H is for Hardcore Horror

by Peter Tennant

It’s an emotive term, and probably the first thing that comes to mind when you see those two words up there at the top of the page is the subgenre of ‘torture porn’, but of course there’s more to it than that. The idea behind the best of hardcore horror is not simply to portray violence in the most explicit and grotesque terms, to disgust the reader, but to deal with the raw material of horror, the terrible things that we all fear, in a way that is brutally honest, to write, as Joe Lansdale said of The Night They Missed the Horror Show, ‘a story that doesn’t flinch’.

Perhaps the first to codify the idea of extreme horror as a separate and artistically viable strand within the genre was the splatterpunk movement of the last years of the 20th Century. The term ‘splatterpunk’ was coined by American writer David J. Schow, and writers associated with this nebulous movement include talents as diverse as Lansdale, Clive Barker, Poppy Z. Brite, Jack Ketchum and Richard Laymon, though whether any of them would actually welcome the brand name is another matter. The idea was to get away from quiet horror, the suggestion inherent in much of the material then published that terrible things could only be implied rather than confronted head on. The splatterpunks didn’t want to be polite and apologetic, to smuggle horror in by the back door; they wanted to kick the front door down, drag us out into the street and rub our noses in the stuff. And if the name splatterpunk isn’t used much now, is even a term of disrepute for some, then at the same time I think it’s fair to say that the values the movement espoused, the idea of horror as explicitly violent and confrontational, have largely been absorbed by the genre’s mainstream practitioners.

Of course the depiction of extreme violence and inhumanity has always been an option for writers, with many of the finest exemplars from outside of the genre, as for instance Bataille’s Story of the Eye, Mirbeau’s The Torture Garden or Kafka’s In the Penal Colony. Such works ask us to confront the things which we usually turn away from or put out of mind.

Perhaps the seminal figure in this idea of a literature without boundaries was the Marquis De Sade, whose work was a far cry from the neutered portrayal presented in the film Quills. Sade’s great novels are sexually explicit, and in the most extreme ways, delving into the darkest corners of the human psyche and coming back with reports of fetishes and peccadilloes unimagined by most of us, and hand in glove with this is some of the most terrible violence ever committed to the page. But at the same time Sade is a revolutionary and social philosopher, his catalogues of atrocity a reaction to the Age of Reason and the prevailing philosophy of the noble savage. With his unapologetic and brutally explicit portrayal of the grossest offences against man and nature, Sade calls into question both the existence of a just God and the rights of the powerful and privileged to act as they wish without fear of reprisal.

Modern writers of horror fiction have followed a similar agenda of showing us the very worst in human nature by way of appealing to the best, and by doing so they endeavour to make real to us the suffering of others.

We all know that child abuse is a widespread problem. Some of us can even quote facts and figures. But it remains an abstraction all the same. Only that’s not possible when you read something like Jack Ketchum’s novel The Girl Next Door, a meticulously detailed and harrowing account of child abuse, one which shows how easy it is for others to become complicit through turning a blind eye, looking away, or worse still, holding the victim somehow culpable. Ketchum leaves us with no place to hide.

We all abhor racism, but it takes a story like Lansdale’s The Night They Missed the Horror Show to put us into the head of a bigot, to help us to understand how such people think and the ways in which they dehumanise others, and only by understanding can we ever hope to address the problem. Disgust alone, worthy as it may be, is useless.

And as far as disgust goes, at the moment a lot of us probably feel that way towards the financial elite, but it’s only when we confront the poster boy for Wall Street excess, Patrick Bateman in Bret Easton Ellis’ black comedy American Psycho, a man for whom everything, even human life, is a commodity with a price tag, that the disgust becomes focused, that it gains a human face and personality in lieu of a collection of statistics.

With the best of hardcore horror, disgust is not an end in itself. Rather, disgust is used as a means to an end. We are challenged to confront reality at its harshest and most brutal, to not flinch or turn away, but to see beyond the excesses to whatever root cause they are a symptom of. If you have a horror story that addresses social issues directly and along similar lines to these examples, then it may be something that TFF would be pleased to consider.

[You can read more of Peter Tennant’s thoughts at his personal blog, and reviews at Case Notes.]

