Interview with Sarah Day

We are delighted to host on our blog a conversation with Sarah Day, author of horror, sci-fi, fantasy, and many other flavors of speculative fiction. Her work is heavily influenced by festival culture, body modification, non-traditional relationships, and scary ghosts. Sarah has been published in PseudoPod, Underland Arcana, The Future Fire (see “The Heart of the Party”), and many other fine places. She lives in the SF Bay Area with her cat. Connect with her at sarahday.org. Her novella, Greyhowler, is released today by Underland Press.

---

Rhia is a Courier, a transient messenger who freely travels the land without calling any town or port home.

The job suits her, for in a land ruled by the Temple, it is difficult to find your own way, especially when you have a Talent. Rhia's is water, and when she arrives in distant Cerretour to deliver a message, she finds a village wracked with suffering.

The well is dry. It hasn't rained. The only person who can save these villagers is missing. At night, a strange creature prowls the prairie. The villagers have a name for it: greyhowler.

---

The Future Fire: Greyhowler is both a story about freedom (from being tied to a place, from oppression) and being trapped (by secrets, by the past); can you tell us a bit more about how the story navigates these two seemingly contradictory states? Do you find a happy medium?

Sarah Day: I think a big topic in Greyhowler is illusion, or self-deception. Some of the major characters are trapped by the lies they tell themselves. Being trapped by their secrets, or their circumstances, is a side effect of self-delusion. I think this is how a lot of people are, honestly—we make choices that we believe are only from a sense of agency or self-determination, but we’re often reacting to influences and experiences in our history that we can’t escape, and maybe aren’t even aware of. 

Connecting our present-day actions to the experiences buried in our past can be a rich vein for personal development–and, in fiction, for plot and character work. For example, Rhia would love to only be a Courier and not have to address her upbringing in the Temple at all… but she can’t help the people in Cerretour without the skills she learned in her past. That’s where her inner conflict comes from, and it’s really fun to write. Some of my favorite parts of Greyhowler are where the characters lean hard one way, either rejecting their self-delusions or embracing them.

TFF: Do you already know what is going to happen in the next book in the series?

SD: I’ve written a couple of other books in this universe already; one about Rhia and her past, and one about two characters who don’t feature in Greyhowler at all. This universe is a land I visit when I want to write fantasy. I hope more of these books get to see daylight with an ISBN attached to them someday, but even if they don’t, I love the characters and have learned a lot from the experience.

TFF: Do you think that writing (and reading) speculative fiction—in particular fantasy that has sometimes been seen as pure escapism—can actually be an act of resistance?

SD: Absolutely! I think reading for “escapism” gets a bad rap, and that when we say we’re reading for escapism, we’re actually recharging our emotional batteries in a way that can contribute to our resilience. Charging the batteries is important for long-term fights.

I spent a lot of 2022 taking care of someone close to me who was going through cancer treatment. For a couple of months during chemo, all he wanted to do was watch YouTube videos of old boxing matches. Neither of us have ever been boxers or done any kind of martial art, so it’s not like we were watching for our education… but he found it galvanizing and encouraging. There was strong symbolic resonance for him to watch smaller guys take on larger guys and win—it was a clear metaphor for his fight against cancer. Was that pure escapism? I don’t think so.

TFF: Your short story “The Heart of the Party” both celebrates the anarchic joy of the free use of transformative technologies, and warns of its potential to aid in our repression by those in power. How do you see this tension?

SD: Speculative fiction uses imagined technology or magic to explore different manifestations of power. Exploring or subverting hierarchical power structures is something I write about a lot. Systems of power constantly seek to shore themselves up, to reinforce themselves. The Temple in Greyhowler and the state police apparatus in “The Heart of the Party” both require compliance and punish deviation with disproportionate severity, because the ability to punish with impunity is part of how they reinforce their legitimacy.

You might notice that the protagonists in both works are people who have a lot of privilege assigned to them by the dominant power structures and are trying to divest from those structures, with varying degrees of success. The theme of privileged people wrestling with the things they have but have done nothing to deserve, or trying to reconcile their privilege with others’ circumstances, shows up a lot in my writing.

