throbbing light machine

Even to the edge of doom (23143 words) by lotesse
Chapters: 10/11
Fandom: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Caspian/Lucy Pevensie
Characters: Lucy Pevensie, Caspian (Narnia), Edmund Pevensie, Eustace Scrubb, Drinian (Narnia), Bern (Narnia), Aslan (Narnia), Ramandu’s Daughter | Liliandil
Additional Tags: Canon Rewrite, Aged-Up Character(s), Sailing, Romance, Eventual Romance, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Royalty, POV Multiple, Teen Romance, Self-Doubt, Book/Movie: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Prophecy
Series: Part 2 of An ever-fixèd mark
Summary:

The spirit that had awoken in her in was, Lucy knew, part of her former life, her life before she’d gone back to being a schoolgirl again. Not stuck visiting family, or bored and dreaming during lessons, but striking out with knife, claws, and faith for freedom, for justice, for her people, for what was right.

Coming back to Narnia meant taking on a mantle of majesty. She felt, not old, not young, but the Queen again.

Even to the edge of doom (20895 words) by lotesse
Chapters: 9/10
Fandom: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Caspian/Lucy Pevensie
Characters: Lucy Pevensie, Caspian (Narnia), Edmund Pevensie, Eustace Scrubb, Drinian (Narnia), Bern (Narnia), Aslan (Narnia)
Additional Tags: Canon Rewrite, Aged-Up Character(s), Sailing, Romance, Eventual Romance, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Royalty, POV Multiple, Teen Romance, Self-Doubt, Book/Movie: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Prophecy
Series: Part 2 of An ever-fixèd mark
Summary:

The spirit that had awoken in her in was, Lucy knew, part of her former life, her life before she’d gone back to being a schoolgirl again. Not stuck visiting family, or bored and dreaming during lessons, but striking out with knife, claws, and faith for freedom, for justice, for her people, for what was right.

Coming back to Narnia meant taking on a mantle of majesty. She felt, not old, not young, but the Queen again.

A Novel Is an Empathy Engine by Cecilia Tan: "When I unleash a book onto the world, I imagine it as a fiction-fueled thresher, reaping hearts and leaving a trail of those who laughed, cried, and were changed in its wake. This might seem like a fantasy unto itself, but this metaphor is based not in my own wildest dreams, but in science. A novel is an empathy engine, and an SF/F genre novel is the turbocharged model."

(I did research on this sort of thing, once. I appreciate the boldness of Tan's tone and approach; got some good swagger)

On Self-Respect by Joan Didion: "Although to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginnings of real self-respect. Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The charms that work on others count for nothing in that devastatingly well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions."

(a rather hard piece, but one I found bracing, in a moment when I needed bucking up)

Hostile to Female Status Altogether: Reading "Intercourse" With Gender Dysphoria by Jude Doyle: "Though she's rarely given credit for it, Andrea Dworkin was one of the great horror writers of the twentieth century."

(this essay spoke to me; I've loved Dworkin's glorious militant language and anger, the sweep and exhortation of her rhetoric, while struggling with her politics and the rotten legacy seen in the terfs. It was interesting to hear from another person who responded, as a youth, to Dwork's prose, and I like the reparative attitude of taking what you can use from sites and sources that may be, are likely to be, impure or problematic)

I spent many weeks this winter sitting with the work and life of genderbending scifi pioneer James Tiptree, JR, legally Alice Bradley Sheldon. I've known for some time that Tiptree was a figure with the power to compel me; in the holiday season tumult of my changing family, Tiptree was the one I needed.

I read Julie Phillips' magisterial biography "James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon," and also worked my way more methodically than I had before through the stories collected in "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever."

The biography presented a portrait of a non-neurotypical woman of unfocused genius I feel like I've known, and been. Raised by wealthy liberal Chicagoans who moonlighted as African explorers, Alli had an epic childhood. Only through sliding with deliberate nonchalance into pseudonymity could she seem to convey the intense art that was in her.

I first became aware of Tiptree through LeGuin's published encomiums, and there's a real treat to be found in the Phillips bio of vital, playful correspondence between early SF figures like Tiptree, LeGuin, Harlan Ellison, and Joanna Russ. Tiptree's inability to connect fully with Russ, separated by pseudonymity, gender pretense, and that thing that afflicts early movement pioneers and makes them unable to connect with the full movements that come after, is poignant.

And then the stories are so very intense. Tiptree circles around biology, love, death, inspiration, and the call of the wild, often ending with gut-punches that make you need to put the book down. I've been a fan of "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" (1973) since I first read it years ago, but, of all the stories collected in this anthology, "And I Have Come upon This Place by Lost Ways" (1972) has sat with me most vividly: a portrait of an inspired scientist believing, past all safety and sanity, in the knowledge that their culture does not value or validate.

It's not a happy story, but the ending rings with strange triumph; and that strange, Pyrrhic victory sits at the core of so much of Tiptree's works, perhaps most starkly in the vore bug horror/romance "Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death" (1973). The expansiveness of Tiptree's ethical and aesthetic vision, the way her stories can contain love, predation, death, rebirth, and beyond, stretching but not breaking, helped me cope with the shifting territory of my own family group, and made the ways that loved ones fight against one another comprehensible, maybe even palatable.

The unravelling at the end of Alli's life is something, the drama getting real. A strange thing, that this person who chose suicide so many years before actually going through with it, still tragically early, and annihilated her partner as she went, tells the insights that make tough times bearable for others. But perhaps it is often so.

What I took from my engagement with Tiptree, beyond the stabilization through personal changes, was a renewed dedication to my art persona, my art community, and making what I can/do make. Tiptree's stories are, imo, impossibly valuable, and they were such a struggle to get out; every time Alli tried to "go legit," she clammed up, or made sentimental things that belied the wild true insight of her creative gifts. It was only when she let herself create for the heck of it, working through her pseudonym, that the stream of her art seemed to flow clear.

My own mother had been pushing me, over the holidays, as she often does, to "go legit," and spending time thinking about Tiptree steered me in another direction: doubling down on doing my weird shit with the people what I do it with. & the early SFF fandom energy in Tiptree's correspondence reminded me so much of my own roots in journal fandom. "Let us not desert one another ... our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world," indeed.

Even to the edge of doom (13445 words) by lotesse
Chapters: 6/10
Fandom: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Caspian/Lucy Pevensie
Characters: Lucy Pevensie, Caspian (Narnia), Edmund Pevensie, Eustace Scrubb, Drinian (Narnia), Bern (Narnia), Coriakin (Narnia), Aslan (Narnia)
Additional Tags: Canon Rewrite, Aged-Up Character(s), Sailing, Romance, Eventual Romance, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Royalty, POV Multiple, Teen Romance
Series: Part 2 of An ever-fixèd mark
Summary:

The spirit that had awoken in her in was, Lucy knew, part of her former life, her life before she’d gone back to being a schoolgirl again. Not stuck visiting family, or bored and dreaming during lessons, but striking out with knife, claws, and faith for freedom, for justice, for her people, for what was right.

Coming back to Narnia meant taking on a mantle of majesty. She felt, not old, not young, but the Queen again.