In this episode of Strange Horizons at 25, editor Kat Kourbeti talks to Naomi Kritzer about her non-linear writing journey, imagining positive futures, and how to deal with the world catching up to your near-future specfic.

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Episode show notes:

• Read Naomi's work in our archives.
• Visit Naomi's website, or follow her on Bluesky.
• Order her latest book, Liberty's Daughter, featuring all of the previously serialised Seastead stories from F&SF Magazine.
• Find more links to her work, along with everything else we talked about today, peppered throughout the transcript below.

Transcript

Kat Kourbeti: Hello Strangers, and welcome to Strange Horizons at 25, a 25th anniversary celebration of Strange Horizons. I'm your host, Kat Kourbeti, and it's my privilege today to welcome you to another episode that looks back at the history and impact of Strange Horizons on the speculative genres. Today's guest is Naomi Kritzer, who was first published with us in 2002, and has since gone on to publish dozens more stories and several novels, and win multiple Hugo and Locus Awards, a Lodestar Award, and a Nebula.

It's so great to have you here, Naomi.

Naomi Kritzer: Thank you. It's great to be here.

Kat Kourbeti: I was reading through your stories on Strange Horizons, and it was interesting to find themes that have a commonality with your newer work. I have to admit, I hadn't gone back through the archives that far. It's really cool to see the trajectory of your writing, if you will.

So that's what we'll be talking about today.

Naomi Kritzer: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: So first of all, 2002, a very early time. How did you come across Strange Horizons in the first place, back in the day?

Naomi Kritzer: I was a regular attendee of Wiscon. Jed Hartman, who was one of the people working on Strange Horizons at the time, was also a regular attendee. Jed came up to me at the con and said, " hey, you should submit a story to Strange Horizons", just straight up.

And being asked to submit my work by an editor was a very novel experience for me, at that point in my career. I think I fairly quickly after that sent a story in, and at the time I will note print was a much bigger deal. Print was a much more prominent part of short science fiction publishing than it is today. There were a lot more magazines. They were much more widely read, I think, than the website magazines were. So getting published in an online magazine, the downside was is I wouldn't get contributors copies to stick on a shelf, which felt like a substantial thing for me at the time. Of course these days, I feel like it's much clearer that the advantage of an online magazine is the accessibility and the number of people who can come read it, and that was just starting to be true back in 2002. A lot of people could read it because they didn't have to subscribe. In 2002, a lot more people just were not on the internet.

It wasn't truly the dark age, it was like 1992. But having a story online meant that people could email it to their friends, which was like, new at that point.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. I certainly came into short fiction as a reader because of online publications, and so like, it's really interesting hearing about that other side of, it used to be you had to buy magazines, or subscribe.

So a solicitation then? That's probably new in the realm of these interviews. So when you submitted, did you know it was this story you wanted to send? Comrade Grandmother?

Naomi Kritzer: Well, it's long enough that I don't remember for sure, but my guess is that it was a story that I had written that I hadn't sold yet. I had probably shopped it around at the time. I always sent first to the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF), both because I liked it and because the editor would respond very quickly. So you'd send it out, paper form, in an envelope, and you'd get a rejection letter from Gordon Van Gelder that usually said, "thank you for showing me your story, but it didn't quite grab me, alas". So I probably sent it there and I don't remember where else I might've sent it at that point, but it had probably been to a number of places and been rejected. And I had it and Jed had just asked me, so I sent it to Strange Horizons.

Kat Kourbeti: What did they say? When Jed got the the submission, what was the response initially?

Naomi Kritzer: They bought the story. I may have submitted other stories that they rejected, and I just don't remember at this point.

Kat Kourbeti: Fair enough.

Naomi Kritzer: It was so long ago.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. But what's fascinating about a lot of these interviews is like talking to folks who, the online landscape was so new that casting your mind back that far, it's just so wildly different to now, and to what's considered normal in the short fiction market in 2025.

Naomi Kritzer: I'm guessing at the time, because it was an online magazine, they took online submissions, but I know that a lot of the places that took online submissions that long ago didn't want attachments. They wanted the story pasted into an email, and that is probably how I submitted to Strange Horizons, but I'm not a hundred percent sure.

Kat Kourbeti: Let's talk about that story a little bit, cause it's very cool and it really is a "Strange Horizons story", even by 2025 standards. It's called Comrade Grandmother, and it's about Baba Yaga helping out during World War II.

Naomi Kritzer: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: How did that idea happen?

Naomi Kritzer: Let's see. So some of it was thinking about Baba Yaga and Baba Yaga stories and wanting to like, write about this character from Russian fairytale and folklore. And some of it was thinking about how easily World War II could have gone the other way, could have gone worse than it did. Not like it went super great, millions and millions of people died.

There's actually a video, which I had definitely not seen at the time that I wrote this story because it was made many years later, but it's this visual depiction of the deaths of World War II. It's an incredible watch because what it communicates visually with like little tiny figures, just stick figures basically, is that Hitler was stopped by a mountain of Russian bodies. That that is what it took to stop Hitler's advance, was just throwing people in his way. Because it shows you all the American deaths, and it shows you all the British deaths, and then it starts showing you the Russian deaths and it just goes on and on.

