As you may know, Fantasy Magazine ran from 2005 until December 2011, at which point it merged with its sister-magazine, Lightspeed. Since that time,Lightspeed has been doing its best to uphold the fine tradition established byFantasy, and we like to think it has kept the old girl alive by continuing to publish the same kind of quality fiction Fantasy fans had come to love and expect.

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.

For some of us, Women Destroy Fantasy! is a kind of homecoming. Guest Editor Cat Rambo served as co-editor of Fantasy from 2007-2011, earning a World Fantasy Award nomination in 2012 for her fine work. I myself spent 2011 as Assistant Editor of the magazine.

It is an honor and a delight to bring Fantasy Magazine to you in this special celebration of women writing and editing fantasy short fiction. If you enjoy this issue and would like to learn more about Women Destroy Science Fiction!, Women Destroy Horror!, and, of course, Women Destroy Fantasy!, visit our new website devoted to the Destroy projects at DestroySF.com.

Thank you for reading!

—Wendy N. Wagner
Managing Editor
Women Destroy Fantasy!

Okay, let’s get the obvious question out of the way first. How many times have you read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe?           

You know, I don’t know? But I’ve read so many things in that sub-genre, the “kid finds a magical world and is swept away into wild adventure” sort of thing. Alice in Wonderland, The Phantom Tollbooth, Peter and Wendy, all the classics, and the more modern pieces, like Abadazad and Cat Valente’s The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. It’s this whole thriving slice of literature, and a lot of it really only seems aimed at a specific age. Everyone I know read those stories, and then one day, they just stopped.

I know so many people who had a place that they just knew they could get to if they found the right door. (Mine was a Narnia-Africa cross waiting just behind the back door of our house. Which didn’t have a key.) Did you have such a place, and if so, would you be willing to describe it?           

When I was a kid, we always lived near creeks. Everything else changed, but there were always creeks. I thought that if you could find the right combination of steps, if you could approach the water just so, you’d be able to find a path you’d never seen before, and it would take you to the Autumn Country, where it was always October, and it was always Halloween, and no one ever laughed at your clothes, and since the candy was free, no one was ever hungry. Part of me still believes that the right corn maze can get you there, which is part of why I love my corn mazes so dearly.

I love the idea of the Truth Fairy. What inspired her?           

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. My favorite was My Little Pony and Friends, which had Megan, a blonde farm girl kidnapped by talking horses. And the stakes were real in these cartoons. If a villain got someone, they stayed got. The Truth Fairy, to me, feels like a villain from one of those cartoons. It’s just that the cartoon she appeared in ceased to exist after she caught all the principle characters.

I think this story draws on some of the same material Kij Johnson’s Ponies drew upon. People, especially women, seem to feel like there’s a real sense of loss of self in becoming an adult, and a lot of YA fiction speaks to that. What do you think? Was that a motivation in writing “Crystal Halloway and the Forgotten Passage”?           

I think that for a girl, you do have a certain loss of who you were implicit in modern adulthood. There’s a wonderful song by a band called Butterfly Jones, called “The Systematic Dumbing Down of Terry Constance Jones,” about a girl who realizes as she gets older that none of her dreams matter as much to the world around her as the way she looks. There’s a bit in the middle—”Well, I played my share of baseball, and I beat the boys at pool. / I was smart and silly way before I found out about being cool.” And I think that’s what we lose. We take it away from each other. It’s something I think about a lot.

We see very few stories at Fantasy that have the main character’s name in the title. It definitely gives the piece a classic adventure quality. Can you tell me about how you titled this piece?           

I dreamed the story, actually. The whole thing … including the twenty or so stories that came before it. In my head, this was the last of a huge series of exciting adventures and remarkable deeds on the part of this one girl. And this is how it all ended for her. This is where she forgot her own back catalog. The story went through about eight titles, but they all began with “Crystal Halloway.”

Is there anything else you’d like to share with us about Crystal Halloway, or any forthcoming projects?                       

I am so excited to be appearing in Fantasy Magazine! See, I just wanted to share that. Let’s see. I have a new book coming up in March 2012, called Discount Armageddon, and it’s the start of a whole new urban fantasy series about family and cryptozoology, and monster hunting, and loyalty, and talking mice. The talking mice are key. My website stays pretty up-to-date, so that can be used to find out where I’m going to be and what I’m publishing. Right now, I’m writing books about fairies, cryptids, genetically engineered parasites, and mad science. It’s a pretty good life.

“The Swordsman Whose Name Was Not Death” is set in the same world as your novels Swordspoint, The Fall of Kings, and The Privilege of the Sword. How did you develop this world? What inspired you?

I was inspired by a combination of books and real life. No, really. The world and the characters started coming to me in my early twenties. I was just out of college, working in publishing and living on a seedy block in an iffy neighborhood in New York City. (Those who know NYC now will laugh uproariously when I tell you it was W. 110^th Street on the Upper West Side—but believe me, my block was so bad that we regularly heard cries for help out the window. It was a different city, then; trust me.) I definitely felt like I had to have my head up and my wits about me every time I went out. And I felt like I was really cool for having the street smarts to live there. But did I wish I had a tough guy with a sword who always made sure no one messed with me? Sure, I did.

Like Riverside, my neighborhood was chockablock with old apartments and brownstones, rich with fabulous architectural details that were falling to bits through neglect, and rented for next to nothing. Richard and Alec’s main room at Marie’s is my old living room, complete with flaking paint, chipped molding, rotted floorboards and a fireplace (though ours was blocked up).

At the same time, I’d just started working in publishing, and read Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer for the very first time. The formality of their worlds intrigued me; I wanted to play with that, because it was very alien to me—as was the formality of business bureaucracy, even in publishing. And I was finishing Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond series then, too. Those books were a huge influence; again I got that sense of challenge, that sense of, “How did she do that?” Other influences on the Swordspoint setting include Shakespeare, Thackeray, Damon Runyon and James Thurber—but they were old friends, a big part of my mental furniture already.

