io9 is proud to present fiction from LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE. Once a month, we feature a story from LIGHTSPEED’s current issue. This month’s selection is “Reconstructing ‘The Goldenrod Conspiracy,’ Edina Room, Saturday 2:30-3:30” by Gabriela Santiago. Enjoy! You can also listen to the story here.
Reconstructing “The Goldenrod Conspiracy,” Edina Room, Saturday 2:30-3:30
by Gabriela Santiago
Can someone get the doors? Thanks. Please remember we’re on an honor system for chairs—if you’ve eaten today, please leave them for someone who hasn’t. We don’t need another fainting incident.
First of all, if you’re looking for a technical look at restoring and reconstructing lost Backwards Man episodes, that’s Greg Bakun’s panel tomorrow morning at 9:30, which I really recommend checking out if you’re not too hungover. This panel is about the recent recovery of clips of “The Goldenrod Conspiracy,” the changes to the story that arise from them, and what it means that every single surviving frame of “The Goldenrod Conspiracy” comes from censorship board clips.
Quick recap for any of you newer fans: the thing about “The Goldenrod Conspiracy” is that for over fifty years, the only records we had of it came from the memories of the people who watched it on the first and only date of its broadcast, November 1st, 1960.
The scripts were gone, not even a rough draft in Boris Tidhar’s old typewriter. There were no on-set photographs from the costume department that we could jerry-rig with an audio track—there was no audio track! After the successful restorations of “The Eye of the Galaxy,” BackMag’s classifieds were bursting at the seams with rewards for home videos, but—nothing.
Eventually, the Tin Soldiers—that’s the original Backwards Man fan club out from Toronto—managed to gather the names and addresses of fifty-three people who claimed they’d seen the original broadcast, forty-seven of whom the Tin Soldiers could verify had been alive at the time and residing in a locale where at least one station had paid for the show’s licensing. Tidhar was dead, but they found the script editor Kathryn Jones, a couple actors—Michael Sylvestre, of course, and Mara Davis. With extensive interviewing, they managed to isolate the elements that the majority agreed on, had those three essentially toss a coin to break any ties—look, I love them, but they were doing this in 1986 for an episode that had wrapped two decades ago; if you’ve been to a mainstage panel this weekend you know half the time they need the audience to remind them what happened in an episode. So they were tie-breakers, and the Tin Soldiers filled in the gaps with best guesses based on the surrounding scripts and the tropes Tidhar used for his later work before his tragic death while covering the Third Battle of Chipyong-ni for the Montreal Gazette.
Anyway, the Tin Soldiers put an ad for the cobbled-together script in BackMag for the cost of the postage and the trips to Kinkos, and it sold like hotcakes. It was so popular they took up a collection to get it made into a comic book, called The Silverrod Conspiracy for copyright reasons that probably wouldn’t have held up under scrutiny, with illustrations by Sharon Smith—yes, that Sharon Smith, she’s a longtime Tinny. Anyway, soon there was clamoring for a fan production, which the Tin Soldiers whipped together with spare video-recorders and duct tape, and turned out frankly better than it had any right to. Not one professional actor in the bunch, but they were all fans, the love they had for the details—and look, sometimes you just have to enjoy a man under a rug setting off fireworks. If you can’t enjoy that, you’ve lost what it means to be human.
For years, this was the closest thing we had to canon for this episode. It got referenced in novelizations and fanfic and academic texts and wikis and TV Tropes. For a lot of us, this is still what we think of when we think of “The Goldenrod Conspiracy.”
Of course, not everyone was happy. Victoria Strauss has written probably the definitive fan history on the divisions between the Crushers and the Sliders, and every few years somebody just has to poke the hornet’s nest and Twitter becomes unusable for a week. Even in the more relaxed years, you’ll stumble across fics on AO3 where the list of tags is actually an anti-Crusher or an anti-Slider rant longer than the fic itself. It seemed like one of those underground coal mine fires that can’t ever fully die down, that flares up especially when things get tense. I know back in March, when we got the news about the fungus that was taking down all the wheat—well, there’s nothing I can do about that, can I? But I can go on Tumblr and write ten paragraphs about how this is supposed to be a show with hope, how the Backwards Man is supposed to be a savior, that I can do.
Speaking of hope, in 2010, when that first censorship clip came out! My god!
I know in 2001 when the Lagos Accords had been signed for a full year there was a lot of cynicism in fandom. A full year, and nothing had come out from behind the Firewalled countries? I admit I was in the camp that was sure that even if we could trust everyone to dissolve their censorship boards—and frankly, I’m still keeping my eye on the Kingdom of Virginia—that there was almost certainly enough spite in the old regimes that they would have trashed all their old
records.
