The introduction to A Taste of Magic presents it as the last novel with which Andre Norton was directly involved. She made notes on it and attempted to write it at the end of her life, when, according to the introduction, she had finally escaped the difficulties and betrayals of her later years. But her health was failing and she despaired, until she was able to share her concept for the book with one of her dear friends and collaborators, writer and editor Jean Rabe.

It’s a poignant story, heartbreaking at times, and it makes reading and reviewing the novel difficult. How can I criticize it when she struggled so hard to bring it out into the world?

Andre was a great lady in many senses of the word. She was unfailingly kind and generous; she loved to share her worlds and characters with younger writers, and one of her great pleasures was to use her own successes to help others. That’s visible in her work from early on: She was careful to write about characters and cultures other than default white and usually male, and she tried to honor the differences as well as the commonalities of human experience.

The Five Senses series is in many ways a reflection of her personal struggles in the Nineties and the early years of the new millennium. The overall concept, of female magic users discovering their powers and contending with political and personal conflicts in separate but similar secondary worlds, is consistent from book to book, and except in Wind in the Stone, she’s careful to focus the magical system on one specific sense. Here we have the sense of taste, and themes familiar from the previous volumes: a protagonist who is more powerful than she knows, tangled political machinations, desperate flight from deadly danger, complicated family situations, animal companions, supernatural “Green” beings, a touch of romance, and of course rapid pacing and breakneck adventure.

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Here we have a young woman named Wisteria, who has been fostered by a noble lady in a medieval-style empire and educated by a retired master of an elite military cadre called the “Moonsons” (which my eye persisted in reading as Monsoons—it’s that time of year in Arizona). Wisteria’s world is full of magic and magic users, and humans share it with supernatural “Green” beings who are capable of interbreeding with humans. She comes from a magical family; her father is the Emperor’s taster, and she has the taste magic as well, though she frequently observes that her brother, who is off in the military somewhere, does not.

In addition to Wisteria, there’s a secondary main character, Allysen, a young child descended from a mysterious and politically perilous family of strong magic users. Allysen, it turns out, is half Green, and her powers are dangerous enough that her room is the only one in the keep with a lock on the door.

In classic Norton fashion, the story begins with Wisteria out hunting with her trusty bonded steed, returning to find her home destroyed and her foster mother horribly murdered, along with everyone else except Allysen. Allysen has been placed under a spell of invisibility by a mysterious and frequent guest, a Nanoo or woods witch. The Nanoo has disappeared. Wisteria, apparently because of her powers, can see Allysen. The men who slaughtered everybody could not.

These men, Allysen tells Wisteria, are led by a horrible “demon-of-a-man” named Lord Purvis. Some of them, to Wisteria’s confusion and horror, are Moonsons. Moonsons are supposed to be noble and honorable warriors, but here they have committed a terrible atrocity. They are, apparently, looking for Wisteria, whose father is dead, as is the Emperor; the Moonsons and Purvis serve the Empress, who has staged a coup.

Wisteria and Allysen gather supplies and horses and flee the scene of the massacre. Wisteria intends to take Allysen to the Nanoo’s people, who can keep her safe while Wisteria pursues her formal “bloodoath” against the monstrous murderer Purvis.

This plan goes sideways at once. First the fugitives have to defend themselves against a huge and horrible fosebear. Then Allysen rescues a weird magical bird-creature trapped in the wood.

At first the creature seems to be one of Norton’s wise alien animal companions a la Eet, but the girls gradually discover that it’s evil. It forces them to wander far out of their way, draining their magic in the process. Worst of all, it kills Wisteria’s beloved horse. But the girls’ magic in the end prevails, and they finally make it to the Nanoo.

Allysen cheerfully agrees to stay there, but the Nanoo who used to visit the village is missing—worse, she’s been taken captive by Purvis. When Wisteria sets out again, the chief of the Nanoo comes with her. Their mission: to rescue the captive, and then Wisteria intends to take off alone and kill Purvis.

This, like the rest of Wisteria’s plans, doesn’t not turn out exactly as she expects. The Nanoo has been tortured; she’s in the custody of Moonsons. Wisteria ignores her companion’s advice and convinces the Moonsons to let her speak to the prisoner, then easily rescues her. But she gets a shock in the process: She learns that Purvis is none other than her brother. Not only that; he has magic after all. And he’s using it for evil. He killed the Emperor and his own father.

Wisteria, therefore, has sworn “bloodoath” against her own blood kin. She also discovers that she wasn’t the target of the attack on the village—Purvis was going after Allysen, partly because of her supernatural heritage, but primarily because Allysen has a hobby. Allysen likes to scry in convenient reflective surfaces, including mud puddles. She’s been spying on the imperial court because she likes the shiny outfits, and she’s watched Purvis’ murders and the Empress’ treachery.

Allysen is a witness, and Purvis wants her dead. Wisteria is collateral damage.

Wisteria meanwhile has been discovering, with the Nanoo’s help, that she’s much more powerful than she realized. In addition to the two women, she meets a young male Nanoo who lives outside the forest. They fall in love in awkward, reticent Norton fashion. In the end, after evil is vanquished, the two of them go off into the metaphorical sunset together, as Norton lovers do.

The plot outline is distinctly Norton, as is the cast of characters. The execution…

It’s hard to write someone else’s story from their outline. Writers do it often; film and television writers make a career of it. But it’s a challenge. It takes a particular set of skills, the ability to become a sort of creative chameleon, to take on the coloration of the source and create something that faithfully reflects the style and intention of the original.

When the project is a loved writer’s last, there’s a further layer of difficulty. How to honor the writer’s wishes with a partial manuscript and an unfinished outline, without the writer present to advise. And, I’m sure, missing her every day, and grieving that she wasn’t able to finish the book herself.

Norton collaborated with a number of writers, often with great success. When the collaborations really worked—as often they did—the result was a lovely combination of both. They played strength to strength.

A Taste of Magic, unfortunately, is not one of these. The bones of the plot are there, but the balance is off. The expedition to the Nanoo takes up the whole first half of the book; the evil-bird-thing plot doesn’t connect to anything else, though it does show how the girls’ different styles of magic work and don’t work. The political plot is entirely offstage, and it seems as if Allysen’s supernatural origins are meant to play more of a role than they do. Neither Wisteria nor Allysen likes each other much; Allysen is a creepy stalker child prone to episodes of weirdly sophisticated political exposition, and Wisteria spends much of her time making foolish or thoughtless choices and leaping to erroneous conclusions.

Once Wisteria finally drops Allysen off, the pacing picks up and the events of the plot fit together more coherently. The Nanoo, when we meet them at last, are lovely and vibrant characters; the story comes alive when they’re onstage. Wisteria however continues her reign of plot-stupidity. As with Allysen’s supernatural father, it seems her Moonson education—which is not given a girl or a commoner—ought to go somewhere, but it never does.

There are a lot of dropped stitches in the fabric (and there’s weaving magic in the opening, which doesn’t get anywhere, either), ideas and lines of plot that show up but aren’t developed. In the first half, Allysen and Wisteria exchange chunks of notes and background synopsis, which, if Norton had lived, would probably have been worked into the narrative. For me it was a frustrating read, because I could see the structure and the shape of the plot, but the text itself was just not getting there.

What summed it up for me was the portrayal of the horses. I have noticed throughout my reading and rereading of Norton’s works that she was not a horse person. For the most part she was wise and kept them to the fringes. If she did feature them prominently, she did her homework. She got them mostly right. She avoided major errors.

The horses here have clearly been researched. There are references to specific breeds and general types: fell pony, vanner, haflinger; cob, warmblood, draft. If they’ve been traveling a long time, we’re told how they can get tired and go lame, and Wisteria thinks to take remounts on a journey. They need to eat early and often, and Wisteria thinks about this. She has her special horse, her beloved companion, whom the evil bird thing kills; this hurts her terribly, as the evil bird thing intends.

But here’s the thing. Research knowledge and lived experience are two separate entities.

The horse breeds and types don’t make sense in the context. Haflingers are a particular breed of Austrian pony; “vanners” are a modern designer breed, as is the European Warmblood. There’s no reason for them to be present in this secondary world. A cob, a draft, a pony, yes—these are broad types that you would expect to see in a horse culture—but when you’re setting up for a trek through wilderness, you will not take the draft horse which is a large, slow, low-stamina animal that eats a great deal and is designed for heavy agricultural work. You take the cob (short, stocky, tough, able to carry quite a bit of weight and travel far on short commons) and the pony (even shorter, stockier, tougher, and lower-maintenance, plus good size for a child) and you pick a couple of guards’ mounts which are fit and trained for that kind of work. And sure enough, the draft never does get used; he’s turned loose and Wisteria hopes he’ll find grass to eat and won’t get eaten in his turn by predators. He seems to be there as an item on a list, rather than because he serves a purpose.

Beyond this relatively arcane range of knowledge, certain details point to the fact that the writer is not a rider. They’re iconic in that way. And they repeat consistently.

First, to make the horse go, Wisteria shakes the reins. Second, she “knees” the horse to make him go faster. Both of these things show up frequently in non-riders’ writing about horses, and they’re both incorrect. (I would love to know the ur-text from which these misconceptions derive. Because whatever it is, it’s pervasive.)

To make a horse go, rather simplistically, you touch or tap him with your lower legs—your calves. You do not shake the reins. You may pick them up. You may in certain riding styles move your hand forward to release the brake that the bit can be, so the horse can advance. You may use your voice, too, or click your tongue. The reins do not shake. If you shake the reins, the horse may give you a Look, but she’s not going anywhere.

To speed him up, you may kick him or nudge him with your lower legs. Or again use your voice. Or slap her with reins or a crop. You do not “knee” her.

There’s a reason why cartoon cowboys are bowlegged. The points of contact for a rider are the seat (butt, seatbones) and the calves and ankles. The knees have to be relaxed and drape around the horse’s barrel. Otherwise you can’t balance on this large moving object. If you clamp the knees, you lose control over your body; clamp too hard and you squirt up like a watermelon seed. The horse is not responding to knee pressure but to lower-leg pressure or refinements of the seat and balance.

So no. No shaky reins. No kneeing him forward. Best to revert to classic Norton and do horses peripherally, rather than trying to center them in the story.

I’m headed back out into space next, with the first of a pair of science-fantasy adventures, Dark Piper. It’s been a long time since I read that. We’ll see how it holds up.

Judith Tarr’s first novel, The Isle of Glass, appeared in 1985. Her most recent novel, Dragons in the Earth, a contemporary fantasy set in Arizona, was published by Book View Cafe. In between, she’s written historicals and historical fantasies and epic fantasies and space operas, some of which have been published as ebooks from Book View Café—and even a book about writing horses: Writing Horses: The Fine Art of Getting It Right. She has won the Crawford Award, and been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award and the Locus Award. She lives in Arizona with an assortment of cats, a blue-eyed dog, and a herd of Lipizzan horses.

The search for immortality is not a thing of the past. From medieval alchemists to Big Pharma, from ancient Chinese medicine to modern nanotech, our quest has never really stopped. Sixteen-year-old Conrad Aybinder is just a part of this storied tradition. When his teacher and lover, Sammy Tampari, dies under mysterious circumstances, he leaves Conrad his legacy: twenty-two journals, a storage unit full of chemistry equipment, and a recipe for the elixir of life.

Jake Wolff’s debut novel, The History of Living Forever is an ambitious and emotionally raw thing, starting and ending with grief, with a twisting alchemical plot tying these human moments together. Its pages jump between Conrad’s youth and Sammy’s, histories of scientific discovery, and an older Conrad, reflecting on all of this and dealing with his beloved husband’s cancer diagnosis. Each point of view invariably asks the same questions: Will we find the elixir? Is it even possible? What sacrifices will we make to cure the very things that make us human?

The novel’s primary plot line follows Conrad as he attempts to recreate Sammy’s elixir, slowly but surely discovering not only the ingredients, but elements of Sammy’s life as well. Conrad may not want to live forever, but his father is dying of liver disease, and he’s convinced that Sammy left him the recipe for a reason. Conrad’s search begins to mirror Sammy’s own: slotting together scientific theories in real time, and even encountering the same people: Sadiq, a scientist and Sammy’s former lover; Catherine, anthropologist and ex-girlfriend; and a whole host of less-than-savory characters from drug kingpins to pharmaceutical execs. All of them have been pulled into Sammy’s irresistible orbit, and all of them have sought the elixir in some form or other. Unlike the others, though, Sammy seems to have found the answer, if only Conrad can piece together the clues he left in his wake.

There’s a lot to be said about this novel’s treatment of science—from its ambiguity between fantasy and reality (do not try these recipes at home, an author’s note warns us) to its treatment of modern healthcare technology as alchemical tradition. However I want to talk about this book primarily as a story about queerness.

And so we might as well start with the elephant in the room: for all this book’s marketing about the power of love, its central love story is one of pederasty. Sammy is an adult man—a teacher and authority figure, no less—in a relationship with a sixteen-year-old high school senior. The book frames this in a rather complex way: an adult Conrad reflects on their relationship, trying and failing to see it as abusive as his therapists and husband argue. He was, after all, in love with Sammy. Regardless of whether that love was returned, and regardless of Sammy’s lies and strangeness in pursuit of the elixir, nothing will change the fact of Conrad’s experiences, or that Sammy left his research to Conrad in the hopes of saving his father. “To recognize the wrongness of a thing,” Conrad confides, “is not the same as to experience it as wrong.”

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So much about the novel, though, is about mental health and trauma. Sammy’s entire search for the elixir is predicated not on living forever, but on curing his depression. His constant refrain—throughout his search, throughout his years of medication and electroshock therapy—is “What is wrong with me?” It’s obvious, though we never see Conrad through his perspective, that he senses something similar in Conrad. Their relationship, then, is not just about love or sex or power. It is instead framed it in the cultural practice of young queer people, especially men, seeking out older mentor figures for relationships, attempting to find someone—anyone—that understands and can guide them through what they’re experiencing.

Queerness is central to The History of Living Forever, and not just because of Sammy and Conrad’s relationship; it is also central to the search for a cure. This desire to be fixed, to be cured of one’s brokenness—Conrad seeks these feelings in Sammy, and Sammy seeks them in the elixir. Sammy’s quest may not be motivated to cure himself of his queerness as such, but it seeps into everything he does: a quest to feel unbroken, to sit right with the world and be considered mentally-well. It’s no mistake that the novel’s climactic scene takes place in an abandoned gay conversion camp. Sammy and Conrad are drawn together in part because they both feel rejected by the world, and it’s no wonder.

This framing of the elixir as a quest not only for immortality, but for normalcy and belonging, is unique amongst the host of alchemy-based SFF I’ve read and seen. It turns the question of “the cure” on its head—if mortality is something no human can escape from, so too are our positions as outsiders, as queers, as mentally-ill, as “broken.” And, the book seems to argue, that can be as painful as it is immutable as it is beautiful. If there’s one thing The History of Living Forever doesn’t offer, it’s an easy answer. It is, after all, not a catch-all elixir.

The History of Living Forever is a page-turner in all its mysteries, both scientific and psychological. It’s the kind of book you think of long after you’ve finished it, whether you liked it or not—and I did like it. I suspect some will be upset by the novel’s central romance, and that’s understandable. But its project is a nuanced one, emotionally real even if it’s not morally inspiring. It’s very worth mulling over.

The History of Living Forever is available from Farrar Straus & Giroux.

Em Nordling reads, writes, and manages research in Louisville, KY.

I write to you this week surrounded the pleasant detritus of an early summer weekend—my ukulele, a pile of books, a sleepy dog, a plate containing the remnants of some homemade ice cream sandwiches. We take summer seriously around here. The only problem is that, although my children are both out of school now, I’m not done until Wednesday.

Although I gather that some aspects of being a Betan Survey Commander and Vicereine of Sergyar are similar to some aspects of teaching at the secondary level, Cordelia has never been a high school teacher. Nonetheless, Chapter 17 finds her in a state of mind not unlike mine: With Jole’s decisions about his career and his children made, the moment she is living is warm and glorious, in many ways the polar opposite of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening”—but all the responsibilities are hanging over it anyway. We have miles to go before we sleep.

I didn’t capitalize the M. That’s all on you. I’m not a monster.

Cordelia’s morning starts with a meeting with her staff. Her press secretary, Blaise, seems to need a lot of guidance, and not for the first time. In general, I believe that Barrayar has developed a mostly-free press, but Blaise’s frequent need for direction suggests that, on Sergyar at least, journalists have yet to create significant difficulties for Barrayar’s political leaders. This morning, Cordelia instructs Blaise to counter the public’s interest in footage of her heroic shirtless boyfriend with a narrative that emphasizes the benefits of Sergyar’s military preparedness. That sounds like an uphill battle, but it’s a nice way to illustrate the Viceregal office’s emphasis on interagency cooperation.

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Her next order of business—Plas-Dan, the plascrete supplier—is interrupted by ghem Lord Soren, who has come to ask for asylum. He says his consul didn’t give him permission to build a discernment garden. I’m not privy to the day-to-day operations at the Cetagandan consulate, but this sounds implausible. The consul’s son helped construct the installation and volunteered at it during the event. Lon ghem Navitt has, on at least one occasion, done things his parents weren’t aware of in advance. But generally, youthful rebellion does not take the form of assisting with construction and implementation of a cultural outreach project alongside one’s school friends. That’s literally something the kid could put on his college applications. Alex and Helen also helped with the discernment garden, and if it truly wasn’t approved by the Cetagandan consulate, I would think that it would have been diplomatic of their staff to share that information with local authorities, or at least send Lon’s friends home.

Nonetheless, Soren is facing the prospect of returning to Cetaganda in disgrace. He would prefer not to go. He’s applying for asylum. He tried asking Kaya Vorinnis to marry him first, and got turned down. BECAUSE OF COURSE. Vorinnis’s heart was never engaged here, and she’s not about to give her hand and her career in its place.

Concern for Soren’s fate is put on hold by a call from Kareen Koudelka. She’s here to bring Cordelia an Escobaran contracting company that’s prepared to assemble a prefab factory in Gridgrad as soon as a site can be leveled and plumbed. Everyone is thrilled to see Kareen, because everyone is always thrilled to see Kareen, as a person, not just as a deus ex machina that travels the Nexus distributing cement factories. Plas-Dan is about to learn the meaning of regret.

And it turns out that the horrible fate Soren wants to avoid in his asylum petition is working in the family plumbing business. Cordelia is so very nice about acknowledging that this seems like an unsurmountable setback to Soren because he’s only thirty. I think he’s a smidge old for Vorinnis, and should have acquired a sense of proportion at least five years ago. Cordelia is willing to grant his petition if he’s willing to work as a plumber on Sergyar. Apparently, anything that keeps Soren on Sergyar is preferable to the humiliation of returning to the Cetagandan Empire with his diplomatic career in shreds. Cordelia leaves the details to her very capable secretary—Ivy has been floating around in the background in this book, and I wish we got to see more of her. She seems less like an administrative assistant and more like a partner in crime—at least, like one of those bright women Cordelia was looking for in Barrayar. And also, I’m now primed to believe almost anything about people’s assistants. Do you think Ivy is trained to be the last man standing between Cordelia and whatever deadly threats she might face?

In the final pages of the chapter, Miles and his family decamp for their commercial flight back to Barrayar. Tune in next week for the epilogue, the very last post in this reread.

Ellen Cheeseman-Meyer teaches history and reads a lot.

Hello friends and readers and readerfriends! Bit of a heads up, we’re only covering one chapter this week, so we can get back on a better rhythm that matches the thematic sections of The Dragon Reborn. Thus, this week will only cover Chapter 40, and next week will cover all of Perrin’s adventures in chapters 41-44.

Fortunately for us, Chapter 40, A Hero in the Night, is both fun and really interesting. It’s strange that we’re still getting to know Mat for the first time, despite all the history we have from The Eye of The World and The Great Hunt. I was particularly struck this week by Mat’s need to insist that he’s not as kind as he is, and the way he impulsively wants to help other people. If you had asked me before this chapter, I would certainly have said that Mat is the most selfish, or at least the most self-centered, of the Emond’s Field folks, but I hadn’t really expected him to have this view of himself, and I’m a little confused about where this impulse to insist that he doesn’t care is coming from. Self-preservation is my best guess. Or maybe Mat picked up somewhere that generosity is weakness? That doesn’t seem like a lesson he would have learned from his clever Da or any of the other folks of the Two Rivers, though. But perhaps his encounter with Aludra will shine some more light on the question.

Chapter 40 opens with the Gray Gull coming into the docks at Aringill, where Mat and Thom find absolute throngs of people, some bustling about carrying possessions, others sitting or standing alone or in family groups as the children cling, crying, to their parents. Mat can see that many of the ships on the Erinin are not occupied with river trade at all, but rather with ferrying people over to Aringill from another town on the far bank.

Mat tells himself he’s not interested in politics, and just wants people to stop telling him he’s an Andorman “just because of some map.” He also notices that Captain Mallia is watching him from the tiller. The Captain never gave up trying to find out what Mat’s mission was until Mat finally showed him the sealed letter and explained that he was carrying a private message from the Daughter-Heir to Queen Morgase. Privately, Mat had loosened the seal with a heated knife and read the contents, but the letter hadn’t contained any sort of explanation as to why men were coming after Mat. Mat is certain that there is some kind of code or hidden message in the letter, even though Thom, with his experience in the Game of Houses, hadn’t been able to make anything out of it, either. Mat’s determined to get that letter delivered and out of his hands as soon as possible.

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Thom meanwhile, is annoyed that no one in this overflowing town cares that a gleeman has just arrived. He observes that half the people look like they are starving, and that it will be difficult to find any room in an inn. He also points out that someone might be tempted to do violence to Mat if he keeps eating the way he ate on the ship, but Mat insists that he hasn’t been eating that much for days now (the hunger had just vanished one day, as though Tar Valon had lost its last bit of hold on him) though he’s been ordering the same amount and throwing it overboard to mess with Mallia.

Captain Mallia, still butting his nose into their business, offers one of his men to clear a path through the “rabble” on the docks, which Mat sees as a ploy to find out which inn they’re staying at. He throws Mallia off by suggesting he might have another meal and a game of dice on the ship before leaving, and the Captain is relieved when Mat decides against that plan. He’s already lost plenty of money to the lucky young man.

Thom asks why Mat has to taunt Mallia like that, and Mat replies that the Captain deserves the taunting, although he admits to himself that the prank of throwing the extra food over the side doesn’t seem so funny now that he can see all these hungry people. One woman, scanning the arrivals as if looking for someone as her three crying children cling to her, catches his attention, and on impulse, he digs a fistful of coins out of his pockets and presses them into her hands, moving away before she can say anything. He insists it’s not a big deal, both to Thom and to himself, and tries to avoid looking anyone else in the face as they continue on.

They learn from a guard on the docks that most people are sleeping under hedges, and they’ll be lucky to find horses haven’t been slaughtered for food. Thom’s disgusted, but the guardsman tells them that it really is that bad; people are arriving faster than food can be brought to feed them all. But it won’t last much longer, because the orders have come down that this is the last day people will be accepted in the crossing. Starting tomorrow, anyone attempting to land refugees at Aringill will be sent back.

Thom doesn’t think that it sounds very like Morgase to cut people off when they are suffering, but Mat, with a dismissive “who else could it be?” is more interested in finding room at an inn. However, they’re laughed out of every place despite Mat’s money and despite Thom playing the gleeman card. Eventually he convinces Mat to try for space in an innkeeper’s stables, and although the innkeeper declares that his stables are only for horses, Mat, spotting dice cups amongst the man’s possessions, challenges him to a game. He wins first the right to stay in the stables, and next, the possession of the innkeepers two horses.

When they go to the stable to check out their “accommodations,” however, Thom is less than enthused, muttering to himself about Mat throwing five sixes to win the toss, and how lately, Mat hasn’t been winning every toss.

I win enough.” Mat was just as relieved not to be winning every throw. Luck was one thing, but remembering that night still sent shivers down his back. Still, for one moment as he shook that dice cup, he had all but known what the pips would be. As he tossed the quarterstaff up into the loft, thunder crashed in the sky. He scrambled up the ladder, calling back to Thom. “This was a good idea. I’d think you would be happy to be in out of the rain tonight.”

They eat a meal of bread and cheese and water—all the innkeeper had to sell them—in the hayloft, and Thom settles back to smoke his pipe. Just then a woman enters the stable with a wagon. She is well-dressed, and able to light a lantern in the dark easily, despite the fact that it’s tricky to use a flint and make sparks in a stable. Mat notices her chewing on a bit of bread from her supplies as though it’s rather hard but she is too hungry to care.

Four big men men, in clothes equally as good as the woman’s, suddenly enter the barn as well, addressing her as Aludra. Their leader, Tammuz, tells her that she would have been left alone if she had been “able to forget the secrets in [her] head” and that she should have known that they would find out that she was making what the Guild alone has the right to make.

When Mat sees them draw daggers with the intent to kill her, he moves, even as he’s calling himself a fool in his head. He grabs one of the doubled ropes suspended from the ceiling and swings down to plow through the group of men, knocking them down. Thom throws Mat his quarterstaff and Mat eventually knocks all the knives away and all the men down.

He tells Aludra that she could have picked a different stable to be murdered in, and she, sheathing a dagger, points out that she would have helped him fight but she didn’t want to get mistaken for one of the men in the fray. As Thom comes down from the loft, Aludra observes that this is like a story, her being rescued by a gleeman and a young hero.

They introduce themselves, and learn that Aludra was an illuminator before Tammuz ruined a performance for the King of Cairhien and almost destroyed a Chapter House. But because Aludra was the Mistress of that Chapter House, she took the blame with the Guild. She also insists that she isn’t telling the secrets of the Guild, as Tammuz claimed, but that she won’t allow herself to starve when she has the ability to make a living creating fireworks.

Aludra declares that she must reward them, but she has no money. Instead she offers a roll of oiled cloth full of different sized fireworks. Thom tells her she mustn’t offer them something so valuable, but she tells him that she has a right to express gratitude as she wishes.

