▪ “Variations on a Theme from Turandot” began in 2010, when I saw a full production of Turandot for the first time. I was enchanted by the characters and the music but dismayed by more or less the entire third act. My first instinct was to write a fix-it fic, the kind of thing that could go up on Archive of Our Own (AO3). But the more I worked on sketching out my ideas, the more I realized that there were more layers to them. I needed Liù not just to grow a backbone but to realize she was in an opera and to enter something very timey-wimey and meta. The questions I was tackling with this fic were so big that in 2010 I couldn’t quite work out where to start.
In 2013 the story idea was still itching in my head. Having some time off school between degrees, I set aside a few weeks and dived into all of the Turandot scholarship I could find, as well as a musicological biography of Puccini. (I would recommend the paper “Turandot’s Victory,” by Jack M. Balkin, as a starting point.) This led me, finally, to a very clean-looking first draft.
This was already the most careful planning and research I had ever put into a short story, but it was only the start of a long process of further revision. With every personal rejection and rewrite request I found even more layers that needed to be added in, including the hesitant relationship between the two sopranos in the “real” world and all the characterization of the Prince, whose interiority I had been actively avoiding at first. I consider the finished story one of the finest things I’ve ever written.
N. K. Jemisin is the first author in the genre’s history to win three consecutive best novel Hugo Awards, all for her Broken Earth trilogy. Her work has also won the Nebula, Locus, and Goodreads Choice Awards. Her speculative works range 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 has been a reviewer for the New York Times Book Review, an instructor for the Clarion and Clarion West writing workshops, and a writer for the comic book Green Lantern: Far Sector. In her spare time she is a gamer and a gardener, and she is single-handedly responsible for saving the world from King Ozzymandias, her dangerously intelligent ginger cat, and his phenomenally destructive sidekick, Magpie. Her essays and fiction excerpts are available at nkjemisin.com.
▪ I wrote “The Storyteller’s Replacement” to practice using a frame to tell a story, and to dig a little at the roots of modern English-language fantasy to see what I could learn from them. In particular I decided to see if I could tell a Grimm Brothers–esque fairy tale that suited my tastes better—you know, retaining the quintessential fucked-upness of the old tales but without the anti-Semitism, etc. What fascinates me about the Grimms’ tales is how utterly amoral they are. Moralizing, certainly—but not moral. In the pursuit of their goals, Grimm heroes frequently do horrific things; their heroism is strictly in the eye of the beholder. So what the tales teach, when they’re shared with children, is not only the societal morals being centered but also which morals a society considers disposable in the process. I wanted to explore that. (And I’m aware that there are entire fields of study devoted to deconstructing folklore like this, but I’m not a scholar. When I want to understand a thing, I write.)
After I wrote this story, though, I was sort of at a loss for what to do with it. It didn’t seem to fit any of the SF/F markets out there, and I didn’t feel like it was literary enough to try that route. I knew it was a good story. It was just doing its own thang, not slotting neatly into any particular kind of category. That happens sometimes. So I set it aside until a place appeared for it or until I could make a place for it—which happened when I published a short story collection. Nice to see my patience pay off!
Usman Malik is a Pakistani writer who divides his life between Florida and Lahore. He has won the Bram Stoker and British Fantasy Awards and been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and storySouth Million Writers Awards. His stories have been reprinted in several best-of-the-year anthologies. In his spare time Usman likes to run distance. You can find him on Twitter @usmantm.
▪ As a child I was fascinated by snakes. I used to dream about having a snake as a best friend—weird, I know, but you have to understand I grew up watching movies about shape-shifting serpents and reading stories about the naag mani, the subcontinental version of the philosopher’s stone that the oldest and wisest of king cobras is said to possess. In 2013 I was crossing a rain-thrashed street in Florida when a black eastern racer sped past me, scaring the crap out of me (I didn’t realize until later what the species was). That was when I finally decided to put my pen to paper.
The idea of the child bride and the nomads of Thal and Rajasthan came from my memories of Pakistan and my wonderment at what a relationship between a man who raises a girl to marry and his bound protégé must be like. I have known such families in Pakistani villages and small towns, and are those not the stories we must tell, no matter how unseemly?
The most challenging thing about this story was the voice. I had to get it just right, because the narrator is an addict and I had to make sure he would ramble but just enough not to impede the flow of the story. That took patience and a lot of time—commodities I find in short supply in my life these days.
Theodore McCombs is a 2017 graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop in San Diego. His stories have appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Guernica, Lightspeed Magazine, the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Nightmare Magazine, among others. He lives with his partner and his cat in San Diego.
▪ Peter Wilson’s Twentieth Century Hangings suggested the formal conceit for this story—an execution registry, with the convicts’ crimes, motives, and last words drily noted—and supplied the white-hot rage that powered me through the writing of it. Because of course, most of the original crimes were against women. The execution registry, with its radically compressive form, juxtaposes these atrocities with the pathos of the men’s executions and their wretched life circumstances; that juxtaposition seemed important to writing about capital punishment and to writing about misogyny. Sometimes when male authors write violence against women, even when it’s properly treated as horrific and wrong, there’s a tinge of indulgence to it. The diabolical super-rapist and the foregone victim is still a fantasy of male power over women, even if that power is finally rejected or restrained. In “Six Hangings . . .” the men are hopelessly outclassed, their power limited and provisional, and yet their violence still does lasting, bitter harm. That seems truer to my experience.