rachelswirsky

[rachelswirsky]

New Silly Interview! Aliette de Bodard and I talk about living in Paris, her eerily fast-growing houseplants, and the delights of Vietnamese food.

[rachelswirsky]

I have a new Silly Interview up! Monica Valentinelli and I talked about science fiction tie-ins, her work on the Firefly RPG, and more! Featuring her charming feline companions.

[rachelswirsky]

My latest patreon-unlocked interview is with science fiction writer and literary translator @john_chu. John is the author of The Water That Falls on You From Nowhere, microprocessor architect, and is generous with both his knowledge of musical theater history and writing tips. Check it out!

[rachelswirsky]

Bunny Chicken is a character I drew for a role-playing game I was sketching out called Cats and Dogs Living Together.

Bunny Chicken is a muscular, black domestic shorthair. He’s five years old, weighs twelve pounds of sheer strength, and is vain about his shining fur and whiskers. He thinks of himself as Alpha, master of all he surveys. He’s genuinely tough, but he’s been tame all his life--deep down, he wouldn’t be cat enough for the mean streets. He’s smart enough to see the benefits of power, but not to worry about consequences.

[rachelswirsky]

My online speculative poetry class, Verses of Sky & Stars, is coming up on June 9th!

As our understanding of the world grows to incorporate more science and technology, our metaphors grow to include them. The static human behavior of looking outside to understand ourselves combines with an evolving society to give us reference points that shift over time and cultures. … Science fiction wrestles with how to figure out the universe and our place in it. Poetry allows writers to focus on metaphors and internal states. Science fiction poetry can get straight to the point and ask, “What can we learn about ourselves from the world around us?”

Keep reading

[rachelswirsky]

My latest interview is with author and game designer @jennamoran, creator of Nobilis, computer science PhD, and owner of a very anxious cat. Check it out!

[rachelswirsky]

Silly Interview with Anaea Lay (who wants to read your hate mail)

Rachel Swirsky: You were in Women Destroy Science Fiction--a project I greatly admire. What appeals to you about the project? What was your story like?

Anaea Lay: The Destroy series has been so phenomenally successful and huge that it's hard to remember that it started as an announcement that basically went, "You know what?  Screw this.  We're going to do a thing. Details forthcoming, let us know if you're in."  I'm both irritable and prone to scheming wild projects, so an announcement like that is a perfect recipe to pique my interest.  I sent them my info: i actually volunteered to read their hate mail for them since I get a bit of a kick out of getting hate mail.  I have a weekly quota of cackling I have to meet and reading hate mail makes it really easy for me to hit it.

They did not take me up on that offer, but did ask me to write a personal essay for a series they were putting up on their Kickstarter page.  There's less cackling involved in that sort of support, but I was game.  It's pretty short and you can still read it online if you want.  It's mostly about how I found SF at just the right moment for it to assure me that I wasn't as alone or strange as I thought I was.

What I like most about the Destroy project as it's grown and developed is how conversations around it have grown and developed.  A lot of voices that were always there, but usually at the edges or hard to go find have been amplified and brought closer to the main stream of the conversation.  That's the kind of effect that stretches beyond a single anthology or project.  Twenty or thirty years from now, I'll get to be the pedant droning on in convention hallways about how this and that other thing taken for granted ties back to this project and here see all the ways I can tie them together.  People will humor me and act like I'm being terribly interesting, and when they finally escape, I'll cackle.  (I'll probably still have a quota to meet.)

RS: You have an unpublished novel. You quote what John O'Neill had to say about it: "…an unpublished novel set in a gorgeously baroque far future where a woman who is not what she seems visits a sleepy space port… and quickly runs afoul of a subtle trap for careless spies.” Can you tell us more? How did you come up with the idea, and did it surprise you where it went?

AL: That novel was a bit of an experiment.  I had a big, sprawling space opera universe that I'd been building in the back of my head for years while working on other things.  It was time to start actually working on things there, but while I knew a lot about it, things in the back of my head tend to be squishy and hard to work with.  So I decided to do a safety novel first, something that would let me touch on the major set pieces  without any risk of pinning myself in later or breaking something I'd need.

