Opening lines. I was thinking about them because my next column for The Point will be about Vonda McIntyre’s “Aztecs” (1977) which has one of my favorite switch-ups:

She gave up her heart quite willingly.

After the operation.…

But also, as I’ve mentioned before (here), Joanna Russ’s signature writing trick is her abrupt and often disorienting opening lines. She wants you to start this story feeling somehow already behind; it’s an “as you know…” addressed to you, a person who doesn’t and couldn’t know. It’s not the only way she opens a story (the opening line of The Female Man is the relatively straightforward “I was born on a farm in Whileaway”) but it’s very common. From The Two of Them (1978):

Here they are. They’re entirely in black, with belted tabards over something like long underwear that make them look like the cards in Alice, though nobody here has heard about that.

Who’s they? Where’s here? And so on.

With any writer who achieves crossover status, which Russ has, it’s tempting to look at their virtues as somehow alien to their context. It’s not science fiction, it’s “Litrachoor” (to use Russ’s derisive coinage in the Khatru symposium). And Russ, because of her feminism, her difficulty, and her pedigree (i.e. studying with Nabokov), is prone to being shifted over to Litrachoor whether she wants to be or not.

But while I would not claim that this type of opening line was “invented” by genre writers, it’s a technique you can find in many such stories. You can chalk some of this up to the way science fiction in particular grew through the pulps (or did in America, anyway). A good first line is an asset in a magazine. But I also think it has something to do with the audience’s built-up tolerance, indeed expectation, for feeling lost and learning how things work in a new context. So the more SFF I read, the more I view Russ’s opening lines as pushing a known “opening move” to an extreme.

Here are some older examples. This one is not science fiction but we’ll start with it anyway… H.P. Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model” (1927):

You needn’t think I’m crazy, Eliot—plenty of others have queerer prejudices than this. Why don’t you laugh at Oliver’s grandfather, who won’t ride in a motor? If I don’t like that damned subway, it’s my own business; and we got here more quickly anyhow in the taxi. We’d have had to walk up the hill from Park Street if we’d taken the car.

C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner’s very creepy “Mimsy Were The Borogoves” (1943):

There’s no use trying to describe either Unthahorsten or his surroundings, because, for one thing, a good many million years had passed and, for another, Unthahorsten wasn’t on Earth, technically speaking.

Robert Heinlein, “All You Zombies—” (1959):

2217 Time Zone V (set) 7 Nov 1970 NYC—“Pop’s Place”: I was polishing a brandy snifter when the Unmarried Mother came in. I noted the time—10.17 p.m. zone five or eastern time November 7th, 1970. Temporal agents always notice time & date; we must.

The Unmarried Mother was a man twenty-five years old, no taller than I am, immature features and a touchy temper. I didn’t like his looks—I never had—but he was a lad I was here to recruit, he was my boy.

Cordwainer Smith, “The Dead Lady of Clown Town” (1964):

You already know the end—the immense drama of the Lord Jestocost, seventh of his line, and how the cat-girl C’mell initiated the vast conspiracy. But you do not know the beginning, how the first Lord Jestocost got his name, because of the terror and inspiration which his mother, Lady Goroke, obtained from the famous real-life drama of the dog-girl D’joan.

James Tiptree Jr.’s “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” (1974):

Listen, zombie. Believe me. What I could tell you—you with your silly hands leaking sweat on your growth-stocks portfolio. One-ten lousy hacks of AT&T on twenty-point margin and you think you’re Evel Knievel. AT&T? You doubleknit dummy, how I’d love to show you something.

And then, to jump forward past The Two of Them, you have Cameron Reed’s The Fortunate Fall (1996):

The whale, the traitor; the note she left me and the run-in with the Post police; and how I felt about her and what she turned out to be—all this you know. I suppose I can’t complain. I knew the risks when I became a camera.

Sometimes these openings are disorienting because you can’t exactly tell the position of the person who is talking to you. Who (for instance) is this mediator in “Mimsy Were The Borogoves” who has already decided it’s “no use” describing something to you? Why can this person grasp both contexts? More than one Tiptree story is narrated by a person whose identity is unclear, someone who knows everything and yet isn’t really involved. Heinlein’s “All You Zombies—” wrongfoots you multiple times, mostly in the second paragraph. The Unmarried Mother is a man. The narrator seems to be meeting him but also already knows him. The way in which all these statements can be true is what you learn as the story goes on.

