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Widowed

Did you know Facebook doesn’t let you change your relationship status to “Widowed” until your partner’s Facebook page has been memorialized? (Unless, presumably, your partner isn’t on Facebook, or isn’t linked as your spouse.) I mean, I kind of understand why, but dang…

I’m still struggling with that label. When Amy and I got married sixteen+ years ago, that was supposed to be it. I mean, we knew one of us would go before the other, but that wasn’t supposed to be until were were both winding down.

“Til death do us part.” In my mind, that always meant death from very old age. Looking at those words now, they feel like an expiration date on a relationship that was supposed to last forever.

Intellectually, I know I’m not married anymore. Emotionally? Not only am I still wearing my wedding ring, I added Amy’s wedding band too.

Wedding bands

I know there’s no rule on how long you’re “supposed” to wear your wedding ring after you lose your spouse. Some people take it off right away. Others move it to the right hand, or wear it on a chain. I’m just not ready, and I have no idea when or if that will change.

At group last night, we had an activity about the tasks of grieving, one of which — and I’m paraphrasing — is the emotional adjustment to a new and different relationship with the dead. Amy is still a part of my life. I see her in our kids, our belongings, our friends, the photos that pop up on my screensaver. I talk to her at least a little bit every day. I hear her in my memories.

The relationship now is with those memories. More than thirty years worth of memories, good and bad. But it’s not the same. That’s one of the many things I have to come to terms with.

Sixteen years ago, neither of us really knew how to be married. We both screwed up sometimes. We had to figure it out as we went. Some things we sorted out fairly quickly. Other parts took years. There are bits I don’t think we ever fully figured out. But by the end, I think we made a pretty good couple.

I barely remember what it was like to be single. I sure as hell don’t know how to be widowed. It’s one of the many things I know I need to learn going forward.

I know my life needs to go on, in whatever shape or form it takes. I know Amy would want my life to go on. I just never imagined it would have to be in a world without her.

Fortunately, I also know I don’t have to figure it all out today.

Vibranium, Nigerium, and the Elements of a Pessimistic Afrofuturism

https://vector-bsfa.com/2019/10/06/vibranium-nigerium-and-the-elements-of-a-pessimistic-afrofuturism/

http://vector-bsfa.com/?p=7866

By Kate HarlinVector289_Cover

This article first appeared in Vector 289.

In his debut short fiction collection, We Won’t Fade Into Darkness, Nigerian writer TJ Benson imagines a post-apocalyptic Nigeria. Several of the stories trace the apocalypse to the same inciting moment: the release of a previously unknown element dubbed Nigerium into the air, after its discovery deep beneath the Nigerian soil where crude oil had been completely extracted. Taking a single story from Benson’s collection — “Jidenna” — as my example, in this essay I will explore WWFID’s technologically advanced but politically pessimistic vision of an African future. Furthermore, I will use another ostensibly Afrofuturist work from 2018, Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther adaptation, to consider the place of Afro-pessimism within the paradigm of Afrofuturism.

We Won’t Fade Into Darkness was released by Parrésia Books, a small Nigerian press, in 2018. Benson, a writer and photographer based in Abuja, has gained notoriety within Nigerian literary circles, but is not (yet) known to an international audience. His collection is specifically located within Nigeria, rather than a vague or fictionalized African city, and this specificity of place is especially crucial to his story “Jidenna.”

Pessimistic Afrofuturism?

“Jidenna” is titled for the young man at its center, but the story’s true protagonist is Jidenna’s unnamed “Father.” The two live in an improvised shelter built into the crumbling Nyanya Bridge in a post-apocalyptic version of the Nigerian capital of Abuja. The story-world is in many ways a hyperbolic imagining of inequality and social segregation in an African city: post-apocalypse, futuristic technology coexists with poverty and political tyranny. In the case of “Jidenna,” women have gained control of and developed reproductive technology to the extent that men are rendered biologically unnecessary. The matriarchal regime, led by a series of woman rulers referred to only as “Mama,” has subjugated men into mainly domestic and reproductive roles within The Citadel, forcing those men who do not comply (including Jidenna’s father) into hiding. Struggling to cope in this post-apocalyptic society, Father has grown addicted both to alcohol and to his Zivini, an augmented reality helmet that infuses the user’s blood with a less dangerous form of the Nigerium isotope, allowing him to travel to the past, apparently by using their genetic material.