Mat squatted beside her, fascinated. He had seen fireworks twice in his life. Peddlers had brought them to Emond’s Field, at great expense to the Village Council. When he was ten, he had tried to cut one open to see what was inside, and had caused an uproar. Bran al’Vere, the Mayor, had cuffed him; Doral Barran, who had been the Wisdom then, had switched him; and his father had strapped him when he got home. Nobody in the village would talk to him for a month, except for Rand and Perrin, and they mostly told him what a fool he had been. He reached out to touch one of the cylinders. Aludra slapped his hand away.

She explains how the different sizes work—which make a bang, which make a bang and light, which makes sparkles, how the fuses work. Finally, she warns them not to leave the package close to fire or they will explode, and not to cut them open, because exposure to air can often make them explode without fire, and one could lose a finger or even a hand.

Then Aludra prepares to leave, remarking that the men on the floor will expect her to go to Caemlyn so she will maybe head towards Lugard instead. Mat thinks of how long a journey that is, how hungry she had seemed gnawing on that loaf of stale bread, and finds himself offering her a fistful of coins. He can always win more.

She paused with her cloak half around her shoulders, then smiled at Thom as she swept it the rest of the way on. “He is young yet, eh?”

“He is young,” Thom agreed. “And not half so bad as he would like to think himself. Sometimes he is not.”

Mat glowered at both of them and lowered his hand.

As Aludra is leaving, Thom asks how she lit her lantern so quickly in the dark. She isn’t going to tell all her secrets, but she does remark that if she ever perfects them, “sticks” will make her fortune for her.

Then she leaves, out into the rainy night, and Thom remarks that he and Mat should follow, as the men on the floor are starting to stir. They saddle the horses Mat won.

Swinging into his saddle, Mat stared at the rain outside the open door, falling harder than ever. “A bloody hero,” he said. “Thom, if I ever look like acting the hero again, you kick me.”

“And what would you have done differently?”

Mat scowled at him, then pulled up his hood and spread the tail of his cloak over the fat roll tied behind the high cantle of his saddle. Even with oiled cloth, a little more protection from the rain could not hurt. “Just kick me!” He booted his horse in the ribs and galloped into the rainy night.

If you were to place Mat on the D&D alignment scale—I don’t play D&D but I do enjoy the internet’s favorite pastime, after sorting characters into Hogwarts Houses—The Eye of the World Mat would fall into Chaotic Neutral, I think. Not a bad person, but he’s ruled by slightly selfish impulses that don’t really take into account considering what effects will result from his actions, for good or for ill. He wanted to find treasure in Shadar Logoth, for example, but when he actually took the dagger it was from an impulse to protect himself from Mordeth, rather than greed, which to me is more of a neutral choice rather than the “evil” of greed. Even Mat in the White Tower is pretty neutral; he’s concerned first and foremost with his own protection and escape from Tar Valon, and while he has no impulse to harm anyone, he also isn’t really motivated by anything except self-interest when he accepts the duty of carrying Elayne’s letter to Morgase. This Mat, however, is finding himself with charitable and kind impulses, and while perhaps he is right that the money means little to him, he was willing to put himself in danger for Aludra and lose the safe haven he had found for him and Thom, something that we know is very important to Mat.

I’m not really surprised that Mat has good-person impulses. What surprises me is that he is so defensive about them. I’m not sure why it is that he needs to prove to himself, in his own mind, that he didn’t give that mother money because he genuinely cared, that he had to tell himself it was only because the children’s crying was annoying.

Maybe he worries that appearing soft will make him vulnerable to others. That makes sense, and he certainly has reasons to fear being vulnerable, given what he’s been through since he left the Two Rivers. Mat’s self-protective streak is strong, so perhaps that feels at odds with his impulse to step into a conflict that isn’t his. I wonder, too, if there isn’t also a generosity that comes with realizing how many advantages he suddenly has. It isn’t as though he gave away his last piece of bread, Aladdin-style; Mat does have plenty of money, and no reason to believe he can’t replenish it at will. Mat has come suddenly, unexpectedly, and mysteriously, into possession of a great stash of money that, for the moment at least, seems to be eternally replenishable. That his first instinct is to pay that good fortune forward isn’t perhaps as unexpected as Mat, who was raised in a small farming community without much wealth, might think it is. And how lovely to see someone rich not be stingy with it.

I like Mat as a force of chaotic good in the world, especially since he is also ta’veren. Captain Mallia is a cruel, xenophobic monster who thinks entire countries of people should be exterminated or enslaved; he deserves every bit of tormenting Mat inflicted on him and more. Not saying that Mat is being cautious or even wise… but I got a lot of satisfaction out of him hazing Mallia and taking his money. Even the innkeeper who loses his horses to Mat’s dice throws is drawn into it by Mat playing on his greed, so there is a certain sense of justice there, too, despite the fact that Mat totally played the man.

I wonder if Mat’s ta’veren nature has something to do with his new luck powers. I remember, when Rand engaged the Whitecloaks at Baerlon, the narrative described his perceptions of things as distant and “wrapped in wool.” While I’m fairly sure that was a reaction from his earlier channeling, I also see some similarities between that scene and what Mat experienced as he gambled in Tar Valon and discovered that he could not lose. Maybe Mat is influencing the Pattern in small, deliberate ways as he focuses on the fall of the dice. I have been wondering whether Mat’s confidence that his luck with gambling will always continue was foolish or warranted: Since he doesn’t know why his luck is so intense, shouldn’t he be worried that it will stop as soon as it started, and be careful to use what he’s gained as thoughtfully as possible? That is, perhaps, not really his nature, but it’s also possible that he is actually influencing the luck in some way, and so on some level is aware that he has control, and therefore that the luck is here to stay.

We’ve seen the way Rand’s extremely powerful ta’veren-ness has shaped the lives of the people around him in very obvious and even extreme ways. In Chapter 32 Rand muses on the weddings at Jarra, and how he played Rose of the Morning at them. The song makes him think of Egwene, who he once thought he would marry, and perhaps the thoughts of Egwene came because of the marriage, but part of me wondered then if Rand’s mood might have shaped how his ta’veren powers manifested, if his thoughts of Egwene hadn’t been the reason for all those people to suddenly want to be married, as Rand had once dreamed of being. We’ve yet to see a suggestion on Perrin’s end that could be read similarly, but I do find this theory interesting, and I’ll be keeping an eye on it going forward.

I was going to bring it up in one of the sections with Nynaeve and co., but reading the physical description of Aludra make me think of it. The narration in The Dragon Reborn has shifted slightly from the first two books in several ways; for example, I observed in an earlier post that the braid-tugging was never so predominant in The Eye of the Word or The Great Hunt as it is in The Dragon Reborn. Similarly, I’ve noticed a focus on breasts, and the word breasts, that wasn’t there in the earlier novels. Rather than, for example, describing a dress as being embroidered along the breast (a slightly old-fashioned word for chest, and a gender-neutral way of describing that area of the body) or even “embroidered along the bodice” or “bosom,” Jordan continually chooses to use the word breasts. Egwene’s ring “hangs down between her breasts,” as does Nynaeve’s. Women always cross their arms “under their breasts,” conjuring an image of them being lifted up and brought into focus. Mat’s sections, meanwhile, focus heavily on the lips of a woman and whether they would be good for kissing. Aludra has “a small, full mouth that seemed on the point of a pout. Or getting ready for a kiss.” It’s not a hugely dramatic or untoward shift, but it is a noticeable one, and it feels to me like it greatly increases the narrative’s intention to remind us constantly of the sexualization of women, their kissability, their breasts, how much Faile may or may not have a nose that’s too big for her face. It’s especially noticeable in the sections from Egwene’s point-of-view, I think; it’s one thing if the narration is trying to tell me that Mat’s obsessed with kissing, but I don’t think Egwene has any real reason to be focusing on anyone’s breasts that much, and it comes off as just being there to—ahem—titillate the reader.

I really do like Aludra’s character, though: her no-nonsense attitude and her status as an elite craftsperson. I had forgotten her and Tammuz’s names, so it was only after she told the story about the Chapter House in Cairhien that I realized we’d encountered them before. Jordan seems to be very adept at weaving (haha) all these threads back together again and again, which in addition to being a fun sort of Easter egg hunt for the reader, reinforces the concept of this world existing as a woven Pattern, where threads are directed by a higher power and nothing is ever really chance. I wonder if we will see Aludra again, or if her gift of fireworks will serve an important role in Mat and his friends’ futures.

The Illuminators Guild and the rules around it are fascinating, and it just occurred to me this week that having the technology for fireworks means that this world also has the technology for early firearms. But the Illuminators don’t seem to have any interest in weapons, and they guard their secrets closely. But now Mister Mischief Mat has got his hands on them, and really anything could come of this. I don’t know if he will keep them or sell them, or if his interest in fireworks will ultimately allow others—perhaps unsavory types—to get their hands on the technology too. But what I do know is that there is a -10% chance that Mat will listen to Aludra and not open one of those fireworks, and I’d guess about a 50% chance he’ll lose a finger or a hand. Then again, his luck has changed since he foolishly picked up some cursed treasure on his first trip outside the Two Rivers, and perhaps I’m not very wise to place any odds against Matrim Cauthon these days.

And whether or not the men chasing Mat have anything to do with Elayne’s letter? Well, that remains to be seen.

Next week we rejoin Moiraine, Lan, Perrin, and his falcon. We’ll see that all is not right in Illian, learn about darkhounds, worry a lot about Lan and Moriane, and do our level best not to make any stupid jokes about an inn called Easing the Badger.

Sylas K Barrett has so many questions about how ta’veren work. Almost as much as it looks like MoiraIne is about to have.

It took me years to own my bisexuality. It also took me years to come to terms with my love of horror, for similar reasons. I come from a family harbouring a congenital obsession with a certain cartoon mouse and his media empire, and so my love of all things dark and gothic was not always well understood—even after The Nightmare Before Christmas gave me an outlet. Over the years, writing became my way of dealing with my difference, my stories stashed in hidden notebooks. I have become passionate about the ways dark and brutal stories can reach out to people in the depths of trauma and show them others have been there and that there are ways to cope, and maybe even a way out. I am excited by the opportunity to tell stories that would make another person feel less alone when things seem darkest.

In the past, horror authors often ‘buried their gays’, a practice that dooms queer characters or their partners to die by the end of the story. Think of homoerotic vampires such as Dracula or Carmilla, or the madness and suicide of Nell, Shirley Jackson’s queer-coded protagonist in The Haunting of Hill House. The genre’s high body count has made the death trope pervasive, but horror also has wonderful elements of the Gothic, which delights in the spaces between set categories, including gender and sexuality. As I learned all those years ago scribbling in my notebooks, horror allows us to safely explore our fears, and by doing so, put them behind us. Below, you’ll find five of my favourite horror novels which move beyond burying queer characters and into original narratives that are chilling in all the best ways.

Let The Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist

Many people have seen the popular film adaptations of this book, but in both films, the queerness of the original book is lost. The book’s story centers around Oskar, a lonely bullied teen, and Eli, an ancient vampire turned as a child who is manipulating a pedophile to murder people on their behalf. Unlike in the films, Eli was assigned male at birth but was castrated, and although her gender identity is not clearly defined by the narrative, the most likely reading is that she identifies as neither a boy nor a girl. This situates her in a non-binary space that defies traditional labels. Despite Eli’s monstrous need to feed on the blood of humans, the two teens develop a forbidden friendship, with Oskar helping Eli to express the childhood they lost, and Eli helping Oskar learn to defend himself against daily beatings at school. This is a chilling and relentless novel with a disturbing premise and it offers lots of gore and creepy moments, but our queer protagonists avoid the body count. Additionally, its take on bullying and the damage it can do to a vulnerable young mind is well worth the read, and very pertinent to many folks in the queer community.

Buy Let the Right One In from:

Wake of Vultures by Lila Bowen

From the suburbs of nineteen-eighties Sweden, we now come to the nineteenth century in America’s West. Nettie has spent her whole life working her adoptive family’s farm, being overworked and underappreciated. Half Indigenous and half Black, bisexual and gender non-conforming, she doesn’t feel like she belongs anywhere, except, perhaps, when she is working with horses. When a vampiric stranger invades the farm where Nettie works and she kills him, it sets her on a strange adventure through a world of mythical monsters and self-discovery in the Old West. This is an exciting and fun tale of monsters and adventure, and although Nettie is a very unique character with a lot of marginalized traits, she is always very well-drawn and relatable. I enjoyed this book for its representation of a non-monosexual hero who is well-rounded and not over-sexualized.

Buy Wake of Vultures from:

Widdershins by Jordan L. Hawk

Every well-rounded top five list needs a good indie pick, and Widdershins is mine. Reclusive scholar Percival Whyborne is forced out of his routine as a museum translator when he is paired with Griffin Flaherty, a handsome ex-detective who is trying to unravel the mystery of a secret cypher. As Whyborne fights his growing feelings for Griffin, and the mystery surrounding the book of cyphers grows more deadly, he must face down the tragic and unrequited love in his past. This is one horror romance that handles death in a more progressive way but still manages to be scary. When his former love interest is brought back from the dead, Whyborne faces a symbolic choice between a life of unrequited affections and something real with Griffin. Overall, it is an addictive and readable book with a Lovecraftian flair. An honorable mention should also go to Restless Spirits by the same author, which also has lots of spooky tension and more of a haunted house vibe.

Buy Widdershins from:

A Book of Tongues by Gemma Files

In an Old West where certain people can be transformed into barely-contained supernatural time bombs by abuse or trauma, Morrow, a private detective hired by a scientist, joins the gang of the unstable Asher Rook, a former Reverend who transformed into a hexslinger when he was hanged for being gay. The trio is rounded out by Chess Pargeter, Rook’s lover, a character who is charismatic, flawed and angry at life. When a bloodthirsty Mayan deity latches on to Rook based on an ancient prophecy, the trio embarks on a bloody and intense adventure that will change all of their lives. I enjoyed this book for its realistic depiction of the anger and resentment that can poison people when they are brutalized for being themselves. Rook and Chess feel so real given the setting, and yet paired the magic system and alternate history, the story has an entertaining and fast-paced feel. One small caveat: some readers may not care for the frank depictions of racism and other oppressions that were realities in the Old West.

Buy A Book of Tongues from:

Drawing Blood by Poppy Z. Brite

I saved my favourite for last. Drawing Blood is the oldest book on the list, and I hope that its age means that it’s almost eligible for the designation of ‘classic’. The story follows Trevor McGee, a talented artist whose family was killed by his famous but troubled father. When Trevor returns to the small town where the horrific event happened he is drawn down a dark path as he tries to figure out why his father did not kill him too. The mystery looms over his budding romance with Zach, a hacker on the run from the law. The story is rich and beguiling from the beginning, addressing generational trauma, attachment and healing, and the combined danger and beauty of imaginative work. I would advise any younger horror fans who were not reading during this time period, especially those who love the rich characterizations and slow-burn stories of Stephen King, to pick this one up. This quote from Drawing Blood sums up my feelings on the potential for horror to be a generative force for the LGBT community:

“You could kill someone because you loved them too much, he realized now, but that was nothing to do with art. The art was in learning to spend your life with someone, in having the courage to be creative with someone, to melt each other’s souls to molten temperatures and let them flow together into an alloy that could withstand the world.”

Buy Drawing Blood from:

That’s my list, friends! What about yours? Suggest your best picks in the comments.

Hello, and welcome to my new monthly(ish) column about language and linguistics in science fiction and fantasy! My name is Conni (CD) Covington, and I have MAs in both German and linguistics. I wrote my linguistics thesis on the effect of usage frequency on verbal morphology in a subset of German strong verbs (class VII), and my analysis suggests that there is a threshold frequency below which strong (“irregular”) verbs are most likely to become weak (“regular”). Catch me at a con, and I will happily talk your ear off about this! Broadly, I’m interested in how people use language: why a particular group of people uses a particular set of words and what it means to do so; whether it’s snuck or sneaked; what effects the massive increase in global communication allowed by social media is having on languages.

On the SFF end of things, I am a graduate of Viable Paradise 17 (2013), and I’ve had a few short stories published in anthologies. I tend to read or watch space opera-type stuff, like Bujold’s Vorkosigan series, CJ Cherryh’s Alliance-Union and Foreigner series, Yoon-Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire series, Babylon 5, and The Expanse. I enjoy mecha anime, mainly Gundam and Macross. I haven’t read a lot of fantasy recently, but Lord of the Rings was very formative when I read it the first time, aged 10. That sparked my interest in languages, like it did for a not-insignificant portion of my fellow linguists.

What is this column going to be about? I’ll be taking a look at the ways various authors use language in their works, and, in some cases, how linguists and linguistics are portrayed in fiction and media. I have a running list of works I want to talk about in a notebook—and I’ll take suggestions! Some of these topics will be positive, some will be neutral, and some things just make me want to hit my head against a wall.

Sapir-Whorf and SFF

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a very commonly used trope in speculative fiction (for example, it shows up in Arrival, Ancillary Justice, and Embassytown), so this first entry will give some background information on the concepts involved.

linguistics meme by Gretchen McCulloch

Also known as “linguistic relativity,” the Whorfian hypothesis declares that the language one learns shapes the way people think. On the surface, this sounds like common sense, right? If you don’t have a word for a thing, how can you imagine or discuss that thing? Once you dig a little deeper, though, it becomes stuff and nonsense. You can invent a word for a new thing. Before computers existed, no one had a word for the thing, so we invented plenty of words to talk about them and how to use them and program them and make them. Someone had to come up with the idea to use a machine to calculate things.

Alternatively, you can borrow a word for a new thing. English has a plethora of them, including scribe (from Latin), cherry (from French), Zeitgeist, angst, poltergeist, gestalt, Weltanschauung (all from German), plus a lot of vocabulary that came from colonization, like mango and khaki.

There is, admittedly, some potential validity to a weak version of the hypothesis. Language is a product of society, which is tightly woven with culture. If cultural norms equate femaleness with weakness and frailty, and maleness with strength and virility (from Latin vir ‘man,’ related to English wer—as in werewolf, weregild), people may associate these things in their minds. It’s this concept that is behind the push for more sensitive use of language, and not using words derived from slurs or insults in a casual manner—like not using ‘lame’ or ‘gay’ as a generic pejorative, and instead choosing a more specific word to convey your actual intended meaning, like ‘ridiculous’ or ‘terrible.’ Unweaving culture from society from language is extremely difficult, although it seems more likely to me that sociocultural norms are what shape worldviews and language reflects that.

Linguists have abandoned the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but it lives on in anthropology, where people study the effects of various color words on color recognition: i.e., if people have a word for dark blue and light blue, as in Russian, whether that allows Russians to perceive more colors than English speakers, who have to preface “blue” to distinguish it, rather than say goluboy or siniy. Some studies suggest a difference, while others suggest they are unreliable. Anthropologists also study the effect of relative (left, right) versus absolute (north, south) systems of direction, or counting systems (most famously, the Pirahã).

Every now and then, you get economists making claims that people who speak languages with a strong future tense are less likely to think about the future. This is, clearly, nonsense. This economist claims that English has a “strong future” tense—when, strictly speaking, it has no future tense at all, only a periphrastic (needs a helping verb) future. In English, the present tense can indicate the future, as in “the movie starts at 6, don’t be late” or “I’m going to the store tomorrow.” So English is definitely not a strong future language! The linked article dissects the claim in thorough detail, and it links to follow-up articles at the end.

The wonderful people at Language Log have written a variety of posts about the Whorfian hypothesis, which are excellent.

The Whorfian hypothesis is bad science, but it can make for great fiction. One of the key features of SFF is speculation—a “what if?” In some cases, the question is “what if language really did shape the worldview and cognitive processes?” If there are aliens involved, human neurobiology is less relevant. This is just one more thing I have to suspend disbelief over—aliens, FTL travel, linguistic relativity. A good, well-written story will allow me to keep my disbelief suspended, while a less-well-written one may break that suspension. Come along with me as I read and discuss stories where my disbelief stayed suspended—or where it was broken.

What’s next: My next columns are going to look at the field linguistics in Arrival and types of aphasia in Butler’s “Speech Sounds.” I hope to see you there!

CD Covington has masters degrees in German and Linguistics, likes science fiction and roller derby, and misses having a cat. She is a graduate of Viable Paradise 17 and has published short stories in anthologies, most recently the story “Debridement” in Survivor, edited by Mary Anne Mohanraj and J.J. Pionke.

On June 18, 1990, Captain Jean-Luc Picard was assimilated into the Borg Collective and I was nine-years-old. The famous third season finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation was one of the first TV shows I was allowed to stay up late to watch, and for a variety of reasons I had a lot of feelings about it. And though I didn’t know it’s what I was doing at the time, that summer all I did was craft fan theories about the resolution of Picard’s Borg problem—more than a few those ideas involved time travel, and one idea definitely involved gambling…

My mother—a hardcore Trekkie, and solo parenting that particular week—was determined to get my sister and me to stay up until 9 pm and catch the local airing of TNG on our Arizona syndicated channel. Her strategy was to make the evening into a pizza night marathon that began with Back to the Future Part II, newly released on VHS.

Back to the Future II was great of course, but I had no idea how spoiled I was to get both that and The Next Generation Borg cliffhanger in the same night. As an adult, the only thing that compares is the day that I met The Lonely Island in the morning and had lunch with Chuck Klosterman that same day. I was, of course, a Star Trek and science fiction fan before that night (it’s not like my mom wanting to watch these things was a new development) but for a future sci-fi critic, the combo of these two things was like getting hit by lighting and being bitten by a spider at the exact same time.

Though both BTTF2 and “The Best of Both Worlds” end on cliffhangers, my child-brain was more interested in using elements of the first thing to solve the problems of the second. Because I’m a bigger Star Trek fan than I am fans of most things, this makes sense to me in retrospect; How could Back to the Future ideas help Star Trek? I’m sure the screenwriters of Avengers: Endgame know what I mean.

ANYWAY. Here are five very specific ideas I remember having after seeing Picard get turned into a Borg.

5. Multiple Datas would travel back in time to save Picard.

Credit: CBS

When there are two versions of Marty McFly running around in 1955, this didn’t really blow my mind, because my kid brain had seen this kind of time traveling duplication thing before; hazily I recalled two Picards in the episode “Time Squared,” and also three versions of Data in the climax of the episode “We’ll Always Have Paris.” The point is, the multiple Martys presented an obvious solution to getting Picard De-Borged; Data would travel back in time at multiple points, and simply prevent the abduction from ever happening. To me, it was canon that Data could not be turned into a Borg, because he was already a robot. You can’t make a robot into a cyborg, meaning three (or more) time-traveling Datas could have easily fixed all this.

4. Geordi would invent a hoverboard to fly over unsuspecting Borg.

Credit: Universal

One disadvantage I noticed that the Borg had in 1990 was the fact they couldn’t fly. This seemed like an oversight on their part (even Spock had rocked rocket boots the year prior in Star Trek V)—and the fact they couldn’t fly meant that the Enterprise crew could exploit that mistake. This is how it is when you’re a kid; the way different fictional characters can defeat each other often rests on which “power” they possess that someone else doesn’t have. Rock beats scissors, lightsaber beats phaser and so on. In this case, I figured a hoverboard would beat the Borg.

Also, if the technology for a hoverboard existed in Marty’s 2015, Geordi and Wesley could have certainly built one in 2366. Right?

3. Riker would become the Captain and have big jazz concerts all the time.

Credit: CBS

The musical number at the end of both Back to the Future and Back to the Future II made a huge impression on me, and I wondered why more sci-fi movies didn’t have scenes like this. (I still wonder this, in fact.) Because it had been well-established by this point that Riker played the trombone (“11001001”) and because I had taken up the trombone for band in 4th grade, it seemed pretty obvious that if Riker did remain the Captain of the Enterprise, he would probably have jazz shows all the time.

2. Picard would be like a Darth Vader figure for the rest of The Next Generation.

Credit: CBS

It’s hard to remember this now, but because “Best of Both Worlds” really, really focuses a lot on Riker being ready to be Captain, on some level, you really buy that Picard is not coming back to Starfleet. At this point in my life, I’d of course seen Star Wars and I knew how this would go: Picard would turn to the Borg Side of the Force, and only Riker would believe there was still some Jean-Luc left in him. I figured this could go on for like the rest of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and when the show finally ended, Riker and the crew would totally get Picard back, but then, just like Vader, Picard would die in Riker’s arms. Listen, little kids are often really macabre. Also, despite the excellent Picard episodes that were still yet to come at this point; I ask you, would it have been so bad if Picard had been Locutus for like a whole season? Come on! It would have been awesome!

1. Riker’s poker addiction would create alternate timelines.

Credit: CBS

Back to the Future II is a cautionary tale about gambling as much as it is a kooky time travel movie. When you fuse this idea and the opening poker game in “The Best of Both Worlds,” and mix that all in with some little kid logic you get a few fake Star Trek episodes where Riker betting on stuff at big stakes poker games just fucks up everything. I’m not really sure how this happened, because let’s face it, I had no idea how poker and gambling even worked at that point. I just knew that Riker had some elements of both Biff and Marty inside of him. He was either going to use his poker skills for good… or screw up the universe in the process.

Ryan Britt is a longtime contributor to Tor.com. His other science fiction essays and journalism has been published by SyFy Wire, Den of Geek!, Inverse, and StarTrek.com He is the author of the essay collection Luke Skywalker Can’t Read (Penguin Random House) and an editor at Fatherly.

Happy mid-June, Tor.com! I who am about to melt salute you, and also offer you this reread post, hurray!

This blog series will be covering The Ruin of Kings, the first novel of a five-book series by Jenn Lyons. Previous entries can be found here in the series index.

Today’s post will be covering Chapter 42, “The Younger Son”, and Chapter 43, “The Dragon’s Deal.” Please note that from this point forward, these posts will likely contain spoilers for the entire novel, so it’s recommended that you read the whole thing first before continuing on.

Got that? Great! Click on for the rest!

Chapter 42: The Younger Son (Talon’s story)

[In which Talon offers very cold comfort and a an even more depressing curriculum vitae.]

Well, gee, Talon, I can’t imagine why your idea of comfort (i.e. “my little torture recording session means you’ll be heard after you’re dead”) might not thrill Kihrin to itty bitty bits. Especially since, as Thurvishar points out in the footnotes, he would have no reason to believe this is the one time Talon isn’t lying. For all Kihrin knows she’s gonna chuck that magic rock straight into a volcano as soon as they’re done. And even if she didn’t, there’s no guarantee that anyone would actually listen, or care if they did.

