Catherynne M. Valente
Author of The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
About the Author
Disambiguation Notice:
Catherynne Valente is nonbinary and uses any/all pronouns.
Image credit: author publicity photo
Series
Works by Catherynne M. Valente
The Beasts Who Fought for Fairyland Until the Very End and Further Still (2016) 20 copies, 8 reviews
The Descent of Inanna 12 copies
Music of a Proto-Suicide 7 copies
A Delicate Architecture 6 copies
What the Dragon Said: A Love Story 6 copies
The Difference Between Love and Time 5 copies
Apex Magazine 15 (August 2010) — Editor — 5 copies
The Future Is Blue {story} 5 copies
Apex Magazine 23 (April 2011) 4 copies
The Consultant 4 copies
Secretario 4 copies
The Wolves of Brooklyn 4 copies
Mouse Koan (short story) 3 copies
One Breath, One Stroke 3 copies
In the Future When All's Well 3 copies
Apex Magazine 16 (September 2010) — Editor — 3 copies
The Red Girl (short story) 2 copies
A Great Clerk of Necromancy 2 copies
The Wedding (short story) 2 copies
Down and Out in R'lyeh 2 copies
Planet Lion (short story) 2 copies
A Voice Like a Hole [short story] 2 copies
The Anachronist's Cookbook 2 copies
Mother is a Machine 2 copies
Golubash (Wine-Blood-War-Elegy) 2 copies
The Ice Puzzle 2 copies
A Dirge for Prester John 2 copies
Snow Day 2 copies
Psalm of the Second Body 1 copy
O pewnej dziewczynce oraz o tym jakie harce wyczyniala pod Kraina Czarow (Polish Edition) (2016) 1 copy
O pewnej dziewczynce i jej podrozy wokol Krainy Czarow na okrecie wlasnorecznie wykonanym (2015) 1 copy
The Sin-Eater {short story} 1 copy
Palimpsest {short story} 1 copy
Aeromaus (short story) 1 copy
Coming of Age on Barsoom 1 copy
The Maiden Death 1 copy
The Omikuji Project 1 copy
The City of Blind Delight 1 copy
A Hole to China 1 copy
Silently and Very Fast 3 1 copy
The Manticore's Tale 1 copy
Silently and Very Fast 2 1 copy
Silently and Very Fast 1 1 copy
The Hanged Man 1 copy
LOST FAIRYLAND 1 copy
The Legend of Good Women 1 copy
The Quidnunx 1 copy
Green Like Dying 1 copy
Urchins (short story) 1 copy
Apex Magazine 21 (February 2011) — Editor — 1 copy
A Buyer (short story) 1 copy
The Room (short story) 1 copy
Kallisti (short story) 1 copy
Red Engines (short story) 1 copy
Associated Works
The Steampunk Bible: An Illustrated Guide to the World of Imaginary Airships, Corsets and Goggles, Mad Scientists, and Strange Literature (2011) — Contributor — 733 copies, 14 reviews
A People's Future of the United States: Speculative Fiction from 25 Extraordinary Writers (2019) — Contributor — 540 copies, 20 reviews
From a Certain Point of View: 40 Stories Celebrating 40 Years of The Empire Strikes Back (2020) — Contributor — 518 copies, 8 reviews
Queen Victoria's Book of Spells: An Anthology of Gaslamp Fantasy (2013) — Contributor — 399 copies, 18 reviews
Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology (2015) — Contributor — 346 copies, 8 reviews
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Ninth Annual Collection (2012) — Contributor — 275 copies, 5 reviews
Chicks Dig Time Lords: A Celebration of Doctor Who by the Women Who Love It (2010) — Contributor — 271 copies, 10 reviews
The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Eighteenth Annual Collection (2005) — Contributor — 231 copies, 5 reviews
The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 2008: 21st Annual Collection (2008) — Contributor — 176 copies, 5 reviews
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 6 (2012) — Contributor — 162 copies, 4 reviews
Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Speculative Fiction (2012) — Author — 160 copies, 4 reviews
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 7 (2013) — Contributor — 154 copies, 3 reviews
Mad Hatters and March Hares: All-New Stories from the World of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland (2017) — Contributor — 145 copies, 11 reviews
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 4 (2010) — Contributor — 141 copies, 2 reviews
Whedonistas!: A Celebration of the Worlds of Joss Whedon by the Women Who Love Them (2011) — Contributor — 115 copies, 4 reviews
The Long List Anthology Volume 2: More Stories from the Hugo Award Nomination List (2016) — Contributor — 76 copies, 1 review
Clockwork Phoenix 2: More Tales of Beauty and Strangeness (2009) — Contributor — 70 copies, 1 review
More Human Than Human: Stories of Androids, Robots, and Manufactured Humanity (2017) — Contributor; Contributor — 62 copies, 2 reviews
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 10 (2016) — Contributor — 60 copies, 3 reviews
She Nailed a Stake Through His Head: Tales of Biblical Terror (2010) — Contributor — 54 copies, 5 reviews