There are two distinct and potentially contradictory terms that can both be useful in understanding “Jidenna,” Black Panther, and the resonances between them. Afro-pessimism is a critical paradigm that values the interrogation of racist and imperialist structures in society, but is skeptical as to whether dismantling them is an achievable goal. Jared Sexton explains it thus:

“Afro-Pessimism is thus not against the politics of coalition simply because coalitions tend systematically to render supposed common interests as the concealed particular interests of the most powerful and privileged elements of the alliance… [But also] because coalitions require a logic of identity and difference, of collective selves modeled on the construct of the modern individual, an entity whose coherence is purchased at the expense of whatever is cast off by definition.”

In other words, Afro-Pessimism seeks to critique politics based around a “we” — even the best kind of “we,” made up of marginalized people united in the pursuit of justice. In any identity-based coalition there will almost always be some contingent that is relatively marginalized, so that even when the coalition succeeds, it simply succeeds in replacing one unjust system with another. Moreover, each of us has many aspects to our identity, and a coalition always demands a suppression of some of these aspects so that, as Sexton puts it, “there is in effect always another intervention to be made on behalf of some aspect of the group excluded in the name of the proper.” Nevertheless, the Afro-Pessimist paradigm is not defeatist. Nor does it argue that working together is futile. However, it is a powerful tool for analyzing the shortcomings of movements predicated on liberating marginalized people, especially global Black populations.

By contrast Afrofuturism, an aesthetic genre and movement first named by Mark Dery in 1993, is often seen as an optimistic antidote to more pessimistic movements in African and diasporic literature. However, “Jidenna” does not view technology as a cure-all for Nigeria’s troubles. For example, as he flees from the scene of a crime, Father notes that “[t]he new government could not afford surveillance cameras but they had heat sensors calibrated to detect the warmth of a mosquito” (Benson 42), suggesting that the surveillance state and budgetary shortfalls both continue into the distant future. As Dery suggests in his initial theorization of Afrofuturism, “Isn’t the unreal estate of the future already owned by the technocrats, futurologists, streamliners, and set designers — white to a man — who have engineered our collective fantasies?” (Dery 180). In other words, for Dery and other Afrofuturists, there is a paradoxical relationship to the future: while it is incumbent upon Black people to imagine a future in which they are the center, the very powers of the imagination are already contaminated by colonialism, slavery, and capitalism; furthermore, there is a great difference between imagining a future and bringing it about. Indeed, for Afrofuturists, technology in and of itself has never been an answer to the oppression of Black people: as Dery further notes, “African Americans, in a very real sense, are the descendants of alien abductees; they inhabit a sci-fi nightmare in which unseen but no less impassible force fields of intolerance frustrate their movements; official histories undo what has been done; and technology is too often brought to bear on black bodies” (180). As such, there is perhaps an inherent cautious optimism is works of Afrofuturism that aesthetically separates them from other works of African and Black science fiction.

The techno-dystopia of “Jidenna” may not immediately appear to fit such a definition; however, several aspects of the story allow for an Afrofuturist reading. First, the Zivini machine, which Father uses to travel back into his familial history, brings “Jidenna” into the realm of Afrofuturism. For example, when questioning the reality of his Zivini experiences, Father reflects that, “Once he had unintentionally returned to the past as the bringer of rain, a god of an ancient community that did not wear clothes. Had this really happened? Had a man once lived with a woman as husband and wife in a home? He laughed at himself” (Benson 50). The Zivini trips fulfill a desire that is also embodied in Black Panther’s Wakanda—the desire to access a usable past untouched by colonialism. The technology of the Zivini, which seems to require pre-colonial African DNA for such time-travel, allows only those with genetic ancestral claim to pre-colonial Africa to access it. Indeed, it is the experiences and ingrained memories of pre-colonial West African village life and family structures that I argue offer Father the hope necessary to sacrifice himself, in order to facilitate Jidenna’s escape at the end of the story. The technology of the story enables both authoritarianism and the hope to rebuild and start anew.

Furthermore, while the extreme inequality of the city reproduces many features of colonial and postcolonial oppression and autocracy, the structure of the government in “Jidenna” subverts expectations surrounding gender and patriarchy. Having acquired the technology to control reproduction, the women of the story finally have a radical autonomy over their own bodies and families; however, the strict controls they put in place around sex and reproduction work to essentially disenfranchise all men. Thus rather than being liberatory, reproductive freedom creates even greater distance between the genders, and queer, gyno-centric families both threaten and reproduce the hold of heteronormative patriarchy over society.

