The Preamble

Who are some of the singular and eccentric authors within English-language speculative literature? The ones who may (re)define or defy genre boundaries, the ones who frustrate and enthrall in equal measure, and how are we to consider their influence on other writers?

Commissioned by Strange Horizons, we gathered via videoconference and shared docs to identify some names and themes. The task is inherently difficult, since it may be oxymoronic: How to categorize and corral the misfits, renegades, those who are purportedly sui generis? What makes a writer idiosyncratic and hard to imitate while nevertheless being inspirational and influential? How do we even discern and trace, let alone measure, “influence”?

We decided that movies, music, and video games were beyond our scope, and that we would focus on the written word (primarily prose, though poetry may figure), from the drabble to the doorstop multivolume series, in English-language speculative literature, potentially including works translated into English.

We were seeking to identify a score or so authors who defy easy classification, whose unique style and/or creative philosophy have influenced other writers (and are recognized as such by other writers) in perhaps subtle and oblique but demonstrable ways—even if they did not establish a “school” or “distinct group of self-defined disciples.”

While we engage for the most part directly with the novels and short stories, we acknowledge the work of critics and reviewers who have also focused on “the odd and the rum,” and more broadly the long history of lit-crit debates about what constitutes “the unique” and “influence.” Please see the appendix for some of the critics and scholars whose insights have most inspired us. Brian Attebery’s “mitochondrial theory of fantasy literature and intertextuality” is an important guide. Above all, we strive to be, in Merve Emre’s words, “generous readers,” “the critic as friend.” We also agree with Molly Templeton when she says: “The criticism I love best is an act of curiosity. An investigation, an exploration. And an open door.”

What follows is not a transcript of a single event, but rather a synthesis of our running discussion over several months via Google Doc, email, and Zoom, jointly edited by all contributors. Our format is not direct one-to-one reportage, much less minute-taking.

The Conversation

Daniel Rabuzzi: Thank you all for joining the roundtable, and thanks to Strange Horizons for organizing it as part of the annual criticism issue. Let’s begin with an assertion by Paul Di Filippo that “some works of SF [are] so unique that they don’t really inspire any scions, homages or imitations.” In this category he included works such as The Stars My Destination (1956), Lord of Light (1967), and The Spear Cuts Through Water (2022). I think Di Filippo is right, and that we can nuance his take: Even the most seemingly unique works influence others, albeit often in obscure, round-about, unacknowledged ways. Your reactions?

Kristen Bell: I really like the quote from The Spear Cuts Through Water review, as well as that novel as an example. I’ve also been thinking about authors who are difficult to imitate because they have such a unique style, like Terry Pratchett or Patricia A. McKillip. They might inspire others but there’s just something about some authors, like Pratchett and McKillip, that’s so uniquely them that nothing will ever seem quite the same even if they were influences.

Yvette Lisa Ndlovu: Authors I think of as “an unheralded influence” would be Helen Oyeyemi and Lesley Nneka Arimah. African women writers are often left out of the canon even though they’re doing some incredible, formally daring work from the margins. Nnedi Okorafor is another pioneering writer in this regard. I want to emphasize in particular how fully Oyeyemi’s work defies easy categorization. Is it gothic? Fabulist? Magical realism? Oyeyemi’s work tends not to follow any rules of genre and always leaves me with more questions than answers. Oyeyemi seems to go where her curiosities lead her.

Drawing from fairy tales, folklore, and gothic traditions, Arimah and Oyeyemi embed the speculative within the domestic and psychological. The uncanny unsettles the familiar environments their narrators inhabit: Houses think, mirrors remember, and mothers breath life into dolls. Their influence is most visible in writers who deploy speculative elements sparingly but decisively, who use the uncanny to reveal the darkness already residing within reality.

Other international or diasporic writers I would add to the canon are Ben Okri and Marlon James. Neither writer fits comfortably within the dominant frames of speculative fiction yet both have profoundly reshaped how writers imagine the relationship between realism and the unreal, myth and history, violence and spirituality. You see echoes of Okri’s The Famished Road (1991) in writers who center Indigenous cosmologies and oral tradition within their storytelling and who resist genre expectations that demand explanation or easy categorization. Similarly, in Black Leopard, Red Wolf (2019) in particular, Marlon James uses lyricism and excess to take the apparatus of epic fantasy (quests, monsters, chosen figures, immersive worldbuilding etc.) and overloads it with fractured narration, timelines that resist linearity, and contradictory narrators. James’s work recalls Amos Tutuola, a foundational figure in African speculative fiction whose use of Yoruba folklore, myths, and oral traditions in The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) was groundbreaking. Tutuola blended fantasy, horror, and spiritual quests through a unique, fragmented prose style. Tutuola laid important groundwork for writers like James who resist easy categorization to emerge.

Daniel Rabuzzi: Oyeyemi’s White Is For Witching (2009) is one of the books that haunts me, that I return to. Nothing quite like it, and, at the same time, its impact is deepened when I recognize how successfully she negotiates with and moves beyond her precursors. Jennifer Croft says about Oyeyemi’s 2025 novel A New New Me that “Oyeyemi’s work is always partly inspired by other writers,” and she argues that A New New Me is most informed by “the great 20th-century satirists of the Czech Republic and Poland, like Bohumil Hrabal (1914-97) and Witold Gombrowicz (1904-69).” Now, Gombrowicz and Hrabal are themselves acquired tastes— “writer’s writers”—so Croft’s comment makes me think of subterranean streams of influence across generations, languages, and cultures. In this case, Oyeyemi adds her unique twist: She acts not only as a quiet influencer but as a translator and transmogrifier of the subtle influencers who came before her. Oyeyemi exemplifies for me hidden traditions that are as important as the obvious lineages we label “Tolkienian” or “in the spirit of Robert E. Howard,” or “Lovecraftian,” or “after Jack Vance,” and so on.

