Interstellar Flight Magazine Best of Year One
Erin Becker
Andrea Blythe
Jeremy Brett
Cassandra Rose Clarke
Kaylee Craig
Michael Glazner
Piper J. Daniels
Archita Mittra
J.T. Morse
Aimee Ogden
Caitlin Starling
John Tuttle
E.D. Walker
T.D. Walker
Holly Lyn Walrath
Kade Walton
INTERSTELLAR FLIGHT PRESS BEST OF YEAR ONE
Copyright © Interstellar Flight Press 2020
All rights to individual essays revert to authors or copyright holders. “Phantom Fares” was originally published in Ladies Lazarus, Tarpaulin Sky Press (2018), reproduced with permission from the author.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover Illustration by amdandy
Edited by Holly Lyn Walrath, Cassandra Rose Clarke, Michael Glazner, and Kade Walton
Published by Interstellar Flight Press, Houston, Texas.
www.interstellarflightpress.com
ISBN (eBook): 978-1-7338862-7-7
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-7338862-6-0
ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-7338862-8-4
First Edition: August 2020
Contents
1. The Ones Who Walk Away
2. Monsters Under the Bed (and Outside the Window)
3. The Greatest Arsenal: Science Fiction Libraries and Archives
4. Boundary Crossing, Liminality, and the Hungarian Literary Fantastic
5. Indie Games and Accessibility: A Personal Odyssey
6. Diverse Space Opera, Fight Scenes, and NaNoWriMo
7. Phantom Fares
8. Riverdale, Writer’s Block, and Naval Warfare
9. Cats in Science Fiction Films
10. Unabashedly Hopeful, Heartbroken, and Silly
11. Strange Bodies
12. Spinning Tales, Chinese Embroidery, and Musical Composition
13. Perception, Uncertainty, and Dread: The Horror of Perspective
14. Space Opera Is Having a Moment and We Love It
15. Goth Weirdness, Slavic Folklore, and Ohio
16. No Room in Narnia
17. Korean Folklore, Big Space Explosions, and Mathematics
18. What Else is there to Say about the Joker?
New and Forthcoming Titles
Excerpt: The Manticore’s Vow
Excerpt: Twelve: Poems Inspired by the Brothers Grimm Fairy Tale
Excerpt: Local Star
Editors & Contributors
Interstellar Flight Press
1 The Ones Who Walk Away
Ursula K. Le Guin’s most famous short story is just as relevant as it was in 1973
By Holly Lyn Walrath
The people at the door never say anything, but the child, who has not always lived in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother’s voice, sometimes speaks. “I will be good,” it says. “Please let me out. I will be good!” They never answer. The child used to scream for help at night, and cry a good deal, but now it only makes a kind of whining, “eh-haa, eh-haa,” and it speaks less and less often.
Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”
Ursula K. Le Guin’s most famous short story was first published in October 1973 in New Dimensions 3, a hardcover anthology edited by Robert Silverberg. It won the 1974 Hugo Award for Best Short Story. In the years since, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” has been taught in classrooms across the globe and anthologized many times. Similar to stories like Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” (The New Yorker, 1948), Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” (The New England Magazine, 1892), or Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Little Match Girl” (1845), it is further proof that shorter works carry just as powerful a legacy as longer ones.
“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” tells the fictional story of a city where everyone is happy—but that happiness is contingent on a very dark secret. In response to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and William James’ “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” Omelas explores a city in which everyone is happy, mature, intelligent, passionate, and decidedly not wretched. War does not exist, there are few rules and laws, and no discernable government.
In short, Omelas is the Utopia you’ve always envisioned.
One of my favorite lines, as Le Guin explains this, is when she asserts, “The trouble is, we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.” Le Guin explores the binary war between happiness and pain, and how as humans, we tend to place these emotions into neat categories, ignoring the gray areas between.
But all is not perfect in paradise. The cost of the populace’s happiness is pain. The pain of one child, to be precise. The citizens of Omelas know of this child, wasting away, forgotten, pushed aside. And yet they choose happiness. We’re presented with this binary over and over again in pop culture: Isn’t the pain of the few worth the happiness of the many? It’s the question asked by Spock in Star Trek’s The Wrath of Khan, “Logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”
As the story closes, it speaks of those “who walk away from Omelas.” These select few are presented as the wiser because they chose to leave and find a new world, one that is “a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness . . . It is possible that it does not exist.”
So this is the binary Le Guin’s story gives us. Do we stay in paradise, always knowing it would be a little bit imperfect, or do we leave?
