Author Topic: Pseudopod 492: The Fisher Queen  (Read 4523 times)

Bdoomed

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on: May 29, 2016, 03:08:23 AM
Pseudopod 492: The Fisher Queen

by Alyssa Wong.

“The Fisher Queen” was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May/June 2014. It is available to read free online at fu-GEN.org. “The Fisher Queen” was on the shortlist for the 2014 Nebula along with Eugie Foster’s last story, “When It Ends, He Catches Her” which ran last year on Pseudopod. It has been translated into Chinese, French, and German. “The Fisher Queen” is set up in the fashion of traditional oral storytelling, where truth and myth blend together. However, it’s about the very real effects of societal, systematic violence against women.

Alyssa Wong is a Shirley Jackson-, and World Fantasy Award-nominated author, shark aficionado, and 2013 graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop. She made the shortlist for the 2015 Stoker Award and won the 2015 Nebula Award for “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers” which you should go check out at Nightmare Magazine. Her work has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Tor.com, Uncanny Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine, and Black Static, among others. She is an MFA candidate at North Carolina State University and a member of the Manhattan-based writing group Altered Fluid, and can be found on Twitter @crashwong. Alyssa Wong has been deservedly shortlisted for the Joseph W. Campbell Award for New Writers this year, and “The Fisher Queen” is part of why she made it to the list.

Your narrator – Mae Heaney is originally from Manila, Philippines and currently lives in Melbourne, Australia with her Irish husband, 2 young children and Parmi the Chook. She is an IT professional who once briefly dabbled in theater, and loves to bake to tame the voices in her head. She is very successful in changing nappies under five minutes, but fails miserably in trying to read her toddler’s mind and in updating her blog celticpinaymom.blogspot.com.

Your guest host this week is Associate Editor Dagny Paul. Dagny is an 8th-grade English teacher who lives in New Orleans with her husband and four-year-old son. She has an unhealthy (but entertaining) obsession with comic books and horror movies.



MY MOTHER WAS A FISH. That’s why I can swim so well, according to my father, who is a plain fisherman with a fisherman’s plain logic, but uncanny flair for the dramatic. And while it’s true that I can cut through the water like a minnow, or a hand dipped over the edge of a speedboat, I personally think it’s because no one can grow up along the Mekong without learning two things: how to swim, and how to avoid the mermaids.

Mermaids, like my father’s favorite storytale version of my mother, are fish. They aren’t people. They are stupid like fish, they eat your garbage like fish, they sell on the open market like fish. Keep your kids out of the water, keep your trash locked up, and if they come close to land, scream a lot and bang pots together until they startle away. They’re pretty basic.

My sisters tried to talk to a mermaid once. It was caught up in one of Dad’s trammel nets, and when they went to check the net out back behind the house, they found this mermaid tangled in it. It was a freshwater one, a bottom-feeder, with long, sparse hair whose color my sisters still argue about to this day. Iris, the oldest, felt bad for it and made May splash some water on its fluttery gills with her red plastic pail. She asked the mermaid if it was okay, what its name was. But it just stared at her with its stupid sideways fish eyes, mouth gaping open and closed with mud trickling out over its whiskers. Then Dad came home and yelled at Iris and May for bringing in the nets too early and touching the mermaid, which probably had sea lice and all kinds of other diseases.





Listen to this week's Pseudopod.

I'd like to hear my options, so I could weigh them, what do you say?
Five pounds?  Six pounds? Seven pounds?


Bdoomed

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Reply #1 on: June 01, 2016, 05:51:58 AM
Loved, loved, LOVED the intro for this.  Great work, Dagny!

Thoroughly enjoyed the story, though I felt it hammered in the "disgusting fish" idea a bit much. 

That said, I loooove magical realism and this one had me hooked almost instantly!

I'd like to hear my options, so I could weigh them, what do you say?
Five pounds?  Six pounds? Seven pounds?


dagny

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Reply #2 on: June 01, 2016, 05:18:13 PM
Loved, loved, LOVED the intro for this.  Great work, Dagny!

Thoroughly enjoyed the story, though I felt it hammered in the "disgusting fish" idea a bit much. 

That said, I loooove magical realism and this one had me hooked almost instantly!

