News from the Collective

Nike Sulway interviews Science Fiction writer Ellen Klages

Last summer I signed three contracts, and Passing Strange was the first one. I hadn’t written anything in two years at that point, and I had no idea if I could, because I can’t sit for long periods of time. I can’t concentrate. So, I signed three contracts for books I didn’t know if I could do.

The other two?

The second one’s a collection of all the short fiction I’ve done in the last ten years, and it almost all done. And the other one’s a novel that’s due in a month.

How’s it going?

Not well. I have about three quarters done, and for three months I’ve been going, It’s three quarters done. I have plenty of time. And now I have 36 days. And I’ve written half a chapter in the last two and a half months. I may be screwed. In which case they have to move it up a year, cos they have a tight deadline. I’m gonna see. I mean, I wrote half a chapter two days ago. [laughs] I mean, I wasn’t sure about Passing Strange. I was like, well, I’ll get it done, but I don’t know if it’ll be any good. And it turned out ok.

Yeah, it turned out ok

The novel’s a kids’ book so it doesn’t have to be quite as good.

Ouch! It doesn’t have to be quite as … long?

Passing Strange is 39,000 words, this one has to be 52-ish. But, I mean, it doesn’t have to be as sophisticated. I’m hoping it’s as good. But I’m not holding my breath. At this point I will settle for finished.

Are you enjoying writing it?

No! I was loving Passing Strange. I was getting up in the morning, and I was all jazzed to do it. I wanna do this, and this, oh and this! This one, it just … it feels like hard work. And you know how it is when you’re supposed to be writing, you can’t do anything else, either?

It’ll be close. If it sucks then the editor gets to send it back to me and go, it sucks. I mean, it sucks in this place, and this place, and this place. I can probably fix it. It’s getting it down in any shape or form that I’m having trouble with. I hate writing. I actually hate writing. I love ending what I’ve written, but I hate drafting. I HATE it.

You’re one of those people?

Yes! I’d rather do anything else than draft. Once I’ve got a draft, I love the fiddly bits.

I like the middle part. Not necessarily the fine-tuning–although I do get a bit obsessive about it–but the process in the middle when you’re working with the structure and characters, but they’re on the page. You don’t have to create them.

Yes, I love that part. I just hate the first third. I think I like the last third best because it’s just the little fiddly bits. But the middle, when you’ve got something to work with, and it’s like, oh ok, I need that. I need this piece here. And … but that beginning part is just like … [makes a face/shrugs]. I need to get something down on the page to work with. I used to be able to go pull a fourteen-hour day and come up from that and go: I’m not leaving this chair until I’ve written three chapters. My body won’t do that any more.

I can work for an hour at a time.

That’s not very long…

No, so it gets very frustrating when I’m really into it, and I have to set a timer to make myself get up. But at the point where I don’t want to be doing it, I’m like, how long has it been? 

Twelve minutes. 

1. How many words is that?

112.

That’s not very many.

Have you tried other ways of getting it down? Recording your voice or 

It doesn’t work. It takes me four times as long to correct the voice recognition software. And it’s not how I work. I write longhand and cross things out. I scribble and draw things in the margin. Nobody has come up with a program that is flexible enough for me. It’s too linear if you’re typing.

Eventually it gets to the point where the linearity controls the chaos, but that chaos needs to happen first.

Is that the painful part? The handwriting chaos part of the process?

Just getting started. Once I’m started it’s like I get there, and once I’ve got it written, then all I have to do is type it. That’s like the first round of editing and I’m fine with that. From then on, it’s just refining and refining and refining, but it’s getting started that I struggle with. It’s like inventing your own clay in order to make a vase. If I have clay, I can make a vase, but I don’t want to have to invent the fucking clay.

It hasn’t gotten any easier? You’ve been writing for a long time now …

I’ve been doing this twenty years and, nah, it doesn’t get easier.

Do you feel that’s a shame, that it doesn’t get any easier?

There were parts of Passing Strange–and actually I think there are parts of this book–that I sat down and wrote like 3000 words in a morning and most of them were keepers. When it works, it’s great!

It’s just with this particular book, it’s not like that. I just want it done.

I hope it writes itself for you.

You know, I keep hoping for that. I keep leaving all the material out on my desk, and it keeps not writing itself. I leave it paper. I leave it pens. I leave it everything it needs, and it’s still not writing itself.

You need the shoemaker’s elves to turn up …

The cat regularly knocks the pens onto the floor. Knocks various pieces of paper over someplace where I can’t find them. That’s less than useful.

We should talk about your beautiful new novella, Passing Strange.

Oh, yes, please. Tell me it’s beautiful!

In the middle of writing a terrible book, it’s nice to know that the one that I did manage to finish is good.

Do you not have any faith in your own work?

Since I finished writing Passing Strange in April, I’ve probably read it fifteen times, and I can’t find anything I would fix. It’s like petting an animal. You sort of feel like, Oh, I wanna read that part again. Oh that part’s really good.

So you do like the work, this work at least, as a reader?

I do. Yeah.

What do you like about it?

You tell me first. You’re the professor.

Well, to start with I like the title, which really sets up a sense of all kinds of strangeness, or queerness, and also evokes stories about passing, as a queer person. Not just in the usual sense, of passing as straight, but also passing through things, or being only passingly strange. At least to those who are strange in the same way you are.

And also, once you’ve read the work, that the speculative elements in the story are so light–so passing–that you could almost wonder if it is a speculative story at all. It’s a story that wears its genre identity lightly. A story that’s passing (maybe) as something other than what it is.

The story also recalled for me, the discussion around Karen Joy Fowler’s title ‘What I Didn’t See’ winning the Nebula short story award: how so much of the discussion around that was about whether the story was speculative fiction at all. Whether it should be ‘allowed’ to win. Whether it should be permitted in the ‘canon’. So this novella of yours, Passing Strange, has such an apt title, because in a sense the title could also be referring to the genre identity of the work: that it’s passing as strange fiction, but perhaps … well, perhaps it isn’t strange at all.

There’s the magic at the beginning and — oh, I don’t want to spoil it for you, Ellen, in case you want to read it again! — but there’s a glimpse of magic at the end, too.

Yeah. Did you read the novella that Andy Duncan and I wrote?

Wakulla Springs?

That got nominated for everything, and everyone was pissed off because it has no spec elements in it. Except that it’s Tarzan–who is a fantasy creature–and the creature from the black lagoon–who is a science fiction monster. But they were maybe just pissed of because there was no overtly spec element in the entire thing.

This time I thought, I’m actually gonna try. I’d never written anything where there actually is magic. I always find magic really hokey. Because everything else is so realistic. I thought, if I can make the magic realistic for myself, and actually find some sort of scientific explanation for why the magic is working, then I can believe in it.

So I did.

So there’s actual magic in Passing Strange.

Definitely, but it’s such a light touch, and everything else seems so rooted in the real. In detailed historical research … It’s a work of historical fiction as well, in one sense, do you think? A romantic, magical, alternative history of queer San Francisco?

I knew, from the beginning, that Mona’s was going to be in there. I mean, I spent a month reading Dashiell Hammett, from Black Mask, to capture what I wanted from the Mona’s chapters. I wanted it to be like gritty 1930s San Francisco, and then the World’s Fair [ed: Golden Gate International Exhibition of 1939/1940] is sort of magic on its own, because it’s all illusion. It’s so much larger than life. It’s not reality. Then the Chinatown stuff, I did the most research on. My god, I did like two months of research on that, because that was the one character that I figured if I got it wrong I was going to get shafted by cultural misappropriation and all of that stuff.

Photograph by Seymour Snear, taken at the 1939 San Francisco World’s Fair. From his book ‘San Francisco, 1939: An Intimate Photographic Portrait’ (pp.28-29).

So, do you mean particularly around creating the character of Helen?

I was trying to balance, from the beginning, all of the ways that San Francisco itself can be described as magic or an illusion, and all of the buzzwords that you use in fantasy, except using them in a non-fantastic context. And the ‘strange’ part, every lesbian pulp fiction paperback from the ’50s is titled something ‘Strange’–sometimes it’s ‘Queer’–but mostly it’s ‘Strange Sister’ or  ‘Strange Lover’. The titles were just code for: this is gonna be queer. So I definitely wanted to have that in there.

Everyone except Franny is passing as something. Franny’s the only character who is pretty much just who she is. And everybody else is passing as something, or could do so.

Haskel doesn’t. Haskel doesn’t, really, but she could, because she’s …

Because she’s an artist?

Right. And there’s that conversation that she has with Helen, where Helen says, ‘Look, if you wanted to you could pass.’ And Haskel’s sort of like, ‘Yeah, but I don’t care.’ And Helen cannot pass for anything other than Chinese–

or Japanese

Well, she is Japanese. Or, I mean, culturally she’s not Japanese, ethnically she’s Japanese.

That was a really tricky part.

I wanted her not to consider herself Japanese except that she’s culturally, in those times,  defined by what she looks like. Even though she’s like, ‘No, my family’s from Oregon. Get over it.’ Because she’s not culturally Japanese. And definitely not culturally Chinese.

I kept playing with that reveal of the fact that she’s not Chinese. I had it at the very end and then it was too dramatic. It’s like the beginning, where she goes, ‘this is my family.’

Everyone’s like, ‘But wait! Aren’t you …?’

‘No, and neither is anybody else at the show.’

I have diagrams of all the research … all of these diagrams trying to figure out, at 11:30 at night, how everybody is passing. And how everybody is related to each other. How they all know each other, without hitting you over the head with it.

So, from the beginning, was that a thing you wanted to explore, the various ways in which your characters are passing as someone other than who they appear to be?

It wasn’t at the beginning, but once I had the title. My working title was Love and Death in the Magic City, which is a terrible title.

There are probably about 11 or 12 other books called Passing Strange. There’s a Broadway show called Passing Strange. It’s not an unusual title, but once I landed on it … I mean, I’m crap with titles, and this is one of the first times it’s like Wow, that’s a really good title! I actually have a title. And then I tried to make the ‘Strange’ part fit. Like I said, it was paperback code, so I tried to take the ‘Passing’ and sort of weave it into every single person’s life in one way or another.

It’s the only reason that Polly does the trick where she appears older. Otherwise Polly’s kind of an outlier, and isn’t really passing as anything. But there’s another story that I wrote, which came out almost three years ago now, about Polly. Polly’s father is a stage musician. So, the story about Polly is another story that’s all about magic, but has nothing fantastic in it. [‘Hey, Presto!’ was collected in Jonathan Strahan, eds, Fearsome Magics]

It tickled me that three out of the six characters show up in other things I’ve written, and it’s like, Oh wait! Could that person be around in that year? Yes! Ok.  That was fun.

Is that a common thing you’re doing– inter-connecting your stories? Or was it just a series of links you wanted to make in this particular story? To create a web.

I’ve got more up my sleeve, depending on what I end up writing. There are some stories that are going to be stand-alone because the time period is too strong, but now I feel like I want to interconnect everything that it can, so that it turns out that it’s just one giant world. Since I write mostly in ‘our’ world, sometimes slightly next door to our world, it’s just a matter of making the time-stream work. But yeah, at some point I would love to connect every story I’ve ever written. I’d like to have somebody show up as a minor character, and somebody else say, ‘Wait a minute, isn’t that …?’

That will make grad students happy.

Little Easter Egg hunts they can go on?

This is the first of those Easter Egg hunts. It was fun for me.

I wanted to ask you about the role of art-making and artworks in the novella. Haskel is an artist, and is making cover images for pulp 1930s magazines. 

Yeah, her first is in ’33 and her last cover is in 1940. Her last cover in that world. I don’t know what she’ll do where she’s going.

Visual art is an important part of this book. I was thinking, too, about the presence of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.

Frida never actually shows up because, unfortunately, Diego really was in San Francisco on that date, and Frida didn’t show up until the end of September, by which point the Fair had closed and they had to be gone. So, she just has to talk about Frida.

I love the fact that Haskel’s slept with Frida Kahlo.

That was a bit naughty!

Oh, it was fun. It was so much fun to write. When I started doing this 40 years ago, Haskel was an actress. She was from LA, and she’d come up, and she’d done all these things. Then I wanted Emily to be a performer, so I didn’t want Haskel to be another kind of performer, cause, neehhh. And Helen was also.

Once I bought Helen in, then I had two different night clubs, so I wanted Haskel to be doing something different. And at some point I have a note that says, maybe she’s a painter, maybe she’s a sculptor maybe. And I have a note somewhere that says, what if she’s an illustrator?

Then I was at Worldcon in Spokane last summer–and this was when I was just in the research and planning part of this, I actually hadn’t started writing–and I found a book on Margaret Brundage.

Actually, a friend of mine, over dinner, said, ‘Well, you know about Margaret Brundage.’

And I said, ‘No.’

Margaret Brundage was this woman who drew a lot of pulp covers, so I sort of modelled Haskel’s career–a little bit–on Margaret.

Most of the covers I describe are Margaret Brundage covers. Sometimes I throw in a few other details that aren’t in the Margaret Brundage covers, but the art is based more on Margaret Brundage than anybody else.

The rest of Haskel’s back story, I just sort of … you know, she just kept forming herself. And the fact that Franny does both art and other things? I wanted to get as much art and science in there as I could. I wanted to have them overlap and inform each other.

There’s a short story that Tor.com just put up called ‘Caligo Lane’. It’s a really, really short one, but it is an incredibly detailed description of exactly how Franny’s magic works. It came out like three years ago, and kind of disappeared without a trace. It’s set maybe three years after Passing Strange, but it is meticulous. It took my two years to write this 3000-word short story, because it’s exactly how the origami and the maps and the fog and everything work together.

So, if you want to find out about Franny and her magic, go and read this other story, which is written in a completely different style: it’s like a prose poem.

Anyway, in Passing Strange Franny’s got this art, and then Franny and Haskel can meet because of art. I didn’t want anybody to have a job as a truck driver: a stereotypical dyke job. Which is why Babs is a mathematician, because I wanted her to be some kind of scientist, and I thought, well, the math part is really kind of cool. So there’s the intersection of art and science, and science and magic, and art and performing, and being somebody in your art that is different to who you are in real life.

Is that how you understand yourself? Are you different in your art to how, or who, you are in real life?

My voice is completely different. When I’m performing and I’m telling a story, it’s a completely different voice than if I’m writing it down.

I’ve only done one prose version of something that I’ve actually done in front of an audience, and it was really weird. The syntax, everything, is completely different than my writing voice. My performing, storytelling, out-in-public voice is really different than my writing voice, which surprised me when I first started writing.

Somebody actually came up to me once and said, ‘It’s really funny that there’s a science fiction writer with your name.’

And I said, ‘It’s me.’

And they said, ‘No, it’s not funny.’

And I said, ‘No, look, it’s me.’

I don’t think I thought about that when I was working on this story. But yeah, I think that that’s in there. Emily is not who she is on stage. And Haskel is not, certainly not, what she draws. Helen is pretty much just doing it for the money.

That notion of these women in the Circle, they’re all in this place and time when being who they are is difficult, or problematic, for one reason or another. So they’re all living in the gaps of heteronormative cis-gendered white culture: a culture which, if they want to live safely in it, requires them to perform in some way. To be prepared to put on a show that they are someone other than themselves. 

Except for Franny.

Exactly! Except for Franny. Why is Franny different? Why does she get out of that bind?

I don’t know. I kept trying to figure out how Franny is passing, or having to compromise herself, and I finally realised that Franny just is Franny.

I don’t think she actually cares. She’s not going to go out and flaunt things, but she dresses very oddly. She’s not particularly dressed like a man or a woman. Actually, she’s dressed almost Oriental. She wears tunics and pants.

I know who all of these people look like, because I’ve cast the movie in my head. I actually started with–a long, long, long, long, long time ago–I knew that Haskel was Lauren Bacall. I can send you the pictures I was working from.

Emily is a very young Katharine Hepburn.

And then there’s Helen. I found this story about aJapanese woman who had just won this swimming competition at the age of one hundred, and I thought, Ok then! I get Helen to be able to go into a basement by herself.

They’re all having to compromise in some way, but not as much as a lot of people. I like the contrast between Emily, who is dressed up in illegal way, and Big Jack, who is cross-dressing and probably would be trans now.

Emily isn’t, she just wears men’s clothing. I wanted there to be a very distinct difference between those two ways of being out and flaunting the heteronormativeness of it, but for very different reasons.

There are these locations in the novel–Haskel’s apartment, and Mona’s and the homes where the members of the Circle meet–where they can be themselves. Or play at being themselves, or dress up as other versions of themselves. That’s interesting to me, that in the novella these are safe spaces, but so many of them are consciously aware of being in dress-ups in those spaces as well. Of playing with their identities. At Mona’s especially.

Some of the people at Mona’s are. The pictures I’ve seen of Mona’s, mostly the people that people took pictures of were more cross-dressing than not, and were usually more butch than not. I mean, Mona’s really was so many things to so many people.

For some people, it was just a bar. And for some people it was the only place that they could be themselves. For people like Jack it was the only place that they could be employed, and for the tourists it was titillating and strange.

Strange. Some kind of human zoo. 

Definitely. The tourists went there because it wasn’t normal.

For similar reasons that they go to Forbidden City, where Helen works; because it’s a place where they can have an encounter with the Other, with something exotic and ‘strange’. For titillation.

There was also a Negro nightclub, a Mexican night club. There was a gay man’s cross-dressing nightclub. Actually, it only closed down about five or six years ago, I think. There was a drag show forever.

There was a whole bunch of that kind of tourism. Most of it didn’t last through the war. It was fascinating stuff, but I decided I wasn’t going to be, like, Now I’ll have a Black character, and a Mexican character! No, I’m just going to have the two nightclub scenes play off each other.

And the World’s Fair is also going on, during the story, which is also a series of staging posts for experiencing the exotic in a strangely touristic and kitsch way. Some of them quite comical. I was really struck by the absurdity of it all. By the Estonian village where you could go and drink cocktails, and so on. 

Me too! I have all these guidebooks from the Fair, and I’m trying to figure out where could they have gone to have a drink. So I look at the maps, and I think, Oh great! There’s a Chinese village, and there had been a Scottish village. (The Fair lasted two summers: closed down in winter and re-opened.) The first summer there was a Scottish village that also had a cocktail lounge, but it didn’t last to the second year. So at first I had the Scottish village and then it was like, oh fuck, it’s in ’39 and not in ’40. Well, what was there in ’40? And then I found the Estonians. I don’t even know what Estonian food is.

What would a reproduction of an Estonian village look like? It’s such an absurd, hyperreal environment. I think that’s what I’m getting at. Within San Francisco there are places like Mona’s and Forbidden City, and at the World’s Fair there are these equally constructed, contained, performative spaces, and they share this sense of being monkey’s masks. Like that Basho poem: Year after year / on the monkey’s face / the monkey’s mask. These are places that are offering a hyperreal version of reality to their audiences. But they’re also places people go to ‘be themselves’; to perform their ethnicity or sexuality for themselves and an insider audience of friends or fellow queers or Asians, but also for an audience.

They’re all forms of unreality. Forms of escapism. They’re all, in many levels of meaning of the word, fantasies.

Illusions. Performances. Some version of being Chinese, Queer, or Estonian, which are temporary and somewhat ephemeral. They can be packed up and taken away.

The World’s Fair will be. Well, they had built the island, and they were going to turn it into the San Francisco airport, but the war happened, and the Navy took it over. It’s been a Navy base ever since. There’s almost nothing left. I think there’s like one half a fountain somewhere. But it’s 40 acres.

It’s like Disneyland being wiped off the map. And turned into a Navy base.

I guess that’s what always happens with World’s Fairs: they’re erected, these enormous architectural event spaces, and then they’re dismantled or repurposed. They disappear underneath or back into the cities in which they arise. 

Well, they’re never meant to be permanent. Although, the 1915 World’s Fair here, there’s still one building that’s left because they saved it. It’s now 102 years old, built out of plywood and plaster and chicken wire. It was not supposed to last for 100 years.

It was getting kind of fun uses in the ’70s, but yeah—they’re never meant to be permanent. They’re never meant to be real. I was hoping that I was playing off the distinction between the very real stuff that happens outside of Mona’s, and the slightly unreal stuff that happens inside Mona’s. Then the Fair is this whole thing of illusion, two miles out in the Bay. It really is like going to another world.

Definitely! When they get on the ferry to go out to Treasure Island, it just reads as fantastical. As unreal. I stopped then, and looked up whether ‘Treasure Island’ was a real place. I was both surprised and delighted to find out that it was real.

That was the most fun part. Absolutely everything was real, except for the characters and the tündérpor, which actually is Hungarian for ‘pixie dust’. I was playing with Google translate, and I was looking for how to say ‘pixie dust’ in 25 different languages, and most of them it was like, Well, that’s stupid. Nobody can pronounce that! And I got to tündérpor, and I went [giggle]. Ok. Sure.

You mentioned earlier that you started writing this novella 40 years ago. I’m presuming you haven’t worked on it constantly for that whole time.

I was 22, and in a new relationship, and my partner and I kept inventing all these characters, you know, the way you do when you’re young and in a relationship.

Wait a minute! You do? This is what you do when you’re young and in love: you invent characters together?

Yeah, you do. When you’re young. Oh, I don’t know. Maybe it’s just me. But you know, did you ever have a nickname for a lover, and they have a nickname for you? So you end up being Banana and Pookie, and sometimes Banana and Pookie take on lives of their own.

Emily Netherfield and Loretta Haskel came out of that.

I was just out of college. I was 22 going on 23. We’d moved to San Francisco from the mid-West. We had Emily Netherfield and Loretta Haskel, and I knew that Haskel was an actress, and my girlfriend was Haskel, and I was Netherfield. Except that Netherfield went by Spike.

I had this great description of this woman, standing at the end of this sleazy bar in trousers and a Fedora, just being a tough guy. So I wrote like four scenes. Emily Netherfield, she worked for a PR agency, and she went off to the Fair to take publicity photos, and met Haskel, who’s this actress.

That was one scene.

There’s this whole backstory, which happens in the ’70s, when this 22-year-old college student discovers that there’s this relative that she’s never known about.

That was one scene.

And then there’s a scene where Haskel’s husband is coming back, and Emily’s really upset, and Haskel goes, ‘Well, you know I’m not going to stay with you? I mean, really, I don’t want to live like Big Jack and Rusty. I want a house, and I want kids. But, you know, he’s off in the war and so for now I love both of you, but, you know, I’m bi.’

I can see from your face that that’s really depressing! I actually wanted this to have a happy ending.

Well, that story might be quite realistic, but it’s not very hopeful or romantic, which the novella is.

Yeah. There are a couple of things, like the line, But how can you eat garlic bread and fudge with the same mouth? That actually came from this break-up scene. They’re not even breaking up: he’s got a three-day pass, and he’s coming.

I kind of always knew he was gonna die. But all I’ve got is like four three-page scenes that I wrote in 1977, and I never did anything with them.

I kept them, though, and every time I changed computers I would bring the file over. The file was called ‘39Fair’, and I always wanted it to be set in the World’s Fair, because I just think that particular World’s Fair is just — I so wanna go there.

Me too! We can go together. If you fold the origami, I’ll come.

