Women in SF&F Month: Arkady Martine
Apr
10
2019

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Today’s guest is speculative fiction writer and Byzantine historian Arkady Martine! She has written short fiction and poetry for various publications such as Uncanny Magazine, Shimmer, and Mithila Review, including her stories “The Hydraulic Emperor,” “All the Colors You Thought Were Kings,” and “Ruin Marble.” And just a couple of weeks ago, her debut novel was released—A Memory Called Empire, a space opera and the first book in the Teixcalaan series!

A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine Cover

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine—another woman with a debut science fiction novel coming out in the next year—spoke out on social media about the pernicious and awful reaction she’d had from some members in her community when she announced that she was pregnant: these people immediately asked her when she was planning on giving up her just-begun writing career. As if the very presence of a baby would automatically mean she wanted to stop writing. The righteous anger and the fear that I felt, when I read about her experience and her determination to be a mother and an author both, at the same time, has stuck with me. I keep thinking about how often women, especially creative women, especially creative women in a field which demands time commitment away from the realms of ‘day job’ and ‘housework’, are presented with this expectation that pregnancy and motherhood is a goal that wipes out all other goals. And about how that expectation both devalues creative work done by women—oh, it’s just a hobby, a little amusement before the proper work of being a mother begins—and devalues the work of motherhood, too. Because motherhood is work, and growing a human being inside a body is physical work of profound difficulty. The idea that all women are naturally—and please do imagine the scare-quotes around “naturally”—aspiring towards the ultimate state of pregnancy and motherhood, and that because it is ‘natural’ it is easy, is another kind of pernicious and awful.

I felt anger on my friend’s behalf, and on the behalf of every woman who decides to be a mother and a creator both: they deserve a better cultural narrative. And I also felt fear, because I am a woman who doesn’t want to be a mother…for many reasons, but amongst them is the terror of losing myself, my creative ability, my independence, and my physical health. This anger and this fear have been with me a long time. I found them as a young teenager, and I found them in science fiction, which is the genre I work in and the genre I read most often. Certainly, the genre that helped form my sense of narrative…including my narratives of motherhood. In my own recent debut novel, A Memory Called Empire, I found myself grappling with the problems of motherhood in science fiction, all despite my own intentions. I was writing a political thriller! My protagonist pretty much never thought about having a kid—she’s too busy trying to solve a murder and prevent the imperialist annexation of her home mining station! But so much of the novel turned on questions of inheritance—the inheritance of memory, of power, of culture, of genetics—that I quickly realized that I needed to think about parenthood. Of motherhood, specifically, because I was writing a culture where I wanted gender roles to be downplayed and mostly insignificant in terms of career paths and societal functioning.

And this meant I needed to think about pregnancy.

I think my first experience of motherhood narratives in science fiction was in Heinlein’s The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress—where I, age 12, was disturbed by how the heroine Wyoming Knott was so eager, at the end of the book, to have babies; as if she’d been waiting all along for the politics to be over so she could fulfil her deepest desires, hitherto mostly invisible to the reader, but somehow inevitable in the author’s imagination of How Women Worked. In general women in Heinlein novels have babies as often as they can, and they all like it, and they all find it easy, and they all want it as an end-state goal. Small me—queer, dubious about human beings, especially ones who you had to take care of all the time—found the whole concept profoundly alienating. If being one of Heinlein’s brilliant redheads meant desiring motherhood at a blood-deep level, then I wasn’t one, red hair and cleverness aside.

And then I found Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan books, and a whole different—if equally essentialist—conception of motherhood in science fiction. One which both made much more sense to me (of course if you could have a baby in an external womb you would! Pregnancy is hard, dangerous, and debilitating!) and kept bothering me…because, in the words of Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan, in the universe Bujold has constructed, all wealth is biological. Having children—continuing lines of genetics, which create lines of loyalty, networks of cousins and family that span planets and can, at times, stop wars—is a primary and necessary form of doing politics. And because women (in the Vorkosiverse—it’s far more complex in the world out here) are the ones who biologically produce children, even if they’re grown externally, there is an explicit linkage between being a woman and being involved in producing biological wealth. And this, too, I found alien. Not the politics of genetics and loyalty, those made sense to teenage me…but the idea that this was what women were for.

