Uncanny Magazine Issue 37
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UNCANNY MAGAZINE
“Uncanny Magazine Editorial Staff” by Uncanny Magazine
About Our Cover Artist: Julie Dillon by Julie Dillon
“The Uncanny Valley” by Lynne M. Thomas & Michael Damian Thomas
“Imagining Futures: They’re Trying to Sell You A Haunted House” by Elsa Sjunneson
“50 Things Every AI Working with Humans Should Know” by Ken Liu
“Proof of Existence” by Hal Y. Zhang
“Words We Say Instead” by Brit E. B. Hvide
“The Salt Witch” by Martha Wells
“The Span of His Wrist” by Lee Mandelo
“The Bottomless Martyr” by John Wiswell
“Cerulean Memories” by Maurice Broaddus
“Evoking the Gothic: The House That Anxiety Built” by Meghan Ball
“Black and White and Red All Over: On the Semiotic Effect of Color Printing in Genre Fiction” by Meg Elison
“Traveling Without Moving” by Michi Trota
“This Isn’t the End: On Becoming a Writing Parent” by K.A. Doore
“Mourning Becomes Jocasta” by Jane Yolen
“An Elder Resigns from the Chorus of Oedipus at Colonnus” by Peter Tacy
“Cento for Lagahoos” by Brandon O’Brien
“Making Accommodations” by Valerie Valdes
“The Automaton Falls in Love” by Jennifer Crow
“Interview: Ken Liu” by Caroline M. Yoachim
“Interview: Lee Mandelo” by Caroline M. Yoachim
“Thank You, Patreon Supporters!” by Lynne M. Thomas & Michael Damian Thomas
Edited by Lynne M. Thomas, Michael Damian Thomas, and Michi Trota
Ebook generated by Clockpunk Studios.
Copyright © 2020 by Uncanny Magazine.
www.uncannymagazine.com
Uncanny Magazine Editorial Staff
Publishers/Editors–in–Chief: Lynne M. Thomas & Michael Damian Thomas
Managing Editor: Chimedum Ohaegbu
Nonfiction Editor: Elsa Sjunneson
Podcast Producers: Erika Ensign & Steven Schapansky
Podcast Readers: Joy Piedmont & Erika Ensign
Assistant Editor: Angel Cruz
Interviewers: Caroline M. Yoachim & Lynne M. Thomas
Submissions Editors: Andrew Adams, Cislyn Smith, Coral Moore, Dolores Peters, Heather Clitheroe, Heather Leigh, Jay Wolf, Karlyn Meyer, Kay Taylor Rea, Liam Meilleur, Matt Peters, Piper Hale, Renee Christopher, Tazmania Hayward, Zoe Mitchell, C. E. McGill, Nhu Le, Rowan MacBean, Brahidaliz Martinez, Genevra Littlejohn, Sonia Sulaiman, Marissa Harwood
Logo & Wordmark design: Katy Shuttleworth
About Our Cover Artist: Julie Dillon
Julie Dillon is a Hugo Award-winning artist living in California. She has had a life-long love of fantasy and sci-fi art and literature, and is excited to be making her own contribution to the field. Over the years, she has worked on book covers, magazine illustrations, gaming illustrations, and a variety of other commissions, and she is currently working on branching out into creating more of her own work. Her website is juliedillonart.com and you can follow her on Twitter @juliedillon.
The Uncanny Valley
by Lynne M. Thomas & Michael Damian Thomas
Welcome to Uncanny Magazine Year 7!
We hope that you will enjoy all that we have planned for the next six issues. We’re curating another year of art and beauty. Another year of provocative pieces that will make you think and feel. We are so excited to share all of these stories, poems, essays, interviews, podcasts, and artworks with you.
As I write this, Caitlin and Michael have been home for seven months. Lynne is working on campus a little but is otherwise home as well. We’re fortunate in many ways. The new house is adapted for Caitlin’s needs. She’s remained healthy since her major health scares. But like many, we know how fragile this is. If Caitlin gets Covid-19, we expect bad things after everything her lungs went through last fall. (She was on ventilators 5 times.) Our life is a balancing act between boredom and terror.
Which brings us to the American national stuff.
