Interstellar Flight Magazine Best of Year One

by Holly Lyn Walrath

  One more thing that might be interesting to contemplate is that boundary-crossings are often held up as something exemplary and crucial. “Genre-bending!” “Liminal!” And so on . . . maybe even fetishized or exoticized, in a way. But boundary-crossing is not necessarily a comfortable experience. My Spouseperson, R.B. Lemberg, likes to say that liminality in the original folkloristics sense is—while something very important—generally uncomfortable, temporary, and dangerous. One is not supposed to hold a liminal position for a prolonged amount of time. But a lot of us are in these kinds of positions for longer. I am currently a “resident alien” in the legal sense, what is that? Or, as a nonbinary and intersex person, I am quite stable in these identities, but in society, there is very little room for them currently. People do not necessarily want to allow me to settle into them.

  To be in a liminal state for long is a massive demand on one’s energy. And yet this is something that happens to marginalized people all too often. I think a lot of my poems are about this kind of discomfort. And also, when a high-energy state is maintained for long, the release can be explosive.

  IFP: The poems that stayed with me most after my reading the collection formed the “Two-Tailed Triptych” series, which explores the activities of the Two-Tailed Dog Party, a political party that parodies Hungarian politics: “The Ideas of March,” “Why I Intend to Vote for the Two-Tailed Dog,” and “Ode to the Ganymedean Telepathic Slime Mold.” As a reader, I see this group of poems as both political commentary and as a statement of what speculative poetry can do as a genre. In his essay for Poetry Magazine, “The Politics of Poetry” (July 1, 2008), David Orr states: “Most contemporary American political poems are written for contemporary American poets, which means that political poems generally have more relevance to the politics of the poetry world than to the politics of America.”

  While your poems address politics in Hungary, they’re set in Kansas, and I’d imagine a good percentage of your readers are American. Do you find that bringing elements of science fiction and “tropes of the dystopian subgenre,” is a useful way to draw a wider audience to political poetry? Can we, as speculative poets, use the mode of the contemporary lyric to make a more impactful political statement by bringing in science fictional contexts?

  BT: A huge chunk of my readership is people in non-Western countries who read in English. It is only a recent phenomenon that more and more Americans read my work (I feel like 2016 was a turning point for some reason, even before the American elections). This is also why I try to make sure that as much of my writing is freely accessible as possible, and use my Patreon to kind of subsidize this, because for many of my readers, $1 per month costs a lot more than for people who live in the US.

  People often ask me to describe my audience and/or whether I write only for my own marginalized group. These days I write fiction and poetry exclusively in English. (A story of mine, Forestspirit, Forestspirit, originally published in Clarkesworld in 2015, was translated to Hungarian for the first time last year by Csilla Kleinheincz). I am not even sure who would be “my group” given that I am a Hungarian Jewish neuroatypical trans intersex person (etc.) who is an immigrant to the US, and all those identities do not necessarily occur together. Most of my relatives can’t read fiction or poetry in English. Ultimately, I write for people around the world who are marginalized in some way, or in multiple ways—even if their specific marginalizations are very different from mine.

  To address the second part of the question, I use the vocabulary of the speculative and the fantastic because it comes naturally to me. Part of it is because I grew up enjoying speculative work, both from the Western and the Eastern Bloc. Part of it is that my life experiences often do not fit into non-speculative framings. So yes, using those framings makes it easier to get my point across.

  From an Anglophone point of view, it might be harder to notice the connections, but I feel like my work can be related to a long tradition of the Hungarian literary fantastic that often comes from a place of ethnic marginalization, and that strongly engages with its political context. Works like Átyin Jóskának nincs, aki megfizessen by the Hungarian Romani writer Béla Osztojkán (1997), or Serbian Hungarian writer Nándor Gion’s tetralogy Latroknak is játszott, many of the One Minute Stories of Hungarian Jewish writer István Örkény and also his absurdist plays . . . or more recently the prose of Ádám Bodor and György Dragomán, both ethnic Hungarians from Romania who immigrated to Hungary, have been influential for me as a reader. I feel these works, to an extent, come from a similar position as especially Latin American and African magical-realist literary traditions.

