Interview with Nebula-nominated SF writer P. H. Lee

P. H. Lee is a Nebula-nominated speculative fiction writer. You can find their website with a list of their stories here.

So, what have you been reading lately?

P H Lee: I just finished a novel/set of interconnected short stories called Bluegrass Dreams Aren’t For Free by Gerri Lean. About twenty years before the story takes place, some genetic engineers accidentally uplifted racehorses in an attempt to try to deal with some of their long-term genetic problems. So the novel looks at what the society of horse racing looks like from the perspective of racehorses who are sentient and run their own careers.

I should really send that recommendation to my girlfriend, who is a horse girl.

It is such a horse girl book. I am not a horse girl, I’ve never been a horse girl, but I have many friends who are horse girls, and I just love the purity of its horse girlness.

You’re not a horse girl, but you believe in their beliefs.

I’m not a horse girl, but I respect them.

Bluegrass Dreams Aren’t For Free is published by a furry press, and that makes sense, but in some ways they’re the least anthropomorphic talking horses that I’ve ever seen. It is very, very interested in the embodied experience of being a horse. I found very interesting from a book published by a furry press.

A lot of attention is paid to the horses’ relationships with their pet cats, who aren’t uplifted, they’re just cats. I feel like, if you didn’t spend a lot of time hanging out in a horse barn, you wouldn’t be like, “oh, of course the horses would have pet cats.”

It’s sort of like xenofiction in the same way as Watership Down.

It sort of has the vibes of Watership Down, but it’s more science fictional. Watership Down is fantasy if rabbits wrote fantasy novels.

One of the things I thought was really interesting in Bluegrass Dreams Aren’t For Free is that it’s about the process of the dissolving of a chattel slavery system. Racehorses today are, you know, they’re commodities. They’re very expensive commodities. In Bluegrass Dreams Aren’t For Free, the racehorses are sentient, and they’re in the process of being liberated, but aren’t fully yet.

At the beginning of the book, there are no horse-owned horse racing barns. The horses are born in enormous amount of debt, because they have to pay their own stud fees.

Oh my god!

The novel’s matter-of-fact about it. None of the characters are super politically motivated. There’s one character who ends up being the first horse to run a horse racing barn, but he’s not interested in fixing the system for everyone. He’s just rich and is like “I would be good at doing this.”

The dissolution of chattel slavery is a very under-the-surface theme. And because it’s an under-the-surface theme, it could be more incisive than if it was the top-level theme. If it it was the top-level theme, then the novel would have to be about the revolution, and it’s not. Bluegrass Dreams Aren’t For Free is mostly just interested in horse romance drama and who wins the race. Almost all of the stories are race stories.

If this is a story about the ending of horse chattel slavery, then you have to have, you know, the YA dystopia protagonist who’s overthrowing the system, but if it is about winning races and also horse chattel slavery is sort of ending in the background, then you can more easily explore different horses’ sense of agency and their relationship to the overall system.

There are some horses that benefit enormously from this system, and so are not terribly interested in changing it.

So, another question I had is, what book that most people, maybe reading my blog or in general, haven’t heard of, do you think people should read?

People who are reading your blog have heard of Steerswoman, but if they haven’t heard of Steerswoman, they should read Steerswoman. That was a freebie. Let me do another one.

Well, you should probably tell people why they should read Steerswoman.

The problem with telling people why they should read Steerswoman is that literally any discussion of the book at all is a spoiler.

Steerswoman is in a fantasy setting, a very frontier-ish society, with these very isolated farming settlements. The protagonist is part of a group of mostly women—not entirely women—called the Steerswomen, who kind of maintain maps, and tcarry news, and help ships on the ocean with navigation. The rule that they’re bound by is that they will always tell the truth. If you ask them a question, they have to answer it truthfully. But you also have to answer their questions truthfully. If you refuse, they put you under a ban, which means that none of them will speak to you again, which is functionally a death sentence in the society.

The Steerswomen are very interested in gathering knowledge, and collating it, and learning more about the world through this process. They haven’t reached the point where they have the scientific method yet, but they’re a proto-scientific society.