And like, this was something I knew, right? And it was something I knew when I wrote the story, and it was part of what the story was about. I actually think the video does a better job of communicating this than my story did, but anyway. These are all things that I thought about and I wanted to write something that was like a fairytale and kind of not.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Naomi Kritzer: That's where that came from.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, it's really cool. It's very stark, as one might expect of a story set in Russia and particularly during the era. And I think it does a great job of capturing—not necessarily heartless, but the matter-of-factness of certain folkloric concepts that, you know, there's a price to be paid and it is what it is, and you're gonna have to face that. Which I really liked. And the return of that motif towards the end.

Naomi Kritzer: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. Like really great. Do you remember at all, like if there were any editorial comments at the time, or was it just bought wholesale?

Naomi Kritzer: I don't remember. So long ago. Seriously, I'll also note: it was published in 2002 - I have two children and they were born in 2000 and 2003. So in 2002, I was parenting a toddler. It was a period of my life where I wasn't getting a lot of sleep and I had a lot going on, although not quite as much as a couple years later, when I had a 3-year-old and a newborn and a novel deadline.

Kat Kourbeti: Wow. Yeah, no, that's completely fair. Yeah, like this story is old enough to drink.

Naomi Kritzer: Yep. As are my kids.

Kat Kourbeti: Yep. The story has been to college and graduated, so.

Naomi Kritzer: Yeah. Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: Okay, so then, there's a bit of a gap, I guess a couple of years. And then we have a two-parter from you. (St. Ailbe's Hall, Part 1 and Part 2)

Naomi Kritzer: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: And I guess we used to do two parters more back in the day, but I find that interesting as a concept, 'cause we don't really do them anymore. So how did that happen?

Naomi Kritzer: My recollection is that two parters were pretty rare, even back in the day. And I don't know why, I can't remember how I came about submitting this story to Strange Horizons 'cause I think it was longer than what you normally took. And I don't know if it was like, Jed bugged me again and I was like, I have this story but it's too long and he said, send it anyway. Which might have been what happened. It might have just been that there was something in the guidelines that said, if you have something that's outside our guidelines, let us know. And so I emailed because you published me before.

Kat Kourbeti: So let's talk a little bit about that one. So if I'm pronouncing it correctly is, is it St. Alba's Hall?

Naomi Kritzer: I always thought it was "Albi", but I don't actually know that for sure.

Kat Kourbeti: So it's a two-parter about enhanced dogs who can speak, and integrating them into society, and the resistance from a certain community, ish.

Naomi Kritzer: It's about enhanced dogs that are used as a slave labor force. And they're human level intelligence, but with like certain dog instincts left intact. The idea being that they could be used for unpaid labor indefinitely. And the resistance to this, like there's a dog that wants to get baptized, and a priest that is undecided about whether to do it, and a human who's pushing for it. A lot of what's going on in the story is the animal liberation movement, the dog liberation movement that's using the religious angle to push people to acknowledge that these animals are people, that dogs really are people.

Kat Kourbeti: With everything that entails. Souls and everything.

Naomi Kritzer: Including human rights.

Kat Kourbeti: Mm-hmm.

Naomi Kritzer: Yeah, I remember a lot more about how I wrote that story.

Kat Kourbeti: Ooh, tell me about it.

Naomi Kritzer: Because an earlier version of that story came fairly close to being my first professional sale, but then didn't quite make it. Actually there was a shorter version that I wrote in the late nineties when I was first getting really serious about writing and submitting, and I had joined a writer's group, and my writer's group gave me some feedback, thought it was a really great story, and I started shopping it around. And when I sent it to Analog, they wrote back and were like—wait, was it Analog? No, you know what? Analog just rejected it, but said it was like, pretty good, but not quite good enough. And I think it may have been a different magazine that sent me a bunch of really detailed critique. And so I did a bunch of editing and sent it back, and then they still didn't want it.

And I tried again on some of the places that had seen it before, and they still didn't want it, although they agreed that it was closer and it just, I couldn't sell it. So I put it aside and a couple of years passed and I went back to the story and just started it over. I still liked the basic premise and still liked the Siberian Husky. And I tried again, right? And that story came out a whole lot longer, but better. And I shopped that around again. And Analog didn't buy it and Asimov's didn't buy it and F&SF didn't buy it, but Strange Horizons was open to reading it even though it was too long. And then bought it and split it into two stories.

And that story, hilariously, years later, I got an email from an anthologist who was doing a collection of best nominees for the Ursa Major awards. And I was like, it was nominated for what? I'd never heard of the Ursa Major awards at that point. I was like, what if it had won? And I hadn't even sent like an acceptance, that would've looked so rude and ungracious. It wouldn't have been an issue apparently at the time, like the same person had won every year in a row for quite a few years, so it was very unlikely. And they didn't make as big a deal out of it as the Hugos, but it's the furry fandom's big award. So it was a story with an anthropomorphic animal and that's why it was up for it. Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: Would you look at that? What a journey that story had. Wow. And so interesting, multiple rounds of feedback and all of that. Gosh, like what does it take to get close to that kind of quality? Like, what people are looking for? The unknowable mysteries.

What do you think made it cross over that line, in its final form?

Naomi Kritzer: So my journey from aspiring writer to get published, to a writer who could get published regularly in short form, passed through a couple of stages. And this story I think passed through them with those stages. As a young writer, by which I mean a high schooler, I was writing stories, I was already sending them out. I had a mentor, Nancy Vedder-Schultz was my neighbor down the street, I babysat for her daughter. She's a really lovely woman and she read some of my early—one of my early stories, and gave me a bunch of really helpful feedback that sort of showed me how to approach editing it, which was really useful.

