A common science fiction trope is that aliens would think differently from humans. Larry Niven’s carnivorous Kzinti are curious only about things that interest them, C. J. Cherryh’s T’ca are multi-brained aliens that speak in matrices readable in any direction, and Steven Spielberg’s aliens from Close Encounters of the Third Kind communicate with music and gesture.
But, even just on the Earth, every human being thinks differently! This tremendous variation is called neurodiversity, and each individual’s distinctive cognitive style is their neurodivergence. Many kinds of neurodivergence are common, including autism, anxiety, synesthesia, and more – sometimes presenting challenges to individuals if society demands a different thinking style.
But could these different thinking styles actually help us understand aliens? Many autistic folks experience hyperfocus on special interests: could they better empathize with Kzinti? Could someone with dissociative personality disorder better understand the multiple-brained T’ca? And could a person with difficulty verbalizing better harmonize with Spielberg’s aliens?
My co-editor Liza Olmsted and I decided to explore whether neurodiversity would help us understand aliens in The Neurodiversiverse: Alien Encounters, a hopeful, empowering science fiction anthology from Thinking Ink Press exploring neurodivergent folks encountering aliens. Over forty contributors shared with us stories, poems and art exploring this theme.
For example, in “The Space Between Stitches” by Minerva Cerridwen, an autistic person’s hyperfocus helps her effortlessly repair an alien’s broken teleporter. In “Where Monolithic Minds Can’t Travel,” Akis Linardos explores whether aliens with multiple minds would resonate with dissociative disorder, unlocking travel to the stars. And in “Music, Not Words” by Ada Hoffmann, aliens that speak in music find harmony with a young woman who has trouble with words.
Many stories in The Neurodiversiverse are told from an authentic #ownvoices perspective, in which authors write stories about characters who share their own distinctive experiences. For example, I struggle with social anxiety disorder, and in my own “Shadows of Titanium Rain,” give those experiences to the character Djina as she struggles to understand solitary aliens.
Liza and I feel #ownvoices are particularly important because they improve the representation of marginalized voices in stories, which is part of the mission of Thinking Ink Press. Sometimes, it can be hard to imagine achieving something if you’ve never seen someone like yourself doing it – and it can be hard to solve a problem if you have no words to describe it.
We’re bringing The Neurodiversiverse to life no matter what, but because we’re a small press, we’re running a Kickstarter to help defray the costs of producing and promoting the book. In particular, we want to pay our authors the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer’s Association (SFWA) “professional rate” of 8 cents a word, and the Kickstarter will help us do that.
Creating The Neurodiversiverse has been a voyage of discovery for us. Recently Thinking Ink Press embraced its identity as a publisher focused on marginalized voices – something we had always done, but not precisely noticed that we were doing; but once we noticed that it was our focus, we decided to lean in on that and do it well.
Exploring the topic of neurodiversity inspired me to propose “The Neurodiversiverse Anthology,” which I shared with our team to ensure we handled it sensitively. Liza was enthusiastic, joining as my coeditor and helping craft the anthology’s explicit focus on hopeful, empowering and #ownvoices stories. And work on the book awakened my understanding of my own struggles with neurodivergence, particularly social anxiety disorder and autism.
The Neurodiversiverse has opened doors for us as not just editors but as people with our own struggles with neurodivergence, and we hope it has a similar impact on everyone who reads it. So please back our Kickstarter (accessible during the campaign via neurodiversiverse.com) where you can not only help us pay our authors, you can get a copy of the book and find out the answer to the question, “Would neurodiversity help in an encounter with aliens?”
About the author: By day, Anthony Francis teaches robots to learn; by night, he writes science fiction and draws comic books. His “Dakota Frost, Skindancer” urban fantasy series begins in the award-winning FROST MOON and continues in BLOOD ROCK and LIQUID FIRE. His latest novel is JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE. He co-edited the anthology DOORWAYS TO EXTRA TIME and is the co-editor of the forthcoming anthology THE NEURODIVERSIVERSE: ALIEN ENCOUNTERS; for more information check out neurodiversiverse.com . You can read more about Anthony’s words, art and science on his blog “The Library of Dresan” at dresan.com.