Finally, I really love old cities, and I’ve been in more than a few. When I was a kid, we lived outside Paris for a year, and drove all over the place. When I got older, I had my adventures with a Eurail pass, checking out old back streets before Europe was quite as cleaned-up as it all is now. The feel of the stones, the smell of the plaster, the height of the old buildings (not very!) … all made their way into the place I invented.

The story draws its name from the book the girl carries. Alec makes the book sound like a fairly trashy romance novel. Is he right? Do you have a good idea what that book is really like and about?

I do, definitely! 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. It’s the one you can’t really explain. We all have one; what’s yours?

In The Privilege of the Sword (“TPOTS”—and yes, I pronounce it “teapots”), which takes place some fifteen years after Swordspoint and is narrated by Alec’s teenage niece (the daughter of the very sister he mentions in this story)—all the teenage girls on the Hill read it [The Swordsman Whose Name Is Not Death] obsessively. One of them defends the book to her parents: “It’s not trash. It is full of great and noble truths of the heart. And swordfights.”

As in this story, some of the girls in TPOTS mediate some ugly events in their lives through The Swordsman Whose Name was Not Death; the fiction they love gives them a way to cope, even to survive.

In TPOTS, I do offer up some more snatches of scenes, characters, and even a few lines of The Book (The Swordsman Whose Name was Not Death, that is!). In fact, it even gets dramatized for the stage, and all the girls go, and argue about how true to the original it is, and bitch about their favorite bits being left out (sound familiar?).

So is Alec right? Well, he’s never read it … so he’ll never know.

Alec condemns his sister for not fleeing her arranged marriage, but he won’t do anything to help the girl, who is trying to escape the same fate. Why? (And how does she keep from punching him in the nose—he’s such a jerk!)

Well, he’s too tall for her to reach his nose—and anyway, he’s just not that important to her. He doesn’t matter to her; Richard does.

Alec is my terribly flawed, beloved character. He doesn’t try to help because he’s a mess. He’s full of rage he can’t direct at anything useful. He’s very young, you know; in this story, set around the time of Swordspoint, he’s not yet twenty. Check him out some fifteen years later in TPOTS—he’s learned a lot, even if he’s still pretty nuts. (And he and his sister have a slambang bashup fight about what happened to her—which I had to write in the novel, having set it up in this little story!)

In a way, this story was meant to be a commentary on Swordspoint. At the time, I was feeling uneasy about having written a book almost entirely concerned with men and the affairs of men (with a few surprising twists, sure, but still …). I wanted to write a story that overtly said: “Yes, I do know that this society I have lovingly invented is hard on women; and that these particularly characters, attractive as they may be, do not very much care about that.”

My best friend from college, the novelist Caroline Stevermer, once called Richard and Alec “Sunlit Villains.”

In American culture, we seem to have stereotypes about certain kinds of men who are extremely sexual, men like actors, models, even gay men. In this story, the sexual appeal and sexuality of swordsmen is played up. Were you drawing on or speaking to some of our preconceptions or stereotypes of men’s sexuality?

Hah. I hadn’t thought of it that way, but, yeah, I guess so. It’s something I set up in Swordspoint that everyone thinks of swordsmen as hot guys who just fight and screw a lot. Because in the society I’ve set up, swordsmen are a combination of professional athletes (think tennis champs crossed with quarterbacks) and performers—and my dear, you know what they say about actors!

What do you think happened to the girl when she walked out of Richard and Alec’s bedroom?

I don’t know. But I worry.

Is there anything else you’d like to share about this piece?

This particular story was the very first thing I wrote about Richard and Alec after I finished Swordspoint. And it didn’t happen right away. I had this Thing about not doing a Sequel (um, this was in the days when series were sort of looked down on—or so I believed. What can I say? I was young. And ambitious. And cocky). I didn’t want to get typecast, I guess—I wanted to show my range; so the next book I wrote was Thomas the Rhymer—very different. But then … I just kind of missed my city, and my mad, bad, boys. And I thought, “Hmm, there are some aspects of them all that I haven’t really explored yet.” So I made a pact with myself, that as long as I could come at the material from a different angle, even a different style, each time, I was allowed to write about them. And as I said above, I wanted to deal first with the issue of feminism (or lack of it) in my city, in this story.

I’ve kept my pact, too: There’s a complete list of “Riverside” stories and novels here, at the bottom of this page on my website.

And each of them is quite different from the others—while still, I hope, filling in the narrative of what happens to all these people and their city.

Are there any upcoming projects you’d like to mention or point out to our readers?

Yes, indeed! Because I [just recently recorded] the audiobook of Swordspoint! I’m working with producer/director Sue Zizza, who was also our director on “The Witches of Lublin.” It really is a dream come true: For years, I’ve been reading bits of the book aloud with great gusto to anyone who’d hold still for it. Audiences seem to like it, and often people come up to me afterwards and say, “Oh, my! Are you going to record that?” My standard answer has always been: “Oh, I’d love to—but I’m so disorganized—and lazy—but, you know, if a producer were to come up to me and say, ‘We’ve got a studio and an engineer, and here’s a microphone: Go!’ then I’d totally do it.”

Be careful what you wish for. Or rather, don’t! I’m loving it a lot, and can’t believe I’m really getting the chance to do a professional recording of this caliber of the entire book.

When will the Swordspoint audiobook be out? And who’s releasing it?

A perfectly-timed question:  I’m delighted to say that the audiobook [just launched]!  It’s coming out from a new label at Audible.com called “Neil Gaiman Presents,” in partnership with ACX.  Neil has picked a number of his favorite books, and it’s a thrill to be on his list with the likes of James Branch Cabell and Avram Davidson. And Sue has invited in some amazing actors to bring just a few of the scenes to life . . . I like to think it’s like someone is reading you a bedtime story, and all of a sudden you’re dreaming that’s it real, hearing all the voices, the carriage wheels . . . And then we go back to the reader (me).  It’s like nothing else that’s ever been done, and I hope you’ll like it.   It can be ordered here.