Ok. I can fold one origami piece, but I can’t draw a map for shit. So, it’s always been a trunk story, and when Jonathan [Strahan] said, last June I think, I’m acquiring novellas for Tor, do you want to write one? Like I said, I hadn’t written anything for two years. I had maybe three or years ago dug it out, gone and done a whole bunch of research, gone to the LBGT archives, found pictures of Mona’s, read some oral histories, had about another notebook full of research. I thought, Oh my God, I could write Haskel and Netherfield!

So I went back and read the stuff that I had written when I was 22, and went, Well, not that. No. 

Why not?

It really wasn’t very good, but it was the germ of all of it. So it wasn’t like I spent 40 years writing the novella. I wrote the novella in about six months, but I had research from 40 years ago. I had old theatre programs from legitimate theatre. Your parents would go to the theatre and in the theatre program there was an ad for Mona’s. So I had all this stuff, and I thought, Oh, that would be fun. 

I wouldn’t have written this when I was 22, for sure. I’m not sure if my 22-year-old self would like this as much as I do.

Why not?

Because the story that you end up telling is never the story that you have in your head. And I understand that now, and I really like this one. But I think, if she was travelling forward 40 years, there would be things she would be very pleased by, and things she would be appalled by. Can you imagine going 40 years into the future and meeting your 80-year-old self?

Please no.

Exactly. My 22-year-old self feels exactly the same way. It is an idea that I’ve had for my entire adult life, that I finally got the chance to bring to fruition. And it’s much, much, much better than I thought it would be.

I just got a four-star review from Romantic Times. I never thought that sentence would come out of my mouth. I’m slightly confused by it. But ok, it is a romance.

It’s very romantic. It’s very much about the romance between Haskel and Netherfield, but it’s also the romance of San Francisco. This city that’s dreaming itself up. The city as a fantasy. 

My aunt and uncle lived out here when I was a kid, and we lived two thousand miles away. We came to visit them, I think, three times in my childhood. They live about 25 miles north of the city. Once a trip, we would come into the city, and we would go to Chinatown and buy cheap souvenirs. My mother wouldn’t let us eat in Chinatown, because you never knew what there was in that food, and there could be white slavers and opium dens, so we would go someplace and have a hamburger.

I grew up in a very flat, mid-Western, ordinary …

Columbus, Ohio. That was ordinary as it gets. And no romance. All the history was pioneers and the revolutionary war.

San Francisco just–. I fell in love with the city when I was eight. And I told my mom, ‘When I’m a grown up, I’m gonna move here.’

And she said, ‘That’s nice, dear.’

And when I got out of college, she asked me what I was going to do with my life. And I said, ‘Oh well, I’m moving to San Francisco.’

And she said, ‘Well, that’s sudden!’

And I said, ‘I told you, like, fourteen years ago.’

And she said, ‘Well, you were just a child.’

And it’s like: Columbus. San Francisco. Really, no brainer. When I first moved here, when I was 22, I fell in love with the quirky history and the fact that layers of the past were still visible. It was 1976 and ’77. So what was across the street from Mona’s was a serious punk club. And everything in current nightclub stuff was all punk and everything, but little pockets of stuff still existed from the ’20s and ’30s. That just fascinated me.

The overlapping of different times and places

Yeah, so it really is a love story to the city. When Jonathan was here last summer, I took him on a tour of everything in the book. This is where Mona’s used to be, and this is where Haskel’s studio used to be, and this is where this used to be. I mean, nothing is there any more. But we drove around and looked at the views, and it was like: Ok, this is where Franny lives and this is the view out there.

I’ll go on that tour.

I’ll take you on that tour. It was really fun. I mean, almost nothing is there, but if you’ve read the story then you can sort of squint and imagine what it was like then. And I’ve got, I dunno, 200 pictures of stuff from back then.

I ended up spending three days with Google maps. I found where I wanted them to be on the steps. And you can do this 3D view, where you can look out at Treasure Island, which is still there, it’s just a Navy base. And then I have all these photographs of Treasure Island at night, all lit up. And I was doing like the Vulcan Mind Meld with Google Maps and a Viewmaster reel, and these photographs, and old newsreels and all this stuff, and colour photos. And then trying to describe what happens when you mush them all together.

So the research was clearly really important for you, and was very comprehensive. It sounds as if it was research not so much about what happened, but about creating a sensory immersion experience, for you and then for your readers. 

I love research. I love research so much more than writing.

I have a notebook that’s like that thick, that’s all research, and I would get a book from the library, or buy it on Amazon for a penny, and read through, and I didn’t know what the story was going to be, mostly, so during the research I would be reading something, and I would find a cool fact and write it down. Eventually it was like, Oh! Oh, those two things go together nicely.

It’s mostly a mainstream story, except that I have fudged the street where Franny lives. And Franny’s house is sort of made up. But I actually went and looked at blueprints of the building that Haskel’s studio is in, in order to get to the point where the one paragraph of description that I need, and sometimes that would be, like, 17 pieces of paper that I’m trying to boil down into one absolutely gorgeous paragraph that says everything you need to know about that neighbourhood.

Well, the building has been torn down, otherwise I would have gone to the building. It’s all real. I can show you pictures of just about everything. And I like that part of historical fiction. Taking this real place, and using it as kind of a stage set for your imaginary friends to walk around in.

This is why, you know, finding out that Diego Rivera actually was where he was, and had been at the Art Institute in 1931, it’s like. Ok, so Haskel can actually know him, and then that whole scene with Frida can happen. I wanted to hit the idea that Haskel is working through stuff in the painting. I wanted to hit that one more time from a slightly different angle. They really are horribly grotesque covers. They’re really misogynistic. They’re all these things, so I wanted to try to figure out a way to explain a horrible cover in a way that I don’t think anybody else has ever done.

But there is an appeal in those Brundage covers, those pulp images, for contemporary viewers. There’s a kind of kitsch appeal, perhaps. When I look at all those pulp covers, they evoke a different world. A different world, with a different aesthetic, and a wildly different sense of the fantastic. 

Yeah. I mean, there were more than a thousand pulp titles at one point or another. And Weird Tales is obviously the most well-known of those.

The detective ones you got detectives, you got people shooting each other, you got guns, you got dames.

I wanted to do the Weird Tales ones partly because that was what Margaret Brundage actually drew for, partially because they really are misogynistic and racist and horrible. And I’m thinking, Oh my God, how could you paint that? I wanted to give Haskel a reason for painting it.

I love the paragraph where she says, ‘Eh, the monsters are easy. Those are just a writer’s nightmares. But the fear. Every time I paint fear, I get more of it out.’ So, the Frida Kahlo conversation: I just love the fact that she learns that from Frida Kahlo. That they’re sitting there going, Well, I’m in pain.

Yeah, but how do you get that into a painting?

Well, you do this. And you paint things like being in this horrible back brace and really unpleasant things that make the viewer turn away.

Besides which, Frida Kahlo. I mean …

I get really obsessive with research. It’s like, I knew that Frida Kahlo had four paintings exhibited in the art building. Nowhere online–I searched for days and days–could I find out which four paintings they were. And it didn’t really matter, because I could have just said there was a picture of a woman with very prominent eyebrows. But I found out. I actually bought the art catalogue on eBay, found out what the pictures were, and then looked up online to find them in colour and describe an actual painting that really was hanging there. Because I’m obsessive that way.

Why is that so important to you, particularly when you’re working in a genre that’s concerned, often, with what can be imagined, rather than what is real? You have permission, in this genre, to play with reality. To bend it. 

Like I said, I find magic hokey. And I give myself permission to play, but I really like the playground to be solidly established.

Partially I’m that obsessive because if somebody goes and looks it up, and finds out that I’ve fudged the history part, they stop believing in the true bits. And if they don’t believe in enough of the true bits, they stop believing in the characters.

I’m not certain if the second part of that is true, but I do know that I’ve had people go, Well, this isn’t right, and they look it up, and it’s right. I think that they start trusting me with the facts, which means that they also stop remembering that the characters are fictional. Especially when you’re mixing real people and fake people.

But the Frida Kahlo one was just because I wanted to know what picture it was. Because I wanted to describe it. Because I needed the moustache part. I needed Emily to say, ‘I have a moustache.’ And Haskel to say, ‘No, you don’t.’ And she says, ‘I mean I own one.’ it sets everything up for later. Otherwise it’s like, Oh, by the way, I have a moustache. Which probably would have worked, but I liked the set up. I also like Haskel going, ‘No you don’t.’

I watched probably five Lauren Bacall movies, and five Katharine Hepburn movies, before I started writing dialogue for them, because I was trying to get the cadence of those two women on the page. So that even if you don’t know that in my head it’s those two women, they have different cadences when they talk.

I wanted to ask you about why you write queer science fiction, or fantasy?

My very first story is a story called Time Gypsy that’s set in 1957. It involves a gay bar bust. And again, it’s almost all completely true, except that the two characters are fictional. It starts with, apparently, not particularly believable time travel. Although I worked really hard to try to make the time travel plausible. The rest of it is just set in the past, so it’s not actually science fiction. It was my first story, and the review said something like, Well, this really isn’t science fiction except for this one little bit. Everything in it is really, really good.

And then mostly, well, there are characters I’ve written that I kind of know will either grow up to be queer, or are, but almost none of it is overtly queer. Except for my first two stories, because I wrote them for queer anthologies.

I’ve always known that Haskel and Netherfield are lovers, and it’s Mona’s, so I wasn’t going to straighten them out. I think it’s going to bring a completely new audience to my work. Not only is Romantic Times reviewing it, but I’m pretty sure that the Lambda people will review it. And so it’s getting out of, to some degree, the science fiction ghetto, and getting a much broader audience.

That’s surprising to hear: do you see the queer audience as being broader than the science fiction readership? Or the romantic readership, or the historical fiction readership? Are you suggesting that you see those genres as broader, less ‘ghettoised’ to use your own term, than science fiction?

It takes it out of the little science fiction pocket. And because the magic is reasonably slight, you can read it as a romance that’s sort of paranormal romance (although I hate that term).

You can read it as a queer book, that’s sort of queer fantasy ish.

You can read it as a science fiction book that’s queer.

I’m sure that I have a fairly big dyke following for some of my books. I mean, all of my stories have girls in them. Most of them are not overtly anything. I’ve got a story with a four-year-old. She’s nothing. She’s a kid. Actually, most of my stories don’t involve any kind of sexuality because they’re usually kids under 13. And the few that do, just have two women, and I don’t make a big deal of it. And nobody–no, just with one fantasy story I wrote–somebody objected to the fact that it was two women. Because it was pointless. They were like, There’s no point to that. I’m like, Welcome to life. I said, These are my neighbours: they’re heterosexual. With some things, it’s just like, yeah, these are two women.

I will have guys say, why do you always write about women? Why do you write about girls? And I’ll say, because I was one. And I write women because I am one, and because I think it’s really important that if you’re going to write an adventure story of any kind you–you know–I don’t want to have to pretend that I’m Tarzan. I want to actually write Shena, Queen of the Jungle.

Andy and I talked a lot, in Wakulla, about how we wanted to balance the people of colour, and the real people, and all of that. We made a very deliberate decision to make all of the protagonists Black. Although neither Andy or I are. It was a big risk, because if we’d got it wrong, we would have gotten creamed. What we got creamed about was that it wasn’t science fiction or fantasy. Nobody seemed to object to our cultural appropriation of people of colour, which I guess means we did it right.

So much of the stuff that I’ve read, that’s queer, is bad. And it’s like, it gets out there because it’s queer. But it’s ham-handed, and usually not well printed. You know what I’m talking about: small queer presses. So I actually wanted to write something really good that was also absolutely blatantly, you-don’t-have-to-even-squint all these people are queer. All of them. I’m not sure about Polly. I think Polly’s straight. But everybody else, they’re dykes, and they are not stereotypical dykes.

I will be interested in how it’s received. So far, I’ve only seen two reviews. I will be interested to see what genre reviewers think of it. Be interested to see what any reviewers think of it.

Have the reviews you have seen not been from genre reviewers?

The Romantic Times? Genre, but not my genre. Publisher’s Weekly gave it a starred review, which is a wonderful and excellent thing. But I haven’t seen any reviews inside genre. It’s not out until four weeks from tomorrow. It’s supposed to come out.

It’s still in the closet.

It is.

Are you nervous about it being released?

Not as much as I was a while ago. Because, yeah, I want everybody in the world to like it and buy it, and nobody say anything bad about it all.

I’m happy with it. Everybody who has read it so far has liked it. And the first two reviews, which are way out of my wheelhouse, liked it. And after Wakulla, if people are going, Not enough science fiction; not enough magic! Well, there’s magic.

Look, it’s magic.

I think that stuff about policing the boundaries of the various genre fields is interesting. Being so invested in, and arguing over, what’s allowed in, and on what terms, is such a big part of social debate around speculative fiction lately. Even the whole Sad Puppies thing is about a different kind of policing of what should and should not be permitted or celebrated. Do you think that there’s more of that going on now than there used to be? More anxiety and debate around these issues?

Wakulla really didn’t have any fantastic element. It was a conversation with the fantastic. Very much like what Brian Attebery was talking about in his speech [Professor Brian Attebery’s keynote at the 2016 James Tiptree, Jr. Symposium’s Celebration of Ursula K. Le Guin]. And it’s a line that Andy and I would have liked to have had, two years ago: well, it’s a conversation about genre.

It got nominated for a Nebula, a World Fantasy Award, a Locus Award, and I think something else. When it got nominated for the Hugo, fan boys went ape shit about the fact that it had denigrated the Hugo, by being nominated. Anything else that had been nominated for a Hugo was now a lesser thing because this thing could get up. And everybody said, you know, It’s the best written work on the ballot. But the fan boys said it shouldn’t qualify because It’s not fair. It breaks the law. 

But what is this law? Who laid down a law about what is, or isn’t, science fiction or fantasy? Isn’t that just an onging conversation we’re all having?

The law is that it actually has to be science fiction or fantasy. And it isn’t. It’s an entirely mainstream book about the filming of a Tarzan movie, so one of the most canonical fantasy figures of the early twentieth century. And the filming of The Creature From the Black Lagoon, one of the most canonical science fiction movies of the last half of the twentieth century. But its mainstream: nothing magic happens.

After that it’s like, bring it on. And Passing Strange really does have magic.

The only thing I’m worried about is that it’s coming out the very beginning of the year, and by the end of the year nobody will remember it exists.

That’s tough, in terms of award nominations and stuff. Is that what you mean?

It was supposed to come out in September. It was due the first of May, and supposed to come in September, and by the time I had finished it they had done a couple dozen novellas and realised, oh, it takes actually a lot longer to do one of these in print than it does just to put one up on the website, so it’s not coming out until January.

It’s a very memorable work; I’m sure it will be fine. 

I hope so. Because they don’t do novellas in December, because nothing happens in December.

And they couldn’t squeeze it in in November. We will see. It’s coming out the same week as–let me see–it’s the week after Nnedi Okorafor’s sequel to Binti, and the week before a new Caitlín Kiernan novella, and two weeks after a new Seanan McGuire novella.

So, there will be lots of wonderful things for people to read during that month. 

Yes. I’m hoping it holds up. My elevator speech is: it’s queer, noir, pulp, magic, magic realism, historical fiction, and screwball comedy. A little bit of screwball comedy.

My favourite line in the entire story, I think, is when Helen says, ‘I have fish heads.’

And Emily says, ‘Most people just get the milk delivered.’

I don’t know why, but I absolutely love that. I want to see that one filmed. Because I can’t do Katharine Hepburn’s drawl, but just that kind of [in a KH impersonation voice], Most people only get the milk delivered. 

That was pretty close.

Except that that’s older Katharine Hepburn. But yeah. So, a little bit of screwball comedy.

This is not necessarily a great segue, but I wanted to ask you about your love for writing short form work. You’ve written a lot of short stories, novellas, novelettes. You haven’t written any big fat novels. Unless they’re in your bottom drawer somewhere.  What is it about the short forms that appeals to you?

I wrote an essay on this at Tor.com. Basically, because I love the details. And I also love the fact that it has a definite beginning and an end, and you get to sort of make up what happens next. In a novel not so much. Passing Strange definitely has a story arc. It has much more plot than almost anything else I’ve ever done. On the other hand, I’ve had people go, So the next one’s going to be, like, what happens to them when they go into the painting.

Why would I do that? You get to make up what happens to them when they go into the painting. That’s the fun of it. You get to make up whether you actually believe they go into the painting.

I love the ambiguity of the ending of short fiction, because if it’s not ambiguous in short fiction, it’s usually trite. The longer you get, I think, the less ambiguous the ending needs to be, because then it’s unsatisfying. Like you’ve spent 400 pages, and the ending goes, There was a knock at the door, and people turn the page and go, what the fuck?

But in a 2000 word short story, or a 3000 word short story, or even a 10,000 word short story, it’s just this little still life. My first short story collection, the afterword says, many of my stories appear to have happy endings. So I want you to go, Oh ok. And then wake up in the middle of the night and go, Wait a minute! What about…? But…

And the people who want me to explain exactly what happens? It’s like, no. No, that would make it trite and boring and ordinary.

The weird thing is that when I was in school, I hated those stories.

Trite stories?

No, the ones that had ambiguous endings. Where you went, like, I don’t know what just happened! What happens to the dog?! 

I start out with stick figure characters, like heroic space captain, and then think, Ok, what if he’s a cowardly space captain. What if she’s a he. What if he’s a dwarf. And somewhere in there, in just playing with the reversal of expectations, I actually find a human character and go on with it. But mostly with the stories, the ending is usually really trite. Or the plot is really trite. And then I have to fix it. Because that’s a bad story.

For me it’s a bad story. For me, it feels really trite.

I grew up wanting to write Twilight Zone stories. You know. It’s a cookbook! 

Do you mean in the sense of those classic ‘twist in the tale’, jar-of tang style endings?

Yeah! Written a couple of them. And they’re really not my best work. They didn’t get reviewed terribly well.

Part of it is, I think, I love the language so much. I spend six months on a story. So, you know, if I’m tossing one out in an afternoon, that’s fine. It’s trite. It’s hackneyed. It’s sold! I’m onto the next one.

But I write them one at a time, mostly. I spend a whole lot of time with them, with every single comma and every single word, so by the time I get to my trite ending, it feels really trite. It’s like ewww. That’s where I thought it was going, but …  ewww. It seems predictable. What I love in a short story is when I get to the end, and the ending seems inevitable but not predictable. Like, Oh, well of course that’s what happens. But you don’t know from the very beginning. It’s like …

It’s not pat.

Every once in a while I think, I’m just gonna knock this sucker out, and I just can’t do it.

Have you gotten slower since your injury?

Sometimes. Because sometimes I’m in too much pain to concentrate, and I can’t find a comfortable position to sit in. And I can’t sit for very long. I can write for an hour and that may have been a four-hour, just everything dumping out session in the past, but I can’t do it any more. So I don’t know that the actual writing is slower, but the process is certainly slower. Because I have to break it up into chunks.

Do you think it’s changed your writing?

It’s interesting that Frida Kahlo shows up in your story, with her back pain, and her idea about using the art to both express and escape pain. That accident certainly changed both her process, and the art she was producing.

That was a kind of deliberate choice, one day when it’s like, Fuck, I can’t do this. And because I was researching, I thought, Well, what would Frida Kahlo do? It’s like Oh, fuck you. Frida Kahlo would be on morphine and painting weird things. 

I think it’s definitely changed how I feel about writing. It’s changed the process. I don’t know if it’s changed the writing.

I like to think that whatever my most recent thing is, is probably the best thing I’ve done. And I think this is the best thing I’ve done. I don’t think it’s qualitatively better, better, better than the last thing about which I thought that, but I really wasn’t sure when I signed the contract, and cashed the cheque, whether I could get to that level again. Whether or not I was going to be writing Klages-lite just because I couldn’t find the focus. So I’m really, really relieved that I still seem to be able to write.

You’re a big part of the genre community in the states, in particular, so I wanted to ask you where you think we’re headed. If you could draw a map, and fold a piece of origami so that we could travel through time and space to the genre’s future, what do you think you’d discover. What would you hope to discover?

I don’t know where the United States is headed. I hope that the Puppies will not take over science fiction and ruin the Hugos and keep shading everybody else’s playground. But I don’t know. Because they’re not playing by the same rules. And I have even bigger fears about what Trump’s gonna do, because he’s really not playing by the same rules. So, do I hope that the forces of good and right will prevail? Yeah. Do I have more confidence in that coming up on this new year than I did last year? No, I don’t. No.

The thing with the Internet is that it makes it possible for anybody to publish anything. It’s not like publishers can say, Well, we’re not going to publish your horrible, militaristic, right-wing crap. Because they don’t need a publisher. They don’t need an editor.

I think that there’s still going to be quality stuff. I mean, the Tor novella line, just as an example, is putting out really amazingly good stuff. And novellas have traditionally been rare. Some years there are four or five published, because if you’re in a print magazine, they take up two thirds of the magazine. So, they really better be good. And they’re long. You know, you write another 20 or 30 thousand words and you’ve got a novel. In my case, you write another 900 words and you’ve got, technically, a novel. So, there’s really good stuff coming out. The people that I know are that audience.

Science fiction is a whole bunch of Venn diagrams. There some people that love space opera–doesn’t really do it for me–there are people that love the militaristic science fiction and love Bujold. I’ve read one of them, and it was really good, but it just wasn’t my cup of tea. It’s sort of like the difference between someone who orders broccoli and somebody who orders mac’n’cheese. They’re both perfectly lovely side dishes.

I would like to be very hopeful that really good writing is going to prevail. The Tiptree still exists, so it’s pulling stuff out that otherwise nobody would know about. Like your book. If I hadn’t gone to Clarion with you, I wouldn’t have known about your book. I wouldn’t have sent it to the jury, and blah, blah, blah. There’s a whole lot of inter-connectedness, but like across the rest of the United States there’s also big divisions and schisms. I think they may be bigger than they ever were. On the other hand, 40 or 50 years ago there weren’t schisms because it was all white guys writing science fiction about martians and rocket ships and stuff. As the field gets more and more diverse, everybody in it gets more and more diverse. So I think there’s more division now because there are more pieces to the puzzle.

More voices?

There are more voices, and that many voices are almost never gonna make a choir without a rehearsal. If everybody decides to get together I’m sure we can blend our voices, and I think that would be really cool. But you have to get everybody to agree to play nice together, and I don’t necessarily see that happening any time soon.

You almost have to start before that: you have to agree on what we’re getting together for. My sense is that we’re becoming more and more aware that there’s enormous disagreement about what science fiction, or speculative fiction more broadly, is, or what it should or can do. We can’t even agree on that.

I don’t really see the need for it.

Totally, we don’t have to agree, as long as we can have productive disagreement. Disagreement that is comfortable with a lack of laws about what genre is, or what it might be going forward. The Puppies stuff, for me, seems to be problematic because it wants to insist on a singular, narrow definition of what’s acceptable.  And reject anybody else’s idea of what’s good, or acceptable.

Every panel I’ve ever been on that even touched on this, somebody says, well, what is the difference between science fiction and fantasy? Everyone throws up their hands, going, What do you think it is?

It’s in the eye of the beholder. And it doesn’t matter. If you like the book, and you have try to squish it into a label, it means you’re doing the wrong thing with the book. Like the book: stop trying to label it.