But never underestimate the power of bureaucracy.
The very thing that first blocked, then later slowed, our receiving of these clips—that was what preserved them. What kept them carefully filed and labeled under their locks and keys for decades. It took us ten years to find the first clip, and another ten to be reasonably sure we’d found them all. There’s now enough to piece together a much more definitive “Goldenrod Conspiracy”—and for that we have to thank those tiny, rigid minds that locked it away. It scared them so much they wanted it to die, but not without first properly labeling and preserving a sample.
What does it mean, to owe a piece of—of culture, to people like that?
Let’s watch that first clip.
Wow.
Did you hear that? You all heard that, right? As the camera pans along the gray gravel beach? “I am becoming strange. I am becoming stranger.” And then—”I am becoming a stranger!” This was likely censored by the Floridian Council for Decency for the reason of “stranger” being a slang term for homosexual at that time, due to the then-current belief that it was a practice only engaged in by members of the Seminole Federation, their traditional antagonists across the border. In fact, later decades would see the term stretch to a more generally xenophobic term, applied to Cuban and Mexican migrants as well as the Seminole and Cherokee ambassadors, often without any hint of its previously homophobic implications.
Now, what impact does this have on the story? After all, it’s only one line, and we certainly can’t fault the fans for not remembering it perfectly. And though English is one of the several official languages of both Canada and Florida, I think we can say with some confidence that Boris Tidhar was not making a conscious political statement here.
Think about what it means to be “stranger”—something the Backwards Man has always reveled in, if you remember his speech to the Marsh Men of Minos—versus “a stranger,” the thing the Backwards Man tries so hard not to be. Pick an episode at random—he makes a new friend within the first thirty seconds. It’s why that last season upset so many of us older fans, though I know you have to shake things up now and then. But anyway, “I am becoming a stranger.” It’s just one word, but it casts a whole new light on the episode. That faint cast of melancholy on his face. The way he hesitates before speaking. The way he looks at the face of General Silver when the general isn’t looking—that yearning. And beyond this episode—that whole arc towards the introspection and self-doubt that ends with Cassiopea being immolated by the Star King, which in turn prompts the whole Tin Resurrection arc the following season? That so many of us have argued about, because it doesn’t make sense, because nothing prompted it? That begins here, with a single word that slipped our collective memory.
Let’s watch the next one.
Forrest, not Ferris! Did you hear that? We’ve been calling them the wrong name for decades. And though we don’t have absolute confirmation, their companion Kat seems very likely to be the “her” that “Ferris” later accuses the Backwards Man of abandoning in the penultimate scene, “Who knows what those power-mad robotic monsters are doing to her?!” I absolutely love this scene. I wish we knew the actors’ names, we’ve tried, believe me . . . They bring such a, a sweetness. The way Forrest says “A wizard?” with their eyes all big! How hard Kat is trying not to laugh at them! Both playing the roles very young, but it works. It brings a sense of personal stakes. How many of us are likely to be confronted with the universe-bending stakes the Backwards Man is so often confronted with? How much easier is it to understand the loss of one person than tragedy on such a massive scale?
Even now.
You see the headlines in the newspapers, all those deaths, and it’s like they’re written in another language. Sometimes even the bodies stacked up on the street corners become like firewood, a piece of background scenery. And then the teller at the bank’s shirt rides up and you see their ribs pressing through their skin and it hits you, a punch to the face—
This clip was suppressed by the personal order of Tsar Alexei, almost certainly for the vigorous debate about peaceful versus armed resistance that Forrest and Kat are having before they’re interrupted by the Backwards Man and his new friend Pamela. The notes on the file just say “sedition,” but that’s of course always been a wide and flexible term for many regimes.
There’s a large gap here, almost all of what we would consider to be the first half of the episode, though of course our sense of how many things happened in the episode is once again dependent on the malleable nature of memory. Without the celluloid to confirm it, who can say if those moments really happened, or if we collectively invented them, collaborating unconsciously to keep the story whole? In our efforts to preserve this story, how much of it have we actually created?
Anyway, this next clip is from what we would call the midpoint. This is a short one, but fun!
I know, right! Wow!
