Uncanny Magazine Issue 8 Read online

  UNCANNY MAGAZINE

  Uncanny Magazine Issue Eight

  “Uncanny Magazine Editorial Staff” by Uncanny Magazine

  About Our Cover Artist: Priscilla H. Kim by Priscilla H. Kim

  “The Uncanny Valley” by Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas

  “The Virgin Played Bass” by Maria Dahvana Headley

  “Lotus Face and the Fox” by Nghi Vo

  “The Creeping Women” by Christopher Barzak

  “The Sincerity Game” by Brit Mandelo

  “The Desert Glassmaker and the Jeweler of Berevyar” by Rose Lemberg

  “The Spy Who Never Grew Up” by Sarah Rees Brennan

  “Gatekeepers: The Nerd/Jock False Division” by Chris Kluwe

  “Growing Up in Hyperspace” by Max Gladstone

  “Creating a Welcoming Fannish Community” by Isabel Schechter

  “Quest for an SF/F Grandmother” by L.M. Myles

  “tended, tangled, and veined” by Kayla Whaley

  “The Exquisite Banality of Space” by Leslie J. Anderson

  “Narrative of the Naga’s Heirs” by Bryan Thao Worra

  “Interview: Maria Dahvana Headley” by Deborah Stanish

  “Interview: Christopher Barzak” by Deborah Stanish

  “Thank You, Patreon Supporters!” by Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas

  Edited by Lynne M. Thomas, Michael Damian Thomas, and Michi Trota

  Ebook generated by Clockpunk Studios.

  Copyright © 2016 by Uncanny Magazine.

  www.uncannymagazine.com

  Uncanny Magazine Editorial Staff

  Publishers/Editors–in–Chief: Lynne M. Thomas & Michael Damian Thomas

  Managing Editor: Michi Trota

  Podcast Producers: Erika Ensign and Steven Schapansky

  Interviewer: Deborah Stanish

  Podcast Reader: Amal El–Mohtar

  Submissions Editors: Alex Kane, Andrea Berns, Arkady Martine, Ashley Gallagher, Cislyn Smith, Elizabeth Neering, Heather Clitheroe, Jen R. Albert, Jesse Lex, Jessica Wolf, K.E. Bergdoll, Kay Taylor Rea, Lesley Smith, Liam Meilleur, Mishell Baker, Piper Hale, Shannon Page, Vida Cruz, Lena Ye

  Logo & Wordmark design: Katy Shuttleworth

  About Our Cover Artist: Priscilla H. Kim

  Priscilla grew up reading fantasy books, playing roleplaying games, and generally refusing to get any sun, to which early exposure she pins her fixation on warrior women. She initially fell into the video game industry as an associate producer, but after several years started to miss creating things with her own hands and moved toward illustration and concept art.

  Since then, she’s worked on games with White Wolf (and later Onyx Path), Fantasy Flight, Lone Shark, Hi–Rez, and many other companies, as well as on the Emmy–winning animated TV show Archer, and has had work in ImagineFX and the Society of Illustrators West. She gravitates toward covers and portraits, particularly of heroines. Currently, she’s based in Austin, Texas, enjoying the hot sun, fine cocktails, and friendly folks. You can see more of her work and find prints at priscilla-kim.com.

  The Uncanny Valley

  by Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas

  Welcome to 2016! The glitter ball has dropped at the Space Unicorn Rangers Corps Space Station of Squee, and we’ve welcomed a new year filled with friends, family, fun, compassion, and art.

  We’re writing this editorial after yet another magnificent Chicago TARDIS convention. We’ve been attending since the first one in 2000 and have managed 14 in total. Caitlin’s experiences with Lis Sladen and Colin Baker back in 2008 were the emotional core of Lynne’s Chicks Dig Time Lords essay. You can literally watch Caitlin grow up in the photos of her with Doctor Who actors. Basically, every year at Chicago TARDIS has felt like another Make–A–Wish trip for Caitlin. This year was no exception. Actors Alex Kingston, Ingrid Oliver, and Katy Manning all made sure to talk to Caitlin and make her feel special. We also had a groovy Uncanny Magazine staff dinner with Steven Schapansky, Erika Ensign, Michi Trota, and their loved ones. It was a glorious and relaxing weekend.