The Zivini is also attended by a complex set of politics, whose progressive possibilities are highly questionable. Father is addicted to it, for instance:

“The man was high on the blood of his ancestors, falling in love with Ifeoma, a pre-colonial, pre-slave-trade… With Zivini and controlled imagination, the father could visit any point in time in the experience of his ancestral line. Tech hawkers who made new modifications every other year warned that consecutive use could cause insanity.” (34).

Later, it is revealed that Ifeoma’s village is being tormented by slave-catchers, undermining the Utopian nostalgia this first scene in the Zivini suggests. Certainly, the reader knows that there is no historical moment at which the imperialist patriarchy offers true comfort and stability to the whole society; thus, what can at first read as a reactionary anti-feminist story, with its caricatures of powerful, cruel, man-hating women, is better read as a text that sees inequality and exploitation as continuous from the past into the future, an Afro-pessimistic (re)telling of a story that would have seemed to hold progressive promise to many of those living it.

Vibranium Independence

Clearly, the tension between futuristic tech and the distribution of power and resources is one that is foundational to Afrofuturism. One particular point of comparison WWFID invites is to another cultural product visible in 2018, Marvel’s Black Panther. Whereas the autocracy of “Jidenna” is built on the toxicity of a fictional element, Black Panther’s Wakanda owes its prosperity to the fictional element Vibranium. Certainly, Black Panther did not begin as an Afrofuturist text; the superhero first appeared in Marvel comics in 1966, and as the creation of white comics artist Jack Kirby, “Black Panther is less of an Afrofuturist work than a neatly commoditized Marvel comic which rides on the coattails of popular black culture, and a popular ability to perform ‘being lit’, more generally” (Marco 4). Yet even in the Sixties the radical potential of the character seemed clear to fans, as critic Brent Staples explains:

“The comic, as first introduced, was not the least bit radical in the political sense — and not even self-consciously black — but it had a genuinely radical subtext. The Black Panther’s alter ego was T’Challa, a highly educated king of the mythical African kingdom of Wakanda, which had never been colonized by foreign powers and was the most technologically sophisticated country in the world. (To underscore the country’s prowess, King T’Challa introduces himself to the Fantastic Four by giving them a vehicle that runs on magnetic levitation.) This portrait begs to be read as a critique of both the western slave trade and the prevailing attitudes of superiority through which Westerners have long viewed Africans.” (Staples)

Indeed, a letter to Marvel in the 1970s, during the Black Panther’s second iteration in the Jungle Action comics, a fan criticizes the strip and its hero for not leveraging Wakanda’s great material and technological wealth to improve the lives of the average African:

“The Panther is a dirty, ruthless exploiter of the people. How else do you explain the incongruity between that nifty multi-million dollar palace of his and the grass huts his subjects live in? Such a squandering of the tribal fortune is unthinkable by one so supposedly noble as the Panther has been made out to be. So let’s see him spending some of those billions on schools, running water, electricity and generally improving people’s condition, huh? Remember, this is supposed to be a super-scientific jungle kingdom.” (Jungle Action 10: letters, qtd. in van Dyk 476).

Indeed, it is a similar conflict that serves as a central plot point in Ryan Coogler’s 2018 film adaptation. Furthermore, the answer at which T’Challa arrives in the 2018 film closely resembles the suggestion from the aforementioned fan: a social outreach center established to educate and uplift Black people, especially children, in Oakland, California. Presumably many more centers are opening all around the world. Thus, the Afrofuturism offered by Coogler’s Black Panther is not of radical liberation or wealth redistribution achieved by Wakanda’s Vibranium reserves and technological exceptionalism; instead, it is a neoliberal fantasy that largely preserves the global status quo.

Returning now to the discussion of “Jidenna,” it is tempting to read Vibranium as a direct inverse or foil to Nigerium. The former offers hope for a prosperous future while the latter is toxic and renders the future nearly unimaginable by destroying human reproductive organs, literally preventing a future of the race. In this futuristic Abuja, if a man were to wander outside without his “cancer diaper,” then “the pure Nigerium in the air would poison his sperm, and his whole reproductive system would rot” (Benson 35). Indeed, even the provenances of the two elements are seemingly oppositional: Nigerium from even further below the ground than the deepest oil reserve, and Vibranium from a meteorite that struck Wakanda 10,000 years ago. However, whereas the relationship between the “Utopic” Wakanda and the fallen Nigeria of Benson’s works may at first seem completely opposed, the dystopia of “Jidenna” offers a more complexly imagined future than its bleak premise might suggest.