Charles Payseur: Being more engaged with short fiction, I’m thinking of the stories of Vina Jie-Min Prasad, who has had a lot of striking short fiction and who I would call a rather unique voice in the field. But there are dozens of authors whose work I’ve come across over the last decade who manage a very unique style and voice and who are challenging, for me at least, to place in a direct flow of influence. Some of that might be simple cultural blinders: I’m largely monolingual and monocultural, having grown up and lived in the Midwest of the US my entire life, and lacking the same cultural touchstones and foundational texts that many who grew up elsewhere or who grew up reading and writing different languages might have. So the idea of “uniqueness” to some extent varies a bit from reader to reader. But I do think, since we’re talking largely of the English-language speculative fiction field, those who are coming in from the margins of that space are going to often have an element of “uniqueness” that can be partly explained by their particular inroads into the genre and how different those inroads can be globally.

Kristen Bell: “Unique” is a rather complicated word because I’m very aware of the fact that there is nothing new under the sun. But, as the rest of Octavia E. Butler’s quote says, “there are new suns,” and those are always fascinating to discover. At the same time, I’m aware that my new sun might seem like an ordinary sun to someone else, given we’ve all experienced different stories—and even for those we do have in common, we could have very different views on it due to other works we’ve read, which parts stand out to us, or myriad other personal reasons. (Which is also fascinating!)

The works that seem most unique to me tend to contain a combination of factors that make them different, memorable, and difficult to imitate. Here are a few examples.

• Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books. Satire, wordplay, and footnotes are not unique on their own, of course, but Terry Pratchett’s cleverness and wit certainly make his work unlike anything else I’ve read. When another work does remind me of his writing, it’s usually only on a surface level, and I probably mainly see a similarity because I don’t read enough humorous, satirical fantasy not to see a bit of a comparison on the rare occasions I pick one up.
• Laini Taylor. She excels at developing characters, her creativity and imagination shine, and she is excellent at building mysteries about the setting she’s created and slowly unraveling them: whether that’s the world beyond the portals in Daughter of Smoke and Bone (2011), the history of the Unseen City in Strange the Dreamer (2017), or the story behind the girl who wakes up one morning with a different eye and new memories—neither of which belong to her—in “Hatchling” (2009).
• Octavia E. Butler. Her work has great range, and though they may have some themes that overlap, each of her stories is different. I love how she often starts with something like our world as a jumping-off point, then makes it diverge from ours in a way that makes it feel like something else altogether. I find it especially fascinating that her Patternist and Xenogenesis books are different takes on humanity’s future development, with each series showing those changes over the course of multiple books.
• Jacqueline Carey. Settings based on an alternative version of history are not unusual, but Jacqueline Carey’s invented pantheon in the Kushiel’s Legacy series (2001-2011) and its message of “Love as thou wilt” is refreshing—and, of course, Phèdre nó Delaunay is an iconic heroine. I can’t say I’ve read any other books following a gods-touched masochistic courtesan/spy, but she also stands out as an exceptionally well-written character due to her rich voice that encapsulates her intelligence and desire for knowledge, deep compassion, and remarkable inner strength.
• Nnedi Okorafor (with a check plus to Yvette’s earlier comment). Death of the Author (2025) is unlike anything else I’ve read, alternating between the story of an author’s life and parts from her successful science fiction novel following robots in Nigeria in the distant future. It’s a fantastic ode to the power of stories.

Daniel Rabuzzi: Delving into “the power of stories,” I want to foreground the importance of prose style as a key vector in what I find unique or at least arresting in an author. (I recommend Matthew Oliver, Magic Words, Magic Worlds: Form and Style in Epic Fantasy [2022], and wish we had much more of this sort of close reading and explication of the text.) What do you all think?

Yvette Lisa Ndlovu: Style is much harder for me to define! Perhaps it is a writer’s signature, something so idiosyncratic to the writer that no one else could have written it? But I think that a writer’s signature is not just one thing: It’s voice, it’s sentence level, the kinds of worlds they build and beyond.

I think one useful way for me to think of it is to borrow from fashion: “Style is the unique way a person combines elements to create their own aesthetic.” So, in writing, how do you wear the sentences, how do you construct the world and guide the reader through it? I’m thinking of how Marlon James’s style embraces excesss with its long sentences, dense imagery, and sprawling casts. His prose often carries the rhythm of oral storytelling. In thinking about how an author guides the reader through their world, do they give us a single candle and expect us to find the way in the dark alone or do they switch on all the overhead lights and let us play in the world and explore at our leisure? I think Oyeyemi is an author who never lets you settle comfortably into the rooms she builds: The overhead light blinks in and out and when you finally change the lights, the room has shifted underneath your feet. Oyeyemi’s work creates uncanny realities, but the strangeness of the world is rooted in character. The worldbuilding is rooted in liminal spaces that you cannot comfortably settle in. We see the world through the eyes of characters who have a second sight, characters who see beyond the visible world and never fully fit into our world. I’m thinking of characters like Jess in The Icarus Girl (2005) who lives between cultures, between Englishness and Nigerianess, between Blackness and whiteness as a mixed raced child haunted by the spirit Tilly Tilly, who follows her to England from Nigeria. I’m thinking of the somewherehouse with two doors in The Opposite House (2007): one opening to London, the other to Lagos. Oyeyemi’s characters are never fully settled in the spaces they inhabit and this creates a warped, loopy world for the readers to navigate, an in-betweenness.

