Novella

• “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary“, Ken Liu (Panverse Three)
• Silently and Very Fast, Catherynne M. Valente (WSFA)

Novelette

• ‘‘The Silver Wind’’, Nina Allan (Interzone 3-4/11)
• ‘‘Six Months, Three Days’’, Charlie Jane Anders (Tor.com 6/8/11)
• ‘‘Queen of Atlantis’’, Sarah Rees Brennan (Subterranean Summer ’11)
• ‘‘The Copenhagen Interpretation’’, Paul Cornell (Asimov’s 7/11)
• ‘‘Bronsky’s Dates with Death’’, Peter David (F&SF 7-8/11)
• ‘‘The Iron Shirts’’, Michael F. Flynn (Tor.com 5/4/11)
• ‘‘A Long Walk Home’’, Jay Lake (Subterranean Winter ’11)
• ‘‘Ghostweight’’, Yoon Ha Lee (Clarkesworld 1/11)
• ‘‘The Cold Step Beyond’’, Ian R. MacLeod (Asimov’s 6/11)
• ‘‘The Boneless One’’, Alec Nevala-Lee (Analog 11/11)
• ‘‘The Book of Phoenix (Excerpted from The Great Book)’’, Nnedi Okorafor (Clarkesworld 3/11)
• ‘‘A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong’’, K.J. Parker (Subterranean Winter ’11)
• ‘‘The Dala Horse’’, Michael Swanwick (Tor.com 7/13/11)
• ‘‘White Lines on a Green Field’’, Catherynne M. Valente (Subterranean Fall ’11)

Short Story

• ‘‘Absinthe Fish’’, M. David Blake (Bull Spec Spring ’11)
• ‘‘∞°’’, Darin Bradley (Electric Velocipede Fall ’10)
• ‘‘Walls of Paper, Soft as Skin’’, Adam Calloway (Beneath Ceaseless Skies7/14/11)
• ‘‘Breaking the Ice’’, Thoraiya Dyer (Cosmos 2-3/11)
• ‘‘Younger Women’’, Karen Joy Fowler (Subterranean Summer ’11)
• ‘‘Canterbury Hollow’’, Chris Lawson (F&SF 1-2/11)
• ‘‘Valley of the Girls’’, Kelly Link (Subterranean Summer ’11)
• “The Paper Menagerie“, Ken Liu (F&SF, 3-4/11)
• ‘‘Tying Knots’’, Ken Liu (Clarkesworld 1/11)
• ‘‘All That Touches the Air’’, An Owomayela (Lightspeed 4/11)
• ‘‘Ragnarok’’, Paul Park (Tor.com 4/17/11)
• ‘‘The Immortality Game’’, Cat Rambo (Fantasy 6/11)
• ‘‘Woman Leaves Room’’, Robert Reed (Lightspeed 3/11)
• ‘‘The Onset of a Paranormal Romance’’, Bruce Sterling (Flurb Fall/Winter ’11)
• ‘‘Red Dawn: A Chow Mein Western’’, Lavie Tidhar (Fantasy 11/11)
• ‘‘The Smell of Orange Groves’’, Lavie Tidhar (Clarkesworld 11/11)
• ‘‘The Bread We Eat in Dreams’’, Catherynne M. Valente (Apex 11/11)
• ‘‘The Sandal-Bride’’, Genevieve Valentine (Fantasy 3/11)
• ‘‘The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees’’, E. Lily Yu (Clarkesworld 4/11)

John Clute

Another slight problem with “intersectionality” over and above problem of reinventing the wheel. (Parenthetically, one is constantly brought back to wonder if any of us has ever said anything not already said in Vienna and Prague before the WW1 snuff flick.) The other slight problem is the fact that the term — unfortunately in line with industrial humanities practice — is a noun not a verb.

URBAN LIFE IS REAL LIFE. This morning, in the new New Yorker, found a quote by Sigmund Freud from his great book Civilization and its Discontents. My copy is in London (I’m in Maine) and I don’t know if this is in the original translation (which I find more readable) or in the later Strachey. Whatever:

Now let us make the fantastic supposition that Rome were not a human dwelling-place, but a mental entity with just as long and varied a past history: that is, in which nothing once constructed had perished, and all the earlier stages of development had survived, alongside the latest. . . . The observer would need merely to shift the focus of his eyes, perhaps, or change his position, in order to call up a view of either the one or the other.”

