Mormons and SpecFic - Liz Busby

Irreantum Genre Issue: Editor’s Comments

I intended to post this after I finished releasing these comments on social media, but graduate school got the best of me. Nonetheless, they deserve a permanent home here, so apologies for the un-timely post.

Irreantum’s genre issue is alive in the world! I have been absolutely dying to share this issue with you all for months. These stories absolutely prove that combining Mormonism with genre elements doesn’t have to be gimmicky or silly; speculative fiction (and other genres, though most of these works have a supernatural slant) can lead to profound thoughts about our culture, about our beliefs, about human nature, and about the universe. Here are my thoughts as a co-editor of the issue on the stories contained therein. I’m going in reverse order of the table of contents just to make sure the ending pieces don’t get forgotten.

Could Brandon Sanderson Have Saved the Nephites? – Obviously, as someone who also writes criticism about Mormonism in Brandon Sanderson’s work, I feel really excited about this piece. Nick Fredrick is a very careful and reflective scholar; his analysis of the parables in The Way of Kings left me thinking about both Stormlight and The Book of Mormon in ways that I hadn’t before. After I listened to him read this piece at LTUE last year, I knew it needed to be published, and I’m so pleased that we were able to include it in this issue.

The Year the Graveyard Flooded – Emily Feuz Jensen’s piece straddles the line between realism and magical realism in the best ways. Are the people of the town just interpreting events in faith-promoting ways or is something really happening? Either way, this story features classic LDS themes of turning the hearts to the fathers in a lyrical, contemplative package.

The Incident at Burning Bush Ranch – I love the way Shayla Frandsen wields the tropes of the “found footage” genre in a written package. The ambiguities and corrections feel authentically folkloresque, and the story she tells plays off of an important but less-explored aspect of LDS culture, girls’ camp. This was one of the first submissions for this issue that I fell in love with.

Welded – I’ll admit to being intimidated by poetry, but I love what Makoto Hunter has done by mashing together poetry and historical research. I learned a lot about the history of polygamy from the footnotes and a lot about the human heart from the stanzas. Hopefully you’ll enjoy unraveling exactly what the author is implying as much as I did.

An Opportunity – This story is unique because Jeanna Mason Stay tells it from an outsider perspective; her protagonist is both outside the LDS community and outside her family’s special heritage. But there’s something undeniably Mormon about the magic system she presents and the wrestle the protagonist has with her past and her future. In an age of strained family relationships, this story will touch your heart and stay with you for a long time.

7 Devils – Declan Hyde gives this issue some classic demonic possession. I love the LDS twists on the lore, but the ending is what made my heart race in the best horror way. I recommend reading this one with the lights on and in a highly-populated area (or the inverse, if you like being scared).

The Archaemaji – This story is a Heavenly Mother story, but perhaps not like the ones you’ve read before. While it’s set in a secondary world, it makes commentary on an issue that’s important in contemporary LDS writing. D. C. Wynters’s ending struck as unique among the Mormon literature that longs for the divine feminine, and it’s one that couldn’t have been achieved without the unique fantasy set-up of the story.

Unidentified Faith-affirming Object – Gregory Brooks’s irreverent mash-up made me laugh out loud from the first line: “A column of light, gradually descending like a tractor beam.” Mormon readers might think they can tell exactly where this poem is going to go, but the scope quickly grows wider than you might anticipate. The radical recontextualization of everything you know will feel familiar and, dare I say, alien at the same time.

An interview with Sandy Petersen – I haven’t listened to the full interview yet, but I’m excited to learn about an aspect of LDS involvement in the nerd-space that I’ve previously only heard about. Sandy Peterson created The Call of Cthulu, an influential RPG game based on Lovecraftian mythos. His story is an important part of the history of Mormon speculative fiction. Thanks to D. J. Butler for conducting this interview.

Remember the Blood – When I first read Nate Givens’s story, it gave me strong early Orson Scott Card vibes. Partly this is because of the horror/dread aspect of this story’s lore. Part is the young male protagonist, both cocky and naive. And part is the unique blend of Mormon and Mesoamerican folklore, strongly reminiscent of Pastwatch or “America” from Folk of the Fringe. For me, the ending hits the perfect blending of fantasy and theology for a surprising-but-inevitable resolution that stuck with me.

