Welcome to the weekly Wednesday read of Skybowl!

This week no one’s plan survives contact with the enemy. The women are uppiting all over the place. Pol comes into his own, and several forms of the inevitable, inevitably, happen.

And best of all: Dragons!

Skybowl—Chapters 31-35

So This Happens: In Chapter 31, the rogue women and Isriam wait for the enemy to come back. They discuss Isriam’s prospects and family, along with the various factions of sorcerers and what to do about them after the war. (They are happily convinced that they are going to win.) And, in connection with that, what to do about the Sunrunners. Sionell again spills the beans about Pol’s sorcerous ancestry. Ruala shares her own family secret: Merisel had an affair with Rosseyn, and she’s their descendant. (…READ MORE)

This segues into a discussion of what kind of High Prince Pol will be with all his combined bloodlines and powers, and how he will act when he confronts the High Warlord. Which in turn brings Sioned and company to a full-circle summary of all six books, with Andrade’s rings and Pol’s ancestry. Then the women get to work.

Meiglan is in Skybowl in the care of the priests. She reflects on her captivity and on the small ways she’s defied her captors, and also on how she’s come to think like a High Princess.

Suddenly Sionell bursts in and drops to her knees in relief. Meiglan gets rid of the priests, and Sionell fills her in on what’s going on—including the fact that the soup is poisoned. They didn’t realize Meiglan as well as the priests would be eating it. Sionell is incredibly glad she got there in time.

Both women burst into tears. They comfort each other. (Wow. Irony.)

Ruala meanwhile is spinning lies about dragons to the High Warlord.

Back in the tower, Sionell gives Meiglan all the family news, with a couple of signal omissions. Meiglan tells her own news in return. Including a new fact: the Plague came from the Vellant’im when a group came to recover the Tears of the Dragon, which had been stolen by sorcerers. One of them had a childhood disease, to which people on this side of the world had no immunity. Further proof for Sioned that (as Rohan always said) “there are no accidents.”

Then Meiglan tells Sionell what is supposed to happen to her and why—and what she’s done to set the enemy up for destruction. Sionell is suitably and considerably impressed. Meiglan observes that she’s finally learned how to be High Princess and a good wife to Pol. (Oh, the twist of the knife, though she doesn’t even know it.)

Sioned is having an attack of the horrors about all the things that can go wrong. Sionell shows up, and reassures her that Meiglan is all right. That calms Sioned down, and gives her an idea. She’s going to make the sacrificial victim disappear.

Arlis is having a sexual dream. Laric shakes him out of it. Laric’s steward has defected from Yarin’s camp, with news of what’s been going on. Hundreds of sorcerers are not serving him willingly, she says.

Laric doesn’t believe her. She’s a plant, he declares.

Aldiar bursts in and takes her, somewhat hysterically, hostage. She’s an involuntary spy, he says, under the same mirror spell that caught Chiana many pages ago.

When that’s taken care of, Arlis and Laric wonder how they’re going to win tomorrow. Neither has any idea.

The High Warlord ponders his plans, remembers his dead, and takes time to yearn after Meiglan. Suddenly a priest bursts in, dying horribly. Which is actually a good thing, the Warlord reflects.

He immediately realizes who must have done the poisoning—and is horribly afraid that Meiglan is dead, too. Until he finds her in a scene of carnage, very much alive.

She is perfectly serene. The Warlord is wildly ambivalent. Sionell bursts out of the garderobe, but escapes. After some confusion and a bit of Fire, he manages to capture one of the others—from the evidence, that would be Alasen.

Chapter 32 finds the High Warlord confronting Sioned. If he’s hot for Meiglan, he’s wild for her mother-in-law.

He’s bound the women with steel needles through their hands to prevent them from conjuring Fire, except Meiglan, who can’t be blemished. They’re coolly defiant (and apparently impervious to pain).

Sionell meanwhile is sincerely and lengthily regretting her lack of Sunrunner powers. She’s escaped, but she has no idea where she is. She knows she has to alert Pol.

Finally she finds the kitchen. She can’t go there, there are enemies arguing. She ponders her options at further and extensive length, and eventually decides on a direction to go.

Back at Goddess Keep, Norian wakes to find Edrel in armor. The enemy are moving.

They discuss plans and options. She gives him his marching orders. He is obedient. She goes to deal with Jolan.

Sionell, lengthily and internally monologuing, is making her way out of Skybowl through secret passages. She again wishes she had magical powers. And hopes she can find her way out before it’s too late.

Pol can’t sleep. He’s pondering his options, somewhat lengthily, but not nearly as much so as Sionell. Tobin contacts him. They have a long discussion about what he has to do and why and how, and also about family and responsibility and what his mother and the others are doing. Tobin refuses to answer that last.

As she signs off, Andry shows up in the flesh. They discuss the plan, and the enemy, and what the horses are for: a stampede. They’re brought up to come when called, you see….

This inevitably segues into the old brangle between them. Suddenly Walvis bursts in, bellowing at Sionell, who is in full armor (pause to wonder where the hell she got it and when). Walvis is Not in favor.

Sionell insists she has to speak to Pol. She tells him the news from Skybowl. Also, explains where she got the armor.

The chapter ends with them in an armor-pinchy clinch, and Sionell declaring that everything’s going to be all right.

As Chapter 33 begins, we’re back at Goddess Keep, where Torien and Jolan are taking dranath. They’re preparing a ritual for the rest of the devr’im. She’s leaning on him about how he’s the de facto Lord of Goddess Keep. He isn’t playing.

There’s some bickering and grumbling as the others come in, the general alarm having sounded. Torien ponders strategies and misses Andry. The jostling around continues. Finally they’re all in place, and Torien is appreciating the irony of sorcerers working for the Goddess.

Evarin and Andry are also taking the drug and chatting. Andry speaks remarkably positively about Pol, and about morals, ethics, and so on. Suddenly a new group of rebellious women shows up, led by Hollis. Andry is pathetically grateful Tobin didn’t come with them.

Meanwhile the dragon banner from Stronghold arrives, and Pol is asked where he’s like to show it off.

Rohannon gets a wake-up call and gives one. Aldiar’s a girl, he tells Idalian. (Ha! I knew it!)

Pol has a different set of armor for Sionell to wear: Birioc’s, which her husband Tallain won. He has an ulterior motive. She’ll imply the Merida have switched sides, and she’ll be highly visible when it’s time to snatch her to safety.

Sionell gets it, and she’s pissed. Pol tells her that if he or Meiglan dies, she’ll be Regent of the Desert. This pisses her off even further. But she takes the armor.

Pol ponders strategy and gives orders. Then Visian gives him the White Crown, with its burden of symbolism. It’s not the real one that Rosseyn wears, but it gives him a vision from that time—how all this badness has happened because of “one woman’s schemes.”

Pol ponders some more. Then he gives Maarken an order, framed as a request.

Sioned and company are in durance vile. Meiglan is with them, because she’s now sullied by contact with non-priests. Sioned ponders Pol’s plan and his options, and how her own plan has failed in ways that make his much more complicated. Also, she ponders her plan to kill the enemy, and the disconnect between ideals and pragmatism. It’s a very Rohan kind of dilemma.

The High Warlord arrives. Meiglan is haughtily defiant. Sioned is anguished: he’s wearing Rohan’s favorite earring.

They go out. Sioned ponders the situation. Rohan would be proud of Pol, she reflects. She allows as how she might be, too.

Alleyn and Audran are up to mischief, incited by Jihan. Rislyn is in on it, and so are the rest of the magic class, Meig included, but not Tobren because she’s Andry’s daughter. They’re heading to the Attic.

Alasen is bound and in pain. Meiglan is free, and confident that Pol will rescue her. Alasen takes in the scene and the characters around the crater that is Skybowl. The High Warlord is magnificent in white and jewels.

Suddenly Alasen hears a series of whistles. The horses are all from Radzyn, and they all know that pattern of calls. It’s dinnertime! They start galloping off. Sioned is laughing out loud.

Chay is disappointed. Only a tenth of the horses got away. His sons agree that it was worth it: it’s got the enemy off balance. Now it’s Andry’s turn.

Hollis and company settle in to be Andry’s power source. They talk about it, with some by now standard sneering at the superstitious enemy. Jeni adds a sneer at their side, with her glare fixed on Sethric. She’s quite out of sympathy with him.

Then she collapses, along with Chayla. Andry’s working has begun.

The children are all together in front of the mirror. They talk about whether there’s anyone in it. Jihan has other plans, involving Rislyn’s dragon and the light outside.

Meig tries to conjure the man in the mirror, but there’s no one. They discuss this. Meig shrugs it off. Jihan is busy with her other plans. Meig goes to sleep. (Meig is very young.)

Chapter 34 begins the deliberately falsified ritual. Sioned reflects on this. Ruala is translating the High Warlord’s speech. Sioned regrets the way she’s treated Meiglan—and the so-clever trap she laid, which created this sacrifice.

Ruala keeps on translating. The Warlord blames Pol for the priests’ murder, because mere women can’t carry that level of responsibility. He’s going to sacrifice Meiglan himself, the way he sacrificed his eldest son to purify the ships. The women are horrified.

The Warlord looks at Sioned and smiles. And she realizes he doesn’t believe a word he’s saying. It’s a game—and he plays it better than Pol. More ruthlessly.

She sees him as like her. Then hears Rohan’s voice begging to differ.

The Tears of the Dragon are brought out. None of the good-guy magic users feels their power, but Sioned does.

The enemy bring out a white cloth that hides Meiglan and the Warlord from the women, but Sioned can see the shadows, and a knife lifting. Sioned tells the others to wait.

Finally Andry makes his move.

Andry realizes he needs more power. He grabs at Sioned, runs into the needles. Sioned tells him to find Riyan and use him as a shield against the steel. Andry gets to work, conjuring an army out of (fake) dragons’ teeth.

Andry is absolutely full of himself. Then it dawns on him that the women he’s drawing on are in agony. The sorcerers are shielding him but not them. That brings him down abruptly. He ramps down his conjuring, and sees the women with their bleeding hands.

Pol and company admire Andry’s dramatic conjuring, though Chay is gruff about it. Then the working collapses. Andry is in a rage about the women and the needles.

Pol is seriously unhappy, too. This shoots down his own plan. He can’t shield Meiglan, herd the enemy away with the ros’salath, and avoid a battle and killing.

He forbids Maarken to use his powers. He’ll be a non-magical war commander today. Then he orders Andry to give him control of the ros’salath, because the sorcerers won’t help unless Pol is in charge. They argue about it. Chay shuts them up by reminding them of the time.

Maarken puts on a show of bravura. Pol and Andry shut up and listen as he rallies the troops. Pol tells Andry they have to work together, as usual.

Andry leaps on his horse and gallops off to make his own speech. Pol is furious. Andry starts to out him as a sorcerer.

Pol takes charge. He doesn’t say who his mother was, but he admits to his dual heritage. And states that he’s High Prince., and he belongs to his people. He rallies them.

Andry tries to call him on it. Someday he’ll have to own up to his mother. “Never,” Pol says.

The argument shifts to discussion of what’s happening in Skybowl. Pol is terrified for his Meggie. They bicker over the details of Pol’s plan.

Pol explains why he has Andry and the Sunrunners here, though he doesn’t really need them: to present a unified front. He demands that Andry not fight him. They stand together against the enemy.

In the Attic, Jihan is fretting about her plan. She doesn’t know enough Sunrunning to do it, so has to rely on Rislyn’s dragon to see what’s going on in Skybowl.

The dragon doesn’t understand. Then Azhdeen shows up, and he’s in a rage. So are all the other dragons. Jahnev says they’re talking through colors—and then Lir’reia fixes on Rislyn.

Edrel takes stock of the troops lined up at Goddess Keep and the enemy coming on. The Sunrunners are all safe inside, of course. He reflects on war, loyalty, and responsibility. He does his best to focus on the coming fight.

The Warlord reflects on his knife, his ritual, and his enemies. He appreciates Sioned’s understanding of what he really thinks. He reflects on his sons, and on Meiglan, whom he wishes he could take home with him and marry. “Such a waste.”

Chapter 35 shifts to Andry, who reflects grudgingly but pragmatically, and at length, on the show he and Pol are putting on, and the fact that Pol is making sure Andry keeps his Sunrunner’s oath. Then he realizes Pol’s crown is starting to glow.

Andry goes Sunrunning to Skybowl. Meiglan is serene and the black pearls are glowing. He takes stock of the rest, and sees Betheyn (age 30) making eyes at Isriam (age 17). Nooooo! Sorin’s Chosen, Choosing anyone else? A kid? Noooooooo!

Andry puts a bookmark in that one to come back to later. With Fire.

The High Warlord strikes with his golden knife, and meets a wall of sunlight. Andry laughs.

Meanwhile, back in Goddess Keep, the ros’salath is in trouble. Too much steel. Torien cries to Andry for help—and Jolan gives him all the Sunrunners. He uses the sorcerers among them as best he can, to shield the rest from the steel. But he’s not Andry. He sends his plea on sunlight to the Desert.

The Warlord is in shock. He can’t kill Meiglan. And he’s glad, glad I tell you. He wants her to choose him over her husband.

She, of course, isn’t even on the same page. The Azhrei, he decides, has to die. Right Now.

The enemy is preparing a charge. Pol beats Andry to the ros’salath. His is nonlethal—and Chayla is loudly outraged.

Andry is just about to deck Pol when he gets Torien’s plea for help. And he knows what to do. He grabs hold of the killing spell back at Goddess Keep.

Now we get a lot of short takes—brief scenes on all fronts. Edrel sees the enemy coming. Pol and Andry duke it out magically. Sioned realizes she can use her pain to hone her power.

Pol is furious but (as usual) helpless. Andry is in control, and killing. Then Sioned contacts Pol and gets the update. And gives him a tremendous gift. “What is you want, then, Rohan’s son?”

Sioned takes power from Alasen and Ruala and gives it to Pol. Pol uses it to pull in Sunrunners from all over the continent.

Sorcerers aren’t so easy. They don’t trust him. Suddenly a great white power offers itself. Through that power, hundreds of other sorcerers come in. They see Pol as their ruler. He can use them. He’s “High Prince for everyone.”

Sionell and Dannar, though they’re halflings without actual power, can see the light around Pol’s head. Sionell determines to find out where it comes from.

Then the dragons come. (Dang. That gets me every time.)

Pol and Andry are duking it out again, magically. Pol just about has the upper hand when the dragons shoot it all to hell. Though not flaming. Yet.

The Sunrunner and sorcerer children in the Attic are in a trance. Jahnev wakes up Meig and tells to him to go get Audrite, and stay out of sunlight. Our omnipotent narrator tells us this is how the brothers will be for the rest of their lives: Jahnev without gifts, using Meig’s gifts but telling him to be careful.

The dragons have conclusively taken over. It’s out of Pol’s hands. The one unnamed dragon claims Andry, and the bloodlust spins out of control.

Pol fights to control Azhdeen and defuse the rest of the situation.

Andry is blind drunk on dragon power and Sunrunner power and dranath. He barely even notices when it starts to fall apart.

Sioned starts to come to. She takes stock, and decides to fight through pain and burn off Isriam’s bonds, so he can find a physical weapon and use it.

Pol’s got it. He’s got them all. Except Andry.

The viewpoint shifts to omnipotent. Dawn sorts out the Sunrunners from the sorcerers. Maarken, ordered not to use his powers, gets to work being Battle Commander. He and Chay discuss this, with some sparks flying. It’s hard on Maarken: he has to conclusively choose between his brother and his High Prince.

The ros’salath is killing Vellant’im. Then the dragons come, and Sionell gallops up. She says it’s Andry killing, and demands that he be stopped. Then Maarken’s dragon pulls him into a nonlethal ros’salath.

