Nebula Award Nominee: If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love

"If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love"
Rachel Swirsky
Apex: March 2013
Nominated for the Nebula Award: Short Story

I think my heart just broke. 

The story opens with some whimsy, or, what seems like whismy at the time.  It seems sweet, if in a slightly twisted sort of way. 

If you were a dinosaur, my love, then you would be a T-Rex. You’d be a small one, only five feet, ten inches, the same height as human-you. You’d be fragile-boned and you’d walk with as delicate and polite a gait as you could manage on massive talons. Your eyes would gaze gently from beneath your bony brow-ridge.

If you were a T-Rex, then I would become a zookeeper so that I could spend all my time with you. I’d bring you raw chickens and live goats. I’d watch the gore shining on your teeth. I’d make my bed on the floor of your cage, in the moist dirt, cushioned by leaves. When you couldn’t sleep, I’d sing you lullabies. 

Most paragraphs flow from the ending of the one before it.  The next one begins with "If I sang you lullabies."  The construction of the story is how Swirsky builds expectation and has the reader wondering how one thing will flow to the next, where she's going with this very short story.  And it builds, with little heartaches that we're not sure what to do with until the story turns, hard, and we know that these little heartaches are built from one very large heartache at the heart of it.

And oh, how the heart aches.

There is wonder and beauty and pain and I cannot recommend this story highly enough.  I've read through it three times now, twice in quick succession, and there is a hollowness inside my chest where Swirsky bored a hole and then scraped the sides. 

Read this. 

new swirsky

I haven't read this yet, but there's a new story from Rachel Swirsky up on Tor.com: "The Monster's Million Faces".  Since Swirsky brings the excellence on a regular basis, I thought you might like to know.

The Blog You Wish Your Blog Could Be

If you think you really want to be reading something awesome but you just don't know what it is, I've got your answer. You want to be reading Rachel Swirsky's guest posts on Jeff VanderMeer's blog about what she is learning at the Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop.

I'm going to cheat just as much as Swirsky did and quote the Launch Pad website:

Launch Pad is a free, NASA-funded workshop for established writers held in beautiful high-altitude Laramie, Wyoming. Launch Pad aims to provide a “crash course” for the attendees in modern astronomy science through guest lectures, and observation through the University of Wyoming’s professional telescopes.

There are twelve students at this year's Launch Pad, and if I'm paying sufficient attention to Rachel's posts the students include: Carrie Vaughn, Kelly Barnhill, Marjorie Liu, and, in Rachel's words

The other class members have an impressive array of backgrounds. We’ve got people who write non-fiction articles, non-fiction books for kids, fantasy novels, erotica novels, Buffy the Vampire novels, hard-science fiction short stories and novels, non-fiction about science fiction, who write movies and tv and video games (including the man who wrote the dialogue for Spore… oooh, shiny), comic books, graphic novels, who fact check for magazines, who edit anthologies and novels and articles, who publish anthologies and novels and articles, and teach writing or teach science, who try to launch commercial projects to the moon… lots of variety, although the preponderance of us have written science fiction or fantasy at some point.

What Rachel is writing about is the science of what she's learning. It's kind of the cliff notes version of actually going to Launch Pad (not as awesome as reading the book, but you get a general sense of what just happened).

If you don't read Jeff's blog on a regular basis (and you should), you'll want to check out the Launch Pad tag on the posts, and that'll keep you up to date. Take this recent post from Swirsky on stuff in our solar system. Interesting as hell. This is why you want to be following her posts over this next week. It's smart stuff taught by really smart people and reported by a smart person. Smart all around.

Check it out. It's probably the coolest thing I'm going read this week.

Through the Drowsy Dark!

Thanks be to Jeff VanderMeer, I was just reminded of something that I forgot!

Rachel Swirsky’s first book is out! Through the Drowsy Dark was published by Aqueduct Press in May, and, well, I’ll let the catalog listing do the talking.

Through the Drowsy Dark collects ten stories and nine poems by Nebula- and Hugo-nominee Rachel Swirsky, "a terrific writer who's been making a name for herself with a string of intelligent, perceptive stories," as critic Jonathan Strahan characterizes her. In Through the Drowsy Dark, Swirsky's characters struggle with too much and too little emotional control, with heartbreak, with grief that has gone deep underground; they search for nothingness, for difference, for oneness. One commits a terrible crime because she believes it's the moral thing to do, while another digs up a dead dog because the very thought of kissing it on the lips makes her clitoris throb. Swirsky's explorations of the heart and mind are fearless—and dangerous fictions indeed.