Like the citizens of Omelas, modern humanity feels more comfortable sitting in our safety, unwilling to see the price for our happiness. Because acknowledging the problem means more than posting on social media or writing our representatives. It means changing ourselves.
A Fable for the Ages
In 2018, I was honored to serve on a panel at Readercon in remembrance of Ursula K. Le Guin. I was there to talk about her poetry, but I came away with a keen sense of the impact of her career. An editor of a popular SFF publication spoke of how she receives a response story to “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” at least once a month. It has been called a story that defies genre, an allegory of privilege, a hideous bargain, and a cautionary tale.
Le Guin said of Omelas in The Unreal and the Real, “. . . [its] a fable, I think . . . it has had a long and happy career of being used by teachers to upset students and make them argue fiercely about morality.”
One of the panelists asked of the story, “It makes us wonder, what would we do if we had to make that choice?”
My response was, “We are already making that choice, right now.”
Or, as Margaret Atwood would put it: “Where in the world [can] we find a society in which the happiness of some does not depend on the misery of others? How do we build Omelas, minus the tortured child?” (“Margaret Atwood: We Lost Ursula K. Le
Guin When We Needed Her Most,” The Washington Post, Jan 24, 2018). When we are living in a world where most people are happy at the expense of the few, it is hard to imagine a new reality. Hard times are here, and it’s not so difficult to see who profits the most.
On Christmas Day 2018, an eight-year-old boy from Guatemala died in United States custody, the second death of a child at the U.S.-Mexico border in three weeks (“8-Year-Old Migrant Child From Guatemala Dies in U.S. Custody,” The New York Times, December 25, 2018.) As of the publication of this anthology, that number has risen to six. In detention facilities, children sleep on mats with a single blanket. Colds, fevers, and other illnesses are rampant. On both sides of the political divide, politicians push blame away. President Trump blamed Democrats for “pathetic immigration policies” (“Trump Politicizes Deaths of Two Immigrant Children to Score Points in Border Wall Fight,” The Washington Post, December 29, 2018). We are told that children suffer because it keeps the rest of us safe. Meanwhile, Democrats shook their heads and called the death a horrific tragedy.
My spouse is a pediatric physical therapist at one of the best hospitals in the nation. Every day he deals with insurance denying coverage to children who need heart transplants. He sees parents separated from their children because they don’t have the resources to care for them. He knows the cost and burden of a child’s pain. As he counsels young therapists in how to deal with emotional burnout, he’s often repeated the words: “You just deal with it and move on.” You let yourself feel, but at the end of the day, there’s always another child that needs your help. There is no choice to walk away.
I could fill this essay with examples until it’s a novel in itself. Everyone seems to agree that things are broken. In our current society, it’s easy to feel like there are only two choices.
And indeed, that seems to be the primary response to Le Guin’s work—that the ones who walk away from the issue have, in some way, chosen the best route. That the only solution to a broken place is to leave it in the dust.
How Do We Make the Third Choice?
But when we give in to that kind of polarized thought, we lose sight of the real victims. Maybe there’s another way. Maybe we can choose to stay and fix the problems at hand. As the brilliant author N.K. Jemisin puts it:
“. . . you’ve got to fix it, especially when there’s nowhere to walk away to. You go anywhere else in our current world and you’re either being completely exploited by capitalism or somewhat exploited by capitalism. So, I mean, it’s just a question of what kind of suffering you want to put yourself through.”
“A True Utopia: An Interview With N. K. Jemisin,” The Paris Review, December 3, 2018.)
(Even Jemisin herself wrote an Omelas response story, “The Ones Who Stay and Fight,” available in her collection How Long ’til Black Future Month? (Orbit, 2018))
Literature as an art form has a unique power. For me, reading Omelas reminds me to think outside of the box. It helps me to process Le Guin’s thought experiment through the lens of today’s news. The fact that the story has captivated readers for so many years speaks to its broad nature, its ability to transcend not just one social issue, but many.
But words do not exist in a vacuum. As Le Guin said, “Words do have power. Names have power. Words are events; they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it” (The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (Penguin Random House, 2004)). A conversation cannot be one-sided. This is the power of literature—to become more than words on a page and enter into a conversation with the reader. It asks, what would you do, dear reader?
After Ursula K. Le Guin’s death, we need her work more than ever. We need art more than ever. To the writers, artists, creators, and dreamers: I encourage you to read “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” I encourage you to respond, to imagine new worlds, and to think not in terms of one choice, but many. As Le Guin said, we need writers who can remember freedom.