This is vertical intersectioning, not horizontal, but all the same evokes China Mieville’s The City and the City (2009). It nicely adumbrates something I’ve felt for a long time about how one lives in a city: that there is of course a small element of what one might call utopian thinking in our learning how to transact the urban: that there is an element of “forward planning” in the gaze we select to embrace in order to cross a street: that every shifting of the gaze or glance generates a nonce utopia (or dystopia, perhaps Avernal) that gives us a clear path, that foregrounds an Ariadne’s Thread (or magic carpet) we can follow (or ride) through the surge and thrust of “intersectioning”. Like tourists, or owners, or writers.

The term I’ve been using myself, a term I hate and am praying I can find something better, is “equipoise” used as a verb. Yes, it sucks. Because what I want to convey is something that addresses both our love for the the onion of the given (the banyan of the prior), but also our need to thrust through it if we hope to make anything, or survive. Am going to be giving a talk next September on the reshaping/dissolution of genres in the 21st century, by which point (hey) maybe a better term than equipoise will grip the mind. Tentative title for the talk is “Do Not Go Gentle.”

Kathleen Ann Goonan

Our cities are enlarging rapidly and “intersctioning,” as it were, in, as Clute points out, infinite dimensions, one of which is our own point of view as regards time and space–a useful and illuminating reality as well as metaphor.

Our own powers of intersectioning are enhanced by the tool of literacy.  Our main developmental task is building the neuronal system, in conjunction with sensory input, that empowers us to build stories about every finely split multilayered instant of our lives.  All of us, whether or not we read, whether or not we read in more than one language, possess the inherent literacy of our minds, which “read” people and surroundings, infer pasts and futures, and bestow upon us so much information that the ability to winnow is paramount in enabling us to navigate and be an effective agent in the city we build and the many cities with which we intersect, constantly.

The ways in which we sort ourselves, the cities to which we often cling (and this is always for want of knowledge) are those of culture.  We are built by invisible strictures of culture.  These strictures often fall along visible markers, such as male/female, skin color, etc., but despite myriad attempts to prove otherwise, we are all human.  I do not hang only with women of my age who have brown eyes and brown hair.  When time and space allow or force, my city is enlarged.

When I was young, literature allowed me to leave the city of brown-eyed, brown-haired white girls of Irish/German/Welch descent living in Ohio. It was a narrow aperture compared to what we have now, a newborn and rapidly expanding library of fluid cities.  I live in cities of music, of images, of culture/thought (for instance, I look forward to Eric Kandel’s forthcoming book The Age of Insight, which promises to explore a verge which glows with tremendous power in my own landscape of thought) which constantly intersect.  The frisson of these intersections gives me life.

Those of us who read and contribute to these roundtables and to other cities of thought have the power to add to it, to influence it.  One of my own particular quests is that of helping others–mainly small children–gain the tools I have been so fortunate, by birth and culture, to own and to use.

SF is one of these cities.  Each novel/story intersects with many other cities.  And so on.

There is never just one way to slice it.

Stefan Dziemianowicz

This puts me in mind of the recent controversy (now entirely moot) over Guillermo del Toro’s plan to put a female character in the period geological expedition in his adaptation of Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, even though there was no such person in Lovecraft’s tale–the objective being to have a character in the movie whom women could relate to, so as not to alienate half (or more) of the moviegoing audience.

Sorry to fall on the Lovecraft crutch, as I often do, but his fiction is a perfectly good example to me of work that makes an impact, despite its failure to suggest credibly the greater world beyond the plot of the story. In Lovecraft’s fiction there is no sense of other races or non-male gender (except mostly in the negative sense). But Lovecraft isn’t interested in conjuring a view of society or its different people that one can relate to. He’s much more interested in evoking, broadly, the human race and human civilization and a cosmic context that diminishes them.