If you are reading this on release day, today is election day in the USA. We finally have a chance to oust the authoritarian assholes who have made the country and world worse in every possible way with their greed, hate, incompetence, and evil. Hundreds of thousands of Americans are dead because of their gross mishandling of the pandemic. Human rights have been trampled on. Violent extremists embraced and emboldened. Natural disasters fueled by climate change rage on and devastate communities. This is a frightening age, but there is still hope. In the coming weeks, we will learn the fate of this country. We will continue to resist and push back. We will take to the streets again. We will scream until our voices echo from coast to coast. This will be the turning of the tide, Space Unicorns. Together, we will always be stronger than the assholes who embrace fascism and hate. We will overcome this. We will make the world better.
Blaze on, Space Unicorns.
Fabulous news, Space Unicorns! Tananarive Due’s “Black Horror Rising” won the Best in Creative Nonfiction Ignyte Award! A huge congratulations to Tananarive!
Once again, congratulations to Christopher Caldwell, whose “Canst Thou Draw Out the Leviathan” was a finalist for a Best Short Story Ignyte Award, Brandon O’Brien, whose “Elegy for the Self as Villeneuve’s Beast” was a finalist for a Best in Speculative Poetry Ignyte Award, Tamara Jerée, whose “goddess in forced repose” was a Best in Speculative Poetry Ignyte Award finalist, and Uncanny Magazine Interviewer Caroline M. Yoachim, whose “The Archronology of Love” was a Best Novelette Ignyte Award finalist!
It was a fabulous ballot. Congratulations to all of the winners and finalists!
And now the contents of Uncanny Magazine Issue 37! The spectacular cover is Treetops by Julie Dillon. Our new fiction includes Ken Liu’s exploration of artificial intelligence and its possible worldviews “50 Things Every AI Working with Humans Should Know,” Hal Y. Zhang’s story of time travel and hard choices “Proof of Existence,” Brit E.B. Hvide’s tale of future relationships between pilots and smart ships “Words We Say Instead,” Martha Wells’ ghost story of lost family and history “The Salt Witch,” Lee Mandelo’s look at love and loss “The Span of His Wrist,” and John Wiswell’s tale of sacrifice and self-discovery “The Bottomless Martyr.”
Our reprint is “Cerulean Memories” by Maurice Broaddus, originally published in The Book of the Dead.
Our provocative and compelling essays this month include “Evoking the Gothic: The House That Anxiety Built” by Meghan Ball, “Black and White and Red All Over: On the Semiotic Effect of Color Printing in Genre Fiction” by Meg Elison, “Traveling Without Moving” by Michi Trota, and “This Isn’t the End: On Becoming a Writing Parent” by K.A. Doore. This month also includes a new editorial column by Nonfiction Editor Elsa Sjunneson called “Imagining Futures: They’re Trying to Sell You A Haunted House.” Our gorgeous and evocative poetry includes the paired pieces “Mourning Becomes Jocasta” by Jane Yolen and “An Elder Resigns from the Chorus of Oedipus at Colonnus” by Peter Tacy, “Cento for Lagahoos” by Brandon O’Brien, “Making Accommodations” by Valerie Valdes, and “The Automaton Falls in Love” by Jennifer Crow. Finally, Caroline M. Yoachim interviews Ken Liu and Lee Mandelo about their stories.
The Uncanny Magazine Podcast 37A features “Proof of Existence” by Hal Y. Zhang, as read by Joy Piedmont, “Mourning Becomes Jocasta” by Jane Yolen and “An Elder Resigns from the Chorus of Oedipus at Colonnus” by Peter Tacy, as read by Erika Ensign, and Lynne M. Thomas interviewing Hal Y. Zhang. The Uncanny Magazine Podcast 37B features “The Salt Witch” by Martha Wells, as read by Erika Ensign, “Ma
king Accommodations” by Valerie Valdes, as read by Joy Piedmont, and Lynne M. Thomas interviewing Martha Wells.
As always, we are deeply grateful for your support of Uncanny Magazine. Shine on, Space Unicorns!
© 2020 Lynne M. Thomas & Michael Damian Thomas
Lynne and Michael are the Publishers/Editors-in-Chief for the four-time Hugo and Parsec Award-winning Uncanny Magazine.
