M is an ageless drifter with a sharp tongue, few scruples, and the ability to bend reality to his will, ever so slightly. He’s come back to New York City after a long absence, and though he’d much rather spend his days drinking artisanal beer in his favorite local bar, his old friends—and his enemies—have other plans for him. One night M might find himself squaring off against the pirates who cruise the Gowanus Canal; another night sees him at a fashionable uptown charity auction where the waitstaff are all zombies. A subway ride through the inner circles of hell? In M’s world, that’s practically a pleasant diversion.

Before too long, M realizes he’s landed in the middle of a power struggle between Celise, the elegant White Queen of Manhattan, and Abilene, Brooklyn’s hip, free-spirited Red Queen, a rivalry that threatens to make New York go the way of Atlantis. To stop it, M will have to call in every favor, waste every charm, and blow every spell he’s ever acquired—he might even have to get out of bed before noon.

Enter a world of Wall Street wolves, slumming scenesters, desperate artists, drug-induced divinities, pocket steampunk universes, and demonic coffee shops. M’s New York, the infinite nexus of the universe, really is a city that never sleeps—but is always dreaming. Daniel Polansky’s A City Dreaming is available October 4th from Regan Arts.

Chapter 5
Bad Decisions

It began with an argument as to what was the quickest way to get from Greenpoint to SoHo. Stockdale maintained that if you grabbed the Z train from Nassau Street, you could be sipping a gin and tonic on Houston within ten minutes. D8mon, who had never had much luck with the Z, spoke rather passionately for the % train—true, sometimes it did not come for hours, and sometimes it came twice within two minutes, but once you got on, it was a straight shot across the Abandando Bridge, twenty minutes at the very most, and there was a dining car that sold the loveliest little bits of finger food. Admittedly, they only accepted payment in guineas, but one never knew what was in one’s pockets, and sometimes you could trade with one of the other passengers.

It will come as no surprise to anyone who has ever ridden the New York subway system, that vast esophageal labyrinth, that there is more to it than the MTA will admit. Indeed, there are few places in which the world that M inhabited and the world known to the rest of us parallel each other so closely. Who, standing on a trash-strewn platform in a far corner of Brooklyn after midnight, has not had the sensation that if they let the 3 pass them by, the next train would offer passage to some strange and foreign existence? Who hasn’t waited until right before the door closed, only to see their conviction dissipate in the face of reality’s cold waters, and the certainty that the next train won’t roll past for another half hour?

Well, I tell you—if you had held to your fantasy for five minutes longer, if you had let that 3 slip by, you might have been privileged to watch while the Ø train rolls into the station, plopped down on a crushed velvet seat, put your boots up on the sterling silver railings, and let it whisk you home in style. Or perhaps that evening the Alkally Special would deign to make its appearance, universally regarded as having the most comfortable private rooms since the decommissioning of the Orient Express.

On the other hand, you might also have been unlucky enough to take the last spot on the Kafka Limited, which takes a whopping two and a half hours to go from Union Square to Van Cortland Park, is always packed, and smells worse than the urinals at a professional football game. Or stepped unthinkingly onto a southbound Herbert Express, which is said to lead into the maw of the sort of creature large enough to swallow a subway train, though of course no one has ever ridden it and come back to say for certain. So maybe you did all right, sticking with your reality.

“My watch stops working any time I get on the %,” Stockdale said. “And by the time I get off, I can’t remember where I was going or when I was supposed to get there.”

Stockdale and M had been friends for longer than he could remember. This was a literal fact, not an exaggerated piece of sentimentality. He was a decent enough chap, apart from being ramrod straight, rather bigoted, long-winded, overly enamored of his own person, and, above all, utterly, determinedly, deliberately British. He dressed like a country squire and carried himself like the hero of a Kipling story, an affectation made all the more curious by his being an ethnic Pakistani and thus on the wrong side of the White Man’s Burden.

“My kind of trip,” M said.

“Oh, it’s a pleasant enough interval, no doubt about it—but try telling some bird that you’re two days late for drinks because you got caught up playing whist in the dining car of a train that—so far as she’s concerned—never existed.”

D8mon laughed. D8mon had the best pompadour that M had ever seen on a man of East Asian descent—one of the best pompadours he had ever seen period. D8mon sometimes seemed very clever and other times only seemed sort of clever, which to M’s mind was a very dangerous medium. D8mon was rather new to the game, and M had heard that he could do some things with technology that other people did not seem able to do.

D8mon pulled a package of clove cigarettes from inside the pocket of his jeans, no easy task as they seemed to be painted over his legs. “Zenegal of Bombast would be the person to ask about this,” he said. Zenegal of Bombast, the Graffiti Prince and High Priest of the Cult of Funk, had been the acknowledged expert on the intricacies of the subway system since it had been opened—and, rather curiously, for some time before that as well. “But I’ve heard he’s in Sao Paulo.”

“I heard an invisible wind picked him up from the ground one day, carried him screaming off into the clouds,” Stockdale corrected.

“So either way, he’s not here to break the tie,” M said.

The conversation turned to Zenegal of Bombast. Where he was, if he was dead, what he had done before he had been made so.

“Did Zenegal ever tell you about the time he got to the Nexus?” Stock-dale asked.

It is axiomatic that all roads, if you follow them long enough, connect to all other roads. The Nexus was the concrete realization of this hypothesis. Previous incarnations had seen it as a dusty crossroads, a hostelry, and a coaling port, but these days, in keeping with the zeitgeist, it was a subway station.

“Yes,” M said. “Many, many times.”

“You believed him?”

“I didn’t entirely not believe him,” M said, taking a sip of his gin and tonic. There was a tattoo of a steam engine below his left wrist. “He said it was a long ways, but if you made it, you could hop a train anywhere you wanted, a straight shot, no connections.”

No one said anything for a while, mulling over that possibility in silence.

“I’ve always had some hankering to get a good look at Shimla, back when it was the second city in the empire,” said Stockdale.

“I’ve never actually been to Tokyo,” D8mon admitted, rather ashamedly. “I keep meaning to go, and something keeps coming up.”

Where it was that M wanted to go, he didn’t say. Regardless, when Stockdale stood up wordlessly, leaving enough cash on the table to cover the three of them—in short, when it was clear that the challenge had been offered—he was not slow in taking it.

It was a bad decision. They had no real motivation in heading toward the Nexus, no plans and no provisions, nothing but a few words from an absent friend with which to begin their quest. And one thing about Zenegal was that, in spite of, or at least in addition to, being the Graffiti Prince and High Priest of the Cult of Funk, he had a rather loose relationship with the truth. But the thing about good decisions is that making them exclusively turns out, curiously, to be the worst decision a person can make; it leads to ruination, to a business-casual existence, to eating takeout and watching network sitcoms.

In short, a bad decision is required to even things out every so often, and M was feeling up for making one that afternoon. Perhaps Stockdale and D8mon felt the same, or perhaps they were both foolish enough to mistake their bad idea for a good one. M was never entirely clear on the point, and afterward, what with how the whole thing ended, he never really felt like discussing it.

* * *

The Q from Seventh Avenue started normally enough, hipsters crawling their way into Manhattan for an evening’s entertainment, no odder or more surreal than your average ride on a New York City subway system, so fairly surreal. They got off at Kings Highway, six or seven stops down the line. M rarely rode the Q and so was not sure if Kings Highway was a real place or not, real in the sense of existing in the reality that M had been born in, rather than some other to which they were playing tourist. If it wasn’t his world, it was another similar enough not to stand out particularly, and they slipped onto the B without experiencing anything unusual. But fifteen minutes later, at Grand Flatroad Station, the train was suddenly packed with bipedal insects, not quite man-size, dressed in gilded-age hand-me-downs. One of them touched a spindle-haired tendril to his bowler hat and chittered something.

“No,” M answered, realizing with a shock that he had understood the question without difficulty, “I’m not sure if this train goes to Moss Bottom Road. I’m not exactly from around here, you see.”

The insectoid clicked its mandibles together. M found himself staring into the thing’s multifaceted eyes and had to remind himself to answer.

“Thanks for the suggestion—I’m not sure we’ll be staying long enough to see the sights.”

It bobbed its antennae back and forth in understanding, then turned to the paper it held in one of its… hands? feelers? claws? The headline read Prime Minister Agrees to Trout Negotiation—War with Prussia Averted.

“Peace in our time!” Stockdale said, rather too loudly.

The mass of surrounding creatures edged away uncomfortably.

“Don’t be an ass,” M muttered

At Idlewyld Station they snagged the back table in the dining car of a Victorian-era steam-engine train. It looked like a Victorian-era steam-engine train, and the people occupying it looked very much like Victorian-era citizens, but the meat that D8mon was picking looked distinctly greenish, and M was fairly certain the waiter had asked if they wanted “fish, chicken, or wyvern.” M stuck with gin, sipped it while staring out the window at a rural version of Brooklyn, quaint villages and bucolic forest scenery.

Suddenly the car door opened and a pale-faced woman burst in. “Come quick! For the love of God, come quick! It’s the Admiral! He’s been murdered!”

“Well, this is me,” M said, dabbing his lips with his napkin and standing. “I absolutely refuse to get involved in another locked-room mystery.”

“I should say not,” Stockdale affirmed, grabbing his cigarette case off the table and following M out.

D8mon forked a last streak of green meat into his mouth before joining them.

* * *

They were sitting on the Four Humours Express, surrounded by men in buckskin shouldering tarnished blunderbusses and dour-faced women in homespun cotton. On the seat across from M, a bony child held a fat pig. Whether the Four Humours Express was the vehicle that would take them all west—assuming that was where they were going—or if it would only leave them in front of a waiting fleet of Conestoga wagons, M could not possibly say.

“What time is it?” asked a loud voice from the other end of the train, followed by some introductory music playing from a tinny boom box.

“Showtime!” answered his hype man.

“Christ damn it,” M said.

The skinny child across from M gaped in horror.

“I hate showtime,” D8mon said.

“Everyone hates showtime,” Stockdale said.

“I haven’t enjoyed watching anyone break-dance since Kool Herc was on the decks,” M added.

“Maybe they’ll just do some juggling.”

“Or recite a poem.”

“Even worse.”

But when they got off the train five minutes later, M was smiling. “Credit due,” he said, “that was amazing.”

“I didn’t think it was possible to fit a squirrel up there, let alone a badger,” Stockdale responded, lighter by twenty dollars.

Our three adventurers were taking dinner at a bar in the vastness of St. Alban’s Station, which did not exist on any of the subway lines that M was aware of, though M very much thought it should have. A small establishment but bustling with folk of literally all sorts—day traders and MTA workers and Soviet cosmonauts and slumming international royalty, Brazilian vaqueros in leather chaps and bullwhips, spindly punk kids with safety pins stuck through their lips and eyebrows, white-clad Buddhist monks ordering red ale via hand signals so as not to violate their vows of silence. There was sawdust on the ground and a giant blackboard hanging over the bar read:

Beer 5¢
12 Oysters 10¢
Fancy women, gnomes, and cyborgs not welcome

“An admirable entrance policy,” Stockdale observed to the barman as he brought over three more pulls of stout.

“These are the best goddamn oysters I’ve ever tasted,” D8mon said, slurping one out from its shell.

“Your first time in here?” asked the man sitting next to them, bullet-headed, the chain of a watch coming out of one pocket and the butt of a revolver sticking out the other.

“Our very first time,” Stockdale said, “though, Lord willing, not the last.”

“Where you from?”

“Crown Heights,” M said.

“Crown Heights? You aren’t from one of those New Yorks where the Brits won in ’76?”

“If you call disentangling yourself from a bunch of ungrateful provincials losing…” Stockdale began. It was Stockdale’s considered belief that the British Empire did right in leaving the subcontinent and wrong in leaving everywhere else.