Fantasy Magazine, Issue 59 (December 2015) - Queers Destroy Fantasy! Special Issue (2015) — Contributor — 49 copies
The Long List Anthology Volume 7: More Stories from the Hugo Award Nomination List (2022) — Contributor — 38 copies, 2 reviews
The WisCon Chronicles, Vol. 2: Provocative essays on feminism, race, revolution, and the future (2008) — Contributor — 25 copies, 1 review
Starshipsofa Stories Vol 3 — Contributor — 4 copies
The Year's Top Hard Science Fiction Stories 7 — Contributor — 3 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Legal name
- Thomas, Bethany (birth)
- Birthdate
- 1979-05-05
- Gender
- female
- Education
- University of California, San Diego (BA)
University of Edinburgh (MA - Classics) - Occupations
- poet
writer
literary critic - Awards and honors
- storySouth Million Writers Award (2007)
- Agent
- Michele Rubin (Writers House)
- Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Seattle, Washington, USA
- Places of residence
- Maine, USA
- Map Location
- Maine, USA
- Disambiguation notice
- Catherynne Valente is nonbinary and uses any/all pronouns.
Members
Discussions
Found: Science Fiction novel about Film studio and movie-making in Name that Book (July 2024)
Subterranean railway fantasy in Name that Book (June 2012)
Reviews
Valente has tapped into some mythic archetypes and borrowed some fairy tale trappings and woven them into something both familiar and wonderfully strange. Tales are entwined and nested together like matryoshka dolls--exotic, fabulous, sometimes tragic, and sometimes horrifying tales. The creation story of the great Mare is worth the price of admission alone, but that's just the beginning of the thread of stories tattooed on eyelids of the mysterious orphan as told to the prince in the night show more garden.
I'm certainly going to read the second book, In the Cities of Coin and Spice, in the hope that I'll find out what happens to the Stars, or how the orphan acquired her tales. show less
I'm certainly going to read the second book, In the Cities of Coin and Spice, in the hope that I'll find out what happens to the Stars, or how the orphan acquired her tales. show less
Rating: 4.9* of five
The Publisher Says: Valente’s adaptation of the fairy tale to the Old West provides a witty read with complex reverberations from the real world. Snow White is the daughter of a Crow woman abducted and forced into marriage by an unloving white magnate called only Mr. H. She gets her name in mockery, as white is “the one thing I was not and could never be.” When her father remarries, Snow White’s glimpse into the second Mrs. H’s mirror suggests they share the show more yoke of female subservience, but the two are inevitably at odds—so the young woman dons a man’s clothes and, like Huck Finn, chooses the “Indian Territory” that so frightens Mr. H’s world. Enter a pursuing Pinkerton’s detective, a pony named Charming, seven kick-ass outlaw ladies, and a variety of showdowns as Snow White searches for meaning, love, and a semblance of belonging. Any attempt to derive a simple message from this work would be an injustice to the originality of the atmosphere, the complexity of the interplay of its elements, and the simple pleasure of savoring Valente’s exuberant writing.
My Review: Wow.
And off we go.
I've said before that Valente is a favorite phrasewright of mine, and I've read enough of her books to know that she and I share a taste for the image that strikes the tiny knife-edge balance between lush and purple. I know also that her storyteller's eye is unerring, and that her vision of what makes a story worth telling is 20/20. She loves the stories that underpin the bland-, the dry-, the melba-toasty-ness of modern literature. The fairy tales, the myths, the folk stories that kept folk enraptured as the details piled up, and the words wove their nets, and the piles of details fell on you and knocked you into the wordnet and the storyteller, with that unerring eye, shot you through the heart with an ending.
And thus The End. Wait, what? This is the beginning! Ah yes, well observed. The beginning of a finely crafted story is also the ending, both of itself and of the earlier story that precedes the story, because there is no beginning and there is no ending. Except in stories. And never in stories.
So it's there, in the space defined by the story and its ending and the ending and its story, there is where Valente writes her beautiful sentences and tells her well-made tales and gives the reader whose heart hasn't sized itself down to hold only the ghostly, pallid, dust-flavored ephemera of "reality" a chance to exult in landscapes that even physics is finally catching on to. Go look up the myth of Indra's Web and then watch The Elegant Universe if you think I'm blowing smoke.
