Overview

What makes science fiction genres better than others at challenging social conventions, especially gender? Are speculative works structured differently when addressed to traditionally under-portrayed individuals or communities? This collection of interviews elicits truly honest and thought-provoking responses that focus on the biographical dimension in speculative fiction, questions of intersectionality, genre (re)definitions and the politicization of fiction. It gives voice to women of different races, nations, classes and sexual orientations who write and edit speculative fiction – such as Ellen Datlow, Kathe Koja, Angela Mi Young Hur, Eugen Bacon, and Cat Rambo. The interviews clarify how the junction of genre and gender is a key element to understanding this literary field, while simultaneously contextualizing and theorizing the interview itself, as a literary genre and a research tool.

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9781501384462

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Reviews

This very original collection of carefully led interviews brings together established and new international voices from the field of horror and speculative fiction written by women. Their great variety and the energy they deploy cast new light and raise intriguing and intertwined questions about the category and categories of 'genre' fiction, enriched and complicated by gender and intersectional issues. * Didier Coste, Professor Emeritus, Bordeaux Montaigne University, France * Women of Horror and Speculative Fiction achieves two important aims. It tells of how progressive intersectional politics has performed, disguised as ‘mere’ genre fiction, beneath prescriptions of literariness, whilst unyoking itself from equally prescriptive notions of gender. In horror and speculative fictions, these genre narratives told the Other’s story. But the volume also witnesses this telling, not with a sovereign eye, but through 24 compelling interviews with women writers, who together create a method suitable for our era of auto-fiction and selfie-awareness. To pull off such a double whammy is no mean achievement. This volume will be a significant resource for anyone interested in life. * Simon Frost, Principal Lecturer in English, Bournemouth University, UK * The writers featured in Women of Horror and Speculative Fiction in Their Own Words offer great insight into how their various origins and different kinds of lives inspire their writing, and their choice to write horror and speculative fiction. In a series of conversations, a range of women-identifying authors share their insights and motivations as they challenge social conventions through fiction, interrogate the increasing inclusive interpretations of the categories of gender and genre, and in the most dazzling examples demonstrate the power of anger and fired-up libido to forge innovative acts, invented worlds, and new expressions of identity: 'the great thing about horror,' according to Gemma Files, 'is that you can kill everybody … if you want to.' Read this collection, gathered by Doubinsky and Kkona during the strange early years of Corona virus, if you want a rare peek into thought processes of writers of horror and speculative fiction. * Christina Ann Messa, Lecturer in American Studies, Stanford University, USA *

Author Information

Christina Kkona is Marie Curie Cofund Fellow-Associate Professor at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark. She is co-editor, with Didier Coste and Nicoletta Pireddu, of Migrating Minds: Theories and Practices of Cultural Cosmopolitanism (2021). Sébastien Doubinsky is Associate Professor of French at the Aarhus University, Denmark. His publications include Reading Literature Today, with Tabish Khair (2011), and Equivalence(s): Necessity and Challenges in Translation Today, with Merete Birkelund and Christina Kkona (2019). He has also published many novels and poetry collections in English and French.

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