Pluralistic: Theodora Goss's 'Letters From an Imaginary Country' (11 Nov 2025)


Today's links


The Tachyon Books cover for Theodora Goss's 'Letters From an Imaginary Country.

Theodora Goss's 'Letters From an Imaginary Country' (permalink)

Theodora Goss's latest book of short stories is 'Letters From an Imaginary Country,' and it manages to be one of the most voraciously, delightfully readable books I've ever read and it's one of the most writerly books, too. What a treat!

https://tachyonpublications.com/product/letters-from-an-imaginary-country/

The brilliant writer and critic Jo Walton (who wrote the introduction to this book) coined an extremely useful term of art to describe something science fiction and fantasy writers do: "incluing":

Incluing is the process of scattering information seamlessly through the text, as opposed to stopping the story to impart the information.

https://web.archive.org/web/20111119145140/http:/papersky.livejournal.com/324603.html

You see, in science fiction and fantasy, everything is up for grabs – the dog snoozing by the hearth can be a robot, a hologram, a simulation, a changeling, a shapeshifter, a cursed knight, a god…or just a dog. We talk a lot about how genre writers invent a scenario ("worldbuilding"), but thinking up a cool imaginary milieu is much easier than gracefully imparting it.

Sure, you can just flat-out tell the reader what's going on, and there's times when that works well. Exposition gets a bad rap, mostly because it's really hard to do well, and when it's not done well, it's either incredibly dull, or incredibly cringe, or both at once:

https://maryrobinettekowal.com/journal/my-favorite-bit/my-favorite-bit-cory-doctorow-talks-about-the-bezzle/

That's where incluing comes in. By "scattering information seamlessly through the text," the writer plays a kind of intellectual game with the reader in which the reader is clued in by little droplets of scene-setting, pieces of a puzzle that the reader collects and assembles in their head even as they're sinking into the story's characters and their problems.

This is a very fun game at the best, but it's also work. It's one of the reasons that sf/f short story collections can feel difficult: every 10 or 20 pages, you're solving a new puzzle, just so you can understand the stakes and setting of the story. Sure, you're also getting a new (potentially) super-cool conceit every few pages, and ideally, the novelty, the intellectual challenge and the cognitive load of grasping the situation all balance out.

One way to reduce the cognitive load on the reader is to build a world that hews more closely to the mundane one in which we live, where the conceit is simpler and thus easier to convey. But another way to do it is to just be REALLY! FUCKING! GOOD! at incluing.

That's Goss: really fucking good at incluing. Goss spins extremely weird, delightful and fun scenarios in these stories and she slides you into them like they were a warm bath. Before you know it, you're up to your nostrils in story, the water filling your ears, and you don't even remember getting in the tub. They're that good.

Goss has got a pretty erudite and varied life-history to draw on here. She's a Harvard-trained lawyer who was born in Soviet Hungary, raised across Europe and the UK and now lives in the USA. She's got a PhD in English Lit specializing in gothic literature and monsters and was the research assistant on a definitive academic edition of Dracula. Unsurprisingly, she often writes herself into her stories as a character.

With all that erudition, you won't be surprised to learn that formally, structurally, these are very daring stories. They take many narrative forms – correspondence, academic articles, footnotes, diary entries. But not in a straightforward way – for example, the title story, "Letters From an Imaginary Country," consists entirely of letters to the protagonist, with no replies. The protagonist doesn't appear a single time in this story, You have to infer everything about her and what's happening to her by means of the incluing in these letters (some of which are written by people whom the protagonist believes to be fictional characters!).

All of this should add to that cognitive loading – it's flashy, it's writerly, it's clever as hell. But it doesn't! Somehow, Goss is setting up these incredibly imaginative McGuffins, using these weird-ass narrative building blocks, and unless you deliberately stop yourself, pull your face out of the pages and think about how these stories are being told, you won't even notice. She's got you by the ankles, grasping ever so gently, and she'll pulling you in a smooth glide into that warm bath.

It's incredible.