The Green Glass Sea. I had a friend–it had just come out–I was sitting at my dining room table. A friend picked it up, started reading, and said, God, this is really good. I wanna get a copy of this. I really like the fact that the print’s bigger than in most books. You know, you get to be our age, and that’s a bonus. And I went, Well, that’s because it was published as a children’s book. And he went, Oh, well I don’t read those. And put it down. So, I’ve had people pick up a book, read part of it, go, this sounds really interesting, turn it over, see the word science fiction and go, I don’t read that crap. But, until you read the label, you were loving it. So I would rather just see us do away with labels. And just have a bookstore where everything’s alphabetised.

At the same time, there are threads within fiction–do you think–sets of images, tropes, themes, ideas, that you’re attracted to. A conversation, if you like, that you’ve been listening in to for a while and want to continue to listen in to. Or even become part of. I look at my bookshelves, for example, and there are lots of stories about women, and about queer people. Lots of science and history, nature writing and fairy tales.

I look at my bookshelves, and I see lots of mysteries.

It would be shame, I think, to do away with any way of grouping works of fiction. Any way of navigating the forest. Of finding the books that will resonate with you. 

Things like, you walk into a bookstore, and you see a shelf that says ‘Staff Picks’. There’s like twelve books, and they’re not usually by genre. Depending on the book store.

On the other hand, it might be like going into an Indian restaurant and all they have is Japanese food and you’re going–or there’s Chinese food and burgers–and you’re going, but wait, I want Indian food. And they say, well, that’s very narrow of you.

There’s a restaurant where I live, actually, that’s breaking down ethnic and genre boundaries. It’s a Mexican restaurant, and on the menu there are only burgers, or fish and chips. 

Do they have guacamole on them, or something?

No. But the restaurant is all decorated with sombreros and donkeys wearing Mexican cloths and carrying loads of corn. 

It’s a bit like the history of gay bars, anywhere. It’s just a bar. It becomes a gay bar when gay people go there. And when gay people stop going there, for whatever reason, it gets sold to its new owners. The bar gets busted, depending on what year it is. Some loud club goes up next door. And the next time you go by there it’s a completely different club. The building hasn’t changed, but it’s not a gay bar any more.

I think genre wars aren’t necessary. It is a nice way to go: tonight I want Mexican food (and then you realise, Oh, don’t go there because they only have fish and chips). But, on the other hand, fighting about what is and isn’t Mexican food …

In Mexico, you can get a grilled cheese sandwich. It is, by definition, Mexican food because it’s in Mexico. I think the people that are using genre to be divisive are not helping anybody. And the people who are using genre to be more inclusive and diverse are spreading things to a larger audience, including more diverse voices. You know: a choir with just sopranos is kinda boring.

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Science Fiction is defined by the winners

Heteronormative whiteness, as the relational nexus, the perspective through which a reader encounters the future–the “strange newness” (Wälivaara 2016, 81)–has been a dominating feature of the science fiction canon (Thibodeau 2012, 264). Reinforced through award ceremonies, conventions and publishing houses, the old white boys’ club of science fiction has nevertheless been inflected and infiltrated by outsiders since the genre’s conception; there remains a continuing contest for science fiction’s role, function and definition (Alter 2016; Bebergal 2015; Newkirk II 2016; Obeso 2014).

In an interview, N. K. Jemisin said, “I think it does take an outsider to a degree to come in and look around and read the stuff that’s key in the genre and be like, whoa something is really missing here” (Newkirk II 2016).

Science fiction, as a genre, has been led by the strange, the unconventional and the divergent (Obeso 2014, 25-26; Wälivaara 2016, 70). That is its stock and trade. In constructing this essay, a love letter to the queerness that is rupturing the genre, I absorbed real life noise around the genre as it became the ideological locus of debate in the 2013 through 2015 Hugo Awards scandals. The noise began with Larry Correia instructing his online followers on how to game the Hugos for his own mediocre work (Bebergal 2015; Heer 2015). He did this on the supposed grounds that science fiction as a genre had been overrun by what he calls “heavy handed message fic”, favoured by the “left wing literati” (Correia 2013). As he defines it:

The vast majority of people who read do so to be entertained. Adventure, comedy, tragedy, whatever… Only a tiny percentage of whiny white guilt liberals buy books based upon the author’s race (Correia 2013).

Larry relies on a false dichotomy here, one that betrays the white universality of his perspective. Either a book is entertaining, or it is only being bought for the author’s race. In this view, readers are white; and people of colour do not write entertaining books; and books that deal with issues can’t possibly entertain. Also, critically, a book either belongs to a genre, or it is literature.

Enter N. K. Jemisin and her action-packed, high sci fi trilogy, The Broken Earth. Andrew O’Hehir in his New York Times review calls the style of these books, “a minimum of exposition and a maximum of action” (2017). Yet, Jemisin may be seen as the visible spearhead, leading the charge of “message fic” with her diverse cast of characters and challenges to the tropes and conventions of the work’s genre (Faucheux 2017, 563). She is, in fact, Larry’s worst nightmare.

Lenses, biases and wishes

‘Worse still is the white person who might be willing to entertain the possibility of said racism, but who thinks we enter this conversation as equals. We don’t.’ (Eddo-Lodge 2017, xi).

In writing on the presumed universality of the white and hetero perspective (white readers, white writers, white heroes), I wish to identify myself as white, feminist and queer. Those are my cards and they both inform and limit my perspective. That is to say, I must attempt to counteract the contraction of my own vision with wide reading and self-awareness and open myself up to criticism. On writing, particularly on this trilogy and its queerness, books that so beautifully speak to issues and experiences of racial oppression, I recognise that my voice may not be the most critical. This is not despairing, but a reality to deal with.

I analyse the trilogy, The Broken Earth, through a kyriarchical–rather than patriarchal–conception of power: “Kyriarchy is the intersecting matrix of systematic oppressions, including sexism, racism, LGBT-phobia and many others” (Walsh 2015, 62). This view acknowledges intersectionality, one of the key concepts to this essay as it originated and has been metaphorised in the influential “Mapping the Margins” by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw. The complexity and diversity of topics that Jemisin handles in the text requires an understanding of the interlocking structures of domination (Crenshaw 1991). Also, similar to Crenshaw’s “potential coalitions” (1991, 1299) between marginalised groups, Jemisin also permits a broadness of interpretation and insight within the trilogy and gestures towards an ideology that disrupts unitary identifications as “exclusive or seperable” (Crenshaw 1991, 1244). Jemisin states in an interview on the trilogy: “As I read about the different sets of people who have been oppressed and the different systemic oppressions that have existed throughout history, you start to see the patterns in them” (Newkirk II 2016). Jemisin’s fiction utilizes an “queer afrofuturist objective” in its manipulation of historical knowledge (Faucheux 2017, 565). She draws from various oppressive regimes, as broad as Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge or Third Reich Germany, as well as America’s history of slavery and its present day consequences (Newkirk II 2016).

Reynaldo Anderson, in his ‘Afrofuturism 2.0 & The Black Speculative Arts Movement: Notes on a Manifesto’, explains: “Afrofuturism is a critical project with the mission of laying the groundwork for a humanity that is not bound up with the ideals of white Enlightenment universalism” (2016, 228). He cites many artists of the “Black speculative movement” including Jemisin’s forebears in science fiction, Ocatvia Butler and Samuel R. Delany. Particularly, this essay examines Jemisin’s work as it contributes to a field that scholar Amandine Faucheux calls “queer afrofuturism”. Anderson allows for a fullness and richness in approaching art, that the Black Speculative Arts Movement, “in contrast to the occidental speculative [approach]” (2016, 228), embraces a radical and genre-rupturing text. “This integration generates overlapping zones with other knowledge formations when formulating or conceptualizing theory and practice in relation to material reality” (Anderson 2016, 228).

This essay explores Jemisin’s practice as it relates to reality, to explicate her queer afrofuturist project, The Broken Earth. The trilogy is examined in three parts. This begins with the many-headed hydra of oppression and the ways it is exposed and delineated through Jemisin’s world-building and use of form. Oppression is an organizing feature of the plot, one that operates variously on the macro- and micro-level. The second part illuminates acts of resistance as they occur in the novel, the implications of the novels for gender and identity, queer happiness and the queer anti-imperialist project. The third part is an ode to Jemisin’s revolutionary expression, the hopefulness at the heart of her dystopian trilogy, the ultimately utopian queer protagonist that leads her plot and the “rupture”/rapture (Ferguson 2004) that her novel imposes upon her readers and on science fiction: the genre in which she operates, the genre that she obliterates, the genre that she rebuilds.

N. K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth makes science fiction fluctuate, vibrate in its genre, to imply the intersections that complicate rather than divvy up reality, and opens the genre to a utopian futurity, one that is, amongst other things, queer.

The Puppies of Oppression

In a review of The Broken Earth’s first book, Naomi Novik writes: “N. K. Jemisin’s intricate and extraordinary world-building starts with oppression.” (2015, 20).

Larry’s 2013 campaign to win a Hugo with his book, Monster Hunter Legion, failed. But his campaigners, named Sad Puppies, grew in numbers and were joined by a second, alt-right flank called the Rabid Puppies (Bebergal 2015; Heer 2015). They grew more overt in their spite not only for literary science fiction but for or POC[1] and LGBTQ+ [2] writers, claiming that the Hugos had turned into an “affirmative action award” (Torgersen quoted in Heer 2015). George R. R. Martin of A Song of Ice and Fire (aka Game of Thrones) fame, claimed that the Hugo Awards were “broken” by the Sad and Rabid Puppies, possibly beyond repair (quoted in Heer 2015).

In 2015, the Puppy campaigns peak, with the Hugo Award judges being forced to attribute “No Award” in several categories as Puppy-selected works swamp the nominations (Bebergal 2015; Heer 2015). It is in this year, the first of the trilogy, The Fifth Season is published.

Naomi Novik’s review of The Fifth Season continues: “Systems of power stalk her protagonists” (2015, 20). The first book establishes itself through three, distinct perspectives on the same harsh world. In the dystopia of this trilogy, “Father Earth” is alive, an embodiment of the planet, one that intermittently destroys with “Seasons” of environmental catastrophe. The only figures in the text that may disrupt the workings of “Father Earth”, particularly his near-constant earthquakes, are a telekinetically-empowered people called “orogenes”. Orogenes live in service to humanity and are widely hated and stigmatised. N. K. Jemisin, like her perhaps most direct forebear, Octavia Butler, makes “revolutionary use of neo-slave narrative” (Thibodeau 2012, 268). The orogenes are certainly analogous to the US history of slavery and racism, most tellingly in this passage, describing one orogenes use of a slang term for their people:

Syenite flinches, just a little, at his rogga… she doesn’t hear it much–just the odd muttered epithet from people riding past them, or [orogene apprentices] trying to sound tough… It’s such an ugly word, harsh and guttural; the sound of it is like a slap to the ear. But Alabaster uses it the way other people use orogene. (Jemisin 2015, 120).

N. K. Jemisin is direct in making her analogies direct with her word choices: orogenes may, for example, be “lynched” (Jemisin 2015, 124). Jemisin, however, as stated in her interviews, takes as representational inspiration within The Broken Earth trilogy many historical examples of persecution[3] as her inspiration for the orogenes (Newkirk II, 2016). There is a particularly poignant thread in the fiction, one that is drawn painfully and extensively in all three books, of how an orogene may be born to human parents without that human knowing and the horror of parents in discovering this truth about their child–which happens, typically as they grow towards adolescence. The first book begins as the protagonist’s (Essun’s) son is killed by his father for being an orogene. These tales of the “invisibility” of orogenes, their ability to pass among humans, the disgusted reaction of parents attempts to quell the orogene behaviour in order to refute the orogene identity, the violence of humans upon discovering an orogene–especially within the family–strongly corresponds to the traumatic “coming out” narratives that are familiar to any contemporary reader. This is particularly drawn out in the interaction between Jija and Nassun, Jija’s daughter. Jija murders his son upon realising that the boy is an orogene. Nassun, secretly also an orogene, finds Jija immediately afterward. On discovering this, he kidnaps her:

“We’re going to take you somewhere you can be better,” he says gently. “Somewhere I heard of, where they can help you.” Make her a little girl again, and not… He turns away from this thought. (Jemisin 2016, 11).

This recalls ideas of fundamentalist Christian reprogramming camps and Jija often uses the gendered language as in the above: “They can cure you, Nassun… I want my little girl back” (Jemisin 2016, 114-115). That is what he demands of Nassun: either she is a “little girl”, the dutiful and gender-conforming and thus human daughter, or she is a rogga-orogene: non-conforming and non-human and therefore open to violence. Orogenes exist outside of the exclusive domain of personhood and belong instead to Otherness. They are queer in that they are “the point of convergence for a potentially infinite number of non-normative subject positions” (Jagose quoted in Hollinger 1999, 312).

The orogenes are, however, subjects rather than objects. The protagonist, Essun, in particular, invites the reader’s empathy as she is portrayed compellingly through use of second-person form. Upon the death of her son at the hands of her husband, Jija, in the opening chapters, Essun’s perspective breaks down grammatically, a technique used by Jemisin in several iterations to convey pain:

They. (He.) Killed your son. (Jija killed your son.)
… The whole rusting town is Jija.
(2015, 58-59)

Here, Jemisin refers to the ways in which the majority mindset, the point of view enforced by the mainstream through stigma may create a context in which violence is permissible. Essun is alive to the reader in her grief through the fragmentation Jemisin variously employs in the novels. The first book, in particular, is a fragmented text, divided in its viewpoints chapter-to-chapter, and yet the three personalities depicted are fully recognised individuals. This is, perhaps, one of her greatest achievements in form throughout the trilogy: in the first book, Jemisin manages to conceal from the reader that these three protagonists are the same person at different points of her lifetime. She invokes a technique that Faucheux identifies as crucial to queer afrofuturism: “[subverting linear] narratives that produce various forms of violence against racialized and/or queer bodies” (2017, 565). In a chapter in which the curtain is definitively pulled aside, the text breaks into chunks, sailing in and out of plot and discursive thought, stating directly: “Even the hardest stone can fracture” (Jemisin 2015, 440). This moment is one of great trauma inflicted on the protagonist, who is going by the name Syen at this point in the novel. It destroys Essun’s first queer relationship­–one to be discussed further in the next chapter. She is forced, by the institution that regulates orogenes, the Fulcrum, to witness the death of a lover and to murder her own child so that he may remain “free” (Jemisin 2015, 441). In this fractured passage, the second-person voice used in Essun’s chapters slips into the Syen chapter and out again. The “who” of the story vibrates and, under horror, breaks. In the queer afrofuturist vein, this also participates in what José Esteban Muñoz, in his book Disidentifications: Queers of Colour and the Performance of Politics , refers to in the practice of writing as “disidentificatory”, a presentation of the self “whose relation to the social is not over determined by universalising rhetoric of selfhood” (1999, 18). The protagonist is Essun/Syenite/Damaya, different personalities–part of which keeps the narrative conceit sustained­–responding differently to the oppressive forces they encounter. Jemisin conveys the fragmentation of self that occurs due to traumatic experiences of oppression: “You’re not quite Essun. Not just Essun. Not anymore” (2015, 397). Jemisin’s presentation of liminal protagonist(s) enables the reader, through form and technique, to experience the shattering weight of systemic oppression. Jemisin reveals the repeating/regrowing/multitudinous hydra heads of oppression, that though the target may change and their manners of dealing with that context may change, persecution rends and degrades wholeness.

Novik’s review continues of the world of The Fifth Season, that it is inhabited by: “[Systems of oppression] so vast that resistance seems impossible even to contemplate.” (2015, 20)

The end of the Seasons. It sounds… unimaginable. (Jemisin 2016, 172).

“A Site of Radical Possibility, A Space of Resistance” [4]

The science fiction community revolts. In 2015, Connie Willis pulls out of presenting the prize, refusing to “lend cover and credibility” to the Sad and Rabid Puppies chosen nominees (Barnett 2016). Several authors, upon finding they are a Puppy candidate find various modes to undercut or reject this. To reiterate, the World Science Fiction Society voted “No Award” (Barnett 2016) rather than choose these nominees–this can be experienced as defeat and resistance; this, too, can be non-binaric.

In creating the trilogy, Jemisin includes and refashions generic elements of “old boy” science fiction. A motto belonging to Cuban-American queer icon, Carmelita Tropicana, is central to Muñoz’s 1999 work on intersectionality, Disidentifications, an idea that threads through Anderson’s conception of afrofuturism and Faucheux’s analysis of queer afrofuturism:

“your Kunst is your Waffen” “your art is your weapon”

Jemisin uses and flips and subverts science fiction’s conventions. The trilogy vibrates within the genre, wavering in and out to strike a note that is not still, that falls in and out of tune with the canon’s norms, to create a text that is suffused with strangeness, queerness, that recalls the old to summon the new–to “disidentify” science fiction.

Those books belonging to what is often called the Golden Age of science fiction are often driven in plot by an “imperial ontology” (Thibodeau 2012, 267). Planets are terraformed, alien species invaded/invading with big, thick rocket ships (Heer 2015; Nicosia 2011, 83; Thibodeau 2012, 267). These novels also often function according to a linear and dominatory notion of time as progress. White men travel through space, at the peak of human technology, plunging their big-boy rocket ships deep into space and discovering. There is a binaric rendering of “primitivism/modernity”, that one is open to be conquered and one that has ascended, that is clean, progressed to the point of undeniability, and white (Faucheux 2017, 576). This narrative trope appears in flashbacks in the third book, The Stone Sky. Humanity uses the earliest orogene peoples to travel into space. In this narrative, there is an exposure of brutality dressed in high technology. The human project of unlimited progress and world domination reveals a ruthlessness and fatal hubris in the treatment of the early orogene people and its consequences for the Earth when the Moon detaches from orbit as a result. Thibodeau calls the colonial impulse “one of the most heteronormative forces in history” (2012, 267). As in Thibodeau’s analysis of Octavia Butler and James Tiptree Jr.’s science fiction, Jemisin “[queers the] traditional space exploration and ‘final frontier’ narratives, which typically rely on a heteronormative imperial thrust… [the authors] take the traditional generic conventions of space travel and morph it into something radically dangerous and wickedly resistant” (2012, 263). Jemisin reimagines a core component of Golden Age fiction and reveals how that same component harks back to “ideals of white Enlightenment universalism” (Anderson 2016, 228), notions of an empire’s spread and acquisition as the desirable pay-off for technological prowess. Jemisin resolves this arc similarly to the Butlerian story of Thibodeau’s analysis, in that the people of earth “give in trade” (2012, 266) to the planet. The moon is restored to Earth in the critical feat of the series’ plot. Again, this occurs in an reformation of the discovery narratives; it requires a feat of enormous human prowess and technological ability. However, it radically, queerly, occurs in the story through an orogene fusing with technology and the desires of the planet, a mingling of the human with the planet and with technology. Agency is granted where an essentialist/imperialist view could not allow for it. Technology is not a tool of the empire and the planet is not a surface to be mapped. Time is not linear, an engine of forward momentum and perpetual material gains. Jemisin’s queering of science fiction reimagines the genre’s perhaps most prevalent plot in a “disidentificatory” manner. She engages in what Muñoz calls “strategies of iteration and reiteration” in order to “deform and reform” the genre’s long-held ideals (quoted in Wasson 2016, 136-137). The books enjoy a state of flux within and outside the genre, obeying its conventions while subverting the “paradigm of normalcy” (Faucheux 2017, 576), unsettling it and revolting against it “wickedly”. Jemisin’s art, science fiction, is her weapon. She uses it to subvert the matrix of domination that is the kyriarchy–imperialism, hegemonic whiteness and the heteropatriarchy. In attuning to queer afrofuturist methods, in fluctuating in and out of the genre, Jemisin’s resolution of the imperialist trope, the happy ending, opens her science fiction world to “endless queer utopian possibilities” (Thibodeau 2012, 277).

Science fiction, as Faucheux points out, still struggles to permit intersectional identities–“a character is either black or queer, but rarely both” (2017, 576) as Essun is. Jemisin populates her trilogy with complex, rich, queer characters and grants them what is so often denied to queer characters in fiction, something denied with stereotypical and enforcing frequency–they are happy. For the moments in the narrative that are most queerly erotic or romantic, Jemisin constructs queer utopias and radically, wickedly utilises “the potential for science fiction to imagine new worlds and modes of thought that may posit a livable world for queer subjects” (Thibodeau 2012, 265). These backdrops for queer love and joy are, notably, forms of oases, bubbles or wrinkles in time. The setting in which Tonkee, a trans character who travels alongside Essun, finds love is a sparkling “geode”. It is a glittering, underground orb made of crystal that has been built, inexplicably, into a city–one that is at risk of being unearthed. Essun’s own queer self-discovery occurs on an island, one that “isn’t even on many maps” (Jemisin 2015, 345-346). In this place, “there passes a time of happiness” (Jemisin 2015, 361) in which Essun enters a relationship with two men and explicitly sleeps with both of them, together: “He and Alabaster are always beautiful together” (Jemisin 2015, 371). Their relationship and Essun’s desire hinges on the three, rather than the two, “an affection dihedron” (Jemisin 2015, 372). The queer utopia is not only sex however, or even romantic love. It is unquestioned acceptance:

[Essun] doesn’t think overmuch about what she does with her bed time or how this thing between them works; no one [on the island] will care, no matter what. That’s another turn-on, probably: the utter lack of fear. Imagine that. (Jemisin 2015, 371).

Jemisin radically takes what Anna Carastathis, in her book Intersectionality, refers to as “multiply-oppressed” subjectivities and grants them the time and space for love and acceptance–certainly, a utopia. Jemisin insists on the articulation of specificity in Essun’s queerness, the “intersectionalities within” (Carastathis 2016, 188) her characters. By defying the tokenism that marks science fiction, even in its attempts to be radical, Jemisin in her intersectional protagonist and varied characters adheres to Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality: “suggesting the breadth of its potential to undo positivist, essentialist and segregationist habits of thought” (Carastathis 2016, 199)–or rather, habits of science fiction. As Veronica Hollinger asserts, heteronormativity is often embedded in both theory and fiction as universal and that science fiction is an overwhelmingly “pressed into the service of a coercive regime of compulsory heterosexuality” (1999, 23-24). Science fiction, however, demands exploration of the new, the imaginative and the non-normative. Jemisin exists at this meeting place, supplying science fiction with radical utopias–fragile and abstracted oases though they may be–and filling them with queer characters that are insistently, specifically divergent and wickedly happy.

Rupture or “All things change in a Season”

A minor clarification for folks that need it: that was not anger you saw, when I gave that Hugo speech. I was accepting an award! I was delighted… Some of us black folks gloat when racists are mad! Welcome to Giving Marginalized People Awards 101. (@nkjemisin, 21 August, 2018)

As the Sad and Rabid Puppies are resisted and thwarted in the years following their 2013-2015 campaigns, N. K. Jemisin is the first African American author to receive the Hugo for Best Novel (Barnett 2018; Newkirk II 2016). She goes on to win the “threepeat” with all three novels, The Stone Sky receiving its Hugo on the 19^th of August, 2018 (Barnett).

This is not to insist–at least, not only–on a linear perspective; time is not carrying us in a predetermined straight line from a science fiction that is regressive to one that is progressive. The detour into Puppy-land was recent and unexpected and easy–and who knows how damaging in its popularisation of misinformation and hatred as well as in demeaning the successes of LGBTQ+ and POC and all marginalised writers. And this is one award ceremony. Yet, it is the opening of one door. Yet, it is a “ruptural possibility” (Ferguson 2004).