And yet, children are something that many women—and men, and nonbinary people—want. The project of children, the project of raising a human being, of making one. And even though I still don’t want one myself, I want the choice to produce one, to devote some of one’s power to the project of motherhood, to be a choice, and thus a choice which can be valued, held up as an achievement, a brave, fascinating, interesting thing to do.

So when I came to write my own science fictional universe, I found myself writing a character, Five Agate, who had a very powerful position—she’s the chief analyst on the staff of one of the Emperor’s closest advisors—and a young child, six or so years old, who she is raising while continuing to be on call nearly twenty-four hours a day. And because in the universe I had built, I had also chosen to decouple the growth of fetuses from the bodies of people with uteruses—my universe has ubiquitous artificial wombs, crèche-style childcare, and universal contraception for everyone, no matter their gender—I wanted Five Agate’s choice to have a child to not only be a choice about work but a choice about her body.

So I had her carry her son in her own womb. Which, on Teixcalaan, is like choosing to run a marathon. No one does it without physical training and profound preparation! It’s considered a real and amazing feat, to carry a child to term and give birth to it! Five Agate trained for two years to get ready, and she is so proud of herself, and of her son. And people who run into her are as amazed at her accomplishment as people here on Earth are amazed at ultramarathoners.

Teixcalaan’s no paradise of genetic legacy, and it is full of problems relating to succession, families, and inheritance. But Five Agate is one part of that world: and through her, I wanted to write someone who could make my friends who have made the fascinating, brave, and interesting choice of having a child feel recognized and valued.

Arkady Martine Photo Arkady Martine is a speculative fiction writer and, as Dr. AnnaLinden Weller, a historian of the Byzantine Empire and a city planner. Under both names she writes about border politics, rhetoric, propaganda, and the edges of the world. Arkady grew up in New York City and, after some time in Turkey, Canada, and Sweden, lives in Baltimore with her wife, the author Vivian Shaw. Her debut novel, A Memory Called Empire, was released in March 2019 from Tor Books, and is available here. Find Arkady online at arkadymartine.net or on Twitter as @ArkadyMartine.
Women in SF&F Month: Marina J. Lostetter
Apr
09
2019

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Today’s guest is speculative fiction writer Marina J. Lostetter! She’s the author of several short stories, including those in the Lifeboat collection, “A Debt Repaid,” and “Discard the Sun, for It Has Failed Us.” Noumenon, which was selected as one of the Best Books of 2017 by Publishers Weekly and Kirkus, was her first novel. In late 2018, it was followed by another science fiction adventure, Noumenon Infinity.

Noumenon Infinity by Marina J Lostetter Cover Noumenon by Marina J Lostetter Cover

Learning to Feel the Shape of Stories
By Marina J. Lostetter

When I first attempted to write fiction professionally, I was desperate for any and all information I could find on how to write effectively. I enjoyed telling stories and people had told me I was a good writer—but love of a thing doesn’t automatically mean you’re good at a thing.

I had so many questions that I was sure had concrete answers. How do you create strong characters? How do you convey a theme? What’s the quantifiable difference between a boring story and an immersive story? What are people actually looking for when they read? When do you know a story has ended? How do you know where to begin?

When I started to break a story down into all of its components, I realized a lot goes into them. I could identify the parts, but I didn’t know how to piece them all together. I mean, I could try. I knew stories had beginnings, middles, and ends. I’d been consuming stories all my life. I knew what a story was (or, I thought I did), and I was fairly sure I could write something that resembled a professionally-told tale, but I knew I needed advice on how to actually get all of those story parts to work together in a way other people could connect with.

How do you actually write a story? What’s the secret?

On my epic quest to discover “the way,” I found all sorts of books on publishing, joined forums, and tracked well-known authors on social media, looking for little straws of knowledge that I could pick up and spin into story gold.

I glommed on to the “rules of writing.” Things like: Don’t use too many adverbs. Don’t use flowery language. You must include three try-fail cycles. You must put the speculative element in the first two paragraphs. You must write every day.

Solid pointers.

One day I stumbled across a piece of advice that I thought was the most flippant and useless thing a professional could tell an aspirant (and I’m paraphrasing): “It doesn’t matter how you do it. Do whatever works for you.”

Well that’s just ridiculous, I thought. At that point I’d met plenty of other writers trying to break into the industry, some of who’d been going at it for ten years. I knew it did matter how you did it. There was a difference between the way I told a story and the way my favorite authors told stories. How did I know? Because they were published and I was not.