M cut over him. “Our New York is part of the United States, by the grace of God.”

But this wasn’t quite enough for their new companion, who was staring over at Stockdale in the way that a person might stare at someone before hitting them. He was barely more than five feet, but every inch seemed made of hard oak and scrap metal. M was wondering if maybe he could convince D8mon to fight him and then eat all of D8mon’s oysters while he was so engaged.

Though it didn’t come to that, because all of a sudden Stockdale raised his half-empty glass of beer toward the sky and said in his speaker’s corner voice, “To the Apple herself, the beating center of the human race, mad and fierce and lovely. There was never in all the worlds a woman more beautiful or more heartless.”

“To New York,” M said.

“To New York,” D8mon said.

“To New York,” the stranger added.

Everyone drank what was left of their beer. In a fit of civic pride, everyone ordered another glass and drank that as well.

“When did you say you were from, exactly?”

“2014,” Stockdale said.

“2016,” D8mon inserted.

“Yes, right—2016.”

“Hell’s bells, that’s a few years past expiration. I suppose you don’t see many of these, when you’re from?” he asked, pulling at the ends of his handlebar mustache.

“Actually, a lot more frequently than you’d think,” M said.

The stranger didn’t quite know what that meant, but he was in a good enough humor to overlook it. “What are you boys here for, then?”

“We’re heading to the Nexus.” D8mon was drunk enough for his voice to carry a few stools down.

“That’s a ways.”

“You ever been there?”

He shook his head. “The ¿ train should take you as far as Fourth Via Station. You want to get any farther, though, you’re going to need to find yourself a berth on the Alighieri Special.”

“That’s an ominous title.”

“It’s aptly named. If you’re set on going, I can tell you this much: The line goes through some of the… infernal regions. The train itself is safe—nothing can touch you while you’re on it. But the things that live round those parts are a tricky bunch—if you step out, you’re theirs. And that”—he shuddered—“doesn’t bear thinking about.”

But they did think about it then, for a while, the three companions and probably the stranger as well, who added, “You sure you aren’t better off having a couple more oysters and then heading home?”

Actually at that point M wasn’t at all sure of this fact, but there was no way at this point to bow out gracefully, and after a moment, Stockdale—who never missed an opportunity to utter an epigraph—answered for him: “Death or victory!”

“I wish you the latter,” the man said, toasting their fortune.

* * *

They had been waiting on the platform of Fourth Via Station for about half an hour when a strange rattle could be heard moving toward them. Fourth Via Station looked like it was located in one of the realities that never got over having knights and so forth—the floor was cobblestone rather than concrete, the only illumination came from the flickering torchlight, and the name of the station was hung on an elaborately embroidered tapestry, complete with heraldry. Below it a filigreed hourglass hung from a wall arm, falling sand indicating the arrival of the next train.

The platform was empty, except for M and his two companions. It seemed to be late in the evening. It was very dark, at least, but then torches don’t shed as much light as neon bulbs.

It was these torches that revealed the source of the rattling. They looked at first like children, an impression aided by the fact that they coasted forward on old-fashioned roller skates, orange wheels sewed into burlap. But even by the dim light that conjecture faltered almost immediately. Their bodies were too thick, their skin a strange mixture of white and green, like a corpse that had been left in water. They wore heavy leather jackets and bright red ski caps, and their teeth were narrow, nasty little points.

One had a length of chain in his hand that he swung back and forth in a fashion unsuggestive of amity. He called out in a language that seemed to have a lot of C’s and W’s stuck together. M didn’t speak it, but he understood a taunt regardless of the idiom.

“What do we have here?” D8mon asked, though it was obvious enough in the broad strokes.

“We call them redcaps,” Stockdale informed him. Actually, Stockdale’s people would have called them Rakshasas or something to that effect, but M did not think this was the time to deal with his friend’s false consciousness.

“I’d call them trouble,” M muttered.

They circled the three travelers like a pack of wolves that had recently seen the film Xanadu, to torture a metaphor rather cruelly. One of the bogies took Stockdale’s lapel between two of his clawed fingers, rubbed at the fabric, and smiled rapaciously.

“What ho, chap,” Stockdale began, stiff-arming the goblin back a step. “You’ve got some cheek, all right, to place hands on a gentleman.”

Stockdale’s new admirer chattered fiercely in his unseemly tongue. One of his confederates stopped in front of M, staring like a hawk at a coney. He had a string of bone fingers on a chain around his neck, and the coat he wore was emblazoned with scenes of slaughter and cruelty. M was wearing only his street clothes, faded jeans and a leather jacket, and he didn’t have any weapons on him that you could see. But after a moment, the goblin faltered, looked down at his roller skates, and backpedaled into the dark.

There was a brief moment when M thought maybe they’d be able to bluff their way past, but then there was the sound of loosed steel and one of the goblins was angling a rusted dagger at Stockdale.

Hari Kumar Stockdale was many things: He was a lover of nineteenth-century adventure stories. He was a frequent wearer of hats. He had once seen service on a whaling ship. He could not use chopsticks.

He was a very hard man to kill. Inside of his jacket pocket was a gravity knife, a four-inch handle with a blade much larger, and then it was outside his pocket, and then it was open. If M knew Stockdale at all, and M did, this was one of the happiest moments of his life, playing Aragorn in the dim outskirts of reality. Worth the trip, you had best believe. And he proved himself up to the challenge, neatly dodging the goblin’s attack, pivoting and responding in a fashion that left the green-skinned creature bled white and tumbling, gracelessly, into the train tracks.

The remaining hobs shrieked and faded back the way they had come.

“You don’t really carry that everywhere, do you?” M asked.

“Only when I leave the house,” Stockdale said.

“Where are they going?” D8mon asked, sounding a bit worried. It belatedly occurred to M that he didn’t really know D8mon all that well, knew him to get a drink with maybe, but not to stand back-to-back against the rising tide.

“To fetch us some tea and scones, I would think,” M said. But just in case he was wrong, they overturned a couple of the nearby benches, barricading themselves along the platform.

There was a horn blast that made M think of a hanged man shitting himself, and then they rolled out of the darkness four deep, carrying knives and chains and planks of wood with nails sticking out of them. They hooted and they hollered and they screamed madness in their gutter speech. Stockdale held his blade aloft, looked ecstatic to be doing so. One of the goblins came closer than it ought, and Stockdale’s counterfeit Caliburn struck a second time, and the thing screamed and fled backward, missing an ear and much of its face.

“The blood of Edward the Black runs in my veins!” Stockdale bellowed. “William the Marshal and John Churchill! Chandragupta and Zahir-ud-din Muhammad Babur! I am Hari Kumar Stockdale, and I will die with my boots on!”

M was happy that someone was having a good time. The pack, the scrum, perhaps even the mob of goblins, were now wary of the barricade and of the flashing blade that hid beyond it, contented themselves by skating back and forth just out of reach of melee weapons and shouting.

D8mon pulled an iPod out of his pocket and held it up in his right hand, pointed skyward. It crackled and sparked for a quarter of a second, and then there was a sound like a MIDI thunderclap and a streak of light seared the chest of the foremost redcap, before dovetailing and hitting two more behind him. The rest scattered back into the darkness.

“Not bad,” Stockdale said.

“Thank you,” D8mon said. “I wish I’d brought my laptop, then you’d really have seen something.”

“What’s the hourglass read?” M asked.

D8mon looked over his shoulder for a minute. “There’s less sand in the top half than previously.”

“Lovely.”

“They seem to have slacked off, at least.”

But then the platform began to, if not shake, at least resound loudly enough that one could be forgiven for thinking it was shaking. The thing that lumbered into the torchlight did so on its own two feet, rather than gliding along on a set of wheels. The thing did not seem graceful enough to remain upright, had it been roller-skating, though it made up for its lack of agility by being huge and muscled and mean-looking. It was twice the height of M at his shoulders, its skin was the black-green of a bad bruise, its tusks, somewhere between walrus and elephant-size, jutted out from its jowls. In one hand it carried a club fully the size of a normal man, knotted and warped as the thing’s skin, thick metal apples on chains hanging from the business end.

“If you were thinking of saving the day in some heroic and unexpected fashion,” Stockdale said to M, “now would be the time to do so.”

M took a deep breath, smiled, and hopped up over the barricade. “Bill!” he said, strutting forward toward the monstrosity. “I haven’t seen you since the ten-year reunion, back in ’08!”

The ogre cocked his head at M, a task made somewhat difficult by the fact that its skull seemed to be attached directly to its overbroad shoulders. Its club hung forgotten in his off hand. After a moment it croaked an unintelligible response.

“And how the hell have you been? You were planning to set up a distillery in Inkinshire, if I remember correctly—double malt, you’d promised me. How’d that end up going?”

Bill made the sort of sound which, were it coming from your car, would suggest you needed to have your brake pads replaced.

“And Madge? How is Madge these days? I hope you held on to her, she’s a good egg if ever there was one!”

Another shrill squeal of a similar type.

“I hate to make a break for it, Bill, what with us not having seen each other in so long—but my train’s just a moment or two out, and it would be a damn shame if I missed it.”

Bill grunted something that sounded rather regretful.

“Don’t suppose you could do me a solid and keep this riffraff off our backs? Bad element, you know. Not to be trusted and so forth.”

Bill nodded and smiled, exposing crooked green teeth the size of M’s hands. Then it turned and let out a bellow that flickered dark the nearby torches, and began to wade back the way it came, its club swinging lustily.

Things screamed in the dark.

M returned to the other end of the barricades and the astonished looks of his comrades. “Confidence is nine-tenths of everything,” he explained.

The screams grew louder, so loud that they nearly drowned out the arrival of the train, which had the facade of a Gothic church, and no windows.

“Where’s it going?”

“Gotta be better than here,” Stockdale said, holding the door until his companions could enter.

But as M took a seat and looked back the way he had come, he saw that above the door was a stained glass panel reading, “Abandon all hope…” and he thought to himself, Fuck.

 * * *

The Alighieri Special was in a state of furious decay. The standing bars were bent, most of the seating had been torn out, and there was trash everywhere. The lights flickered on and off. The scent of urine was almost overpowering. It was somewhat worse than your average L train.

“Happy Valley Station, next stop,” a voice said.

“Rapists’ Corner, next station,” it said again a few minutes later.

“Your Mother Never Loved You, change for the 4 train, the B train, and the Long Island Railroad.”

“That’s a bit much, don’t you think,” D8mon asked, licking his lips.

“Isn’t it just?” Stockdale commented.

The doors closed, the train began to pull away.

D8mon lit his last cigarette and tucked it into his smirk. “They’ll have to do better than that.”

But of course, they did.

A few stops later M’s cell phone began to emit a loud, bleating shriek, as if transmitting from an abattoir. Stockdale’s began to do the same a moment later. For some strange reason D8mon’s iPhone began to play a remix of a Katy Perry song. D8mon swore that he didn’t have any Katy Perry on his iPhone, but no one believed him. By the next stop, all of their electronic devices were behaving in ways contrary or at least unrelated to their normal functions. M’s phone showing something that seemed like a pornographic snuff film involving humanoid bunny rabbits, though M did not look at it long enough to be sure. When the door opened next, they tossed their mobiles onto the platform. M half expected something to rise up and catch them—severed hands of the hell-caught dead—but nothing did. M did not suppose he’d be so lucky if he stepped outside himself.

The urine smell was replaced with rotting flesh, and then cotton candy, and then rotting flesh again. The voice coming over the loud speaker began to tell the story of a child being tortured and eaten, a few sentences each stop (“and then they sharpened their knives against her sternum, and then they nibbled at the corners of her clavicle”). M ignored it, and eventually it stopped. For a very long time afterward the names of the station were the only thing that could be heard, and mostly they seemed straight from an unpublished Hp. Lovecraft story, consonants crammed inconsiderately against one another.