Reproductive Technology as Power

The power of the matriarchal autocracy of “Jidenna” differs from the kind of celebratory Afrofuturism of something like Black Panther. Since its very inception, Afrofuturism has been diasporic, and even a primarily African American movement, and one that continues to center the West by focusing predominantly on the afterlives of slavery, especially in the US. Referring to the newfound celebration and commodification of Afrofuturist texts in Europe, Darlene Marco notes that, “Celebration of Black exceptionalism and black trauma from predominantly Western centers means that… we are still, traditionally and predominantly, taught and understood to think from the West as center” (1). “Jidenna” avoids this trap by imagining a Nigeria insulated from extra-national or Western intervention. In fact, when Jidenna decides to escape life in hiding, his father finds that he is trying to escape over the Gembu Plateau into neighboring Cameroon. Not only is this interesting because it imagines a futuristic Africa that maintains its national borders, Jidenna’s plan implies that even the toxic airborne element Nigerium obeys such imaginary lines.

This is but one of several ways in which the apparently subversive Citadel matriarchy simply reproduces heteronormative capitalist patriarchy. Father recalls a local legend wherein a supposed criminal against the regime is apprehended: “He was taken back to the citadel where he became one of the first cadavers for experimenting post-mortem production of semen” (37). Indeed, it is through reproductive control and coercion—strategies de rigueur of the contemporary patriarchy—that Mama is able to keep control. Men, including Jidenna, are consistently dehumanized in the text, valued solely for their reproductive potential, in grotesque parodies of the way women’s bodies are currently policed. Father recounts at one moment that “if he did not man up soon, [Jidenna] would be pumping babies in one of those skyscraper apartments” (35). Furthermore, recalling his past as a Husband to Mama, Father describes how “[p]art of the training for males involved a mandatory course on childbirth to prepare them for fatherhood. When he told her she had delivered them a son in the maternity ward, he saw victory and conquest where there should have been tenderness, and she corrected him that she had born the nation, and not he a son” (53). The militancy of this moment is a nationalist and imperialist fantasy that simply swaps dialogue between men and women, but does nothing to undermine patriarchal structures.

It is here that Black Panther and We Will Not Fade Into Darkness refract and reveal that they are neither utopian nor dystopian texts, but rather exemplify the benefits of reading through an Afro-Pessimistic lens. Whether intentional or not, both Coogler’s Black Panther and Benson’s “Jidenna” offer technologically advanced futures that reproduce oppression and inequality, either on the local or the global level. In Black Panther, Wakanda is a far more just society than many others—particularly the U.S.—while it remains in isolation. However, the establishment of “social outreach” and “science and knowledge exchange” programs in the U.S. with Wakandan money does little to dismantle racist white supremacy in the many other powerful institutions of the United States and the rest of the world. Rather than a system of reparations that returns the plundered wealth of Africa to its inhabitants, the film seems to offer privately funded schools and other solutions that locate the “problems” of Black communities within the communities themselves. Meanwhile, “Jidenna” imagines a future ruled by African women, yet the African women’s goals seem to be the same controlling and acquisitive goals of male tyrants.

Transnational Futures?

In Dery’s foundational Afrofuturist piece “Black to the Future,” science fiction writer Samuel Delany responds to whether Black science fiction necessarily comes from a Black Nationalist position:

“One of the most forceful and distinguishing aspects of science fiction is that it’s marginal. It’s always at its most honest and most effective when it operates — and claims to be operating — from the margins. Whenever — sometimes just through pure enthusiasm for its topic — it claims to take center stage, I find it usually betrays itself in some way. I don’t want to see it operating from anyone’s center: black nationalism’s, feminism’s, gay rights’, pro-technology movements’, ecology movements’ or any other center.” (189)

Delany resists the notion that science fiction ought to start from a particular political position; rather, he suggests the genre’s true power comes from the margins. If this is true, pessimism that incorporates Afrofuturist themes and aesthetics has the potential to be incredibly powerful.