Spoiler alert: I was right. And I was wrong.

At that point I began looking to my cohort for advice—those writing short stories (one of those straws-o-knowledge I found said if you want to be a novelist you have to write short stories first) and trying to break in alongside me. Once in a while, someone would do it. They’d sell a short story to a professional paying market. They were in! So, how’d they do it?

Inevitably, this person would start to hand out all kinds of advice. They’d give a six-point breakdown of the main components in their story. They’d explain why the main character they’d created was so relatable. They’d talk about the uniqueness of their idea and the straightforwardness of their writing style, or the flowy-ness of their words, or lyrical-ity of their voice or some such.

Basically, they’d bullshit about it until the cows came home. Cuz here’s the truth—when you sell your first short story (and no, you don’t have to write short stories first if you want to be a novelist), you don’t know why that one worked and the one you submitted before that didn’t. But you think you do. You think you’ve cracked the code. You think you’ve found the magic bullet, the mystical formula, the thing that worked.

And you want everyone to know how you did it.

I myself fell into the trap of spewing advice on my process not long after my first couple of sales (no, you don’t have to write shorts first if you want to be a novelist, but here’s the catch: it did work for me). I gave advice as a novice partially because I was proud of what I’d done, and partially because I knew how desperately I’d looked for those straws of knowledge myself. Maybe I could provide a little bit of insight to someone just like me, I thought, and it would spark something that would help their storytelling improve.

At this point, I was still gobbling up whatever pointers I could get. But I also started noticing a trend. Generally speaking, the more someone had published and the longer they’d been in the industry, the more vague their advice became. There were fewer “Three Steps to Guarantee Relatable Characters” articles, and more “This is Kind of What I Noticed About the Types of Characters I Write” articles.

And the longer I stayed in the industry, the more stories I had published, the less sure I became that I’d cracked any kind of code. I was becoming better and better at breaking down any story I consumed into its basic parts and analyzing what worked and what didn’t. The more contradictory advice I integrated into my overall arsenal of understanding, the better I became at sensing the flow of stories, of feeling when all the parts were working in tandem. And eventually that carried over from my analysis of other’s work to my own. I became better at noticing when my stories were broken—when they didn’t feel right.

I started to think of stories as shapes. Kind of like your classic story-arc depiction, with a timeline showing where the climax is and the act-two low point and the denouement, etc. But the shapes in my mind’s eye are more specific, and don’t have any labels. I can feel what unique shape each story is supposed to take, and can feel when they’re bulging or sagging in the wrong place. Sometimes I can fix the shape, sometimes I can’t.

But one thing is for certain: there is no piece of advice I could have ever stumbled upon that would have effectively conveyed to me that the way to write professionally is by feeling a story’s shape. Because this is just what works for me.

But, ironically, I don’t think I ever would have come full circle, to realizing that the advice I thought was so flippant was actually the truest truth, if I hadn’t first climbed the mountain of conflicting Don’ts and You Musts, and if I hadn’t given advice myself while digging for the secret to my own success. I needed that direction as a new writer, and that space to analyze my own work. I never would have gotten to a point where I could feel my stories if I hadn’t tried to build them a hundred different ways. If I hadn’t tried to fit in the misshapen brick of advice labeled “eliminate all passive voice,” then I never would have honed in on when passive voice is most effective and when it’s fighting with the reader’s ability to be in the moment.

I couldn’t simply begin at the end: “Do whatever works for you.” No matter how good that advice is, no matter how important it is that a writer not get too caught up in what someone else thinks they have to do to write professionally, it is not a starting point.

So, my advice to the new writers out there is this: There is no one way. Do what works for you. And the only way you’re going to figure out what works for you is to try a hundred different ways, or a thousand different ways, or maybe just one or two ways. But what’s important is your willingness to learn, to take in all advice, good and bad, and apply it and discard it in turn until something clicks. Until you feel the story’s shape—or whatever it ends up being for you.