  (A side note: I am not dropping all these names for “cred” purposes, but because I hope that at least some readers might seek them out; some of these authors do have works available in English or other languages, and György Dragomán’s breathtaking and magical novel Bone Fire is coming in English in 2021 from Mariner Books.)

  Back to my original train of thought—it was a big turning point for me when I finally had access to a library with a considerable English-language collection (in Vienna, Austria) and read Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Matigari (Africa World Press, 1998) and was stunned by just how familiar it came across; and also his nonfiction Decolonising the Mind (James Currey Ltd/Heinemann, 1986), where he explicitly discussed how non-Western peoples often only have dialogue with each other through Western literary centers. That really hit home for me, and since then, I have been explicitly trying to focus on this kind of decentering, solidarity and literature-building, with my own small tools.

  These are mostly prose examples, but fiction was simply more available for me in translation in that formative phase. Now in the U.S., I can walk to the public library or take the bus, and get practically all the recent English-language releases; after several years, I’m still getting used to this, and it’s amazing.

  One thing that might be worth discussing related to audiences is . . . who buys my political poetry. I have sold poems to most of the major speculative poetry venues at this point, but my political poems are generally self-published through my Patreon (often sponsored by specific backers; thank you!). I have had a small amount of them published in general literary venues, but I feel like the non-speculative literary world has a much more convoluted, opaque, and lengthy process to publication compared to speculative venues, whereas my political poems often reflect on very immediate events and I would like them to be read right away. Of course, in a collection, it is not really visible which works appeared where, unless one scrutinizes the copyright page.

  IFP: Are there collections that touch on the same themes that you’d like to recommend to readers of Interstellar Flight Magazine? Or are there others you’ve read recently that deserve mention?

  BT: On the body, disability, I really enjoyed Bodymap by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (Mawenzi House Publishers, 2015). When it comes to political poetry, one of my favorites is even this page is white by Vivek Shraya (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016).

  Marginalia to Stone Bird (Aqueduct Press, 2016) by R.B. Lemberg is probably the most similar overall because we are married to each other, and some of our poems very directly reflect on each other.

  Nature Poem by Tommy Pico (Tin House Books, 2015) has very little in common with my collection, but I loved it so much, I just want to tell everyone about it.

  I read a lot of Hungarian poetry, I am especially inspired by early twentieth-century Hungarian poets (in translation: In Heaven’s Iron-Blue Vault by Attila József, translated by Frederick Turner and Zsuzsanna Ozsváth (Blood Axe Books, 2009); Foamy Sky by Miklós Radnóti, likewise) and also late twentieth-century and contemporary Hungarian Romani and Jewish poets. I waited so long for Károly Bari’s latest collection Csönd (Kalligram, 2017) and it absolutely blew me away.

  Bogi Takács is a Hungarian Jewish agender trans person (e/em/eir/emself or singular they pronouns) currently living in the U.S. with eir family and a congregation of books. Bogi writes, reviews, and edits
speculative fiction, and has won the Lambda Award in 2018 for editing Transcendent 2: The Year’s Best Transgender Speculative Fiction (also a Locus award finalist book).

  You can find em at Bogi Reads the World dot com, and on Twitter @bogiperson, and Patreon as @bogiperson.

  5 Indie Games and Accessibility: A Personal Odyssey

  Finding comfort in gaming as a woman

  by Archita Mittra

  Navigating [the gaming] world as a girl, to find the kind of game that you like (and can afford) is difficult. That’s where indie games and accessibility come in.

  Gris (Nomada Studio and Devolver Digital, 2018) is an exquisitely-crafted platformer that plays like a poem. It’s deceptively short, not really difficult, and gorgeously rendered. Also, it’s easily playable by both casual and experienced gamers. As therapeutic as painting in an adult coloring book, it straddles the line between “interactive art” and “video games.” I recommend this game to people who’re curious about gaming. Still, to this day, it’s one of the games in whose art I can easily lose myself no matter how many times I play it.