“Unnatural Disaster” does a great job capturing the irritating details of life in law enforcement: the petty politics, the contradictory rules, the personality clashes. How do you know so much about life as a police officer?

In one of my many secret lives, I’m an award-winning, best-selling mystery writer (under the name Kris Nelscott as well as Kristine Kathryn Rusch), so knowing how the police work is important to that part of my writing career. Besides research, how do I know? I used to work for a forensic psychologist. His job was to evaluate people for court—to see if they met the legal definition of insanity, to help with custody cases, to make sure they could continue getting their state-ordered meds. I met a lot of police officers there, and spent a lot of time with them. Plus 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.

This story is a new piece, and the set-up—an earthquake in Japan sparks a tsunami in Oregon—reminds me of the fears a lot of folks had after the March 11^th earthquake in Japan. Did that incident influence this story at all? And living on the coast, have you had any uncomfortable storm or tsunami experiences?

We didn’t just have fears. We had tsunamis all along the West coast. Fortunately the tide was out, or parts of the coast would have been leveled, just like in Japan. We would have had a nine to fifteen foot crest had the tide been in. As it was, several people died to the south of us, and there was still a lot of damage—docks, boats, marinas.

Did that inform the story? You bet. Initially I was going to write the experience exactly, since Whale Rock is based on my town of Lincoln City. The weather was sunny, and it seemed surreal. But Whale Rock isn’t Lincoln City, so my subconscious wanted rain and terrible weather and no exact date.

As for my own experience, well, we’ve been expecting this. We always pay attention to earthquakes in the Pacific because they could devastate us here. So that night, Dean called me out of my office at about 10:30 to tell me that there was a massive earthquake in Japan. We watched the least egregious local news, then I went back to work. When it became clear the tsunami would hit about 7 AM, we paid attention but didn’t do much since our house is outside the historic tsunami zone. About 5 AM, the sirens started going off, warning people off the beach. Low-lying areas had already received reverse 911 calls, and half the town was either leaving or had left. Those of us on high ground stayed.

I was up to see the beginnings of it from my window, but there wasn’t much. Another friend had a police scanner and was giving us a play-by-play (with names of the players, since this is a small town with a volunteer fire department) as our friends tried to keep idiots off the beaches. The first crest hit around 7 AM, and the crests kept hitting all day. No one was hurt here, although there was a lot of property damage.

The most surreal thing, though, happened about 5 PM. Dean & I decided we were too tired to cook dinner, so we went to a local grocery that has excellent to-go prime rib. As we walked in, we saw a crowd. Everyone who was still in town, everyone who wasn’t working, had lined up for prime rib dinners. No one had gotten any sleep, and no one wanted to cook. It was an impromptu relief party. We all knew we had dodged a major bullet.

Whenever a tentacled creature shows up in a story, I think a lot of people immediately think of H. P. Lovecraft. But as a native Oregonian, I tend to think of some of our Northwest creatures, like the mythical Pacific Tree Octopus or the camera-friendly octopods living in Newport’s Hatfield Marine Science Center. Who are some of the cephalopods that have influenced you?

You hit it. I get inspired every time I go to the Aquarium in Newport. (The science center is connected to it, for those who don’t know.) I think the Oregon Coast is a lovely, mysterious place, and it inspires me every day.

This story draws lines between natural phenomena, supernatural phenomena, and truly unnatural phenomena. The unnatural phenomena here are things that humans have done or created that seem like true violations of the natural order, and for Tadero, these have proved to be true horrors. Do you think we live in an era in which the supernatural holds no fear for us? Are we the most horrifying thing on the planet?

To me we are. So I’m like Tadero in that respect. I’ve written many other stories set in the made-up Oregon Coast, though, and the chief that Tadero replaces, Dan Retsler, thought the supernatural was harder to deal with than people. (Those stories are available as stand-alone e-books now. They originally appeared in F&SF and some Daw anthologies.) So I know that opinions vary on this. But I think the stuff Tadero has seen is the most difficult to deal with—not in Seavy Village, but on the streets of Chicago.

Do you have any new projects you’d like to tell us about?

I have a lot of projects underway this year. It’s either feast or famine for me. In September, Audible will release my next Retrieval Artist novel, Anniversary Day, as a two-month audio exclusive. The book (in all forms, including e-book) will appear on December 1. In January, Pyr publishes the next Diving novel, Boneyards. I’m also doing paranormal romance under the name Kristine Grayson. Sourcebooks released Wickedly Charming in May, and Utterly Charming follows in October, with two more in 2012. WMG Publishing is reissuing my entire backlist, including the stories I mentioned above (The first is “Women of Whale Rock”) and the Kris Nelscott mystery novels. In the reissues, WMG is redoing all of my fantasy novels, including my international bestselling fantasy series, The Fey. So I’m quite happily busy!

One of my favorite lines in this piece is, “The only words Pratt understood on the programme were the neologisms: Crisisgate, Lovemaker Missile, CLOTH Talks, Oopscam and Errscam.” We live in a time when “nom nom” makes it into the Oxford English Dictionary. Words seem to be created, accepted and discarded at an ever more-frantic pace. Do you have any thoughts on the growth and evolution of language?

Well, I suppose I must have such thoughts, but they don’t seem to have advanced any since I wrote this little parable, nor been extended into any study into what it would seem should have been a definite interest, from the clue of this early story! I know there’s such a thing as semantics, and the philosophy of language, and of course the genealogy of language and so forth, but I never have gravitated toward any such understanding. I’ve never learned a foreign language, I never studied Latin and can only sometimes tell whether a word is Latinate or Anglo-saxon, and I’m not even very good at naming the parts of grammar beyond the “primary colors” (adjective, noun, verb and a couple of others), nor at doing literal grammatical analyses of sentences.