But at the time that I was in high school, my big influences in terms of the stuff I was reading about how to write were—this is two names that will make lots of people flinch: Orson Scott Card and Marion Zimmer Bradley. Yeah, it's...

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Naomi Kritzer: Orson Scott Card had written a book called How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy. It is still out there. It is actually extremely useful.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Naomi Kritzer: And Marion Zimmer Bradley wrote all these introductions to her anthologies that talked about the sort of stories she liked and what she was looking for. And her formula for a story, which I used a lot in high school, her formula was:

Joe has his butt in a bear trap and this is how he gets it out.

So that was how I approached short narrative for a number of years, like, there's a character with a problem and he has to solve it or she has to solve it. And at some point in my post-college writing era, I realized that the real formula was:

Joe has his butt in a bear trap, and this is how he has changed by his struggles to get it out.

Whether or not he actually succeeds, that the core of the story was the change that the character experiences.

And my very first pro sale, which was to Realms of Fantasy, was a story called Gift of the Winter King, where I realized after I wrote it, handed it out, got critique from my writer's group, which included one member of my writer's group's critique started with a phrase, I want you to know, I really like you as a person.

Kat Kourbeti: Oh, no.

Naomi Kritzer: Yeah, it was a harsh critique, but very useful because I realized listening to him what I had screwed up. But I realized after the first go round that I had chosen the wrong person as the protagonist, because the person I had chosen as a protagonist starts out with one set of convictions and beliefs and dies with those intact. Like, there was a character experiencing change, and she had been a secondary character and I needed to make her the narrator.

Kat Kourbeti: Okay.

Naomi Kritzer: And so that was the first big sort of revelation, was the idea of focusing on the change rather than on the solution to the problem. And then the other thing that clicked in for me at some point, and this was partly thanks to Orson Scott Card, though not his book on writing. He has a anthology or collection called The Changed Man, and in The Changed Man, it has a story in which a character who has done something horrifying is pursued by a monster. And in his little afterword he said, the monster is the physical manifestation of this character's shame and remorse and guilt, and for that reason, those words never appear in the story because they appear as the monster.

And I was like, that was really crystallizing an insight for me. And it was an insight I started applying to my own work, to think about what ideas were at the heart of the story and what theme was at the heart of the story. And once I started really thinking about theme and what I was saying in the story, I got a lot better at figuring out how to rewrite the story so that the theme was present but never spoken. So it was there if you were looking for it, but I wasn't like thwhacking anyone over the head with the, " by the way, this is about guilt" or whatever.

And in the various revisions of the St Ailbe's story, one of the things the editors told me about the story is that the first three pages or something, nothing happens. So the first round of really figuring out how to do this was like, this is a short story, and if I've got two or three pages at the very beginning where absolutely nothing important is happening, I should take those out. Learning how to trim my work.This is where the phrase "murder your darlings" comes from, I think, is that there's stuff in there, I'm sure that felt really clever. But it needed to go. It wasn't serving its purpose.

When I rewrote it from scratch, I had thought a lot more about that idea of character change. And so there's a character at the heart of it who has to undergo change, and that's the priest. I also had thought about, what's the story really about? And what's funny is, I don't actually remember what I decided the story was really about, but I do think at that point I had started to really consciously think about it.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. From a more like craft-, like how do I make this evident, but not necessarily stated? Yeah.

Naomi Kritzer: Exactly.

Kat Kourbeti: I think that it's a very interesting through line, across the board with probably all of your work, but especially this early stage where it's a lot about kind of community and people coming together, but—no actually, lies, because your latest stuff is also very much about people banding together in moments of hardship, and caring for one another and uplifting one another, not necessarily easily, but you know, through a bunch of things.

I find that very cool, like for that to be at the heart of someone's work. So can you tell me a little bit about how you think about those ideas and form them into something that can take the form of a story of some kind?

Naomi Kritzer: I think the central thing for me is that I find stories about people coming together and trying to like, work together and figure stuff out, more interesting than stories where people wanna like, destroy each other. Winning in a conflict by working together is more interesting to me than stories where the solution lies in clever military maneuver or whatever.

Also, I don't know anything about military maneuvers, so if I think something's a clever military maneuver, it's probably not.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

I suppose a better form of the question is, do you start with an idea for a theme like that, or does that just seep into everything regardless of intent?

Naomi Kritzer: It really depends on the story. The Year Without Sunshine, which is my recent story that is about a community of people in a neighborhood in Minneapolis who work together to like, survive through some sort of disaster, and in particular to keep a disabled member of the community safe and alive.

That story really did start from the premise of "would a community do this in a disaster?" How would a community, how could a community protect its most vulnerable members? Part of it was inspired by friends of mine with disabilities talking about how they feel like in stories of disasters, they're treated as expendable and as excess weight that must be thrown overboard, metaphorically—or literally, in the case of like, "lifeboat exercises". That's in quotation marks.

I grew up in the 1980s, and when I was in high school—middle and high school, maybe even elementary school—it was really common to have, if you had like a Friday afternoon before vacation and you didn't wanna make your students do math, you might whip out this thought exercise where you're making decisions for, there's a bomb shelter or fallout shelter, you've got space and supplies for 20 people, but 40 people have made it in. So you gotta decide which 20 get to stay and which 20 get thrown out into the radioactive wasteland.