Isriam frees himself and sets Betheyn to freeing the other from both ropes and needles. He’s going after Meiglan. Betheyn declares her love and sends him off to the High Princess.

Sioned is in awe, and afraid, of what Pol has created.

And Andry. Andry and his dragon are key. So are the sorcerers. Thalassante is having a wonderful time.

Meiglan is absolutely starry-eyed about Pol. The Warlord apologizes. There’s no Fire left to protect her. He kills her.

Pol, meanwhile, combines sorcerers and Sunrunners to overwhelm the Vellant’im.

And I’m Thinking: Well, that was wild. So many threads, so deftly woven. Great writer-craft there, on a par with what Pol manages to do.

Of course I saw Meiglan’s death coming. Like an oncoming dragon, it came. In another, more emotionally ambiguous world, she’d live and the love triangle would persist and continue to complicate Pol’s life. But major characters get their perfect marriages, goddammit, and marital infidelity is for bad guys.

Pol is half bad guy, of course, and Sionell is safely a widow, so they could have their one night of sex and their ongoing sexual tension. But if Pol’s going to be the great all-encompassing hero, he has to be one hundred percent good guy. And that means no active love triangle.

Meiglan is explicitly a sacrificial lamb. Of all the women in this series, she’s the weakest. She has her moments, and she does some important things, but ultimately she’s knife fodder.

The High Warlord, for me, is one of Rawn’s very best characters. He’s right up there with Sioned, especially post-Rohan Sioned, for depth, complexity, and ferocious self-awareness. Unlike the other villains, who mostly sneer and bicker and twirl their moustaches, he makes complete sense in his own context.

Pol is mostly plottus ex machina. I understand why Rohan can’t be the live adversary, he doesn’t have the magical powers or the sorcerous bloodlines, but the way he’s written, he’s the High Warlord’s most convincing male match. Pol is a dumb jock until he isn’t, and then he’s all great unifier of the world. So, yeah. Whatever.

Pol’s actual match isn’t Andry, it’s Meiglan. Two weak characters who do what the plot says. Grand high drama here, and heart-thumping adventure, and stunningly gorgeous visuals.

But when I step back, it’s the Warlord and Sioned that I remember. They’re interesting.

Judith Tarr’s first novel, The Isle of Glass, appeared in 1985. Her new novel, Forgotten Suns, a space opera, was published by Book View Café in April. In between, she’s written historicals and historical fantasies and epic fantasies, some of which have been reborn as ebooks from Book View Café. 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 Heart Dog, and a herd of Lipizzan horses.

Patrick Rothfuss’s The Slow Regard of Silent Things is out in paperback this week from DAW—and we want to send you a copy, along with trade paperback copies of both The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man’s Fear!

Deep below the University, there is a dark place. Few people know of it: a broken web of ancient passageways and abandoned rooms. A young woman lives there, tucked among the sprawling tunnels of the Underthing, snug in the heart of this forgotten place.

Her name is Auri, and she is full of mysteries.

The Slow Regard of Silent Things is a brief, bittersweet glimpse of Auri’s life, a small adventure all her own. At once joyous and haunting, this story offers a chance to see the world through Auri’s eyes. And it gives the reader a chance to learn things that only Auri knows….

Comment in the post to enter!

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY TO ENTER OR WIN. A purchase does not improve your chances of winning. Sweepstakes open to legal residents of 50 United States and D.C., and Canada (excluding Quebec). To enter, comment on this post beginning at 1:30 PM Eastern Time (ET) on November 18th. Sweepstakes ends at 12:00 PM ET on November 22nd. Void outside the United States and Canada and where prohibited by law. Please see full details and official rules here. Sponsor: Tor.com, 175 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10010.

“If it’s a fairy tale you’re looking for, prepare yourselves for so much more,” intones ice queen Freya (Emily Blunt doing her best impersonation of Galadriel), followed by some rumbling EDM in the first trailer for The Huntsman: Winter’s War. What you should prepare yourself for is to root for the fabulous duo of Freya and her resurrected sister Ravenna (Charlize Theron, gamely returning from Snow White and the Huntsman) and not for Freya’s huntsmen-gone-rogue.

Sure, it’s super cheesy that Freya, after suffering a heartbreak, trains young children to wear leather, wield multiple hatchets, and (most importantly) harden their hearts against loving one another. And of course not even a wall of ice can stop Sara (Jessica Chastain) and Eric (Chris Hemsworth, also back) from consummating their love in Thor’s pool from Avengers: Age of Ultron. But that forbidden love story seems much less interesting than learning what would drive a queen, once she gets power over all the land after her older sister’s untimely death, to revive said sibling. Theron also acts better in that top image than Eric or Sara in the whole rest of the trailer. Though yay for bringing the dwarves back!

The Huntsman: Winter’s War draws battle lines on April 22, 2016.

None of these works purport to be survival manuals. That said, survivors of a wide variety of apocalyptic events could most certainly use the accumulated wisdom of the resourceful, empathetic, and honorable heroines of these five post-apocalyptic stories. For that reason alone I recommend that everyone keep a copy of the following books on their shelves at home.

The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

The Handmaid’s Tale is the one that really got things rolling in the women-of-the-apocalypse literary stakes, a feminist classic that’s hard to see past both as a reader and a writer. However, it presents an older vision of women facing imminent doom, one born of 1970s feminism. We’ve changed—and so has Margaret Atwood. In The Year of the Flood, the groundbreaking author takes a new and admirable second run at her own theme. The female protagonists of The Year of the Flood are still the victims of the sexual derangement of men (always worse in end times) but in this new scenario they survive (mostly) by looking out for each other. There are no good men in vans coming to save the day: sisters are doing it for themselves. First they do a good job of simply surviving some kind of devastating man-made plague. Then, armed with little more than a foolhardy amount of grit and character, they go out of their apocalyptic way to find and save their friend from a couple of raging man-beasts. Female camaraderie and gender loyalty may not be the only themes of The Year of the Flood (environmental destruction, insatiable consumerism, quack religion and demeaning sexual politics all vie for our attention), but they are most certainly the lights in the dark that make this second book in the MaddAddam trilogy really shine.

The Book of the Unnamed Midwife by Meg Elison

Almost everyone is dead of an unknown plague that returns like a fever every now and again. There are no more live births. Only one in ten survivors are women, many of them shackled to gangs of men who use them for sex. Most of the world has devolved into savagery. Decent men and free women are rare and vulnerable creatures, safe only in awful and total isolation. Danger lurks in desolate corners and boldly stalks the empty highways. Enter the unnamed midwife, dressed like a man, armed like a cowboy, capable of surviving on her own and sometimes willing to save others. Written both in the first and the third person (a slightly unnerving literary device that offers both emotional proximity and critical distance) this is a strikingly powerful story of one woman’s physical and emotional resourcefulness under the most dire of circumstances. An apocalyptic page-turner that picks up where Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale left off.

Daughters of the North by Sarah Hall

Sarah Hall’s Daughters of the North may have received a mixed bag of reviews (too much heavy political discussion and not enough drama/the wrong kind of political discussion and not enough drama), and to be sure it’s not encouraging that our heroine can only speak to us via a police interrogation, but it remains a personal favorite. I love the idyllic rural setting, I like vicariously experiencing the daily rhythms of life in an all-girls apocalyptic boot-camp and I don’t mind the aggressive tone of some of the women. These are emotionally scarred escapees of an environmental and social disaster, not lady politicians. I’d be happy to have any one of them watching my back and if I ever find myself imprisoned by a gender-oppressive regime, then I too will dream of a platoon of foul-mouthed women in the hills of Cumbria; working the land by day, making love by night, and daring to fight back even when fighting back is the stupidest thing to do. Kudos to the brave, lost, sisters of the Carhullan Army.

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson

Apocalyptic books don’t all have unhappy endings, and that’s a literary fact. They just all begin with a dire premise. In Seveneves, the moon blows up. It is the end of the world as we know it—well, make that in two years’ time—but in this case not everyone uses that as an excuse to behave badly. A collaborative world group of politicians and scientists race to convert the international space station into the last great hope for the survival of humanity. There are many pages detailing the minutiae of this momentous task. Along the way we meet an eclectic bunch of female astronauts and other smart, talented women. In the final days of life on Earth, one thousand fairly chosen and diverse souls are sent into space. Uplifting as that part of the story is, things don’t exactly go to plan. Warning/Spoiler Alert! Only seven of the space-station colonists survive. Seven women—the Seven Eves (not seven eaves as I was expecting, having misread the title). Thank you, Neal Stephenson, for this miraculous victory against both physical and literary odds. Seven great female characters using their collective smarts to save the human race itself. What a spectacular way to give women their apocalyptic due.

Elysium by Jennifer Marie Brissett

Last but not least, a gender-bending postmodern tale in which a woman’s life and relationships survive only as pieces of fragmented code. Elysium is a delicate end-of-days tale seen through the eyes of an alternative heroine with more heart and soul than weaponry. Although there is certainly enough tough material in this book to call it dystopian fiction, the story of Adrian/ne and Anthony/Antoinette is ultimately a gentler and queerer vision of life after the end—one that transforms the notion of post-apocalyptic memoir and offers us a different way of viewing the end itself. Offering a strikingly different Doomsday narrative, an unusual female (most of the time) narrator and an alien twist, Elysium is a book that I imagine will make the sentimental reader weep and the practical reader review their computer backup systems.

Jackie Hatton is the author of Flesh and Wires (Aqueduct Press, November 2015), a post-apocalyptic, post-alien novel that imagines women as the agents of their own destiny.

How are the Doctor and Donna still this wonderful, years later?

Big Finish has released a small preview from their forthcoming Doctor Who audio dramas starring David Tennant as the Tenth Doctor and Catherine Tate as Donna Noble. Big Finish is renowned for bringing back previous Doctors for high quality audio dramas–they’re responsible for the entirety of the Eighth Doctors adventures–but this is the first time Tennant and Tate will reprise their roles.

Take a listen…

The old chemistry leaps right out of the speakers. It’s like they never left!

Radio Times has the rundown on their three new adventures, scheduled for release in May 2016:

The series begins with Doctor Who – The Tenth Doctor Adventures: Technophobia, set in near-future London and written by Matt Fitton. “Mankind is gradually losing its ability to use everyday technology,” the synopsis explains. “Could there be an evil force at work?”

Episode two is called Time Reaver, written by Jenny T. Colgan. This episode is the one you can hear in the audio preview.

The Doctor and Donna arrive on Calibris – ‘An entirely mechanical planet. Catch, hitch, fuel, fix, buy, pretty much any kind of transportation in existence.’ It’s also a world full of scoundrels, where a deadly black market has opened up in a device known only as the Time Reaver.

The third and final episode in the run, Death and the Queen, is written by James Goss.

Donna is swept along in a fairytale romance and meets the man of her dreams in the beautiful land of Goritania. What can possibly go wrong? And why has the Doctor never heard of Goritania?

The new audio dramas will be released on the Big Finish website in May 2016, and are available to pre-order from today.

Big Finish also has an entire season of adventures coming in December that chronicle the trials and travails of John Hurt’s “War Doctor.”

Well…yeah, he is…you both are…but it’s still really exciting!

What happens when you assemble some of the greatest scientific minds of our time, add in a healthy dose of radiation/Chemical X/God knows what, then send them back in time? They become the Super Science Friends! Which is also the name of a wonderfully batty animated series from Brett Jubinville and Tinman Creative Studios. Successfully Kickstarted in 2014, Super Science Friends! has released its first episode for your viewing pleasure! (But be warned: In addition to being “just the right amount of smart, just the right amount of stupid,” as the studio boasts, it’s also a bit NSFW.)

What makes this cheeky series, which has shades of Clone High, so fun is that each of the super-scientists has a power related to his/her field: Nikola Tesla can control electricity, Marie Curie can heal others with radiation (but every time she does, she gets more exposed to it—no, you’re crying), Charles Darwin can turn into animals, and Albert Einstein—well, the clone of him—has super-speed. No one’s really sure why Sigmund Freud is there, but you can blame Winston Churchill for that. Yes, Churchill is the one who assembles the Super Science Friends, which also includes the Mesopotamian chemist Tapputi and Z3, the supercomputer unearthed in the wreckage of Nazi destruction.

In addition to fending off the aforementioned zombies, Nazis, and whoever’s taking away all the apples in the 1600s, the Super Science Friends must also grapple with their personal archenemies. Yep, that means a Tesla/Edison smackdown is imminent. Super Science Friends! looks really batty but also slyly funny, so check out Episode 1:

Keep up with the series on the official Facebook page!

via Gizmodo

When photographer Paweł Kadysz finished his personal photo-a-day project, he decided he need to explore the inner life of a more sinister figure. Thus, Darth Vader’s daily photo project was born! Now he snaps photos of Vader brushing his teeth, grabbing groceries, and hiking through pristine woods, opening a whole new view on this complicated character. Check out more of the shots below!

It’s good to see that despite all of his mechanical parts, Darth Vader still understands the importance of fresh fruits and veggies.

Here’s Lord Vader enjoying a late autumn hike through the woods:

Awww….

We don’t think we need the book, Vader. You’ve been ruling for a long time.

Kadysz intends to continue documenting the Sith Lord’s quotidian existence until the premiere of The Force Awakens next month – check in with him here!

Many walk away from the most perfect city ever known, but never quite on the same route.

In the recently released Plotted: A Literary Atlas, artist and author Andrew DeGraff visualizes the stories of many famous literary works into singular landscapes, charting the progression of their characters all throughout. The results are beautiful maps that enhance classic works like Hamlet, Pride and Prejudice, Invisible Man, A Wrinkle in Time, Watership Down, A Christmas Carol, among others, while standing on their own as storytelling pieces.

We were particularly taken by DeGraff’s map for the classic Ursula K. Le Guin story, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.”

If you want to see the full 2 MB version, click here.

DeGraff explains the overwhelming appeal of visualizing Le Guin’s story. From Plotted:

“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” is not intended as a happy story. The city is built on human misery. It has a heart of darkness that everyone must witness. But even bearing all of that in mind, this is a civilization that still shines more brightly than any that we have ever seen. As opposed to being built on the bones of millions like the most vaunted nations of the present day, Omelas has a body count of one. That is an impressive record indeed. But the story’s power seems to take advantage of that little cost. “One death is a tragedy,” Stalin is supposed to have said, “one million is a statistic.” One million is also truer to life but harder to see and compute. This single, unbearable life on display in Omelas forces us to reckon with our acquiescence in the brutal practices that remain a part of every civilization on earth.

This moral seems clear enough, but the story allows for a tremendous amount of complexity within its few pages. Ursula K. Le Guin won’t make sense of the story’s paradoxes for us. In fact, she forces us to partake of her creative act. She will not tell us about the technological sophistication of Omelas: “Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids… For certainly I cannot suit you all.” Much in this city seems to be negotiable in this fashion; drugs and sex certainly are. But whatever else changes, the child prisoner must remain. Here we have no choice — but we can walk away. Which brings us back to this question of guilt.

“One thing I know there is none of in 
Omelas is guilt.” This despite the fact that everyone within the city’s walls is guilty to the same degree. Guilty as both participants in a horrible crime, and guilty of a self-willed ignorance. But do we live in this city, or are we the ones who walk away? The narrator herself seems to occupy an ambiguous place. Sometimes she seems to discuss the appearance of the city with the knowledge and familiarity of a local (even defending its practices at one point), but at other times she seems to drift away, gaining the perspective of a visitor rather than a resident.

She seems to register what is strange about this place. But she cannot describe what lies beyond, in “the darkness” outside of 
Omelas, because each person there must make her own way. It is clearly an act of bravery to walk away, to stride into the unknown.

As readers, Le Guin provides us with the building blocks to construct the city of Omelas, but if we want to forsake it afterward, then we too have to strike out alone.

