The story’s other major influence is Henry James’s Boston. I’d just finished The Portrait of a Lady, which I loved—those wily purple sentences belong to a brilliant old queen—but in retrospect I was responding to The Bostonians, which I had long ago given up on, with its ugly satire of nineteenth-century suffragism. So I suppose one can look at this story as my weirdest, grisliest, tardiest hot take on The Bostonians, if that seems fun.
Seanan McGuire is the Hugo, Nebula, Campbell, and Alex Award–winning author of more than forty novels, starting with 2009’s Rosemary and Rue and extending through this year’s The Unkindest Tide. Seanan has written for the Alien and Predator franchises and has written comics for Marvel Comics, including Kitty Pryde, Nightcrawler, and Ghost Spider. Her short fiction has appeared in collections published around the world. Seanan doesn’t sleep very much and can be bribed into sitting still with offerings of Disney memorabilia, horror movies, and cold Diet Dr Pepper. When not writing, she can be found at Disney parks and in that one haunted cornfield where all those people disappeared last October. Where the corn is, Seanan can be found. Seanan lives in the Pacific Northwest, where she shares an idiosyncratic old house with her abnormally large, fluffy cats and several axolotls and spends her days writing too many words, pretending to catch up on her email, and reading comic books.
▪ Everyone makes big assumptions about monsters. Including what does and does not deserve the label. As someone who’s worked in wildlife rescue and conservation, I am far too aware that sometimes the difference between “monster” and “magnificent” is just a matter of having soft-looking fur and big dewy eyes. Charismatic megafauna gets all the good press, even when it isn’t deserved.
“What Everyone Knows” came from the questions of how monsters are labeled and how many of the things we view as monstrous are simply natural behaviors of creatures that deserve to be left alone. I have big feelings about reptile rescue and conservation. Some of those big feelings leak out in this story.
Annalee Newitz is a science journalist who writes science fiction. Founder of the website io9, she is the author of Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction, which was nominated for the L.A. Times Book Prize in science. Her first novel, Autonomous, won the Lambda Literary Award, and her latest novel is The Future of Another Timeline. She is currently at work on a nonfiction book about archaeology and ancient abandoned cities. She cohosts the sci-fi podcast Our Opinions Are Correct and writes regularly about science and tech for New Scientist, the New York Times, Slate, and other publications.
▪ I first started thinking about “When Robot and Crow Saved East St. Louis” while I was visiting an archaeological dig at Cahokia, an ancient indigenous city that’s just outside East St. Louis. Though nobody is sure why it was abandoned, we know Cahokia probably had a population of over 30,000 people a millennium ago—making it bigger than Paris at the time. All that remains of it today are massive earthen mounds, one of which has a footprint the size of the Great Pyramid at Giza. It’s huge, and you can still climb it today. The rest of the city lies under at least two feet of earth. I spent two summers in a row visiting the dig and talking to the archaeologists working on it, who told me a lot about how the city changed over the three to four hundred years it was occupied. Cities are not static; Cahokia went through many different configurations and political structures before the last urbanites left in the 1400s. East St. Louis is actually built on top of a Cahokian neighborhood, as is St. Louis. So there is an ancient metropolis buried under the modern cities in the area, and that got me thinking about what would be built on top of East St. Louis eventually. I think of this story as taking place at the very beginning of a new kind of world that might replace our own. And who knows? Maybe it will have more in common with Cahokia than it will with East St. Louis.
Silvia Park’s stories have appeared in Tor.com, Joyland Magazine, and The Margins (Transpacific Literary Project) and won the 2018 Fiction Prize from Sonora Review. Silvia is a graduate of the NYU MFA program and the 2018 Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. She’s working on a novel about robotics in postwar Korea.
▪ When the Asian American Writers’ Workshop released a call for submissions on the theme of plastic, I knew how this story would end.
Last year I read a news article about the vaquita, a deathly endangered porpoise with a beatific smile. A rescue team of veterinarians hauled in a rare female in the hopes of saving the species, which has fewer than thirty left in the wild. Placed in a sea pen, she deteriorated rapidly. They rushed to release her back into the ocean, but by then it was too late.
There is something immensely poignant about our efforts to salvage what we’ve ruined and destroyed.
I wanted to apply this earnest, flawed lens to a mermaid species, who look so eerily human it’s tempting to think we understand them. Written in a gaze that is all too limited, this is a story that mourns and scolds and celebrates our unceasing attempts at empathy, restitution, and conservation—even if it’s too late.
Brenda Peynado has been awarded an O. Henry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award, a Dana Award, a Fulbright Grant to the Dominican Republic, and other prizes. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Tor.com, Lightspeed Magazine, The Georgia Review, The Sun, Southern Review, Kenyon Review Online, The Threepenny Review, and other journals. She’s currently writing a novel about the 1965 civil war in the Dominican Republic and a girl who can tell all possible futures, and she teaches in the MFA program at the University of Central Florida.
▪ This story came out of me in a sleepless twenty-four hours, all in one go. This happens for me when the story comes from an emotional outcry. It started with a vision of deep longing and pain for a lost world—that was the first image of the story, all those dragonflies crying out when looking up at kites. That emotion, that irreparable sense of loss, gradually mixed with the yearning of the narrator.
After that it was the feeling of guilt and responsibility that the narrator had for atrocities she could never take back that took over the story. Some readers have paid attention most to the neo-Nazis in the story, but what I wanted to explore was white and white-passing guilt, complicity in acts of hatred and misunderstanding that we regret. The narrator keeps continuing to cause harm in ways that are less obvious than those of the neo-Nazis, which means they’re easier for her not to acknowledge, easier for her to cloak under the guise of trying to right her wrongs. She wants to be forgiven so badly, but the easy way. I wanted to explore more than the black-and-white good and evil that is so easy to fall into when writing dystopias. Yes, the system has codified so much wrong, but so can human nature, our best intentions, our need to call ourselves good.