Category: philosophy in a teacup

On this week’s Philosophy in a Teacup, I interview Ann LeBlanc, one of my colleagues from the Unusual Short Stories Panel at this year’s Nebulas. Between the wordwork and the queer yearning, she graciously agreed to answer a few questions…

Thank you for joining us! Tell us more about your book/ series/ short story work.

My debut novella, THE TRANSITIVE PROPERTIES OF CHEESE, is coming out from Neon Hemlock in 2024. It’s about a cyberpunk cheese heist (in space!), which is very fun, but it’s also an exploration of what trans body politics will look like in a posthuman future (answer: complicated, with lots of queer drama, and an asteroid’s worth of cheese).

I’m also editing EMBODIED EXEGESIS, an anthology of cyberpunk stories written by transfem authors. It’s also coming out in 2024 from Neon Hemlock.

My short fiction is often about culinary adventures, queer yearning, the ephemerality of memory, and death. If you’re looking for weird stories with unusual POVs and bodies, I’ve got you covered. My cyber-mermaid time-loop story, 20,000 Last Meals on an Exploding Station, was included in We’re Here, the Best Queer Speculative Fiction of 2021.

Why do you write speculative fiction? / What is speculative to you?

For me, writing speculative fiction scratches the same itch as showing someone a cool rock or bug. Look at that! Isn’t it cool?

This is what makes a story speculative to me. The cool bug factor. Of course, literary speculative fiction likes to layer on things like themes and character arcs and exploration of the human condition (and I love those, and use them, they’re great!). But if there isn’t a cool bug at the center of the story, it’s not speculative to me.

I’d love to read more long-form stories that are just explorations of the cool bug. Omelas[tk] is an example of that type of story, and Timekeeper’s Symphony by Ken Liu in Clarkesworld is a recent example.

Where do you find inspiration for your stories?

Literature is a conversation, so when I write, I am in a way responding to what the last person said. All of my stories are some form of “Yes, and…” or “No! But…”

I often find that ambitious but badly executed fiction is a great source of inspiration. If literature is a conversation, bad art makes me want to argue.

My frustration at the wasted potential of Altered Carbon inspired my upcoming novella, THE TRANSITIVE PROPERTIES OF CHEESE. Altered Carbon had so much cool worldbuilding, and yet all of its interesting ideas were shoved aside to make room for gritty-man noir action-wankery. Not to mention the author turned out to be a huge transphobe (how passé).

So I wrote the novella in part because I wanted to do something actually interesting with those cyberpunk concepts. And I made it very trans to spite Richard K Morgan (but also for my own pleasure).

Having read Altered Carbon in China in the early 2010s, all I could do was laugh at Richard K Morgan’s politics when I found out what they were. How he missed the trans undercurrent of his own book is beyond me.

What is your favorite sci-fi, fantasy, or horror trope? / What is your favorite sci-fi subgenre?

I love a weird and/or surreal apotheosis. The sort of ending where things have gotten so out of hand and the walls of reality start to dissolve and everything gets very weird or surreal or meta.

Wrath Goddess Sing by Maya Deane is a great example of this, as is The Frankly Impossible Weight of Han by Maria Dong. I also loved the awesome and apotheotic ending of Destroyer of Light by Jennifer Marie Brissett (which also does really cool things with structure and prose). 

You say “surreal apotheosis” and the first thing that popped into my head was the format-breaking climax of The Stars My Destination.

What is your favorite speculative fiction book (besides yours)? / What is your favorite speculative short story?

I could never ever pick a favorite, but recently I really enjoyed Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki. It mixes together an absolutely delightful combination of ingredients: deals with the devil involving violins, donut-making refugee aliens, a transfem violinist protagonist, woodworking/luthiery, and some absolutely gorgeous writing about human food culture.

That would seem to have “ATTN: ANN LEBLANC” written all over it, yeah.

For short stories, all of Baffling Magazine’s latest issues have been absolutely incredible. So much cool inventive queer flash-fiction.

What is your favorite unusual speculative fiction story? / What is the most unusual story or book you’ve written?

The Marriage Variations by Monique Laban in the Tiny Nightmares anthology uses the choose-your-own-adventure format to tell an incredibly inventive story about a cycle of abuse/trauma that cannot be escaped.

I wrote a story told through a series of out-of-order clay tablet fragments, annotated by an archeologist. The tablet author is a sort of eldritch horror who exists outside time and space, and so is experiencing multiple versions of the same event at the same time. I felt very pepe_silvia.jpg while drafting that one. It’s also got one of my favorite titles: Infinite Clay Tablet Memories Sung Into the Flesh of the World in Apparition Lit (which is a great magazine you should read)

What is the world you long to see?

