It was about two years later, as I was going through a breakup with a woman I loved dearly, that the human element of the story took shape. The breakup dealt with putting up emotional walls—and as we were navigating this, I suddenly understood how the psychic technology of layers could work in the story as a metaphor for the emotional barriers that arise in a romantic relationship. This became the central theme of “Openness,” which explores the way in which we can retract our “layers” from those closest to us. Once I had this element, I was able to start drafting the story. As for the idea of “total openness,” I’m fascinated by the question of how much we share of ourselves with our romantic partners and our ability to be compassionate for our partners’ flaws and their most deeply held secrets.
Nick Wolven‘s fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, and various other magazines and anthologies. He’s particularly interested in near-future science fiction with a strong flavor of social commentary, not because he thinks anyone benefits from the commentary but because he’s so often bemused by society. His favorite authors in the science fiction genre are Samuel Delany, Margaret Atwood, and Kim Stanley Robinson. Wolven has a shabby-looking, sporadically updated blog at nickthewolven.com. He’s on Twitter, rarely, as @nickwolven. He lives in New York City with his family.
# A political spoof like “Caspar D. Luckinbill…” is too easily spoiled with explication. I’ll say only that I think there’s a natural affinity between science fiction and satire, since both depend in some sense on the art of exaggeration. Perhaps I can venture an exaggeration of my own, then, and say that science fiction sets out to make the strange seem ordinary—or anyway, plausible—while good satire often succeeds at making the ordinary seem strange. When the two are brought together, the effect can be dizzying. As Vonnegut reminds us, we all now and then come unstuck in time, unsure how we got to be where we are, dreading where we seem to be going. Nothing gives me this sense of being out of joint, out of place, and out of workable options like today’s multimedia blizzard of ads, fads, and admonitions.
Caroline M. Yoachim lives in Seattle and loves cold, cloudy weather. She is the author of dozens of short stories, which have appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and Lightspeed, among other places. Her debut short story collection, Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World and Other Stories, came out in August 2016. For more about Caroline, check out her website at carolineyoachim.com.
# I have terrible seasonal allergies, and for about a year I got allergy shots a couple times a week in hopes of reducing my symptoms. Allergy shots increase people’s tolerance to an allergen by injecting them with gradually increasing doses of whatever it is they are allergic to. After getting an allergy shot, you have to sit in the waiting room of the clinic for thirty minutes, just in case you have a serious anaphylactic reaction. Local reactions (giant itchy welts) on the arm where they’ve injected the allergen are quite common. “Welcome to the Medical Clinic at the Interplanetary Relay Station | Hours Since the Last Patient Death: 0” was inspired by the many hours I spent waiting in a medical clinic with itchy arms.
E. Lily Yu received the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2012. Her short fiction appears in a variety of venues, from McSweeney’s and Boston Review to Clarkesworld, Tor.com, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Uncanny, as well as multiple best-of-the-year anthologies. Her stories have been finalists for the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, Locus, and World Fantasy Awards.
# “The Witch of Orion Waste and the Boy Knight” paced my mind for days before pouring itself onto paper one March afternoon in a coffee shop decked in War of the Worlds kitsch. Conscious inspirations for this story include Richard Siken’s “Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out,” Norman Rockwell’s Boy Reading Adventure Story, Connie Converse’s “Man in the Sky,” an illustrated edition of “The Red Shoes” in Chinese that terrified me as a child, a dragon borrowed from a Patricia McKillip novel, and a long list of books on family systems, attachment theory, and insight meditation. This is not a complete inventory, since good stories, like thieves, rifle their writer’s pockets and snap up all kinds of unconsidered trifles of life and mind.
In a sense, I wrote “The Witch of Orion Waste…” from a loving dissatisfaction with all of the aforementioned sources. For centuries we have insisted on punishing, on the one hand, Ladies of Shalott and Elaines of Astolat and girls who would dance in red shoes or ride as knights, or demanding, on the other, bottomless forgiveness and patience from wronged women, in the pattern of Griselda, Penelope, and more recently the second half of Lemonade. However pleasing each individual tale, the body of work as a whole, in constantly retreading these narrative paths, has worn them into a deep labyrinth, whose end remains suffering or death. I have written one way out.
Notable Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories of 2016
ANDERS, CHARLIE JANE
Reliable People. Web Conjunctions: Conjunctions: 67, Other Aliens online supplement, November
BARNES, STEVEN
Fifty Shades of Grays. Lightspeed (People of Colour Destroy Science Fiction! special issue), June
BIRD, COURTNEY
The Diamond Girl. Fairy Tale Review, 2016
BOSKOVICH, DESIRINA
The Voice in the Cornfield, the World Made Flesh. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September/October
CASTRO, ADAM-TROY
Four Haunted Houses. Nightmare, September
CELT, ADRIENNE
Big Boss Bitch. ZYZZYVA, Fall
CLARK, P. DJeLi
A Dead Djinn in Cairo. Tor.com, May
Things My Mother Left Me. Fantasy (People of Colour Destroy Fantasy! Special Issue), December
DOCTOROW, CORY
The Adventure of the Extraordinary Rendition. Astro Noise: A Survival Guide for Living Under Total Surveillance, ed. Laura Poitras (Whitney Museum of American Art)
EL-MOHTAR, AMAL
Seasons of Glass and Iron. The Starlit Wood, ed. Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe (Saga)
EVENSON, BRIAN
Click. A Collapse of Horses (Coffee House)
No Matter Which Way We Turned. People Holding…, May
GILMAN, CAROLYN IVES
Touring with the Alien. Clarkesworld, April
GOSS, THEODORA
Red as Blood and White as Bone. Tor.com, May
HALBACH, SHANE
O What Freedom, This Great Steel Cage. Analog, May
HEADLEY, MARIA DAHVANA
See the Unseeable, Know the Unknowable. Lightspeed, September
HICKS, MICAH DEAN
The Carpenter and the Beast of Teeth. Territory, Issue II—Underworlds
HOFFMAN, ADA
The Scrape of Tooth and Bone. GigaNotoSaurus, February
HOFFMAN, ALICE
Love Never Ending. Faerie, Spring
HOPKINSON, NALO
Inselberg. Drowned Worlds, ed. Jonathan Strahan (Solaris)
IRVINE, ALEX
Number Nine Moon. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January/February
JEMISIN, N. K.
Red Dirt Witch. Fantasy (People of Colour Destroy Fantasy! special issue), December
JONES, RACHAEL K.
Charlotte Incorporated. Lightspeed, February
KING, STEPHEN
Cookie Jar. VQR Online, May
KOSMATKA, TED
The Stone War. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May/June
LARSON, RICH
Carnivores. Strangers Among Us, ed. Susan Forest and Lucas K. Law (Laksa Media Groups)