And then also in the society are wizards who do magic. No one understands how the magic works, and they and the people that work for them refuse to ever speak to the Steerswomen because they don’t want the secrets of their magic to be revealed.

It’s a series of four books. It’s not finished yet. It’s supposed to end up being 6 or 7 books. And the whole series is about a fight between the Steerswomen and the wizards. The wizards have all the knowledge and all the power, and the Steerswomen have empiricism. So it’s a fairly close run between the two of them.

But, as I said, a lot of your audience has already heard of those books, so I’m gonna do another one. Here’s a book that probably none of your audience has heard of that I think that they would be very interested in. A book called Biting the Sun by Tanith Lee.

Oh, I should read more Tanith Lee.

It’s so good. It’s the best thing she wrote by a fairly wide margin, and I like a lot of Tanith Lee.

Biting the Sun is a weird book, because it was published in the 70s, I think. So it’s a Singularity story before the Singularity stories existed. It’s about a young woman in a society that is super technologically advanced and is run by AIs, putatively for the benefit of humans. And she’s just incredibly full of malaise, and also kind of an asshole.

So she keeps trying to break things, but the society is built so it’s hard for angry young people to break things, and so she doesn’t seem to be breaking things. She keeps switching genders. She switches bodies too much, and they put her on a six-month body switch cooldown, but if she kills herself, she can get a new body. So she keeps killing herself. Eventually, the AI overlords start putting her in more and more plain bodies every time she kills herself. And the protagonist is just like, “this is a violation of my civil rights, I should be able to determine what my body looks like.”

The protagonist is such a little shit, and you love her so much by the end of the book. Not because, “oh, she’s learned and grown as a person,” it’s just like, “I’m on board with you now.”

I think a group of people who are very concerned about the AI future would get an interesting perspective from reading Biting the Sun.

A lot of people are like, “oh, you can’t write a story set in utopia because everything is perfect.” And I’m like, “You can! You can, you know, write a romance, or a sports story, or a story about somebody trying to write the great post-Singularity novel, or a story about a little shit who’s being a little shit for the entire book.”

All you need is—I mean, you don’t even need this, necessarily, there are books that don’t have this—but one of my writing teachers, Jeanne Cavelos, always says, “what you want is a story with a character who’s struggling to achieve a goal.” A lot of people who read nerd books are used to the goal being dramatic change to the setting, but it doesn’t have to be. Like, it doesn’t have to be a revolution, it doesn’t have to be a cosmic mystery. It can just be “I really want to learn how to make pancakes better.” If you just put enough obstacles between that person and pancakes, that will be an interesting thing to read.

In the case of Biting the Sun, the ideals of the society are that everyone gets everything they want. So the protagonist being dissatisfied is an existential threat to the society. Like, they’re terrified of the degree to which she is bored and angry. So it’s both the pettiest possible stakes and this actually setting-shaking conflict.

In a novel I wrote that is not published but that I’m currently revising, I wanted to do a vaguely post-scarcity-ish society. And so I was just like, okay, I don’t want any of the conflicts to hinge on resource scarcity. And it turns out there’s a ton of things that can be conflict that don’t have anything to do with resource scarcity, right?

For one, social connections are something that is always scarce, right? Like, there are always people who have more or less social connections. Membership in an organization, who gets to be in and out of a group.

There’s also prejudice that is unrelated to resources. The protagonists are disabled in a way that makes their society very uncomfortable. The society keeps trying to sort of slot them into this position of, “well, you just receive care and you can’t actually do anything,” and they don’t want that, and that is a source of massive conflic. That isn’t actually a conflict over resources. If anything, the abundance of resources is a problem in that conflict rather than a solution to it.

You can turn almost anything into a book, really.

I’ve seen writing advice that, once you’ve made your society, you should think about who is the unhappiest person in the society.

Yes! That’s also a great thing for worldbuilding, because it turns out that, if you have a very different society from our society, a person who’s very unhappy about their society is great, because they talk about it all the time. They’ll say, “everyone says that XYZ, but actually, ABC.” And then you’ve learned a bunch of things about the society in a very short sentence.

In Biting the Sun, who is unhappiest in a society where everyone gets everything they want? The little shit who refuses to ever be satisfied with anything.