“Grand Army Plaza, next stop.”

D8mon perked his head up all of a sudden. “Did you hear that?”

“Yes,” M said.

“The conductor said Grand Army Plaza.”

“I heard him.”

There was no need to observe that this was the first stop in however long they had been on the train that existed in the reality they came from. Grand Army Plaza Station was deserted but looked like it always did, like it had a thousand other times that M had seen it. Part of his soul died when the door closed.

“Next station will be Franklin,” the speakers announced.

“I’m going to take it,” D8mon said, standing up swiftly. “It could be our last shot.”

M didn’t move. “It’s a trick,” he said.

“What?”

“Franklin doesn’t come after Grand Army Plaza.”

“Of course it does,” D8mon said, wanting it to be true enough to speak with certainty.

“It does not.”

“You’re out of your mind.”

“If you’re heading downtown, then it goes Franklin, Eastern Parkway, Grand Army, Bergen. If you’re heading uptown, it’s the reverse. But either way, Franklin does not come after Grand Army Plaza.”

“They’re trying to fuck with you,” Stockdale said.

“They already have,” D8mon insisted. “Don’t you get it? This is hell, right here, the three of us stuck smelling piss for the rest of eternity.” And after he said it, he stood up, took a few steps toward the door, and wrapped his hands around one of the poles.

“Hell is not an existentialist play,” M said, “it involves knives and hot poker sodomy. Do not get off this train.”

“D8mon,” Stockdale repeated, “do not get off this train.”

The train started to slow down. D8mon was still standing at the doorway, wide-eyed. “How long have we been here?”

“I don’t know.”

“Could it be years?” D8mon asked. His eyes were blinkered. His pompadour, however, was still immaculate.

“It could be centuries,” M said, and if you didn’t know any better he seemed very much to be losing his temper. “And it doesn’t matter—because hell is eternity, my friend, and it’s an eternity with needles in your eyes, and I assure you what we have at the moment is preferable.”

D8mon reached into his pocket and came out with a small caliber handgun, the kind of thing that might be used to rob a convenience store. The way he held it, M got the sense D8mon hadn’t had a lot of practice. Then again, you don’t need a lot of practice to shoot two friends at close range. “If you don’t have the balls to make a move, that’s your business,” he said. “But I’m not going to spend the remainder of forever stuck in a subway car.”

“You’d rather be blowing razor-blade chewing gum?” M asked, but he put his hands up, to show that he had no intention of obstructing the man.

Stockdale looked like he was going to say something, but then he too shrugged and leaned back against the wall. D8mon was a big boy. He could make his own mistakes.

The train opened, and D8mon took a few steps closer to it, till he was skirting the exit. Then he whooped loudly and leaped onto the platform.

The doors shut sooner than they should have, or at least sooner than M thought they did on normal trains, like a trap closing, or a coffin. D8mon was quickly lost from sight.

M sat back down. Stockdale did also. M began to silently rethink his policy on bad decisions.

“Eastern Parkway, Grand Army, then Bergen?” Stockdale asked.

M didn’t answer. The names of the stations went back to being incomprehensible or horrifying and often both.

* * *

The door opened. “Last stop,” said a voice from the speaker.

They sat there a while, a long while, still half fearing it was a trick. Finally an attendant came on and asked them politely to leave, and they allowed themselves to be ushered off.

The Nexus was bright and very clean and seemed to be built mostly of crystal. It was vast beyond comprehension, but somehow its vastness was not intimidating. Smiling travelers moved by swiftly but without any sense of hurry, commuters on their way somewhere, youthful travelers with bright eyes and heavy backpacks on their way anywhere. On a board stretching upward to the sun every conceivable destination flickered past, the letters rattling over one another loudly. They found their way to an information kiosk, where a pretty young woman in a sky-blue outfit smiled at them. “Can I help you get somewhere?” she asked pleasantly.

M looked at Stockdale. Stockdale looked very tired. M thought he probably looked the same.

“Crown Heights,” M said.

The attendant smiled and nodded and gave them directions. It was a straight shot, she said, thirty minutes to Nostrand.

They found their platform, the train arriving not long thereafter. They found a seat. Half an hour later the doors opened on reality, for whatever that was worth. It was morning. M and Stockdale found their way to a nearby breakfast joint, had a bite to eat, smoked three cigarettes each, and then went home to sleep.

No one ever saw D8mon again. No one has seen him yet, at least.

Excerpted from A City Dreaming © Daniel Polansky, 2016

We want to send you a copy of Jonathan L. Howard’s The Fall of the House of Cabal, the fifth book in the Johannes Cabal series, available September 27th from Thomas Dunne Books!

Johannes Cabal, a necromancer of some little infamy, has come into possession of a vital clue that may lead him to his ultimate goal: a cure for death. The path is vague, however, and certainly treacherous as it takes him into strange territories that, quite literally, no one has ever seen before. The task is too dangerous to venture upon alone, so he must seek assistance, comrades for the coming travails.

So assisted—ably and otherwise—by his vampiric brother, Horst, and by the kindly accompaniment of a criminologist and a devil, he will encounter ruins and diableries, mystery and murder, the depths of the lowest pit and a city of horrors. London, to be exact.

Yet even though Cabal has risked such peril believing he understands the dangers he faces, he is still underestimating them. He is walking into a trap of such arcane complexity that even the one who drew him there has no idea of its true terrors. As the snare closes slowly and subtly around them, it may be that there will be no survivors at all.

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Here’s a story: a young woman is kidnapped by a sailor and forced to sail away with him and a crew. The sailor ‘loves’ the woman, but she never asked to be dragged onto the boat. A storm blows up, kills the sailor and crew, and drives the boat northward. The woman finds herself alone at the North Pole, thousands of miles from family, with no crew to help her get home. But then a mysterious portal opens in front of her. Rather than face a cold and lonely death, the woman walks through, and finds herself in a strange new world where all the creatures speak, where there is only one language, pure monotheism, and absolute peace. The creatures welcome the woman as their Empress, and they all work together to make scientific discoveries.

This is the basic plot of “The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World”, which was written by Duchess Margaret Cavendish, and published in 1666. As the intrepid archivists of Atlas Obscura have pointed out, it may be our earliest example of science fiction and it was written by a shy, lonely woman who, despite being mocked for having career aspirations, married fantasy, proto-sci-fi, and philosophical thinking 150 years before Mary Shelley’s classic Frankenstein.

Margaret Cavendish was born in 1623 to a family of relative means. She became a Maid of Honor to Queen Henrietta Maria, whom she followed to France in exile during the English Civil War. When she returned to England, she was a Duchess with a loving, supportive husband, and between his influence and her own charm and intelligence she was able to observe experiments at the British Royal Society, write, and, increasingly, seek fame through outrageous social behavior. If she’d been born a man, she would have been a poet, and probably a dandy, snapping off witticisms right along with Alexander Pope. Instead she went through painful ‘treatments’ that were meant to help her bear children, and she was mocked as “Mad Madge” by other nobles.

Now obviously there are other contenders for “earliest sci-fi author”, and you could argue that this story is more in line fantasy/philosophical exercise typical of the time—Cavendish does write herself into the book as the Duchess, a friend of the Empress. The two women are able to disembody themselves, and as (gender-free!) souls they travel between the worlds, occasionally possessing Cavendish’s husband to give him advice, particularly on sociopolitical matters.

But, the reason I accept Cavendish as a science fiction author is that her story is fueled by her study of natural philosophy. She (like Mary Shelley, later) attempted to take what was known about the world at the time, and apply a few of the ‘what-ifs’ of scientific experimentation to it, rather than just handwaving and saying “God probably did it.” The Empress employs the scientific method in her new world, investigating the ways in which it differs from her own. Cavendish also writes of advanced technology, as Atlas Obscura observes:

[She] describes a fictional, air-powered engine that moves golden, otherworldly ships, which she says “would draw in a great quantity of Air, and shoot forth Wind with a great force.” She describes the mechanics of this steampunk dream world in precise technical detail. All at once, in Cavendish’s world, the fleet of ships links together and forms a golden honeycomb on the sea to withstand a storm so that “no Wind nor Waves were able to separate them.”

Unlike Mary Shelley, Cavendish published her book under her own name, and it was actually included as a companion piece to a scientific paper, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, where it was probably supposed to provide a fun story to help lighten the dry academic work it was paired with. You can read more about Cavendish and her work over at Atlas Obscura. And if that isn’t enough feminist proto-sci-fi for you, Danielle Dutton has written a novel based in Cavendish’s life, Margaret the First, which was released earlier this year, and you can read the full text of The Blazing World here!

Three more retro Neil Gaiman covers have been unleashed upon the world! I already wrote about Robert E. McGinnis’ gorgeous new cover for American Gods, and now Gaiman has shred the next three in the new paperback series on his journal Here’s Anansi Boys, done in the style of a 1960s comic novel. I have to assume that Mr. Nancy would be pleased with hipness of this lounge scene, and Gaiman loved it so much he bought the print!

This new edition will hit stores on October 25th. Gaiman also shared the equally fantastic covers for Stardust and Neverwhere, and I’ve posted them below the cut.

Stardust looks like a wonderful 1970s homage to The Last Unicorn:

And Neverwhere is pure 1970s Gothic:

So lovely. You can learn more about the covers over at Gaiman’s journal (be warned: post also contains adorable baby pictures) and if you want even more book cover awesomeness, you can check out The Art of Robert E. McGinnis!

My earliest memories of Red Dwarf are, like the show, slightly unreliable. There’s no specific moment where Red Dwarf appears in my consciousness. Just this feeling of recognition as, in the barren, almost totally SF-free TV wastelands of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, I discovered something that felt designed for me. The Seventh Doctor and Ace had just walked off into the sunset and, occasional ITV show aside, there was very little genre TV making the rounds. We took what we could get—and while there wasn’t much of it, what we got was pretty good.

…Not to mention surprisingly dark. The early seasons of Red Dwarf are very nearly Waiting for Godot…In Space. Dave Lister, the last human left alive millions of years in the future, decides to go home. His only companions are the sentient (And DAPPER as hell) descendant of his cat, a well-meaning but increasingly obsessive mechanoid called Kryten, an endlessly laconic AI, and the hologram of Dave’s roommate, Arnold Rimmer.

Who he hates.

And who hates him.

Those early years still hold a special place in my heart because, like most adolescents, I was an occasionally mean-spirited part-time screw-up, so seeing a bunch of kindred spirits managing to survive (and, on occasion, win) was really reassuring. It was like the show was exactly my age and had bad days, just like me.

Admittedly my bad days didn’t tend to involve holes in time, but that wasn’t through want of trying.

So, phase one was scrappy adolescence. That didn’t last. Season Three onwards had some serious (for the BBC) money thrown at it and you could tell. There were actual monsters, and genuinely lovely model-based special effects; things occasionally blew up. It was GREAT, even if the character-based comedy took more and more of a backseat in the new “SF with jokes” approach. The changes worked for the show, as did the production upgrade—all of which led to a huge run of episodes that rarely dropped below “good” and were often fantastic. One in particular, “Gunmen of the Apocalypse” is a near-perfect mashup of classic “Holodeck gone wrong,” “Fantastic Voyage,” “Historical episode,” and “Evil computer virus” plotlines. It’s not just a great half hour of Red Dwarf, it’s a great half hour of TV and it won a completely deserved Emmy. If you watch no other episode, go for that one. Although “White Hole” from Season Four is also great. As is “Legion” and “Dimension Jump” and… well you get the idea.