Now, I know a lot of you are thinking, “Well, it’s obvious why they censored that.” But actually it was very common for women to wear trousers in the Lake Superior Protectorate at that time, as long as they were engaged in farm work. If it weren’t, we’d have a lot more censored clips, especially from Mara Davis’ era! No, the Lake Superior Protectorate was still very sensitive about having supported the United States in the Battle of the Pusan Perimeter, and the rebuff they were given when they pushed for compensation for the war widows. The U.S. Secretary of War made a disparaging reference to the “flannel boys,” and so Pamela teasing Kat for her sartorial choices before kissing her had to go. Only one camera angle, so they scrapped the whole scene. What a shame, right? I hope some of you are going to write some fanfic tonight!
There’s no sound in this next clip, but you are seeing the absolutely amazing set work by Xochitl Jones. The Ministry of Feathers is just . . . She did that with cardboard and gold spray paint and a box of turkey feathers. You don’t get practical effects like that these days. Even the frailty of the set just gives it a sort of ethereal ambience as it sways in the breeze from the fan set up to ruffle Mara Davis’ hair during the “mysterious glowing hand” effect. You really believe this is a palace hovering at the intersection of time and imagination, where fey or eldritch creatures engage in political warfare as arcane and delicate as a spider’s web, so different from the petty squabbles that rule our lives and deaths.
Now this next clip is one that actually creates more questions than answers.
What the actual hell, right? Who is The Lash? Why don’t we see him or hear about him in any of the other clips? Hell, in any of the other episodes, if he’s so important, if his effect on time is that frightening? Why does no one, not one person who filmed or saw this episode, remember what his deal was?
And what exactly is the Redgrave effect? I mean, obviously that’s a bit of technobabble made up for the occasion, but what the hell was it supposed to mean? Why is Kat crying? Why doesn’t the Backwards Man say anything when Forrest makes their accusation? Where the hell is Pamela
during all of this?
As if that weren’t mysterious enough, we don’t even know why this clip was censored. I mean, it was South Albion, so the answer’s probably racism; we tend to forget just how controversial Mara’s casting was at the time. But there’s no label, so there are a lot of theories. The runner-up contender is probably that platter of food in the background, all the roast chickens and apples and cheeses—it’s true that South Albion was going through a food shortage at the time, though nothing like what we experienced here last summer before the Cherokee food aid came through, and it’s true that the S.A. Morale Bureau did sometimes block foreign films that portrayed a higher standard of living. But other theories range from thinking that naming the villain “The Lash” could be an indictment of slavery, to whether that plant to the right there looked too much like marijuana. There could probably be a BackCON panel on just the theories about this one clip and what they reveal about both that time and our assumptions about that time, so you know, maybe propose that next year.
Let’s watch one that’s a little less upsetting.
This is such a good Pamela moment! For all that the popular characterization of her is this space cadet who always falls for the comically obvious villain, you see here she was so much more. She’s not taking any of the Backwards Man’s crap. She’ll accept his apology, but she won’t forget. This is a small moment, but it makes so much more sense of her character arc going forward. Of course the Backwards Man trusts her judgment in “The Electric Devils.” Of course she gives him a hard time about his mistake with Queen Raytha in “The Isles of Calm, Delight, and Terror.” Of course she stays with him for six more episodes even after the Century Clerks tell her about what happened to Bailey Jones.
And the way she bites her lip when she says, “At some point you have to trust a stranger.” Again, “a stranger!” The way she holds her breath until he nods, her shoulders just barely trembling! Get Mara Davis’ autograph this weekend, is what I’m saying.
That was another one for Florida. Sometimes I think about the person who must have had this job. They’d have to watch every episode. Could they have really done that, day in and day out, without falling a little in love with the thing they were supposed to hate? I used to imagine an entire shadow fandom, women in beehive hairdos slipping the clips into their purses instead of the official files, hearts hammering as they walked past the security guards. A little screening later, in the privacy of their own homes. Or if the security was too tight, maybe they just retold the stories—there’s one woman I always imagined when I thought of this, one voice telling the story: she wouldn’t be a natural storyteller, she wouldn’t do the different voices or quite capture the pacing, but she would have watched the episodes so many times that no detail of the script or set escaped her, and she would have fallen so in love that the passion came through in her
voice, and everyone sat spellbound.
Then of course everyone argued about how much better it was five years ago and whether Backwards Man/Pamela was canon.
By the time the Lagos Accords were assigned, I was more cynical. When I thought of the Floridian censor, I imagined her going home to a crumbling stucco apartment complex, drinking the powdered iced tea mix that was all she could afford on her salary while she wrote Backwards Man fic in a worn spiral notebook and burned it in the firepit afterwards just in case there was a raid, or even just because it in the end, she was glad that she could keep it all to herself.