Plotted: A Literary Atlas is available now from ZestBooks.

Katniss Everdeen is dead. Or rather, Katniss dies at least twice during the course of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 2. Held aloft as the Mockingjay, symbol of the Panem rebellion, her image is manipulated by both District 13 and the Capitol for their respective gains.

Mockingjay, Part 1 was about building up the mythology of the Mockingjay, with Katniss’ propo (short for propaganda films) team staging TV spots getting her to rally the troops. But when she’s in the thick of it, getting hit by bullets in the districts and climbing through collapsing buildings in the Capitol, it’s no surprise that both sides would seize on such footage of her in danger: Turning her into a martyr or spinning it as cutting the head off of the rebellion, either way Presidents Coin and Snow have reasons to want the Mockingjay shot out of the sky.

It’s this realization that she’s become nothing but a political pawn that spurs Katniss to regain her agency, by striking out on a suicide mission to kill President Snow.

Minor spoilers for Mockingjay, Part 2 below.

By all accounts, Mockingjay is a difficult book for director Francis Lawrence and screenwriters Peter Craig and Danny Strong to adapt. For much of the book, Katniss is shut out of the action, suffering from PTSD and taking a backseat to the political machinations occurring around her. The last book of the trilogy also lacks the flash and dazzle of the Hunger Games themselves—the reality-TV posturing, the symbiotic relationship between tributes and benefactors, the child-on-child killing. So, Mockingjay, Part 2 recreated this, as best as they could.

In the book, Katniss and her propo team happen to be filming in the Capitol when they are beset by a deadly trap claiming one of their team; in the movie, they set out into the Capitol knowing that Snow is setting booby traps to barricade himself from the onslaught of rebels for as long as possible. And while Katniss goes rogue in leaving District 13, Coin and Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman, shoehorned in about as naturally as can be considering his death last year) immediately spin it that it was their plan and they’ll broadcast her slow march to Snow. As Finnick Odair (Sam Claflin) quips, “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the 76th Hunger Games.” This culture knows nothing else but televised deathmatches.

The portions of the film spent in the Capitol are certainly harrowing, especially an extended sequence in the sewer system that evokes the top-of-everyone’s-horror-list film The Descent. And the fucked-up thing is, it makes sense that a capital city in a dystopian world would have barriers in place to maintain its way of life. But what sets Mockingjay, Part 2 apart from the previous depictions of the Capitol is that instead of the glitzy, glossy hardness that Katniss experiences as a victor, partying alongside the eccentrically-dressed people who cheered on her possible death, now the Capitol is just a shell. Whole neighborhoods have been bombed in an effort to flush out the rebels, and citizens are refugees in their own city, walking in their expensive clothes to Snow’s mansion to beg asylum. That imagery reflects an earlier scene in the film, when the districts are still warring with one another, and refugees from one district enter another district on a train, greeted by guns and mistrust. (The refugee imagery, brief as it is, takes on extra resonance in our current political climate.)

Katniss and her team spend a fair amount of time hiding out in gaudy, spacious Capitol apartments, picking at decadent food and watching mandatory emergency newscasts from Caesar Flickerman (Stanley Tucci). While his presence is comforting and familiar—he provided some of the greatest moments of levity and reality-TV commentary in the previous films—there’s also a certain detachedness compared to watching Katniss and Peeta interact with him in the flesh. By this point, he’s just another pawn.

Both Mockingjay movies turn a lot of the book’s private moments inside out; it’s the only way to achieve a truly cinematic adaptation, by replacing introspection with exposition. Unfortunately, in that expansion we lose much of the story’s nuance, especially as concerns Katniss’ mental state. One of the most fascinating things about her in the books was her steady mental deterioration, wrought by the trauma of the Games and expressed through her mumbled mantras and dissociative episodes. While Mockingjay, Part 1 paid lip service to some of these moments, as this Flavorwire article points out, it was more of a shout-out to readers of the books than any attempt to elucidate Katniss’ mental state to movie audiences.

For all that their aim is true on reality TV and the very public horrors of war, the Hunger Games movies fall short in accurately depicting PTSD and mental illness for The Girl on Fire. The same goes for The Boy with the Bread: While Mockingjay, Part 1 closed on the incredibly tense sequence in which a hijacked Peeta tried to strangle Katniss, he’s very uneven in this installment. Josh Hutcherson has one of the most erratic character arcs in the series, and he gives it his all here, but neither he nor Jennifer Lawrence stick it on the landing for “real or not real,” the book’s emotional touchstone. Peeta’s need to verify which memories happened and which were manufactured is touching, but less so when every memory he mentions is a real one. Aside from occasionally going off the handle, we don’t get a sense of how much the Capitol poisoned him against Katniss.

And how about poor Gale? His character arc is also muffled by the overarching war plot, despite his development being directly tied to District 13’s tactical maneuvers. Instead, Liam Hemsworth reprises his role as Katniss’ guard dog, equally willing to follow her into the Capitol as he was to flee before the Reaping, years ago. But then who’s looking after Katniss’ family? This is the first movie where we really don’t know what’s going on with Katniss’ mother or Prim; sure, we know from Mockingjay, Part 1 that Prim is training to be a nurse, but aside from a prolonged hug at Finnick and Annie’s wedding, we’re lacking the usual Katniss/Prim bonding that serves as the entire series’ emotional core.

Keeping the Everdeens safe was always Gale’s purpose, as he and Peeta discuss in an almost-meta scene in which they hash out which guy she should choose. Twilight had one of these that was much cheesier (it involved Jacob literally telling Edward, “I can warm Bella up and you can’t”), but this moment is weirdly chummy between the two guys who got caught up in the Mockingjay’s orbit. Again, however, by losing Katniss’ interiority we miss out on her silent response to overhearing such a conversation—she thinks, Or maybe I’ll just choose myself.

Even with less insight than usual into Katniss’ thoughts, Jennifer Lawrence shines. I have to quote Emily’s review of Mockingjay, Part 1, because she best sums up Lawrence’s performance: “raw as ever, giving over another arresting performance with no evidence that she remembers she’s acting a part at all.” If anything, you can imagine that part of what lends credence to her portrayal of Katniss as so burnt-out is franchise fatigue. She’s stuck it out, from the first sneers at her casting to utterly transformational fame to the pressures of being America’s TMI-sharing sweetheart, accessible yet still removed. Lawrence’s fame is not unlike Katniss’, but she’ll come out the other side more together than Ms. Everdeen.

The intimate, one-on-one moments in this film are the best. After so many movies of Katniss and President Snow (Donald Sutherland) sidestepping each other in the waltz of the games, it’s gratifying to see them finally come face-to-face in one of the movie’s most gripping scenes. I could watch a whole side movie about Plutarch and Coin, how the former Gamemaker helps mold a stiff and unsympathetic underground president into the next ruler. And though he’s grimacing more than grinning, Haymitch provides (surprisingly) the strongest foundation for Katniss.

The Hunger Games has always been a series about trading one life for another: Katniss volunteering as tribute in Prim’s place; Johanna Mason (Jena Malone, brilliant but underused) and the other victors keeping Katniss alive in the Quarter Quell; Peeta and Gale bluntly discussing if one or both of them will be taken out of the running for Katniss’ heart by a Capitol booby trap. Katniss’ two “deaths” foreshadow the two biggest casualties of this movie (highlight for spoilers): Finnick and Prim. Life is given and taken in equal measure; whimsical silver parachutes carry both gifts and grenades.

Mockingjay, Part 2 is not the best adaptation of the series, but it utilizes the visual medium to dramatize a bleak story about how we depict war and hope, destruction and redemption. In this way, the story remains cyclical; even though there is closure (and it’s about as awkward as the final scene of the Harry Potter movies), the horrors of war remain under the surface. Unfortunately, that’s a message that can’t afford to be lost to time just yet.

Photo credit: Murray Close/Lionsgate

Natalie Zutter has been covering The Hunger Games since 2011 and can’t believe it’s over. Join her in having all the feels on Twitter.

Welcome back to Midnight in Karachi, a weekly podcast about writers, publishers, editors, illustrators, their books and the worlds they create, hosted by Mahvesh Murad.

Writer Mike Underwood talks to Mahvesh this week about managing writing with a day job and podcasting, the soundtracks to his fiction, and his new Tor.com novella The Shootout Solution, the first in the Genrenauts series. Read an excerpt from the novella here.

Episode 37: Michael R. Underwood (29:20)

On a mobile device or want to save the podcast for later?

Midnight in Karachi Episode 37: Michael R. Underwood

Subscribe in iTunes

Get the Midnight in Karachi feed

If you have a suggestion for Midnight in Karachi—a prospective guest, a book, a subject—please let me know at mahvesh@mahveshmurad.com and we’ll see what we can do for you!

At Star Wars Celebration III, before the release of Revenge of the Sith, I walked up to Matthew Stover’s table dressed as Mara Jade, and asked him to sign the Episode III novelization he had written. As he opened the book, I said to him, “I’m planning to wait until after the film is out to read the whole book, but I read the sample chapter they put online and… you made me cry.”

Matthew Stover stopped signing and looked up at me with a smile. Then he took my hand and thanked me. I still have my signed copy of the book.

When I have friends and acquaintances tell me that Episode III really didn’t deliver for them, my auto-response has always been “Read the novel.” And people usually laugh at me. I understand the impulse; novelizations of films are generally not thought of in artistic terms whatsoever, and often the person writing them has very little control over the work they’re producing. They have to use the script they’re given and any outside information from the creators to make something that mimics a film. If you’re lucky, you get some extra background, a window into the character’s heads. If you’re not lucky, you end up with a movie script punctuated by blocky narrative.

It had been ten years since I’d read the Revenge of the Sith novelization, and I admit to being nervous with this reread—should I still be telling people to “read the novel” if they don’t like the film? Would the book have the same hold on me that it did a decade ago? I opened my copy on the subway for my evening commute…

…and was blinking tears out of my eyes five minutes later.

The title above was not meant as clickbait. I am completely serious; you could read this book and forgo the entire prequel trilogy. Sure, you’d miss the beautiful design work, the costumes, the score, but in terms of a satisfying story, the novelization of Revenge of the Sith is superior in every way. It is a perfect self-encompassing tale that emotionally invests you in its tragedy with every step it takes. Every vague explanation, hand-waved plot device, and oversimplified exchange in the movie is leveled in favor of a true epic—the kind that Star Wars in naturally positioned to take on.

What’s more, it’s just a great novel. Full stop. With or without Star Wars in the title. It’s snappy and well-paced and smart. The dialogue is funny, the characters are fully realized and engaging, the prose is frequently beautiful. Star Wars books can be all of those things, but they are often not. And sometimes they forget that they are books rather than films, which is a mistake that Stover never makes. This is a novel, with all the strengths that a novel can have over a film.

To that affect, there are devices Stover uses in his text that play out in jaw-dropping fashion, two in particular. The first is a conversation via the omniscient narrator of the play between dark and light, as ephemeral concepts, as philosophy, as components of good and evil. What’s fascinating is how these meanderings make it clear precisely what about Palpatine’s views are tempting, how easily one could be swayed over to his way of thinking with the right arguments applied. Darkness seems inevitable, unstoppable, the natural reaction to everything good that light struggles to create. But by the very end, he turns those arguments on their head with a few simple turns of phrase, setting the stage for the next generation’s adventures and the resurgence of light.

The second device Stover uses is in service of the characters; when introducing each main character, he begins with a section that goes, “This is [Anakin Skywalker/Obi-Wan Kenobi/Count Dooku].” Then he proceeds to give you an account of that person, a manner of introduction that would seem clunky or awkward in less capable hands, but which works here to give the reader a deeper understanding of that person’s place in this terrible saga. Before each major event, he leads with a section to the nature of, “This is how it feels to be [Yoda/Mace Windu/General Grievous] right now.” Another fascinating window into each character’s mind at the point where they commit a great act or make their gravest mistake. At the end of the novel, Stover turns this format on its head—as Lord Vader’s helmet is fit into place, he explains to you “what it feels like to be Anakin Skywalker… forever.” It’s chilling. By which I mean you will feel actual chills running the length of your body.

It’s not just that the novel fleshes out the motivations of each character in a useful way; it’s that the motivations given are better conceived that any legwork done by previous novels or the films. For example, it’s explained that Dooku shares Palpatine’s xenophobia, and that’s the reason why the majority of the leaders in the Separatist movement are non-humans—so that they will be blamed and the Empire will have more reason to push its all-human agenda. It explains also how Anakin wound up bound to R2-D2 and Padmé to C-3PO; they gave them to each other as wedding gifts, Anakin first thinking of it because he had nothing else to offer his wife. Since he was aware that he’d programmed Threepio with a bit too much personality for a droid, and the Naboo don’t think of droids as servants or property, they made the exchange with the stipulation that their spouse act as a friend to their new companion. It handily explains Anakin’s rapport with and devotion to Artoo, which builds dramatically at some point between Episodes II and III when the audience can’t be around to appreciate it.

Additionally, whenever Artoo is talking to Threepio, we are told what he’s saying. It’s extremely effective—and heartbreaking—at the point in the story where Anakin begins to turn, because Artoo is better positioned than anyone to notice the sudden change in him, and voices those concerns to his golden friend.

There are fun little asides for diehard fans as well; for instance, Lorth Needa (of the infamous “Apology accepted, Captain Needa” fame) shows up as a Republic commander who threatens to blow up General Grievous’ ship over Coruscant. On another high note, Grievous is far more intimidating here; a monstrous, unfeeling mass of circuits that lays waste to everything in his path.

Stover had written a book that centered on Mace Windu prior to the Episode III novelization, and that book laid some incredible groundwork to describe how Windu experiences the Force differently from other Jedi. His particular expertise deals with something Stover refers to as shatterpoints; Mace Windu looks into the Force and sees the future laid over the galaxy like fault lines, points of causality that run between people and eventually explode at their breaking point. This explains his failure to anticipate what occurs during Palpatine’s attempted arrest better than anything the film comes close to suggesting—that Windu makes the mistake of focusing on discovering the Chancellor’s shatterpoint (Anakin), while failing to recognize the importance of Anakin’s shatterpoint (the desire to save his wife). Which is mostly important because Mace’s death in the film seems far too convenient; he’s one of the best Jedi in the galaxy, he shouldn’t seem so easily discarded.

Anakin’s fall to the dark side is no longer an abstract, distant idea that rapidly comes into being due to a bad dream, but something we are helped to understand through past and present events. His difficulty with loss crystallizes years beforehand in a moment where he encounters a dead star—something that he hadn’t known was possible in the universe. The inevitability of death becomes the thing that snaps at Anakin’s heels, the thought that occupies him through every terrible battle, which ties into his natural empathy with the dark side… because the Sith teach that the Force is something that the user bends to their will, not the other way around. Anakin is using the Force in exactly that way every time he refuses to accept an outcome that does not result in the survival of loved ones. To that end, his crash landing of the Grievous’ ship on Coruscant has much higher stakes; what Anakin pulls off is scientifically impossible, but he makes it possible for the sake of Obi-Wan and Palpatine. It is something of a miracle, but proves that his downward spiral has already begun. Same with the execution of Dooku; Anakin’s guilt over the murder is clear and painful, but Palpatine works as always to enable Anakin to do what he truly wants no matter the cost.

Palpatine’s guiding hand where Anakin is concerned is much more carefully depicted, the depths of his manipulation masterful and devious. Stover constantly refers to him as “the shadow,” a description that gets more and more ominous with every page turn. What’s worse is knowing that the Jedi were far closer to catching him than the film leads us to believe; they simply didn’t trust their resources (the lack of trust in Anakin is the crux here, something that the Chosen One himself perceives, leading to his withdrawal from the Jedi faster than ever), a primary effect of the war on a tired and thinned out Order.