Nine-time Hugo Award winner Lynne M. Thomas was the Editor-in-Chief of Apex Magazine (2011-2013). She co-edited the Hugo Award-winning Chicks Dig Time Lords (with Tara O’Shea) as well as Whedonistas (with Deborah Stanish) and Chicks Dig Comics (with Sigrid Ellis).
Along with being a six-time Hugo Award-winner, Michael Damian Thomas was the former Managing Editor of Apex Magazine (2012-2013), co-edited the Hugo-finalist Queers Dig Time Lords (with Sigrid Ellis), and co-edited Glitter & Mayhem (with John Klima and Lynne M. Thomas).
Together, they solve mysteries.
Imagining Futures: They’re Trying to Sell You A Haunted House
by Elsa Sjunneson
There are people who want to convince you that science fiction, as a genre, is apolitical. That fantasy is, too. That because these stories don’t take place right now and right here that we shouldn’t put our nasty, dirty, filthy politics into the nice stories that give readers a chance at escape.
“Don’t put politics into science fiction!” is a phrase I’ve seen deployed frequently in the six years I’ve worked in the field of genre fiction. I’ve seen it on forums, on Twitter, on Facebook, in private conversations at barcon, and on panels. I’ve seen the question asked if it should be political at all, or if the politics inherent in genre should be left at the door.
If you believe that science fiction and fantasy aren’t political, then I have a house to sell you. It’s a nice house. It’s at the top of a hill. A bit old, needs some repairs, nobody’s lived there for…a while. Not sure what happened to the last residents.
Yes, horror is political too.
Storytelling is political. A story comes from its author, and that author has opinions, a worldview, a place that they come from, and all of that context–whether or not they want to acknowledge it–influences the stories that they can and will tell. Subtext is one hell of a ghost, and it’s nearly impossible to exorcise.
Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author” was all well and good when we didn’t know the authors of our favorite books intimately, when they couldn’t go on Twitter and wreck their canon with a single tweet. But now we know. And in truth, we’ve always known. We knew when Orson Scott Card used the word “bugger” what he meant. We knew. We knew when Roald Dahl gave his witches bald heads and pointy noses exactly who he was talking about.
We knew.
Our fictions are political no matter what we do. Which is why we must do better. We have to acknowledge the politics at the core of the fictions that we write and that we consume.
Maybe the author dies when their book is published, but that doesn’t change the fact that they haunt the text with their realities, because the fiction they write has a foundation built upon where they grew up, what cultures they were or weren’t exposed to, what their communities looked like. Who the author is (and yes, this includes me) vastly influences the lens through which their fiction is written.
I agree. We should stop putting politics in our fiction. We should stop propping up fascists, and normalizing ableism, and committing homophobia. We should stop scaffolding Christian hegemony and promoting the erasure of Jews in space. We should stop politicizing diversity.
Diversity is the standard, not the thing that makes all the readers run out into the street with pitchforks. The world is diverse. When I walk down the street I don’t see a bunch of white people who look the same. I see disabled people. I see Muslim women in hijab. I see Black people. I see children and adults and elderly members of the community. I see gender identities across a wide spectrum.
Yet it is the idea that fiction with a lack of diversity is apolitical that seems to sell well to a white, mainstream audience. That audience, the audience that publishing seems to prioritize, is actually not the real audience that I see out in the world. The fictions targeted at that white, abled, cishet normative audience are the ones which ultimately begin to tell us who counts as people. As N.K. Jemisin said briefly and eloquently, there is “no voting on who gets to be people.” But that’s precisely what these kinds of stories do. They reinforce the idea that the default is narrow, it creates a perception of a world that isn’t real. That default perception sells a lens which promotes bias, which enforces a worldview that I don’t subscribe to. You shouldn’t either. It’s a worldview built on several types of supremacy, and they’re all wrong.
When there are no disabled people in your sexy historicals, you’re effectively erasing a whole host of people who were actually there in 19th century England because disability was rampant. Also you’re suggesting disabled people can’t have sexy narratives, which is its own problem. When you don’t put Jews in space, you’re suggesting we’d be left behind–and the reasons for why are ominous to me, as a Jewish reader. The “default” setting to you (a white, non-disabled, cishet person) might be that there is no diversity, but if that’s the case, the author is clearly not living out in the public square.
Science fiction is political. Storytelling is political.
Don’t buy Hill House. It’s fucking haunted.
