REVISITED: Author Interview with Tristan Beiter: Understanding Speculative Poetry

(Originally posted October 19, 2021 by Isaac Payne)

Recently, I’ve had the pleasure of talking to Tristan Beiter, a rising star in the world of speculative poetry.

I’ve been following Tristan’s journey as a poet for a few years, and had a chance to ask him about his thoughts on speculative poetry as a genre, his favorite poets, as well as his upcoming work.

Author Bio:

Tristan Beiter is a speculative poet originally from Central Pennsylvania now living in Rhode Island. He holds a BA in English Literature and Gender and Sexuality Studies from Swarthmore College and an MA in the Humanities (emphasis in Poetry and Poetics) from the University of Chicago.

His work can be found in such venues as Abyss & Apex, Fantasy Magazine, Liminality, Bird’s Thumb and others. When not reading or writing, he can be found doing needlecrafts, crafting absurdities with his boyfriend, or shouting about literary theory. Find him on Twitter at @TristanBeiter

Isaac Payne: A lot of people have different definitions of speculative poetry, and some consider it to not even be a genre, as the nature of poetry is so non-linear and experimental that all poetry could come off as speculative. What does speculative poetry mean to you?

Tristan Beiter: That’s a great question. I’m sure there are panels I haven’t read, but I’ve read all of the discussions I have been able to find about what is spec poetry. These include the panels in Strange Horizons and a bunch of blog posts on the topic. This was a main issue during my Master’s thesis, it’s “what do I mean when I say speculative poetry?”

And the answer I came to, based on all the discussions and my own feelings as a writer, is that in some ways its very simple but also very difficult.

On one hand, you can define it as narrowly as poetry published under the umbrella of spec fic. By this I mean that they’re published in spec fic magazines by authors who call their poems speculative poetry. In some ways, that’s really useful. It sets apart poetry published in literary venues from poetry published in speculative-specific magazines.

But I think that definition is too restrictive.

For me, it comes down to what role is the imaginary playing. It’s about whether the speculative element is more than a metaphor.

In the case of stuff published in genre magazines like Strange Horizons, Uncanny, and Abyss & Apex, it’s pretty straightforward. When we have a poem about a dragon, maybe it’s a metaphor, but also there’s a dragon here. If there wasn’t a dragon in it, we wouldn’t have wanted to publish it at this spec fic venue.

But it also comes down to something you can feel in the text. When they say alien, do they mean space aliens, or just a sense of otherness?

In my experience, I find that you can identify when a speculative poem by it’s feeling. It’s like the Supreme Court case with the famous porn test: ‘I know it when I see it but I can’t define it.’ You can really feel when a speculative element is there on its own terms as well as doing whatever figurative work it’s doing.

And that for me is what makes a poem a speculative poem.

IP: Who are some of your favorite poets?

TB: There are a lot of great poets out there. I’m a big fan of some of the main people we see in the speculative space. R.B. Lemberg, Amal El-Mohtar, Beth Cato, Sonya Taafee.

But I’m also reading lots of other kinds of poetry as well. I tend to gravitate toward poets like Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Lo Kwa Mei-en, and Franny Choi.

Recently I’ve been reading Anne Carson, her work is really special. And Danez Smith, Patricia Smith, and T.S. Elliot.

IP: You’ve had some of your work published in Fantasy Magazine, Liminality, and GlitterShip, and your new poem “Fountain Found in an Abandoned Garden” is out now from Abyss & Apex, right? Can you tell me more about your inspiration for that poem?

TB: That was a really fun and exciting one to work with. It started in several places at once, how many of the pieces we’re excited about as writers start.

One of the places of genesis for the very first draft was written in the advanced poetry workshop in my senior year of undergrad, fall of 2018. The assignment was to write several abecedarian poems, and those are poems where each line begins or ends with one letter of the alphabet. It’s a form I’m really excited about, it’s a major thread in Lo Kwa Mei-en’s The Bees Make Money in the Lion, which is actually the subject of my Master’s thesis.

I tried several poems, A-Z one word per line, Z-A one word per line, and A-Z where I could have as much space as I wanted.

It was the third poem that eventually became “Fountain Found in an Abandoned Garden.”

One of the other strands that goes into this poem is all of my feelings about secluded spaces, statuaries, and garden spaces. I’ve been writing about this idea a lot, and this was my most recent attempt at it.

You go to a place and it’s all alone, you’re all alone. It’s not about being lonely, I wasn’t a lonely child. I had a lot of friends and I loved them, but sometimes I wanted to go to a place and be alone, to feel like the whole world fell away.

In those spaces, I was free to be anyone and anything, not having to worry about the expectations of friendship or growing up in a small town.

There are places like that all over, but that place I’m talking about is at the base of the fire escape at the church by my house where I grew up. There are boring evergreen trees hiding this place, but it’s a tiny slate patio with a bench and flowers in pots, and the fire escape.

That space embodied an absolute freedom, and I’d describe it as a homosexual place, which makes to sense. It’s not a culturally gay space, more of a personally gay space for me. I never knew anyone who ever looked in on this place, as far as I could tell, no one had set foot onto that patio, and that is the space and energy I was tapping into with this poem.

That feeling of twin freedom and aloneness, which is everywhere, but at the same time very hard to access. It’s exciting and hopeful but also kind of sad because it requires acknowledging that the person you are in relation to other people is not, and will never be, all the person you are. The poem isn’t just about the closet, obviously, it’s about lots of other things, but it is also about what it was like when the closet was part of my life, even though it isn’t anymore.

IP: You mentioned that you studied speculative poetry for your Master’s thesis at the University of Chicago; what did you learn about spec poetry there that you hadn’t previously thought about or learned?

In some ways, everything. I really learned so much about how to approach big questions I have about genre in a more principled way. But I also learned to be a better reader, both of poems and criticism. And the really important thing was that I gained a new appreciation for the relationship between the poem as the object, the poem as the project, poetics as the question, and poetics as the theory.

It helped me clarify the ways in which writing a poem is both similar to and different from reading a poem. They were things I had been thinking about and it was largely a confirmation of instincts, but it gave more clarity to those similarities and differences.

And it helped me understand the relationship between questions of ‘how does this text work’—that’s poetics as the questions. And interpretations of how does the poem in general work, what is the poem in general?

How can I use individual poems to learn about poetry at large and vice versa.

It was a big complement to the critical side of my undergrad, which really taught me about how to read criticism and when to realize that criticism is about the author, and that’s most notable in cases like T.S. Elliot.

He’s sort of a pet case for me. I find his critical writings, things like Tradition of Individual Talent, and his Hamlet essay, to not necessarily be right. I don’t think he’s right about the poems or texts he’s writing about.

But it told me a lot about what he wanted to do in his own writing.

If you approach The Wasteland and think ‘what is this fragmented, sprawling monster,’ you can go, wait a second, T.S. Elliot thinks that literature is the invocations of the right words in the right order to produce the correct response.

What does it mean to read The Wasteland as an attempt to elicit a uniform, overwhelming response, almost as if by magic?

And so, at Chicago, I was able to go the other direction, thinking about how do I take poems and from them abstract a theory?

IP: What kind of projects are you currently working on? Can we expect to see a book of poetry from you in the future?

Although I have a chapbook manuscript, about ten poems, that I’ve been shopping around occasionally, I am nowhere near ready to assemble a full-length manuscript.

I’m excitedly awaiting the day I’m ready to embark on that project because I like thinking about poems together in context to each other. But I’m not there yet.

Right now, I’m writing a variety of things. Quite a few religious-of-sorts poems in the works, prayers and spells to a variety of invented gods. One I have no idea what to do with because it’s a doctrinal document. I like the entity I’ve invented, it’s appeared in two poems so far, but I don’t know what to do with the second one.

I’m also doing a series of poems based on “East of the Sun, West of the Moon” which is deeply unfinished, and I’m not totally sure if it will go anywhere.

I have some other unconnected projects too; I sort of fill notebooks at random. A lot has happened in the past twelve months!

Thanks to Tristan for having this delightful conversation!

~~~

Follow Arc Manor Books at:
Twitter / Facebook / Instagram

REVISITED: Prospect: A Solid Sci-Fi Movie on Netflix

(Originally posted September 7, 2021 by Isaac Payne)

I didn’t know anything about Prospect, merely stumbling across it via the suggested for you feature on Netflix.

I took a chance and fired it up. Originally, I was a bit skeptical, because I’d never heard of the film companies that worked on the film, and thought it might be a low-budget, B-rate sci fi movie.

But then, 20 minutes in, I spotted Pedro Pascal, and my fears were assuaged. I’m not saying Prospect is the best sci fi movie on Netflix, but it was pretty darn good.

The Details

Prospect is a 2018 film written and directed by Zeek Earl and Chris Caldwell. Earl and Caldwell previously made commercials and short films with their company, Shep Films, and Prospect was their first movie.

The film stars Sophie Thatcher, Jay Duplass, and Pedro Pascal (who many people know from the wildly popular Star Wars show, The Mandalorian).

Prospect received mixed reviews, with some critics praising the world-building, while others noted that Earl and Caldwell’s character development was lacking.

The Premise

The story follows Cee, a teenage girl who travels to a foreign moon with her father to mine for precious gems.

Along the way, Cee’s father is killed by Ezra, a rogue miner/mercenary stranded on the moon. Despite that, Cee and Ezra have to work together to find a way off the moon before their short window for escape passes them by.

Signals Sci-Fi Movie Review

Above all else, Prospect is a simple film. Unlike some other popular sci-fi films, its scope isn’t massive. Nothing about saving the universe or the fate of humanity. Instead, the film places its focus on the interactions of a couple of people, and the conflict is all about Cee and Ezra putting aside their differences to survive.

Personally, stories that operate in a microcosm—or at least, not on a universal scale—always seem more satisfying to me. For example, I’d prefer to watch the Luke Cage Netflix show than the Avengers movies. Luke Cage feels more realistic, which I guess isn’t what people watch superhero literature for, but c’est la vie.

Anyways, I like the small scope of Prospect, because it makes it easier to focus on the characters.

Cee’s father, Damon, has about 25 minutes of screentime, but from the first scene, it’s easy to dislike him. Once he dies, it creates an interesting dynamic between Cee and Ezra. She hates him for killing her father, but also recognizes how different he is from Damon, better in some ways.

Some critics have said that Ezra’s character is pretty stale, and the only reason it’s interesting is because Cee acts as a foil—or a reverse foil?—and in some ways, I agree.

We don’t get very much information about Ezra’s past, only that he is stranded on the forest moon because his crew committed a mutiny and took his ship. Other than that, the audience is left guessing his past.

But I don’t think the story is supposed to be about Ezra. His presence is a catalyst for Cee’s character growth, her ‘coming of age’ if you will.

We know much more about Cee. Even the little details give us a glimpse into her past. Her conversations about her mother, her escapism through music and reading, her calm demeanor in sticky situations, all those things make her a vibrant, deep character.

The Verdict

Prospect’s pacing was on point, and visually, it was a simple film. The whole story takes place on the forest moon, but there isn’t very much variation in the scenery. A lot of green! I’d have like to see a bit of deviation of color.

While the film was entertaining, it leaves a lot of unanswered questions.

What happened to Earth?
What year is it?
What’s Ezra’s past?
What will happen next?

Some of these things are arbitrary, nonessential to the story. However, I would have liked to have a firmer understanding in the world Prospect is framed in. Maybe I’m just being a stickler or a massive sci-fi nerd, but I feel like knowing the year is a must.

Overall, Prospect was a good first film from Shep Films. Its simplistic story model let you focus on the character interactions, but sometimes those interactions fell flat. The film is missing a few key details to really root in a place and time, and sometimes the film expects viewers to grasp the sci-fi concepts without having previously explained them.

I’d give Prospect a 7/10. Sophie Thatcher and Pedro Pascal made a great duo, and I’d like to see more of their adventures, but I definitely felt like there was room for improvement.

So, not the best sci-fi movie on Netflix, but worth a watch if you don’t have something more interesting to watch.

