Sacré Dieu, the time is upon us! It’s time for the Nebula Awards again! Yesterday, I shared with my patrons my predictions for the winners this year, and I’ll be going “off the verandah and into the field” to see how my predictions turn out. I’ll not only be in (virtual) attendance, I am moderatingthe panel on Unusual Short Story Formats! May 13, 10:30AM. With Oghunechevwe Donald Ekpeki, Carina Bissett, Ann LeBlanc, we’ll be discussing some of the beautiful, strange little ways short fiction can come out that novels simply won’t support, like single scenes where nothing happens and fictional forum threads.
And here’s where I’m going to be…
May 12
Sauúti: An Afro-centric universe
Prep Tips for Your Debut Indie Book Launch
The Queer Imagination: Using SFF to Explore LGBTQ+ Identities, Relationships, and Experiences
May 13
Beyond the 99¢ eBook: Producing Quality Indie SFF Novels
Unusual Short Story Formats
Writing and Publishing in English as Second Language
Navigating Short Story Markets
For The Love of Short Fiction 2022
Exploring Possibilities with Legal Systems in SFF
May 14
Branding and Marketing: Finding That Return on Investment
This is a new feature I’ll be doing for the future – Philosophy (in a Teacup) – interviews with interesting and up-and-coming authors, especially (but not exclusively) interesting folks in short fiction. My first interview is with the always-experimental Ai Jiang (江艾)!
Ai Jiang (江艾)
Thank you for joining us! Tell us more about your book/ series/ short story work.
LINGHUN: A modern ghost story set in a town called HOME, where people go to buy haunted houses to live with the ghosts of their dead loved ones. [R. Jean Mathieu’s review]
I AM AI: A cyborg posed as an AI struggles to stay alive in a tech dominated city threatening to leave those like her behind.
Both timely and employing Ai Jiang’s useful playfulness with language.
SMOL TALES FROM BETWEEN WORLDS: Smol tales that will take you from world to world, genre to genre, featuring many of my less known works.
In terms of my short fiction work in general, I’d say I like to experiment with different genres and cross genre work (though this is similar to my long form as I move into more book-length projects). I tend towards more unconventional perspective use in writing and concept-driven stories. Many of my current long form works-in-progress draw on bit of experimental I had tested through my short stories.
Why do you write speculative fiction? / What is speculative to you?
I think speculative to me is not just having fantasy, science fiction, horror, etc, elements, but it is almost a philosophical musing about the self, the world, and humanity as a whole, as well as the political and social makeup of society—the ways in which things can be different from how it is now, the way our world might evolve or devolve, how humanity might look like if in a world outside of the one we know and understand, exploring our reality through a different lens.
What is your favorite sci-fi, fantasy, or horror trope? / What is your favorite subgenre?
I suppose “The Chosen One” is my favourite trope because I find chosen one stories quite inspirational. In terms of subgenre, I like dystopian fiction. Although bleak, I feel like it’s a genre that really gets us to interrogate humanity and our society and reflect upon it more thoughtfully.
What is your favorite speculative fiction book (besides Linghun)? / What is your favorite speculative short story?
Toni Morrison’s Beloved. My favourite speculative short story is “Flowers for Algernon” — Daniel Keyes.
Where do you find inspiration for your stories?
I suppose it might be cliché to say, but I find inspiration everywhere, in everything, and in everyone.
Bonus question: Novels or short stories? Which do you prefer to read? Which do you prefer to write?
Oh this is a tricky one, but I’d also like for novella to be a choice here!
Sacré OUAIS!
Ed. note
I like novels when it comes to broad, sweeping worlds and narratives but short stories for contained moments in time and within a character’s life. And of course, novellas for all the in-betweens, and for its succinct nature but ability to still experiment and create layered worlds within its word count limitations. If I’m tight on time, I like to read short stories, but when I have longer quiet moments, I enjoy novels. I’d say this is similar for writing, though as they say, novels are where the money is—but I have high hopes that novellas will quickly join its ranks.
And that’s our first Philosophy (in a Teacup)! Merci beaucoup, Ai Jiang, for kicking us off. LINGHUN and Smol Tales are available for sale now, I Am Ai is available for preorder.
Let me strive every moment of my life to make myself better and better, to the best of my ability, that all may profit by it. Let me think of the right and lend my assistance to all who need it. Let me take what comes with a smile, without loss of courage. Let me be considerate of my country, of my fellow citizens and of my associates in everything I say or do. Let me do right to all, and harm no one.
