Testing the Limits of American Science-Fiction Publishing The Case of Jim Grimsley’s “Wendy” Roman Trušník For southern writer Jim Grimsley, child abuse in all its forms has always been an important theme, though he sometimes ran into difficulties selling his work to publishers. His science-fiction short story “Wendy,” a story of a sadistic pedophile who assembles a girl out of body parts grown for transplantation, but then tries to prove that she is not human so that he can continue to abuse her, was accepted for publication by the editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction in 2006 but it was “killed” by the publisher only a few weeks later, apparently for fear of public reaction. The present article explores the reasons for the publisher’s decision, which was made shortly after the magazine was accused of containing “strong adult content” and “explicit tales about sex, drugs, and molestation.” Methodologically, the article demonstrates how literary scholarship can make use of tools for preserving historical versions of online material, namely the tracked history of Wikipedia pages and Internet discussion forums archived by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. On June 8, 2006, the American writer Jim Grimsley announced on Asimov’s Message Board that the editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction, Sheila Williams, had called him an hour before and told him that “she’d been directed by the magazine’s owner to kill [his] upcoming story ‘Wendy,’” even though she had accepted the story two months earlier and the contract had been signed two weeks before. Although Grimsley did not want to reveal too much detail about the story in the hope that he would sell it elsewhere, he noted that the “story’s protagonist is a person with known genetic tendencies toward child abuse, at a time when these can be firmly predicted. The story is being killed due to the child abuse content.” “Wendy” was one of his works warning that the “wonderful technolo[g]ies we are developing will inevitably be used in depraved ways.” Even though AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 45 (2020) · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.2357/ AAA-2020-0014 Roman Trušník 68 Grimsley was taken aback by the situation, he did not blame Williams herself: “Sheila did offer to pay for the story but I declined. This was not her decision and I don’t bear anyone any ill will over this since I knew I was pushing boundaries with this story - apparently a bit too hard, in fact” (Asimov’s Message Board 2006). While it is not unusual for a literary work to be rejected by an editor or a publisher, this case is rather unique in several aspects. First, it is uncommon that the decision to publish a story is reversed at such an advanced stage of preparation, i.e., after the contract has been signed and the author has been sent the final page proofs. Moreover, this decision was made by the publisher rather than the editor responsible for the magazine’s content and quality. Even though Grimsley admits he was “pushing boundaries … apparently a bit too hard,” it is rather paradoxical that the whole incident happened in the context of a genre that prides itself in doing just that, namely pushing boundaries. The reasons for the publisher’s decision thus demand a closer examination in terms of the economic and cultural forces behind it. Jim Grimsley certainly was no newcomer in the field. By 2006, he had already become an author of considerable renown, not only in the areas of southern literature and gay literature, but also in the realm of literature of the fantastic. He had published five literary novels, Winter Birds (1992 in German, 1994 in English), Comfort & Joy (1993 in German, 1999 in English), Dream Boy (1995), My Drowning (1997), and Boulevard (2002). He also had published two works located somewhere between fantasy and science fiction, Kirith Kirin (2000) and The Ordinary (2004), as well as numerous short stories, including several in Asimov’s Science Fiction. Moreover, with the two fantastic novels, to which he later added a third one, The Last Green Tree (2006), Grimsley had successfully challenged established genre categories in fantastic literature (cf. Trušník 2018). Still, rejection of his work was not new to him. In the beginnings of his career, Grimsley had considerable difficulty getting published in the United States, partly because of the theme of child abuse, for which American publishers were not ready. Just as it took several years for Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, published in 1955 in Paris, to be released by an American publisher, it was not until ten years after Grimsley finished his first novel Winter Birds in 1984 that he was able to get it published in the United States. Grimsley’s dark story of a violent family, in which an eight-year-old boy is forced by his drunk father to have sex with his own mother, was probably too much for American publishers at the time. Book editors commented on the beauty and strength of the novel but rejected it nevertheless. Shannon Ravenel, editor of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, wrote