Charles Payseur: Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Alaya Dawn Johnson each have a categorically unique style, regardless of what particular genre or subgenre they are writing in. Yes, Moreno-Garcia has written Lovecraftian-style work, and more romance-influenced speculative fiction, but at the end of the day I’ll agree with Kristen that part of what it comes down to is if the particular combination of influences combine into something that is more rare and singular. Writers like Melissa Scott (cyberpunk science fiction) or Richard Bowes (contemporary fantasy/science fantasy) or Clive Barker (horror) all came out of traditions within SFF, but managed to do things that were very unique and in turn I think went on to influence other writers by showing just how some of those larger trends could be twisted, subverted, or complicated.

I think in short fiction over the last decade or two, we’ve seen authors like Sam J. Miller (contemporary fantasy/science fantasy), R. B. Lemberg (second-world fantasy), Sarah Pinsker (strange, liminal horror/science fantasy), C. L. Clark (2^nd world fantasy), and others all emerge as interesting and unique voices in the field with distinct styles. They have influenced, and will influence, many writers who have come after (even as each of those authors puts out their own work still). But their most important contributions might be more than just the authors they have inspired—it might be more about how they’ve shown what kinds of stories can not only be told, but can be popular and critically acclaimed.

Kristen Bell: I really like this point, having come across interviews where authors mentioned they didn’t realize they fit or that you could do this until reading something specific.

Yvette Lisa Ndlovu: The concept of permission resonates! I will have more to say on this.

Kristen Bell: Returning to the specifics of style, I’d like to draw attention to Laini Taylor’s glorious prose. She comes up with descriptions that feel simultaneously new and old: They’re unlike anything I’ve encountered before, yet they’re such a perfect fit that it’s like they’ve been there all along. One of my favorite examples of Taylor’s writing is from the story “Goblin Fruit” in Lips Touch: Three Times (2009) (interestingly, despite having such a memorable section, this is probably my least favorite of her individual works). This homage to Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” follows Kizzy, a teenage girl who grew up hearing about the time her grandmother saved her sister from goblins when they were young—and like her grandmother’s sister, this girl exudes the sort of palpable longing that goblins find irresistible. The author beautifully captures this wanting and Kizzy’s dreams of who she’d like to be through vividly specific imagery in the following passage:

Kizzy wanted to be a woman who would dive off the prow of a sailboat into the sea, who would fall back in a tangle of sheets, laughing, and who could dance a tango, lazily stroke a leopard with her bare foot, freeze an enemy’s blood with her eyes, make promises she couldn’t possibly keep, and then shift the world to keep them. She wanted to write memoirs and autograph them at a tiny bookshop in Rome, with a line of admirers snaking down a pink-lit alley. She wanted to make love on a balcony, ruin someone, trade in esoteric knowledge, watch strangers as coolly as a cat. She wanted to be inscrutable, have a drink named after her, a love song written for her, and a handsome adventurer’s small airplane, champagne-christened Kizzy, which would vanish one day in a windstorm in Arabia so that she would have to mount a rescue operation involving camels, and wear an indigo veil against the stinging sand, just like the nomads.

Kizzy wanted.

Daniel Rabuzzi: I appreciate the close reading, so we can savor the text directly! For me, “uniqueness” stems in large measure from how effectively the author manages through their prose to make me feel estranged from my daily perceived reality, to make me willingly suspend my disbelief—to harken back to a core definition of what drives speculative literature.

I think Glen Cook’s gritty, first-person style opened doors for later authors to adopt similar voices. Likewise Hal Duncan with his fever dreams, Sonya Taaffe with her re-imagining of poetic forms, Cat Valente with her ornate, hothouse prose. I think Steven Erikson and Ian Cameron Esslemont deserve a special shout-out for the sheer audacity of the Malazan project.

 Charles Payseur: In short fiction, I think the biggest impacts have been on editors and other gatekeepers, who have seen the reception of these trailblazing stories and had to rethink their own resistances to publishing stories that are outside of their comfort zones. And that really is where I see the true influence in the most unique and memorable authors like Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, Clive Barker, Ursula K. Le Guin, Terry Pratchett, and more. It’s not that they don’t have their imitators (there are a ton of authors trying to write after these giants), but that their true impact is in the expanding of the field to be more diverse and inclusive. While the lines of influence in terms of subject, tone, and so on (that is, the elements of style in traditional writing education) are important, there’s something to be said about doing something new and breaking down gates as a result that I think lifts authors into what we think of as influential.

And uniqueness is something that changes over time, as well. We have seen a growing influence in speculative fiction, and fiction in general, of fanfiction, for instance. I feel like some of the growth in discourse around “cozy” speculative fiction has come in part from trends in fanfiction crossing over into the professional writing spaces. There’s something where there were stories that felt more unique before the trend really caught on, but perhaps became a bit less so over time because that’s the nature of trends (and also they weren’t perhaps all that unique if you were already familiar with those trends and tropes in fanfiction before they spilled over). So, whether we see works like Travis Baldree’s Legends & Lattes (2022) as unique is perhaps dependent on whether we already had experience with stories like that in spaces outside of mainstream speculative fiction.

Daniel Rabuzzi: I like the term “mainstreaam speculative fiction” for what it implies about margins becoming cores, in a constant movement of types and genres. Reminds me of how Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint (1987) and Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer’s Sorcery and Cecelia (1988) launched the “fantasy of manners”/Regency romance and magic movement. They were arguably the forerunners to “romantasy,” real pioneers, unique at the time. Young readers today might not even be aware of this history, inundated as the market is with bestselling series by Maas, Yarros, and so on. But if younger readers can be excused for their lack of knowledge, experienced critics cannot be. As Le Guin put the case about the Harry Potter phenomenon: “How could so many reviewers and literary critics know so little about a major field of fiction, have so little background, so few standards of comparison, that they believed a book that was typical of a tradition, indeed quite conventional, even derivative, to be a unique achievement?”

