Kelly Lagor's Lagoraphobia

First off, in writing news, my new essay series for Asimov’s has officially begun! You can pick up both the first installment, as well as a guest editorial about the series by yours truly, in the March/April 2022 issue.

Needless to say, I’m excited about this series, which will trundle along, coming out twice a year for the foreseeable future, and will galavant through cinematic history in a roughly chronological fashion. This issue’s essay is about George Méliès’ La Voyage Dans la Lune, as well as the history of the moon’s depiction in fiction throughout history.

The content of the essays are going to be dictated by whatever I find most interesting about the research process behind some of my favorite science fiction movies. For example, in the next installment, forthcoming in the September/October 2022 issue, will be about the 1931 Universal Horror Frankenstein adaptation, and how a landmark cinematic horror monster was born from such a deeply science fictional novel.

I spent a good deal of time these last few months dealing with an adventure of side effects from a new asthma med. Thus, not much reading or new writing got done. I certainly spent a good deal of time playing Witcher 3 and doing a bunch of puzzles. One of the few books I did read was Crow Road by Iain Banks. Before all the endocrinological excitement, I’d been picking at a strange horror story set in the Scottish Highlands, and I’d picked this novel up so I could take in the scenery through Banks’ eyes. It’s not so easy to find a copy of, but it is Banks at his finest, absolutely tremendous, and I heartily recommend it.

Otherwise, I recently absolutely adored (except for one kind of major quibble) Stephen Graham Jones’ My Heart is a Chainsaw. It reignited that certain joy I’ve always had in 80s slasher movies, and I’ve definitely sucked Shudder’s slasher selection dry over the past few weeks, while also finally watching every single Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th movie. It’s all slowly feeding back into the Scottish horror story, which I’m hoping to get rolling on soon.

Finally, I’m currently reading John Darnielle’s latest novel, Devil House, which seriously has the absolute most nostalgic 80s horror cover art ever. I mean LOOK AT IT. I’m loving it so far – the details he focuses on, the meandering road through his character’s lives. I never would have expected the lead singer of The Mountain Goats, a band I adore, to also become one of my favorite novelists. If you haven’t read anything by him before, I can’t recommend Wolf in White Van enough, but so far, this one has a shot at unseating that as my favorite of his books.

Hope you’re safe and healthy and as happy as it is possible for you to be, and maybe read some good fiction this month if you’re so inclined.

Another year has ticked over, and while this traditionally means a “year in review” kind of post, I did want to start off first with the news that I just had a new story come out in the December issue of Three-Lobed Burning Eye called, “A Selection of Tissues.”

A while back I resolved to stop writing such overtly sad stories anymore. For many obvious reasons, I found I increasingly didn’t want to read or watch sad stuff, and even my default musical taste was shifting into more energetic/angry territory, so why was I still opting for writing such fictional gut punches? Sure, I suffered from depression for a really, really long time, and up until a few years ago, various health issues meant I was dealing with a good deal of physical suffering on top of that. But I always struggled with the disconnect that, if you met me, I’m actually quite sunny, funny and optimistic. So why the hell wasn’t I channeling that part of me into my fiction, too?

It’s funny that my stories published this year represent both the nadir of my physical and mental health, and the fruit of that resolve to write more feel-good stuff. “A Small Turn of the Ladder,” which appeared in the May/June 2021 issue of Analog, I first wrote six years ago in the midst of yet another gut infection and years-long colitis flare, while “A Selection of Tissues” I wrote a few months after the start of the pandemic, after the initial existential paralysis had let up a bit. It turns out, dealing for years with a disease that, given unluckier circumstances, could have easily killed me gave me some pretty good mortality scare coping tools. So I was able to turn my early pandemic frustration as a high-risk person not being able to find any toilet paper, a month’s-long battle that summer against an ant infestation of my bathroom, and my love of all things microbiome and human anatomy, into a weird, but sweet little story about someone remaking themself into the person they want to be. (Also, many thanks to Dr. Tami Lieberman at MIT for all her help with the skin microbiome references).

You can read (or listen to me read!) that story here.