Which meant I had no idea what I was going to do with it when I sat  down.  I knew I wanted a pair of sisters as the protagonists, and I wanted the younger sister to do some protecting of the older sister, then just kept throwing things out there to see what happened.

I'm in the process of re-working on of the plotlines from that novel into a game for Choice of Games.  It's serving as a learning workhorse for me again because I'm using it to experiment with all the things I learned while doing my first game with them.  Clearly pirates, spies, and snarky computers are the learning tools every modern writer needs in their workshop.

RS: You used to podcast poetry--how do you go about figuring how to give a poem voice?

AL: I hosted the Strange Horizons poetry podcast, but I did as little reading of the poetry as possible; that's our venue for getting in a variety of voices and it seems to me that if people are particularly invested in my voice, they can get plenty of it in the fiction podcast.

That said, I would step in when we were short on readers or there was a poem that particularly caught my eye.  (Editor's privilege is a marvelous thing!)  Reading poetry is both easier and harder than reading prose; poems are frequently crafted with a very deliberate ear toward how they sound, which means you're not likely to find the text dull to interpret vocally.  At the same time, you then have to do justice to the choices made in how the poem was put together, and justify it being you doing the reading rather than any given reader's interior head voice.  So I look for the tools the poet gave me, then look for the ways I'm best suited to using those tools and build my performance around that.  I'm a complete sucker for consonant clusters and sibilants.

RS: What was wonderful about running the Strange Horizons podcast?

Running the Strange Horizons podcast is fantastic.  I've given the poetry podcast over to Ciro Faienza, who was one of our staff readers for the poetry podcast and the single most common provocation of fanmail the podcast has gotten.  That podcast takes a lot of work, and I'd gotten to the point where I was very aware of a lot of ways it could be better, but realistically wasn't ever going to have the time to implement any of those improvements.  Ciro immediately made some great changes and I'm really looking forward to what he does as he gets into his groove.

The politic, and mostly true, answer to what's fantastic about doing the fiction podcast is getting to read the stories early and then pull them apart and put them back together in order to give a good reading.  The slightly more true answer, which has been growing over the course of the podcast, is the responses I get to the podcasts from the writers and the audience.  I pretty much only consume short fiction in audio form these days, which leaves me very grateful to all the places that are making it available.  Every time somebody reminds me that I'm one of those people is really great, especially when they're reminding me because they liked what I did.

But also, I really like getting to pull the stories apart and put them back together.

RS: So, on your website, you claim that the rumors I am a figment of your imagination are compelling. What are those rumors and why are you compelled by them?

AL: I actually exist as a multi-bodied individual quietly working to bring the world under the rule of a mischievous alien intelligence through widespread distribution of coffee and sunlight.  We've already conquered most of California and are making great headway in Washington.  Every sip of coffee you take, and every day with bright, clear skies, our agenda advances that much further.

Once, upon being informed of this (it's no fun to subvert an entire civilization if they don't know it's happening - you have to advertise) the person I was warning expressed skepticism about the veracity of my claims.  Apparently, according to them, the very concept of a multi-bodied individual is imaginative speculation and the idea of being one even more so.

There's not a lot I can do in the face of such claims.  There are people who don't believe in the moon landing.  There's not a lot I can do about people who insist on remaining skeptical about coffee and sunshine powered conspiracies.  But I do find such relentless denial of obvious reality to provide a fascinating insight into human psychology, especially when the stakes are this high.

The projects question: got anything you'd like to mention to readers?