  One of the reasons this convention is such a joy for us is Chicago TARDIS and its staff are very attentive to accessibility. It’s held in a hotel built in the last ten years, and they have trained staff members and procedures, so people with disabilities have the same opportunities for a marvelous time as everybody else at the convention.

  We go to a ton of conventions for work, and, sadly, this isn’t always the case. Many excellent conventions are addressing accessibility at their events, and improving every year, which we absolutely applaud and appreciate. Others have resisted, even though it’s both the right thing to do and a US federal law thanks to the Americans with Disabilities Act . After some recent conventions had some major failures with their accessibility again, we and Mary Robinette Kowal—with help from many others—felt it was necessary to create an SF/F Convention Accessibility Pledge , similar to the John Scalzi pledge about not attending conventions without harassment policies. Hundreds have signed the pledge, and it has also been covered by io9 . Most importantly, we’re seeing many convention staff members joining together to share information and work to make their conventions more accessible. That’s awesome, and frankly, the point of the whole thing. Fandom is for everyone, including people with disabilities.

  Speaking of conventions, soon the Thomases will be attending ConFusion in Detroit. We predict massive shenanigans with our friends, colleagues, and readers, probably involving cookies with or without raisins. We hope to see all of you there.

  As you probably know from numerous blog posts around the web by many creators, SF/F awards season has begun. We’re listing all of the eligible Uncanny Magazine works on our blog, classified by length. If you’re unsure whether a story you loved was from 2015, or if it’s a short story or novelette, this is the place to look.

  We are truly proud of everything we published in 2015. Considering this is the first full year of Uncanny, we think it’s been pretty damned spectacular. Thank you so much for reading or listening to the wonderful stories, poems, and essays we’ve been so pleased to share.

  The generosity of the Space Unicorn Ranger Corps through Kickstarter, Weightless Books and Amazon subscriptions, and Patreon makes paying our creators and staff possible. Please keep spreading the word and encourag-ing others to join the ranks. We’re always looking for more recruits!

  Uncanny Magazine 2016 kicks off with a wonderful cover by Priscilla H. Kim, “Round Three.” Our new fiction features Maria Dahvana Headley’s twisted and gorgeous novelette, “The Virgin Played Bass,” Nghi Vo’s haunting and powerful “Lotus Face and the Fox,” Christopher Barzak’s incisive retelling of a classic gothic story, “The Creeping Women,” Brit Mandelo’s sharp and sensual “The Sincerity Game,” and Rose Lemberg’s charming and hopeful “The Desert Glassmaker and the Jeweler of Berevyar.” Our reprint this month is Sarah Rees Brennan’s clever and fun “The Spy Who Never Grew Up,” originally published in Kiss Me Deadly: 13 Tales of Paranormal Love.

  Our essays this month feature Chris Kluwe discussing the false divides and ridiculous gatekeeping between sports and geekery, Max Gladstone examining the impact of Star Wars on SF/F culture and art, Isabel Schechter talking about how to make SF/F conventions more welcoming to people of color, and L.M. Myles discovering that her SF/F grandmother is author Naomi Mitchison. Our poetry includes Kayla Whaley’s stunning “tended, tangled, and veined,” Leslie J. Anderson’s beautiful “The Exquisite Banality of Space,” and Bryan Thao Worra’s piercing “Narrative of the Naga’s Heirs.” Finally, Deborah Stanish interviews Maria Dahvana Headley and Christopher Barzak about their stories.

  Podcast 8A features Erika En
sign reading Nghi Vo’s “Lotus Face and the Fox,” Amal El–Mohtar reading Kayla Whaley’s poem “tended, tangled, and veined,” and Deborah Stanish interviewing Nghi Vo. Podcast 8B features Amal El–Mohtar reading Brit Mandelo’s “The Sincerity Game,” Erika Ensign reading Bryan Thao Worra’s poem “Narrative of the Naga’s Heirs,” and Deborah Stanish interviewing Brit Mandelo.

  Please enjoy the latest issue of Uncanny Magazine, and thank you all so much for your continued support.

  © 2016 by Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas

  Lynne and Michael are the Publishers/Editors–in–Chief for Uncanny: A Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy.