The show’s constant, steady flight path of evolution and improvement was interrupted for three years between Season Six and Season Seven. Six had been rushed into production and the repercussions of that were felt for years. Chris Barrie, a lynchpin of the series as the wonderfully self-loathing Rimmer, left the show, and the story arc that had been established over Season Six was hand-waved away. Changes in filming meant the studio audience was removed, too, and Chloë Annett was drafted in as Kristine Kochanski, Lister’s formerly dead girlfriend. The show was more chaotic than ever, dangerously rushed in places, but still had flashes of brilliance even without the energy of a live crowd. In other words, Red Dwarf had survived adolescence just like its audience had—and, just like us, it had been hurled out into its twenties with more responsibilities and more potential.

So, like us, it was frantically making it up as it went along. Sometimes that didn’t work—but when it did, it was still glorious.

For all the changes, most of those two seasons still work really well. Rimmer’s send-off episode, “Stoke Me A Clipper,” is a surprisingly dignified and moving capstone for his time on the show, and Annett’s Kochanski is great. She’s refined where the others are slobs, precise where they just kind of wing it, and the culture clash is huge fun to watch. Annett was handed an impossible task and nailed it first time out, filling the void left by Barrie in the cast and making the show into something new and interesting and viable.

Which Seasons Eight and Nine pretty much completely ignored.

There comes a time in our lives when we all make some amazingly bad choices. The longer a TV show survives, the more likely it is to do the same. Just as my late 20s were a time of terrible hoodies, a short-lived obsession with duffel coats, and a brief over-fondness for rap metal, Red Dwarf made some very bad calls at this point in its lifespan. More filming changes, greater reliance on CGI, and an interesting arc that was not only utterly fumbled but remained completely unresolved mark these two seasons as the low point of the show. “Back to Earth,” the miniseries that constitutes Season Nine is the absolute nadir. The ten-year hiatus that took place between it and Season Eight is obvious in every scene of its badly-realized, badly-executed Blade Runner pastiche, along with some incredibly unwelcome, clunky metafictional elements. The show’s worst sin is committed here: namely, writing out Kochanski in a way that promises a resolution but, like every story arc in Red Dwarf’s history, fails to deliver. The end result is the 90-minute equivalent of those tubes on the Enterprise marked “GNDN.” Goes nowhere, does nothing.

Again, the show went away.

(This time it deserved to.)

But this time, it learned from its mistakes.

Season Ten went before cameras, and a returning studio audience, at the end of 2011. Kochanski was still gone but there was a sense that the show, like its audience, was moving past the flamboyant screw-ups of its previous decade. It was still entirely too blokey, but the comedic edge and focus on character had returned, as had a slight dash of the early darkness. Plus, there was a tangible sense of everyone having fun again—the show had weathered the storm, along with its audience, once again.

A friend of mine got tickets to one night’s filming and it was amazing. There was a real sense of camaraderie not just between the cast and crew, but amongst the cast, crew, and the audience. One set hadn’t been built yet, but the cast and crew had agreed to perform the entire episode so that we could get a sense of the whole story. Each cast member was greeted with a standing ovation—none more raucous than Robert Llewellyn’s—and there was a fun, relaxed atmosphere that carried across to the show. Although the sight of Llewellyn with his reading glasses over his Kryten mask unfortunately did not.

That episode, Season 10’s finale, “The Beginning” is one of the show’s finest. It’s a sweetly designed shout-out to the original pilot episode that serves as a signoff, an acknowledgement of past mistakes, and a promise of more to come. It’s also features a typically sneaky, and for once deserved, win for Rimmer—everything old is new again, and this time the course that the boys are steering looks much more confident.

It’s an awful cliché to say that Red Dwarf is an institution, so instead let’s think of it as the best running joke on UK TV. It’s a show that’s remained true to its core theme (four mostly-well-meaning idiots versus the universe) but constantly changed its approach through countless production, cast, and budget disasters both on-screen and off. It’s spawned some excellent novels, a surprisingly great tabletop RPG, and a legion of fans that will follow it to the ends of time (as well as to the excellent official website). Untidy, scrappy, endlessly ambitious, and always enthusiastic, it’s moved from being the near lone standard bearer of British TV SF into being something dangerously close to respectable.

But never too close.

So, welcome back, chaps! It’s great to see you for Season Eleven—although this year, maybe bring Kochanski back? She deserves it.

Now, take it away, Skutters!

[Red Dwarf XI premieres in the UK on Thursday, September 22^nd on Dave.]

Alasdair Stuart is a freelancer writer, RPG writer and podcaster. He owns Escape Artists, who publish the short fiction podcasts Escape Pod, Pseudopod, Podcastle, Cast of Wonders, and the magazine Mothership Zeta. He blogs enthusiastically about pop culture, cooking and exercise at Alasdairstuart.com, and tweets @AlasdairStuart.

They are mice and bears and things and whenever I stumble into their worlds they are all unfailingly polite.

But maybe I don’t want to have to tea with them. Do I want to have tea with them? Let’s see.

Dormouse, Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland

I like you Dormouse. I truly do! There are few things I love more than small sleepy animals. But I like to sit and drink my tea, not engage in impromptu therapy sessions with Hatters. Hence, you sit here, near the bottom of the list, snoring away. Gosh you’re cute.

The Depressed Bear, The Magicians

Illustration from Lev Grossman’s The Magicians by Chad White

Sorry, Bear. You may invite me to hang out at your tavern with plenty of honey-drenched tea, but first of all, you are one lachrymose ursus. Second, you tend to have a pretty one-track mind, and I think we’d exhaust your one or two conversational topics in about five minutes. Third, and probably most important: is Quentin Coldwater at the tavern?

Because I am not listening to that.

Mr. and Mrs. Beaver, The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe

You guys set out a mean tea spread! (Although your take on fish and chips is a little odd…) And since I’m assuming that I would only meet you if you were sheltering me, a Daughter of Eve, from the White Queen, it’s fair to say that I’m a fan of yours.

But. None of that will matter in the moment when I have to stand face-to-face with a toddler-sized mammal with teeth the size of my fist. I love you Beavers, honestly, but I don’t think I can watch you eat a scone.

Plus I don’t think I want to get into this weird Aslan-cult-prophecy thing you keep talking about.

I hope you can forgive me.

Worm and His Missus, Labyrinth

Worm, I think you’re great. I appreciate your attempt to help me with the Labyrinth, and it pains me to hear you say you’re “just” a worm. You are a worm of distinction! And I do, truly, appreciate your kind offer of tea with your Missus.

How am I supposed to fit through the door? I see the door. I know it’s worm-sized. What exactly is your plan? Is this some TARDIS-foolery, where suddenly your wormhole is enormous inside? Fine. We’re in a fantasyland, I can accept that, but that does not solve my central conundrum: how do I fit through your worm-door?

You come up with an answer to that, Worm, and then we’ll talk about tea.

TUMNUS, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

So if walking through the woods on a snowy evening I should chance to see a streetlight, I’ll be a little confused? And then if I chance to see a faun carrying his groceries home I’ll… probably faint, to be honest. But after that, Tumnus? Once you’ve dropped your groceries in the snow and shaken me awake, if you do me the honor of inviting me into your home? I know I’ll be in the presence of EPIC TEA.

Come on, you’re a creature who risks your own life to protect a human you’ve only known for an hour! You chose to be turned into a statue rather than betray your new friend. Tumnus, you are a ride-or-die faun, and I’m guessing you’ll create a tea that will reflect your noble soul.

Say I’d like some jam with my scone? Tumnus is all like “Strawberry preserves, orange marmalade, or LEMON CURD, motherfucker? You have your choice of all three in my cave that has been transformed into a cozy library.”

So what I’m saying, Tumnus, is that after you’ve roused me from my shocked sleep, I’ll say hell yes to your kind offer of tea.

However, you’re still not quite Number One.

Ratty, Mole, and Badger, The Wind in the Willows

Illustration of The Wind in the Willows by Michael Hague

If I’m sailing down the river with you, Rat and Mole, there is a very strong likelihood of a picnic breaking out, and since this would be a pastoral Edwardian English picnic, there won’t be any annoying bees or ants, just cute bees and ants. That will probably help us set up the blanket.

When the two of you inadvertently crashed Badger’s winter hibernation, he totally dropped his earlier plan of sleeping for three months and welcomed you in. Badger is warm, friendly, and trustworthy, basically, the best-scenario tea companion. Badger, you never would have voted for Brexit. You would have kept The Great British Bake Off on the BBC where it belongs.

I’m imagining Christmas Tea at your home, Mole. The sideboard creaks beneath the weight of the pies you’ve prepared. The cheese and pickle sandwiches. The Cornish pasties. I’m imagining Mole carefully unspooling honey into my steaming mug as I drowse by a crackling fire, ornaments glinting on a fragrant pine tree… and then I could spend New Year’s Eve getting wrecked with Toad.

The next time a rat or a mole or a badger approaches me and asks me in to tea, I’m saying yes.

Although, if she’s being honest, Leah Schnelbach prefers coffee. Come talk to her about tasty beverages (and the fantasy creatures who love them) on Twitter!

The MacArthur Foundation, which “celebrates and inspires the creative potential of individuals” by awarding “genius grants” to artists, scientists, and other influential people, has announced its 2016 MacArthur Fellows. Among the 23 honorees (a list which includes a physicist, bioengineer, sculptor, poet, playwright, and more) is graphic novelist Gene Luen Yang, recognized for his work in creating diverse characters and finding innovative ways to teach coding and other skills through his art and writing.

MacArthur fellows (Hamilton‘s Lin-Manuel Miranda was one last year) receive a no-strings-attached grant of $625,000 spaced out over five years, timed for the period of their lives in which such financial support would make a difference. This recognition of Yang’s impact on comics and literature comes eight months after he was the first graphic novelist to be named a National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature by the Library of Congress. The MacArthur Foundation praises Yang for his work on such First Second titles as American Born Chinese and the “ambitious” Boxers and Saints. They also highlight his latest series, Secret Coders, through which “Yang is leading the way in bringing diverse characters to children’s and young adult literature and confirming comics’ place as an important creative and imaginative force within literature and art.” (Read an excerpt from Paths & Portals, the second Secret Coders book.)

Here’s a short video following Yang around as he discusses his work and his passions:

But while he looks calm and collected in the video above, Yang told The L.A. Times that he was thrown for a loop when he got the news:

I didn’t have a first thought; it was mind-numbing shock. For three days. When I thought of the MacArthur Awards before this, I thought of scientists. I know they give awards to other writers and artists as well, but I primarily thought of it as an award for scientists, cancer research. So it was totally mind-blowing to me — it was awesome. It felt like it was out of left field, but in the best way possible.

And if you want an idea of how these geniuses use their grants, check out a series of Reddit AMAs in which they explain exactly that. Yang’s plans are especially touching:

This is what I think: I see myself as having three big roles. One, I’m a member of a family — I’m a dad, I’m a husband, I’m a son; two is, I am a cartoonist; and three is, I’m a teacher. And I want to put part of these resources to each of those things. I don’t think I’m going to build a palace,  but it will at least help me send two of my kids to college. I want to hire an intern — there’s a [cartoonist] school out in Vermont that I’ve always been an admirer of. Having an intern would both help me professionally, and it would be a way of easing somebody into the comic book industry. As a teacher, my primary role as a teacher is as the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature through the Library of Congress, and there are a number of different things we’ve been talking about for a while, but we weren’t sure where the resources to do those things would come from — and now I have access to resources. I’m hoping I’ll be able to do some of those things before my term ends at the end of 2017. So those are the three categories that I want to throw money at.

Congratulations to Yang and the other 2016 MacArthur Fellows!