I remembered this, but it's a vague, "yeah the eighties were a really weird time" kind of way, but my friend Elsa Sjunneson, she's about the same age as me, and she talked about at one point how it felt to be in a group of students where everyone else in the room took it for granted that a disability meant you got thrown out, and she was sitting there as a person with disabilities.

Because it was something that was so long ago for me, I had never really thought about it in those terms until I heard her talk about it and I was like, oh my God, that is incredibly messed up, and none of us in the eighties, like none of the able bodied kids in the eighties, as far as I know, were thinking about it in those terms at all.

Also it's a really messed up thing to ask kids to do. The only time I can remember that we did it where there was any justification at all was when we did it in Spanish class, in Spanish, and it was a topic that we were being asked to discuss using our language skills. But seriously of all the things in the world, you could have us talk about who lives and who dies, just... but like I said, the eighties were really messed up time.

Like the nuclear war felt like a really present threat. When I was seven, I thought I wasn't gonna get to live to be 30 because there was gonna be a nuclear war. Like just a really common experience for Gen Xers, at least within the science fiction community. I know Elizabeth Bear has talked about this same thing that she had this nihilistic belief.

Anyway, getting back to the story, I was thinking about that exercise and the ideas implicit in it and all the many stories that just show you the world after a disaster and they don't show you anyone with a disability, because of course it's just assumed they all died or were allowed to die. I wanted to think about alternatives to that, and I also wanted to write a story where the character that experiences change is not an individual, but an entire community. And I wanted to write a story where it's a really good thing that they all banded together to help a disabled person, and it's not because the disabled person turns out to have just the exact set of skills that everyone else urgently needs in order to stay alive, which is sometimes how these stories go. It's a really good thing you saved that person in a wheelchair, because that person in a wheelchair turns out to be like a neurosurgeon, and now the hero can be saved by this person.

I did not want that story, I did not want that moral. I wanted the moral to be that when your community comes together, it changes your whole community for the better. And that can be why everyone survives, is because you all came together. That's where I was coming from with this story.

Kat Kourbeti: I think it spoke to a lot of us—case in point, you won a Hugo with it. You wrote it at a really crucial time as well. I think we've all been thinking about disability, and inclusion of folks with disabilities, 'cause like, there's a lot more of us, and it's just more prevalent, especially—good thing or bad, but I think the pandemic really made us cognizant of a lot of these issues.

So it really came at a time that we were all thinking about these things anyway, and here's this wonderful story about people coming together. We all want to believe in a world where that is the norm. Not just possible, but common.

Naomi Kritzer: Yeah. If you look at stories of actual disasters, people do tend to come together. There's a book by author Rebecca Solnit called A Paradise Built In Hell about the ways in which people cooperate and come together post-disaster. That's actually way more common than people like turning on each other.

And, yeah, Cory Doctorow has a wonderful line about 'covered dish' people, and how in order to survive as a society, we need there to be more 'covered dish' people than the people who come with their guns. There's this line about how, "if your neighbor thinks you're coming over with a gun, she'd be crazy to meet you with anything other than a gun. But if you come over with a covered dish, like a dish of food and she's coming with a gun, but only because she thought you were coming with a gun, once she sees that what you've got is food, she'll put her gun away and you can have a potluck."

He's got some really great stories about communities coming together in interesting ways as well. His book Radicalized is a collection of four novellas, and there's one where you have a character, one of the tech bros who's built himself a little hideout in the middle of nowhere, and it does not go as well for him as it does for the people outside the hideout. Not to spoil anything too much.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. Not relevant at all in today's world!

Naomi Kritzer: Yeah. That book came out in like 2018. That "tech bro hide out in the desert" felt very prescient, like a year or two later.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Naomi Kritzer: Only feels more prescient now.

Kat Kourbeti: I've been really enjoying the mainstream appeal of the term "enshittification", which like, everybody's like quoting it now, and I'm like, "yep. Thank you Cory."

Naomi Kritzer: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: I like how science fiction stories can really start as a thought experiment, maybe of imagining possible worlds, and then specifically the stories where that ends up being like a net positive change, like a better world than what we're in right now. I really like that, and I think a lot of what you write about, whether in science fiction or fantasy, tends to kind of look out with maybe a positive lens.

Would you say that you try to do that intentionally or...?

Naomi Kritzer: It's more that I write about stuff that I want to imagine, and I like thinking about possibilities for at least somewhat brighter futures, more than I like thinking about possibilities for absolutely horrifying futures. And I also, I think that there's a place for the cautionary tale, right? But I also feel like there are a depressing number of people who will miss the point of the cautionary tale.

Everyone knows the joke about like, you know, "Now Brought to You by Meta: it's the Torment Nexus!" You know, like, as seen in the science fiction novel, "Please Don't Build the Torment Nexus." There's just so much about the cautionary tale that people miss the point of, and also there's a lot to be said for pointing out possibilities that look like something we could achieve.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Naomi Kritzer: But there's an older science fiction book by David Brin called The Postman, which is set in a world after a nuclear war. And I had read so many books set in a world post nuclear apocalypse. Like I said, the eighties were a weird time. Many of these were for middle grade, like the number of middle grade books about nuclear apocalypse is a little strange to think about in retrospect. But this was like the first one I'd ever picked up that showed any possibility for— I guess it wasn't the first because Canticle for Leibowitz is also like a post-apocalyptic world where things are bad for a while, but then there's a slow recovery, although then it ends in a second annihilation because of course it does. He (Walter M. Miller Jr) was not an optimist.