  I’ve had doubts about using the “gamer” label for myself—but I’ve accepted I’m someone who just likes to play games, and perhaps also talk about them. If a bookworm is someone who enjoys reading books, regardless of how many books they’ve read, then a gamer, as per my logic, would be someone passionate about gaming, about interactive and non-linear storytelling, and not defined by whether or not they own the latest PlayStation or Nintendo Switch console, or even if they’ve played the games that industry stalwarts consider classics.

  Games have fascinated me for a long time, but growing up, I didn’t get to play as much as I’d have liked. There were many practical reasons: For one, I was a girl, and secondly, I was a girl growing up in an Indian family.

  In fact, I didn’t possess a computer until middle school. Before that, I completed any schoolwork requiring a computer at my local cyber café, which was often crowded with neighborhood boys playing video games by the hour. The games mainly involved shooting people or racing through surreal urban locales on a motorbike.

  Much to the surprise of the boys, the latter interested me, and I lined up to play Road Rash (Electronic Arts, 1991) on a Windows 98 desktop. It was exhilarating to completely lose myself as I raced for the finish line, as though my life depended on it.

  The boys didn’t really object to me playing. Sometimes we even helped each other. But they regarded me as an aberration from the norm.

  We were civil, but we weren’t friends.

  My parents didn’t approve of me hanging out in a local café by myself —and playing games on a computer I had to pay for. They insisted I use computers for “school work.” They also insisted too much screen time would damage my eyesight. Perhaps “games” were not worth it. As the years went on, I frequented the cyber cafe less and less.

  But then, the children’s library I visited every two weeks for my supply of fantasy and sci-fi novels acquired a computer. It was ancient—a grey and white Windows 95 relic that ran tremendously slow and had Captain Claw (Monolith Productions 1997), a side-scrolling platformer some remember fondly even now. Initially, I found the story of a feline pirate hunting for treasure, fighting bosses, and escaping traps difficult. Eventually, I got used to it and played for an hour or two at a stretch. My library routine involved quickly returning and choosing two new books and assuming the lone computer that was unoccupied, proceeding to play Captain Claw until my mother dragged me away.

  When I insisted my parents buy me a Playstation, they regarded the device as some new-fangled monstrosity, and upon hearing the price, straight-up refused. A cheap desktop with minimum RAM, lacking a graphics card, and a carefully-rationed internet connection which limited the choice of games, had to suffice.

  Instead, I focused on Pinball, chess, and those agonizingly slow Windows card games. Meanwhile, I watched the boys in my cohort graduate to first- and third-person shooters and massively multiplayer online role-playing games. At home, I installed some old favorites (Road Rash and Captain Claw), discovered the sheer brilliance of cheat codes, and engaged in short free-to-play Flash games as well as virtual worlds online. In one instance, I remember installing CounterStrike (Valve, 2000), constantly getting killed, and finally crashing my desktop for good. My parents never forgave me for it, and the boys grew even more distant when I told them that CounterStrike really wasn’t my kind of thing.

  And as anyone will tell you, middle school can be terribly long—and I found a new solace in otome games or dating sims and visual novels. They granted me an imaginary social life and provided a semblance of gaming. I began with Alistair++ (Sakevisual, 2010), moved onto the breathtakingly poetic True Remembrance (Shiba Satomi, 2006), and played trial versions of paid games—my avatars nursed dying boyfriends back to health, went on date nights in haunted mansions that always went wrong, and had an assortment of pretty anime characters to choose a romance with. Years later, I played Doki Doki Literature Club (Team Salvato, 2017) and decided to never ever return to the dating sim genre.

  During my last year of high school, I stumbled upon the world of indie games. While looking for Red Riding Hood retellings, I came across a gothic/horror game called The Path (Tale of Tales, 2009) along with Gone Home (The Fullbright Company, 2013), a walking simulator-cum-mystery. Both broke the notion of what video games could do. There were no high scores to beat, monsters to slay, or cities to race through. Instead, what I had in my hands was interactive art.