Padmé’s role as founder of the Rebel Alliance is back in play here, and her difficulty in watching the Republic she loves get ripped to pieces makes the political side of this tale wrenching in a way it fails to be in the movie. Her relationship with Anakin is in many ways more frightening; the love that they feel seems more like a mandate of the universe than a choice. She is aware of all the parts of her husband that are angry and damaged and unsettling, yet she loves him anyway, and it makes their story more tragic. It’s a collision course that the galaxy has set in front of them, both too addled by war and pain and the haze created by the dark side to fully comprehend how wrong their lives will go.

The final showdown between Yoda and Palpatine is devastating because we understand precisely what Yoda is losing when he fails. This isn’t just a big boss fight—Yoda has trained for hundreds of years to be prepared for exactly this. To be the greatest Jedi Master the galaxy has ever seen, precisely so he can defeat evil when it rears his head. And he is forced to come to terms with the fact that those centuries of work, of meditation, or service, amount to nothing. In the end, he doesn’t have what it takes. It sets the tone for the story’s close, the punishment that Yoda levies on himself for his inability to do the duty that fell to him.

The friendship and brotherhood between Obi-Wan and Anakin runs deep through every page of this book, on both sides of the relationship. Their banter is loving, their partnership the stuff of legend. Obi-Wan shows severe discomfort once the Jedi Council starts asking him to keep secrets from his former Padawan (so he can more carefully observe Anakin’s relationship with the Chancellor). Anakin’s growing mistrust of Obi-Wan as Palpatine gets further into his head is devastating because we can see how much it hurts him. Kenobi and Skywalker are billed as two halves of a whole, and the wedge driven between them by both Sith and Jedi is wholly responsible for destruction of their era.

Or as Stover puts it at the very start of the novel—the end of an Age of Heroes:

[…] they know what they’re watching, live on the HoloNet, is the death of the Republic.

Many among these beings break into tears; many more reach out to comfort their husbands or wives, their crechè-mates or kin-triads, and their younglings of all descriptions, from children to cubs to spawn-fry.

But here is a strange thing: few of the younglings need comfort. It is instead the younglings who offer comfort to their elders. Across the Republic—in words or pheromones, in magnetic pulses, tentacle-braids, or mental telepathy—the message from the younglings is the same: Don’t worry. It’ll be alright.

Anakin and Obi-Wan will be there any minute.

Oh god, how could you do that to me?!! (That might be the point where I started sniffling on the subway.) This is everything that the movies were meant to communicate and never got across, this exactly. And it doesn’t hurt that Stover actually considers the impact of the Clone Wars on the galaxy at large, the reaction of its denizens and the public opinion that gets formed around the people who are fighting it. Children are growing up listening to the exploits of these magical knights, believe in these heroes, yet their parents are far more reticent, knowing that legends rarely bare out under the light of day:

And so it is that these adults across the galaxy watch the HoloNet with ashes where their hearts should be.

Ashes because they can’t see two prismatic bursts of realspace reversion, far out beyond the planet’s gravity well; because they can’t see a pair of starfighters crisply jettison hyperdrive rings and streak into the storm of Separatist vulture fighters with all guns blazing.

A pair of starfighters. Jedi starfighters. Only two.

Two is enough.

Two is enough because the adults are wrong, and their younglings are right.

Though this is the end of the age of heroes, it has saved its best for last.

LEAVE ME ALONE, EVERYTHING HURTS FOREVER.

The creation of Vader is given the true reverence it deserves by the end. There is never a suggestion that Anakin cannot see past Palpatine’s lies; he does not know the truth about Padmé or his children, but he also does not believe for one second that the Emperor is a friend. Rather, Vader’s existence is one of resignation, body abused and barely alive, run by machines and barely capable of interacting with the world on a human level. His ability to access the Force is greatly diminished and though he wants to destroy Palpatine, he finds that this man is all he has left in the universe.

The tragedy of Anakin Skywalker finally takes on the dimension it should have had all along.

So there you have it. If you haven’t already, go out and grab a copy of this book. Doesn’t matter if the novelizations are now part of the Legends canon or not. This was the story that we deserved. And it will always hold a special place in my Force-happy heart.

Emily Asher-Perrin honestly sobs her ways through a hefty portion of this book because she just has a lot of feelings about Jedi friendships, okay? You can bug her on Twitter and Tumblr, and read more of her work here and elsewhere.

Welcome back to the Words of Radiance Reread on Tor.com! Last week, Shallan practiced her scholarship and her Lightweaving, and perhaps took a small step toward confronting her memories. This week, we go back in time to watch sixteen-year-old Shallan struggle with the balance between helping her father and helping, well, everyone else.

This reread will contain spoilers for The Way of Kings, Words of Radiance, and any other Cosmere book that becomes relevant to the discussion. The index for this reread can be found here, and more Stormlight Archive goodies are indexed here.

Click on through to join the discussion!

Chapter 61: Obedience

Point of View: Li’l Shallan
Setting: Davar estate
Symbology: Inverse Pattern, Chach, Nalan

IN WHICH Shallan has become the perfect, quiet, obedient daughter; the Davar fortunes are slowly changing, but Father is not happier as a result; he forbids Balat’s courtship of Eylita; in retribution for defiance, Father has Balat’s new pod of axehound pups slaughtered; Father has not only a new steward, but a whole new batch of frightening guards; Helaran has returned to the area briefly, but will soon be gone for a long time (!); Balat suggests that he, Eylita, and Shallan run away and find work in Vedenar; Shallan thinks that perhaps Balat should leave, but she herself must stay; Lord Davar orders one of his men to find and kill Helaran, promising the Shardblade as his reward; Malise confronts him, and a shouting match ensues; Lord Davar stomps out, complaining that it’s all everyone else’s fault because no one in this house obeys him.

Quote of the Week

“Would you go with me? If I took Eylita and left? You could be a scribe. Earn your own way, be free of Father.”

“I … No. I need to stay.”

“Why?”

“Something has hold of Father, something awful. If we all leave, we give him to it. Someone has to help him.”

“Why do you defend him so? You know what he did.”

“He didn’t do it.”

“You can’t remember,” Balat said. “You’ve told me over and over that your mind blanks. You saw him kill her, but you don’t want to admit that you witnessed it. Storms, Shallan. You’re as broken as Wikim and Jushu. As … as I am sometimes …”

While I do understand and sympathize with the need for Li’l Shallan to block her memories, I can’t help thinking that life would have been a lot better for the rest of the family if they’d known the truth. The brothers wouldn’t have to hate their father; their father wouldn’t have to bear Shallan’s secret alone; they could all work together to protect Shallan from the other crazies out there; the internal pressure wouldn’t have to drive them all into their own special form of insanity. *sigh*

But then there wouldn’t be much of a story, so there’s that, I guess. All right, I don’t really want to care less about the characters in a book, or I wouldn’t love the book so much. Even so.

SANDERSOOOOONNNNNN! You make my heart hurt!

Commentary

And so we return to the depressive atmosphere of the Davar estate. Last time we were here, Lord Davar had refused to pay Jushu’s gambling debts—mostly because he had no money to do so, though he wouldn’t admit it. Defying her father’s orders to go to her room, Shallan offered up what little she and her brothers had to buy Jushu back, and for the first time (IIRC) we saw someone else beaten specifically for something Shallan had done.

Now we find that the pattern has been established: when she in any way angers her father, he beats someone else in her name. The only defense a 14-year-old has in that case, I think, is the one Shallan has used for the past 15 months: she became a “perfect” daughter so that no one else would get hurt.

What would happen if Balat left? He backed down from fights with Father, but at least he resisted. Wikim merely did what he was told, and Jushu was still a mess. We have to just weather this, Shallan thought. Stop provoking Father, let him relax. Then he’ll come back….

It’s certainly what I’d have done. “Let’s all just do what he wants, stop resisting, and maybe he’ll get better.” Unfortunately, their attempts at passivity don’t seem to have helped Lin any, and it seems pretty clear that Balat’s pitiful resistance is not enough to have the spiraling negative effects that are in evidence. That’s because they are, of course, reckoning without the influence of Odium on their father, plus whatever manipulation the Ghostbloods are doing. He’s getting worse and worse.

To rub salt in the wound, there’s another reminder that Lin Davar wasn’t always a bad-tempered man:

Surely that would make him start laughing again. Surely that would drive the darkness from his eyes.

Shallan unmistakably remembers a time when her father laughed often, and was the kind of man who loved and enjoyed his little daughter as much as she loved and enjoyed him. Whether that was a daddy-daughter link that excluded his sons, we really don’t know; they don’t seem to have the same loving memories of earlier years, but it’s possible that all their earlier memories are tainted by the belief that he murdered their mother. Shallan knows that not only did he not commit murder, he’s allowing them to think he did because he’s protecting his little girl… so her memories of a devoted father are unaffected.

::sniffle:: Gah! Every time I think about that particular dynamic, it makes me even sadder.

ANYWAY. The topic of contention today is Balat’s declared intent to marry Eylita, who Lin has decided is much too low-ranked for him. No, his son and avowed heir must marry up, and as high up as he can manage. (I wonder if anyone at all besides the now-twisted Lin Davar would be serious about marrying the 21-year-old Balat to Highprince Valam’s fifty-something daughter. Oy.)

Sadly, Balat’s attempt to stand up for himself on this particular day has two very negative results: One, Lord Davar uses Balat’s one healthy pursuit (breeding axehounds) against him, tainting the only thing besides Eylita that was holding him together. Two, Balat spills a secret not meant to be shared by telling his father that Helaran is back… thereby setting up an assassination attempt on Helaran, and a new hostility between Lin and Malise. And we know where that’s going to end.

Speaking of Malise, though, this is the first time she’s felt like more than a bland placeholder. I could love her solely for this:

“How dare you,” said a feminine voice from within.

Stunned silence followed. Shallan edged back to look into the room. Malise, her stepmother, stood in the doorway between the bedroom and the sitting room. The small, plump woman had never seemed threatening to Shallan before. But the storm on her face today could have frightened a whitespine.

“Your own son,” Malise said. “Have you no morals left? Have you no compassion?”

*sigh* This glimpse of backbone was sweet at the time, even though she did follow it up with, “It is one thing to beat the servants, but to kill your own son?” (Eurgh!) There was some hope for her to turn out well, for a few minutes here…

Stormwatch

This takes place one and a half years prior to the “present” action, and about one and a half years after the previous flashback, when Shallan bought Jushu back from his creditors. Shallan is about a week past her sixteenth birthday in this scene.

Sprenspotting

Painspren, for Balat’s anguish over the pitiful remains of the axehound pups he’d been breeding. That is all.

All Creatures Shelled and Feathered

Stepping back from Balat’s reaction to the fate of his latest batch of pups, there are a couple of interesting notes. One is simply that one of the ways Balat has been coping with life has been to develop an interest in breeding axehounds. In focusing on the creation of new life, he’s made progress against his old habits of destroying life; now, he rarely hurts anything larger than a cremling. Which… is still a bit creepy, but it’s better than relishing axehound fights. I guess.

Anyway, the other interesting thing is that axehounds apparently produce pups in pods. The question I have now is this: Is “pod” a nomenclature thing, like a pod of whales? Or is it a physical thing, like the egg case of a locust? Just for the sake of Rosharan ecological weirdness, I’m guessing it’s the latter. But I think I’d prefer the former.

Ars Mechanica

While there’s no direct mention of the Soulcaster yet, I think it’s hinted here for the first time, suitably accompanied a few paragraphs later by the first appearance of the new steward Luesh.

But surely… surely things would get better now. Indeed, as Shallan was involved more by the ardents in accounts, she noted a shrewdness to the way her father stopped being bullied by other lighteyes and started playing them against each other. He impressed her, but frightened her, in how he seized for power. Father’s fortunes changed further when a new marble deposit was discovered on his lands—providing resources to keep up with his promises, bribes, and deals.

Whether Davar’s new shrewdness was the cause or the result of Ghostblood attentions isn’t entirely clear, though I think it reads more like the former. In either case, the new marble deposit is certainly the latter, and is plainly instrumental in encouraging his ambitions.

Heraldic Symbolism

Chach and Nalan grace the arch for this poor chapter. I believe Chach is partly for Obedience, and partly for Shallan’s odd role (the youngest child, and the only girl) as Guard for her family. Regarding Nalan, though, I am—as usual—less certain. Is it simply the references to Helaran and his yet-unknown association with the Skybreakers? Is it the twisting of Justice? The new Confidence of Shallan’s father? I’m really open to suggestions here, folks.

Shipping Wars

Am I the only person who thinks that Eylita is crazy to take Balat? Not only is he the scion of a fairly questionable house—even if he is several dahn above her—but he’s certifiably nuts. I feel sorry for him, very much, but I can’t help thinking this has to be a very unhealthy relationship.

Just Sayin’

Favorite metaphor:

She entered the manor, but couldn’t help feeling that she was trying to hold together a carpet as dozens of people pulled out threads from the sides.

That sounds like fun, eh?

Well. On that cheery note, I’ll see you in the comments for your reactions. That ought to keep us busy until next week time, when we return to Kaladin’s prison cell for further ill-timed revelations. Yeah, sorry, no sunshine there either.

Editing to add: There will be no reread post next week, November 26. I’m taking Thanksgiving week off. So for all you USA types, happy Thanksgiving! For everyone else… uh… sorry? (Now I sound Canadian!) Anyway… use the opportunity to dig deeply into the flashbacks, or go reread both epigraph-letters, or something else fun. Back in two weeks!

Alice Arneson is a long-time Tor.com commenter and Sanderson beta-reader, who likes to take these opportunities to point out that we’re following one of the most prolific SFF writers going these days. With Shadows of Self out just recently, and The Bands of Mourning as well as Calamity coming out in the near future, this is a good time to be a reader. And Sanderson has been tracking progress on Stormlight 3 for NaNoWriMo; his progress bar is now at 28%. Just sayin’… it’s a good time to be a fan.

Laia is a slave. Elias is a soldier. Neither is free.

Under the Martial Empire, defiance is met with death. Those who do not vow their blood and bodies to the Emperor risk the execution of their loved ones and the destruction of all they hold dear. It is in this brutal world, inspired by ancient Rome, that Laia lives with her grandparents and older brother. The family ekes out an existence in the Empire’s impoverished backstreets. They do not challenge the Empire. They’ve seen what happens to those who do.

But when Laia’s brother is arrested for treason, Laia is forced to make a decision. In exchange for help from rebels who promise to rescue her brother, she will risk her life to spy for them from within the Empire’s greatest military academy. There, Laia meets Elias, the school’s finest soldier—and secretly, its most unwilling. Elias wants only to be free of the tyranny he’s being trained to enforce. He and Laia will soon realize that their destinies are intertwined—and that their choices will change the fate of the Empire itself.

We’re pleased to share an exclusive first look at the new cover for the paperback of An Ember in the Ashes, due out on February 9th from Penguin! Sabaa Tahir’s New York Times bestselling debut was recently named one of the best books of the year by Amazon.com. If you haven’t had a chance to pick up a copy of this one yet, check out the excerpt below for a sneak peek! And look for book 2, A Torch Against the Night, in August 2016.

1
LAIA

My big brother reaches home in the dark hours before dawn, when even ghosts take their rest. He smells of steel and coal and forge. He smells of the enemy.

He folds his scarecrow body through the window, bare feet silent on the rushes. A hot desert wind blows in after him, rustling the limp curtains. His sketchbook falls to the floor, and he nudges it under his bunk with a quick foot, as if it’s a snake.

Where have you been, Darin? In my head, I have the courage to ask the question, and Darin trusts me enough to answer. Why do you keep disappearing? Why, when Pop and Nan need you? When I need you?

Every night for almost two years, I’ve wanted to ask. Every night, I’ve lacked the courage. I have one sibling left. I don’t want him to shut me out like he has everyone else.