Charles Payseur: Which I guess is all to say that for me the idea of uniqueness is going to be a bit different from person to person. But something that does seem important in that idea of uniqueness is how unique it remains over time.

Kristen Bell: I think I see what you mean, but I also think there’s more nuance to this. Uniqueness does change over time, and there are definitely trends that will emerge and then won’t seem unique anymore pretty quickly afterward. But I also wonder if there are things that we might not see as particularly unique today that would have remained unique if not for the fact that it did resonate with so many people who tried to do something similar and made something really popular. Is an individual work any less unique if it made people think, “Oh, this is interesting,” and started a trend?

Charles Payseur: At the heart of this discussion of ours is perhaps the recognition that uniqueness is something that we really only see over a longer period of time, as we experience what authors seem to fit better into trends and who stand out as more different not just from their peers but for those who come after. Baldree might be seen as one of the early “cozy SFF” adopters, but as the trend continues I’d be harder pressed to call that style truly unique.

Daniel Rabuzzi: Cy reminds us of the shifting winds of taste and reception. As long-time literary editor Gerald Howard recently wrote:

The life of literature and the lives of its creators are radically unpredictable and, frankly, fractal. As much as we would like to think that the republic of letters, as it used to be called, is a linear and orderly place where the best books are immediately recognized for their quality and achievement and therefore rise like cream to the top, the precise opposite is true. […] Literary reputations are never static and fixed, instead being subject to a ceaseless churn as tastes change and evolve.

I think, for instance, of Lin Carter emphasizing the long-term influence of Lord Dunsany (otherwise forgotten by the late 1960s), Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler pointing out the importance of African American authors neglected by the canon-makers, and the creation of The Sylvia Townsend Warner Society in 2000. More broadly, I recall that artists today considered canonical once languished in obscurity until later artists and/or scholars revived their posthumous fortunes: the Great J. S. Bach Revival of the 1820s, the same for Melville in the 1920s, and the recent surge of interest in Zora Neale Hurston. What would we even know of Kafka if not for Max Brod’s efforts on his behalf?

*

At this point, we all stretched our legs, had a cup of tea or coffee, and then returned to the discussion.

*

Daniel Rabuzzi: Let’s drill down on the nature of influence. One marker of indelible influence—even if made with invisible ink—is whether the author makes me re-read their precursors in a new light. Do I reconfigure my understanding of a given theme, tradition, or trope as a result of this author’s creativity? To give an iconic example, per Harold Bloom in his The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, we read Marlowe today through the lens of Shakespeare. To give a spec fic example: I think this is equally true of N. K. Jemisin, after whom we should be re-interpreting entire swathes of epic fantasy and cosmic horror. Talk to us about how you see the innovators, the unique in spec fic influencing those who come after?

Yvette Lisa Ndlovu: The Kenyan author and editor Shingai Njeri Kagunda has a practice of asking “what does this story give me permission to do?” when encountering a new work, and I’ve found it a useful framework in the way that I think about a particular work’s impact and influence on those who came after. With that in mind, I define influence as giving permission. It is that indescribable magic and alchemy, a kind of “eureka!” moment, when a work sets off a spark in another writer’s brain, when it gives others permission to play, to experiment, to be weird. It is when you read a piece of writing and immediately want to open up a blank page yourself and get to writing. Influence for me opens up something (perhaps a portal!) in another artist’s brain and it is in that opening where the magic happens. The works of Oyeyemi and Arimah have personally given me permission to play with genre, the uncanny and the weird.

I think short fiction and short story collections tend to be left out of conversations about influence in speculative ficiton in favor of bigger, sweeping secondary world epics. One standout science fiction collection in particular that is shaping Africanfuturism is Wole Talabi’s Convergence Problems (2024). Talabi’s science fiction anchors near- and far-future technology and science in Indigenous African knowledge systems. Stories such as “A Dream of Electric Mothers” and “Comments on Your Provisional Patent Application for an Eternal Spirit Core” merge speculative technologies with long-standing cultural practices around ancestry, spirit possession, and consultation. “A Dream of Electric Mothers” is set in an alternative futuristic Yorubaland where politicians make national decisions after consulting the “electric mother,” a network formed from the combined digitised minds of the ancestors. “Comments on Your Provisional Patent Application for an Eternal Spirit Core” takes the form of marginalia on a patent submission for a device that preserves the minds of the deceased, allowing loved ones to experience them as voices in their heads. Both these stories take the tradition in many African cultures of consulting the ancestors before making big life decisions and beliefs in spirit possession and merges them with technology. Talabi’s science fiction worldbuilding treats African belief systems as generative systems capable of producing their own futures. Talabi provides a model for speculative fiction that allows Indigenous epistemologies to shape a story’s ethical questions, narrative structures, and assumptions about progress itself.

Charles Payseur: I’m intrigued with how the idea of Influence intersects with individual authors. Because over time we can start to see what trends develop, and where they lead, and who gets to be seen as a pioneer of a particular trend, and who the disciples, and who are using those trends to jump off into new or contrary styles. Returning briefly to “cozy” SFF, it’s hard for me to see it as a trend wholly independent from grimdark.

Kristen Bell: I also think that these two are related and that it’s a cycle. Grimdark and morally gray characters started in response to stories with noble people who won the day, and now there’s a swing toward cozy, and then there are counter movements to that, and I suspect this will just keep going …

Charles Payseur: Right. “Cozy” SFF responds to the focus on the traumatic and bleak themes in a lot of media. As I see it originating more in fanfiction, I feel this response is more to media that isn’t novels or stories, but is instead television, movies, and video games, and the popular texts in those media that really like to focus on the grim, the gore, and the depressing and/or bleak. Creating alternate universe stories where characters can escape the horrors of their settings, and instead work or meet in a coffee shop or some such, is definitely influenced by grim trends in media, even though it becomes something new in relation to those (at the time) more dominant trends.