The Doc Savage Oath
So what does it all mean?
For the historians of pop culture (both professional fan and the kind that gets paid), there’s a mild interest in Doc Savage for all the bastards he’s ever spawned. Every cape
of screen and page is linearly descended from Doc, the “proto-superhero,” via Superman. Every globe-trotting adventurer, like James Bond, Indiana Jones, and especially Johnny Quest, owes his far-flung trips and exotic locales to Doc’s pre-jetsetting prop-wing adventures. Scooby Doo learned to unmask villains at his feet, the Venture Brothers comment on him in their grandfather’s image, even Yankee WWII movies (and all of their spawn) developed out of the squaddie camaderie of the Fabulous Five – right down to the sickly-looking radio man and the rough-and-smooth banter. Paul Atreides is Doc Savage’s son, by way of the Lady Jessica.
But, in this day and age, even Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino are vaguely aware of Doc, but don’t really care.
Pulp aficionados pay respect to the Man of Bronze, though not so much these days as they do The Shadow. The Eighty-Sixth Floor collected curiosities, and a few dozen old men collect Bama-covered reprints. But Doc’s poor showing in the post-pulp world means that the temporary reflag in interest in the 1960s has faded ever since – the more because of the terrible movie adaptation.
no, I’m not posting a picture here. We do not talk about the Doc Savage movie in this house.
Even readers grew tired of him. Doc is very much a product of the Thirties and early Forties. Later adventures such as The Terrible Stork are strange, eerie, pantomime Doc Savage with mechanical characters clanking through uncharacteristic and nonsensical actions. In Stork, Doc does parlor tricks for Renny, yells at him, and suddenly goes into his laboratory to demand “why did I do that?” He struggled during the War, and had no place in the new world born of nuclear ashes and economic superpowers.
But it’s his very Thirties-ness that makes him what he is.
If Superman is a timeless “truth, justice, and the American way,” then Doc veers closer to Captain America – a paragon, a very specific paragon, for a certain era to look up to.
Like Steve Rogers, Doc’s prison of zeitgeist, how closely he’s bound to the era he was created, is what makes him timeless. No one’s successfully taken Doc, his wonderful toys, or the Fabulous Five out of the ice yet – though some have tried. Taking Steve Rogers out of the ice into …well, whatever present day the writers feel like pulling him out in, to comment on the vast difference between their present day and the virtues of “just a kid from Brooklyn”… in fiction is easy. Confronting Doc, hardwired to the Thirties with all its bright mad possibility and looming terrors and misery and heroism, as a modern reader is hard.
That is, after all, what the world looks like now, and it can be hard to look it in the eye like that.
And what of the Thirties? This, to start with: Doc is a scientific marvel, made not from favorable genetics but from training and upbringing, touching the very limits of human physical and mental ability. You can self-help yourself in Doc’s footsteps! Doc is equipped with money and power, and uses it to cross the world “righting wrongs and punishing the wicked” because he and his friends are so addicted to adrenaline they can’t imagine a life without flying bullets. Later generations can snicker at the PTSD victims and laugh at the corny oaths and simplistic villains – Dent laid them out as he, personally, saw them.
Dent’s incredibly personal touch is an aspect of his timelessness, too. Here are masked or disguised villains, motivated by greed or pride, and here is a Man of Bronze and his closest friends to stop them. Here are the terrors of his age – economic depression, rising fascism, wars and rumors of wars, rapacious landlords and greedy bankers – and here is a face under a hood, ready for Doc to punch in and hoist by his own petard. Here are the exercises you, too, can do at home to become “better and better, to the best of my ability, that all my profit by it.” Here’s the oath that sounds a little too earnest to be a cynical marketing gimmick. Here’s increasingly-elaborate Wonderful Toys, handheld superfirers that shoot bullets that don’t kill and have tracer rounds, cars with miniaturized televisions in them, soundproofed airplanes. Wouldn’t those be nice? Here’s a delicate brain operation that makes criminals Better. And here’s Lester Dent, holding his heart on his sleeve, making exactly the paragon of virtue he wanted to see in the world…for good and for ill.