On one hand, perhaps asking a multi-million-dollar Hollywood enterprise such as Black Panther to be politically radical, or even particularly progressive in nature, is a misunderstanding of genre, or a misreading of the film overall. Furthermore, the film did offer unprecedented representation of Black actors and crew and a diverse mix of African aesthetics to a massive global audience, many of whom are African people themselves and often left out of or tokenized in such mainstream pop culture. On the other hand, “Jidenna,” produced on the continent by a Nigerian writer for a largely African audience, has embedded in it discourses of Afro-Pessimism while also incorporating elements of the Afrofuturist aesthetic. In the final scene, Father sacrifices his life to help Jidenna escape over the bordering mountain range into neighboring Cameroon, away from the autocratic matriarchal oppression he was born into. For Benson’s story, the hope for (post-apocalyptic) Africa is transnational but still decidedly African; Jidenna’s future hinges on successfully crossing borders within the continent, not fleeing it. Whether Nigeria’s future is salvageable by forces within or by extranational intervention is indeterminate at the end of the story.

By placing these two texts together, I of course don’t propose to offer any solutions to the problems facing contemporary African nations or the diaspora, or to suggest that either Black Panther or We Won’t Fade into Darkness should or could offer such answers themselves. Rather, I hope this analysis reveals the ways two vastly different texts that deploy elements of Afrofuturism can be enriched using the lens of Afro-Pessimism. In what ways might hope and enthusiasm obscure the ultimately reactionary politics of Black Panther? Could a Western-inspired feminism, focused on reproductive healthcare access, run the risk of reproducing the same oppressive structures of patriarchy, as suggested in “Jidenna”? I argue that both of these texts invite us to turn a critical eye to all imaginings of the future, whether apparently optimistic or pessimistic.

References

Benson, TJ. We Will Not Fade Into Darkness. Parrésia Books, 2018.

Black Panther. Directed by Ryan Coogler, performance by Chadwick Boseman, Marvel Studios, 29 Jan. 2018.

Dery, Mark, editors. “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delaney, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose.” Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyber Culture, Duke UP, 1994, p. 179–222.

Morris, Susana M.”Black Girls Are from the Future: Afrofuturist Feminism in Octavia E. Butler’s Fledgling.” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 40 no. 3, 2013, pp. 146-166. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/wsq.2013.0034.

Ober, Juliane, and Thomas Krebs. “Chemical Elements in Fantasy and Science Fiction.” Journal of Chemical Education, vol. 86, no. 10, Oct. 2009, p. 1141.

Saunders, Robert A. “(Profitable) Imaginaries of Black Power: The Popular and Political Geographies of Black Panther.” Political Geography, vol. 69, 2019, p. 139–149.

Sexton, Jared. “Afro-Pessimism: The Unclear Word.” Rhizomes, 29, 2016, doi.org/10.20415/rhiz/029.e02.

Staples, Brent. “The Afrofuturism behind ‘Black Panther.’” The New York Times, 24 Feb. 2018, nytimes.com.

Van Dyk, Michael. “What’s Going On? Black Identity in the Marvel Age.” International Journal of Comic Art, vol. Spring, 2006, p. 466–90.


Kate Harlin is a PhD candidate in her final year at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Her dissertation discusses suicide in contemporary fiction from Africa and the diaspora. Her work has also appeared in Prairie Schooner, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and BuzzFeed.

Impostors Story

https://scottwesterfeld.com/blog/2019/09/impostors-story/

https://scottwesterfeld.com/?p=6552

This is a short story set in the extended Uglies universe. It’s from the POV of Rafi, Frey’s sister in Impostors. This story takes place about six years before the time period of the novel, when the two girls are nine.

If you haven’t read Impostors, some quick background: Frey and Rafi are identical twins, but only Rafi is known to the public. Frey was created as a body double, bait for kidnappers and assassins who would strike at Rafia, the first daughter of Shreve. Their father has many enemies.

They have only each other.

Rafia of Shreve

My etiquette tutor is annoyed with me.

Sensei Noriko would never say so out loud, but I can see it in her pursed lips. In her crisp instructions to repeat my moves again and again. In her reminders that the First Family Ball is next week, and that Dad expects me to be as perfect a hostess as my mother would’ve been.

The best daughter.

“Straighten your back,” Noriko says. “This is a curtsy, Rafia, not a bow.”

I learned how to bow last month—in case business ever takes us to Japan.

“Just a respectful nod,” she says. “As if speaking to your father.”

My stomach twists. When Daddy’s in the room, I always stare at the floor. Not out of respect.

I force his image from my mind.

Concentrate. Be the best.

This is how you curtsy: Slide your right foot back. Shift your weight onto your left.

Take the corners of your dress between the thumb and first two fingers of each hand. Pull your dress wider, like gently opening a fan.

“Pinkies out,” Norika murmurs, even though mine are already.

