Author Bookshelf
by Theodore McCombs, May 30, 2023 8:29 AM
Photo credit: Carly Topazio
Reality, even at its worst, is too polite to say everything that needs saying. The permission of speculative fiction is to reach above the merely plausible for those high shelves of meaning. That’s also the promise of queer fiction: we’re not bound to repeat the common wisdoms, we can offer an outside perspective. My debut collection Uranians tries to make good on both those potentials, and while writing it, I turned often to these books to reinspire me toward that goal.
Her Body and Other Parties
by Carmen Maria Machado
Machado’s writing is queer, sexy, voluptuous — not just in substance, but in form too, with an ambition and élan that makes the term “formal experimentation” seem too pale. Each story in this collection is a formal moonshot, an adventure in communicating experience within language-scapes that are hostile to that experience. Whenever my writing feels too safe and reasonable, stories like “The Husband Stitch” and “Especially Heinous” remind me to be entirely unreasonable, more fucky, more fun.
Exhalation: Stories
by Ted Chiang
Chiang sets the standard for philosophical science fiction. Across this collection and Stories of Your Life, his plots operate like little computational engines of inquiry: following his characters through their paces, as they press at the seams of their worlds and confront the discoveries underneath, carries us headlong into profound and original ways of seeing our own. But Chiang’s wise, searching character work ensures these high-wire thought experiments are exhilarating emotional experiences too.
Something That May Shock and Discredit You
by Daniel M. Lavery
It’s understandable why religion often appears in queer writing as an inherently hostile influence, a kind of brainwashing that the queer subject needs to unlearn to be free and realized. But I find it much more exciting to put religion’s conceptual scaffolding to work in service of exploring queerness spiritually — and understanding God queerly. I’ve tried to do that with my Catholic upbringing, but Lavery works miracles as a trans man drawing on his deep knowledge of evangelical Christianity to be a truer, more complete version of himself. It is surprising, moving, irreverent, and of course, incredibly funny.
The Musical Brain: And Other Stories
by César Aira
Aira’s imagination, playfulness, and gift for uncanny atmospherics are inspiring across his prolific works, but these stories’ metafictional preoccupation with choice and coherence was particularly important to Uranians. When does the unbounded freedom of fiction fray into meaninglessness? How do we fold infinite blankness into art? Weighty questions, but it’s fun work thinking about them with Aira’s characteristically zany bestiary of milk-carton genies, simian tea parties, and ovenbirds.
Beyond Black
by Hilary Mantel
Much as I love Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy, it’s her absurdly grim and horribly funny novel Beyond Black that’s influenced me more. Mantel’s commuter-town medium and her entourage of foul, hanger-on ghouls revive, in a contemporary and novelistic way, that medieval democratism of Hell — the idea that Satan’s hordes are after everyone’s soul, even the most trivial, and thus, necessarily, even the most trivial person’s spiritual drama matters in the cosmic scheme.
The Italian
by Ann Radcliffe
Radcliffe is, to me, Gothic fiction at its best. Not the fantastical dark Victoriana of Stoker and Shelley, but moldering alpine castles, long-buried secrets, and a heroine drawing on every scrap of agency left to her to resist a charismatic villain. Best read in a pairing with M.G. Lewis’s trashier, more bonkers The Monk, to which Radcliffe was responding, The Italian showcases its author’s instinct for the sublime — the way the “dreadful pleasure” of beholding a waterfall crashing down from a precipice or chasing phantom monks through an obscure dungeon can expand our souls to the outer bounds of human experience. All “genre” fiction should aim this high.
The Conference of the Birds
by Farid Ud-Din Attar (tr. Sholeh Wolpé)
I’ve been obsessed with the Simorgh, a godlike bird out of Persian legend, ever since I read Borges’s essay “The Simorgh and the Eagle” in high school. In Attar’s Sufi allegory, a quest by the birds of the world to find the Simorgh traces the soul’s journey to self-annihilation and reconstitution within the Godhead. At the end of their trials and ordeals, only thirty birds reach the Simorgh’s home on Mount Qaf and discover they are what they seek: si morgh means “thirty birds.” Here, then, is mystical collectivism alongside the naïve faith of puns — that even accidents of language can reveal. I love this story, and I love Wolpé’s superb 2017 translation the best.
The Changing Light At Sandover
by James Merrill
Speaking of puns, holy shit. Merrill’s wordplay is only a portion of the technical fireworks he sets off in this epic poem, in which, purportedly, two decades of Ouija board sessions with his partner David Jackson lead to a comprehensive revelation of the divine order (not to mention kikis with W. H. Auden and a subatomic peacock). Merrill’s marriage of formal virtuosity, flirty queening, and unhinged cosmic reach serves as another good bad influence for Uranians: go big, go insane.
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Theodore McCombs's stories have appeared in Guernica, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and the anthology Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. Born in Thousand Oaks, California, he is a graduate of the University of California, San Diego, UC Berkeley School of Law, and the Clarion Writers Workshop. He lives in San Diego with his partner and their surly old cat and practices environmental law, with a focus on climate change. Uranians is his debut short story collection.
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