Granted, it turns out they did listen and do care, at least to all appearances (at least enough to publish a book about it), but still.

Buy it Now

(Was it published, in-world? Or is it a private thing only the Emperor got to see?)

I can’t remember at the moment how exactly it ends up being Thurvishar who gets the rock recording, but based on what I do remember of his character, it seems like an odd choice, to say the least. Still, evidently the man got the job done, even if he was apparently unable to keep himself from interjecting his own opinion every ten seconds. It’s okay, Thurvy, I probably wouldn’t have been able to keep from doing it either—and probably with 100x more snark, too. So I won’t throw any stones, heh heh. (DYSWIDT)

In the meantime, Talon gives us the life and times of one Galen D’Mon, who I want to wrap in fuzzy blankets and give cookies and hot tea and kittens to snuggle, and then send his father directly to hell, do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars. Child Protective Services: Definitely not a thing in Quur, and it’s a damn shame. Everyone in this book needs hella therapy, but it’s particularly infuriating to read about a good kid being systematically ruined by epically shitty parenting.

Still, Galen’s basic good character seems remarkably, possibly miraculously, resilient under the onslaught of having Darzin for a father, so I had good hopes for him in the future. Oops?

Chapter 43: The Dragon’s Deal (Kihrin’s story)

[In which Kihrin is stupid and dragons are assholes.]

[Thurvishar:] “Kihrin needs to pay more attention to what people are actually promising, rather than what he wants them to have said.”

Preach it, brother Thurvy. Also, Kihrin, maybe don’t expect a being named (among many other disturbing things) “Betrayal of Foundations” to be interested in honoring their word to puny humans. Just a thought. I mean, yes, a lot of times you’ll have worlds in which fantastical creatures cannot lie or betray an oath, but clearly that is not how we roll in Ruin of Kingsland.

(Does this planet have a name that we’re given? Can’t remember. I suppose I could go check the map. Yep, I definitely could do that. Yep.)

Also:

Being a god and destroying all my enemies did sound like the solution to many of my problems, but at what cost?

This statement is hilarious once you’ve read the whole book. Foreshadowing, what ho. And I never even noticed it (or all the other similar hints) the first time around.

Kihrin is also puzzled in this chapter that the Old Man calls him a “soldier,” which is another thing I don’t think I noticed the first time around, and which in retrospect makes a whole lot more sense, and also reminds me one of my favorite bits of the book is coming up, yay!

Of course, this chapter also reminds me one of my least favorite bits is coming up, so not yay. But also yay. It’s a Schroedinger’s Yay, really.

And on that extremely nerdy note, we out! See you next week!

Following her compelling talk, “Scifi stories that imagine a future Africa” (2017), the TED Books series now presents Nnedi Okorafor’s Broken Places & Outer Spaces. Part memoir, part craft text, the book is a personal narrative of the route Okorafor took to arrive at her career as a writer of science fiction. In the TED talk, she discusses the roots and influences of her science fiction as an Africanfuturist and reads selections from Binti and Lagoon; in this companion book her approach is more personal, focusing primarily on the life-changing experience of a scoliosis surgery that left her—a college athlete and track star—paralyzed.

Confined to her hospital room and laboring under the emotional and physical pain of her recovery, Okorafor first experiences her creative awakening—a process that comes in fits and starts, as does her rehabilitation. As she reflects on this experience in intense, intimate detail over the course of the book, she also explores what it means to be broken and rebuilt, to be made into something greater than the original form: a cyborg, a futurist, an artist.

As Okorafor says in the introduction, regarding kintsugi as an artform that repairs “the total object”:

…you transform what you have fixed into something more beautiful than it previously was. This is the philosophy that I came to understand was central to my life. Because in order to really live life, you must live life. And that is rarely achieved without cracks along the way. There is often a sentiment that we must remain new, unscathed, unscarred, but in order to do this, you must never leave home, never experience, never risk or be harmed, and thus never grow.

This emphasis on repair and transformation after a breakage is the central conceit of Okorafor’s argument in Broken Places & Outer Spaces. Her path to the writing career that has brought us, her audience, such amazing novels as Who Fears Death involved a great Breaking—the spinal surgery that left her temporarily paralyzed and with permanent damage to her proprioception—and a period of recovery. As she narrates her own story for the reader she also brings in examples of other artists and their traumas, how embracing the whole self, pain and all, was important to their creative processes.

However, on that note, I do have reservations about the approach the text sometimes begins to lean toward regarding the relationship between pain and art. In discussions of Frida Kahlo and Mary Shelley, as well as her own journey through trauma to become a writer, Okorafor occasionally shifts the conversational frame to center pain as the progenitor and source of art (as opposed to art as the process that ameliorates and communicates through pain toward survival, for example). The implication that makes me uneasy is that suffering is a requirement for artists to produce their finest work—a concept that has, historically, done more harm than good particularly in the realm of mental health.

But even within the discomfort I’m expressing there exists a delicate balance, since the statement that a person would not exist in their current state as their current self without their trauma is also accurate. The art that they’ve made as a result of their breaking would not exist without it. However: what about the art that might’ve been made in the absence of trauma? We’ll never know what that might’ve been, either. Pain does not always equal growth—sometimes it’s just pain, just breaking, and sometimes it’s unfixable. Sometimes pain kills art. I’m thinking, in this particular moment, of folks like Joanna Russ whose careers did suffer as a result of physical ailment.

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On the level of memoir, though, that hint of discomfort is moot because Okorafor is speaking to her own lived experiences. This book is her personal story, and that’s also important to the context. As a regular reader it’s certainly meaningful to be gifted insight into her artistic development and her theories of creativity. Furthermore, the thesis statement of the book—offering “a philosophy that positions our toughest experiences not as barriers, but as doorways […] to us becoming our truest selves”—has a hopeful ring that I do appreciate, suggesting that our existence in this moment is a collection of opportunities we should do our best to embrace. Life experience, even or especially if it is painful, is indeed unique to each person.

Centering the strength of healing over the valorization of pain—which is, by and large, what the book does do—also allows for that sense of fracture that lets the light in and so forth. That approach is in fact one of significant optimism. Okorafor experienced a terrible ordeal and, as she argues, without it would not have written her work as it stands. However, she also closes the book by emphasizing that her art is made of more than pain—it’s also shaped and created by familial trips to Nigeria, her experiences there, and her shifting understanding of her family’s stories as she became an adult. The final chapters create a more holistic sense of her argument regarding finding the creative catalyst in one’s experiences, not just of pain but also family, time, magic, travel, and more.

Overall, Broken Places & Outer Spaces contains a quietly effective power in its insistence on flexible strengths and the drive to create, on the mind and the body and the self as inextricably intertwined. Okorafor paints an emotional portrait of her paralysis as well as the slow process of her rehabilitation to a cyborg reality—while also offering intellectual and philosophical explorations of disability that emphasize futurity, not just surviving but thriving. The closing imagery, after all, is of her falling free into the water of the ocean. It’s a striking close to a conversational and intimate piece of craft-memoir-oriented nonfiction that encourages the reader to, as the subtitle says, find “creativity in the unexpected” circumstances of their life.

Broken Places & Outer Spaces is available from Simon & Schuster.

Brit Mandelo is a writer, critic, and editor whose primary fields of interest are speculative fiction and queer literature, especially when the two coincide. They have two books out, Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Speculative Fiction and We Wuz Pushed: On Joanna Russ and Radical Truth-telling, and in the past have edited for publications like Strange Horizons Magazine. Other work has been featured in magazines such as Stone Telling, Clarkesworld, Apex, and Ideomancer.

Wastelands: The New Apocalypse is the third volume in John Joseph Adams’ curated series of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic short stories. With this edition, the series now collects over 80 different stories of cataclysm, disaster, and general tribulation.

The New Apocalypse differs slightly from its predecessors, in that it includes original stories as well as carefully selected reprints. With over 30 stories included, there’s no perfect way to draw conclusions about the anthology—however, there are some clear patterns that emerge across the book.

First, a simple demographic note. Wastelands: The New Apocalypse is an American perspective on the apocalypse, with only a very few contributors coming from outside of the United States. There are, for example, nine contributors from California, compared to one from all of Europe. Or, amusingly, as many contributors from Kansas as from, say, the entire Southern Hemisphere. This is a book as quintessentially American as A People’s Future of the United States, if slightly less overt about it in the titling.

Second, the stories in The New Apocalypse, on the whole, take a very literal view of the apocalypse. Whether that’s zombies or viruses or comets or fungus (there are a few fungi stories in here!), we are wiped out. This is not an anthology of metaphorical, psychological, or internalised apocalypsi. There’s plenty of action contained in this volume, and not a lot of metaphor.

Third, and finally, this is a rough generalisation, but there’s a familiar, recurring structure that emerges across the book. A literal apocalypse is happening/has happened, it is detailed (the extent to which is dependent on the Hard SF and/or infodumping proclivities of the writer), and then we follow one of the survivors on their journey of self-actualisation.

As a result, the most successful efforts in The New Apocalypse are those that create a strong emotional connection with the protagonist—so that the character’s journey to fulfilment feels like something the reader can share in, rather than merely witness. Meg Elison’s “Come On Down” is a strangely heartwarming story about recreating daytime TV in a post-apocalyptic setting—a tale of tiny kindnesses. Hugh Howey’s “Bones of Gossamer” features an everyman character, who pulls the reader into a story not only about culture clash and tradition, but also dedication and love. Shaenon K. Garrity’s “Francisca Montoya’s Almanac of Things That Can Kill You” is gently abstracted, rewarding close readers with real emotional impact, buried in its gazetteer format. Violet Allen’s “A Series of Images from a Ruined City at the End of the World” also experiments with the narrative format: a story that shows how even the most toxic, nightmarish future can hold moments of beauty.

“And the Rest of Us Wait” is a standout story from one of The New Apocalypse’s international contributors, Corinne Duyvis. Iveta and her family are trapped in an underground bunker in the Netherlands—alongside the billions of other people who weren’t deemed special enough to be saved from the imminent disaster. Iveta, her family, and her peers are all struggling with gritty, everyday, unsolvable problems. There are, cleverly enough, some traditionally ‘heroic’ figures in the background, but they are deliberately positioned as red herrings: this is a story about the rest of us. Iveta makes it through each day, gets entangled in petty politics, and participates in minor acts of rebellion. She doesn’t save the world—or even ‘find herself’ in a particularly glamorous sense. She endures. It is not the most action-packed of the entries (Jeremiah Tolbert’s goofily Mad Max-ian “Four Kittens” takes the cake there), nor the most triumphant—or even emotional satisfying. It is an oddly realistic, beautifully-composed story that tries to frame the apocalypse not as an individual’s ‘time to shine’, but as a collective struggle. The apocalypse not as a platform for an individual’s Hero’s Journey, but as an implacable challenge for ‘the rest of us’.

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It is hard not to see the three dominant trends in The New Apocalypse—the Americanness, the literalness, and the individual self-actualisation—as interlinked; with a story like “And the Rest of Us Wait” the exception that proves the rule.

Globally, we are obsessed with the apocalypse: a global Reuters poll found that one in seven people believed the world would end during their lifetime. But America takes this to another level: this number increases to one in four in the United States.

Betsy Hartmann, author of The America Syndrome: Apocalypse, War and Our Call to Greatness, talks about a national compulsion to cast ourselves as, as this review summarises it, ‘the chief actors in times of crisis’. Hartmann posits that this cultural urge stems back to the Puritans, and an underpinning belief that “Americans are special and exceptional, a chosen people”. This Salon examination of apocalyptic culture goes a step further, and talks about a genuine eagerness for the apocalypse within certain audiences: a lusty wish for the End Times and desolation. This is an extreme interpretation, but helps demonstrate the underpinning belief. The apocalypse might be really, really bad, but it also a time to shine—your moment to step up, become the hero that you were always meant to be.

Wastelands: The New Apocalypse provides a hefty buffet of the contemporary American apocalyptic story, each one—again, broadly—about people finding themselves at the end of the world. A heartless soldier finds his humanity. A thuggish goon finds his heart. A shy comedian finds her voice. A scared young woman finds the strength to stand up for herself. A conflicted playwright finds her buried talent. Stories of people that, in a time of adversity, tap into previously untapped stores of courage, cunning, and self-esteem. People who have lost everything, but finally found their purpose.

The result is a collection that’s oddly optimistic: not a word that one normally associates with a collection of stories about mass destruction. As long as we can identify more with the lead character than the faceless hordes of the dead, these stories are, well, positive. The more mechanical ones serve as theoretical survival guides; the more emotional ones provide reassurance. Whatever happens, these stories whisper: you’ll be ok. Given the chaos and unease of everyday life in the real world, that’s no bad thing. These stories are entertaining and action-packed; clever, creative, and sometimes even a little bit funny. It may be ironic to use the worst disasters we can imagine as a platform for escapism, but, as the Wastelands series shows, the apocalypse is one hell of an opportunity.

Wastelands: The New Apocalypse is available from Titan Books.

Jared Shurin is the editor of The Djinn Falls in Love, The Outcast Hours, The Best of British Fantasy, and many other published and/or forthcoming works. He writes irregularly at raptorvelocity.com and continuously at @straycarnivore.

A new story in the Mongolian Wizard universe.

The Arctic wastes stretched wide in every direction, vast and irregular plains of ice which seemed to have no end. At their center, barely visible in the weak light provided by a sliver of sun at the horizon, was a rapidly moving sled. It was pulled by eight dogs with a single wolf at their lead, and ridden by a large man bundled in Sami furs.

Ritter welcomed the cold and hardship as an opportunity to test his manhood against Nature at its harshest. The scarf wrapped about his lower face was stiff with ice frozen from the moisture of his exhalations and what little of his skin was exposed to the air felt numb. When he bit off a mitten and pressed a hand over his eyebrows, the flesh beneath was warmed to life again and began to sting. The air was still and that, he had to admit, was good for it allowed Freki to follow the scent of their prey with ease.

He had pursued the half-man from Europe and was prepared to pursue him to the Pole if necessary. He was sure it would not be, however, for the traces of the homunculus’s passage had not been erased from the snows. Ritter was close on his trail.

A nub appeared on the horizon.

Ritter drew up the sled and, taking out a pair of binoculars superior to anything he could have imagined a year ago, studied the anomaly. Under magnification, it revealed itself to be a canvas tent that had been insulated by stacking up blocks of snow on all sides and piling more loose snow over its top.

Methodically, Ritter disentangled the sled dogs from the harness. Then he gave them a mental push to trot back a mile or so the way they had come and wait for him. If he died, his hold over the dogs would cease and then they must do their best to survive on their own. Ritter was not sure that they could. But at least they would have a chance.

He heaped snow over the sled, so that it looked like any other unimportant lump of landscape, then lay down behind it where he could not be seen. He was far from convinced such precautions were necessary. But he had underestimated the creature’s abilities in Helsinki and would not do so again.

Then he sent Freki ahead to serve as his ambassador.

The wolf loped across the snow and, upon reaching the tent, scrabbled at the canvas door. Then, when hands from within pushed it open, he rolled over on his back, exposing his stomach.

The homunculus looked down on the wolf and smiled. Kneeling, he stroked the animal’s underside and scratched it behind one ear. So far as Ritter could tell, he did not project his consciousness into Freki’s mind for even an instant. Nevertheless, the creature said aloud, “You are a diplomatic fellow, whoever you are. Come and talk to me. I promise no harm will come to you.”

Ritter stood, brushing off snow, and began the long trudge toward the tent.

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“The safest thing would be to kill him on sight,” Sir Toby had said. He and Ritter were in his London office, a walnut-paneled room frowsty with cigar smoke and casual treachery.

“I am no assassin. If murder is your intent, send a professional.”

“So I did, three of them. This is no ordinary man. Indeed, by most accounts, he is hardly a man at all.”

In Ritter’s experience, when his superior emphasized the inhuman nature of an opponent, whether physical, mental, or moral, he intended actions such as no decent man would visit on a fellow member of human society. Scowling, he said, “How do you mean?”

“He is a homunculus—an artificial man. There were reports—as reliable as such things can ever be—that the Mongolian Wizard had created a being with powers exceeding even his own. You will read them on your way to Helsinki. He is reputedly of great stature, inhumanly strong, and capable of wielding every known form of magic. For reasons yet unknown, this prodigy broke free of his creator and fled westward. There were several desperate attempts to recapture him. That caught our interest. Then his pursuers simply turned around and went home. Which by itself convinced me that such a being is too dangerous to be allowed loose in the world. While on the run, he somehow managed to acquire a great deal of wealth. Currently, he is using it to provision a ship. A schooner awaits you at the docks. If you leave immediately, you can intercept him before he departs for wherever he is bound.” Sir Toby fell silent. After a long pause, he said irritably, “Why are you still here?”

“I’m not sure I understand what you expect of me.”

“Use your own judgment. You have a certain…flexibility in these matters.”

Ritter had never before been accused of flexibility. He decided to receive the declaration as praise. Nevertheless, he said, “If I must kill him, I will. However, I require full autonomy in this affair. It is entirely possible I will end up letting this fellow remain alive and at large.”

Sir Toby sighed. “So be it.”

“I am prepared to offer you asylum,” Ritter said, “in exchange for what you know about the Mongolian Wizard. You will be given a modest stipend for as long as you need it, an apartment of your own, assistance in finding work, a new identity. By this time next year, you will be a citizen of London like any other.”

The homunculus laughed. “A grotesque like me?”

“You are a little tall, perhaps. But not beyond the range of human possibility.”

“It was you who shot at me at the docks, wasn’t it?”

“I had no choice. You rebuffed my invitation to parlay and the ship was pulling out.” Watching the man’s eyes and seeing in them no trace of intemperance, Ritter decided to take a chance. “I hit you too. You grimaced, clutched your chest, and bent over. I am certain that I saw blood. But when you straightened again, it was gone.”

“You hit my heart, yes. Any other man would have died then and there. But I did not. Would you like me to tell you why?”

“It is my most fervent hope that you will.”

“I was born by immaculate conception.” The homunculus was a handsome fellow, though his extreme height—he was a good eight feet tall—rendered even that alarming. He had given Ritter a barrel of salt pork for a chair and himself sat cross-legged on his sleeping pallet, putting their eyes on the same level. “Do you know how that works?”

“I am afraid that I do not.”

“It is a gruesome process. First the skeleton is assembled from the living bones of various animals. Human bones would not do, for it was desired to give me the features and physiognomy of a god. Bones taken from dead creatures would be…dead. So animals were required to suffer. It took a phalanx of surgical wizards just to keep the skeleton viable while muscles and cartilage were attached, nerves grown to interlace the flesh, organs coaxed into interaction, skin convinced to cover all…More magical talents were employed in my creation than for any other single purpose in human history. It is doubtful that anyone but my father—for so I consider him—could have arranged for such a thing. And even he had to effectively bring the war to a standstill to free up the resources necessary for it.”

“I’m sorry—which war was this?”

“The current one. Difficult though this may be for you to believe, I was created barely six months ago.” The homunculus proceeded to tell his tale.

My earliest memories are of combat. Day after day, I was drilled to exhaustion in all the martial arts. My father I never saw. His place was taken by a weapons master, a pompous but capable Austrian named Netzke who taught me to fight with dagger, sword, pistol, rifle, and singlestick. Specialists were brought in to train me in fisticuffs and various other forms of bare-handed combat. Herr Waffenmeister Netzke worked me hard. At the time, I had the understanding of a child for I was mere weeks old, and it did not occur to me that I had any choice but to obey him.

At night, as I was falling asleep, I heard voices. At first, they were a soft murmuring, as of a not very distant sea. But day by day they grew louder and more insistent, as if they were saying something I needed to know but could not understand.

When I asked Netzke about the sounds and what they meant, instead of raising his fist to strike me as I’d more than half expected, he looked thoughtful. “They mean we must accelerate your training,” he said, and the very next day he brought in a wizard to tutor me in pyrokinetics—a much more likable fellow than Netzke by far, the Margrave von und zu Venusberg.

A harsh cry involuntarily escaped Ritter’s lips.

“I’m sorry, is the margrave someone you knew?”

“He is my uncle. A most excellent man and one who disappeared when Bavaria was overrun. I can scarce believe he would betray his own country. I…No, pray continue. Forgive me for interrupting.”

The homunculus placed a hand on Ritter’s shoulder. “He would not have had any say in the matter. The Mongolian Wizard has ways of converting talented people to his cause. But allow me to return to my story and, though it is not a happy one, perhaps you will find some small measure of comfort in it.”

It was the margrave who convinced Netzke that I was being overworked. “You are like the swordsmith who heats his creation red hot,” he said, “and then quenches it in oil, only to return it to the furnace again, back and forth, over and over, until the metal is so brittle it will break with the first blow struck in battle. Your charge has a brain—he must learn to use it as well as his brawn.”

Hearing the logic of those words, Netzke agreed, though reluctantly. So the margrave set out to teach me how to read. After the first hour of his ministrations, I grew impatient. “Explain to me the principles of this skill,” I demanded. And when he had done so, I astonished him by picking up the text he was using as an exemplar, Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War, and reading the first several pages aloud.

Thus, I gained access to my father’s library.

I was in Heaven. In short order, I read Milton’s Paradise Lost, Plutarch’s Lives, and, most sublime of all, The Sorrows of Young Werther. From there, I went on to Rousseau and Kant and Locke and Descartes and Spinoza and Hobbes and, oh, so many more! I entered the library little more than an animal. Reading books made me human.

Perhaps it was coincidence, perhaps not. That evening something broke open within me. I realized that the sounds I heard were words, though neither spoken nor written. I was eavesdropping on the private thoughts of those around me: their fears, greeds, lusts, hatreds…It was not a pleasant experience. Much of this, I have since learned, came from my being in a nexus of worldly power, which necessarily drew to it, like flies to rotting meat, the worst exemplars of humankind. But even in the best of men there are dark thoughts and unwelcome fantasies. Had I lived in a monastery, the minds of the holy brothers would have been a torment to endure. And, having mastered literacy, my weapons training began anew. Only now, understanding—or so I thought—their intent, the exercises were repugnant to me.

At such a miserable time, your uncle was a godsend. In me, I think, he saw the mirror of his own unhappiness. We both despised our situations yet could see no way free of them. Young though I was, he spoke to me as if I were his equal, freely sharing his doubts and regrets. He was, as I am sure you know, a good man. From him I learned that to be human was not necessarily to be evil.

“Sir?” I asked him once. “Why is the world in books so much better than the world in life?”

After a long, thoughtful silence, the margrave replied, “People often relate arguments they have had and claim to have said things they only thought of later. Novels are life lived as it should have been and factual works such as essays and history are thought laid out without the false starts, blind alleys, and easy assumptions we experience in the event. That’s all.”

“I intend to think clearly the first time, and to live life without making mistakes.”

It was a callow thing to say, but the margrave only replied, “Well, perhaps you will be the first man to manage that trick. In any event, I encourage you to try.”

The margrave also taught me the rudiments of projecting fire with one’s thought, a skill I have since expanded far beyond anything he could ever have envisaged. As with reading, this skill opened new worlds to me. All forms of magic are but expressions of a single talent—I see you nodding, as if you had already suspected as much—limited only by the mental capacity of its possessor. Most people can wield this talent not at all. An elite class can, with training, master a single skill toward which they have a predisposition. And scattered here and there are a handful of extraordinary individuals who can master two or even three skills without being destroyed by them.

There are many such skills. In short order, I became the master of them all.

Word of my accomplishments spread swiftly through the court. We were housed in an ancient castle near the Russian border—by your expression, you know which one—whose windows had been bricked up and courtyards covered over to prevent men like yourself sending goshawks or the like to eavesdrop upon us. Though I more than once fancied I heard faint thoughts emanating from behind the wainscoting, which suggested you had spies diminutive enough to ride mice through small openings in the masonry. Be that as it may, the castle was a dark place.

So it was in a gloomy chamber insufficiently lit by whale-oil lamps that Netzke showed me off before a crowd of high-ranking officials. “This is our big day, eh?” he said, rubbing his hands together. Then he ran me through my paces. I bent iron at a distance, levitated, ran a dagger through my hand and then closed and healed the resulting wound, and made a dead rabbit hop and then, rising up on two legs, dance a gavotte. Finally, for the climax, Netzke commanded me to destroy a dummy tied to a cross at the far side of the room. Nothing could have been simpler. With a thought, I turned it to ashes—and burnt off the eyebrows of those who stood too close to the dummy, to boot.

The crowd broke into spontaneous applause. They were all smiles.

But I could read their dark, ambitious thoughts.

The Mongolian Wizard—even in his own court, he had no other name—was away on business of the Empire. But now Netzke announced that, my education being complete, he would be sent for and that within a fortnight, I would meet my father at last.

More applause.

I told you that animals had to be cruelly abused to create my frame. Only one animal could donate the materials that make up my four-lobed brain—the human animal. I had known this fact from very early on. My readings then made me aware of how vile a deed this was and, as a result, I was profoundly ashamed of my origins. Nevertheless, having more to think with than other mortals, and it more efficiently structured, I could perform prodigies of reasoning unknown to lesser men. All in a flash, I realized that my father had not had me created as a weapon, as I had previously assumed, but as a host for his identity. Using his own uncanny powers, he would oust me from my brain and assume my body as an ordinary man might don a new coat. The first such, moreover, of many he would assume in a lifetime that might well last a thousand years.

I stood transfixed with horror.

It was the worst of all possible times for Netzke to nudge me in the ribs and say, “You will sit at the right hand of your father—and then you will remember old friends, eh? What will you do for them then, eh? Eh?”

The evil burning within him was like a flame—dazzling. I had the power to reach out and turn it down low. May God forgive me, I did not. Instead, I said, “I will do this,” and quenched that flame entirely.

He fell to the ground, dead.

Everybody present—and they were among the most powerful men and women in the Empire—saw me do this. When I stalked off to my quarters to brood, not a one of them tried to stop me.

That night, the voices crashed in on me with unprecedented clarity—and all of them were focused exclusively upon me. Some courtiers simply feared my power. Others hoped to corrupt and then blackmail me or by elaborate lies to make me their ally and dupe. To kill me and place the blame on a rival. To convince another to kill me and afterward denounce him. To encourage my ambitions and become my most loyal and trusted lickspittle. In all the castle, there was but one soul whose thoughts were not violent and vicious. Half-maddened by this mental cacophony, and by the guilt I felt for the thoughtless and casual murder of the weapons master, I rose from my bed and dressed.

