Testing the limits of American science-fiction publishing the case of Jim Grimsley's "Wendy"

Abstract

For southern writer Jim Grimsley, child abuse in all its forms has always been an important theme, though he sometimes ran into difficulties selling his work to publishers. His science-fiction short story "Wendy," a story of a sadistic pedophile who assembles a girl out of body parts grown for transplantation, but then tries to prove that she is not human so that he can continue to abuse her, was accepted for publication by the editor of Asimov's Science Fiction in 2006 but it was "killed" by the publisher only a few weeks later, apparently for fear of public reaction. The present article explores the reasons for the publisher's decision, which was made shortly after the magazine was accused of containing "strong adult content" and "explicit tales about sex, drugs, and molestation." Methodologically, the article demonstrates how literary scholarship can make use of tools for preserving historical versions of online material, namely the tracked history of Wikipedia pages and Internet discussion forums archived by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.