So many more. Many phrases speaking truths I knew but didn't know I knew, and plucking bright moments from the stream of consciousness that is all of life. I could, I suppose, copy-and-paste the whole novella excerpt here as a kind of meta-review, a review that reviews by simple mirroring. I think they call it plagiarism, though, and there are lots of folks who frown mightily on that, not least (I feel morally certain) Author Catherynne M. Valente, owner of the copyright to these quoted words. But believe me when I tell you that, unless there is no lock inside you that, when properly keyed, opens a door into the icy hot bath of wonder, you'd like it best if I said nothing and Valente said it all.
Why, since I'm blowing big and hot like Old Faithful, am I not giving the excerpt I read five whole, shiny stars? Why deduct that parsimonious, pursey-mouthed tenth of a goddamned star? Because, as beautiful and as delightful as the reading experience was, I am happy and I am refreshed but I am not looking at the world through altered eyes. The fifth full star is for books that mark changes in my life, delivered by them. I give comparatively few five-star ratings because there aren't that many moments in a normal, non-schizophrenic soul's life.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. show less
The Publisher Says: Valente’s adaptation of the fairy tale to the Old West provides a witty read with complex reverberations from the real world. Snow White is the daughter of a Crow woman abducted and forced into marriage by an unloving white magnate called only Mr. H. She gets her name in mockery, as white is “the one thing I was not and could never be.” When her father remarries, Snow White’s glimpse into the second Mrs. H’s mirror suggests they share the show more yoke of female subservience, but the two are inevitably at odds—so the young woman dons a man’s clothes and, like Huck Finn, chooses the “Indian Territory” that so frightens Mr. H’s world. Enter a pursuing Pinkerton’s detective, a pony named Charming, seven kick-ass outlaw ladies, and a variety of showdowns as Snow White searches for meaning, love, and a semblance of belonging. Any attempt to derive a simple message from this work would be an injustice to the originality of the atmosphere, the complexity of the interplay of its elements, and the simple pleasure of savoring Valente’s exuberant writing.
My Review: Wow.
Flush and jangle with silver and possessed of a powerful tooth for both spending and procuring more of whatever glittered under the ground, Mr. H traveled to the Montana Territory on a horse so new and fine her tail squeaked. He disliked to travel in company, being a secretive man by nature. Mr. H had a witch’s own knack for sniffing out what the earth had to give up. The notion of a sapphire rush brewing in the Beartooth Range pricked up the north of that comstock-compass stuck in his heart. All the way out in San Francisco he felt the rumble of the shine.
And off we go.
I've said before that Valente is a favorite phrasewright of mine, and I've read enough of her books to know that she and I share a taste for the image that strikes the tiny knife-edge balance between lush and purple. I know also that her storyteller's eye is unerring, and that her vision of what makes a story worth telling is 20/20. She loves the stories that underpin the bland-, the dry-, the melba-toasty-ness of modern literature. The fairy tales, the myths, the folk stories that kept folk enraptured as the details piled up, and the words wove their nets, and the piles of details fell on you and knocked you into the wordnet and the storyteller, with that unerring eye, shot you through the heart with an ending.
Mr. H encountered the woman who would be his first wife by chance alone. She turned up like an ace of spades in the general store, trading elk meat for cotton cloth and buttons. Her brother, who had shot the beast, escorted her. But the girl did the bargaining. She had good English and did not like the owner of the general store.
The terrible covetous heart of Mr. H immediately conceived a starvation for the girl not lesser in might than his thirst for sapphires or gold. In the lamplight her hair had the very color of coal, plaited in two long braids and swept up at the brow into what I have heard called a pompadour. Her dark mouth was a cut garnet, her skin rich copper, her eyes black diamonds for true. She looked over her shoulder at him and her body hardened to run if such became necessary. Mr. H took this slight stiffening as a sign that his feeling was returned.
And thus The End. Wait, what? This is the beginning! Ah yes, well observed. The beginning of a finely crafted story is also the ending, both of itself and of the earlier story that precedes the story, because there is no beginning and there is no ending. Except in stories. And never in stories.
So it's there, in the space defined by the story and its ending and the ending and its story, there is where Valente writes her beautiful sentences and tells her well-made tales and gives the reader whose heart hasn't sized itself down to hold only the ghostly, pallid, dust-flavored ephemera of "reality" a chance to exult in landscapes that even physics is finally catching on to. Go look up the myth of Indra's Web and then watch The Elegant Universe if you think I'm blowing smoke.