 

Marina J Lostetter Photo Marina J. Lostetter’s short fiction has appeared in venues such as Lightspeed, InterGalactic Medicine Show, and Uncanny Magazine. Originally from Oregon, she now lives in Arkansas with her husband, Alex. Her most recent novel, Noumenon Infinity, is an epic space adventure starring an empathetic AI, alien mega structures, and generations upon generations of clones. Marina tweets as @MarinaLostetter and her website can be found at www.lostetter.net.
Women in SF&F Month: Sam Hawke
Apr
08
2019

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Today’s guest is Sam Hawke—whose recent debut novel, City of Lies, was one of my favorite books of 2018! This wonderful epic fantasy follows two siblings as they work to unravel mysteries surrounding their Chancellor’s murder and their city suddenly being under siege. Though it features poisonings, war, and betrayal, it is ultimately an optimistic book with main characters seeking to do the best they can in the face of difficult circumstances—and they and their stories are excellent!

City of Lies by Sam Hawke Cover Image

The Sewing Test

There is a particular kind of character in SFF. You know her. She’s smart and tough, determined, decisive, and she can kick the collective arses of any takers. She comes in a few varieties—in better stories she’s an Alanna of Trebond or a Brienne of Tarth, with depth and history and more than one dimension; in weaker ones she’s an empty Strong Female Character™ who has no real contribution to the plot other than Being Awesome While Female—but either way it’s her prowess at fighting, particularly against men, that sets her apart.

I don’t remember a time when I didn’t love to fight. I had no particular talent at any other sport, but fighting? That I was good at. Small and quick and tough, I sparred and wrestled with my older brother all throughout my childhood, and watched Jackie Chan movies and Royce Gracie dominating the original UFCs. I married my jujitsu training partner (our most beloved wedding photo is me accidentally ogoshi-ing him on the beach) and we teach a club together. My six year old did an escape from half guard last night at training that almost made us weep with pride. I bloody love fighting, is what I’m telling you. It seems a natural fit, when I went to write a big fat fantasy novel, to write my lead in that mould.

Instead, I wrote a woman, Kalina, with a chronic illness who couldn’t fight to save her life. Literally. I wrote a book in which the main characters’ problems couldn’t be solved by the strategic and entertaining use of violence even if they had the skills to deploy, and I did it purposefully. I did it in part in response to my own sewing test.

Let me explain.

The sewing test is failed when a book deploys a lazy code to tell me how much better, more interesting, more deserving, the female character is than those silly other women by making a point of having her hate sewing or embroidery or [insert other feminine-coded activity or trait of your choice—but you wouldn’t believe how often it’s sewing]. These days, if a book does this, I’m out. It’s not just lazy, it’s not just a cliché, it’s a statement by the author that I’m expected to cheer on one woman by disparaging the rest of them.

Listen, I was as much of a tomboy as anyone. I was a small, skinny, flat-chested teen with short hair I wouldn’t brush and bruises all up and down my shins and forearms from sparring. All of my close friends were boys. I liked martial arts, rock-climbing, SFF books, rock music. I wasn’t pretty, I didn’t own any makeup or heels, I was scrappy and smart-mouthed, and scornful of shopping and shoes. I was one of the top maths and science students in my school and I had no fucks to give for people who thought I couldn’t or shouldn’t do something because I was a girl. So stories of girls rejecting arranged marriages, seizing power, joining the army, outdoing their brothers and their fathers and the men who underestimated them, fighting, winning? These were my jam, they were made for me, they were my very lifeblood.

By their very nature these are often intended to be stories of rebellion and fortitude, stories about escaping the box that society has crammed you in. And there’s nothing wrong with that—don’t we all dream of escape, sometimes? Nor is there anything wrong with any of the traits that we see in these characters. It’s fine to be tough and smart mouthed, to be sexually aggressive, to be physical, to desire travel and adventure. It’s fine to be brash and practical and to bravely fight for what you believe in. Undoubtedly our cultural enjoyment of the tough tomboy who breaks free of her societal constraints has played its part in the positive change in the genre over time—why, it’s entirely possible now to fill your reading calendar exclusively with novels that do not solely centre men, in which women matter, without trying too hard—and I applaud her for that.

The danger, though, is a trend toward attaching our respect and enjoyment solely to those types of characters at the expense of other kinds of power and strength and importance.

Basically, there’s a nasty underbelly to over-reliance on this very limited model of ‘strength’, and it’s rooted in the same insidious patriarchal BS that gave us the old style women-as-objects-to-be-rescued stories: here are traits which are traditionally coded as masculine, which you have been taught are more valuable than traits which are coded as feminine. See how you should cheer on this woman because she’s different and better than those other women, who are weak and shallow and worthless. Reward her for those traits, and punish those who lack them. Applaud Arya Stark as she gets her bloody revenge, and make sure Sansa is dragged through the mud for her foolish hopes and desires and ambitions. Write a book that seems to be full of strong amazing women—but do it in a way that’s actually deeply contemptuous of them.