In Biting the Sun, they swap bodies all the time, and they swap genders—although, hilariously, and this is because of when it was published, they coincidentally are always in heterosexual romantic relationships.

There manages to be a character who has severe body dysmorphia, even in a setting where you can change your body at will. And I just think that that’s a fascinating thing to have put in there.

He keeps making escalatingly gross and deformed bodies. But he’s never happy with the amount of gross that they are. Partially, this is because everyone treats him badly. They’re like, “why would you choose to look like that?” And he’s like, “I’m trying to make a statement here, I’m trying to express something about myself.” And no one gets it.

So, transitioning to talking about your stories, the story you wrote which has come out most recently is Timelike Curves, Spacelike Curves, which I really recommend everybody read. It explores a lot of themes about sexuality. It’s pretty sexually explicit. So do you have thoughts on the use of sexuality in fiction?

I am, in theory, very in favor. Although Timelike Curves, Spacelike Curves is actually the first story that I ever wrote with explicit sex in it.

That comes from being at a workshop. Early in the workshop, one of my classmates, Subraj Singh—who was was a finalist for the Commonwealth Prize for Fiction, by the way, I’m just gonna brag about him, because I like him, and I like his writing—he wrote this really, really good story that was two-thirds made up of one sex scene.

It was very inspiring, and a bunch of us swore that we were also going to write stories with sex scenes in them. We admired what he’d done.

I kept putting it off, and it got to be the last week, and I realized that this was my last chance to submit a story with a sex scene in it. So I went down to this bar where they had $5 Moscow Mules, and got drunk enough that I was no longer embarrassed to write sex scenes.

And Timelike Curves, Spacelike Curves has, like, eight sex scenes in it, so…

That’s a lot.

My feeling is that I’m too embarrassed to write them normally, but I generally approve, and I think they’re very good. I also think that there’s just some weird things going on with sex and fiction right now.

The science fiction of the 70s and 80s, which I read a ton of as a teenager, usually had at least one sex scene in a novel. And, basically, the internet seems to have killed that. I think that the widespread availability of pornography has sort of taken sex out of fiction that isn’t explicitly pornographic. Because, like, why bother, right? If you want that, you can just go on to AO3 and read 800 sex scenes about those characters.

I think that that’s sad. I both support the existence of pornographic writing, and think that there are reasons to write about explicit sex scenes that are not pornographic, that are not primarily for the purpose of someone masturbating to them.

Sex is just part of life, and it can be part of character development. And there are things that you can depict in non-pornographic depictions of sex that you can’t depict in pornographic descriptions of sex. You can depict unsatisfying sex, right? I mean, of course, there are fetishes for which unsatisfying sex is pornographic, but normally sex in pornographic fiction is satisfying.

I support both, but I also feel like I wish non-pornographic fiction had more sex in it than it currently has.

I feel like there’s often a sort of cringing back from it, because you’re worried it’s too revealing, or that people are going to laugh at you, or you have that horrible Bad Sex Award—

Oh, God.

That keeps making fun of unsexy sex scenes, and half the time you’re like, “okay, but I think that’s supposed to be unsexy.”

No, I genuinely think that the sort of point-and-laugh culture of the internet, did a terrible number on fiction. A lot of writers look at r/MenWritingWomen, and the Bad Sex Awards, and so on and so forth, and are like, “oh, well, the way to be a good writer is to not do that.”

But I think that you can’t ever get to good writing by not doing that. The path of not doing things is the path to being mediocre.

From the reader perspective, you’re like, well, why don’t you just not do the thing that really annoys me? But from the writer perspective, every time that you shut a door on something, it’s another thing that is in the back of your head telling you your writing is terrible when you’re trying to actually get the words down.

It seems like we’re growing out of that as a culture. I’ve seen more and more, in mainstream spaces where people are discussing writing in fiction, that people are rolling their eyes at that and being like, “Yeah, whatever, who cares?”

I was on r/MenWritingWomen once. Some people were like, “but Ozy is trans,” and other people were like, “trans men are men.”

Well, you know, kudos to them for being inclusive.