  Three–time Hugo Award winner Lynne M. Thomas was the Editor–in–Chief of Apex Magazine (2011–2013). She co–edited the Hugo Award–winning Chicks Dig Time Lords, as well as Whedonistas and Chicks Dig Comics.

  Along with being a two–time Hugo Award nominee as the former Managing Editor of Apex Magazine (2012–2013) Michael Damian Thomas co–edited the Hugo–nominated Queers Dig Time Lords (Mad Norwegian Press, 2013) with Sigrid Ellis and Glitter & Mayhem (Apex Publications, 2013), with John Klima and Lynne M. Thomas.

  Together, they solve mysteries.

  The Virgin Played Bass

  by Maria Dahvana Headley

  (For Patrick Farrell, who told me a story about that very fish soup one rainy night)

  PART ONE: It Seems I Met You in an Unlucky Hour

  After the War, and before the War, the first time I met him on the road to Moscow, the cat was wearing a green woolen coat he’d stolen from a sleeping soldier. He had fluffy white fur, and was six feet tall in leather boots he’d made from a reindeer he’d killed with his teeth.

  He was standing on the side of the road, making a cackling sound in the back of his throat and stalking a bird, but out of courtesy to me he stopped cackling and the bird flew away in a panic of feathers.

  I knew the cat instantly for a thief and a madman but I was on my own desperate attempt toward the North to find another accordion player I knew, and my boots were lined with mangy goat. The back of my belly mapped the front of my spine. All I could think was that I didn’t know what my last song would be. I thought I should decide before it was too late.

  The cat looked well fed. I wondered if I might rob him, and then decided he’d kill me for it. I thought about begging, but he didn’t look like he’d be in-clined to give to a beggar. I tried to keep walking, but my legs were shaking.

  He stopped me, and told me in seven languages to fuck myself.

  “Sack of curd, waste of universe, I’ll teach you to throatsing like an angel,” the cat continued in Russian. “I’m a fucking feline. You don’t need to go to the Sami. Join me.”

  I could not identify his accent, which seemed to be from everywhere and nowhere at once. He gave me a cocky green look, adjusted his gun belt, and stamped his boots. The Sami had indeed been my plan, but the cat had no way of knowing that. I’d been imagining reindeer jerky and eerie tones, the herders and their open spaces. Once, I’d played at a rural festival with my father. I’d seen someone’s pretty wife, and eaten a dinner cooked by her, and now she was all I thought about day and night.

  I was delirious. I’d been walking a year, since the previous December. There were murderers where I’d come from, taking us into trucks. There were graves all over the hillsides of Khakassia, and shady red–leafed trees fed on blood. My whole country had been killed for twenty years, and then renamed. No one had intervened, because we had no oil, and we had no diamonds. All we had were orchards full of apricots. They were the size of grapes and the color of sunrise, and we made them into brandy, but when the war came, no one had the patience for fermenting our fruit, and the soldiers shook the trees and trampled them. When you looked at a globe, the place we’d been was nowhere on it. I’d run out from my father’s house in the dark.

  “There’s no point fighting, Bruno. There are too many of them,” my father told me. “No one knows you’re not dead already. You’re an invisible man. Leave me here and let them come.”

  I was twenty–four, returned from a failure in another country. I’d been home in secret shame only a week before the army started marching over the roads and into the houses, calling us all dead men. I’d been an intellectual, but now I was nothing.

  “You’re the end of the line,” a soldier said to my friend Jacob Mogilevich, and then tore the tree from the back page of Jacob’s family bible in half, like he was chopping down an elm. I didn’t hear this from Jacob Mogilevich. I heard it from his sister, after I found her on the road. She was dressed as a man. Jacob Mogilevich was dead by then, and she was nearly, but she had yellow hair and so no one killed her. It was only that by then. The world was a strange rattle of black and white film, and the ones who survived were the ones who shone in the sunlight and melted into the snow in the winter. Jacob Mogilevich’s sister and I walked together for a time, and then she gave me her best wishes and her knife, sang a high note and stepped into a place where the river ice was cut away. I’d been alone since the New Year.

  The cat passed me a wormy sausage from his knapsack and said “I’m on my way to sing to a city, fuckface. You better come with me or they’ll kill you by Christmas.”