It’s a peculiar thing, but the more you write your own foibles, your own obsessions, your own quirks — from being raised in a hundred-year-old adobe by two loving hippie parents who shout too much, and from reading books that are always twenty years out of date because you got them at the library book sale and from chasing homeschool dreams of da Vinci and Doc Savage and orangutans and Asian philosophy and printing ‘zines and memorizing The Simpsons and Mystery Science Theater — the more timeless and “relatable” (oh that word!) your work becomes. My best stories are the ones where I wear my heart on my sleeve.
And the only author I’ve ever read who puts quite as many fingerprints as Lester Dent on every word of prose was Robert Heinlein.
And finally, Doc’s earnestness shines from everything. As a Millennial, I lived through the hipster era. I asked some friends of mine if they thought I was a hipster, as I was into homebrewing beer, foreign folk songs, swing dance, and retro fashion. “No,” was the immediate answer, “you enjoy everything too earnestly to be a hipster.” Which is why they hung out with me. In an age defined by cynicism, “fake news,” scoffing, affect, and sneers, the earnestness of Dent and of Doc stands out by way of contrast. Stands out? Bestrides like a colossus, more like. There is much every modern reader needs to take Doc to task for, to criticize and doubt him for – the Crime College, the blackface, the casual stereotyping, telling Pat to stay in the kitchen, the whole raft of Dent’s vintage Thirties values as expressed through his heroic paragon who has suddenly become a plaster saint.
And after all the criticisms are rightly levelled and Doc’s superlative goodness is cut down to a more appropriate fit…there is still that earnestness that Doc is a paragon, is what we all could be and could strive for, is ultimately on the side of justice. And it really does stand out by way of contrast from every word written, uttered, moaned, tweeted, or screamed that one imbibes from 2023.
This might be the twilight of Doc Savage. I might be the last one alive to call myself a fan of the Man of Bronze, who has ever tried to copy Doc’s Method of Self-Improvement at home, who can recite the history of how Ham got his name, and Monk’s role in it. Even if the remake gets made (with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson or whoever follows him), I doubt it will raise much interest in the books. They’re too much of their time, too idiosyncratic, too influential, and, not in the least, super objectionable to any decent human being living after the Civil Rights movement. There’s a lot of artistic, ethical, and historical distance to overcome.
But it is worth overcoming. For all his myriad bastards, no one is aggressively hopeful, deeply personal, and, in Dwayne Johnson’s words, “FUCKING WEIRDO” as Doc Savage. No globe-trotting spy or kindly alien or superscientist comes with an earnest promise of self-improvement or a sincere belief you can replicate his heroism as home. No other paragon, with the possible exception of Captain America, so completely embodies his zeitgeist or the stamp of his creator, and in embracing them so completely, transcends them. Superman stopped being a New Deal superhero before Doc did.
We have rising fascisms. We have wars and rumors of wars. We have economic depressions, bright mad possibility, and wild-eyed philosophies struggling to break free, no matter who it hurts when they escape. The Thirties came back ninety years later.
We need Doc Savage. His time comes around again, but we need a Doc Savage to fit our times. We need him to be a Doc Savage who’s striven to be better and better these last ninety years, and rights the wrongs he did then and all the wrongs we know are wrong in 2023.
We need Lester Dent to put a face behind the wicked mask, and send Doc, Monk, Renny, Ham, Long Tom, Johnny, and Pat down there to bust trouble, gum up the works, feed the hungry, smash the munitions, right wrongs, and punish evildoers. Just to show it can be done.
We need to remember it can be done – even if only on pulp paper for 10c a copy.
This is the opening scene of a story I’m shopping around, “Doña Ana Lucía Serrano y la Caja de Venuswood (Doña Ana Lucía Serrano and the Venuswood Box).” Next time someone asks “what is solarpunk?” I’m showing them this, because these dozen paragraphs are pure, distilled solarpulp.
Credit to Kim Schmidt, as always
“I wonder what they hold over you, Doña Ana Lucía.” Said Anni Talavalakar. “Did you ‘retrieve’ a relic from your own museum? Seduce a Senator’s lover? I like to think you killed a man, it’s the romantic in me.”
“It is a little of all three.” Doña Ana Lucía smiled — a feral smile on her imperious, cultivated features.
The two Syndicate goons juddered her a little.
“And you still won’t tell me where my venuswood box is…? A pity.” Anni looked up, out toward her stars, gears ticking beneath her silver streak. “But since you have done me the honor of revealing your unspoken truth, I can freely give you this…with your consent.”
“F-freely given.” Confirmed the stunned archaeologist.