Of course, even this vision was romanticized, or at least old-fashioned. By 2001 that censor would have been retired decades ago, replaced by a complex set of algorithms that removed content automatically based on keywords in the script and object-recognition technology in the footage. Even after the Accords, a lot of the corporate states still use copyright and contract loopholes to disappear entire shows they find objectionable. In some ways, for some countries behind the Firewall, things have gotten worse. Not that things are peachy keen here, but at least we have—a little escape.
Maybe that is why I find myself thinking about that woman again, who is definitely retired, who may have died, who probably never even existed. Because I want to believe that she loved this show. I want to be grateful to her without hating myself.
Humans are so good at finding patterns where there are none, but I wonder—did she do it on purpose, the pieces she cut away? Was she looking for excuses to preserve her favorite moments, knowing the broadcast episode would be written over in five years when the studio needed space to preserve a new jingoistic speech or piece of chest-thumping?
Would that be better? Would we forgive her for everything else she hid away, everyone else she suppressed?
We probably shouldn’t.
I might.
I would at least understand why.
Okay, enough blather, time for the main clip, which I’m sure all of you have been watching on repeat on YouTube, but just in case anybody is wandering in here somehow unscathed from The Discourse, here we go.
Okay. Okay. Can we—can we get a bit of quiet here? Okay, so yes. At first glance, this does seem to vindicate the Tin Soldiers’ choice to go the Crusher route. No, wait a minute, okay? I’m not done. Don’t act like you haven’t been watching Tiktoks on either side since this came out, you
can handle this for five minutes.
So, the evidence in favor of the Crusher camp: there is obvious tension in the portion of the Backwards Man’s forearm that is in frame. The way his eyebrows come together, very angry. And when General Silver enters the frame, we do see him glance right down to where the Backwards Man’s hand would be offscreen, as if he’s noticing a fist, perhaps one with the crumpled remains of a note in it.
But before half of you start whipping out your celebratory memes, I would like to point out that if you watch my arm right now, you see not only tension but also a slight leftwards movement, consistent with sliding a piece of paper along a wooden table. And Silver’s glance could be at the Backward’s Man’s hand, yes, but it could also be towards Pamela, who last we saw, was sitting at the Backward’s Man’s side. When the camera cuts back to the Backwards Man after the General’s short speech, she’s not there anymore, and the final shot of this scene is her walking out the door with the General.
So I’m sorry, but no, I don’t think this has resolved the eternal debate. Did the Backwards Man conceal the plans for the Ministry of Feathers, knowing that if he allowed the General to attack that fortress, that his newest friend, a better person than he would ever be, would die? Or did he discreetly pass the plans to the General via Pamela, preserving plausible deniability for himself if he was again interrogated under the Truth Ray, but ensuring that the machinations of the Ministry were at least partially stymied?
Did he love his friend enough to save him? Did he love the universe enough to save it?
I don’t know if we can ever resolve that.
What we can resolve, though, is one tiny detail about The Lash.
You see that repeating diamond pattern in the background there? Do you remember where we last saw it? That’s right! So this scene doesn’t take place in the General’s council room, as the graphic novel depicted it, or in the underground bunker as the fan film depicted it after they were kicked out of the Annette Street Library and couldn’t film any more council room scenes there. It takes place in The Lash’s pocket dimension skipper, whatever the hell that is. Which means there must have been at least one more scene with The Lash in it for this to make any narrative sense, yet for fifty years we’ve managed to build an entire narrative without him.
Was that scene censored too? I think that’s pretty unlikely, at this point, given that no other clips have resurfaced. So he almost certainly was in the original broadcast episode everyone saw. He was clearly transgressive enough to be censored twice, but at the same time, forty-seven people forgot his entire existence, how transgressive could he possibly be?
Maybe what we take from this is how little actually shocks children. You think you’re going to have to explain trousers or race or immigration, but what they actually want to know is can they be the General for Halloween, and then they want to know why there’s no candy for Halloween this year.
Or maybe what we take away is how random taboos are—no, that’s the wrong word. They look random if you line them all up next to each other, but if you see them in their context, you can trace the threads leading back to the groups most feared by people in power. My Floridian censor isn’t real. The real people are Osceola, Senator Marsha Johnson, William Cooper. So many others. Because they fought, because they marched, because they spoke out—they made people in power afraid. And that was what really preserved those clips, kept them locked away in climate-controlled rooms, lined up neatly like evidence for the prosecution. And they didn’t do it for these clips, even those who were alive at the time they were airing, even those who were fans—they did it for real living people, who are obviously more important than a silly underfunded Canadian sci-fi show that we all improbably love—
They were all just trying to live. And as a side effect, we eventually got a little more of a thing we love. And we just try to live, every day. And it helps. To have this. And I hope our ancestors don’t judge us too harshly if we thank them for this.
