(1) Arachne is the obvious role model for a woman who works magic through her weaving and who sucks the life from her lovers: although Arakhnë in the story claims to be the weaver, not the spider, in actual fact she’s both. Even the myth here is really about how Arakhnë interprets her cultural heritage and uses it as a prism for how she relates to the women who sent her into exile.
(2) Helike was a Greek city that was struck by an earthquake in 373 BC and vanished into a lagoon overnight; later visitors reported seeing the ruins, and also the complaints of fishermen who caught their nets on a submerged bronze statue of Poseidon. Some people put the earthquake down to Poseidon’s anger at the Helikonians. I generally prefer to make my major sea deity female, but the luxury of adjusting details like that is one reason why I write historical fantasy rather than straight historical fiction.
(3) And the Athenian statue of Nike Apteros (“Wingless Victory”) was unusual: in general, the goddess Nike was represented with wings, and there was a story that this particular statue had been made without wings so that Nike (that is, Victory), could never fly away from Athens. I always thought that clipping the wings of a goddess sounded like a proposition that would attract the wrong sort of divine attention, so even after I looked it up and discovered Nike Apteros had probably originally been an Athena Nike (“Victorious Athena”) who was later interpreted as plain Nike, I wasn’t going to throw the idea away.
Ann’s pain is deliberately remote which makes it all the more heartbreaking. There is her grief for the duke, for the city of Florens and the dead she returned to motion, for Arakhnë, even for herself. You also touch on a terrible, lonely anger. What is it about the appeal of such primal emotions that encouraged your exploration in this story?
Remoteness is one of Ann’s key characteristics. She’s seen and done a lot of damage in the past, and most of it hasn’t touched her very much, because it happened and/or she did it to people she didn’t care much about or, worse, didn’t find at all interesting. Ann’s usual approach to human society is summed up in the moment when she walks unseeing through a blur of people and hones in on the one person in this whole city who does interest her. At this point in Ann’s life, though, she’s dealing not just with loss but also with the fact that she cares about the people and things she’s lost, which is all the more upsetting because it’s such an unfamiliar experience for her. Everyone experiences grief and loss at some point, but I find it particularly interesting to write about how it affects characters who aren’t psychologically prepared to deal with it at all.
Modern fantasy is often seen as the realm of “women” and science fiction “men.” Do you feel your own explorations of stories have been influenced by these attitudes?
No, not really. I have always read fantasy written by women and men and I have always read (rather less, I admit) science fiction written by women and men. I suppose the short answer is that I generally lean towards historical-flavoured fantasy because I love history, rather than for any other reason.
As a young writer, were there any particular women authors who challenged you to explore deeper meaning in your fiction?
Lots! I feel I may have been scarred for life by the looooooooooong wait times between books by Katherine Kerr and Kate Elliott particularly, and should really have been more grateful to find all three books of Barbara Hambly’s original Darwath trilogy on someone else’s bookshelf than I was. But I was about twelve and pretty innocent in the ways of publication schedules then. And there are too many other beloved writers and characters to list here, but Patricia C. Wrede’s Cimorene from the Enchanted Forest Chronicles will always have a place in my heart.
What can we expect from you in the future? Are there any other mythic retellings on the horizon?
Maybe! But mixed with quite a lot of history, too.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sandra Odell is an avid reader, compulsive writer, and rabid chocoholic. She attended Clarion West in 2010. Her first collection of short stories was released from Hydra House Books in 2012. She is currently hard at work avoiding her first novel.
Author Spotlight: Delia Sherman
Sandra O’Dell
This wonderful story about communication and discovery has remarkably little dialog, and the lack only serves to enhance the telling. How did you approach the challenge of writing characters who did not share a common language, or even point of reference?
The true answer to this question has nothing to do with craft. “Miss Carstairs” was the second story I’d ever written—not in my life, but as a serious writer with a one sale under her belt. It was 1983 or 4, and I didn’t really know what I was doing. I had never been to a writer’s workshop, taken a course, or read a book on writing. I was simply trying to make my ideas and characters line up with my inspiration—a clay statue of a merman I bought in Provincetown in 1983 and put on the window of my beach cottage so it could look out to sea. I was also reading Darwin’s The Origin of Species, and was fascinated by his chapters on animal communication. Also teaching Freshman Composition to students who seemed to come from a different planet and a difficult patch in a friendship with a woman I liked enormously but found hard to get along with. Not that I was thinking about that consciously—I couldn’t have. Consciously, it was Darwin and the statue and the pros and cons of the solitary life. As for the communications, Darwin himself, in the first edition of The Origin of Species, hypothesizes about marine mammals evolving telepathy, which would have atrophied when they came to spend more time on land, but possibly not disappeared—kind of like a mental appendix. After reading that, how Miss Carstairs would communicate with her catch was pretty much set.
The narrative voice carries the story along, lending itself to the characters and setting, and harkening back to the fiction of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Why did you chose this particular setting and voice?