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’ve always had a very excited feeling about the innate properties of words, their tangible, and often onomatopoetic properties—almost a synesthetic feel for them, that I’ve preferred to having these external frameworks and devices surrounding language. It’s with that “feel”—I hope I’m not mystifying things—that neologisms are always so striking to me, excitingly weird and terrific when they’re necessary, when they expand something (without having any goal in mind, no Joycean impulse to word-creation, I do find I often invent little words, sometimes in a way no one would be too likely to notice—my spellchecker tells me about it—and I usually leave these in the text, for future struggles with copyeditors). They’re also ugly and objectionable when they seem to make language coarser or more crass and commercial, or when they open the way for historical amnesia—we should, for instance, call the horrible corporate entities that plague our reality “trusts,” shouldn’t we? But it seems somehow naive and antique—or perhaps it reminds us that we thought we “busted” the “trusts,” yet here they are, ruling our world. Lydia Davis has this great short story that rants against the funeral directors who’ve invented the word “cremains,” which strikes her as demolishing whole areas of human sensitivity in one blow—I agree with her.

What are some words you would never, ever want to lose?

Just you asking that makes me instantly unable to recall them.

When Pratt has finally eliminated his English vocabulary, he says: “New York transmuted itself into a wonderland of incomprehensibility.” He is cast adrift from humanity, more alone, and more free. This is in fascinating contrast to Orwell’s 1984, where the government is destroying English so people can be better controlled. Were you thinking of 1984 when you wrote this? Were there any books or stories that influenced this piece?

Well, at the time I wrote this—I was twenty-one, or twenty-two—Orwell’s 1984 was one of the books that most ruled the small kingdom of my literary influence, so it would have been traceable (along with Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, Thomas Berger, and Franz Kafka) in this story, or anything else I wrote or probably mused about writing at the time. All of those writers are conscious elements in this mix, as ponderous a suggestion as that may seem—how could such a slight story support so many titans? Yet, there it is—I did go around being consciously influenced by all of them at once back then. It’s a miracle the results are readable at all.

What’s striking to me here, though, is the powerful new influence I’d come under, and how much it directs this story in particular: I’d discovered the short stories of Bruce Jay Friedman in the months before, and was reading them compulsively. I clearly gathered in quite a bit of his tone and form for this piece.

Pratt works so hard to protect his aloneness, to escape the constant presence of communication. This story was written in 1990, before everyone owned a cell phone, before Facebook and blogging, before wireless internet. I have wondered if we use telecommunications to block out the press of humanity or to more thoroughly inundate ourselves. Do you think we now have more control over communication or less?

I tend to believe much less has changed than people sometimes want to believe. Ironically, the world was at the time threatening—or promising—to become far less linguistic and textual—the story ignores all this, but in the background was the invention of virtual reality, which I wrote about incessantly back in that time, usually from a crank’s perspective. The promise was that we’d shed language (along with, incidentally, our bodies), in favor of a polymorphic new language of color and movement and pure understanding. Odd how much the internet has instead been a giant pile of epistolary mediums, a series of rivalrous telegraph poles for all these short urgent missives we’re all tapping out. But in a much more literal and prosaic sense there is something strangely antique about this story, which if it were recast in the present would beg the question of cell phones, the internet, and so forth. In fact, it would seem to demand that the last word he ever understood was glimpsed on a sheet spitting forth from a fax machine, I think.

The story also looks odd in the assertion that Montreal would in any way provide Pratt with such perfect insulation from the English language. I lived in Canada for a little while later on, and it wasn’t like that. Even Paris isn’t like that now—maybe it would have been when I wrote the story, still, but barely.

This story seems to draw on multiple definitions of pragmatism. One sense of the word is a focus on practical matters—and Princess Ousmani is clearly a practical woman. She’s very sensible and a great problem-solver. But this story digs into the philosophical sense of pragmatism, too, when Princess Ousmani reveals her very empirical outlook on religion and religious belief. Do you have background or an interest in philosophy?

Princess Ousmani has a great deal of interest in philosophy, and a background of intensive study on the subject. I, her author, have interest in it also, but no formal training in Western philosophical traditions. 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: I practice the I Ching, the ancient Taoist divinatory system; and I follow a West African belief system known as Ifa. Neither of them refers directly to the concept of pragmatism—at least, not under that name.

We live in a markedly more secular society than most societies in the Middle Ages. And yet Princess Ousmani has this amazingly humanist outlook. Do you think that a woman like her could have existed in her time?

Absolutely. Often the idea of repressive theocracies in the “Middle Ages” refers to Europe, though of course they existed in many places during those centuries. But the Caliphate of Cordoba, Andalusia, “Moorish” Spain, was home to a highly humanist culture with very modern attitudes concerning gender equality and religious tolerance. In this story I’ve extended those attitudes to other parts of this empire, putting them in balance with their converse—just as they are most places, most times.

Princess Ousmani references so many wonderful old texts. What kind of research did you do while working on this story?

Probably not as much as I ought to have. I can’t remember anymore where I got the ideas for those texts, those titles. I only wanted to show that geekiness is timeless.

You have a strong connection to science fiction—you’ve been writing science fiction reviews for the Seattle Times for more than ten years, and you’ve got this amazing book about science fiction and African American writers coming out very soon. Do you have a preference for writing science fiction over fantasy? Or is there any difference in the writing experience?

The distinction between science fiction and fantasy is so fraught for me. I think about it a lot and ask other writers and readers what it signifies to them. At one point I had an epigram taped to my wall near my computer: “Science fiction is fiction that believes in science.” Who said that? I did. It’s a nice definition, but it begs the question how an abstract entity can believe in anything.

