We are delighted to unveil a new literary work by Octavia Cade, for Academia Lunare: Nylons, Lipstick, and Narnia: Rewriting Susan Pevensie in Fanfiction!
Octavia joined the Luna Family back in 2019in the Call for Papers A Shadow Within: Evil in Fantasy and Science Fiction. Her article, "Spring Again: The Problem of Evil and the End of Winter in C.S. Lewis’s Narnia", contributed to the volume being described as "...an impressively inclusive cross-section of various spheres of discourse on the fantastic" by Fantastika Journal.
Subsequently, in 2021 she wrote "Environmental Changes as Catalyst for Worldbuilding in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home", in the call for Papers Worlds Apart: Worldbuilding in Fantasy and Science Fiction, which won the British Science Fiction Awards and was shortlisted for the British Fantasy Society Awards.
About the book:
When Francesca asked me why I had written this book, I laughed. “Spite," I said. "It was written out of spite."
I first read the Narnia books as a child – The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is actually the first book I ever remember reading. The Last Battle, however, remains to this day the only book I’ve ever thrown across a room. I hated that book. Rather, I hated the ending: the supposed wonder of the train crash was bad enough, but the real genesis of my decades-long grudge was what happened to Susan. Narnia is incompatible with nylons and lipstick, apparently. Even as a kid I thought that was rubbish. As an adult, I discovered fanfiction, and the many fanfic writers who held the same Susan-related grudge. I love that! So many of those stories were absolutely outstanding, and I thought they deserved some critical attention of their own. It started out as an essay and just kept growing, and now I’m excited to share it with all of Susan’s other defenders.
About Octavia:
Octavia Cade is an award-winning New Zealand science fiction writer. Seventy of her short stories have appeared in markets including Clarkesworld, F&SF, and Asimov’s; her latest book is the collection You Are My Sunshine and Other Stories from Stelliform Press. Her academic work also focuses on speculative fiction, and she’s had around thirty academic papers or book chapters published in venues including Horror Studies, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, SFRA Review, and anthologies from Routledge, McFarland, and various university presses. She attended Clarion West 2016 and has also received a Creative New Zealand Arts Grant. Octavia held the Ursula Bethell writer's residency at the University of Canterbury in 2023, and is the 2025 Robert Burns Fellow at the University of Otago. You can find her at ojcade.com, or on Bluesky at @octavia-cade.
As always, you can follow the book, Nylons, Lipstick, and Narnia: Rewriting Susan Pevensie in Fanfiction, as it make its way through the publishing process on our newsletter.
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