The biggest thing I'm in the middle of right now is the Dream Foundry, which is a very cool new organization that's connecting different types of creative professionals all across science fiction, fantasy, and the rest of the speculative world.  We're running useful articles on our website and starting up some very fun programming on our forums.  We've got really big plans for the future (Contests! Workshops! Assimilation of the entire industry into our standards for compensation and professional conduct!) but we're already doing some very neat things, which is great for an organization that's less than a year old. In the short fiction realm, I just had "For the Last Time, It's not a Raygun," come out from Diabolical Plots. It's a tiny bit a love letter from me to Seattle, though I'd understand if it looks more like hate mail to some people. Much larger, my first game with Choice of Games, "Gilded Rails," came out late last year.  It's a huge (340k) interactive novel where you're trying to secure permanent control of a railroad in 1874, during the very early days of the labor movement and age of Robber Barons.  You get to choose between fixing markets or helping out small scale farmers, you've got a possibly-demonic pet cat, and a supreme court ruling over inheritance law for a big tent revivalist operation accidentally turned society into a more egalitarian alternate history where just about the entire cast might, depending on what you choose, be female.  Also, I snuck in hot takes about the contemporary theater and poetry scenes, which is exactly the sort of timely, incisive commentary everybody needs in their business sim.  I spent roughly forever, and also an eternity, working on this, so I'm really thrilled to have it out in the world.  It could be said that I'm cackling over it.

[rachelswirsky]

Drawing for Tuesday, April 16: Hanging Out

To me, all the curlicues look like they're hanging out in a mass, doing whatever curlicues do.

[rachelswirsky]

Birthday Review Round-up

What a lovely thing to wake up to on my birthday yesterday. Rich Horton has posted a round-up of his Locus reviews of my short fiction from the last decade. It's neat to see them all in one place! 

[rachelswirsky]

Have another silly interview! I've interviewed E. J. Fischer, Winner of the Imaginative Long Jump. We talked about Clarion, nail polish, writing advice, and his story "New Mother."

[rachelswirsky]

Trains, Brains, and Computers

When I teach my speculative fiction class (there’s a section this weekend, by the way!), I like to talk to the students about the most popular varieties of speculative poetry. A lot of speculative poetry is narrative, or works with imagery from mythology and folk tales.

One of my favorite varieties is poetry that uses science as a metaphor for understanding the human condition. Using sciencey science--the kind we teach in the classroom--may be relatively recent in the scope of human history, but as far as I can tell, people have used elements of the natural world to describe their inner lives as far back as we can track.

Concrete descriptions of the external world provide a way of translating ineffable internal states into concrete, shared experiences. I may not be able to point to the sensation of happiness, but I can point to grass--or photosynthesis--as something that exists outside myself in the world we share.

As our understanding of the world grows to incorporate more science and technology, our metaphors grow to include them. The static human behavior of looking outside to understand ourselves combines with an evolving society to give us reference points that shift over time and cultures. I love the throughlines like this we can see through human history, the ways in which we stay the same and also become different.

Here’s a cool example--apparently when we’re trying to talk about the human brain (at least in Western culture over the past couple of centuries), we tend to analogize it to cutting edge new technology.  

Right now, computers are a dominant metaphor. We might talk about broad anatomical restraints as being similar to hardware, while software installation represents training that occurs within the anatomical structure. We run various programs to accomplish various tasks--our email helps us communicate, our search functions help us shuffle through data recorded in our memory banks, etc.

Before computers, there were other ascendant technologies, such as trains. Instead of comparing mental functions to hardware and software, they’re described as engine parts, or infrastructure. The things that keep trains on track become metaphors for the things that keep the human brain ticking.

In some ways, these are useful, clarifying metaphors. In other ways, they elide the plasticity of the brain. To risk extending the computer metaphor in the wrong direction, our software changes our hardware and vice versa. If we think of ourselves too strictly as machines, we risk ignoring the many other ways in which humans are not predictable systems of inputs leading to outputs. Like all metaphors, brain-as-technology rides a line between clarifying and confusing.

Science fiction wrestles with how to figure out the universe and our place in it. Poetry allows writers to focus on metaphors and internal states. Science fiction poetry can get straight to the point and ask, “What can we learn about ourselves from the world around us?”

Here’s a poem I wrote using the moon as a metaphor:

Moon, part II

White, like the blankness of a page.

Distant, like friends I’ve lost,

Like time that’s passed,

Like youth whose optimism winnowed into the finite.

