I live in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and I was revising this novel in May 2020. On Memorial Day, a police officer in Minneapolis knelt on the neck of a Black man named George Floyd, cutting off his air and circulation for eight minutes and forty-six seconds, while three other police officers helped hold him down. In the wake of Floyd’s murder, there were protests that exploded into riots and then fires, and South Minneapolis—where I lived for seventeen years and where much of this novel takes place—was permanently changed.
I’m now finishing the book with no clear idea of where things might stand a year from now, when the book comes out, or five to ten years from now, when the book takes place, so I decided to run with the suggestion of my friend Lyda Morehouse, and write the Minneapolis I want to see. In my novel, the bus ride down Lake Street passes a plaza named after George Floyd where the burned-out remains of the third precinct police station stand now. The science fiction bookstore that burned to the ground last month has been rebuilt in a new location (with a rocket ship on the front, because I think that would be cool).
Minneapolis is in the process of radically rethinking public safety—rethinking how we use the police and how other professionals could do some of the things we have the police doing now. I am not an expert on policing, but in the moments when Steph comes in contact with law enforcement in this book, I tried to provide a plausible vision of public safety workers whose first priority is public safety. Who see a teenager wandering downtown on a viciously cold night and think, Is she okay? Does she have a safe place to go? Does she need help buying a warmer coat? Steph, of course, refers to anyone in uniform as a “cop”—but one reason there’s such a dramatic contrast between the aggressive bullies working in law enforcement who appear in Catfishing on CatNet and the gentle concern she encounters here is that this is what I want to see—people who approach problems to solve them rather than who approach citizens to subdue them.
There are a few places in this story that are real (or real-ish) that were in the book before the many catastrophes of the first half of 2020. Powderhorn Park is entirely real and exists basically as described in the story. Can Can Wonderland is also real, although (at present) it does not have a roller coaster and the real-life owners are not secretly supervillains (so far as I’ve heard). It does have an artist-designed indoor mini-golf course. The James J. Hill House is real and offers tours. There is currently no school named after Coya Knutson, but she was a real person, the first woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Minnesota. And the Midtown Exchange, which was built in a former Sears building next to Abbott Northwestern Hospital, is real and has an amazing array of excellent food.
I don’t know what Minneapolis will look like in ten years; I don’t know what policing and public safety will look like here in ten years. But I think part of what science fiction is for is to think about what the world could look like—the ways in which things could go right, not just the ways in which things could go wrong, so that’s the vision I embraced.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I received a lot of useful input from Elise Matthesen about small towns when I wrote Catfishing on CatNet, and I received a lot of incredibly useful thoughts and advice from Elise Matthesen this time about growing up as a queer kid in a very controlling religious group and how it feels to leave. I don’t know if I successfully captured one of her most important insights, which was, “It can be very much the right thing to do, and it can still feel terrible when you first leave,” but I am tremendously grateful for her time and insight.
Many thanks to Shawn Rounds for her thoughts on Hill House and to Lee Brontide for their thoughts on therapy. Thank you to Dan Martin for answering my questions about phone app security, and to Kristy Anne Cox for thoughts on Mormonism (even though that scene did not make it into the book). Finally, for answers to legal questions (and related useful input), many thanks to Candy Heisler, Jennifer Moore, Dena Landon, Susan Claire, Rachel Caplan, and Emily Stewart.
Thanks, as always, to all the members of the Wyrdsmiths, my writers’ group: Eleanor Arnason, Kelly Barnhill, Theo Lorenz, Lyda Morehouse, and Adam Stemple. An extra thank-you to Lyda for last-minute brainstorming and for saying the words, “Write the Minneapolis you want to see.” Thanks to my agent, Nell Pierce, and my thoughtful and insightful editor, Susan Chang, who is superlatively good at spotting emotional beats that I routed around and need to find a path through. Finally, thanks and love to my husband, Ed Burke, and my two endlessly delightful children, Molly and Kiera Burke.
ALSO BY NAOMI KRITZER
Catfishing on CatNet
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
NAOMI KRITZER is a writer and blogger who has published a number of short stories and several novels for adults. Her 2015 short story “Cat Pictures Please” was a Locus Award and Hugo Award winner and a finalist for the Nebula Award. It inspired her YA debut, Catfishing on CatNet, a Lodestar Award winner. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Visit her online at naomikritzer.com, or sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
1. CheshireCat
2. Steph
3. Nell
4. Steph
5. CheshireCat
6. Nell
7. Steph
8. CheshireCat
9.
