Eugene Fischer

Category: Blog

Carmen Machado’s Crawford Award Acceptance Speech

I only believe in bounded meritocracies. Below a certain threshold of power, prestige, attention, population—that is where actual events can, sometimes, resemble such a fanciful notion. Add a few more eyes, a greater quantity of dollars, the weight of more history, and invariably you’ll find that chaos, luck, and zeitgeist dominate events. But, very occasionally, those uncontrollable factors line up in a way that is functionally indistinguishable from an impossible meritocratic dream.

That’s how I see the tremendous success of Carmen Maria Machado’s book Her Body and Other Parties. It’s been a finalist for the National Book Award, a Tiptree Honoree, won the John Leonard Prize, won the Crawford Award, and undoubtedly has a slew of other accolades yet to come. I’ve been Carmen’s friend for years, and seen how long in the making was her overnight success. This triumph couldn’t have happened to a lovelier person, nor someone who worked harder for it, nor someone whose writing merited it more. Carmen is the real deal, and her stories are piercingly relevant and stunningly rendered.

I spent the past weekend in Orlando, Florida, grinning from ear to ear as I watched writers young and old flock around her, agog at her literary accomplishments and casual brilliance. I got to sit next to her while she accepted an award for best first fantasy book. (I wasn’t planning on attending the International Conference of the Fantastic in the Arts award banquet this year, but of course that all changed when Carmen won.) Here’s a video of her acceptance speech. The completely shameless yee-hah! is, of course, mine.

Reading: Bat City Review, Austin, Jan. 26

What: a reading series organized by Bat City Review, the art and literary journal of the University of Texas. There will be free food and drinks, including mulled wine!

Who: Well, me, but also reading will be Leah Hampton and Jay T. Howard, with musical breaks from American Dreamer.

Where: The Lewis Carnegie Gallery, outside if the weather is nice, inside if the mulled wine alone is insufficient to keep us all warm and happy.

When: Friday, January 26, 6:00 pm. Hope to see you there.

Interview at Conflict of Interest

There’s a new, long interview with me up at Conflict of Interest, a magazine covering the visual art and literary communities in Austin, Texas. Rebecca Marino talked with me about “The New Mother,” writing process, influences, translation, and gave me room to ramble about lots of other things. This interview is, I think, the first time I’ve publicly articulated what my priorities would be were we faced with the spread of a condition like GDS.

I personally think our sexual dimorphism is nothing more than a happenstance of evolution, not invested with any kind of fundamental ethical importance. There are many in the story who believe that GDS heralds the extinction of men, and while the validity of that fear is left up to the reader, I don’t think it’s an unreasonable thing for people in the story to worry about. If GDS were to occur in the real world, I would have sentimental and aesthetic reasons to want preserve the human male phenotype if possible but not at the expense of individual human rights, which are ethically charged in a way that supersedes aesthetics and sentimentality. I’d rather see my own morphology disappear into history than persist via the subjugation of other people.

Update on My Social Media Presence (Absence)

I mentioned back in August that I was drastically reducing my social media usage. Three months later I’m still largely disengaged from these systems. Here’s the current rundown of where I can and can’t be found.