I completely understand that sort of point-and-laugh culture. And, like, whatever, critic culture is what it is, it’s not their job to make it easier to be a writer. But if you are a writer, you need to find some way to have that not be in the forefront of your mind while you’re working.

Kill the cringe compilation in your head.

Legitimately, I think romantasy has actually done a very good job of reopening the doors to just being cringe, because a lot of the people who are in those spaces are now also reading romantasy, and are now going, “oh, actually, it’s fun to be cringe.” It’s fun to read this story where the romantic interest is a horribly objectified alien prince who instantly bonds for life upon seeing the mostly average female protagonist.

It’s like, yeah, yeah, that is fun, actually.

That one where she’s isekai’d to the other world, and then there were the crows that steal plastic, and of course, all her clothes had plastic in it, so they stole all of her clothes, and she was naked.

Yes! The crow lady. A bunch of people were making fun of her on Tumblr, and then she responded, “yep, it’s really cringe, I love it.” I was so happy for her. Yeah. Boom.

In that book, the protagonist is Australian, and there’s a hilarious mix-up where she calls someone mate, and they think that that means that they’re life bonded partners, and in fact, she was just Australian.

Oh my god!

I’m glad she’s getting to do that.

The next question was in my notes as “how do you feel about being the mpreg writer?”

I am not yet the mpreg writer. I only have one published mpreg story so far. It will happen at some point, because I have a lot more coming.

We’ll see what happens when it happens. If it kills my career, that would be the funniest possible way for my career to die.

In general, I think a lot of your stories explore these sort of themes of gender and embodiment and often sexism, but specifically sexism related to the body.

God. This is one of these things where, like, I can write stories with themes, but it’s very hard for me to make a coherent statement that is not just the story.

I find it really interesting from a trans perspective. One of the things that I think is very interesting about being non-binary and existing in trans-ish social spaces is that we can examine these things. Of course, science fiction and fantasy has always been full of “let me examine a current political issue by what-if-ing it in an incredibly weird way.”

So, what portion of misogyny is because women are the ones who get pregnant? Is it all of it? Is all of the patriarchal system the oppression of the ones who get pregnant? Are there other things? What does the world look like if men can get pregnant? There are a bunch of pithy one-liners that are about “if men can get pregnant, then XYZ”, but actually, if men can get pregnant, what is that society like? How does society treat pregnant men?

Simultaneously, this is a what-if question, and it’s also very real. There are, in fact, trans men who get pregnant. They get treated by society in a different way than women who are pregnant, and also in very similar ways.

I grew up in an extremely feminist environment, and so I grew up with all of this stuff. This is very second nature to me. The excuse to kick the tires is very good. I like asking myself, “why do I believe this thing? Do I believe this thing because I was brought up with it? What would the world be like if this other thing was true?”

A lot of that ends up being around gender and sexuality, for being-nonbinary-and-transfeminine reasons, and for feminism reasons, and because I live in a society that will not shut up about gender and sex. We care about it so much. It’s insane.

I’m not helping.

I remember this conversation, like, fifteen years ago, so it’s worse now. I had this conversation with this woman, and she was genuinely like, “men can’t have impulse control around sexuality because testosterone makes it impossible.” And I was like, “okay, I have very high testosterone levels, and yes, it is something you have to learn. It is something that I had to learn very painfully as a teenager. But you can learn it. It’s not that hard. You have to learn.” And she was like, “no, that must be because you have low testosterone.”

And I was like, “I don’t… What? Okay, but, like, I have all of the signifiers of high testosterone.” And she was like, “well, you must have some other hormone that is mimicking the effects but isn’t testosterone.” And I was like, “What is going on?”

People on the Internet just have insane takes on each other’s lives all the time.

So if I’m constantly going to be in that place, then it behooves me to write about it and think about it.

There’s another thing that comes across more in the fantasy. This isn’t so much in Timelike Curves, Spacelike Curves, but in the fairy tale stories.

One of the things that fairy tales do is that they’re instructions for surviving the societies that the were told in. Beauty and the Beast is kind of like, “if you are going to survive an abusive marriage, here’s what it looks like.” I think that gets misinterpreted by modern audiences as being pro-abuse. Or that it’s claiming that it would be 100% successful, which of course it would not be.