But tonight’s different. I know what’s in his sketchbook. I know what it means.

“You shouldn’t be awake.” Darin’s whisper jolts me from my thoughts. He has a cat’s sense for traps—he got it from our mother. I sit up on the bunk as he lights the lamp. No use pretending to be asleep.

“It’s past curfew, and three patrols have gone by. I was worried.”

“I can avoid the soldiers, Laia. Lots of practice.” He rests his chin on my bunk and smiles Mother’s sweet, crooked smile. A familiar look—the one he gives me if I wake from a nightmare or we run out of grain. Everything will be fine, the look says.

He picks up the book on my bed. “Gather in the Night,” he reads the title. “Spooky. What’s it about?”

“I just started it. It’s about a jinn—” I stop. Clever. Very clever. He likes hearing stories as much as I like telling them. “Forget that. Where were you? Pop had a dozen patients this morning.”

And I filled in for you because he can’t do so much alone. Which left Nan to bottle the trader’s jams by herself. Except she didn’t finish. Now the trader won’t pay us, and we’ll starve this winter, and why in the skies don’t you care?

I say these things in my head. The smile’s already dropped off Darin’s face.

“I’m not cut out for healing,” he says. “Pop knows that.”

I want to back down, but I think of Pop’s slumped shoulders this morning. I think of the sketchbook.

“Pop and Nan depend on you. At least talk to them. It’s been months.”

I wait for him to tell me that I don’t understand. That I should leave him be. But he just shakes his head, drops down into his bunk, and closes his eyes like he can’t be bothered to reply.

“I saw your drawings.” The words tumble out in a rush, and Darin’s up in an instant, his face stony. “I wasn’t spying,” I say. “One of the pages was loose. I found it when I changed the rushes this morning.”

“Did you tell Nan and Pop? Did they see?”

“No, but—”

“Laia, listen.” Ten hells, I don’t want to hear this. I don’t want to hear his excuses. “What you saw is dangerous,” he says. “You can’t tell anyone about it. Not ever. It’s not just my life at risk. There are others—”

“Are you working for the Empire, Darin? Are you working for the Martials?”

He is silent. I think I see the answer in his eyes, and I feel ill. My brother is a traitor to his own people? My brother is siding with the Empire?

If he hoarded grain, or sold books, or taught children to read, I’d understand. I’d be proud of him for doing the things I’m not brave enough to do. The Empire raids, jails, and kills for such “crimes,” but teaching a six-year-old her letters isn’t evil—not in the minds of my people, the Scholar people.

But what Darin has done is sick. It’s a betrayal.

“The Empire killed our parents,” I whisper. “Our sister.”

I want to shout at him, but I choke on the words. The Martials conquered Scholar lands five hundred years ago, and since then, they’ve done nothing but oppress and enslave us. Once, the Scholar Empire was home to the finest universities and libraries in the world. Now, most of our people can’t tell a school from an armory.

“How could you side with the Martials? How, Darin?”

“It’s not what you think, Laia. I’ll explain everything, but—”

He pauses suddenly, his hand jerking up to silence me when I ask for the promised explanation. He cocks his head toward the window.

Through the thin walls, I hear Pop’s snores, Nan shifting in her sleep, a mourning dove’s croon. Familiar sounds. Home sounds.

Darin hears something else. The blood drains from his face, and dread flashes in his eyes. “Laia,” he says. “Raid.”

“But if you work for the Empire—” Then why are the soldiers raiding us?

“I’m not working for them.” He sounds calm. Calmer than I feel. “Hide the sketchbook. That’s what they want. That’s what they’re here for.”

Then he’s out the door, and I’m alone. My bare legs move like cold molasses, my hands like wooden blocks. Hurry, Laia!

Usually, the Empire raids in the heat of the day. The soldiers want Scholar mothers and children to watch. They want fathers and brothers to see another man’s family enslaved. As bad as those raids are, the night raids are worse. The night raids are for when the Empire doesn’t want witnesses.

I wonder if this is real. If it’s a nightmare. It’s real, Laia. Move.

I drop the sketchbook out the window into a hedge. It’s a poor hiding place, but I have no time. Nan hobbles into my room. Her hands, so steady when she stirs vats of jam or braids my hair, flutter like frantic birds, desperate for me to move faster.

She pulls me into the hallway. Darin stands with Pop at the back door. My grandfather’s white hair is scattered as a haystack and his clothes are wrinkled, but there’s no sleep in the deep grooves of his face. He murmurs something to my brother, then hands him Nan’s largest kitchen knife. I don’t know why he bothers. Against the Serric steel of a Martial blade, the knife will only shatter.

“You and Darin leave through the backyard,” Nan says, her eyes darting from window to window. “They haven’t surrounded the house yet.”

No. No. No. “Nan,” I breathe her name, stumbling when she pushes me toward Pop.

“Hide in the east end of the Quarter—” Her sentence ends in a choke, her eyes on the front window. Through the ragged curtains, I catch a flash of a liquid silver face. My stomach clenches.

“A Mask,” Nan says. “They’ve brought a Mask. Go, Laia. Before he gets inside.”

“What about you? What about Pop?”

“We’ll hold them off.” Pop shoves me gently out the door. “Keep your secrets close, love. Listen to Darin. He’ll take care of you. Go.”

Darin’s lean shadow falls over me, and he grabs my hand as the door closes behind us. He slouches to blend into the warm night, moving silently across the loose sand of the backyard with a confidence I wish I felt. Although I am seventeen and old enough to control my fear, I grip his hand like it’s the only solid thing in this world.

I’m not working for them, Darin said. Then whom is he working for? Somehow, he got close enough to the forges of Serra to draw, in detail, the creation process of the Empire’s most precious asset: the unbreakable, curved scims that can cut through three men at once.

Half a millennium ago, the Scholars crumbled beneath the Martial invasion because our blades broke against their superior steel. Since then, we have learned nothing of steelcraft. The Martials hoard their secrets the way a miser hoards gold. Anyone caught near our city’s forges without good reason—Scholar or Martial—risks execution.

If Darin isn’t with the Empire, how did he get near Serra’s forges? How did the Martials find out about his sketchbook?

On the other side of the house, a fist pounds on the front door. Boots shuffle, steel clinks. I look around wildly, expecting to see the silver armor and red capes of Empire legionnaires, but the backyard is still. The fresh night air does nothing to stop the sweat rolling down my neck. Distantly, I hear the thud of drums from Blackcliff, the Mask training school. The sound sharpens my fear into a hard point stabbing at my center. The Empire doesn’t send those silver-faced monsters on just any raid.

The pounding on the door sounds again.

“In the name of the Empire,” an irritated voice says, “I demand you open this door.”

As one, Darin and I freeze.

“Doesn’t sound like a Mask,” Darin whispers. Masks speak softly with words that cut through you like a scim. In the time it would take a legionnaire to knock and issue an order, a Mask would already be in the house, weapons slicing through anyone in his way.

Darin meets my eyes, and I know we’re both thinking the same thing. If the Mask isn’t with the rest of the soldiers at the front door, then where is he?

“Don’t be afraid, Laia,” Darin says. “I won’t let anything happen to you.”

I want to believe him, but my fear is a tide tugging at my ankles, pulling me under. I think of the couple that lived next door: raided, imprisoned, and sold into slavery three weeks ago. Book smugglers, the Martials said. Five days after that, one of Pop’s oldest patients, a ninety-three-year-old man who could barely walk, was executed in his own home, his throat slit from ear to ear. Resistance collaborator.

What will the soldiers do to Nan and Pop? Jail them? Enslave them?

Kill them?

We reach the back gate. Darin stands on his toes to unhook the latch when a scrape in the alley beyond stops him short. A breeze sighs past, sending a cloud of dust into the air.

Darin pushes me behind him. His knuckles are white around the knife handle as the gate swings open with a moan. A finger of terror draws a trail up my spine. I peer over my brother’s shoulder into the alley.

There is nothing out there but the quiet shifting of sand. Nothing but the occasional gust of wind and the shuttered windows of our sleeping neighbors.

I sigh in relief and step around Darin.

That’s when the Mask emerges from the darkness and walks through the gate.

2
ELIAS

The deserter will be dead before dawn.

His tracks zigzag like a struck deer’s in the dust of Serra’s catacombs. The tunnels have done him in. The hot air is too heavy down here, the smells of death and rot too close.

The tracks are more than an hour old by the time I see them. The guards have his scent now, poor bastard. If he’s lucky, he’ll die in the chase. If not . . .

Don’t think about it. Hide the backpack. Get out of here.

Skulls crunch as I shove a pack loaded with food and water into a wall crypt. Helene would give me hell if she could see how I’m treating the dead. But then, if Helene finds out why I’m down here in the first place, desecration will be the least of her complaints.

She won’t find out. Not until it’s too late. Guilt pricks at me, but I shove it away. Helene’s the strongest person I know. She’ll be fine without me.

For what feels like the hundredth time, I look over my shoulder. The tunnel is quiet. The deserter led the soldiers in the opposite direction. But safety’s an illusion I know never to trust. I work quickly, piling bones back in front of the crypt to cover my trail, my senses primed for anything out of the ordinary.

One more day of this. One more day of paranoia and hiding and lying. One day until graduation. Then I’ll be free.

As I rearrange the crypt’s skulls, the hot air shifts like a bear waking from hibernation. The smells of grass and snow cut through the fetid breath of the tunnel. Two seconds is all I have to step away from the crypt and kneel, examining the ground as if there might be tracks here. Then she is at my back.

“Elias? What are you doing down here?”

“Didn’t you hear? There’s a deserter loose.” I keep my attention fixed on the dusty floor. Beneath the silver mask that covers me from forehead to jaw, my face should be unreadable. But Helene Aquilla and I have been together nearly every day of the fourteen years we’ve been training at Blackcliff Military Academy; she can probably hear me thinking.

She comes around me silently, and I look up into her eyes, as blue and pale as the warm waters of the southern islands. My mask sits atop my face, separate and foreign, hiding my features as well as my emotions. But Hel’s mask clings to her like a silvery second skin, and I can see the slight furrow in her brow as she looks down at me. Relax, Elias, I tell myself. You’re just looking for a deserter.

“He didn’t come this way,” Hel says. She runs a hand over her hair, braided, as always, into a tight, silver-blonde crown. “Dex took an auxiliary company off the north watchtower and into the East Branch tunnel. You think they’ll catch him?”

Aux soldiers, though not as highly trained as legionnaires and nothing compared to Masks, are still merciless hunters. “Of course they’ll catch him.” I fail to keep the bitterness out of my voice, and Helene gives me a hard look. “The cowardly scum,” I add. “Anyway, why are you awake? You weren’t on watch this morning.” I made sure of it.

“Those bleeding drums.” Helene looks around the tunnel. “Woke everyone up.”

The drums. Of course. Deserter, they’d thundered in the middle of the graveyard watch. All active units to the walls. Helene must have decided to join the hunt. Dex, my lieutenant, would have told her which direction I’d gone. He’d have thought nothing of it.

“I thought the deserter might have come this way.” I turn from my hidden pack to look down another tunnel. “Guess I was wrong. I should catch up to Dex.”

“Much as I hate to admit it, you’re not usually wrong.” Helene cocks her head and smiles at me. I feel that guilt again, wrenching as a fist to the gut. She’ll be furious when she learns what I’ve done. She’ll never forgive me. Doesn’t matter. You’ve decided. Can’t turn back now.

Hel traces the dust on the ground with a fair, practiced hand. “I’ve never even seen this tunnel before.”

A drop of sweat crawls down my neck. I ignore it.

“It’s hot, and it reeks,” I say. “Like everything else down here.” Come on, I want to add. But doing so would be like tattooing “I am up to no good” on my forehead. I keep quiet and lean against the catacomb wall, arms crossed.

The field of battle is my temple. I mentally chant a saying my grandfather taught me the day he met me, when I was six. He insists it sharpens the mind the way a whetstone sharpens a blade. The swordpoint is my priest. The dance of death is my prayer. The killing blow is my release.

Helene peers at my blurred tracks, following them, somehow, to the crypt where I stowed my pack, to the skulls piled there. She’s suspicious, and the air between us is suddenly tense.

Damn it.

I need to distract her. As she looks between me and the crypt, I run my gaze lazily down her body. She stands two inches shy of six feet—a half-foot shorter than me. She’s the only female student at Blackcliff; in the black, close-fitting fatigues all students wear, her strong, slender form has always drawn admiring glances. Just not mine. We’ve been friends too long for that.

Come on, notice. Notice me leering and get mad about it.

When I meet her eyes, brazen as a sailor fresh into port, she opens her mouth, as if to rip into me. Then she looks back at the crypt.

If she sees the pack and guesses what I’m up to, I’m done for. She might hate doing it, but Empire law would demand she report me, and Helene’s never broken a law in her life.

“Elias—”

I prepare my lie. Just wanted to get away for a couple of days, Hel. Needed some time to think. Didn’t want to worry you.

BOOM-BOOM-boom-BOOM.

The drums.

Without thought, I translate the disparate beats into the message they are meant to convey. Deserter caught. All students report to central courtyard immediately.

My stomach sinks. Some naïve part of me hoped the deserter would at least make it out of the city. “That didn’t take long,” I say. “We should go.”

I make for the main tunnel. Helene follows, as I knew she would. She would stab herself in the eye before she disobeyed a direct order. Helene is a true Martial, more loyal to the Empire than to her own mother. Like any good Mask-in-training, she takes Blackcliff’s motto to heart: Duty first, unto death.

I wonder what she would say if she knew what I’d really been doing in the tunnels.

I wonder how she’d feel about my hatred for the Empire.

I wonder what she would do if she found out her best friend is planning to desert.

Excerpted from An Ember in the Ashes © Sabaa Tahir, 2015

Welcome back to A Read of Ice and Fire! Please join me as I read and react, for the very first time, to George R.R. Martin’s epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire.

Today’s entry is Part 1 of “The Princess and the Queen, Or, The Blacks and the Greens: Being A History of the Causes, Origins, Battles, and Betrayals of that Most Tragic Bloodletting Known as the Dance of the Dragons, as set down by Archmaester Gyldayn of the Citadel of Oldtown”, (deep breath) which originally appeared in the anthology Dangerous Women, edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois.

Previous entries of the Read are located in the Index. The only spoilers in the post itself will be for the actual section covered and for the material covered previous to this post. As for the comments, please note that the Powers That Be have provided you a lovely spoiler thread here on Tor.com. Any spoileriffic discussion should go there, where I won’t see it. Non-spoiler comments go below, in the comments to the post itself.

And now, the post!

[Note: This part covers pages 703-730 in the Kindle ebook edition of the anthology, to the paragraph ending with “The date he chose for the attack was the first full moon of the new year.” Sorry if that pagination doesn’t match your particular edition. Also, please see the end of the post for a scheduling note.]

The Princess and the Queen: Part 1

What Happens

The rather misnamed “Dance of the Dragons” is the account of the internecine struggle for the Iron Throne after the death of King Viserys I between his named heir, Princess Rhaenyra, his daughter from his first marriage, and Aegon, his eldest son by his second wife, the ultimate result of which was the diminishment of both the Targaryen dynasty and the dragons they commanded. The war was unusual in that it was largely fought not on land, but on the sea and in the air, and also via stealth and poison.