The Case of the Missing Sacrament Bread – Katherine Cowley sets up a humorous mystery with the form of a ward history, a genre which perhaps only those who have to write them know about. I know none of the Relief Society histories I’ve written were half so interesting as this. You’ll recognize many characters from your local ward in her send-up of the quotidian aspects of LDS culture.

It’s About the People Under You – The concept of this one made me laugh out loud when I was reading through the slush pile, and I knew we needed it for the issue. Willow Dawn Becker satirizes so many aspects of Utah Mormon culture with the protagonist’s gradual downward spiral.

This is What Happened in Trígonus – Alejandro Seta’s work, presented in both English and the original Spanish, examines a familiar scripture story from a different frame of reference, you might say. I was so happy to see this submission right after finishing my analysis of how Mormons write about aliens as it fits right into the pattern of expanding the gospel story beyond a single planet. Gabriel González’s lyrical translation reflects the ethereal and dreamlike nature of the story.

The Double-Snatcher – I’ll admit that when I first started reading W. O. Hemsath’s story, I was skeptical as I’m not much of a consumer of talking animal stories. But when I realized what she was doing, I zipped right through to the heartbreaking ending. Maybe you’ll catch on more quickly than I did, but either way, I know you’ll enjoy this clever story that takes on an issue I never before considered.

You Are Beautiful, Dead, Whole – Chanel Earl’s story/poem takes fairy tale tropes and scripture stories, places them in a blender, and pushes “puree.” The result is a smooth refreshment composed of the real and the fictional, all of it with a special mythopoeic feel. Makes me excited to see what she comes up with for the upcoming folklore-themed issue of Irreantum she’s helping to edit.

The Haunted – I’ve saved another of my favorites for last (or first, if you’re reading the right way round). Mathilda Zeller’s story of a teen girl with a strained relationship with the church and with the ghosts who haunt her is a real achievement in Mormon speculative fiction. Her characters manage to be very real about their relationships to the institutional church while also dealing with a very unreal problem. I laughed, cried, and learned to love Moroni Alvarez and our unnamed protagonist, and I hope you do as well.

The genre issue, along with the rest of Irreantum, is freely available on the internet. That being said, if you feel you got some value out of this issue, please support the writers by joining the Irreantum Patreon. It only charges when a new issue is released; I believe the donations for this issue will be collected November 1st. The Patreon money goes straight to paying the authors who worked so hard to bring you these unique stories that might not have been published in a mainstream press. Plus by becoming a patron, you’ll get early access to Irreantum’s next issue. There are currently three themed issues accepting submissions, one on folklore and one on the restoration. I’m sure you’re gonna want to see what comes next!

Author’s Note – Reclaiming the Desert

Read “Reclaiming the Desert” in the fiction section of Wayfare. Mild spoilers ahead!

This story started off like many of my stories do, in response to a prompt: a short fiction magazine was looking for pieces for a solar punk collection. In case you haven’t heard of it (I hadn’t!), solar punk is a new-ish genre of speculative fiction that focuses on an optimistic future where humanity has harnessed technology along with traditional techniques to create a future where the planet is brought into a sustainable balance. When I was casting about for an idea to fill this prompt, I turned to the news story that was happening around me: Utah’s 20-year-long megadrought. In 2022 we were finally confronting the impending doom that the drying of the Great Salt Lake would bring upon the Salt Lake Valley, especially the risk of toxic chemicals from the lakebed being dispersed into the air. I combined these two elements by researching what sustainable, high-tech living might look like in the desert.

scenic view of desert landscape against dramatic sky — Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

There are a lot of really wild ideas out there! A TED Talk by Magnus Larsson on turning dunes into architecture inspired the structure of the train station where Martea waits for her sister. This real-life waffle gardening technique inspired her desert-friendly garden. The neighborhood park swale is also based on a real-life technique. And Martea’s explanation about why they rely on cattle in the desert is drawn from Allan Savory’s TED Talk about how herds of cattle can combat desertification. All this being said, I’m not an expert on sustainable desert living or on Utah’s ecology and there was only so much learning time I could put in for a short story, so I’m sure I’ve gotten some things wrong. Please go gentle on a poor fiction author.

