You requested, and I delivered. R. Jean Mathieu is now on Patreon, at patreon.com/rjeanmathieu! You, too, can help me create more of the speculative fiction you love while feeling like a Medici. And there’s lovely lagniappe to be had in the bargain:

As an ami(e), you’ll get a look at all my Murdered Darlings and never miss another story going live. For matelot(e)s, there’ll be exclusive Lagniappe content here at Innerspace and polls on new projects. Comarades can have Letters from Characters addressed to them in particular or a chance to make it into a new story alongside them. Full Mathieuvien(ne)s will get the keys to my private wiki and the audio stories I record for my parents and grandpapa.

…of course that last is for patrons who donate $100/month, but I also value my privacy.

As an opening offer, I will send out the first Letters from a Mathieu Character, physically written on postcards, to any matelot(e), comarade, or Mathieuvien(ne) who pledges their support before January 6. So if you’ve always had a burning desire to hear from Gooch or get Marie-Pier Corriveau’s advice, now is your golden opportunity.

Become a Patron!

In our house, we have lutins.

Les lutins have been quite an education in watching belief being born. I read about them in one of those big tomes of Québécois folklore I keep winding up with: a Northern French survival of Germanic or Celtic belief in household gods that hung on (hangs on?) in the distant villages of Québec where, in the middle of Arctic night, you can totally believe in things like werewolves. While not invisible, they are generally too clever to be seen by human eyes. They can change their appearance and often consort with “noteworthy animals of the neighborhood,” whom they often disguise themselves as. Something akin to the English hobgoblin, at least in the original sense: a goblin (or elf) of the hob (hearth). I explained the concept to Melissa, and she got all excited, like when I told her about French Catholic werewolves for the first time.

Then, one fateful day, she came home and was astonished that the dishes were done. She asked if I’d done it, and I looked up from my book and idly said “oh, les lutins must have done it.” She was curious, so I explained that when they’re pleased,  les lutins will do minor chores like sweeping or a few dishes. When they’re displeased, I said, they get mischievous, like gremlins: they hide small things and pull down books and stop up heat and water. They’re trying to bring attention, I explained, to the things that displease them.

Well, asked my wonderfully credulous wife, what displeases them?

My mind raced. Well, I reasoned, they were not Québécois, but French-Canadian, a belief that did not survive la revolution tranquille but smacks of a dark, Catholic, illiterate, un-electrified past that endured until the 1960s. So, I said, they love the things of summer: music and laughter and cooking smells and light and good cheer and tidiness and warmth and dry, snug, hygge places. And they abhor l’hiver: Darkness. Cold. Wet. Clutter. Silence. Strife.

She nodded with solemn face, for she understood such creatures well.

Strange things began to happen. When the salon and cuisine and chambre were tidy and warm, when the house was filled with bubbling stew smells and néo-trad and Hebrew prayer and conversation, chores really were done when no one was looking. Missing items turned up. The whole household moved a little easier. And when the house was cold and silent, when clutter piled up in the corners and on the tables, when arguments broke out…well, then, wires were tangled and things hidden. My passport. My watch. Once, my wallet out of my pants.

Melissa asked how to propitiate them when they were upset like this. I told her, eh bên, ils sont francos, et pis…

We left out Belgian ale and good cheese, and I told these beings I had made up for amusement that we were sorry, we would work on being tidier, cheerier, friendlier, but until then, have these. Both were gone by morning.

When Melissa was away on some errand or other in the evenings, I began to turn on all the lights and play néo-trad over the sound system. While making soupe aux pois or Irish stew. Just in case.

The real turning point, for me, was when I saw Sophie in two places at once. Melissa’s min-pin, or, as I call her, “the bat-eared tremble rat,” was inside when I took out the garbage that night, and stayed there. Aside from the huge hound who lived up front, there were no other dogs in the neighborhood.

When I saw Sophie sneaking around in the weeds, I thought she’d escaped. But when I went inside, there she was on the couch, dozing.

“Noteworthy animals of the neighborhood, whose form they often take for a disguise.”

