction
fandsf.com | @fandsf
If you’re looking for a copy of this issue, you can find F&SF in most Barnes & Noble stores, as well as many local independent booksellers. You can also order a single copy from our website or buy an electronic edition from Amazon, AmazonUK, and — now, available worldwide and in every electronic format — through Weightless Books.
January/February
71st Year of Publication
“Air of the Overworld” – Matthew Hughes
“Banshee” – Michael Cassutt
“Falling Angel” – Albert E. Cowdrey
“The Key to Composing Human Skin” – Julianna Baggott
“Interlude in Arcadia ” – Corey Flintoff
“Three Gowns for Clara” – Auston Habershaw
“The Nameless” – Melissa Marr
“The Leader Principle” – Rahul Kanakia
Recommended Reading by C.C. Finlay
Film: Ad Astra Per Corde by Karin Lowachee
Science: Where’s My Flying Car? by Jerry Oltion
Curiosities: Man’s Mortality by Michael Arlen (1933) by Rich Horton
Cartoons by Nick Downes, Arthur Masear, Arthur Masear, Kendra Allenby
Cover: By Max Bertolini for “Chisel and Chime”
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Editor’s Note for the 70th Anniversary Issue
Tags: GeneralI was reading stories from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction long before I know The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction existed.
There were no other science fiction readers in my family growing up. No parent or aunt or uncle to pass me secondhand copies of pulp magazines or leave them lying around for me to find. Instead, I was introduced to genre fiction in our rural town’s public school, where we read and talked about “All Summer in a Day” by Ray Bradbury, “The Fun They Had” by Isaac Asimov, and “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. The school library shelves seemed to have an endless supply of copies of A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr., Flowers for Algeron by Daniel Keyes, and collections of The People stories by Zenna Henderson.
All of these — along with so many other authors, stories, and novels, some with much more adult themes, that I would discover later on my own — originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Even though they were genre fiction, something popular, intended to appeal to students who might be reluctant to crack the spine of any book, much less something “serious,” they also had a literary respectability about them. These were entertaining, fun stories to read, that simultaneously encouraged, even demanded, thought and discussion. So, by the time I was 12, my reading tastes and preferences were already being shaped by the very short list of editors who had helmed a magazine that I would not encounter for another decade.
And now, after a long, anfractuous, journey, I’m part of that very short list.
For the past five years, one of my guiding principles as the editor of F&SF has been to find work that still accomplishes those two goals. I scour the submission queue for stories that are fun to read — entertaining, compelling, and well-crafted — with a narrative that pulls you from paragraph to paragraph, page to page, from the first sentence to the final line. At the same time, I’m also hunting for stories that have at least one additional layer to them beyond the surface, something that makes you think, even if it makes you think by making you laugh, that makes you want to discuss the story, to consider the way it reflects our lives and the world we live in. I believe that it’s this particular combination of qualities that has made the stories in F&SF continually feel fresh and relevant in every decade of its existence.
We have a wonderful collection of those kinds of stories for you in this issue as we celebrate the magazine’s seventy years of publication. In typical F&SF fashion, they span the genre from literary fantasy to wuxia adventure, from the near future on Earth to the far future in outer space, from ridiculous satire to thoughtful speculation, from one of the genre’s Grand Masters and some of its most awarded figures to up-and-coming authors, from the debut story of a brand new writer to the final tale from one of science fiction’s greatest writer/editors.
Once you add in a couple poems, a special essay from Robert Silverberg, our usual columns and features, and some cartoons, you have an issue that is both like every other issue of F&SF and also something special.
We hope you enjoy this one, even more than usual.
C.C. Finlay, Editor
Fantasy & Science Fiction
fandsf.com | @fandsf
If you’re looking for a copy of this issue, you can find F&SF in most Barnes & Noble stores, as well as many local independent booksellers. You can also order a single copy from our website or buy an electronic edition from Amazon, AmazonUK, and — now, available worldwide and in every electronic format — through Weightless Books.
September/October 2019
70th Anniversary Issue
“The White Cat’s Divorce” by Kelly Link
“American Gold Mine” by Paolo Bacigalupi
“Kabul” by Michael Moorcock
“Erase, Erase, Erase” by Elizabeth Bear
“Little Inn on the Jianghu” by Y.M. Pang
“Under the Hill” by Maureen McHugh
“Madness Afoot” by Amanda Hollander
“The Light on Eldoreth” by Nick Wolven
“Booksavr” by Ken Liu
“The Wrong Badger” by Esther Friesner
“Ghost Ships” by Michael Swanwick
“Homecoming” by Gardner Dozois
“Last Human in the Olympics” by Mary Soon Lee
“Halstead IV” by Jeff Crandall
Three Score and Ten by Robert Silverberg
Books to Look For by Charles de Lint
Books by James Sallis
Films: Love Death + Some Regression by Karin Lowachee
Science: Net Up or Net Down? by Jerry Oltion
Plumage from Pegasus: A Giraffe Yoked to an Ox: A Review of Flora Columbia: Goddess of a New Age by Paul Di Filippo
Curiosities: Science Fiction: Complete with Everything: Aliens, Giant Ants, Space Cadets, Robots, and One Plucky Girl by No-Frills Entertainment (1981) by Thomas Kaufsek
Cartoons by Mark Heath, Danny Shanahan
David A. Hardy‘s cover art shows Saturn as seen from one of its moons.