Kat Kourbeti: No.

Naomi Kritzer: But The Postman is a book in which like, there's a lot of horror, but also people are starting to pull together again and they pull together over something as simple as the ability to communicate over distance again, and recreating the postal service. And I loved that. That was like a really great idea, and it didn't make the idea of a nuclear war less horrifying. But I liked the fact that it thought about what are the essentials of civilization, and what are the things that we would most need to get back in order to rebuild? I really liked that.

So I think some of what I write comes out of of course the things I read and the things that I found most memorable and affecting. I read so many apocalypse books that just blended together, but even though I haven't picked up The Postman in 20 some years, I remember that a lot better.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. What speaks to someone is quite a personal thing and like an unconscious thing, but it will stick to you. Yeah, for sure. Now what I find fascinating about your journey is that it took quite a while to transition, if you will, from something short form to longer.

Naomi Kritzer: No, I have five books published in the early 2000s. Nobody remembers them anymore.

Kat Kourbeti: What?!

Naomi Kritzer: Yeah, no, I sold my first novel in 2001.

Kat Kourbeti: Oh, okay.

Naomi Kritzer: Yeah. So that was a fantasy novel, secondary world fantasy, historical flavored. That was published in 2002 and 2003 by Bantam, was split into two books: Fires of the Faithful and Turning the Storm. And then I sold a trilogy on proposal to Bantam, also historically flavored secondary world fantasy, Freedom's Gate, Freedom's Apprentice, and Freedom Sisters. And the trilogy did not sell well, and the last book came out as the economy was cratering.

Kat Kourbeti: Oh no.

Naomi Kritzer: So that left me without a publisher; Bantam did not wanna publish any more of my books. And I wrote, let's see, an urban fantasy that nobody wanted to publish. Just never sold. Two middle grade books, one science fiction and one fantasy, that have never sold.

And then at that point I was so discouraged about writing long form, that I couldn't make myself write the YA book that I wanted to write and instead wrote it as short stories. That was the Seastead stories, which have come out since then as a novel, Liberty's Daughters, came out in 2023. But those were published one at a time by F&SF.

I was also at that point in 2010 or so, I was so discouraged, I would write short stories still, but then I would send them out one time and then stick them in a drawer when they didn't sell the first time out. And I started selling again because my friend Lyda said, I will send them out for you and pretend I am your agent. Just give me the printouts and I will take care of this. Gimme the files and I'll take care of this.

And so she's the one who sold the Seastead stories to Gordon Van Gelder, as I had sent it to Asimov's, and Asimov's was like, this kind of reads a little more like chapter one of a novel.

Kat Kourbeti: That's 'cause it is.

Naomi Kritzer: 'Cause it was, yeah. And I was like, oh God, they're totally right. And that was why I stuck it in a drawer. So Lyda sent it to F&SF, and F&SF bought it and was like, "this reads like there might be more stories about this character. Please send those to me as well." Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: Interesting.

Naomi Kritzer: So essentially I sold them a serialized novel, which is a little bit old school, but yeah, no, I had a career as a novelist that then tanked and had to sort of, you know—

Kat Kourbeti: Be rebuilt.

Naomi Kritzer: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. Wow. What a— wow, publishing is a fickle mistress.

Naomi Kritzer: It really is. And this I'll say, my story is really common. There's so many people in science fiction and fantasy who have a career and then they stop selling and their publisher cuts them loose, and they have to come up with a way to reinvent themselves, either by switching genres or taking a pen name or both. And I feel like it's something we—we tend not to talk about much, and I think it's partly fear. And it's the kind of—I think if you're succeeding, if your career is going well, you wanna tell yourself that your peers who've just vanished, it's because they did something wrong, or they took a break voluntarily. Because you don't wanna acknowledge the extent to which it's luck, because if it's luck, your luck can change and it can happen to you. You wanna believe that you're immune.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Naomi Kritzer: No one's immune, no one. If you made a big enough splash with your first book, you might be immune, but most people do not.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. It is unfortunately a super common happening. It's happened to friends of mine, and I do think that we need to talk about this more, because it's common and people need to know about that, but also, as it is in your case and certainly in others as well, it is reversible. Like publishers who think, oh, I'm not gonna, I don't think this will sell, can be wrong. They're wrong all the time.

Naomi Kritzer: Nobody knows anything. This is the thing about publishing too, is that nobody knows anything. It is an industry that is based on superstition to a degree that's hilarious. Like, when my very first book came out, the number of people who looked at it and said, oh my God, they gave you a green cover? Because there was a superstition, for years, that green covers didn't sell. It is just like, that's so silly.

Kat Kourbeti: I have the urge to look at my bookshelves and see if I have, how many green books do I have? I feel like I have a bunch of green books.

Naomi Kritzer: Maybe it was genre specific.

Kat Kourbeti: Perhaps.

Naomi Kritzer: Like there was this belief, this absolute belief that was still lingering in the early 2000s and may have since gone away, I don't know, that customers just didn't like green books. They found them off putting for some utterly mysterious reason. And so green books didn't sell, so you couldn't do green covers.

Everyone knows that like, certain types of covers telegraph certain things about a book. Like you can look at a book with no text, like you could replace all the text with Lorem Ipsum or whatever, and you'd look at a book and you would know from the font, am I looking at romance? Am I looking at women's fiction? YA science fiction, space opera science fiction, literary sort of science fiction. You have a pretty good sense, just because everybody knows certain types of covers communicates certain things.