TFF: Have you ever killed a character that you loved?

SD: Would I be a terrible person if I said I loved all my characters, even the bad guys? Every time one dies, I’ve killed someone I love. I don’t think I can write a believable character unless I can find them relatable somehow. I have to be a chameleon this way; each character I write has to have the strength of their own convictions. They might make terrible decisions, or do things I personally find morally indefensible, but have relatable motivations. Everyone’s morality is internally consistent. We’re each the hero of our own story.

At the end of Greyhowler, two characters discuss a third who has done terrible things, and whether actions like that can ever be understood or forgiven… I guess I think everything can be understood, even if it can’t be forgiven. To write a character well, I have to understand them, and by understanding them, I come to love them.

TFF: Thank you for being our guest, Sarah, we look forward to falling in love with the characters of the Greyhowler! Best of luck, and happy writing.

---

Greyhowler is out today, and can be bought here.

Outlaw Bodies ToC

We’re delighted to be able to announce the table of contents of the forthcoming Outlaw Bodies anthology, published by The Future Fire and guest co-edited by Lori Selke.

• Emily Capettini, ‘Elmer Bank’
• Anna Caro, ‘Millie’
• Fabio Fernandes, ‘The Remaker’
• Vylar Kaftan, ‘She Called me Baby’
• Lori Selke, ‘Frankenstein Unraveled’
• Stacy Sinclair, ‘Winds: NW 20 km/hr’
• M. Svairini, ‘Mouth’
• Jo Thomas, ‘Good Form’
• Tracie Welser, ‘Her Bones, Those of the Dead’

Plus introduction by Lori Selke and afterword by Kathryn Allan.

Outlaw Bodies will be available in print and e-book (PDF, Epub, Kindle) from early November 2012. (e-ARCs available from September: contact me if you’re interested in reviewing a copy.)

Feminist Utopias: What’s Gender Got to Do With It?

In January, I posted to this blog on the subject of utopia, a perfect place. Is such a society possible?

Do certain conditions, such as the absence of crime, poverty, racism and other inequities make for the perfect place? Utopian narrative is a place to explore these questions, but these same narratives could be termed dystopian. Who decides what conditions are the most important, and how can these conditions be established and maintained without creating new modes of oppression?

One way to approach the inherent teetering between utopia/dystopia is to acknowledge and use that tipping point as a point of departure. In feminist utopian literature, narratives often complicate the easy answer, avoid closure, or look to examine multiple perspectives but provide no simple solution.

I hope I don’t have to explain or defend “feminist” here, but I welcome relevant dialogue.

Let’s just say by way of definition that feminist utopias are concerned with the search for equality in the ideal community. They consider both the existence of social stratification based on difference (sex, race, race, class) and the humanist ideal of sameness to be problematic. Gender inequalities are part of the exploration but not the totality. Feminist fiction tends to project its desires for perfect community and to investigate problematic elements of those desires. As such, some may seem neither utopian nor dystopian per se.

Three perfect examples are Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (she even subtitles it “An Ambiguous Utopia”), Starhawk’s The Fifth Sacred Thing, Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time. These works look at social inequalities and suggest structures or processes to enable more equitable ways of living, but they’re not easy.

In The Dispossessed, the protagonist Shevek is forced to travel from his anarchist/socialist world to a repressive capitalist one to share scientific ideas which are deemed disruptive and self-serving to the functioning of his community. In The Fifth Sacred Thing, factions within a radically democratic city disagree about how to peacefully resist attack from militaristic invaders. Piercy’s novel presents an alternate society that may or may not be the hallucination of a mentally ill narrator.

Compare these narratives to utopias such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, which projects a desire for the perfect human community or dystopias like Orwell’s 1984 which predict extreme, dim futures as cautionary tales. Their approach is humanist, focused on repression of citizenry, not issues specific to women's social roles and intersections of identity.

What are your thoughts on these intersections, and what other texts explore this?

What's useful about this kind of literary exploration?