G is for Gestalt

‘Gestalt’, as we endeavor to use the term here, can refer to the science fiction concepts relating to an alternative somatic existence, ‘special powers’ or alternative in/human form. Use of the word in this manner and for our purposes here, derive from Theodore Sturgeon’s sci-fi novel More Than Human where early protagonist ‘Lone’, who is a telepath, refers to himself as a ‘homo-gestalt’. Gestalt can be analysed through a socio-political lense on the basis that it presents a universe of inequality that transcends the sociological or economic advantages humanity can be either born with or attain. Further to the privilege an individual can receive from his/her background, such fiction presents a novum of physical or mental advantage beyond what we deem ‘natural’. While straightaway the graphic novels of Marvel and DC Comics perhaps come to mind, this can be far subtler than capes and muscles bulging beneath spandex. It might more simply be considered an examination of how fiction portrays post-human, or ‘more than human’ and subsequently, the societal and political implications of this.

Firstly, being more than human is not always appreciated by the fictional, yet on some level contemporarily reflective, society. While the X-Men each have a tragic back-story of abuse, disaffection and persecution, a better example of this might be the children which feature in John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids. They have to keep their ‘powers’ secret as such abilities would render them as ‘blasphemies’ in an unenlightened and intolerant religious community. The individuals repression of these abilities, or at least a wider examination of how normative society treats ‘the other’ is arguably a rich source of conflict for writers to explore in their narratives. Widening the net of this application, such exploration can be seen in novels like Dracula and Frankenstein. It might be suggested that the socio-political elements of both of these classics confer the deep fear of ‘the other’ and how such powers are both considered wrong and unnatural. Therefore hiding from society, or repressing what is natural, has significant thrust in such texts.

This analysis can be expanded further if you consider how sociologically and politically ‘the other’ is treated in society. Being different, a minority, or an ‘out group’ member has significant impact of life choices, chances and opportunities. Arguably, belonging to any stratified group that isn’t white, male, able-bodied, straight, cis and middle/upper-class, can empirically restrict life opportunity and similar obstacles faced by characters in literature who are ‘more than human’ can perhaps reflect this on a thematic level.

It might further be suggested that somatic super-powers and economic power/influence can be almost interchangeable if we analyse the texts unaffected by the writer’s sympathy, or lack of, for the protagonist(s). The powers tend to be born with, acquired by accident or somehow bestowed upon a character rather than something they earn and work towards. We could deliberate on what this implies about the wealthy and powerful in our society: royalty, those born into wealthy families or any form of inherited privilege. Does reader sympathy of literary characters with more than human abilities, legitimise or support the inherited power of contemporary society’s elites? Perhaps a more progressive liberal ideology would oppose the inheritance of such power, especially if we consider the incredibly wealthy backgrounds of politicians who go onto govern a society made-up predominantly of those without such privileges. However, champions of individualism might see these texts differently, instead considering them as a legitimisation of inherited power. Such narratives can subsequently exhibit an kind of vulgar libertarianism that propagates notions of privilege over fairness. The political message of a story submitted to The Future Fire is therefore an important component to demonstrate with coherence and accuracy. Perhaps especially so when concerning ‘gestalt’, as such narratives may be erroneously perceived as containing a subtext which endorses unfairness and inequality.

Even within texts that consider the ‘more than human’, there can exist an array of conflicts and issues that present opportunities for explorations in the narrative. Authors such as Ursula LeGuin, for example in her novel The Left Hand of Darkness, have been able to consider and explore alternative versions of life that transcend so much of what we consider normative regarding gender. Although dealing with aliens, the reader has to consider such texts as a mirror to his/her human norms and values. It demonstrates that ‘more than’ humanity or, by extension, the ‘different yet similar’ allows for self-reflection- another valuable tome for authors to address.

With a principal component of ‘gestalt’ being difference, there are arguably a wide variety of themes which could work within the ethic of The Future Fire. ‘Difference’ perpetually creates elements of distrust within society, consider again the ‘blasphemies’ within The Chrysalids or the way in which the writers of X-Men include political perspectives, usually negative, towards the ‘mutants’. Gestalt narratives might be created which perhaps include a correlation between the way in which characters of ‘homo-gestalt’ are treated by a fictional society and the way minority groups are stigmatised in contemporary society. For example, could the story be a reversal on the way disability is discussed in society? Perhaps a perspective on what is natural and unnatural could be explored, or further, an epistomological consideration of how society defines normality might also also work. Texts that attempt to deal with what might also be called Human 2.0 have been popular in science fiction, especially in light of scientific discoveries such as atomic power and genetic code. Therefore such narratives remain an interesting way through which to explore implications for such research, either good or bad. The vector between which science and society creates any number of socio-political discourses, and good stories play with these new and unexplored spaces.

F is for Feminist SF

I remember growing up in the ‘60s and ‘70s, looking out at the vital civil rights movement and imagining that I would one day live in a world where women were seen as equal partners in all things, a world where we didn’t suffer from a gender gap in terms of respect, power, airplay, or paychecks. I envisioned a world where gender wouldn’t matter, unless someone wanted to create a new baby. In contrast, I looked at stuff like Dick Tracey’s cool wrist communicator more as science-fantasy.