We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
Ursula K. Le Guin, National Book Awards Speech, 2014
2 Monsters Under the Bed (and Outside the Window)
An interview with T. Kingfisher, author of The Twisted Ones
by E.D. Walker
I take things that I’m scared of . . . and then I write that into the book. If other people are scared of it too, then I’m not alone.
T. Kingfisher
T. Kingfisher is the pen name of Hugo Award-winning author Ursula Vernon. As T. Kingfisher, she’s known for fantasy novels with kind and practical protagonists. While her books usually contain some elements of horror, The Twisted Ones (Gallery/Saga Press, 2019) is her first horror novel.
Interstellar Flight Press: Your previous adult books have been fantasy novels (usually with some horror elements creeping in). Was writing a full-on horror novel like The Twisted Ones a different experience for you? Did you encounter any challenges writing The Twisted Ones that you didn’t have with your fantasy works?
T. KINGFISHER: I did! The problem with writing anything contemporary is . . . well . . . cell phones and the Internet. You have to find a reason that the heroine can’t just call 911 or look up the answer to her problems. Fortunately, there’s still a lot of spots in rural NC with very spotty cell coverage.
IFP: The Twisted Ones is loosely based on an old story by Arthur Machen that provides the inspiration in your novel for “The Green Book,” a notebook which kicks off part of the plot of The Twisted Ones. What made you want to build a story around Machen’s work? Did using his book as a jumping-off point cause you any problems?
TK: To a certain extent, the book was inspired by my long-standing problem with found manuscript stories. Machen’s “The White People” (1904) is probably the ur-Found Manuscript—it’s all this long, strange narrative that wanders between dreamlike and “Dear God, I want a copyeditor.” Some gorgeous turns of phrase, but a lot of . . . stuff. So the story [in The Twisted Ones] became partly about an editor reacting to this strange rambling manuscript that’s both creepy and just very strangely written. But the line about the twisted ones is one of the most beautiful and weird in the book, and I used it as a jumping-off point to get into the strange happenings in the woods.
* * *
Then I made faces like the faces on the rocks, and I twisted myself about like the twisted ones, and I lay down flat on the ground like the dead ones, and I went up to one that was grinning, and put my arms round him and hugged him.
Arthur Machen, “The White People” (1904)
IFP: I believe I saw somewhere that you’ve mentioned writing a horror novel as being an ambition of yours for a long time. Do you have any horror authors who inspired you?
TK: Oh goodness! Lots, more than I could probably fit in one page, and probably which are familiar to nearly every other writer out there. But one of my great inspirations that doesn’t get mentioned a lot is the SCP website [hosted on a collaborative, community-based wiki], which is this wonderful sprawling shared universe, where a government agency is trying to contain all these horrible paranormal things. Some of the most creepy, effective writing I’ve ever read has been from there.
IFP: Are you planning to continue writing adult horror for the foreseeable future?
TK: I definitely think I’ll be writing more horror—well, I mean, I already sold another novel, so that’s a good sign!—but I’d definitely like to write more after that. I get told that my fantasy has a lot of horror elements, so I suspect I don’t have much choice.
IFP: I wanted to mention Bongo, the heroine’s dog in the book. He was one of my favorite parts and often provided heart and humor during some of the darkest moments of The Twisted Ones. Was he always a character in the book? Or did you add him later? Is he b
ased on one of your own dogs?
TK: He was always a character, right from the beginning. I didn’t quite know what I was going to do with him, but a friendly animal companion is a recurring theme in my books. I do own a pair of coonhounds, and he’s pretty solidly based on one of them. They are lovely dogs, good-natured, not particularly bright, and absolutely single-minded once they get on a scent.
IFP: I have to tell you, The Twisted Ones scared the hell out of me.
TK: Oh man, I never know whether to gloat or apologize when people say that!
Thank you and I’m sorry?
IFP: How did you craft the horror elements when you were writing this? Did you manage to freak yourself out while writing the creepy stuff, or are you immune to your own scary writing by now?
TK: Ah . . . I’m not exactly immune, but writing it helps immunize me, if that makes any sense. I take things that I’m scared of—I have a longstanding nervousness of looking out windows in the dark, in case there’s something pressed against them, for example—and then I write that into the book. If other people are scared of it too, then I’m not alone!
Once I’ve written it, I am sometimes less frightened of it myself. Not in this one, so much . . . there’s too many potential things outside the window . . . but I once did a comic about a monster under the bed, and afterwards, I wasn’t as frightened of things grabbing my ankles in the dark, because I had created a heroic dustbunny patrolling the underside of the bed, and I knew he was on the case.
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