(It’s more than that, of course. It’s also a product of our cultural fascination with violence as a solution—our love affair with creative ways of inflicting harm on each other has led us, I think, to prioritise physical conflicts and solutions, and in so doing we lose precious opportunities to tell different kinds of stories and come up with creative methods of resolving those conflicts. But that’s another article.)

There are all kinds of strength. There’s valour in staying home and keeping it functioning while others are away at war. There’s strength in raising children, in caring for our elders. There’s as much grit in persevering through domestic hardships as in the trenches, as much intellect in managing emotional needs as broad scale strategic ones, and mastery with a sword is no more inherently impressive than mastery with a needle (again, this is another article, but historically sewing is one of the most important skills in a society). If you show me in your story that you don’t understand that… well, no hard feelings, but I’m moving on.

So, I wrote Kalina. She is kind, emotionally intuitive, clever, and psychologically if not physically resilient. She can’t run, she can’t fight, she needs a lot of rest. And I hope that readers will appreciate her strength and her skills as no less valuable than a warrior’s or an assassin’s or a Queen’s. I also hope that people—especially women—will see themselves in her in the way that I saw myself in the scrappy little Aryas of SFF.

She is fucking great at sewing.

Sam Hawke Photo
Photo Credit: Kris Arnold Photography		 A black belt in jujitsu, Sam Hawke lives with her husband and children in Australia. CITY OF LIES is her first novel.
Women in SF&F Month 2019: April 8–12 Schedule & Week in Review
Apr
07
2019

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I’m excited that the eighth annual Women in SF&F Month is underway. Thank you so much to last week’s guests!

All guest posts for April 2019 can be viewed here, and here’s a summary of last week in case you missed any of the essays:

And next week, there will be guest posts from:

Women in SF&F Month 2019 Schedule Graphic

April 8: Sam Hawke (City of Lies)
April 9: Marina J. Lostetter (Noumenon, Noumenon Infinity, Lifeboats)
April 10: Arkady Martine (A Memory Called Empire, “The Hydraulic Emperor”)
April 11: Samantha Shannon (The Bone Season, The Priory of the Orange Tree)
April 12: Jenna Glass (The Women’s War, Faeriewalker)

Women in SF&F Month: Rachel Cordasco
Apr
05
2019

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Today’s guest is editor, reviewer, and translator Rachel Cordasco! She runs the wonderful site Speculative Fiction in Translation, which is dedicated to providing information on speculative fiction works that have been (or are being) translated into English—from reviews, to interviews, to The Big SFT Spreadsheet, to compilations by year and indexes by language, and more! I’m thrilled she’s here today to discuss speculative fiction in translation by women, and if you want to read more with this particular focus, you can also check out the special issue of Anomaly she curated in 2017, Anomaly #25: Speculative Fiction in Translation by Women.

Speculative Fiction in Translation Site Header

The Women of International SF

With the marked increase in speculative fiction translated into English (SFT) over the past ten years, we’ve also seen a rise in the amount of SFT by non-Anglophone women, whose translators also tend to be women. These numbers tell us not only that women are being published around the world in ever greater numbers, but that their novels, collections, and short stories are attracting attention in the Anglophone world, in which translations themselves still account for just a fraction of books published each year.

Focusing on 2018–19 shows us that this trend is continuing, especially in the realm of the short story collection. In this period, Anglophone readers have gotten/will get the chance to read ten collections of mostly dark fantasy by women, with seven of the collections translated by women. And while they come to us from around the world (including Russia, Indonesia, Japan, Bosnia, Slovakia, and Korea), almost half come from either Argentina or Spain. When many of us think about Latin American speculative fiction by women, we think about the highly-acclaimed Angelica Gorodischer, whose stories and novels have been well-known for decades for their dark comedy and unique approach to the fantastic. In the second decade of this century, we have even more such writers, including Sara Gallardo (Land of Smoke, tr. Jessica Sequeira) and Samanta Schweblin (Mouthful of Birds, tr. Megan McDowell) from Argentina; and Cristina Jurado (Alphaland, tr. James Womack) and Sofia Rhei (Everything is Made of Letters, tr. various translators) from Spain. Schweblin, Jurado, and Rhei have all appeared in previous years, publishing novels or stories in English translation, while Gallardo, who died over thirty years ago, is just getting her English debut. And while Gallardo’s Land of Smoke is a kind of magical realism that prompted one critic to call it a “poetic communiqué from an exceptional imagination,” Schweblin’s Mouthful of Birds and Jurado’s Alphaland reach more toward the dark and surreal side of life, blurring the real and the bizarre into ultimately haunting collections. Rhei’s collection is the most sci-fi of the group, with stories about parallel worlds and alien planets that instantly transport the reader.