When King Viserys died, Queen Alicent and her “greens” (as opposed to Princess Rhaenyra’s “blacks,” so referred to by the color dress each woman had worn to a tourney years before) determined not to announce the king’s death until the question of succession had been settled. Lord Beesbury, the Master of Coin, reminded the small council that Princess Rhaenyra was Viserys’s named heir and the eldest of his living children, but Lord Jasper “Ironrod” Wylde, Master of Laws, countered that the rights of a trueborn son must always come before that of a mere daughter. Ser Otto Hightower, the King’s Hand, adds that if Rhaenyra comes to the throne it will truly be her husband Prince Daemon who will rule, and he and Queen Alicent both aver that Daemon’s first move will be to execute Ser Otto, Queen Alicent, and all her children. Ser Criston Cole, Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, thinks that Rhaenyra and Daemon will turn King’s Landing into “a brothel,” and that her heir, Jacaerys Velaryon, is bastard-born and cannot be allowed to rule. Grand Maester Orwyle points out that crowning Aegon will lead to war. Lord Beesbury declares that he will not forget his oath of loyalty to the princess, and makes to leave, but Ser Criston Cole pushes him down and slits his throat, making him the first casualty of the war.

Rhaenyra being in confinement on Dragonstone, about to give birth, gives Alicent’s greens the advantage, and they move to secure their allies and delay the announcement of the king’s death as long as possible. Prince Aegon at first resists the idea of usurping his half-sister’s birthright, but Ser Criston convinces him that Rhaenyra will kill him and all his siblings if she comes to power, and so he agrees to be crowned. The council assesses their allies and those who are more likely to support Rhaenyra, and send Prince Aemond on his dragon Vhagar, the largest of the dragons in Westeros, to secure the allegiance of Lord Borros Baratheon at Storm’s End by wedding one of his daughters. Soon the dead king becomes too pungent to hide any more, and the announcement is made and Prince Aegon is crowned King Aegon II, and his wife and sister Helaena is crowned queen. Ser Steffon Darklyn of the Kingsguard is not present, having defected the night before, taking with him King Viserys’s crown (Aegon chose to use another one).

Meanwhile, Rhaenyra is in labor, screaming curses against her half-brothers and Queen Alicent and her own unborn child. The babe is stillborn and deformed, and Rhaenyra declares that it was murdered by the news of her family’s treachery. She calls a council of her own, but her advantages at first seem slight against Aegon’s. However, she has the support of Corlys Velaryon of Driftmark, called the Sea Snake, which means she has the advantage of Aegon at sea, and Corlys’s wife Princess Rhaenys points out that they have more dragons, especially if they can find riders for the six riderless dragons at Dragonstone. They discuss their allies, and Rhaenys is sure the Baratheons will stand with them. Daemon hopes to secure Lady Arryn of the Vale, and perhaps even the Iron Islands, though he knows Aegon will be pursuing them as well. They decide to send Daemon on his dragon Caraxes to seize Harrenhal and from there secure the allegiance of the river lords, while Velaryon’s fleet bottles up King’s Landing. Rhaenyra’s eldest son Jacaerys will fly to the Eyrie, then White Harbor, then Winterfell, while his younger brother Lucerys is sent to Storm’s End, where they are sure he will have a warm welcome.

When King Aegon hears of his half-sister’s coronation, he wants her head, and is only reluctantly convinced to send Orwyle with peace terms instead. The terms are generous, in fact, but Queen Rhaenyra will not accept them, and tells Orwyle to tell Aegon that she will have the throne or his head. Aegon is enraged by this, and the war of words is on. Daemon defeats Harrenhal easily, and Prince Jacaerys secures the support of the Vale, White Harbor, and Winterfell with no trouble, but Prince Lucerys comes to Storm’s End to find that Prince Aemond has beaten him there. Lucerys delivers his message to Lord Borros calmly despite Aemond’s taunts. Borros asks which of his daughters Lucerys will marry to secure the alliance, but Lucerys regretfully replies that he is already pledged to his cousin Rhaena, whereupon Borros kicks him out rudely. But Aemond is not satisfied with this, and follows Lucerys into the sky on his dragon, and kills them both, and thus brings to an end any possibility of avoiding wholesale bloodshed.

Prince Daemon, in retaliation, contacts certain low criminals of his acquaintance from his misspent youth in King’s Landing, today only known as Blood and Cheese, who sneak into the Red Keep and waylay the Dowager Queen Alicent and the present Queen Helaena both, with Helaena’s children: Jaehaerys and Jaehaera were six, Maelor two. They tell Helaena that a son is required in payment for Lucerys’s death, and force her to choose between Jaehaerys and Maelor. Weeping, Helaena picks Maelor, and the men grin and behead her older son Jaehaerys instead. Helaena’s mind does not survive this horror, and Alicent takes in Maelor to raise him instead.

Aegon II begins to realize his position is not nearly as secure as he had supposed, and in his impatience ousts Ser Otto Hightower as Hand and replaces him with Ser Criston Cole, who immediately moves against the more vulnerable lords supporting Rhaenyra, including Lord Staunton at Rook’s Rest, who calls for aid. It is answered by Princess Rhaenys and her formidable dragon Meleys, but it turns out to be a trap: the king and his dragon Sunfyre and his brother Aemond with Vhagar engage Rhaenys. She and Meleys do not survive the battle, but both Aegon and his dragon are grievously wounded, and Ser Cole tells Aemond that he must rule in his brother’s stead. Meanwhile Rhaenyra and her allies are thrown into disarray and infighting by the loss of Lucerys and Rhaenys, but Prince Jacaerys makes peace among them. He sends his younger brother Joffrey to Gulltown to keep him safe, and his half-brothers, Aegon the Younger and Viserys, to be fostered in Pentos.

Jacaerys is hesitant to confront Aemond and his dragon Vhagar head on, and decides to find riders for the six unmounted dragons in Dragonstone by searching among the many byblows of the Targaryen lords among the populace in the area, called “dragonseed” or just “seeds”. Many of them die or suffer grievous wounds in their attempts to master the riderless dragons, but eventually all but the two wildest dragons find riders, including a sixteen-year-old girl named Netty. Jacaerys determines that his attack will commence on the first full moon of the new year.

Commentary

Well, it’s definitely an ASOIAF story. Westeros: a continental experiment in proving Murphy’s Law, ad infinitum.

The format’s a lot different, though. I rather feel like (though obviously I could be wrong) that this was pulled more or less wholesale from Martin’s no doubt copious background notes for the main story. Which is sort of a fun thing to contemplate, for those (like me) who like glimpses of the process—the “behind the scenes” aspects of writing, so to speak.

That said, the historical style of the prose, along with the fact that we are being introduced to an entirely new cast of characters, made it a little difficult to get into at first. However, the framework of familiar surnames, and the sort of broad character traits we have been taught to associate with them (Martin isn’t quite guilty of making his noble Houses Planets of Hats, but he definitely has tendencies in that direction), eased the way. I would really not recommend that anyone should read this as their first introduction to ASOIAF, though. I’m definitely glad that I read all of what’s currently available of the series proper and the Dunk & Egg stories first, otherwise this would have been hopelessly confusing, and probably off-putting.

But I did read all that other stuff first, fortunately, if at a glacial weekly blog pace, so I have at least some notion of how all these people fit together and what their deal is. I’m not entirely clear on how long before the events of the series proper this is, so…

Well. Actually, it occurs to me that I can just go and Google that now, can’t I? Golly. So, hang on.

Ah, okay, so this is about 170 years before the events of the series proper, and about 80 years before the Dunk & Egg stories. Cool.

It was interesting to read about the Targaryens at what I presume was the height of their power (or the tail end of the height of their power, anyway), all just casually riding dragons around like it ain’t no thang. Also done like it ain’t no thang: siblings (and uncles and nieces) getting married. Yeek. So much inbreeding, so little time.

When the babe at last came forth, she proved indeed a monster: a stillborn girl, twisted and malformed, with a hole in her chest where her heart should have been and a stubby, scaled tail.

Q.E.D. Although the actual dragon blood may have played a part there as well, I suppose. (Though I’m still unclear on whether that’s supposed to be literally true, though I think it is. And if so, I’m resolutely failing to consider how that, er, outcrossing happened in the first place, because woowwwwwwwww.)

Anyway, the Targaryens are as delightfully unstable as always. It might make me a terrible person, but I found the mental image of Rhaenyra (and wow is that an annoying name to type over and over) screaming insults at absolutely everyone while in labor, including at her own unborn child, to be kind of awesomely horrible, if that makes any sense.

“Awesomely horrible” sums up the Targaryens in general, I think. Though sometimes the emphasis is less on the “awesome” and more on the “horrible,” of course. Like the little digression in this section about their indulgence in “the ancient law of the first night”:

Though this custom was greatly resented elsewhere in the Seven Kingdoms, by men of a jealous temperament who did not grasp the honor being conferred upon them, such feelings were muted upon Dragonstone, where Targaryens were rightly regarded as being closer to gods than the common run of men.

Uh-huh. Well, I’m sure that’s what they told themselves.

Or, hey, it might even be true—people have believed stupider things, and honored even more reprehensible traditions than that of droit du seigneur. Although I must note that most modern historians think that droit du seigneur is a myth made up by earlier historians, who were either (a) trying to demonize the Middle Ages or (b) indulging in a male power fantasy, and that it was never actually a thing in real life.

But naturally a horrible thing that is only an urban legend in the real world would turn out to be completely true in Westeros, because ASOIAF. Lord.

It’s also a neat sort of reminder that Martin is himself playing the role of an obviously biased historian, here, and that therefore we must treat the events told in the story as coming from the equivalent of an unreliable narrator. Heh.

I also have to note that as often as the Targaryens do horrible things to other people, it apparently doesn’t hold a candle to the horrific things they’ll do to each other. That Blood and Cheese business… wow. I don’t even have words.

Anyway, this first part is a pretty deft demonstration of (a) why governments should not consist almost entirely of people related to each other, especially inbred people who are really really related to each other, and (b) how easy it is for things to go from zero to FUBAR in the blink of an eye. Forcing an entire nation to deal with the fact that you and your stepmother can’t stand each other, what a concept.

And just in time for Thanksgiving! FAMILY TOGETHERNESS FTW.

And speaking of: I, like most Americans, will be enduring my own iteration of eating too much food in the company of people related to me next Thursday. Thus, there will be no ROIAF post on November 26^th . I will return with Part II of TPATQ (which I pronounce in my head as “Tee-PAT-quah”, because I am odd) the following Thursday, December 3^rd.

Ergo, have a lovely holiday week for those so geographically and culturally inclined, and I’ll see alla y’all in two weeks! Whoo!

Hello!

I am a rocket and as a rocket I encounter many interesting things throughout the cosmos. Stars that sing gentle lullabies to their orbiting planets. Lifeforms made entirely out of semantic arguments. Game of Thrones.

The weirdos who crawl around inside of me write about these things many times per day, and a lifetime spent fleeing the random deathtraps I place in their living quarters has made them, well…funny. And prone to reflection in the oddest moments.

Every Thursday I collect their reflections into a handy, single-page newsletter and email it out across the universe. This digest contains original fiction, pop culture commentary, and sometimes free book offers that aren’t available anywhere else.

Would you like to receive this weekly newsletter email? All you need to do is sign up here with your email address. That’s all.

I am a rocket.

I must begin this review with a confession: I’ve never read The Man in the High Castle. I’ve meant to; I’ve owned copy since college, and I’ve taken it off the shelf a dozen times… but the truth is, I’ve been too afraid of the alternate history it creates to let it into my head. So when I went to a New York Comic-Con screening of the pilot and second episode for Frank Spotnitz’ adaptation, I was nervous. It turned out this was justified: the world depicted in the show is harsh, brutal, and deeply horrifying. In a day when I watched the pilot for the new The X-Files miniseries (damn good!) and the pilot for Jessica Jones (Holy. Shit.) The Man in the High Castle easily held its own with an unbearably tense story, shot through with enough humanity and hope that I can’t wait to see where it goes next.

Obviously with only two episodes I can’t speak to how well they’ll pull off an entire arc, but these first two were remarkably taut and engaging (with some fun little PKD Easter eggs scattered throughout). The show’s creation of the alternate timeline is exquisite. For those who also haven’t read the book, here’s a brief, spoiler-free summation: The Allies lost World War II, and the U.S. has been partitioned into three sections. The Greater Nazi Reich rules over the East Coast and Midwest, the West Coast is now collectively called the Japanese Pacific States, and the Rockies fall under an uneasy “Neutral Zone,” which has become a haven for “undesirables.” There are hints that some liberal cultural artifacts from the ‘50s and early 60s have come to rest here, and there is also the possibility of fleeing to South America, but it seems inevitable that the Reich and the Imperialist Army are going to clash again, and the Neutral Zone isn’t going to last too long. We check in with San Francisco, which is now the extremely Japanese capital of the coast, and New York, which, well:

I could be snarky, and say, “Hey! They actually found a way to make Times Square worse!” But if I’m being honest, that image nauseated me so much it took me minute to catch back up with the plot. Almost more upsetting, the town that we visit in the Neutral Zone was filmed in Roslyn, Washington, so any fans of Northern Exposure are in for an extra gutpunch.

Obviously there’s a Resistance—there wouldn’t be much of a show if everyone was living placidly under foreign rule—but the object that the Resistance is trying to smuggle across the country manages to be simultaneously a MacGuffin that transcends its MacGuffin-ness; a commentary on the power of storytelling; and, most impressively, a commentary on the alternate history subgenre itself. Woven through that story of Resistance are the many nuances of life an an occupied people. Each character has to decide how far they can bend, and how much they’re willing to risk, to restore their country. Especially poignant is that, as the story is set in 1962, the U.S. has been occupied for 16 years (in this timeline WWII continued into 1947) so all of the mid- to late-twenty-somethings that we meet have no real memory of life before the war and occupation. They’re literally fighting for a dream. In the same way, the younger characters that we meet have all accepted the ideologies taught to them by their Imperialist and Nazi overlords, because why would they fight them?

Alexa Davalos is utterly luminous as Juliana Crain, who has to decide how far she’s willing to go to try to save her country, and Rupert Evans is sweet and heartbreaking as her boyfriend Frank. Also, Rufus Sewell makes an absolutely chilling Obergruppenführer of the New York branch of the SS. One of the particularly sick parts of the Nazi ideology was the promotion of a model family, ruled by a patriarch and his submissive matriarch, where only the collective matters. There’s a particular scene in the Obergruppenführer’s home that brings this ideology to life and transplants it to Long Island, and the obvious parallels between this and the ideal American family of the 1950s are terrifying. I’ve written in the past about those lifestyle shorts that were gleefully skewered on Mystery Science Theater 3000—this scene mirrors those shorts, except the stern-yet loving Papa wears a swastika on his arm.

Speaking as someone who’s never read the book, the show is shocking and tense, but throws you enough lifelines of human decency that you can make it through. This is also very much a PKD story. When a person is thrown into jail, his subsequent struggle isn’t just to try not to turn informant on someone he cares about – it’s also framed in very Dickian questions about freedom, identity, and the integrity of his soul. The Japanese commander plans much of his policy on the warning of I Ching sticks. Juliana may hate the Imperialist control of her country, but she still loves Japanese culture, and is on her way to becoming an Aikido master. Nazis love their sons, and torturers are quick to point out that they’re not monsters.

I’m pleased I was able to see these first two episodes in a theater setting, as well, because the audience reacted viscerally to each new twist and betrayal. The showrunner, Frank Spotnitz, and castmembers Alexa Davalos, D.J. Qualls, Joel de la Fuente, and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa came out before the screening to talk with us a bit about the show. While Davalos spoke most about how much she loved the warmth and strength of Juliana, and Qualls tried to lighten the mood as much as possible with occasional jokes, Spotnitz highlighted the show’s commitment to examining moral truths. He encapsulated the horror of the show with one line: “Gandhi was able to shame the British into leaving India, and Martin Luther King was able to shame the government of this country into desegregation. But you can’t shame Hitler.” It’s a horrifying question, but one which must be asked again and again in this world: How can do you remain human under a regime that doesn’t value humanity?