Sometimes you can survive an abusive marriage. If you are in a society that doesn’t allow divorce, if you’re in a society where if you’re a married woman you’re the property of your husband, then you have to convince him not to be a monster. That is not a fair or just position to be in, but, you know, fairy tales don’t have to be concerned with that.

So when I write fantasy, often I’m very interested in sort of exploring how women operated in these systems. My fairy tales are very, very interested in women and women’s lives, because I think the originals also are. How can your family bail you out of an abusive marriage? How can your marriage bail you out of an abusive family? These sorts of tradeoffs are very interesting to me.

I feel like, culturally, we’re losing touch with the idea that this is how people lived. We look at the past and these old stories and—I mean, it’s completely reasonable to interpret them in the modern context, but then we’re like, “oh, this story is bad because XYZ.” Well, why was it useful? Why did people tell it?

They didn’t tell it because it was bad. They weren’t dumb.

I think fiction is a really great way of expressing how other people live, and I’m very interested in exploring that with my fiction.

There’s an empathy thing with fiction, right? Like, you can read a book about the legal position of women in 1700 in England, and what the court records say about how they got treated, and what the diaries say. But it’s very different to be in that person’s head trying to live through it.

Maybe it gets overstated—people really love talking about how fiction is a tool for generating empathy—but I really think fiction is a great way of putting people in someone else’s shoes.

It’s good, because it’s fairly hard to do that without guidelines. It’s fairly hard to just do that on your own without someone prompting you to do it.

Often there’s a lot of things that you wouldn’t necessarily think of unless somebody else is guiding you. I notice that when I read biographies—I really like biographies—or ethnographes. At first I’m like, “what is going on with these people? They make no sense.” And then I get to the end and I’m like, “oh, okay. I get it now. That’s why you are making all of these terrible life choices.”

Yeah.

On a different note, your story The V*mpire was nominated for a Nebula Award and lost to Why Don’t We Just Kill The Kid In The Omelas Hole which is, you know, a very honorable sort of loss. A lot of the people I’ve talked to— I really like the story, a bunch of people I know like the story—were on Tumblr in 2014, and said, “yes, this is exactly what it was like to be on Tumblr in 2014, but with vampires.” So I was wondering about what techniques you used within the story to create that sense that this is exactly what it was like, except with vampires.

Two things, one of which is that I was there. Some of the Tumblr scenes in that story, the scenes that are just Tumblr posts, are me taking a memory of some really terrible discourse from Tumblr, and inserting vampires.

That’s what I wrote first. It took me a really long time to write that story. When I started thinking about it and writing it, it was pretty contemporary. I think I started around 2016. It was historical by the time I finished it.

The Tumblr stuff all came first. And then I was like, “oh, I can’t figure out how to make it so there’s actually a plot here.” I had to put it down and come back to it.

The other answer is I had an expert reader who was also on Tumblr at the time, and is very autistic, and, followed Tumblr discourse incredibly closely. They were very useful for, like, “this form of disingenuous argument didn’t take off until spring of 2014, which is just before Captain America: The Winter Soldier came out.” I actually ended up reordering a bunch of the things in the story so that it would afit with the correct timeline.

Obviously, no one who is not incredibly obsessive about terrible Tumblr discourse will notice this, but I feel like it did lend confidence and authenticity to the story, that I could just be like, “I know that this form of discourse is coming in in a wave at the same time that Marvel fandom is doing this thing.”

One of the things I was really sad about, though it was the right choice for the story, was that it’s limited to Marvel fandom, a little bit of Twilight, because I didn’t want to explain what Homestuck was to a bunch of readers. I wrote a bunch of stuff about what the vampire discourse looks like in the Homestuck fandom that I did not include in the story.

Put up an omake!

No, no, I think the story needs to stand as it is.

There’s maybe a prequel story, but it is very different, and probably doesn’t have space for me to include that.

When I see people talk about your stories, I often see you referred to as being a horror writer, and a lot of your stories are kind of fucked up. Do you have thoughts about being someone who writes horror?

It’s very odd to me, because I never know when I write a story what genre it’s in. I’m very surprised because I don’t really read horror. I’m enough of a weenie that I can’t watch horror movies. They’re just too scary for me. I don’t like it.