Yet today, videophones (ones that also check your e-mail, host videogames, live-stream TV and radio, and take better pictures than my single-purpose camera did back then) are commonplace, while equal pay for equal work is still a dream, and women and genderqueer people continue to suffer prejudice and disadvantages in nearly every legal and social aspect of life.

So, what does this have to do with science fiction and fantasy? Everything. As a race, homo sapiens is incredibly adaptive. With our technology and culture, we have found ways to survive, at least for a while, in every environment we’ve been to, even the vacuum of space. We have found ways to defeat terrible birth defects, viruses, bacteria, and injuries. We have even created more than a million ways to defeat boredom. But we have limits—we cannot create what we don’t dream first.

Over and over, I’ve seen our dreams made real in big and small ways. Not only do we, like Captain Kirk, have the ability to speak to our computers and be answered in plain English, but you can answer many cell phones by flipping them open just like his communicator. We can look inside a pregnant woman’s belly to see her baby-to-be has a heart condition and do surgery while the child is still in the womb. There are many, many examples of how, technologically, we are living in the future. But gender equality is not one of them.

Is it simply that it’s easier to create gadgets than change how people behave? I’m not convinced of that. People were changing human behavior long before the industrial revolution, after all. No, I think the problem lies elsewhere.

I look back at the literature I loved while I grew up, and I see many male authors, and not so many women. Of the women I do see, many, like Andre Norton and C. J. Cherryh were not published under names like Alice and Carolyn. I see male hero after male hero, and while there are a few fabulous female heroes, they remain (like female CEOs) in the distinct minority. Many, like Red Sonja, exist in the shadow of more famous males. To put it bluntly, I see a failure of vision regarding equality in gender even in the literature that I love and that helped me grow into an independent woman.

This isn’t just a matter of behavior in decades past. Less than two weeks ago, Charlie Stross asked, “what do you think is the most important novel of the past 10-and-a-bit years (published since January 1st 2000)?” and he states that although 55% of speculative fiction writers are female, less than 10% of the responses were novels by women. This prompted him to do another poll at http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/08/more-on-books.html asking only about female authors. One respondent admitted to not having read any female writers in the last ten years; a number of others just didn’t think to include them.

If we cannot knowingly respect female and male writers equally in the literature of the future and imagination, how can we expect more conservative parts of our society to provide equal economic opportunities?

In modern society, our writers and recording artists are our dreamers. I think it’s important to be aware that our visions of fictional futures and alternate worlds, both bright and dark, help shape the thoughts and dreams—and culture and technology—of our own present and future.

To me, writing as a feminist means imagining a world where all people—boys, girls, intersex, and genderqueer—have an equal chance to achieve their dreams and live the life they choose. It means imagining not just the goal, but the struggle to achieve that goal, and depicting one or the other in stories. Working for change isn’t easy, and we need role models for how to confront and undermine prejudice as much as we need visions of what a world without that prejudice might be like. (Besides, you need conflict to make a good story, and people who succeed against the odds make great heroes.)

My primary goal regarding my protagonists, however, is to write about interesting, believable, and likeable people regardless of their gender (or lack thereof). Because at the core, what feminism has always meant to me is that people are people, and gender is just one of the many things that, taken together, makes each of us unique.

E is for Eco-SF

It is hard to write good ecological science fiction.

This may sound paradoxical, because environmental catastrophe is very much in our cultural attention right now, for obvious reasons, and we often argue that warnings about the future are one of the most valuable things science fiction can do. Surely a science fiction story that takes us to task for our current self-destructive trajectory—preferably without offering a magical cure that doesn’t involve proactively cleaning up our act—would be exactly what TFF is looking for.

And yes, it would. But it is more difficult to write great eco-SF. I mean, it could be very easy to write disaster adventure stories involving some of the many documented symptoms of climate change, or other environmental mishap, in which the white, male, heterosexual, rich, educated, possibly military, heroes save the day (if not the world) in ways that perpetuate the worst stereotypes and the laziest political attitudes we have. (You’ve all seen The Day After Tomorrow or 2012, or if you haven’t—and good for you—you’ve seen the trailers and the reviews and know what I’m talking about.) None of that would be what we want.

Interestingly enough, most of the eco-SF themed stories we’ve published over the years have not been about climate change or global scale catastrophe (the cynical and lovely ‘Ephemeral Love’ is an exception), so much as about smaller examples of humanity’s dysfunctional relationship with our planet. Some involve environmental problems on other planets (‘Silent Song’, ‘Drown or Die’), others show individuals dealing with the impact of our hubris (‘Neap Tide’), or deciding to do something about it (‘Maryann Saves the World’).