We have the resources to make sure every human on the planet has a home, as well as plenty of food, clean water, and medical care. So much structural oppression is about denying people these things. I can’t cure the hatred in people’s hearts, or topple the whole unjust system by myself, but I can try to help people in my local community access food and shelter and medical care.

How do queer yearning and woodworking steep into your work?

Yearning is always an excellent starting seed for a story. The wanting and the not having and what happens as a result of that. So much of queerness is about yearning for something we don’t understand yet, and then when we do, yearning for something that cishet society reviles.

Queerness enters my work through body politics, transformations, the problem of queer legibility, the tension between the desires for assimilation vs liberation, and the way that queer histories are erased.

Bonus question: Novels or short stories? Which do you prefer to read? Which do you prefer to write?

How can I choose? It’s like asking me if I prefer to eat or drink. I want to do both!

To use a different analogy, a short story is like a dagger, and a novel is like a spear. I will explain.

According to Yoon Ha Lee, the point of a short story is to assassinate the reader. (Go read this interview, it’s so good) The reader is my opponent. I distract them with something shiny in one hand, while my other hand is preparing to strike with a knife made of pure emotion. It’s all about quick maneuvers and flashy tricks.

A novel is like a hurled spear. It was Jo Walton, I think, that coined Spearpoint Theory.

A novel has enough length that I can set things up ahead of time (the long shaft of the spear), so that when the tiny element of the spearpoint hits the reader, even if it’s a single paragraph or sentence, it has enough weight behind it that it pierces their heart and emotionally guts them.

I find it interesting that many authors use the language of violence to describe their craft, but I don’t think there’s any profound meaning behind it. Any physical activity involving two (or more) people could probably be wrought into a metaphor. At some point, I’ll come up with a theory of writing involving communal meals.

The Transitive Properties of Cheese will be available in 2024, and Ann’s anthology Embodied Exegesis will be available next year as well. Find Ann LeBlanc at https://www.annleblanc.com/.

This is a new feature I’ll be doing for the future – Philosophy (in a Teacup) – interviews with interesting and up-and-coming authors, especially (but not exclusively) interesting folks in short fiction. My first interview is with the always-experimental Ai Jiang (江艾)!

Thank you for joining us! Tell us more about your book/ series/ short story work.

LINGHUN: A modern ghost story set in a town called HOME, where people go to buy haunted houses to live with the ghosts of their dead loved ones. [R. Jean Mathieu’s review]

I AM AI: A cyborg posed as an AI struggles to stay alive in a tech dominated city threatening to leave those like her behind.

SMOL TALES FROM BETWEEN WORLDS: Smol tales that will take you from world to world, genre to genre, featuring many of my less known works.

In terms of my short fiction work in general, I’d say I like to experiment with different genres and cross genre work (though this is similar to my long form as I move into more book-length projects). I tend towards more unconventional perspective use in writing and concept-driven stories. Many of my current long form works-in-progress draw on bit of experimental I had tested through my short stories.

Why do you write speculative fiction? / What is speculative to you?

I think speculative to me is not just having fantasy, science fiction, horror, etc, elements, but it is almost a philosophical musing about the self, the world, and humanity as a whole, as well as the political and social makeup of society—the ways in which things can be different from how it is now, the way our world might evolve or devolve, how humanity might look like if in a world outside of the one we know and understand, exploring our reality through a different lens.

What is your favorite sci-fi, fantasy, or horror trope? / What is your favorite subgenre?

I suppose “The Chosen One” is my favourite trope because I find chosen one stories quite inspirational. In terms of subgenre, I like dystopian fiction. Although bleak, I feel like it’s a genre that really gets us to interrogate humanity and our society and reflect upon it more thoughtfully.

What is your favorite speculative fiction book (besides Linghun)? / What is your favorite speculative short story?

Toni Morrison’s Beloved. My favourite speculative short story is “Flowers for Algernon” — Daniel Keyes.

Where do you find inspiration for your stories?

I suppose it might be cliché to say, but I find inspiration everywhere, in everything, and in everyone.

Bonus question: Novels or short stories? Which do you prefer to read? Which do you prefer to write?

Oh this is a tricky one, but I’d also like for novella to be a choice here!

Sacré OUAIS!

Ed. note

I like novels when it comes to broad, sweeping worlds and narratives but short stories for contained moments in time and within a character’s life. And of course, novellas for all the in-betweens, and for its succinct nature but ability to still experiment and create layered worlds within its word count limitations. If I’m tight on time, I like to read short stories, but when I have longer quiet moments, I enjoy novels. I’d say this is similar for writing, though as they say, novels are where the money is—but I have high hopes that novellas will quickly join its ranks.

And that’s our first Philosophy (in a Teacup)! Merci beaucoup, Ai Jiang, for kicking us off. LINGHUN and Smol Tales are available for sale now, I Am Ai is available for preorder.