Maria Judite de Carvalho's AND HOW HAVE YOU BEEN (Tr by Margaret Jull-Costa)

To read and savor a story a day from And How Have You Been, Two Lines Press' latest and last collection of Margaret Judite de Carvalho's short fiction, is to subject oneself to a slow and precise beating, one perfectly aimed and precisely calculated blow at a time. At the conclusion of each incisive little portrait of an unusual and pivotal moment in a suddenly vivid character's life comes a denouement that, while not in the least bit funny (except when it sometimes, bitterly, is), the reader is doubled over and gasping, with de Carvalho and translator Margaret Jull-Costa looking down at her, tsking and eyeing one another with disappointment that one turned out to be such a lightweight.

(What's the opposite of a punchline? Even though what de Carvalho does is more worthy of that term than anything else I've ever seen?)

Finally, after an awkward moment or two, one of them stoops slightly and deigns to offer a graceful hand to help their victim to her feet, might brush off a little dust, if she doesn't have a newly-chipped nail to attend to, then everyone wordlessly parts company in a swirl of impeccable mid-century skirts, leaving unspoken the obvious certainty that all three will reassemble for another round tomorrow. The reader can already hear the ominous clicks of their tasteful heels approaching in the distance as she opens the book again, as she is compelled to do. 

This, of course, makes the title of this collection perhaps the most viciously funny one I can recall encountering. Picking up this rather hefty paperback for the first time, I didn't realize just how condescending this title's question was meant to be. Even before seeing that the "you" is in italics, the reader is being challenged by the vast array of characters whose bitter little moments she is here to snoop on. They know they've got a voyeur, that she's probably trying to escape her own distressing or disappointing or maybe even traumatizing present with some nice glimpses into an imaginary Continental past.

Not so fast. 

I've been wholly ignorant of Maria Judite de Carvalho and her oeuvre; this is why things like subscriptions to specialist publishers like Two Lines Press (publishers of this volume), Charco, NYRB, my beloved Open Letter, etc are the some of the best money a reader can spend. Yes, you're letting someone else pick some of your reading (which, what do you think you're doing looking at YouTube/Instagram/TikTok/etc book content?), but that someone is a person who gets to go to the Frankfurt Book Fair and other such events, who has had to hustle to get the grant money to pay translators and buy rights and rent warehouse space and pack up shipments and... so it's gonna be someone who really loves books, and I mean really loves them, because that skill set means they could be making more money doing pretty much anything else, but they're doing this instead. So they tend to have reliable taste while also venturing further afield than I ever could. So anyway. I would not be currently dusty on the ground desperately stanching a nosebleed and missing all my lunch money without my having gotten myself a Two Lines subscription for Christmas. And I'll do it again this coming Christmas, based even just on this, to say nothing of the many other excellent works that subscription has brought me -- some of which I haven't read yet; some of which I'm saving for Halloween. 

I'm still fairly ignorant of de Carvalho (I'd love to find a biography of her!), which made my experience at her hands such a bevy of surprising blows. For instance, the first third or so of And How Have YOU Been consists largely of domestic scenes and relationship dramas -- what once was and possibly still is, in her native Portugal, regarded as "women's fiction" but then, suddenly, "The Jungle in the House" takes a turn for the subtly science fictional and, depending on your interpretation of the ending, possibly magical realist, as a painting hanging in a family home that depicts a range of extinct predator and prey animals like lions and deer and tarantulas (I did say subtly science fictional; at least for now in 2026 while I write this. Your mileage may vary, future reader) begins to influence the family's well-being in somewhat dramatic ways -- or does it?

And then "My Father was a Millionaire" takes us into a realm I'm used to exploring with someone more like T.J. Bass. Its heroine is the first successful revival from a kind of suspended animation, but she isn't exactly dazzled by the technological wonders and incredible social progress prevailing in her new surroundings. This is Maria Judite de Carvalho, here to remind you that in this future, the ladies still wear deadly, pointy-toed, thin-soled, high-heeled girl shoes. The better to kick you in the crotch with, smiling enchantingly all the while.

All this is to say, Maria Judite de Carvalho is the very, very feminine Philip K. Dick that I didn't even know I needed. Minus, you know, the agency-lacking figurant women, and the vicious virago women who are just out to undermine the haplessly bumbling men, i.e. her gender politics, even in her most wildly science fictional stories in which we have colonized both Mars and Venus, are way, way better than dear old PKD could even understand the need for, and her science fictional ideas are at least as good as his, if not better.