The Fortunate Fall and the Cordwainer Smith story operate another way: the openings are aimed at an audience in mind that is clearly not you or anybody you know. It is a future audience with an entire knowledge base and history that you don’t share. Throughout Reed’s text she exploits not only what you don’t know but also what you think you’ve put together, which sometimes feels like you’re reading a joke with an elaborately delayed punchline.2 The narrator of The Fortunate Fall in fact tells you in the book’s opening pages what events will be significant in uncovering the book’s secrets (“the argument over Moby-Dick the night before; to the first time Voskresenye said the word, in the café on Nevsky Prospect”), but also tells you that these events won’t answer your real questions:

I will hide instead behind this wall of words, and I will conceal what I choose to conceal. I will tell you the story in order, as you’d tell a story to a stranger who knows nothing of it: for you are not my friend, and what you know is far less than you think you know. You will read my life in phosphors on a screen, or glowing letters scrolling up the inside of your eye. And when you reach the end, you will lie down again in your indifferent dark apartment, with the neon splashing watercolor blues across your face, and you will know a little less about me than you did before.

Many of these stories are designed to be read at least twice, one time understanding nothing and the second time understanding something. The opening lines can never be as disorienting as they were the first time but they become charged with the knowledge you now possess, because the stories are enriched by knowing what’s coming instead of being deflated. For comparison one can look at the kind of science fiction that is all about the twist ending: “To Serve Man,” “The Star,” and so on. These stories are memorable—but once you know the ending you may not feel any need to reread them.

Another approach to disorienting and then orienting the reader can be seen in the opening of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed:

There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall.

Samuel Delany has a lengthy critique of The Dispossessed (“To Read The Dispossessed,” collected in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw) in which he discusses, among other subjects, how much he doesn’t like this paragraph. (He really does not like it.) Delany thinks that the superior, more science fiction–true version of this opening would go more like this:

There was a wall of roughly mortared, uncut rocks. An adult could look over it; a child could climb it. Where the road ran through, it had no gate. But for seven generations it had been the most important thing in that world.

I find “To Read The Dispossessed” an interesting but unconvincing essay; it’s worth reading to think about the opposed ways in which Le Guin and Delany approach creating art, but his problems with the book as such don’t land that well for me. (More on that some other time.) However, the difference between Le Guin’s opening and Delany’s is also instructive when it comes to thinking about disorientation. Le Guin’s narrative voice is talking to us. One of Delany’s issues with the opening is that it’s unclear to whom the wall could possibly appear unimportant. The answer is: us. It wouldn’t look important to us. So the opening of The Dispossessed is how Le Guin makes it clear she is telling us a story, as if there’s an invisible “once upon a time” before “there was a wall.”

Similarly, Delany does not like Le Guin’s use of phrases like “even a child” but if you read the two passages out loud side by side you can see how the language is again putting the reader into the mental place to be told a story. It’s not that different from the way Tiptree sometimes uses the real but anonymous narrator in “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” or “The Only Neat Thing To Do” except that Le Guin’s narrative voice in The Dispossessed never directly addresses you and also isn’t insane.

Delany’s opening on the other hand doesn’t really try to disorient you. That’s not what he wants to use it to do. In fact, he wants to orient you. One reason he’s not in the litany of openings above is because I’m not sure he really goes for this technique that much. Ironically I think this is part of why I often have to start his novels a few times before I really begin to lock into them—I enjoy this feeling of being kicked off into the deep end, but he refuses to indulge me… most of the time.

I’d like to say, in response to Darrell Schweitzer’s plea to the “older famous writers in the field” to set an example, that I have never allowed and will never allow the franchising of my works/worlds/characters/universes, or the use of any of the above in any kind of electronic or other game; and that I don’t do readings or any kind of PR appearance at Borders or the other commoditybook chains. For anybody who gets decent advances, and so has the luxury of such choices, this seems to me a minimal commitment to literary values and writerly solidarity.1

Now… the specifics of what Le Guin won’t do are not really useful to anybody working in 2026.2 They are directed to the media ecosystem and publishing world of 1995. If Le Guin were still alive and giving readings I think she’d be happy to support any Amazon competitor, because that would be the situation in which she was now applying the underlying principle. Similarly, I read “franchising” as more about the kind of thing Marion Zimmer Bradley did with her Darkover books, where she had (for instance) anthologies of stories set in “the world of Darkover” that were written by other people.3 It’s not about the possibility of a TV show of The Dispossessed.4