Stories:
"Those Who Wait Through the Drowsy Dark" -- original to this collection
"Heartstrung" -- Interzone 210 (2007)
"Mirror Images" -- Fantasy Magazine (May 12, 2008)
"Of Passage" -- Flushed (Bannock Street Books, 2009)
"Heat Engine" -- Last Drink Bird Head (Ministry of Whimsy, 2009)
"The Black Angel's Kiss" -- original to this collection
"Detours on the Way to Nothing" -- Weird Tales 349 (2008)
"Defiled Imagination" -- original to this collection
"The Debt of the Innocent" -- Glorifying Terrorism (Rackstraw Press, 2007)
"No Longer You" (with Katherine Sparrow) -- Interzone 229 (2009)

Poems
"A Season with the Geese" -- Abyss&Apex (2007)
"Pomegranate" -- original to this collection
"Remembering the World" -- Electric Velocipede #15-16 (2008)
"Insider Her Heart" -- Ideomancer (2007)
"The Dream Vacation" -- Mothering Magazine (2006)
"The Oracle on River Street" -- Goblin Fruit (2007)
"Dear Melody" -- Sybil's Garage #4 (2007)
"Invitation to Emerald" -- Lone Star Stories (2007)
"The Fate of Hitler's Brain" -- Flashquake (2006)


While I’ve read a fair amount of Swirsky’s earliest stories, I do not believe I have read any of the stories collected here. That’s exciting, because Rachel Swirsky is one of the best young writers working today and she remains one of the names to keep an eye on in the coming years. She is only just now beginning to get the wider recognition her fiction deserves and it’s time to check out her work if you haven’t already.

I suppose you could also check out this page on Swirsky’s website to see what stories of hers are currently available online if you’re inclined to sample before you buy. "A Memory of Wind" was nominated for the Nebula and "Eros, Philia, Agape" is nominated for the Hugo (a story which I felt strongly enough about to put on my own nomination ballot).

I expect to pick up a copy of Through the Drowsy Dark sooner rather than later.

Transcriptase

I don't believe I ever posted here about the Helix / William Sanders (Sanders is the editor of Helix) racism / prejudice blow up from a few weeks back. It's insane. I bring it up because it has led to something which I feel deserves some support and a wider audience.

That something is Transcriptase, a website chock full of stories originally published in Helix, but available at Transcriptase without the baggage.

Go here to read Rachel Swirsky's excellent overview of the whole thing (both the Helix issue as well as Transcriptase). Tobias Buckell offers commentary here and here on the fallout. The comments section of each Buckell entry says a lot.

From the Transcriptase website:

We are Helix writers who believe in a speculative fiction community that welcomes all readers—inclusive of all races, genders, and marginalized people of all backgrounds.

In July 2008, Helix editor William Sanders stirred up controversy in the community with remarks that many found offensive. The blogosphere exploded with discussion. You can find a summary of the events here.

As the controversy continued, several Helix writers asked to remove their work from the magazine and were met with unprofessional treatment. This upset all of us. We agreed that we would not stand by in silence.

Transcriptase hosts reprints of our stories and poems originally published at Helix. During the controversy, some of us removed our work from Helix; others left it up. There are valid reasons to make either choice, and we hope you’ll respect that we had difficult decisions to make. We offer our stories and poems at Transcriptase so that you can enjoy our work away from Helix, if you choose.

There is now fiction from the following writers up on Transcriptase:
Mike Allen
Beth Bernobich
Maya Bohnhoff
Eugie Foster
Sara Genge
Samantha Henderson
Janis Ian
N. K. Jemison
Vylar Kaftan
Ann Leckie
Yoon Ha Lee
Jennifer Pelland
Margaret Ronald
Vaughan Stanger

With poetry from
Elizabeth Barrette
Samantha Henderson
Rachel Swirsky

I think this is exciting. These writers will hopefully gain more exposure from this mess (one of only two positives to come out from the situation). I believe there should be some good stuff here. I've only read Jennifer Pelland's Nebula nominated (and awesome) "Captive Girl", but there are two more Pelland stories on Transcriptase.

At the very least I want to read N.K. Jemison's work and Yoon Ha Lee, and some Vylar Kaftan. All are writers I've heard of, all are writers I've been kind of interested in before, and now there is the perfect opportunity.

I'm sure I'll be writing more about some of the particular stories I've read from Transcriptase. This is something worth supporting.

Short Fiction Read: July - September 2007

My original plan was to log all short stories I have read, not counting those collected in book form, and earlier this year I listed all the stories I read from January through June. I intended to do another six month stretch and then next year break them out in quarters. But the list is getting unwieldy.