A few weeks later when I saw Sophie and Sophie together just outside the front door, I wasn’t nearly as surprised. And when Melissa dubbed the nearby field where we walked Sophie every night, “le champs des lutins,” I nodded, because it looked like exactly the kind of field where les lutins would gather, light their bonfires, pull out their fiddles and squeezeboxes, and chant their fairy chansons for their own saints’ days.

When we moved to our new house, we put out beer and cheese, and I invited les lutins to be welcome in our new home as they had felt more than welcome in our old one. Still, sometimes, we find the dishes taken care of and fresh socks laid out for us. And, sometimes, we mutter that such-and-such article has been spirited away because we have not played enough music lately.

I have watched every part of this process happen. I usually caused it to happen. I am perfectly aware that my lutins are as much my invention as historical folklore, and at any rate, fictional all the same. They are no more real than Tintin, loup-garou, or Jean Valjean. I also completely believe in les lutins, les p’tites bâtards embarbés who are too clever to be seen and whom Sophie knows on an intimate basis. They are a true bokono, a lie that makes us better people that is too useful to discard. Les lutins teach us to be modest, clean, and polite, they remind us to keep our space warm and dry and bright, they invite us to the cheerful hedonism of music and beer and conversation. They even encourage us to use more French, since we both naturally code-switch when the subject comes up. What pleases them is, by and large, what is good for us, Roscoe and Melissa Mathieu.

So.

Do you have lutins in your house?

And if not, whyever not?

And the good news just keeps rolling in. My short story, “Earth Epitaph,” crowns the amazing collection in Triangulation: Dark Skies.

Dark Skies is about the importance of the sky at night, how much we humans need to see the stars. Ms. Turnshek and Ms. Nightingale almost tell a story themselves with the artful way they arranged all our stories. From Blake Jessop’s opening shutdown of Hong Kong to my final message to an emerging cosmos, it’s a building thematic rhythm of night, stars, and humanity. When I finished the book, I wept into my Belgian beer for about half an hour.

I can’t recommend it highly enough.

So, when I was fourteen, in the midst of spitting out about a story a night, one of the stories I wrote was a little something-something called “The Heretic.” It’s short, just over a thousand words, and I filed it away with the rest of my juvenilia when I reviewed my older stuff back in 2011. Then the call came out, a call for submissions for a new anthology, and I knew exactly what story to send.

Yes, really. That’s me next to Spider Robinson, Cat Rambo, Lawrence Watt-Evans, and Gregory Benford. I can’t really wrap my head around it, but now, you can. And if you needed more convincing, a full table of contents is right here, at editor Randee Dawn’s website.

A sci-fi anthology about the Beatles. My mother is gonna be so proud.

As of today, I can proudly announce that I will be published in WorldWeaver Press’ Solarpunk Winters! Coming January 7, 2020, Solarpunk Winters is the sequel to WorldWeaver’s bestselling Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers.

My story, “Glâcehouse,” is the story of a father and daughter fighting over the last snow-covered maples under glass, and whether to unlock the door and release them into a post-independence, post-Anthropocene French-Canadian future.

(I knew the story would sell when one of my beta readers told me, “Roscoe, this is the first story you’ve written where I actually cared about Québec.”)

But mine isn’t the only story. I haven’t had a chance to read the others, but based on the back-cover description, they sound amazing.

These are stories of scientists working together to protect narwhals from an oil spill, to bring snow back to the mountains of Maine, to preserve ecosystems—even if they have to be under glass domes. They’re stories of regular people rising to extraordinary circumstances to survive extreme winter weather, to fix a threat to their community’s energy source, to save a living city from a deep-rooted sickness. Some stories take place after an environmental catastrophe, with luxury resorts and military bases and mafia strongholds transformed into sustainable communes; others rethink the way we could organize cities, using skybridges and seascrapers and constructed islands to adapt to the changes of the Anthropocene. Even when the nights are long, the future is bright in these seventeen diverse tales.

The full TOC below. Remember, January 7! I’m buying my copy the minute they go on sale.

