When Bravery is Fiction • by Casey Plett • 1

Hamilton Arts & Letters In 2017 I edited a story called “Angels Are Here to Help You” by Jeanne Thornton who’s an amazing writer you should check out. It’s one of my favourite stories in the collection Meanwhile, Elsewhere, which I co-edited with Cat Fitzpatrick—a collection of twenty-five new science fiction and fantasy short stories by transgender writers from the US, Canada and beyond.  The story speaks to concerns about a tech-dominated world, in a way that was new to me at the time. But another thing. So when this story first came to me, I read the draft she sent, and I was like crying by the end. I’ll try not to spoil too much of it, but basically this girl who’s generally in stasis most of her life, she gets this entrepreneurial idea to do business with another planet. And it all goes so wrong, and she almost dies, and it’s comedy-grade futile how bad her idea was and she almost ends up in jail. But instead of going back to Earth, she decides to go out even farther into space, and the last line is “Pretend the rest of your life was the aberration. Pretend you have the confidence you need. Try, try so hard.”  [  >>>>>  FORWARD ]   + [Distillate © HA&L + Casey Plett {from the Greek bios} -- the course of a life.]