In some sense the difference between sf and f boils down to the question, “What is science?” In my opinion that invites the added corollaries, “Who gets to decide what’s science and what’s not?” and “”What’s in it for those who get to decide?” At WisCon 35, on a panel on magic realism, an audience member said something like, “In science fiction the science is explained; in fantasy, the magic doesn’t need to be explained.” I took exception to that, because there are quite a few sfnal tropes that aren’t ever explained, and that strike me as inexplicable in a scientific framework: faster-than-light ships and time travel, for example.

Yes, the interplay between science fiction and fantasy is one of my favorite dance partners. Anyone who wants to hear me talk a bit about how science and magic/religion (a convo on privilege is needed to unravel that slash) fade into one another can listen to a podcast of a talk I did last year at Duke University.

That book you mention, though? I think it’s The WisCon Chronicles 5: Writing and Racial Identity, which I edited. WCC5 came out at WisCon 35, and it deals with more than sf in terms of authorship, and more than African Americans in terms of racial identity. But I think that’s the one you mean. I agree—it’s totally amazing.

I love the description of Aegyptus, with his oily wings and great wit. Were you inspired by any other dragons in fiction? And have you written any other dragon tales?

At this point, Aegyptus is the only dragon I’ve written about. Dragons abound in our genre, but I recall three and only three with any clarity: Tolkien’s Smaug; C.S. Lewis’s Eustace Clarence Scrubb (a bad boy who physically manifested his inner dragon, to his own shame and horror); and R.A. MacAvoy’s Mayland Long. Aegyptus sprang up mostly in opposition to the negativity Smaug and Eustace represent. He owes a bit to Mayland’s scholarly stance in the world. I really wanted him to appeal to Ousmani’s love of the natural world, though, so I strove for traits that were believable and based in nature. The oily wings, for instance—how else could they be thin enough yet strong enough to handle the winds of his flight?

Is there anything else you’d like to add? Would you like to tell us about any forthcoming projects we should be looking out for?

I have a lots goin on. In the fall, a new magazine called Phantom Drift will publish my story “Just Between Us.” See if you like it. See if it makes sense to you. I’m writing a story now for Steam-Powered II, the second volume of lesbian steampunk edited by JoSelle Vanderhooft. That story will actually be an excerpt from my Belgian Congo steampunk novel-in-progress, Everfair. And I have three more novels out with publishers, in various degrees of revision. Other stuff. So much. Watch this space.

I think the first question has got to be the most obvious: Why Brooklyn?

First, because I’ve stayed there a lot over the last few years, and have come to be fond of it, and it is an iconic place. But the real genesis of this story is that a friend of mine, who lives there, made a blog post one night. Very simply, just about going out to dinner or something. But this was during the first big snowstorm of last winter, and after talking about the unfriendly weather, she closed the post by saying: On our way home, we were eaten by wolves. The story just unspooled itself in my head.

One line in the story really jumped out at me. Anna is talking about the movie planned about the wolves, and she lists off one of the complaints locals have about the movie: “It’ll just bring stupid kids out here wanting to be part of it.” In the movie Shortbus, Justin Bond talks about how all the kids flock to New York because of 9/11, because it stands out as this remarkably authentic event in a time when much of what happens is so shallow. Is authenticity a theme you’ve wrestled with before?

Wow, that’s very perceptive! I love that line and I think it’s very true. As someone who was never drawn to New York like many people are, but came to love it, I’m fascinated with reasons for coming there, reasons for staying. I think there’s this idea that it’s America’s beating heart, and people do go there seeking some kind of authentic experience—and are derided for it, only to become natives in their turn and deride the next wave.

We’re all seeking authenticity because our culture is a culture of images, and saturated with images we start to feel unreal—and so many books and movies and television have told us that urban experience is more real than rural experience, and New York experience the most real of all. Layers of reality interest me—when Sarah Palin talked about her version of real America she was trying to cast a kind of magic spell, to define what was and was not at the most basic level. But she can’t fight against the onslaught of stories that tell us real America is New York (of course it’s all real and I know that, but as long as we keep spinning a narrative of real/unreal I’ll keep poking at it). New York is where the sitcoms are set. It’s where New Years come in. And it’s a place where sometimes terrible things happen.

In fact, after finishing the story, I joked that only now was I a real writer, having written a New York story. Other than London and possibly Paris, I can’t think of another city so often storied, made into narrative.

Anna says she always wears red. In a story about wolves, this definitely raises up visions of “Little Red Riding Hood.” Is this the first time you’ve played with this fairy tale? Do you have any favorite retellings of “Little Red,” or favorite riffings?

[Laughs.] Fairy tales and I go way back. I wrote The Orphan’s Tales, which is a series of novels that contain dozens of original fairy tales in an Arabian Nights structure, as well as Deathless, my most recent adult novel, a retelling of a Russian fairy tale set in Leningrad during WWII. I’ve also written many stories and poems that retell and remix folklore. It’s an obsession of mine.

So yes, of course Anna’s clothes are meant to invoke Red Riding Hood—but she is not Red Riding Hood. Part of the reason I like fairy tales so much is that without really thinking about it or meaning to, we walk in them every day; we organize our lives according to their principles (or the tales reflect our principles, or both—it’s very circular, when you grow up inundated with these stories). We obey the rule of three, we think there is one true love for everyone, and when wolves are about, we sometimes wear red.

I love Anna’s outfit, with the gold ropes and strappy ballet shoes. What inspired it? Actually, there’s a whole lot of fashion going on in this story. How did that element wind up in the piece?

I love fashion, and though I have little or no sewing talent, I love to write about it—clothes are how we present ourselves to the world. Clothes say everything, even the geek choice of “eschewing” fashion and sticking to black t-shirts with ironic/hip slogans on them and jeans—well, that’s a choice, a decision to express a certain statement (i.e., not wearing pink or orange but black; what cultural item the shirt references). It’s a huge gateway into a character; it can say everything about them. It seemed like a natural element here, in such a fashion-conscious city.

