Must Read 'Stack: Catherynne Valente
A 'Stack you need to read, she has a way with words, artistic use of profanity, yet her passion and intent come across cleanly.
About a year ago, Cory Doctorow pointed his readers about a screed by fellow SFF1 writer Catherynne Valente. I remember that screed being about the assholery that Musk was wreaking on Twitter2 and I was smitten. She writes a lot of YA targeted fiction, and I have read a couple of her books. She’s gifted.
But, on her Substack, she takes off the filters, and holee sheeit does she capture the rage and anger that is in her head, and her gift with words comes out as artistic strings of sentences that just take your breath away. Where I sprinkle in a few “fucks”, “shits” or even some British/Aussie peppery words, she weaves a rich tapestry that just leaves you gawping. Like this from her most recent post about people asking for Biden to step aside (cough - Bill Kristol - cough):
He should step aside! For whom? Oh, we don’t have a suggestion, we hate any Democrat who rises in prominence so it doesn’t really matter oh by the way can we interest you in a Nikki Haley? She’s got all the charisma of Hillary, the exact same evil goals as Trump, and the PR skills of a dead gopher (the gopher is also a racist) buuuuut she hasn’t eaten pudding with her fingers on camera yet so I don’t know, we just like her, you can’t explain attraction, there’s just something so cool and fun about her we can’t possibly call her shrill or unlikeable or remember all the egregious burning
crossdumpster things she says.
Just fucking gold.
I STRONGLY recommend you go read her latest post, absorb the message, and then revel in her tapestry of obscenities that truly elevate the message to match the intensity of her rage. It is a thing of beauty:
Science Fiction and Fantasy
I refuse to call it ‘X’. That is just ignorant