She leaned up, and pressed naked lip to blood-red. Her mouth was rich and full, with the confidence of age and the playfulness of youth. Anni even marked the end with a little flick of her tongue that hit Doña Ana Lucía like the sting at the end of a melody.
Anni lingered there, her dark hand caressing Doña Ana Lucía’s morena cheek, her gaze taking in as much of the archaeologist as she could. The Syndicate goons filling the train car looked on respectfully, without a sound.
Finally, Anni drew back and took a deep, regret-filled sigh.
“Toss her.”
The taste of her goodbye kiss lingered on Doña Ana Lucía’s lips as they threw her over the drumhead.
She knew the fall was not far: two meters, if that. But it went on forever, long enough that Ana Lucía could see the stars overhead all wink out in the harsh, cold light of day before she hit the ground.
This is a perfect little exemplar of science fiction. It is a precisely-cut, perfect cameo of how modern literary science fiction works, breathes, and executes. If any of your friends ask “what is science fiction?” or, more precisely, “what is short science fiction?” then show them this story. Like it or don’t, they will understand.
The story is about Mary, last resident of Dusty Creek, AZ. Dusty Creek has been slowly clearing out because while cities like Phoenix and Albuquerque can buy weather machines, giving them tourist weather and perfect crop-growing seasons, the pent-up weather dumps on little places who can’t afford their own weather machines. Places like Dusty Creek.
Mary refuses to leave, either in the face of the common sense (which is neither) of the townspeople or the appeals of her Aunt Bea. Mary keeps thinking of her grandmother, the “tornado in size five boots,” what Gran would have done, how Gran would have responded, how Gran would have had the personality and the will to bring the town back from the dead. Gran had helped build this town.
Until Aunt Bea silently reminds her that Gran had come from somewhere else. Mary looks up from her furious, stubborn knitting to look on the photo of Gran and Aunt Bea in the refugee camp, over across the sea, from whence the two women had come to Dusty Creek. She looks down in her hands, at the ugly, too-tight stitches on the sock she’d started, and goes to join Aunt Bea on the road to Flagstaff and a new life.
What I love about this story is twofold. First is that it is a true science fiction story – the story would not work without the super-science of the weather machines wreaking havoc on the American Southwest. Second is that it is a true character story – the turning point of the story isn’t the flipping of a switch or the punching of the one Big Bad, it’s looking at a photograph and realizing the world was bigger than she thought it was. It’s the main character seeing the world differently.
The fact that the details of the photograph require us, the reader, to reevaluate Gran and Mary in the light of the new revelation of Gran’s refugee status is just icing on the cake.
I gave “Knitting Weather” seven rocket dragons when I read it, a rating I dole out maybe once a year. I’m keeping an eye out for Wendy Nikel both in Daily Science Fiction and elsewhere. I can’t wait to see her next story.
You’ve all been wondering what I’ve been working on? Here it is, in glorious brights.
Out of the darkness of the present comes the light of the days ahead …
From all the good things provided by advanced AI to the innocence of discovering new worlds, join our authors as they present uplifting stories of science fiction and fantasy.
The list of names is pretty interesting, too:
Kevin David Anderson, Maureen Bowden, Steven D. Brewer, Nels Challinor, Regina Clarke, Stephen C. Curro, Jetse de Vries, Nestor Delfino, Gail Ann Gibbs, Henry Herz, Gwen C. Katz, Brandon Ketchum, Julia LaFond, R. Jean Mathieu, Cynthia McDonald, Christopher Muscato, Alfred Smith, A.M. Weald, David Wright
I’ve seen some of these names in the magazines, under titles of stories that snuck up on me six months later to remind me.
I hope my story, “Scars of Satyagraha,” will be one of those when you read it.
I forgot these sorts of stories ever existed, ever could exist.
Ken Liu needs no introduction – here is the man who translated and advocated for The Three-Body Problem, who showed us paper tigers and dandelion kings, the man who I jokingly referred to as the eight-foot tall invisible giant of Chinese-American science fiction. But the story, the story could use introducing. “Timekeepers’ Symphony” just debuted this September 1, in the pages and electrons of Clarkesworld. It takes just enough time (ha) to make its point, and leaves you to contemplate it for days after. It is the riveting story of…
No one.