Z is for Zombie

Zombies may be the most clichéd and least sexy of all tropes of horror fiction—even if vampires and werewolves are the paranormal romance-cliché of the year, shambling mindless zombies are surely among the most pointless monsters in the canon. Add to that their problematic status in terms of racial sensitivity, since the Hollywood zombie is an appropriation and perversion of an element of Afro-diasporic culture (Vodoun practitioners do not turn people into zombies, any more than they stick pins into dolls representing their enemies), and you might well imagine that zombie fiction has no place in TFF.

Then again, the world after a zombie outbreak is usually represented as a postapocalyptic landscape (or maybe a paranoid dystopia), both of which are great themes for socio-political scifi. In addition we’ve recently seen the ability of zombies to represent sexuality and sexual conflict; human rights and alienation; terrorism and the politics of fear. In other words zombies are very political.

As with every genre or theme we’ve discussed this month, the important point is that a story is not social and political because it’s overtly about societal roles or political activism. Whatever the surface subject matter of a speculative fiction story, a good writer who is willing to speculate and extrapolate changes to our world in a way that matters, cannot help but write socio-political fiction.

Y is for Young Adult

The Young Adult (YA) genre has come a long way since I was a teenager. Back in my day (!) we had to supplement books by the likes of S.E. Hinton with novels for adults. That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing; it meant that I was introduced to fully-realised feminist role models such as Dr Susan Calvin in Asimov’s "Robot" series and Patricia Luisa Vasquez in Greg Bear’s "Eon". But even though these strong female role models were a vital part of my formative years, I would have loved to have read about characters I could have identified with more.

The emergence in recent times of a wider YA body of fiction is both reassuring and welcome. Being a young adult can be so challenging that it is important that these readers have plenty of material to see them through their often difficult adolescent and teenage years.

But how much of present-day YA fiction is speculative?

Contemporary YA showcases recognizable science fiction tropes, such as time-travel in Rebecca Stead’s "When you Reach Me". But it is in the dystopian themes that socio-political elements are more prominent, for example in YA books such as Scott Westerfield’s "Uglies" series, where the pursuit of the body beautiful is taking to devastating degrees or the setting of "The Chaos Walking" trilogy by Patrick Ness, where not even an individual’s thoughts are private.

By contrast, another sub-genre in YA fiction — paranormal romance — could not be deemed speculative. The most famous female character in this genre, Bella in Stephanie Meyer’s "Twilight" novels, is neither empowered nor independent; she doesn’t care about her schooling or future career, and neglects her friends in favour of spending time with her boyfriend. This submissive streak can also be seen in the mortal female counterparts to the male fallen angels in Lauren Kate’s books and again with those of the sexy fairy kings in Melissa Marr’s "Wicked Lovely" series.

Luckily there are plenty of alternatives to this paranormal romance category. The most influential book I read as a young adult was Isabel Allende’s "The House of the Spirits", so it made me very happy to see such an accomplished speculative fiction author writing for young adults. In her YA books "The City of the Beasts", "The Kingdom of the Golden Dragon" and "The Forest of the Pygmies", Allende touches on humanitarian issues such as child slavery and inequalities between the developed and developing world. She also sets out to challenge perceptions about what makes a culture “civilised”.

No article on YA speculative fiction can fail to mention the legacy of the masterful storyteller Ursula le Guin. "The Wizard of Earthsea" spawned a legion of young adult novels that followed the pattern of its story: a setting in a walled city where a young person of humble origins becomes an apprentice to a sorcerer. Books such as Joseph Delaney’s "Wardstone Chronicles", Trudy Canavan’s "The Black Magician" trilogy, Garth Nix’ "Old Kingdom Series" and William Nicholson’s "Wind on Fire" trilogy all pay homage to this original idea. Ursula le Guin’s contribution to speculative fiction has been phenomenal - for example with her exploration of gender in "The Left Hand of Darkness" or her strong female characters in her YA novel "Tehanu".