~~~

Follow Arc Manor Books at:
Twitter / Facebook / Instagram

REVISITED: Galaxy’s Edge Interviews John Scalzi

(Originally posted February 17, 2022 by Isaac Payne)

In Galaxy’s Edge magazine Issue 54, January 2022, Jean Marie Ward chatted with John Scalzi, best-selling SF author and former president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

From Rock Stars to Redshirts and Kaiju

At any moment in time, the number of cultural figures immediately recognizable by a single name can be numbered on a single hand. For over ten years, John Scalzi has been one of those rare few. His last name alone not only conjures images of fast-paced, witty, pop culture–infused science fiction, but also the attitudes and opinions that have made his long-running blog, Whatever, a must-read for fans and detractors alike. Despite over 15 best-selling books, numerous published novellas and short stories, produced scripts, and Hugo Awards, he retains the work ethic and crusading spirit of the journalist he used to be—and on occasion still is. His unprecedented three consecutive terms as president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America focused on making SFWA a better advocate for writers in the marketplace. In the years since, he has continued to promote the genre and its writers. Catching up with Scalzi as he prepared for the March release of Kaiju Preservation Society, Galaxy’s Edge quizzed him about how to grow a writing career out of pop culture, a philosophy degree, and a lot of low-hanging fruit.

Galaxy’s Edge: When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer? Was it before or after you wanted to become a rock star?

John Scalzi: I think everybody wants to be a rock star from a very early age. I think the very first time I thought of being a rock star was in 1977 when, as an eight-year-old, I thought I had a more than passing resemblance to Shaun Cassidy. As it turns out, that resemblance no longer exists. Shaun Cassidy still has much more hair.

I figured out I wanted to be a writer was when I was 14, when I did an assignment for a class in high school. It was English composition class taught by John Hayes. He had everybody in the three sections that he taught do a story about a gift and the consequences of that gift. As someone who read a lot of science fiction and horror and mystery and stuff like that, my first thought was to write a sort of supernatural tale about a black cat that was cursed.

I couldn’t make it work. So, at the last—literally the last—minute, I stayed up all night to write a lightly fictionalized tale about my friends, Peter and Jennifer, who had started dating. The story was that their gift to each other was the love they had for each other. I typed it up overnight in a panic, turned it in, and I was the only person in those three sections that got an “A” on the thing. And I had, as we call in the industry, an epiphany, which was like: “Holy crap, I threw this together at the last minute and still somehow did better than everybody else. Also, everything else in school is really hard. So, I’m gonna be a writer, because this is easy, and everything else is hard.”

Now the irony is that writing became hard, because there’s a difference between what you can do in an English composition class when you’re a freshman and what you can actually publish and make a living out of. But by that point, it was too late. I was too far down the rabbit hole, and I was not qualified to do anything else.

So that’s when I became a writer. I would still not mind being a rock star, but I don’t think it’s gonna work out. There’s not much of a market for a 52-year-old rookie rock star. I’ll just have to content myself with collecting more guitars than any one person really needs.

Galaxy’s Edge: How did “Writing is easy!” translate into taking a philosophy major in college?

John Scalzi: The thing about it was… (And again, this helps establish the trend of I will do anything as long as it furthers my own laziness.) I was going into college to be a writer. I went immediately to the school newspaper and started writing there. As I tell people, regardless of what degree I would have ended up with, I majored in newspaper. But while I was writing for the newspaper, I still had to take classes, or they wouldn’t let me stay in school. Strange how that works out. So, I started taking the classes that looked interesting to me, and they ended up being philosophy courses.

At the end of my third year, I went to talk to my advisor, and my advisor said, “Look, if you were planning to get an English degree because you’re a writer, I regret to tell you, you haven’t taken enough English courses. It would take you five years. But if you took a philosophy degree, you could pretty much graduate now.”

And I’m like: “Well, I guess I’m a philosopher.” So, I kind of fell into it.

Having said that, a philosophy degree ends up being very useful for a writer, not in any practical sense, but in the overarching sense of learning how to think, learning how to reason, learning how to research, learning how to find things out for yourself, and also examining the consequences of what people do and how they do them. Now, additionally, my concentration within the philosophy degree (which is basically the equivalent of the minor) is in language arts. So, my full degree is philosophy with a concentration in philosophy of language.

Learning how people use language not only to communicate, but also to obfuscate, or to explain or to avoid or just how people make language work comes, oddly enough, in handy when one is a writer and one is trying to develop characters and have them use language in particularly interesting ways. So, for me, the philosophy degree, on one hand, has been completely useless. I only have a bachelor’s in it, not a master’s or a doctorate. But on the other hand, it has been extraordinarily useful to me in the sense of the things I learned in philosophy, I use every day, not only when I write fiction, but nonfiction as well.

Galaxy’s Edge: One of my college humanities courses was taught by a philosophy professor. His said you could tell a lot about a nation by the structure and the content of their language.

John Scalzi: That’s entirely possible. I think it’s certainly true that the way that language is being used today and how we communicate with each other has made a huge difference in the politics of the day. So much of our discourse right now is about making rhetorical points, not necessarily to the advantage of political unity or political cohesiveness. And it’s not unintentional. Of course, we are also talking about the fact that social media is often used to manipulate public opinion, not only just in the matter of people talking to each other, but by specific actors using rhetoric in a way that gets other people to share it and shapes the conversation for good or for ill. I think it’s very important that we understand how rhetoric is used, how discourse matters, how the language that we use in describing others dictates how we feel.

I’m a liberal who lives in a county that went 81 percent for Trump. I have a lot of very liberal friends who are like: “Oh, my God, how can you live there? These are awful people.” It’s difficult to say, “Well, their politics are awful from my point of view, but 90 percent of the time when I’m dealing with my neighbors, politics is not the thing that comes up.”

Now, there are lots of ways that that can be broken down. You can’t just ignore what they are voting for. You can’t just say, “Oh, they’re good neighbors,” and leave it at that. And there’s some truth to that, but it’s also a matter of 90 percent of what I have to do with my neighbors on a daily basis isn’t about politics.

The question is, isn’t there more that connects us than separates us? How do we build our discourse and our rhetoric so that becomes the case, so that we can learn to cooperate where we can cooperate? And where we can’t cooperate, how do we learn to make that an issue that is very focused, as opposed to just a general No, we can no longer get along with these folks? It’s a very difficult, particular moment that we’re in, and we’ll just see where it goes in the next several years.

Galaxy’s Edge: Your first paying jobs were all nonfiction gigs. How did your experiences writing nonfiction contribute to your fiction?

John Scalzi: In a number of ways. The most practical thing is I learned to hit deadlines. Mostly. That is really important for me as a fiction writer, because whether or not we want to admit it, most of the people who write fiction are commercial writers. You want to be reliable and able to say, “I’m going to do this, and I’m gonna hit this deadline.” That sort of stuff is really important. If your publisher realizes they can trust you to produce a book each year, every year, and have it be of reasonable quality, then all of a sudden you are more likely to get a three-book deal or a four-book deal, or in my case, it was a ridiculous 13-book deal because they’re like, “Yeah, we can trust that Scalzi’s gonna have something for us every year.”

So, deadlines were a huge thing, but also the idea that writing was a gig. Writing was a job. Writing was a thing that you did day in and day out, and you didn’t wait for the news. Because if I was as a newspaperman waiting for the news before I wrote my reviews and before I wrote my feature pieces for my newspaper column, the copy editor would have come over and strangled me. Because news, schmooze, you have a three p.m. deadline. Hit it. I think that that is really useful, particularly if you are a commercial writer and you want to be seen as reliable. So, having writing demystified, having it just be a job, having it be something where everything needed to be in by three p.m. every day, or your stuff didn’t show up, and then your editor had to talk to you—all of these things were really important.

But I also think that it [contributed] a bit of character in terms of what my prose is like. I am not a particularly ornate prose writer. If you look at my prose and then you find out that the first ten years of my writing life was as a working journalist, all of a sudden, it’s like: “Wow. That makes sense.” Because the prose does not generally call attention to itself in a way that [the prose of] someone who has gone through fiction writing and everything else first necessarily does. This isn’t a complaint. This isn’t me saying what I do is better. Some of my favorite writers have prose that is so beautiful that it almost doesn’t matter about the story they’re telling, because each sentence is its own reward. My sentences are not the reward. Generally speaking, the story is the reward. It’s just a different type of writing, but it is a type of writing that suits me as a person and as a reader in many ways. So as far as it goes, I’m happy that I had that experience writing nonfiction.

The final thing that was really useful—and piggybacking on the thing about philosophy teaching you how to write and how to research—is when you are writing nonfiction and writing as a freelancer, you are basically writing whatever you can get, because that’s how you pay your bills. You learn very quickly how to research, how to find things, how to communicate those ideas quickly and simply, as much as you can. I had a lot of experience as a freelance writer and as a journalist becoming sort of an instant expert on things, or if not an expert—because now I can hear all the actual experts clearing their throats—then at least someone able to learn enough to communicate the precis of a concept to people who know even less about it than I do. That becomes very useful, particularly in science fiction, when you have all these really weird concepts that you need to get across to people who are encountering them for the first time in your prose.

Now we can say that science fiction readers are used to super cool concepts and will take a flyer. But I don’t write just for the dyed-in-the-wool science fiction readers. I also write for people who want a good story but don’t necessarily know that they like science fiction, or who have always said, “Oh, there’s so much I have to take on board. I don’t know that I can read science fiction.” I want to be someone who makes science fiction that you can give to your dad, or you can give to your grandma, or you can give to your kid. That being the case, the idea of explaining abstruse stuff in a way that we’re like, “And now you have enough, let’s go on with the story,” comes really in handy. So, I’m super grateful that my first few years were as a journalist and then as a freelancer, because I think it’s made all the difference in terms of both how I write and, when I got lucky enough to be successful, being able to maintain that success.

Galaxy’s Edge: You read a lot of mystery in science fiction before flipping the coin that had you trying your hand at writing science fiction. In other interviews, you’ve talked a lot about the SF writers who influenced you, but who are your heroes in the mystery canon? (I have a bet with myself on that.)

John Scalzi: Well, now I need to know who it is you’re thinking of.

Galaxy’s Edge: Dashiell Hammett.

John Scalzi: That’s not a bad guess at all, because it’s not only him, but the second order of people and the people who were influenced by him. Particularly, I’m thinking of Carl Hiaasen. The big three for me, in terms of being really enjoyable, were Elmore Leonard, Carl Hiaasen and Gregory Mcdonald, who wrote the Fletch books—and the Fletch books, in particular. I think if you look at the way I use dialogue and the way Gregory Mcdonald used dialogue in the Fletch books, you will see a lot of similarities. Not necessarily the same words, not necessarily the same tone, but having so much of the story told through people talking is something I definitely got from him. I mean, with the Fletch novels, it was such a prominent part of the books that it was on the covers. The cover treatment for the Fletch books originally was snippets of dialogue, which nobody ever did. Nobody ever made that a selling point of their books, and yet Gregory Mcdonald absolutely did.

[The thing about] Carl Hiaasen, for me, was the absurdity, being able to put absurdity in his books and still have it grounded into the real world, because he wrote all his books in Florida, where everything was possible no matter how ridiculous. With Elmore Leonard, a lot of it was tone. I think that that happens with folks like Hammett, as well. The thing about Hammett and Elmore Leonard is the way they so economically communicated where they were, where you were, what the characters were like, what they were doing, and what the world was like. The world-building that mystery writers do so quickly and in such shorthand is a portable skill. It’s not only something you can use in mystery. You can use it in science fiction and other genres, as well. I find it becomes super handy in science fiction. When I want to make people very quickly aware of where we are, what we’re doing, all that sort of stuff, I fall back on the mystery writers that I love more than I fall back on the science fiction writers.