Of course, a lot of people would probably say that Lovecraft is not a good writer, or at the very least that he’s a writer whose work has to be taken on terms of its shortcomings.

Theodora Goss

OK, I’m going to disagree with this characterization of Lovecraft (sorry, Stefan!), but from a particular critical perspective.  And this is where an intersectional viewpoint can come in usefully for the critic.

In Lovecraft, female characters ARE alien.  As are characters of other races.  They are literally allies of the alien gods.  If a woman feels alienated by Lovecraft, it’s because she is, in fact, alienated (read as a verb!) by Lovecraft.  She is an other, and a symbol of otherness.

I don’t yet have my Lovecraft argument worked out in detail, but I’ve looked at 19th century texts that largely exclude female characters, such as Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde and Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, and this is what I see.  In Jekyll and Hyde, Jekyll describes Hyde as “closer than a wife” and describes the experience of being taken over by Hyde as “unmanning.”  Hyde himself exhibits hysteria.  In other words, there are ways in which Hyde is coded female.  In King Solomon’s Mines, the landscape itself is female (they pass mountains called Sheba’s Breasts, hello!).  In these works, femaleness is MEANINGFULLY excluded.  And it’s only by being aware of gender, of what seems outside the text, that you can understand the subtext.  I don’t think you can fully understand Lovecraft, Stevenson, or Haggard without thinking of gender, even though gender seems excluded from their works.  So the critic has to think intersectionally.  I’ll give you another example from Jekyll and Hyde. Homosexuality is certainly never mentioned in the novel, but after looking at the cultural context and the way in which Arthur Symonds, a closeted gay man and friend of Stevenson’s, responded to the novel, many of my students conclude that what Jekyll is Hyding is his homosexuality.  That the novel is about the difficulties of being a gay man in Victorian London.

I want to write a paper on female characters in Lovecraft.  But my main point here is, taking an intersectional perspective, which includes looking at what is seemingly excluded from these texts as significant, opens the texts to interesting and, I think, enlightening interpretations.

Stefan Dziemianowicz

I want to write a paper on female characters in Lovecraft.

It will be a pretty short one, given the paucity of female characters in Lovecraft’s work. I don’t want to bog down in particulars, but I think you make an excellent about the female-as-alien in Lovecraft’s work. This may break down somewhat in “The Dunwich Horror,” in which the sole female character is more victim than victimizer, and arguably the least monstrous representative of her family.

I’ll give you another example from Jekyll and Hyde. Homosexuality is certainly never mentioned in the novel, but after looking at the cultural context and the way in which Arthur Symonds, a closeted gay man and friend of Stevenson’s, responded to the novel, many of my students conclude that what Jekyll is Hyding is his homosexuality. That the novel is about the difficulties of being a gay man in Victorian London.

Fascinating to read this in the context of the Mammoulian movie adaptation of the story. In an attempt to open up Stevenson’s story to reflect the world beyond the plot, the movie presents two types of female characters: the prim and proper Victorian lady whom Jekyll wants to settle down with, and the prostitutes and slatterns that the bestial Hyde consorts with. I doubt that you could read the film as a study of repressed, or hidden, homosexuality, but then it’s a completely different story, no?

Theodora Goss

Oh, I once wrote a seminar paper on Anne de Bourgh, the daughter of Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice!  She has no speaking lines in the novel.  (And then I wrote a story from her perspective that came out in Asimov’s last year.)  Blame graduate school, where one is taught to write 20-page papers on ANYTHING . . .

I think talking about Lovecraft from a feminist perspective would actually be fascinating and informative (and article-length!).  Even in stories where no female characters appear, to the extent those stories are about heredity, women are implied and implicated.

N. K. Jemisin

Oh dear God, Dora, thank you.  Was about to asplode!1! at that characterization of Lovecraft, myself.  I’ll also point out that his fear of not just women but brown-skinned folk is represented in his work — not only in allegorical form as incomprehensible eldritch monsters, but also in overt and hostile form (per his 1912 poem “On the Creation of Niggers”, which I was unfortunately shown by Nnedi Okorafor recently).