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Assembling an itinerary for a blog tour? Promoting a book, game, or other creative effort that’s related to fantasy, horror, or science fiction and want to write a guest post for me?
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Guest posts are publicized on Twitter, several Facebook pages and groups, my newsletter, and in my weekly link round-ups; you are welcome to link to your site, social media, and other related material.
Send a 2-3 sentence description of the proposed piece along with relevant dates (if, for example, you want to time things with a book release) to cat AT kittywumpus.net. If it sounds good, I’ll let you know.
I prefer essays fall into one of the following areas but I’m open to interesting pitches:
Interesting and not much explored areas of writing
Writers or other individuals you have been inspired by
Your favorite kitchen and a recipe to cook in it
A recipe or description of a meal from your upcoming book
Women, PoC, LGBT, or otherwise disadvantaged creators in the history of speculative fiction, ranging from very early figures such as Margaret Cavendish and Mary Wollstonecraft up to the present day.
Women, PoC, LGBT, or other wise disadvantaged creators in the history of gaming, ranging from very early times up to the present day.
F&SF volunteer efforts you work with
Length is 500 words on up, but if you’ve got something stretching beyond 1500 words, you might consider splitting it up into a series.
When submitting the approved piece, please paste the text of the piece into the email. Please include 1-3 images, including a headshot or other representation of you, that can be used with the piece and a 100-150 word bio that includes a pointer to your website and social media presences. (You’re welcome to include other related links.)
Or, if video is more your thing, let me know if you’d like to do a 10-15 minute videochat for my YouTube channel. I’m happy to handle filming and adding subtitles, so if you want a video without that hassle, this is a reasonable way to get one created. ???? Send 2-3 possible topics along with information about what you’re promoting and its timeline.
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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
~K. Richardson
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Guest Post: Mike Baron on Horror Comics
Literature is the best medium for horror, and comics are the worst. Literature succeeds because of the power of words to suggest, to take you ninety percent there, and leave that final ten percent up to you. The horror we imagine in the darkness of our minds far exceeds anything that can be set down on paper in words or pictures. We love horror because it allows us to exorcise our fears in a safe and fun manner. It usually delivers a moral epiphany, as Mary Shelley intended.
There’s also existential horror with no good guys or bad guys, like The Devil’s Rejects. Without a moral epiphany no film can hope to reach a wider audience. Exorcist is not only the scariest movie ever made, it’s one of the most moral.
But enough about that. We’re talking scares. Movies do horror well as they control not only pacing, but every aspect of the experience. They can manipulate what you see — or what you think you see –on the screen. They can scare the bejesus out of you with sudden motion, unexpected thrusts from unexpected places. These tropes prove irresistible to hack filmmakers who fill their film with ominous musical crescendos and fake scares. Which brings us to pacing. You want to catch your audience off-balance; that’s why you throw in the fake scare followed a split-second later with the real scare.
Comics can’t do that. They must rely on the storytelling alone for inevitably, when the big scene comes — the full-page panel of the werewolf or the witch or the monster — it’s just a drawing on paper. Sure, there have been some horrible drawings in comics –pictures of torture or mutilation — but is this really horror? Or is it just Grand Guignol? You set the comic down and it goes away.
Horror is an intimate, terrifying sensation. It’s far more than disgust, and you all know what I’m talking about. You can count on the fingers of one hand those movies that touch on real supernatural evil. They’re the ones you remember.
Why are horror comics so popular?
People love the genre and the whiff of cheese issuing from the sideshow exhibit. The great EC tales in Shock Suspenstories, Tales from the Crypt and their ilk create horror by leaving the protagonist in a horrible situation. Buried alive. Chained to a corpse in a desert. As children, we can all relate because we can all imagine ourselves in that situation. The best comic book horror succeeds through powerful storytelling and great characterization. Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing or even Al Capp’s Li’l Abner, like the time Abner was trapped in the mushroom cave with no hope of rescue. We experience a visceral horror through the protagonist because we care about him, her, or it. It’s not the same jolt as in the George C. Scott movie The Changeling when that ball comes bounding down the stairs.
