■ This story is unofficially dedicated to the food trucks of Los Angeles, which in a sideways fashion inspired it. I drafted the whole thing in a day while visiting Hollywood a couple years ago. Like any tourist trap, most Hollywood restaurants on the main strip are overpriced chains with underwhelming selection, so I spent a lot of time chasing down food trucks instead. While this story started off as a dark comedy about a cyborg cannibal food truck making a name for itself in the quadrant, at its heart it’s a tale about the creative life. Late-stage capitalism often requires you to offer yourself up for consumption as the price of success, especially in any customer-facing career, from artists to fast-food servers. And not only are you required to make yourself part of the product, you’re supposed to thank the customer for the privilege. While it sounds undesirable, the reward system can be tough to escape. We all want that five-star rating, even if we want to pretend like it doesn’t matter to us. Engineer’s journey is a cautionary tale not to give up your dreams for the cheap meaningless rewards of the people who would consume you, then turn your steel into forks by way of thanks.
Kathleen Kayembe is the Octavia E. Butler Scholar from Clarion’s class of 2016, with short stories in Lightspeed, Nightmare, and The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year, Volume Twelve, as well as an essay in the Hugo-nominated Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler. Her work appeared on the SFWA and Locus recommended reading lists for 2017. She publishes LGBTQIA romance under the pen name Kaseka Nvita. She currently lives in St. Louis, Missouri, with a beloved collection of fountain pens, inks, and notebooks, and never enough time to write what she wants.
■ If you’re curious about the inspiration for this story, I talk about that in the Author Spotlight Nightmare has on its website. I probably never would have submitted this story for publication, however, if it weren’t for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop.
When I wrote this story years ago, it didn’t work. It all came from Izzy’s perspective, and the battle for her body at the end of the story was a mess of disembodied memories trying to convey the backstory of how a “dog” wound up in Mbuyi’s bedroom—all while remaining six thousand words or less, because you should always follow submission guidelines. The story worked fine until Izzy lost her body, then it all fell apart, and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out how to fix it.
Enter Clarion 2016. John Joseph Adams spoke to our class, told us not to self-reject, and encouraged us to submit to Lightspeed and Nightmare. I gave the story to Kelly Link, who told me some helpful things about horror and said I might consider different structures for telling the story. Then Derek So submitted a triptych to workshop that didn’t work, but the form intrigued our cohort, and I tried one; it also didn’t work, and Ted Chiang explained why. Then Jaymee Goh turned in a triptych and it worked brilliantly, used three individual stories to tell a larger story, one greater than the sum of its parts. That’s when it finally clicked: “Family” hadn’t worked after Izzy’s body was taken because she couldn’t tell Kanku’s story, or Mbuyi’s, and “Family” belonged to all of them.
I cut everything after Kanku took Izzy’s body and wrote his story, and Mbuyi’s, and “Family” was much longer than six thousand words—a smidgeon too long for Nightmare Magazine, unfortunately, where I’d wanted to submit it—but at last it was whole, it finally worked. When “Don’t self-reject” warred with “Always follow submission guidelines” in my head, I compromised by asking permission. John Joseph Adams very kindly took a chance on me when he gave it, and I submitted “Family” to Nightmare, and the editors published it . . . and now here we are.
Carmen Maria Machado’s debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Kirkus Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of “the New Vanguard,” one of “15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.”
Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Tin House, VQR, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Believer, Guernica, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Michener-Copernicus Foundation, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the CINTAS Foundation, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She is the writer in residence at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Philadelphia with her wife.
■ It was only after I brought an early draft of “The Resident” to a workshop in the mountains of North Carolina that I realized the structure and tone of the story were heavily influenced by Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, with its meandering opening journey, odd protagonist, tiny supporting cast, rambling manor, disquieting atmosphere, and abstruse denouement. But there was a second gothic novel at play: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, whose dark, troubling sensibility had spoken to me since adolescence. As in both of these novels, the protagonist of “The Resident” is emotionally fragile, scarily intelligent, and inarguably touched—hardly the strong female character that’s so in vogue nowadays. That’s terrifying territory for a writer, especially one for whom subverting genre expectations and sexist clichés is an ongoing objective.
I used subsequent revisions to interrogate tropes of trauma, madness in women, and the ways in which demanding these tropes—or rejecting them out of hand—alters women’s ability to be eccentric, afraid, difficult, and human, cutting off their self-determination at the knees. My protagonist comes to her own conclusion about this, ultimately identifying as a “madwoman in her own attic” as she spirals into her own psyche. Her traumas have made her, and it is her right to occupy them with rage, art, catharsis; they are hers, after all. But the question at the heart of the story isn’t whether or not our traumas affect or define us. I believe they do. Rather, it’s this: what do we do with the person we’ve become?
Kate Alice Marshall likes to describe herself as a genre magpie. She is the author of the YA survival thriller I Am Still Alive, and her short fiction has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Crossed Genres, and Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy. In her other lives she writes everything from historical romance to video games.
