Spec fic writer, poet, autist
And now, the other exciting news I was hinting at!
I am delighted to announce that my novel-length work is now represented by Hannah Bowman of Liza Dawson Associates.
I have been squeeing for several weeks sitting on this news, but of course, waited to announce until the contract was officially signed and countersigned. (If we often talk privately, then you’ve probably already heard my squeeing! Squeeeeee.)
I am extremely excited to announce that I’ve just finished putting together a Patreon for Autistic Book Party. It’s really for all of my writing, and there are reward tiers that involve cool story- and poem-related rewards. But I was especially thinking of my Autistic Book Party reviews when I put this together.
The actual reviews that I do for Autistic Book Party will always be public and free. But sometimes money constrains what I can and can’t review at a given time. After literally being told by a friend that they’d pay money to see me review certain things, I got thoughtful. With just a little bit of money a month from people who appreciate my reviews, maybe I could vastly expand my access to different kinds of autistic books – and maybe I could use that expanded access to better meet readers’ needs.
For as little as $1/month, you can become an Autistic book Party backer and vote on which autistic SFF books I’ll review next. When we reach a total of $50/month, backers – all backers – will also be able to nominate the books that we vote on. At $100/month, I’ll be able to open it up to things that aren’t just books: you can vote to get my opinion on the latest SFF move, TV show, podcast, or anything else with autistic characters in it.
If that wasn’t enough, there are also reward tiers with reprints that you can’t find anywhere else, sneak peeks at WIPs, cat pictures, custom poem prompts, and more.
Check it out here. And don’t touch that dial – because very soon I believe I’ll have an even more exciting announcement to make!
Today’s Book: “Marginalia to Stone Bird”, a poetry collection by Rose Lemberg
Autistic Character(s): The author.
I am going to try to write this review in a way that isn’t just jumping up and down and squeeing, because quite apart from the issue of being autistic, Lemberg is one of my favourite speculative poets ever and “Marginalia to Stone Bird” is their debut collection. And although I write poetry I do not think I am very good at reviewing it in detail, but I will try.
“Marginalia to Stone Bird” is a collection of speculative poems (almost entirely fantasy, with a single sci-fi scenario thrown in). The topics of the poems progress from magic realism firmly set in the real world, to folktales and love stories in fairytale-like settings, to the mythic, epic Journeymaker Cycle that dominates the last third. All of them are written in the lush, ornate language that is Lemberg’s trademark:
Give me of these fine threads that sing with indigo and weld,
I’ll make them into a carpet of my hurts,
knot them into a desert alive with Bird’s burning,
I’ll weave—with undyed wool and spidersilk—
the bones out of their hiding places.
This kind of language will not be to everyone’s taste. But I love it, and the ornateness is never at the expense of making sense. The poems also play off each other well enough that reading some will provide useful context for others; many, for instance, are set in the same world, Birdverse (also the setting of “Grandmother Nai-Leylit’s Cloth of Winds“, “The Book of How to Live“, “The Desert Glassmaker and the Jeweler of Berevyar“, and “Geometries of Belonging“).
Lemberg’s poetry is very socially aware. The first third of the book, mainly magic realism, is centered firmly in the experience of oppression in the real world: immigration, faith and doubt, war, a failing marriage. The middle section translates these oppressions to the fantasy realm: its heroes are exploited peasants, abandoned women, unwanted people whose surroundings and cultures never treat them particularly well. (At least one is trans.) The Journeymaker Cycle, in the final third, makes this awareness both larger and more inward. It’s a winding story that unfolds across multiple lifetimes, in which its reincarnated heroes struggle with the use and abuse of their power, taking refuge in powerlessness and then eventually needing to reclaim power; in which they try to use their power to help, and help many, but also run up dramatically short against the limits of that ability. (Readers who liked the healing-and-consent themes in “Geometries of Belonging” will be fascinated by the additional complexity that they take on in the poem “Long Shadow”.) The shorter, more magical realist poems of the final third also play off of these themes, presenting a narrator who is afraid of their own power, afraid to speak or create, and yet who feels inevitably drawn to creation.