This is a new story for you—did you write it since you took the helm over at Apex Magazine? And has digging into editorial work within the realm of short fiction affected your approach to creating short stories?

I did write it since taking over—in fact I think it’s the first short story I wrote since taking over the magazine. I don’t think my own stories have changed because of my editorial work—perhaps I am more conscious of the value of a first line, of what is tired and what isn’t, but mainly I keep the two kinds of work separate. I’ve been experimenting with a more stripped-down, talky style in some of my short fiction, which seemed to fit well with this kind of magical realist story. However, that was in swing before Apex.

Is there anything else you’d like to share, either about the piece or anything new and exciting coming up for you?

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.

***

The Weirdly Fantastic: Lovecraft Rock

Weird Tales was one of the earliest fantasy magazines, and H.P. Lovecraft made a name for himself in its pages. His work spans the sister genres of science fiction, horror, and fantasy. Lovecraft’s most important works establish a mythos he spun from science fictional elements (traveling space creatures that settled prehistoric Earth), folkloric references (at least one of his recurring monsters is drawn from Egyptian mythology), and his own alternate history of the occult. The result is a creepy fantasy universe referenced in books, games, and dozens of rock songs.

Many musical groups have taken their very identities from Lovecraft and his mythos. For example, the band H.P. Lovecraft was an early folk rock/psychedelia group that sought permission from the author’s estate before taking his name as their own (although later, the band would shorten their name to Lovecraft, and later still, Love Craft). H.P. Lovecraft is best known for their unique combination of operatic and folk singing, combined with rich orchestration to create a multi-layered eerie sound. Their most successful original work is the song “The White Ship” (inspired by the Lovecraft short story by the same name), released in 1967, but which you can still catch some late nights on independent radio stations.

Other bands styling themselves after Lovecraft’s works include Canadian rockers The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets, whose name references the Lovecraft short story “The Tomb,” a tale of a young man so obsessed with a mausoleum hidden in “the darkest of the hillside thickets” that he goes insane. Most of the band’s songs and albums explore Lovecraft stories. All in all, there have been four bands named “Arkham,” a town mentioned in several Lovecraft works, and one rockabilly group named The Arkhams. Even Lovecraft’s monsters have been honored with offerings of band names: Shub-Niggurath, a forest being, has given her name to both a French progressive rock group and a Mexican metal band.

But a band doesn’t need a Lovecraftian handle to be inspired by him. With works emphasizing the occult and dark forces, it’s no surprise Lovecraft’s fiction has made appearances in many metal songs. Black Sabbath produced the 1970 classic “Behind the Wall of Sleep,” based on the short story “Beyond the Wall of Sleep.” Metallica recorded “The Call of Ktulu” and “The Thing That Should Not Be”—each an homage to Cthulhu, a tentacled and winged monster appearing in several Lovecraft tales—and “All Nightmare Long,” inspired by a story about time-traveling monsters called the Hounds of Tindalos (the Hounds are inventions of Lovecraft’s, but the story Metallica referenced was “The Hounds of Tindalos,” by Frank Belknap Long, a good friend of H. P. Lovecraft). The monstrous Cthulhu is further described and even summoned in two songs by Michigan metal band The Black Dahlia Murder: “Thy Horror Cosmic” and “Throne of Lunacy.” And for those with a taste for more progressive rock, Dream Theater included a Lovecraft monster in their recordings—”The Dark Eternal Night” is about Nyarlathotep, a quasi-Egyptian creature from Lovecraft’s mythos.

With all of these musical offerings, Lovecraft’s tribute-hungry Elder Gods would be pleased with themselves. The magicians and wizards who toiled so hard to translate the forbidden works of Lovecraft’s fabled Necronomicon couldn’t have spread the message of the weird and otherworldly half as well as these hard-rocking bands.

***

Lord of the Rock: Tolkien

In The Lord of the Rings and its related texts, J. R. R. Tolkien created a detailed world of magic and personal valor. Its themes, settings, and creatures launched high fantasy as an important genre, and it didn’t take long for rock music to begin absorbing his creations.

Tolkien’s work drew significantly on Old English and Norse myths, and many readers have found connections between The Lord of the Rings and Wagner’s Ring Cycle. With these roots, it’s no surprise that several Scandinavian bands have played homage to his works. Amon Amarth, a Swedish death metal band whose music primarily focuses on Viking themes of war and adventure, took their name from one of Tolkien’s languages; Amon Amarth is one of the names for Mount Doom. And while metal giants Dimmu Borgir are best known for their darkly medieval look, their vocalist’s stage name (Shagrath) is borrowed from one of Tolkien’s orcs. Orcs were important to Norwegian band Burzum, too, whose name not only means “darkness” in Orcish, but whose original band name was “Uruk-Hai,” after a particularly violent troop of orcs. The group’s front man even went by the stage name Count Grishnackh, a moniker taken from the orc leader.

Many musicians have touched on Middle-earth in their songs. Led Zeppelin wrote at least two songs that have clear Tolkien references in the lyrics (“The Battle of Evermore” and “Ramble On”); Rush recorded the song “Rivendell.” But some bands made Tolkien’s world their own stomping grounds. Blind Guardian is so well known for their Tolkien references that in Metal: The Definitive Guide (Outline Press Ltd, 2007), Gary Sharpe-Young describes the band as “middle-earth metal.” The Finnish band Battlelore not only draws all its lyrical inspiration from Tolkien, but its members often perform in middle-earth styled costumes.