Stefan, his (not at all credible, to me) exclusion of women and people of color from his depictions of “the human race” strikes me as a clear implication that we weren’t human to him.

And this is a lovely example of how the intersections of identity affect each person’s perceptions of an author’s work.

Theodora Goss

There’s also “Medusa’s Coil,” the story he co-wrote with Zealia Bishop.  (At least that’s my understanding, but I’m not a Lovecraft scholar and I don’t know the exact extent to which either was responsible for the story.)  It’s about a beautiful woman who turns out to be a monster and is also revealed at the end to be, “though in deceitfully slight proportion,” black.  (Quoting from my edition of The Loved Dead and Other Revisions.)  The monstrous woman who is also racially other is so common in late 19th c/early 20th c fiction that you could write a whole book about her.  This story is very much a standard example.

What these lenses allow us to do is see that what seems excluded from a text may actually be at its center.  For example, to the extent that Lovecraft’s stories are about biological degeneration, what he excludes (women and sex) are actually central.  You can see this in The Shadow Over Innsmouth: toward the end the narrator says, “One night I had a frightful dream in which I met my grandmother under the sea.”  (Quoting from The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre.)  The horror of the story comes from interbreeding with monstrous women who are associated with racial otherness.

I’m using Lovecraft as an example because I think he fits so well.  He wouldn’t be an interesting writer if his monsters didn’t involve this intersection of gender, race, nationality, etc.  I don’t think we can usefully read him without taking these issues into account.

Stefan Dziemianowicz

Lovecraft’s intellectually broad but sociologically, psychologically, and emotionally narrow perspective is what shaped his chilling–and chilly–cosmic worldview. But that’s what you would expect, given that Lovecraft wrote to reflect on the insignificance of humanity in the grand scheme of things. I don’t go to Lovecraft expecting to find any compassionate, inclusive, or comprehensive depiction of the world beyond the plot of his stories. As he alluded in more than a few of them, the world beyond the small circle of familiarity illuminated by our feeble cave fires abounds with monsters that we can’t even begin to comprehend.

Karen Joy Fowler

When I think about identity with respect to myself I get some slippage   Some attributes are assigned to me from the outside, some from the inside, some I choose for myself, some I can’t escape.  Some feel empowering and some diminishing and mostly the same ones do both.  Some matter more to me inside certain books than others do, although the others may matter more when the books change.  Different books call out different parts of me.  I guess that’s operational intersectionality.

Parts of my identity are in flux.  Most obviously, my age.  I’ve begun to notice that when I dream at night I’m always younger than I now am.  I’ve read that some people in nursing homes, when asked to produce a photo of themselves, will offer something from a younger age.  They don’t think the way they look now, the age they are now, is an accurate reflection of who they are.  Apparently my dream-mind believes that as well.  But since I’ve been both, I can write and read as a younger and an older woman, neither harder to do than the other.

My race is not changing nor my sex nor the class of my upbringing.  But I know from conversations with other women that I am not alone in having done my early reading, all those boy adventure stories, with no awareness of myself as an outsider to the text because I responded with the part of me that wanted to be an adventurer.  I would guess that I read those in the same way a boy would, although I can’t know for sure, and that my girl-reading came on me later when I finally read a book that called it out.  Even now I can watch a movie and identify the exact moment in which I understand it wasn’t made for me, but on another day in another mood a movie that functions in a similar manner will pass on through without me noticing.  My boy-reading mind is still there, intact and functional.

I wonder if people of color have a similar reading experience or not.  I wonder if white men do.

I feel that my reading identity is vastly larger than my writing one, but am not sure exactly what I’m saying when I say that.  Probably something suspect and specious

Rachel Swirsky

I wonder if people of color have a similar reading experience or not. I wonder if white men do.

Where that sort of thing intersects with sociologically minority identities, I’ve always thought that was an aspect of double consciousness – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_consciousness

Karen Joy Fowler

Du Bois’ double consciousness is a negative thing, an impediment to true consciousness.  If this is the reading experience for the sociologically minority reader, then it’s not similar to mine, which has its positive aspects.  My subjective experience is one of understanding my own thinking better by contrast and also getting to see something about how someone else thinks, even if what (we’ll say he) he is thinking about is me.  The gaze goes both ways and I am prepared to be as judgmental as I feel is necessary.

