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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16 days 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.)

Earth Abides (George R. Stewart, 1949)

Suppose a third of mankind got wiped out by a plague. Suppose you survived. Suppose there was nothing very interesting or important or even especially talented about you. You just lived, unlike everybody else you ever knew, and you don’t even know why. That is the situation of Isherwood Williams, otherwise known as “Ish.”2 Isherwood goes on a road trip across America, finds love, and tries to re-found civilization. In this last task, he mostly fails. Ish succeeds at preserving a relatively sane, free, and democratically-minded part of humanity, but he can’t transmit culture. He can’t even really make anybody understand why they should try to teach their children to read.

I didn’t love this book.3 The argument as presented throughout Earth Abides is that Ish cannot transmit culture to the next generation because their needs are too primitive and the development of the arts or of planning in the long term must come later. (For instance, the children cannot enjoy jazz, because it is too complicated.) It really is an argument because Stewart has blocks of italicized text that present a commentary on events that stands slightly outside them, and through these italicized blocks he presents the case that if reduced in circumstances people will cease to perceive differences between “work” and “play.” So they will not have culture:

When once they stalked the deer, or crouched shivering in the mud for the flight of ducks to alight, or risked their lives on the crags after goats, or closed in with shouts upon a wild boar at bay—that was not work, though often the breath came hard and the limbs were heavy. When the women bore and nursed children, or wandered in the woods for berries and mushrooms, or tended the fire at the entrance to the rock-shelter—that was not work either.…

But centuries flowed by and then more of them, and many things changed. Man invented civilization, and was inordinately proud of it. But in no way did civilization change life more than by sharpening the line between work and play, and at last that division came to be more important than the old one between sleeping and waking…. Men marched on picket-lines and threw bricks and exploded dynamite to shift an hour from one classification to the other, and other men fought equally hard to prevent them. And always work became more laborious and odious, and play grew more artificial and febrile.

Thus all of Ish’s children are dumb (except for one), they can’t really work at things or think far ahead, and so on. With the exception of Em, Ish’s wife, the women in the book exist only in terms of getting pregnant. The only person interested in raising the children or educating them is Ish. And he just can’t teach them.4 But like… lots of not particularly smart people have taught their not particularly smart children how to read and do mathematics. One of the adults is a carpenter and after he dies it’s just like well I guess there aren’t carpenters anymore. Why wouldn’t he have an apprentice?

There was a realism to the book that I appreciated about how little average people would be equipped to try to maintain the world they live in and would instead be reduced to scavenging if nobody in your area happened to have special knowledge—as with, for instance, cars, which are basically picked up and abandoned when they break down because people don’t know how to fix or maintain them. I didn’t expect Ish to go forth and maintain California’s hydroelectric power plants after reading how in a book, as a Heinlein hero would. But when it came to the children, I felt as if I had to believe that I was reading about a group of survivors who were not as capable as the average person but in fact less capable. Ish’s “Tribe” lives in peace and without fear of hunger or (for much of the book) disease; they raid grocery stores and live in abandoned suburban homes. There is no reason for them to neglect passing on skills to the degree that they do. I finished the book feeling I’d been lectured by somebody who never quite convinced me and whose point was additionally never very clear.

Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (Samuel Delany, 1984)

Some writers you love naturally and some you love unnaturally. I have found that with Samuel Delany I usually end up starting a book, putting it down, and starting it again a few times before I find a way into his writing. The funny thing about Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is that I did not have to do this, even though it’s much more abstract than Nova (a book which took me a few attempts to get started reading).

I think my experience was helped along by two things: one, I was warned by a reader of this newsletter that Stars largely consists of people explaining things to each other. Two, I was also reading M. John Harrison’s Light, a book where I gave up “trying to follow what was happening” by at least the halfway mark.5 Harrison’s approach of extreme disorientation rhymes with Delany’s, but in Light disorientation feels like an end in itself, and in Stars it’s a means to an end. One of the primary cast members of Stars, Rat Korga, is pretty literally deprived of the ability to understand his circumstances. His ability is sporadically restored to him, but we begin the book from his perspective and his experience as what might as well be the least important and least enlightened member of the human race.

In the future of Stars, knowledge is easily acquired, but understanding and wisdom are not. It is a trivial thing to read a book in seconds or learn another language. For those who can travel between planets, the easy acquisition of knowledge and language place them in a state of permanent cultural relativism.6 Korga briefly attains a sort of hyperliteracy and masters a canon of texts within three minutes, only to discover that they are a bunch of women writers nobody really reads (and which the person who has given him literacy didn’t really intend for him to read):

“What a strange view of world culture you must have!” She leaned forward and shook her head. “When I was packing those, I called myself taking all the important, profound, and indispensable titles I could—nearly filled the box. But one of the more eccentric librarians at the internment compound I’d gotten permission to rifle had put up a whole shelf full of cubes of women writers or texts about women. She was convinced nobody could be truly educated unless they’d read them—though nobody I ever met had, except her, maybe. Anyway.” She pressed another pedal again. Outside, headlights brightened. “I decided I might as well take those too, as a lark, and loaded the box up with cubes from her special shelf. I’m afraid they were the top three inches in the carton. From the titles, it sounds to me like that’s what you got stuck in!”

“But …” he began.

She pushed the thrust bar. The transport lurched on into desert night. “But Horeb—Saya Artif—” he said, “was the most famous writer … in the world.” He added: “For almost thirty years,” and felt odd making a contestatory statement about his world; till now it had never occurred to him he’d had one.

But then, in a moment that had me almost shouting “no,” Korga loses that literacy, and in so doing loses what he’s learned, this canon that only he and this absent librarian care about, and even the ability to express what he’s lost.