Nevertheless, the quote has stuck with me because it clarified some things for me. Put bluntly, there’s an anti-commercial quality many people have that I don’t share. I have often joked to people that if some little demon or something appeared to me and said that the way to ensure Weird Sisters will sell hundred of thousands of copies is to partner with Funko Pops, there would not even be a dilemma. In this scenario I suppose I’m assuming I can write the book exactly as I please and am merely assured many sales because of Funko Pops, which is maybe not how it would work.5 Perhaps my idea of commercialism is itself strangely romantic and detached from reality.6

However, at some point, you know, a few books down the line, it would behoove me to say: it’s time to drop the Funko Pops. We have achieved cruising altitude. (Ignore the image this conjures up of a plane dropping Funko Pops onto a helpless populace below.) Or, in brief, I read this letter as an expression of the following principle:

• Up to a certain point, we all gotta hustle. “No blame,” as the I Ching says.

• Past that point, we have a responsibility not to hustle. “Blame,” as the I Ching must say sometimes though I’m always getting “no blame” myself, presumably because I’m a perfect innocent baby lamb.7

Le Guin’s term for this is “solidarity,” but another change that has taken place between now and 1995 is the way “solidarity” has become a frequently and vaguely invoked ethical and political imperative, such that I’m rarely sure what somebody means by it.8 For this reason, I would like to propose a different term for this attitude of understanding that “if you’ve reached a certain level of success responsibilities have accrued as well as privileges,” a term which has the advantage of appealing to people’s vanity: noblesse oblige.9

There are drawbacks here. The first thing you have to say about “noblesse oblige” is that it is an inherently condescending attitude. As the line goes, whenever you feel like criticizing any one, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had. What “noblesse oblige” emphatically cannot be is a relationship that exists between equal people, and thus in certain situations it is really an evil way to regard others. The second thing you have to say about “noblesse oblige” is that some people absolutely do not want to say they are noblesse. The idea of being across some winning line is absolutely existentially terrifying to them. Finally, the world of 2026 being what it is, there are many markers of status one can accrue, particularly in the realm of “online,” that do not translate into material security. There are people you might think of as noblesse who are not really doing so hot.

On the other hand, I think some acts of oblige10 are available to people at basically any level. If for instance an editor contacts me about a piece I don’t have time to write, I usually recommend one to three other people, with their contact information if I have it.11 Sometimes the editors follow up with these people and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes I have recommended other people and the editors have come back with a sweet talkin’ but we really want yooooooooou which I may simply not resist. (I like being flattered.) (Who doesn’t?) Recommending other people is an easy task; I imagine a lot of writers do this.12 It doesn’t add to the editor’s workload since they are under no obligation to investigate your recommendations. The only cost is the five minutes or so it takes to type a paragraph and link to an example.

As stated above, a primary selling point of noblesse oblige is the appeal to vanity: it feels nice to be helpful. It feels nice to do something gratuitously thoughtful. Ideally, such actions do not come with the score-keeping mindset of keeping track of everybody you’ve ever done something nice for to make sure they are properly grateful.

Still, it would be nice to have a way of thinking about this stuff—by which I mean first of all money and at a distant second status—that is not “getting paid is a radical act” or “here’s my ten paragraph explanation as to why this money doesn’t contaminate me actually” or “here’s why everybody else is a neoliberal puppet sellout.”13 And ultimately the big problem with most of our public ethical and political stances, lines drawn or crossed in the sand, etc., is that they are driven by anxiety rather than trying to work out what you feel is your actual responsibility. Anxiety does not encourage generosity of spirit, doing favors, or even simple fairness; it is the affective state that causes people to freak out over the idea of being successful.

A final objection to noblesse oblige is simply that it’s about the individual, as opposed to solidarity, which is about the group. As with the other objections, I think this one is true, but, if we’re just talking about writers of articles and books, I am not sure how much it matters. Ultimately the calls made on people are individual, and so are the consequences. There is no community support on call for the person who burns a professional bridge for principled reasons. Shaming by strangers is unpleasant, but pleasing those strangers won’t do anything for you (and they won’t even really be pleased). So in this rather limited context I think appealing to the individual and the individual’s public spiritedness and magnanimity is simply what you have. And you gotta work with what you have.

Strange at Ecbatan

The Good Stuff: 2025

Just for kicks, here are my Hugo nominees for works published in 2025. I’ll note in advance that while until about 2022, I could consider myself plausibly an authority on the best short science fiction and fantasy published each year, thanks to my position as a short fiction review for…

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2 months ago · 7 likes · Rich Horton

Also, I don’t have enough to say about this for a capsule review, but I finished Suzy McKee Charnas’s The Vampire Tapestry recently and find myself surprised nobody has adapted it for the screen. There’s a whole story about a vampire going to therapy in there! What gives? (There is a play.)