to Grimsley in 1985 in a now-famous rejection letter: “It is a beautifully written novel and you are a gifted writer. But this is not a book that Algonquin Books could publish successfully for you. The misery is too stark, the tragedy and sadness too unrelieved” (Ravenel 1985). Testing the Limits of American Science-Fiction Publishing 69 It was the German translator Frank Heibert who recognized the artistic value and importance of the novel and was willing to put out the previously unpublished work in Germany, where it was released as Wintervögel in 1992. In the end, Winter Birds was issued in Grimsley’s native United States by the publisher that had once rejected it, Algonquin, but only after the literary landscape had been made ready for child-abuse novels by works such as Kaye Gibbons’s Ellen Foster (1987) or Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina (1992). Many of the later novels by Grimsley feature the theme of child abuse in all its forms as well. According to Günther Deegener (2001), child abuse includes not only sexual abuse, but also physical abuse, emotional abuse, and abuse by neglect. In Comfort & Joy, Dan, also the protagonist of Winter Birds, struggles to cope with the trauma of his childhood experiences decades later. In My Drowning, Dan’s mother revisits the landscape of her poverty-stricken childhood, when all possible forms of child abuse were all too common. In Dream Boy, the teenage protagonist not only suffers from sexual assaults by his father but is eventually raped and murdered by a fellow student. The story of “Wendy” takes the theme of child abuse in fiction to another level: it is narrated by a sadistic pedophile, Mr. Desai, who creates a young girl out of body parts grown for transplantation - “a body grown in a tank, a brain bought on the open market, and the best software money can buy.” For Desai, Wendy is an “organic construct, inhabited by the most advanced of artificial intelligences, alive in every sense of the word except for the actuality that she is an artifact, something [he has] fashioned, a doll of living tissue and artificial sensibility, an object” (Grimsley 2006c: 93). The protagonist regularly abuses his “daughter,” and then wipes her hardware brain and resets it after each use. In order to continue with these activities, he needs to spend a great deal of time in lawsuits trying to prove that “the object Wendy” is not human and thus may be exploited by him in order to protect society from his urges. However, during the legal procedures Desai takes a liking to the judge’s young daughter, and once he wins the case, he decides to take hold of the girl. He leaves all his property to Wendy (or rather, her nurse, as Wendy has been proven not be human in the meantime and thus cannot own property) and goes after the judge’s daughter. The cynical pedophile protagonist, though affected by an inherited condition, offers little to no space for compassion, as he is perfectly aware of Wendy’s inability to be reset completely: during one meeting the narrator observes that she “must sense that tonight is different” (Grimsley 2006c: 96) so she obviously preserves the knowledge of what is done to her even between restarts. Moreover, Grimsley mocks the utilitarian nature of legal battles in the United States, as in his struggle to prove that Wendy is “a machine” (Grimsley 2006c: 95) the protagonist is helped by extremely diverse groups of supporters, ranging from “creators of artificial intelligences Roman Trušník 70 and smart machines [whose] corporate owners [have] no desire to see their products granted legal status as people” to “a legion of churches and conservative groups determined to help [him] prove that nothing manufactured by humans should be called human. Only God can make a soul. These co-litigants include the Conservative Christian Coalition, the Sally Randall Foundation, the Muslim Liberty Council, the Jewish Anti-Cloning League, the Anti-Homosexual Ecumenical Opposition, and a host of others” (Grimsley 2006c: 95). And of course, the protagonist relinquishes the possibility of protecting society from his urges using a human-made creation by abandoning his “organic doll” (Grimsley 2006c: 93) and preparing to attack a real child. The motif of a man and his creation places “Wendy” near the very roots of science fiction, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), a novel which Brian Stableford (1995: 48) in agreement with Brian Aldiss considers to be “the foundation-stone of the modern genre of science fiction.” Another scholar, George Slusser, would trace back the beginnings of science fiction in various national literatures well before Shelley’s novel, but even he rather reluctantly admits that Frankenstein is “the work consensually seen as the ‘first’ SF novel” (Slusser 2005: 27). Moreover, Grimsley’s exploration of the “wonderful technolo[g]ies we’re developing” (Asimov’s Message Board 2006) comes very close to Isaac Asimov’s understanding of science fiction, which in his view explores “an impact of scientific or technological advancement on human beings” (Slusser 2005: 28). “Wendy” appears to be even more