“Wings of Glass” by Wendy Nikel
“Halps’ Promise” by Holly Schofield
“A Shawl for Janice” by Sandra Ulbrich Almazan
“The Healing” by Sarah Van Goethem
“The Fugue of Winter” by Steve Toase
“The Roots of Everything” by Heather Kitzman
“Viam Inveniemus Aut Faciemus” by Tales from the EV Studio and Commando Jugendstil
“Recovering the Lost Art of Cuddling” by Tessa Fisher
“Oil and Ivory” by Jennifer Lee Rossman
“Orchidaceae” by Thomas Badlan
“The Things That Make It Worth It” by Lex T. Lindsay
“Glâcehouse” by R. Jean Mathieu
“Snow Globe” by Brian Burt
“Rules for a Civilization” by Jerri Jerreat
“On the Contrary, Yes” by Catherine F. King
“Set the Ice Free” by Shel Graves
“Black Ice City” by Andrew Dana Hudson

As most of you know, I spent this last weekend in San Jose, at WorldCon 76. It’s why I overhauled the blog and restored the Books and Stories page. Right now, I’m gonna talk about why. Why I went to WorldCon, and why I want to bring the stars closer.

My wife used to work for Ten Speed Press. They are definitely not a science fiction and fantasy publisher; their forté is more cookbooks, self-help, and New Age. Our Matron-of-Honor, Abigail Simoun, is a writer in her own right, a seasoned editor, and runs Red Fox Literary, the prestigious children’s/YA agency. Melissa’s confidante, Danny, only has finer taste for hard bop jazz than he does for American literature, his walls lined with Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon and Haruki Murakami. When I first met Melissa, she thought I was an arrogant upstart writer and I thought she was a snobbish New York literati type. Turns out we were both right.

All these literati have been, for the last six months, looking up from my manuscripts with shocked and impressed eyes and telling me that it’s high time I got an agent and a publishing deal. Indie is all well and fine, and I intend to continue publishing that way, but even I have to admit that New York can distribute and sell books better than I can.

Even after clarifying that I am, in fact, a commercial writer, and not Haruki Murakami or something, they have stood behind their opinion that my writing is good and needs representation yesterday. And I have to admit, having so many capital-L Literary people who believe in me has been a shot in the arm.

That’s when I found out WorldCon would be in San Jose this year. My round-trip train ticket cost $70. Membership in WorldCon was $250. I phoned up my Aunt Nona in San Jose to have a place to stay. Yes, I said, I think I can do this.

WorldCon is the oldest, and most prestigious, continuously-running literary SF/F con in the world. It floats from continent to continent, city to city, year after year. At the first WorldCon, in New York City in 1939, Asimov, Clarke, and Bradbury all attended. As fans. While Comic-Con is larger, WorldCon is the industry event of the year if you’re involved in genre publishing.

WorldCon is also where the Hugos, “the Academy Awards of science fiction,” are awarded. Comparing them to the Oscars is a bit imprecise, though, as the Hugos are awarded by the collected membership/attendees of WorldCon, in other words, the fans. Fans assemble the nomination lists and fans vote for the winners. You may remember, a few years back, when the alt-right tried to stage a coup.

I printed business cards and polished my query letter (and stopped polishing when Abi told me what she’d do to me if she found out I accosted an agent at an industry event with unsolicited queries). I practiced my pitch. I annoyed the shit out of Aaron Ochs with publicity questions. I drove pretty much everyone around me up the wall. When a friend called with a job offer, I said “perfect timing – I’m so busy worrying about WorldCon I don’t have any nerves left over to worry about a job interview.”

And on August 16, 2018, Wednesday, I waved goodbye to Melissa as the train pulled out of Paso Robles. I was on my way to WorldCon.

The next four days are kind of a blur. I remember asking Mary Robinette Kowal to sign my notebook, furiously taking notes at N. K. Jemisin’s worldbuilding class, demanding to know how in the Hell Neil Clarke can have a response time of less than forty-eight hours with 1500 submissions a month, shooting the shit in Mandarin with the crew of SF WORLD, realizing with dawning horror as Caroline M. Yoachim talked that I wasn’t revising nearly enough, getting congratulations from Sheila Williams for a sale twenty years ago, making an ass of myself in French, and sitting in Callahan’s Bar with new friends as the world turned upside down.