There's industries where they actually do marketing studies on what works and what doesn't. I don't believe publishing has ever done that, probably because they don't have the money. But nobody really knows what works, nobody really knows what matters. Certain books take off. Some of it's stuff that the publishers do and there's like, certain writers who've cracked the code and have a social media presence that works really well for them, which is why publishers are like, we want you to have a social media presence. We have no idea what to tell you beyond, "have a social media presence", but you totally need to have one.

I have a social media presence because I like talking to people on BlueSky. I honestly think is the best reason to have a social media presence is if you find it fun.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Naomi Kritzer: So, yeah, no, from a publisher's perspective, if you don't sell, it is easier for them to assume it's you than it is to like, take a second look at whether they gave you a cover that communicated the wrong thing.

I'll say my trilogy that I published back in the early 2000s, Freedom's Apprentice, I got the cover through the mail at the time. They would send them to you as like lovely printed flats. And I looked at that cover and I thought, did they give me one of Jacqueline Carey's covers by mistake? Because it looked like Kushiel's Dart type cover.

It's beautifully done, but it's a woman from behind and you see her back, her naked bare back, and she's like reaching up and doing something. What's interesting is it clearly depicts a scene in the book, but it's a scene that is happening in Central Asia in January, so she would've been wearing clothes because otherwise she'd be freezing. And also it's a scene that sort of implies sex, right? Because there's nudity and there's no sex in the book. And I emailed my editor and I was like, should I add a sex scene somewhere? And she's like, no, no, no, no. This is just a marketing thing.

I mean, Jacqueline Carey's books were selling really well, but I feel like if somebody picked up my book because they were expecting something like that, they would've been very disappointed with what they got because it was really different from Jacqueline Carey's work, like in every possible way, starting with the complete lack of sex in the book that I had written, and the reverse for hers.

That's probably not why this trilogy struggled to find its footing. There's a million and one reasons why books might struggle. I have friends whose books were amazing and nonetheless flopped.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Naomi Kritzer: I feel terrible for everyone whose book came out in like, early part of 2020. Jo Walton's Or What You Will came out in July of 2020, and I was talking to Jo recently and I realized I definitely read that book when it came out, and I have no memory of it at all.

Jo just shrugged and was like, "it was a really bad year to have a book come out, or to be trying to read anything."

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, I had friends who were debuting in 2020—

Naomi Kritzer: Oh God.

Kat Kourbeti: And they were like, my tour is canceled, and I guess we're doing a Zoom launch ...question mark?, and is anybody gonna turn up and will anybody even know that my book exists? Because everyone's just like watching the news, trying to figure out if the world will exist in a week. Like it was just...

Naomi Kritzer: Yeah, books actually sold pretty well in 2020.

Kat Kourbeti: Turns out we were reading a lot!

Naomi Kritzer: Well, like, people were buying books. I think, in a lot of cases the books were just piling up. They were collecting books more than reading. And then if you did read like, the books that I read, some of them I remember, but some of them I just—I reread Or What You Will, and I was like wow, I remembered one thing, and what I remembered was incorrect.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, no, there's definitely a gap for me, like 2020- 21, I don't remember most of what I read for sure.

Naomi Kritzer: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: In fact, for me personally, it was a struggle to just read a novel, like a full, long thing. I read a lot of short things.

Naomi Kritzer: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: In those years because it was just easier to finish something that wasn't too long. I don't know why I just couldn't do it, like for a couple years. And in fact, when I started reading novels again, I was like, oh my God, I can read books!

Naomi Kritzer: Yeah, no, that's very much how it was for me. I really, really struggled for several years to read anything.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Naomi Kritzer: And especially to read like a novel, because that was gonna require really sustained concentration. With nonfiction that was a little easier to read because if a chapter was boring, I could skip to the next one and miss out on some information, but it wasn't like missing part of a narrative.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. Yeah.

Naomi Kritzer: I really started reading again, I wanna say in 2022, maybe '23, and suddenly it was like a light came back on.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Naomi Kritzer: Great.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. It was definitely like that for me. And I figured out a hack for me, which was to try and pair what I was reading with appropriate music, where I would try and find like the right soundtrack for something, and in some cases it was just what I was listening to at the time, and in other cases I was like, "hmm, but I feel like this needs like a certain sound". And so I would go and I'd find the sound and I'd be like, "okay, great, now we put this album on repeat and we read this book".

And so that's how for me, there was a Tade Thompson book called Far from the Light of Heaven, and I picked it 'cause it was short. Sorry, Tade! It was just literally like, how long is this? Not very. Great, let's just give it a go. And at the time I was listening to this British band that I had discovered 'cause I went to a gig and they just happened to be on repeat for me while I was reading this book, and now that's my soundtrack to this book. Like, I listen to those songs now and I just remember a spaceship locked in orbit, and there's a murder mystery.

Naomi Kritzer: Oh!

Kat Kourbeti: But yeah, that was just something I did to trick myself into reading again, to make it feel more like a full experience than just reading the words. And that was what unlocked it for me, but it was a struggle to get there, to be honest. So I'm glad we're all back, but it was a time, it was certainly a time.

And so during this time you'd already written the Catnet books, and I feel like around that time, that's when you were doing kind of middle length type things, like novellas and stuff.