relevant today than it was at the time of its publication because, as a story informed by contemporary technologies, it discusses the question of the boundaries of humanity that has been raised in connection with embryonic as well as stem cell research and is likely to continue with an even greater urgency with the advancement of biotechnologies. Grimsley sending his short story to Asimov’s actually fits into another tradition in science fiction, namely that of publishing short stories in magazines rather than other formats. Mike Ashley points out that the “science fiction magazine has been the primary driving force in the generation of science fiction” since the 1920s, with its “heyday” in the 1940s and 1950s. The first magazine publishing “scientifiction” exclusively, Amazing Stories, appeared in 1926 (Ashley 2005: 60, 62). The area of science fiction magazines, most of which were significantly shaped by their editors, has gone through a turbulent development, with many ups and downs. One of the many differences between various science fiction magazines across decades was their willingness to publish daring stories. Ashley points out that perhaps the most important magazine since the 1950s, Galaxy, was not very good in this respect: “One thing that Galaxy claimed it would do, but never really did, was challenge taboos” (Ashley 2005: 68). Asimov’s, founded as Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine in 1977, has been much more daring Testing the Limits of American Science-Fiction Publishing 71 than Galaxy, even though it did not publish “Wendy,” for reasons discussed in the present article. Yet, in spite of the rejection by Asimov’s, the short story found its way to the press, as it was printed the very same year in issue 5 of Subterranean, a more daring science-fiction magazine edited by William Schafer. Grimsley even optioned the film rights to the story in 2008 for the symbolic sum of one dollar (Option 2008). Although no film has been made based on the story, this interest nevertheless serves as proof that the timeliness of the themes as well as the story’s commercial potential has been recognized. Last but not least, Grimsley included “Wendy” in his only published collection of short stories, Jesus Is Sending You This Message (2008). The extraordinary history of the journey of “Wendy” into print would have been lost for both science-fiction fans as well as literary historians without Grimsley’s announcement on Asimov’s Message Board. The message itself spurred a lively discussion on the Internet forum, ranging from a number of readers expressing indignation, certain participants siding with the author and giving him suggestions where to publish the story, contributors voicing support for Sheila Williams, who had been put into an awkward position by the publisher, along with some comments expressing general disappointment over the state of science fiction at the time. One interesting aspect of this series of posts is that Asimov’s allowed the discussion on their website for several weeks, with the last contribution dated June 16, 2006. The message forum finally taken down from the website sometime between June 21 (the date of the printout of the complete discussion preserved in the Jim Grimsley Papers at Duke University) and October 18, 2006 (the date when it could no longer be accessed). Moreover, the debate soon extended far beyond the original message board postings, as several bloggers responded to the discussion outside the forum: editor John Scalzi posted a reaction to the situation on his own blog on June 9, 2006, pointing out that cases in which publishers for various reasons decide not to publish previously accepted texts do happen and that in this case Grimsley should have accepted the generous “kill fee” offered by Sheila Williams following the reversal of the decision to publish (Scalzi 2006). Swedish writer and graphic artist A. R. Yngve posted a comment on his blog four days later, on June 13, 2006, making several observations on the whole exchange of opinions on Asimov’s Message Board. According to Yngve, the “reactions are more interesting than the event that started the debate,” as the decision of the publisher could be discussed in a public forum. Yngve also noted that some contributors to the discussion “responded that the critics of the decision were harming the magazine,” as science fiction publications had “suffered a steadily sinking readership for the past few decades.” The third line of discussion identified by Yngve was the question as to whether printed magazines for short fiction had a future at all. Overall, he sees one positive thing in the debate, as “it shows readers are passionate about what they get to read; they care, and they will be Roman Trušník 72 active participants in the future of publishing” (Yngve 2006). A contributor to Asimov’s Message Board, S. F. Murphy, also announced that he “took the extreme liberty of posting this information at Nightshades,” another forum for which registration was needed; Murphy expressed surprise that the information had not been posted there yet. Another reader reported that Harlan Ellison “mentioned