At the panel “selling strategies for short fiction,” I thought of my half-dozen stories out in the mail, each with at least a half-dozen rejections each, and I asked the panel: “When should I retire a story?”

Caroline Yoachim leaned forward and said: “When you stop believing in it. It doesn’t matter how many rejections it gets, if you look at it, revise it, and still believe in it, send it out again.”

It wasn’t the answer I was expecting. It was the one I needed.

(And on that note, I am retiring “Only the Good Die Young.” Completely. I’m removing it from Amazon and taking down the description from my bibliography. It’s a better idea than it ever was a story, and the moment when that story would have worked is past. I no longer believe in it. I’m retiring it. Thank you, Caroline!)

I must have passed out a few hundred cards to authors, editors, agents, reviewers, and general fans. I collected just about as many. I’ve filled in half my notebook and a ton of comments and marginalia in the program guide besides. I’ve learned a lot about writing and about being a writer, so much I’ll probably spend years processing it all.

But the biggest part of WorldCon 76 wasn’t about me.

On my way out the door on Saturday night, I met a couple of Chuck Tingle buckaroos who know that love is real.

We fell in together and went out to dinner, and agreed to meet up at Callahan’s for the Hugos the next evening. That evening, Sunday, we sat around our table with new friends and sipped beers, the liveliest table in the bar as the awards ceremony wore on. We were comparing notes on which story or novella we’d voted for and why, making bets on who’d win, cheering Rebecca Roanhorse and Lynne and Michael Thomas and others as they ascended the stage.

All through, one of my new friends kept nervously glancing at the end of the awards program, at Best Novel, muttering “God, I hope she makes it…” and “What if she really did?” I knew what she meant, of course. After the Sad Puppies’ attempt to hijack the Hugos, in 2015 and ‘16, the very Black, very female, very academic, very proud N. K. Jemisin won Best Novel for her amazing The Fifth Season – the antithesis of everything the Puppies had stood for. The next year, she won again, for the sequel The Obelisk Gate. Now, Jemisin’s third book in the Broken Earth trilogy, The Stone Sky, was on the shortlist.

And when Joe Pacacio announced that The Stone Sky had been voted Best Novel, Callahan’s went batshit. N. K. Jemisin had pulled off a threepeat, the hat-trick, the power trio, I’ve heard a dozen names for it. Here’s the truth: one trilogy, three years, three books, three Best Novels. It was something no one, no one, in the history of the award had ever done. Not Asimov, not Heinlein, not Gibson, not Stephenson, not Gaiman.

There was laughter and tears, screams of joy and stamping of feet and thunderous applause. Callahan’s shook.

And Jemisin strode up on that stage, resplendent in golden constellations, and she gave this speech.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lFybhRxoVM&w=560&h=315]

That was an amazing moment in science fiction. The world turned upside down.

And I’d been there to see it.

I’m still processing a lot of what I saw, and did, and heard, and said. But the big thing is what Ms. Jemisin said: let 2018 be the year the stars come closer for all of us.

At last, “Hull Down” is available to read from Amazon!

“The room pulsed around him, its fetid breath almost palpable even through the helmet. The bodies of Commander Wu Suzhen and Major Sam Harris were woven into the wall, a superimposed lovers’ embrace developed in resin and red light. Their shapes were fuzzy; the inside of Matt’s helmet sticky with condensation like his hair was sticky with sweat. His inner ear couldn’t find north or down, his eyes stung and he could taste something salty, but whether blood, sweat or tears, he couldn’t tell.

Why did you live?”

Pvt. Matthew LeWald is surprised when a Navy officer leads his Marines on the Search and Rescue operation. He’s even more surprised to be the only survivor of a mission gone disastrously wrong, when better men than him died left and right. Why did he live? But there are stranger things afoot than war, things like love and things like enlightenment.

The reviewers are saying it’s “not your Dad’s military SF” and calling it “strange [and] haunting.”

I’ve just (re-)discovered Twitter, and on about the second day, Cat Rambo posted a tweet from the Magical Realism Bot: “A Brazilian math teacher proposes marriage to compassion.” She challenged the world to write a story of it. I took up the challenge. This is the result.

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