![niche maelstrom niche maelstrom](https://www.mtnscoop.com/media/images/2021/02/Niche-Maelstrom.jpg)
That’s what she did, staying out of the limelight and growing ever more frustrated by what had happened to her. She decided on something drastic: She would no longer be Isabel Fall.Īs a trans woman early in transition, Fall had the option of retreating to the relative safety of her legal, masculine identity. When she emerged from the hospital a few weeks later, the world had moved on, but she was still scarred by what had happened. Because there was little biographical information available about its author, the debate hinged on one question: Who was Isabel Fall? And that question ate her alive. The story - and especially its title, which co-opts a transphobic meme - had provoked days of contentious debate online within the science fiction community, the trans community, and the community of people who worry that cancel culture has run amok. In January 2020, not long after her short story “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” was published in the online science fiction magazine Clarkesworld, Fall asked her editor to take the story down, and then checked into a psychiatric ward for thoughts of self-harm and suicide. If she wanted to publish again, she surely could. There is a person who wrote under that name alive on the planet right now, someone who published a critically acclaimed, award-nominated short story. “The fact that Isabel Fall was an unknown led to her death.” Unknown travelers are shot on sight,” says Isabel Fall.
![niche maelstrom niche maelstrom](https://media.rainpos.com/6322/niche_chroma_sonnet_2021_a.png)
It is an homage to one of Gustave Doré’s illustrations for Paradise Lost, by John Milton.“In a war zone, it is not safe to be unknown. The graphic on the Maelstrom was created by Niche’s Creative Director, Ana Van Pelt. They believed all sorts of things - and maybe they saw all sorts of things, too, for the Middle Ages had some curious phases. And before Goya you have to go back to the mediaeval chaps who did the gargoyles and chimeras on Notre Dame and Mont Saint-Michel. I don’t believe anybody since Goya could put so much of sheer hell into a set of features or a twist of expression.
![niche maelstrom niche maelstrom](https://static.evo.com/content/cms/campaigns/2020-winter-preview/niche/2020-niche-pryne-snowboard.jpg)
You recall that Pickman’s forte was faces. Gad, I wouldn’t be alive if I’d ever seen what that man- if he was a man - saw! If I had ever seen what Pickman saw - but no! Here, let’s have a drink before we get any deeper. Anyhow, he manages to turn out results that differ from the pretender’s mince-pie dreams in just about the same way that the life painter’s results differ from the concoctions of a correspondence-school cartoonist. Well, I should say that the really weird artist has a kind of vision which makes models, or summons up what amounts to actual scenes from the spectral world he lives in. You know, in ordinary art, there’s all the difference in the world between the vital, breathing things drawn from Nature or models and the artificial truck that commercial small fry reel off in a bare studio by rule. And Pickman had it as no man ever had it before or - I hope to heaven - ever will again.ĭon’t ask me what they see. There’s something those fellows catch - beyond life - that they’re able to make us catch for a second. I don’t have to tell you why a Fuseli really brings a shiver while a cheap ghost-story frontispiece merely makes us laugh. That’s because only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear - the exact sort of lines and proportions that connect up with latent instincts or hereditary memories of fright, and the proper colour contrasts and lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness. Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare or a Witches’ Sabbath or a portrait of the devil, but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. You know, it takes profound art and profound insight into Nature to turn out stuff like Pickman’s.