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The idea of perfection, the perfect being, is one of the oldest stories in the world. How that perfection might be tainted, or turn against the hand that made it, is something that has always intrigued writers of fiction. We can see this idea in stories as wide ranging as The Stepford Wives to Pygmalion to The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
On this podcast, we often talk about smashing the patriarchy, but what if you’re made by the patriarchy? What if your sole reason for being is to please the men around you? This is the idea that Cat Valente considers in her new novella, Comfort Me With Apples.
Mentioned in this episode:
- Star Trek
- The Good Place
- The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
- Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives: Feminist Horror That Can’t Escape the Patriarchy by Noah Berlatsky
Catherynne M. Valente is the New York Times bestselling author of forty works of speculative fiction and poetry, including Space Opera, The Refrigerator Monologues, Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, Radiance, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Own Making (and the four books that followed it).
She is the winner of the Andre Norton, Tiptree, Sturgeon, Prix Imaginales, Eugie Foster Memorial, Mythopoeic, Rhysling, Lambda, Locus, Romantic Times’ Critics Choice and Hugo awards. She has been a finalist for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with a small but growing menagerie of beasts, some of which are human.
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