I was also able to get quite a bit of other new writing and editing done this year, including the completion of a brand new novelette, as well as an editorial and the first three installments of a new essay series for Asimov’s Magazine called, “Speculative Screencraft.” I’m excited about this one, as I’ll be writing about science fiction movies, and the first two installments, coming later in 2022, will be about George Méliès’ 1902 short film, A Trip to the Moon, and the history of fictional portrayals of the Moon; and the 1931 Universal Pictures Frankenstein and the history of horror and monsters in fiction.

Between getting vaccinated at the start of 2021, and my recent resuming of hermiting, despite being recently boosted, until a bit more is known about how high risk I’ll be against Omicron, I got to do quite a bit of living. My band got to play our first show in three years, I got to see a dozen live shows (including an absolute stunner by Alanis Morisette and Garbage, and the best show I saw all year by CHVRCHES in support of their fantastic new album Screen Violence), went on a few trips, mostly to different SoCal locations (Indio, Big Bear, Anza Borrego, East Jesus, LA, and Catalina), as well as one long trip to see family in Chicago, finished gauging my ears (which I’ve always wanted to do), started a new tattoo, got a day job promotion, and caught up on a lot of overdue socializing, all while avoiding to get COVID, so hooray for that.

This year I’m planning on finishing a novel draft and a handful of new short stories, writing a few more essays, and, depending on how the pandemic looks, head up to the Pacific Northwest to see friends and attend the Rainforest Writer’s Retreat, visit Chicago, and go to Portugal for a dear friend’s wedding this summer, which will also coincide with my 40th birthday.

I hope your 2022 is healthy and happy, and that Omicron represents the last phase of this pandemic in which COVID completes its transformation into yet another minor seasonal cold.

Well, I am at least.

I don’t have too much to say about the intervening time between my last post in March of 2020 and today. I spent most of that time like many others who already had a work-from-home day job – indoors and away from others. I started wearing masks everywhere, got more houseplants and pairs of leggings, and got vaccinated as soon as I got the green light to from work. I also read more than I usually do, played more guitar and video games, did a variety of horror-themed puzzles, had conference call movie nights and virtual hangs with friends, and started lifting at home and running outside instead of at the gym.

Eventually I was able to start writing again after the initial shock of everything faded back into the general background baseline anxiety of existence.

In happy news, my short story, “Small Turn of the Ladder” was published in Analog in time for my 39th birthday. It’s the first story I’ve sold in quite a while, one I first wrote years ago when I was in the midst of the worst of all my autoimmune garbage and chronic c. difficile infections. It was meant to be about the coming antibiotic crisis and the psychological weight of coping with an incurable disease and a possibly fatal infection.

I also completely finished my long-term Tor.com Science and the Fantastic column. I believe it came in at around 40k words total, and covered over 150 years of history across science fiction and biology. I’m pretty proud of it, and it gave me an excuse to read a lot of older science fiction I might never have thought to look at otherwise.

I’ve got exciting news to share as well – I’ve got contracts signed on what I hope will be another long-lived essay series – this time for Asimov’s! It’ll start up next year and explores different thematic aspects of classic science fiction movies. I’ve already got two and a guest editorial in the can: the first about George Méliès’ 1902 silent film A Trip to the Moon and the third about Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. The second essay, currenlty in progress, will be about Frankenstein, which I’ve been thoroughly enjoying the research for. The first essay and the editorial is currently scheduled to appear in the Spring 2022 issue. Expect further announcements here and on Twitter as I have them!

Finally, I’ve got a lot of stories making the rounds at different markets at the moment – a healthy mix of revisited older and newer ones I’ve finished in the past year. I’m in the middle of writing a few more, which I’m hoping to finish by the time this last essay gets submitted, since I want to spend the Winter working on a novel.

I hope you’ve all been as well as can be expected, are fully vaccinated, and have plans to get your annual flu shot in the next month or two.

It’s been a minute since I last updated, but I’ve had a bunch of things published in the past ::counts backwards:: nine months? Sheesh. Well, no one reads personal blogs anymore, so no great loss. I’ve been channeling that energy into lots of different writing projects lately. Namely:

• A slew of new installments in the Tor.com Science and the Fantastic column
• A two-part examination of how science is used in science fiction over at Locus Magazine (from both the theoretical and practical angles)
• I channeled my current anxiety over the coronavirus epidemic into an essay on con crud and community over at Uncanny.

