An expert on online privacy and fanfiction communities responds to Julian K. Jarboe’s “The Only Innocent Man.”
This past summer, the Slate Future Tense editor sent me a short story and asked if I’d be willing to write a response essay. She thought of me, she said, “because fanfiction and also privacy.”
The short story is called “The Only Innocent Man” by Julian K. Jarboe - go read it! But in short, it’s about a man who published queer stories online, and then realizes years later that they’ve connected back to him.
When I first read this story, a memory immediately came to mind for me:
“Dr. Fiesler, I found your fanfiction!”
Anyway, this essay is about all the reasons we share things online, and the potential danger to our privacy this poses even decades later. But also how conversations about the latter tend to leave out the nuances of the former—especially how sharing things like stories online might not only help us, but also help other people.
[This was actually published in August, but I was just updating my CV and realized that people here would probably appreciate this. :) ]
Migrants must grapple with a sense of feeling bonded to a place and not being able to fully escape its shadow after leaving.
Excerpt from this review of the short story, “What the Dead Man Said” by Chinelo Onwualu, from Slate. If you want to read the story, here’s the link.
Immigrants know what is like to deal with restless ghosts from the past. Some of us are haunted for the rest of our lives by the inability to have closure. But when the opportunity presents itself to face our demons, it’s never like what we imagined in our heads.
Chinelo Onwualu’s short story “What the Dead Man Said” speaks to and delves deeper than that universal theme. The reader enters a futuristic society suffering from climate change–induced disaster and migration, a place where human bodies of those once enslaved are treated as a commodity and where unhealed trauma lies beneath the surface.
Onwualu’s main character Azuka takes us back to New Biafra after more than 30 years of being away from her motherland and living in Tkaronto—what colonizers called North America. She returns for her estranged father’s funeral, where she is forced to peel the scabs of childhood sexual abuse. She exists in a world that, very much like herself, is coming to terms with the loss of what it was before it was broken by the “Catastrophe,” the floods and drought caused by human-made climate change. It is a threat that looms large today. One recent study from the World Bank estimates that in just 30 years, 143 million people will be forced to migrate within their countries due to the impacts of climate change. Many others will have to leave their nations altogether.
“What the Dead Man Said” might take place in fictional New Biafra after Igbo separatists declared their independence from Nigeria and called for the return of “its children in diaspora”—both those forcefully taken from their homeland during the trans-Atlantic slave trade and those who migrated voluntarily in recent decades. But it echoes an all-too-familiar contemporary Latin American narrative. As a South American journalist living in Arizona and reporting in the borderlands, I have witnessed the unspoken grief and trauma of immigrant and refugee communities.
Two authors from the recent Future Tense Fiction anthology discuss how they approach their craft.
An interview with acclaimed science fiction authors Charlie Jane Anders and Madeline Ashby about the interaction between sci-fi authors and scientists, the role of fiction in policymaking, the new Future Tense Fiction anthology, and asking the question “What’s the worst that could happen?”