And that's just the style and structure of these stories. They're also incredibly imaginative and emotionally intelligent. Many of these stories are metatextual, intertextual remixes of popular literature – the first story in the collection, "The Mad Scientist's Daughter," is a sweet little tale of the daughters of Drs Frankenstein, Moreau, Jekyll, Hyde, Rappaccini, and Meyrink, all living together in a kind of gothic commune:

http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/the-mad-scientists-daughter-part-1-of-2/

It's such a great premise, but it's also got all this gorgeous character-driven stuff going on in it, with an emotional payoff that's a proper gut-punch.

Other stories in the collection concern the field of "Imaginary Anthropology," a Borges-inspired riff on the idea that if you write a detailed enough backstory for an imaginary land, it can spring into existence. Again, it's a great gaff, but Goss attacks it in both serious mode with "Cimmeria: From the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology":

https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/cimmeria-journal-imaginary-anthropology/

And as a more lighthearted romp with "Pellargonia: A Letter to the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology," which is extremely funny, as many of these stories are (and in truth, even the most serious ones have laugh-aloud moments in them).

Goss grounds much of this fiction in her experience as an immigrant to the USA and in her Hungarian heritage. Fans of Lisa Goldstein's Red Magician and Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos novels will find much to love in Goss's use of Hungarian folklore and mythos, and Brust fans will be especially pleased (and famished) by her incredibly evocative descriptions of Hungarian food.

This is a book bursting with monsters – the final novella, "The Secret Diary of Mina Harker," is a beautiful vampire tale that remixes Dracula to great effect – food, humor, subtle emotions and beautiful premises. It's got Oz, and Burroughs' Barsoom, and King Arthur, and so much else besides.

This was my introduction to Goss's work – I'd heard great things, but the TBR pile is always 50 times bigger than I can possibly tackle. I'm off to read a lot more of it.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Agent to the Stars: comic sf about an alien race’s Hollywood agent https://memex.craphound.com/2005/11/10/agent-to-the-stars-comic-sf-about-an-alien-races-hollywood-agent/

#15yrsago ACTA will force your ISP to censor your work if someone lodges an unsupported trademark claim https://www.itnews.com.au/news/acta-isps-could-be-liable-for-trademark-infringements-238141

#15yrsago Free Kinect drivers released; Adafruit pays $3k bounty to hacker, $2k more to EFF https://blog.adafruit.com/2010/11/10/we-have-a-winner-open-kinect-drivers-released-winner-will-use-3k-for-more-hacking-plus-an-additional-2k-goes-to-the-eff/

#15yrsago White paper on 3D printing and the law: the coming copyfight https://publicknowledge.org/it-will-be-awesome-if-they-dont-screw-it-up-3d-printing/

#15yrsago UK security chief upset at being asked to surrender banned items at Heathrow https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/terror-chief-tries-to-board-plane-260577

#10yrsago All smart TVs are watching you back, but Vizio’s spyware never blinks https://www.propublica.org/article/own-a-vizio-smart-tv-its-watching-you

#10yrsago Gallery of the Soviet Union’s most desirable personal computers https://www.rbth.com/multimedia/pictures/2014/04/07/before_the_internet_top_11_soviet_pcs_35711

#10yrsago Future Forms: beautifully curated collection of space-age electronics https://www.future-forms.com/

#10yrsago The Four Horsemen of Gentrification: Brine, Snark, Brunch, Whole Foods https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the-four-horsemen-of-gentrification

#10yrsago America’s airlines send planes to El Salvador, China for service by undertrained technicians https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/11/airplane-maintenance-disturbing-truth

#10yrsago Google releases critical AI program under a free/open license https://www.wired.com/2015/11/google-open-sources-its-artificial-intelligence-engine/

#10yrsago UK law will allow secret backdoor orders for software, imprison you for disclosing them https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/11/snoopers-charter-uk-govt-can-demand-backdoors-give-prison-sentences-for-disclosing-them/

#5yrsago Broadband wins the 2020 election https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/10/dark-matter/#munifiber

#5yrsago Rights of Nature and legal standing https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/10/dark-matter/#rights-of-nature

#5yrsago Microchip "dark matter" https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/10/dark-matter/#precursor

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://twitter.com/doctorow

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

Today's links


The Tachyon Books cover for Theodora Goss's 'Letters From an Imaginary Country.