One of the things I would say—and this is not necessarily fair, and it’s not necessarily true now—but back in the golden age of these genres, science fiction writers had more of a monopoly on ideas that were really cool, and mystery writers had a better grip on human relationships. I think that’s a gross oversimplification, and I don’t think that that’s true now. Science fiction has expanded what it does and who does it and how they do it. But that shorthand of establishing characters was very much more of one genre than the other. That’s why when I started writing science fiction, I was like: “Well, I can use more in my toolbox to write science fiction than just what is in science fiction.”

And it wasn’t just mystery. It was journalism. It was also humor. There’s as much Nora Ephron in my writing as there is Robert Heinlein. I think that’s really important to say: Science fiction and fantasy writers can get influences from anywhere. It’s important to be well-read—not only within your genre, which is a thing that science fiction writers have always done, but outside of it as well.

Galaxy’s Edge: Much of your science fiction seems to be a deliberate engagement with classic SF novels and media properties—Old Man’s War, Redshirts, Fuzzy Nation…. What’s at work here? Is this marketing savvy or something more thematic?

John Scalzi: Absolutely pure cynical marketing. I’ve gone to where the kids are.

No. The answer is kind of complex. I wrote Redshirts in part because I’m a fan of Star Trek, and I really wanted to. It was a world that I liked, and a world that I was exposed to, and a world that I wanted to honor. At the same time, I was well aware that nobody had actually written a book about redshirts, and it was inexplicable to me that nobody had. The reason was because everybody in science fiction was so familiar with redshirts as a concept and redshirts as a five-minute joke, that they never thought to…I don’t want to say they never thought of it as more, but nobody had taken that extra step and written that novel. And I was like: “Really? This is super low-hanging fruit, this big ripe fruit almost to the ground. It’s so low-hanging, and nobody has plucked this particular fruit.” I think everybody just looked at it and went: “That’s too low-hanging.” And I’m like: “No, I’m gonna take this fruit, and I’m gonna make a pie.”

When you look at a lot of stuff that I write, a lot of it echoes a lot of media. Old Man’s War is very clearly, and acknowledged as such, a riff on Starship Troopers and that tradition of science fiction. Redshirts is obviously Star Trek. Kaiju Preservation Society, which is coming out in March, is clearly riffing off not only people’s knowledge of Godzilla and all the Japanese movies but all the second-order movies like Pacific Rim as well, and everybody gets the joke. Again, part of that is just me. I’m writing a kaiju book because I wanted to read a kaiju book. But also, I am not unaware that when I go into Tor and I say, “Hey, I have this book, and it’s called Kaiju Preservation Society,” that the marketing people go Bzing! because they know that everybody will get it. That is not a difficult concept to sell to booksellers or to readers.

The same thing happened with Redshirts. I told my editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, “Hey, I’m writing a book.” And he’s like: “Great. What’s it called?” I said, “It’s called “Redshirts.” And he’s like: “Ah!” He immediately got it. He went to the marketing people and said, “Scalzi’s writing a new book.” “What’s the book called?” “It’s called Redshirts.” And they went, “Ah!” Then the marketing people went to the booksellers and said, “Hey, booksellers, Scalzi’s got a new book out. It’s called Redshirts.” And all the booksellers were like: “Ah!” They were all so excited.

The only person who wasn’t 100 percent with the brief right at the beginning was the guy who did the cover, Peter Lutjen, who is fantastic. He did all these amazing cover art treatments that were so clever and were so awesome, and we all looked at them and said, “Why isn’t there a red shirt?” To be clear, Pete Lutjen is the best. He’s just the best. He’s done so many good covers for everything including Redshirts, but you could just hear him going: “It’s too on the nose.” And we were like: “No, make it a red shirt, because then you can see it all the way across the bookstore.”

So, it’s a combination. I am a pop culture guy. I don’t pretend that I am not a pop culture guy, but more to that point, I also have no problem acknowledging that I’m a pop culture guy. But also, pop culture is a great place for someone who writes like me and who has goals like mine. Why did I write Redshirts? Because I wanted to and once I did, I was like: “I am not gonna deny this is gonna be something that everybody gets.” And everybody did get it.

Now, not everybody liked it. Redshirts is the book that has the largest number of one-star reviews and five-star reviews. There’s almost nothing in the middle. You either love it or you hate it. I find that I’m often polarizing that way. Either people are totally in for the John Scalzi experience, or they’re like, “Why Scalzi? Why? What is it with him? Why…” And they make strangling motions and stuff like that. I totally get it. I mean, I don’t think that I’m that polarizing in the actual text of what I write, but I am polarizing in how I write it. I am additionally polarizing because I’m a very outspoken person on the internet, but that’s mostly an aside.

~~~

Follow Arc Manor Books at:
Twitter / Facebook / Instagram

REVISITED: Interview with Author Mica Scotti Kole

(Originally posted August 9, 2022 by Alicia Cay)

An award-winning author, and a regular to the pages of Galaxy’s Edge Magazine, writer and editor Mica Scotti Kole gave us the chance to peal back the pages and get a glimpse inside the life of a dreamer, artist, and someone who has followed her dreams straight into a reality …

Mica is a published science fiction writer, developmental editor, and Writers of the Future winner. She’s currently pursuing traditional publication with a virtual-reality novel about a kid stuck inside a video game boss—all while making an Actual Living as a fantasy ghostwriter on the side. She grows too many plants, brews her own beer, and makes googly noises over her goofy husband and their one-too-many cats. She once wrote 25,000 words in one day.

Alicia Cay: Hi Mica, welcome!
While I was reading about your many interests, I found out that you: can forge signatures, brew your own beer (I love that you name them after Magic the Gathering cards!), interned for Speilburg Literary Agency, founded #write4life, are a developmental editor, and are now making a living ghostwriting. Wow! What else should we know about you?

Mica Scotti Kole: You should know that my first love was writing; I’ve been doing it since my letters were an inch tall, and my stories were about polar bears riding hoverboards fueled by coconut milk.

But the thing about writing is that it’s not very physical, and to combat that, I’ve picked up some physical hobbies. Right now, I’m learning home renovation one project at a time (I was recently at Home Depot buying so much base molding that a stranger asked if I owned my own business), and I’m doing some heavy duty gardening (while periodically digging up the same toad who is absolutely terrorizing me), and a few years ago I picked up homebrewing to try to get my husband out of his computer chair (beer? yes, please!) … which hasn’t worked (beer someone else made? That I don’t need to help with? Double yes please!).

Sadly, however, I’m currently addicted to the Genshin Impact video game… so I have even more reason to get out of my chair, if only to ensure the blood keeps flowing in my legs.

AC: I think being terrorized by this toad while gardening is an idea begging to be made into a short story—haha!
Speaking of short stories, you have a new one out—“Still City”—in the current issue of Galaxy’s Edge Magazine, July 2022, Issue 57.

“The walls are so bare, they reverberate. She took all the pictures down, but the memories still hang.”

Can I just say, this story is beautiful—futuristic, haunting, and full of longing—it makes the reader feel all the things that are going on in this story, but without telling them to feel it. Really lovely.

What inspired this story?

MSK: I’ve been through a divorce myself, at nineteen of all times. It taught me that people will endure a lot of bullshahonkey that makes them unhappy, clinging endlessly to something that is bad for them because Change Is Hard—until the one moment where some proverbial straw breaks the proverbial camel’s back, and they are just Done. I wanted to explore that point for a character.

At the same time, I also wanted to involve the powerful moment in the movie Shawshank Redemption where a character is released from a lifetime in prison, and the world he returns to is so different that he kills himself because he can’t understand it.

With these ideas, I then formulated a question: what if two people—presently getting a divorce—have to face a futuristic world with no one else but each other to help them deal with it? What would their final-straw moments be?

AC: That’s powerful! And once our readers check out your story “Still City” that explanation will hit home even harder.
You also have a short story — “Grave 657” — in a prior issue of Galaxy’s Edge Magazine, January 2021, Issue 48.
Tell us what that story is about? What inspired it?

MSK: Holy cow, this one has a story. During the Writers of the Future workshop, the mentors challenge the winners to write a short story in a day. We brainstormed these stories in “class”, and mine was about a robot mourning a human loss at a candlelight vigil.

One of the mentors, Orson Scott Card, absolutely destroyed this idea, rightfully saying that “a robot acting human” is too cliché, and to throw this story right out.

Um—challenge accepted?

So, I twisted the story up, made some changes, and Card ended up looking at a revised copy later. He then said to the whole group, “Look, I don’t know which of you wrote this, but I didn’t think you could do it, and you really, really pulled it off. Well done.” True glory moment, right there.

AC: That gave me goosebumps, what Scott Card said about your story. That is an incredible glory moment!
You mentioned you’re currently working on a virtual-reality novel about a kid stuck inside a video-game boss, and on your website it mentions a saga fantasy you’re writing—tell us about that one.

MSK: Oh, gosh, I’ve had to shelve that saga. I’m hoping I can get it out into the world someday … but it’s an elemental-type magic system (fire, water, earth, air) that spans seven planes of existence (Magic the Gathering actually invented the term “planeswalker”, so I can’t use it … cry).

The novel started off exactly as basic as it sounds, since I worked on it as a preteen; but as I aged, I wrote new stories from different worlds and times within this same invented universe. So, in a way, as I grew and improved as a writer, the story itself grew and improved as well. It was my learning experience, and I may return to rewrite it someday.

As a teaser though, the saga included: a modern-day competition to become God, multiple cities built over pits (of the lava and bottomless variety, respectively), and giant snails that control gravity. A far cry from the “let’s use the elements and defeat the evil guy” story it all began with 🙂

If you haven’t noticed, I like to take people somewhere dark and weird without them knowing they are headed somewhere dark and weird, until it’s too late. The same goes for some of my science fiction.

AC: I think taking your readers somewhere dark and weird is an excellent description of your award-winning short story, “Are You the Life of the Party?” in the Writers of the Future, Vol. 35, anthology.
This was the first piece of yours I read, and dear readers, it will stick with you long after you’ve put the anthology down.
Mica, this one is so dark it almost leans to horror in mood and tone. Was this piece intended to be horror?

MSK: It was supposed to be plain old science fiction … turns out it’s not only dark, but that the staff and other winners at Writers of the Future described it as, “Oh no, girl, this is totally horror.” I wasn’t aware it was even “dark” until I met my illustrator, and he said, “I knew my writer was a woman. I had four of you to guess from, and you were my last guess.”

Another glory moment, thank you and good night.

AC: I myself enter and know many other up-and-coming writers who enter the Writers of the Future contest. Tell us a bit about your win and what’s happened for you since then.

MSK: I’d only entered once and lost without mention, then barely squeaked into third place with my second, completely different entry. The main thing you get as a winner, I think, is encouragement—they really make you believe you can do this for a living, and they give you the advice to make it more possible than ever.

As for my writing career, oh boy did it pay off, but not immediately.
See my timeline:
2019: WotF inspires me to self-publish.
2019: I self-publish a seven-book fantasy erotica series.
2020: The series fails miserably.
2022: One of my fellow winners meets a guy who needs erotic fantasy ghostwriters, he remembers what I published, and refers me.

I now make good money writing fantasy—all because Writers of the Future inspired me to do the exact, specific things I needed to become the exact, specific ghostwriter this guy needed, while also giving me the exact connection I needed to get the job to begin with.

Basically, both connections and failures pay off, and the more you have of both, the better your chances of succeeding. WotF gave me what I needed to fail well, and also to eventually succeed.

AC: It’s so true in the writing world that “both connections and failures pay off.” I think it’s knowing things like that which inspire so many writers to keep at it—to keep climbing that mountain and writing the next story. Who are some writers that have inspired you?

MSK: M. J. Kuhn, who wrote Among Thieves—this woman is superhuman—her book (agented and published by a Simon & Schuster imprint) is incredible. It’s The Lies of Locke Lamora meets Six of Crows, and she wrote, pitched, and edited it while working a full-time job and working toward a master’s degree and working out every day and maintaining an online platform presence and being a friggin’ bridesmaid at my wedding. Oh, and she’s also a great person. Gods know that takes effort too.

I should stress here that a writer need not be superhuman to succeed. I really admire anyone who writes while having kids or a day job (or both), but everyone’s path is different. You don’t have to burn yourself out to succeed, either. Self-care is important (I’m looking at you, too, M. J.).

AC: Any favorite novels that have inspired you?

MSK: Interestingly, it was Maggie Stiefvater’s incredible writing (e.g. The Raven Boys) that anti-inspired me, in a good way. I was reading that novel and realized, this woman writes so beautifully. I can literally never be this good. It was actually quite freeing.

I discovered then that I was a commercial writer, not a prose artist, and that I didn’t have to be a word master to write for a living—I could just be me. And throwing away that yardstick changed my career for the better. After all, Brandon Sanderson writes without frilly words, and he does just fine, amirite?

AC: What moves you to write?

MSK: I’ve been writing since I was four years old and just never stopped. And when I found out—while reading Harry Potter—that I have the same birthday as both Harry and J. K. Rowling, well, that made it clear writing was my destiny. Twelve-year-old logic, but still.

Dreams usually inspire my stories somehow—some random, wacky dream snippet (say, the sole gamer who can speak to a child trapped in a game boss), that I then pair with another concept (let’s involve Roku’s Basilisk somehow!), setting (let’s play this virtual reality game while on board on a spaceship!), or idea (hmm, now there has to also be Dyson spheres) which eventually wrangles itself into a book. Which is an exact example from the book I’m currently revising, running title Armor Like Glass.

As for my inspiration to keep writing… I have to. Quite simply, I would die without it.

AC: Where can we read more of your work?

MSK: I have a (happier) story in the Resurrection Trust anthology.
There’s my WotF win, which is one of the best volumes ever, in more than just my opinion. Seriously, the winners my year were mind-blowing, and to even make third place beside these people is one of the greatest honors of my life.

I’ve also got my winning Reedsy story up, if anyone wants a freebie.
“Still City” – Galaxy’s Edge Magazine, July 2022, Issue 57.
“Three, Two, One”-Galaxy’s Edge Magazine, Sept 2021, Issue 52.
“Grave 657” – Galaxy’s Edge Magazine, Jan 2021, Issue 48.
And, I offer Developmental Editing Services, if anyone’s keen on that.
I’m focused on my novel now, so there’s not many of my short stories out there, except—Galaxy’s Edge Magazine has more coming out soon!

AC: That’s great to hear. I for one can’t wait to read them.
Thank you so much for this, Mica! We wish you all the best going forward.

Find more about Mica at her website ~ micascottikole.com