And of course “cozy” SFF has already spawned a number of counter movements from people wanting to get back the more grim elements, and who see “coziness” as lacking value in the genre. So I think that influence is more complicated than just influential authors inspiring writers to emulate or otherwise lean into a particular style.

Kristen Bell: Love this point, agree 100 percent.

Daniel Rabuzzi: So, influence as not only one-to-one but also as many-to-one, of ambient ideas, memes in the atmosphere.

Charles Payseur: Yes, there are many stories each year that are influenced by specific other stories or authors (looking at you, all the Omelas stories I’ve read over the last decade). But there are also trends that become self-sustaining, where certain styles are viewed as more marketable or valuable, which in turn influences the stories that get bought and published, and the stories that get taught in classes and workshops, and on and on. We can’t tell, after all, how influential any particular author or trend is if the majority of the works produced under said influence never make it into the hands of readers.

This is not as much an issue with short fiction, because the gatekeeping is less (direct submissions with no need for an agent and many non-profit or “non-professional” markets that still have a wide readership); but it’s still there. Influence is in some ways baked into the genre by things like comp titles (titles that authors compare their works to in order to pitch them to agents and publishers), which promise “it’s X meets Y by way of Z.” These are things that are looked for in the field, which means that influence is certainly something that people are consciously thinking about, at least in terms of marketability and sales (which might seem beside the point but again, if your comps are things that aren’t popular, then they’re less likely to seem like the safe bet that most agents and publishers want when looking for books to represent and/or publish). So not having popular influences isn’t rare only because people aren’t writing more unique works, but also because there are active barriers to getting works out there that are more unique, at least through the bigger presses. I feel like smaller-press works (thinking particularly of Tachyon and Neon Hemlock) often take bigger chances on works that do feel more like they come out of influences that aren’t as popular and so feel more striking and different.

Kristen Bell: Sometimes we pick up on influences without even realizing it. Many of an author’s influences will probably be from conversations, readings, and experiences that we readers aren’t privy to, and some probably aren’t even apparent to the writer. I’ve sometimes seen authors mention people saying "You were obviously influenced by author X" when they have never read author X in their life. There’s so much that’s connected and trickles down even if it doesn’t come directly from the same source.

This means you may not be able to tell what precisely influenced an author unless they themselves have said so. It may be possible to make some educated guesses based on works they’ve read, but two people can still have similar ideas independent of each other or be inspired to write two different works of fiction based on the same mythology (or from two different pieces drawing from the same myth, and so forth).

Daniel Rabuzzi: Reminds me of how many technologies—the internal combustion engine, the telephone, the light bulb—had multiple independent inventors, each working separately and unaware of one another, but influenced by the same underlying knowledge.

Kristen Bell: Indeed. I want to try to be very clear about whether or not I’m speculating based on work the author has mentioned experiencing before, or I can refer to a source where the author stated they are paying homage to something—trying to emulate a certain style, or just found something specifically formative when it came to writing, building worlds, or creating characters.

Two authors I’d like to highlight as unique writers and unheralded influences: Patricia A. McKillip and Storm Constantine. (This is tricky since there still needs to be some evidence of influence so they can’t be too unheralded or new!)

With Patricia A. McKillip, I knew I’d encountered something rare and special when I picked up my first book of hers, her short story collection Wonders of the Invisible World (2012). Her prose is elegant, conveying so much in few words, and there’s a subtle wit, wisdom, and sense of humor running through a lot of her work that feels unique to her, even if much of it may fall into familiar fantasy categories, such as fairy-tale-inspired, mythic types of stories.

Daniel Rabuzzi: I fell in love with McKillip’s prose from the first page of The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, which I read when it first came out in 1974! So yes, say on!

Kristen Bell: There’s just something timeless and magical about McKillip’s writing, with its dreamy quality. There’s a strangeness to some of her work that leaves me unsure of what exactly happened at times (her novel The Bards of Bone Plain [2010] and short story aptly titled “Weird” [2014] both come to mind), but I always feel like she knew exactly what she was doing even if parts feel a bit too slippery for me to grasp. Her work tends to feel classic to me: Even her works set in more modern settings than most, like Kingfisher (2016) and The Bards of Bone Plain, have an old, mythic quality that makes me forget that they are set in a world much closer to the one I know than many fantasy stories.

Although there may be echoes of her elsewhere, there’s something about McKillip’s prose and the way she pieces everything together that is unlike anything I’ve read before. If I’m in the mood to read something “like McKillip,” it’s probably best to stick to reading or rereading one of her many stories since nothing else is likely to match her prose style or the little touches that she adds closely enough to be satisfying.

The only book I can recall that felt like it could be a successor to her particular style is Amal El-Mohtar’s recent novella The River Has Roots (2025), mainly its earliest pages describing the river that runs with grammar. The lovely but spare prose style combined with magic that’s both mysterious and real—something a bit beyond my grasp but also something that seems true in a way I can’t quite put into words—had me thinking of McKillip’s work. (The author has expressed her admiration for McKillip’s writing, although I’m not certain if she considers her an inspiration for this book given that it’s not included among those I’ve seen her mention.)

