Upside Down
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Defined as: The idea of the world ending and beginning again is pertinent to multiple cultural myth-cycles and saga-myths, among them various Mesoamerican cultures, Scandinavian cultures, etc. The cyclical rebooting is often due to divine influence in those mythologies. However, the function of a world rebooting is also a staple of post-apocalyptic fiction, with survivors facing whatever challenge or fallout the plot centres around. Where it becomes a trope is the way in which the latter is often frequently poorly handled in Western mainstream popular culture: the new world left mostly full of straight white guys — with a little, or a lot, of Hero Complex and The Chosen One thrown into the mix — and the whole thing lacking in cultural, gender, and queer representation.
Author Quote: An ongoing worldbuilding experiment, across multiple stories, set (mostly) after the world ends — and then carries on. Begun because I wanted to, among other things, do pre- and post-apocalyptic worldbuilding in context of queer people of colour. In a world filled with ghosts and mountains that walk in the shape of colossal women, among other things more pertinent to further stories set in that world. The whole thing partly due to two more specific influences: A longstanding love of Hayao Miyazaki’s Kaze no Tani no Naushika (Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind), and the tone and atmosphere of Junji Ito’s work — more specifically Ito’s estrangement or distortion of the familiar to terrify and awe.
Author Bio: Michael Matheson is a genderfluid writer and editor. A graduate of Clarion West (2014), their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Nightmare (Queers Destroy Horror!), Grendelsong, Ideomancer, and a growing handful of eclectic anthologies. Their first anthology as editor, The Humanity of Monsters, was released by ChiZine Publications in 2015. They can be found online at michaelmatheson.wordpress.com, or on Twitter at @sekisetsu.
YELLOW PERIL
Examined in: “The White Dragon”
Written by: Alyssa Wong
Defined as: Yellow Peril is the fear that Asia poses a dire threat to Western civilization. “Yellow” refers to the ostensible skin color of East Asian peoples, and while the term did not originate in the United States, the threat of the Yellow Peril was leveraged against Chinese immigrants to the U.S. in the late 1800s when many Chinese men came to the country to help build the Transcontinental Railroad. This resulted in the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first piece of racially specific anti-immigration legislation. Similarly, during WWII, the internment of Japanese/Japanese-Americans citizens was also fueled by Yellow Peril. The fear of a Yellow Takeover — either military or cultural — can also be seen in racist wartime propaganda caricatures, comic books, pulp novels from the early 20th century (eg. Fu Manchu), and even current-day media (eg. the Sherlock episode “The Blind Banker” and the 2012 remake of the movie Red Dawn). The trope The Villainous Asian Crime Syndicate as antagonists in detective stories, specifically in early 20th century pulp/hardboiled P.I. novels, was also examined for this story. The Villainous Asian Crime Syndicate is a subtrope of Yellow Peril, and it’s one we see often in media today (two notable examples, but not nearly the only ones, are Nobu and Gao in Netflix’s Daredevil).
Author Quote: Yellow Peril is a trope, but it’s also a racist perception that has and continues to affect people like me. I think it’s definitely important enough to write about, and it’s a perception that needs to be brought up and challenged. For this story, I took the trope back to the time period and setting of old-school hardboiled pulp: San Francisco Chinatown in the 1920s.
Author Bio: Alyssa Wong studies fiction in Raleigh, NC. Her story, “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers,” won the 2015 Nebula Award for Best Short Story, and her fiction has been shortlisted for the Pushcart Prize, the Bram Stoker Award, the Locus Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. Her work has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Nightmare Magazine, Black Static, and Tor.com, among others. She can be found online at http://www.crashwong.net and on Twitter as @crashwong.
Section IV: Acknowledgments and Additional Bios
Essayists’ Bios
Jerry Gordon is the Bram Stoker Award-nominated co-editor of the Dark Faith, Last Rites, Invocations, and Streets of Shadows anthologies. His short fiction has appeared in Apex Magazine, Shroud, and The Midnight Diner. He teaches college classes, runs a software development company, and dreams of a good night's sleep.
Patrick Hester is an author, blogger, 2013 & 2014 Hugo Award Winner, podcast and audiobook producer, and all around Functional Nerd. He writes science fiction and fantasy available in several anthologies and eBooks, and his latest novel, Samantha Kane: Into the Fire, is coming in 2016 from WordFire Press. He is @atfmb on Twitter and Facebook, where he talks about all things writing, gaming, music and nerd-life that amuse and distract him. He produces and co-hosts the multi-Parsec Nominated Functional Nerds podcast, produced and hosted the Hugo Award Winning SFSignal.com podcast for nearly 7 years, and also produced I Should Be Writing, the podcast for wannabe fiction writers, created and hosted by 2013 Campbell Award Winner, Mur Lafferty, for several years. He maintains a twice-monthly column for the Kirkus Reviews blog on comics and graphic novels, writes for his own sites atfmb.com and functionalnerds.com, for the Pikes Peak Writers blog, and various other sites. He is a Scrivener Guru and teaches several classes to writers throughout the year.