In Nexus, Steve Rude and I are always trying to put our finger on the pulse of evil. But true horror depends on the unknowable — and we don’t know the unknowable. So how can we show it? The best we can do is dance around the edges and try to capture aspects of evil that ring true.
In comics, as in life, the true horror lurks just beyond our senses.
BIO:Mike Baron broke into comics in 1981 with Nexus, his groundbreaking science fiction title co-created with illustrator Steve Rude; the series garnered numerous honors, including Eisners for both creators. A prolific creator, Mike is responsible for The Badger,Ginger Fox, Spyke, Feud, and many other comic book titles. Baron has also written numerous mainstream characters, most notably DC’s The Flash, Marvel’s The Punisher, and several Star Wars adaptations for Dark Horse. He lives in Colorado with his wife, dog, cat, and wildebeest.
Guest Post: Historical Fiction Requires Research: Including Pop Culture! by Elizabeth Guizzetti
Thank you for having me today!
I love writing about vampires because of the historical research. One question I always ask when doing this research is: what would someone of that era know?
My latest novel, Accident Among Vampires (Or What Would Dracula Do?) is set in 1951-52. The protagonist is Norma Mae Rollins, a 14-year-old girl who is learning to survive as a vampire. Before she was transformed, she spent many Saturday afternoons and evenings in her small hometown theater.
Going to the movies was a different experience than it is today. The movie started with not just trailers, but also newsreels, cartoons.
The movie palaces of this era often showed first run movies, but small theaters often showed older movies. Some B films were made to be the less publicized of a double feature, but before television, cable, and streaming services, movie studios sold second run movies to drive-ins and smaller theaters in bundles who played them as double features or as the B showing with a newer film. This is why Norma would have likely seen movies such as Dracula, 1931 though she wasn’t born until 1938.
I also used these films to ensure my speech patterns felt correct as I used a few archaic words in dialogue: may’ve, shall, and shan’t. Norma doesn’t call adults by their given names without permission. Other than close relations, Norma calls adults: ma’am, Madame/Lady, sir, Sir, or honored ancients/one. She calls her creator Mr. Caruso, until he said “Call me Bill or even Dad”¦”
I will offer a warning: modern audiences delving into classic American theater will find plenty of cringe-worthy moments. For most of these films, the Hayes Code was in effect. A woman’s innocence was generally their ticket to life; conniving women were killed. In Dracula’s Daughter, the love interest (human) talks about shooting women as a joke. Son of Dracula has racist depictions of minorities: Black and Roma characters. You will, and should be, offended by certain spoken lines or things you see in these old movies.
This list is not by any means extensive, I watched close to a hundred movies for this book alone, but this list is the vampire-specific films I watched to prepare me to know what Norma knows about vampires in 1951. She thinks about what hurt (and didn’t) the vampires from films and books constantly. She asks adult vampires about scenes in many of these films. And she pretends to be Bill’s “sweet” daughter because as I said, sweet innocent women survive.
This list is in order of release. There are actors you will see again and again: Bela Lugosi, Lionel Atwell, Lon Chaney, as many of them were typecast into these roles.
This is the one with Bela Lugosi in the title role that everyone knows, loves, parodies, and quotes.
My Thoughts:
The first act follows the book, then it tells its own story with many of the book’s characters. If you haven’t seen it, it is a classic piece of cinema.
Helen Chandler plays lovely and sweet Mina but her near transformation scene when she wants take a bite out of Jonathan make the movie worth watching.
Dwight Frye as Renfield is the closest to the book character: always escaping his cell and very strong.
Villagers start dying of blood loss and town leaders suspect a resurgence of vampirism.
