My Favorite Things with Erin Roberts

They might not be raindrops on roses or whiskers on kittens, but that doesn’t mean that we love them any less. Welcome back to My Favorite Things, the weekly column where we grab someone in speculative circles to gab about the greatest in geek. This week, we sit down with Odyssey Writing Workshop Graduate Erin Roberts, whose short story, “Sour Milk Girls,” will be featured in The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 4 edited by Neil Clarke, available Tuesday, July 2nd!

What does Erin love when she’s not writing about people dealing with oppressive cultures or navigating dark science fiction, fantasy, and horror environments? Spoiler alert: a canceled science fiction show that doesn’t get near enough love, a heroine whose voice will captivate you page after page, a fictional piece of tech that needs to exist right now, and a fan-funded documentary that’s a heartful thank you to a sci-fi classic. Interested? Read on to learn more!

Favorite Show Cancelled Before Its Time: Dark Matter

I know, you probably thought I was going to say Firefly. And no shade to Firefly, which stars Nathan Fillion, a man I’ve been watching act his socks off since he played Joey on One Life To Live back in the day. But Dark Matter had it all for me — charismatic leads with missing memories, plot twists that stayed true to character, and an intriguing take on a corrupt corporate-run dystopia. In its last season, it slowed a tiny bit, but in that way that made me feel like it was setting up an amazing next season where all my questions would be answered and intriguing moments pay off…only to get cancelled altogether. The creator, Joseph Mallozzi, recently started tweeting his ideas for a continuation of the series in episode form, act by act, which is amazing, but still not quite the same as getting a real ending to the show. RIP Dark Matter!

Favorite Narrator: Merricat Blackwood (We Have Always Lived In The Castle)

I love voice — the way that characters in a story talk and think that makes them uniquely who they are — and I spend a lot of time in my own work trying to make the characters’ voices consistent and compelling (and often a bit creepy). So it’s no big surprise that I absolutely love the voice and story of 18-year-old Mary Katherine “Merricat” Blackwood, the main character of Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle.  For a quick taste, here’s her self-introduction from the opening lines of the book:

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the deathcup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.

Merricat’s odd obsession with the fantastic, the way she copes with the town’s hatred of her family (who died in a poisoning that her sister Constance was arrested and later acquitted for), and her close relationship with Constance are all made even better by the voice that Shirley Jackson gives her, which is a perfect combination of vulnerability and protectiveness, superstition and sensitivity, charm and naïvete. Merricat isn’t someone you soon forget, and why would you want to?

Favorite Fictional Tech That Seems Kind of Feasible: A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer (The Diamond Age)

First, I have to be clear — if I could have any tech no matter how unlikely, I’d probably pick the transporter (Never late to work again! Vacations anywhere in the world!) or the holodeck. But I don’t think those are coming anytime soon, so instead I root for a book — A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer — given to three young girls in Neal Stephenson’s book The Diamond Age. The Primer is no ordinary paperback; it uses sophisticated AI, nanotech, and virtual reality to tell an interactive story about each girl’s life that draws from the world and events around them to teach them morality and help them grow up, like so:

“What’s an adventure?” Nell said.

The word was written across the page. Then both pages filled with moving pictures of glorious things: girls in armor fighting dragons with swords, and girls riding white unicorns through the forest, and girls swinging from vines, swimming in the blue ocean, piloting rocket ships through space. Nell spent a long time looking at all of the pictures, and after awhile all of the girls began to look like older versions of herself.

Over the course of the novel, the book tells stories that help the girls deal with their home lives, figure out their dreams, and take action where they need to. Maybe it’s because I’ve dabbled in writing interactive fiction myself, but the idea of a book that is so interactive that it sees what’s going on in your life and shapes itself accordingly is a completely captivating one. I want one of those books. I want to write one of those books. Is it likely to exist tomorrow? Probably not. But as the individual fields it draws on continue to advance, here’s hoping that we get something like it sooner than later.

Favorite Thank You to a Creator: What We Left Behind

I love Star Trek: Deep Space Nine — and when I say love, I don’t just mean watched the TV series love. I mean read the book series that continues the story of DS9 after the end of its final season on my iPod touch while commuting to work on the subway every day for an entire summer love. So when I found out that there was a fan-funded documentary about the making of DS9, What We Left Behind, and that it was coming to theaters for one night only? I was there with bells on (metaphorically, of course, because that’s just rude to do at the movies). And I loved it! It was full of interviews with the series’ actors, writers, and producers, included a theoretical first episode for a continuation of the series, and took a look at how maligned the show was at the time by fans and studio brass. I came to DS9 after its original run, so I had no idea how little credit the show seemed to be given at the time for its willingness to portray moral grayness, build long-running continuing story arcs, and tackle topics like racism and the consequences of war as best it could. It’s a good reminder to me as a writer that the immediate reaction to your work doesn’t define what its long-term impact will be. ‘m glad the folks who brought us DS9 got a chance to see and share that impact with all of us fans.

Erin Roberts is a speculative fiction writer who tells stories across formats — her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in publications including The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 4; The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2019, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, The Dark, and THEN AGAIN: Vintage Photography Reimagined by One Artist and Thirty Writers; her interactive fiction has been published in Sub-Q Magazine and is forthcoming from Choice of Games; and her non-fiction essays and reviews have appeared on Tor.com and in Cascadia Subduction Zone, People of Colo(u)r Destroy Fantasy, and Strange Horizons, among others.

Erin earned an MFA from the Stonecoast program at University of Southern Maine and is a graduate of the Odyssey Writers Workshop. She received a 2019 Individual Artist Award from the Maryland State Arts Council and the Speculative Literature Foundation’s 2017 Diverse Worlds and Diverse Writers awards. To learn more about her work or read her musings on writing and life, follow her on Twitter at @nirele, support her on Patreon at patreon.com/nirele, or visit her website at writingwonder.com.

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