this thread on his message board at Ellison Webderland,” and yet another reader actually provided a link to Ellison’s thread. Fandom has always been important in science fiction, yet the availability of fan discussions on the Internet for research is a relatively new phenomenon, nevertheless one that deserves its place within digital humanities. The term “digital humanities” has become an umbrella term for all the uses of computer technologies in areas ranging from analyses of all kinds of material, through scholarly tools in editing and publishing, building and exploring media collections, or their use in teaching. A volume edited by Schreibman, Siemens, and Unsworth (2004) provides a comprehensive overview of the extent of the field at the time when the concept started to become commonplace. The study of fan discussions, as demonstrated in the present article, depends on the preservation and availability of the material once freely available on the Internet. The issue of archiving was addressed in the cited volume by Abby Smith, who noted that the “purpose of preserving cultural and intellectual resources is to make their use possible at some unknown future time.” Smith made it clear that for “the humanities ... access to the recorded information and knowledge of the past is absolutely crucial, as both its many subjects of inquiry and its methodologies rely heavily on retrospective as well as current resources” (Smith 2004: 577). Smith believed sixteen years ago that the major actor in preservation was a group of private visionaries, with the “outstanding exemplar of the digital collector” in the person of Brewster Kahle. Kahle built the Internet Archive, a project that started to gather web pages in 1996 (2004: 587). The Internet Archive has since become a non-profit organization and one of its components, the Wayback Machine, at present allows searches of “the history of over 406 billion web pages on the Internet” (Internet Archive Wayback Machine 2020). In this way researchers can access many web pages which have disappeared from the Internet. In this particular case, this means that they are not relegated to using the single copy of Grimsley’s own printout of the whole discussion (which is now preserved in the collection of his papers at David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University) but can access the source in electronic form. In this sense, Scalzi’s and Yngve’s blog entries on the authors’ personal websites are unique in that they are still online, almost fourteen years after the events took place, with both postings preserving the link to the original message board, which may have otherwise been lost. Even though the links Testing the Limits of American Science-Fiction Publishing 73 are no longer working now, the discussion can be excavated thanks to the Internet Archive. Many debates that emerged on Asimov’s Message Board are certainly interesting, as Yngve pointed out, but as an explanation of the reasons for the publisher’s rejection they frequently miss the point since “Wendy” was not turned down by the editor but by the publisher. Grimsley comments on Williams’s role in his second post on the board: “The real damage is to Sheila, who accepted ‘Wendy’ and was undercut by her own boss. She worked very hard with me on this story. She has been very concerned about its message and rejected an early draft because it went much further toward shock and violence than the present version. ‘Wendy,’ wherever it is published, will reflect Sheila’s work as well as mine.” (Unfortunately, it seems that Grimsley’s original draft has not been preserved: the collection of his papers at Duke University includes at least seven different versions of the story, including two printouts of Asimov’s galleys, but their development indicates stylistic polishing rather than a major rewrite. Cf. Grimsley 2006b.) In trying to discover the reasons the publisher decided in the end not to run the story, one must realize that the magazine was published by a profitoriented company. Gordon Van Gelder, at the time the editor and owner of the competing Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and thus an insider in the science fiction market, offered a balanced view of the whole event: “Based on Mr. Grimsley’s post and on the fact that ASIMOV’S has allowed this thread to go up on the message board, it sounds like the decision was made responsibly and professionally. I doubt it was made lightly.” Van Gelder pointed to the economic and cultural forces behind such a decision by asking a rhetorical question on the message forum: “[D]oes anyone think that the people who might have cancelled their subscriptions over this story or done worse (remember the incident with the Grand Rapids TV station a couple of years ago? ) are likely to be the same people who are here on this message board discussing this subject? ” Indeed, the threat of cancelled subscriptions was highly pertinent. As Ashley points out, the circulation of science fiction magazines “had been dwindling since 1988 ... and all of the surviving professional magazines, Analog, Asimov’s, F&SF, and Realms of Fantasy, survive primarily