We hope you’ll share your thoughts about the issue with us. We can be found on:
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Editor’s Note for July-August 2019
Tags: GeneralSummer is here (or Winter, for our readers in the southern hemisphere) and so is the July/August issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction!
Many of our electronic and paper subscribers have already received their issues, but if you’re looking for a copy you can find us in most Barnes & Noble stores, as well as many local independent booksellers. You can also order a single copy from our website or buy an electronic edition from Amazon, AmazonUK, and — now, available worldwide and in every electronic format — through Weightless Books.
Mondolithic Studio‘s cover illustrates the inevitable robot apocalypse.
This month, humanity’s doom comes on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
Cassandra Khaw, who first appeared as the co-author of “Shooting Iron” in our Sept/Oct issue last year, returns with a story set in London in the aftermath of the great robot war to remind us that “Mighty Are the Meek and the Myriad.”
And across the Atlantic, in the ruins of robot-ravaged New York, F&SF regular Alex Irvine relates “The Legend of Wolfgang Robotkiller.”
AND THE DIFFICULT TO CATEGORIZE
Our other science fiction for this issue includes the F&SF debut of Theodore McCombs, who takes us to a near future where computer-aided memory enhancement leads us to “Lacuna Heights.” Dominica Phetteplace returns with another story of the near future at the intersection of social media and private healthcare with “Nice for What.” And another debut author, Eliza Rose, takes us on a colony ship to deep space for a visit to “Planet Doykeit.”
What robot-filled summer issue would be complete without some dragons for balance? On the fantasy side, Deborah Coates gives us an intimate look at the dragon invasion of South Dakota and introduces us to some “Girls Who Never Stood a Chance.” G. V. Anderson takes us to Yorkshire for a gothic tale of haunting and asylums seen in “A Strange Uncertain Light.” And Albert E. Cowdrey returns with another story of William Warlock, a New Orleans lawyer with supernatural abilities and a client who receives “The Legacy.”
And some stories are just too hard to categorize but that’s part of what makes them so interesting. In this issue, we have “The Slave” by Andrej Kokoulin, translated from the Russian by Alex Shvartsman. In 2017, “The Slave” won the FantLab Award and immediately prompted a lengthy debate about whether or not the story is speculative. We’ll let you decide what you think. We also have “The Everlasting Humming of the Earth” by Molly Gloss, whose fiction constantly invites you to forget about categories and consider the human experience instead.
You’ll also find two new poems slipped into pages between the stories. Mary Soon Lee has a message directed “To Skeptics” and Beth Cato makes her first appearance in F&SF with the assurance that “My Ghost Will Know the Way.”
Looking for summer reading? Charles de Lint recommends some Books to Look For, by Sarah Pinsker, Kim Beall, John R. Little, Melissa F. Olson, and Philip K. Dick: A Comics Biography by Laurent Queyssi and Mauro Marchesi. Meanwhile, Michelle West is Musing on Books by Tim Maughan, Max Gladstone, K Chess, and Cate Glass. And for our monthly Curiosities column, rediscovering lost writers and books, David Langford reviews Charles Eric Maine’s The Mind of Mr Soames, a 1961 novel about science and the social contract.
In our latest film column, David J. Skal shares his delight in the new Mary Poppins movie. Jerry Oltion’s science column explains “How Vaccines Work.” And Paul Di Filippo has plucked another feather of the Plumage from Pegasus to tickle your fancy. The print version of the magazine also offers up new cartoons by Nick Downes and Arthur Masear.
We hope you’ll share your thoughts about the issue with us. We can be found on:
Happy reading!
C.C. Finlay, Editor
Fantasy & Science Fiction
fandsf.com | @fandsf
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Interview: Alexander Jablokov on “The Comfort of Strangers”
Tags: General– Tell us a bit about “The Comfort of Strangers.”
OK, so it’s an alien sex story. Or at least it started out that way, though it developed a bit more emotional subtext as it developed. While it seems pretty light and funny, it is also an actual hard SF story that struggles directly with the real fact that the more realistic the far-future hard Sfness of a story, the less likely it is to be emotionally engaging to a reader in 2011. So, like any writer in our genre, I bootleg current-day emotional content back in, and translate the incomprehensible emotional connections of that future into terms we can relate to, even though that translation would make no sense to the actual beings in the story. That makes the story sounds more complicated than it is. It’s supposed to be fun to read.
– What was the inspiration for this story, or what prompted you to write it?
I’d read a few recent stories about sex with aliens. I found them too focused on human emotional reactions. I thought, “well, how different could sexual drives be and still be understandable?” Plus, I just wanted to play the game of creating aliens based on specific biological constraints.