There is a theme of doubling that recurs throughout the work, most obviously in one of its early poems, “The Three Immigrations”. While a real-world character moves from country to country in fraught and desparate circumstances, other characters in a surreal and mythic world do the same. Characters in “Marginalia to Stone Bird” are mirrored by their counterparts in other worlds, by ghosts, by other identities with other genders sharing their body, by the people they were in past lives. The fantastical is always present, even in what would seem to be a very unvarnished real-world scene – and the difficult, complex social and emotional webs that constrain people’s actions in the real world are never quite absent, either, even at the collection’s wildest and most mythic.
If anyone tells you that autistic people cannot imagine whole worlds with attendant mythology, or create beautiful phrases, or imagine other people’s lives, or write about complex social situations movingly and with empathy – point them at this poetry collection, please.
The Verdict: Recommended-2
Ethics statement: Rose Lemberg is someone I consider a fairly close friend. I asked for an electronic review copy of this collection and was given one for free. All opinions expressed here are my own.
For a list of past/future/possible Autistic Book Party books, or to recommend a new one, click here.
For mental health reasons (I’m fine now, I just got overloaded by world events for a bit) I did not collect autism news during the months of January and February. I will not be making any attempt to retroactively collect news from this time: today’s Autism News post is for the news cycle starting March 1. Thanks for understanding.
Let’s start this cycle off with some political content: an ASAN toolkit on contacting your elected representatives.
Media and reviews:
About diagnosis:
About fun and play:
Misc:
Sad things:
My poem “A Lover, Asleep” is now online in Issue #11 of Liminality Magazine.
I’m pleased to announce that my short story “Minor Heresies” will appear in the Broken Eye Books anthology Ride the Star Wind: Cthulhu, Space Opera, and the Cosmic Weird in Summer 2017.
“Minor Heresies” is the story of a shapeshifter from a far-future human theocracy who discovers that there is more than one reason why learning about certain alien religions is forbidden.
There has been additional good news this week, which I hope to be able to share with you soon.
Today I’m going to do something a little bit special. I worried that, by separating my Recommended stories into Recommended-1 (for stories with autistic characters, regardless of author) and Recommended-2 (for stories by autistic authors with no autistic characters in them), I would be somehow ghettoizing the work of autistic authors. Instead, I feel freer and more excited about reviewing stories that would go in the Recommended-2 category. I’m no longer putting pressure on myself to justify why these works are as relevant to Autism Issues as the Recommended-1 stories; I can let them be their own, good, thing.
In this spirit, I want to review four short works by autistic authors that are up for awards this year. Let’s celebrate some autistic award nominees!
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Rose Lemberg, “The Ash Manifesto” (Strange Horizons, October 10, 2016)
[Autistic author] A powerful poem about personal strength (and un-strength), written in gorgeous, mythic words. “The Ash Manifesto” was one of my favourite speculative poems of 2016, and is one of two poems of Lemberg’s to be nominated for the Rhysling award this year. [Recommended-2]
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A. Merc Rustad, “This Is Not A Wardrobe Door” (Fireside, January 2016)
[Autistic author] A 2016 Nebula finalist, this is a subversive take on portal fantasies in which two friends in different worlds attempt to fix the malfunctioning portal that is keeping them apart. It’s a short, sweet tale with a firm emphasis on the value of community and connection, and some gorgeous, surreal descriptions. There is also some minor, but nice, queer content. [Recommended-2]
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A.J. Odasso – “Nothing Goes Away” (The New England Review of Books, November 30, 2016)
[Autistic author] A poem that uses beautiful language to describe a moment of inaccuracy by a doctor, and the sheer density of thought that can occur in a moment in response. I don’t know if this poem is autobiographical, but it is certainly meant to be read as the experience of an autistic person who is similar to the author, and it succeeds at that. It is one of three poems of Odasso’s that are nominated for the Rhysling award this year. [Recommended-1]
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Bogi Takacs, “Marginalia on Eiruvin 45b” (Bracken, issue ii)
[Autistic author] A poem about a character, like some of Takács’ fictional protagonists, who accumulates intense levels of magical power in their body and has to learn to let some of it go. (Eiruvin 45b is a verse from the Talmud, which, as far as Google can tell me, has to do with movement and water – but you don’t have to be a Talmudic scholar to understand the basic events in the poem and appreciate the way they are described.) “Marginalia” is a Rhysling nominee this year in the short category. [Recommended-2]
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Of course I cannot review my own work, but just to round out the set, I will note here that my own short poem, “The Giantess’s Dream“, has also been nominated for this year’s Rhyslings.