on direct subscription” (Ashley 2005: 72). The “Grand Rapids incident” thus offers an explanation why the publisher suddenly became reluctant to publish a story like “Wendy.” In February 2004, Grand Rapids-based Wood TV brought a story of a mother of a thirteen-year-old girl who had subscribed to Asimov’s Science Fiction through a school fundraising drive. The mother accused the magazine of intentionally bringing adult themes to children when she reportedly found “strong adult content” on its pages, with the magazine containing “explicit tales about sex, drugs, and molestation” which included “[y]oung girls with no panties, young girls in white socks, young girls looking at his wank-mags with him, young girls doing it with Roman Trušník 74 one another while he watched.” The fundraising company, QSP, told the TV station in their defense that “[a] lot of care goes into choosing the magazine titles [they] offer. This magazine’s content would no longer meet [their] standards” and the company reportedly “permanently severed its relationship with this science fiction magazine” (Wood TV 2004). Asimov’s Science Fiction responded to the accusations on February 18, 2004, confirming that their editorial offices had been contacted by the parent of a child who had ordered the magazine through QSP. However, Asimov’s showed how inaccurate and misleading the reporting of Wood TV 24 Hour News 8 had been. First of all, the principle of the fundraising drive was that “students sell magazines to their family, their neighbors, and their parents’ coworkers.” While the QSP catalog had a section geared to children, Asimov’s was listed in the catalog in the appropriate section “Science/ Technology/ Environment.” Moreover, even though News 8 gave the impression that Asimov’s was dropped from QSP’s list as a result of this case, the magazine pointed out that their “relationship with QSP ended several months earlier over remit rates (the amount of money the publisher receives from the agent for each subscription the agent sells), not as a result of this incident.” Based on the distortions, Asimov’s claimed that the reporter “Ms. Andersen and the News 8 channel are not practicing journalism, but sensationalism. They know, better than most, that ‘sex sells’” (Asimov’s Science Fiction 2004). While the magazine refuted the TV station’s accusations, the case took on a life of its own. Current databases do not show any further media coverage of the case in the contemporary press but, due to the open and largely anonymous editing of Wikipedia articles, the encyclopedia and its article “Asimov’s Science Fiction” can serve as evidence for the controversy. The first, one-paragraph summary of the cause, with a link to the Wood TV news report, appeared in the Wikipedia entry on May 23, 2005. According to its author, the “event became a minor cause celebre [sic] among many Internet sf fans.” Two days later, another editor added a link to the magazine’s response. On April 20, 2007, the coverage was expanded and converted into a section of its own called “2004 controversy,” which quoted extensively from Asimov’s response to the accusations. On August 1, 2010, a bot (i.e., a computer program) marked the section as one that “contains information of unclear or questionable importance or relevance to the article’s subject matter,” though the article made it clear which sources were cited. Finally, on April 3, 2012, an editor, self-identified as Student7, removed the whole section with a comment that “controversies can be nice, but this one just too localized. [sic] Parochial. Nationwide, another matter” (Wikipedia.org 2020b). 1 In other words, the coverage of the incident was 1 The changes in the Wikipedia pages can be traced through the Internet Archive as well, though in much less detail: the one-paragraph addition was captured for the first time on December 15, 2005, in a somewhat ill-formatted version. The expansion Testing the Limits of American Science-Fiction Publishing 75 removed by a self-appointed Wikipedia editor due to his personal views, much to the detriment of literary scholarship. Nevertheless, the two links to the TV station’s coverage of the story as well as Asimov’s response have survived at the bottom of the Wikipedia webpage to the present day (Wikipedia.org 2020a), even though they are not contextualized in any way in the current version of the article. While the memories of this cause célèbre have waned in the meantime, two years after the event in 2006 it was certainly still painfully remembered by the publisher. In this context it comes as no surprise that a story featuring a sadistic pedophile was killed by the publishers, as it might attract more negative publicity than was desirable. Once again, Van Gelder commented on such situations from a publisher’s perspective on Asimov’s board: “[A] publisher has to ask him/ herself, ‘How many readers am I willing to lose over this particular story? ’ At least, that’s what I ask myself over edgy stories, and sometimes I decide that I don’t like a story enough to risk losing readers over it. Every organism has boundaries.” Van Gelder spoke based on the experience of someone