Over the course of my research, I was struck by how different it looked to live sustainably in the desert than in other environments portrayed in typical solar punk stories. The things that work in a more temperate area don’t make sense in Utah’s unique climate, yet there’s so much that’s still possible. This reminded me of the misunderstandings between Mormons and nonmembers. Both ways of life can work well in their own way, but there’s a tendency from both sides to condemn the other because they don’t understand why they do things differently.

In the story, I posit that a highly-organized community like the Latter-day Saint community is well-positioned to enact ecological change in the west because the division of water in a dry climate requires sacrifices that aren’t naturally going to happen without outside intervention by some kind of authority. (Witness the way the federal government had to step in and impose top-down reforms after Western states were unable to make the numbers add up for sharing decreased water from the Colorado River.) Most solar punk stories favor a more anarchic or libertarian form of government where there’s so much abundance that everyone can basically just do whatever they want. (Though of course, those decisions never seem to lead to overconsumption, which might be too optimistic . . . .) From there, I decided the main conflict of the story would be from an outsider visiting New Zion and trying to understand a system that was counter-intuitive to their vision of the world.

Often, Mormon lit stories are from Mormon families looking at the one who left or the one who left looking back in their Mormon community. I decided to flip these roles a bit by having the Mormon be the one who left her family and feels misunderstood. Initially I thought Martea’s whole family would be coming to visit her, but that ended up being too many characters for the size of the story, so I reduced it to just her sister.

The theme of reconciliation without conversion is one that feels very important to me right now. Every day, it seems, I hear stories of people cutting each other out of their lives because they don’t agree on politics or religion. But we need each other. We all need love and support and community, and trying to build those only with people who agree on everything is unnecessarily limiting. If we can’t bridge the divide over these issues with our closest family and friends, what chance does the world have to do the same? The key is not to convince others that we are right, but to learn to live together and love each other even while we live and believe in different ways.

The short fiction magazine I’d written the story for didn’t end up taking it. I’m so thankful that Jeanine Bee, Wayfare’s fiction editor, reached out to me for this story, and for the effort that she and the whole Wayfare editorial team put into helping me revise this story into the best possible version of itself. I hope it inspires you to make sustainable changes in your life and to reach out to those who may see things differently than you do.

Latent Mormonism or Explicit Representation in Speculative Fiction: Some Thoughts

A slightly updated version of this post appears on the Association for Mormon Letters blog

When I was reading a new compilation of CS Lewis’s ideas in On Writing (and Writers), I was particularly struck by this quote (originally from an essay found in God in the Dock, I believe) as it might apply to the Latter-day Saint writer:

What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects – with their Christianity latent.

In the surrounding text, Lewis claims that it’s much less beneficial to write works of apologetics than it is to write books on other subjects with a definitively Christian worldview. Ignoring the fact that this statement is exactly the opposite of what CS Lewis did in his own writing practice (both in nonfiction and fiction), I wondered whether I buy the argument.

A Reading List of Mormons and Aliens

This morning I had the great privilege to read my paper “One Great Whole: An Exploration of the Alien as the Self in Mormon Science Fiction” as part of the Association for Mormon Letters 2023 conference. You can watch a recording of the whole panel on YouTube, and you definitely should because my co-presenters Paul Williams and Jesse Christensen brought some great thoughts about Orson Scott Card’s Alvin Maker series and Brazilian missionary novels respectively.

I meant to get this annotated reading list up before the panel, but better after than never. So, here are some interesting readings to consider about Mormons and aliens, divided into fiction and nonfiction and listed in the order discussed in the paper:

mosaic alien on wall — Photo by Francesco Ungaro on Pexels.com

Five Stages to Acceptance of the Brandon Sanderson Wired Article

This article also appears on the Association for Mormon Letters blog

Someone tagged me on Discord–“Calling Liz Busby!”–with a link to a profile of Brandon Sanderson on WIRED.

The tagline got me really excited: “He’s the biggest fantasy writer in the world. He’s also very Mormon. These things are profoundly related.” Yes! Yes, they are!