Alphaland by Cristina Jurado Cover Hybrid Child by Mariko Ohara Cover

Surrealism and dark fantasy are also at the center of collections by Tatyana Tolstaya (Aetherial Worlds, tr. Anya Migdal), Intan Paramaditha (Apple and Knife, tr. Stephen J. Epstein), Yukiko Motoya (The Lonesome Bodybuilder, tr. Asa Yoneda), Asja Bakić (Mars, tr. Jennifer Zoble), Uršuľa Kovalyk (The Night Circus, tr. Julia Sherwood and Peter Sherwood), and Ha Seong-Nan (Flowers of Mold, tr. Janet Hong). Collections like these offer readers an unflinching and unrelentingly dark look at modern life and what lies just beneath the surface.

Of the ten works of novel-length SFT by women out or coming out between 2018 and 2019, three are from Japan, which itself has a long tradition of sophisticated, excellent speculative fiction (especially science fiction). Yoko Tawada’s The Emissary (tr. Margaret Mitsutani) depicts a post-apocalyptic Japan, in which the old remain healthy while the young wither away; Mariko Ohara’s Hybrid Child (tr. Jodie Beck) is an award-winning story about motherhood, murder, and cyborgs; and Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police (tr. Stephen Snyder) takes up questions of memory and trauma on an island where forgetting is the norm.

Novels by women from Korea, Finland, Catalonia, Argentina, Russia, the Dominican Republic, and Israel span the range of speculative fiction, from the psychologically-harrowing dark fantasy of Vita Nostra (by Marina and Sergei Dyachenko, tr. Julia Meitov Hersey) to the biohorror/science fiction of Dark Constellations (by Pola Oloixarac, tr. Roy Kesey) and everything in between. For instance, The Vestigial Heart (by Carme Torras, tr. Josephine Swarbrick) imagines a teenage girl waking up in a future filled with emotionless, robot-dependent humans, while The Heart of the Circle (by Keren Landsman, tr. Daniella Zamir) offers us an alternate-world fantasy about sorcerers and their fight for the right to exist.

Vita Nostra by Marina and Sergei Dyachenko Cover Dark Constellations by Pola Oloixarac Cover

All of this, dear reader, is still not all, but if I went into all of the short-story-length SFT by women that came out in 2018-19, this post would be miles long. Instead, I’ll just mention a few of the especially notable ones. Man Booker International Prize-winning Polish author Olga Tokarczuk had her chilling story about genetic experimentation published recently in Hazlitt (“All Saints’ Mountain, tr. Jennifer Croft), while Italian author Clelia Farris saw her blend of science fiction and fantasy about a strange addictive substance published in Future Science Fiction Digest (“The Substance of Ideas,” tr. Rachel Cordasco). French author Melanie Fazi’s fantastical story about disease and statues came out in World Literature Today (“Our Lady of the Scales,” tr. Edward Gauvin), and Latin American Literature Today printed a story about trauma and holographic images as witnesses by Gabriela Damián Miravete (“They Will Dream in the Garden,” tr. Adrian Demopulos). Finally, Algerian author Safia Ketou’s story “The Mauve Planet” was published in English for the first time on Arablit.org (tr. Nadia Ghanem).

The women who write, translate, and publish speculative fiction around the world enrich our literary lives and enhance our understanding of the world(s) around/beneath/within us. So if you haven’t read any of these women before, or are looking for more from authors you already love, bring this list to your favorite bookstore or read some of the stories online. You’ll be glad you did.

Rachel Cordasco has a PhD in literary studies and currently works as a developmental editor. She also writes reviews for publications like World Literature Today and Strange Horizons and translates Italian speculative fiction. For all things related to speculative fiction in translation, check out her website: sfintranslation.com.

