Undine Love

Tor.com is thrilled to reprint “Undine Love” by Kathleen Jennings, which first appeared in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine in 2011. “Undine Love” started as a symptom of reading Gothic fiction (as in, actual Gothic fiction written in the late 1700s and early 1800s, with people being dragged off to hell and screaming “Wertrold, Wertrold, save me!” and wrestling anacondas in Ceylon, in case you ever wondered what Jane Austen’s characters were reading). I began writing a story in suitably anguished prose, then wondered whether (as an exercise) it would work if updated from wuthering medievalish riverbanks to a modern beachhouse. It worked, but it felt rather sandy and unpleasant, so I shifted the story to something like the Lockyer Valley, where my parents live now and where the side roads plunge into deep romantic creek-valleys, and set it at a farmhouse and a bed-and-breakfast above a little river. After “Undine Love” was first published, a few people asked if I’d write more about Tori and the Damsons and their world. It was an idea I played with now and then, in between other projects and hinted at in other stories, without ever quite naming the connection. But as I wrote Flyaway, set in the more remote areas of (something like) Queensland, I realised it had echoes (though considerably more Gothic) of the concerns that drift below the surface of “Undine Love” and that, indeed, some cobweb Damson relations would be involved in the events of Bettina Scott’s life…