Nod your head. Bend your knees outward, but keep your back straight.

All of it at the same time. Gracefully, like asking someone to dance. When I come back up, my best smile is on my lips.

Everyone loves my smile.

But Sensei Noriko still isn’t happy.

“A curtsy shows courtesy,” she says. “The way you move shows something else.”

I sigh. “How bored I am, maybe? We’ve done this a thousand times!”

Noriko doesn’t answer at first. She steps closer, scanning my posture. Then she reaches out and flattens one palm on my stomach, like a doctor trying to sense something beneath the surface of the skin.

The twist in my stomach flinches a little.

Her eyes soften. “You move with anger, Rafia.”

I leave the lesson early.

On the way back to my room, my fists stay clenched until I cross the red line painted on the floor. Only in the secure area can I let go.

Daddy has enemies. The people who killed my mother, who stole my older brother before I was born. Here inside the red line is where I feel safest.

It’s also where both halves of me slide back together with a click.

When I open the door to our room, my twin sister looks up at me, a little surprised. She’s toweling her hair dry. Her skin is flushed with exertion, her eyes bright. Her knuckles look raw—combat training.

She smiles at me. It’s such a waste. Frey has a beautiful smile, and no one ever sees it.

“You’re back early.”

“Obviously.” I fall backwards onto my bed.

Frey sits down beside me. “What’s up, big sister?”

“Just Noriko. She was being a pain today.”

Frey has to think for a second. She’s never met most of my tutors.

“She teaches you etiquette?”

I nod. “She says I don’t curtsy right.”

Frey laughs, like someone who’s never had to be a perfect hostess. Who’s never had to smile at people she doesn’t like. She laughs like someone free, even if she’s trapped here inside the red line.

“That’s silly, Rafi.” She leans back beside me on the bed. “You do all that stuff right.”

I love praise from my sister, but you move with anger still rings in my ears.

It was mean of Noriko to see inside me like that.

I can’t tell Frey why I’m really upset. I have to protect her, like she protects me.

While I’m learning how to bow and dance and be polite all day, Frey is learning how to fight. How to shield me with her body. How to kill for me if she has to.

She’s my guardian, my body double.

Frey is my anger, my violence. I’m not allowed to have my own.

It isn’t fair. All that time I spend with language tutors, dancing masters, etiquette tutors, I’m squishing my feelings down into my stomach—while Frey is swinging her fists.

She jumps up and tugs on the sides of her sweatpants so they look like jodhpurs. Does a little bow.

“This is a curtsy, right?”

I have to laugh. “That’s terrible!”

“Then show me. I’ll have to learn eventually.”

It scares me that someday soon, Frey will start taking my place. When I start going out in public, she’ll be bait for snipers, kidnappers, bombs.

She’ll have to know the basics of being a first daughter. Whose hand to shake. Who to ignore. How to wave to a crowd.

It helps settle the fear in me, when I teach her stiff I’ve learned. Frey’s terrible with words and manners, but she can imitate any movement in a flash. She thinks with her body. Her muscles, her fists.

I hold out my hands. “Okay. I’ll show you.”

She pulls me up from the bed, like I weigh nothing. We face each other, her in sweats, me in my formals.

“Feet in third position,” I say.

“That’s ballet-talk, right?”

I roll my eyes and show her. She becomes a scruffy mirror image of me.

Only one tiny thing is wrong—her pinkies are stiff. Like they’re broken, in tiny splints.

“Relax your hands.”

Frey tries, but her hands are never relaxed, never still—they always want to grab, to strike. Our hands are so different.

She always laughs at me when I make a fist.

Thumb on the outside! You wanna break it?

No. But most days I do want to punch someone.

Frey’s first curtsy is graceful. In a feline way, measured and dangerous. No anger in her movements.

“Is this right?”

I shake my head—it isn’t fair. She’s the trained fighter. But I’m the one who wants to kill.

Frey tries again, and a low growl runs through me. This is so easy for her.

“What am I doing wrong?” she asks.

“You have to be more . . . respectful.”

She looks confused. Then straightens and bows from the waist, much lower than Noriko has ever taught me to.

“This is respectful, right?”

I can only nod.

This must be the bow Frey gives her trainers. All at once, I see what’s missing in my curtsy. Frey feels something for her tutors that I never have.

And suddenly I’m angry at her for being twenty-seven minutes younger. For getting to punch things. For living here inside the red line, away from our father.