– What kind of research, if any, did you do for “The Comfort of Strangers?”
Everything is based on actual reproduction of species here on Earth.
– What would you want a reader to take away from this story? “That was pretty funny! No, wait, there was more to it than that…and how much of my way of relating to the world is derived from my underlying biology? Do I really understand what the other participant is getting out of it?”
– What are you working on now?
I am just finishing a young adult novel with the tentative title Timeslip. It is about a teenager whose father gets shanghaied into an alternate universe, and has to travel across various realities to figure out what happened to him.
– Anything else you’d like to add?
Sex is more complicated than it seems.
“The Comfort of Strangers” appears in the Jan./Feb. 2012 issue.
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Interview: Naomi Kritzer on “Scrap Dragon”
Tags: General-Tell us a bit about “Scrap Dragon.”
Back in the spring of 2010, there was an online fundraising auction to raise money to defray the expenses of a liver transplant for a woman I know through fandom. My contribution to the auction was the offer of a short story, written about the winning bidder or the person of their choice. I would make them the hero (or the villain) of the story, I’d work in their interests and do my best to fulfill requests about storyline and genre. (So, for instance, if someone had a child who was obsessed with both unicorns and rocket ships, and they wanted a story in which their child was the captain of a rocket ship that discovered the Unicorn Planet, I’d do my best to write them a satisfying story with that premise.)
The auction was won by a college friend of mine, Fillard, who wanted me to write about his fiancee, Heather. (They’ve since gotten married.) He requested a number of themes, including dragons and scrapbooking, while leaving the actual plot and setting basically up to me.
I should note that I felt reasonably confident I could pull this off because I did something like this once before — as an 80th birthday present to my grandmother, I wrote a story in which she was the heroine. That story, “Honest Man,” was published in Realms of Fantasy and turned into a podcast by PodCastle. (The podcast is still available, if people are interested.)
– One of the most interesting aspects of this story is the interplay between the narrator and the child listening to the story. How did you conceive of this narrative choice, and how difficult or easy was it for you to write?
The interplay came out of the dialogue I had with Fillard as I was trying to come up with a framework that satisfied him and that I thought I’d be able to write. I tossed out the idea of making Heather a princess in a fairy tale and he immediately shot down the idea of a princess. I imagined telling a bedtime story to someone really detail-oriented and exacting (like Fillard), and came up with the first two lines. And those two lines hooked ME — I made myself laugh, and I knew instantly that THIS was a story I could write. It’s partly a story about Heather and a dragon, and it’s partly a story about telling a story to someone with very strong opinions.
(The second voice in the story is not Fillard’s voice; it’s much more childlike and less analytical than Fillard is in real life, while also being a little more adult than a typical ten-year-old.)
– As it was an auction prize for someone to be written into a story of yours as either the protagonist or the villain, how did you find writing “Scrap Dragon” under these unusual circumstances? Interesting or a challenge?
I found it interesting AND a challenge. This auction prize was sort of a literary blank check; I wanted the winner to be satisfied with what they got, but there are subgenres I’ve never even read much of, and others I don’t know if I could re-create, so I was relieved that the auction was not won by someone who wanted, say, a comedy of manners starring themselves and Cthulhu.
It took me some time to come up with a framework, but once I came up with the two voices, the whole story basically clicked into place, and “Scrap Dragon” became really easy and fun to write.
– Most authors say their stories are personal. If that’s true for you, in what way was this story personal?
Part the challenge of writing this story was that I was trying to write something intensely personal — for someone else. The personal element for ME was the two voices: I have two daughters, who are currently 11 and 8 years old. Both my girls are intensely curious and opinionated, so the experience of trying to tell a story while someone repeatedly interrupts to demand more detail about a tangential topic is DEFINITELY something I drew on while working on this.
– What are you working on now?
I’m working on a series of short stories (that may turn into a novel) about a teenage girl living on a seastead. Seasteading is a real thing, or at least real-ish — there are people trying to build sort of a do-it-yourself island out in the ocean somewhere so they can found their own country. Many of these people are libertarians of the “all taxation is theft and should be illegal!” variety. The stories are set about 50 years after the establishment of the seastead, and the protagonist, Rebecca, lives there with her father. In the first story, “Liberty’s Daughter,” Rebecca gets asked to find a missing bond-worker (sort of an indentured servant) and it’s sort of a mystery with a dystopic setting. This story will also be appearing in a future issue of F&SF, possibly this spring or summer, which I’m really excited about.
– Anything else you’d like to add?
I did some experimentation with self-publishing last year: I put together two short story collections and made them available for both Kindle and Nook. They’re cheap! If people liked my story, they might check them out. (Most of the stories in them were previously published but there are also a couple of never-before-published stories in both.) “Honest Man,” which is the story I wrote about my grandmother, is in the one called “Comrade Grandmother and Other Stories.”
“Scrap Dragon” appears in the Jan./Feb. 2012 issue of F&SF.
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