SFF, Short stories

You Are My Sunshine and Other Stories

OJ

My new collection is out! You Are My Sunshine and Other Stories, published by Stelliform Press, is available now.

It’s a collection of speculative eco-fiction, ranging from eco-horror to solarpunk. Many of the stories have been published before, and you can read them in places like Clarkesworld (“You’re Not the Only One”) or Strange Horizons (“We Feed the Bears of Fire and Ice”). Have a read of either of these to see if you’ll like what’s in the rest of the book!

There’s also a few stories original to the collection, including the title novelette, “You Are My Sunshine.” This is one of my favourites, because it’s just so weird. It’s set in the same world as my Stelliform novella The Impossible Resurrection of Grief, where in the near-future ecological grief at a degrading environment causes a wave of insanity and suicide. Plus, the novella had jellyfish. Lots of jellyfish. There’s no jellyfish in “You Are My Sunshine” – this time it’s starfish. Zombie starfish, which are a real thing. Sea star wasting disease is spread in warming waters, and it causes the poor starfish to disintegrate… but the bits that fall off keep moving. For a while, anyway. If you’re a marine biologist, as main character Cyrus is, that’s pretty disturbing. Also disturbing are the severed human arms that keep appearing on his property, complete with apology notes. It’s bizarre, but I think it’s also a bit funny.

Stelliform has a fantastic range of books, focused on environmental and climate fiction, so if short stories aren’t your thing, take a look at their catalogue and you’re sure to find something appealing!

SFF, Short stories

Year’s Best: Pollen and Salt

OJ

I’m happy to say that one of my climate fiction shorts, “Pollen and Salt,” has been reprinted! You can find it in the inaugural volume of The Year’s Best Science Fiction on Earth, edited by Allan Kaster. I have to admit that even though I basically grew up on Star Trek as the epitome of science fiction, my own scifi is predominantly set here on Earth. It’s not that I don’t still love space travel and alien worlds; it’s just that what’s happening on this world is what I’m most invested in. The changes taking place here, and the changes coming. I’m really pleased to see an anthology that focuses on that, and it’s wonderful to be in it.

I will say, of all the reactions to this particular story, I’m most interested in how people perceive the protagonist. The story’s told by a first person narrator, and they talk about how much they miss their dead spouse, and how affected they are by the changing environment of the salt marsh, but as far as I recall there was no real indication as to the gender of either of the people involved. Every so often a reader reaction or review indicates that they think the protagonist is a man or a woman (I suppose nonbinary would also be a valid interpretation, although I haven’t seen that one yet.) Same with the spouse. Honestly, it doesn’t matter. No matter your gender, you’ll grieve when someone you love dies.

I can’t honestly say that ambiguity was a deliberate choice on my part. I noticed it later, and thought might as well keep it in, but I’m enjoying seeing how people choose to interpret it. I have my own opinion, of course, but there’s no right answer. People can read into it what they want.

Horror, Papers

Forensic and Experimental Estrangement

OJ

I have a new paper out! “Forensic and Experimental Estrangement: Investigating the Supernatural Body” is free to read in the latest issue of Supernatural Studies. It’s a special issue, devoted to one of my favourite films of all time, The Exorcist. I’ve written a paper on that film before, looking at the archaeological imagery of the film and how it relates to the presentation of medicine therein (that paper can be found in volume 7.1 of Horror Studies), and this new paper is a little related to that.

I happen to love horror films about exorcism and possessed or supernatural bodies, and I note that, in some of them at least, there’s a strong focus on medical examination of the body in question. Sometimes that examination is carried out on a living person, as it is in The Exorcist with little Regan, but sometimes the person is dead, and the examination shifts to autopsy. It almost never goes well.

In this paper, I look at four different films – The Exorcist, The Atticus Institute, The Possession of Hannah Grace, and The Autopsy of Jane Doe. I’m interested in how these films present medical science, both its practice and its efficacy… and, honestly, it’s not exactly a research hardship, sitting on my arse and watching horror films.

I’ll take any excuse for that.

Horror, Short stories

Those Shining Things Are Out of Reach

OJ

I have a new story out! “Those Shining Things Are Out of Reach” can be found in Wilted Pages: An Anthology of Dark Academia from Shortwave Publishing.

Now, I enjoy reading dark academia but I’ve never really written any before this, so when editors Ai Jiang and Christi Nogle kindly asked if I’d be interested in contributing a story, I about fell over myself to give it a go. Especially as I was allowed to take a slightly more speculative approach… Don’t get me wrong. I haven’t gone full-on sci-fi here (tempting though the prospect was), as I wanted to still maintain a very contemporary setting. “Those Shining Things” is, however, ambiguously placed when it comes to time period. It’s near-future, mostly, though informed by historic events.

I was interested to see how far I could push ambiguity in this story; how many things I couldn’t come straight out and say. I’m not, it must be said, an especially subtle writer. When I have something to say I tend to want to hammer it, so maybe this is nowhere near as subtle, or as elliptical, as I hoped it would be, but I still enjoy the lingering sense of threat. A lot of my fiction work is influenced by the dark side of science: unethical experiments and horrific hypotheses, and I’m interested in seeing just how people can get corrupted into behaving that way. This story was a way to explore that. It’s pretty grim, but then this is dark academia.

Sometimes it’s fun to be horrific.

Horror, Papers, SFF

Transgressive Reproduction in “Évolution”

OJ

I have a new paper out! “Évolution (Lucile Hadžihalilović, 2015) – Transgressive Reproduction” can be found in The Deep, edited by Marko Teodorski and Simon Bacon. It’s one of the Genre Fiction and Film Companions series from Peter Lang, which means it’s basically an excuse for academics to do close readings on their favourite genre films. In this case, genre films connected to the ocean. Anyone who’s ever loved a sea monster will understand the desire to contribute to a book like this!

I saw Simon talking about the book a few years back on Twitter, inviting calls for papers. I do like creepy ocean stories, so I wracked my brain for one that I could pitch a chapter on. I didn’t have to wrack very hard, because I’d recently seen something very weird and very cool. It was Lucile Hadžihalilović’s film Évolution, which was about women who seemed to be part starfish, living on an isolated island with a group of young sons. These sons were adopted, and human, and being used in medical experiments so that their mothers could reproduce in other ways.

The downside was that the film was in French, and while I have schoolgirl French (propped up by daily lessons with Duolingo) it is still very schoolgirl indeed. The upside was that the script was absolutely minimal – for vast swathes of it there was no talking at all – and so I was determined to manage. Partly because the film was weird and cool and I loved it, but partly because the setting struck me as especially interesting. The women and children primarily inhabited the intertidal zone (my marine biology background was excited to be used!) and the navigation of their transgressive biologies could be mapped onto aspects of that environment.

It’s a short paper, but I had fun writing it. If you get a chance to see the film, don’t hesitate! It’s amazing.