Announcements
Introducing Can You Sign My Tentacle? by Brandon O’Brien
Cthulhu Meets Hip-Hop in a New Chapbook from Interstellar Flight Press
Science fiction is a radical genre, but that fact is a neutral one. It has the capacity to unlock the anxieties of today and cast them back to us through a myriad of lenses, some so clinical and precise that the tiniest flecks of complexity appear in sharp relief, others so comically absurd that as you watch you cannot help but ask aloud, “do we really behave like that? Damn. That’s… weird, isn’t it?”
We’re stoked to share our latest chapbook of poems. Can You Sign My Tentacle? is a horror poetry collection that combines heroes of hip hop like Childish Gambino with monsters from the Lovecraft mythos — and flips the genre as you’ve never seen before. This poetry collection is absolutely stunning and will make you rethink how you view H.P. Lovecraft.
Nightmares are reversed as O’Brien asks readers to see Blackness as radically significant. Can You Sign My Tentacle? explores the monsters we know and the ones that hide behind racism, sexism, and violence, resulting in poems that are both comic and cosmic.
Can You Sign My Tentacle? releases August 20th, 2021 from Interstellar Flight Press. Review copies are now available on NetGalley. Now available for pre-order!
Author’s Note: Can You Sign My Tentacle?
by Brandon O’Brien
In mid-2018, I once submitted to one of my favorite science fiction and fantasy magazines a poem I had written mostly on a lark — a semi-comic juxtaposition between the weird, surreal, often hostile relationship the media has with one particular musician and actor, and the similarly weird, surreal, hostile lens through which one of science fiction’s most beloved mythologies would view that same person based solely on their body. To be quite honest, the poem was a very sudden thing, the stuff of poetic genius that wiser artists remark on — or wiser poets warn you against — all the time. I had written it months before almost as an experiment. In that year, I had read it aloud only once. Beyond that, I hadn’t thought about that poem much more that day.
Four months later, accountant Botham Jean was shot dead in his apartment by a Dallas Police Department patrol officer who came off the wrong floor in her apartment building. She found a non-threatening, surely afraid Jean, in his own living room, eating ice cream, not expecting to face a police-issue pistol that evening, and she took his life for alleged fear of her own.
This juxtaposition surely means very little to most. Sadly, a death of a Black person by extrajudicial police violence seems to be a punctuating event in the international calendar — even if you can’t set your watch to it, you know where you were when it happened, its relation in time to other moments in your life. I am not an American citizen, but things stood out to me regardless: he was born in the Caribbean, a St. Lucian citizen; he was only a few years younger than me, an accountant with one of the States’ most popular firms. In short, in a lot of the ways many other Black people point out that someone has worked very hard to not deserve this kind of violence, it still visited Jean at a moment he could not prepare for.
One of science fiction’s most well-known authors has a history in his work of devaluing and denigrating people of colour.
We don’t need to go into the details. I suspect that you know. If you’ve gotten this far in the collection, at least you can proffer a guess. It obviously wasn’t his claim to fame — he was an otherwise talented and creative hand in the genre, and we credit him on the expansion of an entire subgenre mythos that science fantasy and horror still reveres to this day.
The conversation is a challenging, bitter thing: it would be utterly dishonest to say that the creator in question hasn’t had a strong, indelible effect on the genre, and yet that effect is shaped by an undeniable, hostile fear. Far wiser persons have already observed how the core themes of the Cthulhu mythos — of unfathomable knowledge rendering mortals catatonic with fear and madness as they gaze upon creatures they can barely use words to define — share so much, at least superficially, with the same mindset that powers old-school racial discrimination — a fear of the unknown, a suspicion of the intentions of others, and a misguided feeling of superiority. Hell, the name that the creator in question (or one of his parents) gave to his childhood pet cat is a silently repeated meme on social media as we speak.
Does it bear repeating that the caliber of racism he espoused in his heyday of the 1910s to 1930s was not uncommon among white Americans? Of course — but it would be a sorry excuse, as if to imply racism was some unavoidable product of circumstance rather than the deliberate ideology of spiteful people, some of whom may be honestly otherwise remarkable (much to the benefit of that spite). There is no shame or cruelty in observing this. He was a truly remarkable creative mind, but one whose creativity was colored by a misguided value of monoculturalism.
Science fiction is a radical genre, but that fact is a neutral one. It has the capacity to unlock the anxieties of today and cast them back to us through a myriad of lenses, some so clinical and precise that the tiniest flecks of complexity appear in sharp relief, others so comically absurd that as you watch you cannot help but ask aloud, “do we really behave like that? Damn. That’s… weird, isn’t it?” Sometimes the thing you see on the other end of that lens is that we think that we mean so much to the universe, are so rare and special to it, that we would never be able to deal with the fact that we are truly so insignificant that leviathans larger than our philosophy are acting out their own strange drama without even noticing that we’re there, too small to them to even be pests.
But in there is an even more interesting counterpoint: sometimes the lens shows us that there are creatures — people — who think themselves so perfect and incontrovertible in the face of something so small and seemingly worthless that they never notice exactly how resourceful, how resilient, and how significant we may be.
Get Holly Lyn Walrath’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
In mid-2016, the experimental hip hop group clipping. released their second studio album, Splendor & Misery. Just under a year later, it was nominated for a Hugo Award in the Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) category, although it sadly didn’t win. It is one of only three music records to be nominated for a Dramatic Presentation Hugo in the history of the overall category, and the first time a recorded album had been so nominated since 1971. Two such nominations are theirs — in 2018, the band would score another such nomination for their single ‘The Deep’.
