Catherynne M. Valente is the New York Times bestselling author of over two dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, Radiance, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Own Making (and the four books that followed it). She is the winner of the Andre Norton, Tiptree, Sturgeon, Prix Imaginales, Eugie Foster Memorial, Mythopoeic, Rhysling, Lambda, Locus, Romantic Times’ Critics Choice and Hugo awards. She has been a finalist for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with a small but growing menagerie of beasts, some of which are human.
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Catherynne M. Valente has the following works available at Clarkesworld:
1. NIHILIST My name is Tetley Abednego and I am the most hated girl in Garbagetown. I am nineteen years old. I live alone in Candle Hole, where I was born, and have no friends except for a deformed gannet bird I’ve named Grape Crush and a motherless elephant seal cub I’ve named Big Bargains, […]
Continued From Part One. 3. Green The place between the Blue Country and the Green Country is full of dinosaurs called stories, bubble-storms that make you think you’re somebody else, and a sky and a ground that look almost exactly the same. And, for a little while, it was full of me. My sorrow and […]
1: Violet I don’t know what stories are anymore so I don’t know how to tell you about the adventures of Woe-Be-Gone Nowgirl Violet Wild. In the Red Country, a story is a lot of words, one after the other, with conflict and resolution and a beginning, middle, and, most of the time, an end. […]
Fight the Communist Threat in Your Own Backyard! ZOOM IN on a bright-eyed Betty in a crisp green dress, maybe pick up the shade of the spinach in the lower left frame. [Note to Art Dept: Good morning, Stone! Try to stay awake through the next meeting, please. I think we can get more patriotic […]
Continued from Part Two Part III: The Elephant’s Soul It is admitted that there are things He cannot do such as making one equal to two, but should we not believe that He has freedom to confer a soul on an elephant if he sees fit? —Alan Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence Thirteen: The Parable […]
Continued from Part One Two: Lady Lovelace’s Objection The Analytical Engine has no pretensions to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. —Ada Lovelace Nine: The Particular Wizard Humanity lived many years and ruled the earth, sometimes wisely, sometimes well, but mostly neither. After all this time on […]
One: The Imitation Game Like diamonds we are cut with our own dust. —John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi One: The King of Having No Body Inanna was called Queen of Heaven and Earth, Queen of Having a Body, Queen of Sex and Eating, Queen of Being Human, and she went into the underworld in […]
I. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was a high-density pre-baryogenesis singularity. Darkness lay over the deep and God moved upon the face of the hyperspatial matrix. He separated the firmament from the quark-gluon plasma and said: let there be particle/anti-particle pairs, and there was light. […]
Being unable to retrace our steps in Time, we decided to move forward in Space. Shall we never be able to glide back up the stream of Time, and peep into the old home, and gaze on the old faces? Perhaps when the phonograph and the kinesigraph are perfected, and some future worker has solved […]
In the antiseptic, sour-smelling halls of psychology, there is an entire wing devoted to Anxiety. Within that wing is a dingy corner containing a dry mop and a broken drinking fountain bearing a sign that reads “Please Love Me.” This section is wholly devoted to Writer’s Anxiety. There is a hierarchy of Writer’s Anxiety, and […]
Lot 657D Topographical Map of the Ross Ice Shelf (The Seal Map) Acuña, Nahuel, 1908 Minor tear, upper left corner. Moderate staining in left margin. Landmass centered, Argentinean coast visible in the extreme upper quadrant. Latitude and longitude in sepia ink. Compass rose: a seal indicating north with her head, east and west with her […]
On the third day the ardent hermit Was sitting by the shore, in love, Awaiting the enticing mermaid, As shade was lying on the grove. Dark ceded to the sun’s emergence; By then the monk had disappeared, No one knew where, and only urchins, While swimming, saw a hoary beard. —Aleksandr Pushkin Rusalka, 1819 I: […]