Then I went to the margrave’s room and knocked upon his door.

As I already knew from his thoughts, he was still awake. The margrave had been sitting with a glass of whiskey, thinking solemnly about suicide. On seeing me, he set aside the glass and said, “A moment ago, dear friend, I was thinking that there remained not one kindly face in all the world—and now, in an act of Providence, you appear to prove me wrong.”

I sank to my knees before the margrave and, taking his hands in mine, cried, “Sir, you must not entertain such evil thoughts as I see in your mind. The world is a dark place, but it would be darker still without your presence. I pray you, do not follow Werther’s path to self-destruction.”

The margrave looked surprised. Then he said, “I keep forgetting what a remarkable young fellow you are. So you can read my thoughts? I should not be surprised. But be comforted. Even that mode of escape is forbidden me. Willingly or not, I must be faithful to your father—and since he desires that I live, so I shall.”

“Then we are returned to our eternal colloquy: Whether or not there is free will and, if there is, why it is denied to the likes of us.”

“It can hardly be called eternal,” the margrave said with a touch of amusement, “for we have only known each other for a month. But, yes, we have had this discussion before.”

Caught in a turmoil of emotions such as would require a Goethe to describe, I blurted out, “Tell me. If you were free from all restraints, what would you do?”

“I would scour this castle with fire and kill all within it,” the Margrave said. “Present company excepted, of course.”

“And if that were denied you? What would be your second choice?”

Without hesitation, the margrave replied, “Oblivion.”

My heart sank. I could see his thoughts and knew that my mentor spoke only the simple truth. Wise though he was, the old man was blind to all possibilities save those he had been brought up to esteem. “Alas,” I said, “I had hoped for a different answer.” But respecting the margrave as I did—and, remember, his was the only moral authority I had ever known—I had, I felt, no choice.

Reaching into his mind, I freed him from my father’s control.

The homunculus lapsed into silence.

After a time, Ritter said, “I’ve heard rumors of what ensued.” Which was a lie, for they had been formal reports. Then, truthfully, “I had no idea my uncle was involved.”

“There were many wizards in my father’s court. So the margrave was, inevitably, as he knew he would be, killed. Not, however, before having his vengeance. For over an hour, he raged up and down the castle corridors. At the time I thought I had done the right thing. Yet it deprived my world of the only being I knew to be worthy of admiration. Even today, I wonder. Does freedom inevitably entail death? Freeing the margrave was the act of a young and inexperienced man. I regret it now.

“I am sorry, Ritter.”

“Don’t be,” Ritter said. “My uncle labored chiefly as a diplomat. But like all the men of my family, he was at heart a soldier. He died a warrior’s death. That is good to hear. What did you do next?”

I fled, with the castle burning behind me. On my way out of the city, I encountered a Swedish merchant returning from Russia with a short wagon train of goods and bought passage with him (or, rather, put the memory of my having paid him in his mind) to Helsinki. He was a fat, ugly, vulgar little man—the first words he ever said to me were, “Pull my finger,” and he roared when I did—yet I found I liked him quite a lot, for he was utterly free of malice. He talked frequently of his wife, whom he sincerely loved, though that did not prevent him from frequenting brothels while he was on the road. Such a specimen was he! So different from the models of my reading.

Old Hannu was a merchant through and through. It was a kind of religion to him. He spoke often of its virtues: “Each man benefits,” he said. “Mark that! I buy lace in Rauma, to the enrichment of those who make it, sell it in St. Petersburg to shopkeepers who immediately double its price, and with the proceeds buy furs from Siberian trappers, who are grateful for my money. Both lace and furs multiply in value through the mere expedient of bringing them elsewhere. Midway between, I buy amber and silver jewelry to be sold in both directions. At every step, I make a profit, as do those I buy from and sell to.

“People speak harshly of merchants because we drive a hard bargain. And it’s true I squeeze the buyers until they shit gold. Yet at the end of the day, everyone goes home satisfied. If there is a magic greater than this, I’m damned if I know of it. Did the Apostle Paul make half so many people happy as I have? Bugger me with a mule if he did.”

When I booked passage with Old Hannu, I had deemed it necessary to pay with fairy gold, for I was penniless and in desperate straits. Traveling with the merchant, however, I came to see that I had cheated this cheerful, awful, self-serving little man as he would never have cheated me. With a shock that was almost physical, I realized that, once again, I had sinned…For which I must atone.

So it was that the next time we came to a city, I accompanied Old Hannu to a tavern where women sold themselves. I did not partake in the pleasures of the flesh, however. Instead, I got into a card game with two professional cheats and a compulsive gambler.

I won everything the three men had. Two of them followed me out onto the street and in the shadows set upon me with cudgels. I could have broken their bodies. Instead, I placed in their minds an awareness of the precariousness of their position: that they were landless men outside the protection of the law, outnumbered and hated by the righteous and yet easy prey to men even more wicked than they. Then I set fire to their cudgels and watched them flee into the outer darkness. Perhaps they reformed their evil ways. If not, I am sure that they practice their illicit trade a great deal more circumspectly than before.

The compulsive gambler I trailed at a distance. He came to a church and, going in, climbed the long spiral stair to the top of the steeple. There, he gripped the stone balustrade with fear-whitened hands, building up his courage to throw himself over. He did not hear me coming up behind him. It gave him a start when I spoke, but that was all to the good. Returning half his money, I said, “You have learned a hard lesson tonight, my friend. Go home and never gamble again.” And I erased the compulsion from his mind.

Thus it went, step by step, for larger and smaller sums. In Lublin, I saved a dowager’s fortune from a venal lawyer and he was fined to pay for my efforts. While stopping at a farmhouse, I uncovered a buried Viking hoard, for which I accepted a modest finder’s fee. Sometimes my actions were legal and other times not. But every one of them ended with the other party better off than before. As Old Hannu would have put it, I gave good weight. And, bit by bit, I paid him back every pin of what I owed him.

Occasionally, men tried to kill me. I made them less murderous and sent them back to their masters.

We came at last, after long and ordinary hardships, to Helsinki. Old Hannu brought me home to meet his family.

Doubtless, you will be nowhere near so dumbstruck as I was to learn that Old Hannu’s wife Leena was in no way the paragon of beauty and virtue he had made her out to be. She was, in her way, as ugly as he. Worse, as I was headed for the outhouse, she ambushed me, rubbing her body against mine in a manner no respectable housewife would. “I’m no beauty,” she said, “and I know it. But lie down with me and close your eyes and you’ll swear I’m as delightful as any of those Russian whores my husband won’t shut up about.” It would have made a dog laugh to see the convolutions I went through to evade her intentions.

Yet for all that, the love Leena and Old Hannu had for each other was genuine. I saw it in their glances, heard it in their speech, witnessed it in their deeds, and of course read it in their thoughts.

Further, they had a daughter.

Kaarina was as pious, virtuous, and chaste as Werther’s beloved Charlotte, and as beauteous as her father imagined her mother to be. I was smitten. When her parents invited me to stay on for a time, I did, just to be near her.

You will scarcely believe this, but Kaarina did not see me as hideous at all. Perhaps this was because her love for animals—she was forever rescuing kittens and fostering crippled dogs—caused her to see me not as a caricature of humanity but simply as one of God’s creatures. For a time, I was content merely being a part of her world, worshipping her from afar.

Then, one day in the garden, Kaarina invited me to sit down beside her. “You are always so silent,” she said. “When you first arrived, I thought you a mute. Tell me something of yourself.”

I needed no urging. All my thoughts, dreams, hopes, fears, loftiest aspirations, and meanest deeds came pouring out of me in a torrent of words. I shared my innermost self as I never had before nor ever would again, save right now with you, holding back only my feelings for Kaarina herself, lest she be alarmed by them. And when I was done…

Kaarina looked at me in blank bewilderment.

“But none of this makes any sense,” she said. “A child born without a mother and grown to man’s estate in a matter of months. A nonpareil who teaches himself to read in an afternoon but kills his instructor on a whim. A redeemer of widows and gamblers who steals from an honest merchant. A master of all magics who has neither wealth nor position. A demigod who can read thoughts but suffers from doing so. How could such a living contradiction even exist? What place could he possibly find for himself in human society? You must clear your head of these dark fantasies and strive to be restored to your true self.”

Kaarina was not angry at me—her character was too refined for that. Nevertheless, her words cut through me like so many knives. I was her physical and intellectual superior and knew it. But our emotions are seated in the body and the body is an animal, even as the bear or the ass. In this regard I am in no way superior to any other man, nor will I ever be, however much my mental powers may increase.

My passion got the better of me.

“But every word I spoke was true!” I cried and, throwing caution to the winds, added, “Furthermore…”

Seeing my distress, Kaarina took my great hand in her wee paws and said, “You may speak your mind freely, my friend. There is nothing you cannot tell me.”

“Then I will say it—I love you.”

May you never see such a look on the face of a woman you esteem! Kaarina’s mouth fell open with astonishment and horror. There could be no mistaking the latter emotion, for I saw it burning in her thoughts like a flare.

I flushed red with humiliation. My blood surged and my hands clenched with the desire to strike Kaarina, to hurt her, to punish her for not loving me. It lasted only a single horrifying instant. Then, overcome with confusion and remorse, I fled. Kaarina, I am sure, prayed for my welfare and the rapid recovery of my wits. As if that would help!

That night, lying abed in the guest room (with the dresser pushed against the door, in case Leena again decided to make an assault upon my virtue), I thought over everything I had gone through and learned since coming to Helsinki. It had just been forcibly demonstrated that there could be no future for Kaarina and me. I needed love, not pity! And she…needed someone she could understand. My feelings for her were undiminished. But, alas, there could be no true communion of thought between us. The imbalance of intellect was simply too great.

It was a painful process working this out while the thoughts of the city roared and crashed over me like a mighty surf. But I came at last to two conclusions. First, that I could not stay in this house a day longer. Second, that in order to adequately think through my life and purpose, I must somehow isolate myself completely from humanity.

In the morning, profusely thanking Old Hannu for his hospitality, I left. Then I set about outfitting an expedition to the unknown Arctic regions. Out of respect for the values of the man I considered the second great mentor of my life, I earned the tremendous sum this required by honest means.

Which was why you almost caught up with me before my ship sailed.

As the ship left the harbor, the eternal pandemonium of thoughts faded and I had to endure only those of the Erebus’s officers and crew. I wept with relief. So you can imagine with what ecstasy I beheld the icy shores of this desolate land. And when the ship sailed off, carrying away with it the last trace of any thought other than my own, I experienced a sensation of pure bliss. Oh, blessed silence! I fell to my knees to thank whatever gods may be for that wondrous gift. Then, carrying all my supplies on my back, I walked inland until I judged myself safe from the influence of any passing ship. There I sat down and proceeded to think. To think, and to plan.

My first conclusion was that I needed a mate—one every bit as beautiful and virtuous as Kaarina but also as intelligent and strong of body as I. There being no such woman, I would have to create her myself. Which would be no easy task. To build such a goddess would require the use of many wizards, the sacrifice of numerous animals and women, and a fortune in related materials. Vast wealth would be required. Further, since such a project could not possibly be kept secret, it would demand defenses: an army, a secure territory with fortified borders, and a system of secret police to protect me from spies and saboteurs. In short, it would entail exactly such an empire as my father is currently endeavoring to create. For a moment, I was aghast at the thought of what atrocities I would have to perform.

Then I resolved to do it. My mate and I would wed and have children who would have children in their turn and their descendants would inevitably supplant the human race. All the world would be theirs and I their Adam.

You blanch, Ritter. Be reassured. My resolution lasted but a moment. For I then reflected that to carry out my plan would be to expose a woman I hoped to love with unswerving dedication to the pain of hearing the thoughts of Mankind which had almost driven me mad. Yes, I could immediately upon her creation put to death all those involved, before her capacity to hear their thoughts came into focus and then carry her off to some desolate tract such as this. But what would happen when she could read my thoughts? When she understood what crimes I had committed in her not-so-immaculate conception?

Logic, alas, told me that the project was doomed to fail.

Thus: No wife, no offspring, no hope, no future.

I had just determined what course of action I should take when I sensed your approach. It occurred to me then that it would be pleasant to share the tale of my life with a sympathetic soul. From what I could sense of your character, it seemed to me that you might well understand my story.

So I let you approach.

For a long time, the homunculus did not speak. Ritter, who was comfortable with silence, waited. At last his host said, “Have you ever considered beetles, Ritter?”

“Beetles,” Ritter said flatly. “No, not since I was a boy.”

“They are, I assure you, fascinating creatures and well worthy of your respect. But they cannot provide much in the way of companionship.” The homunculus stood. “On which note, the time has come to put an end to our colloquy.”

Ritter tried to stand and discovered that he could not. Nor could he move so much as a finger though his lungs, for a mercy, continued to pump air.

The creature looked down on him with an expression of gentle pity. “You are not a good man, Ritter. How could you be, given your occupation? However, you are not as bad a man as you fear you might be—not yet, at any rate.” He went outside, leaving the tent flap open behind him. Over his shoulder, he said, “Imperfect though you are, I wish you well. I wish every single one of you well. But I cannot bear to live among you.”

The homunculus walked steadily away from the tent, toward a distant ridge. When sufficient time had elapsed, he passed over the ridge and out of sight. All the while, Ritter strove in vain to cast off his paralysis. Nor could he enter Freki’s mind—that ability too, it seemed, had been frozen.

Then the sun came up.

There was a tremendous light, at which Ritter discovered himself capable of movement again, for he automatically turned away from it and threw up an arm to protect his eyes. Almost immediately, there followed a sound so thunderous that he clapped his hands over his ears to reduce it to a roar.

Ritter burst from the tent.

Running with all his might, Freki at his heels, he came to the top of the ridge over which the creature had disappeared. Below him Ritter saw a crater half-blasted and half-melted into the ice with a smudge of black at its center, as if a god had reached down from the sky to brush a dirty fingertip against the snow.

When Ritter had done making his report, Sir Toby said, “It is a pity you could not win him over to our cause.”

“In his estimation, our cause was not a good one. I do not believe that the creature saw very much difference between our side and his father’s.”

A darkness congealed within Sir Toby then, as if there were a thunderhead filling his skull and threatening to burst through it with gales and lightning. But he only said, “And who was he to pass judgment on us? The ugly brute!”

“No. He was a handsome man, very much so. By any reasonable definition, he was extremely well made.” Ritter shook his head sadly. “Yet in his own eyes, he was monstrous.”

“The New Prometheus” copyright © 2019 by Michael Swanwick.
Artwork copyright © 2019 by Gregory Manchess.

We resist enclosure. Deer roam forests. Vines colonize abandoned Coliseums. A human being held in solitary confinement will self-harm, scream, plead, kick doors, smear feces on their cell walls, and refuse food if there exists even the promise of seeing the sun for fifteen minutes of their day. There are many words in English for what that human being quests for: liberty, emancipation, freedom, independence. So much of the American project has been dousing its cultural fabric in these colors. No mention of brotherhood and precious little of equality. Justice is nowhere to be found. Peace, somewhere far off in the distance. Over the horizon, in fact. Those messy words presume an After, and they presume that this After is other than post-apocalypse. Liberty, emancipation, independence, without brotherhood or equality or justice or peace, presume utopia. Any alternative imagining can only be fiction.

An episode in the second season of Black Mirror, titled “White Bear,” dramatizes precisely this conundrum. The protagonist, a woman played by Lenora Crichlow, awakens with amnesia, haunted by a symbol that flickers on the television screen in her room and hunted by unreasoning pursuers. People on the street catch sight of her and immediately raise their cameraphones to record. Even as her pursuers shoot at her and those who have decided to aid her, the spectators remain just that. Spectators. They’re being held captive by a signal from a transmitter at a facility called “White Bear.” Get to White Bear, destroy the transmitter, and free the world from their stupor. When she and her confederate reach the transmitter, two hunters attack. In what is supposed to be the episode’s climax, she wrestles a shotgun away from one of her assailants, aims, and pulls the trigger.

Out comes confetti.

The whole thing was a hoax. Her name is revealed, as well as the fact that she and her fiancé had murdered a child, her sentence for which is daily psychological torture. Relive the same day over and over and over again, with no memory that it has ever happened before.

Emancipation with no hint of peace. Some would watch the aftermath of that reveal, the woman being driven back to her compound while those spectators from earlier curse her and damn her and spit at her, and say that’s justice. They might say that, in punishing her, whatever justice system that exists in the world of this episode is simply operating out of procedural fidelity. Maybe the algorithm decided this, and an algorithm sees neither color nor sex nor gender nor faith, that renders us equally as numbers. But of the many things I came away from that episode holding in my chest, nowhere among them was any sense of justice.

Black Mirror places the episode somewhere in our future. An After, as it were. The paradox of progress here is that it takes our imaginations to create an After where there are no Afters, revealing the mistake inherent in founding your identity on the sole item of liberation. The light at the end of the tunnel, brought to you by lamps that have been hung up in the next portion of tunnel. If your organizing principle is freedom, maybe all you’ve done for yourself is fashion another cage. And a cage does not need metal bars and concrete walls to be obvious.

Count on the Brits to expose American absurdity.

In early 2018, the Fort Bend Independent School District broke ground in Sugar Land on the site of what was to be a new technical center. It was in February that the first remains were discovered. By July, archaeologists had discovered a total of 95 bodies. The bodies were buried in individual wooden caskets. Initial analysis places the youngest of the deceased at 14, the oldest around 70. Analysts deduced, early on, that the bodies showed evidence of severe malnourishment and physical stress, pointing to a history of hard labor. Prison labor.

A former prison guard, Reginald Moore, had told officials in the fall of the previous year that there might be a cemetery there. Since his term as a corrections officer in the 1980s, he had adopted as his mission excavating the land’s past and serving as caretaker for the Imperial Farm Cemetery, also in Fort Bend County.

It is speculated that the bodies were buried between 1878 and 1910. Technically, none of the buried could have been slaves at the time of their deaths. Slavery had officially ended in Texas 13 years prior.

June 19, 1865

Union Army General Gordon Granger stands on the balcony of Galveston’s Ashton Villa. Maybe there are banners commemorating the occasion. Maybe a flag hangs from somewhere. Maybe he has bathed, maybe he has not. The previous day, the General had arrived on Galveston Island with 2,000 federal troops to occupy Texas on behalf of the federal government. Just over two weeks prior, on June 2, the last of the Confederate forces, the Army of the Trans-Mississippi, had formally surrendered. Maybe they hadn’t believed reports of Robert E. Lee’s formal surrender on April 9 of that year. Maybe they thought it Union propaganda. Maybe the officers leading that corps had lost the mail. News, back then, didn’t travel as quickly as it does now.

But on June 19, 1865, General Granger unfolds a piece of parchment and reads aloud from what is marked “General Order No. 3”:

“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”

The once-enslaved rejoiced in the streets.

The 14-year-old boy, whose destiny is a shallow grave near the Brazos River, is one year old. Born a slave before the moral border crosses him, and he’s suddenly freed. In thirteen years, he will be buried alongside the rest of the prison labor.

An even cursory reading of General Order No. 3 reveals just how conditional freedom was in the post-bellum Re-United States. Despite “an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves,” the freedmen “will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.” Nor will they be allowed to “collect at military posts.” Whether they served the Union or the Confederacy, they will be left with nothing but the scarred skin on their backs. There will be no government assistance, no 40 acres, no mule, no “help them get back on their feet” allowance. Liberation pure and simple. A typical American blunder to mistake emancipation for justice, liberation for peace. To mistake the light up ahead for the tunnel’s end and conclude that the hard work has been finished.

The After that these freefolk walk into is a Texas whose economy depended heavily—too heavily—on sugarcane, a Texas whose economy had depended almost entirely on free labor. So two Confederate veterans, Edward Cunningham and Littleberry Ellis, sign a contract with the state in 1878 to lease the state’s prison population. The Vagrancy Act of 1866, also known as the “Act Providing for the Punishment of Vagrants,” drafted and ratified by the Virginia state legislature, forced into imprisonment for a term of up to three months anyone who appeared to be unemployed or homeless. It is only one example of the type of legal regime that proliferated over the United States. So-called Black Codes declared, among other things, that if a freedman left employment without the employer’s permission, he would be denied his wages. Also declared was the fact that a worker could be fined $1 for acts of disobedience or negligence or 25 cents per hour for every missed hour of work. In Texas, a system of apprenticeship was enacted, along with a host of vagrancy laws.

Cunningham and Ellis suddenly had their workers.

In many instances, men were handpicked, noted for their heavy bearing or their workers’ hands or their strong backs, innocent men, targeted as they walked through the thoroughfare because they looked like good laborers, arrested, and swept into the machine of convict leasing.

That year, 1878, the 14-year-old boy, if he is not already serving time in a cell or on a plantation, will arrive at his destination and not last the year.

Out comes confetti. Emancipation? Freedom? The whole thing was a hoax.

By the time he died, Ralph Ellison had compiled thousands of pages of notes and drafts and pieces of drafts on what was to be his second work of long fiction, the novel that would follow his masterwork, Invisible Man. He never lived to see it completed. Looking at the themes it examined, perhaps unfinished is its most natural state. There is a dying race-baiting Senator who once was maybe a small black boy destined to be a preacher. There is a parodic exploration of filmmaking culture as an allegory for Franklinian ambition, the American ideal: reinvention. There’s jazz in the prose and in the story. There’s a tragicomic scene where Senator-to-be Sunraider, as a maybe black boy, is raised out of a tiny coffin by his adopted preacher daddy during the course of a rousing sermon only to see a white lady from the congregation loudly claim him as her long-lost son. The story is ostensibly a satire, but the shape-shifting of the maybe black preacher’s son to race-baiting United States Senator brings to mind more fantastical creatures, the werewolves and sprites and witches and vampires who all, in one way or another, embody our fears and hopes and lusts. The werewolf’s human form is a seduction, and so is the promise, in Ellison’s unfinished second novel, of whiteness. Of freedom.

Long after Ellison’s death, a near-comprehensive collection of what was supposed to be this novel was released, titled Three Days Before the Shooting. Previously, the material had been compiled, condensed, and published by his editor as a novel coming in under 400 pages.

Its original title was Juneteenth.

July 22, 2013

I arrive at the Ofer military court for the first time. It wasn’t that far from the office in Ramallah. We took a service taxi to the gates, offloaded and got into a van that operated much like a taxi the way a plainclothes cop is police and we crossed the first major threshold, whereupon we passed through the first metal detector and showed our passports to the bored guard behind the glass. When we came out from beneath the shelter of that first station, we walked down an outdoor corridor to a waiting room where waited family members of those whose trials were scheduled today, along with men and women in the process of attending their own hearings, often for parking tickets.

In May of 2013, I began work at an organization that represented and advocated on behalf of Palestinian Arabs detained in Israeli prisons. At the time, I occupied a flat in Ramallah with a classmate of mine from law school. She was working on women’s rights. I was at the Ofer military court on this day with a supervisor and a few colleagues, one of whom was a student like myself, from Harvard Law School.

Buy it Now

My supervisor took our passports into the main booth and then after a wait, we went through. Shoes and belts removed, pockets emptied, then we came out on the other side with our belongings. Down another corridor and into a courtyard that looked very much like the prison courtyards in the US, only this was populated with family and friends of the to-be-incarcerated. Heat blanketed everything, and people bounced in and out of the shade, waiting, joking about what they’d do if they couldn’t get rid of the parking ticket. I talked career paths with this fellow intern and movies, I think, with another. Inside a small shack-like building that resembled a mini airport waiting station, I practiced my Arabic script and a fellow intern taught me some new words and I worked on my numbers. With us, at that time, were the wife and the brother of one of the detainees we’d come to see, a man who had worked and researched with our organization and who had been arrested and detained the previous September. We were here for his sentencing hearing.

Our colleague is being held in Trailer 4. There are four prisoners in the box here to our left. Less chaos than hearings earlier in the day. There’s one dignified hijabi woman who looks like defense counsel. New witnesses enter, and we play musical chairs to shuffle so that the men sit in an unbroken line.

The translator here has a wide, sharp face, stubbled, shiny blue eyes, looks like so many kids I went to school with. A Billy club hangs from his back pouch.

A dumpy middle-aged prosecutor charges his phone in the wall behind him.

The prisoners here are older than most of us in the audience. Much older.

One of the prisoners received word from his wife, behind me, seated amongst the spectators, that his friend had just died. “My God,” he said, “rest in peace.” The expression on his face is beyond my ability to describe. Before he can fully process the news, his attention snaps back to his hearing.

The prisoners are handcuffed in pairs and led out. That was it.

It turns out the hearing for the man we had come to see was now moved to July 29, 2013, a week from today. Four hearings in five minutes.

On July 28, 2013, the night before our colleague’s trial, I’m in Jerusalem with yet another colleague from work. The friend she’d brought with her had on a Metallica shirt.

It took quite a bit of cajoling on my colleague’s part to eventually get me to Jerusalem and while the three of us sat on the roof of the Austrian Hospice with the sun gilding East Jerusalem, waiting expectantly for the muezzin so that we could begin eating the sweets we’d picked up in the souk, she asked why I’d waited until my last week in Palestine to come to Jerusalem.

I thought of the Qalandiya checkpoint that I’d seen numerous times and had occasionally passed through and how the very sight of all those Palestinians herded like cattle through the stations, many of them waiting in lines in a shack reminiscent of a post-apocalyptic Six Flags, made my hands start shaking. I thought of how comfortable I’d gotten in Ramallah, even as this place had begun to wear on my spirit. It was familiar. More familiar than leaving.

And I thought of everywhere else I’d traveled to. All the other countries where voyaging was an effortless thing. A wish was all it took to put me on a train in Paris that would spirit me to Amsterdam. Being stranded at the Kosovo-Serbia border and having to negotiate my way through Macedonia, cut a path through Bosnia, to wind up back in Croatia again, that was an adventure. Rabat to Tangier, an inspired odyssey.

Here, though, freedom of movement didn’t seem to exist beyond the contours of Ramallah. There were passable barriers, but the trouble of negotiating them overwhelmed me so that it took as long 10 weeks for me to see a city that was but 10 kilometers away. There was security behind bars. Should our imprisoned colleague eventually be released, this is what would have been waiting for him. More tunnel.

