Content warning:
This mourning poem was assembled by poetry editor Romie Stott using text from reviews editor Maureen Kincaid Speller’s writing published in Strange Horizons between 2006 and 2022, as a posthumous tribute.
This is not an exhaustive survey.
even though it is about a child, it doesn’t fit comfortably with our current understanding
like a treasure hunt
the noonday train, seen but never heard.
And what else passes once a day? The sun.
For a critic, going against the prevailing opinion on a text is fraught with danger. To disagree is to worry that perhaps your critical faculties are at fault. It is uncomfortable to be out of step with everyone else, and yet you have to say what you see.
The questions should always be, “What is this piece of fiction doing, does it work, and if not, why not?” Everything else unfolds from that.
until they reach a hillock, where the hoofprints stop
Half threat, half promise
Like fish hooks
caught in the mind
resurfacing during quiet moments
a search for wholeness or reconciliation in the ruins
we understand from the beginning that this idyll cannot continue.
Weather patterns are changing
and the community itself is finally overwhelmed by a huge storm
The plan is built on dreams which cannot be economically sustained
journeys across unmapped terrain, in the company of an avatar of Death
which transforms her into a black angel
waiting for something without being clear what it is she is waiting for
why this stillness is so necessary
I speak as someone who is entirely happy to skip to the end of a novel if things are getting tense, to reassure myself that X survives.
to have the freedom to talk about the whole of the book.
to learn how collaborative the business of creating
that ability to … detach oneself?
We’re all building on what has gone before
no longer civilians but vital in maintaining the security of hearth and home
moving in ones and twos in the chinks of the SF writing machine
How do we come to terms with grief so overwhelming it strips us of the means to function at even a most basic level?
grief so overwhelming it is like a never-ending storm, rain pouring down constantly, the sky too dark to see clearly.
houses are built up the steep sides of the hill—leaving nowhere else to go
Everyone knows everyone else, everyone knows
the much discussed but vaguely defined “cosy catastrophe”
They inhabit a world which is cobbled together, the gleaming and new jostling for position alongside the old and worn. It’s also a playful world.
As the pace of life moves faster, the assimilation is quicker and mostly unremarked on
the letter written but not read, read but not answered, or read by another person, the wrong person
it remains a liminal thing, potent yet inert
the intended recipient will never, ever (with one exception) read the letter.
So much not known, so much to be said.
encounters with the Pale Lady
blessed with an inquiring turn of mind
sensitive to the impressions left by the use of magic
and somehow it is not quite enough
I find myself beginning to wonder if being a writer isn’t in some ways not dissimilar to being a con artist.
to appear as normal as possible in order to counteract people’s expectations
it is the speed of the transition, the compression of that shift
having apparently sleepwalked there while dreaming about a white cat
How are we supposed to respond?
scandalised by the brawling antics of the god-family
we apparently forgive the divine
the insistent thud of the basketball bouncing rhythmically on the court.
it was left to the online community to collate information and coordinate a response
the online community turned to unconventional sources of information
For mavericks, they are all terribly well-behaved
presence of the machine-gods
a child raised among ghosts
wordplay for breaching the rules
this is the dream speaking, not the conscious human being
a fluid landscape with no shape, no names
indeed, change is on its way, though not in the dramatic fashion
a blank tablet, awaiting some sort of revelation
all along things must have been changing, imperceptibly slowly
and everyone has misgivings about the voyage
While information has undeniably been lost along the way, the implication seems to be that much of it survives
such things could also be happening just around the corner
riven with nostalgia for a lost bucolic ideal
the boundaries between the two dissolving, the fantastic spilling over
an undertone of special pleading
providing a physical home for spirits desperate to be reborn
allows them to map one another
close to the huge cremation Ovens
why would she leave?
a small group of people working together, constantly adjusting to the new conditions around them, improvising, adapting
patched together at crazy angles
the goo in the cavern
making families out of lost souls
the kind of character that turns up in Ealing comedies and their clones
there are protocols involved in being a superhero as well
a middle-aged white woman, twice married, no kids.
there is a flavour of uncertain courtship about the whole thing
putting theoretical complications onto something which really is just two blokes in a bar, being companionable
And there are so many other silences here
creating a private narrative, that narrative is also much more layered than we might initially realise. Indeed, do we ever realise its full extent?
There's a lot of incipient wish-fulfilment in this
“not a thing in itself and therefore cannot be lost” isn’t actually the fundamental weakness
an assumption that if you remove the people or establish a distance, they’re not real
you focus less on the recovery and far more on the consequences
moved around by events
the emotional toll exacted by the situations
the Renaissance is clearly over
there’s no new space opera, no widescreen baroque
see this shift in emphasis, this relaxation of border controls
many jump cuts, a constant shifting of viewpoint
it touched so often on things I know a little about and I was nodding, ticking things off in my mind, thinking “of course.”
the veiled childhood of the saint. Exceedingly veiled
how well she built her alliances
to test the boundaries of such a carefully constructed society
There is a buzz about
This recounting of lineage makes for a formal beginning
everyone carries a mark to indicate the precise degree of their status
so determined to do what seems right
invested with what I suppose we must call “humanity”
raw edges showing, tiny loose threads hanging here and there, odd moments of untidiness
I find it very difficult to envisage where this story can go next
whether “collection” means just that: a series of stories that happen to have been brought together. That is, should we expect to see a connection beyond the fact that they are written by the same author, and what sort of connections might we expect to see. And that, bearing in mind that each of us as readers finds our own connections anyway.
fold around themselves, move back and forth in time
writing with “white ink,” i.e. milk
the evocation of panic
ancient is also a corruption of “ensign,” which is a military title, which carries with it an underlying meaning of flag bearer, which brings us back to the idea of signaling an entry.
but what kind of arrival?
