Margaret Killjoy (26:41)
And we're back. The storehouse memory that had served Stina so well through the years clicked open a half forgotten door. With one swift motion she tore loose her space all and flung the baggy garment across the back of the the nearest seat. Bat was snarling now, emitting the throaty rising cry that was his hunting song. But he was edging back, back towards Stina's feet, shrinking from something he could not fight but which he faced defiantly. If he could draw it after him past that dangling space saw he had to. It was their only chance. What The Cliff had come out of his seat and was staring, staring at them. What he saw must have been weird enough. Stina bare armed and shouldered, her usually stiffly netted hair falling wildly down her back. Stina watching empty space with narrowed eyes and set mouth, calculating a single wild chance. Bat crouched on his belly, retreating from thin air step by step and wailing like a demon. Toss me your blaster. Stina gave the order calmly, as if they still sat at their table in the Regal Royal, and as quietly Cliff obeyed. She caught the small weapon out of the air with a steady hand, caught and leveled it. Stay just where you are, she warned Bat. Bring it back. With a last throat splitting screech of rage and hate, Bat twisted to safety between her boots. She pressed with thunder, thumb and forefinger, firing at the space alls. The material turned to powdery flakes of ash, except for certain bits, which still flapped from the scorched seat as if something had protected them from the force of the blast. Bats sprang up in the air with a scream that tore their ears. What? Began Cliff again. Stina made a warning motion with her left hand. Wait. She was still tense, still watching Bat. The cat dashed madly around the cabin, twice running crazily with white ringed eyes and flecks of foam on his muzzle. Then he stopped abruptly in the doorway, stopped, and looked back over his shoulder. For a long silent moment he sniffed delicately. Stina and Cliff could smell it too now, a thick, oily stench which was not the usual odor left by an exploding blaster shell. Bat came back, treading daintily across the carpet, almost on the tips of his paws. He raised his head as he passed Stina and then went confidently beyond to sniffto sniff and spit twice at the unburned strips of the space all. Having thus paid his respects to the late enemy, he sat down calmly and set to washing his fur with deliberation. Stina sighed once and dropped into the navigator's seat. Maybe now you'll tell me what the hell's happened. Cliff exploded as he took the blaster out of her hand. Gray, she said dazedly. It must have been gray, or I couldn't have seen it like that. I'm colorblind, you see. I can see only shades of gray. My whole world is gray like bats. His world is gray, too, all gray. But he's been compensated for. He can see above and below our range of color vibrations, and apparently so can I. Her voice quavered, and she raised her chin with a new air Cliff had never seen before, a sort of proud acceptance. She pushed back her wandering hair, but she made no move to imprison it under the heavy net again. That's why I saw the thing when it crossed between us against her space. All it was another shade of gray in outline. So I put out mine and waited for it to show against that it was our only chance, Cliff. It was curious at first, I think, and it knew we couldn't see it, which is why it waited to attack. But when Bat's actions gave it away, it moved. So I waited to see that flicker against the Space Hall. And then I let him have it. It's really very simple. Cliff laughed a bit shakily. But what was that gray thing? I don't get it. I think it was what made the Empress a derelict. Something out of space, maybe, or from another world somewhere. She waved her hands. It's invisible because it's a color beyond our range of sight. It must have stayed in here all these years. And it kills. It must, when his curiosity is satisfied. Swiftly she described the scene in the cabin and the strange behavior of the gem pile which had betrayed the creature to her. Cliff did not return his blaster to its holder. Any more of them on board, do you think? He didn't look pleased at the prospect. Stina turned to Bat. He was paying particular attention to the space between two front toes in the process of a complete bath. I don't think so. But Bat will tell us if there are. He can see them clearly, I believe. But there weren't any more, and two weeks later, Cliff, Stina, and Bat brought the Empress into the Lunar Quarantine Station. And that is the end of Stina's story. Because, as we have been told, happy marriages need no chronicles, and Stina had found someone who knew of her gray world and did not find it too hard to share with Her Someone besides Bat. It turned out to be a real love match. The last time I saw her, she was wrapped in a flame red cloak from the looms of Riegol and wore a fortune in joven rubies blazing on her wrists. Cliff was flipping a three figure credit bill to a waiter and Bat had a row of vernal juice glasses set up before him. Just a little family party out on the town. The end. Okay, what Hazel has to say about this story. I like this story quite a lot, and I don't usually like Golden Age pulp all that much, but it's mostly a well written female character written by a woman that's pretty fun for me. Ms. Norton or her editors wrote this blurb for the magazine. Under normal conditions, a whole person has a decided advantage over a handicapped one. But out in deep space the normal may be reversed. For humans at any rate. And back to Hazel. And that's really interesting to me. I wouldn't have clocked this as an early story about disability, but I can totally see what Ms. Norton is trying to do. It's, you know, a little old fashioned, but reading generously. Sure, that works for me. The stuff about colorblindness and the twist of a creature being a color outside of human doesn't land as well today because we have a different scientific understanding of vision and colorblindness. But who knows, maybe that was just different in the 1950s. We still get a story of a woman with a disability who has gotten crafty, needing to accommodate it, light years more competent than any man in the story, using her well honed problem solving skills to solve a problem that no one else could. That's pretty nifty to me as a chronically