So, when my friend asked me why it took me so long to get to Jerusalem after I’d been in the Territories for almost ten weeks, I shrugged and said I was scared.

The next day, our colleague went on trial. Again.

After my ten weeks in Ramallah, I would return to law school where I would be put on the habeas corpus case for a man who had been wrongfully convicted and held in prison in my home state for over 18 years. I would write a long and heavily-researched paper on carceral philosophies fed and watered in the US and exported to El Salvador and the Occupied Territories. I would later graduate and spend a year at a job, part of which required observing minors held in solitary confinement. After that would come Rikers.

Spend enough time on the outside looking at people held in cages and you might shake your head, look for confetti under your shoes, and begin muttering to yourself, “the whole thing was a hoax.”

September 15, 2018

Liberation is one of the principal themes in the myth of the United States of America. Liberation from tyranny, liberation from savagery, liberation from taxes. Hell, early Americans even liberated themselves of imported tea. What a mess they must have made on those ships docked in the Boston Harbor. Clean-up is for later. As is the burial of convicts leased out for labor. As is the release of the modern American incarcerated. And with a largely monochrome literary lineage, American letters has largely allowed myth to morph into accepted wisdom, some facsimile of fact. American letters gave Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind a Pulitzer Prize. And though the film The Birth of a Nation is largely credited with the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan, it was adapted in part from the first two novels in Thomas Dixon Jr.’s Ku Klux Klan trilogy: The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the Whiteman’s Burden – 1865-1900 (published in 1902) and The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (published in 1905). Less sanguine a patrilineage but just as alabaster, one may start somewhere around Washington Irving or even Edgar Allan Poe and work one’s way through Thoreau, Hawthorne, Whitman, Dickinson, Twain, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Mailer, etc., etc. etc. American myth.

Those works that did exist to scrub away some of the varnish, like Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, more often than not written by those on the margins, largely concerned those on the margins. Even after the tiff between Henry James and H.G. Wells results into the greater beef between “literary” and “genre” fiction, that writing by the racially marginalized, in order to be seriously considered as a work of merit, need by definition concern the racially marginalized.

So the first alleged science fiction novel by an African American isn’t about aliens. It isn’t about other planets. The novel figures our own is strange enough.

Its author is one George S. Schuyler. Its title is Black No More: Being an Account of the Strange and Wonderful Workings of Science in the Land of the Free, AD 1933-1940. And at its center is a scientific procedure. Protagonist Max Disher, after having been spurned by a white woman in a Harlem speakeasy on the simple fact of his blackness, reads of a scientific procedure that could result in the complete bleaching of his skin. “Black-No-More” claims to be able to turn a black man white.

The scientific procedure grows in popularity, throwing the social and economic order of the country—predicated on a strictly delineated racial hierarchy—into bedlam. NAACP leaders with their Talented Tenth aura hate it. Southern segregationists, desperate for a critical mass of Other to hate, despise it. Meanwhile, Max Disher, now Matthew Fisher, wins the white girl. The novel’s hijinks involve a potential mixed-race baby, a jet plane and mutilation at the hands of animalistic, atavistic Mississippi whites.

“[S]peculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of 20th-century technoculture,” that is how Mark Bould defines Afrofuturism in “The Ships Landed Long Ago: Afrofuturism and Black SF.”

And lately, the word “Afrofuturism” has received a lot of purchase, eagerly slapped on any story in which black people and magic (or sufficiently-advanced technology) are co-pilots. It’s another attempt to categorize and catalog, some way to trace genealogy and link Schulyer with Octavia Butler with Tananarive Due with Sheree Thomas with Samuel Delany with Andrea Hairston with Colson Whitehead with N.K. Jemisin with P. Djeli Clark. A justification for putting them in the same cupboard, aside from the fact of their shared blackness. That would be too gauche a reason.

But the fact of the matter is that the aforementioned authors resist sameness. Time travel, galaxy hopping, climate catastrophe, zombies, broken cities with burnt skies, they are at the business of excavating myth and pulling humans out of it, same as any other bushel of writers. The fact of their blackness does not mean that they are obligated to allegorize black death or black anguish or black angst (whatever those reductionist terms may mean or entail) or that the entirety of their oeuvre must stem from the primordial wounding.

If they were to address injustice and un-freedom and the paradox of progress, it would be by choice.

It is a Saturday. September 15, 2018. At a place called Roulette on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. Somewhere in the emails, perhaps on the Gala invite itself, there’d been dress code instructions, but due to characteristic failure of foresight, I arrive at the venue wearing jeans and a black t-shirt that reads “Abolish ICE.” My worries are assuaged by a young man in a rumpled, dark-colored button-down waiting in line just in front of me for the bar.

It’s my third time at the Brooklyn Book Festival, second time as a dude who wrote a thing. And, thus, my second time at the pre-Festival gala. So many of the writers I’d been lucky enough to have befriended or known over the previous two year are in attendance. Crystal Hana Kim, author of the Korean War love epic If You Leave Me; essayist and novelist Naima Coster; R.O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries. In the low lighting, I’m sure there are others I would recognize if only they came affixed with name badges.

After enough time has passed, we are urged to our seats. I and friends take our seats in the balcony. In June of that year, it had been announced that the Best of Brooklyn Award, given annually by the festival, would go to N.K. Jemisin. The previous honoree had been Colson Whitehead.

In the time between her name is called and she makes her way to the stage to accept her award and give her speech, everyone rockets to their feet. There can’t be more than a few hundred of us in that hall, but it feels like we are one thousand strong. Applause thunders. And thunders. And thunders.

The previous month, Jemisin had won her third consecutive Hugo Award for Best Novel, making history twice over as the first author to threepeat and the first to win for every novel in a series. For a series of novels quite explicitly about injustice and un-freedom, into which can be read with remarkable ease black anger and black pain and so many of those other complex weavings of emotion that stem from having buried somewhere deep in one’s genealogy that primordial wounding. In short, a series of novels that not only stars black people, but that thematically concerns itself with the business of being black in the United States of America. A series of novels about having too little and too much power simultaneously, about loving in the face of loss, about the separation of families, about containing in one calcifying body both God and woman.

UX Designer and theorist Florence Okoye writes: “Afrofuturism dares to suggest that not only will black people exist in the future, but that we will be makers and shapers of it, too.” She ties the Afrofuturist project to a reaching back. Far from operating from the blank slate baseline that results from the wholesale obliteration of one’s history by the triangle slave trade, “we can reach back to our past to inspire our futures.” We’ve snatched the pen, the tablet, the laptop from the hunter and type out, with our claws, the true story of the savannah. Oppression seeks to pulverize the possible, to atomize hope, to granulate not only dreams but the very act of dreaming. What control does one have over the slave, the sharecropper, the convict in a capitalistic enterprise if they can imagine another Now, if they can build, in the cathedral of their mind, an After? No, better to erase their name, indicate only their present physical features on the bill of laden, amputate their familial bonds by scattering the children into plantations all over the country. A century later, however, rappers walk the streets of New York City with Africa pendants hanging from their necks, at work, knowingly or unknowingly, repairing American injury. Telling story the way Schuyler told story, the way Butler told story, the way Jemisin will tell story. Afrofuturism is exhuming the bodies buried in Sugar Land and reanimating them. Afrofuturism, this imagining of Afters, pushes the laborer toward the tunnel’s mouth. That warmth? The feel of the sun on your face. Prison still persists, environmental racism aggravates illness, material and professional advancement will still be thwarted, but there is nothing like the moment when a prisoner the first night of the 1971 Attica Uprising, stares up at the sky from a D Yard crowded with other prisoners crafting a civil rights moment, and says, tears leaking down his face, that he hasn’t seen the stars in 22 years. We resist enclosure.

I think of the Broken Earth trilogy and the word that comes to mind is liberation. Authors from marginalized backgrounds may, to varying degrees of success, deny the more pernicious aspects of American publishing and refuse to write their marginalizations, to allegorize them even, or to reduce themselves and their demographic to suffering. What matters is the choice. Because should a black author face the plight of black Americans in the United States since before its inception and allegorize that, excavate from the mythmaking of Irving and Thoreau and Hemingway and Mitchell a series of humans the same color as her, the result can be a piece of writing so powerful and painful and daring that we can’t look away from that most essential truth it purrs, screams, weeps, shouts, whispers into our ear: that liberation without justice is not liberation, it is simply a hoax.

May 30, 2019

On this day, a Thursday, someone dear to me begins his jail sentence. He was convicted in Connecticut for a crime he is alleged to have committed in Connecticut, and when he is released, he will, absent permission from a probation officer, have to remain in Connecticut. His sentence is for one year. He will be eligible for parole in eight months.

He is a college graduate and a veteran of the Air Force. He enjoys difficult video games, then, bafflingly, replaying them at higher and higher difficulties. By turns brooding and articulate, reluctant and insistent. He loves potatoes, eats irregularly, and his metabolism is so powerful that whatever food he digests seems to vanish entirely, leaving no trace in his stomach or his ass or his chest or arms of its ever having been. If we are not plagued by the same haunts, the same principalities that swing us not from happy to sad but from ecstasy to sorrow, that render life for us in nine dimensions, that set whatever’s inside our ribcages on fire, if we are not whispered to by the same voices, then, at the very least, those phantasms, like the bodies hosting them, share DNA.

The afternoon of the first day of his sentence, I sat at a table in the Jacob Javits Center and, for ninety minutes, signed copies of a novel I’d written. It is difficult to say that anything other than providence had a hand in placing me here and placing him there, but there it is.

When he is released into probation and given his set of instructions, his list of constraints, and whatever methods they’re going to use to continue monitoring him, I hope I’ll be able to look at him and think of his time inside and now his time outside, his having lost a year in the prime of his life, him leaving a house of Corrections for a world of ankle monitors and check-ins, to look at him at the end of all of this, the entirety of his sentence, and not say out loud, “the whole thing was a hoax.”

Between the time he went in and the time he gets out, I will have published two books, the second of which is about, in part, a young man in jail. I wrote it because I think science fiction, fantastika, is one of the best tools I have to help build an After. Imagining justice. Imagining equality. Imagining peace. Cleaning up the mess American mythmaking has made of this place. I hope he is able to read this book. I hope he is able to read Riot Baby and know that I tried my best.

I hope he makes it to the end.

I wrote it for him.

Tochi Onyebuchi’s fiction has appeared in Panverse Three, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Obsidian, and Omenana Magazine. His non-fiction has appeared in Nowhere Magazine, the Oxford University Press blog, and the Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, among other places. He holds a B.A. from Yale University, a M.F.A. from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, a J.D. from Columbia Law School, and a Masters degree in droit économique from L’institut d’études politiques. His debut young adult novel, Beasts Made of Night, was published by Razorbill in October 2017, and its sequel, Crown of Thunder, was published in October 2018. His next YA book, War Girls, will hit shelves on October 15, 2019, and a novella, Riot Baby, will be available from Tor.com Publishing in January, 2020.

By her own admission, Anne McCaffrey had found Dragonquest (1971) very difficult to write, to the point where she more or less burned down the first draft and started again. Which understandably did not make her overly inclined to start writing its sequel—especially since she had other non-dragon books to write. But five years later she published a companion novel aimed at younger readers, Dragonsong (1976), swiftly followed by a sequel, Dragonsinger (1977), both set during the time of Dragonquest.

She clearly still had more to say about dragons.

This eventually led to a short story, “A Time When,” published by the New England Science Fiction Association in 1975, which McCaffrey expanded into a novel, The White Dragon (1978), one of the first science fiction books to land on The New York Times Best Seller list.

The predecessors to The White Dragon had all focused on struggle of one type or another: the struggle of a vengeful woman against a patriarchal society that had deeply failed her (and dragons!) in Dragonflight; a fragile political coalition fighting a growing, unpredictable environmental threat (Dragonquest); and two young and talented outsiders desperately trying to earn their places on Pern (The Harper Hall Trilogy). The White Dragon took a distinctly different approach, telling the story of a young, highly privileged guy—in the full sense of that term—cementing his position as, well, a still young but even more privileged guy.

It’s not that The White Dragon lacks the environmental themes of its predecessor, although these themes are considerably muted in this book. Or harpers—Masterharper Robinton and several characters from The Harper Hall Trilogy make appearances in this book, although that trilogy’s fascination with music is almost completely absent.

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And it’s not that Jaxom, Lord Holder of Ruatha Hold, the protagonist of the novel, lacks problems, or doesn’t feel the need to prove himself. For one thing, he is an orphan. His mother died in childbirth on the same day that his father, the conqueror Lord Fax, died in a duel with F’lar. Jaxom has since been raised by his milk mother, Deelan, who isn’t in the book much, and former dragonrider turned master craftsman weaver turned Lord Holder Lytol. And despite—or perhaps because of—his rank, he is bullied and harassed by the other boys of the Hold. Nor is he exactly a “real” Lord Holder; his guardian, Lytol, does most to all of the work of running the Hold.

For another thing, despite not being a “real” Lord Holder, Jaxom is both a Lord and a dragonrider—a combination strictly forbidden by Pern’s rules. Dragons belong in the independent, autonomous Weyrs, as protectors of those living in Holds and Crafthalls, who in turn send tithes (read, taxes) to the Weyrs. A Lord Holder with a dragon doesn’t just screw up this system financially and socially, but is a Lord Holder with too much power. So, as a dragonrider, Lord Jaxom cannot be the Lord Holder of Ruatha Hold. Unfortunately, since Jaxom’s father killed most of the Ruathan family, the Hold only has two other claimants—Lessa and her son F’lessan, both dragonriders, and thus equally ineligible—in theory opening up Ruatha Hold to any claimant.

Lessa, however, holds another role, as the senior Weyrwoman of Pern and the acknowledged co-leader of the Northern Continent. Her word carries weight. And that weighted word wants someone of Ruathan blood to remain as Lord Holder of Ruatha. That is, Jaxom—the only other person with Ruathan blood. Only a few drops, granted, but that’s still Ruathan blood. Lessa doesn’t want the Hold going to anyone else

SPOILER: Absolutely none of this ends up going anywhere, except to introduce a secondary theme of the novel, population expansion and resource deprivation, a nice follow-up to Dragonquest’s focus on the various ways of combating invasive species.

The reason it doesn’t go anywhere is because Jaxom’s small dragon, Ruth, is not a normal dragon. He’s so abnormal that Jaxom’s initial, uncertain flight on his back takes place in front of several carefully watching dragons and human witnesses—including neighboring Lord Holder Groghe, the charming and ubiquitous Masterharper Robinton, Journeywoman Harper Menolly (popping in from her own novels), and several dragonriders. The concerned dragons tell Ruth to land after just a few minutes in the air, and warn Ruth that although the flights can gradually become longer, Ruth still must be careful. But even after this proof that Ruth is a proper dragon, given his small size and unusual color, the dragonriders agree: Ruth can and should stay at Ruatha Hold.

Meanwhile, now that Jaxom can fly, he’s forced to attend various classes with other promising young people. It’s mostly an attempt to prevent a repeat of the previous “well, the last people who knew how to do X died, so, now we’ve lost that technology” that caused so many problems in the first novel. These lessons include an astronomy meeting with Wansor, who has finally figured out the orbits of the other planets in this system, and concluded that these other planets are responsible for the fluctuations in the orbit of the Red Star—allowing everyone on Pern, with a little bit of advanced math, to figure out just when Thread will arrive.

SPOILER TWO: Before everyone leaps in to protest the physics here, Wansor’s conclusions here turn out to be entirely wrong in a later book. I can only assume that at this point in the series, McCaffrey hadn’t quite worked out the size/density/orbit of the Red Star—all kinda key factors in figuring out something like this—but in the meantime, let’s just be kind and note that Wansor has only been doing this astronomy thing for the equivalent of five years now. Mistakes are understandable.

And since this is a lesson moment, let’s pause for some definitions:

Milk mother: More or less the same thing as a wet nurse—a woman already nursing her own child who agrees to nurse another child, though in this case, combined with actually fostering the child.

Milk brother: The milk mother’s son (presumably a daughter would be called a milk sister), someone the foster child is supposed to feel a debt of gratitude, since if not for the milk brother, the child would not be alive. Jaxom isn’t exactly on board with this entire definition, for the record. Or should I say on dragon?

Firestone: It’s come up before, but I forgot to mention it: a substance that dragons have to chew before they can release the flames that burn Thread away in the sky.

Threadscore: Also something that’s come up before, but I forgot to mention it: the wounds left by Thread. Extremely painful, frequently leaving noticeable scars.

Timing it: The relatively new term for something initially introduced in Dragonflight—traveling through time on a dragon.

Anyway, the astronomy lessons bore Jaxom, who has heard it all before and is more concerned with, well, proving that Ruth is a proper dragon (that is, a dragon who can chew firestone and produce flames) and with proving that he, Jaxom, is a manly sort of manly man who yes, has no problems getting girls even if he’s not interested in making a match with a daughter of a neighboring Lord Holder.

The dialogue about this is Not Great, so let’s move on to the next bit: Jaxom’s Adventures in Trying to Teach Ruth How to Chew Firestone. These adventures include Jaxom wondering if he could or should conquer other holds, deciding to pick up a girl as cover for his actual activities, stealing firestone from the Ruatha Hold watchdragon, deceiving his guardian Lord Lytol, and cleaning up firestone vomit—this last not exactly enough to make Jaxom endearing.

Which is just one of many problems that pop up early in this novel. To be fair, some of these problems —most notably the sudden introduction of a number of characters from The Harper Hall Trilogy—were probably inevitable. Those novels, featuring cameo appearances from various Dragonquest characters, had been popular, and the decision to drag Menolly and later Sebell and Piemur into this novel certainly makes sense from a “what would my fans want?” point of view.

And, to be fair, getting to see Menolly again and finding out what happened to her after the Harper Hall Trilogy is great. I love seeing her talent and skills acknowledged, and I love knowing that she’s continuing to create music and have adventures. If anything, those adventures have even expanded: In her own books she did outrun Thread and Impress nine fire lizards, while in this book, she rides dragons, sails to distant continents, hangs out with the most important people on Pern, and explores ancient ruins. This is all pretty great.

But her introduction into this novel feels forced and awkward, as does her character transformation from shy, diffident girl feeling a desperate need to prove herself, to a confident character who doesn’t hesitate to slug a wounded Jaxom. To be fair, Jaxom is being more than a bit of a jerk here, and Menolly has slugged other people before this in her own books, including the spoiled sons and daughters of Lord Holders, so that’s perfectly in character. And to be equally fair, this not entirely convincing character transformation also appeared in the last book of Menolly’s series, Dragondrums —a book which appeared one year after The White Dragon.

Her friendship with Jaxom feels equally forced. Which is slightly puzzling: Menolly and Jaxom, after all, are about the same age. They both Impressed by accident, while trying to save fire lizards and a dragon respectively. But they otherwise have little in common; indeed, Menolly’s previous interactions with Holders of any type have not been particularly positive. And many of Jaxom’s thoughts about Menolly feel less like thoughts Jaxom—or anyone—would have, and more like reasons to keep her in the book.

Take, for instance, the moment when Jaxom starts running through a list of his friends who might be willing to help him steal firestone so he can teach Ruth to be a proper dragon. This works well as a handy list of Jaxom’s friends—and as a quick illustration of just who is attending these classes—but Jaxom’s conclusion, that Menolly would be just the person, makes no sense. In her own books, certainly, Menolly challenges and changes the status quo—but out of her love for music and talent. She’s not a rulebreaker. Indeed, she often lectures others on the need to follow the rules, and tries very hard to follow them herself. And more to the point, in this novel, she’s not a dragonrider, and has no direct access to firestone. How is she the ideal person to help steal firestone? Because McCaffrey wanted to emphasize her friendship with Jaxom to give a reason for a journeywoman Harper to have adventures with a dragon.

Awkward.

But the real problem is Jaxom, the least sympathetic protagonist in the Pern books so far. Writing unsympathetic characters was not new ground for McCaffrey—she had even included their viewpoints in earlier Pern books. But in those viewpoints, she had scrupulously included just enough to show that even her most antagonistic characters had some reason for their grievances.

Jaxom is an exception to the rule. Oh, he certainly tells himself, and his dragon, and readers, that he has real problems. And, as mentioned above, he does have real problems. But most of those problems stem from unbelievably good luck and a remarkably privileged position. He’s a Lord. He’s a dragonrider. He—unlike every other main character save F’nor introduced so far—has not one, but two caring, involved, and alive parents focused on his welfare. He—unlike every other main character so far, including F’nor—was not required to do physical labor as a teenager. To be fair, he does end up doing that in this novel—as part of attracting a girl. But it’s presented as Jaxom helping out as a favor, not as Jaxom needing to do the work.

Jaxom doesn’t appreciate any of this—except for his dragon—in the slightest, leading to a lot (and I do mean a lot) of whining.

It’s pretty typical teenage behavior. So typical that I feel I should note that I liked and identified with Jaxom much more when I was fourteen than I do now. But at the same time, it leads Jaxom to make some major misjudgments. He is convinced, for instance, that by treating him as a sickly child, his milk mother Deelan has fostered the resentment of his milk brother, Dorse—something that, in turn, leads Jaxom to resent Deelan.

It seems equally likely that Dorse’s resentment comes from another cause entirely: jealousy. As Jaxom’s milk brother, Dorse gets to share Jaxom’s things—but is never regarded as Jaxom’s equal. Indeed, when the idea of fosterlings and playmates for Jaxom is raised, Dorse is never even mentioned. Instead, everyone (well, everyone other than Dorse, at least) agrees that Jaxom needs to have companions of his own rank—that is, children of other Lords. Groghe sends over his son, who becomes Jaxom’s new companion. Dorse soon vanishes from the novel. So, to be fair, does Lord Groghe’s son, but there’s a fairly strong hint that he’ll be back.

It’s no wonder that Dorse harbors some resentment.

Not that Jaxom—with an amazing ability to look at all of his advantages in life and see them as problems—realizes this.

He’s almost a poster child for whiny, privileged wealthy guys everywhere.

Enough to make the book not worth reading? No. Because in yet another stroke of luck, Jaxom happens to be in a novel that he’s not worthy of, glimmers of which also appear in these early chapters.

A few of those glimmers are introduced, unsurprisingly, by Masterharper Robinton, who with his usual penchant for thinking in very useful plot summaries, notes that Pern has now shifted from the invasive species crisis to an overpopulation crisis. Concerns about human overpopulation had gained prominence throughout the 1970s, making it a natural theme for the novel—helped by the setup in previous books. The fight against Thread has gone so well, and birth control among the holders is so limited (or unavailable) that multiple Lord and regular Holders have an abundance of sons—and no land to give them. Those of you who are thinking that, okay, then they can just be harpers or mechanics or weavers—something useful, that is—should probably drop that thought, since the Lord Holders want their kids to be, well, Lord Holders.

In their slight defense, we do see many of the Lord Holders in this book working as land managers or helping to harvest or plant crops or later, provide building materials. Against that, this land hunger, especially for the unexplored lands of the Southern Continent (which could, Lord Holders, be kept as nice nature reserves, a solution that would fit the environmental themes of this novel), has a distinct sense of greed about it. Not to mention that the Oldtimers exiled to the Southern Continent and the settlers who suddenly had the Oldtimers foisted on them might just want to have a say in this.

But The White Dragon doesn’t just have a whiny, privileged protagonist and discussions of environmental issues and population pressure. It also has the little white dragon, Ruth—arguably the real draw of the novel. We’ll get to Ruth in upcoming posts.

Mari Ness currently lives rather close to a certain large replica of Hogwarts, which allows her to sample butterbeer on occasion. Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Fireside, Apex, Daily Science Fiction, Nightmare, Shimmer and assorted other publications—including Tor.com. Her poetry novella, Through Immortal Shadows Singing, was released in 2017 by Papaveria Press. You can follow her on Twitter @mari_ness.

A House Like a Lotus bears many of the traits common to Madeleine L’Engle’s work: family members swap kids; a deeply eccentric adult mentors a deeply precocious child; ESP exists when convenient; half of the characters are the youngest/most eccentric members of old, old families; precocious children are abused at school; extraordinarily intelligent parents insist that precocious children stay in schools where they don’t learn anything because of the nebulous concept of “social intelligence” which in the L’Engle-verse seems to mean “learning to put up with idiots”; and, of course, international travel. But, other than that instance of convenient ESP, and one fictional terminal illness, Lotus is pretty straight realism.

Or, if you’ll humor me, pretty queer realism.

Polly O’Keefe, daughter of Meg Murry O’Keefe and Calvin O’Keefe, and central character of L’Engle’s previous books The Arm of the Starfish and Dragons in the Waters, is trapped in finding it hard to adjust to life as a teen in South Carolina. Luckily, her middle-aged next-door neighbor turns out to be the regal scion of a very old, very rich Southern family, who first befriends her, then sends her to an all-expense paid internship with an artists’ conference where her favorite author is a guest. The book mainly follows Polly as she tries to process a traumatic experience, and sort through her own emotional life, while being romanced by a vapid playboy named Zachary Grey (a character who also appears in L’Engle’s Austin Family books). But none of that mattered much to me, because I just wanted to grow up to be that ridiculous neighbor, who was also the first openly queer character I ever encountered in a book. And reader, she was fantastic.

Reading this book at age 11, I was probably supposed to identify most with awkward and gangly 16-year-old Polly—or at least look at her like a big sister. But it wasn’t her I cared about. The only character who mattered to me was Polly’s absurdly over-the-top neighbor, whose name was, I shit you not, Maximiliana Sebastiane Horne. (Her beloved, long-deceased sister is named, and I am still not shitting you, Minerva Allaire.) Obviously she’s called Max, or sometimes Metaxa, after “a strong Greek liqueur.”

I shouldn’t have to explain why I blew right past Polly and identified with Max as hard as I could.