Alone, against the stars with no one to call, no man, no lady, no rabbit,

only the footprints of men who won’t return.

You can register for the class here: www.kittywumpus.net/blog/speculative-poetry-with-rachel-swirsky/

[rachelswirsky]

My next silly interview is up! Read all about Agent Debra Jess, International Woman of Mystery and her incredibly handsome and hunky sidekick: https://www.patreon.com/posts/25233863 We also talk about romances, HEAs, what makes a hero, and her upcoming projects!

[rachelswirsky]

Xiyue Wang

Hi!

Today I wanted to mention a rally going on even as I post at the UW Jackson School of International Relations. This is to contact representatives and otherwise raise awareness of the drastically underreported case of Xiyue Wang, an American student, husband, and father who has now been held hostage in Iran for more than two years. I hope you’ll be able to help and maybe even participate evenif you are too far away or too busy at work or class to attend.

Here is the story.

Xiyue Wang was studying the 19th century Qajar dynasty as part of his graduate research for Princeton. He was following research plans approved by Iranian authorities. Then the work was retroactively declared to be espionage and he was arrested and detained. The U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has concluded that this was without legal basis. Then there was barely a mention of it in the U.S. news for… years.

If you would think about contacting your representative to ask them to prioritize this humanitarian case and issue a public statement or social media post drawing attention to his plight and calling for his release… that would be kind? And kindness is our work in this life.

I would also take it as a personal favor if any of you who are or have been thinking of becoming members of grassroots political groups, or have any media contacts whatsoever, would bring it up with them too for discussion and action.

Thank you.

[rachelswirsky]

The most recent of my silly interviews: Silly Interview with Henry Lien, but Also Lots of Cute Bird Pictures.

As promised, there are lots of cute bird pictures, plus vegan Taiwanese food, cool photography, PEASPROUT CHEN, and more.

[rachelswirsky]

Mash It Up, an excerpt from my class on How to Write Retellings

Explicitly or subtly, writers are always building on the stories that came before us. For a couple of years now, I've been teaching a class on retellings at Cat Rambo's Academy. It's always a good time to see what people come up with.

Here's an excerpt from the class, on one of the many strategies for retelling stories -- the mash-up.

Craving some hard science fiction spaceships, or some Western cowboy hats? You don’t have to move your story into space or a ghost town and write completely in that new genre—you can do both at once. Sometimes you have to get that chocolate into that peanut butter. Mix things because you love them, or because they go together, or because they should never go together, or because they went together in that weird dream you had the other night.

Some combinations play up the contradictions. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is funny because it makes you imagine all those staid regency ladies juxtaposed with B-horror movie makeup. The retelling thrives because the combination is both ridiculous and delightful.

Other match-ups are about synergy instead of clash. A common blend is fairy tale characters who are under criminal investigation. Fairy tale characters have made many appearances in court room dramas. These days, I mostly see the combination as fairy tales written in a Noir style. Although the genres don’t pair well to me, they appeal to many readers. Perhaps it’s a way to tease out the motivations and complexities of the original, simple stories. The author wants to know “why did this happen?” and poses a fictional detective to find out.

You can mash up whole genres--but you can also just mash individual stories. When superhero comics have big crossover arcs where characters from different parts of the universe all interact, they aren't changing genre. They're still superhero comics, just ones without their normally distinct lines.

It’s entirely possible to mash together as many genres and stories as you want. More doesn’t usually mean better--but it can.

If this sounds interesting to you, consider signing up for my class this Sunday, or checking out the On Demand version.

[rachelswirsky]

Five Favorite Books

My friend Sadie sent me one of those pass-it-on memes. I misread it and thought it was "list five favorite books." Then I realized it wasn't, but I was already halfway through this post. So in the meantime, here are five books that are among my favorites.

It's always hard to pick a few favorite books. For one thing, I think it's easy to slip into listing only favorites from childhood, because those formative years are so vividly imprinted on us. For another, I know a lot of authors personally, and I don't want to hurt any feelings, nor do I want my personal love for an author to bias me in favor of the book (we can call this my Ann Leckie rule).