■ “Destroy the City with Me Tonight” is not a story about motherhood, but it is a story that exists because I became a mother. It was the first piece of writing I attempted after the birth of my son. With him swaddled beside me, I set out to ease back into my writing with a straightforward, fun superhero adventure—something fluffy and uncomplicated. That plan didn’t survive the first sentence. Instead what emerged was a story about obligation, isolation, and identity—issues that, in retrospect, had a great deal to do with the struggles of redefining myself as a mother and as a writer. “Destroy the City with Me Tonight” is not a story about motherhood, but it is a story about grappling with identities into which it is too easy to vanish—losing who we are in what we are.
Maureen McHugh lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the University of Southern California. Her collection of short stories, After the Apocalypse, was one of Publishers Weekly’s ten best books of 2011.
■ I checked my spam one day and among the offers from Nigeria was an email from the Boston Review. I’ve been teaching Junot Díaz’s short stories for years and was rather astonished to get a request for a story from him. (I fangirled and admitted as much and he emailed back that he had taught some of my short stories. I may have shrieked.) The story was for a collection called Global Dystopias.
I had written a number of stories about possible apocalypses in my own collection year
s before, but after I said yes, I realized I wasn’t actually sure how much I wanted to go back to that headspace. Apocalyptic stories are as much a way for me to take my 2 a.m. staring-at-the-ceiling fears and put them into words, and I really didn’t know if that was where I wanted to be writing. Then I saw a book about cannibalism. A friend recommended I also look at the siege of Leningrad. North Korea was in the news, and it was easy to imagine a kind of complex collapse.
I wrote the first scene of the story without knowing exactly where things were going, and then the story sort of told itself to me. When I describe it to friends, I call it my apocalyptic lesbian cannibal story, which is kind of fun in and of itself. Junot (I can call him by his first name now, right? I mean, I wrote a story for him) was quite gracious and the editorial notes were spot on. It was a weirdly great experience considering the subject matter.
Charles Payseur grew up in the suburbs of Chicago and now lives with his partner and an assortment of ridiculous pets in the much more scenic landscape of Wisconsin’s Chippewa Valley. He is a queer reader, writer, and reviewer of all things speculative. His fiction and poetry have appeared in Strange Horizons, Lightspeed Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and many more. He’s also a Hugo-nominated fan writer who runs Quick Sip Reviews, contributes to The Book Smugglers, drunkenly reads the original Goosebumps on his Patreon, and generally has far too many opinions about Star Trek’s Garak. You can find him gushing about short fiction (and occasionally his cats) on Twitter as @ClowderofTwo.
■ I live in a city built around rivers. Eau Claire, Wisconsin, twists and turns where the Chippewa and Eau Claire Rivers meet, and I think the story sprang out of the personalities the rivers possess. And, ultimately, how rivers are exploited and polluted, a situation that mirrors other, much more human experiences. To me, the story was about exploring how oppressed communities are often set against one another, pushed to fight each other instead of joining together to resist the larger and more dominant power. It’s about the gravity of violence among the exploited and hunted, that even trying to avoid confrontation the rivers are pulled into fight after fight where they must hurt and kill, all the while losing more and more of themselves to the dust and sand. That, and I’m a big fan of the steam Western aesthetic and I love the visual of a person who can transform into a river.
Lettie Prell is a science fiction writer whose work has appeared in Tor.com, Clarkesworld, Analog, and Apex Magazine. Her stories have been reprinted in a number of anthologies, and another story is being published in The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2018 Edition, edited by Rich Horton. She is a lifelong midwesterner and currently lives in Des Moines.
■ I wrote “Justice Systems in Quantum Parallel Probabilities” while I was still the research director of the Iowa Department of Corrections. It was a distinct departure from my usual subject matter, which considers humankind on the brink of the technological singularity. However, I want to eventually write a science fiction novel about alien justice, so I started writing these vignettes as a way to explore possible new angles on the topic. The scenes quickly amassed into a sort of Invisible Cities of justice systems.
I was nervous about sending it out for publication. Here I was, thirty-five years deep in a justice career, a recipient of a research award from the American Correctional Association, and I’d written this subversive story that dissects the system’s structure and finds it wanting.
The story came out in January 2017. No one arrived at my office door to escort me from the building. Later, my Tor.com story of 2016, “The Three Lives of Sonata James ,” was reprinted in The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Two. I decided then it was time to switch careers—my second bold move. It was the year I let go of fear.
A. Merc Rustad is a queer nonbinary writer who lives in Minnesota and was a 2016 Nebula Award finalist. Their stories have appeared in Lightspeed, Fireside, Apex, Uncanny, Shimmer, and Nightmare and several year’s-best anthologies, including two previous appearances in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. You can find Merc on Twitter @Merc_Rustad or their website, http://amercrustad.com. Their debut short story collection, So You Want to Be a Robot, was published in May 2017.