So, here are the stories I’ve read from June through September. I was originally going to link, but linking that many stories would be overly cumbersome. I think what I'm going to do in the future is list them like the novels: Monthly. I can handle monthly.


The best of the bunch are as follows:
A Letter Never Sent - Rachel Swirsky
Dead Man's Holiday - Nicholas Seeley
The Way He Does It - Jeffrey Ford
Questions for a Soldier – John Scalzi
The Bound Man – Mary Robinette Kowal


The Full Listing
73. Galatea - Vylar Kaftan (Heliotrope #2)
74. They Play in the Place of My Dreaming - Gerard Hoarner (Heliotrope #2)
75. Unrequited Love - Gene Wolfe (Subterranean: Summer 2007)
76. A Letter Never Sent - Rachel Swirsky (Konundrum)
77. I'll Gnaw Your Bones, the Manticore Said - Cat Rambo (Clarkesworld: July 2007)
78. Honey Mouth - Samantha Henderson (Heliotrope #1)
79. On the Air - Edward Morris (Heliotrope #1)
80. American Gothic - Michael Colangelo (Heliotrope #1)
81. Brazos - Jerome Steuart (Strange Horizons: July 2, 2007)
82. Transtexting Pose - Daniel Speegle (Clarkesworld: July 2007)
83. Dead Man's Holiday - Nicholas Seeley (Strange Horizons: October 30, 2006)
84. Scenes from a Dystopia - Rachel Swirsky (Subterranean #4)
85. Snowball's Chance - Charles Stross (Subterranean: Summer 2007)
86. The Thief With Two Deaths - Chris Wilrich (Fantasy & Science Fiction: June 2000)
87. Carnival Knowledge - Mike Resnick (Subterranean: Summer 2007)
88. Under the Beansidhe's Pillow - Sarah Monette (Lone Star Stories: Issue 22)
89. The Captain is the Last to Leave - Caroline Lockwood Nelson (Strange Horizons: July 9, 2007)
90. Love. &c. -- From 506 JB - Toiya Kristen Finley (Lone Star Stories: Issue 22)
91. The Way He Does It - Jeffrey Ford (Electric Velocipede #10)
92. Wake Up Call - Leslie Brown (Strange Horizons: July 30, 2007)
93. The Taste of Wheat - Ekaterina Sedia (Clarkesworld: August 2007)
94. The Last Reef - Gareth Lyn Powell (Interzone #202)
95. The Ballad of the Sinister Mr. Mouth - Catherynne Valente (Lone Star Stories: Issue 22)
96. The Girl From Another World - Leah Bobet (Strange Horizons: August 13, 2007)
97. The Perfume Eater - R. J. Astruc (Strange Horizons: July 16, 2007)
98. Artifice and Intelligence - Tim Pratt (Strange Horizons: August 6, 2007)
99. Limits - Donna Glee Williams (Strange Horizons: July 23, 2007)
100. Siege of Cranes - Benjamin Rosenbaum (All Star Stories: Twenty Epics)
101. The Third Brain - Charles Coleman Finley and James Allison (Subterranean #4)
102. A Finite Number of Typewriters - Stuart MacBride (Subterranean #4)
103. Horrible Historians - Gillian Polack (Subterranean #4)
104. Hesperia and Glory - Ann Leckie (Subterranean #4)
105. What a Piece of Work - Jo Walton (Subterranean #4)
106. The Last Science Fiction Writer - Alan M Steele (Subterranean #4)
107. Stone Shoes - C.S.E. Cooney (Subterranean: Summer 2007)
108. The Beacon - Darja Malcolm-Clarke (Clarkesworld: August 2007)
109. Make a Joyful Noise - Charles DeLint (Subterranean: Summer 2007)
110. Shoah Sry - Tobias S. Buckell and Ilsa J. Bick (Subterranean #4)
111. Labyrinth's Heart - Bruce Arthurs (Subterranean #4)
112. The NOMAD Gambit - Dean Cochrane (Subterranean #4)