Roderick A. Ferguson’s notion of “rupture” is useful in analysing The Broken Earth’s impact on science fiction and implications for identity. In Aberrations: a Queer of Color Critique, Ferguson writes:

We must read African American literature as a cultural form, that is, to show how it disrupts [canonical and white heteronormative] ideals by referring to a gender and sexual multiplicity… possibilities outside the normative parameters and racialized boundaries of those canonical structures. (2004, 26).

N. K. Jemisin, as argued previously in this essay, both permits the hallmarks of “canonical genealogies” as Ferguson would term it while resisting and subverting the ideals that have typically underpinned the canon: its “its reliance upon and privileging of the normative heterosexual subject idealized by the West” (2004, 26). The possibility for radical imputations and a revolution in science fiction encouraged and embodied by The Broken Earth is explored in this chapter via the most crucial use of the concept of “rupture” as it appears in Ferguson’s Aberrations.

Jemisin employs an icon of science fiction in raising the ambivalent figure of the android. Stone eaters, particularly in the third and final book, are revealed to be something akin to a cyborg. They communicate not only with stone, but technology. They have a seemingly limitless lifespan and are at least partly deliberate constructions. They are continually described in robotic terms, as almost emotionless and distinctly non-human. Jemisin even seemingly refers to the famous notion of the “uncanny valley” in the following passage:

He moves slowly again. They don’t do this often, stone eaters. Movement is the thing that emphasizes their uncanny nature, so like humanity and yet so wildly different. It would be easier if they were more alien. When they move like this, you can see what they once were, and the knowledge is a threat and warning to all that is human within you. (Jemisin 2017, 27).

Here, the android–stone eater–poses a traditional problem of the android in science fiction: their proximity to humanity. [5] They exist as a blurring of boundaries, the “ultimate fear” of a society that rests upon binaric definitions and hegemonic categorisations (Nicosia 2011, 93). This adheres to the “canonical genealogy” of science fiction (Ferguson 2004, 24). However, The Broken Earth books, “as discourses of mimicry, they estrange themselves from the normalising knowledges upon which canonical literature is founded” (Ferguson 2004, 26). Jemisin’s android intimates a radiantly non-defined, multiplicitous sexuality and thereby suggests an escape route from the kyriarchy. The protagonist’s, Essun’s, relationship to Hoa, the stone eater/android, reveals an abject and enigmatic sexuality. Their relationship is ambiguous and yet undeniably romantic. Essun, in using the extremes of her powers, turns her arm into stone. Her stone limb’s desirability to Hoa is evident, “your flesh is pure, perfect” (Jemisin 2016, 379). There is a blurring between Hoa’s hunger and love. Every other character perceives the stone eater’s desires as grotesque, “revolted by the idea of Hoa chewing the arm off” (Jemisin 2017, 19). This moment of consumption is spelled out in erotic language: “Slowly, slowly… His stone hand slides against yours with a faint grinding sound. It is surprisingly sensual, even though you can’t feel a thing” (Jemisin 2017, 27). The scene culminates in a body-horror moment–“His mouth opens. Wide, wider, wider than any human mouth can open” (Jemisin 2017, 28). Jemisin creates a sexuality in the fiction that is utterly alien to the reader and impossible in the real world. Much as in Thibodeau’s reading of a Butlerian story of alien-human breeding, there is a “utopian queerness in the eroticism of the unknown and incomprehensible–the desire across a boundary we consider uncrossable” (2012, 273). Androids in science fiction theory have often been posed as signifiers for queerness. In Hollinger’s “(Re)reading Queerly”:

As has been frequently pointed out, the techno-body reiterates itself through replication, not through reproduction, and it does not require the heterosexual matrix as the space within which to duplicate itself. Given the emphasis in theories of performativity on reiteration and citation, the techno-body as replicated body points us towards the utopian space of queer excess. Perhaps all techno-bodies are, at least potentially, queer bodies. (1999, 31).

The love between Hoa and Essun is not “heteroproductive” (Thibodeau 2012, 266) as is encoded into conventional utopias of science fiction, nor does it fit the “replication” of an androidal futurity (Hollinger 1999, 31), queer though that may be. As Essun is, at the end, consumed by Hoa, he then transforms and rebirths her body: “Your rise from [the geode’s] spent halves, the matter of you slowing and cooling to its natural state” (Jemisin 2017, 397). Her transmogrification into a form of stone eater–“locs of roped jasper… skin of striated ocher” (2017, 397)–is inherently connected to Jemisin’s utopic/restorative ending to the series. This ending requires a calming and course-setting of the Earth and Moon in order to banish the world-ending Seasons. Radical change is the key feature of The Broken Earth’s utopia. As in the opening of Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia:

We can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality… [Queerness is] a doing for and toward the future. Queerness is essentially about the rejection of the here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility in another world. (Muñoz 2009, 1).

Jemisin insists, all must change: the planet, the peoples that populate it and the world’s systems and institutions. Essun’s queer bodily shift represents the over-arching revolutionary call-to-arms in the trilogy. As she is newly reborn as a stone eater and as she and Hoa provisionally commit to being together, explicitly the text reads, “This is the way a new world begins” (Jemisin 2017, 398). Jemisin’s android is “estranged” from its typical readings in science fiction as is Jemisin’s utopia utterly distinct. The Broken Earth, rich with “ruptural possibilities” and utilising “mimicry” (Ferguson 2004, 24-26), conceptualises utopia not as a cyborg replication, after all recreating only itself, or through the idylls of hetero-reproductivity. Rather, it must be regrown anew, emerging in a similar but fundamentally changed shape. There must be a micro- and macrocosmic revolution, presented in the fiction from the cells of the protagonist’s flesh to the literal planetary alignment of the Earth in the universe.

Jemisin, to re-iterate, vibrates the genre. The greatest “site of rupture” (Ferguson 2004, 26) in The Broken Earth trilogy occurs within the transforming, punctuated and discontinuous protagonist. As referred to earlier in this text, there is a fragmentation of Essun that continues to be meaningful beyond its narrative reveal moment. The second book opens:

A person is herself, and others. Relationships chisel the final shape of one’s being. I am me, and you. Damaya was herself and the family that rejected her and the people of the Fulcrum who chiseled her to a fine point. Syenite was Alabaster and Innon and the people of poor lost Allia and Meov. Now you are Tirimo and the ash-strewn road’s walkers and your dead children… and also the living one who remains. Whom you will get back. That is not a spoiler. You are Essun, after all. (Jemisin 2016, 1).

Again, Jemisin thwarts binaric thought. She deploys a Judith Butler-esque denial of a “vital and sacred enclosure” (quoted in Constable 2018, 287) that is unitary and essentialist personhood. Essun is defined for the reader, or rather obsessively documented, by another character–Hoa, the character behind the second person perspective–as himself and herself just as she is the towns and peoples and grief that she has known. Tellingly, Hoa breaks the fourth wall in referring to “spoilers”. This occurs frequently in the books. Hoa’s perspective–the second person passages as well as interludes where Hoa speaks more directly to Essun, the “you”–escapes linear time and, at times, seems to speak the language of the reader’s world to the reader. The style with which Jemisin portrays her protagonist inflects that character with other characters. Essun resists the unitary, single-axis identity that would enable her to be tokenized, to be a safe exception to the rules of white heteronormativity. She is queer and sexually “deviant”, at times. At others, she is a submissive mother or an obedient servant of the Fulcrum–the oppressive regulatory institution that enslaves orogenes. As she appears by different names in the books, we see a representation of identity–bound up with gender–as “performative” in the sense of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. There is no real Essun under these differing identities: “her identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (Butler 33).

Essun is human and orogene and stone eater. “All things change in a Season” is echoed throughout all three books, which is to say, as earlier in this essay, under the extremes of trauma there is fragmentation. But also, that fragmentation may be a “rupture”. In evading essentialism, by eliding Essun/Damaya/Syen and even Hoa, Jemisin destabilizes the singularity of identity itself. Jemisin manifests the inadequacy of categories that Crenshaw’s intersectionality asserts. As Hollinger writes of queer theory, the trilogy goes “against the grain of heteronormativity, so that we can also begin to think ourselves outside the binary of oppositions of a fictively totalizing feminine/masculine divide” (1999, 25). Beyond this, Jemisin invokes a multiplicitous identity, one that cannot be pinned. The Broken Earth exposes falsely universalizing and categorising ideologies of identity; she variously treads on binaries in favour of multiplicities. If the Other may not be explicated and thusly caged, then the One also remains open to the slings and arrows of interrogation or, perhaps, elimination. This is the “ruptural possibility” of Jemisin’s trilogy.

Rapture

In the making of The Broken Earth, Jemisin participated in “disidentificatory” practices, not discarding the old but altering it (Wasson 2016), queering it, to make something useful, a form of generative recycling of the canon’s modes and manners. It can be read as Muñoz reads queer art forms: “an insistence on something else, something better, something dawning” (Muñoz 2009, 189). By acknowledging the interstices, by singing along them, Jemisin’s The Broken Earth is a science fiction that is “multivocal, multiracial, multidimensional, that isn’t limited to a single privileged narrative” (Obeso 2014, 26).

The Hugo Awards represent something of a popular election. They reflect a democratic form of award-giving, to the extent that is allowed at such a prestigious level. As Jemisin took the stage for The Broken Earth’s third and final Hugo Award for Best Novel, she was dressed in a cloak of stars. There is something about her clothing choice that signifies her success: she is draped in the genre, wears it like the garment of a ruler. As the popular choice, the threepeat winner, the undeniable champion, she takes her trophy. A trophy that is incredibly phallic and also reflective, a dark void of a mirror that bounces back at the audience, that deforms and reforms as it re-iterates. Jemisin shakes the science fiction genre and ruptures its binaries and barriers. She is a ruler with a cape and a scepter but also a rebel in a cloak with a gun (her art is her weapon). The speech goes:

I look to science fiction and fantasy as the aspirational drive of the Zeitgeist: we creators are the engineers of possibility. And as this genre finally, however grudgingly, acknowledges that the dreams of the marginalized matter and that all of us have a future, so will go the world. (Soon, I hope.)

But this is the year in which I get to smile at all of those naysayers—every single mediocre insecure wannabe who fixes their mouth to suggest that I do not belong on this stage, that people like me cannot possibly have earned such an honor, that when they win it it’s meritocracy but when we win it it’s “identity politics”—I get to smile at those people, and lift a massive, shining, rocket-shaped middle finger in their direction. (quoted in Cunningham, 2018).

Bibliography

Alter, Alexandra. 2016. “N. K. Jemisin on Diversity in Science Fiction and Inspiration from Dreams.” New York Times, September 6, 2016. http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A462580811/STND?u=unimelb&sid=STND&xid=5250ad54.

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Barnett, David. 2016. “Hugo Awards Shortlist Dominated by Rightwing Campaign.” The Guardian , April 27, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/26/hugo-awards-shortlist-rightwing-campaign-sad-rabid-puppies.

Barnett, David. 2018. “Hugo Awards: Women Clean Up as NK Jemisin Wins Best Novel Again.” The Guardian, August 20, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/aug/20/hugo-awards-women-nk-jemisin-wins-best-novel.

Bebergal, Peter. 2015. “Samuel Delany and the Past and Future of Science Fiction.” The New Yorker , July 29, 2015. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/samuel-delany-and-the-past-and-future-of-science-fiction.

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Carastathis, Anna. 2016. Intersectionality: Origins, Contestations, Horizons. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Jstor.

Correia, Larry. 2013. “How to get Correia Nominate for a Hugo.” Monster Hunter Nation, January 8, 2013. http://monsterhunternation.com/2013/01/08/how-to-get-correia-nominated-for-a-hugo/

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review, 43, 6 (July): 1241-1299. https://doi.org/10.2307/1229039.

Cunningham, Joel. 2018. “Read N.K. Jemisin’s Historic Hugo Speech.” B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog , August 20, 2018. https://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/sci-fi-fantasy/read-n-k-jemisins-historic-hugo-speech/.

Faucheux, Amandine H. 2017. “Race and Sexuality in Nalo Hopkinson’s Oeuvre.” Science Fiction Studies , 44, 3 (November): 563-580. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5621/sciefictstud.44.3.0563

Ferguson, Roderick A. 2004. Aberrations: A Queer of Color Critique. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Jemisin, N. K. 2015. The Fifth Season. New York: Orbit.

Jemisin, N. K. 2016. The Obelisk Gate. London: Orbit.

Jemisin, N. K. 2017. The Stone Sky. London: Orbit.

Jemisin, N. K. (@nkjemisin). 2018. “A minor clarification for folks that need it.” Tweet, 21 August, 2018. https://twitter.com/nkjemisin/status/1032314104709611520.

Heer, Jeet. 2015. “Science Fiction’s White Boys’ Club Strikes Back.” The New Republic, April 17, 2015. https://newrepublic.com/article/121554/2015-hugo-awards-and-history-science-fiction-culture-wars

Hollinger, Veronica. 1999. “(Re)reading Queerly: Science Fiction, Feminism, and the Defamiliarization of Gender.” Science Fiction Studies 26, 1 (March): 23-40.
https://www-jstor-org.ezp.lib.unimelb.edu.au/stable/4240749.

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Muñoz, José Esteban. 1999. Disidentifications: Queers of Colour and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press. ProQuest.

Newkirk II, Vann R. 2016. “N. K. Jemisin and the Politics of Prose.” The Atlantic, September 2, 2016. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/09/nk-jemisin-hugo-award-conversation/498497/.

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Obeso, Dionne. 2014. “How Multicultural is your Multiverse?” Publishers Weekly 261 (40): 28-31. EBSCOhost.

O’Hehir, Andrew. 2017. “The 21st-Century Fantasy Trilogy that Changed the Game.” The New York Times, September 26, 2017.

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Thibodeau, A. 2012. “Alien Bodies and a Queer Future: Sexual Revision in Octavia Butler’s ‘Bloodchild’ and James Tiptree, Jr.’s ‘With Delicate Mad Hands’.” Science Fiction Studies 39, 2 (July): 262-282. https://doi.org/10.5621/sciefictstud.39.2.0262

Wälivaara, Josefine. 2016. “Dreams of a subversive future: sexuality, (hetero)normativity, and queer potential in science fiction film and television.” PhD diss., Umeå University.

Walsh, Reubs J. 2015. “XI. ‘Objectivity’ and intersectionality: How intersectional feminism could utilise identity and experience as a dialectical weapon of liberation within academia.” Feminism & Psychology, 25, 1 (February): 61-66.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0959353514562807.

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The queer at play in Sulway’s Rupetta reveals the tensions between the religious, heretical, and historical themes of the novel. Yet how deep does this rabbit hole go? A closer look at some of the novel’s fantasy coordinates—Fairy Tales Studies, the Salt Lane Witches fairy tale, The Winter’s Tale, etc—reveals that speculative Rupetta pushes the boundaries of what can be formalised as Queer Science Fiction. The axiom of this discussion is that the anti-normative stance that Sulway assumes with regard to the queer in Rupetta provides comment on the twists of Queer Science Fiction and its intertextuality more broadly.

Introduction

The queer at play in Nike Sulway’s speculative novel Rupetta (2013) serves to reveal a cadre of antagonistic forces at work between the religion, heresy, and history in the novel. As regards the queer, for the purposes of this discussion I choose to define ‘queer’ (as much as one can) according to the critical works of Alexander Doty, Lisa Duggan, and Jasbir Puar, separated as their works are by over a decade of critical debates. For Doty, writing in the early 1990s, queer was almost categorically defined as anti-straight sexualities (xv). Lisa Duggan’s critique of homonormativity in the 2000s aligns with Doty’s focus on mass culture. In The Twilight of Equality (2003) Duggan critiques the species of homonormativity that rests on what she viewed as the depoliticisations of north American gay cultures by neoliberal conditions of consumption and domesticity (2003: 50). For Duggan and Doty alike, queer sexualities are about pleasure and political agendas much like straight sexualities. Ultimately, this recent debate is centred on the mainstreaming of gay cultures, a political event so influential upon modern states like the United States of America that, today, the military and the police march at Mardi Gras and Pride alongside those they have a long history of violently oppressing. This historical tension may be one of many reasons why Duggan remains ambivalent about the growing conservativism surrounding this ideological development, particularly the inclusion of identities that have a long history of oppressing queer and gay people at the celebrations of gay culture that they now participate in (2003: 41). Since the turn to the 2000s, Puar has attacked this conservativism, arguing that the geopolitics of queer have come to define certain portions of gay culture as worthy of the protections of the state and others not, or, more strongly, excluded by the designation ‘terrorist’ (2013: 336). The axiom of the discussion below is that Puar’s anti-normative stance on queer in this brief sequence from Doty to Duggan to her work, accords with the queer motifs in Rupetta in such a way that it provides comment on the weirding and wending of Queer Science Fiction.[1]

Rupetta Out and About

At the level of the narrative, there are several queer, and sometimes weird, elements in Sulway’s novel that are connected to the novel’s portrayal of religious ideology: the homosocial and romantic relations between Henriette (Henri) and Miri in the straight shadow of the Oban and Elm Colleges; Henri’s intellectual passion for the heretical history of the Salt Lane Witches; the juxtaposition of immortality and organic life in the political tensions between the official religion of the Rupettans and the guerrilla heresies of the Oikos; and the fusion of immortality and organic life in the form of Rupetta’s child, Perdita. This range of elements, and the immense scale of Sulway’s intertextual layering, make it a challenge to summarise the novel in its totality. Suffice to say that as a reader of English literatures, European philosophy, and cultural legal theory, I saw a lot of subterranean jokes alighting beneath a serious story about political and theological upheavals in Gothic shadows, Romantic flux, and New Weird tenors.[2] The reading of Rupetta that I offer below is particularly interested in the strategies that the narrative employs to construct a recognisable queer discourse in the shadow of an authoritarian political theology. Central to my critical reading is how the Rupettan censure and repression of the heresy of the Salt Lane Witches and their—particularly Mathilde’s—support for the ‘psychotic leaders of the Oikos’ (Sulway 2013: 48) serves to expose the ideological frame of the Rupettans. This reification of Rupetta—from a curiosity and guardian of the Reni women to a god-like being for all post-humanity, told through both the psycho-historical narrative of Rupetta and Henri’s bildungsroman—spawns the colonial Oikos resistance yet also finds itself spurred onwards by the subsequent repression of the Oikos and its Salt Lane supporters as heretics. [3] This narrative line constructs an alternative historical vision of the past in order to tell the story of its central character in the tradition of some science fiction equally invested in political retellings such as Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle (1962).

Sulway uses the queer politic of the censured and silenced stories of the Salt Lane Witches to clear a space for Henri’s disinterested scholarly gaze to transform itself into a passion for claiming a forgotten truth. This critical shift is carried out by Henri in distinction to the advice of her mentor Abel Jenon’s warning about the seductions of heresy for the historian. This shift is significant because it structures two thirds of the narrative in the novel. As I will argue below, this in turn shifts Henri’s regard for the Rupettan Annal and the validity of the grey literature that surrounds it: the ‘analogical and metaphorical embroidery of truth’ (Sulway 2013: 161) is not simply posited by the historical scholar but, and perhaps rather, it cannot not be written.

Rupetta is a novel with a queer sense of time about the untimeliness of individual passion and collective action in the face of an oppressive politico-religious regime. The geography of the novel is traced by Rupetta’s journeys from a surreal Languedoc to a parallel Moreton Bay, far away. Rupetta begins her existence in the novel as a mechanical guardian of the women of the Reni family gifted with sentience. Rupetta is ‘wound’ by successive generations of the Reni women who press their hands upon the innermost chamber of Rupetta’s chest. When wound by these ‘wynders’ Rupetta saps something of their life energy and comes to exhibit some of the wynders’ strongest traits and attitudes. This ‘hearts and minds’ construction of Rupetta’s winding (sic. wynding) takes on ever more predatory tones across the novel as her sentience and personal interest force her reassessment of the changing world in which she finds herself eventually venerated and taboo.

Rupetta ’s narrative carries two significant symbolic constellations in its novelisation: the miracles and the law. The seven miracles of Rupetta are testimonies of significant events in Rupetta’s existence that come to be known as the Rupettan Annal, a historical text with deep ideological revisionism marshalled at its core by the claim to show Rupetta’s history as it ‘truly’ was—with the exception of the seventh hidden miracle. These miracles align to the major chapter divisions of Rupetta’s narrative, which tends to subordinate Henri’s narrative arc—which we will turn to shortly. The dividing role of these miracles in the formal structure of the novel also cleverly mirrors, perhaps even allegorises, the gaps and lapses that arise between each temporal leap as a reader moves from one chapter to the next, and between Rupetta and Henri’s narrative arcs within each chapter. In this way, Sulway deploys allegorical alignments between the narrative arcs of Rupetta and Henri. And yet any attempt to use Rupetta’s narrative as an allegory for Henri’s arc must confront or playfully ignore the obscuring role that these miracles edit into the diegetic and non-diegetic textures of the novel.

The law is the second constellation of critical value in the story. In my first edition of the text, The Fourfold Rupettan Law is on the facing page to the Foreword after the Contents and, like the latter, has no pagination. (Sulway 2013) This formal position in the text posits the Rupettan laws in between the ambiguously defined knowledge and prejudices of the reader coming to the novel and the story told in the novel. In this way the intertextual links between Rupetta and the fairy tale and other ‘real world’ discourses that it presses upon, is conditioned by and read between, are complicated by a series of natural laws or presumptions of policy: “Life is Death. The Earth is a Grave. The Body is a Machine for Dying. Knowledge is the Path to Immortality.” (Sulway 2013: no page) I say ‘presumptions of policy’ here because the Rupettan laws operate not as rules deciding particular cases so much as policies for how to interpret the actions and events of scenarios demanding accountability to Rupettan judgment in the novel: the miracles of the Rupettan Annal and Henri’s unfinished dissertation most pressingly. The ideological fervour of the followers of the official Rupettan religion, such as the scholars and students of the colleges, is latched to this short-circuit between the law as both a policy of interpretation and the rules governing a discourse. This gives the world that Sulway has created a sense of etiquette, realpolitik, and, at times, a frightening absence of doubt.

Henri’s narrative arc persists in this categorical adumbration of the laws. Drawn to wonder about her dead mother’s and Great Aunt Grace’s missionary motivations in the reclaimed and to be reclaimed Oikos colonies, and against her father’s advice, Henri’s story begins with the causa sui that puts her on a scholarly path: “I want to be an Obanite … I want to be a Historian … It’s what my mother would have wanted.” (Sulway 2013: 26-27)

Where Rupetta’s narrative arc is constantly referencing her difference to human-qua-human relations, the narrative of Henri is far more affective, humanist even. The romance with Miri, sleeping in the stacks, and Henri’s fascination with the heresy of the Salt Lane Witches, serve to create crescendos and cascades of emotion that are anathema to the Rupettan way of life depicted in Henri’s narrative. Indeed, it is Henri’s faculty of desire that enables her to find more than erotic satisfaction with Miri; to find love. The desire of Henri does not play out in a linear fashion however. Often Henri is frustrated, sometimes admonished by her mentor Jenon, who does not enable Henri’s abilities as a historian through praise, only negation, limitation, and rejection. In spite of such negativity, Henri’s desire to be a historian continues on and diversifies, first to History, then to heresy, and then to Miri.