This book contorts itself around the question of queerness like a snake trying to mate with itself. Max is bisexual, but is presented in a way that goes to pains to explain why she’s bi. Her father was an abusive lush, who got drunk one night and tried to rape her sister M.A., which has led to Max pinballing between hard-drinking and promiscuity and serious, sober monogamy. When we meet her, she’s in the thirtieth year of a committed relationship with a woman named Ursula, but L’Engle has to make sure that we understand that she was with a man first, and had a daughter with that man. The death of her daughter led to the breakup of the marriage and launched Max into a series of erratic affairs with at least a few genders before she met Ursula. Max is brash and confident, traveling the world painting, and accruing a spectacular private art collection, and generally acting much more like a rich playboy than a late-middle-age wealthy woman. Basically, she’s become the son her father wanted. Ursula embodies a different queer stereotype: short, a bit round, “handsome” instead of “pretty,” short clipped hair, hyper-competent, steady. Plus, we’re in the L’Engle-verse, so obviously she’s also one of the best neurosurgeons in the world.) But even though Max and Urs are obviously exceptional people, and a great couple, Max seems to think she needs to talk Polly through her history to explain it, and Ursula seems to think she owes Polly an explanation for her attraction to Max, and refers to herself as a woman who’s had to make it in a man’s profession.

This couple is contrasted with the O’Keefes: Meg Murry O’Keefe and her husband Calvin, who are miles away from their teen selves in A Wrinkle in Time: Cal is now a world-renowned scientist who tends to be pretty standoffish and stern with the kids, and Meg has reacted against her own mother’s brilliant science career by leaving academia to have seven children, but has somehow also grown into the exact kind of perfect, graceful woman that young Meg would have hated. We also learn, through Max, that Meg has begun to feel stifled by her family—after dedicating her twenties and thirties to raising kids, she might be eager to return to the mathematics career she left behind.

Polly’s favorite brother, Charles, is living in Boston with Meg’s brother Dennys while Dennys’ daughter Kate stays with them in South Carolina. Kate is beautiful and willowy and immediately fits in at Polly’s school, going so far as to mock her cousin at the dinner table for being a dork. Polly, meanwhile, goes from being mostly unnoticed to being harassed by her classmates for her friendship with Max. And this is where the book veers in a direction that has made a lot of people condemn it over the last few years. Max and Polly talk about sex, because they talk about everything. Max clearly sees Polly as a replacement for the daughter she lost, Polly sees Max as an awesome non-Mom role model, and seemingly Meg sees her as a way to have one less kid to worry about. So at a certain point Polly and Max talk about sex, and Max tells Polly she’s straight. At another point Polly and her parents talk about sex, and she reassures them that she’s straight, and insists that Max and Ursula should keep their business to themselves. Polly is caring for Max one night when she drinks too much, and maybe kinda sorta makes a pass at her. Now this is obviously bad in many directions, but even as a kid I read this as a dumb drunken mistake. She wants her life and her youth back. She wants to be the hot, healthy, fabulous Maximiliana who go out at night and come home with whomever she wanted. But the second she realizes where she is and what she’s doing she sobers up and apologizes.

The immediate aftermath of the night with Max is that, as Polly’s walking home, a couple of boys from her school try to pick her up, and then start berating her and yelling homophobic slurs at her when she refuses to get in their car. Then, when her kinda-sorta, much-older boyfriend Renny comes and gets her, he comforts her, which turns into sex, which she allows.

There’s a lot here, and here is where as much I wanted to identify with Max, I had to admit that I was a lot closer to Polly in both age and class. First, as I already knew all too well, stepping outside of “normal” can be terrifying in school—I was already familiar with the power move of a popular girl approaching and pretending to be friendly before she asks if you’re a lesbian. I also suspected that boys’ already outsized reactions to anything “gay” might also apply to finding out about me—the fact that I didn’t really see myself as a girl, exactly, and that whatever I was, I certainly wasn’t The Thing People Referred To As Straight—seeing Polly navigate this situation as it turned violent gave me a preview of how things were going to be as we all got older, stronger, and more hormonal.

Not fun, but useful.

And that brings us to the second part of this encounter. Polly, distraught over Max’s drunken betrayal, and freaked out by the confrontation with the high school boys, decides in the moment to lose her virginity with a man she doesn’t know that well. She does this seemingly out of a need for physical comfort and reassurance, and also, I think, to prove to herself that she’s straight.

This has bothered me since I read it. As an 11-year-old, deciding to sleep with someone seemed like the single biggest and most important decision a person could make, and I felt betrayed that Polly chose to do that on a whim. Where was the love, the commitment? Hell, where was the condom?

But more than that it upset me that Polly made this momentous choice to prove that she wasn’t what Max was.

I wanted to be what Max was.

Was it really so terrible that you’d risk pregnancy with a guy you don’t know just to get away from it? Was there some part of her that was trying to prove those high school boys wrong? So she could walk into school on Monday knowing that she’d had sex with a handsome older guy—a guy even her snotty cousin thought was cute—so there would be a part of her those kids could never touch?

What did that have to do with love? Max and Urs had been together for thirty years, despite not even being allowed to get married. They loved and supported each other’s work, they lived apart for months but always came back together, they were romantic and fun. They weren’t proving themselves to people who didn’t matter. They weren’t bound together by children, or resentful of giving up promising careers. They didn’t judge the straight couples around them for being shitty allies. Max didn’t even press Polly for her forgiveness. She knew she’d hurt the girl, and she relayed her apology through Polly’s uncle, paid for Polly’s trip to Greece and Cyprus, and waited for Polly to process enough to talk to her again. Even though she was dying, she recognized that Polly needed to take her time.

Since I don’t really do gender, I just always identified with whichever character I liked most. When Polly O’Keefe proved disappointing, I surrendered to my love of Max: someone who was not supposed to be a role model, who was bitchy and snotty, often drunk, but fabulous. She was committed to life with her deadpan, no-bullshit partner, and in a book full of colorful, globetrotting artists, and several ludicrously rich playboys, it was Max and Urs who represented #relationshipgoals. Max was dying, which came up to the edge of the trope I would eventually learn was called “tragic queer”—but the illness had nothing to do with her sexuality, it could have happened to anyone. Her career as an artist, and Ursula’s as a WORLD-RENOWNED NEUROSURGEON (fuckin’ L’Engle) were unaffected by homophobia, or at least, they didn’t allow anyone to see the effects, they just kept on being themselves. And L’Engle made Max so defiantly herself, and created a character who built her life around art, loved where she loved, and remained fundamentally open to life despite pain and illness. She is also immediately and genuinely remorseful when she causes Polly pain, knows how to apologize, and (unlike many of the other adults in the book) knows to give Polly time and space to process and forgive. I don’t think L’Engle wrote Max Horne to be an inspiration, but finding her when I was twelve gave me the example of a life of queerness and art that I desperately needed.

Now Leah Schnelbach just needs to work on that “scion of an incredibly wealthy family” thing! Come talk to them about Pride on Twitter!

Paul Weimer recently asked:

“I saw JJ’s comment above about Space Opera and wonder just how much space is required to make a Space Opera a Space Opera, as opposed to being something more akin to Planetary Romance.”

It’s an interesting question that prompted responses on File 770, Cora Buhlert’s blog, and no doubt elsewhere. There probably is no hard line between Space Opera and Planetary Romance; that does not mean we cannot argue incessantly discuss passionately where the line should be drawn. Here’s my two cents (rounded up to a nickel because Canada phased pennies out in 2013)…

One world is not enough (probably). There are space operas that center on one world—novels such as Dune or The Snow Queen come to mind—but their plots require interactions between that planet and the rest of the narrative universe. The story may take place on one world, but this world is only one of many.

Space travel is a therefore a necessary feature of space opera. Travel can delightfully complicate the plot: trade, migration, proselytization, and the chance that the local equivalent of the Yekhe Khagan might pop by with ten thousand of his closest friends to discuss taxation and governance.

We also expect a setting that suggests great expanses of space and time. Opera, after all, often involves spectacle, and what grander scale than a million worlds? Or distances so vast that entire species have gone extinct while light was crawling across interstellar gulfs?

All of which seems to imply that space opera requires interstellar travel and a galactic setting. But…but… let us not get ahead of ourselves.

First of all, if the author limits themself to plausible or semi-plausible propulsion systems, the time required to traverse the Solar System will expand immensely. Second, the Solar System is actually quite, quite large. A combination of

• realistic delta-v (kilometers or tens of kilometers per second)
• or possibly higher delta-vs (at the cost of hilariously low accelerations)
• and great solar distances

can imbue a tale with the scale and grandeur we usually associate with galactic space operas.

The same advanced technology that can deliver a warhead full of nuclear awesomeness from a Russian missile silo to your living room in less time than it takes to watch an episode of Game of Thrones would take half a week to reach the Moon. And nine months to reach Mars. Or consider the reach of electromagnetic radiation (which includes light). The signals that can circle the Earth in a seventh of a second would take almost a second and a third to reach the Moon, more than three minutes to reach Mars, and over half an hour to reach Jupiter. The outer reaches of our solar system are even farther away. The spacecraft New Horizons is more than six hours away by photon; Voyager One is so far away that light takes seventeen hours to arrive.

Moreover, the Solar System is both very large and full of stuff. At least eight planets and five dwarf planets. Almost two hundred known moons. Maybe one hundred thousand 100 km+ Kuiper Belt Objects. Perhaps two million large asteroids. A trillion bodies in the Oort Cloud. Assuming sufficiently advanced life support, time, and some reason to plant people on various celestial bodies, there’s certainly room for as many distinct cultures as any galactic space opera offers.

Eleanor Lutz’s Asteroid Map of the Solar system gives a nice impression of what’s out there just in the Inner System (and is available for purchase in a variety of formats.)

Even better, the distribution of matter in the Solar System lends itself to plot-enabling complications.

Contrary to the old belief that spacers would avoid large masses, it turns out that planets (Jupiter in particular) are extremely useful sources of free momentum (spacecraft can swing round those worlds for an extra boost). Well, free at the current moment. Anyone who can control access to Jupiter may be able to make a nice living off that control. How to establish control? How to maintain control? There are stories in those questions.

Then there’s the fact that the distances between objects in the Solar System are dynamic. Here, enjoy this animation of the orbits of Jupiter’s Trojans:

Human colonies may alternate between glorious isolation and easy access to other colonies . This would be predictable (orbital mechanics for the win), but it would still make for some interesting politics and would complicate trade in interesting ways . Poul Anderson wrote a story based on this observation (“The Makeshift Rocket”); I am sure that other stories are possible.

Once one is past the Belt, each planet’s satellite system presents the potential for a natural community, close to each other both in terms of time and delta-v. As pointed out decades ago in “Those Pesky Belters and Their Torchships,” this means one could have a setting in which the Solar System might be divided into dozens of nations, which as we all know from current history, is a very plot-friendly arrangement.

Scale, plot-friendly orbital dynamics, plot-friendly heterogeneous matter distribution: the Solar System all by itself provides every resource a space opera author could want.

In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is a finalist for the 2019 Best Fan Writer Hugo Award, and is surprisingly flammable.

Amazon’s adaptation of The Wheel of Time has found its Moiraine! The Wheel of Time Writers Room took to twitter to announce that Oscar-nominated actor Rosamund Pike will take on the role.

Last week showrunner Rafe Judkins promised that he’d return to announcing news on Twitter under the hashtag #WoTWednesdays, and he did not disappoint! Here’s the tweet:

Please welcome Rosamund Pike to the Wheel of Time family. Say hello to Moiraine. #WoTWednesday pic.twitter.com/577Hffwy6Y

— Wheel of Time Writers' Room (@WoTWritersRoom) June 19, 2019

Moiraine is a member of a sisterhood called the Aes Sedai, and she travels the world with a group of five youths (Although…could Nynaeve really be considered a youth?)—one of whom may prove to be very, very important. Best known for her Oscar-nominated role as Amy Dunne in Gone Girl, Pike has also appeared in Die Another Day, The Libertine, and the most recent adaptation of Watership Down. Wheel of Time will be coming to Amazon in a co-production with Sony Pictures TV.

We’ll keep you updated as the wheel of new turns, but in the meantime, what do you hope to see from Moiraine?

So far in this column, I’ve already reviewed the first and second parts of The Way of Thorn and Thunder, and now we’re getting to the finale. I chose to review this book in three parts because it was originally published as three separate books, though I read the more recent re-release, which molds the trilogy into a one-book whole that is around 600 large-format pages long. Whew!

It is tricky to avoid spoilers when discussing the final book of a trilogy; so far I’ve tried my best not to delve too deeply into specific plot details, but I do want to discuss those aspects at the end of this review. I’ll clearly mark the point after which spoilers follow.

The Way of Thorn and Thunder offered a huge apparatus of characters, locations, peoples, magical systems and more in the first two books. There was also a clear movement toward a looming catastrophe. How does the final part deal with all this complicated setup?

This last segment (Cycles Five through Seven in the new edition) starts with a combat scene between characters that has been a long time coming. We also find out their backstory, which makes for a slightly slower start, but it enriches the characters themselves. (A small side note that is more directed at editors and publishers rather than authors: I am a bit frustrated every time there are whole pages in italics—something epic fantasy tends to do. This gripe is not specific to this book. I feel italics are best suited for short highlights and not entire sections—if something needs to be set aside, just put it in a separate chapter. Italics are often harder to read, and this can be an accessibility issue.)

After this opening, we are plunged into the depths of destruction set up in the first two volumes. (Not a spoiler—the destruction is mentioned on the back cover, and the text makes it clear that it is coming.) The Humans forcibly march the Folk to the deserted, ravaged land that’s been designated for them. This is genocide, and we get to see it up close, though Daniel Heath Justice never gets extremely graphic in his depictions. Still, the impact lingers.

Many, many people are desperately working to turn the tide in favor of the Folk in even the smallest way, albeit in the face of overwhelming force. We get to see all the characters we’ve gotten to know from the first two books (or first four cycles), and some also finally find love—an F/F/M polyamorous relationship develops between several of the main characters. The narrative makes it clear that Humans view both polyamory and zhe-gender—the third gender of the Kyn—in a very Western way, but also that neither of these concepts are any issue for the Folk, and some Humans are shown changing their attitudes, too. I also thought the dynamic of the aforementioned relationship was interesting in that it centers around a strong woman (and main character) who’s attracted to people of multiple genders, and who attracts people to her who then also need to figure out how to relate to each other. (This is a quite distinct dynamic from Melissa Scott’s Roads of Heaven trilogy, which I reviewed recently in this column—there, the strong, polyamorous woman character ends up in a relationship with a previously established couple of two men.)

There are also plenty of other relationships portrayed, though the focus is never strongly on the romance—as even the characters themselves point out, they are engaged in a massive high-stakes confrontation and often just do not have the time and energy required to devote to romantic pursuits. They do try to get in moments of romantic love, even amidst the desperation, whenever they can. The book is very clearly inclusive in its depiction of romantic relationships, and not just that: It is also inclusive in terms of the many other ways of strongly and intimately relating to each other, like friendship, found family ties, mentorship, and more.

After copious political machinations, we arrive at the climactic battle, waged between the forces of good and evil in classic epic fantasy fashion… and it is pitch-perfect. Everything comes together, all the effort both from the author and the reader pays off, and yet nothing in the narrative leans toward easy, simplistic solutions. It is very intense, comparable to some of the scenes in the first book where Tarsa tries to get a handle on her magic. I was shivering. I was trying not to cry—I didn’t quite succeed. (Spouseperson: “Um, Bogi… what’s going on with you?” Me: “I’m… reading…”) I’ll say a bit more in the final, spoilery section, but it was a very emotional experience.

Reading this section, I felt that all the moving parts slotted into place. All of them: first during the final climactic confrontation, and then in the epilogue/dénouement. I don’t think there was a single plot thread that remained undiscussed—even if it was unclosed, which is different! While this made the epilogue read a bit like an inventory, it also came as such an immense relief to me as a reader that it stopped me in my tracks. I honestly wish more authors did this at the closure of their lengthy trilogies. Yes, I desperately want to know what happened to X, Y, Z side characters who were my favorites—and everyone has different favorites among side characters. I was very much invested in the whole world created in this book, and this ending helped me so much. There has been a lot of discussion about how “show, don’t tell” is an Anglo-Western and specifically colonialist concept, and this was such a good example of the ways straightforwardly (queerforwardly?) telling can benefit both the book and the readers so much. There was plenty of showing in the final climactic battle—and then the telling in the epilogue helped bring me back onto solid ground, emotionally.

And now for the spoilers…

I really did not know how the main plot would end, because of the tension between the prospect of a genocide inspired by real-world genocide on one hand and the epic fantasy convention of the virtuous triumphing over the forces of harm on the other. I set the book down during the parts of the forced march and it really got me thinking. How would, how could this end?! I could not see a clear path. Forced marches are part of my history—a history that took place on a different continent and as part of a different context, but still. And the narratives I read about that never really ended in any kind of triumph. But… the author is here to write this book, and I am here to read it, so the people who were determined to kill us didn’t succeed. Can that be triumphant, in some way? Obviously there is no exact parallel and I would not want to equate Indigenous and Jewish struggles, but this really brought up all my convoluted feelings—especially since the book is fictional and not a historical retelling, with many, many different details at play. (The dilemma of the Ubbetuk that they acquire military might as a marginalized people and might be swayed in the direction of harm because of it—the book does not show where it leads—was also very relatable to me, though I am a diaspora Jewish person.)

Buy it Now

I read on, and the novel ended in a way that was both hopeful and still not shying away from showing the magnitude of the destruction, and all that had been uprooted. And some part of me really, really needed that. Scratch that—all of me needed that. Healing, but not facile “magical cure” tropes. Hope, but not the erasure of all the suffering that has taken place. Life, while not pretending that everyone made it out alive. (This is not a queer death book, though we do find out that one of the older non-straight characters dies a peaceful death later—which in itself gave me solace. Sometimes showing death can also show hope; that we can be allotted quiet deaths in a circle of family.)

This book also deliberately doesn’t disentangle and tear apart gender and ethnicity/culture; that is such a key experience of mine and it was shown here—again, in a very different context—with such ease. In the epilogue we’re also shown how gender roles can move in the direction of greater inclusion, with men practicing traditional women’s crafts; just because something is traditional doesn’t mean it is not responsive to change if the people wish it so. The Way of Thorn and Thunder offers all this and more, in glorious detail, both meandering slowly and speeding up in turn as the plot flowed. This is exactly what I want in my epic fantasy, and I got it here, and I am grateful. You will probably also get something out of it, something that is offered by sadly few books in current SFF, though their numbers are slowly increasing.

Next time, we will start discussing the winner of the previous poll I’d had on my Patreon: Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy, starting with Dawn! This will be a reread for me, but a reread of a series that has been very influential for me, so I’ll see how it goes—I feel like every time I reread Butler’s work, I get something else out of the experience.

Bogi Takács is a Hungarian Jewish agender trans person (e/em/eir/emself or singular they pronouns) currently living in the US with eir family and a congregation of books. Bogi writes, reviews and edits speculative fiction, and is a winner of the Lambda Literary Award and a finalist for the Hugo and Locus awards. You can find em at Bogi Reads the World, and on Twitter and Patreon as @bogiperson.

Welcome back to the Lovecraft reread, in which two modern Mythos writers get girl cooties all over old Howard’s sandbox, from those who inspired him to those who were inspired in turn.

This week, we’re reading David Barr Kirtley’s “The Disciple,” first published in the Summer 2002 issue of Weird Tales. Spoilers ahead.

“I’ve lost things in my life, so many things, but I’ve gained something too—this rotting emptiness inside me, and I can use it. I swear I can use it.”

Summary

Professor Carlton Brose is evil, and nameless narrator adores him as only a freshman can. Brose teaches at a university in Massachusetts, but people have heard of him as far away as narrator’s “dear old Carolina,” if (like narrator) they have a habit of joining cults. Narrator’s friend there tells him Brose is “the real deal.” Every spring Brose enrolls a dozen students into his special program, and they get power—before going away. Perhaps to places not of this world.

Narrator scoffs. Why would someone so awesome work at all, and what school would have him? More pertinent, why isn’t friend studying with Brose? Friend admits Brose wouldn’t have him, said he had no talent. Isn’t that final proof he’s no fraud, turning down a potential dupe?

Narrator travels to Massachusetts and hangs around Brose’s office until the man emerges. His eyes are the color of tombstones, and shadows darken in his wake. Instantly smitten, narrator enrolls in the university. When he finally meets with Brose, Narrator says he’ll do anything to get into the program; though he has no power yet, the rotting emptiness inside him has to be good for something.

All right, Brose’ll get the application form. While he’s gone, narrator examines a statue on Brose’s shelf. It resembles a man’s head with a beard and body of tentacles. Trying to pick it up, he finds it far heavier than its size warrants. Brose returns with a shoe box. Inside is the “application form,” a small white mouse. Narrator can “fill out” the “application” by drowning the mouse in a fish tank, which he does. He gains admission.

Buy it Now

Thirteen students, mostly male, meet in an old house at the edge of campus. In a basement classroom, they have their first lesson. Brose crucifies a cat, staunches its wounds while it howls, then explains they must learn to bind their wills to another’s. Pain can point the way in, but the greater things they aspire to connect with have never felt pain. He turns to narrator and commands: “Make it bleed again.”

Narrator longs to prove himself, but whispers that he doesn’t know how. Another student doesn’t need even to look at the cat to make its paws spurt blood. Turns out he’ll be narrator’s roommate in the isolated house–his name is Adrian, and he declares he’s not in the program to make friends but to make Brose notice him. Narrator counters that Adrian may have done well with the cat, but there’s more to magic. Adrian asks wryly if he should try something bigger, then makes narrator’s nose bleed.

It’s an omen for what’s to come. Adrian’s soon Brose’s favorite, while narrator earns only the master’s indifference. Narrator notices the other faculty view Brose and his students with fear and hostility. Yet they make no effort to shut Brose’s program down.

As semester’s end approaches, Brose grows agitated. The students must work harder, so they can bind themselves to “the impossible mind of the Traveler on Oceans of Night, the Stepper Across the Stars.” Only by becoming His disciples can they journey with Him to the places He dreams into reality. Brose exhibits his black statue. Narrator notices tiny human figures among its tentacles–if the scale’s true, the Traveler must tower to mountainous heights.

Narrator starts dreaming of alien cities. One night he wakes to see Adrian on the floor, staring in terror. Adrian wails: “His boundlessness reaches across the void to poison our dreams.” The Traveler is coming.

And, narrator concludes, how much worthier of veneration is this entity than Brose! Never mind the professor’s indifference; surely he can learn to impress the Traveler.

On binding night, Brose leads his students into the woods bearing his black statue. The air crackles with magic. The statue sucks shadows from under their feet and into itself as they make their way to an ancient shrine overgrown with rotting ferns. A wind rises that seems to shriek with pain. Shadows leap from beneath the trees to block the starlight.

The Traveler appears, stretching to infinity, far away yet near. The students collapse and weep without shame. Brose screams for them to bind to Him. Adrian rises first, face ecstatic. He lifts from the earth, as do all but narrator, until they circle the Traveler like flies. But Narrator looks at Brose and sees the same indifference he reads on the otherworldly visage of the Traveler. He hides until the Traveler’s stepped away, toward another dreamed world. Brose says he’s failed the binding. Narrator attacks his teacher—Brose lied, promising he’d make them the Traveler’s disciples when they could be no more to Him than fleas on a rat on a great vessel, when they’re now only “frozen forms twirling slowly in an endless dance among the stars.”

Brose makes narrator’s eyes bleed, clearly meaning to kill him. Instead, narrator drives the fallen Traveler statue through Brose’s forehead.

Now narrator’s the one handing mice to applicants—the only one who can take Brose’s place. The university may hate the program, but it knows somebody must deal with those who’ve “latched onto darkness, or [who] might.”

Harmless wannabees narrator rejects. The rest he’ll eventually lead to the Traveler’s embrace, but in the meantime they’re enthralled, eager for his attention.

They adore him.

What’s Cyclopean: Brose’s eyes are the color of a tombstone, and flies swirl around him in formation. That’s how you know he’s legit.

The Degenerate Dutch: People who start their first year of college with misanthropic tendencies and a predilection for nihilism clearly need to be filtered out of the school with the greatest possible force. (Or possibly they just need a few years away from home—but we’ll never find out.)

Mythos Making: For your delectation, a new contribution to the Mythosian Pantheon: the Traveler on Ocean of Night, the Stepper Across the Stars.

Libronomicon: Perhaps Brose’s students should be more suspicious about the fact that, at a school that keeps a copy of the Necronomicon, his class doesn’t involve so much as a mimeographed reading packet.

Madness Takes Its Toll: The ritual to summon the Traveler brings “a maddening sense of dislocation, a nightmare cacophony of unbearable sensations.”

Ruthanna’s Commentary

As anyone who’s read my stories can probably tell, I’m a bit of a cynic about academia. Sure, the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake is noble, but, in practice, the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake is mixed with the pursuit of knowledge for ego’s sake. There are old men who use tenure like a weapon, guarding gates they once passed through with ease, and there are people who assume those gates are worth passing through simply because they’re heavily guarded. There are toxic assumptions about the sacrifices that must be required to prove your devotion, and people and institutions all too willing to accept those sacrifices.

How much worse must these academic sinkholes grow at a place like Miskatonic, where the knowledge studied includes whole majors man wasn’t meant to know?

Important things to bear in mind when investing in a program of study:

• There is, and will always be, life outside of your university. Not only the strange inhuman minds that dwell beyond the stars, but, like, alternate career paths and relationships that deserve attention even when they distract from your studies.

• The major that attracts you to a school may not be the one you stick with. Don’t focus too hard on one topic during freshman year, even if you feel confident about what you want to do.

• Some professors are never going to be satisfied. Others just enjoy poking holes in students’ egos. Those guys make terrible advisors.

• If a class—let’s call it Study Hard Be Evil 101—uses the agonizing deaths of small fuzzy animals to make abstract points about the nature of reality, that’s what add/drop week is for.

• If a class—let’s call it Study Hard Be Evil 101—starts by training you to “bind your will to that of another,” make sure you’ve taken enough grammar and literature to recognize how different that is from “binding another’s will to yours,” and consider dropping the course even if add/drop week is over.

So I have opinions about Brose. He is a walking red flag, surrounded by the buzzing of infinite flies that wreathe his figure waving their own tiny little red flags. Presumably narrator, having played and won the Game of Tenured Chairs, has now inherited this flag collection. Perhaps he ought to reconsider his life choices.