Theodora Goss's 'Letters From an Imaginary Country' (permalink)

Theodora Goss's latest book of short stories is 'Letters From an Imaginary Country,' and it manages to be one of the most voraciously, delightfully readable books I've ever read and it's one of the most writerly books, too. What a treat!

https://tachyonpublications.com/product/letters-from-an-imaginary-country/

The brilliant writer and critic Jo Walton (who wrote the introduction to this book) coined an extremely useful term of art to describe something science fiction and fantasy writers do: "incluing":

Incluing is the process of scattering information seamlessly through the text, as opposed to stopping the story to impart the information.

https://web.archive.org/web/20111119145140/http:/papersky.livejournal.com/324603.html

You see, in science fiction and fantasy, everything is up for grabs – the dog snoozing by the hearth can be a robot, a hologram, a simulation, a changeling, a shapeshifter, a cursed knight, a god…or just a dog. We talk a lot about how genre writers invent a scenario ("worldbuilding"), but thinking up a cool imaginary milieu is much easier than gracefully imparting it.

Sure, you can just flat-out tell the reader what's going on, and there's times when that works well. Exposition gets a bad rap, mostly because it's really hard to do well, and when it's not done well, it's either incredibly dull, or incredibly cringe, or both at once:

https://maryrobinettekowal.com/journal/my-favorite-bit/my-favorite-bit-cory-doctorow-talks-about-the-bezzle/

That's where incluing comes in. By "scattering information seamlessly through the text," the writer plays a kind of intellectual game with the reader in which the reader is clued in by little droplets of scene-setting, pieces of a puzzle that the reader collects assembles in their head even as they're sinking into the story's characters and their problems.

This is a very fun game at the best, but it's also work. It's one of the reasons that sf/f short story collections can feel difficult: every 10 or 20 pages, you're solving a new puzzle, just so you can understand the stakes and setting of the story. Sure, you're also getting a new (potentially) super-cool conceit every few pages, and ideally, the novelty, the intellectual challenge and the cognitive load of grasping the situation all balance out.

One way to reduce the cognitive load on the reader is to build a world that hews more closely to the mundane one in which we live, where the conceit is simpler and thus easier to convey. But another way to do it is to just be REALLY! FUCKING! GOOD! at incluing.

That's Goss: really fucking good at incluing. Goss spins extremely weird, delightful and fun scenarios in these stories and she slides you into them like they were a warm bath. Before you know it, you're up to your nostrils in story, the water filling your ears, and you don't even remember getting in the tub. They're that good.

Goss has got a pretty erudite and varied life-history to draw on here. She's a Harvard-trained lawyer who was born in Soviet Hungary, raised across Europe and the UK and now lives in the USA. She's got a PhD in English Lit specializing in gothic literature and monsters and was the research assistant on a definitive academic edition of Dracula. Unsurprisingly, she often writes herself into her stories as a character.

With all that erudition, you won't be surprised to learn that formally, structurally, these are very daring stories. They take many narrative forms – correspondence, academic articles, footnotes, diary entries. But not in a straightforward way – for example, the title story, "Letters From an Imaginary Country," consists entirely of letters to the protagonist, with no replies. The protagonist doesn't appear a single time in this story, You have to infer everything about her and what's happening to her by means of the incluing in these letters (some of which are written by people whom the protagonist believes to be fictional characters!).

All of this should add to that cognitive loading – it's flashy, it's writerly, it's clever as hell. But it doesn't! Somehow, Goss is setting up these incredibly imaginative McGuffins, using these weird-ass narrative building blocks, and unless you deliberately stop yourself, pull your face out of the pages and think about how these stories are being told, you won't even notice. She's got you by the ankles, grasping ever so gently, and she'll pulling you in a smooth glide into that warm bath.

It's incredible.