I’ve got just one more installment in the Tor.com column coming up for next month, another essay I pitched to a new venue due later this month, and some other exciting non-fiction-related stuff in the months to come.

I’m writing this, as I mentioned above, in an anxious time. I’ve been following the coronavirus news so closely that I almost feel like I did way back in 2009 when I was unemployed for six months between grad school and finding a job – obsessively refreshing pages waiting for new information that might make me feel… what, exactly? Better? Like I have a handle on things? Like control over my life is magically back within my grasp?

I wish I weren’t asthmatic (adding one to the infinite pile of times I’ve wished this were true since I was diagnosed when I was five). I wish I didn’t have this autoimmune disease (again, with a +1 to the ever growing pile). I dislike being robbed once and for all of that youthful sense of immortality, which I feel like we can cling to if we can only convince ourselves that the manner of our own death remains nebulous – could be literally anything. But then as you get older, and health problems compound, you spend more time shoring up those crumbling walls between you and your own mortality, certain likelihoods increasing in size become difficult to ignore.

Ah, well. Being mad about it, I learned a long time ago, accomplishes nothing except to increase stress. I accept it, take all my medications, go to all my appointments, get a job that gives me good enough health insurance (which is a kind of fucked thing to have to always have in the back of my mind) to be able to best take care of myself and reduce anxiety levels to a manageable amount so I can continue to have the headspace to do the things that make me feel like I’m living as best I can between obsessively refreshing websites for coronavirus updates.

It’s raining here today, which people always treat like such an anomaly but this is just the other season in San Diego – the wet one – and I am now technically putting myself under enhanced social distancing, so I’m curled up on the couch, work laptop beside me, deadlines coming down the pipeline, a slew of unwatched media and unplayed video games to engage with, and a brand newish pirate banjo to pluck when I want to fill the room with something as lonesome sounding as someone asking, “Why?” in an empty toilet paper aisle at the grocery store.

These are strange times, to be sure, and sometimes I can almost feel the history unspooling beneath our collective feet.

Be good to each other y’all – it’s pretty apparent now, more than ever, that we are all that we have.

There have two more installments of the Science and the Fantastic column published on Tor.com since I last wrote – they cover the weird interstitial period of SF of the 50s that I cover using Bradbury, and the maniacal scientific work of Monod in uncovering mechanisms of cellular regulation. This was followed up by my first dip into the expansion period for both biology and science fiction in the 60s, covering Ballard and the movement’s British origins, which aligned nicely with the birth of recombinant DNA technology, and thus biotech.

I am happy to be out of the golden age of SF – I am getting really sick of writing about sexist white dudes. That being said, there are still more sexist white dudes ahead, but it’s going to be easier to move away from them in SF as we move forward. Not so much so in biology.

The Nobel Prize page has a breakdown about the demographics of Nobel Prize winners between 1901 and 2018 (mind you, this is in all categories, not just the sciences):

• Of 935 Nobel awards, 52 have been awarded to women. That’s a little over 5.6%.
• Of those 52 Prizes, most were in Literature or Peace, and one for economics
  • 3 women have won for Physics (out of 210 winners – or 1.4%)
  • 5 women have won for Chemistry – one was Marie Curie, who also won one of the physics ones (out of 181 winners – or 2.8%)
  • 12 women have won for Physiology/Medicine (out of 216 – or 5.6%)

I couldn’t find a convenient current breakdown of prizes in the sciences by racial demographics, but the awards are overwhelmingly awarded to white men, and there has yet to be a black Nobel prize winner in the sciences.

Of course, Nobel prizes are not necessarily the best indicator of the quality of a career in research (much like the Oscars aren’t the end-all-be-all in quality of an acting career). There are always politics involved, and many of the women and minorities doing groundbreaking research today won’t necessarily see any recognition for a lifetime of work for a while, but I both imagine and hope that this is going to continue to change moving forward as barriers continue to be broken down and scientific cultures of racism and misogyny diminish. The numbers don’t look good right now, and writing a history of two fields that have been overwhelmingly white and male (for a lot of the same reasons) feels disheartening, especially looking around at how the demographics in both fields has changed and continues to change.