So although we’d love to see more eco-SF, and we do feel that environmental concerns are among the most pressing topics that social-political speculative fiction can and should address, a good story needs to do more than pay lip service to this subject matter. And it needs to be inclusive and progressive in all socio-political areas it covers, not just confounding the reader’s expectations in one while conforming to lazy assumptions in all others.

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.

C is for Cyberpunk

Cyberpunk is often mischaracterized as being science fiction about computers and hackers. It is true that some of the best golden age cyberpunk contains the features identified by participants in a Twitter #Cyberpunkchat discussion in early 2011 as core to the genre: “science fictional setting; use of computer technology core to the plot (the ‘cyber’); preferably a dystopian or hyper-corporate society; protagonists who are anti-establishment rebels, activists, underdogs, or hackers (the ‘punk’).”[1] These are, as the group recognised, almost entirely features of William Gibson’s Sprawl novels rather than of any coherent genre. The editors of and contributors to the Mirrorshades cyberpunk anthology, published at the height of the cyberpunk craze in 1986, included many stories with no computer elements at all, and in some cases highly Weird or Fantastic rather than science fictional. (Indeed there are more computer tech stories in Rewired, the 2007 “post-cyberpunk” anthology, who claim to rebel against their cyberpunk roots, than in Mirrorshades.)

As defined by Sterling, cyberpunk is a movement in science fiction that was inevitable in, and perhaps technically restricted to, the 1980s. It combined the New Wave ethos of Ellison, Delaney, Moorcock and Ballard, with the surreal or psychedelic techno-literacy of Farmer, Dick and Pynchon. The Cyberpunks were a generation of writers who came of age in a decade that was science fictional (at least by the standards of all earlier generations): personal computers made their way into every household, portable communication devices became commonplace, electronic communication entered the public consciousness; all of these things were a source of great excitement (techno-fetishism), but also of social vertigo, fear of rapid change, and a certain anarchic, revolutionary danger. Most importantly, they were obviously going to change the world, whether you believed that would turn the old power structures upside down in favour of a democratic utopia, or that it would destroy everything. (Obviously it has done neither, because the old élites, the capitalist rich and the privileged, are still in power, but it has also changed everything.)

Whether we live in a cyberpunk or a postcyberpunk world, therefore, writing about these changes, whether they be informatic, biological, cybernetic, economic or social-political requires real foresight into the way the modern world works and the way we interact with it. If you have a streetwise sympathy for the underdog, a penchant for questioning conservative mores, the vision to extrapolate these changes into the future, the energy for a rock n’ roll lifestyle, and the courage to question every level of your perceived reality, then you are probably a cyberpunk, and you will probably write the kind of speculative fiction that The Future Fire is looking for.

---

[1] The consensus was that cyberpunk literature or film needs to have some elements of: science fictional setting; use of computer technology core to the plot (the “cyber”); preferably a dystopian or hyper-corporate society; protagonists who are anti-establishment rebels, activists, underdogs, or hackers (the “punk”). In addition to these fairly basic requirements, it was generally felt that certain settings and flavours helped set the cyberpunk theme for a piece, including: “used world”, graffiti, garbage, derelict neighborhoods, music, young protagonists, body art/modification, home-made/modded tech. Likewise some genres and settings are so strong that even if the story otherwise fit the criteria defined above, they would overshadow it and not really feel like cyberpunk (e.g. space opera: Alien and Firefly/Serenity both have cyberpunk elements, but we don’t really call them cyberpunk shows per se). It was also recognized that a lot of these features are part of our consciousness as a direct result of the “canonical” cyberpunk text, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, and this is not necessarily a weakness of this definition. (Carlisle 2011)

B is for Borgesian

Google’s doodle on the 24th of August celebrating Borges’ 112th birthday greatly pleased me since I have always felt the Argentinian writer never got the credit he was due. The fact that he never won the Nobel prize confounded me, just as it did the author himself: “Not granting me the Nobel Prize has become a Scandinavian tradition; since I was born they have not been granting it to me,” he once remarked.

I was first introduced to the works of Jorge Luis Borges during an ‘Interactive Narrative’ module in Trinity College Dublin. I was blown away by the required reading text of ‘The Garden of Forking Paths,’ not just for its experimental narrative or its magical realism (my favourite genre back then) but for how the story eerily encompassed so many issues I was concerned with at the time. I got chills while I read a reference to the Irish historical period I was researching: the description of Richard Madden, the “Irishman in service of England” in the year 1916 of all years; one of the most turbulent in my country’s history, one that set in motion the long, violent and tragic process of Ireland gaining independence from Britain.