And that's just the style and structure of these stories. They're also incredibly imaginative and emotionally intelligent. Many of these stories are metatextual, intertextual remixes of popular literature – the first story in the collection, "The Mad Scientist's Daughter," is a sweet little tale of the daughters of Drs Frankenstein, Moreau, Jekyll, Hyde, Rappaccini, and Meyrink, all living together in a kind of gothic commune:

http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/the-mad-scientists-daughter-part-1-of-2/

It's such a great premise, but it's also got all this gorgeous character-driven stuff going on in it, with an emotional payoff that's a proper gut-punch.

Other stories in the collection concern the field of "Imaginary Anthropology," a Borges-inspired riff on the idea that if you write a detailed enough backstory for an imaginary land, it can spring into existence. Again, it's a great gaff, but Goss attacks it in both serious mode with "Cimmeria: From the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology":

https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/cimmeria-journal-imaginary-anthropology/

And as a more lighthearted romp with "Pellargonia: A Letter to the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology," which is extremely funny, as many of these stories are (and in truth, even the most serious ones have laugh-aloud moments in them).

Goss grounds much of this fiction in her experience as an immigrant to the USA and in her Hungarian heritage. Fans of Lisa Goldstein's Red Magician and Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos novels will find much to love in Goss's use of Hungarian folklore and mythos, and Brust fans will be especially pleased (and famished) by her incredibly evocative descriptions of Hungarian food.

This is a book bursting with monsters – the final novella, "The Secret Diary of Mina Harker," is a beautiful vampire tale that remixes Dracula to great effect – food, humor, subtle emotions and beautiful premises. It's got Oz, and Burroughs' Barsoom, and King Arthur, and so much else besides.

This was my introduction to Goss's work – I'd heard great things, but the TBR pile is always 50 times bigger than I can possibly tackle. I'm off to read a lot more of it.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Agent to the Stars: comic sf about an alien race’s Hollywood agent https://memex.craphound.com/2005/11/10/agent-to-the-stars-comic-sf-about-an-alien-races-hollywood-agent/

#15yrsago ACTA will force your ISP to censor your work if someone lodges an unsupported trademark claim https://www.itnews.com.au/news/acta-isps-could-be-liable-for-trademark-infringements-238141

#15yrsago Free Kinect drivers released; Adafruit pays $3k bounty to hacker, $2k more to EFF https://blog.adafruit.com/2010/11/10/we-have-a-winner-open-kinect-drivers-released-winner-will-use-3k-for-more-hacking-plus-an-additional-2k-goes-to-the-eff/

#15yrsago White paper on 3D printing and the law: the coming copyfight https://publicknowledge.org/it-will-be-awesome-if-they-dont-screw-it-up-3d-printing/

#15yrsago UK security chief upset at being asked to surrender banned items at Heathrow https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/terror-chief-tries-to-board-plane-260577

#10yrsago All smart TVs are watching you back, but Vizio’s spyware never blinks https://www.propublica.org/article/own-a-vizio-smart-tv-its-watching-you

#10yrsago Gallery of the Soviet Union’s most desirable personal computers https://www.rbth.com/multimedia/pictures/2014/04/07/before_the_internet_top_11_soviet_pcs_35711

#10yrsago Future Forms: beautifully curated collection of space-age electronics https://www.future-forms.com/

#10yrsago The Four Horsemen of Gentrification: Brine, Snark, Brunch, Whole Foods https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the-four-horsemen-of-gentrification

#10yrsago America’s airlines send planes to El Salvador, China for service by undertrained technicians https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/11/airplane-maintenance-disturbing-truth

#10yrsago Google releases critical AI program under a free/open license https://www.wired.com/2015/11/google-open-sources-its-artificial-intelligence-engine/

#10yrsago UK law will allow secret backdoor orders for software, imprison you for disclosing them https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/11/snoopers-charter-uk-govt-can-demand-backdoors-give-prison-sentences-for-disclosing-them/

#5yrsago Broadband wins the 2020 election https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/10/dark-matter/#munifiber

#5yrsago Rights of Nature and legal standing https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/10/dark-matter/#rights-of-nature

#5yrsago Microchip "dark matter" https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/10/dark-matter/#precursor

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE AND SUBMITTED.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://twitter.com/doctorow

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.