  Finally, in college, I had the good fortune of meeting a friend who let me check out games on his snazzy laptop. I played a few rounds of Tekken (Namco, 1995) with him which I didn’t like, tried my hand at Dark Souls (FromSoftware, 2009) which was a disaster, and explored a magical cave in the thoroughly enjoyable Rime (Tequila Works, 2017). He even let me borrow games from his hard drive that would run on my slow and crippled laptop.

  Of course, the games we like tend to say a lot about ourselves and our tastes. The magic realism of Kentucky Route Zero (Cardboard Computer, 2013) enraptured me, the finale of Life Is Strange (Dontnod Entertainment and Square Enix, 2015) devastated me and What Remains of Edith Finch (Giant Sparrow and Annapurna Interactive, 2017) left me speechless. I enjoyed the sibling bonding in Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons (Starbreeze Studios and 505 Games, 2013). 80 Days (Inkle, 2014) brought back my nostalgia for text adventures, and playing the cyberpunk Red Strings Club (Deconstructeam and Devolver Digital, 2018) and the slightly supernatural Oxenfree (Night School Studio, 2016) made me realize my fondness for dialogue and choice-heavy narrative-focused games. Walking simulators seemed to me the easiest to get into, like The Stanley Parable (Davey Wreden, 2013), Firewatch (Campo Santo and Panic, 2016), and Dear Esther (The Chinese Room, 2012) while To The Moon (Freebird Games, 2011) recalled my love for visual novels. Owing to the constraints of time, I thought role-playing games wouldn’t be up my alley, but I was pleasantly surprised by Transistor (Supergiant Games, 2014) and Child of Light (Ubisoft, 2014).

  While I was in the middle of playing Night in the Woods (Infinite Fall, 2014), another friend expressed an interest in playing it with me, saying his computer was too old for the game to run. Playing together was an alternative kind of multiplayer experience. We argued over which dialogue option to choose or which part of the city to explore and all the time talked about the characters whose trajectories we decided. He also installed an emulator on my smartphone, thereby fulfilling my long-cherished wish to play Pokemon Emerald (Game Freak, The Pokémon Company, and Nintendo, 2004), which I’d seen engross my best friend in middle school.

  Indie games made me realize that while not many of us may be able to afford the tech or even the games for that matter, there is a game for everyone if you look hard enough. And being a part of an inclusive gaming community that welcomes everyone regardless of their experience and gender is important—both for fostering a love for the genre and for making games accessible to all. At least from what I’
ve seen, playing video games regularly as entertainment is a privilege.

  But even those of us without access find ways to enjoy this privilege. We share Steam libraries, we go over to a friend’s place to play a pre-installed game, we anxiously follow flash and discount sales on gaming sites to get a game or two for free. Or we pool enough money to buy them. Not all of us come from families or communities that encourage gaming. Navigating that world as a girl, to find the kind of game that you like (and can afford) is difficult. That’s where indie games and accessibility come in.

  Incidentally, Gris is a game about a girl who is unable to sing and who journeys from a colorless world to newer places of magic, life, and vitality. The game ends with her having found herself at last, away from despair and ready to sing, in a world of restored color and light.

  But it took me years to find that game (and myself).

  And I suppose that’s a really beautiful metaphor for so many girl gamers out there.

  6 Diverse Space Opera, Fight Scenes, and NaNoWriMo

  An interview with Valerie Valdes, author of Chilling Effect

  by E.D. Walker

  What can I say, I’m a sucker for power couples.

  Valerie Valdes

  Valerie Valdes is the author of Chilling Effect (Harper Voyager, 2019), first in a new series of fun space opera novels starring a Cuban-descended spaceship captain, Eva Innocente, and her misfit crew as they blunder their way through the galaxy trying to save her kidnapped sister from an intergalactic crime syndicate. Valdes is a member of the NaNoWriMo community and also writes short fiction and poetry, with stories in Nightmare Magazine and poetry in Uncanny Magazine. Chilling Effect is her debut novel and perfect for fans of the weird world-building in Farscape and the crew camaraderie of Firefly.