Studying the humanities can be very lonely, especially when your passion involves the intersection of a genre typically looked down on by the academy and a religion looked down on by both the religious right and the secular left. Reading through the article, my only thought was, “This is great! Someone else recognized that Brandon Sanderson’s work is influenced by Mormonism. And look at that great quote from Brandon. I’m totally using that in a future paper!”

I posted on Twitter that I was disappointed that they hadn’t consulted my work for the article, but overall, I was pretty happy with it.

Then I started chatting with Mormon lit friends about the article. Most of us were excited for Brandon to be getting this recognition and even that someone in the mainstream media had almost recognized that Mormon lit is actually *a thing.*

Then the little doubts started dripping in. “Isn’t it weird that he insults Brandon’s writing to his face?” Yes, but even Brandon admits he’s not a flowery writer. We aren’t here for the prose, and acknowledging that is fair. “What’s with the author’s elitist attitude towards pretty much every restaurant in Utah?” I guess understandable. I myself miss Seattle’s Asian food after moving back here. “Are those side-long insults Brandon’s family and friends?” “Or towards the fans at Dragonsteel 2022 when he claims to read predominantly science fiction and fantasy?” “Is this author attempting to do a ‘why do people love these books so much’ article and just forgetting to actually include the upswing?”

I open the article again and as I reread it, and suddenly it’s everywhere. The snide reference to Dragonsteel employees as “people/Mormons,” the putdowns of Brandon as “unquotable” and “boring” seemingly because he’s a family man without a dark past or drama of any kind, calling his writing group lame because they eat apple crisp instead of drinking cocktails.

Have I just read an anti-Mormon article and had the whole thing go over my head?

The rage across LDS author Twitter spreads quickly. Many of them are friends of Brandon, personally slighted in the article by name (or omission) or by association. Even those who don’t read or like Brandon’s work are baffled that a mainstream publication would put out such a poorly written article. The craft is frankly bad, not to mention the outright rudeness of insulting someone who lets you stay in their home and eat dinner with their children. It drips of coastal elite-ism, something that both Mormons and fantasy fans are familiar with wiping off their faces.

And there’s even more anger in the Sanderson fandom sites. I feel vindicated as the messages of wrath pour into the 17th Shard Discord. I compulsively watch YouTube takedowns of the article to assure myself that I am justified. Though most of them focus on the disrespect of Brandon’s person life, his success writing commercially successful books, and the speculative fiction community writ large, most of them also find the side-eye comments about Mormonism to be weird and inappropriate.

Most of this anger is put back under wraps after Brandon’s response to the article is posted. I vicariously pat all Mormons on the back for taking the high road and get a few chuckles out of the Reddit comments, thinking I’ll move on with my life.

Then another pattern.

Jessica Day George sums it up beautifully: “Hot take: You can denigrate a poorly written article about a Mormon author without adding that you hate the Mormon church and all Mormons.” I am reminded again of the comment made to McKay Coppins, now ubiquitous in these kinds of discussions: “your people have absolutely no cultural cachet.”

I think back to the YouTube takedowns and how they were careful to say that it’s okay to criticize Mormon doctrine because, who wouldn’t disagree with those crazy people? A recent Pew survey shows that Mormons are the most universally disliked religion in America, and the only one that also likes all other religious groups. Sometimes being Mormon feels like you’re that one nice kid in middle school who just can’t seem to make a friend. The one who probably reads large fantasy novels during lunch to hide that he has no one to talk to.

Now I consider Brandon’s carefully worded response in a new light: is he just continuing the long tradition of Mormons taking it on the nose and then smiling and thanking them for the publicity? Taking out an ad encouraging people to “read the book” after they’ve watched a play that treats your whole religion as a joke? Some people comment that they wish he had taken the opportunity to at least say, “Hey, this wasn’t cool.”

At this point, I start noticing a pattern in the posts on Twitter: “Man, I wish there was an interesting article about the connection between Mormons and science fiction/fantasy, but this ain’t it.”

Something snaps inside me and I decide to start spamming posts: We’re here! Mormons have been writing about this for a while, and it might do you some good to read what we’ve already said before jumping into the conversation as if you invented it. In fact, there’s an AML conference coming up to discuss Mormon genre fiction in about a month. Watch it on YouTube! Check out these essays! Please listen!

Sometimes it feels like screaming into the void, but at least I can still hear the echoes and know that I was there.

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