Dr. von Niemann (Lionel Atwell) cares for the victims. He learns a patient, a kindhearted woman, Martha, was attacked by a bat. Another villager, Herman Glieb, claims he likes bats. Soon the village thinks Herman is a vampire.
My Thoughts:
This movie felt original and fun. It is definitely worth watching. It is a mystery and a horror film. Plus there is a scientist.
The portrayal of women is straight out of Gothic Tropes 101. Fay Wray plays the good and clever ingenue, but there is also the foolish middle-aged hypochondriac, the kind-hearted villager, etc.
Finally, the expressions, general strait-laced manner, and mustache of the police inspector directly inspired the vampire Derrik Miller in my novel.
A reluctant vampire, Countess Countess Marya Zaleska, believes that by destroying Dracula’s body, after his death, she will be freed of her vampirism. This fails, she turns to a psychiatrist and becomes obsessed with him.
My Thoughts:
If you watch any film on this list, please watch this one! This beautifully shot film plays with lights and shadows as if it were a film noir. The characters all feel important, nothing in the sets or onscreen feels wasted.
Gloria Holden plays the Countess Marya Zaleska in a soft but deadly way. A direct sequel to Dracula, 1931, it said to be loosely based off Dracula’s Guest or the title character of Carmilla, but the plot has nothing to do with either story. The Countess’ preferred victims are women (she kills men too), and she is thought to be coded bisexual or lesbian which is the only tie it has to Carmilla.
Lon Chaney plays Count Alucard/Dracula who marries an American woman named Kay who loves all things morbid. She wants to gain eternal life. She is turned into a vampire when her ex-lover shoots her accidentally, he was aiming for Dracula.  Kay changes in unexpected ways.
My Thoughts:
This is a very good film and well-worth watching, but there are several racist depictions of minorities. One of the best parts about the film is everyone is acting pretty smart. Also it has the first on-camera transformation of a bat to vampire. (Earlier films were done with cutting, this is done with animation.)
In regards to my novel, this is the film which gives Norma daymares after she is transformed as a vampire for two reasons: Kay is the smartest one in the room and will do anything to get what she wants. Sometimes, Norma fears being a “bright girl” for this reason. Though her death is offscreen, well the idea of it gives Norma daymares.
A kindly small-town doctor Lloyd Clayton murdered his evil twin brother, because Elwyn practices the occult. However, Elwyn returns as a vampire and murders the villagers by draining them of their blood and leaves evidence The doctor, his niece, and her fiancé discover that Elwyn still lives.
My Thoughts: PRC is known for low budget B films. While this is an original story, it hits many of the same beats as Dracula especially in regards to the ingenue (Mary Carlisle) and her love interest. The lead dual role played by George Zucco is very campy (especially when he plays Elwyn) so if you enjoy that, you’ll enjoy this one.
Dr. Gustav Niemann played by Boris Karloff escapes from prison along with his hunchback assistant, Daniel. To exact revenge on the man who had put him in prison, Niemann revives Dracula. Dracula, played by John Caradine, seduces Hussmann’s granddaughter-in-law and kills Hussmann.
Niemann causes the poor vampire to perish in the sunlight. Niemann and Daniel move on to the flooded ruins of Castle Frankenstein, where they find the preserved bodies of Frankenstein’s monster (Glenn Strange) and Wolfman/Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney).
My Thoughts:
I enjoyed all the monster mash-type films as did Norma. They are her favorites on this list.
This is the sequel to House of Frankenstein Dr. Franz Edelmann is visited by Dracula and the Wolfman who are trying to cure their vampirism and lycanthropy. John Carradine, Glenn Strange, and Lon Chaney reprise their roles from The House of Frankenstein.
My Thoughts:
The sequel is even more wonderful monster mashup film. It has all the wonderful tropes of the era. There is one thing that always strikes me as unintentionally funny–a very polite mob.
I love this movie and it is also Norma’s favorite on the list. She questions the older vampires about things she witnessed in this movie.