By now I expect you are shaking your head and tallying up on your fingers the obvious and ungraceful lies of my story. Well, I have told it straight. A body can only deliver up the truth its bones know. Its blood which is its history. My body is my truth...
So many more. Many phrases speaking truths I knew but didn't know I knew, and plucking bright moments from the stream of consciousness that is all of life. I could, I suppose, copy-and-paste the whole novella excerpt here as a kind of meta-review, a review that reviews by simple mirroring. I think they call it plagiarism, though, and there are lots of folks who frown mightily on that, not least (I feel morally certain) Author Catherynne M. Valente, owner of the copyright to these quoted words. But believe me when I tell you that, unless there is no lock inside you that, when properly keyed, opens a door into the icy hot bath of wonder, you'd like it best if I said nothing and Valente said it all.
Why, since I'm blowing big and hot like Old Faithful, am I not giving the excerpt I read five whole, shiny stars? Why deduct that parsimonious, pursey-mouthed tenth of a goddamned star? Because, as beautiful and as delightful as the reading experience was, I am happy and I am refreshed but I am not looking at the world through altered eyes. The fifth full star is for books that mark changes in my life, delivered by them. I give comparatively few five-star ratings because there aren't that many moments in a normal, non-schizophrenic soul's life.
Once, I took a bead on a seagull and shot it plumb out of the sky. I did not expect to come close to it. As soon as it dropped down toward the sea my heart fell through a hole in my chest. I looked for the bird all over the meadowy grass, crying miserable. The sun set my tears to boiling. I talked myself into the notion that I would find the seagull wounded through the wing and keep her and mend her and teach her to love humans and live in a house. She would help me and bring me fish and be my companion. She would sleep in my bed with her soft head against my shoulder.
I found the poor bird down at the bottom of a green hill. I had put my bullet straight through her black eye.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. show less
Something was lost when movies started talking. Yes, a lot of silent movies are hopeless melodramas, overacted with simplistic plots that can be carried by intertitles. But to the greatest of the silent directors - yer Sjöströms, yer Murnaus, yer Vertovs, yer Langs, yer von Stroheims, yer Dreyers, and of course yer Mélièses - there was a poetry to it, a freedom to dip directly into that thing beyond plot, into the dream that gave rise to the moving image in the first place, that show more disappeared among clumsier cameras, stricter guidelines, tighter plots and louder stars. Endless possibilities unfettered by anything so prosaic as spoken language.
That's not what this book is about.
Let's see, it starts with ... No, I can't do that. The problem with a story, as soon as you hand it to a movie studio, is that the beginning is always so nebulous, it changes with each rewrite, with each new character brought on board.
It ends here: IN A WORLD nope, can't do that, you need a voiceover. Besides, there's only one world, isn't there?
It ends here: A film crew come to Venus - which, as we all know, was colonised in the late 1800s - to make a documentary about the mysterious disappearance of a small fishing village. The director: A young woman, the daughter of one of the great early directors who transformed the moon into one huge movie set (all in high-contrast black and white, of course), who's grown to hate her father's silly space dramas and just wants realism, true stories, and yes, even the SOUND of her own voice, even though everyone knows real movies are supposed to be silent. Things, as they are wont to do in space dramas, go Very Very Wrong. But of course, what's an ending without a story, so after enough years have passed, her father tries to tell that story.
Radiance is a remarkable book; a poem, a fairytale, not remotely science fiction in the sense that anything here is plausible; it lives in a world where mankind easily spreads across the solar system via rocketships fired out of cannons, where every planet is full of colourful flowers and strange animals but (probably) no intelligent life but our own, where old-time radio dramas and silent b&w movies are broadcast to the moons of Jupiter, where Charon and Pluto are connected by a bridge trafficked by stagecoach. And we get dropped into this by the means of camera lenses, gossip columns, movie scripts, interviews, diaries and interrogation records, trying to piece together not only what happened to Severine Unck and her film crew, but what it means. Because nothing is real if it's not recorded, but as any film director will tell you, anything that gets recorded (even documentaries? Especially documentaries) becomes artifice the second you yell "CUT!" Or was it "ACTION!"? You know, kind of like how if we find a huge aquatic animal on Venus, we're going to call it a whale even if it's not technically a cetacean; it fits the story we know. We think. It's the beauty of cinema: Anyone can play any part, with the right script and a clever enough crew making it look right. And sure the actual flesh-and-blood people get used up and shat out and hurt and heartbroken, but honestly, who cares what happens when the camera's off?