Paramount Pictures has released a set of five new teasers for Ghost in the Shell, its adaptation of the manga of the same name. At 10 seconds each, the teasers are shorter than any of these sentences, but they at least give you a feel for the world. In addition, it’s our first look at Scarlett Johansson in action.

The first and last teasers are the most interesting, with the greatest cyberpunk feel. We’re introduced to an almost robotic-looking masked geisha:

Cyborg police officer the Major (Scarlett Johansson) gets online:

“What are you?”

An ominous encounter:

The Major stumbles upon something:

Here’s the synopsis:

Based on the internationally-acclaimed sci-fi property, Ghost in the Shell follows the Major, a special ops, one-of-a-kind human-cyborg hybrid, who leads the elite task force Section 9. Devoted to stopping the most dangerous criminals and extremists, Section 9 is faced with an enemy whose singular goal is to wipe out Hanka Robotic’s advancements in cyber technology.

Ghost in the Shell comes to theaters March 31, 2017.

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.

This week, Mahvesh talks with writer Nisi Shawl about the Samuel Delany tribute anthology Stories for Chip, and her new alternate history novel Everfair—available now from Tor Books, you can read an excerpt here. Their discussion touches on the writers Nisi admires, and the things steampunk has the potential to be.

Listen to Midnight in Karachi Episode 64 (25:29):

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Midnight in Karachi Episode 64: Nisi Shawl

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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!

In August 2017, the World Science Fiction Convention, a.k.a. Worldcon, will take place in Helsinki, Finland—the first time the convention has been held in a Nordic country, as they mark the occasion of Worldcon 75. Citing the growing global interest in science fiction and fantasy, co-chair Jukka Halme said in a press release, “This is an opportunity to reach out to new audiences and literally bring the world to Worldcon.”

Worldcon 75 also announced the five Guests of Honor, who “come from five different countries and reflect the diversity in science fiction and fantasy”: Johanna Sinisalo, Nalo Hopkinson, John-Henri Holmberg, Claire Wendling, and Walter Jon Williams.

Crystal Huff echoed her co-chair’s comments, saying, “In the early days, the science fiction community was dominated by the US, and accordingly most Worldcons have taken place either in the US or in English speaking countries. But in recent years this has changed rapidly. Many of the most interesting works today are created in other languages, and those new voices bring new energy and new ideas to the genre. We see the beginning of a new era of diversity, not only in colour, but also in gender, beliefs and abilities. To bring Worldcon to Helsinki is a natural, but important step in this development.”

Here’s more information about the Guests of Honor, including some of their work and accolades:

• Johanna Sinisalo, of Finland, is one of the few science and fantasy fiction novelists to win the prestigious Finlandia Prize.
• Nalo Hopkinson, of Jamaica, a novelist and academic currently based at the University of California Riverside, has won a World Fantasy Award for her work, among other honours.
• John-Henri Holmberg, of Sweden, is a prolific editor, critic, publisher, and translator, co-authored The Tattooed Girl, an Edgar-nominated analytical biography exploring the work of his friend and colleague Stieg Larsson.
• Claire Wendling, of France, is known widely for her work in comics and game art, and was nominated for the Angoulême Grand Prix 2016.
• Walter Jon Williams, US, has written more than 30 works including cyberpunk, near-future thrillers, space opera, and post-cyberpunk new weird epic fantasy.

Worldcon 75 will take place August 9-13, 2017 at the Helsinki Messukeskus convention center in Finland. For more information, check out the Worldcon 75 website.

I was that kid who, every night before I went to bed, would check my closet for a way into Narnia. Every year, I put “magic wand” on my birthday wish list—and I didn’t mean a toy wand. I wanted the real deal. At age eleven, I was crushed when Merriman Lyon didn’t drop by to tell me I’m the Seeker, and I’m still waiting for my late-admissions letter to Hogwarts. So pretty much, I was destined to be a fantasy writer from a very early age.

My upcoming book The Queen of Blood, the first in a new epic fantasy series called The Queen of Renthia, is set in a world where it’s dangerous to not have magic—and even more dangerous to have it. It’s a world filled with bloodthirsty nature spirits, and only certain women have the power to control them and keep them from killing all humans. Daleina desperately wants to be one of those women—a queen—but she wasn’t born with much magic in her. She’s the opposite of the Chosen One; it’s not supposed to be her destiny to save the world, but she’s determined to work hard to change her fate. So she teams up with a banished warrior to try to become powerful enough to protect her people.

Here are five books that make me—like Daleina—wish I had magic:

Deep Wizardry by Diane Duane

See also Harry Potter and The Dark is Rising. Ordinary kid suddenly discovers he or she has magic. This is the kind of book that makes you believe you can have magic too. In the first book of the Young Wizards series, Nita finds a book in the library called So You Want to Be a Wizard, and by taking the oath she reads inside it, she becomes a wizard. I’m listing the second book in the series because it’s my favorite—it has talking whales and the best shark ever written.

Wild Magic by Tamora Pierce

One of the things that makes Tamora Pierce’s books so fantastic is that you turn a page and—whoa, there’s the best thing that could have happened to those characters at that particular moment! She’s my inspiration whenever I’m plotting a novel. Wild Magic centers on Daine, a girl with a very powerful magical gift of talking to (and becoming) animals, and it will make you want to talk to animals (if you didn’t want to already).

The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley

I love training montages, and this book has my favorite training montage of all time, wherein Harry transforms from an ordinary young woman into a swordswoman who can single-handedly face a demon army. The magic in this book is less in-your-face-powerful than others on this list, but it’s there. Plus there’s a kind of magic inherent in the experience of reading this book—this is the kind of book that makes you feel like you too can be better and greater than you dared dream you could be. Also, it has a nice horse.

The Belgariad by David Eddings

This series will always have a special place in my heart. These books—along with Terry Brooks’s Shannara, Anne McCaffrey’s Pern, and Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar series—shaped my early love of epic fantasy. (And yes, I know the Pern books are technically SF, but they have a similar take-you-away-to-a-faraway-land feel.) But I’m singling out The Belgariad because the Will and the Word is such a beautifully clear and powerful magic system. Definitely the type of magic I’d want if I were stuck in a fantasy landscape.

The Libriomancer by Jim Hines

As to magic I want to have here in the real world… I’d love to have the magic power from The Libriomancer. It’s a unique and brilliant power that has endless uses. Isaac Vainio can “reach” into any book and pull out items from it, bringing them into the real world. His fire-spider Smudge is one of the only spiders (aside from Charlotte) that I don’t want to smush.

How about you? What books make you wish you had magic?

Top image: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001)

Sarah Beth Durst is the author of ten fantasy novels for adults, teens, and children, including The Lost, Vessel, The Girl Who Could Not Dream, and her latest book, The Queen of Blood. She was awarded the 2013 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award and has been a finalist for SFWA’s Andre Norton Award three times. She is a graduate of Princeton University, where she spent four years studying English, writing about dragons, and wondering what the campus gargoyles would say if they could talk. Sarah lives in Stony Brook, New York, with her husband and children.

How to hold a torch is almost certainly on the list of things I never thought I’d have to write about here. I mean, it’s pretty straight-forward, right?

I thought so, yet here I am.

I just returned from my first foray at DragonCon, you see. Due to other obligations, I was there for only a day, but I had a genuinely fine time with some genuinely fine people. I sat on a couple of panels, which are a great way to meet fellow authors and amazing fans. The whole thing was just grand and I hope I’m back next year (with more panels and more fans!).

Anyway, on one of these panels one of my fellow authors wanted to make a point about how mistaken most folks are about the reality of what I’ll term “adventuring”: there are a great many matters about which Hollywood and other popular culture have miseducated the public. He was observing, in other words, that there’s a gap betwixt real reality and perceived reality, and that those of us who know the real reality would do well to try to bring the perceived reality closer to it.

Thumbs up from me. I mean, I’m a professor of matters medieval whose career (and this column) is built on that gap … so, yeah, I totally agree. Educating is a good thing.

My fellow author then went on to stake a claim for his own expert status relative to the clearly uneducated and inexperienced masses. He made this point by standing up and announcing that people don’t even know how to hold a torch.

Further down the table, I perked up.

Said expert first held his hand (with its imaginary torch) out in front of his face. This is how everyone thinks you’re supposed to do it, he said. But holding it in front of your face blinds you!

In a dramatic sweep of his arms he then shifted his (still thankfully imaginary) torch into position behind his body. This is how you do it, he said. Only a fool would do it any other way!

Boom. Mic drop. Expertise established.

Only … well, um, that’s still not how you hold a torch.

I didn’t say anything at the time. It didn’t seem right to hijack the panel from the beginning with a discussion of proper torch-wielding techniques. And for all I know, said author was tired and just made a mistake. It happens.

But just in case …

Torch-holding 101

Since I can’t dramatically swing my arms around in front of you, let’s see how not to hold a torch by using the example of Medieval Bob, a terrible stick figure on a terrifying journey (which simultaneously serves as evidence of my complete non-expertise in artistic endeavors).

Out on an adventure, Medieval Bob has entered a cave. Unbeknownst to him, a bonnacon lurks within its lightless depths. Indeed, at the very moment in which we join our hapless hero, the bonnacon is deploying its acidic flatulence upon another traumatized warrior somewhere in the near darkness ahead.

Frightened, Medieval Bob lights his torch. First, he tries holding it in front of himself:

Silly Medieval Bob.

Nope. That isn’t going to work. He’s blinded by the light.

Well, it just so happens that Medieval Bob once heard an expert opine that torches ought to be held behind oneself. So he gives it a shot and finds that while he’s no longer blinded by the light (woo-hoo!) … he’s now casting his own shadow forward upon his path (doh!). He also realizes he faces other problems. In no particular order:

• He’s in a sub-optimal stance to move freely.
• In attack or defense, he’s disabled half of his abilities by taking his torch-hand out of use.
• He significantly increases the chance of setting himself on fire.

Still not quite right, Bob.

What will Medieval Bob do? Is all hope lost?

It is then, in this moment of potential despair, that a lightbulb quite anachronistically goes off over his head. Medieval Bob remembers that the sun doesn’t blind him when it’s high in the sky. Neither do the ceiling lights in Merlin’s house. If he could find a way to get the light of his torch over the line of his brow, why surely …

That’ll do, Bob!

Huzzah! And behold! By the light of the Two Trees, there’s that dastardly bonnacon with its dung of doom! Medieval Bob needed only to lift his arm to see it clearly without blinding himself or hampering his ability to fight it.

Yes, folks, if it works for Lady Liberty and Muhammed Ali, it works for Bob and you and me.

The Greatest.

As his arm tires, Medieval Bob will later discover that the torch held to his side will also work quite well. It is perhaps not quite as enlightening as an overhead hold — for the same reasons that ceiling lights tend to illumine a room better than floor lamps — but it’s a bit easier on the shoulder over the long-term.

Indeed, if you look across ancient and medieval statuary, reliefs, manuscripts, and other artifactual evidence — in other words, if you look at what the folks did who actually lived in a world of torches — you’ll see again and again that these two holds are standard. Here’s a 14th-century manuscript illumination of the Last Supper that actually depicts both:

Image from the Velislaus Bible, fol. 145r.

Long story short: Torches aren’t held in front of your face or behind your back. They’re held high above the brow or off to the side of the body.

Michael Livingston is a Professor of Medieval Literature at The Citadel who has written extensively both on medieval history and on modern medievalism. The Gates of Hell, the follow-up to The Shards of Heaven, his historical fantasy series set in Ancient Rome, comes out this fall from Tor Books.

