What strikes me now is how much like Pratt I am, in a way—devoted to hardening my shell of ignorance, and operating within it, even if it isn’t so small as his.

As the story went through revisions, I reworked some of the lessons (and sometimes changed them back again!) to be sillier and less predictable. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was tempting to fall back on “true love conquers all.”

The problem Donna, Russ, and Piggy have is that they live in a world which is, so far as they can tell, entirely devoid of magic. Also, they’re adolescents, which amounts to the same thing.

In this week’s Author Spotlight, we ask author Laura Anne Gilman to tell us a bit about her story for Fantasy, “Crossroads.” What inspired your story “Crossroads”? Could you tell us about the process of writing it? The story, or at least the opening lines, came out of a writing assignment that I gave my class during […]

I felt rather presumptuous using the word “pragmatism” in the story the title. I know it has a bunch of baggage. My research has been in other areas of the discipline.