I also have opinions about this version of Miskatonic. I do kind of follow their logic—if you tend to attract baby Voldemorts, there’s a temptation to sacrifice them to ancient powers in their first semester, before they can do any damage. I absolutely believe a school would do this. (I did say I was cynical.) I would, however, like to shake them and point out that aspiring teenage dark lords often benefit from therapy and a well-rounded set of humanities requirements. That is, potentially, an alternative to a class that encourages their worst tendencies and then sends them buzzing after an elder god. Perhaps we could put together a committee to consider our options. (Not that anyone would join it, given how little Service counts for during the tenure process.)

It’s enough to make one wonder if David Barr Kirtley, with this excellent contribution to both cosmic horror and realistic academic fiction, isn’t perhaps a bit of a cynic himself.

Anne’s Commentary

Well, Toto, this week’s nameless narrator is obviously not in North Carolina anymore, but is his Massachusetts university our own beloved Miskatonic? I’d say yes, because what other institution of higher learning would support Professor Brose’s program? I’d say no because MU is in the middle of downtown Arkham, with no extensive woods like Kirtley’s Arboretum in the immediate vicinity of campus. But my no could be getting over-picky about fictional topography, and the Bay State is big enough for more than one university with weird curricula.

The other burning Mythos question is: Who’s this Traveler on Oceans of Night and Stepper Across the Stars? Two fine sobriquets, by the way, arguably not grandiose enough for an Outer God but suitable to the chief of a Great Race, like Cthulhu. The Traveler has a tentacle-beard on a sorta anthropoid head; however, Cthulhu has a much more complex body than He, no mere tangle of additional tentacles. The Traveler has a habit of sweeping human worshippers into the ultimate cold of space, as Ithaqua does its captives; however, Ithaqua’s “companions” survive after a cannibalistic fashion, while the Traveler’s appear to freeze to death, oops. My guess: The Traveler is Kirtley’s own addition to the Mythos pantheon, perhaps a cousin of the Great Squid’s, for the Squid has many relations across time and the void.

All that written (because Mythosian quibbling’s fun), “Disciple’s” central concerns are ethical ones—we learn that from the story’s attention-seizing first sentence, “Professor Carlton Brose was evil, and I adored him as only a freshman can.” Wait a minute, what’s this about adoring evil, and are the young and impressionable particularly prone to such adoration? Darkness has an intrinsic glamour, its own aesthetics founded on contrast to the light. Dig deeper, and there’s the primal definition of evil as the rejection of established order. “Disciple’s” narrator joins cults in rebellion against the society that has (for reasons unstated) rejected him. I sense he acts out of more than a jejune delight in defiance, for he’s suffered losses that have left a “rotting emptiness” inside him. Rotting emptiness! Terrible words for a terrible void narrator can’t hope to fill, which he can only use as a force in itself, a negative potential that Brose recognizes, for it’s the foundation of his own faith.

However, faith may be too strong a term for what Brose lives on. Significantly, the expression narrator comes to recognize as Brose’s default is indifference. It’s the same indifference narrator sees in the face of the Traveler, whose most telling feature is His utterly empty eyes. Perhaps they’re empty because they only reflect the emptiness beyond the stars—whatever marvelous visions or dreams lie behind the Traveler’s eyes, they don’t radiate them. As for Brose, he has no visions or dreams to share. Narrator, initially adoring, as taken as any initiate with Brose’s shadow-tricks, eventually realizes his idol’s a small man, with no lofty ambitions moral or immoral, content to be the big fish in a small pond and willing to do anything to stay that way.

In narrator, Brose may see himself as a younger man, still hungry for big power. In Brose, narrator first sees his ideal self and then his deeply compromised future. Brose, it turns out, isn’t worth adulation. The Traveler may be a “great vessel,” but cares as much for human worship as a great vessel could care for a rat stowed away in its hold, or a flea stowed away on the rat. Looking at the faceless horror of Brose’s statue-crushed skull, narrator understands that the Traveler is “blind to the pain of this sad world.”

It remains for narrator to blind himself to the world’s pain, to grow as indifferent as Brose. That way he can become the University’s new policeman and executioner; that way he can stuff his inner emptiness with the emptiness of adoration he knows his “meager powers” don’t deserve.

Emptiness plus emptiness equals—you can do the math.

As for the moral calculus carried out by the University, tacitly endorsing a program that kills off its entire student roster every spring semester, there’s a good Ethics 101 topic for you. Granted everyone in the program’s a mouse-killer at the least. Granted it’s a bad idea in Lovecraft territory to suffer evil wizards to live. Granted the University has the moral grace to hate the program. Isn’t it still setting up a Starry Void Chamber of one to deal with the problem? Isn’t its executioner’s chief balm still the stroking of his vanity?

And isn’t the Traveler still getting “fed”?

Just wondering.

School’s out for summer, so it’s time for a road trip. Join us for Premee Mohamed’s “Us and Ours”; you can find it in the Secret Guide to Fighting Elder Gods.

Ruthanna Emrys is the author of the Innsmouth Legacy series, including Winter Tide and Deep Roots. She has several stories, neo-Lovecraftian and otherwise, available on Tor.com, most recently “The Word of Flesh and Soul.” Ruthanna can frequently be found online on Twitter and Patreon, and offline in a mysterious manor house with her large, chaotic household—mostly mammalian—outside Washington DC.

Anne M. Pillsworth’s short story “The Madonna of the Abattoir” appears on Tor.com. Her young adult Mythos novel, Summoned, is available from Tor Teen along with sequel Fathomless. She lives in Edgewood, a Victorian trolley car suburb of Providence, Rhode Island, uncomfortably near Joseph Curwen’s underground laboratory.

I hope you’re all prepared for one doozy of a chapter, because this one’s chock full of questions, theories, death, betrayal… everything that makes one of Sanderson’s “avalanches” edge-of-your-seat events. There’s a lot going on here, as Kaladin and Elhokar finally find Unmade-possessed-Aesudan in the palace and Shallan confronts two different Unmade on the Oathgate platform, and Alice and I are ready to pull it all apart and pick the bones clean of theories, nuance, and… gifs. Of course. So buckle your seat belts and keep your arms and legs inside the ride at all times, because the Stormlight Coaster is about to drop clear off the edge of Roshar.

Reminder: We’ll potentially be discussing spoilers for the entire novel in each reread. There aren’t any big Cosmere things in this reread to be wary of, but if you haven’t read ALL of Oathbringer, best to wait to join us until you’re done. Because spoilers all the way.

Chapter Recap

WHO: Kaladin, Shallan
WHERE: Kholinar palace (not going to bother with a map this week, everything takes place in the palace or the Oathgate platform)
WHEN: 1174.2.3.3 (immediately after Chapter 83)

Kaladin, Elhokar, and a group of guards make it up to Aesudan’s chambers to find that she’s possessed by Yelig-nar, one of the Unmade. They rescue Gavinor, Elhokar’s son, and make their way out to the steps, where they’re confronted by an army of parshmen… ones Kaladin unfortunately recognizes as his friends. He freezes up, unable to kill his friends, and just as Elhokar is about to say the Words which will transform him into a Radiant, Moash appears and kills him. Meanwhile, Shallan manages to drive away the Heart of the Revel from the Oathgate platform, only to be stopped by Sja-anat, another Unmade who claims to be on her side, and warns her that the Oathgate is a cleverly laid trap…

Truth, Love, and Defiance

Title: The One You Can Save

“Elhokar,” Kaladin said, gripping the king’s shoulder. “Be a hero to the one you can save.”

A: Oh, my aching heart… (And yes, I’ll say that repeatedly this week, I expect.)

L: I can’t even imagine how hard this was for Elhokar. It’s pretty clear that he loved his wife, and to have to walk away knowing that Kaladin might be staying behind to kill her… Yeah.

Heralds

Shalash and Jezrien are there for the most obvious of reasons: This chapter is all about their Knights Radiant being Knights Radiant.

Icon

Kaladin’s Banner and Spears icon indicates that the chapter starts with his POV; he trades off with Shallan several times as it goes on.

Epigraph

The enemy makes another push toward Feverstone Keep. I wish we knew what it was that had them so interested in that area. Could they be intent on capturing Rall Elorim?

—From drawer 19-2, third topaz.

A: Yeah, I wish I knew too! There’s something significant about Feverstone Keep, right? Unless this is just a marker for us, reminding us that Dalinar’s Recreance vision took place there, it seems likely that there is something in the area, and quite possibly at Rall Elorim. It can’t be called “the City of Shadows” for nothing.

L: With the number of times that Brandon’s name-dropped this, it can’t not be significant.

Stories & Songs

They passed a corridor lined with statues of the Heralds. Nine of them, at least. One was missing.

A: This isn’t particularly significant for the chapter, but it’s worth noting that this is likely the same passageway that Szeth mentioned in the prologue to The Way of Kings. For what that’s worth. There are a couple of other reminders that this is the same palace that we’ve seen in all the prologues.

L: Which Herald is missing? What’s her name, the one who keeps destroying all the images of herself? That’s Shalash, right?

A: That’s the one. Szeth noticed that her statue was missing back then, and apparently it’s still missing. Or they replaced it and she destroyed it again, I suppose.

Buy it Now

L: Nice to know that my memory didn’t fail me for once.

“I can hear her,” Elhokar said. “That’s her voice, singing.”

I know that tune, Kaladin thought. Something about her soft song was familiar.

A: I checked with all the smartest people I know and confirmed that we still don’t know why Kaladin recognizes the tune. The main theory I’ve seen is that it’s a Singer tune which Kaladin learned from the parsh he traveled with, on the assumption that Aesudan knows it from having eaten the Yelig-Nar-gem. I don’t find this very satisfactory, because Sanderson is still being very coy when asked about it—and why would he be, if it was a question and answer completely contained within Oathbringer? Someone else had a theory (promptly disproven) that Kaladin’s mother Hesina might be closely related to Aesudan, and Kaladin had learned it from her. Oddly enough, the answer was no, that’s not why he knows it—but yes, Hesina is not closely related to Aesudan. Go figure.

But this is going to drive me crazy until we learn the answer. Why would Sanderson mention that Kaladin recognizes the song??

L: I think the idea that it’s a parsh song, or at least a Rhythm that Kal recognizes, makes total sense. Music seems to be underlying so much in this world. I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised if the “aliens” (humans) hear and recognize a lot more of the Rhythms that drive their world than they realize.

A: It could be. I mean, I totally agree that it’s quite possible for humans to recognize Rhythms without realizing it. But he refers specifically to the tune itself, so… I don’t know. Well, hopefully we’ll find out soon. (ish…)

This isn’t a human heart, she decided. Maybe it’s a parshman heart. Or, well, a giant, dark violet spren in the shape of one, growing over the Oathgate control building…

So. Time to try what she’d done in Urithiru.

Trembling, Shallan closed her eyes and pressed her hand against the heart. It felt real, like warm flesh. Like in Urithiru, touching the thing let her sense it. Feel it. Know it.

A: Even knowing that it worked in Urithiru, this seems like a horrible idea…

L: Aside from that, I find it curious that Shallan assumes that it’s mimicking a parsh heart. Parsh hearts are gems, so far as we know, and hence it doesn’t seem logical to me that it would look anything like a human one.

A: Well, two things. I believe parsh have two hearts—one that pumps blood, like a human heart, and the gemheart that controls their forms. So there’s that. The other is that I don’t think Shallan knows about their gemhearts yet, does she?

L: Wait, really? Do we have a WoB on that two hearts thing, or is it just speculation?

A: In the Eila Stele, there’s a line referring to humans that says, “They have but one heart, and it cannot ever live.” It seems reasonable that the writer is familiar with having more than one heart. I’m pretty sure there’s more evidence, but I can’t locate it right now.

His voice brought to her an awareness of the city around her. Of soldiers skirmishing only one street over. Of distant drums going silent, one at a time, as the guard posts on the wall fell.

L: This is just… haunting. I’m putting it here because it has to do with drums, but really… it has to do with death. With the city slowly falling, like a tree that’s been cut and is ever so slowly keeling over before it crashes to the ground.

A: This was such powerful imagery, it hurts to read.

She tried Pattern first, stabbing him into the heart as a Shardblade. The mass simply split around the Blade. She slashed with it, and the spren cut, then sealed up behind.

L: Whoa whoa whoa. Wait just a tick. So if Shardblades were made to fight the forces of Odium (???), the fact that this one doesn’t work against the Unmade is a pretty big thing. Did Odium realize that the Shardblades were destroying all his forces and created the Unmade specifically as superweapons that could withstand them?

A: Well, it’s entirely possible. I think. We see them work against a lot of different things, but apparently Unmade are an exception! A few weeks ago, we noticed how Syl as a Shardblade was able to direct Kaladin to find the Fused gemheart and destroy it, and that might be even more widely useful than fighting thunderclasts. It’s almost nice to know there’s something they can’t do. Sanderson’s Second Law: “The limitations of a magic system are more interesting than its capabilities.”

L: So, so true. If they could destroy every threat easily, this wouldn’t be as interesting of a book series.

He passed the remnants of lavish meals only partially eaten. Pieces of fruit each with a single bite taken out of them. Cakes and pastries. Candied meats on sticks. It looked like it should have rotted, based on the decayspren he noticed, but it hadn’t.

L: More of that time dilation going on here? Or is there something more? If the decayspren are there, maybe the food actually is decayed and there’s some sort of illusion happening.

A: This is clearly intended to make us wonder what’s going on, and I honestly don’t know. It’s likely one of the two reasons you mentioned, but it’s also possible that there’s something else bizarre that we haven’t picked up on yet.

L: And then we have this:

Kaladin picked around a pile of musical instruments of the finest wood, sitting in a heap.

L: More excesses, not only of the flesh, but of the mind as well. Gluttony doesn’t only need to refer to food, it’s indulging in anything to excess, and it appears that Aesudan was doing so about many things. Whether or not she was actually playing any of those instruments or simply wanted them just to possess them is up for debate… I wonder if there’s any sort of connection between the musical instruments and the fact that she was singing when they walked in. Maybe she was seeking the perfect accompaniment for the song in her head.

A: We don’t know much about Aesudan. It’s possible that she’s musically oriented and then, as you say, felt the need to possess them all. (Side note… most musical instruments are difficult to play with one hand. Just sayin’…)

L: I’m curious about the overlapping effects of the different Unmade, here. This seems like it’s a Heart of the Revel thing, so is it affecting Aesudan even while she’s possessed by Yelig-nar?

A: That’s a good question. I’m reasonably sure she was affected by the Heart of the Revel before she swallowed the Yelig-nar rock, so it’s possible that this is all leftovers from that time. It’s also possible, and I think probable, that she’s affected by the Revel right up until the moment she’s so possessed by Yelig-nar that she starts growing carapace and her eyes start glowing red.

He passed the balcony to his left. If he remembered right—though the story had been told so often, he had heard a dozen differing versions…

L: I have to laugh at this, because Sanderson is making a subtle little nod to the fact that every book in the series begins with a different retelling of this same event.

A: ::gigglesnort::

“Yelig-nar serves me. Or do you speak of the Heart of the Revel? Ashertmarn has no will; he is merely a force of consumption, mindless, to be harnessed.”

L: Yeeeaaaah I’m not sure how much of that I believe. Yelig-nar clearly has her wrapped around its little finger, so anything she thinks she knows about Ashertmarn is also questionable.

A: ALL the information we have about the Unmade is questionable. For what little we do have, though, Hessi’s Mythica seems to sort of agree with this; she calls it one of the “three great mindless Unmade.” Calling it “merely a force of consumption” is a bit understated, though—it’s like calling Nergaoul “merely a support in battle.”

Oh, also… “Yelig-nar serves me.” Oh, you ignorant, arrogant little twit. She seriously thinks she controls one of the Unmade, rather than the reverse.

L: Yeah. This is really, really stupid. But understandable, seeing as how it’s certainly been whispering in her ear all this time, twisting her mind.

A: I wonder if it was made easier by her time spent under Ashertmarn’s influence. Then again, she’s always been arrogant and power-hungry, so…

Give it all to me, the voices whispered in Shallan’s mind. Give me your passion, your hunger, your longing, your loss. Surrender it. You are what you feel.

L: I mean… in a sense, it’s not wrong. We are what we feel. But we can also control what we feel. Which is, of course, what Shallan’s about to learn.

A: I thought it was quite profound, to have the “force of consumption,” a.k.a. the “lust for indulgence,” urging her to consider herself only in terms of her emotions. It’s one of her biggest areas of difficulty: reconciling truth with feeling and, as you say, learning to control what she feels.

The enormous heart became sludge, then melted away, almost seeming to crawl, sending out runners of dark liquid before itself.

L: I can’t help but imagine noh-face from Spirited Away here. Actually… come to think of it… This Unmade is a bit like Noh-face, isn’t it? Engaging in things to excess, trying to convince others to do the same… I wonder if this was an influence on Sanderson’s work, here.

A: Not being familiar with the work in question, I have no opinion here. Shocking, isn’t it?

“You did it!” Adolin said.

I did?

L: I’m with Shallan here. I’d really like to know exactly what it is she’s doing that’s scaring these things off.

A: Well, in a bit someone else will explain this…

L: I have the memory of a goldfish, and haven’t read this in its entirety for two years now.

A: RAFO… like another page or so. :D

L: (After finishing initial notes on the chapter): Okay, so a trap. Right. I’d forgotten that in this case, that’s what’s going on. It stands to reason that Odium would expect Shallan to try the same strategy, and hence tell the Heart of the Revel to expect that and take a hike once she does.

A: It seems reasonable, and it totally would have worked without Sja-anat’s twisting of her own twists—at least, according to her, and I’m inclined to believe her.

It looked much as the one she’d discovered at the Shattered Plains—though better maintained, and its tile mosaics on the floor were of fanciful creatures. An enormous beast with claws, and fur like a mink. Something that looked like a giant fish.

A: For what it’s worth, the mosaics in the Stormseat Oathgate were of people: “Knights in armor stood before swirling skies of red and blue. People from all walks of life were depicted in all manner of settings…” I wonder if the differences are significant. Also, Dalinar being who he is (i.e. not Shallan) of course he didn’t take any note of the mosaics in the Azir Oathgate.

On the walls, lanterns shone with gemstones—and between them hung full-length mirrors.

L: Considering what she saw in mirrors earlier in this part, you’d think that she’d be a little more wary of these.

Radiant, the thing said, mouthing the words. My name is Sja-anat, and I am not your enemy.

L: I don’t know why I immediately trust her, and yet… here we are.

A: This is the third time we’ve heard someone tell Shallan recently that “I am not your enemy,” and now I believe all three were Sja-anat. The first one was when “Swiftspren” was listening to the cultists, hearing what they could hear, and then one line stands out differently: “Shallan, I’m not your enemy.” The second was when she came up here to investigate the Oathgate, saw the shape in the mirror, and heard the voice saying, “I’m not your enemy. But the heart is a trap. Take caution.” Now this one—where she can actually see the spren talking to her—makes me think all three have to be the same person.

And… I know this is based on not much, but I agree. I do trust her, at least to an extent, and I think she’s going to be the one to break away from Odium, and maybe turn out to help Our Radiants. (I can’t help thinking that we’re going to have all sorts of folks changing sides this time around, so that we have Heralds and Unmade and humans and parsh on both sides of the conflict.)

The queen’s soldiers blinked against the light, as if it were somehow too strong for their eyes.

L: Just another tallymark for the “people under the influence of the Unmade react weird to stuff” list.

They call me the Taker of Secrets, the figure said. Or they once did.

L: Okay, 1. Really cool name and 2. Interesting parallel here with Pattern and his “you have to give me truths” thing.

A: It is indeed a cool name. I just can’t quite figure out what it means, and what it has to do with her abilities! Does she take secrets from your mind and use them against you? Or is it more like the Lightweaver’s truths, where you give her your secret and she gives you… something or other? I badly want to learn more about the Unmade.

We were made, then unmade, she agreed.

L: What the heck is that supposed to mean? Did Odium somehow like… unravel their being and then put them back together differently? So they were made (by god or whatever the creator of the Cosmere is), then Unmade (by Odium, like, rearranging their magical DNA or something)?

A: Oh, the theories!! And we don’t know what this means, except that they were something before they were Unmade. I can’t help wondering if it’s sort of similar to the Heralds—they were ordinary humans, and then Honor gave them extra powers, and they became Cognitive Shadows who could do a lot of really amazing stuff. It’s quite possible that these were originally Singers (or humans, or Aimians, or greater spren), and then for whatever reason, they allowed Odium to give them extra powers but they had to be “unmade” to function. And of course, there’s always my loonie theory that they were somehow “pieces” splintered off of the Sibling…

L: Is it possible that the Sibling has been completely and totally dismantled? Rather than pieces splintered off while the main body/being still exists, that it’s been broken apart entirely and the Unmade are all pieces of it? This would explain the “unmade” thing for sure…

A: I think it’s possible. I hope it’s not. I don’t think that’s the whole explanation, if it’s even partially true, because the Sibling was still known and loved by the Knights Radiant while the Unmade were active. Still, if they are pieces of the Sibling, there’s nothing to say the splintering hasn’t continued to the point where there’s nothing left by now. That would be sad indeed.

Interesting thought… if they were originally bits of the Sibling, that could explain why Sja-anat is starting to claim that she’s not of Odium, and now is only of herself—if Odium couldn’t create anything new but only twist the existing, maybe he couldn’t twist it beyond its ability to revert. (Oops. I guess that could apply to whatever they originally were, whether it was the Sibling or not. Odium unmade something that someone else had made, no matter how you look at it.)

Ask my son. Please.

L: Son? Who? WHAT IS GOING ON?!

A: There’s a popular theory that she’s referring to Glys here, but I don’t think it’s confirmed. There is at least one WoB that sure sounds like he’s hinting that she’s referring to Glys, so… there’s that.

L: Oooooooh that’s a cool theory. I like it.

The queen descended the stairs, wreathed in black smoke, eyes glowing red. She’d transformed, strange crystal formations having pierced her skin like carapace. Her chest was glowing bright with a gemstone, as if it had replaced her heart.

L: Really cool mental image. It’s neat that she’s growing almost a parsh carapace…

A: Too bad for her that she can’t control Yelig-nar as well as she thinks she can. (I don’t actually feel sorry for her. There’s a reason Jasnah was thinking about having her assassinated.)

Relationships & Romances

The queen focused on Kaladin. “New bodyguard, dear one? Far too scruffy; you should have consulted me. You have an image to maintain.”

…

“Dear one,” Elhokar said, keeping his distance from the queen, “we heard that the city has seen… trouble lately.

…

“Aesudan,” Elhokar said, his voice pained. He stepped forward, extending his hand. “You’re not well. Please, come with me.”

“Not well?”

“There’s an evil influence in the palace.”

“Evil? Husband, what a fool you are at times.”

A: There’s more of this, but that’s enough to be going on with. Elhokar has seemed to be genuinely concerned for his wife, to the point of risking his life to retrieve her and their son. He’s deeply reluctant to leave her behind, even though she’s got glowing red eyes. She, on the other hand, treats him like an idiot, and says outright that it was best that he went off to play at war so she could get on with doing the important things. We never saw Aesudan “on screen” before she was deeply under the influence of the Unmade, but we do know that Jasnah never trusted her. There’s a WoB that says Jasnah thought Aesudan wanted to usurp power and was reckless, and the plan to assassinate her was a matter of protecting the throne. What we’ve read of her behavior, between the Lhan Interlude in Words of Radiance and this scene, indicates that Jasnah was not wrong.

L: Yeah. Not a fan of her, at all. A good partner should be helping to advance her husband’s plans and support him, not… this. Yet another example of the influences around Elhokar serving to weaken him rather than strengthen him, which is why it’s so much more impressive that he managed to (start) overcoming that and become a stronger person.

A: I’m almost surprised that she was willing to grant Elhokar the intimacy required to actually produce a child, but I suppose an heir fit well enough into her plans at the time. Quite possibly, she was hoping Elhokar would die in the battles, leaving her as either Queen indeed, or at the very least Regent to the young heir.

L: Yeah, I guess. She might just like sex and not care about who it’s with, too. We’ll never know for sure, I’m certain, because this just… isn’t the type of thing that Sanderson usually elaborates on.

A: True, that. I too have wondered how much of Elhokar’s personal insecurity was deliberately fostered by a wife who wanted power and was happy to turn her young and malleable husband into a puppet. I wonder… we don’t know exactly when they were married, but it was at least six years before the opening of the series. Could they have already been married when the Roshone thing happened (he arrived in Hearthstone “seven years ago”), and might she have been part of the cause for throwing Moash’s grandparents in jail? I’m not saying Elhokar isn’t responsible, since he was acting in the king’s stead, but how much of it was actually his idea? Sheer speculation, of course.

L: I was wondering this same thing. I’m willing to bet that she was behind the decision that wound up setting Moash’s whole awful story into motion.

Elhokar whispered something to his son. Kaladin couldn’t hear the words, but the child stopped weeping. He looked up, blinked away tears, and finally let his father pick him up. Elhokar cradled the child, who in turn clutched his stuffed soldier. It wore blue armor.

L: There’s a wonderful book on writing called Save the Cat (it’s specifically about screenwriting but it has very, very good advice that can be applied to any long-form fiction) that states that any likable character has to have a moment that endears them to the reader (the specific example the author gives is Ripley choosing to save the cat in Alien). A character can be utterly loathsome, but one single moment can win the readers over to their side (the reverse is also true, as we will soon see). And this was Elhokar’s Save the Cat moment, for me. This one moment of tenderness that he shows to his son, this one aspect of true fatherhood and humanity. If it had only been this, I don’t think it would have been enough, but we’ve seen this gradual growth in him from a total pushover into a man who’s genuinely trying to become a better person. And, interestingly, this is almost a perfect reverse image to Moash’s development (and one of the things that makes him such a fascinating character).

A: That’s an excellent observation. There is more to Elhokar’s character development that combined to make me like him, but I agree that this is one of the few moments that can truly be called “endearing.” I liked his efforts to become better, and I liked seeing him draw good maps, and I liked his determination to save his family, but his evident love for his son—especially after seeing how Aesudan was allowed the poor child to be treated—was a beautiful thing.

It’s also worth pointing out that there was something extra going on, because Elhokar knew what to say to make Gavinor trust him, despite the fact that there’s no way a child that age would remember a father he hasn’t seen for… how long? Ever, maybe? He’s three years old at the most.