Speculative fiction for young adults offers an exciting opportunity to forge a storyworld where limits can be pushed to the extreme to shed light on the problems facing our society. An author has the power to make her readers think differently, and this is especially true for YA authors whose audience is in the process of learning about themselves and the world around them. So if you’d like to submit a YA speculative fiction story to "The Future Fire", push boundaries as far as you can. Your readers will love you for it.

K is for Kafkaesque

The term Kafkaesque suggests surreal, nightmare-like situations, which have a malign sense of foreboding underpinning them. Kafka's stories included: the dystopian, particularly political and social nightmares (the powerless immigrant, the arrestee); the surreal punishment (like Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum, later beautifully taken off by Rhys Hughes's The Fury Machine); the magic realist take on gritty blue-collar life (Metamorphosis). We have come to see in his works the Orwellian dystopia, the surreal nightmare and the hopeless daily struggle, but in his wide range of works he combined a relentless realism and a beautiful elegance of language that made him one of the giants of 20th Century literature.

Many of Franz Kafka’s characters suffer at the hands of a bizarre and tragic fate, but just because their circumstances aren’t familiar doesn’t mean we feel any less when misfortune befalls the characters. The absurdity adds to the sense of hopelessness that surrounds them.

In Metamorphosis Kafka turns the hard-working and exploited Gregor Samsa into an insect. Gregor’s freeloading family quickly forget all the sacrifices he made for them once he assumes such a shocking and, to them, repulsive form. In this way, Kafka weaves a gritty but intensely detailed magical realism by twisting one element in reality and then taking the situation that ensues very seriously. It's a beautiful story, horrifying in its inhumanity, but astonishing in its attention to detail and emotional engagement.

Kafka switches from positioning the enemy within to one without in The Trial, when the main character K. is victim to a dark, totalitarian dystopia where bureaucracy and secrecy means that nobody knows what’s really going on, but of course, the little guy is made to pay the price regardless. This is political speculative fiction par excellence: warning at the dangers that lack of transparency in politics and judicial process hold for our civilization.

These works highlight what’s quintessentially Kafkaesque: the murky, unclear threat befalling a regular, relatable character. This danger is life-threatening, and in both these examples, terminal.

The most Kafkaesque piece of art I have experienced is David Lynch's film, Inland Empire, with its oppressive soundtrack, the shadowy lighting and the horrible and demeaning fate of the female lead, Nikki Grace / Sue. As Nikki / Sue suffers one horror after the next, the film takes on a hallucinogenic quality as the plot goes down a series of rabbit holes (one really does include rabbits), disorientating the viewer. Nikki / Sue loses everything she has and just when she thinks things can’t get any worse she finds out ‘rock bottom’ has a false bottom... Like Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire explores the shadow side of the Hollywood dream.

One of TFF’s stories that strikes me as particularly Kafkaesque is Kemistry by Terry Grimwood. The main character, Judy, is plunged into a dangerous situation that she doesn’t understand, one that in turn opens out into an even worse, lifelong nightmare as she is forced to return to her violent ex-husband.

Kafka’s works are beautifully written thanks to his poetic language, innovative styles and story structures, not to mention his creativity and artisanship. He never sacrifices medium to message, which may be his most enduring legacy to world literature.

All of the elements we identify as Kafkaesque in literature—the grim, dystopian setting; the attention to detail and unflinching realism; the range of story structures and willingness to experiment; the masterful proficiency with language and style; the keen awareness of social detail and political observation—are things we would like to see more of in TFF. We don’t insist that a story be dark and gritty, but we also don’t expect every socio-political piece to have a happy denouement. So don’t try to emulate one of Kafka’s short stories; rather follow his example and use beautiful language to warn of hazards in a surreal and dream-like way... Use elements such as beautiful language, surreal and dream-like features or gritty realism to comment on political agendas or warn of the dangers in our civilization.

D is for Dystopian

In a dystopian science fiction story, characters inhabit a future (or imaginary) society that is repressive, totalitarian, fundamentalist or in some other way intolerable. The best dystopias are only slightly exaggerated forms of our own world, perhaps stretching government censorship (at least as we know it in the “Free World”), taking media bias to a logical extreme, and removing personal freedoms that we are already allowing to degrade around us. Whether political, corporate or religious dystopia, there is of course plenty of grist to chew on in our contemporary world. Classics of the genre—Orwell’s 1984, Gilliam’s Brazil, Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale—contain nothing that would be out of place in a realistic account of Fascist, Soviet, and/or theocratic dictatorships of the Twentieth Century.