Well, what other voice would suit a story about Darwin and evolution and women who were educated and uninterested in marriage or charity work or even community (or at least the kind of communities open to them) and big, lonely houses above the sea? Seriously, though. At the time, I was reading a lot of 19th century fiction—mostly English, but some American. It was, as it were, the water I was swimming in and by far the easiest voice for me to write in. As for the setting, I was living on Cape Cod at the time—which has no cliffs, but hey. Gothic houses are set on cliffs. It’s a thing.
Fantasy is often defined by its tropes—mermaids, sirens, dryads—yet your merman deliberately subverts the hyper-feminine magical creature trope. What made you decide to flip this particular stereotype and present a distinctly male character?
Well, my merman statue was male, so there’s that. There’s also the fact that long-haired sirens with big breasts have always struck me as, er, aerodynamically unsound. I mean, think of the drag. Think of the difficulty of maneuvering really fast burdened with pectoral bags of tissue instead of fins. Sure, arms make up for something, but that’s more than balanced by the possibility of getting your hands tangled in all that hair. No, traditional mermaids would never have evolved. And this is a story about evolution, according to the best 19th century principles.
This story presents a merfolk species based more in the realm of science than one of magic. If you were to return to this world, what other magical species would you like to present in such a fashion?
When I wrote the story, I felt I was writing in this world, our world, one lacking any magic outside the ordinary miracles of scientific, observable fact. It might be interesting to look at some of the blended creatures from Greek mythology, like hippogriffs and centaurs, or from Pliny and Herodotus, like the headless Blemmeyae. It’s always fun to see what happens when you rub magic and science together. After all, they are strongly allied.
Many of your novels and stories focus on the struggle for personal freedom as seen through the lens of history, The Freedom Maze in particular. What spawned your interest in the history of such struggles?
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sp; Until you asked this question, I had no idea that’s what I was writing about, but of course you’re right. The thing about writing is that while you’re consciously researching and writing a story about, say, scientifically plausible mermen, asexual women, and the infinite varieties of human affection, your subconscious is busily weaving a different story entirely, about love that seeks to own, or plain, middle-aged, scientific spinsters trying to make a place for herself in a culture that doesn’t believe such a creature could possibly exist. So I guess I must be interested in such struggles, although I wasn’t consciously aware of it. Perhaps it comes from coming of age in the 60s. Perhaps it comes from having been something of a disappointment to my mother, who would have preferred a biddable social butterfly to the stubborn scholar she got. I did, however, get my love of history from her—or from the biographies of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Mary Tudor, and Elizabeth I on her bedside table. I always loved historical fiction, and when I started to write, that’s what I wrote. At first it was because the past was so much more colorful than the rather colorless present that was my graduate school experience. But it grew into a strong sense that it’s important to look at the past because our present grows out of it, both the positive and the negative. The past may be a foreign country where they do things differently, but it’s also our ancestral home that has shaped who we are.
Also, putting things in the past allows me to write about myself without having to reveal anything specific. I like that. And the clothes. I wouldn’t want to wear a corset, but I like writing about them.
What can we expect from Delia Sherman in the future?
More corsets. The book I’m going to start as soon as I hand in the one I’m currently revising is a clockwork-punk thriller-mystery-romance-ghost story-sub-Dickensian thing about a Welsh blacksmith’s daughter who becomes an inventor, moves to London, and gets mixed up with a Great Detective. After that, I’ve got a Hansel and Gretel retelling set in New York in 1929 to research and write. Possibly more short stories, although I’m not a natural short story writer and writing one takes me a lot longer than I wish it would.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sandra Odell is an avid reader, compulsive writer, and rabid chocoholic. She attended Clarion West in 2010. Her first collection of short stories was released from Hydra House Books in 2012. She is currently hard at work avoiding her first novel.
Author Spotlight: Nalo Hopkinson
Liz Argall
I love the multiple uses of eggs and bottles in this story. I was particularly struck by idea that the protagonist was the egg, slowly and perniciously sucked into this bottle of a relationship. I was so drawn to this aspect of the story that the Bluebeard element caught me by surprise and made me gasp out loud. When and how did the bottle and egg themes emerge when you were writing this story?
I wrote it so long ago that it’s difficult to remember. I think I wanted to write about Bluebeard, so I probably searched my mental bank of fascinations to find associations. Bluebeard gives his wife an egg, and when she enters the forbidden room, she drops the egg in horror and gets blood on it. The bloodstain won’t come out, and that’s how Bluebeard knows she’s been in the room. So right away, the folktale has associations with menstruation and a loss of both innocence and reproductive possibility (the latter in the sense that if you’re trying to get pregnant, every month you menstruate is a month in which you didn’t succeed). I’ve known the “Yung Kyung Pyung” snippet since I was a girl, though I don’t remember from which folktale. Those three sisters have the most arresting names! Especially Eggie-Law. And I’d recently read the science experiment about creating a vacuum in order to suck a boiled egg into a bottle. Have yet to do that experiment. Plan to do so someday. Anyway, take all three of those eggy associations, sprinkle on the seasoning of knowing that the “Fitcher’s Bird” version of the story includes the wife dressing up as an enormous bird, squish all together, and come up with a Bluebeardish story line that could make them all be part of the story. That’s the closest I can explain how I did it.