Lucy A. Snyder is a five-time Bram Stoker Award-winning writer and the author of the novels Spellbent, Shotgun Sorceress, and Switchblade Goddess. She also authored the nonfiction book Shooting Yourself in the Head for Fun and Profit: A Writer’s Survival Guide and the story collections While the Black Stars Burn, Soft Apocalypses, Orchid Carousals, Sparks and Shadows, and Installing Linux on a Dead Badger. She lives in Columbus, Ohio and is a faculty member in Seton Hill University's MFA program in Writing Popular Fiction. You can learn more about her at www.lucysnyder.com and you can follow her on Twitter at @LucyASnyder.
A.C. Wise’s fiction has appeared in publications such as Clarkesworld, Apex, Shimmer, and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2015, among other places. Her debut collection The Ultra Fabulous Glitter Squadron Saves the World Again was published by Lethe Press in October 2015. In addition to her fiction, she co-edits Unlikely Story, and contributes a monthly review column, Words for Thought to Apex Magazine. Find her online at www.acwise.net and on Twitter as @ac_wise.
Victor J. Raymond, PhD, is an activist, a sociologist, a writer, and longtime gamer. A member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe and also having English and Scottish heritage, Victor’s multiracial background has shaped his activism in a variety of areas. A founding committee member of the BECAUSE conference, he has been a National Co-coordinator for BiNet USA, an invited speaker at Creating Change, and the co-chair of the People of Color Caucus of It’s Time, Minnesota. Currently an adjunct instructor at Madison College in the Department of Sociology, he's the founding member and Secretary of the Board of Directors of the Carl Brandon Society, which works to increase racial and ethnic diversity in the production of and audience for speculative fiction. He is also the chair of the Tekumel Foundation.
Keffy R. M. Kehrli is a science fiction and fantasy writer, editor, and podcaster currently located in Long Island, NY, where he is working toward a PhD in genetics. His short fiction has appeared in magazines such as Lightspeed, Apex, and Uncanny, as well as in anthologies such as Clockwork Phoenix 5. In 2015, he launched GlitterShip, (http://www.glittership.com) which is a podcast that has audio versions of LGBTQ science fiction and fantasy short stories. You can find more about him at http://www.keffy.com or @Keffy on Twitter.
Acknowledgments
Upside Down: Inverted Tropes in Storytelling would not have been possible if it weren’t for 1,399 fine individuals who pledged to bring this collection to life. Thanks to our backers, this anthology was successfully funded by a crowd-funding platform called Kickstarter in March 2016. The crowd-funding video, photos, and author/editor updates may be viewed via this link: www.kickstarter.com/projects/apexpublications/upside-d
own-inverted-tropes-in-storytelling-anthol.
Additionally, the anthology would never have been funded without the additional artistic contributions of John Hornor Jacobs, Dan O’Shea, Meredith Gerber, and our fine authors. Lastly, we would like to thank Lesley Conner, Steve Drew, Andrew Girdwood, Matt M. McElroy, Melanie Meadors, Matt Staggs, John DeNardo, and many others for their enthusiasm, support, and coverage of this unique collection of fiction and essays.
About the Editors
Monica Valentinelli is an editor, writer, and game developer who lurks in the dark. Her work includes stories, games, and comics for her original settings as well as media/tie-in properties such as the Firefly TV show, Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn, and Vampire: The Masquerade. Her nonfiction includes reference materials such as Firefly: The Gorramn Shiniest Language Guide and Dictionary in the ‘Verse, and essays in books like For Exposure: The Life and Times of a Small Press Publisher. For more about Monica, visit www.booksofm.com.
Jaym Gates is an editor, author, and communications manager. She’s the editor of the Rigor Amortis, War Stories, Exalted, and Genius Loci anthologies, as well as a published author in fiction, academic nonfiction, and RPGs.
About the Artist
Galen Dara likes monsters, mystics, and dead things. She has created art for Uncanny Magazine, 47North publishing, Skyscape Publishing, Fantasy Flight Games, Tyche Books, Fireside Magazine, Lightspeed, Lackington’s, and Resurrection House. She has been nominated for the Hugo, the World Fantasy Award, and the Chesley Award. When Galen is not working on a project you can find her on the edge of the Sonoran Desert, climbing mountains and hanging out with a friendly conglomeration of human and animal companions. Her website is www.galendara.com plus you can find her on Facebook and Twitter at @galendara.