Here’s what we’ve got lined up for you in this special issue: Original fantasy (edited by long-time FANTASY editor Cat Rambo) by Kate Hall, H.E. Roulo, T. Kingfisher, and Julia August. Reprints (selected by legendary editor Terri Windling) by Delia Sherman, Emma Bull, Carol Emshwiller, and Nalo Hopkinson. Nonfiction articles (edited by LIGHTSPEED managing editor Wendy N. Wagner) by Kameron Hurley, Galen Dara, Sandra Wickham, Shanna Germain, Sofia Samatar, Kat Howard, and Wendy N. Wagner. Plus an original cover illustration by Elizabeth Leggett.
It’s so ironic that you’ll hear people talk in one breath about how women are better at writing fantasy and men are better at science fiction, and in the next breath talk about how of course men write better epic fantasy, and women really only write that “girly” fantasy. There are some folks who’d squeeze us out entirely if they could.
Bluebeard gives his wife an egg, and when she enters the forbidden room, she drops the egg in horror and gets blood on it. The bloodstain won’t come out, and that’s how Bluebeard knows she’s been in the room. So right away, the folktale has associations with menstruation and a loss of both innocence and reproductive possibility.
The air was full of storms, but they refused to break. In the wicker rocking chair on the front verandah, Beatrice flexed her bare feet against the wooden slat floor, rocking slowly back and forth.
Our view of the world, and reality, is a constructed one. Our brains—in their unending quest to be more efficient—often pull on early images and memories to construct our view of the real world. After all, what other information do we have to achieve this but those early stories about how the world is, how it works?
Many fairy tales have their own sort of logic and don’t hold up very well to scrutiny, but Cinderella’s particularly bad in that regard—can you imagine what that slipper would be like after it had made the rounds of the kingdom?
Once upon a time, in a land near and far away, there was a girl whose mother died when she was young.
Once upon a time, there was a woman who told stories. Stories of witches and of princesses and of choosing true love. Stories that began once upon a time, and ended in happily ever after. You think you know what these stories are, and oh, perhaps you do. But until this woman, until Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, the stories were not yet called what they are now. But she wrote these stories, and she gave them their name—contes des fées. Fairy tales.
The thing about writing is that while you’re consciously researching and writing a story about, say, scientifically plausible mermen, asexual women, and the infinite varieties of human affection, your subconscious is busily weaving a different story entirely, about love that seeks to own, or plain, middle-aged, scientific spinsters trying to make a place for herself in a culture that doesn’t believe such a creature could possibly exist.
The night Miss Carstairs first saw the merman, there was a great storm along the Massachusetts coast. Down in the harbor town, old men sat in taverns drinking hot rum and cocking their ears at the wind whining and whistling in the chimneys.
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.