Although McKillip is a World Fantasy Award–winning author who has been lauded by many other speculative fiction authors—including Peter S. Beagle, Charles de Lint, Ellen Kushner, and Marjorie Liu, to name a few—I still think she qualifies as an author who has not received her due. It seems to me that her name doesn’t come up nearly as much as it should, and I’ve seen others express similar sentiments. Aaron Heil’s review of Audrey Isabel Taylor’s Patricia A. McKillip and the Art of Fantasy World-Building (2017) noted that he did not remember McKillip ever coming up during his speculative fiction studies, and that Taylor wrote this book because of the glaring lack of literary analysis focused on her work.

Daniel Rabuzzi: Such an important point—so many of the spec fic authors we love fail to garner the kinds of critical attention we feel they deserve. Here you highlight one critic who felt moved to write the book she felt needed writing, emphasising the role of criticism, and the need for The Long View. Reminds me of Goss’s study of Coleridge, Mew, and Townsend Warner (2008), and likewise Swanwick’s work on Hope Mirrlees (2009), James Branch Cabell (2007), and Greer Gilman (2021).

Kristen Bell: And then there’s Storm Constantine. Like McKillip, Constantine has not just a single book but a large body of work that eludes easy classification. Her eclectic collection of novels and short stories don’t tend to follow a particular structure or feel like they’re utilizing common tropes. Each of her works I’m familiar with stands out as something no one else could write. With her Wraeththu books (1987-2005), she imagined mutants who are both male and female in stories that are a bit fantasy and a bit science fiction, populated by characters who feel real in part because of how human they seem in spite of it all: They are so convinced they are superior to humanity yet subject to the same foibles. In Sign for the Sacred (2002), she examined the journeys of characters connected by their views on a charismatic prophet and showed how different individuals can perceive the same situations very differently—and left much open to interpretation so readers can similarly take away their own different ideas about it. Through Calenture (1994), a novel about the relationship between art and artist, she created a world unlike any other with characters encountering everything from a city of people who follow a script in their daily lives to a family living on a giant insect that they share a special connection with and worship as a god. And her short fiction encompasses a variety of fantastical and science fictional settings, using her lush prose and unconventional storytelling to examine themes like identity, self-discovery, gender, and obsession (especially romantic or religious).

Others have found her work to be a rarity as well, including Sarah Ash, Michael Moorcock, and N. K. Jemisin. When announcing that Constantine would soon have a guest post on her blog, Sarah Ash wrote about realizing through her work “that it was possible to write fantasy that was not Tolkien-influenced but instead something genuinely ‘rich and strange.’.” Michael Moorcock opens his introduction to Constantine’s short story collection The Oracle Lips from 1998 by calling her “an idiosyncratic voice, a unique vision.” Her Wraeththu books were part of the inspiration for N. K. Jemisin’s debut novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (2010)—this inspiration was one of the reasons I was so eager to read her debut when it first came out! The books also inspired a lot of fanfiction, some of which was selected for anthologies released through Constantine’s own publisher, Immanion Press.

Daniel Rabuzzi: Another example of why small and independent presses matter!

Kristen Bell: Though Immanion was originally created to keep Constantine’s own work in print, she championed other writers’ works as well, and the press expanded into publishing “unusual and intriguing fiction by other authors.” This included anthologies containing stories by various authors set in the world of Wraeththu, co-edited by Constantine and Wendy Darling, and several works by Tanith Lee, as Immanion is “committed to keeping her legacy alive.” After Constantine’s passing, Immanion released Pashterina’s Peacocks (2021), a tribute to her edited by Danielle Lainton and Louise Coquio that includes pieces by Lee, Moorcock, Warrington, Liz Williams, and many others.

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We took another break, to share recipes and to talk about upcoming books we were especially looking forward to reading.

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Daniel Rabuzzi: In closing, are there other authors you would add to our ever-growing list of the hard-to-classify and/or the quiet influencers?

Kristen Bell: There are a few books I can think of from the last couple years that aren’t necessarily ones I’d call hard to classify but do stand out to me as giving permission to do something different. The Scarlet Throne by Amy Leow (2024) is a book about a teenager that isn’t young adult and one that does not include a romantic relationship, during a time when fantasy romance is particularly prominent—especially for books with main characters in the same age range as this one. It’s also not a cozy story, and it does not feature found family or even just a strong friendship; but there are additional aspects related to worldbuilding and characterization that cement it as one of the more unique books I’ve read during the last couple years.

There’s also The Mountain Crown by Karin Lowachee. Part of what makes this feel a bit different is that Lowachee is an author who goes where the story takes her, making this feel like you’re going on a journey with the characters, and she also pulls from an eclectic set of inspirations like North American frontier literature and the Daoist philosophy of wu wei, and animals (especially her cat, who served as a model for possible dragon behaviors). In particular, the way her dragons communicate using sets of words that make sense to them but aren’t straightforward human language is unlike anything else I’ve encountered. It’s difficult to parse at first, but with repetition, meanings start to emerge even if the precise details remain a bit mysterious.

Charles Payseur: The Birdverse works by R. B. Lemberg remain one of the most singular and engrossing projects in speculative fiction to me. The collection Geometries of Belonging (2022) includes a lot of the earlier works that for me have shown what can be done with second-world fantasy, from the worldbuilding to the poetry to the inclusion of really complex takes on gender and sexuality and power and pleasure. While relatively recently published, I do feel the ripples that have spread from the impact of these works in the larger writing communities. The field is so much richer for the conversations that these stories moved forward and complicated. For me they remain both incredibly unique and deeply influential.

Nalo Hopkinson has also put out some fantastically original and provocative fiction, from her novels to her shorter works. Part of what makes her works so original for me might be that they were among my first introductions to Caribbean perspectives and folklore and culture, but she’s also not afraid to take on very serious topics without losing a sense of hope and future. Her depictions of LGBTQ+ relationships and communities has been fearless and really important to getting outside the mainstream visions of what those communities really look like—not just the young pretty white gays but messy and beautiful families that can form along the margins, seeking a better world.