~~~

Follow Arc Manor Books at:
Twitter / Facebook / Instagram

REVISITED: The History of Time Travel: A Sci Fi Movie on Amazon Prime

(Originally published February 15, 2022 by Isaac Payne)

Every once in a while, you come across that one movie that really stick out, whether it’s a super unique concept or just an off-the-wall sort of film.

I recently found a sci fi movie on Amazon Prime that presents itself as a documentary, when it’s actually a sci fi concept film. The History of Time Travel is filmed like a classic documentary but it’s anything but that, and it’s certainly not a Doctor Who film, either.

Here’s a complete review of The History of Time Travel.

Some History

The History of Time Travel was an Austin Film Festival movie in 2014, but it had been in various stages of production since 2010.

The writer and director, Rick Kennedy, has worked on a few other films, most of which you’ve probably never heard of. A Year from Now is a Christmas Carol meets Groundhog Day film, and his first film, The Line, is about a prisoner escaping from Nazi Germany.

Of his work, The History of Time Travel stands out as a unique entity, mainly because the idea of filming an obviously fictional story as a documentary is particularly boggling.

In an interview with the Austin Film Festival, Kennedy says that some people “might enjoy the sci-fi elements more, or find the alternate histories interesting, or appreciate the humor and the absurdity of the whole thing,” and I certainly think he’s hit the nail on the head there.

The Premise

So, as you’ve probably guessed, The History of Time Travel is a fake documentary. It employs the classic documentary narrator to make ominous comments, and all of the “experts” and first-hand accounts seem to be on the same page about the story.

And the story revolves around Edward Page and his family. Page was an MIT graduate in the late 1930s and later became a researcher for the Indiana Project, a clandestine project funded by the Pentagon to create time travel.

The Indiana Project and the Manhattan Project ran parallel for many years, but after WWII ended with the atomic bomb, the Pentagon began to cut funding to time travel research.

At some point, someone designs a portable time machine. And I say someone because as the film goes on, it becomes unclear who invented the machine. Originally, it was Edward’s son, Richard, but as Richard goes back in time to fix his family, the timelines start to get jumbled.

Just know that there is a time machine, and it does work, and you’ll know. The history gradually starts to change as the film goes on. Even though Richard only intended to change one or two aspects of the world when he went back in time, he ended up changing the whole trajectory of American history.

Nixon is assassinated in Dallas instead of JFK, Russians land on the moon first—the list goes on.

Eventually, we reach a point where the rabid flurry of timelines convene, and the world returns to normal. Not to the normal of the first half of the film, but to our normal. The History of Time Travel becomes The Theory of Time Travel, and it’s on the Science Fiction Channel instead of the History Channel.

The Verdict

At first, the scripted nature of the movie made it feel very stiff and unrealistic. Sure, they had the conventions of a documentary, but everything seemed to line up too easily, and that’s how you knew it was scripted.

The experts—which included a sci fi author, a philosopher, and a few time-travel physicists and historians—all had a similar way of storytelling, which made it evident they were reading a script. Instead of acting as individual characters, they were simply voice actors reading lines.

They spent a lot of time in the first minutes of the movie discussing the family life of Edward Page, in pretty vivid detail. I didn’t quite understand why until the movie started to branch off into different timelines, and we literally saw our history change before our eyes.

I think that the film is bold and interesting. It takes the medium of the documentary and turns it into a sci-fi concept film, and that’s something I would have never paired together. It gives me the vibe of the Ancient Aliens TV show and other similar conspiracy-theory documentaries, but with a more creative flair.

The History of Time Travel had a fairly small budget, but the production value was pretty good. There were a few points where I giggled at the poorly Photoshopped “evidence”, but I think that only contributed to the humor.

Overall, I’d give the film a 7/10. It had an original concept, and even though it stumbled through the first twenty minutes, it ended with a potent question about time travel: “Would we even notice if it happened?”