But I do know, as a child, I wished I were a boy on many occasions.  So clearly I did adopt something of the outsider’s view of myself for several years.

I think double consciousness must have a tricky relationship to intersectionality; again, because the first seems like a problem to be overcome in pursuit of wholeness and self-determination.   I don’t think of intersectionality that same way although it, too, involves double (and triple, etc) consciousness.

N. K. Jemisin

I realize this is your reading of Du Bois, not your own opinion, but I should state that this is one of several points on which I disagree with him, with the strongest possible vehemence.  Please keep in mind that Du Bois’ views reflect a degree of unquestioned internalized racism, sexism, and his own class-privileged background; many of his own peers disagreed with him, and in my opinion time has proven him wrong on a number of points. This is one of them.

Let me point out that in modern developmental and learning theory, most psychosocial models progress from the authoritarian/single-viewpoint toward the multiplistic.  That is, as people grow (usually older and) more complex in their thinking, they tend to develop the ability to comprehend multiple viewpoints and digest often-contradictory information.  Eventually they develop a sense of relativism that allows them to sift among the contradictions, making their own judgments based on personal experience and empathy as well as the facts on the ground. That this is a skill oppressed people have to develop, while people of more privileged backgrounds may do so if they choose or are exposed to enough complex information, is a feature, not a bug, of life as a member of a minority.  It is not a problem to be overcome, except in the eyes of assimilationists or zealots.

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There’s probably a better definition out there, but to my mind, “intersectionality” refers to the idea that one can relate to numerous sorts of marginalized identities, and that the effect of these marginalizations is synergistic–and needs to be seen as such. For instance, my identity includes my race, gender, age, physical disabilities, and so on. My experience as an African American is influenced by my gender, age, and physical ability, etc. So any analyses of the impact of racial factors on my life will be more accurate when they reflect these other factors as well.

I think that intersectionality is modified not just by the experience of oppression, but also by the experience of privilege. So, again, my experience of my racial identity as an African American is transformed by my US citizenship, my highfunctioning literacy, and so on.

Where the idea of intersectionality fits in a discussion of speculative fiction is in the representation of differences to be found in our stories and in the courting of larger audiences for them.

How can intersectionality affect how we read and write fiction?

As always, this discussion is broken up into multiple pages for ease of reading. If you’d like to read it all on a single page, select ‘View All’ from the drop down menu above. If you don’t see the drop down menu, please click here.

John Clute

This idea is not exactly reinventing the wheel, but I do have two fast thoughts, before going out to dinner (or out to lunch: that’s two of me): 1) “intersectionality” is a good but not a new description of the experience of urban existence, which is the most important and most valuable (and overall the least energy-consuming per capita) form of existence we can live on this planet, unless we are exceedingly privileged; and 2) that it is always good to understand more, but that calving ourselves into Aspects, though it may make us feel like Virtuals before the fact, is a bit, dare one say it, utopian: when I think of intersectionality, I think of city planners not understanding the action…..

Michael Dirda

I rather agree with John. For years I kept posted above my desk at Book World a famous sentence from Henry James: “Be one on whom nothing is lost.” This is, obviously, a goal for any critical reader, rather than a completely achievable reality. Still, it does seem that intersectionality is essentially that: To be aware of as many of the dynamics as possible that inform a work of art. But one doesn’t want to forget that somehow, too, the great work of art not only registers all these local forces and sometimes provincial aspects, but can transcend them too.

Karen Burnham

This topic put me in mind of the idea of theory as a series of lenses that you can use to examine a story (or text). I was lucky enough to attend the SFF Masterclass in the UK in 2008. Dr. Wendy Pearson was leading a discussion of Geoff Ryman’s The Child Garden, and we were mostly discussing it using queer theory. Someone asked if there was any other theoretical approach we could use, and I tentatively suggested Marxist theory. Another person mentioned that if we looked at it via a Marxist lens, we’d miss out on those aspects of the story that touched on personal sexuality, but it seemed to me that when we were using a queer theory lens we were missing out on the parts of the story that dealt with governance and economics. It seems like we should be able to bring all these different lenses/theories/perspectives, including race/class/gender/nationality/sexuality/ability, to the things we read as needed.