who was at the same time the editor and publisher - the role of the publisher would thus prevent him as the editor to buy a story he would not publish. In the case of Asimov’s, the two roles were divided and it was the disagreement between the two parties that was at the root of the case. Sheila Williams, as the magazine’s editor, bought the story, as she believed it was a good story for the magazine. The publisher, trying to protect its financial interests in the wake of a recent attack at the magazine, thought otherwise and prevented the story from appearing on the magazine’s pages. Locating the cause of rejection in the then-recent Grand Rapids incident appears to be logical, yet this argument seems to be challenged by another of Grimsley’s short stories, “The 120 Hours of Sodom,” which was published in the February 2005 issue of Asimov’s, i.e., between the Grand Rapids incident and the acceptance and subsequent rejection of “Wendy.” In this short story, a man dubbed as Sade prepares a birthday party for Figg, the oldest male member of the ruling family. The party is supposed to be a re-enactment of Marquis de Sade’s novel, The 120 Days of Sodom. The highlight of the party is to be the licensed public suicide of a girl, Cherry, who will be dying on stage for five days. Coming from the poorest social conditions, Cherry has agreed to commit public suicide for the amusement of the guests at Figg’s party because she hopes to secure a better future for her younger brother, Keely. Figg himself discusses Cherry’s motivation with of the “2004 controversy” section was first recorded by the archive as late as January 6, 2008, and the removal of the section was recorded in the version of June 17, 2012. This shift in the timing of evidence is not significant in this particular case, yet it demonstrates the possible limitations of using the Internet Archive as a research tool. Roman Trušník 76 her, but he does not dissuade her from the suicide. Sade could have prepared any kind of death for her, yet she is given a seemingly merciful numbing poison. She hardly suspects what kind of agony Sade has prepared for her - she realizes that only shortly before her death when Sade brings in her little brother so that he can see her die, which will traumatize him for his whole life. Figg, who was originally nonplussed by the suicide itself but, as a whim, has promised to help Keely, is immediately offended by Cherry’s contempt towards him, as she believes it is Figg who has betrayed her. Figg lets his artificial toy spider combined with a bodyguard kill Sade on the spot, much to the shock of the party guests who, “expecting only a suicide, received the murder of their host as an added bonus” (Grimsley 2005: 38). It might seem illogical that Asimov’s would publish “The 120 Hours of Sodom” one year after the Grand Rapids case, and would reject “Wendy” two years later, yet the two stories, even though portraying various forms of abuse and perversion, are fundamentally different in their literary technique, which can be seen in how they make use of the concept of poetic justice and how they work with point of view. Poetic justice is a term coined by Thomas Rymer in the late seventeenth century “to signify the distribution, at the end of a literary work, of earthly rewards and punishments in proportion to the virtue or vice of the various characters” (Abrams and Harpham 2012: 299-300). Neither of the two stories offers real virtue to be rewarded (the only virtuous character, Cherry, dies for the amusement and excitement of perverts), but they do differ in the degree in which vice is punished. Indeed, in “The 120 Hours of Sodom” poetic justice, however imperfect, can be found in the fact that Sade, the orchestrator of Cherry’s death and the whole party, is in the end killed by Figg’s bodyguard. Figg himself is no angel either, as he has committed many deplorable deeds in the past and, after all, agreed with the party and the public suicide. His killing of Sade would thus hardly qualify as an act of virtue, yet it has to be admitted that at least Sade’s vice was punished, and this event started the transformation of Figg’s character, who decided to take care of Keely after the party, when “Figg realized what he was feeling was a change in himself, welcome because it meant he was still, truly, alive” (Grimsley 2005: 38). On the other hand, the protagonist of “Wendy” remains a reprehensible character from the beginning to the end. He consciously and ruthlessly acts upon his desires, obviously aware of the pain he causes to Wendy, regardless of whether she is legally declared a machine or a human. The narrator’s selfishness is palpable throughout the whole story. Trying to prove Wendy is not human, he insists on calling her “she” and treating her like a little girl, “not because of any right she has to be treated in this way but because her therapeutic value to [him] is increased by the pretense” (Grimsley 2006c: 93). After a session with Wendy, the nurse taking care of her, asks the protagonist: “Do you need me to call one of the doctors? For you, I Testing the Limits of American Science-Fiction Publishing 77 mean? ” (Grimsley 