Is it the best sci fi movie on Amazon Prime right now? Not by a long shot, but it’s certainly worth watching if you’re tired of all the lasers, spaceships, and aliens that populate mainstream sci fi film.

~~~

Follow Arc Manor Books at:
Twitter / Facebook / Instagram

REVISITED: Galaxy’s Edge Interviews Jonathan Maberry

(Originally posted on September 23, 2021 by Isaac Payne)

In the September 2021 issue of Galaxy’s Edge, Jean Marie Ward interviewed Jonathan Maberry, prolific writer and editor of Weird Tales magazine. Check out the full interview below …

About Jean Marie Ward

Jean Marie Ward writes fiction, nonfiction and everything in between. Her credits include a multi-award nominated novel, numerous short stories and two popular art books. The former editor of CrescentBlues.com, she is a frequent contributor to Galaxy’s Edge and ConTinual, the convention that never ends. Learn more at JeanMarieWard.com.

Confessions of a High-Output Writer

New York Timesbestselling author Jonathan Maberry credits his grandmother, his middle school librarian, and the college professor he once hated most with turning him into writer. But it’s doubtful they or his former mentors, Ray Bradbury and Richard Matheson, could have foreseen how far their lessons would take him. The short list of his honors includes five Bram Stoker Awards, the Inkpot Award, three Scribe Awards, multiple teen book awards, and designation as a Today Top Ten Horror Writer. His many novels and anthologies have been sold to more than thirty countries. As a comics writer, he has written dozens of titles for Marvel Comics, Dark Horse, and IDW Publishing. V-Wars, the shared world anthology series he created for IDW Publishing, has been made into a Netflix series starring Ian Somerhalder, who previously appeared in Lost and The Vampire Diaries. Maberry’s young adult Rot & Ruin series was adapted as a webtoon for cell phones and is in development for film. As if that wasn’t enough, he currently serves as the president of the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers AND as editor of the iconic Weird Tales magazine.

Huffing and puffing to keep up, Galaxy’s Edge talked to Maberry about his origins as a writer, the experiences that shaped him into a multi-genre powerhouse, and the seminal role Black Panther played in his life.

Galaxy’s Edge: You’ve said many times that you always wanted to be a writer. As a young child you made stories up about your toys. What pointed you in the direction of horror?

Jonathan Maberry: My grandmother, who was my favorite blood relative, was basically a grownup version of Luna Lovegood from Harry Potter. She was that person who believed in everything. She believed in what you call “the larger world”—ghosts, goblins, and by extension, things like UFOs and alternate dimensions in the realms of fairy. She believed in everything. She was born on Halloween, and she embraced that. She only had pets that were born on Halloween. In fact, she gave me the very first pet I ever had, my dog Spooker. There’s a picture of him behind me on the wall. [My grandmother] gave him to me because he was born on Halloween.

She got me involved in the spooky stuff. But what’s interesting is, not only did she tell me all the folklore tales and some of the fictional tales of monsters, she encouraged me to read the anthropology, the science, and the commentary on why people believe these things. Even though she was very broad in her belief systems, she felt that there was a connection to our real world. She felt that what we consider to be the supernatural—or the preternatural, or the paranormal (there are different variations)—are all parts of a world we will eventually learn how to measure, and that we only know about one hundredth or 1 percent of what we will eventually know. So, she considered these things to be future science.

From there, I started learning about vampires, werewolves, and all sorts of things. Of course, I started watching the TV shows and the movies, and became hooked on those. I loved the folktales, the fiction, and the nonfiction. In fact, the first couple of books I did on the supernatural were nonfiction, exploring beliefs about the paranormal and supernatural around the world throughout history. I wrote those books because of her and because of the things she’d exposed me to as a kid.

Galaxy’s Edge: This is probably unfair to your hometown, but my mom was from Philadelphia, and I lived in the suburbs from 1969 to 1977. So, I’ve got to ask, how much did living in Philadelphia during Frank Rizzo’s tenure as police commissioner and mayor shape your vision of monsters?

Jonathan Maberry: Well, it didn’t so much shape my vision as monsters as it did shape my vision of a corrupt police state, which may have informed my love of writing thrillers with corrupt officials. [Rizzo] was not only corrupt, he was notoriously and openly corrupt. It was a reinforcement of the same skewed view of how power was used by those in power over those who didn’t have power that I had learned from home. Because I grew up in a very abusive home with a very dictatorial and violent father in a blue-collar neighborhood that was very violent. A lot of abuse.

There were also a lot of people in the neighborhood who were involved in the police department in one way or another. Rizzo was a policeman’s mayor, you know. Not a good policeman’s mayor, but a policeman’s mayor. He would have been a really good mob boss had he been in Chicago in the ’Thirties. It gave me a very jaundiced view of political power. And the fact that for him, it wasn’t even about party. It was just power. He was a manipulative sociopath in power. That’s a pattern we’ve seen elsewhere.

Galaxy’s Edge: Yes, it is. I also wondered what role did observing this abuse of power play in your writerly activism. You’re involved with multiple writers’ organizations. You founded the Philadelphia Liars Club and Writers Coffeehouses across the country specifically to help writers. Was there a connection between the two?

Jonathan Maberry: It was more of an economic thing, because in the neighborhood where I grew up—actually, in my own household—reading was not encouraged. In fact, if we were seen reading a book, the most commonly asked question was, “Are you trying to get above yourself?” My father used to ask that all the time. And of course, the thought I had was, “No, I’m trying to get above you.”

The desire to educate myself out of that environment was really strong. Not only was reading not encouraged, creative expression of that sort was viewed as impractical and something of an insult to people who are hard-working blue-collar stiffs, which is not the case. You rise to the call of your genius. Whatever you feel you do best is what you should try to do. Writing is what I always wanted to do, and I found so many other writers who had been browbeaten by everyone they knew, even well-intentioned family members, because it’s too hard, you’re not gonna make any money, you’re not gonna do this. It’s all this negative propaganda that is parroted at all levels. It comes down from somewhere, but it filters through family, from neighborhood, through high school counselors.

My high school counselor tried to talk me out of being a writer. That neighborhood, that environment, was all about getting out of school, getting into a factory, and paying the bills. That was it, and that’s doom to a writer. I mean, it’s worse than a prison sentence.

I got some unexpected help along the way from incredible writers who I met in most unlikely circumstances, Ray Bradbury and Richard Matheson, in particular. They didn’t need to help me. It was of no actual benefit to them. But they saw someone who was trying to write their way out of where they were and into the future they wanted. And they helped.

As an inspiration, that can’t be beat. So, whenever I had the opportunity to use my position, my connections, my experience, whatever, to help other writers move up and break through the propaganda, break through the self-doubt, into the opportunity to do something worthwhile with their skills, I took it. It’s tied also to a viewpoint that I saw a lot as a kid, but also saw reinforced during the economic downturn of 2008-2009.

There are two camps of writers. One camp seems to feel that if somebody asks you for advice, or a lead, or something, and you give it to them, that means you’re denying it to yourself. That camp feels opportunities are finite, that open doors are finite, that if you help someone else, you’re screwing yourself. It’s a very fear-based viewpoint. It’s also a very popular viewpoint. The other camp believes that if writers help other writers to become better writers, more good books will get written. Those good books will attract more book sales and more readers, and everyone will prosper.

One approach is fear-based, and the other is optimism-based. I’ve always felt that the optimism-based approach is what’s going to get us out of the mud that we’re stuck in when we grow up in an environment like that and have been propagandized like that.

Galaxy’s Edge: Your first fiction series, the Deep Pine Trilogy, drew a lot on the knowledge and love of folklore your grandmother inspired. But your later works, notably, V-Wars and the Joe Ledger series display a profoundly scientific bent. What drew you to blending science and horror?

Jonathan Maberry: Again, that started with my grandmother encouraging me to read the science, the folklore, even the medicine, to explain things. For example, a lot of the beliefs about evil spirits coming to draw the life out of a sleeping child were really ways for less educated people in earlier centuries to explain things like sudden infant death syndrome. If you look at the science of it, you can understand the belief. With that comes also understanding of the needs for [the belief]. I’ll explain with SIDS.

A healthy child goes to bed and dies. There are no marks. There’s nothing to suggest that it was harmed. But maybe the window was open, and people say, “Oh, something got in.”

But say this is the 17th century, and a child died under those circumstances. It feels so arbitrary that it puts people out of sync with their religious beliefs. Why would a loving God allow an innocent child to die like that? So, the parents go to their priest, which was the common thing to do, because the local church was the center of knowledge and where information was shared. The priest says, “Well, you must have sinned in some way, say these prayers, put up these relics, and it won’t happen again.” Sudden infant death syndrome rarely happens again within the same family. So, the next child doesn’t die after the rituals, and the people have a reinforcement of their faith.

Thus the presence of the belief in a monster that has come and taken the life of the child becomes necessary to reinforce their belief in a protective God. Reading the science of that not only gives me a historical and clinical perspective, it gives me real insight into character motivations as needs, and the way in which a story then evolves into a satisfying conclusion.

Galaxy’s Edge: Did meeting Richard Matheson have anything to do with it?

Jonathan Maberry: Richard Matheson is the biggest influence on my style. Even though I write in about a dozen different genres, almost everything I write is built on the structure of a thriller, the race against time to prevent something from happening—as opposed to a suspense, where we’re all in the moment or in a mystery we’re solving. The thriller is that race against time. {Matheson’s] novel, I Am Legend (which he gave me a copy of for Christmas 1973) is a prototypical thriller. I mean, it’s a prototype for the thrillers that came afterwards.

[In I Am Legend] something comes up. A big calamity ends the world. You have the apocalyptic element of the story. You also have a science element to the story because it was the first time that a horror story or the genre of science fiction horror used actual science to try to explain itself.

Prior to that science fiction horror like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or Frankenstein made references to chemicals or galvanism without going into any detail. In I Am Legend, [Matheson] actually went into the experiments to find bacillus vampiris, which created the vampire plague. He gave us the scientific explanation, the step-by-step. That made it so much more real. The story became more riveting and more threatening to the reader, because now that line between reality and fiction is blurred. That makes it a really compelling thriller.

I’ve taken that model and applied it to almost everything I’ve written. I also use this old con man saying: “Use nine truths to sell one lie.” I build my fiction on a scaffolding of pretty solid science. I do a lot of research, so it’s harder for the reader to know when I have stepped off into fantasy. That started with Matheson and a lot of what Matheson told me when I was a kid.

Galaxy’s Edge: Fifteen-years-old is a very impressionable age, isn’t it?

Jonathan Maberry: Yes.

Galaxy’s Edge: You imprinted on him.

Jonathan Maberry: Well, I met him when I was 12. It was the middle school librarian at my school in Philly who introduced me to him, Bradbury, and others. There was a group of writers who would meet occasionally in New York, and she worked as a kind of informal secretary for them. She dragged me along, partly as baggage and partly because she knew I wanted to write. They took me on as a pet project. All of these great writers, Arthur C. Clarke and Harlan Ellison—whoever was in town—took time to give me advice, like they were competing with one another to give me the best advice that night. I’m really cool with that kind of attention. In fact, the tenth-anniversary edition of Ghost Road Blues, my first novel, has the last ever cover quotes from Bradbury and Matheson.

Galaxy’s Edge: Oh, how wonderful! Now you’re paying forward the help you received.

Jonathan Maberry: Which I should. We should all do that, because there’s not one person who has ever gotten anywhere significant without help. And often, too often, people don’t pause to explain that help was there, who helped them, or to even focus on their own gratitude for what happened. You know, it’s not all about us. It’s literally about us—the community, not the individual. I get so jazzed seeing people take that step, get that deal, or hit a list. It’s like an ongoing party.

Galaxy’s Edge: Returning to the subject of science and pseudoscience, we both grew up in a time when educators and behaviorists believed that growing minds should be shielded from the horrors of things like Weird Tales, EC comics, and Hammer Films. As evidenced by your YA titles, such as the Rot & Ruin series, you see things differently. Why is horror important for young adult readers?

Jonathan Maberry: Because horror is almost always a metaphor for things that are happening in real life. I grew up, as I said, in an abusive household, a very violent household, and a violent neighborhood. There was nobody shielding me as a kid. As a result, I think I got a more clear and well-balanced perspective on life than I would have had if I had been sheltered. Sheltering someone from immediate harm—like pulling your kid away from a hot oven—okay, that’s smart. But not allowing the kid to understand the nature of danger, the nature of heroism, the nature of survival, or all the different qualities that they will need as adults? Sheltering them from that is silly, because it’s not like once they graduate from high school, they suddenly get a download of all these survival skills. They don’t. They have to acquire them along the way.

I remember just talking to my friends as a kid. We were a lot deeper than the adults thought we were. All kids are deeper than adults think they are. To shelter them is a great way to prevent that intellectual growth, empathic growth, and societal awareness. Anytime you shelter, you blind. Anytime you allow the kid to see and then make decisions, and form their own opinions, you’re encouraging growth. It’s useful if parents are there to have conversations about it, but not to stand in the way.

Galaxy’s Edge: You’ve worked extensively in comics, television, and animation. How difficult was it to switch from writing novels and short stories to scripting comics and other broadcast media?

Jonathan Maberry: Well, I haven’t actually written TV scripts yet. I’ve had stuff adapted. I was executive producer, but I was not actually writing the scripts. I haven’t done that yet. I’m studying the form because I will be doing that.

As far as comics go, comics were a bit of a culture shock for me. I mean, I grew up with comics. I was a Marvel kid. I’ve read all the Marvel Comics. But to write them? I write very long novels. My first novel is 148,000 words. It’s a long novel where you can have long conversations with characters, long descriptions, long interior monologues, and so on. But you can’t in comics. Brevity is very important. But also with comics, you have to realize that it is no longer a solo act. With a novel, it’s you and your laptop. With comics, you write the script. You describe what’s in each panel, so you give the art direction. Sure.

But then the artist comes in, and the artist’s A game is to do visual storytelling. You have to learn how to not yield control but share the process, so that they are able to do their best work while you’re doing yours. Then the colorist, and the letterer all have artistic contributions to make. It’s a much more collaborative process. I’ve been told by friends of mine who have gone from comics to writing TV, that it’s excellent training for writing for television, because TV and film are also collaborative. I’m now in the process of pitching a TV series with a couple producer friends, and everything is collaborative. We all have strong ideas, but it’s not one person’s gig. So I learned a lot of that from comics.

One funny thing happened when I just started writing comics. I love dialogue. So I had a lot of dialogue in one of my first comics, and the artist very politely said, “At any point, would you like the readers to be able to see the art?” And I’m like, “Oops.”

It’s funny, I had already been warned about that by Joe Hill, who is the son of Stephen King, and a great writer himself. [Hill] had had almost exactly the same conversation with Gabriel Rodriguez, who was his artist for Locke & Key. Joe said, “Do your draft, and then cut it back by 80 percent.” And I’m thinking, “I don’t need to do that.” Then I got that email, and it was: “Oh, yeah, I need to do that.” The comic was better for it, by the way…

Friends of mine, like Gregg Hurwitz, who wrote Batman and a lot of TV, said, “Writing an issue of comics is very similar to writing an hour of TV drama.” Even the beats are the same, because you have to have dramatic beats for ads and page breaks, which are not that dissimilar from the beats for commercial breaks. He said, “It’s about 75 percent. If you can write a comic book, you’re 75 percent there for how to write a TV script.”

Galaxy’s Edge: Speaking of comics, I didn’t realize when I was drafting my questions that the way you got involved with the Black Panther comic was among the most important events of your life, both in terms of your introduction to the comic, and later in terms of writing it. Would you mind talking a little bit about that?

Jonathan Maberry: When I was a kid, I got involved in Marvel Comics in a big way. I was really a huge fan of Marvel, my favorite comic being The Fantastic Four. The character of the child of the Black Panther was introduced in one of the early issues. I think it was issue 54 of Fantastic Four.

My father, who was deeply racist and involved in the Ku Klux Klan, was very upset that I was reading a comic in which a black man was a king, a superhero, and a scientist. He tore the comic up. He knocked me around for even having it. But a couple of years later, I took another issue of that comic in which the Black Panther appeared to my middle school librarian, the same one introduced me to Matheson and Bradbury. I said, “I’d get in trouble if I show this to my father. Can [you] tell me about this?” And she said, “Well, that particular issue is about apartheid.” I had no idea what that was.

[I showed her] another issue that I brought with me, and she said, “That one’s about the Jim Crow laws.” She kept asking me if I knew about these things, and I didn’t, because all that had been suppressed in my neighborhood. I met no one of color until I was in seventh grade, not one person. I wound up diving deep into an understanding of racism and intolerance. As much as Philadelphia is the City of Brotherly Love, there was a lot of racism there. In certain parts of the city, it was pretty intense, especially in the ’Sixties. That understanding opened my eyes. You know, you have a choice. You can close your eyes and pretend the world is what you were trained to believe, or you can keep your eyes open to see the world for what it actually is.

I don’t believe in closing one’s eyes. The old nature versus nurture thing is actually an imperfect equation. It’s nature versus nurture, versus choice. Choice is a big thing. I chose to keep my eyes open.

I went diving deep into understanding racism. It changed the course of my life and split me from my father forever. Every part of my personality, every part of my understanding of the world and fairness and everything of history pivoted on that moment. It is the most important single moment of my life.

Roll forward to 2008-2009. I had just started writing for Marvel Comics, and Reginald Hudlin who is the founder of BET, an Academy Award-winning producer, and was then the writer of Black Panther, heard this anecdote. He suggested to the editor-in-chief of Marvel that when he stepped down, they have me write the comic.

Now, this was a challenge. At this point, Black writers were writing the Black Panther comic, and I agree with having Black writers write that comic. It’s the iconic, first Black superhero ever. But that child had saved my life too. It had changed me. Just as it changed the lives of a lot of Black kids who found that character, it changed my life as a White kid who found the character. And they asked me if I would write a comic which, of course, I wanted to write. I actually cried when I was told that they were offering this to me.

But also, because I had been teaching women’s self-defense for so many years, including 14 years at Temple University, they made a change in the character. T’Challa got injured in the comic, and his sister Shuri had to step up to become the Panther. So what they handed me was the feminist Black Panther comic to write, which I did for two years. It was one of the greatest honors of my career, and so much fun. And I’m pretty sure that my father was spinning in his grave at warp speed because this was everything he would have hated, and it’s everything that I became because that character help split me off from him.

It’s one of my favorite memories, and one of my favorite things to say is: “Yeah, I was part of that actual world. I was part of the Black Panther. I have my own guest membership in Wakanda.”

Galaxy’s Edge: Amazing. Simply amazing. You never know where the words you put on the page will take someone you never met.

That’s an impossible act to follow, but I do have a couple of questions left. With all the articles, books, comics, greeting cards, and everything else you’ve written, what prompted you to add editing to your resume?

Jonathan Maberry: When I got into novels, which was only 2006, I thought that was all I was gonna do. I had no interest in writing short stories. Then I was invited to write a couple of short stories for different anthologies. I liked the process, but I generally do not do a project unless I become familiar with the other players. So, I started having conversations with the editors, getting insights into what they do and seeing how much they loved it. You know, they’re the first people to read stories [they’ve commissioned] by their favorite writers. I said, that sounds like Christmas morning.

So, I started putting out feelers. But the way I started editing my World War Z anthologies was kind of funny. Max Brooks had been editing an anthology of G.I. Joe stories—the little Hasbro toys. He invited me to write a novella for it, which I did. He had originally planned to do a couple of different anthologies for that same publisher, IDW Publishing. But after [the G.I. Joe] project, he had to go and do something else.

So IDW asked me if I would like to edit the next anthology. I had just finished reading a whole bunch of shared world anthologies, and I thought, “Wow, that’s kind of fun. If I’m gonna do one, I might as well do one where I can play too.” Generally, the editor of an anthology does not contribute a story. But in a shared world, they usually create the world, write a framing story, and other people write individual stories.

So, I pitched one about a plague that turns people into vampires. It became V-Wars, my first anthology, and I loved it. I curated it. I invited those friends of mine who were really good writers, but who were also of the same emotional bent as me in that I felt they were good-hearted people, people who were generous with their colleagues, especially with newer colleagues, and played well with others. I do not work with people who are prima donnas. It’s just not worth the effort. I want people who are having fun but also professional. I fell in love with them.

I’ve edited 18 anthologies. Then later on, a producer friend, who was involved in the return of Weird Tales magazine, asked if would I be interested in coming aboard to help curate and edit some issues. I started out as consulting editor or editorial director—I think that was the first title. But by the second issue, I was actually the editor. And well, I’m working with my next two issues simultaneously.

Galaxy’s Edge: That is a heavy workload. Anything related to a periodical is a full-time job.

Jonathan Maberry: Yeah, but I had really interesting training. I went to Temple University School of Journalism, and I had a couple of teachers, notably John Hayes, who was a teacher I hated while at school, and now I wanna put him up for sainthood. He taught me how to be a high-output writer, which is a skill set. I didn’t know I would like to do that. Turns out it’s where I’m having the most fun. I wouldn’t have taken on the editorial gigs had I not felt that I could work them into my schedule while still writing three to four novels a year and short stories. I’m having a blast doing it. Yeah, it makes for some long days sometimes, but it’s a long day doing what you love. It’s not like it’s a hardship.

Galaxy’s Edge: We’re coming up on the end of the interview. Is there anything you’d like to add?

Jonathan Maberry: For any writer out there who’s reading this, the Writers Coffeehouse has, because of COVID, moved online. You can find us on Facebook at Facebook.com/groups/TheWritersCoffeehouse. It is free. It is a community of writers helping each other with no agenda other than to help each other. So go check it out on Facebook. Also, if you go to my website, JonathanMaberry.com (only one “Y”), there’s a whole page of free stuff for writers—comic book scripts, novels, samples, and so on. It’s all downloadable PDFs. Go grab what you need.

