You see, in science fiction and fantasy, everything is up for grabs - the dog snoozing by the hearth can be a robot, a hologram, a simulation, a changeling, a shapeshifter, a cursed knight, a god...or just a dog. We talk a lot about how genre writers invent a scenario ("worldbuilding"), but *thinking up* a cool imaginary milieu is *much* easier than gracefully imparting it.

Sure, you can just flat-out tell the reader what's going on, and there's times when that works well.

3/

Exposition gets a bad rap, mostly because it's really hard to do well, and when it's not done well, it's either incredibly dull, or incredibly cringe, or both at once:

maryrobinettekowal.com/journal…

4/

My Favorite Bit: Cory Doctorow talks about THE BEZZLE

Cory Doctorow is joining us today to talk about his novel, The Bezzle. Here’s the publisher’s description: New York Times bestseller Cory Doctorow’s The Bezzle is a high stakes…

^{Mary Robinette Kowal}

That's where incluing comes in. By "scattering information seamlessly through the text," the writer plays a kind of intellectual game with the reader in which the reader is clued in by little droplets of scene-setting, pieces of a puzzle that the reader collects and assembles in their head even as they're sinking into the story's characters and their problems.

5/

This is a *very* fun game at the best, but it's also *work*. It's one of the reasons that sf/f short story collections can feel difficult: every 10 or 20 pages, you're solving a new puzzle, just so you can understand the stakes and setting of the story. Sure, you're also getting a new (potentially) super-cool conceit every few pages, and ideally, the novelty, the intellectual challenge and the cognitive load of grasping the situation all balance out.

6/

One way to reduce the cognitive load on the reader is to build a world that hews more closely to the mundane one in which we live, where the conceit is simpler and thus easier to convey. But another way to do it is to just be REALLY! FUCKING! GOOD! at incluing.

That's Goss: really fucking good at incluing. Goss spins extremely weird, delightful and fun scenarios in these stories *and* she slides you into them like they were a warm bath.

7/

Before you know it, you're up to your nostrils in story, the water filling your ears, and you don't even remember getting in the tub. They're *that good*.

Goss has got a pretty erudite and varied life-history to draw on here. She's a Harvard-trained lawyer who was born in Soviet Hungary, raised across Europe and the UK and now lives in the USA.

8/

She's got a PhD in English Lit specializing in gothic literature and monsters and was the research assistant on a definitive academic edition of *Dracula*. Unsurprisingly, she often writes herself into her stories as a character.

With all that erudition, you won't be surprised to learn that formally, *structurally*, these are very daring stories. They take many narrative forms - correspondence, academic articles, footnotes, diary entries.

9/

But not in a straightforward way - for example, the title story, "Letters From an Imaginary Country," consists entirely of letters *to* the protagonist, with no replies. The protagonist doesn't appear a single time in this story, You have to infer *everything* about her and what's happening to her by means of the incluing in these letters (some of which are written by people whom the protagonist believes to be fictional characters!).

10/

All of this should add to that cognitive loading - it's flashy, it's writerly, it's clever as hell. But it doesn't! Somehow, Goss is setting up these incredibly imaginative McGuffins, using these *weird-ass* narrative building blocks, and unless you deliberately stop yourself, pull your face out of the pages and think about how these stories are being told, you won't even notice.

11/

She's got you by the ankles, grasping ever so gently, and she'll pulling you in a smooth glide into that warm bath.

It's incredible.

And that's just the style and structure of these stories. They're also incredibly imaginative and emotionally intelligent.

12/

Many of these stories are metatextual, intertextual remixes of popular literature - the first story in the collection, "The Mad Scientist's Daughter," is a sweet little tale of the daughters of Drs Frankenstein, Moreau, Jekyll, Hyde, Rappaccini, and Meyrink, all living together in a kind of gothic commune:

strangehorizons.com/wordpress/…

13/

The Mad Scientist's Daughter (Part 1 of 2)

We don't judge. Who, indeed, are we to do so? We have all done things of which we are not proud. The club is a haven for us, a port in a particularly stormy world.

^{Strange Horizons}

It's such a great premise, but it's also got all this gorgeous character-driven stuff going on in it, with an emotional payoff that's a proper gut-punch.

Other stories in the collection concern the field of "Imaginary Anthropology," a Borges-inspired riff on the idea that if you write a detailed enough backstory for an imaginary land, it can spring into existence.

14/

Again, it's a great gaff, but Goss attacks it in both serious mode with "Cimmeria: From the *Journal of Imaginary Anthropology*":

lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction…

And as a more lighthearted romp with "Pellargonia: A Letter to the *Journal of Imaginary Anthropology*," which is *extremely* funny, as many of these stories are (and in truth, even the most serious ones have laugh-aloud moments in them).

15/

Cimmeria: From the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology - Lightspeed Magazine

Remembering Cimmeria: I walk through the bazaar, between the stalls of the spice sellers, smelling turmeric and cloves, hearing the clash of bronze from the sellers of cooking pots, the bleat of goats from the butcher’s alley.

^{Wendy Wagner (Lightspeed Magazine)}

Goss grounds much of this fiction in her experience as an immigrant to the USA and in her Hungarian heritage. Fans of Lisa Goldstein's *Red Magician* and Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos novels will find much to love in Goss's use of Hungarian folklore and mythos, and Brust fans will be especially pleased (and famished) by her incredibly evocative descriptions of Hungarian food.

16/

This is a book bursting with monsters - the final novella, "The Secret Diary of Mina Harker," is a beautiful vampire tale that remixes Dracula to great effect - food, humor, subtle emotions and beautiful premises. It's got Oz, and Burroughs' Barsoom, and King Arthur, and so much else besides.

This was my introduction to Goss's work - I'd heard great things, but the TBR pile is always 50 times bigger than I can possibly tackle. I'm off to read a *lot* more of it.

17/

I'm on a tour with my new book, the international bestseller *Enshittification*!

Catch me next in #Lisbon, #Cardiff, #Oxford and #London!

Full schedule with dates and links at:

pluralistic.net/tour

eof/