  • Facebook: ❌ I’m disenchanted with the site politically on a few different axes, and enjoy having back the amount of my time it used to consume, so I’m still mostly off Facebook and don’t plan on going back any time soon. I do still log in for some purposes, such as interacting with event pages or getting a specific message I’ve been clued to expect. But aside from that, if it’s only on Facebook, I probably haven’t seen it. Right now my profile exists as a repository for my social graph and receptacle for automated notifications about updates to my website.
  • Twitter: ❌ Speaking of sites with which I am politically disenchanted, hey, Twitter exists too. I still log in to this one a bit more often than Facebook, though for (a) engaging with people about recent publications, or (b) talking about NBA basketball. Mostly the basketball bit. So unless it related to something I’ve recently published or the San Antonio Spurs, you can assume that I didn’t see what happened on Twitter either. Automated tweets about updates to this website are still active.
  • Instagram: ✅ I’m aware that they’re owned by Facebook, for whom I have profound ideological skepticism, but pictures of my friends’ pets are too crucial to abandon. This is where I’m currently most active.
  • LinkedIn: ✅ I like that LinkedIn has a monetization model that isn’t exclusively selling my attention to advertisers/propaganda agencies, so when I got off Facebook I set up a LinkedIn account. I have no real idea what I want to do with this, if anything, but if we know each other I’ll be happy to connect with you on there. It’d be nice for my social graph to exist in more than one place.
  • Tumblr: ❌ I mirror this site to Tumblr, but never look at it. If you like Tumblr though, you can follow this content there.
  • Snapchat: 🤷 My significant other uses this a lot, so I’ve started actually opening it sporadically. I have almost no connections, and I don’t really know what to do with it, especially now that Instagram has ripped off all of its functionality. But I have an account here I look at sometimes.

How to contact me if our social media presences do not overlap: send me a text or an email. If you don’t already have my contact information, you can reach me via email through my contact page.

States of Decay by Ben Mauk

While growing up in Texas meant that fanciful notions of 19th century cowboys acculturated into my head too young for me to recall any sources, I do remember my introduction to the 20th century Atomic West. It was from Tom Lehrer’s 1953 tune, “The Wild West Is Where I Want to Be,” unmistakably satirical even to a child’s ears, wherein he sings: Along the trail you’ll find me lopin’ / Where the spaces are wide open / In the land of the old A.E.C. (yee-ha!) / Where the scenery’s attractive / And the air is radioactive / Oh, the wild west is where I wanna be. I had to ask my father to explain the acronym for the Atomic Energy Commission.

From prospectors to the Manhattan Project to artifacts of Cold War industry, the American West has existed in my mind as a kind of mottled antique, retro-futuristic in those places where it isn’t simply retro. So it was with great interest that I read Ben Mauk’s new longform piece in Harper’s, “States of Decay: A Journey through America’s nuclear heartland.” Ben has visited the wellsprings of the Atomic Age, explored disused mines, talked to the people still inhabiting its ghost towns and superfund sites. It’s a fascinating read, full of resentment, nostalgia, and unhealthy doses of radiation.

Back outside, Lucas held his Geiger counter up to his face. This was apparently a favorite pastime of rad heads, but even Lucas seemed startled by the figure: around fifty times background, the result of the radon progeny that had caught on condensation in his beard. “Wow,” he mused, taking a selfie with the counter against his mouth.

“You might want to think about shaving,” Jennifer said.

“States of Decay” by Ben Mauk at Harper’s Magazine.

"Okay," said Ceasar. "I'll get along with you, Ezekial." And you could hear his gentle, generous nature in his voice. You could hear it, actually, even when he said, "Ima fuck you up!" Gentleness sometimes expresses itself with the violence of pain or fear and so looks like aggression. Sometimes cruelty has a very charming smile. –Mary Gaitskill, "Lost Cat: A Memoir"

Social Media Presence — August 2017

After flirting with the idea for a while, I’ve finally deleted the Facebook and Twitter apps from my mobile devices and logged out of the sites on my computer. I’m not deactivating my accounts or anything; I might return to them at some point. But I’d grown unhappy with how much of my time and attention social media was consuming. While I regret that I’m undoubtedly going to miss some event invitations and meaningful news from distant friends, I’m already feeling happier and more productive after just a couple of weeks. Some auto-posting systems, like blog posts getting shared to Twitter, remain in place, but the only social media service I’m still actively using is Instagram. So, for the time being, if you want to get in touch with me the best ways are by email or text. If you don’t have those and are trying to establish contact, please use the contact page on this site.

My WisCon 41 Schedule

I’ll be in Madison, Wisconsin from May 26-29th for WisCon. Here’s what I’ll be doing.