Bela Lugosi is a vampire named Armand Tesla who is thwarted over the course of two wars by a doctor, Lady Jane Ainsley, played by Frieda Inescort. Lugosi basically plays the same characterization as Dracula, but due to copyright issues, he is Aramand Tesla.
My Thoughts:Â
This is another movie I really enjoyed. Inescort plays an educated doctor who is also a successful, loving mother. Obviously, she is a privileged woman, but it’s always nice to see an educated adult woman, who raised a son on her own, being the smartest one on the screen. Her aging makeup was well-done and restrained.
Other than a few moments of overacting at the first death of Tesla, the werewolf character, Andreas, is another standout. His acting is subtle even through his wolf makeup, and there are so many moments the audience feels for him.
John Abbot plays Webb Fallon, a nightclub owner and occult expert who offers advice on some murders. He falls in love with the ingenue. Loosely based on the 1819 short story “The Vampyre” by John Polidori.
My Thoughts:
The film hits several ingenue threatened by vampire stuff, but I felt this movie was somewhat forgettable and had very little tension. Even when the scene was supposed to be tense.
This is the last vampire Bela Lugosi played, but the first of several films in which the comedy duo, Abbot and Costello, meets classic Universal’s monsters and characters from their films. They and their friends encounter an evil doctor, Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, and the Wolf Man.
My Thoughts:
The chemistry between Abbot and Costello makes for good comedy, even if the comedy itself isn’t evergreen. The actors who play monsters play their roles straight from their respective films. There is also an uncredited cameo of Vincent Price as the voice of the Invisible Man.
My name is Norma Mae Rollins. I’m fourteen and an illegal vampire. I miss my mom, but new ghoulish appetites force me to remain with my creator.
Bill didn’t mean to transform me. At least, that’s what he claims. His frightening temper, relentless lies, and morbid scientific experiments makes it hard to know what to believe. However, someone snitched about Bill’s experiments to a nearby coven. Now both of our corpses will burn.
Bill won’t run. He is curious what happens to a vampire after final death. I don’t want to die again. It hurt so much the first time. Bill thinks his vampire boyfriend might shelter me. I must brave an eternal existence with elder vampires and other monsters who don’t think I ought to exist. Oh and figure out who I am allowed to eat.
BIO: Much to her chagrin, Elizabeth Guizzetti discovered she was not a cyborg and growing up to be an otter would be impractical, so began writing stories at age twelve. Three decades later, Guizzetti is an illustrator and author best known for her demon-poodle based comedy, Out for Souls & Cookies. She is also the creator of Faminelands and Lure and collaborated with authors on several projects including A is for Apex and The Prince of Artemis V. To explore a different aspect of her creativity, she writes science fiction and fantasy. Her debut novel, Other Systems, was a 2015 Finalist for the Canopus Award for excellence in Interstellar Fiction. Her short work has appeared in anthologies such as Wee Folk and The Wise and Beyond the Hedge. She loves vampires and after writing Immortal House, she has written”‹ several other vampire stories in the same universe. Guizzetti lives in Seattle with her husband and two dogs. When not writing or illustrating, she loves hiking and birdwatching.
A common science fiction trope is that aliens would think differently from humans. Larry Niven’s carnivorous Kzinti are curious only about things that interest them, C. J. Cherryh’s T’ca are multi-brained aliens that speak in matrices readable in any direction, and Steven Spielberg’s aliens from Close Encounters of the Third Kind communicate with music and gesture.
About the author: By day, Anthony Francis teaches robots to learn; by night, he writes science fiction and draws comic books. His “Dakota Frost, Skindancer” urban fantasy series begins in the award-winning FROST MOON and continues in BLOOD ROCK and LIQUID FIRE. His latest novel is JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE. He co-edited the anthology DOORWAYS TO EXTRA TIME and is the co-editor of the forthcoming anthology THE NEURODIVERSIVERSE: ALIEN ENCOUNTERS; for more information check out neurodiversiverse.com . You can read more about Anthony’s words, art and science on his blog “The Library of Dresan” at dresan.com.
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