L: And, side note, but I wonder if that little doll is meant to be Elhokar, or Adolin. Adolin’s armor was blue, wasn’t it? It would be pretty cute if little Gavinor had some hero worship of Adolin going on.

A: That would be fun, though it’s not likely he would know Adolin. Only stories, though Navani might have told him enough to have that effect. (Come to think of it, maybe that’s what Elhokar told him—that he was going to take him to see Navani.) For what it’s worth, both Gavilar and Adolin had their Shardplate painted blue. Elhokar’s was golden, at least in The Way of Kings.

L: I could totally see a little boy looking up to his heroic knight cousin. Adolin must seem like one of King Arthur’s knights to the kids back in the capital, all gallant and talented and upholding all the ideals of what a Good Alethi Should Be.

Bruised & Broken

She became a new person with every heartbeat.

L: Something Shallan is intimately familiar with.

Shallan was a thousand people in a moment.

But which one was her?

All of them. A new voice. Wit’s?

…

You’re all of them, Shallan. Why must you be only one emotion? One set of sensations? One role? One life?

“They rule me, Wit. Veil and Radiant and all the others. They’re consuming me.”

Then be ruled as a king is ruled by his subjects. Make Shallan so strong, the others must bow.

L: Wow. That’s some pretty heavy philosophizing, I love it. But I do wonder if this is really Wit’s voice speaking to her in her head, or just what she imagines he would say to her. I think I would rather imagine the latter—especially since this would be yet another incarnation of the very thing she’s talking about here. On one level, she’s pretending to be Wit just like she does with Veil/Radiant/the rest. But it would reveal a deeper wisdom within her, one she doesn’t even realize she has. When acting, we often say that we can’t bring out something that isn’t already there, buried deep within you. The character mask you wear allows you to have the confidence to let it out. I believe that of Shallan—she’s smart, she’s wise beyond her years. She just needs to realize that she is, on her own, without the masks and illusions she’s hidden behind.

A: I honestly don’t know what Sanderson intended here—if this is Shallan imagining what Wit would say, or if there’s some kind of bond between them that lets him communicate with her. I suspect, though, that it’s the logical application to the immediate circumstance that follows from their last conversation.

Kaladin felt his rage flare, and he lowered the Sylspear. It was time to begin the work of death.

Then he saw the face of the parshman in front of him.

It was Sah. Former slave. Cardplayer. Father.

Kaladin’s friend.

L: And here we go. Poor, poor Kaladin. Stuck between two groups of friends, both of them trying to kill the other. War is hell, but never more so than in a situation like this.

A: Oddly enough—or maybe not—the note I wrote here while preparing for this was, “And so it begins.” This is a horrible moment.

L: Taking a break from the awfulness to note that, awww, Alice. You used a gif! I’m so proud of you!

In that moment, Kaladin lost something precious. He’d always been able to trick himself into seeing battle as us against them. Protect those you love. Kill everyone else. But… but they didn’t deserve death.

None of them did.

L: There are no words. Only this. (And oh how fitting that particular one is, eh, considering the character parallels…)

A: I get so angry at Kaladin for freezing here, but at the same time… what else could he do? What is the right thing to do? They were all his friends—or at least, they were all people he knew, for whom he had felt great sympathy. So I get angry, but I still totally understand.

L: I don’t blame him for freezing. Anything he did would almost certainly result in him killing someone he cared about in an attempt to protect other people he cared about!

A: I hate false binaries—you either kill these people, or you kill those people—but Kaladin’s indecision doesn’t help anyone either. What would have happened if he’d started glowing and floating and knocking people over and acting like the Voice Of Authority? Or something? Weren’t there possibilities besides kill or freeze? ::sniffle::

“Stop!” he finally bellowed. “Stop it! Stop killing one another!”

Nearby, Sah rammed Beard through with a spear.

“STOP! PLEASE!”

L: Ugh. My heart.

A: Oh, my aching heart. And it just goes on. Sah kills Beard, Noro kills Jali and Sah, Khen kills Noro…

L: Yup.

A: …and then that absolute… %@&*$… Moash shows up. I can’t even think of a printable word bad enough for him. I loathe that man.

L: Oh, oh, I know lots of words for him. Let me type the words, Alice.

A: Printable words! I have all sorts of words in my head for him… and all of them unprintable.

L: Guys, this is Alice this week.

A: Since Aubree isn’t here to defend him, I was so determined to try to be fair to Moash in this chapter. And I can’t. I hate him so much. Especially after that endearing moment we just talked about, where all of Elhokar’s progress was capped by his love for his son.

“Moash, no…” Kaladin whispered. He couldn’t move.

A: I think this is the part where I’m most angry at Kaladin. He’s protected Elhokar against Moash before—and gained his Sylblade in the process—and he knows Moash stands against him now. Why did he remain frozen and not at least stand up to the man who had betrayed him?

L: Poor baby’s traumatized, give him a break.

A: Nope.

No, I do understand it. I just… don’t want him frozen right now. This is where it’s pretty clear who he should be defending, and he still can’t break free.

L: Well. Is it clear, though? Moash is his friend, too. And he knows Moash—knows how dedicated to this cause he is. He’s gonna have to kill him to stop him.

A: They fought before without killing each other. He could have at least tried. (I know, I’m being unfair. I’m frustrated.)

L: So… one of the more interesting things I learned when taking Japanese sword lessons was the philosophy of “if you unsheathe your sword, you must be prepared to use it.” Now… I have never been in a life and death battle (thank goodness). But I feel like… if you go into that situation, you have to be prepared for the worst possible outcome.

A: Normally you do go into battle prepared to kill… though usually it’s not your friends on the other side. But it’s a fair point: I haven’t learned sword-fighting, but I have had handgun training, and one of the first rules is that you never point a gun at something you’re not willing to shoot.

L: And potentially kill. I actually remember this as well (I was a game hunter when I was much younger).

A: Now, to be honest, I wouldn’t be at all sad if Kaladin killed Moash here. Or somewhere else. I can’t help thinking that it’s set up: one of them will kill the other somewhere along the line.

L: I’d be sad for Kaladin, because having to kill his friend would destroy him. But yeah. I think it’s probably going to happen, if only because of the age-old trope of “best friends wind up mortal enemies.”

A: ::sadface::

Moash pinned the king to the ground, shoving aside the weeping child prince with his foot. He placed the boot against Elhokar’s throat, holding him down, then pulled the spear out and stabbed Elhokar through the eye as well.

L: This poor kid’s gonna be traumatised for life. After having gone through all that business with the Voidspren, and watching your mom go crazy, then seeing your dad who just rescued you brutally murdered right in front of you… I wouldn’t be surprised if he gives poor Shallan a run for her money.

A: No kidding. I kind of hope he can forget the worst of this. Otherwise it’s nightmare city for the rest of his life.

Squires & Sidekicks

Noro shrugged. “Without the captain, we don’t have a proper platoon leader. Figured we should stick with you.”

Beard nodded and rubbed at the glyphward wrapping his right arm. Fortune, it read.

A: Okay, they aren’t Bridge Four—we haven’t spent enough time with them to know them very well. Still, they’re cool dudes. Also, it’s sadly ironic that for this battle, Beard finally found enough faith to wear a glyphward.

L: I’m surprised they didn’t stick with Azure as she headed towards the Sunwalk, but on the other hand… I’m kind of not surprised, either. When given the choice of hanging around with Azure, who’s clearly competent, or someone who’s practically a god of legend, I’d probably choose the latter, too.

A: Fair point! Especially since they don’t know Azure has a few extra secrets too.

“Good to have you,” Kaladin said. “Try to keep me from being flanked, but give me space if you can.”

“Don’t crowd you,” Lieutenant Noro said, “and don’t let anyone else crowd you either. Can do, sir.”

A: Heh. Keep it simple, soldier.

Glowing Stormlight flooded the chamber as twin Radiants exploded out from the Sunwalk. Drehy and Skar swept through the enemy, driving them back with sweeping spears and Lashings.

A second later, Adolin grabbed Kaladin under the arms and heaved him backward. “Time to go, bridgeboy.”

A: I do love these guys. It’s been fun all along watching Skar and Drehy protecting—and fighting alongside—Adolin. Now the three of them form a team to protect Kaladin when he can’t protect himself. It was a brighter ending to the chapter than I’d begun to hope for.

L: This is a great moment. And what you just said… “protecting Kaladin when he can’t protect himself…” kinda made me tear up a little. Even Windrunners need protecting sometimes.

Weighty Words

Kaladin prepared Stormlight; he could paint the walls with a power that would cause crossbow bolts to veer aside in their flight, but it was far from a perfect art. It was the power he understood the least.

A: I’m quoting this only to link it to a piece much later in the chapter:

Sylspear held high, Kaladin stepped between the two groups and pooled Stormlight into the ground, drawing the bolts downward. He was unpracticed with this power, and unfortunately, some of the bolts still slammed into shields, even heads.

A: It’s interesting to notice that he actually did a better job with this lashing when he was going on sheer instinct back in The Way of Kings. Now that he’s focused on learning how to use his Surges, I’m guessing that this one is harder to understand, maybe? Just guessing.

Elhokar had fallen to his knees. In one arm he held his terrified son, in the other hand he held… a sheet of paper? A sketch?

L: This is Shallan’s sketch of him, isn’t it. Where he’s all kingly and s**t. (I’m too emotionally devastated already to bother moderating my language.)

A: This is such a callback to Blunt in Words of Radiance, where he died heroically with Shallan’s sketch in his hand. It’s heartbreaking. Reading through the chapter in preparation, I was crying right here. Oh, my aching heart. “It depicted Elhokar kneeling on the ground, beaten down, clothing ragged. But he looked upward, outward, chin raised. He wasn’t beaten. No, this man was noble, regal.”

L: ::lower lip quiver::

Kaladin could almost hear Elhokar stuttering the words.

Life… life before death…

The hair on Kaladin’s neck rose. Elhokar started to glow softly.

Strength… before weakness…

“Do it, Elhokar,” Kaladin whispered.

Journey… journey before…

A figure emerged from the battle. A tall, lean man—so, so familiar. …

“Moash, no…” Kaladin whispered. …

Lowering his spear, Moash ran Elhokar through the chest.

L: And there it is. The moment that spawned a million memes, convention ribbons, and arguments on social media platforms. The betrayal (or culmination of an honorable quest, however you want to look at it). I think we all know where I stand.

A: I stand with you.

L: In all seriousness, I get where Moash is coming from and I fully believe that his character thinks that what he is doing is absolutely right. He’s a well developed character and his reasoning for his own decisions is sound. But storm it, I love Kaladin and Kaladin sees this as a betrayal, so I’m on Team!Kal for life. #F***Moash.

A: Yeah. Sanderson is fond of saying that everyone is the hero of their own story, which is another way of saying we all think generally we’re doing the right thing (or at least a justifiable thing, even if we acknowledge that it’s not exactly right) when we do it. Moash presumably felt that Kaladin’s defense of Elhokar at the end of Words of Radiance was a betrayal, since he’d agreed earlier to go along with Graves’s plan. Even so, Moash acknowledged that his own actions constituted a betrayal of Bridge Four—though of course, being Moash, he didn’t acknowledge that he was actually at fault for it. But yes, through it all, he believed that Elhokar was a bad king and deserved to die, one way or another, so he saw his own actions as justified.

L: Also, the reason I put this into this section to begin with was because, obviously, Elhokar was about to become a Radiant. Which order is up for debate. We know from book 1 that he was drawing Cryptics, but just because he was interesting to one group of higher spren doesn’t mean that that’s the only group that was interested in him. He was so close, and the only way we’ll ever know for sure which order he was about to enter is if/when we find out what his little spren (who, presumably, Wit will soon acquire) was.

A: It’s pretty solid—if we’re willing to spoil the end of the book—that his spren was a Cryptic. He’d have become a Lightweaver, and I would love to have seen where he’d gone with that.

L: Interesting to consider what could have been. He’d have had to give up secrets/truths.

A: There’s a WoB that says his first Truth would have been that he’s a bad king.

L: I do remember reading that at one point. Heartbreaking.

A: ::sniff:: Given the chance, do you suppose he’d have become a better king, or abdicated the throne to someone “better” and focused on becoming a good Knight Radiant? We’ll never know, of course…

L: Well, given that Dalinar has mostly taken over the power of rule, I suppose that was making his job a bit easier. He was still the ruler of Alethkar, true, but when someone is over you, you’re not taking the brunt of most of the decisions yourself. I think he might have continued on and tried to make himself into a better king, a more worthy one, as atonement.

A: That was my guess, too. If they could actually implement that business where Dalinar was “high king” responsible for Urithiru, the Knights Radiant, and the Shattered Plains, and stayed out of Elhokar’s way in ruling Alethkar, maybe it would have worked. Maybe Elhokar could have developed into a wiser, stronger, better king.

Also, I think the reason all of this combines so well to build the emotional storm is the drama of Elhokar beginning to haltingly speak the First Ideal. It sets up the hope of seeing a new Radiant revealed in the height of a battle, which is guaranteed to be an awesome visual (as note every one of Kaladin’s level-ups). Blend that with the terrified child he’s protecting, and the regal man Shallan’s sketch showed, and you get a breath-taking moment of awe… suddenly shattered by Moash’s spear.

L: Reminds me of this.

A Scrupulous Study of Spren

“Up the stairs,” he said softly to Syl. “Check for an ambush on each floor.”

“Yessir, commander sir, Radiant sir,” she said, and zipped off.

A: BAHahaha! I adore Syl sometimes.

L: Gotta love the snark.

“Where is Gav, Aesudan? Where is my son?”

“He’s playing with friends.”

…

Kaladin joined Syl and glanced behind the dressing screen, which had been pushed back against the wall to section off a small cubby. Here a child—two or three years old—huddled and trembled, clutching a stuffed soldier. Several spren with soft red glows were picking at him like cremlings at a corpse. The boy tried to turn his head, and the spren pulled on the back of his hair until he looked up, while others hovered in front of his face and took horrific shapes, like horses with melting faces.

L: There’s a lot to unpack here, but I need to start with the fact that I want to simultaneously pick up this child to protect him and slap his mother senseless for allowing this to happen.

A: YES. This was kind of soul-crushing, that a mother could let her child to be treated this way. It hurts so much. “Playing with friends” indeed. You foul… woman. (I have a few unprintable words in my head for her, too.)

L: Okay, so, that out of the way. Exactly what kind of spren are these? Just… generic Voidspren? Do Voidspren not correlate to specific emotions/ideas the way normal spren do?

A: We don’t know much about Voidspren. I think they do correspond to something that makes each “kind” different, but I don’t think we know what those somethings might be. Again, hopefully we’ll learn more about this from Venli.

L: AND. Why horses? Why would they be imitating something that’s not even native to this world? This is very similar to Shallan’s sketch from earlier in the book of the creepy… undead-horse-spiral thing. Is there something more to horses that we’re not seeing, or is this just a coincidence?

A: That… uh… I have no idea. Does Sanderson have nightmares about horses (oh, look, it’s a pun!), or is he doing this on purpose?

L: AND. AND AND AND. Why in the hell is it torturing a child? What could its possible motivation for this be? Is it trying to break his mind, drive him as insane as his mother appears to now be?

A: All I can guess is that, being of Odium, these spren get their kicks from whatever (negative) emotion they can elicit, and a child can easily be prodded into terror. It’s like they’re just playing a very nasty game to pass the time. Foul things.

L: This next quote has no bearing on spren but it leads directly from this conversation, so…

Kaladin reacted with swift, immediate rage.

L: YES. Kaladin, MAH BOY.

A: WOOO!

He drove the dagger forward and caught one of the spren, pinning it to the wall’s wooden paneling. He had never known a Shardblade to cut a spren before, but this worked. The thing screamed in a soft voice, a hundred hands coming from its shape and scraping at the Blade, at the wall, until it seemed to rip into a thousand tiny pieces, then faded.

The other three red spren streaked away in a panic. In his hands, Kaladin felt Syl tremble, then groan softly. … “That… that was terrible,” she whispered, floating over to land on his shoulder. “Did we… just kill a spren?”

L: Talk about a lot to unpack! Okay. So. Is it dead dead, or just dead like the old Shardblades are dead, which means “wandering around somewhere in Shadesmar”?

A: I have no idea. I didn’t know this was remotely possible until they did it, and I don’t even know what they did. Falling back to my “best guess” shtick, I think it’s either completely destroyed, or gone back to Braize. But don’t ask me to defend my guesses, because I’ve got nothing to go on!

L: And why is this something that Syl seems totally unfamiliar with? Has this never happened before, ever, in any of the past battles? If that’s the case (and Syl’s not just forgetting things again) then what makes this time different? Was it because Kaladin was feeling such a strong emotion, one which is often associated with Odium? Is that why he was able to kill the Voidspren, because he was channeling an Odium-emotion?

A: That would be pretty twisty, though this is Sanderson we’re talking about. Syl could be unfamiliar with it because she remembers so little of actually fighting the Voidbringers, or it could be something that is so extremely difficult to do that no one bothers to mention it. Or it could be considered so horrific among spren that it’s a forbidden topic. She’s pretty horrified about it, anyway.

L: AND what emotion or idea is this spren representative of? Does killing it mean that the thing that created it has somehow been destroyed? Like… let’s say, for the sake of argument, that this was a gloryspren. If Kaladin killed it, would that also kill the emotion (glory) that someone was feeling in the moment? If it was a decayspren, would the decay vanish from the real world since its mirror in the Cognitive Realm has been destroyed? Appropriate meme is appropriate. Can Kaladin even kill spren that aren’t of Odium? ??????

A: Maybe they’re torture-spren. Terror-spren? See above gif re: appropriate meme. I have no idea.

“I found the secret, Elhokar. Spren, ancient spren. You can bond with them!” … “Have you seen my Radiants?” Aesudan asked. She grinned. “The Queen’s Guard? I’ve done what your father could not. Oh, he found one of the ancient spren, but he could never discover how to bond it. But I, I have solved the riddle.”

In the dim light of the royal chambers, Aesudan’s eyes glittered. Then started to glow a deep red.

L: Whoa Nelly. This is pretty disturbing in a lot of ways. She’s deluded herself (or the Unmade has deluded her) into believing that she’s got Radiants of her own. Yikes. And Gavilar having found the Unmade… that must be that dark sphere that he had, right?

A: I don’t know if she’s actually talking about Unmade, or just ancient spren—and if ancient spren, does she (knowingly or not) mean the parsh ancestors who bond to make Fused, or does she mean actual spren? I mean, the thing she’s got is an Unmade, but I don’t know if that’s the same thing Gavilar had. Seriously, I don’t think she knows what she’s talking about. She’s been guided by Voidspren (and/or Unmade and/or Odium) despite her claim that she found the secrets. I don’t know whether Gavilar was smarter than her, or if he was also being guided by forces of Odium, but the queen is a seriously disturbed individual. She’s gotten her guards to give up their free will in order to bond/serve a bunch of Voidspren, she’s letting others play with her child, and she’s happy about having three Unmade taking up residence with her. Creepy.

L: Hold up a second. Do you think her Queensguard have actually bonded with Singer souls, like the Fused did? I just assumed they were under the influence of the Unmade.

A: Might be influence of the Unmade, or might be that they’ve bonded Voidspren—like Ulim and Yixli. I can’t see the ancestors lowering themselves to bond a bunch of random guards, which is why I’m more inclined to think they’ve got spren bonds of some sort. I’m not sure how that would work; normally, those bond with a Singer’s gemheart to give them the “forms of power,” but humans don’t have gemhearts to bond with. On a guess, someone figured out how to create a Nahel-type bond between Voidspren and humans, which doesn’t give the human the same level-up powers as a true Nahel bond but which gives the spren more control over the human.

Quality Quotations

He looked at Kaladin, then quietly made the Bridge Four salute, wrists tapped together.

L: Yo Moash, I got a salute for ya.

A: I know our rule is not to talk about these quotations much, but I need to point out the parallel—or the antithesis—between this salute and the one we saw last week, where Adolin gave Kaladin the Bridge Four salute, and Kaladin gave it back. I think Sanderson intended Moash to mean it as a real salute here, but it felt like a mockery to me.

L: Yeah. Since Moash thinks that he’s doing the right thing, he probably sees this as doing Kaladin a favor. “He can’t do this because his honor is holding him back, so I’ll do the hard thing he can’t.” I don’t doubt that his salute is genuine. I still hate him for it though.

The next two chapters are pretty short, so we’ll tackle them together. Join us in the comments, which I suspect will be pretty talkative this week, as hoo boy what a chapter! Please remember that no matter whether you fall on Team!Kal or Team!Moash, to respect one another’s opinions and remain civil.

Alice is still mad at Elhokar, in case you hadn’t guessed. She’s also annoyingly busy for “summer break;” maybe moms don’t get summer break after all, eh?

Lyndsey’s gif game is strong today. If you’re an aspiring author, a cosplayer, or just like geeky content, follow her work on Facebook or her website.

Queer fiction—that is, stories with more than just a token side character and about more than just the trauma of coming out—has exploded in the last few years. We still have a long ways to go before the representation becomes acceptable—becomes more than just cis white guys and gals, that is—but I think it’s fair cause to celebrate.

That said, sometimes it can feel like not even five years ago we lived in a land of nothing but heteronormativity, which isn’t as true as it feels. The number of times I’ve seen someone lament how there are no queer protagonists in fantasy makes my nose itch. While it’s important to celebrate what is coming, it’s equally important to celebrate what we have. Queer authors have been paving the way for this explosion for decades now, with their words and wit and wisdom and, most importantly, their persistence.

The specific lamentation that there are no f/f or queer women in fantasy is one I hear often enough that I set my watch by it. That’s not to say we couldn’t use more (always more, please more), but saying there are none is dangerous in its broad-stroked erasure.

To be fair, I limited this list to anything more than five years ago (that is, 2014 and earlier) and still had a difficult time finding queer f/f books beyond that same three or four that are referenced again and again. But there are more than those—we just have to keep digging.

So in that spirit, here are five books that center an f/f relationship, whatever the flavor, from 2014 or before that haven’t been remembered as consistently as other queer books:

Otherbound by Corinne Duyvis (Amulet Books, 2014)

Amara is a mute servant from the Dunelands, forced to protect a cursed princess on the run. Nolan is a high schooler in Arizona who can’t focus on his hobbies and schoolwork because every time he closes his eyes, even to blink, he’s in Amara’s mind. Nolan’s been a powerless observer of Amara’s life for years, but Amara doesn’t know. Until Nolan accidentally stumbles on a way to control her.

Naturally, that doesn’t end well.

But what unfurls from there in this YA fantasy is both refreshing and queer af. Not to spoil anything (or spoil it anyway), but Nolan and Amara are not soul mates, do not end up making out at any point, and, in fact, never have romantic feelings for each other. Amara is bi. She has a relationship with one male character early on and then falls in love with a female character later. And that relationship between the two women is really the beating heart of the story, without ever once trivializing Amara’s bisexuality.

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Ascension by Jacqueline Koyanagi (Masque Books, 2013)

Alana Quick is a sky surgeon—a starship mechanic—yearning to be among the stars and planets she’s helped send so many ships into. But repairing ships doesn’t pay what it used to and she’s got chronic pain to manage. So when a desperate crew comes to her shipyard looking for her sister Nova, a spirit guide, Alana seizes the opportunity and stows away, hoping her boldness will get the dust off her feet—or at least a gig on the ship. Of course, Alana gets a whole lot more than that.

This is a character-driven space opera romance, with just enough explosions to suffice. Alana is a queer woman who knows what she wants—mostly—and even has a history of past queer relationships. The heart of this story isn’t just an f/f relationship, it’s a polyamorous one, and Koyanagi explores the fluidity and ever-evolving nature of those relationships with care and ease.

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The Warrior’s Path by Catherine M. Wilson (Shield Maiden Press, 2008)

It’s 16-year-old Tamras’ turn to become a warrior, like her mother and her grandmother before her. But when she finally begins her apprenticeship at Lady Merin’s house, her small stature gets her cast aside. Instead of being trained as a swordswoman, Merin assigns her as the personal servant to a stranger who wants nothing to do with Tamras.

What follows is a story not about battles, swords, bravery, or bloodshed, but one about all the ways someone can be strong. When Women Were Warriors is the name of the series, but in these books warriors fight with both swords and words, with heart and despair, and are both short and tall and caring and cruel and every shade inbetween. It’s an exploration and celebration of women, as well as the love between them.

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Huntress by Malinda Lo (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2011)

When nature falls out of balance and hostile creatures begin to appear, two girls are picked to go on a dangerous journey to the city of the Fairy Queen. Along the way, they fall in love—but only one of the girls will be allowed to save their kingdom.

Whenever Malinda Lo comes up, usually the discussion is about her groundbreaking, sapphic Cinderella retelling, Ash—and for good reason. But her second novel, Huntress, is often eclipsed by the first. I’m not here to argue which is better, but Huntress is a beautiful story about queer women in its own right that often gets missed. It might not have an HEA, but the relationship built within its pages has a weight and reality that should make this book stand out.

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Hild by Nicola Griffith (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013)

Perhaps not so much forgotten as overlooked for its queerer parts, Hild is a slow-burn of a historical novel about Saint Hilda of Whitby, a woman with remarkable political power in 7th century Britain. As a child, her uncanny ability to put together patterns, both human and nature, and seemingly predict the future put her at the king’s side as his personal seer during a particularly tumultuous time in Britain’s history, when the old pagan gods were being rooted out and replaced by Christianity.

Hild, it turns out, loves both men and women, and Griffith gives Hild’s relationships with each equal weight. In this society, it’s clear the class of your lover is far more important than their gender. This nonchalant and historically accurate approach to queer relationships is a breath of fresh air in a culture that often presupposes our own heteronormative biases on the past.

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Now it’s your turn: What do you feel has been missed?

K.A. Doore was born in Florida but has since lived in Washington, Arizona, and Germany. She has a BA in Classics and Foreign Languages and an enduring fascination with linguistics. These days she writes fantasy in mid-Michigan and develops online trainings for child welfare professionals. The Perfect Assassin is her debut novel; its sequel, The Impossible Contract, publishes in November 2019 with Tor Books.