Contents

Special Guests Issue

 

The Bird in the Bush: Semipermeable Selfhood: ICFA 43 Guest

of Honor Keynote Speech                                                                         8

        Nisi Shawl

       

Curating Science Fiction in the ‘Rainbow Age’: A Discussion in

Several Parts: ICFA 43 Guest Scholar Keynote                                   22

        Farah Mendlesohn

 

Deep Sea Speculations: Science and the Animating Arts of

William Beebe, Else Bostelmann, and John Wyndham: ICFA 42

Guest Scholar Keynote                                                                              69

        Stacy Alaimo

 

Conversations with Creatives: Interview with Neil Gaiman,

Conducted by Novella Brooks de Vita online at VICFA 2022,

“Building Inclusive Worlds and Global Representations in the

Works of Neil Gaiman”                                                                             92

 

TOO LATE/NOT TOO LATE: Jeff VanderMeer’s Discussion

with Alison Sperling at ICFA 42, “Climate Change and the

Anthropocene”                                                                                            117

 

Healing Our Histories Through the Lens of Horror: Guest

of Honor Plenary Address Online at VICFA 2022, “The Global

Fantastic”                                                                                                     132

        Tananarive Due

 

Utopianism After Utopia: VICFA 2022 Guest Scholar Keynote      152

        Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay

 

 

 

REVIEWS

 

Tananarive Due, Steven Barnes, and Marco Finnegan’s The

Keeper                                                                                                           177

        Rev. by Aaron Kashtan and Kevin Maroney

 

The Bird in the Bush:

Semipermeable Selfhood:

ICFA 43 Guest of Honor Keynote Speech

 

 

Nisi Shawl

 

 

 

HIS SPEECH IS ABOUT WHO I AM and therefore it’s also about who you are.  All of you.  All my relations.

               There are eleven parts to this speech, so let’s get started.  First:

 

I am born.

 

This statement, famously, is the title of the opening chapter of Charles Dickens’ novel David Copperfield.  In line with the tradition of the pseudo-memoiristic fiction of that time and earlier, a large part of its text deals with the narrators’ forebears.  Before “I” even take the stage, I am of others: of my mother, of my father, and of their mothers and their fathers.  I am in relationship to them and to all my ancestors, and all their ancestors: genetic, intellectual, spiritual, animal, vegetable, mineral, ALL are my relations.  Into this web of being I am born, already connected to it.

 

 

 

I am a child.

 

As a child growing into the world, exploring the world, learning the world, I of course wondered at the ways of the world’s adults: what they thought, what they did, what they said.  And one saying I often wondered about was this:  “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.”  That made no sense to me at all.  Two birds are manifestly worth more than one bird, right?  And with that second option you’d get a bush as well, and probably some nice berries on the bush also, right?  Even one bird with a bush just had to be worth more than one bird without a bush.

When I finally got an accommodating grownup to explain this discrepancy I learned that worth is a function of possession: what is possessed—and only what is possessed—is valuable.  And possession means control.  If there’s no control, there’s no possession.  The boundaries of the self do not extend beyond the limits within which the will dominates and controls.  The saying boiled down to defining these limits.  Physically controlling the bird was the goal.  Only by holding the bird could one be sure it was one’s own.

I have kept this lesson front and center throughout my life.  I tested it, questioned it, looked for examples of how it worked.  And how it didn’t work.  I studied it.

 

I am a nerd.

 

As a student in Kalamazoo Public Schools’ science classes I learned two words that have helped me understand the implications of the aphorism about the bird in the bush: “meniscus,” and “semipermeable.”  A meniscus is the sloping curve formed between the surface of a liquid and the walls of the container in which it is held.  It’s really important to be able to understand this when making exact measurements.  Liquids will cling to their containers’ sides, and if you’re measuring the amount of a liquid against marks made on these sides you need to take the liquid’s meniscus into account.  By holding a liquid, a container changes it.  Possession affects what is possessed, and it does so in a way that can distort how we perceive it.  Possession is not influence-free.  The hand changes the nature of the bird.

The concept of semipermeability, featured in this speech’s title, bears even more closely on my ruminations on the bird in the bush.  I first came upon it in biology.  It seems our bodies are full of semipermeable membranes.  There are semipermeable membranes in our lungs that allow certain gas molecules through and keep others from passing.  They form filters in our digestive systems.  They are selective barriers.  They let certain items in and keep others out; they exist for certain things and for others ils n’existent pas.  They’re situationally dependent objects, and though they exhibit a very refined degree of control they do not rule.  They do not dominate.  They mediate.  They exchange.

 

I am a hippy.

 

It has been said that anyone who remembers the 60s didn’t truly experience them.  It’s also been said that much of the era popularly referred to as “The 60s” happened in the 1970s.  I can tell you that that second statement is fairly accurate based on what I remember—which is quite a lot, though I assure you I was really “there.”  Or maybe I’d better say I was really “then”?  My “there” was mostly my birthplace, Kalamazoo, Michigan, with side excursions to Scotland and New Mexico’s Gila National Forest and Beloit, Wisconsin, and then with Ann Arbor, Michigan as my last and longest-lasting home.

In 1970 in Kalamazoo I became best friends with Katree Duncan.  Katree and I rambled around hugging oaks and yearning after the moon.  She played for me and taught me the meaning of this somewhat risqué but extremely relevant song:

 

The Bird in the Bush¹

 

Three maidens a milking did go; three maidens a milking did go;

The wind it blew high, the wind it did blow low,

It tossed their petticoats to-and-fro.

 

They’ve met with a young man they know; they’ve met with a young man they know;

And they asked of him, if he had any skill,

To catch them a small bird or two.

 

“Why it’s yes, I’ve very good skill; why it’s yes, I’ve very good skill;

And if you’ll come with me, to yonder greenwood tree,

I’ll catch you a small bird or two.”

 

So it’s off to the greenwood went they; so it’s off to the greenwood went they;

And he tapped at the bush, and the bird it did fly in,

Just a little above her lily-white knee.

 

Her sparkling eyes they did turn around; just as if she had been all in a swoon;

And she cried “I’ve a bird, and a very pretty bird,

And he’s peckin’ away at his own ground.”

 

Here’s a health to the bird in the bush; here’s a health to the bird in the bush;

And we’ll drink down the sun, we’ll drink up the moon,

Let the neighbors say little or much.

 

So now I had another model for the interaction of birds and bushes and ownership, in which the bird was “pecking away at his own ground.”

In Beloit, on a 1971 road trip visiting college campuses I found further proof that the boundary of my body was a non-absolute, and that physical control wasn’t an actual prerequisite for identification.  Granted I was stoned.  I had smoked some marijuana, and okay, I had smoked a whole lot of marijuana.  And I was still smoking it when I somehow saw myself from across the dorm room.  For seconds I was looking through the eyes of Rick Maxon, one of the Maxon twins traveling along with me in the school van.  Through the eyes of Rick, who was seated several feet off in a wine red armchair.

The bird, the bush, the hand—all the aphorism’s elements had switched places and so had subverted its message of containment and discretion.  I took that subversion to heart.