In the place I am showing you, no one can live anywhere but Earth.
Oh... Oh, God. What an awful, lonely place. How can a place like that be? How can they bear it?
Have you ever seen a movie?
I've never read Valente before but I'm going to have to read more of her. She bases this story (has her characters base their takes on the story) on so many sources, on tales old and new (and as we all know, fairytales are very old indeed), twisting them around each other until they bleed up new ones, throwing us from noir to space opera to murder mysteries to animated children's stories without missing a beat, but without ever getting to close to the ONE story, the ONE explanation, the ONE perspective that will supercede all others. It's a sheer delight to read, an explosion of imagination that never forgets that the almighty Power Of Stories bullshit can awake things you can't control. show less
That's not what this book is about.
Let's see, it starts with ... No, I can't do that. The problem with a story, as soon as you hand it to a movie studio, is that the beginning is always so nebulous, it changes with each rewrite, with each new character brought on board.
It ends here: IN A WORLD nope, can't do that, you need a voiceover. Besides, there's only one world, isn't there?
It ends here: A film crew come to Venus - which, as we all know, was colonised in the late 1800s - to make a documentary about the mysterious disappearance of a small fishing village. The director: A young woman, the daughter of one of the great early directors who transformed the moon into one huge movie set (all in high-contrast black and white, of course), who's grown to hate her father's silly space dramas and just wants realism, true stories, and yes, even the SOUND of her own voice, even though everyone knows real movies are supposed to be silent. Things, as they are wont to do in space dramas, go Very Very Wrong. But of course, what's an ending without a story, so after enough years have passed, her father tries to tell that story.
Radiance is a remarkable book; a poem, a fairytale, not remotely science fiction in the sense that anything here is plausible; it lives in a world where mankind easily spreads across the solar system via rocketships fired out of cannons, where every planet is full of colourful flowers and strange animals but (probably) no intelligent life but our own, where old-time radio dramas and silent b&w movies are broadcast to the moons of Jupiter, where Charon and Pluto are connected by a bridge trafficked by stagecoach. And we get dropped into this by the means of camera lenses, gossip columns, movie scripts, interviews, diaries and interrogation records, trying to piece together not only what happened to Severine Unck and her film crew, but what it means. Because nothing is real if it's not recorded, but as any film director will tell you, anything that gets recorded (even documentaries? Especially documentaries) becomes artifice the second you yell "CUT!" Or was it "ACTION!"? You know, kind of like how if we find a huge aquatic animal on Venus, we're going to call it a whale even if it's not technically a cetacean; it fits the story we know. We think. It's the beauty of cinema: Anyone can play any part, with the right script and a clever enough crew making it look right. And sure the actual flesh-and-blood people get used up and shat out and hurt and heartbroken, but honestly, who cares what happens when the camera's off?
In the place I am showing you, no one can live anywhere but Earth.
Oh... Oh, God. What an awful, lonely place. How can a place like that be? How can they bear it?
Have you ever seen a movie?
I've never read Valente before but I'm going to have to read more of her. She bases this story (has her characters base their takes on the story) on so many sources, on tales old and new (and as we all know, fairytales are very old indeed), twisting them around each other until they bleed up new ones, throwing us from noir to space opera to murder mysteries to animated children's stories without missing a beat, but without ever getting to close to the ONE story, the ONE explanation, the ONE perspective that will supercede all others. It's a sheer delight to read, an explosion of imagination that never forgets that the almighty Power Of Stories bullshit can awake things you can't control. show less
I can count on one hand books with satisfying endings, by which I mean endings that feel right. I didn't know how things would turn out for September, and even though I knew that the author and I are on the same hind-brain wavelength about this whole Fairyland business, I couldn't see how everything could be reconciled.
So I was surprised at the end, because I hadn't thought of it, but also not surprised because the end is so fitting and so right. I wept real tears at the end. Happy tears, show more but they were ripped from my gut. (Actually, I initially lost it long before, at the scene with the Great Vole, where I was so overcome my eyes just leaked for 15 minutes while I put the book down and stared at the wall. I was a mess. The rest was bonus.)
These books are beautiful and amazing and restorative. show less
So I was surprised at the end, because I hadn't thought of it, but also not surprised because the end is so fitting and so right. I wept real tears at the end. Happy tears, show more but they were ripped from my gut. (Actually, I initially lost it long before, at the scene with the Great Vole, where I was so overcome my eyes just leaked for 15 minutes while I put the book down and stared at the wall. I was a mess. The rest was bonus.)
These books are beautiful and amazing and restorative. show less
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Statistics
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