Winter Reading
Alt Histories
Mac 1
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Mac 1 hits hard and heady with a nice energetic euphoria. Cov-
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With feelings generally originating in the top of the head and
eyebrows, Mac 1 is a great daytime smoke for any occasion.
If hippos took over the South BY CAMILLA MORTENSEN
THC:
I
knew I liked Sarah Gailey when we met in a
bar in Montana and they bought me a shot of
whiskey before I even had my coat off.
Gailey (who uses the pronouns they,
their, them) and I were in Choteau on the
Rocky Mountain Front for a writers’ group. I liked
Gailey even more after I read the piece of fiction
they submitted to workshop. “If this is a draft,” I
wondered at the polished writing, “what’s a final
version look like?”
In the space of a short story, Gailey had a
created a whole world. Me? I submitted a blog
about my horse.
Gailey was living in Portland at the time, but
tells me they have since moved to Los Angeles.
The big city is perhaps where you go after you win
the Hugo Award for fan writer, which Gailey did
this year.
After reading the writer’s group work, I was
curious to read more, and hit up publisher Tor.com
for American Hippo: River of Teeth, Taste of Marrow, and New Stories ($18.99). Published
in 2018, the volume, together with the promised “new stories,” is Gailey’s two novellas
about alternative-history 1880s America, in which the Mississippi River is dammed and
the swamp overrun with feral hippos that were brought into the marshlands of Louisiana as
part of a harebrained scheme to breed and slaughter them for meat.
In Gailey’s world of hippo wranglers, people don’t just eat (and get eaten by) hippos —
they train, ride and love them. And former hippo rancher Winslow Remington Houndstooth
plots dam-exploding capers and exploits with a ragtag group of miscreants who sound
peculiar but really shouldn’t be in this day and age or any other one — an agender/
nonbinary demolitions expert and poisoner, a pregnant Latinx assassin and a cross-dressing
con-artist make up some of the crew.
Eugene Weekly asked Gailey to respond to a few quick questions about their work.
So this hippo thing, it really was something that was proposed. How did you learn of
it and why did it grab you?
I learned about this proposal when I was a kid, and the idea stuck with me as I grew older.
It’s the kind of thing that has a lot of legs, because it engages with a lot of different vectors
of American culture. This thing almost happened because of the American tendency to
believe that our collective willpower can overcome biological realities like the adaptability
of an invasive species and the tenacity of highly aggressive megafauna.
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THC:
Is it something like the hippo scheme that generally generates your ideas? I’m curious
in particular about what spurs science fiction or alt history.
Most of my ideas come from a sense of curiosity about the rules that shape our culture
and society. Our world is defined by a relatively narrow set of truths, and many of them
are coincidental or arbitrary. When I come to understand a new one, I start to wonder what
would happen if it wasn’t there.
You won the Hugo for Best Fan Writer, I’m going to admit I read sci-fi but I don’t
follow it. What does that award entail?
The Best Fan Writer award is an award for works related to science fiction or fantasy,
which appeared in low- or non-paying publications such as semiprozines or fanzines or
in generally available electronic media during the previous calendar year. I write literary
analysis of genre media — for instance, “This Future Looks Familiar: Watching Blade
Runner in 2017,” an analysis of police brutality in Blade Runner, or “City of Villains: Why I
Don’t Trust Batman,” an analysis of the capitalist problems with Batman. The award I won
was effectively in recognition of my entire body of media commentary and analysis to date.
Tell me about your upcoming book, Magic for Liars.
Magic for Liars is a novel about a private investigator who finds herself embroiled in a
murder investigation at a high school for magical teens. It’s about sisterhood, class, grief,
identity and the lies we tell ourselves in order to survive the cruelties we visit upon each other.
This Q&A has been edited for clarity.
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THC:
What are you reading currently?
I just finished Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik, which was absolutely perfect. I’ve also
been reading Shirley Jackson, whose work is beautiful, unflinching and terrifying.
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THC:
How do you create a world (or history) like that? Do you line it out, map it, feel it?
Creating a new world is a lot of fun! When I’m writing speculative fiction, I usually
start with the rules of the world — the boundaries that define it. Because the fiction is
speculative, those rules are different from the rules that define the world we currently live
in. So, I define the differences, and then I determine how those differences shape culture
and society.
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3, 2018
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