~~~

Follow Arc Manor Books at:
Twitter / Facebook / Instagram

REVISITED: Weird Movies on Netflix: Bigbug

(Originally published July 20, 2022 by Isaac Payne)

In general, science fiction movies tend to err on the weirder side of media, and that’s just a fact of their nature. But, there are some weird movies on Netflix that fit too nicely in the sci-fi genre, and Bigbug is at the forefront of those films.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet has developed a reputation as a science fiction writer and director. Over the course of his career, he’s imagined many futuristic worlds, some bleak, some optimistic. His first feature film, Delicatessen (1991) takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where famine has ravaged much of the population. His characters live above a delicatessen, and are picked off by the butcher who runs the shop, eventually turned into meaty treats.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet was even the director or Alien Resurrection, and his film Amélie was nominated for a few Academy Awards.

Suffice to say that he’s a pretty established guy, and Bigbug is his first feature film to come out in the past 10 years.

Bigbug stars Isabelle Nanty, Elsa Zylberstein, Claude Perron, Stéphane De Groodt, and Youssef Hajdi, among others. The film received lackluster reviews, including a 5.7/10 on Rotten Tomatoes and an even lower score on Metacritic.

Despite this, I found the film to be profoundly interesting, both visually and narratively, as well as quite odd. Here’s a brief summary of the plot:

Bigbug Summary

Alice, a suburban mother and artist, lives in a smart home that’s equipped with multiple different robots, some of which are designed for cleaning, others act as maids. When the film starts, we see Alice flirting with Max, a man who pretends to take interest in her artistic endeavors and her bookish nature.

As the story continues, many other characters come into the house, including the neighbor, Alice’s ex-husband and his girlfriend, and Alice’s daughter, Nina. Once all the characters are inside the house, the systems AI, Nestor, locks the doors, citing code C4 because the outside danger level surpassed acceptable limits.

On the news, the characters see a terrible traffic jam, due to automated car malfunctions. And frequently, the television will play the show Homo Ridiculous, which features humans in humiliating situations for the Yonyx clones. The Yonyx are a group of intelligent, violent, AI clones that despise humans.

Most of the movie revolves around the characters trying to get out of the house, while the robots working to please their human counterparts by searching for what it means to be human.

Eventually, things come to a head when the Yonyx show up, but I won’t ruin the ending for you!

What’s So Weird About Bigbug?

Bigbug has a bit of a weird feeling to it for a few reasons. First, it was originally in French, but I watched the English dub on Netflix. The voices and the lips of the characters didn’t match up, which made the whole thing rather trippy, especially since there is supposed to be a big contrast between the robots and AI and the humans. But with the dub, it makes everyone feel a bit like a glitching robot.

Another element of the film that was confusing–and somewhat uncomfortable at times–was the sexual overtones. Pretty much all the of the characters, aside from one or two, were driven by sexual urges, and often ended up being sexually frustrated. Alice and Max spend most of the movie skirting around other characters trying to have sex, while Nina and Max’s son, Leo, have a similar relationship.

Even the robots get oddly sexual. Monique, the maid-AI, follows around Max trying to be seductive like Alice, and the whole thing just comes off as cringy.

I think that the sexual nature of the film helps to portray the humans as driven by instinct, which gives them an animalistic feeling. When contrasted with the Yonyx, who are hard, smart, and cold, the humans just feel kind of lame and useless without their technology.

And that hunts at one of the larger themes of the film, which is whether or not humans are important in a world where robots and AI are ten times smarter, faster, and more efficient than humans.

It’s a common theme in science fiction, dating all the way back to the 1920s and even something that we are seeing unfold before our very eyes, with things like Google’s AI and Blake Lemoine’s leaked interview.

The key takeaway from Bigbug is veiled behind flashy suburbanite futurisms and sexual desire. Its message is simply that humans are lucky. Despite their flaws and their antics, their technologies eventually get too smart for their own good. Some might even say that our saving grace is that we’re simple creatures! And being simple isn’t always a bad thing.

So despite being just a weird movie on Netflix, Bigbug shows us that the more complex we become, the more problems we encounter. What’s wrong with reading books, practicing calligraphy, and drinking vodka shots? Seems like a good way to pass the time to me.

~~~

Follow Arc Manor Books at:
Twitter / Facebook / Instagram

THE FINAL ISSUE: GALAXY’S EDGE MAGAZINE—THE LAST WEEK

Oof! This is an emotional post to put down on the page.

Not only has Galaxy’s Edge magazine been out for ten years in print with a whopping 61 issues under its belt, but here we are, not only our final issue, but also the last week of our free, two-month preview of this issue on the Galaxy’s Edge website.

In the past several weeks, we’ve shared with you a bit of history from the creator of this magazine, Mike Resnick, from a look back to his Editor’s Notes in Issue One, where he shared with us a history of some of the magazines in the field of Science Fiction and Fantasy, to his Editor’s Notes from Issue Two, where he went on to tell us more about some of the writers and editors in this genre.

We went on to share some story teasers from our final issues, here in Part 1 and Part 2; a teaser of the final Editor’s Note from our current Editor-in-Chief, Lezli Robyn; Highlights from Issue 62; our final Review Roundup from Richard Chwedyk; and a short story from Mr. Mike Resnick, the creator of this magazine.

Head over to Galaxy’s Edge, take a peek around one last time, and join us in waving farewell to this version of Galaxy’s Edge magazine.

We’ll have news about our upcoming semi-annual themed anthology series soon!

Stay tuned for all the details, and the open call … when it comes.

Thank you. ♥

~~~

Follow Arc Manor Books at:
Twitter / Facebook / Instagram

GALAXY’S EDGE MAGAZINE: A LOOK BACK (CONT.) ISSUE TWO

A couple of weeks ago, we shared a look back to Issue One’s: The Editor’s Word by Mike Resnick. In that article, Mike shared some of the “colorful” history of the Science Fiction world and then promised to return in Issue Two with a story or two about the writers and editors who make up this genre.

