Yeonsoo Julian Kim is a game designer and cultural consultant who designs tabletop RPGs, LARPs, card games, and writes interactive fiction. Some of their games include the interactive horror novel The Fog Knows Your Name published by Choice of Games, and the card game Battle of the Boybands published by Game and a Curry. Other games they have contributed to include Kids on Bikes, Teens in Space, Magical Kitties Save the Day, Mutants and Masterminds, and they are currently working on Avatar Legends: The Roleplaying Game. Their game about using food metaphors to talk about BDSM in secret, Pass the Sugar, Please, can be found in Honey & Hot Wax: An Anthology of Erotic Art Games.
In this episode of the Strange Horizons Fiction podcast, Michael Ireland presents Reprise by Samantha Lane Murphy, read by Emmie Christie. Subscribe to the Strange Horizons podcast: Spotify
Black speculative poetry works this way too. It’s text that is flexible and immediate. It’s a safe space to explore Afrocentric text rooted in story, song, dance, rhythm that natural flows from my intrinsic self. It’s text that has a lot of hurt, as in pain, and a lot of healing—an acceptance of self, black is beauty, despite what the slave trade, colonialism, racism, social injustice might tell us.
It’s not that I never read realistic fiction and not that I don’t like it. It’s just that sometimes I don’t get it. I know realistic fiction, speculative fiction, and genre fiction are just terms we made up to sell more narrative, but I’m skeptical of how the expectations and norms of realism lurk, largely uninterrogated or even fully articulated, in the way readers, editors, and publishers interact with work that purports to depict quote unquote real life. Most broadly defined, realistic stories depict the quotidian and accurately reproduce the daily events, characters, and settings of the world we live