The depth and exuberance of Tolkien fan references in rock music has helped promote wide-spread acceptance of fantastical elements in the musical world. There are many bands who might not directly reference Tolkien’s characters or stories but who still enjoy a high fantasy motif in their appearance or lyrics. Groups like Dragonforce and Skyclad routinely write songs about dragons, swords, and nobility. And it’s hip to dress in fantasy costume. GWAR regularly takes to the stage in full-body armor, although their style is more over-the-top than stylish. But more fashion-conscious examples range from Stevie Nicks’s “hippie-elf couture” ensembles to Lady Gaga’s Red Queen costume. Fantasy is apparently an au courant flavor of rock.

***

From the Ministry of DIY Magic: J.K. Rowling

The newest wizard on the rock block is Harry Potter. The teenage wizard has spawned an active fan culture since his appearance on the literary scene in 1997, including a number of DIY pop bands. Fans dubbed the motley music scene “wizard rock,” and it stuck.

The first Harry Potter-themed song was probably “Ode to Harry,” written in 2000 by pop-punk band Switchblade Kittens, but two brothers in Massachusetts blew up the genre when they founded the band Harry and the Potters. Joe and Paul DeGeorge started making music about J. K. Rowling’s universe as a joke, but soon found themselves traveling the United States, playing gigs in libraries and backyards. They were joined by groups like Draco and the Malfoys, The Whomping Willows, and The Luna Lovegoods. The Wizrocklopedia currently lists close to 880 bands.

Most of these “wrock” bands perform in costumes pulled from J.K. Rowling’s books, with the musicians’ stage personas drawn from characters in the stories. Like the novels, there is a distinct element of social consciousness to wizard rock music; bands have created fundraisers to help fight social injustice and buy books for underprivileged children. Lyrics in many songs, especially by genre leader Harry and the Potters, reflect upon individual responsibility and friendship in dark times. It’s rock with consciousness—and magic.

***

There’s a reason fantasy writers J. K. Rowling, J. R. R. Tolkien, and H. P. Lovecraft have inspired so much great music. They are world builders par excellence, designers of universes big enough for not only their own imaginations, but dozens of other writers and musicians who have wanted to traverse the same realms. These three authors alone have created some of the most memorable occultists, magicians, and wizards in the genre.

Wizards and magicians play important roles in fantasy literature. They bring wisdom and magic to their universes. They even the odds in battles too large for ordinary people. These same qualities have brought them to the rock show. Fantasy rock music and fantasy novels offer their fans a place to escape the ordinary world with its prosaic difficulties. Listeners or readers can enfold themselves in themes that our hyper-rational modern society often downplays or denies: personal heroism, adventure, supernatural experience. These are components of human existence we hunger for. As the DeGeorge brothers said in their song “Voldemort Can’t Stop the Rock”:

We all know that there is nothing we like more
Than watching the wizards rock it out like this.

Sauron, Cthulhu, and Death Eaters be warned: Wizards were meant to rock.

“Virgin of the Sands” is set in an alternate-Earth North African World War II campaign. What kinds of research did you do for this piece?

To be honest, most of my “research” probably came from reading novels and watching movies. Humphrey Bogart’s Sahara was a favorite when I was growing up, and I’ve read Olivia Manning’s wartime novels more than once. I’m also a big Alan Furst fan. I figure I can get away with fictional research, at least for a short story, since what I’m really aiming for is atmosphere.

The world of this story feels very full and well-developed, particularly the different magical systems. Do you have other works set in this universe?

When I’m working on a novel I can spend hours noodling in my notebook, trying to figure out how the basics of magic and society work, because there’s nothing more frustrating than getting halfway through a plot and then discovering a gaping hole in the basic premise. But for “Virgin” I think my main focus was on the physicality of necromancy—that, and how well it works as a metaphor for intelligence work. Once I hooked those two things together, the rest fell into place with surprising ease. And I definitely have other ideas planned for a quasi-WWII world, but you know how it is. So many ideas, so little time….

The virgin says at one point that she’s lodged a protest with “the Sisterhood.” Can you tell us a little bit more about this group? For me, the name immediately brought up connotations of Frank Herbert’s Bene Gesserit. Was that intentional?

I don’t think the Bene Gesserit reference was intentional, though I have no doubt that Dune is lurking around the depths of my subconscious, along with every other book I read passionately as a teen. I think the Sisterhood in “Virgin” is much closer to a nun’s holy orders: less powerful, less scheming, and much more subverted, or even perverted, by the war. I don’t think the virgin would have been who she was, doing what she did, in peacetime.

This piece carries a very strong anti-war flavor. Is that a theme that you’ve drawn upon before?

It’s a theme that will recur in a lot of my work. Aside from the sheer destructiveness of war, 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. But one of the reasons why World War II is an on-going fascination for me is the fact that, without question, it was a war that had to be fought. A “moral war” seems like an oxymoron to me—and maybe never more so than now—yet Hitler’s fascists had to be opposed. But even soldiers who are fighting for a just cause will find themselves doing things that would have appalled them as civilians.

“Virgin of the Sands” contains a lot of sensual material, and sex is clearly critical to the Virgin’s job. It was also originally published in an anthology about sexuality. But with the focus of the piece so strongly on military intelligence and military failure, it’s certainly not erotica. Did you expect the piece to be as sexually charged when you began writing it?

It’s been a while since I wrote the story, but I think the sex—or anyway, the love affair between Graham and the girl—was probably the starting point for me, and for the story to work that very conflicted relationship had to be physical, considering the physicality of the fighting and the magic they were both engaged in. All those bodies, you know? But at the same time, the sexiness did surprise me, since I tend to be a little prudish, if anything, in my fiction. And I was very surprised that it sold first to an erotica anthology, since I thought I was writing a horror story!

Is there anything else you’d like to add or any upcoming works you’d like to discuss?

I haven’t been writing a ton of short fiction lately, because I’ve been pretty invested in various novel projects. I have a YA literary horror, a supernatural suspense, and a fairly traditional fantasy adventure, all in various stages of completion—or, to be more realistic, non-completion, just at the moment. I’ve always been a sucker for variety. And if anyone’s interested in checking on my progress, they can drop in on my website at
www.hollyphillips.com.