We’re thrilled to share the cover for Passing Strange, a new novella from World Fantasy Award winning author Ellen Klages. Set in 1940s San Francisco and inspired by pulps, film noir, and screwball comedy, Passing Strange is a story as unusual and complex as the city itself.

Head below for the full cover, illustrated by Gregory Manchess and designed by Christine Foltzer.

Passing Strange arrives January 24, 2017 from Tor.com Publishing. From the catalog copy:

San Francisco in 1940 is a haven for the unconventional. Tourists flock to the cities within the city: the Magic City of the World’s Fair on an island created of artifice and illusion; the forbidden city of Chinatown, a separate, alien world of exotic food and nightclubs that offer “authentic” experiences, straight from the pages of the pulps; and the twilight world of forbidden love, where outcasts from conventional society can meet.

Six women find their lives as tangled with each other’s as they are with the city they call home. They discover love and danger on the borders where mystery, science, and art intersect.

Pre-order Passing Strange at the links below, or from your favorite retailer:

iBooks | Kindle | Nook

Disney animators faced the 1970s in a glum mood. After Walt Disney’s death in 1966, it seemed more than possible that the storied animation department would be closed down completely as the company moved on to focus on other, more profitable things such as family friendly live action films, theme parks, and merchandise. The Aristocats had earned back its costs, but not much more than that, and critics had noted—or claimed to have noted—the lack of the distinct Walt Disney touch. The animation studio’s budget was slashed. About all the animators really had on their side was company history, which virtually identified “Disney” with “animation.” To continue the success of the Disney brand, they argued, the animation studios needed to continue to produce full length films. Disney executives were not quite persuaded, but did release just enough—just barely enough—money to let the animators cobble together another full length film, Robin Hood.

Like many Disney projects, plans for this film had been tossed around for decades, starting in the early 1930s, when Walt Disney, looking for additional projects, came across the tale of Reynard the Fox. For Disney, Reynard’s tale had a couple of advantages: it featured a cute animal, a Disney strength. As a medieval tale, it was fully in the public domain, freeing Disney from needing to pay for the copyright. It also had one major disadvantage: in the original story, Reynard is a trickster and, worse, a thief. Disney had just managed to get away with a little lying wooden puppet in Pinocchio, and a Dog With a Past in Lady and the Tramp, but an outright thief as a protagonist was a line too far. The initial financial failure of Pinocchio (1940) which had featured a fox antagonist, was also discouraging. A virulently anti-Semitic version of the story in Dutch, printed in 1941, proved the final straw.

Walt Disney still liked the idea of a fox character, however, and art director Ken Anderson—who would eventually, much to his irritation, be given script and creative credit for Robin Hood—continued to produce various sketches of animal characters and suggestions for incorporating the fox character into various other films: as cartoon segments in the live action Treasure Island (1950); as the antagonist against Chanticleer, a rooster, based very loosely on Edmond Rostand’s Chantecler, a project that was eventually dropped in the 1960s; and a Western featuring talking animals.

This is more or less how animators arrived at the incoherency that would be Robin Hood: it was a mess of all of the above ideas, none of which were, in fact, Robin Hood. Robin Hood only entered the picture (forgive the pun) when Ken Anderson realized that calling the fox Robin Hood would allow the film to keep the fox as a trickster and a thief, like Reynald, while still being—mostly—a hero, like Robin Hood. A nod to that contradiction does appear early in the film, when Little John asks Robin Hood if they are good guys or bad guys. Robin says they are good guys, and then the subject is pretty much immediately dropped for hijinks, apparently never troubling Little John’s conscience again.

The decision to use the Robin Hood name did not mean that the animators had any interest in researching the Robin Hood legends to add elements of those to their trickster fox/rooster/Western film. Instead of checking literary sources like Sir Walter Scott’s 1820 Ivanhoe or Howard Pyle’s 1883 The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, animators instead watched Robin Hood films, chiefly the 1938 classic The Adventures of Robin Hood, featuring Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland. That choice had some profound effects. First, The Adventures of Robin Hood bursts with color—showing off the Technicolor process was one purpose of the film—which in turn helped create the look of the Disney film, which keeps most of its characters in similarly bright colors. Most of the Disney backgrounds were based on the locations and sets Warner Bros built for their film: a positive, since Warner Bros deliberately designed those castle sets to allow for plenty of stunt work and movement, something Disney would take advantage of in some later scenes in the film. This also meant bringing in a character new to the literary Robin Hood sources: Disney’s Lady Cluck, directly based on WB’s Bess, a character created specifically for the great Una O’Connor (probably best known on this site for Bride of Frankenstein) in the earlier film.

And since the earlier film had not made the slightest pretense towards historical accuracy—or any sort of accuracy—that helped free the Disney film from any such pretense as well, allowing Disney to do such things as, say, keep the original sketches of the Sheriff of Nottingham walking around with a badge straight from the Wild West, a holdover from the earlier concept of the talking animal Western film.

At the same time, however, The Adventures of Robin Hood had been created in part to demonstrate that Warner Bros could make something other than cheap gangster films and to sneak in a highly anti-Nazi, pro-American intervention film right past censors who had strictly forbidden Hollywood studios to produce any such thing. Neither of these were huge concerns for Disney animators, so part of the fierce energy behind the earlier film was lost in this animal adaptation, replaced by elements from the previous conceptions of the fox character.

Speaking of which, I honestly don’t have a problem with the concept of an anthropomorphic Robin Hood, but some parts of the execution are, shall we say, a bit odd, starting with, what are North American raccoons doing in medieval England, and continuing with why, exactly, is Maid Marian, a fox in all senses of that word, the niece of two lions? Was she adopted? All of the other families and couples are grouped by species, so yes, this stands out. And why doesn’t Maid Marian—still a fox—eat Lady Kluck, a hen? Or the little rabbits that end up in her castle yard? Is it possible—barely possible—that she vanishes from most of the movie not because the animators had no idea what to do with her, but because she knows she has to eat a rabbit, now, and decides to indulge in that need far away from Nottingham?

(Look, I can’t be the only person who has thought this.)

The most distracting thing about the characters, however, is probably not that they’re animals, but that although about half of them sport proper British accents, one apparently arrived straight from Alabama, one is singer Phil Harris, and the others sound like they’re straight out of a Western—because, as it turns out, all of their voice actors were straight out of a Western, known specifically for those roles. This is hardly the only instance in a film filled with anachronisms and “uh, what is going on here,” but it’s one of the more distracting.

Also mildly distracting: the decision to start the film with pictures not of animals, but of a storybook filled with human knights and kings, before zooming into a rooster, Alan-A-Dale, who informs us that animals tell the Robin Hood story very differently. That’s the last of the humans, as the rooster starts to sing—later, this song would be attached to a hamster dance, but let’s try not to get too depressed in this post—introducing the characters and their voice actors, including a few celebrities, before trying to draw out the length of the picture by including little bits of animals chasing each other that—spoiler alert!—is taken straight from later scenes in the film, and by taken straight, I mean they’re the same animation cels.

It was a budget saving stunt the film would use again and again. Baloo from The Jungle Book and Little John in this film happened to be voiced by the same actor, Phil Harris, so animators simply reused the character design—and in some frames, reused the animation cels from the earlier film. Things got worse from there. If, while watching Maid Marian lift her skirts to dance in the forest to the sound of Phil Harris’ cheerful “The Phony King of England” you are suddenly struck by the resemblance to a similar dancing moment from Snow White, this would be because it is the similar dancing moment from Snow White: the animators simply traced the earlier animation. And if, in this same scene, you find yourself asking, wait a minute, isn’t that one of the cats from The Aristocats? Yes, yes, it is—in another reuse of the actual animation cels from a previous film.

When Robin Hood didn’t simply trace from previous Disney films, or reuse animation from previous Disney films, it cannibalized its own animation sequences, frequently and obviously reusing them. The crowd reaction scenes in the archery competition sequence are arguably the worst offenders, but Robin Hood also reused sequences with the church mice, the vultures, and flying arrows. In one case, to be fair, this creates a pretty decent visual joke, but mostly it results in a lot of visual, obvious repetition. The film also has a moment where Robin and Marian give each other a long, intense stare, allowing the camera to move in closer to each unmoving face—not at all incidentally allowing the animators to skip drawing several additional cels. A later scene with Prince John and Sir Hiss pulls the same trick.

As a final dismal note, all of this animation featured thick, rough, black lines, instead of the fine colored lines that Disney had created in earlier films and would start creating again in just two more films (with The Rescuers), an unavoidable consequence of the still unrefined xerography process. It’s not completely ugly, but it helped show the budget strains.

Also showing the strains: the plot, what there isn’t of it, since instead of a plot, the film went with various loosely connected bits: Robin Hood and Little John robbing the king, then a detour to meet a little bunny who is having a very very sad birthday until Robin Hood shows up, then another detour to meet Maid Marian and Lady Cluck, then the archery tournament, with the initial parts more or less lifted, except for the balloon, from the Errol Flynn film, then another detour with Maid Marian and Robin Hood, then a sad sad moment at the Nottingham jail and church (mostly to allow the animation to slow down and use fewer cels for several frames, in yet another cost cutting technique), before the final confrontation between Robin Hood and Prince John, which is only the final confrontation because after that, King Richard shows up, and, well, that’s it.

Sorta connecting this are the characters, including the little bunny who, as it turns out, wants to be an archer, and assorted other bunnies, and a turtle, and some poor church mice, some vultures under the impression that they are in a Western film, and of course Robin Hood, Baloo—er, that is, Little John—Friar Tuck, the Sheriff of Nottingham, and, singing along, Alan-A-Dale. Most are unmemorable, with two exceptions: the villains, Prince John (voiced by Peter Ustinov) and Sir Hiss.

Prince John is often regarded as the most inept of the Disney villains, in large part because his plan to capture Robin Hood at the archery tournament fails spectacularly, because his underlings openly mock him, and because he manages to set his own castle on fire. Not exactly strong evidence for competence, I admit. Oh, and he’s more than a bit sexist, with his insistence that women can’t be bandits. Granted, in this film, women aren’t bandits—these particular women are just Robin Hood and Little John in unconvincing disguises, but still, his reasoning is not exactly great here. And even his loyal and evil underling Sir Hiss objects to one of Prince John’s plans as being too evil.

But against this, Prince John also manages to succeed in most of his goals. He amasses sacks of gold and manages to throw nearly the entire population of Nottingham into jail—and not just briefly, either. His plan for drawing Robin Hood out does, indeed, draw Robin Hood out: if the rest of his minions had been even slightly more competent—and had Lady Kluck not flown to the other side—it might even have solved his Robin Hood problem. And he comes extremely close to killing Robin Hood, more than once: indeed, in one scene the characters are briefly convinced that Robin Hood is dead. And in the end, Robin Hood never does completely defeat Prince John. That’s King Richard.

No, Prince John isn’t so much inept as pathetic. And here is where—on top of the film’s other issues—I find myself cringing more than once. Because Prince John is laughed at, again and again, by the other characters, because he still cries for his mother and sucks his thumb, despite being a grown-up. Of sorts.

I cringe, partly because I can identify, closely. It took me awhile to break that particular habit—sucking my thumb. But partly because Prince John is getting mocked for being a child—much like his audience. He ends the film doing hard labor, presumably the first step in becoming a grown-up. It’s deserved: he has, after all, spent the entire film mostly lounging around while his minions busily dispossess the good people of Nottingham of their gold, and it’s no doubt about time that he put in some actual labor.

At the same time, however, I can’t help but feel, as the film goes on, that what I’m really watching is not so much the story of Robin Hood, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, but rather the story of a little lion with very little self-esteem and deep set parental issues, who ends up getting bullied by nearly everyone except for his one friend, and after finally getting his vengeance, ends up in jail.

