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The Wishing Hour
Jul. 29th, 2013 12:20 pmMy short story "The Wishing Hour" is up at Stupefying Stories! It has pregnancy and a genie and skateboarding. It's funny, free, and short. What's not to like? Read it here.
I wrote this almost exactly two years ago, which is a fairly normal completion-to-publication timeline. There's submitting and then waiting for people to read it, and then probably getting rejected a few times, and then after acceptance, waiting for the issue to come out. Sometimes, it's faster. Sometimes it takes years longer. I mention this because this is the first of three (or possibly five, now that I think about it) pieces I have coming out in the next few months, and I didn't write any of them at remotely the same time. But it makes me look like I've suddenly been very productive. Coincidence.
In this case, the time-slip aspect of it is particularly pronounced, and so it feels as though past me, a different person, wrote this story which is now being read by present me. Present me feels completely understood and embraced by this other writer - that sense of recognition, of "hey, that's how I feel!"
Although "The Wishing Hour" is not remotely a polemic story and was not intended as such by the author (I am fairly confident of this as a critic), and is really more magic realism than science fiction, I realized after it came out that if I said "hey, everybody, read this sci-fi pregnancy tale!" a lot of people would probably assume it involved alien invasion/posession/parasitism, because this is a dominant SF trope.
I like that trope; I am a huge fan of Alien, for instance. (Less so the sequels, although I don't hate them. I hate Prometheus, but that's a prequel.) However, something I have noticed when talking to my male friends is, to put it gently, they don't seem to think of this trope as containing any irony. They really think it has to feel weird and alien and unnatural to be pregnant. (One would hope they are all therefore extraordinarily pro-choice, but as Prometheus would suggest, not necessarily.)
On the one hand, yes, sure. Yes. There is a foriegn body which has set up residence in a uterus. On the other hand, pregnancy is definitively not alien, by virtue of the fact that it is producing humans. It is also, not incidentally, something half of the human race can do with our bodies. It's not something we always do with our bodies, and it's not something all of us do with our bodies, but no, pregnancy and menstruation are automatically not alien or supernatural or weird.
So the SF tendency to treat it as weird and alien supports the dominant cultural narrative that women are deformed men. There are not a similar number of stories about how erections are alien parasites, which use chemical signals to take over your brain, suck the blood out of other parts of your body to feed themselves, and make part of you swell up to a totally wrong size that is horrifying. John Varley did write a penis-as-alien-parasite story, and it is excellent, and Tiptree did some work in this area although as far as I know not specifically penis-focused, but these stories are understood by readers to be symbolic, and to portray men in not the best light. Whereas alien pregnancy stories are just telling it like it is.
Or I would say isn't.
I wrote this almost exactly two years ago, which is a fairly normal completion-to-publication timeline. There's submitting and then waiting for people to read it, and then probably getting rejected a few times, and then after acceptance, waiting for the issue to come out. Sometimes, it's faster. Sometimes it takes years longer. I mention this because this is the first of three (or possibly five, now that I think about it) pieces I have coming out in the next few months, and I didn't write any of them at remotely the same time. But it makes me look like I've suddenly been very productive. Coincidence.
In this case, the time-slip aspect of it is particularly pronounced, and so it feels as though past me, a different person, wrote this story which is now being read by present me. Present me feels completely understood and embraced by this other writer - that sense of recognition, of "hey, that's how I feel!"
Although "The Wishing Hour" is not remotely a polemic story and was not intended as such by the author (I am fairly confident of this as a critic), and is really more magic realism than science fiction, I realized after it came out that if I said "hey, everybody, read this sci-fi pregnancy tale!" a lot of people would probably assume it involved alien invasion/posession/parasitism, because this is a dominant SF trope.
I like that trope; I am a huge fan of Alien, for instance. (Less so the sequels, although I don't hate them. I hate Prometheus, but that's a prequel.) However, something I have noticed when talking to my male friends is, to put it gently, they don't seem to think of this trope as containing any irony. They really think it has to feel weird and alien and unnatural to be pregnant. (One would hope they are all therefore extraordinarily pro-choice, but as Prometheus would suggest, not necessarily.)
On the one hand, yes, sure. Yes. There is a foriegn body which has set up residence in a uterus. On the other hand, pregnancy is definitively not alien, by virtue of the fact that it is producing humans. It is also, not incidentally, something half of the human race can do with our bodies. It's not something we always do with our bodies, and it's not something all of us do with our bodies, but no, pregnancy and menstruation are automatically not alien or supernatural or weird.
So the SF tendency to treat it as weird and alien supports the dominant cultural narrative that women are deformed men. There are not a similar number of stories about how erections are alien parasites, which use chemical signals to take over your brain, suck the blood out of other parts of your body to feed themselves, and make part of you swell up to a totally wrong size that is horrifying. John Varley did write a penis-as-alien-parasite story, and it is excellent, and Tiptree did some work in this area although as far as I know not specifically penis-focused, but these stories are understood by readers to be symbolic, and to portray men in not the best light. Whereas alien pregnancy stories are just telling it like it is.
Or I would say isn't.