Rupetta’s narrative arc is often phrased as a story told to Henri that is in Henri’s interest, dislocating the local time and ‘making history’ of Rupetta herself. For the broader view of the novel Henri’s lesbian romance with Miri in the straight discourse of the Elm and Oban colleges is the most obvious of the queer and gay themes. Yet the forces that throw these lovers together are what let us delve further into Henri’s attitudes to law, heresy, and History. These views of Henri often put her awry and sometimes afoul of the Rupettan discourse, although not of Rupetta herself. To this extent it appears to my reading that Henri sees something of her own struggle—however distorted—in the fragments that she finds about or by the Salt Lane Witches, Emmeline and Mathilde, in her historical inquiry.

The Salt Lane Witches and the Politics of Wonder

The novel’s Rupettan revelry derives the political and theological repression of the Salt Lane Witches through a reinterpretation of a nineteenth century folktale from the English midlands. Since 2011 the folktale has been listed on tourist information websites such as Worcester People and Places for visitors to Cheshire County (Hinks 2016a). Earlier visitors may have heard the story told by local storyteller Edward C. Corbett, a solicitor who gave up his practice to promote Worcestershire sauce for Lea and Perrins in the interwar years (Hinks 2016).

So the Salt Lane story goes: two old women lived in a cottage by a particularly muddy track that was frequented by salt wagons. [4] When the wagons got stuck the wagoners would pay sixpence to one of the women, who would then gently coax the horses to move on. Eventually, the second woman would appear unannounced behind the wagon, seeming to coax the wagon to move also. One day a wagoner, hoping to avoid the sixpence fee, considerably lightened his load of salt before setting off down the muddy track in his wagon drawn by a team of horses. Nonetheless, his wagon became stuck in the mud and one of the women appeared by the door to the hut, calling to ask if he needed aid. The wagoner began to reply across the backs of his wheel-horse when he noticed a straw laying across the horse’s back. He tried to move it but it would not shift, so he cut it in half with his knife. As the straw was cut the horses screamed and leapt from their muddy footholds and the wagon, horses, and driver went careening onwards down the lane, leaving in their wake the body of the other woman, shorn in two.

This folktale has the enigmatic status of a fairy tale for two reasons. Firstly, the lengthier version listed on the Worcester People and Places website describes the women as being healers and known white, well-intentioned witches to the nearby villagers. In purely utilitarian terms, the website version of the witches’ tale ascribes a moral ground to them in contrast to the wagoner who wanted to cheat them of their main source of income through their magical deception—a deception unbeknownst to the wagoner we may assume given the bare level of psychological detail in the folktale about him. The witches’ curing of ailments and distribution of medicine also suggests that they are closer to nature than the wagoners atop their wagons, from which they never appear to dismount in the tale. The second curious feature of the Salt Lane Witches folktale is the silence about the domesticity of the pair or the fortunes of the surviving woman in the doorway. Although we might infer her future loneliness, at the level of the local narrative time of the folktale the surviving Salt Lane Witch is in an ambiguous, mournful space. Or perhaps the illusion is an all the more insidious magical deception: there is only one old woman. The politics of wonder in this folktale work to attract and withdraw our wondering, despite its critique of the wagoners’ mercantilism and the healing gifts of the witches.

It is popular to critique fairy tale magic as deception in Fairy Tale Studies today. Yet my cursory reading of the magic of the Salt Lane Witches folktale above seems to be in distinction to Bacchilega’s and Zipes’ arguments about the contemporary dissatisfaction with fairy tale magic as a deception. Bacchilega concurs with Zipes in her Fairy Tales Transformed?(2013) that the history of secularisation is complex but that the magic of these secular and post-secular fairy tales remains a tool at the disposal of the politics of wonder. By placing the magical deception of the witches at the centre of the tale, the fairy tale of the Salt Lane Witches provides a metanarrative for the politics of wonder that does not create a hierarchy of difference between the wagoners and witches so much as place them side by side. The interests of the witches, materialising through their magical deception, appears to be grounded in the same mathematics of guilt/blame as the wagoner who tried to cheat their fraud. The morality threaded with magic in this folktale therefore becomes a traditional allegory for deception writ large (Žižek 2002: 18). Therefore, although the folktale arrives at the same terminus of fairy tale magic identified by Bacchilega, the circuitous route that it takes distinguishes it from the reification of the magic trope that is supposed to evoke wonderment in the reader.

Where the Worcester folktale of the Salt Lane Witches presses the fraud and bad faith of its characters against one another, it remains a folktale that allegorises mercantilism in idea and practice. The Salt Lane Witches of Sulway’s Rupetta, however, are pushed outside the official Rupettan politico-theological discourse for their heretical insistence on living in distinction to the clockwork automation of the Rupettans’ hearts. As foreshadowed above, the Salt Lane Witches story is of two distinct characters: Emmeline and Mathilde. The Salt Lane Witches sub-narrative is largely told through the scholarly thread of Henri’s narrative as a tale of disenchanted educators and reformists retreating from the theological politics of the urban and technology-driven Rupettans to found the Salt Lane School in the far-flung Territories. Outside these official Rupettan channels, the school of Salt Lane stands as a hedge school.

The story of Emmeline and Mathilde’s school parallels and materialises the scholarly journey of Henri’s character arc in Rupetta. This parallel arc begins with snatches of archival fragments that Henri finds in the stacks of the academy library (Sulway 2013: 44-45, 62-63, 85 & 159) and culminates in the unfinished dissertation ‘Mathilde and Emeline Salt: An Account of Their Lives from 1895-1946’ (Sulway 2013: 284-307). Such incompleteness may be deduced from the second footnote on page 287 (Sulway 2013). The arrest and subsequent disappearance of Mathilde from the official history of the Rupettans—particularly that composed by Henri’s mentor Jenon (Sulway 2013: 161-162)—marks the beginning of the repression and silencing of the Salt Lane School, and the erasure of Henri and Miri’s miraculous child Perdita from the historical traces and ‘false narrative composed and distributed by the Consorts and Alazaïns since the time of Eloise IX’ (Sulway 2013: 306). This repression and silencing of the heresy of Emmeline and Mathilde by the Rupettans reveals the latter’s perverse manipulation of history as the zero-level of its ideology: in a plural and random universe of traditions, the Rupettan Annal is arbitrarily asserted as the Tradition and is rigorously enforced as such through the manipulation and sanitisation of historical records and artefacts.

This tension between Henri’s excursions into the silenced history of the Salt Lane Witches enables Sulway’s novel to tell us more about Henri’s relationship with this silencing of history than about its supposed contents, i.e. their heretical ideation of Life against the first line of the fourfold Rupettan law ‘Life is Death.’ This situates the allegorical effect of Henri’s investigation into the Salt Lane Witches in a modern genealogical way: it is about the relationship between those who write history and history itself. [5] The folktale of the Salt Lane Witches, by contrast, functions as a traditional allegory that evokes the ideal form of Deception through wonderment. This traditional allegorical mode is a structuralist sense of wonder. Rather than such anti-textual wonderment, the Rupettan historicisation of the Salt Lane Witches favours a silence about their history offering any deep lessons both as a heresy and as an ideological motor of Rupettan oppression. In Rupetta, history arrives in what Walter Benjamin called ‘a state of emergency’ (Benjamin 1999: 248). Sulway’s novel thus spins a post-modern narrative that offers its readers a reflexive accounting for how we may approach the tale of the Salt Lane Witches through Henri’s dangerous historical inquiry rather than traditional allegory, myth, or meaning-making (mythopoesis); as Robert Coover has quipped, ‘myth nice, tale naughty’ (in Bernheimer 2007: 57).

Gender and Rupetta

I now wish to turn from this allegorical difference to the questions of how gender features in the critical reception of fairy tales and why this may be seen to offer some guidance to understanding the queering of the Salt Lane Witches folktale in Rupetta, given its allegorical variation. This folkloric content may also be a contributing factor for why some decide that Sulway’s narrative is outside of science fiction; of course, to do so requires that we ignore important framing devices ing the novel such as alternative history that are themselves prominent tools of the genre. In the introduction to Brothers and Beasts (2007), Kate Bernheimer notes the dominant view that fairy tales are for girls and that boys’ interest in fairy tales generally always carries the risk of shame (2007: 7-8). However irrational such self-directed guilt may be, Bernheimer argues that this infantilising social attitude flows into the gendered critical discourse on fairy tales:

Nonetheless I received so many anguished correspondences in the process of gathering this book that I began to worry that I had asked something of these writers that was really causing them to suffer. “I can’t write the essay after all,” more than one told me in a painful phone call that would go something like this: “It is simply too personal an endeavour, I’m afraid. I’m awfully sorry.” I would murmur in compassion, express my regret.

[…] Of course, as evidenced by this collection, you may gather that days or weeks later I would receive a gorgeous essay from that very same person—it would just suddenly appear on my desk without explanation.

What magical agent had intervened? I think simply the magic of fairy tales (Bernheimer 2007: 7).

Bernheimer’s editorial insight here is that the literary quality of fairy tales, their politics of wonder and magical deception, enables a rupturing of the girl-boy gender binary to move each reader/critic to express their critical views. In his afterword to Bernheimer’s anthology, Zipes makes a similar claim, arguing that the magic of fairy tales is their potential for subversion and resonance within a reader’s psyche (Zipes in Bernheimer 2007: 184-185).

The Salt Lane Witches tale is one such example of subversion with the wagoner’s attempt to cheat the witches’ magical deception that is yet to be recognised as such—fraud against fraud. Rupetta, by contrast, offers an enlivening of these witches’ lives revealed through Henri’s historical investigations. If one takes a critical measure of the deceptive and the queer in Sulway’s recasting of the Salt Lane Witches tale in Rupetta some informative differences arise. The magical deception of Emmeline and Mathilde is not fraudulent in the sense of competing for money through duplicitous means. Instead, their heresy rests on the public and deliberate abrogation of the Rupettan laws. The practical effects of this heresy produce a familial and maternal domesticity written through with botanical labels, as evidenced by Henri’s excursions to the Salt Lane School that has in her time become a wunderkammer of disorganised and censored memorabilia, memoir, and an air of memento mori: things at odds with the historical revisionism that Henri’s colleagues and mentors at Oban College pursue for the Rupettan Annal (Sulway 2013: 111-113). The homosocial leadership of Emmeline and Mathilde ends in tragedy: according to the Hidden Miracle chapter of the novel and its rearticulation in Henri’s unfinished dissertation, Mathilde’s guardianship over Perdita restricts her from returning to Emmeline after the former’s interview with the Rupettan inquisition (Sulway 2013: 262-283 & 297-307). Henri’s dissertation notes that this tragic tension between Emmeline and Mathilde set the latter towards the gardening that she could teach to Perdita while Emmeline continued to tend to the garden that was the Salt Lane School.

The reimagining of the Salt Lane Witches in Rupetta creates a gay cultural reference that is also queer. The queer distinction here is necessary to highlight that the domesticity of Emmeline and Mathilde, which they enjoy prior to Mathilde’s arrest, is a terrorism and heresy—terrifying and heretical for the Rupettans. This domesticity is not the same domestic discourse evoked by Duggan’s critique of the neo-liberalisation of gay culture under laissez-faire capitalism. Rather, it is closer to Puar’s argument that queer is generated through decentration against the essentialist controls of patriotic and eidetic assumptions. For the narrative of Rupetta, this decentered queer is silenced, repressed, and manipulated; it remains outside the protections of the apparatus of the Rupettan state and its normativity, and remains a motor of history.

Rupetta and Intertextuality

The return to/departure of Mathilde from the Salt Lane School in lieu of the Rupettan Inquisition breaks with this queer domesticity of Emmeline and Mathilde by seeming to produce an intertextual commentary on the missing years of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale from Folio 1 (1623). In the play, Perdita is banished by her father Leontes as a result of his paranoia about his jealous imagining of her mother’s fraternising with the king of Bohemia. Perdita’s exile is marked by a change of act and scene. In 3.3 an old, kindly shepherd takes in the infant Perdita, who is abandoned with a letter explaining her royal lineage. The next manifestation of Perdita is in scene 4.4, set some sixteen years later, and begins the tale of her return to Sicily, the city and her father. We simply do not know what occurs in this gap of sixteen years. It is my contention that the story of Perdita in Rupetta exchanges the shepherd for Mathilde, and that the sequence of small snapshots of Perdita and Mathilde that Sulway gives to mark their exile works to make minimally visible Perdita’s sixteen year absence in The Winter’s Tale while at the same time giving an alternative to the alienation of Mathilde from Emmeline. It is this ‘minimal difference’ of the Perdita narrative in Rupetta that challenges the reader to think again.

How are we to take what we see of this minimal difference in Rupetta ? The traces that Henri works through in her unfinished dissertation position Perdita and Mathilde outside the Rupettan Annal. This decentration does not simply marginalise them: they are in cache, hidden from history. Yet the trace of the pair is not without substance, and this leads me to wonder if what is more important for Henri’s investigation is the anti-historical lurching from crisis to crisis that the Rupettan Annal represents late in the novel by way of Jenon’s rigorous repression of Henri; an intellectual violence which her dissertation seeks to address by unveiling the hidden miracle that is Perdita. The discursive field of Henri’s dissertation engages the queer figures of Perdita and Mathilde from its unfinished state and yet still offers some fragment of conclusive judgement: ‘From this and other evidence contained within the record, it appears Perdita is, then, the heretofore undisclosed eighth miracle; perhaps the only heresy Mathilde was a part of—a union of the Organic elements of the Natural World and the Mechanical elements of Rupettan Life’ (Sulway 2013: 306). This unity that Perdita represents late in the novel is not triumphant and over-determining. It is instead the minimal difference that spurs on the Oikos rebels and the Rupettans as they jostle and fight. Perdita is, philosophically speaking, an indivisible remainder of the Rupettans’ renouncing of the Salt Lane Witches and their school: a narratological element that is irreducible to either or both sides but nonetheless appears in the wake of their quarrel.

The conclusion of Rupetta stages the eclipse of the idolatry that supplanted Rupettan eschatology. For the Fourfold Law, immortality is wrought by knowledge and mechanics rather than life. As the sentiment of the novel suggests, life rather than death is the price for this Rupettan—note not Rupetta’s—immortality. In this dramatic closing chapter, Perdita has aged beyond the child uncovered by Henri’s investigations. Perhaps most pressingly for my minimal difference thesis above, it is in this chapter that Perdita assumes responsibility for herself for another: Rupetta. The update to present time in this final part of the novel coincides with this assumption of responsibility, collapsing the historical focus of the past chapters. Henri is at a distance from the drama of this chapter, squirreled away in the Territories while Rupetta and her conspirators search for Perdita. Perdita’s parting from Rupetta as she escapes maintains this present—out of history—time at play in the chapter:

Perdita shakes (sic.) her head. ‘You will go home, to Henri,’ she says. ‘But we cannot leave here together. They will be looking for us: a woman and a child.’ She smiles, wryly, her eyes shining with unshed tears. ‘A goddess and a monster’ (Sulway 2013: 345).

The wit of Perdita should give us pause here. The minimal difference that Perdita arguably maintains for the narrative of Rupetta and the intertext of The Winter’s Tale appears as wit for Perdita. This wit traces her selfless choice to part from Rupetta in the emptiness of present time. Thus where in historical recounting Perdita is one exceptional element among many it is in present time where she is rendered unhomely and made to find her own path. This is chorused on the closing page of the novel: “And each year she came, and each year she was lost to us again, as children are and should be” (Sulway 2013: 352).

What Remains…

Sustaining a critical gaze on a narrative as I have proffered above often evacuates humour and this, I feel, is a failing. This temptation to be all too serious when reading Rupetta tends to ignore the many jokes of the novel that engage with the revisionist mode of fairy tale narratives told by feminist speculative fictions of the 1970s and 1980s—Angela Carter, Anne Sexton, Joy Williams, and others (Haase 2004: 22). The witches of Salt Lane are saucy, especially in Rupetta. The hedge school commanded by the informal instruction of Emmeline and Mathilde is heretical. The school itself is a site for the romantic tryst of Henri and Miri. The queer that is here is an intertext of the tale from Cheshire County. The intertextuality is itself a modicum of difference between both Rupetta and the folktale, read from the side of Rupetta. In the same way, reading Rupetta as a commentary on the missing years in the middle story of The Winter’s Tale relies on staring into the ontological abyss between the texts in some attempt to bridge this through interpretation that ruptures the Shakespearean work. Such intertextuality is political comedy insofar as it attends to the difference between the frames of the texts only to subvert these frames, i.e. history is propaganda in a state of emergency.

While the queer at play in Sulway’s Rupetta reveals the tensions between the religious, heretical, and historical themes of the novel, a closer look at some of its fantasy coordinates—Fairy Tales Studies, the Salt Lane Witches fairy tale, The Winter’s Tale, etc—show that Queer Science Fiction is a shifting literature. This literary motion is a twist of queer play, an airy whimsy that rustles the leaves of allegory and intertextual difference, with the chaotic swell to produce storms elsewhere. The heretic history of the Salt Lane Witches mirrors Henri’s academic and romantic struggle within the Oban and Elm colleges. In this era of deconstruction lessons, literary critics may be armed to see the force of such a mirror as a distorting tain. Within the boundaries of my reading of Rupetta however this tain is the politics of wonder, complicated as they are by the minimal difference to the missing years of The Winter’s Tale. The queer here is a motor for the Rupettans’ oppressive hierarchy and propaganda that masquerade as the History, the Rupettan Annal. And although this queer motive is repressed and desublimated in Rupetta by the coding of heresy and Henri’s scholarly rupture, its effects burn so brightly in the closing chapter that the temporal shift in the narrative becomes all the more shocking. Perdita is no longer lost but nor is she recovered: she is herself for another, self-conscious of untimely actions, a being in the throes of emergency. This, then, may be the insight that Rupetta offers readers of Queer Science Fiction who are trying to respect the genre as a literature in the modern sense of the term: literature is a shifting, political thing, that can have red planets and red witches. Sulway proves that even if a queer literature is political, it can still have a sense of humour about itself.

Bibliography

Bacchilega, Cristina. 2013. Fairy Tales Transformed? Twenty-First Century Adaptations & the Politics of Wonder . Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Benjamin, Walter. 1955/1999. Illuminations. London: Pimlico.

Bernheimer, Kate. 2007. Brothers and Beasts: An Anthology of Men on Fairy Tales. Ed. Kate Bernheimer. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Alexander Doty. 1993. Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press.

Dick, Philip K. 1962. The Man in the High Castle. New York: Putnam.

Duggan, Lisa. 2003. The Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy . Boston: Beacon Press.

Le Guin, Ursula. 1989. The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. London: The Women’s Press.

Haase, Donald. 2004. “Feminist Fairy-Tale Scholarship.” Fairy Tales and Feminism: New Approaches. Ed. Donald Haase. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. 1-36.

Hegel, GWF. 1807/1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Tr. AV Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hinks, Pam. 2016. “Edward C. Corbett and the Telling of Folk Tales.” Worcester People and Places. Accessed 14 December 2017 at <http://www.worcesterpeopleandplaces.org.uk/index.php?mact=News,cntnt01,detail,0&cntnt01articleid=301&cntnt01returnid=90>

Hinks, Pam. 2016a. “Folklore and Superstitions: The Salt Lane Witches.” Worcester People and Places. Accessed 14 December 2017 at < http://www.worcesterpeopleandplaces.org.uk/index.php?mact=News,cntnt01,detail,0&cntnt01articleid=303&cntnt01returnid=90>

Jagcose, Annamarie. 2012. Orgasmology. Durham: Duke University Press.

Macdonald, George. 1893. “The Fantastic Imagination”. Fantasists on Fantasy: A Collection of Critical Reflections by 18 Masters of the Art . Ed. Robert H Boyer and Kenneth J Zahroski. New York: Avon. 14-21.

Puar, Jasbir. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke University Press.

Puar, Jasbir. 2013. “Rethinking Homonationalism.” International Journal of Middle East Studies. 45: 336-338.

Shakespeare, William. 1623/2005. “The Winter’s Tale.” The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, Second Edition. Eds. John Jowett, William Montgomery, Gary Taylor, and Stanley Wells. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1125-1152.

Shelley, Mary. 1818/2012. Frankenstein: A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. J. Paul Hunter. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Strickland, TJ. 2001. Roman Middlewich: A Story of Roman and Briton in Mid-Cheshire. Middlewich: Roman Middlewich Project.

Sulway, Nike. 2013. Rupetta. North Yorkshire: Tartarus Press.

Tiffin, Jessica. 2009. Marvelous Geometry: Narrative and Metafiction in Modern Fairy Tale. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Wiegman, Robyn. 2012. Object Lessons. Durham: Duke University Press.

Žižek, Slavoj. 2002. For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, Second Edition. London: Verso.

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Alisa Krasnostein and Julia Rios, editors
Kaleidoscope: Diverse YA Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories
Twelfth Planet Press, 2014

Turns out the author is not dead after all. But I guess we knew that.

Recent years have seen widespread campaigns for diverse books: for stories reflecting the reality of readers’ worlds, and for protagonists with a range of identities beyond middle-class white people. There’s so often a disconnect between the stories we read and the world we experience. And between the worlds the writer creates, and the lived experience of the writer.

Surveys and research raise time and time again the overt and subtle exclusions, appropriations, misrepresentations and stereotypes presented in fiction—particularly in writing for young adults and children—and the impact these have on generations of readers and their views of the world, and of one another.

Elena Monoyiou and Simoni Symeonidou outline a few sample studies:

A recent analysis of 90 realistic novels written in the USA between 2000 and 2010 for children aged from 9 to 14 years reveals that most mixed race characters are portrayed in negative ways (i.e. they are struggling to make a living or they are just managing; one or both of their biological parents is probably dead, absent, or peripheral; their environment comprises mostly white people; and the protagonist is the only biracial). Disabled characters are either presented as ‘poor little things’ who experience a personal tragedy and they are passive and unable to defend themselves or as ‘superheroes’ who manage to thrive ( Ayala 1999). Even relatively recent children’s books written from 1990 onwards often reproduce oppressive terms and segregational attitudes (Symeonidou 2012; Tassiopoulos 2006) and present unrealistic ‘happy ever after endings’ (e.g. the disabled character is ‘cured’ in a miraculous way, Beckett et al. 2010). (2015: 590)

Findings like these are not new, and the need for change is now accepted by some publishers, by library and literacy organisations, writers’ centres and guilds, and by many writers and illustrators of books for young adults and children.

Part of the response is a call for greater diversity, particularly in activist communities of readers and writers of children’s and young adult (YA) literature: on social media, on blogs, in library and literary sector journals, and in mainstream media. There are variations in the language and emphasis of the debates in different countries (which sometimes leads to misunderstanding), but the dialogue is transnational and often online and immediate, flaring up and evolving rapidly. What follows is a brief survey of some of the prominent positions that arise in those public exchanges, and of the ways in which the discussion about the nature of diversity has developed over the past few years.

One of the key players (among many) is Malinda Lo, author of magical and inherently queer fantasy novels for young adults. She, with other YA authors including Ellen Oh, began the #WeNeedDiverseBooks campaign, a US-based movement that is largely responsible for the momentum behind the current debates.