Aww...thanks!

And "hooked"--I see what you did there. :)

"Wolfman's got nards!"


Unblinking

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Reply #3 on: June 02, 2016, 01:20:29 AM
I will comment on the story later, but FYI the post story commentary refers to "the author N.K. Jemisin" I don't know if maybe the name could be cropped from the audio in that sentence so it just says "the author" since it uses the wrong name?



dagny

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Reply #4 on: June 02, 2016, 01:50:38 AM
I will comment on the story later, but FYI the post story commentary refers to "the author N.K. Jemisin" I don't know if maybe the name could be cropped from the audio in that sentence so it just says "the author" since it uses the wrong name?

I was quoting N.K. Jemison, a different author from the one who wrote "The Fisher Queen," in my commentary.

"Wolfman's got nards!"


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Reply #5 on: June 02, 2016, 01:44:54 PM
I will comment on the story later, but FYI the post story commentary refers to "the author N.K. Jemisin" I don't know if maybe the name could be cropped from the audio in that sentence so it just says "the author" since it uses the wrong name?

I was quoting N.K. Jemison, a different author from the one who wrote "The Fisher Queen," in my commentary.

Ah, apologies!

Listening again, it appears to have been a misinterpretation on my part.

"The author N.K. Jemisin has said"

To me "The Author" when mentioned in the first few sentences of a post-story commentary registers in my brain as implicitly "The Author Of The Story You Just Heard" and then the name immediately after "The Author" who was not The Author Of The Story You Just Heard threw me for a loop.  I even replayed that sentence 3 times last night before posting to make sure I hadn't just misheard something, and apparently I was still wrong!  

If it had been "Author N.K. Jemisin has said" I think I would've interpreted it correctly?  I think the definite article made me take the leap from "N.K. Jemisin is an author" to "N.K. Jemisin is the author of this story".

Anyway, sorry about the confused post!



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Reply #6 on: June 02, 2016, 01:53:56 PM
OK, as to the actual story itself!

This one was really dark and creepy and effective.  The examination of whether mermaids are human or just fish, the way that they were used implying one while the words people said to justify their actions implied the other (the commentary was really good on examining the hypocricy of that dichotomy, dagny, thank you for it!). I liked the variations of mermaid types from the bottom-feeding catfish variety to the more exotic ocean species, and especially the appearance of the deep water mermaid whose appearance has very little to do with the common conceptions of mermaids but makes sense for deep water adaptations.

I had read this one while reading Nebula nominated works last year and I thought the audio adaptation was a nice enhancement for it.

When I first read it I was lukewarm on the somewhat branching ending.  I liked that more this time perhaps because I knew what to expect.  Even the "definitive" ending I'm not entirely sure I know what happened--did she wish for the mermaids to swap bodies with the sailors so that the sailors would go to meet the abuse and death that they inflicted on so many mermaids before that?  That seemed like the most likely interpretation but I wasn't certain that was it. 

I haven't read many stories by Alyssa Wong, but the ones that I have read have been really excellent.  "Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers" is probably my favorite of hers so far and her name has become one of those where I am immediately excited when I see it on an upcoming story.



Obleo21

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Reply #7 on: June 02, 2016, 09:26:39 PM
I absolutely love this story, though I thought the 'epilogue' ending was unnecessary. What a unique interpretation of the mermaid trope! I want to hear more from Alyssa.



Dwango

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Reply #8 on: June 03, 2016, 02:56:58 PM
Another interesting take on mermaids, similar to a previous story "The Sea of Wives" where the Selkies are fished to be wives of men.  This was more insidious by far, especially the lying and the raping.  As the truth is revealed, its gets pretty disturbing.

The ending was a big jump for the character, for it is a pretty chilling thing to do to both the people and the mermaids.  A very Brother's Grim ending.  The only issue is there was not much indication that the girl could be capable of such an act, and the sudden turning on the father so quickly.  I should think it would take a while for her to digest the truth about her father, unless there was something in her mermaid's heritage that would allow for this.  The mermaids did seem somewhat more predatory, but that was from the girl's perspective, and she had a pretty dim view of them as just fish.  I also don't want to think that just because her mother was a mermaid, that would affect her actions.  Maybe its that cold view of the mermaids that made her make such a wish, the continual hatred that made her less sensitive.  But she seemed pretty sheltered from the horror of what was really happening until the last minute.  I think that is what made the ending jarring for me.