What I’m saying is, I don’t necessarily know who to cheer for here. I’m back to Little John’s question at the beginning of the film: Hey, Robin, are we the good guys, or the bad guys? That question is inherently part of most Robin Hood retellings, granted, since they are stories that cheer on a thief, but I think perhaps Walt Disney was on to something when he said that having a crook as a protagonist in an animated film for kids had issues.

Robin Hood can be, and has been, read as a metaphor for what was more or less going on at Disney at the time—the benevolent, wise, rightful ruler (Walt Disney) gone, replaced by various inept villains (the incoming executives) trying to choke every last cent out of the morose survivors (the animators) and ok, fine, I can see it that way. But although this may be an accurate metaphor, it’s not always a particularly entertaining one.

On a lighter note, Robin Hood has several cute visual jokes here and there—like having the royal trumpeters be trumpeting elephants, get it, ha ha? And the moment when Sir Hiss ends up floating away in a balloon, only to be shot down later. It’s not at all period, and I’d love to know how anyone at a medieval fair managed to find latex for a balloon, but maybe they used a pig’s bladder. Or maybe they got Little John, with his distinctive American accent and general feeling that he’s just attending a modern Renaissance fair, to pick up some balloons before he wandered into the film. However, since this is soon followed by an even greater anachronism as Lady Cluck and various rhinos start tackling each other to the strains of what sounds suspiciously like American football music (mostly to allow Robin Hood to sneak in yet another repeat of the same cheering crowd sequence) I suppose I shouldn’t complain. Plus, if we get too into this, we’ll also have to figure out where Robin Hood and a later band player picked up their sunglasses.

I’m also amused by the moment when the Sheriff of Nottingham saunters into a castle, singing Little John’s none too kindly song about Prince John, and getting Sir Hiss to join in—it’s a rather catchy tune, after all, so I’ll buy this. Even if this does result in crushing taxes on the animal population. All of that ended up being rather better than I remembered.

Robin Hood did decently in its initial box office release and a few later rereleases. The company still occasionally releases Robin Hood trading pins and fine art from time to time, and Disney caricature artists will draw you as a fox character if you ask. (That may not actually be related to Robin Hood, but I thought it was important to note.) Otherwise, the film fell into obscurity, remembered, when it’s remembered at all, as either one of the weaker Disney films or the film that helped to bring us that hamster dance moment, however incidentally.

But for all its flaws, Robin Hood had two major effects on the history of animation. First, this was the film that brought Don Bluth, who would later create his own animation studio, back to Disney and trained him in character animation. And second, its box office take was enough to prevent Disney executives from shutting down the animation department—though for the next several years, Disney would focus on adaptations of literary sources instead of original films.

Next up: Fantasia 2000.

Mari Ness lives in central Florida.

When the mysterious fog of the Ruining crept over the world, the living died and the dead rose. Only the walled city of Viyara was left untouched. The heirs of the city’s most powerful—and warring—families, Mahyanai Romeo and Juliet Catresou, share a love deeper than duty, honor, even life itself. But the magic laid on the Juliet at birth compels her to punish the enemies of her clan—and Romeo has just killed her cousin Tybalt. Which means he must die.

Paris Catresou has always wanted to serve his family by guarding the Juliet. But when his ward tries to escape her fate, magic goes terribly wrong—killing her and leaving Paris bound to Romeo. If he wants to discover the truth of what happened, Paris must delve deep into the city, ally with his worst enemy… and perhaps turn against his own clan.

Mahyanai Runajo only wants to protect her city—but she’s the only one who believes it’s in peril. In her desperate hunt for information, she accidentally pulls Juliet from the mouth of death—and finds herself bound to the bitter, angry girl. Runajo quickly discovers Juliet might be the one person who can help her recover the secret to saving Viyara.

Both pairs will find friendship where they least expect it. Both will find that Viyara holds more secrets and dangers than anyone ever expected. And outside the walls, death is waiting…

Rosamund Hodge’s Bright Smoke, Cold Fire is available September 27th from Balzer + Bray.

Such Sweet Sorrow

If he does not come soon, she may not have the heart to kill him.

For an hour now, she has sat at the foot of her bed, gripping her sword in its crimson scabbard. Over and over she whispers, I am the sword of the Catresou. I was born to avenge the blood of my people.

But her traitor throat aches and her coward eyes sting. Once upon a time, she believed she was only a sword. Now she fears she is only a girl.

She hopes he will come soon. She hopes he will never come.

The casement swings open.

She stands. Her numb hands draw the sword and let the scabbard drop.

His dark eyes are wide as he climbs through the window, but there is no surprise in them when she greets him with the point of her blade, held to his throat.

He looks strangely small. Just a boy, with messy black hair and a sweet laugh she will never hear again.

Her only love, and now her only hate.

“I see you,” she says, speaking the ancient words for the first time, “and I judge you guilty.”

He sighs, and the corner of his mouth tips up just a little. “I know,” he says, and he kneels and bares his neck.

She can smell the blood on him. He is clean: he took the trouble to bathe before coming here to die. But he spilled the lifeblood of her kin, and she can smell that guilt upon him—she can almost taste it. Her body shakes with the desire to kill him for it.

She wants him to fight. She wants him to beg. To flee, to threaten, or persuade.

Ever since she met him, she has most terribly wanted.

“Look up at me,” she demands, and he does, his gaze as simple and sure as the night she fell in love with him.

“Why did you come?” she whispers. “You knew what I would do. You know what I must do.”

He swallows; she sees the muscles move in his throat, and she thinks of the blood pulsing just below the skin. He is a fragile, perfect balance of breath and heartbeat, skin and bones and blood. A little world entire, most beautifully made—he was her world, and now she is going to destroy him.

“‘Journeys end in lovers meeting.’” She says the words flatly, without tune, but they both remember the sun-drenched afternoon when he sang them to her. “‘Every wise man’s son doth know.’ Why did you come back?”

“Because I’m sorry,” he says hoarsely. “Because I know you loved him. You deserve to avenge him.”

Not because it is her duty. Not because vengeance is written on her skin and the spells that wrote it compel her to obey.

Because she loved her cousin. Because he ruffled her hair and comforted her when she was a little child. Because he is dead and cold now, in a vault beneath their house, his arms sliced open as the embalmers do their work.

And yet even he, her most beloved cousin, never wondered if she wanted to avenge or not.

Nobody ever wondered. Nobody until this boy who kneels before her now.

Slowly she kneels so they are eye to eye, and she lays the sword upon the floor.

“I see you.” Her fingertips trace his cheek; her voice is tiny and soft. “I judge you guilty. But you belong to me now. So all your sins are mine.”

She slides her fingers into his dark hair and kisses him, kisses her dearest sin, again and again. Her heart pounds with the desire to kill him, to wreck and ruin and revenge, but she only clutches him closer, kisses more fiercely, and his arms wrap around her as he kisses her back.

She will not be the one who kills him.

She will give everything else to her family, to her duty, to the adjuration written on her skin.

But she will not give them this.

1

The walls that kept out death could drive you mad.

That was the story Runajo had heard, whispered among the other novices: sometimes, when a Sister of Thorn climbed the central tower of the Cloister to inspect the wall of magic that guarded the city, she would go mad and throw herself down. The other novices liked to giggle about it as they sat up late at night in the dormitory, but not one of them ever went up the tower by choice.

Runajo had volunteered for the duty sixteen times.

Some of the novices thought she was already mad. A few probably thought she was brave. Runajo knew she was neither. She just wasn’t fooling herself, like everyone else in the city: she knew they were all dying, no matter what they did.

The daily inspection started at dawn. It took nearly half an hour to climb the narrow stairs of the tower; despite the early-morning chill, Runajo was sweating when she finally reached the top. She flung open the trapdoor, heaved herself up, and collapsed to the white floor. For a few moments, she did nothing but gasp for breath.

The wind stirred against her face. She heard a soft rustle and looked up.

There was no wall around the rim of the tower’s roof; but there were narrow steel posts, and strung between them, cord after cord of scarlet silk, every inch hung with the slender white finger-bones of those who had been sacrificed to give the wall its power. Each skeleton finger was complete, the bones hung with thread so they could flex in the morning breeze.

Memory clutched at her throat: her mother’s fingers, thin and pale as she wasted away with sickness. When Mother died, one of her hands had rested on the coverlet, and Runajo had seen the last color drain from the knobby joints.

A proper daughter would have gazed at her mother’s dead face and wept. All night as she sat vigil, Runajo had stared at the bony, bone-white fingers and felt nothing at all.

Well, she thought, if you didn’t have a stone in place of a heart, you might not do so well up here.

She stood.

If Sisters went mad at the top of the tower, it wasn’t the wall that did it, but the world: so vast, and yet so very small.

Runajo wasn’t scared of heights, but it was still a little dizzying to look down to the red-and-white domes of the Cloister. Down the steep slope to the white buildings and twisting roads of the Upper City that clung to the sides of the vast, rocky spike. Down to the grimy mess of the Lower City that tangled on the ground of the island around the base of the city spire; and the water around their island shimmering silver in the early-morning light.

This was Viyara, the last city left alive in the whole world. It was the whole world.

Because very close to the far shore was a barely visible line in the water: the line where the walls of Viyara—the translucent, dearly bought dome—ended.

And outside the walls was death.

The wind must have been blowing all night, for the white fog of the Ruining had drawn back from the far shore. Runajo could see pale beaches and rocky cliffs. She could see the green of moss and the spreading branches of trees—the Ruining was deadly only to humans. She could even see the peaks of the mountains, rising out of the fog that swirled around their slopes.

On the far shore lay the ruins of Zucra, the city that had once been the bustling gateway to Viyara, when people came on pilgrimages from all around the world. But now it was crumbling and abandoned. Its stone quays were empty, the ships having long ago rotted away as they waited for sailors that would never come.

Something moved in its streets.

It was so tiny that Runajo could barely make it out, but she still saw the sudden scurrying of a tiny, pale figure in the abandoned streets. No. Two figures.

Revenants. The dead that rose and walked again.

Fear slid up her spine like the touch of a cold finger. Her heart pounded, but she refused to let herself look away, so she watched the two tiny figures scramble down the street until they turned a corner and disappeared.

Runajo let out a shaky sigh.

The Ruining was more than the white fog that killed every person it touched. It had changed the nature of death. Even here in Viyara, behind the walls, the dead would rise again within two days, mindless and hungry for the living. And so the bodies had to be cremated first; the furnaces of the Sisters never cooled.

Outside the walls, there was nobody left to burn the dead. In the early years of the Ruining, revenants had crowded the far shore, hungering for the beating hearts inside Viyara. But over the past century they had slowly wandered away. After all, they had a whole world to walk.

That, Runajo believed, was why Sisters sometimes threw themselves down from the tower. Because standing up here, they had to see what everyone pretended wasn’t true: that death had already won. That Viyara’s walls hardly made a difference. They were all going to die.

It didn’t bother Runajo. She couldn’t pretend she was going to live forever, not after the years she spent helplessly watching her parents die. Up here on the tower, staring death in the face, at least she could fight.

At the center of the tower’s roof was a round hole, about as wide as Runajo was tall. Out of the hole—rising up from a shaft that plunged deeper than the height of the tower, down into the heart of the Cloister—grew the wall. Here, near the base, it looked like seven columns of tiny, faintly glowing bubbles, pressed together into a ring. Overhead, it became transparent as it spread out in a vast dome that covered the city, the island, and part of the water.

Gently, Runajo leaned forward, taking a breath through her nose. The surface of the wall hummed against her lips, then swirled into her mouth.

It was lighter than water, thicker than air. It hummed and almost sang against her tongue; it had a bright, mineral taste, like the scent of sunlight on clean, hot stone.