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At The Point, my third essay talking about “genre” short stories is out. (Previously: C.L. Moore, Fritz Leiber.) This time it’s “Mother of Cloth, Heart of Clock,” by Craig Strete, a story written from the perspective of a doomed lab animal:

The most widespread and ancient relationship between humans and the other animals, though, is the rejection of identification. The animal is no longer our neighbor in a shared world but a substance: meat to eat, skin to wear—and, more recently, a tool for scientific investigation. We may ask ourselves how the animals feel about it, or try to minimize their suffering, but our knowledge that they aren’t fans and would prefer not to be treated this way doesn’t really affect our decision to continue experimenting on them. It’s not as if we think they’re enjoying themselves. We’re animals too, after all, and we can tell. As the narrator of Craig Strete’s story “Mother of Cloth, Heart of Clock” comments: “I care about them going to kill me. Wouldn’t anyon…

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I find it’s hard to talk frankly about writing the book, as in, the actual writing, because when I imagine writing “what I want to achieve is this, and what I don’t want is that,” I also imagine somebody bookmarking it to quote in a future review. (“On her Substack, McClay feverishly documented minute details of her process and expressed exalted goals for her work; admirable goals, certainly, but not in evidence.…”)

Something I do a lot is use techniques from “outside” of writing to think about what I’m trying to do with writing:1 vocal layering, pastry baking, supersaturation, ballet…. The vocal layering comparison, in particular, has been useful when I work because I find that I do lay a “base” and then keep editing details over it. (“McClay has repeatedly used the comparison of vocal layering and indeed that comparison is instructive when it comes to the book’s failures.”)2 When I edit somebody else, or myself, I talk about tempo a lot. Mary McCarthy has a line about Elizabeth Hardwick somewhere to the effect of “her essays have plots,” and that’s another mental touchstone for me, though that one is in fact about writing.

The other reason not to talk about the writing process is just that the manuscript is not even close to done… it’s not even close to a third done! I could realize this approach is a bad idea and then do something else. Still, this stuff is what I’ve been thinking about. And “stuff I’ve been thinking about” is the one and only topic of this newsletter. So.… But please don’t take what follows as my definitive statement on writing biography, a thing I have not actually done at this point in time, just how I’m currently approaching it (an approach which may eventually be subject to change).

I’m going to paywall the rest of this because it’s a little ~vulnerable~ but as usual if you are a regular reader who cannot afford to subscribe you can email me at barbara dot mcclay at gmail and I’ll comp you for a month so you can read.

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This book popped up in a letter I read here in Oregon—basically somebody wondering if anybody else had read this book and saying it felt like a combination of Joanna Russ and Ursula K. Le Guin.1 So, well. I felt I had a duty. If somebody said that about a book now I’d write it off as hyperbole. This mention felt a little different. Now that I’ve read it, if I were trying to do a “it’s X meets Y” pitch for Floating Worlds, I would say: “It’s The Dispossessed meets Dune.”2

Before I actually discuss the book, though, I do want to say… sometimes a post about a forgotten book will have an air of “why did we all forget about this,” a push for revival, and so on. Why people forgot about Floating Worlds is actually very easy to answer: Holland only wrote one sci-fi book. Her publisher withdrew the hardcover from the Nebula nominations for unclear reasons,3 and when they resubmitted the paperback the book had lost its momentum. Also, the book is not revivabl…

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This collection contains some standout stories from my beloved girls, and yet, it is much worse than Dangerous Visions. Part of the reason is that there is, I regret to say, a real eau de male backlash about many of these stories.1 To stroll through a few examples: A woman offers herself to be fucked to death (?) as atonement for the sins of humankind. A guy gets stuck on a raft with a female reporter who is a simpering coward who can barely talk. Kurt Vonnegut fantasizes about sending a rocket full of freeze-dried sperm to space. A man hooks up with a woman; the fade-to-black here goes: “Those endless legs closed, on him, all urge, going like the legs of the napalmed.”2 That one is part of a diptych and its counterpart is about a guy who refuses to sleep with a woman younger than himself because he’ll find it emasculating to have a muse.3 Then we have the entry by Piers Anthony, which is about an alternate Earth where women are used as…

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In his anthology “Dangerous Visions,” Harlan Ellison wrote that the award-winning Emshwiller (1921-2019) was “the first writer I ever encountered who said she wrote to please herself whom I believed.” In the same piece, he quotes her as saying, “I like interesting failures better than works where the artist always knows exactly what he’s doing.” As Ellison is quick to say, the story in question (“Sex and/or Mr. Morrison”) is not a failure, but part of what makes Emshwiller’s work both compelling and frustrating is the way that it seems to operate by a hidden, different set of rules about what it means to succeed or fail. You can respond to Emshwiller’s work by throwing it across the room, but you can’t suggest it might have benefited from being written in another way. These stories must be accepted or rejected in some total sense.