Okay, yes, yes, I hear you, that essay by Christian Coleman is a very interesting take on the relationships queer people of color were able to build with the show, even in Firewall countries. I just wonder—did it change anything? Was it enough?
Not enough, that’s not what I—of course it couldn’t be—I just want—
Is hope possible?
It’s—all those stories that will never be told. That aren’t waiting in some canister in a back
room, because they were never allowed to be filmed.
They were just lives, and now they’re gone.
Anyway.
Uh.
On a lighter note, there is another side effect of this reconstruction’s provenance: nerd arguments! You gotta love them. One whole faction of nerds saying that, as this is the only collection of original video clips ever, it’s the definitive version and all others should be scrapped. Another faction immediately rising saying that actually, the fact that all these scenes were cut—never mind the reasons—makes them deeply unofficial, and the fan film should still be considered canon. They go on arguing long enough that a third faction arises from the deep, apparently having forgotten their copy of Theodor Adorno’s The Death of the Author, and starts to say that actually no version can ever be canon without the confirmation of Boris Tidhar, which, good luck, guys, I know death of the author is usually a metaphor but in this case it is very much not. And while all this is going on it’s spawning Discourse left and right: does fandom overvalue things being “canon,” and would we all be happier if we lived with our own interpretations? Does telling people they overvalue canon lead to the slippery slope of queerbaiting? What item on that background food platter would you have personally punched a baby for last summer, and why is your choice not as logical as mine? Let’s start a shipping war just for fun!
I do see all those hands, and we’re going to get to questions in just a sec.
I guess I just want to say, I do see both sides. Being able to take down a transcript of a scene, running my finger down the top of a row of DVDs or old VHSes on a bookshelf—it does feel more real to me like that. And I feel more secure knowing that no matter what happens with Disney’s land grabs or the ongoing nuclear stalemate, they can’t disappear my copies the way they could if I were one of their citizens.
But time is another thing that makes things more real, time and love, like the Velveteen Rabbit. All those years thumbing through the graphic novel, looking for little details in the background that you might have missed in all the previous reads. All those rewatch parties with friends yelling the battle speech along with General Silver and raising red Solo cups on the final cry of “Forever!” All those summers meeting up after panels at BackCON, bunching up the door and blocking the people trying to get in to the next one, shooting theories back and forth about what the Ministry of Feathers really was—the afterlife, a hallucination, an alternate universe Isle of Avalon . . .
In the end, all I can do is hold all these competing versions up to the light like overlapping transparencies, seeing some details clearly, and others not. To me? This one is official. But it doesn’t mean I love the others any less. It doesn’t mean that last summer they didn’t offer me some blessed distraction.
All stories are important. If a different version of this story nourished you, gave you hope—I’m not going to argue with you that it’s not real.
We have about ten minutes left for questions—
The additional evidence of—you mean that line where he says . . .? Okay, I see where—yes, that line does seem to indicate that the Backwards Man has something in his pocket, possibly the crumpled plans. But if you recall earlier in the graphic novel and the fan film, we see him steal six butterscotch candies from the General’s pocket.
That’s certainly a very interesting theory about the Lash.
Look, I want to be a Crusher. I would love to be a Crusher. I love the Backwards Man, and I don’t want to believe he’d send General Silver to his death. But I can’t just forget “The Isles of Calm, Delight, and Terror.” And Bailey Jones. Not to mention most of Season Twenty-seven. For me, I just have to face that the Backwards Man is more complicated than that. And honestly, it helps. To be able to see that complexity, and to still find hope. It helps right now, so much.
I love that theory about the Lash! You should write that into a fic if you haven’t already.
Well, it certainly wasn’t my intention to present Boris Tidhar as an apolitical figure. He was a passionate voice on many social issues, both in his creative writing and his journalism. I discount him making a political statement here not because I’m trying to say that “art isn’t inherently political” but because these were not the politics that consumed Boris Tidhar. If you analyze the thousands of articles and columns he wrote for the Montreal Gazette over the course of his twenty- five-year career, fifty-one percent were on the Korean Conflicts, twenty-seven percent were on local city council and school board races, and twenty-two percent on various government science initiatives. The only articles that touched on immigration were candidate profiles, and I only got three hits on any sexual-orientation-related search terms. Tidhar was very politically engaged, and I would even bet that he held some of the same opinions you just expressed! But these are not the themes we see him writing about. The most I can think of is the Creatites in “Shadow of a Bear,” and that could also be a metaphor for the Third Dust Bowl.