The timing was perfect for “Ender’s Game”: 1977 was a year of exceptional breakthroughs in American technology—and exceptional violence in American streets. January saw the first personal computer, the PET, on demonstration at the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago. July brought a New York black out that set off riots and arson; the city was already in a grip of panic due to the steadily escalating violence of the Son of Sam killer. Son of Sam (real name: David Berkowitz) was arrested August 10, just ten days before the launch of Voyager Two. At the intersection of technology and violence, “Ender’s Game” hit home like a ton of bricks. It won Card the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer.

But he was not finished with the topic of violence. 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. And both pieces focus on how a tool—technology, in the case of “Ender’s Game,” and magic in “Sandmagic”—can distance people from the violence they release in the world, with horrifying repercussions.

Beyond their thematic similarities, these two early pieces also proved to be seeds of inspiration for future works. The story “Ender’s Game” morphed and grew into the novel, which has spawned nine related novels and several short stories set in the universe. The world of “Sandmagic” had to wait a bit longer before Card tapped into it again. In 2008, Subterranean Press released Stonefather, a novella that returned to the land of magecraft.

Why the long gap?

In a recent interview Card did on The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, Card suggested that working in fantasy was not only a bad business choice (and as a man with four kids to raise, money was no light matter), but unexciting to a young author at his peak. He told hosts John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley: “Fantasy sucked back then, as a general rule … I became quite cynical about it.”

Times have obviously changed. As authors have pushed fantasy’s boundaries, the genre has exploded. Now, Orson Scott Card has created his first full-length novel set in the universe of “Sandmagic”—the Mithermage universe. The novel, The Lost Gate, is the first of a promised trilogy (although Card warned Adams and Kirtley that he expected the Mithermage universe to produce stories for a long time after the trilogy wraps up). Critical response has been favorable, with Publisher’s Weekly calling the book “well crafted, highly detailed, and pleasantly accessible.” The Mithermage world has arrived.

It’s hard to believe, looking back at “Sandmagic,” that Orson Scott Card could ever have doubted the power of fantasy or resisted working within the world he had created. From the forests to the deserts, the places Cer Cemreet visits are remarkable and fully developed. It’s easy to see that Card spent his early years living in the American Southwest: Arizona, California, and Utah were all his home states before he served as a LDS missionary in Brazil. The desert’s lazy hunger is a palpable presence within the tale.

Of course, the undercurrent of “Sandmagic” is the violence in Cer Cemreet’s life and heart. It’s a theme growing up out of the times in which the piece was written, and a theme Orson Scott Card has handled deftly in other works. In many ways, violence is a theme in the piece because violence is the perfect mirror for morality. Our responses to violence reveal the moral skeleton that holds up our selves. Cer Cemreet’s moral bones have been fractured.

To read works like “Sandmagic” is to wonder: Would that violence break me? Would I let myself wither and die?

Just to wonder is to strengthen your own moral bones.

First, let’s get the big question out of the way: How many of those Choose Your Own Adventure books did you read as a kid?

Every one I could get my hands on. I tried to read them in all the possible combinations of choices, too, so I knew all the possible endings.

Part of the Choose Your Own Adventure form is the use of the second person, a point-of-view often maligned by writing texts. How did you feel about writing this way?

Once I began the story, I knew it had to be in second person. Once I knew that, part of the fun of writing it was seeing if I could pull that off. And it was fun—I got to think about the way the story fit together in a manner that’s different than how I normally write. But the other thing is, I think one of the parts of a story that writers ought to think about is how the story gets told. We have more options than simply third person past for appropriate literary distance, or first person present for a sense of immediacy and connection. The way we choose to tell a story matters.

What I loved most about this piece is how it reflects upon its own textuality. What inspired this approach?

When I’m not being a writer, I’m an academic. I teach English literature at Stony Brook University. When I discuss a text with my students, one of the questions that I ask them to think about is, “What is this text in dialogue with?” as if the text itself were speaking. So some of it came from pressing on that question, and thinking about the possible sentience of the text. But most of it came from reading all of those Choose Your Own Adventure books. I tried to find all of the endings, because I was sure there was a right one, an ending the book wanted me to come to. If the text is sentient, then it must have a preferred reading.

Each section of this story touches on a setting or situation really vital to the fantasy genre. It reads like an exploration of what fantasy really means to its readers. What pushed or inspired you to use these topics?

This story started, as many wonderful things do, via Twitter. I said that I was stuck on my current WIP, and so I was going to put on some music and dance around my office, and when I came back to my desk, someone would have written the next bit for me. When I looked back at the computer everyone had responded with “rocks fall, everyone dies.” (Okay, one person said “bombs fall,” but you get the point.) I laughed, and offered co-author credit for the brilliant endings, but then I started thinking about all the sort of things we know we’re not supposed to do in our writing, like end a story with “and then I woke up,” or write an Adam and Eve story, or start a work of fantasy in an inn, either because these elements have become overdone, or because they’re seen as cheating the reader. And I thought, what if you shoved all of those things in one story? How could you write it in a way that worked, and took them seriously?

I am still sad that I couldn’t actually make “rocks fall, everyone dies” work.

In this story, there are many choices to make, and each one feels like a choice to resist moving forward or keep soldiering on. The work becomes a kind of journey story. Are there any stories or novels about journeys that have influenced you and your writing?

Like I said, when I’m not wearing my writerly hat, I’m an academic, and a medievalist by training, so I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Dante’s Divine Comedy. Well, the Inferno and the Purgatorio, anyway. Also, I was reading Patti Smith’s Just Kids while writing this story, and it’s an extraordinary book about her artistic journey. I highly recommend it.

Is there anything you would like to add?

My friend Ellen Kushner, who is an extraordinary writer, wrote five of the Choose Your Own Adventure books. This story is for her.