Read it here.

One thing about most good writers is that the comment “they aren’t like anything else” is not one hundred percent true. They have resemblances to their peers (who are not always their contemporaries). Sometimes, however, you read a writer where this is really, really true. Carol Emshwiller is not like anything else.

I recently acquired a little book of Tiptree’s poetry and was surprised and a little moved to find a (not very good but still) poem, “S.O.S. Found in an SF Bottle,” about other women in science fiction that includes this passage:

Salve: Joanna of the rocks; Ursula of the waters; Kate burning,
   burning;
Salve: Fierce
   Vonda; Quinn indomitable; desperate Suzy; wild Kit; Carol-
almost-beyond-humaness; dead Shirley.…

This litany being Joanna Russ, Ursula K. Le Guin, Kate Wilhelm, Vonda McIntyre, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Suzy McKee Charnas, Kit Reed, Carol Emshwiller, and (I assume?) Shirley Jackson.2

If you want to read Emshwiller, Moon Songs is a good place to start, but I also have to recommend her novels Carmen Dog and The Mount. (Her novels might actually be easier places to start than her short stories, because while they are short for novels, she can’t do the same kind of highly compressed weirdness that she can achieve in a short space.) And if you want to get all of Carol Emshwiller’s short stories in one go, there’s a two volume set from Nonstop Books that is easiest to get if purchased directly from them. Personally, I would (1) buy Moon Songs and the novel of your choice (2) lend Moon Songs to your friend (3) buy the two volume set when your friend keeps it. You can work a novel into the process as the spirit moves you.

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Back in June—remember June? I sure don’t—I mentioned discovering a review calling Ursula K. Le Guin’s Norton Book of Science Fiction: North American Science Fiction, 1960–1990 “a masterpiece of totalitarian propaganda.” This reaction was intriguingly over-the-top. But the review, published in the British zine Foundation, took a bit of effort to track down. Eventually I found the right copy of Foundation for sale in New Zealand and after the now usual nail-biting about tarrifs, it got through. So here’s a little bit about it. What follows is probably going to be quite niche even for people interested in this subject. Given that it is going to mostly be talking about a review that’s not online of a book that’s out of print, I’ve done my best to keep it comprehensible.

Some notes before we get into it, though. First, Slusser mentions at the beginning of the review that he unsuccessfully pitched a Norton Anthology of science fiction four years be…

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Double Star (Robert Heinlein, 1956)

Bookshop links are affiliate links.

There’s a Tumblr post that lives on in my memory, but which I can never find when I look for it, where somebody sarcastically describes a certain tendency as people saying, basically, “normalize being normal.” In other words, you know, you feel a bit defensive about doing something “normal” and you make that other people’s problem.

“Normalize being normal” is also beginning to describe my mental relationship to Robert Heinlein, in the sense that he is this enormously popular and beloved writer who I nonetheless feel a bit dangerous for liking to read. I act about Heinlein like somebody who has discovered black lipstick exists: Oh, is this too much for you? Is this too much edge, mom?1

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Bookshop links are affiliate links. Also, standard disclaimer that I’m not going to be logged on much today!

The Best of Nancy Kress (Nancy Kress, 2015)

The first story in this collection, “And Wild For to Hold,” was so good I immediately paused any further reading to go text friends about it. One said (paraphrased), “Nancy Kress is talented, but sort of evil.” Further discussion made it clear my friend was talking about the novel Beggars in Spain, and the original novella of that story is the final piece in this volume, so as I continued to read The Best of Nancy Kress I felt what I can only call a sense of Doom every moment I got closer to “Beggars in Spain.”