Having seen the first two episodes, I’m hopeful that this show will continue making thrilling television out of Philip K. Dick’s examination of history. The whole series will be available on Amazon Prime on Friday, November 20th, but if you can’t wait that long, here’s a slightly spoilery trailer, and the first two episodes are available now!

Leah Schnelbach will quietly admit that the Time Square shot up there makes her tear up every time she sees it. Well done, show. Come bug her on Twitter!

As work started on Oliver and Company, the Disney animation studio was, to put it mildly, in a depressed mood. Roy Disney had returned to head the animation department—a plus—but the animation department was still dealing with newly arrived Disney CEO Michael Eisner and newly arrived chairman of Walt Disney Pictures, Jeffrey Katzenberg. The animation department had a particularly tense relationship with Katzenberg, who had not liked The Black Cauldron at all and done something the animators considered unforgivable: personally cut the film. The glory and success of Who Framed Roger Rabbit was still in production and had not yet appeared on screen, and the entire animation department was now glumly working in a warehouse instead of their nice animation studios.

Yet, despite all this, an unsympathetic Jeffrey Katzenberg ordered the animation department to produce one film per year. This was an ambitious order for a department that had barely managed to do this under Walt Disney’s direction, and not at all in the years since his death, and for a department that was understaffed and—despite The Rescuers and The Black Cauldron—not trained to the rigors of the old days.

It was probably the perfect time to focus on adapting Charles Dickens’ mercilessly cheerful work, Oliver Twist.

Oliver Twist had already been adapted into numerous stage productions, films and television miniseries, all more or less unfaithful to the original. Disney stuck to that pattern, so much so that when I saw this film, I almost pulled it from this Read-Watch for the same reason I’ll be skipping The Lion King and Pocahontas; at a certain point, “vaguely connected to the source material” just isn’t enough. But if Oliver and Company isn’t particularly like the Dickens novel (it really isn’t), and isn’t a very good film (it really really isn’t), it is a relatively important film in Disney history, because this is the first full length animated film Peter Schneider worked with.

Disney had hired Schneider to run the animation department in 1985 (with Roy Disney as chairman), shortly after their awareness of The Black Cauldron disaster; he would remain there until 1999. His first triumph involved coordinating production with Amblin Entertainment and Touchstone Pictures through the production of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. His last accomplishment with Disney (depending upon how you look at it) involved negotiating the deal that brought Pixar firmly into the Disney fold. In between, he kept Disney animators on track to fulfill Katzenberg’s one animated feature per year directive. Which is to say, like many people at Disney then and now, I’d ask you not to judge the guy by Oliver and Company. We’ve all made mistakes, and Beauty and the Beast was yet to come.

Meanwhile, we have Oliver and Company.

Sigh.

The film does have a few resemblances to the Dickens novel. It has an adorable orphan kitten eventually called “Oliver” (initially called “you” and “kitten”) and a charming dog thief called “Dodger,” and a gang of dog thieves and a thief named “Fagin” and a mean guy named “Sykes.” Also, both Olivers have to squeeze through some tight spots, go on adventures, and eventually get happy yet very platonic endings with a girl. Also both Olivers occasionally squeak that they are hungry.

And that’s about it. It’s not, frankly, that I was expecting a Disney animated film of all things to tackle the novel’s fierce social satire and examination of the darker aspects of the criminal underworld, and I’m frankly just as glad that the Disney film entirely tossed out the second half of Oliver Twist with all of its suspiciously coincidental plot twists and mysteriously returning half-brothers. But I am somewhat surprised that Disney never tackled the fairy tale aspect of Oliver Twist that I mentioned in the discussion of the novel, and outright surprised that Oliver and Company turned Fagin (Fagin!) into, well, a rather nice guy.

So, what is in Oliver and Company? Well, little Oliver is put in a box with other adorable little kittens only no one adopts him so he gets rained on and then kicked by a hot dog seller (this film doesn’t seem to like New Yorkers very much) and then Dodger comes along and they steal some hot dogs together only Dodger won’t share them so Oliver uses a convenient musical number to chase Dodger to Fagin’s hideout where Fagin turns out to be a kinda nice sort of thief who reads books to his doggies (and now one kitten) only Fagin’s in desperate trouble because he owes Very Mean Guy Sykes some money so the dogs try to rob a limo with Oliver’s enthusiastic help only things go badly in part because of enthusiastic Tito the Chihuahua, and Oliver is sorta kidnapped by a six year old, and just as the story is going nowhere, Bette Midler comes out to sing a song about being a classy poodle, which, ok. A squirrel is briefly involved. The dogs try to rescue Oliver, which would be more interesting if it was necessary, but it isn’t, and thanks to this, the six year old really does get kidnapped, which leads to a chase scene and Sykes’ inevitable and not particularly tragic demise.

I’ve made it sound like a lot is happening, but really, not a lot is, because between all of this, nothing is happening. Oliver and Company has scene after scene where characters do nothing but cuddle kittens (cute as this is), or dance (ditto) or exchange some inane dialogue (not so much.) It gets, well, dull.

Even when something is happening, it’s rather difficult to care. It’s hard to cheer on the dogs when they go in the six year old’s house to rescue the kitten, for instance, because the kitten, at this stage, has never been happier in his little kitten life and indeed is living in the lap of kitten luxury. (The six year old, Jenny, just happens to live on Fifth Avenue in the sort of house that only fabulously, fabulously wealthy New Yorkers can even dream of having.) If this scene were played more as a comedy of errors, it would work, but it isn’t; instead, we see a bunch of dogs tear a happy little kitten away from a little girl, and then see a dog sulk because the kitten isn’t terribly grateful for the favor and—from the dog’s point of view—now thinks he’s too good to hang out with dogs.

It’s also difficult to conjure up much sympathy for Fagin, even when Fagin orders the dogs and the kitten to go out and steal something because otherwise he’ll die and “Dead men do not buy dog food.” This is all very nice and touching, except for the not so small problem that the film just showed us that all of the dog food is coming from Dodger, and all of the rest of the (limited) income is coming from the dogs.

It’s not that Fagin, in this version, is all terrible—he’s fond of the dogs and reads stories to them which makes them happy enough, and the dogs are clearly fond of him, which says something, though genuinely evil guy Sykes also has two dogs who are fond of him, so…maybe it doesn’t say that much. And later, Fagin seems to feel genuinely guilty about trying to use an adorable kitten to get money out of a little girl. To his slight credit, without that money, he’ll die; he not unnaturally assumed that the kitten now belonged to wealthy adults; and he does give the kitten back as soon as he sees just how upset Jenny is. Having said all that, this is the same guy who is asking dogs to risk their lives stealing things—including cars—for him, and who just threatened to kill a kitten if he wasn’t paid up—all in order to cover up one of his mistakes, borrowing money from Sykes.

Sure, the movie wants us to believe that Fagin is really a nice, kindhearted sort of guy who just, well, happens to have his dogs stealing for him, happens to make terrible financial decisions that leave the dog in danger, happens to send ransom notes about adorable little kittens the second he realizes that the kitten has ended up on Fifth Avenue, and just happens to make a series of mistakes that leaves yet another dead person and crashed car in the East River. But I’m having problems believing it. Oh, I’m aware that the East River is now used to getting this sort of treatment from films, so is probably ok with this, and aware that in many ways, Fagin really is just a pathetic figure down on his luck. I don’t know his backstory in the film—we never get it—and it’s very possible that he, too, was originally a victim here. And for a moment—a brief moment—I did feel sorry—well, I felt something—for this pathetic, beaten guy who still took a moment to read a story to his dogs.

And then the film continued.

It’s something I wish the film had done more with, if only because the idea of a kindhearted, or even sympathetic villain was a mostly new one for Disney, which previously had gone for over the top outrageously evil villains—and continued to do so here with Sykes, although since at first Skyes’ major crimes appear to be just trying to get a repayment for a loan and keeping Dobermans as pets, Skyes initially kinda comes off as almost—well, sympathetic is the wrong word, but perhaps not totally in the wrong. That changes once he kidnaps Jenny, but it’s worthwhile to realize that the only reason Jenny is in even a modicum of danger is because of Fagin and his dogs. I’m delighted that they end up doing the right thing by rescuing her in the end, and less delighted by the circumstances that brought her there.

It’s easier, indeed, to feel sympathy for several other near villains in the Disney lineup—the Huntsman in Snow White, the disgraces to the forces of evil in Sleeping Beauty, Horace and Jasper in One Hundred and One Dalmatians, Mr. Snoops in The Rescuers, and a few others yet to come—goons who are clearly terrified of their evil bosses, with good reason, and who in some cases even do manage to resist their evil overlords. Fagan has his good moments, certainly. But not that many of them, and I’m not quite prepared to call him a complex, let alone truly sympathetic villain, yet.

And alas, even the vocal talents of Billy Joel, Bette Midler, and Ruth Pointer could only do so much with the songs—they’re bouncy enough, but completely forgettable—though fans of Lady and the Tramp and One Hundred and One Dalmatians should keep an eye out during the “Why Should I Worry” number.

These flaws, and long stretches of dull moments, did not stop Oliver and Company from making a decent return at the box office—possibly thanks to Billy Joel, whose name featured heavily in the Disney marketing for this film. Huey Lewis, who sang the opening number, was not featured heavily in the Disney marketing for this film. Sometimes you just have to wonder. It also featured increased computer animation, although the major film to experiment with that was still two films to come. Disney went public with its plans to release a new animated film each year, although they warned investors not to expect too much from the next film, which was just this small thing about a mermaid—they had much bigger pictures coming. In the meantime, they expected decent revenue from Oliver and Company—a joint marketing campaign with McDonald’s Happy Meals had done well, and Disney planned to launch a series of plush toys and other merchandise to capitalize on the film.

Yet within a few years, the only revenue trickling in from Oliver and Company came from continued VHS and later DVD sales (and now presumably Amazon.com screening.) The toys based on the characters have been discontinued, although you can still find Disney Oliver and Company trading pins here and there if you search. The film sank into obscurity, overshadowed by its successor.

The Little Mermaid, coming up next. The literary source, I warn you, is more than a bit depressing.

Mari Ness lives in central Florida.

The Harry Potter Reread has decided to create a cowbell troupe that can be hired for all occasions where a cacophony is needed. The reread imagines there are plenty of those occasions lying about.

This week we’re going to find out what the fruits house-elf spy labor bear, and then we’re going to spend more inadvisable time among giant spiders. It’s chapters 21 and 22 of The Half-Blood Prince—The Unknowable Room and After the Burial.

Index to the reread can be located here! Other Harry Potter and Potter-related pieces can be found under their appropriate tag. And of course, since we know this is a reread, all posts might contain spoilers for the entire series. If you haven’t read all the Potter books, be warned.

Chapter 21—The Unknowable Room

Summary

Harry can think of no way to convince Slughorn to confide the important memory to him, so he’s taken to looking through his Potions book for clues from the Prince. He does comes across a spell “for enemies” and dogears the page. The Apparition Test is coming up, but only Ron and Hermione will be old enough to take it—Ron is panicked because he hasn’t achieved it yet during practice (both Harry and Hermione have). Ron’s spellcheck quill isn’t working, and Hermione helps to correct it. Ron ends up talking about how he wants to end things with Lavender, but she holds on harder when he hints that way. Harry’s about to head up to bed when Kreacher shows up. Dobby shows up afterward; he hasn’t slept for a week (Harry tells him he shouldn’t be avoiding sleep to help out). Kreacher does everything he can to avoid saying what Draco is up to, but Dobby explains that Draco is going up to the seventh floor with various people to stand watch while he’s in the Room of Requirement. Harry figures that he should be able to get in there and find out what he’s up to since Malfoy discovered that DA meeting room last year, but Hermione isn’t so sure about that. The two house-elves leave.

As they discuss the variety of students helping Draco, it occurs to Harry that it must just be Crabbe and Goyle using some of the Polyjuice Potion that Slughorn had brewing in the dungeon at the start of the year. Hermione isn’t quite sure she believes all of Harry’s theories, and she’s still insistent about the difficulty in getting into the Room of Requirement. She heads up to bed, and Ron continues to mope about not being able to Apparate. That night, Harry goes to bed trying to think of what Draco might be using the room for. The next morning Hermione is cross with Harry for choosing to bother with Draco when he still has to persuade the memory off of Slughorn. She reads the paper and notes the Mundungus Fletcher has been sent to Azkaban for impersonating an Inferi during a burglary. Harry heads to the seventh floor corridor and tries to think his way into the room Draco has the Room of Requirement turing into, with no luck at all. Defense Against the Dark Arts goes horribly, with Snape giving Seamus, Harry, and Ron all a hard time. After the lesson, Ron tries to get away from Lavender by going to boys’ bathroom, where he and Harry run into Myrtle. She’s upset over not seeing a boy who promised to come back and talk to her. She says he comes into the bathroom to cry, and they have things in common, that he’s sensitive and bullied. Ron teases her about it, and she rushes away with a howl.

While Ron and Hermione head to Hogsmeade for extra Apparition lessons on the weekend, Harry goes to stake out the Room of Requirement again. Hermione tells him that he should be cornering Slughorn, but Harry has tried, and the man keeps avoiding him. So Harry heads to the room under his Cloak, and on seeing Goyle disguised as the girl with the scales, and frightens him by invisibly hitting on him. Goyle runs off and Harry tries again to room again, to no avail. He kicks the wall hard and hurts his toe—at the same time, Tonks stumbles across him. She had been looking for Dumbledore, who it turns out is away again, hoping for some news about someone in the Order. She asks Harry if he’s heard from anyone, but he tells her that no one had written him since Sirius’ death. Tonks gets teary, and Harry tries to comfort her, saying he misses him as well, but she doesn’t respond to it. Then she leaves. Ron and Hermione comes back and Harry tells them what he’s been up to, then voices a suspicion that Tonks was maybe in love with Sirius. Hermione isn’t sure that makes sense, with her abandoning her guard post to talk to Dumbledore, but Ron thinks that she’s lost her nerve, citing how easily upset women are. Hermione points out that women don’t sulk forever when Madam Rosmerta doesn’t laugh at their jokes… like Ron did today.

Commentary

And here is the point where Harry decides to mark the page with the Sectumsempra spell, which even on a first read you know is going to be trouble.

Harry is assuming that he’s not going to get a great grade on his Dementors essay for Snape because they disagree on the best way to tackle Dementors. Now, I have to assume that Harry thinks the best way to fight dementors is via Patronus, since that’s what he does, and what he taught to all his DA buddies. Which means that Snape doesn’t think so. And while I’m curious as to what Snape prefers instead, the other thing that really comes to mind is that Snape doesn’t like Patronus’ because they must be produced via happy memories, and all his happy memories are about a dead woman who never loved him back. So, you know. Ouch.

I get that Dobby not sleeping for a week to follow Draco around is supposed to be kind of funny, but it’s really just depressing? Plus, a reread means that we know the endgame for Dobby, which makes his devotion to Harry err on the side of heartbreaking rather than annoying. Still a good thing that he helps, since Kreacher is utterly useless at this juncture, but mostly just fodder for tears. (New band name! Sorry, that is not what we’re about here. Think the caffeine just kicked in for me.)

What’s fascinating is that Ron’s spellchecking quill seems to reflect current spellcheck problems even better than the ones more common when Rowling wrote the book. It’s like autocorrect on your smartphone. No, smartphone, I’m trying to write “probably,” not “puerile.” (This happens EVERY TIME, ugh, they are not remotely the same word.) This actually makes me wonder if other current tech problems will filter into the wizarding world. Magical emojis? I kind of love that idea.