For me the hard part is remembering to look at different lenses once I’ve found one that gives me something interesting to say about the story at hand. It’s really easy to stop at that point and miss other potentially fruitful ways of reading.

Karen Lord

Different lenses, or soft/overlapping boundaries. That’s the poetry of writing: having many identities/roles/aspects/things encased in one supposedly simple skin … purposely ambiguous, confusing, conflicting or reinforcing. Some readers will see only according to their habits of categorisation; others will look for and detect the layers and shades and nuances. I love those other readers very very much. They understand the game I’m playing.

Add cultural/historical differences to intersectionality and we’ve really got a fun game going. Age, appearance, accent, occupation – they all mean different things and spark different reactions depending on where you are now, and where you came from before. That does affect how I write. I’ve seen a few other countries, few people have seen, really seen mine. I have to remember that not many readers share my particular lens, or are even aware that a different lens (or set of lenses) is in play.

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Series

It All Started When

Teaching Writing

Short Story Club

Science Fiction for Kids

Roundtables

SF Aesthetics

SF vs. The Future

Writing Within and Without Genre

Ian McDonald

All the Awards

N. K. Jemisin

Summer Movies

While GRRM Fans Wait for Book Six…

Fantasy Genres

Conventions: Going Pro

Conventions: Going Fan

Conventions: Lost, Alone, and Confused

Conventions: Finding Your Tribe

Conventions: Going Weird

Heinlein Juveniles, Then and Now

Teaching Literature

Formative Reading Experiences

Genre Accessibility

McCarthy, Chabon, and Franzen

Commercial Writing

Becoming Assigned Reading

The Silliest Thing…

Podcasts

Peter Straub and Gary K. Wolfe

Andy Duncan and Ellen Klages

Elizabeth Hand and Gary K. Wolfe

Cecelia Holland and Ellen Klages

Terry Bisson and Connie Willis

Theodora Goss, Eileen Gunn, Cecelia Holland, and Paul Park

Karen Burnham and Graham Sleight

Karen Burnham and Ted Chiang

Joe Haldeman and Jay Lake

Brian Evenson and Peter Straub

Tim Akers and Daryl Gregory

Jeffrey Ford, Elizabeth Hand, and Gary K. Wolfe

F. Brett Cox and Andy Duncan

Keffy Kehrli and Beth Wodzinski

Karen Burnham and Karen Lord

Gail Carriger and Francesca Myman

Kathleen Goonan, Eileen Gunn, and Gary K. Wolfe

Andy Duncan and Jeffrey Ford

Nalo Hopkinson and Karen Lord

Daryl Gregory and Mark Teppo

Marie Brennan and Kari Sperring

To our readers: as I look forward to 2012, please let me know what you think. Anything you’d like to see more of, less of, people you’d like to hear on a podcast, or specific topics you’d like to see us tackle? Please let me know by sending an email to LocusRoundtable [at] gmail.com or Karen.Burnham [at] gmail.com. Thanks for reading, and happy 2012!

What’s the silliest thing that: a) an editor has said to you (for the writers); b) a writer has said to you (for the editors); or c) a student or teacher has said to you (for the professors)

Graham Sleight, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Cat Rambo, Nancy Kress, Gardner Dozois, Elizabeth Hand, Cecelia Holland, Paul Witcover, Andrienne Martini, Gary K. Wolfe, Terry Bisson, Ellen Klages, Stefan Dziemianowicz, Gwenda Bond, John Clute, Karen Joy Fowler, Brian Evenson, Stacie Hanes, Andy Duncan, Rachel Swirsky, and N. K. Jemisin all contribute to this, our last Roundtable of the year.

As always, this discussion is broken up into multiple pages for ease of reading. If you’d like to read it all on a single page, select ‘View All’ from the drop down menu above. If you don’t see the drop down menu, please click here.

Graham Sleight

I was once mistaken for China Mieville. Does that count?