But to return for a moment to “And Wild For to Hold”—this story is about an organization which extracts people from the past they’ve deemed crucial pivot points in history. By removing these people, they avert war and bloodshed. These “holy hostages” include Helen of Troy, Adolph Hitler, the Tsarevich, and, now, Anne Boleyn. But A…

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The Story Until Now (Kit Reed, 2013)

Bookshop links are affiliate links the government makes me put this in every time I still haven’t actually set up any way to get the money out of my affiliate account because frankly there’s like $18 in there. I don’t blame you however I always look for cheaper options too we’re all broke here at BDM Industries and its Allies.

A true fact about 60s and 70s women’s science fiction is that there is really too much to write about. Every time I pick up something to read as background I’m confronted by some wonderful weirdo that feels as if she surely deserves a book of her own. On the other hand, it strikes me as prudent not to write too much about the authors who will be focuses of the book on here. So the abundance of weirdos is a blessing: there is lots to write about even if I avoid directly touching on my main girls very often.

Carol Emshwiller is one of these writers who doesn’t feature as a main player but deserves to; however, I plan to review her forthcoming selected short stories, Moon Songs, so we’ll put a pin in her1 for now. Another one, a recent discovery, is Josephine Saxton, who is British and thus ineligible for inclusion in the book anyway, but her novella The Travails of Jane Saint is a very funny trip through dreamworld2 that involves a courageous dachshund named Merleau-Ponty.3

But the one I want to talk about in this post is Kit Reed. Reed published her first story, “The Wait,” in 1958, and she published her last story the year she died, in 2017. In between she published, if not literally countless stories, at least more stories than I want to count.4 Also, I am going to experiment here with a new post format, in which there is a complete “capsule review” as it were of The Story Until Now, then a paywall, behind which will lie some discussion of a specific Kit Reed story, “Songs of War,” her version of a “battle of the sexes” story. As I say, this is an experiment.

I mentioned Emshwiller and Saxton earlier because Emshwiller, Saxton, and Reed all feel like they fit into a lineage whose most prominent figure these days is Kelly Link.5 They tell stories that project a strong feeling of normality but the gap between what the story presents as “normal” or the narrator considers “normal” and what we do is not only massive but unpredictable; it seems essential to the ways these stories work (at least as a body of work) that every once in a while what is common sense in story world is the same as what is common sense in our own.

To this technique, Kit Reed often adds a twist of her own: stories about people who are abruptly switching from one “normal world” with one set of priorities to a different “normal world” with a different set of priorities. In “What Wolves Know,” a boy who has been raised by wolves is returned to the bosom of his ambiguously loving family (“the wolves aren’t Happy’s real parents. In a way this is news to him, but from the beginning he had suspicions”). Which world deserves one’s allegiance? Which set of values should you try to maintain? Is choosing between them even possible?

In another story, an inverted version of “The Metamorphosis,” Joseph Bug, a cockroach, awakes to discover he’s turned into a human being. Rejected by his old friends, he begins to smash them: “I had for the first time power, and as I thought on the injuries the others had done me, this new power tasted sweet.” Glorying in his newfound superiority over his onetime peers, he proclaims to the other cockroaches: “Now I understand. The lesser will always hate the great.” In the end, however, Joseph Bug doesn’t fare much better than Gregor Samsa.

That both of these worlds are often crazy is part of the charm. Mismatched but equally bizarre normalities are used to great comic effect in “High Rise High,” where a city has put all of the teenagers in a giant impregnable high-rise fortress, only for the teenagers to revolt and take over. Agent Betsy, who is actually thirty-five but who can pass for a teen, is sent in to infiltrate the guerilla leadership. In her teenage persona as “Trinket” she instantly gets swept up in the emotional high school world she never got to have as a real teenager:

Onstage with Johnny, cute, popular little Trinket is so caught up in the moment that she forgets who she used to be. The crowd roars and that stringy, unhappy, capable person whose dad died in the line of duty which is why she’s such a good cop fades away. She fingers the silver Scrunchy Johnny put on her wrist excitedly because she’s about to get everything she wants! In her life outside HRH, Betsy Gallaher went to her high school junior prom alone and her senior prom with a blind date who threw up on her feet, and no matter how smart a woman is, or how accomplished, no matter how smart you are, hurts incurred in high school never go away; they just go on hurting. Well, life’s unexpectedly turned around for her. Trinket is going to the Tinsel Prom at HRH with the hottest boy in the entire school.

Now, as Agent Betsy, our heroine not only knows the situation in HRH needs to be shut down but that the town (however improbably) has a nuclear arsenal and is going to nuke the high school if she can’t fix things. But as Trinket…? In fact, though, while the situation in “High Rise High” is ultimately resolved without nuking the school, Agent Betsy / Trinket herself has little to do with it.

