Peter S. Beagle was born in 1939 and raised in the Bronx, where he grew up surrounded by the arts and education: Both his parents were teachers, three of his uncles were world-renowned gallery painters, and his immigrant grandfather was a respected writer, in Hebrew, of Jewish fiction and folktales. As a child Peter used to sit by himself in the stairwell of the apartment building he lived in, staring at the mailboxes across the way and making up stories to entertain himself. Today, thanks to classics like The Last Unicorn, A Fine and Private Place, and “Two Hearts,” he is a living icon of fantasy fiction. In addition to his novels and over one hundred pieces of short fiction, Peter has written many teleplays and screenplays (including the animated versions of The Lord of the Rings and The Last Unicorn), six nonfiction books (among them the classic travel memoir I See By My Outfit), the libretto for one opera, and more than seventy published poems and songs. He currently makes his home in Oakland, California. His latest novel is Summerlong.
# There is one origin story for “The Story of Kao Yu” that I’ve never mentioned to anyone—even myself. I knew a lady long ago who was no pickpocket, no thief, no murderer, but for whom I would have come across the world—I did, more than once—to do her bidding, without the slightest issue of right or wrong ever raising its head. James Thurber ends one of his fairy tales with the moral, “Love is blind, but desire just doesn’t give a good goddamn…” As with Kao Yu himself, she was my only true experience of not giving a good goddamn. I miss her still.
Helena Bell lives and writes in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Her fiction has previously appeared in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, The Indiana Review, and Strange Horizons, among other places.
# “I’ve Come to Marry the Princess” began with the thought, Wouldn’t it be funny if a boy found a dragon egg, and instead of helping the boy save the kingdom, the dragon ate the boy in the end? Eventually I settled on the idea of setting it at the summer camp my brother and I went to as kids because, again, the thought of it amused me. But the core of it came from some advice that Joe Hill gave me at Clarion West about a completely different story. He’d suggested that I make a character do something really terrible, unforgivable even. That advice stayed with me, and I liked the idea of framing a story around an apology that needs to be given.
Brian Evenson is the author of a dozen books of fiction, most recently the story collection A Collapse of Horses and the novella The Warren. His story collection Windeye and novel Immobility were both finalists for a Shirley Jackson Award. His novel Last Days won the ALA-RUSA award for best horror novel of 2009, and his novel The Open Curtain was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an International Horror Guild Award. He is the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes as well as an NEA Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work has been translated into French, Italian, Greek, Spanish, Japanese, Persian, and Slovenian. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the Critical Studies Program at CalArts.
# I’d had the idea for “Smear” some time ago, stemming partly from Kelly Link’s terrific story “Two Houses,” partly from Guy de Maupassant’s “The Horla,” and partly from reading M. John Harrison’s and Samuel Delany’s work that describes body modification of starship pilots. I like too the idea of there being something we’re semiconscious of, something that’s there hovering just beyond perception or that might operate more along our neural pathways than out in the open. For such a being, if being is the right word for it, the distinction between a human mind and the artificial mind of a ship might not be as distinct as it would be for us, and we might perceive it only as a shift or torque in reality, always doubting whether anything was there at all.
Joseph Allen Hill is a writer based in Chicago. His work has appeared in Lightspeed, Liminal Stories, the Cosmic Powers anthology, and this anthology, which you are reading right now.
# I’ve always liked metafiction, from Looney Tunes to Italo Calvino to comic books proclaiming in bold-print narration that the superheroes will die if I don’t turn the page. It always gets me, no matter how corny or pretentious. Stories about stories are meaningful because our lives are made of stories. We tell ourselves stories about who we are and how the world works and what it is to exist and act in the world. I wrote “The Venus Effect” because I was exhausted by a real-life story. Let’s call it the police brutality story. The names change, the setting jumps around the United States, a few plot details get switched up, but it’s always the same structure and always the same ending. I imagine the police brutality story will play out at least a couple times between me writing this now and you reading this. I hope very much that I am wrong in this assertion, but history suggests that I will not be. It was this sense of inevitability that drove me to write the story, the slow, dull grind of knowing exactly what is going to happen and not being able to do anything. I wanted to capture that feeling of exhaustion and powerlessness. The story is about other things—who is and is not a part of society, respectability politics, the value of fiction in confronting real-world issues—but the core of it, I think, is that feeling, the agony of the inevitable.
N. K. Jemisin is the author of several novels, including The Fifth Season, which won the Locus and Hugo Awards (making her the first black author to win either award for best novel). Her short fiction and novels have also been nominated multiple times for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards and shortlisted for the Crawford and the Tiptree. Her speculative works range in genre from fantasy to science fiction to the undefinable; her themes include resistance to oppression, the inseverability of the liminal, and the coolness of Stuff Blowing Up. She is a member of the Altered Fluid writing group, and she has been an instructor for the Clarion and Clarion West workshops. She lives in Brooklyn, where in her spare time she is a biker and a gamer; she is also single-handedly responsible for saving the world from King Ozzymandias, her obnoxious ginger cat. Her essays and fiction excerpts are available at nkjemisin.com. Her newest novel, The Stone Sky, came out in August 2017.
# Back in 2014 or 2015, there was a debate about the H. P. Lovecraft bust that embodied the World Fantasy Award, and substantial discussion of just how much Lovecraft’s fear of “the other” informed his work. I’d read some Lovecraft a long while before, but somehow hadn’t realized that his “sinister hordes” were immigrants, poor people, and people of color like me. Once I saw it, though, I couldn’t unsee it. I started to notice Lovecraftian paranoia not just in his work but in the reactions of bigoted people in the everyday: the police officer who imagines that an unarmed black child is a terrifying monster; the doctor who believes his Latina patient can’t feel pain the way ordinary (white) human beings can; the parent who sees a trans child as an unnatural freak. I’m also well aware that despite the paranoid fantasies of Lovecraftian bigots, historically it’s marginalized people who have the most to fear from “the other”… yet we seem to manage without seeing every stranger on the street as a monster from beyond.
So then I got the idea to write a story about (basically) Cthulhu attacking New York City, as one does. And I decided that New York—the New York of my experience, which is filthy and “ethnic” and full of “perverts” and poor people and basically everything Lovecraft despised, by his own word—would tell the big C exactly where he could put his eldritch abomination. Maybe, just maybe, all the people Lovecraft hated, all us sinister hordes, are exactly what humanity needs in its direst hour. And maybe, just maybe, I could use Lovecraft’s own material to battle the ugliness he helped to foment in the fantasy zeitgeist. Plus: giant monster fight! Those are always fun.