Yet again, we see that the kids are getting better at piecing things together, especially Harry, who probably grows up to treat everything in his life like it’s a mystery created by Death Eaters: “Ginny, I can’t find my briefcase! But I have a theory—have you noticed how every time I use the Floo Network lately, I sneeze? It must be that someone else is flooing into our home when we’re out, and they have a pet lizard! Because I’m allergic to lizards. That person must have stolen my briefcase while the lizard stood guard….” What I mean is, normally we’d find out all this stuff about Draco’s plot at the end of the book through an adult or what-have-you, but Harry pretty much nails this one.

Which is why it’s so frustrating that he thinks he’ll be able to break into the Room of Requirement. Harry, use your brain. If that worked, anyone could find anyone, which is the opposite of the point of the room. On the other hand, the fact that he doesn’t realize this provides us with narrative gems like this:

Harry tried every variation of “I need to see what Draco Malfoy is doing inside you” that he could think of for a whole hour, at the end of which he was forced to concede that Hermione might have a point: The room simply did not want to open for him.

*side eye at Rowling*

*EPIC side eye*

Like, ARE YOU KIDDING ME WITH THIS. Stop trolling the fanfic writers, Jo. (Never stop. This is perfect.)

After yet another lesson where Snape belittles his students and fails to offer any useful guidance, Harry and Ron run into Myrtle, who we will later find out is pining for Draco. Which is yet another example of just how low Malfoy must be—confiding in a ghost about his sad feelings? Myrtle, out of any of them, on top of that? (Though I suspect none of the House ghosts would really be interested…) Poor kid feels isolated enough to confide in a ghost who likes to spend her time harassing boys in the prefect’s bathroom.

By the by, is it just me, or is Draco’s warning system extra crappy? I mean, Crabbe or Goyle drop the scales to let Draco know someone’s outside. But what do they do to let him know that the coast is clear? Harry doesn’t note anyone coming back to check on him, so it sounds like they don’t check back in. So Draco just, what… hangs out there forever? Until nighttime? It’s possible that he’s engaged the entire day in there anyhow, but still. As plans go, not the best one.

I haven’t touched on the weirdness of Crabbe and Goyle being forced to transform into girls, and the extremely invasive knowledge that gives them of their female classmate’s bodies because it’s honestly just too weird to me that it’s never addressed. And weirder when you consider that there’s no reason why Draco couldn’t have collected the hair of male classmates far more easily. It’s clearly just being used for the joke of “Haha, Crabbe and Goyle are girls right now, that’s hilarious!” And it’s… not actually funny. Because then the whole joke is down to being emasculated by being stuck in a woman’s body. I’d be much more interested if Rowling had tackled that issue seriously.

Later on Harry runs into Tonks, and I guess his mystery skill aren’t perfect yet, because he comes away with the idea that she might have been in love with Sirius, when she specifically tells him that she’s looking for news from Order members. And asks Harry if he’s heard from anyone. Ahem. You know, Harry, someone. Who said he would be writing to you if his undercover work weren’t so horrendous. Cough.

Chapter 22—After the Burial

Summary

Harry has had no progress figuring out what Draco is up to, or getting the memory from Slughorn. Ron and Hermione are about to take their Apparation tests and it’s jitters all over the place. Harry gets a note, and is worried it’s from Dumbledore, but it turns out to be from Hagrid: Aragog has died, and asks if they can come to the burial because he can’t face doing it by himself. Hermione and Ron are adamant about not going, thinking of the trouble they could get into now that security is tightened. Harry wants to do it, but figures Hermione is right. She again suggests that he try to soften up Slughorn, though Harry can’t imagine he’ll be lucky this time. Ron suddenly realizes that this could be the perfect use for the Felix Felicis, and Hermione agrees. Harry says he’ll give it a go. Ron and Hermione go to take their test, and Harry winds up one of three people in Potions class: he, Ernie, and Draco. Slughorn advises them to whip up something fun, since it’s such a small class. After noting how thin, pale, and unhappy Draco seems (and figuring that his mission must be going badly), Harry finds a Prince-corrected version of the potion for inducing euphoria and decides to try it out. Slughorn is pleased, but before Harry can ask him to try it post-lesson, the man has already vanished.

Hermione has passed her exam, but Ron just barely fails for leaving half his eyebrow behind. Harry reckons he’s going to have to use the luck potion to get the memory from Slughorn, but that he’ll just take enough for a few hours’ worth of luck, so as not to waste it. He does it after dinner, and is possessed with a sudden need to go to Hagrid’s. Ron and Hermione are dismayed by that turn of events, but Harry leaves under the Cloak and they rush along behind him. Lavender sees Ron leaving the boys’ dormitory with only Hermione and starts fighting with him. On his way out of the portrait hole, Harry invisibly brushes Ginny, leading her to snap at Dean for pushing her. Harry passes no one on his way out of the school, and the door happens to be unlocked. He strolls onto the grounds and decides to take a detour by the vegetable patch on his way to Hagrid’s. When he does, he stumbles across Professor Sprout and Slughorn, picking something for Slughorn’s third-year class. After Sprout is gone, Harry takes off the cloak and greets Slughorn, telling him that he’s out because Filch forgot to lock the doors. When Slughorn asks what he’s doing out at night, Harry admits that he’s worried for Hagrid, and tells the man about Aragog. Slughorn is excited at potentially getting some of Aragog’s venom, since it’s very valuable, so Harry suggests he come to burial. Slughorn agrees, and tell Harry he’ll be back with some alcohol and a new tie.

Hagrid is happy to see Harry, telling him that they can’t bury Aragog in the forest because the other spiders will eat them. (He was shocked to learn that the only reason they hadn’t before was on Aragog’s orders.) Apparently they wanted to eat Aragog’s body too, but Hagrid got him away in time. Slughorn shows up with booze, collects the venom on the down-low, and gives Hagrid his condolences. Hagrid is pleased for the extra company and surprised that Slughorn would care about a creature like Aragog. The three go out back to bury him, and Slughorn gives a little speech, which Hagrid loves. Then they go back inside to have a drink. (Slughorn has had all the bottles tested for poison by making house-elves try the liquor first.) Slughorn spots a bunch of unicorn hair in Hagrid’s hut (also worth lots of money) and starts asking Hagrid how he cares for all the creatures in the forest to learn more. Harry refrains from drinking, but Felix Felicis helps him to cast a refilling charm on Slughorn’s bottles, and he and Hagrid get hammered. Hagrid gives Slughorn the unicorn hairs, they toast over and over, then they get melancholy after starting to sing a song about a dying wizard. Hagrid starts thinking of his dad and Harry’s parents. He soon falls asleep.

Harry starts talking about his parents when Slughorn asks if he remembers their deaths. Harry tells the story of how his mother died, which makes Slughorn uncomfortable. Harry points out that Slughorn liked his mother, but won’t help her son by giving him the memory he needs. Slughorn is waffling, but Harry insists that he needs the memory because he’s the Chosen One and he has to kill Voldemort. (The luck potion is telling him that Slughorn won’t remember this in the morning.) The professor is afraid of the potential retaliation that will occur if he helps, and also ashamed of what the memory shows, but Harry insists that he’ll be undoing that damage by giving it to him. After a long silence, Slughorn retrieves the memory and gives it to Harry in a glass bottle. Harry thanks him and Slughorn falls asleep.

Commentary

We finally get to the point where Ron’s evasion of Lavender is getting plain silly. And while it’s kind of annoying to have to read through, you can’t fault it for realism. (The sudden talk of “ghosting” as a relationship term is funny for exactly that reason; people have been doing this forever, we just needed to assign it a name.)

I feel bad because I’m extra annoyed with Hermione in these chapters, primarily because her main action comes down to badgering Harry about Slughorn at every available moment. And this isn’t Hermione’s fault as a character—this book moves much slower than any of the previous ones, and neither Ron nor Hermione get much to do in it by way of helping Harry as is their typical M.O. As a result, Hermione spends chapter after chapter just nagging endlessly. And then Ron brings up the luck potion, and Hermione is reported to look “stunned”—and again, Hermione, being so shocked at Ron displaying a modicum of cleverness does nothing to help him level up as a human being. This is a problem with your relationship that has nothing to do with the stuff he’s put you through with Lavender this year (which still sucks). Loving someone means that you encourage and believe in them.

It’s interesting that Ron basically says aloud what I was thinking about the Felix potion earlier; that it seems like half of its effect in in the user’s head. Ron claims that he knows what it’s like to be on the potion because he thought he had taken it, insisting that it’s nearly the same thing. And he’s kind of right about that. A sort of intuitive suggestion, which shouldn’t be surprising, since that’s where Ron’s strength as a character lies.

Harry takes a bit of the Felix Felicis to get the memory from Slughorn, and it works a treat. But what makes me happiest is that getting the memory leads him to being there for Hagrid, which he wanted to be in the first place. I understand Hermione’s pragmatism in not wanting to get them into trouble, but Harry is Hagrid’s family in so many respects. and it’s right of him to want to go. On the other hand, I’m not so sure that I agree with Hagrid’s insistence of removing Aragog’s body for burial. For someone who loves knowing every little thing about big scary creatures, you’d think that he’d understand that he was maybe preventing something very natural, imposing human values on a completely non-human population. Just because we think eating your dead is not cool doesn’t mean that the spiders should think that.

While it’s kind of gross that Slughorn uses Aragog’s death as a way to get some fast cash, I love his presence in this moment merely for the appearance of his “somber black cravat.” Can we make that a necessary funeral accessory? I’d like to see more of them, please.

And I know that the luck potion is helping Harry along while he talks Slughorn into giving up the memory, but daaaaaamn. Son. That is some A++ manipulation, you go boy. Sheesh. I feel bad on Slughorn’s behalf, and I didn’t even do anything. You know Dumbledore would be proud, since that’s basically his stock and trade. But perhaps the best thing about Harry’s manipulation is he never twists the truth to get what he wants. He just makes the right points to Slughorn, and tells him what’s really happening.

Which is a relief because we kind of need to plot to pick up here. We’ve been in limbo for a while.

Note: Next week the reread will take a break on account of me road-tripping for Thanksgiving. So I will see you all back here in December!

Emily Asher-Perrin is going to eat SO MUCH STUFFING OM NOM NOM OM. You can bug her on Twitter and Tumblr, and read more of her work here and elsewhere.

We all know that cats are fickle creatures; if you try to chase them down or entice them for a cuddle, they’ll definitely plant themselves on the farthest possible point from your lap. But perhaps these aloof felines can be tricked! That’s why Japanese apparel company Unihabitat created the Mewgaroo Jumpsuit, right? While it resembles the animal-themed onesies that have come into fashion in the past few years, it has an important extra feature: A pouch to carry your cat in!

Yep—Unihabitat heard you like neko (the Japanese word for “cat(s)”), so it made you a neko suit to put your neko in. Buy them in bulk, and you and your friends can have cat slumber parties! Your kitteh will be so happy and warm and will probably do this:

Or it will look horrified like the black cat in the top photo, and try to claw you through layers of fleecy onesie on its way out. If all else fails, you’ll be all warm and fluffy while you play Neko Atsume!

via Kotaku

Are you tackling National Novel Writing Month, and just hitting the point where it feels like November is at least 8 months long? If so, I have some excellent writing tips that will hopefully do more than ease your pain—they’ll make you eager to get back to the keyboard again. Last year, I gathered up some of my favorite pieces of advice from Charlie Jane Anders (EIC of io9, of some great short stories here on Tor.com, and the author of the forthcoming novel All the Birds in the Sky.), and now I’ve found even more excellent ideas from her Writing Advice column!

Obviously, we’re thinking right now of National Novel Writing Month, but one great aspect of these articles is that they’re short story-specific, which is nice, since shorter fiction truly is its own art. A great case in point is Anders’ article “How To Create A Killer Opening For Your Science Fiction Short Story” which walks you through opening scenes from well known stories, analyzing why each of them works to pull a reader in. It’s a great, practical tactic that shows you just how many options you have, which is always a welcome relief when you’ve been working on a story for a while.

One of the best aspects of the column is that Anders is not afraid to face up to some hard truths in the writing life. For instance:

…writers are really good at spinning bullshit and convincing you that their made-up story actually happened—and that means that bullshitting yourself is an occupational hazard. It’s easy to bullshit yourself that you’ve made two pieces fit together when there’s actually a really awkward gap.

She discusses the danger of this in a great column, “The Difference Between a Great Story and a Shitty Story Is Often Really Tiny”, and talks about all the small details that can throw a piece off course. She also cops to her own years of writing practice in “I wrote 100 terrible short stories that I’m glad you’ll never read” which chronicles her early days writing stories about FTL drives that run on human guilt and… cactus genitalia? (I think I want to read that one…)

Are you a renegade writer who likes to scoff at the rules? Well, Anders has compiled a list of rules that are particularly fun to break! This is probably the most SFF-specific column on this list, since it talks at length about the uses and abuses of magic and faster than light travel… although if you’re adding FTL to your Carverian literary fiction, I want to read it. Actually, even if you aren’t writing Carverian literary fiction, you can still incorporate your life experience into your work. Even if you’re writing about a dragon-herder, if you and that dragon-herder have both been dumped abruptly, you have an emotional trauma in common that can help your reader empathize.

Are you writing about the future? You’ll definitely want to look the “10 Ways to Create a Near-Future World that Won’t Look too Dated“. Nothing is worse that reading a story that prominently features a long-extinct trend, and Anders deals with that, but there are also lots of smaller pitfalls to avoid while building a world. And whether you’re writing the future, the past, or trying to capture NOW, you’ll need to put thought into your worldbuilding. How can you take your setting from a matte painting to a fleshed-out, lived-in society? Anders has an excellent column on this topic, arguing that by paying close attention to your characters’ privilege, pain, ideology, and technical ignorance you can get them to create a world that the reader will see through their eyes.

Anders is also great at pointing out helpful advice from other writers, for instance Chuck Wendig’s tips on how to deal with the flashlight-wielding velociraptor that all writers must defeat as they plot their stories…well, OK, that’s a slight exaggeration, but you will need to get your characters in and out of trouble. Which could always involve velociraptors. Are you working on book with a lot of action? Anders has rounded up some tips from some of our favorite action writers in SFF, including Daniel Abraham, David Weber, and Karen Traviss. Are you writing any sexytimes for your characters? Anders has some great advice for that potential minefield, helpfully illustrated with Star Trek characters. Do you need to torture your characters to move the story along? Of course you’re going to feel guilty, but remember: You’re a writer, and you understand that misery is a crucible.

Say you want to get under your writing’s hood, and really dig into craft? Anders has some advice about dialogue in general, adverbs in particular, and the word ‘grim‘ in, um, even more particular. Now say you’re following all of this advice, you have a story that’s OK, but just doesn’t quite come to life the way you want? Anders has a tip for that, too! Actually, two of them. And since we’ve already talked about beginnings, we might as well head to the other end of your story:

Just look at the language we use to talk about endings. Nobody ever accuses the beginning of a story of being a “cop-out,” or a “cheat,” or of “falling flat.” Beginnings don’t have to pay off anything, or explain everything. The beginning of the story hooks us, and makes a bunch of promises—and then the ending has to deliver on all those promises. So perhaps it’s not surprising that it’s slightly easier to make promises than to deliver on them.

While Anders can’t promise a silver bullet that will fix every ending, she does have tips on endings that might help jog a good conclusion from your brain-meats.

Finally, Anders is willing to take on the dark side of the writing life. Most people, no matter how hard they work, are going to be met with at least some criticism. The trick is turning that into a platform for better writing. The odds are also good that you’ll be rejected, probably quite often when you’re starting out. Anders has some great advice on how to incorporate that into your writing practice without turning into a basket case.

You can read my original roundup of advice columns here, and check out the whole index over at io9. In the meantime, I wish all of you adventurous wordsmiths a joyous NaNoWriMo!

Leah Schnelbach needs to go back and work on her beginning. and he ending. And that bit in the middle that still doesn’t make any sense… come distract her from her writing on Twitter!