The mention of Dr Yu Tsun’s ‘resources,’ among them a red and a blue pencil – for years ‘my’ signature writing implements, ones that always seemed to evoke interest from others for some reason. I knew these parallels were sheer coincidences; however a small part of me liked to think that I was co-creating a sort of collaborative fiction with the deceased writer, that there was a sort of hive mind at work; not constricted by time, just like the forking paths he described in the story. It was as though one of those different yet equal paths through the networks of time had found itself in me, the reader…

After reading ‘The Garden of Forking Paths,’ such improbable and delusional notions seemed somehow plausible. Only the best fiction could induce such an immersive response in a reader; but for speculative fiction, the barre is raised even higher, as the author has to present unreal concepts convincingly. No better writer than Borges to successfully accomplish this however; anyone who can formulate the universe into hexagonal library rooms (as he did in ‘The Library of Babel’) is clearly adept at presenting the most complex ideas in a succinct and compelling way.

These days I am somewhat more objective about my love for Borgesian literature. Borges’ legacy is so widely encompassing it is hard to quantify its numerous and varied facets; but here are the areas that stand out for us in his vast contribution to literature:

Magical Realism and Surrealism

Borges’ work is full of monsters, alternate histories and fantasies, surreal stories that undermine traditionalist structures by their very eschewing of realism. Even if on the surface they may seem to be pure fantasy, Borges stories often twist reality (as in many entries in The Book of Imaginary Beings or A Universal History of Infamy), subvert it to comic effect, or warp reality in an absurdist manner, creating a new world which is then taken deadly seriously, literally, and in doing so reveals the absurdity of our own socially-constructed reality.

Experimental narratives

Borges is known for his postmodern story structures; meta-fictions that address issues of writing, art, creativity and lying, implying that reality itself is as constructed as our stories and myths. He writes pieces that illustrate the social and historical contingency of writing, such as ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quijote’ (a theme he also addresses in the essay ‘Kafka and his Precursors’, further blurring the distinction between fiction and criticism).

Other experiments with narrative form include ‘The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero’, a story disguised as the précis of a novel (also involving revolutionary Ireland!), or hoaxes such as his fake book reviews, which combine creation with the mischievous and postmodern wit that was his particular genius. If inventing stories is a form of lying, then what greater lie than to pretend not to be creating a story at all?

Bibliophilia

It is hardly surprising that Borges was a librarian. His love of books and learning is omnipresent in his writing, with motifs such as the library (‘The Library of Babel’), the encyclopaedia (‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’) recurring with reassuring regularity. There is a circularity in a story about books destined to be printed in books, written by a man who will never read them by himself (Borges became blind mid-way through his career), but whose whole life was surrounded by them. Almost every novel, story, or film centered around a mysterious book or based in an antiquarian bookseller feels Borgesian to me.

Borgesian stories in 'The Future Fire'

Given the great man’s range, we should think a bit about what would make a short story written today “Borgesian”. Recent authors who deserve this soubriquet might include mischievous and postmodern writers such as Umberto Eco and Salman Rushdie, cheeky and not afraid to be clever, always confounding expectations; writers such as Isabelle Allende and Ursula K. Le Guin who have adopted the sheer beauty and poetry of writing as core to everything they do; authors who exhibit the wicked inventiveness and bibliophilia in their twisted works, like Jonathan Carroll, Neil Gaiman and Clive Barker; absurdist fantasists like Rhys Hughes; and writers of mercilessly mocking, political meta-narratives like Joanna Russ. Many other authors who work in the genres of magical realism, surrealism, postmodern/metafiction, fantasy have drawn from the infinite library of Borges’ inspiration. These writers have helped to make our reception of Borges what it is today: as he himself said in ‘Kafka and his Precursors’, “every writer creates his precursors.”

At another level, every author who lets their writing, while beautiful and exciting, reflect an undiluted political sensibility, could be deemed ‘Borgesian.’ Although Jorge Luis Borges himself was a social conservative, and we at TFF tend to a more progressive and speculative approach, his sensitivity to the social and political relevance in all stories, without needed to slap the reader in the face with it, is something we admire and encourage.

If you have written something “Borgesian” in any of the senses above; or if you want to try something unusual in structure or format or medium; or if you want to write a story that is disguised as a book review, as an exchange of blog posts, as a social media phenomenon; or if you want to publish a fake review of a nonexistent book in a reviews blog or a nonfiction section... Call us. I mean it—we are especially fond of this type of thing. (It’ll have to be good, as everything does, but we really are willing to be playful.)