ill person who needs to get crafty to work around a lot of my own debilitating symptoms. It's cool to see that represented in early pulp. 2. All cops are grasstards okay, and then this is me again. This is Margaret. What do I have to say about this? I have so much to say about this. I always have so much to say about this. There's a lot of stuff that wouldn't pass muster in modern short story writing. And that doesn't make this wrong. It means that we just have different tastes, right? Like what counts as well written has changed. But this is clearly a well written and entertaining story. I'm never not entertained by this story. So instead we have this assumption that this modern way of doing things is more correct. For example, you should have should have quote if I had this story in front of me as like a. This is really funny because Andre Norton is a grandmaster of sfwa and I'm like a lowly dues paying member of sfwa. But if I had this story in front of me in a workshop, I would say you need to foreshadow, at the very least the colorblindness, right? The thing that is the grand reveal can't come out of nowhere. You have to. Has to feel earned so that the reader has a chance to feel smart. The perfectly written modern story, the reader figures it out just ahead of the reveal in a way that makes the reader feel smart even though you're actually setting it up. So of course they figure it out. You actually are revealing it before the reveal, right? But there's instead, in this case, it's like, ah, I'm colorblind. That's why I know this thing was like, not the way you would do it in a modern sense. And also, there's also kind of a trope of like, I have heightened senses because of this disability that when I've been reading about people from the disability community talking about how disabilities represent in fiction that they're like, not in love with. Again, this is the 1950s, and, you know, I think it's really interesting and worthwhile to trace how these things go and like, what we consider, like, intentionally a positive story and how that changes. But the main thing, I enjoy this story, and the fact that I enjoy this story means something to me. The discourse on blue sky. I'm so sorry to have said both of those nouns. I'm very sorry, but the discourse on blue sky last week, as you listen to this, if you listen to it when it comes out, was about AI writing. But it wasn't really discourse, which makes it more fun. It was just people dumping on using AI for fiction writing. And lots of science fiction writers being like, you couldn't catch me dead using AI because there was some fucking mainstream article that was like, all writers use AI. Some of them are just honest about it. No, no, most writers don't use AI. Why would we want to? There's no technical thing preventing us from writing. It's purely a matter of time and skill and learnability and ideas, right? And it's one of the most glorious and beautiful things that you get to do with your life sometimes. And that article, I think the article that everyone was dunking on, and I dunked on it too, because it needed to be dunked on, it was saying how, oh, people call it AI slop, but what about human slop People were like, all the old stuff was all crappy and written badly. And the thing is, it's not slop, it's pulp. And there's a world of difference. Pulp is what gives you the fiber, it keeps you regular. And pulp fiction, it's entertaining and beautiful partly because it comes from people. And specifically it's kind of, to me, sort of holy because we get to have these glimpses into someone else's imagination. What we get to see by reading a story that's kind of just pulpy fun adventure is we get to see what someone fantasized about was like, oh, wouldn't this be neat? And this story is such a perfect example of it because it, I mean it reads like fan fiction. Again, I feel really weird coming for this story in any way. I really like it, but it reads like fan fiction. You have a character who can kind of do no wrong. And she like, I don't know if she's a self insert about Norton, Ms. Norton, but it's like very much the kind of. It's a cat lady who's always overlooked, but at the end she lets her hair down when she learns her own agency and she's never gonna put it back up again. And she's like sort of boring and gray. But then she finds her love match in this like rough and tumble spacer. She saves like it's like the most wish fulfillment early spec fic woman writing thing. And it's glorious for that. That is what we get to see and experience by reading All Cats are Gray. And whereas just some random shit spit out that has a story shaped form, it's meaningless. So here's to human slop. Because it's not human slop, it's pulp. And I love it. I also love that pulpit makes you want to write. It's like punk. You listen to it and you're like, I could do that. But you also have a good time listening to it. And so you can do that. You genuinely can. You can go start a band with three chords. And there's a lot of genres that do this. And folk and hip hop are like two of the other ones that do this. Off the top of my head where it's just like you can just do it and you should. And it rules. And so you should go write stuff. You should go write pulp. There's no barrier. You don't need to hold yourself up to some elaborately high standard. Now. I actually also at the same time kind of will defend gatekeepers publishers. This is the only context in which I'll defend gatekeeping. I think. I think that editors of magazines and places like that do a really important job of filtering through slush and presenting you with stories that are entertaining and well written. And I actually do think that the story is entertaining, well written, just to a different standard than the current modern standard. And I don't know. So it's like, go write your story and maybe it isn't good enough for a science fiction magazine to pay you a professional rate for. That's okay, write another story. But in the meantime, it might be good enough to entertain your friends, right? Like I'll go see the local punk bands play, even if they're not very good, and I'll have a good time. But then some punk bands are so good that they go on international tours and everyone is like, oh, this band fucking rules, you know? Anyway, that's what this story made me think about. Well, take care of each other. Free Palestine. Fuck Ice. See you next week.