With Sayaka Murata we talked a bit about normalcy—Normalness Studies?—and I think one thing you find in these Kit Reed stories is a similar interest in the way there is something a bit unnerving about the plastic nature of the normal. People have the wrong priorities, such that they cannot be reasoned with; people are either too easily changed by changes in circumstances or too rigid to change at all (or a freakish combination of the two, as is the case in “The Wait”). Reed very much exploits the fact that her readers will already be primed to find new and strange worlds in her stories; there’s a constant negotiation at play among what you expect, what you get, and what you can assume.…

Behind the paywall: Some discussion of “Songs of War.”

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I’m back with my next installment of my genre column at The Point! The first one was about C.L. Moore’s “Shambleau,” which you can read here (or here if you’re paywalled out), and this one is about Fritz Leiber’s “A Deskful of Girls.” Check it out:

People don’t really understand each other: that’s at least half of what makes stories run at all. Fritz Leiber, who grew up with a traveling Shakespeare troupe, might have absorbed this fact before most people. By the age of four (the family legend had it), he knew most of Hamlet’s lines by heart. Embedded as he was in these plays, watching Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies of crossed communications, mistaken twins, misplaced mistrust and disguised selves, he learned that lesson early. As a professional writer of speculative fiction, Leiber would go back to Shakespeare often, setting stories backstage at Shakespeare productions or lifting a line to title a book. The greatest tribute he would pay to Shakespeare, though, was his interest in human doubleness: double agents, double crossings, double hearts.

I think this piece and the Northanger Abbey piece are some of the better things I’ve written lately. So… read it!1

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These are capsule reviews for (some) things I’m reading in the process of researching Weird Sisters. If you don’t want to follow this category, you can see instructions on how to adjust your subscription here. Bookshop links are affiliate links.

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In September 1959, Joanna Russ’s first genre story, “Nor Custom Stale,” was published in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. In the next issue, the magazine also published the first half of a serial by Robert Heinlein titled “Starship Soldier,” better known now as Starship Troopers. Heinlein’s book would go on to win the Hugo for best novel; Russ’s next story, “My Dear Emily,” wouldn’t show up until 1962.

There’s no relationship between Russ’s story and Heinlein’s other than proximity, but one part of researching Weird Sisters is going back to read the old Hugo and Nebula winners that I haven’t read (or haven’t read in a long time), as a way of keeping a “mainstream” in mind as I go. And Heinlein is, in general, a pretty big blind spot for me. If I read any of his stuff when I was young I have forgotten it. So, here are some notes on Starship Troopers. Initially, I was going to do a bundle of “weird capsule reviews” but this turned out a bit too long for that. Still, they rea…

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There’s supposed to be a taboo about talking about money and we’re supposed to break that taboo for public-spirited reasons. I would like to say that I’m detailing some stuff about the money side of writing a book for such reasons. But in truth, I just like talking about myself. And money! There’s a point at which money becomes not fun to talk about because people start hating you. But I am not there yet… I think….

What follows is not fully transparent (please imagine those words triple underlined, written in red, circled, etc). This is not like… my entire financial history or expenditures or income or whatever. It is (mostly) the kind of stuff I would turn over to i.e. a grant committee. If that makes it unhelpful to you, well… I did say I was only doing this because I like talking about myself.

I’m paywalling some of this but the ~gossip items~ are all above the cut.

All expense numbers are counting from January 2024 to now.

Advance: $50,000, paid in thirds (divided into signing, delivery, publication). So, after my agent’s cut and putting aside a chunk for taxes… that’s about $10,000 on signing, I think?

Number of books I have to sell to “earn out”: According to this calculator, 14,409 hardbacks. I believe in me. 🫡

Amount spent on research materials (books, magazines, zines, etc, but not supplies like electronics or notebooks or pens): About $3900.

Amount spent on supplies: $993, ~half of which went to an e-ink tablet. Extremely useful. If you spend any amount of time with PDFs, you should consider getting one.

Single largest sum dropped on a research item: $320, for The Complete Science Fiction Digest and Fantasy Magazine. Also super useful.

Single stupidest purchase: Probably paying for Notion ($120) because free Notion could do everything I actually wanted it to do, and yet I was like… “I must pay for this.”

So if you’re doing some mental math here, that leaves about $380 of “supplies.” You are asking yourself… is that shit just pens? Did she spend $380 on pens??

No. That would be stupid. I spent $123 on pens.