Kristen Bell: I’d also cite The Wings Upon Her Back by Samantha Mills. What sets it apart is how deeply Mills dives into the protagonist’s relationship with her religion, and her mentor, after she makes a decision that leads to her being cast out of her sect after having served for twenty-six years, starting when she was a teenager. It’s not at all unusual for fictional characters to have to face the fact that everything they once believed is wrong, but most of those I’ve read are about younger people who don’t have to contend with the fact that they’ve spent a big chunk of their adult life dedicated to a cause they now realize is wrong. This one does show how her younger self came to be where she was, but it also shows her grappling with the consequences in a story about redemption, disillusionment, and deciding to walk a new path.

Another recent book I can see having an influence is Goddess of the River by Vaishnavi Patel (2024). There has been an influx of retellings and reimaginings that seek to give a voice to female characters often relegated to the background, but many of those have focused on stories with their roots in Europe, particularly Greek myths (like Circe by Madeline Miller [2018], Ariadne by Jennifer Saint [2021], A Thousand Ships [2019] by Natalie Haynes, Ithaca by Claire North [2022], Medea by Eilish Quin [2024], and too many others to list here). Of course, it’s not that there aren’t those based on stories from other parts of the world, or even others also based on Indian epics like this novel or Vaishnavi Patel’s previous one, Kaikeyi (2022); but they are fewer and further between when one primarily reads books published in the United States. Goddess of the River is a reimagining of the Mahabharata centering the goddess Ganga and the impact she had on its events, which Patel wrote after discovering the river goddess was often overlooked in studies and texts despite having an important role. It’s a novel that focuses on platonic relationships, primarily the one between Ganga and her son, and I appreciated how vividly Patel portrayed the eponymous character as an otherworldly divine being and a river who encompassed so much—and had to learn what it was like to go from larger than life to a smaller, single form when she spent some time as a mortal.

Charles Payseur: In general we do see a lot of “take a fairy tale and update it” stories: Every year there are dozens of stories that basically take a swing at some of those formative fables, folk tales, and so on. This year has had a number of Beauty and the Beast stories, and every year it seems to shift a bit so that one year it’s Little Mermaid stories and another year it’s the one with the brothers who get turned into swans and on and on. So writers have that background and indeed we see a lot of this in the short fiction landscape, too. It’s good to see this tradition expanding.

Nisi Shawl is another pioneering voice in speculative fiction. Their short works have for a long time really pushed the envelope and blended fantasy, horror, and science fiction in amazing ways. They have a voice that’s difficult to characterize but hits hard. Stories like “The Things I Miss the Most” (2018) and “Queen of Dirt” (2017) really hooked me when I came across them, and their novel Everfair (2016) does things with alternative history that I had never seen before.

Kristen Bell: And there’s Blood Over Bright Haven by M. L. Wang (2023). Originally self-published before its release through Del Rey, Blood Over Bright Haven is one of those novels that had a storyline that felt like one I’d read before in the beginning and then diverged from it in an interesting way. One of its main characters is the first woman to become a highmage, but it’s not a story about how she’s breaking the glass ceiling and paving the way for others like her. Instead, it exposes her obliviousness to intersectional problems when the male mages decide to amuse themselves by making the other main character, a refugee to their city who works as a janitor and knows nothing of magic, become her assistant. It’s a book about the worst aspects of humanity, and resistance to tearing down established structures, with a female protagonist who can be selfish in her ambitions but also courageous and smart. I felt that the way it explored the discovery of the secrets of their city’s magic and the fallout from it made it stand out as different—even given the predictability of its mystery and the novel’s complete lack of subtlety. It mixed tragedy with hope in a way that felt true to life, and it didn’t have easy answers or solutions.

Charles Payseur: And I’d be remiss without mentioning Sam J. Miller, whose stories are probably a big part of why I fell in love with and stayed so entrenched in short fiction. I learned so much about myself as a person and so much about what’s possible to do as a writer from his stories. He leans into angst and pain and trauma, but not to revel in it or glorify it. Rather, he finds the magic that comes from people pushing back against the crushing weight of intolerance and bigotry—the light that shines brighter for being fragile and delicate. That breaks at times, but still endures and is passed from person to person and heart to heart in an unbreakable and beautiful chain.

Daniel Rabuzzi: Bobbing my head in wonder and excitement: Thank you for adding more books to my already vertiginous TBR pile! Feeling the need to dive into the pile, I will summarize what I heard as some of our conversation’s main points. Whew, defining “unique” and “influence” is really difficult. Having said that, what shines through for me is the concept of “giving permission,” that is, of an author’s work illuminating a new path forward (or sideways or around in a circle), granting an emerging writer the freedom to explore beyond what “the canon” (however defined, and by whom) has allowed or even contemplated. Influence as emancipatory, a spirit of generosity, not strict adherence to a precursor’s style or themes or mode of worldbuilding; influence as “a ha,” not “how to.”

Another key take-away for me is the reminder that influence waxes and wanes over time. Today’s critical darling may be forgotten a generation hence, then re-discovered a century after that. What is perceived as unique at publication may or may not be viewed as longitudinally unique in years to come. Lastly, a publisher has to take a risk on an eccentric manuscript, often in defiance of what the market thinks it wants, highlighting the vital role of small and independent presses in providing a home for the singular and odd. With that, I am off to my book stacks, with gratitude for the lively conversation—thank you Kristen, Charles, and Yvette!

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Appendix. 

Works of criticism:

Attebery, Brian. “A Mitochondrial Theory of Literature: Fantasy and Intertextuality,” chap. 5 in his Fantasy: How It Works. Oxford University Press, 2022.

Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Oxford University Press, 1997 (orig. 1973).

Delany, Samuel. The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction. Wesleyan University Press, 2009 (orig. 1977).

Di Filippo, Paul. Review of The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez, in Locus (August 27,2022).

Emre, Merve. “The Critic as Friend: The Challenge of Reading Generously.” The Yale Review (Summer, 2024).

Fenkl, Heinz Insu. “Introduction” to Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing (eds. Theodora Goss & Delia Sherman). Small Beer Press, 2007.

Frow, John. Genre. Routledge, 2015; second ed.

Goss, Theodora. Voices from Fairyland: The Fantastical Poems of Mary Coleridge, Charlotte Mew, and Sylvia Townsend Warner. Aqueduct Press, 2008.

Jenkins, Henry. “Introduction: On the Pleasures of Not Belonging,” in Interfictions 2 (eds. Delia Sherman & Christopher Barzak). Small Beer Press, 2009.

Keegan, Ken. “Why Fabulist and New Wave Fabulist Stories …,” preface to ParaSpheres: Extending Beyond The Spheres of Literary And Genre Fiction (eds. Rusty Morrison & Keegan). Omnidawn, 2006.

Kelly, James Patrick & John Kessel, “Slipstream, the Genre That Isn’t,” in Feeling Very Strange (eds. Kelly & Kessel). Tachyon, 2006.

Le Guin, Ursula K. “Commodified Fantasy Takes No Risks,” foreword to her Tales from Earthsea. Harcourt Brace, 2001.

Maund, Kari. “Reading the Fantasy Series,” in The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature (eds. Edward James & Farah Mendlesohn). Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Mendlesohn, Farah & Edward James. A Short History of Fantasy. Middlesex University Press, 2009.

McGurl, Mark. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Harvard University Press, 2009.

Moorcock, Michael. Wizardry and Wild Romance: A Study of Epic Fantasy (with China Miéville’s intro and afterword by Jeff VanderMeer). MonkeyBrain Books, 2004.

Oliver, Matthew. Magic Words, Magic Worlds: Form and Style in Epic Fantasy. McFarland, 2022.

Sangster, Matthew. An Introduction to Fantasy. Cambridge University Press, 2023. See esp. chap. 2 on the “value of iteration.”

Schwab, V.E. “Just Trust Me: In Praise Of Strange Books.” (NPR, Dec. 23, 2017).

So, Richard Jean & Andrew Piper, “How Has the MFA Changed the Contemporary Novel?” The Atlantic (March 6, 2016).

Swanwick, Michael. “In the Tradition ... A Cruise Through the Hard Fantasy Archipelago in Search of the Lonely and the Rum … “ [the latter a term used by Tove Jansson], in his Moon Dogs (eds. Ann A. Broomhead & Timothy P. Szczesuil). NESFA Press, 2000.

Templeton, Molly. “(It’s Not) The Death of Criticism (Again).” Reactor (September 11, 2025).

Thomas, Ebony. The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to The Hunger Games. NYU Press, 2019.

Thomas, Sheree Renée. Introduction to Dark Matter: Reading the Bones (ed. Thomas). Aspect/ Time Warner, 2004.

Walton, Jo. “The Weirdest Book in the World,” and “Something Rich and Strange: Candas Jane Dorsey’s Black Wine,” in her What Makes This Book So Great: Re-reading the Classics of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Tor, 2014.

Williamson, Jamie. The Evolution of Modern Fantasy: From Antiquarianism to the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

Wolfe, Gary K., with Amelia Beamer. “Twenty-First-Century Stories,” in his Evaporating Genres. Wesleyan University Press, 2011.

Selected authors discussed, with some of their representative works:

In talking before our discussion, and in sidebars throughout, we bandied about many possible authors to consider. Among legacy authors whose work we mulled were Mervyn Peake, William Hope Hodgson, Hope Mirrlees, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Angela Carter, Clark Ashton Smith, Silvina Ocampo, Austin Tappan Wright, Tanith Lee, Avram Davidson, Leonora Carrington, Ursula K. Le Guin, Amos Tutuola, and Octavia Butler. Among living writers: Mark Z. Danielewski, John Crowley, Greer Gilman, Kelly Link, M. John Harrison, Samuel Delany, C. L. Clark, Alan Garner, Clive Barker, Andrea Hairston, Susanna Clarke, Sofia Samatar, Sarah Pinsker, Tamsyn Muir, Jared Pechaček, Nghi Vo, P. Djèlí Clark, and Vajra Chandrasekera. We emphasize that any and all of these could just have easily made the list below! We settled on the following (in alphabetical order):

Travis Baldree, Legends & Lattes.

Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel’s Legacy.

Storm Constantine, Wraeththu.

Nalo Hopkinson, Skin Folk.

Alaya Dawn Johnson, Reconstruction.

R. B. Lemberg, Geometries of Belonging

Amy Leow, The Scarlet Throne.

Karin Lowachee, The Mountain Crown.

Patricia A. McKillip, The Forgotten Beasts of Eld.

Sam J. Miller, Boys, Beasts & Men.

Samantha Mills, The Wings Upon Her Back.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Love & Other Poisons.

Lesley Arimah Nneka,  What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky.

Nnedi Okorafor, Death of the Author.

Helen Oyeyemi, White Is for Witching.

Vaishnavi Patel, Goddess of the River.

Vina Jie-Min Prasad, “Pistol Grip.”

Terry Pratchett, Discworld novels.

Nisi Shawl, “The Things I Miss the Most,” “Queen of Dirt.”

Laini Taylor,, “Goblin Fruit.”

M. L. Wang, Blood Over Bright Haven.