Karen Burnham

That’s not silly, that’s just flattering!

Maureen Kincaid Speller

Walking down the street with Paul Kincaid can be quite interesting in the winter, when he’s wearing his fedora. On the basis that he also has a beard and glasses, he has been mistaken for Terry Pratchett a number of times, which can be quite entertaining. So far, at least …

Cat Rambo

From a wanna-be writer: “I would love to write, but first I need to exorcize some inner demons.”

See also: the guy who kept wanting me to write his novel about parasitic wasps for him.

Nancy Kress

The dumbest thing a student said to me when I was teaching college-level courses in SF as Literature occurred just before we began Stan Robinson’s RED MARS.  This was not a dumb kid, but the level of science education in his high school must have been abysmal.  He said, “Ms. Kress, I’ve heard that Mars has a really thin atmosphere, and it only comes up to your knees — is that true?”

Gardner Dozois

That’s why Martians have evolved lungs in their kneecaps.

Click here to continue reading.

Karen Burnham

When I first came across the original question, I had in mind the sort of genre books that eventually become canonized classics even in non-genre reading programs. Brave New World, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and Left Hand of Darkness are the four that first spring to mind in that category. (Heavy on dystopias there!) That moves away from the pop culture aspects of best-sellerdom, and into the ‘we don’t get no respect’ realm of academics. Of course, academia is itself changing–even when I was an undergrad 10 years ago (!) I was able to take a class on Tolkein. And pop-culture studies seem to be taken much more seriously these days (although my impression may be skewed by going to ICFA every year and watching that community grow).

Now, how much good does it do for an author to get onto college reading lists? It seems like an even more select club than the NYT best seller list!

Theodora Goss

I don’t know how much good it does an author to get onto college reading lists. But I’ve been told several times that my stories have been taught in a class, either a literature class or a writing class. I suspect that those of us who write in that strange space between genre and literary fiction get taught more often than we know. I would put Kelly Link there, probably Jeff Ford, Liz Hand, writers like that. Of course John Crowley. My sense is that it’s actually quite easy to cross over into literary fiction, if that’s what you’re going for. Just write very well and submit to literary rather than genre magazines. Even genre magazines like Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, and Strange Horizons are already publishing stories that could easily go into literary magazines. So at that level I think there’s quite a lot of crossover, but that’s the level of short fiction, where you don’t really need to worry so much about marketing categories. Of course, that also means writing in a way that doesn’t quite fit within genre conventions: a straight science fiction story is probably not going to be published in Tin House. An experimental story with science fictional elements might be.

In the writing program I teach for, we often teach classes in genre fiction, but it’s an academic writing program with a literary focus. It’s easier to create a class focused on science fiction or fantasy (which is what I teach) than in the English department. There is a popular class on detective fiction in the English department, but detective fiction became academically respectable before science fiction or fantasy, which are still getting there — but they are getting there! So in terms of the academy, science fiction and fantasy are crossing over.

Siobhan Carroll

I went to my local Borders for their closing sale last week, and saw stacks of unsold copies of books I’d placed on my fantasy syllabus last semester. Curiously, Borders didn’t have copies of other books by these authors, though some are prolific, and have published many more recent novels.

From this I deduce that:
a) there’s a reason Borders is going out of business;
and
b) for novelists, there may be a real benefit to being on a college syllabus.

If a novel gets on a college syllabus, it boosts the number of books sold in an area and therefore how many of your books a big chain store like Borders or B&N is going to automatically ship into local stores. Because instructors will probably teach your book more than once, the small and steady sales produced from the course may help keep your novel on shelves. If you’re lucky enough to get your novel on, say, 10 college syllabi across the country, I suspect that this could translate into a fairly significant sales boost.

Short story authors, alas, don’t get the same kind of benefits, because short stories are usually distributed in photocopy or pdf form. Furthermore, if students like your story, they’re probably going to have a harder time locating the rest of your work than they would if you wrote novels.

This is one of the reasons I follow Marie Brennan in thinking that submitting your short stories to services such as Anthology Builder can be a good idea: it allows authors to receive royalties from each sale, and also allows new readers to locate other examples of your work easily.