The entrapment of the duppy wives adds a brilliant extra level to this re-imagining as well as uncertainty around the ending. I found myself wondering if there were other layers of Caribbean folk tales and folk lore that I might not have the depth of Caribbean literacy to see in the text? Are there any other interesting cookies or references you’d like to share with us?
There’s the bottle tree. It’s like a wasp trap for ghosts. It’s a tree or section of a tree that has been trimmed of its leaves. You shove bottles over the trimmed ends of the branches. Blue glass bottles are best. You erect the bottle tree outside your home. The duppies go inside the bottles and can’t figure out how to get out, because the bottles are upside-down. If they’re trapped inside the bottle tree, they can’t come into your house to trouble you.
The tragedy and visceral loss of human potential through colonial power structures and internalized racism is made flesh in this story. It makes a powerful statement. Bluebeard can be a hard character to care about, but I found my grief for Samuel shot through the roof as my dread of him grew. Samuel is so trapped in a cold world that he rages and kills things that might make him experience real warmth and human connection. The possibility that dark skin, especially his dark skin, could be beautiful is such a violent attack on the colonial values he has internalized that it will drive him to murder. Beatrice is a very likeable character in part because she resists colonial values and is able to see, enjoy and appreciate beauty—beauty in general, but particularly beauty in brown skin. I feel like her enjoyment and appreciation of the world around her is what helps her be strong. What role do you think beauty and pleasure serve when challenging & resisting invasive colonial constructs?
The thing about Beatrice is that she’s also affected by the same colonialism. She knows full well that her lighter skin colour, less bushy hair, and less African features make her desirable to certain men, and she’s not above preening so as to attract them. And of course she should be able to enjoy her own beauty, to show it off, to flirt. But it’s not an uncomplicated pleasure. It’s a pleasure that the world works very hard to deny dark-skinned women. It’s easier for Beatrice to love all the shades of brown skin because she’s allowed to love her own. (Most of the time. In that particular location. If she were to move to white-dominant North America, dominant culture values would effectively make her into a negro first and devalue her beauty. And she’d still have to deal with the exoticization from straight white and black men alike, with the resentment she already experiences from some darker-skinned women. No one of any race or combination of races escapes racism. We all just experience it differently, depending on our circumstances.) In addition to all that, Beatrice pretty much ignores other women—this story deliberately fails the Delany/Bechdel test—and has chosen to use her light-skin privilege to snag a mate who will support her rather than figuring out how to support herself. And yet she is a good soul. She truly loves Samuel; she wouldn’t be with him if she didn’t. She’s compassionate and sensual. She seeks joy and tries to share it with others. She treats others with respect. She’s supportive to her man. It should be enough. But the world is harsh, and often those things aren’t enough. Beatrice has put herself into a situation of depending solely on Samuel. When he turns out to be murderously unhinged, the only beings she can reach to for help are the angry ghosts of his previous victims. That may be enough to save her, or it may not.
Gloria has been with the household for a long time. Do you think Gloria has a sense of what happened to Samuel’s previous wives? I feel like she is sincere about a pickney being a blessing, but she certainly left the house swiftly when Beatrice announced she was going to tell him!
In my mind, Gloria doesn’t know. She leaves quickly because it’s Friday night and she wants to be about her own business. She’s an employee, not a member of the household, and she wisely never forgets that.
What does it feel like knowing your short story is studied in universitie
s and that people write papers about it?
I don’t know whether this one is studied in universities, but others of mine certainly have been. It’s the best. Feeling. Ever.
What needs destroying in fantasy?
The practice of representing non-Christian gods as demons that can be vanquished by chanting prayers at them in church Latin. The ubiquitous usage of invariably accurate books of prophecy as a short-cut around actual plot development. As a part of that, the faux-mystical assertion that unspecified “ancients” were able to see into the future. As a corollary to that, the implication that our fates are pre-determined. Because how boring is that?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Liz Argall destroyed fantasy from an early age, as chewed on books smeared with crayon will attest. She writes fractured fairytales, literary SF and the occasional Jules Vernian ghost story set in space. Her work has been published in places like Apex, Strange Horizons, and This is How You Die. Go read her web comic, Things Without Arms and Without Legs, a comic about creatures who are kind: thingswithout.com.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Kickstarter Backers
This special issue came about as a result of our sister-magazine Lightspeed’s Women Destroy Science Fiction special issue Kickstarter campaign funding at more than 1000% of its original goal. Because the campaign did so well, we unlocked several stretch goals, including this special issue of Fantasy (which, otherwise, has merged with Lightspeed). Needless to say, we could not have put this special issue together without the help and support of all the wonderful backers who supported the campaign—all 2801 of them!
Fantasy Magazine Issue 58, Women Destroy Fantasy! Special Issue Page 29