I'm going to limit my favorites on this list to authors who are deceased, or who I've never met personally. ...I'm also just going to let the childhood thing go, though, and list some books I've loved since I was young.

I'm also limiting this to books with speculative elements, just to make the volume a bit more manageable.

Biting the Sun by Tanith Lee -- This was my favorite book through high school. Tanith Lee's dreamlike, intricate prose reads like a string of jewels with dazzling clarity. I was enamored of the strange world--a merging of utopia and dystopia. In retrospect, I think its treatment of gender was a strong allure. People could design new bodies when they were bored with their existing ones, and switch to male or female and back with minimal fuss. Wouldn't that be cool?

Beloved by Toni Morrison - I first read this in college. The raw, painful emotion is deeply affecting, and sensorily rendered. It's beautiful, though also dark and unflinching in its dealings with its intense depiction of the psychological aftermath of slavery. (Also, the poetic passage in the middle is brilliant and weird, and I'm grateful that I was lucky enough to be reading the book in a class where the teacher was able to help us interpret it, because I'm not sure I'd have understood on my own.) Toni Morrison may be the greatest living writer, although of course that's a silly thing to say, because there is never one "greatest" by an objective criteria. She's clearly in the top tier of brilliance one way or another, and for my standards, is a strong contender for greatest.

Lilith's Brood by Octavia Butler - I'm going to make another "greatest" claim, which is that Octavia Butler is the best and most important science fiction writer of the twentieth century. (Obviously, there are strong arguments that can be made for other people, too.) Lilith's Brood is, I think, the height of her talent. It's emotionally vivid, and takes place in a deeply strange world. Butler's aliens really read like aliens. Like many of her books, Lilith's Brood considers how humanity might evolve in the future, and whether it's possible for us to shed our instincts toward violence and xenophobia.

And here are a couple of recent books I'm excited by, written by authors I've never met. I don't know if they will stand in my pantheon forever, but they were books I've found impactful in the past few years.

The Walls Around Us by Nova Ren Suma - A dark horror novel that brilliantly weaves together multiple timelines. It's told from the perspectives of two teenage girls -- one imprisoned for allegedly murdering her stepfather, and the other a ballerina. The ballerina's best friend has been convicted for murder, and now she's the first girl's cell mate. The rendering of the characters is sharp, interesting, and emotionally engaging, and the tightly woven plot of flashbacks and revelations, creates a magnetic, urgent force that draws you through the book.

Everybody Sees the Ants by A. S. King - It's sort of random that I picked this book by A. S. King as opposed to one of the other books by A. S. King, almost all of which are excessively brilliant. (The others are merely quite good.) I picked this one because I remember the plot best, and because I argued for its inclusion on the Norton ballot when I was on the jury. This book has a spare, almost aggressive style, which helps illuminate the psychology of the main character. The teenaged main character is a boy who is bullied for seeming insufficiently masculine and socially adept, and I like it when books treat that subject matter seriously and well. I thought it did an excellent job of capturing that trauma, and the reactions it can create.

So, there's five books, y'all! What are your favorites?

[rachelswirsky]

Q&A on Being a Jewish & Disabled Author

A patron of mine asked me some questions recently about Jewish identity, and writing while Jewish and disabled.

I thought y'all might find the answers interesting. Hopefully, I'm correct!

Are secular Jews overrepresented in the media?

I am personally a secular Jew. I suppose my first question in wondering whether we're over-represented is -- what percentage of self-identified Jews in America are secular? (It also matters what the percentage of secular Jews in media work is, but that seems harder to find.)