Keep reading for a look back and a little fun.

~~~

From the end of the last Editor’s Word by Mike Resnick:

“Mike here again. Okay, now you know a bit about the magazines. Next issue I’ll tell you about some of the writers and editors who make up this colorful field.”

And now …

THE EDITOR’S WORD
by Mike Resnick

~May 2013~

Welcome to the second issue of Galaxy’s Edge. Like the first, and all future issues, this one is a mixture of new stories and reprints, reviews and columns. The reprints are stories you may have missed by very-well-known authors, and the new stories are by authors who we expect to join the ranks of the well-known somewhere up the road.

And while I’m on the subject of well-known authors …

We have quite a coup this issue. The magnificent C. L. Moore has been one of my two or three favorite authors for the past half century, and I assure you I’m not alone in this regard. She broke into print in her early twenties, and her very first story, “Shambleau,” which appeared in a 1933 issue of Weird Tales, is an acknowledged classic.

Well, “Shambleau” was her first professional story, but it turns out that her very first published story was “Happily Ever After,” which appeared in the November 1930 issue of The Vagabond, a student magazine published by Indiana University. It’s quite short, but it shows that she had the right stuff even then. And with this issue, Galaxy’s Edge is thrilled to be able to present—for the first time in 83 years—C. L. Moore’s very first story. Thanks to Catherine for writing it, and to Andrew Liptak for unearthing it.

And why (I hear you ask) was she “C. L.” rather than “Catherine”? The general assumption is that she was hiding her gender in what was an almost all-male field. Logical, but wrong. She was hiding her name from her employer, a bank president who viewed the pulps with total loathing.

An interesting historical tidbit?

Yes, it is—and it’s just one of many.

So many people are so interested in the giants of our field—many, alas, no longer with us—that I thought I’d share some memories of them with you before they’re all forgotten by me and others.

***

The late Robert Sheckley was my good friend, and even my collaborator the year before his death.

Bob occasionally suffered from Writer’s Block, but he had an infallible way of beating it. He set himself an absolute minimum production of 5,000 words a day. If he couldn’t think of anything else, he told me, he’d write his name 2,500 times. And on those days he was blocked, he’d sit down and force himself to start typing. And to quote him: “By the time I’d typed ‘Robert Sheckley’ 800 or 900 times, a little subconscious editor would kick in and say ‘Fuck it, as long as you’re stuck here for another 3,300 words, you might as well write a story.’”

According to Bob, it never failed.

***

E. E. “Doc” Smith was the first pro I ever met at a con, back in 1963. Sweet man, very fond of fandom, very accessible to anyone. I always thought his greatest invention (other than the Lens and the Lensmen) was the seasonal Ploorians. Doc’s daughter, Verna Trestrail, became a good friend, and I used to see her every year at Midwestcon and Rivercon. She once remarked that she helped her dad from time to time. So I asked how, and she replied that, among other things, she had invented the Ploorians.

(Verna also created the planet where Clarissa had to function in the nude. She told me that Doc bought a gorgeous painting of it—and Mrs. Doc took one look at it and consigned it to the attic for the next 25 years.)

***

I met Robert A. Heinlein only a couple of times, at the 1976 and 1977 Worldcons, so I have no personal anecdotes to tell you about him—but Theodore Sturgeon had one. There was a point in the mid-1940s where Sturgeon was played out. He couldn’t come up with any saleable stories, his creditors were after him, and he was terminally depressed…and he mentioned it to Heinlein in a letter. A week later he got a letter from Heinlein with 26 story ideas and a $100 bill to tide him over until he started selling again. And, according to Sturgeon, before the decade was over he had written and sold all 26 stories.

***

I never met Fredric Brown. I know he grew up in Cincinnati, where I have lived the past 37 years, but no one here remembers meeting him. And I know he spent a lot of time working in Chicago, where I spent my first 33 years, and I never met anyone there who knew him either. But I do know he had a habit, especially when writing his mysteries (which far outnumbered his science fiction) of getting on a Greyhound bus and riding it for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of miles, until he had his plot worked out to the last detail. Then he’d come home, sit down, and quickly type the book he’d already written in his head while touring the countryside.

***

Phil Klass (who wrote as “William Tenn”) told this one on a panel I moderated at Noreascon IV, the 2004 Worldcon where he was the Guest of Honor.

He was dating a new girl, and he mentioned it to Ted Sturgeon when they were both living in New York. Sturgeon urged Phil to bring the girl to his apartment for dinner. He and his wife would lay out an impressive spread, and Ted would regale the girl with tales of how talented and important Phil was. Phil happily agreed.

What he didn’t know was that Ted and his then-wife were nudists. So Phil and the girl walk up to the door of Ted’s apartment, Phil knocks, the door opens, and there are Ted and his wife, totally naked. They greet them and start leading them to the dining room.

Phil’s girl turns to him and whispers: “You didn’t tell me we had to dress for dinner!”

***

Speaking of dinners …

At our first Worldcon, Discon I in 1963—I was 21, my still-beautiful bride Carol was 20—Randall Garrett invited a bunch of new writers and their spouses out for dinner—his treat. Then, during dessert, he excused himself to say something of vital importance to his agent, who was walking past the restaurant. He left the table—and we never saw him again. The rest of us got stuck with the tab (it was an expensive restaurant, we were broke kids, and Randy himself had the most expensive dish and wine on the menu).

Move the clock ahead three years. Randy spots Carol and me at Tricon (the 1966 Worldcon in Cleveland) and offers to buy us dinner. We say sure. During dessert Carol excuses herself to go powder her nose, and I remember a phone call I have to make. We meet and walk out, leaving Randy with the tab he had promised to pay (but, according to Bob Bloch, Bob Tucker, and others I’d spoken to before going out with him, had no intention of paying).

Move the clock ahead one more year, and we’re at NYcon III, the 1967 Worldcon in New York. On opening night Randy spots me across the room, turns red in the face, and yells: “Resnick, I’m never eating dinner with you again!”

I got an ovation from every pro and fan he’d ever stuck with a dinner check.

***

And let me end with one about a living giant, just to be different—my friend, Nebula Grand Master, Worldcon Guest of Honor, and contributor to this issue, Robert Silverberg.

When Bob started submitting to Astounding, John Campbell turned down his first few stories, and Bob’s sometime collaborator Randy Garrett (they wrote as “Robert Randall”) suggested that Campbell disliked Jewish names, so Bob submitted one under the name of “Calvin M. Knox,” and Campbell bought it.

Over the years he sold to Campbell as both “Knox” and Silverberg. Some years later John Campbell asked him why he’d used the Knox name. Bob gave him an honest answer. Campbell’s reply: “Did you ever hear of Isaac Asimov?”

Then, as the conversation was drawing to a close and Bob was about to leave, Campbell asked him why of all the pseudonyms in the world he chose Calvin M. Knox. Bob replied that it was the most Protestant-sounding name he could think of.

Finally, as he’s going out the door, Campbell asks him what the “M” stands for.

Bob’s answer: “Moses.”

***

How can you not love this field?

~~~

We agree, Mike. We agree. ♥

Join us next week when we share Part 2 of some snippets of the twenty-two stories gracing Galaxy’s Edge magazine’s last issue.

~~~

Follow Arc Manor Books at:
Twitter / Facebook / Instagram

GALAXY’S EDGE MAGAZINE FINAL ISSUE: STORY TEASERS ~ PART I

It was Mike Resnick’s hope in starting Galaxy’s Edge magazine that: “Most of the new stories are by less-well-know (but not less talented) authors.” In keeping with that spirit, our Editor Lezli Robyn filled this final, and extra-large issue ~ Issue Sixty-Two: May 2023 ~ with twenty-two spectacular stories.

This week we’re bringing you a taste, a teaser, an amuse-bouche of the first eleven stories of those stories, and our hope? That you’ll read on and find your next favorite author! ♥

~~~

MOON AND SKY, FEATHER AND STONE
by Rebecca E. Treasure

Rebecca grew up reading in the Rockies and has lived in many places, including Japan & Germany. Rebecca’s short fiction has been published by or is forthcoming from Flame Tree, Zooscape Magazine, Galaxy’s Edge, and others. Fueled by cheese-covered starch and corgi fur, Rebecca is an editor at Apex Magazine and a writing mentor.

***

Lora never fit where she was. When the moon bells rang and everyone’s eyes turned glassy, hers stayed dull and hollow. When Mother made blackberry tea, Lora snuck warm goat milk from the bucket. When Father sang the morning song and Ella cried with faith and passion, the music jangled in Lora’s ears.

The closest she’d ever been to belonging was right here, mud squishing between her toes and her little brother’s hand in hers as they prepared to jump.

Lora looked down into Oran’s eyes. “Ready?”

He shared her grin, nodding. They scrambled up the steep granite over the swimming hole, a miniature mountain. Their breathing deepened, drawing in delicate perfume from lilacs surrounding the clearing. Three steps—Lora shortened hers so they leapt together—and they flew.

Lora knew where she’d fit, but it was in a place she’d never been, with people who were not hers …

THAT SUNDAY ON THE TRAIL WITH THE MEREST BREATH OF SEA
by Beth Cato

Nebula Award-nominated Beth Cato is the author of A Thousand Recipes for Revenge from 47North plus two fantasy series from Harper Voyager. She’s a Hanford, California native now residing in a far distant realm. Follow her at BethCato.com and on Twitter at @BethCato

***

Rosamund had hopes that the family reunion wouldn’t completely suck after her mom told her it’d take place in Cambria, right on the California coast, but as Mom drove up a narrow winding road flanked by squished-tight houses, Rosamund’s enthusiasm withered up like a three-year-old raisin.

“Mom! I can’t even see the ocean!” Rosamund twisted around to look, the seatbelt strap threatening to strangle her.

“You’ll be able to smell the ocean from the camp, I’m sure. Now face forward.”

Rosamund flung herself around. “This is going to be awful. They don’t even like me.”

“Stop that. My family loves you.” Mom glanced at her in the rear-view mirror.

“But they think I’m a freak.”

Mom sighed and didn’t argue. Rosamund glowered out a window that showed only pines as the road dipped and snaked through a small patch of forest. A tall wooden archway, adorned with balloons, announced their arrival at Camp Carraway …

THE LAND OF PERMUTATIONS
by Tatsiana Zamirovskaya
translated by Julia Meitov Hersey

Tatsiana Zamirovskaya is a writer from Belarus, who moved to Brooklyn in 2015. She writes metaphysical and socially charged fiction about memory, ghosts, hybrid identities, and borders between empires and languages. Tatsiana is the author of 3 short story collections and a novel about digital resurrection, The Deadnet, which was published in 2021 in Moscow, receiving great critical acclaim. She is also a journalist and essayist, writing about art, traumatic memories, dictatorships and dreams.

Born in Moscow, Julia Meitov Hersey moved to Boston at the age of nineteen and has been straddling the two cultures ever since. She spends her days juggling a full-time job and her beloved translation projects. Julia is a recipient of the Rosetta Science Fiction and Fantasy Award for Best Translated Work, long form (2021).

***

A terrible rumbling noise woke us up at nine in the morning.

It was the field—our field.

We took off as soon as we heard it, obviously, because it was our field. Everything that happened there was ours, and only ours. That’s where Nielle and I met the brown earthen witch in her mushroom apothecary cap. That’s where, breathless with terror, I summoned the White Dog on the fifth moonrise, and the Dog came, and brought us ten-day-old pups in a basket, just for cuddles. Every day these pups, blind and sweetly hairless like dandelions after a storm, grew thinner, their skin more pink and transparent, until on the tenth day they morphed into a pile of quietly wiggling skin bubbles, and then the White Dog came and took them back into her womb. That’s where Nielle dug a grave for the forest devil and did such a great job that, when the forest devil died, he came and lay in his new grave because he had no other refuge, no other place to go. That’s where we searched for the meat fern flower on a July night, and eventually we found it and put it under Uncle Volodya’s pillow. The next morning he won the lottery—a three-room apartment somewhere on the outskirts of our town. He stays in that apartment drinking day and night, and now we know we should have put that flower under his ex-wife’s pillow, not his. It was our field, our feral, bloody, boggy, alive land, and our hair sat within it, and the amber half moons of our nails, our incantations, and the summer rhymes we composed for Death. (It was Nielle’s idea to write special verses for Death so She would stop by the edge of the field and listen for a moment. The verses were to have these special white spots, flickering agony, arrhythmical Cheyne-Stokes rattle, pools of cloudy morning water in lamb hooves, an attentive stare of a bewitched snipe at sundown—we couldn’t break the spell, but at least we tried.) …

THE INCONSTANT HEART
by Kary English

Kary English is a Hugo and Astounding finalist whose work has been published by Galaxy’s Edge, The Grantville Gazette, Wordfire Press, Writers of the Future, and Tor Nightfire.