 

Women in SF&F Month: Jessie Mihalik
Apr
04
2019

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Today’s guest is urban fantasy and science fiction romance writer Jessie Mihalik! She’s the author of The Queen’s Gambit, a science fiction romance novella in the Rogue Queen series, and she is currently releasing the sequel, The Queen’s Advantage, as a serial on her website (with several chapters available to read now!). Her latest book, Polaris Rising, is the first novel in a new romantic space opera trilogy, the Consortium Rebellion. The second book in this series, Aurora Blazing, is scheduled for release in October 2019.

Polaris Rising Cover Aurora Blazing Cover

On Writing and Reading Science Fiction Romance

Thank you so much for having me as a guest! Today, I want to talk a little bit about my experience writing science fiction romance, how I try to meet the expectations of both genres, and why you should give cross-genre books a try.

Polaris Rising, my debut novel, is a space opera and a science fiction romance. My heroine is a kick-ass space princess who becomes reluctant allies with an outlaw soldier. Shenanigans ensue and they fall desperately in lust, then in love. The relationship is at the core of the story, but there are also spaceships, battles, politics, rescues, and friendships—all of the things you’d expect from space opera.

When I started writing the book, I knew it might struggle to find the right audience, the right niche. Science fiction romance is something of a balancing act, and I deeply appreciate all of the writers, especially the women, who came before, forged a trail, and made the road far easier for me to follow.

Science fiction romance merges two genres with very loyal, very vocal fanbases, each with their own expectations and biases. Whenever that happens, it becomes tricky to please everyone—hence the balancing act.

On the science fiction side, some readers are deeply skeptical of anything labeled romance, sometimes without ever having read a romance. I’ve had conversations with people where they perk up at “space opera” then immediately deflate when I follow it with “romance.” Then they tend to find somewhere else to be.

I’m seeing it less than I used to (thanks again to all of the writers who forged this road before me!), but it’s a teensy bit frustrating to constantly have to defend that a good romance can also be good science fiction. And maybe my book isn’t it. I mean, I’d like to think it is, but I’m a little biased. Regardless, books that are great at both exist, and have for decades, if not longer. The two genres are not mutually exclusive.

On the romance side, some readers are deeply skeptical of science fiction in general. They think it’s not for them, either because they think it’ll be too technical or because they’ve been repeatedly (and unfairly) told “it’s not for you.”

And that’s a tragedy, because science fiction spans so many subgenres that there’s very likely a niche for everyone. Hate military SF but love cyberpunk? You’re still a science fiction fan. And from a technical perspective, science fiction ranges from extremely intricate and detailed hard SF to more hand-wavy space opera where the focus is more on the characters than the technology, so you can find exactly the level of technical detail you want.

I was lucky that as a kid, I read everything and no one teased me about it. Or if they did, it didn’t stick. I read Herbert, McCaffrey, Adams, and Tolkien—and so many more—as fast as I could tear through them. Science fiction and fantasy were the foundation of my formative reading years. I loved the escape, the vastness of new worlds.

Then in high school, I found romance. I’d borrow my grandma’s Harlequins and read them on the bus. And I was absolutely teased for reading them, but that didn’t stick, either, because romance filled a hole in my reading that I hadn’t even realized was there. I wanted those happily ever afters and impossible dreams coming true.

When I sat down to write a book, I wanted both. I wanted happily ever afters and the vastness of space and new planets. So I wrote both. And I had a blast doing it.

If you’re an aspiring science fiction writer, especially a writer who wants to dabble across genres, do it! Write the story you want to write.  Don’t worry about how it will be received or if it will work.

All of that comes later.

Write the story that’s in your soul and readers will find it. We need all kinds of stories, not just the things that stay neatly in the lines.

So go forth and boldly create!

And if you’re a reader who’s been hesitant to cross into a new genre, maybe dip in a toe. Check out a book from the library. Check out five books. You won’t lose anything except a little bit of time and you might find a whole new world that is exactly what you didn’t know you were missing.

Happy reading!

Jessie Mihalik Jessie Mihalik has a degree in Computer Science and a love of all things geeky. A software engineer by trade, Jessie now writes full time from her home in Texas. When she’s not writing, she can be found playing co-op video games with her husband, trying out new board games, or reading books pulled from her overflowing bookshelves. Find her online at www.jessiemihalik.com.