She also conveys, even better than PKD did, the profound sense of alienation lurking under the surface of everyday life, the way ordinary scenes can charge into the stuff of our worst sci-fi nightmares with just the barest shift of perspective. 

Before sitting down, though, she picked up the lighter belonging to Ivette or Arlette and that she had nudged underneath the armchair and she studied it closely. It was nothing special, just an ordinary lighter made of silver-plated metal. She placed it on the round glass-topped table and left. She felt as if something had drained all the color from the world which was suddenly entirely black and white (a very discreet black and white, with no strong contrast), a transformation that had arrived unannounced. She could vaguely see people, the ones who had been there and others too, and they seem to her as if they've been cut adrift, with no roots or even an aura that would allow them to reach out to her or even touch her. They suddenly seem so strange, those people. Talking like mannequins, walking about like mannequins, and with her ending up being one of them, however imperfect.

Tell me that's not straight out of Ubik, say, or a Mercerist interlude in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, or maybe a late encounter with some fellow humans already afflicted with one of Palmer Eldritch's Stigmata? Or did we wander into some Thomas Ligotti by mistake? But no, it's just an ordinary woman playing hostess to a cocktail party. 

So she's absolutely the answer, not only to "what if PKD had been a woman" but also to "what if PKD had encountered some initial success back when he was trying to be a mainstream/literary fiction writer." He would have been free, as de Carvalho was, to write whatever the hell he wanted, including science fiction. Ah, what might have been. 

Meanwhile, we did get Maria Judite de Carvalho, and you'd better believe I'm going to read everything of hers I can find. I've already acquired her novel. Grace Period, for instance, and I've got my eye on the other story collections Two Lines has already published. And if it hasn't been translated yet, I'll get back with the program of learning more Portuguese. Because I don't want to miss a thing. 

She knew that her brothers made fun of her, and that her parents, when they thought she wasn't looking, would watch her with furrowed brows or moist, uncomprehending eyes. She knew all of this and other things too, but she could do nothing to help them. They were strangers with whom she lived, and they always had been, and she felt as disconnected from them, even from her mother, as one of those fallen branches she sometimes spotted being carried along by the river, far from the banks, with no chance of getting caught up in the reeds. All right, she was there among the four walls of her room, but it almost came to the same thing.

Did somebody get the license plate number off that truck? Call an ambulance. 

Ursula Whitcher's NORTH CONTINENT RIBBON

Sometimes there's a better way to show me the society, the world an author is imagining than via a single piece of narrative fiction. If you've created a truly richly developed culture that really differs from ours, it can be more effective, by which I mean both more efficiently communicative and more interesting for me as a reader, to show me facets, via vignettes or mini-biographies or, most gracefully, short stories about different characters occupying different roles in that society. And the stories need not necessarily overlap or interact, nor do they have to depict earth-shattering crises or huge personality conflicts or major civilizational turning points, either. An older example of this is Lucius Sheperd's story cycle surrounding the vast corpse of The Dragon Griaule; but I've found an even better one here.

Ursula Whitcher's phenomenal story suite, North Continent Ribbon, where, as the cover explains to us, "every contract is a ribbon, and every ribbon is a secret," depicts one of those imagined worlds that would feel like a fantasy setting if the tales within were read out of order; several of them involve no science fictional wizardry or even much-beyond-medieval era technology. Were it not for its opening matter, which declares that it comes from a larger work named Cross-Planetary Investment: A Practical Vraselian's Galactic Opportunity Handbook and informs us that the planet on which most of these stories take place is an important source for "faster-than-light vehicular components sourced from a high-orbit E-type singularity," the society on the North Continent of Nakharat would be all but indistinguishable from one of the weaving planets in Andreas Eschbach's The Carpet Makers, for instance.

But amidst its tales of ribbon-crossed lovers and sundered families and somewhat shady business dealings, we get hints that there's a lot more going on than just trade and agriculture and the many different ways love can come and go in human lives. There's the question, for instance, of how those aforementioned vehicular components, once assembled into faster-than-light vehicles that navigate through what this culture refers to as the deep*, are sourced. And what they even are. Which, it might seem as one pages through this slim little volume, are questions that might not get answered? At least not explicitly?

