Category: SFF

Nonfiction, SFF

Nylons, Lipstick, and Narnia

OJ

My latest book is out! Nylons, Lipstick, and Narnia: Rewriting Susan Pevensie in Fanfiction is available now from Luna Press Publishing.

I must be honest: this book was written because I am a world-champion grudge-holder. I was a big fan of The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis when I was little. Then came The Last Battle, the final book in the series, and it got chucked across a room. The kids all died in a train crash, yay! Except for Susan, because doubt and lipstick made her unfit for heaven, the harlot. That’s what you get for liking nylons and having the temerity to go to parties instead of sitting round whining about how much better you had it running for your life from wolves and witches. Susan aside, I suppose the rest of the kids had to die. They were, all of them, getting too old for Narnia and who wants to survive their teenage years, really? Better death by British Rail. Susan will just have to bury her entire family on her own. It’ll be a good lesson for her. Character-building.

(If you hear a slam now, that’s the sound of the book hitting the wall, echoing through decades.)

So, yes. I hated the book as a kid and I hate it now. Happily, I’m not the only one who does! From the vast amounts of Susan-centric fanfic out there, it’s plain that there are a lot of Narnia fans who also can’t stand The Last Battle. Good. That book deserves to be hated, and there’s a great deal of pleasure in reading through fanfiction archives and realising that there are a whole bunch of people hating together. Hatred gets things done. So does disgust. So does disappointment.

Together, those things have combined to give Susan, in hundreds of different stories, a better end than she gets in canon. There are also a number of stories, to be fair, where the poor girl has it even worse. What can I say: fanfiction is a haven for drama. (Don’t look at me like that. You read it too.) But whether the stories give her a happy ending or a tragic one, they are all, implicitly, interrogating The Last Battle in particular, and the rest of the Narnian canon in general, and the ways in which that interrogation works – the shared themes, the multiple points of attack – are just plain interesting. They say things not only about how we see Susan, but how we see ourselves.

And that’s worth investigating.

Horror, Nonfiction, Papers, SFF

Lunar Gothic and Meredith Ann Pierce’s Darkangel Series

OJ

I have a new chapter out!

To be honest, it’s not really new. It came out last year and I missed it. Oh well, better late than never. “Sterility Across Chasms: Dead Worlds and Technological Imaginations in Meredith Ann Pierce’s Darkangel Series” is available to read in Lunar Gothic: The Influence of the Moon on the Gothic Imagination from Palgrave Macmillan, edited by Elana Gomel and Simon Bacon.

When I saw the call for papers for this, which really was years ago at this point – academic publishing is notoriously slow – I knew at once that I wanted to submit something. Lunar Gothic? That was too exciting to pass up. There was really only one choice of text for me, too.

I was obsessed with the Darkangel series as a kid. I can’t tell you how many times I took it out of the school library. It was vampires! On the moon! And the central romance fell apart because it turns out it doesn’t matter if you (literally) offer up your heart to a prince, he doesn’t have to love you for it and it doesn’t make him a bad person, it just means you get to transfer your previously rather limited ambitions to (literal) worldbuilding instead. The drama! The imagery! The dead Earth, hanging in the sky while gargoyles roamed a creepy lunar castle and a whole series of brides got their blood drained and hung around afterwards, whining. (To be fair, in their place I’d whine too.) Death! Rebirth! Fantastical creatures and artificial life!

That trilogy was weird as hell and I loved every page of it. Because I mostly write academic papers on my own time – it’s the world’s nerdiest hobby – I end up writing a lot about my favourite things and pieces of media over the years. And why not, I say. Any excuse to reread this series is a good one. And Gothic really can go anywhere…

Nonfiction, SFF

Nylons, Lipstick, and Narnia

OJ

I have a new book coming out! Nylons, Lipstick, and Narnia: Rewriting Susan Pevensie in Fanfiction is due out on the 18th of August, and pre-orders are open now at Luna Press Publishing.

Like many fantasy fans, I read The Chronicles of Narnia as a child. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is actually the first book I remember reading. I got it as a Christmas present and was utterly enthralled. As the years went on I read the rest of the books in the series, and they were all fine… and then I got to The Last Battle, which remains to this day the only book I’ve ever thrown across a room in disgust.

The problem was Susan: exiled from Narnia for her disbelief and her liking for nylons, lipstick, and invitations, she was the only one of her entire family to survive the horrendous train crash that sent them all to Aslan’s country. Heaven, supposedly, and they were all so happy to be there, to die in this horrendous way, and I looked at that book – I can’t have been much older than twelve, the age that Susan was went she first went to Narnia – and was deeply, irrevocably, revolted by it.

I have held a grudge about that stupid book for decades. Then I started reading fanfiction, and I came across Narnian fanfiction, and it didn’t take very long after filtering the characters for Susan to discover that there were a lot of other people as repulsed by that storyline as I was. I started bookmarking, and then I started writing about it: how fanfiction authors were re-imagining Susan to give her a better life away from Narnia… and away from Aslan.

Good for them. I like their stories better. And I hope, if you read this, that you do to.

Horror, SFF, Short stories

The Barrens

OJ

I have a new story out! “The Barrens” is available, free to read, in the latest issue of Three-Lobed Burning Eye. It’s great to have a story in there again!

“The Barrens” is a body horror/eco-horror sort of story. A while back I read an article about kina barrens here in New Zealand: “kina” being what we call Evechinus chloroticus, the NZ sea urchin. I do love those spiky creatures! They’re so interesting to look at. They are less interesting, though, when they turn the sea floor into desert. You see, there are lots of kina and they are very hungry, and given that we have stupidly overfished their natural predators – crayfish and snapper – the local sea urchin population has exploded.

You can eat sea urchins too, but we don’t seem to be eating enough of them. Admittedly, I’ve never had a meal of kina myself, so I’m hardly one to talk. I read that article about kina barrens, though, and immediately thought that it would make a great horror story. I don’t know why, but I had a sudden image: people with kina for eyes, sea urchins embedding themselves in sockets. Which is implausible and mostly grotesque but also such a great image, especially when the little horrors burst out.

Hence the body horror. Yeah.

Anyway, I had immense fun writing this story, so please go ahead and take a look at it, as well as all the other fantastic stories in this issue of 3LBE.

Horror, SFF, Short stories

How to Dispose of a Dead Albatross

OJ

I have a new story out! “How to Dispose of a Dead Albatross” is free to read at Strange Horizons.

It’s a bit of a weird story. Very experimental, but then it’s part of an experimental project of mine. I’m currently the Robert Burns Fellow at the University of Otago, which basically means I’m the writer in residence there for 2025. One of the projects that I’m working on as part of the Fellowship is a near future science fiction/climate fiction novel called Bloom, in which a toxic algal bloom invades Otago Harbour. Dunedin, you understand, sits on that harbour, so it’s a very local story!

Down near the bottom of New Zealand’s South Island, Dunedin is a great place for wildlife spotting. There are sea lions here, and penguins, and a colony of albatrosses on Taiaroa Head. I’ve been out to see that colony, and the birds are amazing. In the world of Bloom, however, they’re also dead. Poor albatrosses! A lot of the wildlife is dead, in the novel, with the waters choked by algae. And somehow, without my planning it, the novel started to be this exploration of how people might respond to this strange and quietly violent disruption of their environment. “How to Dispose of a Dead Albatross” is actually the first chapter of the novel. It works as a standalone, so when I saw that Strange Horizons was open again for submissions earlier in the year, I sent it along.

I’m so pleased I did!