  This was something better, I thought, than the death I could find anywhere. If I grew weary of the cat, all I’d need to do was call out in a loud enough voice and the war would come for me. I fell into step, my accordion on my back. I thought I was too tired to keep going. I’d been living on dry bread and melted snow. If I’d played anything more tender to the tooth, I’d have eaten my instrument by then, but accordions couldn’t be boiled into soup. Still, I walked along behind him.

  The cat called himself The White Pet, or The Pet when he felt informal. He’d stolen the name of a sheep he’d met somewhere, because he thought it suited him. He had no fucks left. Instead, he had delusions of grandeur. He’d been mistaken for a god and a warlike thief, over and over again, and he didn’t care if he was only a musician. Only wasn’t a word that applied to him.

  The Pet sang Ochi Chyornye as we walked, and eventually I joined him. Everyone knew it. How could you not? It was the worst and most typical song. I’d heard it played around a Roma campfire by men with fiddles and women dancing in a circle.

  Black eyes, passionate eyes,

  Burning and beautiful eyes!

  How I love you, how I fear you,

  It seems I met you in an unlucky hour!

  The cat danced a sideways rendition of the Dance of Cakes, pounced on a rabbit, tore its head off, and ate it raw. He offered me the hindquarters, and I built a fire while he brought a violin out from his knapsack and played the next verse with screaming trills added in. I knew I should never join him, but I couldn’t help myself. He was a cat on his hind paws. There were stories about things like him, but my mind couldn’t hold onto them. My mother’s voice in my head, black cats, white cats, crossing my path. All I wanted was some of The Pet’s rabbit.

  Oh, not for nothing are you darker than the deep!

  I see mourning for my soul in you,

  I see a triumphant flame in you:

  A poor heart immolated in it.

  The cat played a harmonica and ate a sparrow loudly, crunching the ribcage. I tried to suck the marrow from my rabbit bones. It was an effort to keep from chewing off my own fingers as I ate. The cat’s voice wasn’t good, but as he sang, my accordion wanted playing. It was a caterwaul, and my instrument asked for his claws. I didn’t take it from its case, and so The Pet sang on. I couldn’t help myself. I joined him.

  But I am not sad, I am not sorrowful,

  My fate is soothing to me:

  All that is best in life that God gave us,

  In sacrifice I returned to the fiery eyes!

  The Pet looked calculatingly at me, and tossed me a string of small birds, already roasted. By the end of the song and meal I belonged to him forever. It was only later that I thought about the crossroads we’d been st
anding at.

  He slung his knapsack onto his back and said “What are you waiting for, goat’s son? Make tracks. We’re in the miracle market.”

  “We do miracles?” I asked. I was already falling into step. “What type?”

  “We do miracles and mysteries both, alongside the traditional repertoire. I’ve been looking for an accordionist for half a year. The war’s walking behind us, and if we don’t move, we’ll be fucked. Nothing but thieves and murderers out there.”

  The Pet had one silver fang, replaced from the original by a dentist in Odessa. He occasionally claimed he was a minor minion, a missionary sent by the devil to right the wrongs of the state, but he only did that on nights when we had enough money to buy bullets for our gun. The Pet seemed not to care that he was plagiarizing part of his identity from a famous novel. Otherwise The Pet kept his counsel and wore a scarf he’d bought off a Roma violist around his feline face.

  The Pet was one life into nine when I met him, more as we went along. Somewhere along the line he’d begun to believe himself to be some kind of embodiment of the real deal, and now he felt impervious to danger.

  “Where are we going?” I asked the Pet.

  “Brementown,” he said. “Bremen’s where we’re always going, until there’s no Bremen to go to. If we ever get to Bremen, you’ll know we’ve touched the end of things.”

  I didn’t know where Bremen was, but it seemed as good a destination as any. I wanted something other than death. I wanted life and a wife. I wanted to play music in rooms with fireplaces. I didn’t want to be killed at Christmas.

  I followed the white cat in his stolen green, and we made our way down the road.

  The first time I resurrected was a few months later. I died for a while, then concluded I hadn’t died, and thought I must not have been shot at all. When I looked beneath my vest I found a bullet wound, and inside it a bullet, still hot from the gun. The police had found me with a lot of money from one of the taverns we’d just left, and decided I should be dead. I wasn’t.