• As of 2015, women have reached parity in the biological and medical sciences
• Minorities seem to have equal representation if all lumped together, but representation within groups is disproportionate, with more Asians in STEM careers and fewer black and latinos (see table 3-19)

None of this is to say that women don’t still run into misogyny in the sciences, and systems of oppression still act as gatekeepers to many minorities, but compared to even 30 years ago, the trend in diversity has at least been in an upward direction.

But I digress. The next article will be about Philip K. Dick (who the above title quote is from) and Sydney Brenner’s massive project to map the developmental fate of every cell within the roundworm C. elegans. Both were preoccupied with the central questions of life – what makes us what we are? It’s a compelling question to examine both from the angle of Dick’s fiction and Brenner’s work, and I felt it was interesting enough to push back the article I’ve been looking forward to writing about LeGuin and Lynn Margulis.

2001 A Space Odyssey is one of my favorite movies of all time. It’s the perfect marriage of gorgeous and profound, with some of my favorite tropes (AIs and space madness, first contact, scientific realism, etc) by one of my favorite directors, and I am beyond delighted to have been able to write about it, albeit in an oblique way. I will forever plug Michael Benson’s phenomenal Space Odyssey about the making of it. I didn’t think it was possible for me to love that movie any more than I already did, but Benson managed to increase my fondness exponentially. The next Tor column will cover Arthur C. Clarke and the cracking of the genetic code, and I also got to throw in a very relevant shout out to Fred Sanger, who’s inventiveness is the grandfather of my specific biotech niche (so I can thank him for paying my bills), so I was a very happy camper researching this one.

The last one, if you missed it, went up a few weeks back on Isaac Asimov and the discovery of messenger RNA. Jacques Monod was an absolute madman and I deeply enjoyed the logic in Asimov’s books (and memoir). I once again lament someone who seemed so affable was also a serial ass grabber of women. ::long sigh:: In any case, you can find that post here.

Not too much to report on other writing fronts, except to say I have found over the past year that I deeply enjoy writing nonfiction. It scratches the itch of my atrophied academic past self, and I have gotten to read a lot of science fiction, biographies and histories I wouldn’t have otherwise. I love finding the strange connections between things, and exploring both histories in parallel has really colored my perspective on history in the last century and a half. Even past the expiration date of the column, you can bet I’ll find other things to jump into to write about (maybe ones that don’t require quite so much reading – I’ve read 20 books so far this year and February’s barely half over).

On the life front, I’m doing quite well. I’ve got some personal goals of being able to run a sub 30 minute 5k, leave the country again, get competent at my new day job (which I love so far), level up my cooking game, and start getting some fiction back into circulation. The first four I’m already working on, and my upcoming pilgrimage to Cascadia and the annual Rainforest Writers Retreat should help with the last of those, and since the latest column is in the can, I am very much looking forward to focusing on just fiction for a week. See, I’ve had some novelette/novella length projects that have had to take a back seat to all the research and writing of the column, and are at least three medium/long stories and a novel trilogy stuck up in my head – all kind of dark, hopefully funny, and chocked full of science. I look forward to having some of those see the light of day hopefully in the next few years.

No playlist this month, but instead I encourage you to check out the latest albums by Jeff Tweedy (WARM), Sharon Van Etten (Remind Me Tomorrow), and Hop Along (Bark Your Head Off, Dog), which have all been in my heavy rotation lately.

In the meantime, please enjoy this hole to another universe that is definitely NOT a tiny bathroom monolith.

First off, I’ve decided to take a short hiatus from the column. I’ve fallen chronically  behind by inches each month with all of the reading for each installment, despite staying on a just-about monthly schedule. I’ve succeeding in impressing myself with my stamina, but I’ve been skirting the edge of burnout these last few months, which have been busy with travel. Along with a recent (and impending) major dayjob upgrade, I needed a moment to breathe. After checking in with my editor, I settled on taking the holiday months off, and we’ll jump back in with Asimov and beyond in the new year.