In her ground breaking count of young adult books with LGBT main characters (Lo 2013), Lo found that 45 percent of books published in the US in the decade to 2013 featured a cisgender male protagonist, and 35 percent featured a cisgender female protagonist. Only 6 percent featured a main character who was identifiably queer, and a further 4 percent featured a transgendered protagonist. 12 percent of YA novels also addressed LGBT issues as issues, or, as Lo put it, ‘situated as a problem to be overcome’ (2014); for example, coming out stories (sometimes the ‘problem’ affects a minor character rather than the protagonist).

A year later, she reported that mainstream publishers had dramatically increased the number of books about LGBT characters:

In 2014, mainstream publishers published 47 LGBT YA books. This is a 59 percent increase from 2013, when only 29 LGBT YA books were published by mainstream publishers (Lo 2014a).

But Lo’s 2014 analysis of leading titles by US publishers found that 85 percent featured white main characters; that all but two of the books classified as LGBTIQ featured a gay male protagonist; and that only 4 percent featured a character with a disability (Lo 2014b).

This data about representation complements what we already know about inclusion and exclusion on the basis of gender and gender identity in literature—or, more broadly, in the industry around literature—including reviewing and bookselling.

More recently, discussions around diversity of representation in fiction have focused on the identities of writers and illustrators, rather than on characters and the situations in which they are portrayed. Importantly, the ongoing public conversation has also raised issues around intersectionality, and around the ways in which books with diverse characters, or books by writers from diverse backgrounds and identities, are received and discussed.

The annual VIDA count of gender representation has, in 2014 and 2015, investigated beyond gender to interrogate intersectional factors affecting the reception of writing by women. It found, as you would expect, that male writers are more often reviewed and commissioned to write reviews, and that women, and particularly women who are queer, Indigenous women, women of colour, women with disabilities, and transgender people appeared less regularly in the pages on leading literary journals.

The Stella Count has also surveyed female-identifying authors whose books have been reviewed, since 2013, to test whether women of certain identities are less likely to appear in the literary journals, books pages and awards in Australia.

So if there is now little debate about the lack of representation of diverse communities in fiction (and elsewhere), the question remains: how do we address it? And who gets to address it?

There’s no one answer to that question. Publishers, booksellers, editors, librarians, educators, reviewers, researchers, arts funding bodies, parents and carers, and young readers all have parts to play.

Public debate still rages, however, on the most fundamental role of all—the creator. If the world needs more diverse stories, who should write and/or illustrate them, and how? And what happens if all those straight white male writers start writing ‘diverse’ books?

The campaign for diversity has become a process of questioning who writes diverse works, and about creating space for writers who are marginalised in the publishing industry to write their own stories, so that, in turn, readers can find and experience their own stories.

Australian author and illustrator Ambelin Kwaymullina has articulated some of the issues around the emerging idea of diversity as a synonym for visibility—and specifically that an enthusiasm for diversity might lead to interventions by mainstream publishing and writers:

A lack of diversity is not a ‘diversity problem’. It is a privilege problem.

… When a lack of representation of Indigenous peoples and people of colour in kids’ lit is misunderstood as a diversity issue, the focus tends to be solely on accuracy of representation (and it is of vital importance that marginalised peoples are accurately portrayed). But in order to begin to address the cause of the lack of diversity (privilege), the question writers need to ask themselves is not simply whether they can accurately portray someone else’s experience, but whether they should be telling the story at all.

… A defence to poor representation framed in terms of someone’s good intentions can also carry an unspoken assumption that a desire to ‘help’ the marginalised is an act of charity or kindness for which marginalised peoples should be grateful (Kwaymullina 2016).

Ellen Oh, co-founder of #WeNeedDiverseBooks, unpacks some of the complexity that has arisen in the embrace of diverse books:

Yes We Need Diverse Books. But that doesn’t always mean that we want YOU to write them. No, it means we want you to support them. We want you to read them. We want you to promote them, talk about them, buy them, love them. We want you to recognize that these stories told by authors in their own voices has as much importance as all the white ones that are published year after year.

I’m going to keep saying this over and over again. Diversity is not a new hot trend for you all to jump on and write about because you think it will help you get published. That’s not what this is about. White writers can write about whatever they want, they have that luxury. Whether or not they do it well is of course subject to debate. White writers don’t have to worry about writing main characters that are white and being told “Oh we have a white story already so we have to pass.” There is no arbitrary quota of stories for you all. We get 1 maybe 2 books allocated to Asian stories – so when it is taken by a white author writing about Asian stories – guess what happens to the Asian writer trying to write their own stories(Oh 2016).

The award-winning author Meg Rosoff recently caused a storm by rejecting the idea of own stories and representation in literature to reflect readers’ lives:

The children’s book world is getting far too literal about what ‘needs’ to be represented … You don’t read Crime and Punishment to find out about Russian criminals. Or Alice in Wonderland to know about rabbits. Good literature expands your mind. It doesn’t have the ‘job’ of being a mirror (qtd in Flood 2015).

This is tricky territory, as evidenced by the furious online response to Rosoff’s comments. On one hand, there is nothing artificial about a genuinely diverse cast of characters, such as a group of friends who come from different cultural backgrounds, identities and lives. It is, simply, how life is for many of us. Seeing that reflected on the page or screen ought not be unusual, but it is. For that to change, all writers may have to create representations of people who may not be like them. Some will do it well, like some of the best Australian YA novels of recent years, others not so much.

On the other hand, sometimes diverse books can feel contrived, most often due to the sketching of barely-there characters as gestures towards diversity, rather than as fully realised people. Even when they are intended, as Oh suggests, as positive stereotypes, they are still stereotypes: thoughtlessly created and often ill-informed. This is where we most often see diversity as an ally of tolerance, or even a token gesture, rather than a natural aspect of acceptance.

Which brings us to Kaleidoscope, an anthology of diverse YA science fiction and fantasy stories, in which many of these questions are at play. It was conceived in the wild days of the diversity debate a couple of years ago, in a genuine attempt to deliver representation of a range of characters and themes, and to directly deal with a lack of diversity.

As is the case with many anthologies, there’s some beautiful writing here, some frankly pedestrian, and plenty in between: chilling, adventurous, challenging, funny and bleak.

In some cases, the cynical reader in me suspected that a character’s gender or cultural background had been changed in order to fit the editors’ submission guidelines. It reminds me of the time I met a man who was writing a detective novel. He told me that the protagonist had originally been male, but he’d decided a lesbian would be cooler, and so he just changed the pronouns. Not the nature of the character, just the tiny signifier. Does a lesbian character, then, have the same attributes on the page as a male detective?

But this begs the question: what expectations of representation do we, as readers, bring to the text? How are binary genders or sexuality, say, indicated to us as aspects of fictional characters? Do writers indicate the femaleness of a character purely by physical description, and if so, where do our descriptors come from? Or does the writer signify some concept of femininity through personal characteristics—and from which gender system do these come? If it’s a wholly imagined world, how does gender operate? The same questions might be asked of portrayals of a wide range of people who are currently under-represented in popular culture, or represented by stereotypes.

In Kaleidoscope we have at least two fairly heartless and possibly violent butches, and a number of characters with little characterisation outside their existence as examples of diversity, such as a young woman with a pushy Chinese mother, a pair of gay dads, and the odd gay or bisexual best friend or person in a wheelchair. We see the trope of magic as metaphor for autism or an undefined difference, but we can also read stories that interrogate familiar tropes, such as the miracle cure for disability.

Of course, when we argue for diversity, we also argue for ordinary representations, for stories in which a character who is a bit like us has an adventure or falls in love or in crisis, but who just happens to be queer or gets around the streets on a mobility scooter—or, since we’re in fantasy and sci-fi worlds, a space shuttle or lightning bolt. But we do also expect some depth, some inner life, some sense of character beyond mere representation.

A few of the writers here manage it beautifully. In Ken Liu’s ‘The Seventh Day of the Seventh Moon’, two young women are about to be parted on the night of a community celebration of an ancient legend. The story weaves storytelling and myth into a metaphorical journey from realist Hefei into the heavens, in which our young lovers learn about themselves and their future together, or apart.

In Alena McNamara’s ‘The Day the God Died’, a jogger hears the voice of a trapped god whose process of powerlessness and change reflect the gender transition of the narrator and the sense of them, like most young adults, locating themselves and defining their relationship to the world:

“I’ll go off to college in a couple of years. Then I can be whoever I want.”
The god said, And what if, by then, you do not want to be yourself?
“I’ve never wanted to be myself,” I said.
The god waited, I think for me to realise what I had just said, but I knew exactly what had come out of my mouth so I waited too.
I see, it said at last.

Reading Kaleidoscope as an exercise in diversity also provides, in a nutshell, the challenges for the reader in responding to the concept of own stories and diversity. Do you read without knowledge of the author (impossible in some cases—there are some familiar names here), and the assumptions you might make about them and their lives? For us to read own stories, does the writer have to publicly identify as a person eligible to write the story? And what might that mean for writers who are not comfortable in doing so? Will we just know if a story speaks to us, if it feels absolutely right, if it holds truth for us, that it has worked? Or will we, as we have always done, read ourselves into the text, even in stories where we no longer feel scribbled into the margins or left out completely?

As Malinda Lo argues:

Writing outside your culture is a complicated endeavor that requires extensive research, being aware of your own biases and limitations, and a commitment to delving deeply into the story. However, writing any fiction requires this. There are no shortcuts to writing fiction truthfully and well. There really aren’t (Lo 2014c).

Publishing diversity, in a way, calls for a reductivist approach. It rightly calls out the lack of visible representation in text (and elsewhere), and argues that the way to redress it is to create more varied representations. Is this a moment of transition, like equal opportunity in employment, during which measures such as revealing the identity of the writer are required to right past wrongs and help reverse imbalance? As a short-term strategy, this runs the risk of simplifying a complex and painful issue.

This anthology’s approach is potentially even riskier, collecting together stories which have little in common beyond an attempt to address a lack of representation. The act of anthologising itself reflects some of the discussions about the idea of diversity, as does the act of contributing to a demonstration of diversity in print. As an anthology of fantasy and science fiction, too, it is deeply engaged with the idea of the Other, and it’s no coincidence that many of the ground breaking works of fiction that interrogate concepts of gender, for example, or race, are those set in totally imagined worlds in which our cultural traditions need not apply—although the opposite also applies.

We can wholeheartedly support publishers and editors who respond to demands for diversity in the best way they know. But the idea of an anthology of diverse stories, like some other interventions in diversity, risks (unintentionally) conflating myriad identities and representations into one. Festivals and conferences feature diversity panels, and it’s common now to hear writers being described as diverse, as if that’s an identity—as if it’s something core to our very being, something hard-won and defiant and proud. It’s not.

Diversity is not fairy dust.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Flood, Alison. 2015. “Meg Rosoff sparks diversity row over books for marginalised children”. The Guardian. Viewed 1st August 2017, <http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/13/meg-rosoff-diversity-row-books-marginalised-children-edith-campbell-large-fears >

Kwaymullina, Ambelin. 2016. “Privilege and literature: three myths created by misdiagnosing a lack of Indigenous voices (and other diverse voices) as a ‘diversity problem’”. AlphaReader: My Solo Book Club. Viewed 1st August 2017, 10 March, 2016 < http://alphareader.blogspot.co.nz/2016/03/privilege-and-literature-three-myths.html >

Lo, Malinda. 2013. “LGBT young adult books 2003-2013: A Decade of Slow But Steady Change”, Malinda Lo. Viewed 1st August 2017, https://www.malindalo.com/blog/2013/10/lgbt-young-adult-books-2003-13-a-decade-of-slow-but-steady-change?rq=slow%20but%20steady

Lo, Malinda. 2014. “2014 LGBT YA by the Numbers”. Diversity in YA. Viewed 1st August 2017, < http://www.diversityinya.com/2014/12/2014-lgbt-ya-by-the-numbers/ >

Lo, Malinda. 2014. “Diversity in YALSA’s Best Fiction for Young Adults: Updated for 2014”. Diversity in YA. Viewed 1st August 2017, < http://www.diversityinya.com/2014/02/diversity-in-yalsas-best-fiction-for-young-adults-updated-for-2014/ >

Lo, Malinda. 2014. “Should white people write about people of colour?” Malinda Lo. Viewed 1st August 2017, <https://www.malindalo.com/blog/2014/04/should-white-people-write-about-people-of-color?rq=should%20white%20people%20write%20about>

Monoyiou, Elena and Symeonidou, Simoni. 2015. “The wonderful world of children’s books? Negotiating diversity through children’s literature”. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 20 (6): 588-603.

Oh, Ellen. 2016. “Dear white writers”. Ello’s World. Viewed 1st August 2017, < http://elloellenoh.tumblr.com/post/139448275729/dear-white-writers >

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Throughout literary history, a number of women writers have taken on male nom de plumes. Critics and other observers have noted the ways in which these names have been adopted for pragmatic reasons: in order to provide women with avenues for publication that enhance their reputations as (male) writers, and protect their identities as (female) daughters, sisters, wives and mothers.

Alice B. Sheldon created James Tiptree, Jr in 1967. In this paper, I argue that Tiptree, or ‘Tip’ as he was known to his friends, was not merely a nom de plume. Rather, Tip was a fully realised identity—Alice’s alter ego, or ‘Other I’—a well-known and respected writer who maintained epistolary relationships with other writers, editors, publishers, and readers.

In Seymour Chatman’s, Coming to Terms, he writes that the act of reading is “ultimately an exchange between real human beings, [which] entails two intermediate constructs” (Chatman, 75). This paper examines the ways Tip’s identity, as revealed in his creative works and in his letters, disrupts the gender-normative structure of this ‘exchange’, particularly in terms of the assumed correlation between the gender of the Implied Author and that of the ‘real human being’ he is (mis)recognised as being.

James Tiptree, Jr was a writer of science fiction. His works appeared in various high-profile science fiction magazines between 1968 and about 1980. During that time, he was nominated for ten Hugo awards, and won two of them; and was nominated for nine Nebula Awards, of which he won three.

His work was highly regarded for a range of reasons, including the ways it combined the familiar markers of ‘good’ science fiction, including—as Silverberg described Tip’s work—‘ineluctably masculine’ writing, with an intelligent and considered engagement with race and, more particularly, gender. He often wrote from a female viewpoint.

Silverberg, describing Tiptree’s work in an introduction to Warm Worlds and Otherwise, wrote that:

It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing. I don’t think the novels of Jane Austen could have been written by a man nor the stories of Ernest Hemingway by a woman, and in the same way I believe the author of the James Tiptree stories is male … Hemingway was a deeper and trickier writer than he pretended to be; so too with Tiptree, who conceals behind an aw-shucks artlessness an astonishing skill for shaping scenes and misdirecting readers into unexpected abysses of experience. And there is, too, that prevailing masculinity about both of them—that preoccupation with questions of courage, with absolute values, with the mysteries and passions of life and death as revealed by extreme physical tests, by pain and suffering and loss. (Silverberg 1975, xv)

Science fiction, though often cited as having its origins in Mary Shelley’s iconic novel, Frankenstein, has a long history of considering itself a male, or at least masculine, genre. A genre written by and for men in a largely masculine style identified by, for example, an emphasis on action over characterisation or style, with science and rationality over emotion, and with speed and economy over beauty of expression.

Even when women do write and publish science fiction, its claim to belong within the genre has been often and loudly critiqued. Pat Murphy, for example, at a panel at the feminist science fiction convention WisCon in March 1991, ironically stated:

… that women don’t write science fiction. Put a little more rudely, this rumbling says: ‘Those damn women are ruining science fiction.’ They are doing it by writing stuff that isn’t ‘real’ science fiction; they are writing ‘soft’ science fiction and fantasy. (cited in Yant 2014)

In 2002, the publication of Karen Joy Fowler’s short story ‘What I Didn’t See’—a story in conversation with Tiptree’s short story ‘The Women Men Don’t See’—on SciFiction.com sparked a long-running and heated debate about whether it actually was science fiction or not. Brenda Cooper was typical in applauding the story but remarking that it was “not science fiction” (Duchamp in Larbalestier 2006, 370).

More recently, in 2012, after the Arthur C Clarke judging panel put forward an all-male longlist, the judges published an article in The Guardian defending the outcome by insisting that women were, in general, not writing science fiction, even when they thought they were. As Walter writes:

Encoded into this strange divide between fantasy and science fiction is what Joanna Russ, author of The Female Man, called The Double Standard of Content. How To Suppress Women’s Writing, Russ’s satirical text on sexism in art, is 30 years old this year but its lessons are still largely unlearned. Women’s writing is dismissed as fantasy, while the fantasies of men are granted some higher status as science fiction. (Walter 2013)

Women writers are commonly understood as interlopers in the field of science fiction; as writers who are largely incapable of writing ‘real’ aka ‘hard’ science fiction. A perception memorably hashtagged after the Clarke Award announcement, and in a special issue put together by Lightspeed Magazine, as #WomenDestroyScienceFiction.

Wendy Pearson writes, in an analysis of Tiptree’s short story ‘And I Woke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill Side’, that women characters are “presented as aliens in a society in which men are assumed to be the norm” (cited in Larbalestier 2006, 183). I would argue that women writers, too, have been consistently understood as aliens—as ‘Others’—within the science fiction community, where male writers are assumed to be the norm.

By now, unless you’re a regular reader of science fiction (or you’ve read the abstract for this paper) you’re probably wondering what any of this has to do with James Tiptree, Jr. I’ll try to explain.

Tip was a notorious recluse, but he was also an active and engaged member of the science fiction community who “had a voluminous correspondence with editors, other writers, and fans and took part in a variety of sf-related events, such as the symposium on women in science fiction printed in the fanzine Khatru” (Pearson in Larbalestier 2006, 171).

Tip, however, was ejected from the Khatru symposium because, as Lefanu (a fellow participant) has written, he was “the women found her male persona too irritating to deal with” (Pearson in Larbalestier 2006, 171). His good friend, Joanna Russ, told him that he had ideas “no woman could even think, or understand, let alone assent to” (Philips 2006, 3).

His letters were littered with references to “fishing, duck hunting, and politics. He was courtly and flirtatious with women. When … Robert Silverberg sent him a letter on his wife’s stationery, Tip answered that he had ‘shaved and applied lotion’ before reading on” (Phillips 2006, 2).

Jeff Smith, a then very young sf-fan who later became Tip’s literary executor, from quite early on in their correspondence, urged Tip to attend cons and award ceremonies—to make physical his virtual interactions with the science fiction community. In 1974, just after winning the Nebula for ‘The Girl Who Was Plugged In’, Tip wrote to Jeff:

I can’t explain it, really. Partly stubbornness, I fear. I don’t see who I’m hurting, why can’t I squat in my cave in peace? I’m just a plain old mortal, I don’t see why I have to present the knobby flesh to be scanned in vain for what makes the words come out … (cited in Phillips 2006, 323-324).

To Virginia Kidd, Tip wrote: “What could the metabolizing hunk that is me be but a disappointment?” (cited in Phillips 2006, 324).

*

In 1976, Tiptree’s mother passed away. Mary Bradley had been a published writer—she had won an O Henry Prize. A dashing, eccentric, inspiring and somewhat intimidating figure. As a child, Tip had travelled to Africa with Mary. During the first trip, when Tip was six years old:

After slaughtering five gorillas, they kept one of the babies under [Tip’s] cot, causing the smell of formaldehyde to pervade everything. Mary killed a lion and posed next to it until it came back to life, not fully dead until she shot it in the heart. (Carnevale 2010)

Mary’s passing was devastating. Tiptree wrote to Jeff Smith, passing on news of his mother’s death and asking Jeff to arrange to have an obituary printed in Khatru, “so friends would know why they hadn’t heard from him” (Philips 2006, 357).

Jeff decided to do some research. He later wrote that he didn’t expect to find anything very important. “I thought I was going to find out his name was really James Johnson, so what?” (cited in Philips 2006, 357). Instead what he found was an obituary in the Chicago Tribune that listed the author and explorer’s only surviving relative as her daughter: Mrs Alice Hastings (Mrs Huntington) Sheldon. A 61-year-old woman.

In Gender Trouble (1990) Judith Butler writes that “all gender identity is a performance, an apparent substance that is an effect of a prior act of imitation” (Butler 1998, 677). So, too, all authorial identities are performances—effects—that include or enclose, or overlap with, gender performances.

The desire (on the part of the science fiction community) to penetrate the mystery of the author’s (gender) identity can be understood as an expression of the desire to discover or excavate an essential or stable gender, even though there never was/is One to be found.

Gender, instead, as discussed by Butler, is always-already ‘drag’: “an imitation that regularly produces the ideal it attempts to approximate … a performance that produces the illusion of an inner sex or essence or psychic gender core; it produces on the skin, through the gesture, the move, the gait (that array of corporeal theatrics understood as gender representation), the illusion of inner depth” (Butler 1998, 728).

Except that, Tiptree’s performance of his masculine gender was not produced on the skin. It was not produced through ‘the gesture, the move, the gait’ or any other ‘corporeal theatrics’. Tiptree’s gender performance was entirely textual, or virtual. It was produced on the page, through science fiction stories, through articles, reviews and textual symposiums, and through letters that were ‘ineluctably masculine’, through tone, and word choice, and a signature—that array of authorial theatrics.

Tip’s performance as a male science fiction author is, here, a performance that does not imitate an original, but only another imitation. It is, as Derrida describes mimesis, a ‘reference without a referent, without any first or last unit, a ghost that is the phantom of no flesh’ (Derrida 1981, 206).

Tip was doxed as a married, older, white woman in a series of communications over which he had no control. In fact, he feared being revealed in this way and had worked very hard, over almost ten years, to maintain his authorial identity and, alongside it, his right to privacy.

Doxing is the term used now—though it wasn’t in use in 1976—to refer to the revealing of the ‘real’ identity behind a virtual—usually an online—personality. According to Wikipedia, doxing, may be carried out to “aid law enforcement”, but is more often used, particularly within the science fiction community, “[to aid] coercion, harassment, public shaming, and other forms of vigilante justice” (“Doxing”). In this sense, it is very similar to the practice of outing.

Edelman has written about the ways in which outing, or publicly revealing the biological sex or sexual orientation of closeted queers, is used to reinforce heterosexist ideology by insisting on the necessity of ‘reading’ the body as a signifier of gender orientation, and by insisting on the threat of the ‘unnerving’ capacity of queers to ‘pass’ (Edelman 1998, 722). Edelman writes that “Just as outing works to make visible a dimension of social reality effectively occluded by the assumptions of a heterosexist ideology, so that ideology, throughout the twentieth century, has insisted on the necessity of ‘reading’ the body as a signifier of sexual orientation,” (Edelman 1998, 722). In a similar way, the doxing of an author, like Tiptree, who is ‘passing’ as a man both makes visible a dimension of the essentialist science fiction community otherwise rendered invisible, and exposes the ways in which the community insists on reading authorial identities as signifiers of sexual and gendered identities.

What Tiptree’s doxing reveals (as do other more recent doxings, such as that of Benjanun Sriduangkaew) is that doxing operates, particularly within the science fiction community, in much the same way as outing functions within the hetero-patriarchy. That is, doxing arises in response to the fact that authorial gender identity remains, for conservative readers, troublingly indeterminate. It is too easy, for those who are uncomfortable with the idea that gender and sex are indivisible, and that it matters, for a woman to pass as a man, a man to pass as a woman, for a writer to inhabit an unknown, indeterminate or slippery gender identity. Authors, in such a hetero-patriarchal construct, must be either one gender, or another.