• Friday, 9:00 am – 12:00 am, Caucus: Critique Session. I’m running one of the workshop sessions this year, and very excited to do so. This is one you’d’ve had to apply for in advance. If it sounds like something cool and you missed your chance, look for it next year. There are general fiction workshops every year, plus special topic sessions on things like genderqueer writing and romance in SF.

• Friday, 7:30-8:30 pm, Capitol/Wisconson: Opening Ceremonies. Pat Schmatz and myself, last year’s Tiptree winners, will be there to crown this year’s winner, Anna Marie McLemore.

• Saturday, 10:00-11:15 am, room 605: Judging the Tiptree. Current Tiptree jurors discuss the process of judging and selecting Tiptree award winners. Other panelists are Jeanne Gomoll, Aimee Bahng, Kazue Harada, Alexis Lothian, Roxanne Samer, and Julia Starkey.

• Sunday, 10:00 am – 11:15 am, Michelangelos: Burning Up on Re-entry (reading).  I’ll be reading some of my fiction, along with Jed Hartman, Kat Tanaka Okopnik, Benjamin Rosenbaum, and David J. Schwartz. This’ll be in the back of the Michelangelos coffee shop around the corner from the con hotel, where I’ve attended many WisCon readings over the years but never before done one.

Judging the Tiptree Award

This was made public a little while ago, at the same time the new winner and honorees for work published last year were announced (congratulations to them all, especially Anna-Marie McLemore!), but I’ve been remiss in mentioning here that I’m on the panel of judges for the 2017 James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award. The panel often includes a past winner of the award, and I’m thrilled to fill that role this year. Serving with me are Cheryl Morgan, Julia Starkey, Kazue Harada, and our chair Alexis Lothian.

As a consequence, I won’t be tracking my fiction reading online at all this year, since it will mostly be for award consideration. Also, if you follow me on social media, you will see me posting about the award with some regularity. That’s because the judges need people’s help making sure we see all the excellent work that gets published this year. The Tiptree Award has an open recommendations system, so any new (i.e. published in 2017) science fiction or fantasy that you think explores or expands notions of gender is eligible, and can be nominated just by typing the details into a simple web form. You submit it, we’ll see it.

Nominate works for the 2017 Tiptree Award here.

2016 Tiptree Symposium celebrating Ursula K. Le Guin

In December I traveled to Eugene, Oregon to attend the 2016 Tiptree Symposium, a two-day academic conference on the work of Ursula K. Le Guin. I got to see some old friends, made some new ones, briefly met Le Guin herself, and heard many thoughtful panels and lectures. If that sounds like something you’re sad to have missed, you’re in luck: the University of Oregon has put videos of the presentations online.

I’m planning to rewatch several of these, starting with the incredible panel Alexis Lothian put together on “Speculative Gender and The Left Hand of Darkness,” featuring Aren Aizura, micha cárdenas, and Tuesday Smillie presenting three trans perspectives on the novel. I took five pages of notes on this panel alone, and came away feeling I hadn’t been able to jot down everything I wanted to think more about.

Since the video index page I linked above truncates the titles, here’s a full listing of the videos:

December 1, Sally Miller Gearhart Lesbian Lecture, Dr. Alexis Lothian, “Queer Longings in Straight Futures: Notes Toward a Prehistory for Lesbian Speculation”

December 2, Welcome and Panel 1: Ursula K. Le Guin and the Field of Feminist Science Fiction

December 2, Panel 2: UO Prof. Edmond Chang’s Feminist SF students on The Word for World is Forest

December 2, Keynote and Q & A: Karen Joy Fowler, “Ursula Le Guin and the Larger Reality”

December 3, Panel 3: “Speculative Gender and The Left Hand of Darkness”

December 3, Panel 4: “Le Guin’s Fiction as Inspiration for Activism”

December 3, Panel 5: Kelly Sue DeConnick and Ben Saunders: “New Directions in Feminist Science Fiction: A Conversation with Kelly Sue DeConnick”

December 3, Keynote: Brian Attebery, “The James Tiptree Jr. Book Club: A Mitochondrial Theory of Literature” (The text of this one was also published on Tor.com)

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