But the last one on Heinlein and all things DNA replication went up at the end of last month. It represents the first essay on the three corners of the Central Dogma, and the first of the Golden Age trifecta of grandmasters (which can be found here). Reading as much by and about Heinlein, I think, preventing me from letting my personal distaste cloud the essay while still not letting him off the hook for the problematic elements that make him hard to read in a modern context.

When I sent that piece off, I went on a gleeful Asimov palate cleansing binge. Despite knowing Asimov himself was no paragon of modern virtues, I much prefer his detective story frames and long form psychohistory chess games. Though both Heinlein and Asimov frequently resort to white rooms full of talking heads, Asimov’s diatribes read more like cold logical proofs than hyperbolic political screeds, and I’ll take a proof over a screed any day.

Which has got me thinking more and more of bypassing the obvious Clarke article to follow up Asimov and skipping ahead one to Bradbury. Reading The Martian Chronicles for the first time these past few days has me feeling more as though Heinlein’s the heart, Asimov’s the head and Bradbury’s the soul, with Clarke pulling it all out into the future with the evolution of humanity. I can almost justify it to myself to exit the Golden Age early to talk about how Bradbury (and Vonnegut) took the genre and painted it with shades of literary awe to bring in a wider general public.

I know I’m probably just looking for an excuse to read all the Bradbury that’s been heaped on my to read pile, but, true to form, I’ve been mostly following my whims with this column anyway and my intuition hasn’t steered me into a corner yet. Futhermore, in the introduction to my edition, Bradbury says,

The Martian Chronicles was published in the late spring of 1950 to a few reviews. Only Christopher Isherwood placed a laurel wreath on my head as he introduced me to Aldous Huxley, who, at tea, leaned forward and said, “Do you know what you are?”

Don’t tell me what I’m doing, I thought. I don’t want to know.

“You,” said Huxley, “are a poet.”

I can see so many shades of Bradbury in so many of the writers I adore, and reading his fiction is like crawling under some warm blankets with a flashlight. Of course I’m looking for an excuse.

Finally, Bradbury’s sentiment above (in italics), he picked up from Fellini in describing his creative processes – to ignore the film in the camera and let his feel for the scenes inspire him. Bradbury says writing The Martian Chronicles stories followed a similar path. So since I’ve been taking a very similar approach to writing this column, I’ll consider this my final, flimsy, fortune-cookiesque justification.

Since I last wrote, I went to New Orleans for the first time, camped in the desert, saw one of my dearest friends get married, saw a slew of bands and finished my Agent Cooper tattoo, but that’ll be for another post.

Until then, I’ve put together another new playlist of music I’ve been enjoying. You can find it here (opens in Spotify).

A little late updating this month because there has been a lot.

First up, next Tor column is up! It deals with the discovery of the structure of DNA by Watson and Crick, and the rise and fall of John W. Campbell. This one I had the distinct pleasure of having to write TWICE, thanks to my overzealous cleaning of my desktop mixing with a moment of I-should-have-known-better. It’s a strange experience having to rewrite an entire draft from memory. Never before had I been so sure that a first draft was flawless than in that second full draft (while knowing full well that first drafting was no better than the second). But in the end it wound up hitting all the notes I had wanted it to and it was no worse for the delay.

Pescadro: where the streets have no reception

Thankfully, this installment marks my departure from the pulpy roots of SF and has launched me up into SF’s woody stems. As such I have been reading a lot of Heinlein and Asimov. Asimov has proven to be a good chaser for all the Heinlein, but I know totally understand why folks were always saying, “Stick to his juvenilia.” Starman Jones and Have Spacesuit Will Travel did both turn out to be the least (literally) offensive things I’ve read by him, whereas every single other book made me want to throw my Kindle across the room. Repeatedly. The objectifying feminism, bad faith arguments, the black and white thinking, the logical contortions in the midst of strawman arguments… They’re exhausting. I’ll be happy to be done with the Heinlein article (and him) and onto the Asimov one where at least there aren’t as many women on the page for him to be misogynist about and I can just loose myself in cold waves of beautiful logic.