Metalsludge

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Reply #9 on: June 06, 2016, 01:53:37 AM
I had mixed feelings about this one as it seems well written, yet pretty familiar. It's remarkably similar to an earlier Pseudopod story by Eugie Foster, Biba Jibun - the one set in Japan where the girl eventually realizes that her mother really was a spirit/demon-thing, and the theme is not so different either as it dealt with the treatment of women in a society as well.

This story has a similar setup and execution - another teen girl discovers her family members have abusive ulterior motives in their actions and a shady past, and that the family legend of her being born of a non-human mother actually is the truth after all. A deadly revenge is enacted on one or more of the icky male characters, and the girl gets to meet mom and discover the whole Truth.

The big divergence in the two stories, aside from the mother only getting a sort of stand-in here, is that, in the Biba Jibun story, the character gets to run off with mom into a sort of happy ending, while here, though the author notes that she is well of aware of that kind of ending for this kind of story, there will not necessarily be such a simple happy ending here. We still get the deadly revenge fantasy though, and the mother stand-in is another grinning and knowing creature who reveals truths while offering alternatives to how the world of the character is through magic.

I'm not sure which ending I prefer. I too like the idea of the wound that won't heal, as it seems to hint at both lost innocence and impossible to reconcile realities. Even with the similar just deserts element, this ending feels more realistic in that way, recognizing that there is no complete healing from such realizations as what the character has gone through. But then again, I liked the main character's grab for empowerment and the even more mischievous mom-thing in Foster's story more.

In both stories, the girls seem to choose to side with their inhuman ancestry, and let the humans who bug them die, as a sort of rebellious act. In comments on the Biba Jibun story, people questioned that a little and wondered if the character had really found wisdom or empowerment, or had just given up and gone with being a demon. Here, the thing I'm finding troubling is that the other people on the boat, some of them teens like herself, are not much more guilty than the main character is, as she has been in the same trade for a while too, and they don't seem to fully grasp the implications of their system any more than she did until being just recently enlightened about her ancestry, even if it's arguably a willful ignorance. Yet we are seemingly supposed to just accept her absolute judgment placed upon them as an absolute justice. It doesn't quite follow for me, as she did all the same stuff to the "fish", short of molesting them, as her colleagues for quite a while. But she is part "fish", so she gets a pass as she can pick sides? For a story that is supposedly about learning to not pick sides against the "other" (we are told in the outro), that seems a bit convenient. But then, maybe it's not supposed to be taken at face value.

Lastly, it's kind of an interesting inversion of Innsmouth, in that instead of the "fish" coming from the sea to mate with the humans, the humans go to the sea to mate with the "fish."



Fenrix

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Reply #10 on: June 15, 2016, 02:36:46 AM
I liked this even more after listening to it. Mae did a great job with the narration. Also, the human trafficking metaphor really jumped out on this most recent visitation to the story. Added a nice extra dark layer to the objectification.

All cat stories start with this statement: “My mother, who was the first cat, told me this...”


Metrophor

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Reply #11 on: July 15, 2016, 04:47:34 AM
The only issue is there was not much indication that the girl could be capable of such an act, and the sudden turning on the father so quickly.  

It seemed like she was fine with using them for food (since she didn't think they were sapient)- but there's a difference between killing and eating something for survival, and deliberate cruelty.

I'll be honest, if I found out that one of my relatives was physically and/or sexually abusing something, be it animal or human (to say nothing of possibly being the product of that rape and abuse)? I'd do the same exact thing.  It doesn't matter how much you love someone. There are some lines you just do not cross.

(of course I say that, even though I have no way of knowing how different circumstances would change my personality, but she DOES call her father a monster after the revelation.)

Of course, this story, along with The Toyol and Escape From Kroo Bay, really got under my skin because (again) abuse is one of my foot-down berserk buttons. That being said, I thoroughly enjoyed the listen. What a fascinating story.
« Last Edit: July 15, 2016, 04:50:31 AM by Metrophor »