I found this here: http://www.pewforum.org/2013/10/01/jewish-american-beliefs-attitudes-culture-survey/

"The changing nature of Jewish identity stands out sharply when the survey’s results are analyzed by generation. Fully 93% of Jews in the aging Greatest Generation identify as Jewish on the basis of religion (called “Jews by religion” in this report); just 7% describe themselves as having no religion (“Jews of no religion”). By contrast, among Jews in the youngest generation of U.S. adults – the Millennials – 68% identify as Jews by religion, while 32% describe themselves as having no religion and identify as Jewish on the basis of ancestry, ethnicity or culture. "

It goes on to say:

"Secularism has a long tradition in Jewish life in America, and most U.S. Jews seem to recognize this: 62% say being Jewish is mainly a matter of ancestry and culture, while just 15% say it is mainly a matter of religion. Even among Jews by religion, more than half (55%) say being Jewish is mainly a matter of ancestry and culture, and two-thirds say it is not necessary to believe in God to be Jewish. "

I'm surprised that the percentage of people who think you have to believe in God to be Jewish is that high, actually. There's a pretty lengthy historical tradition of Jews who participate in their communities without being personally religious. The article does say that Jews who identify as secular now are less likely to be tied into Jewish cultural organizations than other Jews, so I wonder whether there's an increasing idea that being a secular Jew is the same as being an uninvolved Jew. (I should note that people who convert to being Jews are also definitely Jews whether or not they have the ancestry. Judaism is a dessert topping and a floor wax.)

That said, I'm uninvolved in a lot of ways. My grandfather made a decision as a young man to sever himself from his Jewish past. I think this was his reaction to World War II. He never denied being Jewish, or changed his name, or anything like that - but he had no interest in his past as a Jew, or in any of the associated cultural traditions. Our family still exists in the shadow of that decision.

I could try to figure out more about the demographics involved -- what percentage of great sci-fi writers, editor, etc, from Christian backgrounds are also secular? Is this a function of Jewishness, or a broader secular cultural trend among people in those industries?

But I feel like the more interesting questions are tangential. What could we gain from having more religiously Jewish creators?

Probably something. My friend Barry writes a series of graphic novels about Hassidic Jews. He himself is a secular Jew, but many Hassidic people have contacted him, grateful for representation of their community that is humanizing and generous. There are clearly religiously Jewish people who are not seeing themselves reflected, or are only seeing themselves reflected in ways that are inaccurate or unkind.

There can be pressure on secular Jews to put their Jewish heritage in the background, especially when antisemitism and white supremacy are on a resurgence. I've paid the price for being a Jewish female creator, and it's a nasty one. So, there's another point where I think there's tension over secular Jewish representation in the media--in order to work in the industry, to some extent, we must blend in with Christian normativity.

I had a woman say to me, in all seriousness, in a critique group once, that she was annoyed I had included Jewish rituals in one of my stories. "If I want to read about that kind of thing," she said, "I'll just read fantasy."

I'm not sure this resolves anything (in fact, I'm sure it doesn't), but those are some of my thoughts.

What about your background and current ideas/beliefs/practices has contributed to your interest in Jewish sci fi?

Right now, I'm more interested in the theological questions of Judaism than I normally am because I have a good friend who is tipping over the border from secular to religious Jew, and his journey is very interesting to me. The way he talks and writes about his burgeoning belief (as opposed to the feeling of irresolution he'd had before) is fascinating; it helps that he's a very good writer who is fascinating on many topics.

I think my interest in Jewish science fiction stems from my interest in Jewishness itself, which is probably related to my self-identification as Jewish. I'm not sure why I have a strong identification with Judaism -- I didn't have to. As the granddaughter of a secular Jew who tried to cut all connections, I could have just put it aside; my brothers have. Our father is from WASPy blood with deep roots in American history--we're descended from one of the people who signed the Declaration of Independence--and I could have chosen to identify with that to the exclusion of my Jewish ancestry.

What are you writing about now?

I'm writing a lot about disability. As a disabled person, there's a lot of rich material to mine--and I still have a lot of unreconciled thoughts about disability, and things I'm figuring out. I think a lot of good writing is produced when the author is still on the edge of revelations, instead of settled.

Many of my previous writing obsessions have been much more externally focused. Of course there's a hideous amount of dehumanization and violence directed toward disabled people, but for some of us, there's also an intense personal struggle of identity and self-knowledge that requires a deep investigation of the psyche. That's where I am right now--fiction about selfhood and perception.