7/8 of the soberest Bruisers you’ve ever met

The last month (and a half) has been eventful. I finally got to realize the childhood dream I never thought I had and go to scenic Sheboygan, Wisconsin for a dear friend from grad school’s bachelorette party. There was much drinking while floating in a lake beside a ridiculous house with a bunch of hilarious women. This was immediately followed up with a retreat with my writers group. Never have so many of us been in one place (we missed you, Sandra!) in meatspace at the same time. There was no cell reception (and limping WiFi), much giggling, alcohol and delicious food, and I managed to get the column draft done before discovering I had deleted it once I deposited myself at the WorldCon hotel. A number of drinks later and I was able to just relax and enjoy the con for the rest of the weekend. There was again, much giggling, drinking, good food, and good friends, and I got back feeling primed and ready to… rewrite that column.

My leg has something to tell you

I also got a new tattoo – this one representing my deep and abiding love of Twin Peaks and a promise to future Kelly that we’ll make it up to the Pacific Northwest someday. Until then, I’ll have a little bit of it with me always.

My band also played another show. There was surprisingly good turnout, we played some new songs and some old, retooled songs. It was our sixth show this year, and along with the new EP we recorded, I really feel like we’re hitting our stride and that’s a deeply satisfying feeling.

Finally, I’ve updated my monthly Spotify playlist with all the things I’ve been enjoying this past month (and a half). Find it below, and feel free to subscribe to it if you dig it. I’ll be posting updates to it regularly since I know there’s an overwhelming amount of great music coming out all the time and finding new stuff (especially as you get older) gets to be more and more work, so you can benefit from the legwork I’ve been doing (and maybe throw some cash at some good bands when they come through your town).

https://open.spotify.com/embed/user/1222446874/playlist/37NhgOVlNAFxc128ntv1Fy

I’ve had two articles go up since I last posted.

Part 4 of the Science and the Fantastic series about Edgar Rice Burroughs and Theodosius Dobzhansky. This one’s theme was mutation and I got to write a bit about the radium craze that was happening after the turn of the 20th century, and Dobzhansky’s work in tying mutation to the mechanism of natural selection.

A spoilery thought experiment about what happens after the end of the latest Jurassic World movie. It was the article I never thought I needed to write about a Jurassic Park movie.

I also turned 36 a few weeks back. I celebrated by swapping out my 18 year old car for one that doesn’t spew white smoke from beneath the hood and hit me in the face with the sun visor whenever I would accelerate. I wondered if I would have feelings about giving up my car – I bought it 14 years ago when I was in grad school. No matter how tight money got and how many bills I had to float to make sure I could eat, I never missed a single car payment. That car was my sense of security and represented a kind of freedom of movement I’d never felt before. We went on a lot of adventures, me and that car. But not being hit in the face while I drive hasn’t gotten old yet.

I’m also on vacation for the next week. I haven’t had this much time off in a row where I get to stay home in a very long time. I’m hoping to get a head start on the next two Science and the Fantastic posts, which will hopefully free up some time in the next two months for me to finish up a draft of a space horror story I have been slowly re-outlining. Up next is gonna be an article about Olaf Stapledon, Julian Huxley, Star Maker and the Modern Synthesis. I’ve been looking forward to writing this one for a while. After that I’ll be writing about Watson, Crick, Gernsbeck and Campbell, with the birth of the magazine era and the discovery of the structure of DNA.

I am getting a little tired of writing about white dudes in these articles, but we’re finally starting to get to the time periods where diversity was increasing in both fields. I am really looking forward to what’s coming after these two, where I’m going to start writing about broader movements within SF chronologically, as well as areas of specialty in biology with their salient discoveries.

If you’re interested in the source material I’ve used so far in the articles – I have a running bibliography in this post that I’ve been keeping updated as I go.

I might attempt to make another ridiculous cake, too. I made this one for my birthday this year, and am itching to add a new ridiculous cake to my repertoire. This one looks promising. Also, PBS just started airing a fifth season of Great British Bake Off, in case you might need something kind to watch because your threshhold for horror just keeps getting crossed by current events.

Be good to yourselves and let’s look out for each other, okay?