At least, not if you're not well versed in the kinds of science fiction and fantasy that I love best, where what's going on between the characters is not the whole of what's going on in the book, might even be a distraction from that, actually. See also Gene Wolfe and M. John Harrison and Frank Herbert and Alastair Reynolds.**

But even if you're not willing to plumb the weird and somewhat distressing secrets of this world, Whitcher still has plenty of rewards for your attention in store; these stories feature deftly drawn characters facing dilemmas that are delicately fantastic yet still mundane enough to be believable, from clandestine business machinations by rival corporations vying for profit, to local political scandals, to estrangement between children and parents, to inappropriate workplace love affairs, to secret labor union conspiracies, to the threat of imminent invasion by military forces that might just be coming to restore peace and safety, but might also come to impose new tyrannies over old -- all amidst some stunningly good line-for-line science fiction writing, like this in an earlier story, "The Fifteenth Saint":

The new text began with a litany: an electron's internal spin, the electron dancing around a nucleus, the shiver of atoms within a rock, all the way up to the slow rotation of the galaxy's arms and the slide of entire galaxies. Twisted behind and within and around all of these things was the deep, that other space where starships cut between stars. At every shift in scale, the book said, we experience a loss. But at every shift in scale there is the deep, thus at every shift in scale we find eternity; at every shift in scale there is the beloved, who has always been the beloved.

The text under discussion in the above, by the way, is a sort of samizdat that is buried in a book that has found its way into the hands of one of a district's hard-working political officials, who is starting to suspect that some of his co-equals in power and responsibility not only aren't holding up their ends -- he has just had to spend a whole day solving what should be a trivial problem for somebody else's constituent, only to be stymied repeatedly by layers of bureaucracy that he didn't even know had been imposed because things have been so compartmentalized -- but might actually be corrupt! But the culture of Nakharat is far too subtle for a samizdat to just come out and say things like that; far better to do so indirectly, poetically and above all memorably.

But also, and this is what makes Nakharat feel truly fantastic to a 21st century reader in most of the English-speaking world, the situation that official just had to deal with is really more of an exception than the rule, because Nakharat has a fundamentally different conception of how a civilized society runs. Among other things, the military forces on this world do not exist primarily to fight wars or extend or exercise the domination of a particular polity. No. As two characters in a later story, "Ten Percent for Luck," discuss as one explains to another why she's chosen the career path she has:

"But why the military?" Because it sounded like Inkar hadn't just taken a Contract with Otter Company. Her parents might have had actual shares. People with that sort of income didn't join up, not usually, not even with a paid commission.

"Because I wanted to build something."...

"Don't Companies build things?"

"For themselves. So they can take tolls. The army, we protect everyone. It doesn't matter who you are."

And I haven't even gotten into the lovely grace-notes present throughout these stories, like the whole ribbon thing. Almost everyone on the planet wears their hair in braids decorated with colorful ribbons that show their various personal and professional affiliations. Look at a person's hair and you can see where they went to school, to what professional societies they belong, if they are married and/or have children, if they're a high official in a Company or a public servant or a member of the military or a sex worker -- but only if you are on close enough terms with them to see them without their turban. Every contract is a ribbon, and every ribbon is a secret. And yes, there are some people who have no braids, no ribbons at all, and who flaunt this with loose, flowing hair not wrapped up in a turban. Those are very special people indeed, and yes, we meet one, kind of. But that person is maybe not as unencumbered as his hair suggests, hmm?

All in just 154 pages. My goodness!

Lots of people have had a good chuckle at the fact that North Continent Ribbon was short-listed for the 2025 Ursula K. LeGuin Prize for Fiction, and that the author is also named Ursula, as though the fix is in. But her own prose above and Your Humble Blogger are here to assure you that Whitcher deserved the honor, actually. And she's just revving up; this is her first book. And whether she chooses to continue writing, publishing and collecting Nakharat stories, or tries her hand at something else entirely, I'm here for it. Though I reckon I'll have to be patient, as she is a working mathematician, too.

I'm gonna choose to believe that she's taking her poet's ribbon at least as seriously as her math one, though. Because I definitely want to see more of her stuff. I'll put one in my hair, too, if need be. I've been growing it out again. And hey, it's grey now, so whatever color she chooses, it won't clash! Lemme know, Ms. Whitcher!

*Which I think is basically what most science fiction calls hyperspace or wormhole space or folded space. Use your favorite hand-waving term for how we cross the stupefying vastness of space without wasting human lifetimes in generation ships here. "The deep" seems just fine. I like, too, that it's treated as nothing special, so that it doesn't even get capitalized.

**What? You didn't know that the secret of the Revelation Space universe's Conjoiner Drives is explicitly revealed within that series? Tell me you haven't read Reynolds' short stories without telling me you haven't read his short stories. My goodness!