Just as doxing works to make visible a range of otherwise occluded aspects of the heteronormative/masculinist science fiction writing, publishing and fan communities, so that same ideology has insisted on the necessity of ‘reading’ the gendered body of the author as a signifier of authorial worth and importance. A gendered authorial identity is read in particular ways. As Kelley Eskridge writes:

As readers, we look for the boundaries of the narrator and the values that those boundaries imply, based on our complicated social code for these things. A certain kind of behavior exhibited by someone we perceive to be acting as male means something different to us than precisely the same behavior performed by someone acting as female … We’ve been trained as readers to believe these lines exist, and it’s important to us to know which side of them the characters are on, so we know how to feel about their behaviour … Gender is one of the big lines … that you are not allowed to cross, at least not without a great deal of flashing headlights and beeping horns. (Eskridge, in Merrick & Williams 1999, 177)

Eskridge’s observation applies equally, or in even more complicated ways, to reader’s perceptions of works by authors we perceive to be male or female. This was explicit in the critical responses to Tiptree’s work prior to his doxing, which often commented on the ways in which his authorial gender stood in relation to his authorial concerns, interests, and style. Silverberg’s comments are most famous in this regard, both his description of Tip’s work as ‘ineluctably masculine’ and comments about particular stories, such as his description of Tip’s ‘The Women Men Don’t See’ as a “profoundly feminist story told in an entirely masculine manner.” (Silverberg 1975, xvi)

Butler writes that “compulsory heterosexuality sets itself up as the original, the true, the authentic; the norm that determines the real implies that ‘being’ lesbian is always a kind of miming” (Butler 1998, 722). Masculine science fiction writing has been able to maintain the status of its own authority as the ‘natural’ mode of the genre by defining male science fiction writing against the threat of an ‘unnatural’ feminine science fiction. Female science fiction is, like lesbianism in Butler’s analysis, a ‘kind of miming’ of male science fiction. A miming that is both always-already false, and a threat. This sense of the threat of women’s writing is effectively mobilized by generating anxiety and concern about women’s, and Others’, unnerving and strategically manipulatable capacity to ‘pass’ as straight, white, male science fiction writers. The anxiety produced by Tip’s queerness lies not only in his ability to effect a ‘kind of miming’, but in his capacity to undermine the authenticity of masculine writing, to make something unnatural appear natural.

Butler further argues that gender is a “compulsory performance in the sense that acting out of line with heterosexual norms brings with it ostracism, punishment, and violence” (Butler 1998, 725). Tip’s doxing resulted in the widespread revelation of his unnatural performance, his acting out of line with the heterosexist norms of the science fiction reading and writing communities. The consequences, for Tip, of being doxed were dramatic, immediate, ongoing, and, I think, horrifying. He was ostracized not only from his community, but in an even more troubling and violent sense, from himself. Tip no longer existed. Alice, if she were to write at all, would have to write as Alli Sheldon, or as Alli-as-Raccoona, or even as Alli-as-Tip. Nobody would—nobody could—allow Tip to exist in his own right any longer.

Alice wrote several notes, in her diary, and in letters to her friends, about what she called Tip’s death, and its impact on her both personally and professionally. She wrote in her diary that “writing was at, or coming to, an end” (cited in Philips, 363), and on February 2^nd, 1977, she wrote in her journal:

I am [no longer] a man. I am not a do-er, the penetrator. And Tiptree was ‘magical’ manhood, his pen my prick. (cited in Philips, 363)

After her first in-person meeting with her primary doxxer, Jeff Smith, she wrote in a letter to Le Guin:

I could see vanishing shreds of Tiptree whirling through the suburban air, evaporating […] I don’t know if Jeff perceived that Tiptree was hiding somewhere underneath and slightly to the left of the matron, but I could feel it; I’ve spent so long not being Tiptree, which is to say, [not being] me, that it was strange to speak with someone who knows my real self […] those 8 years in sf was the first time I could be really real […] Now all that is gone, and I am back with the merry dumb-show as life, and it doesn’t much suit (cited in Philips 2006, 366-7)

Alice Sheldon did write for a while, though, in a series of critical moments beyond the scope of this paper, her work was never received in the same way that Tip’s was. Indeed, Tip’s doxxing also intervened retrospectively in the ways his work, too, is read, evaluated and understood. These days, very few people read Tip’s work as it was read in 1976. Instead we read it through the lens he never wanted; we read it as Alli-being-Tip’s work. As the work of a woman masquerading as a man.

On May 18, 1987, Tip wrote to Le Guin: “Life here is on the way down and out. Not to condole, it’s been a great one for both. Love, yrs Tip/Alli”. More than ten years after their doxing, Tip remained their primary literary/epistolary identity, ableit one that came increasingly, and increasingly ironically or self-deprecatingly, linked to their identity as Alli. Some time later that night, Tip shot first their husband, and then themself/ves.

Ellen Moers once wrote, in Literary Women, that “women writers have women’s bodies, which affect their senses and their imagery. They are raised as girls and thus have a special perception of the cultural imprinting of childhood. They are assigned roles in the family and in courtship, they are given or denied access to education and employment, they are regulated by laws of property and political representation which […] differentiate women from men” (Moers 1976, xiv). The inference here is that women’s bodies also always produce women writers, and, by extension, women’s writing (a form of writing perhaps uncomfortably related to Irigaray’s less essentialist notion of écriture feminine). Tiptree’s very existence, and his doxing, reveal, of course, that the relationships between our bodies, our authorial identities, and our texts, is far more complex and interesting than any such flattening out suggests. Writers both do and do not have genders. Their authorial identities both do and do not have genders. Their texts express complex and slippery relations to their bodily and authorial genders. Relations that change over time, and possibly even in response to the gendered performances of their characters and their readers.

In Tip’s work, and in his extra-literary writings, men and women are often figuratively, or literally, aliens to themselves and to each other. In one letter, for example, Alice (writing after the doxing) says:

I see here the interesting question about whether it is man or woman who can be seen as the alien, the Other. Yet it seems obvious … It is understandable that women could view themselves as alien to male society … but if you take what you are as the normal Human … then it is clear that to a woman writer men are very abnormal indeed (DuChamp in Larbalestier 2006, 358)

*

Tiptree had travelled to Africa with his parents as a child, several times, at six, nine and twelve years of age so perhaps it was natural that he came up with the following, part of an unpublished essay:

Consider how odd it would be if all we knew about elephants had been written by elephants. Would we recognise one? What elephant author would describe — or perhaps even perceive — the features, which are common to all elephants? We would find ourselves detecting these from indirect clues; for instance, elephant-naturalists would surely tell us that all other animals suffer from noselessness, which obliges them to use their paws in an unnatural way. So when the human male describes his world he maps its distances from his unspoken natural center of reference, himself. He calls a swamp “impenetrable,” a dog “loyal” and a woman “short.”
The only animal who can observe man from the outside is of course the human female: we women who live in his house, in his shadow, on his planet. And it is important that we do this. This incompletely known animal conditions every aspect of our individual lives and holds the destruction of Earth in his hands. (Tiptree n.d.)

Even more interestingly, in Tip’s writing, aliens not only serve as metaphors for women in relation to men, or men in relation to women, but as a figuration of the alienated self. The queered self. In a sense, Tiptree’s project, both in the work and in his authorial identity, was a performance of destabilised, decentred, de-unified identity. He worked to create and then occupy a space that honoured his sense that we are all divided, unknowable aliens, not just to each other, but also, more intimately and more properly, to ourselves. That is, to abuse Irigaray’s phrase, Tip’s work was a performance—a masterful performance—that called attention to the fact that we are all, always and already, this sex which is not one.

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In this article, the author provides an examination of Michael Cunningham’s 2005 narrative Specimen Days, which is composed of a trio of novellas set in three separate, yet related time periods. By positioning this narrative in relation to perspectives of human desire, feeling and migration, the author explains how Specimen Days speaks to cultural scripts and performances of daily life. In particular, Cunningham’s narrative can be interpreted as being a multilayered allegory concerned with the social relations of intimacy, including the ways people experience non-normative forms of amative sociality across a range of contexts.

Introduction: Understanding Social Alterity in Intimate and Oppressive Contexts

In June 2005, the American gay and lesbian magazine The Advocate published a brief and cordial interview that the writer David Bahr conducted with the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Michael Cunningham. During the interview, Bahr talks with Cunningham about his then-recent novel Specimen Days, which is the narrative that followed Cunningham’s prize-winning novel, The Hours (Bahr 2005: 60-1). Cunningham’s The Hours focused on the lives of gay and lesbian people, which is a theme that appears in much of Cunningham’s oeuvre. His narrative Specimen Days is not explicitly about lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT) people, yet the interviewer David Bahr tells Cunningham that Specimen Days offers: “one of your queerest stories” (Bahr 2005: 60). In response, Cunningham explains, “I’ve always thought of myself as a queer [rather than gay] writer” (Bahr 2005: 60). In his comment, Cunningham frames his work and himself in both a personal and professional way, linking his writing’s qualities to his own personal lived experience. Instead of self-identifying with the fixity that comes with the term gay, he chooses the more capacious word queer, which many critics see as an umbrella term encapsulating many more forms of social and sexual experiences (Somerville 2007: 189). In narrating his sense of self in this way, Cunningham prompts readers to consider his text through a lens shaped by a myriad of socio-political struggles as well as beliefs about human desires and feelings.

To understand the intimate aspects of Specimen Days, let us consider the ways in which Cunningham connects the social relations of outcasts in a multilayered narrative of American struggle. One of the book’s three novellas, ‘Like Beauty’, speaks to the aforesaid issues by focusing on the lives of several characters, including an extraterrestrial refugee and two cyborgs that the populace perceives as ‘abominations’ and ‘criminals’ (Cunningham 2005). The meanings of the characters’ social statuses become apparent as the characters come to terms with their position of alterity during the course of the narrative. One of Cunningham’s cyborgs links his frustration at having to hide his unusual identity with the experience of ‘being illegal’ (Cunningham 2005). By doing so, the narrative suggests a parallel between cyborgs and undocumented migrants, who also are criminalized by oppressive American nativists. To survive this oppression, the cyborgs and aliens must perform social roles that are inconsistent with their interests, such as working as a nanny and a prostitute. Yet alongside these less desirable performances, the text’s aliens, cyborgs and others are shown as generating meaningful intimate bonds that mirror the closeness of present-day amative relations (Cunningham 2005: 231). In this manner, ‘Like Beauty’ presents several unconventional intimacies that bring to mind the lives of queer people and migrants who negotiate unsavory daily challenges as well as survive the humiliations and violence emanating from authoritarians and corporatist society. Interestingly, this futuristic and unconventional story is told in a correspondingly unconventional way insofar as this tale of aliens and cyborgs is positioned alongside two other short novellas. These other novellas connect with and parallel ‘Like Beauty’, yet ‘Like Beauty’ is the most innovative and unique piece in Cunningham’s set. Hence, I focus on ‘Like Beauty’ by theorizing that the text embodies a sub-genre I call ‘intimate allegory’, which I understand as a multi-textual story form arising in the wake of twentieth century queer movements, which resisted American ideals of intimate bonds. While the text is an allegory, I am mindful of the ways it also exhibits a slippage in genre. This set of novellas remains difficult to categorize and might also be understood as experimental and queerly composed because of how the storytelling resists simplistic taxonomies. In a comparable fashion, this allegory offers a resistance to the forces and stresses of an inflexible society through the characters’ acts of contesting the cultural scripts that prescribe normative ways of living.

Specimen Days challenges scripts and socio-political constructs as many marginalized communities and subordinated peoples have had to do historically. Across the United States, people of color, people with disabilities, the economically disadvantaged, queer communities and multitudes of women have engaged in activism, advocacy, civil disobedience and other kinds of protest as a means of undoing unfair circumstances. Much as these groups have done, Specimen Days invites readers to ponder the results of transgressing boundaries and notions of morality that often relegate vulnerable peoples to the peripheries, where they are forced to perform for the dominant culture. Robyn W Warhol and Susan S Lanser provide cogent commentary on the ways so-called unconventional desires are theorized in feminist work, performative acts and queer experiences writ large (2015: 8). As Warhol and Lanser show us, feminist and queer cultural forms have a history of suggesting ideas of performativity. Lanser and Warhol’s work builds on the ideas developed by scholars like Judith Butler. In the pioneering book Gender Trouble, Butler writes, ‘Consider gender, for instance, as a corporeal style, an “act”, as it were, which is both intentional and performative, where “performative” suggests a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning’ (1990: 177). Cunningham’s text shows how the characters are drawn into several kinds of performance and are forced to negotiate with a bevy of constraints as they perform social roles to make a living and be deemed valuable within their social environments. The constraints in question are fostered by relations of heteronormativity and loathsome belief systems, such as the supremacist imperative to maintain forms of ‘racial purity’ (Cunningham 2005: 113). By and large, Cunningham’s main characters reject such notions of purity and normativity as well as engage with new kinds of coalition where differences are embraced. In so doing, Cunningham’s allegory leads readers to see how these characters’ performances relate to daily life in their own realities. While this intimate allegory is defined most prominently in the third novella, this storytelling form is in part predicated on ideas of difference that come through in the first two novellas. This form invites readers to compare the novellas, see links between them, and ponder how these texts resist the forces of conformity, segregation and taxonomy that often hinder social progress and harm people. This storytelling formula is not entirely unique, however, as narratives such as the television show American Horror Story: Asylum and Hollywood films like District 9 and X-Men: The Last Stand also allegorize the struggles of queers and ethnic groups.

The intimate allegory and the queer subtext of Cunningham’s third novella become more discernible as the text focuses on the relations of two cyborgs and an alien named Catareen. This science fictional portrayal functions like a linchpin insofar as it drives readers to see the parallels between the last novella’s unconventional intimacy and other forms of sociality in the first two novellas. Similarly, this last novella’s position—as the third text in Specimen Days—also makes a remarkable statement through its positioning, telling us that this text’s set of ideas has moved beyond the prior two, resisting the limitations of twoness and binarism that are ubiquitous in today’s thinking about matters such as gender and sexuality. For instance, this allegory’s main character—a cyborg named Simon—is neither man nor machine, but rather inhabits a third identity that pushes social boundaries. To develop this line of thinking, my project places Cunningham’s third novella at the center of the discussion, making it the primary object of analysis. This paper’s focus on the third novella’s allegory offers an alternative pathway to studying Specimen Days and allows us to rethink our reading practices as well as ways of looking at the world.

Synthesizing a Critical Framework: Cyborg Intimacies in Context and Theory

As the first and second novella take place in the industrial revolution and the early

twenty-first century respectively, ‘Like Beauty’ offers a major departure by jumping more than a hundred years into a dystopian future where America as we know it has fallen. While each of these stories could be seen as self-contained, they also exhibit similarities and connections to one another, as well as to the writing of the nineteenth-century poet Walt Whitman, who is regarded as being exceptionally compassionate, innovative and radical for his time. Whitman’s poetic language is integrated directly into the narratives of each novella in Specimen Days, suggesting that Whitman’s creative thought correlates with the text’s motifs and the characters’ experiences. Whitman’s presence within the three novellas is never explained directly, but readers who are cognizant of the poet’s emphasis on desire, intimacy and love may surmise that his presence functions as a connective tissue that emphasizes intimate feelings as being a key, yet often discounted, component of the American cultural mosaic, driving readers to ponder the intimacies of their own lives. Whitman’s presence leads us to consider intimacy as taking various shapes. Instead of imagining intimacy as being bound between just one man and one woman, this text validates a variety of intimacies beyond heterosexuality.

Although some readers might interpret the intimacies in ‘Like Beauty’ as resembling those of dominant heteronormative culture, I contend that Cunningham’s narrative lays bare a greater continuum of queer desires, feelings, practices and thoughts. Scholars of queer narratives such as Judith Roof have called into question the heterosexual ideology present in much narrative and theory (Roof 1996: 63). Much like Roof, I employ a queer reading strategy that departs from conventional praxis. That is to say, by giving greater attention to the third novella, this project challenges the normative belief that narrative study requires a certain order of operations, such as the act of beginning with the beginning. Rather than follow convention, this project contends that the unusual intimacies of the third novella merit another approach that values the queerness of the characters as well as honoring the alternative approach of the writing itself. This queer approach also provides for a more socially conscious understanding of how the story’s human-made cyborgs are forced to hide from an authoritarian post-American government that attempts to harass, imprison and kill them due to their behavioral and physical differences (Cunningham 2005: 251). Although these simulos are partly mechanical in their interior physical composition, they possess a highly advanced form of artificial intelligence and a human-like exterior body, which allows them to pass as human beings. The simulos’ passing evokes the way that ethnic and sexual minorities often feel forced to hide their so-called behavioral and physical differences to advance themselves economically and politically.

Aris Mousoutzanis and Olu Jenzen have discussed some of the characters’ differences in their commentaries on Cunningham’s text, but their analyses mostly address the portrayal of trauma and repetition. Jenzen’s writing smartly calls attention to some of the non-normative forms of kinship within the third novella, yet upon studying this third piece, other queer dynamics become visible (Jenzen 2010: 16). To expand this scholarship, my paper builds on these ideas, and those of Lionel Cantú and Eithne Luibheid, who work at the intersections of American ethnic studies and queer studies, examining the phenomena of identity, migration and sexuality. Like these critics, I analyze discourse and texts to explain how groups are marginalized and become entwined in the larger economic and political processes of American society. This set of experiences and vulnerabilities manifest within Cunningham’s three novellas, in which American workers suffer amid the dangerous conditions of the Industrial Revolution within In the Machine (97), the weaponized bodies of child terrorists kill innocent bystanders in ‘The Children’s Crusade’ (126) and the targeted cyborgs of Cunningham’s ‘Like Beauty’ are forced to labor in undesirable ways. As we empathize with the workers, children and cyborgs, we are led to consider how norms and policies that oppress vulnerable groups continue to be an ongoing problem. This notion is brought to the forefront when Cunningham depicts the senseless killing of a cyborg named Marcus, who is a close friend to the main protagonist, Simon (who is also a cyborg). Like his friend, Marcus was created to work in high-risk environments like outer-space, yet the government has labeled these cyborgs as threats and hunts them down because they have minds of their own (252). When Marcus is murdered by a computerized drone, Simon observes his friend’s horrifying death yet remains quiet to protect his own future:

‘A ray of brilliant red shot out and sheared Marcus’s right arm off at the shoulder. Simon stood still. The arm fell. It lay on the ground with its shoulder end smoking. The fingers twitched. Marcus did not slow down. The drone fired again … It let loose: a ray, a ray, a ray in split second intervals. Marcus’s other arm fell away, then his leg. He ran for another moment on one leg. His arm sockets were smoldering. He looked at Simon’ (234).

In several ways, the pointless killing of Marcus resembles the murders of many other persona non grata perpetrated throughout the history of humankind, yet it also resembles the way in which migrants are now being targeted and tracked by drones at U.S. borders (Davey 2008: 22; Nicas 2015: 3). This terror is dramatized as we see the drone’s ‘brilliant red’ ray strike down the good-natured Marcus, evoking imagery of a bloodbath. The narrative suggests there is something more to this injustice, particularly when we look at Marcus’s social circumstances (or intimacy) with Simon. The narrator states that ‘He looked at Simon’, gesturing towards the importance of the social relations between these two hunted cyborgs. This connection tells us the relation between these cyborgs means something, even if they (or Cunningham’s readers) have yet to comprehend it fully.

The uncommon sociality of Marcus and Simon mirrors the uncommon textual form of Cunningham’s tri-part novella structure, which is employed both in Specimen Days and his prior narrative The Hours. Such repeated use of fragmented storytelling emphasizes the impression that this form is intentional and fulfills an authorial purpose. In studying this form, the researcher Heon Joo Sohn has suggested The Hours exhibits a ‘generic ambiguity’ (2005: 31) that resists categorization. Following this line of thinking, I contend that Cunningham’s work reads as an inventive and non-normative intervention in allegory due to how it duplicates and challenges conventional modes of allegorical storytelling. This innovation in allegorical storytelling may come as little surprise to critics familiar with the work of Angus Fletcher, who hypothesizes that allegory has the potential to be a ‘radical linguistic procedure’ (2012: 3) that urges readers to think beyond the primary narrative that lies at the surface level. By recognizing Cunningham’s text in this manner, we allow for other interpretations of his texts and for the possibility that his work functions as an intimate community of stories. This privileging of diverse forms and sui generis intimacies can be theorized when we position Specimen Days in relation to the research of critics such as Eileen Boris, Harry Brown and Peggy Pascoe, among others. These researchers expound on the lives of unconventional couples and intimacies in the U.S., such as couples that consists of partners from diverse races, who have faced discriminatory measures and challenges. Perhaps the most famous examples of this animus are found in the U.S. Supreme Court cases Loving v. Virginia and Bowers v. Hardwick, in which the nation-state addressed the question of who could live together. Although American miscegenation laws were repealed and anti-gay laws are being litigated, queer and mixed-race couples continue to face bias, stigma and violence that induce forms of anxiety and trauma and can leave lasting impacts on people’s interior selves. Through this lens, we can read Cunningham’s narrative as signaling that the nation’s social, racial and sexual policies actually have given rise to new acts of solidarity and defiance.

As it defies commonplace generic labeling, yet relies on several science fiction elements, Specimen Days has much in common with writing that has been identified as ‘slipstream’ (Sterling 1989: 5). Slipstream work crosses boundaries in ways that resemble the manner in which many queer people transgress normative behaviors and categories. While considering this queer generic dimension, my paper mainly expounds on ‘Like Beauty’ because it provides a productive means of exploring the overall text, including the first two novellas in Specimen Days: ‘In the Machine’ and ‘The Children’s Crusade’, which are a ghost story and a detective story respectively. ‘Like Beauty’ tells the story of three outcasts: a cyborg named Simon, an alien woman called Catareen and a disfigured young man named Luke, who faces social difficulties because of a congenital disease. In the first novella, three characters named Catherine, Lucas and Simon confront the harsh realities of the industrial age, while in the second novella, ‘The Children’s Crusade’, a black woman character named Cat battles home-grown terrorism in the post-9/11 age. Within this second novella, Cat and a white man named Simon engage in an intimate relationship, which partly mirrors the intimacy between the cyborg Simon and an alien woman named Catareen in the last novella, ‘Like Beauty’. In the first novella, the narrator Lucas explains that Simon was ‘intimate with machinery’ (2005: 97), showing how his link to a factory’s equipment creates an unusual kind of social connection. Equally, in the second novella, the police officer Cat comes to have an intimacy with a would-be child bomber, which appeals to her because of how she lost her own son; but in doing so, she gives up her job for the sake of starting a new ‘family’ (213) that partly mirrors the unconventional intimacies between the cyborg Simon and the ‘four foot tall lizard’ Catareen (217). Through this approach, Cunningham unfixes readers from anthropocentric and heteronormative ideas, therefore leading readers to ponder how matters of affect, migration and sexuality are imbricated in these timelines.