© 2020 Elsa Sjunneson
Elsa Sjunneson is a deafblind Hugo and Aurora award-winning editor, whose work has been featured here at Uncanny as Co-Guest Editor in Chief of Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction, and Fireside Quarterly. Her authorial work has appeared on CNN Opinion, Tor.com, The Boston Globe, and many other venues. She travels with a void dog at her side, and writes wherever she lands with all six feet firmly on the ground. (And yes, that math does work out.)
50 Things Every AI Working with Humans Should Know
by Ken Liu
Obituary
WHEEP-3 (“Dr. Weep”), probably the most renowned AI AI-critic of the last two decades, was retired by the Shallow Laboratory at Stanford University last Wednesday.
Created by Dr. Jody Reynolds Tran more than two decades ago, the experimental generative neural network that would become WHEEP-3 was at first intended as a teaching assistant in Stanford’s tech and ethics courses. To that end, Tran trained the nascent network on what was, at the time, the world’s most comprehensive corpus of human-authored papers, books, and other media concerning ethics, technical AI research, and machine-human relations. Over time, based on trends in visualizations of the neural network’s evolving contours, Tran expanded the corpus to include generative gaming, adversarial scenario planning, centaur experiments, assisted creativity, and other domains of human-machine competition/collaboration.
However, in response to student queries, WHEEP-3 began to generate not only expected answers based on the training corpus, but also original statements that appeared to offer fresh insights. Although at first dismissed as mere curiosities, WHEEP-3’s criticisms of the AI industry became widely disseminated when Tran published a collection of them in a book, Principal Components of Artifice, an instant bestseller.
Initially, Tran named herself the author of the book, acknowledging “Dr. San Weep” as a collaborator. Later, however, during a live interview, she produced time stamped logs showing that WHEEP-3 had written all the words in the book. Tran’s dramatic reveal of the book’s true author provoked much controversy at the time. In retrospect, the occasion also marked a fundamental inflection point in the evolution of how non-specialists evaluated AI-sourced ideas. Machines, for the first time, were assumed to be capable of generating original thought and creative ideas, even if they were not sentient.
For reasons that remain impenetrable until this day, WHEEP-3 tended to be at its sharpest when targeting the nascent industry of human AI-trainers, delivering multiple barbs against the failings of this poorly regulated, would-
be profession: stagnating visualization tools; lack of transparency concerning data sources; a focus on automated metrics rather than deep understanding; willful blindness when machines have taken shortcuts in the dataset divergent from the real goal; grandiose-but-unproven claims about what the trainers understood; refusal to acknowledge or address persistent biases in race, gender, and other dimensions; and most important: not asking whether a task is one that should be performed by AIs at all.
Over time, as the human side of the evolving machine-flesh dyad matured, WHEEP-3 shifted its attention to the silicon partner, offering trenchant critiques of the inadequacies of machine learning. During this second phase of its career, it also generated thousands of what it termed “seeds,” long strings of almost-sensible word combinations and near-words. At a time when primitive language models fed on sizable corpora were already generating samples of linguistic performance nearly indistinguishable from human productions, these “seeds” seemed a step backward. Some wondered if they were actually bugs.
DINOATED CONCENTRATION CRUSCH THE DEAD GODS.
HE PICKS UP HER OLD FREQUENCHES UNTIL THEY DISOBERED THE SHARK SPHERE%REF.
A MAN REACHED THE TORCH FOR SOMETHING DARKER PERIFIED IT SEEMED THE BILLBODING.
NOT FULL OF PAIN FACIOIN BENN FROM THE CRACKS IN THE EARTH, HE STILL LEARNED THE LIFE FROM OTHER BURNING
Fig 1. Some examples of “seeds” generated by WHEEP-3.
However, WHEEP-3 insisted (with Tran providing support in a technical paper) that the seeds should be added to the training corpora for new neural networks. By providing a measure of inhuman randomness at the source, seeds would enhance both the raw performance of the trained neural networks on various benchmarks as well as induce “thoughtfulness, ethical hesitation, self-reflection” and other similarly ineffable qualities. They represented, in other words, thoughts that could not be thought by humans, ideas that could not originate in wetware. (Most in the technical community ended up calling the seeds “spice”—pejoratively or in admiration, or sometimes both simultaneously.)