ON APRIL 12 Carol Emshwiller  joins the ranks of writers still active past 90 years of age. A few writers already in this stratospheric range are Jack Vance (94), Frederik Pohl (91), Ray Bradbury (90), and Doris Lessing (91). All of these authors save one had their first works of fiction published in pulp magazines. (Lessing, a British subject born in Iran, is the only one to bypass a pulp apprenticeship—the start of her career might have been very different if she were American.) All of these writers also write science fiction. (Is there something in the science fiction water that leads to longevity?) The secret power of science fiction is that anything is possible. The genre is, after all, basically a reckoning with an explicit future using an implicit past and present. Emshwiller writes in the foreword to her new book The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Vol. 1, that, “One thing I like best about science fiction, though I can’t always do it, is that you can write a story that makes comments on our world here and now. I think the best science fiction does that—gives us a new view on what our world is like right now. Often from an alien point of view.”

All of the aforementioned writers have embraced what Michael Chabon has labeled “trickster literature.” Chabon defines a trickster as “always associated with borders, no man’s lands, with crossroads and intersections. Trickster is the conveyer of souls across ultimate boundaries….” Chabon also talks about how some of the best writers from the past seventy-five years have been drawn to these genre borderlands. He mentions Borges, Calvino, Pynchon, Vonnegut, Millhauser, and Cormac McCarthy, but Chabon overlooks writers such as Vance, Pohl, Bradbury, and Emshwiller, who began working within these borderlands when the region was just a frontier.

Emshwiller’s first story appeared in a mid-1950s issue of Smashing Detective, her most recent this month in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. In between she has published over a hundred pieces of fiction in such diverse places as Transatlantic Review, New Directions, Croton Review, Twilight Zone Magazine, The Village Voice Literary Supplement, Omni, The Little Magazine, Cavalier, The Magazine of Science Fiction & Fantasy, and many other publications encompassing the full map of the literary landscape. Closer to the trickster’s native origins she has even written westerns.
At the end of her foreword to The Collected Stories, Emshwiller writes, “I’ve never known quite what to call my writing. When I’m boasting I call it Magic Realism… and some of it is…. It’s often fantasy, though lots of it is actually science fiction.”

Emshwiller has long traveled the off-roads of the trickster’s borderlands.

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There will be a celebration of Carol Emshwiller’s 90th Birthday in NYC on Tuesday, April 12th at  The SoHo Gallery for Digital Art, 138 Sullivan Street, (between Houston & Prince St.) – Doors open 6:30 PM. $7 suggested donation.

(Photo: Carol in front of her Levittown, New York home in 1951.)