Today’s Book: “This Other World” by A.C. Buchanan
Autistic Character(s): Vonika, a human woman living in an alien country.
I have decided that, while novelettes can go under Short Story Smorgasbord, novellas deserve a full Autistic Book Party episode. “This Other World” was first published in the anthology Winter Well, but has since then been self-published as a standalone. On many platforms (I used Kobo), the self-published version is available for free.
Vonika is the protagonist of “This Other World”. She’s a human living among the aliens of the city-state Temia. Like many real-life autistic humans who move to another country, Vonika finds that in some ways, she is more accepted among aliens: her strange behaviors are thought of as a foreigner’s quirks instead of being pathologized. Her autism isn’t her only reason for feeling at home on Temia. Vonika excels in a career (architectural engineering) that is needed on Temia, and has a warm, stable romantic relationship with a Temian woman.
As a menopausal woman, Vonika will soon undergo a Temian rite of passage called Ha-Ran, in which older adults become telepathically connected to each other and enter a more communal life. But Vonika’s transition may not be going according to plan. She’s beginning to experience bursts of telepathic perception, even though she hasn’t yet ingested the drugs that cause Ha-Ran to occur. And war is breaking out between Temia and one of its neighboring countries – a war Temia is likely to lose.
“This Other World” is not “about” autism, but Vonika’s autism is well-drawn, consistently coloring her reactions to people, events, and her surroundings without becoming a replacement for agency. Vonika has an aversion to crowds, bright colors, and shallow social pleasantries; a factual, detail-oriented thinking style; and a phenomenal memory for architectural detail. Her way of thinking is described matter-of-factly through most of the story, with a light touch and an occasional hint of dry humor:
She tells half-truths of loyalty and determination. Says she needs to show faith in her new home. That she doesn’t give up when things get tough. There are, of course, elements of truth in all of these, but telling the whole story would make her sound ridiculous, unbalanced even. I don’t like change is not generally considered a strong reason for staying in a war zone.
In the hands of a clumsy NT author, the temptation to make Vonika’s autism the major conflict in a story like this would be irresistible. The story would end up being all about the supposed contrast between autism and telepathy, and the inner conflict that this causes for the character. Happily, Buchanan avoids this trope. Ha-Ran, even if it works for humans, won’t fundamentally alter who Vonika is. While she does feel some minor reluctance, it’s only because does not like change, and is relatively easily dealt with. Meanwhile, she gets a plot full of other interesting things to do, a war to survive, and a mystery to solve – because she is not the only one experiencing early Ha-Ran, and as the war progresses, the number of cases is increasing.
Spoiling the solution to this mystery would be unfair, but I found the solution one of the most satisfying parts of the novella. It’s something that sheds an interesting light on human ideas about empathy and belonging, and about empathy as the primary cause of morality – ideas which are often used to paint autistic people as inherently inferior – and about what those ideas can, and can’t, actually solve.
For a list of past/future/possible Autistic Book Party books, or to recommend a new one, click here.
I’ve noticed that I often wait to signal boost this year’s stories – at least, in blog post form – until the very end of the year when everybody else is doing it and, consequently, everyone gets story-link fatigue. I think I’d like to change that in 2017. So here are some stories first published in 2017, totally unrelated to Autistic Book Party, that I really enjoyed these past two months.
Kat Howard, “Seven Salt Tears” (Lightspeed). A story about a girl and her mother and selkies and mermaids. I love the ocean imagery in this one and the poignant mood.
Iori Jusano, “Next Station, Shibuya” (Apex). A gorgeous story of a sentient city, full of detail. Also I apparently have a thing for stories about magical subways / trains.
Marissa Lingen, “Out of the Woods” (Beneath Ceaseless Skies). A Robin-Hood-like band of outlaws discover that the true king they are waiting for will never come home. A story about resistance and what can happen, for both good and ill, when rebellions are internally divided.
Charles Payseur, “A Lumberjack’s Guide to Dryad Spotting” (Flash Fiction Online). A gay couple have plans to better their lot through a forestry-related scheme. Eerie and morally ambiguous in a very relatable way.