A is for Alternate History

There are at least two traditions of Alternate History in speculative fiction. One, a very old genre sometimes known as “What If”, is perhaps the closest to “respectable” scifi, involving a parallel universe in which, at some pivotal moment in our own past, some perfectly realistic event occurred to change history. Fast forward to some time around the present (or stay in the past) and watch a completely different world unfold to the one we know. This may involve events such as the Roman Empire not converting to Christianity (and/or not falling), China discovering the New World before Columbus, the Victorians establishing information technology of a Babbage/Lovelace design, the American Civil War or Second World War turning out differently than in our timeline, or such events.

Another tradition, which has recently become very popular, is a less “realistic” take on alternative histories, typified by Steampunk and certain flavours of Paranormal Romance. In the worlds created by this sort of story, a historical period is embued with magic or technology or alien intervention or other fantastic powers. In this tradition, there is usually less concern for realism than in the “What If” genre; not only historical events may be changed by the new interference, but social conventions, religious attitudes, language and idiom, etc., even in quite anachronistic ways. As might be expected, these stories tend to be more wild fantasy adventures, rather than clever nerdy historical explorations.

Tellingly, alternate history fiction writing is sometimes used as a technique for exploring history in academic writing (I have read more than one appendix to a serious book on ancient history imagining that Anthony and Cleopatra won at Actium, or the Greeks fielded weapons designed by Archimedes). Whether realistic or fantastic, alternative histories allow the writer to strip away the random, incidental details that are the skin of a story and look closely at the important bones and guts beneath: the social and political influences on and repercussions of events; the way people behave and interact; issues of sex, race, class and other inequalities that alien times and places can throw an unforgiving light upon.

So in steampunk stories women may play prominent roles in ways they never could in our Victorian period; a story set in a world without a Roman Empire might feature openly queer protagonists centuries before such was possible in our timeline; a different history of the New World could lead to Africans interacting with native Americans without the genocidal brutality inflicted on both sides by the descendants of Europeans. Or they might not, but because historical details become the choice of the writer, they can be highlighted in ways that tell us about our own inequalities, prejudices and crimes.

Good speculative fiction stories can cast light on our own world by showing a world that is better, or a world that is worse (or a world that is better in some ways and worse in others): either way it should show us how we need to improve our own.

Interview with Illustrator Robin E. Kaplan

Robin E. Kaplan graduated from art college with a children's book portfolio and has been working in that capacity ever since. Since April 2008, she has been working with the award-winning www.MrsP.com, illustrating classic kids' stories. In early 2010 her first book, "The Last Keyhole," was published with Createspace, a gothic picture book for children who'd rather be friends with monsters than frightened of them. Robin's latest book, "Spartacus and the Circus of Shadows," written by Molly E Johnson, is being released by Rainbow Press on October 1, 2011.

Robin created illustrations for "Neap Tide," a beautiful yet gruelling story of survival and humanity's effect on our environment. She also worked on "Silent Song" a story in our Feminist issue which focuses on how we can deal with adversity while taking others into consideration, and in the process averting violence and learning to overcome prejudice. View the beautiful cover illustrations for "Neap Tide" and "Silent Song."

The Future Fire: I am struck by the range of styles in your work. How do you select one for a particular piece?

Robin E. Kaplan: Thank you! Actually that range of styles makes it easier for me to start a piece, because each one is for a different audience, and knowing my audience is the first step in my visualization of a project. The flat, saturated, textured cut-out style I use primarily for children's books because it lets me play with very stylized shapes and lets me simplify space and lighting so that the character's faces and personalities get more attention. For stories like Neap Tide and Silent Song, the fine detail adds a little more realism and gives me more to work with in terms of lighting and space, since the stories are more nuanced.

Is your art influenced by socio-political considerations?

Absolutely. Art has to be honest, even when its speculative, which means it has to be true to the way I see the world. I'm not ashamed of being a feminist and strongly supporting queer rights. My own world view colors my work, and an awareness of certain—I wouldn't presume to say all—social issues and political discussions is one of the hues I work in.

On the other hand, in order to be honest I also try to keep certain political messages away from my work, since there are things I do not have a solid enough view on to express comfortably, and while I may work some of that out through art, it’s not my natural habitat. I'm more interested in just showing the world the way I see it that is, colored by the issues which have always surrounded me. For instance, I do a lot of 'Steampunk' work that uses a Victorian motif, but the characters portrayed are primarily women doing interesting things outside of home (such as field research) and may be any ethnicity, which is quite contrary to the actual social clime of the era! The point of this isn't to rewrite history or deny the horrors of Imperialism, but to address the modern audience for this art and fashion movement, and to create another world where perhaps things had gone far differently. That's the power of speculation, and speculative fiction is at its best when it addresses at least some socio-political issues—which I'm sure isn't news to this magazine and its readers!