Naomi Kritzer: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: So what's your kind of relationship with each format, if you have one, in terms of writing them?

Naomi Kritzer: I really love writing short fiction. I've recently started writing novellas, in part because they're kind of an intermediate length, it lets me tell a longer story. A lot of the time, my ideas are sometimes short story shaped and sometimes they're novel shaped. Some of my stories, I can imagine a novel version of them, but I just told a little corner of what was going on in this future that I've imagined or this world that I've imagined. It's just a really tight focus. I worked on a couple of things that I didn't end up finishing in 2021-22.

2020, I was rewriting Chaos on Catnet as the pandemic was really spinning up. There's a story I tell in the afterword of the book: so I'd gotten my editorial letter in February of 2020; having turned it in a few months earlier, I got the letter back from my editor with "this is what I would like you to fix or change" or whatever. Super normal. And I read it and then set it aside to digest it and think it over. And then March arrived and we went from "this could happen" to, "this is definitely happening".

And I spent all day of every day like, staring at social media and thinking about how I was living in the timeline with an actual pandemic. Which is still honestly mind boggling to think about. And then April came around and I was like, this book is due in June. It is due like June 1st. And it was like, fairly substantial. It was the editorial letter, so it's not copy edits, it was substantial rewrites. I was like, I have got to do this. And so starting in like mid-April, I made myself sit down and work on it. It was extremely hard and extremely slow. Then in May, I was pretty close to the end, I could see the light at the end of the tunnel, and I was writing a section of the book that includes rioting in Minneapolis, right around Memorial Day, which as you may recall, is when police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd on camera. And suddenly I really couldn't think about my book for lots of reasons, one of which was that like, this is a book that was set in Minneapolis and suddenly the landscape of the book was being reshaped. And I sent an email to my editor and said, "I'm going to miss my deadline."

Kat Kourbeti: Straight up.

Naomi Kritzer: Straight up. There's just no way, I am not gonna make this. It was close, but not gonna happen now. She emailed me back and she was like, "don't worry, it's fine. Are you safe? Are you okay?" And I was like, "oh yeah, no, my neighborhood is fine. The nearest fires are like a mile from me." And she did not find this as reassuring.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. A mile is not that far.

Naomi Kritzer: But see, I had many friends who were like, one block from where fires were happening. I had friends who would cough from tear gas if they stepped outside their houses. Like, many of my friends were really in the heart of where the protests were happening very close by. One of my friends, her kids came and stayed at my house because she was really worried that if fire spread to their house that her kids would refuse to leave without getting the pets out. And she didn't wanna, she didn't wanna risk it. So they came and stayed with me for a couple of days and like, it was pandemic too, so it was like the first we'd had people in our house in a while.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Naomi Kritzer: It was also unnerving. And anyway, when things had quieted down, I was talking to Lyda, the friend who sent out my stories for me when I was depressed, and I was like, "I don't know what to do. There's places they visited in the book that are ashes." Literally in the book they went to Uncle Hugo's Science Fiction Bookstore, and that burned. And I was like what do I do? Lyda said, "Rebuild it. It's set in the future. Make the Minneapolis you wanna see."

Turned out to be really, really good advice. It did mean that like, the rebuilt Uncle Hugo's that they visit in the book, is not in fact where Don Blyly reopened. It also meant that I revisited how I wrote about policing in the book, and I thought about what the long-term results would be of what happened in 2020 for the Minneapolis that I wanted to believe was possible.

I know that it worked well for Minneapolis readers 'cause a lot of people have told me that it worked really well for them. But that was an extremely hard year in so many ways.

Kat Kourbeti: Wow.

I think from a perspective of like, not a Minneapolis person, obviously—to me, I don't have a way of knowing what the landscape looked before or after, but certainly in terms of the setting and the future that you wanna build, I think A, that works perfectly, and B, that is solid advice for anyone working on anything that's near future. 'Cause I think the trap of writing in near future is that you're racing the clock.

Naomi Kritzer: Yes. Very much so.

Kat Kourbeti: And so then, yeah, you run the risk of like the world actually changing before you can finish your story.

Naomi Kritzer: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: And then what do you do? And I think for a lot of people, certainly for me, I couldn't think of fiction during this time. I just couldn't. I was writing a book that for many reasons I'm not working on anymore, and I just could not think about fictional people at a time that like the world was in such a state.

Naomi Kritzer: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: Afterwards, I think one of the main questions that I was struggling with was, how do I picture a world that I was picturing before, but none of this had happened yet, and now these stories, that world doesn't exist, and how can I repicture that again?

And I think for a lot of people that meant, no, we're just gonna put this in the book and it's going to reflect whatever happened. And for other people it was very much a, how can I protect the setting that I had? It's just such a wild time to be living, because everything is happening really fast.

Naomi Kritzer: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: And things change any second and we're just aware of so much.

Naomi Kritzer: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: So for Catnet in particular, you imagined the Minneapolis that you wanted to see and the future that you wanted to see. Other works of yours don't necessarily have that central question I guess, with the near future, but how do you keep that in mind now, after having dealt with this for one of your books?

Naomi Kritzer: When you're writing near future, stuff can catch up with you and that's just, that's a problem. That is inherently a problem. And you can have stuff catch up with you in ways, both where it's this fabulous futuristic technology that's now in everyone's pocket, and you can have the situation where it's like, yeah, this thing that I thought was coming soon turns out to be like vaporware, you know, robot cars. I don't know, 10 years ago we were absolutely convinced we would have self-driving cars by now.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. Yeah.