There is no protagonist here, no character development that Dostoevsky would recognize. It is a description of approaches to time, on various of humanity’s colony worlds and back on Earth in Hawai’i. How some people live an entire lifetime in an afternoon, others over centuries with a deliberateness and gravity far beyond kings. The troubles of trying to import time from one locale to another. J. Robert Oppenheimer’s contributions to divisions of time. The elaborate timepieces, fast and slow, each world prizes as part of its identity, Earth included. And the harmonious whole of this cacophony, the cosmos underlying the chaos, Earth’s precisely-kept atomic second, the fundamental block of all human timekeeping, wherever in the cosmos it is.
That’s it. That’s the whole story.
And you’ll walk away from it wondering at your watch, and wondering how to import time from your home to your workplace, since they so clearly operate on different clocks.
Hopefully the New Year is treating us all well. One of the things I’d like more of this year is talking about short stories. Outside award season (or major controversies), we don’t talk much about short stories, novellas, and novelettes compared to novels, even when they’re as innovative, or as thought-provoking, or as startling. So, starting this year, I’m going to talk about the short stories I think are cool.
I’m clearly not the only one who loved it, since Franco made the cover.
In his introduction, DiChario explained that he wanted to write an “Italian fairy tale,” and the fairy tale notes are all over the work. But this isn’t the Brothers Grimm by a long shot. It’s ribald and funny and clearly delights in the startling details and the imagined squeamish reactions of its listeners. You can clearly imagine, say, Sonny Corleone telling this story, and bursting out laughing at the over-the-top bits. I’d say he did his homework, but DiChario clearly enjoys reading Italian fairy tales the way I enjoy reading Chinese tales, and it makes it a delight to read.
Marco is about to get married to Marianna, the prettiest girl in the Villaggo delle Ombre, when his older brother Franco gets killed. This is a problem for Marco, since family traddition demands the elder brother stand as best man for the younger. It’d be bad luck if Franco weren’t there. So he goes to the village witch, Brunilda, to bring Franco back from the dead. La strega agrees, on three conditions: that he defend her honor whenever she is slandered, that he take full responsibility for Franco, and that he deliver her a bottle of his best, by hand, every day of his life.
The meat of the story is the next forty eight hours as Franco lives it up as much as an undead man can, Marco tries desperately to keep him in check, and Marianna grows furious with her new in-laws. And, always in the ombres, Brunilda, whose magic weaves through the tale.
Obviously, I love this story. I love the interactions between Franco and Marco and Marianna, I love how sardonic and self-aware (but still serious) Brunilda is. Most of all, I love the life in these lines, the sheer joie de vivre. It really does feel like Sonny Corleone is telling it over a couple glasses of wine, laughing at the funny bits and sometimes (like the requirements to put Franco back) laughing so hard he can barely keep telling it. It was an absolute joy to read just for the telling of it.
But the reason I’m highlighting this story is, ironically, the reason the next paragraph’s un-highlighted and in shadows.
(Spoilers ahead)
With fairy tale retellings or fresh tales, there’s an almost-obligatory twist ending. It’s why I don’t enjoy fractured fairy tales very much, because too many of them either contort the rest of the story around the twist, or the twist is an afterthought that falls flat. This Italian fairy tale has its twist ending – of course Marco loses Maria and his estate on account of his brother, that’s old as Aesop. The twist ending is just as expected: he becomes betrothed to the witch instead.
The neat part is what happens next: Marco isn’t happy. DiChario makes a point of describing his sunken cheeks, the loss of his good looks, his loss of will or verve.
Indeed, the narrative switches almost seamlessly into a discussion of witches, and this witch Brunilda in particular, and it ends as her story as Marco is subsumed into her own will. And maybe it’s always been her story, not Marco’s. A conventional twist ending on this kind of fractured fairy tale would be for Marco to discover that the witch was his fate after all, and that is not how DiChario plays it.
This is what made this whole amusing story keep bouncing around in my brain, days later, when the more serious stories were all muddying together. This twist on a twist and the way it really does make me rethink the entire tale up to that point. I don’t want to say it’s punching above its weight class, but it’s not what you expected of the ribald, funny story in this month’s issue, is it?
(End of spoilers)
Pick up a copy of F&SF this month because Sheree Renée Thomas knows her stuff, because other stories like Maiga Doocy‘s “Salt Calls to Salt” and Innocent Chizaram Ilo‘s “The City and the Thing Beneath It” are moving and well-done…but especially because “Animale dei Morti” calls to you like the call of the unquiet dead who want to sing and drink a little wine again before they go, no matter who they burn down.
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