Wendy N. Wagner grew up in a town so small it didn’t even have its own post office, and the bookmobile’s fortnightly visit was her lifeline to the world. Her short fiction has appeared in magazines and anthologies including Beneath Ceaseless Skies,The Lovecraft eZine, Armored, The Way of the Wizard, and Heiresses of Russ 2013: The Year’s Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction. Her first novel, Skinwalkers, is a Pathfinder Tales adventure. An avid gamer and gardener, she lives in Portland, Oregon, with her very understanding family. Follow her on Twitter @wnwagner.
Welcome to issue fifty-eight of FANTASY MAGAZINE! Over at LIGHTSPEED we were excited to publish our special issue, Women Destroy Science Fiction!, in June, but when our Kickstarter’s tremendous success unlocked all of our stretch goals—thus offering us the chance to expand the destruction into fantasy and horror—we knew that the Women Destroy Fantasy! special issue had to be a FANTASY MAGAZINE special issue.
So the “kids + magical world = adventure” equation was very, very heavily used during the 1980s. Almost every cartoon had it, because it was a way to get the kids into the story.
It’s the book we all loved in high school (or college), the one we weren’t sure we should admit to our friends we loved—until we found out they loved it, too. It’s the one with the trashy cover that turns out to be amazingly great.
I have many friends in the FBI (that makes my old hippie self shudder) and lots and lots of friends in the legal community. So law enforcement stuff is almost as natural as breathing to me.
What strikes me now is how much like Pratt I am, in a way—devoted to hardening my shell of ignorance, and operating within it, even if it isn’t so small as his.
I felt rather presumptuous using the word “pragmatism” in the story the title. I know it has a bunch of baggage. My research has been in other areas of the discipline.
Whenever I go back to Brooklyn I think of my wolves, now. I think that’s my favorite part of this piece, how it changed the way I saw the city.
I’m definitely not a fan of the military mentality, particularly because of the way it can overwrite ordinary people’s moral codes with one that’s a lot more ruinous.
In 1979, Orson Scott Card published the story “Sandmagic.” Like “Ender’s Game,” the piece is about people at war and how war affects children. Both are about innocents who become weapons.