It is therefore obvious that dystopian SF will be an extremely suitable work for a magazine of socio-political science fiction (‘Art Attack’, ‘Kemistry’ and ‘The Recycled Man’ use it to particularly good effect), and the corporate dystopia is particularly popular in one of our favorite subgenres, Cyberpunk. Exaggerating the worst elements of our society as a warning against complacency and political apathy is one of the most valuable roles science fiction can play in our culture.

In a dystopian setting the individual is powerless, is lost; the protagonist may be a victim of this repression, or may be a rebel against it, or may even be a cog in the sinister machine that keeps the world in its unjust and intolerable state (aren’t we all, if we don’t speak out against it?).

Perhaps the most popular dystopian setting is the totalitarian crypto-Stalinist regime that openly demands loyalty and agreement in political and ethical dogma; free-thinkers are the first to fall, and brutal public reprisals against real or alleged dissidents are used as a means to instill terror and therefore submission in the rest of the populace. The regime claims to be acting for the greater good, because only through social engineering of this kind can lasting peace and prosperity be assured.

Almost as terrifying, and especially popular in the fantasy flavour of dystopia (perhaps because we naïvely think this sort of religious fervour is a mediaeval throwback), is the fundamentalist theocratic government. In the world the government are a benign, paternalistic force, often working through the medium of honest local pastors of the faith to ensure that society follows literally the moralistic teachings of whatever Book the society follows. Victims of this culture will typically include women, homosexuals and nonbelievers to varying extents; resistance is particularly difficult to sustain because of the great power of propaganda that religious proselytism allows, and the simplistic and attractive picture of good versus evil that they project.

In my view the most potent form of dystopia available to the Twenty-first Century Western speculative fiction writer, however, is the libertarian or hypercapitalist “meritocratic” dystopia. In this world, which is most obviously an exaggeration of our own, rather than a historical horror story, society claims to be free, to the extent that government has almost no role in restricting the lives of its citizens. Individuals are only constrained by the extent of their own ambition and ability to succeed, to make money, to rise through the classless culture to a position of privilege, luxury, and power. Without government intervention against monopolistic industries, corrupt corporations and unscrupulous individuals, however, those who rise to the top of this ruthless society have almost limitless power to exploit, suppress and silence the bulk of humanity who are still sucking on the ocean floor. Any kind of social welfare, universal healthcare, workers’ rights, anti-corruption activity or redistribution of wealth is instantly, mercilessly and decisively crushed in the name of virtuous market forces.

The three scenarios above are only examples of how modern dystopias might work; you should come up with your own, and I think it will be inevitable that as you set out the dark forces at work controlling this repressive society your heroes have to fight against, social and political parallels with our own or other cultures will become obvious to you, and your story will turn into a cautionary tale whether you conceived it as one or not. It will also become obvious that you cannot write a political dystopia without your own political views and biases being reflected in the setting (if you think this isn’t true, go read Rachel Swirsky’s ‘Scene from a Dystopia’ and we’ll talk again).

But I am of the opinion that dystopian fiction can also be among the most optimistic of stories, or at least can contain elements of heart-warming and reassuring detail. In the worst of circumstances, people are capable of pulling together, of showing human warmth, generosity and altruism in contrast to the paranoid, self-interested isolationism that totalitarian rulers would like to instill in their subjects. We don’t always do so, it’s true; nevertheless showing awareness of and highlighting the co-operative, socialized and community-spirited side of human nature is a deeply political act (see the companionable characters in ‘Avatar on the Belts’ or ‘Silence’, for example). This shouldn’t be the point of the story, or it turns into a cheap morality play, but observing human nature like this is itself a political act.

It’s hard to imagine a well-written dystopian science fiction story that is not deeply socio-political and speculative.