And I’m mad at Noriko for putting her hand on my stomach, for feeling the anger in me. I want to punish her for that.

“You should take my next lesson,” I say.

Frey’s eyes widen. “Pretend to be you? Dona would kill us.”

“She won’t find out. No one can tell us apart.”

“In a crowd, maybe. But one on one?”

“One day you’ll have to fool everyone, Frey—my friends, Dad’s business partners, a million people watching on the feeds!”

She shakes her head, stepping back into the corner.

This is how it always is. I’m the one who makes my little sister break the rules. Like when we sneak out of the secure area and pretend to be adventurers in a dungeon full of monsters, making sure no one sees us together.

“Aren’t you tired of hiding?” I ask.

Frey just stares at me. She doesn’t know what hiding is, like a worm doesn’t know what dirt is.

I switch to pleading. “I’ll never get this stupid curtsy right. But I bet you will. Then you can teach me!”

Thoughts flit across her face. She wants to help. To protect me, like she was born to do. But she doesn’t want to get me into trouble.

“What if your teacher figures it out?”

“How? Noriko doesn’t even know you exist! If she looks at you funny, just say you feel sick and leave.”

Frey stares at me. She’s not allowed to walk out of lessons whenever she wants.

I take her shoulders. Dig my fingers in.

“Do this for your big sis, please?”

I’m going to get my way. But Frey has one last argument to make.

“Donna said if anyone sees us together, they’ll get in trouble too.”

That’s the whole point, little sister.

No one sees through me.

“We won’t be together, Frey. And Noriko won’t figure you out.” I let go of her and turn away. “But if you’re not up to it . . . ”

The window is a few steps from me. It’s late afternoon, and the shadow of our father’s tower spills out across the gardens, almost to the forest.

“Okay. I guess.” Her voice is small.

I smile, but my stomach twists tighter. I want to hurt Noriko, not Frey. I want to hurt me. I want Daddy’s secret spilled into the world, just a little. I want to hurt him most of all.

As I turn to hug my twin sister, I move with anger.

The post Impostors Story appeared first on Scott Westerfeld.

Grief: Doing it Wrong?

For me, blogging has always been a way of sharing things I care about and connecting with folks. That encompasses everything from sexual assault issues to arguments in the SF/F community to just geeking out about whatever catches my interest in a given week.

Well, the focus of my life has been a bit different for the past ten months, and especially so since August 29. An awful lot of my time and energy is spent dealing with the aftermath of losing Amy. There’s paperwork — so much paperwork — and belongings to sort through and online accounts to clean up and close, not to mention the whole single parent thing.

And I’ve been immersing myself in that work, partly because it needs to be done, but partly because it keeps the grief from dragging me down… sometimes.

Maybe it’s my own background in psychology. Maybe it’s having spent almost 16 years married to someone with so much more experience in psychology and counseling. But I keep worrying that I’m grieving wrong.

I’ve attended three sessions at Ele’s Place, where I’m dealing with the most recent death in our group. Sometimes it’s helpful to be in a room with people who understand. Other times, someone will talk about a particular feeling — take guilt, for example — and I end up wondering why I don’t feel that too. What’s wrong with me?

I know everyone grieves differently. I know it’s ridiculous to expect my grief to follow the same paths and patterns as anyone else’s.

I also know grief is hard. I lost my wife and best friend. I lost my partner. I lost the future we expected to have together, all the hopes and dreams and plans… It’s overwhelming, and it’s tempting to lock it all away in a box and not deal with it.

I know that’s not the healthiest approach. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to start attending Ele’s Place, to force myself to face that grief, to work on figuring out how to live with it.

I keep questioning. Why haven’t I cried more? Am I just a cold, stone-hearted person? Is it because I cried so often during the nine months we were fighting cancer, and I’m just exhausted and cried-out?

I realized earlier this year that a part of me was grieving even before we knew whether Amy would survive. (And I felt guilty as hell about that, too.) In trying to understand what the hell was wrong with me, I discovered something called anticipatory grief.

Apparently what I was going through was kind of normal? But it means some of the wounds don’t feel quite so exposed. It’s been just over a month since I was able to talk to her, but it’s been almost a year since we were able to sleep together in our own bed. If grief is a path, I feel like my progress along that path skips around from one day to the next. It’s disorienting and confusing.