“there” suggests that there is a place to go.
like a storm that’s been through overnight
the world is, simply happy to consume, and disinclined to engage
suggesting that parts of the ecosystem are rather weak at the moment
The question is how we rage
It’s almost as though we need a format that hasn’t actually been invented yet, but which will be completely perfect when it does turn up.
None of these things exist in isolation, but just because we can’t see how they all join together doesn’t mean they don’t somewhere in some way link to one another. And the question is, do we actually want to find a way of making those intersections more immediately visible?
accepting it may actually be impossible to achieve, but the journey is the interesting part of the endeavor.
the tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas is not necessarily a global one
the telling of midwinter ghost stories, a thing I have taken for granted
a certain kind of ghost story—the antiquarian ghost story
I still love the antiquarian ghost story best.
there remains this sense that women’s supernatural writing continually requires attention to be drawn once again to its existence
told to a group of snowbound railway passengers
the narrator, who remains at a slight distance from the main social group.
the elaborate indoor garden
stiff-necked refusal to admit that anything has happened
And if the ghosts are more democratic, then perhaps so, too, are the writers.
To read the story, then the commentary, and then the story again
I don’t recall seeing this format used before but I certainly found it incredibly effective.
the sense of anxiety increased.
I was struck by what I missed at the time, in terms of the stories I didn’t read, and the messages I perhaps internalised but couldn’t articulate, at least not until much later.
there was another way, and while it wasn’t all fun, beautiful frocks, and parental approval, it was equally valid and worth pursuing.
It is invidious to single out favourites, but having already hinted
going around the museum with a friend, the art gallery with a friend
interplay of trust and the critical eye
as we all know, things change. People spend some time with us, they move on
fantastically dynamic.
I was a young adult in the late 1970s/early 1980s and I genuinely believed that I would not get as far as my thirties, because the threat, real or imagined, of nuclear war loomed so large in my life
knew my chances of survival were poor, doubly so because of my gender
As I once searched for representations of women like me, so other groups search for representations of people like them.
Women must inevitably struggle and fail unless they surrender to the masculine imperative and are placed safely within the confines of the house.
but as she grows older, she is the one who thinks clearly
compelled to make recompense by becoming a nurse
repairing and painting the buildings
even though all around her is chaos
Life is hard yet she seems to have embraced her destiny.
The harshness of women’s lives is brought into the open
subject to the vagaries of a harsh way of life which snatches away happiness in an entirely arbitrary fashion
if not a sugar-sweet happy ending then a decent and believable resolution to their sufferings.
unicorns are famous for being catchable only by virgins, but that episode with the smashing of the jug
with what seems to be love’s young dream
on the brink of more mobility
stripped of timber for charcoal
climbing Mow Cop to get stone for the grindstones
they are trapped in and escape from a tower
the fairies leaving England
half-acknowledgement that something has happened while eliding the detail
the most distinctive thing for me must be the absence of Arthur himself, but also the presence of his absence.
the landscape is somehow all those things simultaneously, it’s also something else I can’t quite reach
to puncture an accepting complacency that had developed.
remembering can become institutionalised, or formalised in certain ways that in themselves become a form of forgetting
whether relationships work through forgetting as well as through remembering
who guards the entrance to that other world, weaving the two together
a ghostly airship
sorting and discarding to a pattern that isn’t available to those who are part of it
now attempting to deal with the utterly unknowable
untested therapies of dubious merit, desperate for a breakthrough that never comes
another layer of world
“first light,” an astronomical term referring to the first reading taken with a new telescope
to see the fantastic alongside the ‘real’.
to say that something shouldn’t be in a place is to suggest that its landscape should be immutable.
left to itself a landscape changes in small ways day by day, and over time larger transformations will occur
the woman made of flowers
type the name into a search engine to see if it existed. Of course I did.
keep an eye out for the box of artefacts
asking who is actually entitled to pull back that curtain.
the critical mind must surely ask questions that don’t have a straightforward answer
on her deathbed; it is an extraordinary record of a deeply private, intimate moment.
For all this is a genuine painting of a dead woman, the scene has nonetheless been carefully arranged to create a certain effect. The painting presents us with a scene of calmness, dignity, restraint.
we live but a short span on this earth and are doomed, like the flower, to wither and die.
vanished without a trace, although the mountain’s name stands as a memorial
let us strip away the academic pretense, the endnotes, the letters, the scholarly explanations
In the moments before one dies, one’s entire life supposedly flashes before one’s eyes.
this is far from the truth.
In fact it is a moot point
in an instant, time is nonetheless subjectively altered
after the terrible exactitude of that death
Perhaps it is the presence of the weeds.
I was disappointed by the ending, I can’t deny
and mourn for the lost possibilities
Credits:
Editors: Reviews Department
Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department
Accessibility: Accessibility Editors