The Bandcamp description of Splendor & Misery describes it in part as “a reversal of H.P. Lovecraft’s concept of cosmic insignificance”, wherein the protagonist of the Afrofuturist concept album “finds relief in learning that humanity is of no consequence to the vast, uncaring universe”. Instead of being scandalized by the revelation that he is small in such a neverending space, that feeling is freeing — he is unbound by what the notion denies. There is a radical unlocking in discovering that, on a supreme level, no mortal is superior or inferior to you, the universe doesn’t owe you or anyone else anything, and every piece of you, for good or for ill, will turn to dust in its wake and the breadth of it will never notice. There is nothing maddening about being small, the album argues. In fact, it mostly clearly reveals the hollowness of man’s inhumanity to man, and to the marginalized in particular.
This is not the only work that has taken the most recognizable parts of the Cthulhu mythos and reshaped them for thoughtful and critical effect. From the most deliberate reimaginings of Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom and Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country to even the admonishing context written into the rules document of the Fate of Cthulhu tabletop roleplaying game, we have acknowledged how resilient the mythos is as a subgenre of horror, and from where it emerged in the author’s mind, and have cast that lens back inward to the work with incredible effect.
The end goal of this collection is in the same spirit as those works, but hoping to accomplish the inverse: for Blackness to be seen as radically significant.
It is. It has no choice but to be. It has spent the better part of the history of the old New World being significant enough to be the driver of entire industries of capital, the metaphorical and literal masons of entire nations, the driven bodies of decades of conflict, torture, struggle, exile, revolution, and resilience, and has survived throughout.
One may imagine that, if there were an entity so large and unfathomable that it looked past such centuries as if they were mere moments, it would still be impressed at how many moments there have been, and how brutal they have been — but also how filled with hard-fought pride, resistance, declaration, and joy. To hazard a tired analogy, even if we were as ants to such gods, you would imagine they respond the same as we do when we learn that ants can carry so many times their own weight, and withstand forces many times more still — with a kind of childish awe that they would resist, even in the face of such an unbending world.
The truth of our world is much like the truth of clipping’s album — all over the world, Black people have witnessed vast and indefatigable systems built specifically for us to struggle to grasp them, so deep and cruel that they tell us to our face how small we’re meant to feel, so unmoving that the act of challenging them is meant to drive us wild with rage or sorrow. And yet, not only have we stood our ground in the face of those systems, we have survived them, we have lived in the face of them, we strove to understand them, and finally many of us actually touched those systems with our own hands. And even though those elder beings — the law, the medical practice, the police, housing, employment, the faith, and so much more — are still so cantankerous that they may wrestle violently in our grip, never content to take our understanding for power, at least so many of our siblings did still earn that knowledge. In struggling against those monsters, they have won, at least, the understanding that there is nothing truly special about them — and simultaneously, even in our utter banality, a world of wonder about how we’ve made it this far.
Admittedly, a large portion of that intent is also to make you laugh. Just because someone is significant doesn’t mean there is no room for them to be imperfect, and in that imperfection, I try to find spaces where something truer than praise, and yet lighter than shame, can be found. Not everyone who writes an autograph in this collection is good or right all of the time, and not all of the circumstances under which they are asked to sign are good or right at their immediate moments. That’s fine. We spend so much time struggling under the weight of how the media ‘perfectly’ sees Blackness — one moment perfectly broken and untrustworthy, the station of the poor and downtrodden who live to rob or hurt you, and then the next moment perfectly talented and accomplished, always willing to bear unnecessary burdens for free to prove their worth. Sometimes, though, we’re just tired, hungry, selfish, mistaken, distracted. Sometimes we are not in the mood.
The resilience for which we credit having survived such a cruel universe for so long, I reckon, has nothing to do with being perfect, unbreakable, or just. It is neutral fact. We are here because we have made an effort to remain, and to value what remains, as we must. But I think it’s also worth remembering that we can do so without it being perfect — that we can be given the paradoxical gift of being valued because we have survived being insignificant with such undeniable magnitude.
Can You Sign My Tentacle? releases August 20th, 2021 from Interstellar Flight Press. Review copies are now available on NetGalley. Now Available for pre-order!
About the Author
Brandon O’Brien is a writer, performance poet, teaching artist and game designer from Trinidad and Tobago. His work has been shortlisted for the 2014 Alice Yard Prize for Art Writing, the 2014 and 2015 Small Axe Literary Competitions, and the inaugural Ignyte Award for Best Speculative Poetry. His work is published in Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, Reckoning, and New Worlds, Old Ways: Speculative Tales from the Caribbean, among others. He is the former Poetry editor of FIYAH: A Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction.
About the Cover Artist
Trevor Fraley is an illustrator with a passion for characters and the worlds that they inhabit. Starting at a young age, he was always interested in the ability to tell stories through a visual medium. Throughout years of exposure to countless mediums from storybooks, film, television and many others, the idea of creating impactful work from seemingly thin air drove him to pursue this endeavor.
In 2016 he earned his BFA in Illustration from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia where he also received the Marcel Vertes Award. Since then his work has been featured in numerous outlets such as Medium, FIYAH Magazine, Action Lab Comics and Silverclutch Games.
Trevor continues to add to the world of illustration while also finding new and intriguing ways to contribute to the world that we live in.
Interstellar Flight Magazine publishes essays on what’s new in the world of speculative genres. In the words of Ursula K. Le Guin, we need “writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope.” We use affiliate links and Patreon to pay our writers. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