Favorite ship? Honestly, it’s a free for all.
You’re right, of course—it probably was much more complicated than the evil censors and the noble oppressed. Oppressed people joined the ranks of the censors too. They needed jobs, they needed to eat. People do not stay in clear-cut categories of good and evil. We are often so much more ready to slip the bounds of our beliefs than we want to believe. Some of the things we saw last year, the things we did—Well. Like I said. It’s why we need stories.
That’s a good question, and I think that “Holy Grail” aspect has definitely influenced the search,
but I do think it probably was a good episode on its own merits, not just the hype. I’m sure the
artificial scarcity has built it up in some people’s heads. But who needs something to be a Holy
Grail to love it?
I think that’s a very valuable perspective. Would you be interested in proposing a panel next
year? You should talk to Jason or Amber—I know they would love to hear more of a perspective
from previously Firewalled countries, and growing up with censorship as a fact of life.
Okay, we have time for just one more.
No, I don’t think we’ll find any more. I think we forget—look, The Backwards Man is great. It’s the greatest show of all time. But in terms of cultural impact—sure, it’s got more name recognition than some one season wonder like Adam Adamant or Doctor Who, but it’s no Star Wars. It didn’t saturate that deep. We forget how fragile old media was, how easily it could just disappear without being uploaded to the Internet. The clips we got, those are the clips that were there to be found. I really, really doubt that after ten years, we’re going to find any more.
We’re not the Backwards Man himself, after all. We aren’t travelling backwards down the Twigs of Time, branching histories knitting together into a solid trunk that will lead us to the Deep Roots, where everything will be explained. Where we’ll find a reason for our sacrifices, our suffering. No, we move forward from where we were planted, our histories forever splitting away from each other in endlessly branching variation. No one answer, only so many questions: Will the food shortages be worse this summer? Will the grocery stores be repaired in time for the second round of riots? Will the United States withdraw from the Lagos Accords citing the need to suppress that one group, I forget their name, the ones who worship the hunger? Yes, that’s the one.
Anyway, what I’m saying is, all we get when we look to the future is questions. Certainty belongs to our pasts, and we aren’t the Backwards Man—we can’t travel there.
I don’t believe there is a great unbroken treasure waiting for us. Of course, even as I say that—we never stop hoping, do we? That’s the power of story. You can’t prove a negative. As long as pieces of “The Goldenrod Conspiracy” are missing, there is always the possibility that another piece of “The Goldenrod Conspiracy” will be found. There is always the possibility that this piece will change everything—make your ship canon, prove your fan theory right, explain the inexplicable.
There is always the possibility of a whole, unbroken story with the happy ending your life seems so unlikely to provide.
As long as some things are lost, we can imagine perfection, and yearn for it, and search through all the storage closets of South Albion if we have to. Is there something noble in that?
Well, I’m getting the nod that they need this room for the “Season Six As a Quest Narrative” panel, so we’ve got to clear out, folks. Had we but world enough, and time . . .
If you’d like to chat further, I’ll be in line for the hotel restaurant. I hear a rumor they’ve got some rice, and maybe even some canned peaches. Hope springs eternal.
About the Author
Gabriela Santiago grew up in Illinois, Montana, Florida, and Yokosuka, Japan; these days she lives in St. Paul with her partner, their dog, and a semi-alarming number of nightshades. She is a graduate of the Clarion writing workshop and a member of SFWA (as well as a proud member of Team Tiny Bonesaw). Her fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, among others; she has a short story forthcoming in Not Your Papi’s Utopia: Latinx Visions of Radical Hope. You can find her online at writing-relatedactivities.tumblr.com and on her website at gabriela-santiago.com.
Please visit LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE to read more great science fiction and fantasy. This story first appeared in the September 2024 issue, which also features work by Adam-Troy Castro, Osahon Ize-Iyamu, Meg Elison, Ash Huang, Sagan Yee, Jae Steinbacher, Jon Lasser, and more. You can wait for this month’s contents to be serialized online, or you can buy the whole issue right now in convenient ebook format for just $3.99, or subscribe to the ebook edition here.
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