Karen Joy Fowler (1950– ) is an influential and award-winning US writer of speculative and mainstream fiction associated with the Humanists (including Kim Stanley Robinson) and the rise of feminist science fiction. She studied at Berkeley and the University of California at Davis, receiving a BA in political science and an MA in North Asian studies. Fowler is best known as the author of two bestselling novels, The Jane Austen Book Club (2004), which was made into a movie, and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (2013). She has won several awards, including the Nebula Award and World Fantasy Award, in addition to being shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Warwick Prize (both for We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves). In 1991, Fowler cofounded the James Tiptree Jr. Award, given annually to a work of science fiction or fantasy that “expands or explores our understanding of gender.”
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is not, strictly speaking, science fiction (although, amusingly enough, it was shortlisted for the Nebula Award for science fiction) but exhibits a speculative impulse in how it interrogates the way human beings interact with and perceive animals. Her often ambiguous approach to genre writing also manifests in novels like Sarah Canary (1991), which can be read as a feminist story of the nineteenth century and a first-contact story with a character who may or may not be an alien.
Fowler began publishing science fiction with “Recalling Cinderella” in L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future, volume 1 (1985), edited by Algis Budrys. Swiftly thereafter her first collection, Artificial Things (1986), had a large impact on the field and she won the 1987 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Later collections include Peripheral Vision (1990), Letters from Home (1991; with separate stories by Fowler, Pat Cadigan, and Pat Murphy), and Black Glass: Short Fictions (1997), which assembles stories from the previous two volumes, plus original material, and which was recently reissued. Her most recent collection, What I Didn’t See and Other Stories (2009), won the World Fantasy Award. Fowler has shown considerable range in her short fiction throughout her career. Some stories, like “Face Value” (1986) or “Faded Roses” (1989), are pure science fiction, while others shift into fantasy or fabulation, using ambiguity in ingenious and unique ways.
On the topic of ambiguity, Fowler wrote in an essay included in Wonderbook (2013), “I don’t use ambiguity in a story as a literary device or a postmodern trick…I use it in an attempt to acknowledge that the things we think we know are submerged in a vast sea of things we don’t know and things we will never know. I mean to admit to my own lack of comprehension about the world in which we live.”
“The Lake Was Full of Artificial Things” (1985), originally published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, features hypnotherapy and time travel. Despite being an early tale of hers, the story is typically Fowleresque in its mixture of complexity and deep characterization.