Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places

by Ursula K. Le Guin

This section contains the only pieces I have ever published under a nom de plume. Some persons who shall be nameless, including myself, co-edited a brief-lived (two issues) journal of reviews of science fiction, called Venom. We felt that sf reviewing had become awfully milquetoasty; it was hard to tell the reviews from the blurbs—everything the greatest, the biggest, the best. Venom was to be an antidote (“Mithridates, he died old”). The precondition for becoming a reviewer for Venom was that you do a killer review of one of your own books, to be published in the magazine. Then you could cut loose on somebody else. So that nobody could know which were the suicides and which were the murders, you had to use a nom de plume. Mine was Mom de Plume.