Theorizing Other Intimacies: Performances of Cyborgs from Earth and Aliens from Nourthea

As Lionel Cantú and Eithne Luibhéid postulate, the struggles of migration are shaped intricately by the affective experiences of desire, intimacy and love. Interior feelings of love motivate people to migrate as oppression impels people into exile. This profound effect of affect on human lives likewise has been corroborated in the work of Sara Ahmed, Ann Cvetkovich and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, among many others (Ahmed 2004; Cvetkovich 2003; Sedgwick 2003). These ideas are useful for understanding how Cunningham’s work explores the story of the alien woman Catareen, a refugee from the planet Nourthea (Cunningham 2005: 267). Catareen came to the former U.S. after she resisted her tyrannical government’s policy. Because of her political dissidence, her family was murdered. Now Catareen works in a low-income position (like many exiled people) as a nanny for a rich family in New York City, where she cares for two spoiled children who are named, in a humorous manner, “Tomcruise” and “Katemoss” (238). While a talented caretaker, Catareen can also perform a rather frightening self by snarling, yet her scaring tactics are shown to be a last resort in self-protection. Conversely, Simon appears nearly fully human, but his muscles and skin are constructed over a metallic core. As he was intended to advance numerous corporate goals, he is powerful, and his machinery allows him to lift a human ‘up off his feet’ (225). Yet Cunningham mitigates this power by showing Simon has an ethical imperative programmed into him and is unable to use his strength maliciously. Simon nevertheless hides his identity because his government views cyborgs like him as ‘monsters and abominations’ and a form of ‘property’ (267). Much like the slaves and newcomers imprisoned by many cultures throughout the history of the New World, Simon and his kind are afforded neither choice nor rights in this future society, making them highly vulnerable to a slew of abuses.

Like many impoverished migrants today, the cyborg Simon has few opportunities and hence he ekes out a living in a queer way by working as a ‘scabrous subprostitute’ (228). Simon works for what might be called a pleasure-industry company, which caters to rich tourists. Simon’s subprostitute role is one of the elements that leads me to interpret Specimen Daysas a queer form of allegory. Like today’s sex workers, Simon works for money to support himself, but his social positioning can be read as signifying much more. Notably, the critic Elana Gomel contends “the allegorical text is always double” since allegory typically has two stories to tell (Gomel 1995, 89). In Simon’s case, the implication is that his work corresponds to that of present-day queers, who are imperiled by stigmas. Simon’s employer, Dangerous Encounters, is one of the few groups that hire un-credentialed people like Simon. Simon fits the company’s profile especially well. The company offers clients the opportunity to be menaced by ‘thugs’ (221) such as Simon in a milieu known as Old New York. Resembling a palimpsest, this space is a reenactment and performance of New York City as it was in the late twentieth century. Old New York is a tourist-filled zone built on the original site of New York City. Humans visit this locale out of curiosity, or for the purpose of satisfying personal desires. This narrative of reenactment is in keeping with the theorizations of queer narrative studies scholars, who have shown how queer texts often emphasize the idea of performance (See, for example, Lanser and Warhol 2015: 7). Simon performs his ‘menacing’ in Old New York’s Central Park, where he roughs up clients for yen—rather than dollars (Cunningham 2005: 220). Simon is compensated for performing as a sadomasochist, yet the text never moralizes about his actions, nor does it punish him for them.

Scholars, such as Donna Haraway, Mimi Nguyen, Esperanza Miyaki and Veronica Hollinger have theorized diverse cyborg contexts, suggesting that queers and cyborgs are kindred beings because of their dissident forms of embodied and interior experience. These scholars urge us to consider how cyborg paradigms can challenge traditional sexual ideologies; for instance, as cyborgs are unable to reproduce like most human beings, cyborgs give life to new forms of gender, eroticism, and intimacy. Nevertheless, many cyborgs in mainstream science fiction conform to heteronormative standards due to their own choosing or because of their programming. As proof, we need only consider the heteromasculine cyborgs in Star Trek’s The Next Generation, the Terminator series, and Bladerunner, among others. While Simon never wholly identifies as straight or gay, his actions suggest queerness such as when he appreciates so-called ‘dikey’ video programs (232). Likewise, he understands simulos, like his fellow simulo Marcus, to be dressing in ‘man-drag’, signaling an understanding that human masculinity is a construct that can be performed by others (234). Moreover, in a scene before Marcus’s death, Simon holds Marcus’s hand in a meaningful way, comforting him as he worries about the future. While resonating as homoerotic, their relation is based in their shared status as outsiders and hybrid ‘artificials’ (239). In a discussion of such perilous contexts, José Esteban Muñoz asserts that there is a need to theorize a form of queer futurity that allows us to look beyond our own present difficulties and recognize the possibility of a new horizon of more hospitable socio-political conditions (19). Simon is part of that effort to foster a better future as he protects Catareen when she gives one of the drones false information about his location. Simon’s rescue of Catareen is portrayed as heroic as he risks his own ‘life’ in a dramatic chase: this self-risk shows the depth of his concern for her well-being. This portion of the text and his remarks about her ‘glorious’ quality (217) reveal that Simon is attracted to Catareen despite the fact that simulos like him are built without the ability to have ‘emotional responses’ (305). Simon’s behavior suggests he possesses inchoate forms of affective emotion as these two team up for a cross-country journey motivated both by a desire for personal safety and Simon’s wish to meet his human maker. Like many queers who traveled to the supposedly liberal West Coast, Simon is drawn to Colorado, braving multiple threats along the way. It is through this cross-country search for non-traditional intimacies that Simon’s feelings for Catareen come into greater focus.

Making the Cyborg’s Intimacy Queer: Reimagining Ideas of Interiority and Relationality

To instill a greater sense of humanity and a moral compass in Simon, his creator—Emory

Lowell—based the cyborg’s internal programming on the poetry of a major American literary figure, Walt Whitman. While critics have interpreted this approach in several ways, I contend we can look to archival research where investigators have hypothesized that Whitman engaged in sexual relationships with both men as well as women (Schmidgall 2012: 252), which leads us to view Whitman in a decidedly queer way. Similarly, Cunningham has said in a recent interview that he views any disavowal of Whitman’s queerness as ‘heterosexism’ (60), suggesting that any interpretation of Specimen Days must take into account Whitman’s queerness. Whitman’s identity and sexuality arguably occupy a unique position in Specimen Days because Simon frequently quotes from Whitman’s poetry in the text, creating an intertextual link between Simon and Whitman. As Simon channels Whitman’s words, there arises an equivalency between the two, suggesting that Whitman’s life and work lives on through Simon’s interiority. This equivalency, and the fact that much of Whitman’s poetry exhibits queer sexual undertones, effectively renders Simon a queer cyborg. By this, I mean that Simon comes to embody a queer figure with Whitmanesque qualities enacted in various ways. Simon’s citation of Whitman’s words is notable because he apparently cannot control his quotations from these poetic verses. Simon finds himself saying Whitman’s words unintentionally, which has the humorous effect of confusing interlocutors who misunderstand Whitman’s verses. This inherent, yet still constructed, aspect of his subjectivity is emblematic of the transgressive desires that LGBTQ folks are unable to change or control. For although therapists have tried to convert queers to heterosexuality, such efforts fail or are seen as hurting people; thus these so-called therapies are being outlawed in order to prevent further harm (Stolberg 2011: 14).

Simon’s first transgression of challenging social mores takes place as he works for Dangerous Encounters in Old New York. In his work, he performs the role of a bully for customers who want to experience historical New York City. While ‘menacing’ a German tourist in Central Park, he edges over into sexual territory despite the fact his job never requires him to do so. As Simon works his client over, he intuits that his client wants more than simple robbery and roughing up. The client asks him ‘What if I don’t have the money? … What will you do to me?’ suggesting masochism and a desire for punishment (Cunningham 2005: 225). But Simon thinks, ‘It’s not sex, sir. … He offered no note of S&M seduction this time’ (225). He continues his menacing of the client by saying, ‘I. Will. Kill. Your. Fat. Sad. Ass’ (225). Simon never physically injures the man; rather, he intuits that the man wants erotic gratification. To satisfy his client, Simon grabs the man’s crotch and squeezes before forcefully taking the man’s money. As a ‘bonus’, Simon exposes the man’s buttocks and spanks him in the park’s open air (226). The text’s omniscient narrator relays this story in a way that implies it is an ordinary day’s work for Simon, but for readers this scene is evocative of contemporary sex work, which mainstream US society prohibits within most states. In Simon’s workplace role, such menacing appears ostensibly legal, yet Simon’s performance as a public dominatrix posits a larger set of questions about the socio-sexual dimensions of cyborgs who menace and gratify other men for money in the open spaces of Old New York City’s Central Park.

To a similar extent, ‘Like Beauty’ leads readers to consider the unconventional intimacy that arises when Simon and Catareen escape from Old New York and travel across the former US in search of Simon’s creator. As these two pariahs travel, the narrative suggests an emerging erotic and intimate connection between them. Both Simon and Catareen skinny-dip in the water and, upon emerging, regard each other in a ‘shy’ way (287). Cunningham writes:

‘Catareen naked was all sinew, with thin, strong arms and legs, tiny breast-buds, and a small, compact rise of boney squarish pelvis. Who was the sculptor? Giacometti. She looked like a sculpture of Giacometti’ (287).

Simon’s detailed observations about Catareen’s body indicate a fascination and attraction that clearly goes beyond the coldness commonly associated with artificial intelligence, cyborgs and robots. In this erotic bathing scene, which resembles the imagery of older, more traditional narratives, the implication is that Simon begins to desire Catareen in a way that indeed resembles the desire in humans’ relations. The text reifies this impulse later in the same scene when he observes her and says, ‘Beautiful’ (287). Although Simon was ‘not entirely sure what he meant by the word’ (287), we garner another clue as he clearly focuses on her body’s erogenous zones—the breast-buds —which frame her as a feminine flower about to bloom. As the story soon tells us, however, Catareen is near the end of her life. Another alien explains that Catareen’s species ‘are vital and productive right up until the end’ (309). The text calls us to reconsider how we judge each other’s interiors on the basis of our exteriors—much in the same way that Specimen Days pushes us to realize that while Simon may not be fully human, he has many elements associated with humanity, such as intelligent thinking, self-awareness and ethics. Cunningham’s work thus encourages us to see difference not as a limitation; rather, Specimen Days prompts us to re-think our notions of humanness as well as the intimacies existing beyond mainstream cultures.

Cunningham is by no means the first author to narrate an unorthodox sensual encounter between two ostensibly incompatible partners. The critic and editor Ellen Datlow has published anthologies such as Off Limits that are comprised of science fiction stories about alien intimacies and the sexualities of beings originating beyond Earth (Datlow 1990 and 1997). As the stories in Datlow’s collections attest, there are many ways of conceptualizing alien intimacy and sexuality. This perceived range lends some credibility to my assertion that Simon and Catareen experience an eroticism and intimacy, despite the fact that it may not duplicate human sexuality or desire. Much can be gleaned from Simon’s likening of Catareen to the sculptures of Giacometti, who produced artistry that the critic Anne Umland has called ‘elliptically erotic’ (2011:2). Simon’s comparison links Catareen’s body with the aesthetic beauty of fine art. Though Simon does not appear to realize his feelings for Catareen till the story’s conclusion, we see a build-up of erotic energy between the two, which begins with Simon’s fascination for Catareen’s eye-catching alien body. Specimen Days bespeaks the idea that for Simon, beauty transcends the socially constructed limits that his world’s dominant society has imposed on desire. That is to say, while Simon signals that it remains taboo for humans—or in Simon’s case, simulos posing as humans—to be intimate with Nadians, we see that Simon overcomes that hurdle. When Catareen and Simon travel together their perceived closeness would likely be read by their contemporaries as contentious:

‘Here a human (what passed as a human) and a Nadian traveling together would excite more suspicion’ (Cunningham 2005: 255).

While many might read their closeness as impossible, Simon remains respectful towards and protective of Catareen: a protectiveness that is demonstrated when he saves her from the drone that attacks them as they leave Old New York. Alongside Simon’s protection of Catareen, he demonstrates a notable appreciation for Catareen’s beauty, which is in keeping with Cunningham’s other texts. In a parallel to Simon, Cunningham shows a similar scenario in his novel By Nightfall where the main character—Peter Harris—likewise begins to feel a very deep appreciation for the beauty of another man. Peter questions his captivation with this man because in the past he self-identified as heterosexual and he has a wife. Cunningham’s interest in affect and desire becomes clearer when we consider Simon’s interest in the attraction caused by beauty, which he only partially feels (253).

Simon begins to explain this lack of feeling as he spends more time with Catareen. As they travel, Simon explains to her that his self-presentation is based on computer programming and that his interior core lacks what some would call authentic human feeling, saying: ‘There’s no emotion behind it. Does that bother you?’ (256). Simon’s unusual personality never bothers the alien Catareen, who is herself rather stoic and soft-spoken. Though his feelings are somewhat nascent, we can deduce some of their significance as Simon shows affection for her. Simon makes private observations about her physical appearance of beauty, appreciates her company and watches over her well-being like a partner or lover.

As we consider Simon’s burgeoning feelings through the allegorical lens, his desires arguably become emblematic of how some queers struggle to reconcile sexual feelings in the context of compulsory heterosexuality, which historically has demonized sentiments that deviate from dominant culture. As Simon tells Catareen about his unusual state of feelings, she identifies with his predicament, calling it ‘stroth”’ in her language (253). She cannot translate the concept for Simon, but through semantics, readers may hypothesize stroth to be an emotional connection or inner feeling, such as adoration, desire or passion. Although these desires appear mysterious, we can deduce their significance by looking at them as a whole, as well as in terms of how unconventional intimacies result in numerous challenges. Ryan Conrad and Yasmin Nair show a deep skepticism towards the intimacies that conform to fixed forms of coupling like same-sex marriage, yet Cunningham’s work holds up a comparable form of coupling as Simon and Catareen generate an intimate connection and partnership. A scene that speaks to this idea is the moment when Simon and Catareen are driving a Winnebago (as many contemporary couples do) across the US. Although this scene might duplicate the common image of Americans vacationing for the purpose of heteronormative familial bonding, this moment is decidedly different insofar as Simon and Catareen have stolen the motorhome and harbor another purpose: to reconnect with Simon’s father (Emory), who had mixed his own engineering skills with the artistry of Walt Whitman to make Simon. This queer origin, in which a cyborg is made from the ideas of two men, resonates as a queer form of reproduction. In addition, as Simon and Catareen travel, she states that this —as in this moment – is stroth. When Simon asks her for clarification, she says, ‘I mean we’ (293), suggesting that their intimate connection has an element of passion to it. Her words are simple, but they reveal that Simon means more to her than a friend. After she says this, the narrator tells us that, ‘A low crackle shot through his circuitry, a quick electrical whir’ (293). The crackle and whir of Simon’s interior suggest he feels a remarkable sensation as Catareen acknowledges their growing connection. Catareen never explicitly defines what this relation is, though her linking of Simon to herself leads us to deduce that she has developed an attachment to him. Skeptics may interpret these scenes as reproducing heteronormative familialism, however scholars such as Judith Butler point to the ‘reformulation of kinship’ (1993: 241) that has come to exist in social milieus enacted by queer figures such as drag performers. Like Butler, I envision the sociality of living beings as taking shape in many forms beyond that of the binaristic —as in gay vs. straight—and thus there are many shades of queerness along the continuum of desire, feeling and interiority.

Cunningham’s novella certainly allows for intimacies that stretch our current dominant ideals of affect, yet the text still employs recognizable frameworks, such as stoicism, which provide an entry-point into understanding their relations. For instance, readers see Catareen’s self-awareness of her rather minimalist emotions when Simon ruminates on his existence as being literally and symbolically ‘heartless’ (291). She replies: ‘I am same’ (291), signifying the idea she exhibits a similarly masculine form of stoicism, which has the effect of further marking her gender performance as non-traditional. The Nadians’ gender performances and desires are something of a blindspot for both Simon and readers since the story is told from Simon’s perspective, and there is difficulty in discerning the nuances of Nadian physicality, which resembles what some scholars today refer to as androgyny or genderqueer. Simon’s appreciation of her beauty empowers readers to embrace alternative conceptualizations of beauty. This embrace of otherness is shored up when Simon and Catareen arrive in Denver, Colorado, and meet Emory and Emory’s wife, Othea—an alien woman. This human and alien have had a baby whose “skin was the color of celery stalk … She had ears, perfectly human but dwarfed, like tiny shells’ (311). Their child mirrors Simon, since Simon is also Emory’s creation, despite the fact Simon disregards such a label outright when Emory implies it, stating: ‘I’m not your son’ (307). In spite of this denial, the text suggests that Simon is Emory’s progeny, and it that it is his unorthodox origins that mark him as a queer being although, unlike the baby—who is the product of another unconventional intimacy—Simon came into being through the efforts of a company that Emory worked for five years earlier. Likewise, as Simon and Catareen unite during their travels, their inability to reproduce exemplifies queerness: Catareen’s biology and Simon’s partial humanity allow them to evade prescriptions of compulsory heterosexuality.

After arriving at Emory’s house in Colorado, Simon has an opportunity to ask his creator about these matters of difference, including whether cyborgs like him might have the potential for more emotional experience. He explains to Emory:

‘I have this sense of a missing part. Some sort of, I don’t know. Engagement. Aliveness. Catareen calls it stroth … I can see everything perfectly, but I don’t quite connect with it’ (307).

His words “I don’t quite connect” illuminate a partiality or glimmer of emotional lived experience. His uncertainty about his bonds with others exemplifies what many queer people experience insofar as while they may wish to act upon their desire and connect to others through their feelings, such forms of engagement are frequently constrained, leaving queers to languish in a state of forced repression. Moreover, Simon learns that Emory and the other people in Emory’s house, are planning to leave Earth soon in order to travel to a distant star system to escape the frustrating political and social climate. Emory invites Simon to go along with them, offering to do some tinkering to enable Simon to explore his emotions more fully (307). Although this appeals to Simon, he ultimately decides to stay on Earth because he wishes to remain with Catareen, who is dying and cannot be taken aboard the ship. When he tells Emory about his desire to stay with Catareen, his creator responds, ‘This is really rather extraordinary, you know’, suggesting that Emory recognizes Simon’s emotional attachment to Catareen (327). Although this affection for Catareen may superficially resemble a heterosexual relationship, this pairing rewrites the textual time period’s conventional model of desire and emotional attachment, thus suggesting a much wider variety (as well as potential) of unconventional amative experiences.

The importance of Simon’s decision to stay with Catareen bespeaks the profound connection that Simon and Catareen have forged during the course of their travel from Old New York to Denver. Once he tells Emory that he is remaining with Catareen, Simon returns to Catareen’s bedroom. She encourages him to depart with the other space travelers, but he says, ‘I wouldn’t want to go without you …. This is where I want to be’ (329). Her protests cannot change his mind, and as she closes her eyes to rest, we see further confirmation of his feelings for her. The narrator tells us: ‘Carefully, he put his arm over her … He inclined his head towards hers, let the skin of his cheek touch the skin of her forehead. He thought she would not mind that’ (329). This skin to skin contact symbolizes a consummation of their bond as well as revealing the meaningfulness of their closeness. Upon Catareen’s death, Simon shows pronounced care for her body, burying her in a way that speaks to the amative bond that these two derelicts came to share. While Simon never cries over losing Catareen, we see him conduct a very reverent burial. After placing her corpse in the grave that he has dug, he worries about how to bury her body. Cunningham writes:

‘It didn’t seem right to put dirt directly onto her face. He thought at first he would go back into the house for a cloth but decided instead to remove his shirt and drape it over her head. He thought she should have something of his in the grave with her’ (332).

Simon’s desire to bury Catareen properly tells us he desires to honor her memory and the connection they shared. For Simon, Cunningham writes, ‘A pure change happened. He felt a buzzing through his circuits. He had no name for it’ (333). These sensations intimate that Simon has begun an emotional evolution, which is reinforced when Simon quotes Whitman:

The earth, that is sufficient, I do not want the constellations any nearer, I know they are very well where they are, I know they suffice for those who belong to them’ (333).

Simon’s recitation looks to faraway places—constellations—such as the place Catareen calls home, thereby uniting his memory with her past: becoming closer, yet still distant, like a gathering of stars in the sky.

Towards a Conclusion: What becomes of the intimate allegory and uncommon relations?

Simon’s extraordinary story in Specimen Days challenges our notions of emotional experience, which continues to define the lived experiences of the Earth’s peoples, albeit in ways that some people have yet to appreciate or recognize. The story of Simon and Catareen tells us that it is not the supposed limitations of alien existence or cyborg affect that are important. What matters, according Specimen Days, is the meaning that these characters attach to the affect, which binds these intelligent life forms together in mutually satisfying affinities. Just as Simon vocalizes Whitman’s idea of constellations, it becomes clear that comparable intimacies exist in close proximities to one another—much like stars that line up in the heavens. The parallels of these intimacies suggest that mutually supportive forms of affect should be honored, revered and supported, regardless of their appearance or process. For after all, affect can be—according to the late queer studies researcher Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick—a rewarding and powerful influence that produces: ‘durable, structural changes in one’s relational and interpretive strategies toward both self and others’ (Sedgwick 2003: 62). Much as Sedgwick suggests, emotions such as desire and shame impel us in myriad ways, and her words urge us to become more self-reflective about the roles affective experience plays in our lives. This point applies to Cunningham’s text inasmuch as Specimen Days reveals how forms of emotional intimacy are central in human cultures, yet continue to be conceptualized in simplistic forms and stigmatized as a troubling burden.

Although Simon’s story may partly mirror the classic American narrative of personal

growth, Cunningham takes that storyline in a new direction that leads us to contemplate deeper ontological questions concerning justice. To ponder such questions, we benefit by linking these stories’ elements to others by Cunningham. In such rumination, we foster a critical comparativism, in which we look beyond the surface and consider how these scenes relate to a larger economy of feelings in culture and texts. It is this narrative’s form of intimate allegory that ultimately situates readers in a deep questioning about the ways that uncommon feelings take shape between unconventional people. We are led to question why we perform our daily lives according to particular social standards that feel arbitrary and disconnected from our own personal values and larger worldview. Such questioning also opens us up to seeing the benefits of performing new relations where they had never existed beforehand. Such forms of social relations as the cyborg and alien pairing are new frontiers that Americans will likely need to consider as we explore space and augment our physical bodies with various forms of machinery. In this process, Specimen Days instructs us to think about what it means to be an ethical and feeling subject in places where unusual intimacies are demonized. Simon’s exploration of his queer feelings shows that, though reconciling alternative forms of affect may be challenging, there is much to be gained by braving the struggle.

The narratives of Cunningham’s Specimen Days generate a cautionary (and inspirational) tale that warns readers about the problems of failing to recognize new or unusual intimacies as deserving dignity and opportunity. In this manner, the text turns the lens back on US culture and suggests that American groups, institutions and populations should carefully question how and why hard-and-fast limits are imposed in the relationality of belonging, humanity and citizenship. Banning or censoring new formulations of social relationality prevent dialogue and growth, which are key to Simon’s personal story and the stories of many Americans. Moreover, Specimen Days empowers us to compare and consider the ways in which American cultures have at times employed a narrow interpretation of cultural ideals such as the imperative to engage in so-called proper intimacies. By taking such approaches, we may look outside the imperatives that demand strict adherence to cultural scripts and performances that hinder our ability to feel and think in a wide range of ways. In sum, the unusual approaches and stories within Cunningham’s text largely encourage us to embrace chances for social experimentation and to explore the uncharted feelings and sensations within ourselves more freely.

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