■ The first idea I had for “Brightened Star, Ascending Dawn” came from the ending, with the crew and the ship helping people escape a doomed world. I essentially worked backward from this point, figuring out what would bring the characters to this moment in their lives. Like with the majority of my stories, I had a series of words that helped define the mood and aesthetic: shining, innocent, compassion, family. (This story is also part of a series of space operas in the Suns of the Principality universe, which also had the challenge of fitting timeline elements and specific worldbuilding touchpoints seamlessly into the narrative.) Most of all, though, when I’m writing, I need to know where the emotional keystones are; Brightened Star’s relationship with her crew and passengers—her family—was the most important element for me to illustrate. Without the empathy among the characters (and between me, the author, and the characters) there would be no heart, and I needed that heart to be present. We are all in the universe together, and our ability to care for one another is one of our great strengths.
Cadwell Turnbull’s work has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed, and Nightmare. He is a graduate of North Carolina State University’s MFA program in creative writing and the 2016 Clarion West Science Fiction Workshop. He grew up in the U.S. Virgin Islands and currently lives in Boston, Massachusetts.
■ A cow-foot lady lived on the hill near my grandmother’s house. The neighborhood kids and I would run past it on the way to get treats from a house further up that hill. Inside, the cow-foot lady’s house was always dark, even though the land around it was well kept. It’s strange the feeling I still get when talking about this. I’m not superstitious at all, but these stories have a sort of power that goes beyond rationalizations. Our monsters inhabit the same space as us; we don’t tempt them with our unbelief. We are careful not to answer whispers late at night so as not to bring home unwanted guests.
The soucouyant is another character from Caribbean folklore. I’d heard my own stories of her growing up. When I sat down to write “Loneliness Is in Your Blood,” the story came mostly out of my memory and then I added some things here and there to make it my own. My friends at Clarion West helped me get the story to where it needed to be. There are lots of variations of the soucouyant myth, so mine should be taken as just another account of a being that goes by many names. I’m not sure who told me the story first, but it has lingered in me all this time. Oral traditions are like that—the stories live on beyond the teller. And like the very best horrors, they never truly die.
Peter Watts (www.rifters.com) is a former marine biologist, flesh-eating-disease survivor, and (according to the U.S. government) Undesirable Element, whose novels—despite an unhealthy focus on space vampires—have become required texts for university courses ranging from philosophy to neuropsychology. His work is available in twenty languages, has appeared in over two dozen best-of-year anthologies, and been nominated for over fifty awards (fifty-one, actually) from a dozen countries. His (somewhat smaller) list of seventeen wins include the Hugo, Shirley Jackson, and Seiun Awards. He lives in Toronto with his wife, the fantasy author Caitlin Sweet; four and a half cats; a pugilistic rabbit; a Plecostomus the size of a school bus; and a gang of tough raccoons who shake him down for kibble on the porch every summer. He likes them all significantly more than most people he’s met.
■ There’s a scene in my 2014 novel Echopraxia: a weary old colonel reminisces about his early days in the zombie program, about what it was like to give your body over to subconscious process that fought and thought and acted faster than the conscious mind ever could. “We first-gen types, we—stayed awake,” he remembers. “They could cut us out of the motor loop but they couldn’t shut down the hypothalamic circuitry without compromising autonomic performance. There were rumors floating around that t
hey could do that just fine, that they wanted us awake—”
It was pure throwaway, a minor bit of character development, but it stuck with me. What would it be like, I wondered, to be possessed by some neurosurgically induced iteration of alien body syndrome? How might it feel to be a passenger in a chassis doing things you would never do, if only you could take back the controls? I’ve never been big on military SF, but when Jonathan Strahan approached me to contribute to Infinity Wars, I knew exactly where to go.
Of course, no one’s going to risk their best and brightest on an untested protocol that rewires the whole damn nervous system. No career soldier’s going under the microwave gun until they’ve worked out the bugs on other, more expendable assets. So while our colonel does show up for a cameo near the end of “ZeroS” (as a lowly lieutenant this time), he’s more of an Easter egg than a character. This story belongs to Kodjo and his buddies.
“ZeroS” isn’t just an acronym for the squad. It’s also the value of a lab rat.
Caroline M. Yoachim has written over a hundred short stories. She is a Hugo and three-time Nebula Award finalist, and her fiction has been translated into several languages and reprinted in multiple best-of anthologies. Her debut short story collection, Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World and Other Stories, came out in 2016. For more about Yoachim, check out her website at carolineyoachim.com.
■ The initial seed for “Carnival Nine” was spoon theory, developed by Christine Miserandino as a way to describe living with disability or chronic illness. In spoon theory, the energy to do tasks is represented by spoons, and people get a limited number of spoons each day. I initially considered writing this story with spoons but quickly began to consider other options. Candles were the first alternative to come to mind, and later keys—not the wind-up keys that are in the current story, but more traditional keys for opening doors. I eventually decided I wanted to represent energy with something that was internal to the character—spoons inside their rib cage, or burning-candle hearts. In the end I settled on wind-up characters, and from there the story came together pretty quickly.
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