***

Once upon a time in the spring of the world, a young man named Edwin set out to seek his fortune. Edwin’s coat was thin and threadbare, and his boots were more patches than leather. His purse held only a few small coins, but his back was strong and his heart was pure, so off he went into the wide world with a pack over one shoulder and his bow over the other. He walked for several days until the fields gave way to wilder lands, and the road dwindled to a dusty track. On the eve of the seventh day, he came across a cottage of wattle and daub nestled against the edge of a dark forest.

Night was falling. A chill wind out of the east sliced through Edwin’s coat like a scythe through wheat. His stomach rumbled, for he’d had nothing to eat or drink but water from a nearby stream. Warm firelight flickered through the cottage window, and when Edwin drew near, he could smell the cottager’s supper cooking inside. Barley stew, he thought, and bannocks baking on the hearth. If Edwin had heard even half the tales about enchanted forests and the misadventures of widow’s sons, he might have turned away from the cottage and slept on the cold ground instead …

THE WEREWOLF
by Jonathan Lenore Kastin

Jonathan Lenore Kastin (he/they) is a queer, trans writer with an MFA in writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. His short stories can be found in On Spec and Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores, as well as the anthologies Ab(solutely) Normal, Transmogrify! and Queer Beasties.

***

It was late April when Amelia realized that she was a werewolf. She was reading in her room one evening and as the moon came out from behind a cloud it fixed her with a pale, trembling beam of light. She froze at once, sniffed the wind, and took off her skin. Underneath grew a radiant coat of fur and one by one her senses came alive to the night.

The next day she tried to tell her mother.

“I’m a werewolf,” she said, picking leaves out of her golden hair.

Her mother patted her on the head. “That’s nice dear. Maybe Aunt Matilda will make you a costume for Halloween.”

“No,” said Amelia. “I’m a real werewolf. With fur and claws and everything.”

“Well,” said her mother. “As long as you don’t stay out in the woods too late.” She went back to her magazines …

FRUITING BODIES
by Xauri’EL Zwaan

Xauri’EL Zwaan is a mendicant artist in search of meaning, fame and fortune, or pie (where available). Zie lives and writes in a little hobbit hole in Saskatoon, Canada on Treaty 6 territory with zir life partner and two very lazy cats.

***

There was a strange plant in Mrs. Edgerington’s garden.

The plant looked like a tiny clamshell sprouting up out of the ground. It had a smooth surface, glistened with a dull silver sheen, and ended in a sharp knife-like ridge. It didn’t look like anything she had ever seen before. In fact, it hardly looked like a plant at all, though it certainly grew like one. Mrs. Edgerington had her grandson look on the internet to see what it was, but he couldn’t find anything matching the description. He told her she should dig it up and burn it, but Mrs. Edgerington liked weird plants, and she decided to let it grow and see what happened.

The plant slowly got bigger and bigger over the next few months. Neither water nor lack of water affected its rate of growth, nor did shade or sun. It eventually grew to about a foot in height and half a foot in width …

XI BOX
by T. R. Napper

T. R. Napper is a multi-award winning science fiction author, including the Australian Aurealis twice. His short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Interzone, the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and numerous others, and been translated into Hebrew, German, French, and Vietnamese. Before turning to writing, T. R. Napper was a diplomat and aid worker, delivering humanitarian programs in Southeast Asia for a decade. During this period, he received a commendation from the Government of Laos for his work with the poor. He also was a resident of the Old Quarter in Hanoi for several years, the setting for his debut novel, 36 Streets. These days he has returned to his home country of Australia, where he works as a Dungeon Master, running campaigns for young people with autism for a local charity.

***

The first thing Joshua Lee did was whisper his dreams into the Xi Box. Snatching up those fragments running around the plughole of his hippocampus, before they faded from view. Before they could be absorbed into the back fabric of his mind.

After his dreams, he confessed his feelings. His fears, mainly.

The little things, to start with. The Infected woman at work who’d accused Joshua of stealing her lunch. He’d told her no, even though he had; he’d eaten it all, container perched on his lap in a darkened file room. Then the slow-burning fear: he’d fail to pass probation in his new position. Corollary: the already unsustainable mortgage on their two-bedroom apartment burying them.

Then the biggest fear.

Jess would go over. That part of her wanted to become Infected. Like so many others. The simplicity of it, the relief of being able to join the Children of Heaven, though she would never admit it …

KRISTIN, WITH CAPRICE
by Alan Smale

Alan Smale is the double Sidewise Award-winning author of the Clash of Eagles trilogy, and his shorter fiction has appeared in Asimov’s and numerous other magazines and original anthologies. His latest novel, Hot Moon, came out last year from CAEZIK SF & Fantasy. When he is not busy creating wonderful new stories, he works as an astrophysicist and data archive manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

***

He did not ring the bell. Strange enough to have to knock on his own front door, when the key was in his pocket. He heard a strange bleating sound from within, quickly suppressed. Then footsteps, and his heart began to thump a little harder.

Kristin opened the door and stared at him. Her hair was in a bandanna and she wore an old softball tee-shirt. Around her eyes were traces of yesterday’s makeup. House-cleaning, then. Scrubbing away the last of him.

She looked so gorgeous he wanted to cry.

“I came for my things,” he said.

“If you’d called, I could have been out.” She stood aside to let him in. Reluctantly.

“That’s not necessary,” said Paul. “You don’t have to do that. You look great.”

“Yes, it is,” she replied. “Yes, I do. No, I really don’t. Your stuff’s in the spare room.” She walked into the kitchen and he heard the strange squeal again. Perhaps the sound of a sponge against the inside of the oven? …

THE DREADNOUGHT AGAMEMNON, ON COURSE TO CONQUER THE PEACEFUL MOON OF RE
by Dafydd McKimm

Dafydd McKimm is a speculative short fiction writer whose stories have appeared in publications such as Flash Fiction Online, Daily Science Fiction, Deep Magic, The Cafe Irreal, and elsewhere. He was born and raised in Wales but now lives in Taipei, Taiwan. You can find him online at www.dafyddmckimm.com

***

As when an airship, streaming westward soon after dawn into the city, is silhouetted by the sun and dilates like a pupil as it makes its final approach with the slow, steady pace of massive things;

so the dreadnought Agamemnon, on course to conquer the peaceful moon of Re, awoke;

and as when you descend the gangway and take your first steps along the city’s arabesque of streets, not knowing where you are going, for you’ve never visited this city before and have no friends or place to stay or any idea of how to speak the language that permeates the air like the chatter of strange insects wherever you go, or what you will do now that you’re here, thinking for a moment that perhaps you should go back, back to where you came from and the safety of it, the security of its familiar pathways and customs, the blissful boredom of doing things the way you’ve been told for so long they’re second nature; but no, no, you’ll never go back to that—never—and so you walk on, wandering the city without a destination, not understanding a word, not knowing what food is good to eat or indeed how to ask for it, and even when you do manage to get something onto a plate in front of you, worrying that you might commit some awful impropriety so that those around you, those people who have known this city and the ways of this city from birth, will laugh at you and mock you as stranger, foreigner, and yet finding small comfort in knowing that at least your old life is behind you, that you have shed your past like the pale, translucent skin of a snake and can begin anew here, in this city, which is so beautiful, with its painted houses perched on forested hills and markets full of sweet temptations and patterned fabrics and parks dotted with statues of creatures from myths you’ve never heard of and noisy processions that pop and fizzle and chime with the ring and crash and keening of unfamiliar instruments and temples to so many different gods …

PABLOVISION
by Deborah L. Davitt

Deborah L. Davitt was raised in Nevada, but currently lives in Houston, Texas with her husband and son. Her poetry and prose have appeared in over fifty journals, including, F&SF, Analog, and Lightspeed. For more about her work, including her novels, poetry collections, and her recent chapbook, From Voyages Unending, please see www.edda-earth.com

***

The object of backpacking through Europe in your twenties is to see strange things—or at least to look at the world through new eyes. You only get so many chances to paint old walls and ruined fortresses; to capture the patina of time itself.

Drew took a bus into Spain, figuring he would hike the Pyrenes while the weather remained good; the driver woke him in the gray of dawn and turfed him in a village that Drew’s phone informed him was Santa Pau. His phone further told him that the ancient walls he saw, which captured the dawn’s light so enchantingly, had been built in the thirteenth century.

Enraptured, he set up his easel in an out-of-the-way spot. He had charcoals with him, and he wanted to capture some of the spirit of this place, before he lost this magical moment. Maybe even mix some watercolors, try to catch the evanescent colors on paper so that when he had an opportunity to work on canvas later, it would be easier for his late-dreaming mind to recall what his eyes saw now …

A FEAST OF MEMORIES
by R.D. Harris

R.D. Harris lives with his family of four in Arizona and works as a biomedical technician by day. He loves the Carolina Tarheels, time with his kids, and SpongeBob. His work has appeared in Little Blue Marble, Terraform[Motherboard], and Galaxy’s Edge magazine.

***

We were hidden in his garden, where he wanted to die. The garden in our hollow where he taught me about life and how to be a man.

“Dad,” I said, tears blinding me, “you know where we are?”

His fading cognition and memory broke my heart. My hero and life-long role model couldn’t remember who I was half the time.

Eyes half-open, tired, Dad said, “On the ground,” with a mustered grin.

I couldn’t help but laugh. It was bittersweet, though, as the shimmering caterpillars squirmed from their vegetable meals to my dad’s girth atop the tilled soil. They scaled his body from all sides and froze on his stomach, waiting until it was time.

I cradled his half-bald head and whispered, “We’re in the garden like you wanted.” I kissed his forehead.

“The mimics?” he uttered, eyeing the larvae that patiently waited for him to pass on. Dad’s memory was serving him well. I hoped it would serve the mimics too …

~~~

Last week we posted Mike Resnick’s very first Editor’s Word where he shared some colorful history on science fiction magazines. Now, join us next week when we hear from Mr. Resnick again as he regales us with stories about some of the writers and editors who made up our favorite fiction field.

~~~

Follow Arc Manor Books at:
Twitter / Facebook / Instagram

The Details

The Premise

Signals Sci-Fi Movie Review

The Verdict

From Rock Stars to Redshirts and Kaiju

Some History

The Premise

The Verdict

About Jean Marie Ward

Confessions of a High-Output Writer

Bigbug Summary

What’s So Weird About Bigbug?

THE EDITOR’S WORDby Mike Resnick

MOON AND SKY, FEATHER AND STONEby Rebecca E. Treasure

THAT SUNDAY ON THE TRAIL WITH THE MEREST BREATH OF SEAby Beth Cato

THE LAND OF PERMUTATIONSby Tatsiana Zamirovskayatranslated by Julia Meitov Hersey

THE INCONSTANT HEARTby Kary English

THE WEREWOLFby Jonathan Lenore Kastin

FRUITING BODIESby Xauri’EL Zwaan

XI BOXby T. R. Napper

KRISTIN, WITH CAPRICEby Alan Smale

THE DREADNOUGHT AGAMEMNON, ON COURSE TO CONQUER THE PEACEFUL MOON OF REby Dafydd McKimm

PABLOVISIONby Deborah L. Davitt

A FEAST OF MEMORIESby R.D. Harris

THE EDITOR’S WORD
by Mike Resnick

MOON AND SKY, FEATHER AND STONE
by Rebecca E. Treasure

THAT SUNDAY ON THE TRAIL WITH THE MEREST BREATH OF SEA
by Beth Cato

THE LAND OF PERMUTATIONS
by Tatsiana Zamirovskaya
translated by Julia Meitov Hersey

THE INCONSTANT HEART
by Kary English

THE WEREWOLF
by Jonathan Lenore Kastin

FRUITING BODIES
by Xauri’EL Zwaan

XI BOX
by T. R. Napper

KRISTIN, WITH CAPRICE
by Alan Smale

THE DREADNOUGHT AGAMEMNON, ON COURSE TO CONQUER THE PEACEFUL MOON OF RE
by Dafydd McKimm

PABLOVISION
by Deborah L. Davitt

A FEAST OF MEMORIES
by R.D. Harris