The biggest symptom I’m aware of is lack of sleep. I still have a really hard time getting to sleep at night. All the thoughts I’ve been too busy to deal with during the day come rushing back. I roll over and touch her pillow and remember snuggling up with her. I talk to her. I try to sleep, and after a half hour or an hour I give up and read for a bit or find something else to do. And then it’s 6:10, and the alarm is telling me it’s time to get up and get my son ready for school…

Part of me feels relieved that I’m not sleeping. It’s a reminder that I’m not stone-hearted, that I’m hurting and grieving just like I’m supposed to. But I also know it’s not healthy, and I’m trying to adjust things to help me sleep a little better.

I don’t know what I’m doing. There’s no handbook. One therapist says it’s good I’m keeping busy. Another points out that keeping busy is a way to avoid facing those hard feelings. I suspect they’re both right. Everyone grieves differently, and it’s a process that lasts years, if not an entire lifetime.

And I’m basically winging it. Trying to figure it out day by day, the best I can.

From what I’ve learned, that’s pretty much how grief works.

A Pack Of Scammer Lies

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Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware®

How do scammers entrap unwary writers? The other day, an especially egregious example came across my desk, in the form of this "proposal" shared with me by an author who really, really wanted to believe it was real (I've redacted the author's name and book title to protect their privacy).


Not to beat a horse, dead or otherwise, but if you'll glance at the sidebar, you'll see that Alpha Books United is on Writer Beware's big list of Philippines-based Author Solutions copycat publishing and marketing scams. (When I got hold of this proposal, on September 26, Alpha Books' website was working fine, but when I checked it today it refused to load. "Mr. Ken Davis", however, has not stopped emailing and calling the author who contacted me.)

(UPDATE: Just a few hours later, Alpha Books' website is back online. Check out its specifics-free About Us page, on which it tells the following lie: "Once you’re earmarked, we open the possibility for you to be eligible for a non-contributory agreement with us.")

Here's the bait. Author empowerment! Amazing expertise! Commitment! Relationships! Sounds good, right? (Other than the complete lack of any verifiable specifics, of course.) Like most scammers, Alpha Books is counting on establishing a direct line to the author's deepest hopes, dreams, and ego.

Note that there's no mention of money. The initial phone calls and emails sent by "Ken Davis" didn't mention money, either.


Here are the "PUBLISHING Inclusions" supposedly on offer (only "if needed", of course!). Kind of bare bones basic, right? But for an author who isn't all that savvy about what goes into design and production, it hits the high spots: cover design, print and ebook format, and the all-important "content evaluation," which Alpha Books is hoping the author will wrongly interpret as "editing".

Again: no mention of money. That will come later, after the author has responded with interest to what they may believe is an amazing offer, especially if it's accompanied by flattery about how their book has been "discovered" or "recommended" by "book scouts" or "literary agents". These scams are successful in part because they solicit so relentlessly, but also because they have an acute grasp of author psychology. They know that it's easier to hook victims if you first get the victims to hook themselves.


And here is the pack of lies. Well, pretty much everything the scammers offer is a lie, but these are mostly slant lies: they could be true (it's just that they aren't). Alpha Books, on the other hand, distinguishes itself by going well beyond the usual obfuscations and half-truths with a great big alternative fact: guess what, we have access to Penguin Random House! Which will pay you $40,000!

If Alpha Books' previous phone calls and emails haven't convinced the potential victim, this magic name surely will. It's an especially sneaky tactic because there really is an Alpha Books associated with PRH: it's under the umbrella of the DK imprint, and publishes, among other things, the popular Idiots Guides series.

Of course, to anyone who knows a little bit about publishing, Alpha Books' claims about PRH are laughable:


The author who received this pitch nearly fell for it. Only when "Ken Davis" told them they'd have to pay $7,000 for this wonderful opportunity (the "true" cost being $19,000, of which Alpha Books would supposedly defray the bulk) did they start to balk. At that point, this happened:


As brazen as most of these scams are, this is just about the worst I've seen.

Fortunately the author contacted me, and I was able to convince them they were being scammed. (It wasn't the first time: they'd originally published with one of the Author Solutions imprints, and had previously been solicited by scammers Bookwhip, Stonewall Press, and True Media Creatives.)

I'm guessing that at least a few of my readers will be thinking "Well, if someone is that naive/ignorant/unwary, they deserve what they get." Believe me, I get frustrated too with writers' gullibility, and in particular with how many writers fail to educate themselves about publishing and self-publishing before trying to publish. But no one, no matter what, deserves to be deceived and ripped off by a pack of con artists.

That's why I keep doing what I do. Suck it, scammers.