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Who was the first woman to write science fiction?

One traditional answer is Mary Shelley (Frankenstein, 1818). Another is Margaret Cavendish (The Blazing World, 1666). Maybe you favor Marie-Anne de Roumier-Robert (The Voyages of Lord Seaton to the Seven Planets, 1766). If you’re looking only at Americans—that is, if your question is really, “who was the first American woman to…”—you might pick Gertrude Barrows Bennett (who wrote under “Francis King”) or Claire Winger Harris (who is often tagged the first American woman writer who wrote science fiction under her own name).1

That is, the question “who was the first woman to write science fiction” is kind of like asking “who wrote the first novel.” If you consider a novel to be a work of prose fiction sustained over a certain length, then the Romans were writing novels (including science fiction).2 If you don’t, then it’s more complicated. If “science fiction” means any counterfactual narrative that doesn’t inv…

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I’m really excited to share this news! Weird Sisters was an idea I had back in 2020 (!), but at the time, I thought the smart thing to do was to work on an essay collection. Getting sick clarified for me that I should do the book I’m a little scared to write.

This is also a project that is going to bring together a lot of my pet interests, which, I mean, any book of mine ought to do! One thing I stressed in the proposal for this book was that women are very present in SFF before the period I’m focusing on. And there are going to be a lot of women I can’t include because I am king of only a finite space. I understand the temptation to say “oh, so-and-so was the first woman to do…” as a shorthand for importance, but declining to do it opens up a lot of possibilities. Some that I hope to realize in Weird Sisters are:

• putting women’s writing in continuity with tradition, but also

• preserving the ways in which they sharply differed from one another, and finally

• writing about them as major artists and / or players in their scenes, not minor ones in need of rescue

Additionally, we have

• art that also wants to be entertainment, and

• the possibilities inherent to genre

Finally, I also want to say thank you to all the people who read draft copies of this book proposal and gave me comments on it or encouragement. Thank you! You will all achieve literary immortality in the acknowledgements. And a big thank you, too, to Will, my agent, an infinitely patient man. And while she did not read my proposal and does not know I exist, I would also like to say thank you to Chappell Roan, for this specific performance. I don’t know if Joanna Russ, actual person, would have loved this… but Joanna Russ, “person that exists in my head,” certainly does.

I’ll take some questions now…

I came here to find out who the hell you are?

Here are some things I have published that are directly relevant to the book:

• “Joanna Russ, the Science-Fiction Writer Who Said No” (The New Yorker [dot com])

• “Ursula K. Le Guin was her own toughest (and best) critic” (Washington Post)

• “The Soul Should Not Be Handled” (The Point [dot com])

And here are some things I’ve written over the years that I really like, in no particular order:

• “Summer, Glorious Summer!” (Lapham’s Quarterly)

• “Full-Length Mirror” (Paris Review)

• “What Is Miss America, if Not a Beauty Pageant?” (New York Times Magazine)

• “The Bad Patient” (The Drift)

• “Monumental Woes” (The Hedgehog Review)

• “Thunder Entered Her” (Commonweal)

• “What exactly do we want from the author of ‘Cat Person’?” (The Outline)

• “American Gothic” (The Baffler)

• “Enough with the ‘forgotten’ writers” (The Week)

• “Teaching a Dog to Talk” (Full Stop)

So, that is who the hell I am. You can also see some science fiction blogging I’ve done by click on this tag, though I need to go through and straighten out my archives.

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A while ago, my friend Becca Rothfeld asked me if I’d be interested in writing a column for The Point—four articles with some link among them. I was! (I did: here’s the first installment.) I decided to write about four “genre” stories. By “genre” I really mean what is loosely called “speculative fiction,” the umbrella term that covers weird fiction, science fiction, horror, and fantasy.1

Something I’m always trying to do when writing about stuff I’m into on here, whether it’s pop stuff or more niche material, is transcend the “slobs vs snobs” dynamic. The Point seemed like an ideal place to take this project elsewhere because it’s a little further along the snob side. And to make things a little harder and a little more interesting for myself, I decided to impose the following rule when selecting my four stories: they could not be stories by “crossover” writers.

I made this decision because I think most people will agree that a story by (spins wheel) Ray Bradbury is good. But they might say it’s good in a way that “transcends genre” or they might be sort of unable to regard a Bradbury story with fresh eyes. What I wanted to do was find a way of writing about my chosen stories as works of genre that realized their genre potential, in a way that worked both for fans and for people who had no real attraction to genre as such.

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