2006c: 94). At court, he presents Wendy as “essentially, an elaborate toy” (Grimsley 2006c: 95). Moreover, his final act, providing for her future, suggests that he considers her more human than he publicly admits. But his decision to get hold of the judge’s daughter undermines his claim that the way he used Wendy as well as “her predecessors” (Grimsley 2006c: 94) would protect society. With the sadistic pedophile protagonist at large following the judge’s daughter, readers would thus hardly find poetic justice in this short story. The different levels of poetic justice in the stories are further complemented by the difference in point of view. While “The 120 Hours of Sodom” is narrated from a neutral omniscient point of view, “Wendy” has a first-person narrator. Indeed, a contributor to the discussion on Scalzi’s blog identified as G. Jules points out that while works dealing in some way with child abuse are not that rare, it is the point of view that makes the difference in the perception of such stories: “Telling about a child surviving those experiences, growing up, and working through their past to become a stronger person is ... ‘empowering’ .... The child-overcoming-abuse trope is one we’re uncomfortable but ultimately okay with. A story told from the POV of the child molester, though? It’s dealing with the same subject matter, yeah, but it’s a totally different sort of a story which gets entirely different reactions” (Qtd. in Scalzi 2006). Yet the use of a molester’s point of view has some tradition in literature: generations of literary scholars as well as students will readily remember Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita again, a work which famously uses the molester’s perspective in the portrayal of his illicit relationship with an underage stepdaughter. Though the genre as well as the kind of molestation are different in “Wendy” and Lolita, Grimsley clearly alludes to Nabokov’s novel. Desai’s longing for the judge’s daughter is manifested by his preoccupation with her name: “I know her name, Elena, and roll it around in my mouth” (Grimsley 2006c: 97). This is reminiscent of Humbert Humbert’s obsession with his nymphet: “Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth” (Nabokov 1996: 7). Interestingly enough, just as Lolita remains quite popular on syllabi for literature classes, as an example of the use of an unreliable narrator, Jim Grimsley’s “Wendy” has made it into at least one syllabus as well: Laura Otis, a professor at Emory University, used the short story in her course “Cognitive Science and Fiction” in a unit in which she explores the relationship between literary point of view and theories of mind, with Grimsley as guest writer in her seminars (Otis 2012). Nevertheless, the use of the molester’s point of view along with the lack of poetic justice in “Wendy” has thus created a synergy that makes the story digestible to even fewer readers. While the publisher might get away with such a story under different circumstances, in a situation when the public’s condemnation has already been turned on the magazine and its treatment of sexand abuse-related issues, it is only understandable that Roman Trušník 78 the publisher would decide not to run the story. In the case of “The 120 Hours of Sodom,” which Asimov’s did publish, the magazine felt it necessary to accompany the story with a proper disclaimer: “A word of warning: There are scenes in this story that may be disturbing to some” (Grimsley 2005: 16). Even William Schafer, who eventually published “Wendy” for the first time in Subterranean, included an ominous warning about the contents: “Literary novelist and short story writer Jim Grimsley’s Subterranean debut is not one to take lightly, a tale which examines the all-too-dark, and all-too-possible ways in which people may one day utilize technology. A word of warning to the reader: ‘Wendy’ contains mature themes, images, and language” (Grimsley 2006c: 93). “Wendy” and the controversy associated with its publication seem to have left a permanent mark in the world of science fiction. When editor and critic Dave Truesdale announced on another Internet forum that he was “putting together a list of some controversial SF stories” in 2012, Grimsley’s short story as well as the discussion surrounding it was brought up quickly by a user identified as Rob, who remembered the conversation on the Asimov’s website, remarking that “It was quite a thread - Harlan Ellison even had two posts, if I recall correctly.” This user also provided a link to A. R. Yngve’s blog entry in order to “refresh some memories” (Truesdale [2012]). Fortunately, the case did not leave a permanent mark on the relationship between Grimsley and Sheila Williams (or Asimov’s), as Grimsley submitted another short story just two weeks after “Wendy” had been rejected. In his cover letter to the short story submission dated June 19, 2006, he wrote to Williams: “as far as I’m concerned ‘Wendy’ was a fluke in an otherwise wonderful relationship” (Grimsley 2006a). Indeed, the story Grimsley tendered in June, “The Sanguine,” was accepted on September 21 (Dell Magazines 2006), and the writer has