113. The Mayor Will Make a Brief Statement and Then Take Questions – David
Nickle (Chiaroscuro: Issue 33)
114. The Vine that Ate the South – Bill Kte’pi (Chiaroscuro: Issue 33)
115. The Conviction of Praxis – Eugie Foster (Spaceships and Sixguns #3)
116. In Search of Ellen Siriosa – Ron Hogan (Subterranean #4)
117. Tees and Sympathy – Nick Sagan (Subterranean #4)
118. Last – Chris Roberson (Subterranean #4)
119. Refuge – David Klecha (Subterranean #4)
120. The Infinite Heat Death of the Universe – Elizabeth Bear (Subterranean #4)
121. Questions for a Soldier – John Scalzi (Subterranean Press)
122. Ladders - David Sakmyster (Chiaroscuro: Issue 33)
123. Waiting Period – Sunil Sadanand (Chiaroscuro: Issue 33)
124. Horizontal Rain – Mary Robinette Kowal (Apex Online)
125. The Acquaintance – Kealan Patrick Burke (Subterranean: Fall 2007)
126. Tiger, Tiger – Liz Williams (Electric Velocipede 11)
127. Milk and Apples – Catherynne M. Valente (Electric Velocipede 11)
128. Moon Does Run – Edd Vick (Electric Velocipede 11)
129. The Duel – Tobias Buckell (Electric Velocipede 11)
130. How to Get Rid of Your Monster: A Series of Usenet Postings – Scott William Carter (Electric Velocipede 11)
131. Quitting Dreams – Matthew Cheney and Jeffrey Ford (Electric Velocipede 11)
132. A Punctuated Romance – Mary Turzillo (Electric Velocipede 11)
133. Last Bus – Jennifer Pelland (Electric Velocipede 11)
134. Sometimes I Get Lost – Steve Rasnic Tem (Electric Velocipede 11)
135. Nine Billion and Counting – John B. Rosenman (Electric Velocipede 11)
136. Bar Golem – Sonya Taafe (Electric Velocipede 11)
137. The Geode – Marly Youmans (Electric Velocipede 11)
138. Sweetness and Light – Nicole Kimberling (Electric Velocipede 11)
139. Little Ambushes – Joanne Merriam (Strange Horizons: August 20, 2007)
140. All Kinds of Reasons – Katherine Maclaine (Strange Horizons: September 3, 2007)
141. Practicing My Sad Face – Marc Shultz (Strange Horizons: August 27, 2007)
142. In Stone – Helen Keeble (Strange Horizons: September 10, 2007)
143. A Darker Shade of Green – Robby Sparks (Apex Online: September 2007)
144. House of the Rising Sun – Elizabeth Bear (elizabethbear.com)
145. Little Conversations – Caitlin R. Kiernan (Clarkesworld: September 2007)
146. Follow Me Light – Elizabeth Bear (Scifiction: January 2005)
147. Harvey's Dream – Stephen King (The New Yorker: June 30, 2003)
148. Sounding – Elizabeth Bear (Strange Horizons: September 18, 2006)
149. The Four Hundred Thousand – Livia Llewellyn (Subterranean: Fall 2007)
150. The Cold Blacksmith – Elizabeth Bear (Baen's Universe #1: June 2006)
151. What's Expected of Us – Ted Chiang (Nature: July 6, 2005)
152. One Eyes Jack and the Suicide King – Elizabeth Bear (Lenox Avenue: April 2005)
153. All the Wonder in the World – Lavie Tidhar (Apex Online: September 2007)
154. The Company of Four – Elizabeth Bear (elizabethbear.com)
155. Lost Soul – M P Ericson (Clarkesworld: September 2007)
156. How the Little Rabbi Grew – Eliot Fintushel (Strange Horizons: Sept 17, 2007)
157. The Jerusalem Theatre – Lavie Tidhar (Apex Online: September 2007)
158. The Bound Man – Mary Robinette Kowal (Twenty Epics)