I think there’s a degree to which science fiction, or fantasy that takes itself seriously in specific ways kind of becomes horror. Lev Grossman is basically pushing this line with The Magicians, right? There’s a secret world of magic that’s fun and full of adventure, just underneath our world, and then you’re like, “actually, that’s terrifying! Extremely bad. Oh my god, I’m so glad I don’t live in that world.”

It’s just a question of where the camera is pointing.

Every horror story has a fantasy story that is on the other side of it. And every fantasy story is a horror story that’s on the other side of it.

The same is true about science fiction and horror, and science fiction and fantasy as well.

One of the first stories I published is a vampire story that’s set during the Industrial Revolution in the Hungarian Empire. I submitted it to a horror magazine, because I was like, “it has a vampire in it, it’s horror.”

And the editor was like, “I like this story, but do you mind if I publish it in my science fiction magazine instead? Because I don’t think this is horror, I think this is science fiction. There’s a vampire in it, sure, but I think the speculative element is the telegraph. It’s about how these new, exciting technologies banish the terrible darkness and awfulness of the previous era. I really feel like this is a Golden Age science fiction story, it just happens that it’s set in the 1870s, and so the technology is 1870s technology.”

I was like “okay, sure, I don’t care.” Like, that’s fine. I thought I wrote a horror story, it turned out I’d written a science fiction story. A lot of times, I think I’m writing a fantasy story, it turns out I’m writing a horror story. I didn’t know if The V*mpire was comedy or horror until I wrote it, and people reacted in a horrified manner. There are lots of jokes in it, but overwhelmingly, the reaction was “oh my god, this is so scary.” So, okay, I guess it’s scary.

Jordan Peele, who was a very famous comedian, and now he’s a very famous horror director, says that comedy and horror are basically the same thing. Like, structurally.

Yeah, there’s definitely that element to it.

Get Out, which is a movie I absolutely adore and you shouldn’t watch because it’s very scary, does this thing where it starts out as cringe comedy, and then slowly escalates into pure horror, and it’s extremely well done.

I’m a big fan of Jordan Peele’s comedy stuff. I haven’t watched his movies, because I can’t watch horror movies, because they’re scary.

But, like, the Jazzercise sketch. Jordan and his partner Key are doing Jazzercise for, like, an 80s exercise video, and over the course of the thing, where they’re just doing this wordless motion, it becomes apparent that one of them murdered the other one’s wife that night. It’s amazing. Like, this is so funny, because it’s such a stupid situation, but it’s also terrifying! The gradual realization that your wife is dead, and she was murdered by your coworker. That’s a horror story, like, that’s absolutely terrifying.

It’s just very both-and, which I think is great.

I guess maybe it’s about how distant you are. It’s comedy if you’re a little distant from the characters, and it’s horror if you’re right up there inside the character’s head.

Yeah, and it’s also just how it’s depicted, right? Like, if a piano falls on somebody and they walk away with an accordion fold in them, it’s comedy. If a piano falls on someone, and their neck breaks, and you see realistic chunks of brain and skull flying out, then that’s horrifying.

Unless they’re really funny chunks of brain, because there are definitely gross-out comedies that do that.

Yeah, when you can go that far, right? There are very subtle distinctions between those things.

I really like Douglas Adams. Douglas Adams’s stuff is, of course, all very, very comedic. It’s also incredibly critical, and it takes its own stupidity extremely seriously. And sometimes that’s just brilliant.

There’s a bit in Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul, where there’s the sort of rest home for supernatural beings, and there’s a girl who’s in a coma and is constantly reciting stock ticker prices from exactly 24 hours ago. And the people who run the rest home are like, “obviously she’s faking it.” If she was reciting it from 24 hours in the future, then it would be magic. But for 24 hours in the past, this is an elaborate hoax. That’s so unpleasant!

Like, it’s a really brutal skewering of rationality as an ideology. Which Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul does a lot of. But that particular one is just like, oof.

My policy with genre in general is that I just submit everywhere, and whatever place buys it, it is whatever genre they buy. If Clarkesworld buys a story, it’s science fiction. If Uncanny buys a story, it’s fantasy.