also published numerous other short stories in Asimov’s since then. Moreover, under the influence of the discussion on the Asimov’s Message Board, Sheila Williams sent Grimsley a check with the kill fee, regardless of his earlier rejection of the payment. She wrote to Grimsley: “It’s not so much that I should suggest that we pay you some sort of kill fee as it is that we are obliged to do so” (Williams 2006). Although it is not known if Grimsley cashed the check or not in the end, the fact that Williams sent it to the author proves that the publisher did monitor the discussion and it is thus a salient example of how fan discussions are actually influential in the field of science-fiction publishing. It can be argued that with “Wendy” Grimsley, once again, happened to offer a text to a publisher at the wrong time, as can be seen in how little attention it has attracted in the overall context of Grimsley’s short fiction. Grimsley has always acknowledged his works that belong to the literature of the fantastic as an equal part of his œuvre, and when he put together a collection of his short stories, he naturally included some of his sciencefiction ones. Published by Alyson Books in 2008, Jesus Is Sending You This Testing the Limits of American Science-Fiction Publishing 79 Message thus included not only “Wendy” but also two stories previously published by Asimov’s, namely “Peggy’s Plan” (October-November 2000) and “Unbending Eye” (February 2006). Conspicuously, the two Asimov’s stories that provided background to Grimsley’s 2006 novel The Last Green Tree, “The 120 Hours of Sodom” and “Perfect Pilgrim,” were omitted from the collection. Unlike previous books by Grimsley, Jesus Is Sending You This Message received very limited media coverage. Indeed, while some scholars cite the endorsing introduction by Dorothy Allison, there are actually very few mentions of the collection in the press. I could locate only a single fullfledged review of the book, written by Gary Kramer and published by Philadelphia Gay News in 2009. Kramer’s opinion of the collection is rather low, as he describes it as a “disappointing collection of short fiction by the talented gay author of ‘Boulevard,’ ‘Dream Boy’ and ‘Comfort and Joy.’ Although it boasts a kind introduction by Dorothy Allison that gushes about Grimsley’s writing, somehow this book never quite excites readers to the same degree.” He devotes a single sentence to “Wendy”: “Another entry, ‘Wendy,’ about a man who creates a young girl, deals with the legal ramifications of what he has done, but it is equally tedious [as another story, ‘Unbending Eye.’]” (Kramer 2009). Yet it is significant that although the reviewer considers the story “tedious,” he does not express any of the kind of indignation present in the reaction of Asimov’s publisher. The theme of child abuse plays a significant role in the work of Jim Grimsley and his works have greatly enriched our understanding of the trauma that abuse causes to its victims (cf. Trušník 2010; Deutsch 2019). Moreover, Grimsley has explored this theme both in literary fiction and literature of the fantastic, which offers the author more speculative opportunities to discuss the ramifications of abusive behavior, and he has run into difficulties publishing his fiction both in the realms of literary fiction as well as fantastic fiction. The half-forgotten case of Grimsley’s “Wendy” thus deserves a permanent place in the history of American literature because it demonstrates that there are limits of what is acceptable not only in literary fiction, but also in science fiction, a genre focused on a speculative exploration of possible developments of society. Yet, even science fiction exists in ever-changing real-life contexts influenced by real economic and social constraints. While “Wendy” might at another time have gone unnoticed in Asimov’s, just like it did in the collection of Grimsley’s short stories, in a situation jarred by negative publicity and false accusations by a parent and inferior news reporting by one local TV station, the publisher decided to kill a previously accepted story, even at the price of offering the honorarium as compensation to the author, as it happened in this case. And we can only imagine how destructive to Asimov’s the Grand Rapids incident might have turned out in the present-day United States in which social networks rather than local TV stations have demonstrated an unprecedented level of power and influence. Roman Trušník 80 Last but not least, this episode in American literary history shows how much of its development is not only hidden from the general readers, but also gets lost from the focus of literary historians. Were it not for the Internet community of science-fiction fans along with innovative research tools such as the Internet Archive Wayback Machine or using the history of Wikipedia entries, the whole case would have been long forgotten. Works Cited Abrams, M. H. and Geoffrey Galt Harpham (2012). A Glossary of Literary Terms. 10th ed. Boston: Wadsworth. “Asimov’s Message Board” (2006). Asimov’s, June 8, 2006, to June 16, 2006. 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