Catherynne M. Valente is the New York Times best-selling author of over thirty works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, Radiance, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making (and the four books that followed it). She is the winner of the Andre Norton, Tiptree, Eugie Foster Memorial, Mythopoeic, Rhysling, Lambda, Locus, Romantic Times’ Critics Choice, and Hugo Awards and the Prix Imaginales. She has been a finalist for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with a small but growing menagerie of beasts, some of which are human.
# “The Future Is Blue” came from a fairly simple assignment: Jonathan Strahan asked me to write a story about global warming, about the rising sea levels and how we would live in the new world they will almost certainly create for us, for an anthology called Drowned Worlds. I turned the idea over in my mind for several months and kept returning to two things: a line I’d had in my notebook for about five years, and the idea that we would live as we always have, with the same dramas and shortsightedness and lonely children and longing for entertainment above almost all other things, only there would be much, much fewer of us and we would be sea-bound. The line was, “When I grow up, I want to be the Thames.” And the idea became Garbagetown. I’ve always been fascinated with the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, in part because it sounds like something out of a children’s book, but it is heartbreakingly real, a roving patch of garbage in the ocean the size of Texas. And how much bigger will it become when coastal cities are inundated? How much will it be a testament to everything we had and threw away? If I was going to write a story about the ruin of our world, I couldn’t think of a better place to set it than on top of all our flotsam and jetsam, full of humans doing the same stupid and sublime things they’ve always done, the same tribal foolishness, the same hoarding, the same extremes of violence and revenge, the same fear of change and yearning for it.
I’d intended to explore Garbagetown in a third-person point of view, describing the world as much as the characters. But Tetley’s voice took over, and her first line, “My name is Tetley Abednego and I am the most hated girl in Garbagetown,” demanded to be left in charge of everything. I couldn’t let go of that line, of the question it asked—when the world has already ended, what can a person do that is worse than everything that’s already happened? And so it was her voice, her inexplicable cheerfulness, her crime, her punishment, and a child whispering that he wanted to become the Thames (appropriately, all clinging together like floating detritus of the mind) that I followed through a beautiful and horrible world of half-understood rubbish, which is, naturally, a perfect descriptor of the world at any time period. Beautiful and horrible and full of half-understood rubbish. That seems unlikely to ever really change. In “The Future Is Blue,” it just becomes literal. How we will live if the seas take back the land will be only different in setting, because we are tragic animals in the end, and the seed of our downfall is buried deep in our nature, never to be entirely thrown away, along with teabags and spent candles and old earrings and advertising circulars and kerosene cans…
Genevieve Valentine is the author of Mechanique, The Girls at the Kingfisher Club, Persona, and Icon. Her short fiction has appeared in over a dozen best-of-the-year anthologies, and she has written Catwoman for DC Comics. Her nonfiction and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, The A.V. Club, NPR.org, and elsewhere.
# A lot of things found their way all at once into “Everyone from Themis Sends Letters Home”; some of them were concerns I knew I had, and some of them, as usual, are obvious only in retrospect. As someone who imagines herself to be a curmudgeon with a poor track record of correspondence, I didn’t know how interested I was in the epistolary form, and how it affects the reading experience, until I started writing this story.
Greg van Eekhout has so far published six novels whose audiences range from adult to middle grade. His most recent work is the Daniel Blackland trilogy, beginning with California Bones, a modern-day fantasy about wizards who gain powers by eating the fossilized remains of extinct magical creatures. Upcoming work includes a middle-grade novel about dogs in space. Find him at writingandsnacks.com.
# Among the biggest influences on my work are the crappy things I grew up on. Fast food. Hanna-Barbera cartoons. Corner convenience stores. Shopping malls. Hardly a Bradburian childhood to mine for material. Nevertheless, I keep coming back to the extruded product of my youth and examining what it turned me into and what about it is interesting, valuable, mythological, magical. When I was asked to write a science fiction story for an anthology inspired by the music of the awesome Canadian rock trio Rush (who never recorded extruded product, who are not crappy, who are in fact, as I said, awesome), I immediately thought of their song “Subdivisions,” which evokes the stultifying existence of suburbia. The trick was writing something that would not only appeal to Rush fans but would also speak to people who hate Rush, or are indifferent to Rush, or have never even heard of Rush. These people exist. I can’t even. The other challenge was to write something more than just a fan letter to my favorite band, but rather to make a statement of personal concern to me. So I wrote about extruded food product, social status, pets, commercial real estate development, quests, and friendship. For research I looked to Tempest, the video game featured in the early-’80s MTV video for “Subdivisions.” I got the high score because hardly anybody else had played the game in a while.
Alexander Weinstein is the director of the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and the author of the short story collection Children of the New World (2016). He is the recipient of a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, and his fiction has been awarded the Lamar York, Gail Crump, Hamlin Garland, and New Millennium Prizes. He is an associate professor of creative writing at Siena Heights University.
# “Openness” was a story that took three years to write. The idea for the psychic technology came quite quickly. I was on a crowded bus in Boston, and I suddenly thought of how useful/horrifying it would be if we could project our likes/dislikes/preferences onto a visual aura around our bodies. You could look across a room and know that a stranger enjoyed Tom Waits, or hated cats, or was originally from Maine, and in turn you could psychically message people who shared your interests. So the technology of the story was fully formed, but I couldn’t yet place its human conflict. For my stories to feel successful they need the human element, so the technology becomes backgrounded (and part of the setting) and the humanity of the characters is foregrounded. Since I didn’t yet have this element, the story was put on the back burner.