When I was very young, I knew a woman, who was a mother of a friend of mine and who was a gallery artist, and a fairly successful one. She was very strongly of the opinion that creative people should never decide what genre they’re in. That’s the job of the critics and the audience. The creative people can just make whatever they want to make, and not care about how it’s labeled.

I admire that. I have not been able to reach the total stoic disengagement that she recommends, but I do my best.

So a lot of your stories are told in second person, which is one of those voices where they say in the How to Write books, “you can theoretically write things in second person, but you shouldn’t do it unless you’re doing a choose-your-own-adventure book.” Why do you use second person so much, and what is it doing in your writing?

There’s two answers to this question, one of which makes me sound like a fancy artist, and the other of which makes me sound like a lazy asshole.

I guess we need to talk more generally first. That advice is about twenty years out of date. Stories that are in the second person have been reliably getting published for the last twenty years. I don’t think it is in any way a drawback at this point, except that some old, very fussy people will get old and fussy at you about it, and if they like the story, they won’t, so whatever.

“Don’t use second person” keeps getting repeated in writing advice books, just because writing advice books are very conservative. Writing advice books are often things people write at the end of their careers, and then it takes time for them to publish, and so on and so forth. So they just run a little behind the times.

The “lazy asshole” answer is that I spent ten years writing tabletop role-playing game manuals, and second person is the very natural voice in English for instructions. A tabletop role-playing game manual is a set of instructions. You know, recipes are written in the second person, usually.

So, I was just very used to writing in second person. When I shifted over to writing fiction, it was very easy for me to just keep doing that, and not have to teach myself a new voice. So I did.

The artsy answer is that I don’t like immersion as an aesthetic goal. I want people to think about what the story means to them. When I write in the second person, people are more likely to engage with the story as if it mattered to them, rather than as if it’s something that’s talking to someone else and that might be amusing or not.

I guess that sort of goes back to the empathy thing, right? The V*mpire is written in the second person. For a lot of trans stuff, second person is a very natural voice, because you don’t have to have a gendered pronoun in English. But it’s also like, “okay, you’re not a teenage trans girl on Tumblr in 2014. Like, no one reading that story is a teenage trans girl on Tumblr in 2014. They might have been one ten years ago. But what if you were?”

And also people in workshops kept telling me not to do it, so I kept doubling down on it.

Because of the writing book thing, people in writing groups will often be like, “oh, second person, it pulls me out of the story.” And I’m just, “I don’t care. I don’t want you in the story. Get out of my story.”

Not to completely deflate all your artistic pretensions, but what you’re saying reminds me of xreader fanfic.

Yeah, it super is.

Tabletop role-playing games are in conversation with xreader fanfic. Science fiction and fantasy has a fanzine heritage, which involved a ton of xreader fic, and I think we are absolutely in continuity with that, too.

There’s a story which I’m trying to get myself to write. It’s a little scary to write, and I I haven’t decided if I can write it or not, blah blah blah. But that one is explicitly going to be xreader. Not only is it a second-person story, but also, whenever the protagonist name comes up, it will just be “[reader]”.

For people who aren’t familiar with xreader fic, that’s an xreader thing so you can search-and-replace “reader” for your name.

That should be fun, if I actually manage to psych myself into writing it.

Your second-person stories are very specific, and often very specific about things that are just not true of the audience, like the teenage trans girls in 2014. A lot of xreader fics are very, very vague about the you who is being kidnapped by One Direction or whatever.

Right, right. To me, this also comes out of role-playing games. I don’t like that tendency of xreader. I like the specificity, because… what if you’re someone else? I don’t know. When you’re at karaoke and you’re singing a song, you take on the identity of the protagonist of that song for the purposes of singing that song.

Or when you’re reading one of those long LARP character sheets, and they’re like, “you are a grizzled veteran of the Orcs’ War and you have a magic prosthetic arm” and you’re like, “Cool!”

Yeah. I feel like we should be a little more flexible with our identity, generally.

There’s a novel I wrote a while ago—I don’t know if it will ever be published—which is a second-person story, in which the “you” is very intentionally framed as you, the person reading this book right now. And one character is trying to microaggress the protagonist by misgendering them, which is actually quite hard when you don’t know the reader’s gender. So I had to invent new ways to do gender-based microaggressions for this science fictional society so that I could have them happening.