What role do you think illustration can play in affecting change?

I think illustration helps make a world more real to people. We see propaganda, photo journalism, political cartoons, satirical drawings—artwork can be used to tow the line or to dissent, and that's very profound because what artwork does primarily is bridge one person's imagination to another—or to everyone's. While I would never feel comfortable using my artwork to make a political point on the level of campaigning for a particular party, person, bill, etc, I believe that improving society is something that imagery can do, and adding to that which is good, kind, accepting, curious, sophisticated, multi-faceted—well, my list of positive attributes can go on, but what I mean is that instead of simply escaping into a fantasy world, speculative fiction actually provides a place for us to try out our deals, hopes, irritants, and our fears. Illustration helps make a visual reality out of abstract concepts.

Could you describe your approach to illustrating the two TFF stories you worked on? Did this approach differ to your other commissions at all?

One of the stories was set in Vietnam, the other in Iceland, two places I've never been but which hold a keen interest for me—and how could they be more different! So first off I researched the places a bit. Both stories had a strong sense of place. I thought it was also clever to use such extreme locations that do seem alien to many Western readers. Next of course I had to choose two scenes to sketch, the most visually arresting moments in the story that wouldn't give too much away but did supply enough information that the illustrations would be very specific to the story. That meant I needed to do a second, close reading of the pieces. I'm very visual when I read, and since I'm seeing everything as a tableau just looking at black-and-white words on the page, that gives me a place to start, at least, with the sketches. I think it’s important to lay-in color at this stage because I'm very color-oriented and color is what makes a piece stand out or look like a mess. For ‘Neap Tide,’ I wanted very misty blue colors, for the feel of the piece. For ‘Silent Song,’ things needed to look very cold, but have pockets of warmth, just like the story, and of course the Aurora Borealis features heavily so I knew I was going to work with those colors! What a treat.

What advice would you give to budding illustrators?

For your artwork: use reference, draw thumbnails before a finished drawing and observe everything. The more you know, the more you can show people in your imagery.

For your career: research the markets that exist and submit your work accordingly. It can be so scary to look at a whole store full of books and wonder how you can get hooked up painting some of those covers, but it’s much more accessible to look through a database like Duotrope and read submissions guidelines for the publishers and art directors who could hire you. Understanding how publishing works makes it much easier to build a portfolio, and easier to know what to do with it once you have it!

What are your hopes for your career in the future?

I really hope to be doing more book work ― even if books begin to exist in multimedia forms to be read on digital tablets instead of pulpy print ― and to be writing and illustrating some of my own projects, as well as helping bring other people's stories to life. My latest book, with Raintown Press and written by Molly E Johnson, is coming out on October 1st, 2011. It is called "Spartacus and the Circus of Shadows" and is a middle-grade novel with some unforgettable characters and a fantastic finale. I hope it’s the first of many, and intend to see that future out myself.

Thanks everyone!

Find out more about Robin's children's illustration and other illustration work.

Artist Feature: Rachel H. White

As part of our celebrations of the re-opening of TFF to fiction submissions in the next few weeks, we're going to be running features of some of our fine artists and illustrators. We kick off with a brief look at some of the work of Rachel H. White, who has blogged about her experience of illustrating for TFF at Odes to a Dark Future.

Rachel, who also writes dark fantasy and is working on a graphic novel, has illustrated three stories for us in the past (including the image we used as the cover for TFF 2009.16), and has displayed an impressive range of styles.

In issue 13, she illustrated the whimsical and inventive, almost childlike fantasy story with a very dark twist, Suburban Alchemist: her artwork was appropriately simple and storybook-like, but tellingly reflected the dark edge of the work. (Click through to see in full size; it really is worth it.)

Then in issue 16 she illustrated Galatea's Stepchildren, a dark and highly allegorical cyberpunk story of artificial people, abuse and the processes of (de)humanization, and in the process produced what is one of my favorite pieces of TFF artwork ever (which we used not only as the issue cover but also as an inside centrefold).

Finally in issue 19 she illustrated a rollicking scifi adventure story, Daughters of Hralln (it is this story she describes in her blog post linked to above). For this piece, which involved sumptuously described alien huntresses on a frigid world, she turned to a more cartoon-like style perfectly suited to the material.