This gaining and losing of literacy is not the story of the book, but it is the motion of the book, in which things are gained and lost over and over. Things are explained, things are learned, things are unlearned. Around this story of individual gains and losses, bigger events in world (galactic?) history are taking place. There are gigantic conflicts going on in the larger universe of Stars. Maybe we should care about them, but we don’t. What we care about are these moments in which somebody briefly sees a kind of wholeness of the world and then loses it and now can only see absence. A truly beautiful book, if hard to describe. I will probably try to write about it again, as I don’t feel satisfied with this attempt.…

My paternal grandmother was a math professor and, as I now realize in retrospect, a gigantic nerd. She read not only Tolkien, which might not sound all that strange, but Dune. She loved Star Trek, and I do remember watching an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation with her. If memory serves, which it often doesn’t, it was “Sub Rosa,” otherwise known as “the episode where a character has a fling with a ghost.”

I never talked to her about these things, however, because before I was born she had a stroke that deprived her of most of her speech. She had a small vocabulary at her disposal, which she used very well, but its subjects were limited. As far as art went she could only really indicate enthusiasm or disapproval. (Mostly disapproval.)1 I was a little afraid of her and also ashamed of being afraid of her. Still, even if I had not had those feelings, we could not have talked about Dune. For one thing, I hadn’t read it.

Though she was, again, in retrospect, a huge nerd, in terms of the time, she wasn’t a fan, by which I mean, she did not interact with “fandom.” I feel with moral certainty that she never went to a convention. I would guess that she did not subscribe to sci-fi magazines or ever look at a zine. If I had her copy of Dune, I could check to see the edition, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she were a member of the Science Fiction Book Club, which would have been a way of keeping tabs on books compatible with being “a normal person” with “a job,” “a family,” “a bridge playing habit,” or, in short, “a life.”2 She was a kind of hidden fan.

Short of a gender breakdown of the Science Fiction Book Club members, which could yield some information, there’s not an easy way to know if being a non-fandom-oriented reader was more typical of women than men. A group of people who enjoyed reading and watching science fiction and fantasy but whose interest and participation stopped there are, by definition, not going to leave a big footprint. But the Pareto principle tells us that there must have been a lot of them: if the “fandom is a way of life” type of fan was the twenty percent, who made up the eighty?

My grandmother is also an example of how the gender connotation of “fandom” has changed. It used to be male—which is why in the SNL skit where William Shatner scolds Star Trek fans, he asks if any of them have ever kissed a girl. Shatner surely knew that there were many women obsessed with Star Trek, but that wasn’t the image that could be accessed as a comic shorthand. See also, the amazing scene in Donnie Darko where Jake Gyllenhaal suddenly defends Smurfette’s honor:

Now “fandom,” the word, makes you think of girls, even retroactively: the Beatles, Elvis. There are certainly still types of fandom that are mostly male, but this isn’t about the actual gender breakdown of fandom so much as what the word itself makes pop into your mind. It used to be: scrawny guy with Vulcan ears who argues about numbers.3 Now it is: girl wearing fox tail who writes real person fan fiction.

The generally accepted story is that women entered science fiction en masse with Star Trek. While I think there’s some useful pushback to this story that you can find in books like Partners in Wonder, if we’re talking fandom and not science fiction in general, Star Trek absolutely introduces something new to the dynamic. Part of what it introduces, though, is a split in fandom. The world of Star Trek super fandom was, or at least this is my impression at this time, a little bit siloed off from everything. The women who are really fixated on Star Trek are not trying to mingle. They are creating their own fandom. There’s a lot of fan activity, but in their own zines.4

Joanna Russ specifically more or less stops writing fiction for publication and puts all that energy toward writing Kirk/Spock fiction under a pseudonym.5 There were various reasons for this shift, among them poor health, but I do think one was simply that she couldn’t handle the world of SFF anymore. She was not—understatement of the century incoming—an easy person to get on with for most of her life, but that world had been cruel to her in ways that made her embittered and a little paranoid. She could write Kirk/Spock without feeling like she had a target on her back.6

I have gone back and forth and every which way about fandom, the concept. It’s bad, it’s bad but other things are more annoying, maybe it’s good, maybe it takes the blame for things that are not really its fault, whatever.7 I think my relationship to it these days is neutral. Like “parasociality,”8 “fandom” is a natural social creation with good and bad effects; both can be manipulated and played into by advertising and corporate brand building, but neither can be made out of nothing or completely controlled.9 In the 2010s I had a sense that “fandom” was eating everything.10 Now, though… I don’t really feel that fandom is the major problem threatening the arts, writing, etc.11

But I could be wrong about that; it could be that I just got kind of bored with that drum and went to find another drum. Mostly, though, the problem with “being anti-fandom” is that it doesn’t really push people toward more mature ways of thinking and reading. It creates its own reactive enclaves which can’t develop much of a way of thinking beyond “not capeshit” or “not YA” or (now) “not slop.” These enclaves do not have anything like the commercial reach of fandom, but the way they get stuck in pure reaction is more frustrating to me personally because they should be the place better thinking and writing is happening.12 In the end it feels like there are a lot of people who really only want to talk and think about the stuff everybody else is talking and thinking about—just angrily.

Still, I think there was a lot that was good about the science fiction fan world for a long time. There was also plenty of stuff that was bad. The harbinger of things getting worse was not Star Trek (which was an essentially niche phenomenon) or its mountains of slash fans (a niche of a niche). It might have been Star Wars, which revealed that there was a lot of money people could make in this area, and in so doing began to transform fandom from a niche spot for discussion into something else. Now, do I think this because I like Star Trek and not Star Wars? Yes, OK.13 Also I don’t really have anything to back that up. It’s just a thought.14

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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