Breaking new ground in books being hostile to their readers. The book is misgendering you.

There’s a great video game—video games have so much more flexibility around this, I’m so envious of it—called Loved, by Alexander Ocasias. It was from the era of, like, weird arty little flash games. I don’t know if you remember that era of video games. I think it’s still online. You might have to, like, download an illicit copy of Flash in order to play it, but it is available.

It starts by misgendering you. It asks, “are you a woman or a man?” If you click woman, it says, “no, you are a boy.” And if you click man, it says, “no, you are a girl.”

I have decided to have a tradition in these interviews. You get to be the inaugural instance of the tradition. I’ll close by asking you to make your recommendation, and it can be about anything. It can be a book, or music, or food, or activity, or general piece of life advice.

I’m just gonna recommend more books.

I feel like there’s this whole class of writers in science fiction and fantasy who were women, who were very successful in the 80s or early 90s and were winning awards, but they basically vanished from the discourse. Like, the discourse is all Silver Age, New Wave, you know, Ursula Le Guin. Ursula Le Guin is great! I love Ursula Le Guin.

The writer I’ve been telling a lot of people to read is Eleanor Arnason, who is an absolutely fantastic writer, and writes really, really interesting things about space anthropology that maybe are a little bit more critical of anthropology,

My favorite book of hers is called A Woman of the Iron People, which is about space anthropologists from Earth, studying this just barely Iron Age society of these sort of big furry aliens which are inherently gender-segregated. Like, the men, after a certain point can’t stand to be around any other members of the species, except women who are in heat. So the way that the society is organized is that there’s women and children living in villages, and then there’s sort of this halo of men around it, who are all living solitary lives and fight each other sometimes. Then the women go into heat, they walk out of the village until they find a man to mate with, and then they go back.

So obviously there’s a lot to do with gender. The alien protagonist is a woman who becomes emotionally attached to a man, which is extremely taboo. Like, in addition to being biologically not the normal way they operate, is also extremely taboo. A lot of the book is about how the people who don’t fit in the system function. Anyway, that book is really good, I really like it.

Maybe the better book of hers to start with is Ring of Swords. That’s her most successful book. It’s about an alien species—also a gender-segregated alien species— which is super technologically advanced, and is trying to determine if humans are sentient. If we’re sentient, then they can fight a war with us, and they would very much like to have someone to fight a war with. But if we’re not sentient, then we’re a pest species, and we have to be exterminated.

So, from the viewpoint of the humans, this woman who is an expert on extraterrestrial intelligence gets picked to be the person to go convince the aliens that humans are sentient so they don’t exterminate us.

She’s extremely weird. She kind of reminds me of some of the weirder edges of Roger Zelazny’s stuff. She’s interested in anthropology, so you would think of Ursula Le Guin, and also in gender and gender segregation, so there’s, like, a whole universe of feminist science fiction that she’s a part of, and also sometimes has some pretty interesting opinions about.

I appreciate this recommendation, because people keep telling me to read A Fire Upon the Deep, and I read it, and I was like, “I only care about the dog aliens.” This sounds like a recommendation for somebody who only cares about the dog aliens.

She is very interested in giant furry aliens who are sex-segregated.

There’s a great recurring bit in her books where aliens read Marx, and they’re like, “this is the best thing ever, we love Marx, we’re all Marxists now,” and humans are like, “there’s some problems with that, actually.”

I totally thought you were going to recommend a recipe.

Oh, gosh, that’s true. I don’t know, I don’t… I always feel like, when I recommend recipes, I should recommend something that’s easy. But the recipes I like are extremely fussy, because I’m a hobbyist, and so I want to make it weird.

You should learn how to make your own tomato sauce. It’s very easy, it’s much better than the jarred tomato sauce, and it’s like a quarter the price. So, if you are living at home and eating spaghetti sauce out of a jar, if you learn to make your own spaghetti sauce, you will save an enormous amount of money, and your daily food will taste better.

[P. H. Lee later sent me this recipe for tomato sauce.]