Naomi Kritzer: We're not actually any—we do, but they're not common.

Kat Kourbeti: They don't work yet.

Naomi Kritzer: Not really very safe. They're not fully vaporware, but they're really not realized in the way that I was thinking they would be by now, a decade ago when I was thinking about this.

On the other hand, I reread recently, I'm not gonna name the book, but I reread a book recently that was written in the 1990s, the early 1990s. And it is set sometime in 30 ish years from now. And in the book, in this setting that's, still off in the future, cell phones don't exist. And there's stuff in the book that holds up really well, but the lack of cell phones and the ramifications, the ways in which people are still coping with communication in the way that they did in the early nineties, is very funny. It just, that is not a piece that held up well.

Like, cell phones even existed in the early nineties, they just were not very common yet. Not a lot of people had 'em. You tended to have one if you were like, rich or like a doctor. Also, their doctors and drug dealers had pagers. Also don't seem to exist in this future. And like a lack of pagers, we don't have 'em, right? Like it's been years since I've seen a pager. Maybe we do, somebody still uses them, but they're not common the way they were in the eighties and nineties. But cell phones are completely ubiquitous, and cell phones are also little pocket computers with all the information of the universe at your fingertips. But yeah, no, it's just a chronic problem.

I have a near future novella that I wrote, I expect to be able to make an announcement about soon, but it's near future, and it involves an obstetrician, who gets abducted by a cult that wants to have access to her skillset. And I was thinking about the fact that like, in the book there's references to the FBI. Are we even going to have an FBI by the time it comes out? Are we gonna have something else or are we gonna have nothing? The trajectory we're on as a country feels really dire, and it's really hard to know where we land.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Naomi Kritzer: I'll say one thing I find a little bit comforting, is this thing Ada Palmer talks about. Ada Palmer is a science fiction writer and also a historian at the University of Chicago, studies the Renaissance. And there's this letter that was either written by Machiavelli or to Machiavelli where somebody is like, "you need to tell them how terrible this time period was and how much ground we lost, so they'll understand why things are such a disaster". And this was written during the period of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci and a period that like, from here we look at and we're like, this is when things started to get better in all these different ways. And like, that was not how it felt to the people who are living through it.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Naomi Kritzer: And that gives me a little hope that maybe later we will look back and this will all feel like part of a shift for the better.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. A through line of some kind.

Naomi Kritzer: Yeah. It's hard to see now how that happens. It just feels so dire.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. Her new book, Inventing the Renaissance, very much has that question at the heart of it, which is, you know, we think of this period as a bright time, and it was not. And let me tell you about it for a thousand pages.

Naomi Kritzer: Yeah, no, I don't have a copy yet, but I do want to read it.

Kat Kourbeti: Her essays on her blog in advance of the launch were delightful, and I will link a couple of them in the show notes because they are hilarious. And also just—

Naomi Kritzer: She is so funny. She has a really dry sense of humor. Love hearing her talk about stuff like this.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. She's another one of those people who like, takes all of that knowledge she has amassed through her day job and she really puts it through its paces for the speculative fiction side of things.

We once had a conversation at Dublin Worldcon, I think, 'cause I had just read the first book of the Terra Ignota series, and it turns out that a couple of the characters in it are Greek, and they're supposed to be speaking Greek to each other, but they're using gender-neutral pronouns, which currently in Greek do not exist. And so I was like, "so what are you picturing there? 'cause I can't, I don't know what that sounds like in Greek in my head, 'cause it's not like a real thing". And she was like, "I'd like to imagine that, that far down the line, the language has evolved to include this". There are movements in Greece to kind of change that, but we are borrowing right now a lot from English in order to create like a queer vocabulary, like it doesn't quite exist natively.

But it was just, yeah, just very interesting to pick her brains about it. 'Cause I was like, "I don't know what I'm picturing right now when this dialogue's taking place".

But yeah, excited to hear about this novella that's a mystery, but soon to be not mystery, maybe. Hopefully. And yeah. Outside of that, which I suppose you can't really talk about right now, is there something else that's recent or upcoming that you would like to plug or promote?

Naomi Kritzer: No.

Kat Kourbeti: You've got the Seastead book, though!

Naomi Kritzer: Yeah, the Seastead book came out in 2023, and people can order that. And I had a story published in Asimov's last year, which is up for Hugo in best Novelette.

Kat Kourbeti: Hey.

Naomi Kritzer: Which is pretty exciting. And since it's up for various things, Asimov's has put it online and people can just go read it, it is called The Four Sisters Overlooking the Sea. Yeah, that's it.

Kat Kourbeti: Great. Yeah, that's all right. Plus the mysterious upcoming story.

Naomi Kritzer: Yes. Actually there's two novellas that I wrote in the last couple of years. There's also one that is about two teenage girls whose mother is a psychic reader at a Renaissance festival. And that is fantasy, and I should have something to announce about that too.

Kat Kourbeti: Awesome. We'll look forward to those, and we'll find you on Bluesky, @naomikritzer.bsky.social, I think?

Naomi Kritzer: Yep.

Kat Kourbeti: And yeah, thank you so much for chatting to us today, about your career and your writing, and we look forward to reading more from you soon.

Naomi Kritzer: Thank you. I'm so glad you invited me on.