So, January through September I have read 158 short stories, not counting those collected in anthologies and single author collections where I have read the entire anthology.

Not bad.

Next month we'll have better tracking. When I started reading short fiction this year I didn't think I'd read this much.

Rachel Swirsky Interviewed by Jeff Vandermeer

Jeff Vandermeer is starting a series of interviews with people he is calling “Conversations With The Bookless”, talented writers who are year(s) away from writing / publishing their first book. For his first interview he selected Rachel Swirsky.

Discerning readers of this site will remember Rachel Swirsky from her Subterranean Online story “Dispersed by the Sun, Melting in the Wind” and her Konundrum story “A Letter Never Sent”, both of which I was impressed with...in particular “A Letter Never Sent”. She’s a writer I’m watching and excited about.

It’s a good interview. I like the work I’ve read from Swirsky and it was fun seeing her interviewed since she is, after all, The Bookless.

Wonder who else he has on tap for interviews. I have ideas on who I would want to interview (Swirsky, Lori Selke, Mary Robinette Kowal, Elizabeth Bear, etc), so I wonder if Vandermeer will come up with some more short fiction writers I’m reading these days.

Subterranean #4

Subterranean Magazine #4 is the Sci-Fi cliche issue and was guest edited by John Scalzi. All of the stories in this collection deal with pretty much every cliche the genre has, but puts a new and fresh feeling twist on them. Last Man on Earth? Check. Sentient Computers? Check. The End of Existence? Check. Some of them even cover multiple cliches. As a concept for a themed issue the cliche is a great idea.

But, how was the execution? Overall, the stories were solid and worth the time spend reading. Issue #4 features debut stories by Rachel Swirsky and David Klecha as well as entries from more established authors. While stories like "The Last Science Fiction Writer" and "The NOMAD Gambit" entertained, and "Tees and Sympathy" was clever, only once did I feel that sense of excitement about reading something extra special and that was Chris Roberson's "Last" (the last man on earth story). Roberson's take on the cliche, with the last man returning from a space mission to find everybody dead and dealing with the empty environment and a futile search for a survivor while touching on the clicheness of what is happening really worked and resonated. I think I’m a sucker for Last Man stories, though. What with Richard Matheson's I Am Legend and all. The one story which I struggled through was "Hesperia and Glory". I only read a page or two of that one before I had to skip ahead.

Also featured in the issue were two articles, one by John Joseph Adams and the other by Teresa Nielson Hayden, and some book reviews (including A Feast for Crows and Cell)



Scenes from a Dystopia, by Rachel Swirsky
The Third Brain, by Charles Coleman Finley and James Allison
A Finite Number Typewriters, by Stuart MacBride
Horrible Historians, by Gillian Polack
Hesperia and Glory, by Ann Leckie
What a Piece of Work, by Jo Walton
The Last Science Fiction Writer, by Alan M. Steele
Shoah Sry, by Tobias S. Buckell and Ilsa J. Bick
Labyrinth’s Heart, by Bruce Arthurs
The NOMAD Gambit, by Dean Cochrane
In Search of Ellen Siriosa, by Ron Hogan
Tees and Sympathy, by Nick Sagan
Last, by Chris Roberson
Refuge, by David Klecha
The Infinite Heat Death of the Universe, by Elizabeth Bear

Subterranean #4 is available free online, but it is fun to own a copy of the magazine for the bookshelf.

This was a solid issue and one which did not disappoint, but knowing the overall quality of what I get from Subterranean Online with some of their novellas I had hoped for something extra special in the print edition.

A Letter Never Sent, by Rachel Swirsky

A Letter Never Sent
Rachel Swirsky
Konundrum Engine Literary Review: July 2007


With A Letter Never Sent Rachel Swirsky has written a chilling short story which gets into the head of a pedophile who has not yet acted on his desires, if the narrator is reliable. The narrator, Marc, addresses the letter to a Dr. Wickham, presumably a psychiatrist.

My name is Marc. I am twenty-two. I need to prove to you that I am "under significant mental stress" and that I am a "threat to others." Probably you need to know something about me so that you will understand why.

Marc spends the next eight pages (single spaced) explaining to the doctor how he met and befriended an eleven year old girl named Lisa. Since we know from the beginning that Marc believes he is a threat to others, the reader spends the entire story waiting for the other shoe to drop, for something unspeakable, perhaps un-writeable to occur.

The scariest thing about A Letter Never Sent is that it feels authentic. It feels real. We get that Marc initially has feelings that he is uncomfortable with and that he truly tries to do right by not encouraging them, but then we realize that Marc is also not going out of his way to avoid situations where he will experience those feelings. Not really.

A Letter Never Sent is a terrifying story because of how trusting Lisa is and despite Marc not wanting to harm her at the beginning of the story, he remember from the first paragraph that he believes he is a threat to others. To Lisa.

This isn’t a story which brings pleasure in the reading or which would be passed around to friends because they "just have to read it", but A Letter Never Sent draws the cliches of "chilling", "powerful", and "moving" to the forefront. Rightly so. We fear for Lisa while we are hoping beyond hope that Marc will not act. This is "only" a story, but Swirsky makes it real.

A Letter Never Sent feels like a letter of warning to parents, that innocents can be harmed, and perhaps it is a warning letter. Perhaps it is just a solid, scary story where the fear lies in what might happen. Perhaps it is more since Swirsky has stated that it is a story she feels passionate about. Whatever A Letter Never Sent might be, it is a very good story and one that is worth reading despite (or because of) the fact that it is uncomfortable to read and that we might need to wash off the dirt when the last page is turned.