We all look forward to seeing more of Rachel's art in future issues of TFF.

TFF relaunch and guest blog series

Those of you who follow this blog are probably aware that The Future Fire has been on publishing hiatus for just over a year. We always said we'd reopen to fiction submissions in 2011, and so we shall a little later this summer. In the run up to the relaunch (which will be announced very loudly here, on Twitter and via various other channels) we have a couple of events planned.

1. A blog series: in the 26 days running up to the reopening of submissions, we (and several very cool guest bloggers) will post a short piece per day addressing one subgenre, theme or topic that we'd like to see in the TFF slushpile in the future. (As our guidelines have always made clear, we don't discriminate by genre or content, but only by (a) quality and (b) social-political relevance.) Hopefully these posts will help to make this point more clearly, and will provoke some discussion.
2. Some book giveaways: a couple of generous authors or publishers have made copies of their recent books available for a giveaway in honour of our reopening. We'll find some excuse to get them to a deserving home. If anyone else would like contribute titles or objects, and raise some profile for the magazine as well as themselves, please give me a shout.
3. Featured artists/contributors: the unsung heroes of TFF have always been our artists. It's shameful how we underpay them, and it's heroic how great the artwork they produce is. We'd love to feature some of our favourite artists' work and send adoring eyeballs their way. If you have any ideas for people/works to feature, leave a comment. (Which TFF art has impressed you the most over the years?)
4. Invite guest co-editors: as I hinted a few months ago, we're also going to put out a call for guest co-editors (more on this in a post here closer to the time). The idea will be for people to suggest a themed issue or anthology, and we'll pick one every now and then to collaborate with on making that issue a reality. Themes need to fit with the general ethos of TFF (see above), but we're open to all suggestions.

If anyone wants to take part in any of the above, or has other ideas for celebrating/publicising/expanding our relaunch, we'd love to hear about it. (Comment here, or tweet me, or find the email addresses on the website.)

The Russ Pledge: favourite science fiction by women

(Blog response to Nicola Griffiths: Taking the Russ Pledge.)

I've occasionally felt the need to answer the question, "Who are your favourite authors?" or "What are your favourite science/speculative fiction novels/stories?" I don't have a record of having answered this recently, but my impression is that a large proportion of my responses are women authors or books/stories authored by women. Here is my answer today, focusing (as per the Russ Pledge) on women who write scifi and speculative fiction (focusing a little more on science fiction than fantasy, but not shying away from the gray area between).

In no particular order (and with no claim to completeness):

• Octavia Butler's Fledgling (a vampire novel, but definitely shows a scifi mentality); 'Speech Sounds' is one of the best short stories about what it means to be human that I have ever read
• Nancy Kress, Beggars in Spain is a thrillingly creative social-sf novel, and stories like 'Inertia' are an unflinching look at biological engineering and how humans adapt
• Ekaterina Sedia's wonderful The Alchemy of Stone is probably considered fantasy, but it's really steampunk science fiction with an emphasis on human (and created) expertise and craftsmanship
• Tananarive Due: 'Like Daughter' (in the Dark Matter anthology) is a particularly heartbreaking story about cloning and the confusion between genetic and personal identity
• Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover novels (one of my earliest introductions to overtly strong women and alternative sexualities in future-of-humanity science fiction)
• Nisi Shawl: the stories in Filter House reinvented my idea of what speculative fiction should be (and do)
• Ursula Le Guin's Rocannon's World, Planet of Exile, City of Illusion etc.: powerful exploration of human settlements in an alien future and the real implications of science fictional technologies
• Roz Kaveney's short fiction, especially 'A Wolf to Man'
• Nalo Hopkinson: can anyone remind me the title of a short story I now can't find about a man and a woman who wear suits that allow them to feel each other's experiences and have sex?
• Joanna Russ, The Female Man, How to Suppress Women's Writing
• Julie Czerneda, Survival (haven't read the rest of the trilogy yet)
• Jennifer Maria Brissett, 'Nasmina's Black Box' (again, might look like fantasy, but a story about human creation--and destruction--and full of gadgets and dreams)
• Suzette Elgin, Native Tongue (real hard social-science fiction, with linguistics as the science)
• Vandana Singh: speculative fiction that avoids most of the Anglo-american clichés and boundaries of the genre
• Elizabeth Vonarburg, Chroniques du Pays des Mères, and the short story 'L'oiseau de cendres'; powerfully imagined, unromantic stuff
• Mary Rosenblum, 'Search Engine' (low-life cyberpunk political thriller)
• Therese Arkenberg, 'Drown or Die' (when we terraform another world, do we change it or ourselves?)