There was no hint of bitterness, no discord in the not-quite-song. Which meant there were no cracks forming in this part of the wall. No need for adjustments in the spell-weaving chambers far below. But the wall felt thin and faint in her mouth. When Runajo had first tasted it eight months ago, it had been as hot as noon sunlight beating down on her black hair. Now it was barely warm at all.

Tomorrow was the Great Offering, and not a moment too soon. The wall desperately needed the fresh strength it would gain from another human life.

Runajo should have released the mouthful of magic—it was dangerous; if she breathed it in, she would die—but she hesitated, rolling it over her tongue. This was why she volunteered to inspect the wall, again and again. Because the wall had been the last great magic of the Sisters, before they had lost so much of their knowledge. When she tasted it, she tasted those vanished secrets.

Visions flickered through her mind: complex diagrams and blueprints, memories of the foundations of the city. The images were so clear, every line as sharp as a needle’s point, she felt sure that if she could just remember them, she would know all the secrets of the city.

But she couldn’t keep them in her head. They faded too quickly, though she tried and tried to memorize the patterns. Finally, when her tongue started to feel numb, she leaned forward and opened her lips. The tiny mouthful of magic swirled back into the wall whence it had come.

Runajo had to check each of the streams rising out of the base; she took a few moments to rest and regain the feeling in her mouth before she went on to the next. And the next, and the next.

Each time she waited, trying to read the secrets hidden in the foam. Each time, she couldn’t. And each time, the knot of frustration in her chest drew tighter. They didn’t know how this wall worked. They had the ceremonies to keep weaving it, to check for simple flaws and make small adjustments, but they didn’t understand.

They only knew that to keep the wall standing, they had to offer it human lives. And they knew that the need was increasing: in the beginning, they had only needed to sacrifice every seven years. Now, it was every six months.

Her fingers dug into her palms. They were all dying, and nobody wanted to admit how soon. It was the same sort of cowardice that had made Runajo’s mother spend all of Father’s illness prattling about the things they would do as soon as he was well again. Even at the end, when the tumor in his side had turned into an open wound, Mother still whispered to him that next spring they would sit beneath the flowering trees and she would read him poetry.

For all the years of her father’s illness, and her mother’s illness after, Runajo had been a perfect daughter: silent, obedient, still. She had smiled and agreed with the lies. Her only rebellion had been refusing to hope for either of them.

When Mother finally died, Runajo had joined the Sisters of Thorn the next day, because they were the only ones who resisted death in any way that mattered.

And then she had found that they, too, were sick and unwilling to admit it.

Runajo was done with silent obedience. She refused to watch the whole city fall in her lifetime, without even trying to keep it alive a little longer. Without even knowing why the wall was failing.

And she had a plan. She would take the first step this afternoon, at the Great Offering. It was risky, and it was probably going to get her killed.

But at least she would die fighting.

2

It seemed like half the city had turned out to watch a single man die.

Runajo, standing in her place with five other novices, thought all the fuss was a bit silly. People died every day. And the Great Offering was no less regular or essential than carting the dead away to be burned, or tending the sewage pipes that pulled waste out of the city. But because it was done only twice a year, surrounded by the songs and dances of the Sisters of Thorn, it was a great festival, and nobody wanted to miss it.

When they had to kill somebody every week to sustain the city walls, maybe then the thrill would fade.

Maybe Runajo would be able to keep it from coming to that.

“You’re looking awfully solemn,” said Sunjai, and Runajo startled.

Sunjai just dimpled. She was a plump, pretty girl whose dark braids were always sleek and flawless, coiled around her head. Her gray novice’s robe was immaculate as always, her clasped hands primly tucked into her wide sleeves.

“Worried that Romeo has forgotten you?” she asked.

“No,” said Runajo, glancing to see if Miryo, the novice mistress, was listening.

It was not Runajo’s fault that the idiot son of her mother’s childhood friend had spent years fancying himself in love with her, and had kept sending her poems even after she’d entered the Sisterhood. But Miryo was always looking for an excuse to punish Runajo; she’d jump on even a hint of scandal.

“Then you’ll be glad to hear that everyone says he’s still refusing to look at another girl,” Sunjai went on cheerfully. “Perhaps he’s just spent all this time working on a really special poem.”

Probably that was true. Sunjai was the only other novice from Runajo’s clan, and she seemed to know just as much of the gossip from their kin as she did of the goings-on among the Sisterhood.

“I don’t care what you heard,” said Runajo. “And I don’t care if Romeo lives or dies, let alone loves me. Why don’t you go bother Inyaan? I don’t think anyone’s told her she’s glorious in the last five minutes.”

Sunjai patted her shoulder in fake fondness and then went to whisper in the ear of Inyaan, the novice who was the younger sister of the Exalted himself. Unlike the rest of the novices, who were thrilled at the great occasion, she was staring at the crowd with the same blank disdain she directed at everyone in the Cloister

It wasn’t true that Runajo didn’t care if Romeo lived or died. He’d been the closest thing she ever had to a friend, and he had tried a lot harder to be kind to her than anyone else ever had. But his delusion that she had thrown herself into the Cloister out of grief for her parents and needed to be rescued? Insufferable.

If he wasn’t sending her letters anymore, he had probably found another girl to imagine himself in love with, and that was all for the best. He could write more bad poetry, and Runajo could get on with saving Viyara.

It felt like the whole city was gathered now. The Great Offering was held in the grand court at the center of Viyara. It was, perhaps, the most magnificent place in the Upper City. A broad avenue cut straight into the rising stone slope of the city spire. At the end was a round marble dais—wide enough to hold a hundred men—in which the glowing patterns of the city’s magic shifted and whirled. Above the dais, the gargantuan obsidian face of the god Ihom looked out from the white stone wall, as if the rest of his body was sealed into the city itself. Of the nine gods, he had been the first to die, and so it was before his image that human lives were offered now.

The summer sun was blazing and the air was a sodden weight. Even so, people from the Upper and Lower City thronged the court, chattering, laughing, singing, selling sweetmeats and trinkets. Only the three high houses were allowed to stand before the dais. At the center, of course, was the Exalted—a bored-looking young man who ruled the city on the strength of his supposedly divine blood. All around him stood the rest of the Old Viyaran nobility. They were a tall people, dark skinned wth white-gold hair, all of them resplendent in translucent white silks and gold chains.

To the right was Runajo’s own clan, the Mahyanai. They looked like a reverse of the Old Viyarans: fair skin, black hair, their silk robes a swirl of colors, their wide sashes heavily embroidered. Most of the men wore at their hips curving swords in lacquered black scabbards, while the women’s hair was piled atop their heads, wound about gold or silver headdresses.

At their center stood Lord Ineo, his harsh face solemn. Supposedly he ruled the city in all but name, since the Exalted was too lost in his own pleasures to care. For this, the Mahyanai adored him.

Runajo could never decide if she hated Lord Ineo or not. He was Romeo’s father—and no matter how insufferable Romeo could be sometimes, when she thought of how Lord Ineo ignored him, she could happily spit on the leader of her clan. But when her family petitioned Lord Indeo to drag her out of the Sisterhood, he had declared she had the right to sacrifice herself. He’d set her free.

To the left stood the Catresou in sullen ranks: still, dressed in black, and dead silent. Every one of them was masked, because they did not believe outsiders worthy to see their faces; at the center of the crowd stood Lord Catresou, robed and hooded in black velvet, his face completely covered in a mask of gold and rubies. Beside him—dressed in a simple red gown, her face half covered by an ivory filigree mask—stood the Juliet, the nameless girl who had been ensorcelled into being their mindless attack dog.

The Juliet was the pride of the Catresou. They didn’t realize what hypocrites they were, calling the Great Offering a cruel abomination when they were happy to enslave their own children.

Drums had started beating. At the center of the dais, a young Sister prostrated herself before the face of Ihom. The High Priestess knelt behind her with a silver knife; gently, reverently, she kissed each of the girl’s feet and then sliced a shallow line down the sole, from heel to toe.

The girl rose and began to dance, her body twirling and undulating in time to the drums, her bloody footprints spreading across the marble dais. Where her feet touched the marble, light blossomed in the stone, and the glowing patterns bent and shifted toward her. The city was eating up her bloody sacrifice.

The world was made from the blood of gods. The blood of men sustains it now. So said the Sisters of Thorn. Runajo did not believe in the gods, but she didn’t doubt the power of spilled blood.

Nobody in Viyara did.

A low note sounded from a horn. The girl paused, swaying on her feet. Runajo couldn’t help wincing at the trembling line of the girl’s mouth: the volunteers for sacrifice were drugged, but on such a solemn occasion, Sisters were expected to bear all their pain themselves.

The horn sounded again, and then all the people—Sisters, nobles, commoners, even the Catresou—prostrated themselves on the ground. Because this moment was in memory of all they had lost.

The horn sounded again, and they rose. Runajo blinked at the sudden dazzle of light—she had squeezed her eyes shut during the prostration—and when she could see properly again, the young man was being led out to the sacrifice. He was an Old Viyaran this time, which meant he was a volunteer, not one of the condemned criminals that the Catresou dragged out when it was their turn to provide the sacrifice. Golden chains dangled across his bare chest; he swayed slightly under all the drugs.

Runajo thought, If they don’t like my plan, then very soon that could be me.

They’d make me wear more clothes, though.

She wasn’t afraid. Not exactly. But her body felt terribly light and fragile. She was aware of her tiny, rapid heartbeat: the little flutter that kept her among the living and not the dead.

First the young man was brought to the Exalted, who laid hands on him and blessed him; then to Lord Ineo, who bowed gracefully to him; and last of all to Lord Catresou, who remained stiff and expressionless as a marionette as he placed a velvet-wrapped hand on the young man’s shoulder.

Then the Sister escorting the young man turned him around, toward the bloodstained center of the dais where the High Priestess waited. He wobbled on his feet, but gave her huge, dreamy smile. Not every sacrifice died by the hand of the High Priestess herself.

Runajo’s stomach turned uneasily. This wasn’t the first sacrifice she had seen. Before the illness, her parents had taken her every year, starting when she was a little girl who barely understood the pageant unfolding before her.

But six months ago, she’d missed the Great Offering because she was ill and vomiting. This would be the first sacrifice she saw since she’d truly understood what death meant.

The cold emptiness was back in her chest, and her hands clenched into fists, because she couldn’t panic now. She couldn’t.

But as the young man knelt in front of the High Priestess, the feeling rolled over her in waves: a cold, absolute emptiness that left her drifting and hollow, watching the world from what felt like an immeasurable distance. She saw—in flashes—the High Priestess carve the sacred signs into the man’s skin and whisper the sacred words into his ears. But the splendor in front of her didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. She was going to die, and this bright bubble of a world would wink out, and there would be nothing left of her.

Trying to imagine it felt like choking. Her heart pounded—desperately, fleetingly alive.

Nothing. Not even silence. Nothing.

The High Priestess cradled the man’s head. The whole grand court was silent, still and breathless. Her knife flashed.

The man’s lifeblood poured out, the dais flashed with dazzling light, and a great shout went up from the crowd. Horns and flutes and drums and tambourines rang out, proclaiming that they would all live for another six months.

Runajo realized she was trembling. Her nails bit into her palms.

She was alive. Right now—just for now—she was alive. And she had a plan to carry out.

On the dais, several Sisters of Thorn danced around the body in languid movements of stylized grief and reverence. It was their teaching that those who died in sacrifice—or in dueling, or in childbirth—would go to feast with the dead gods, while those who died of sickness or age would serve them, forever less but not cast out into darkness like thieves and murderers and oath-breakers.

Runajo didn’t believe it. Not because of the ancient Mahyanai sages, who said that the gods were a delusion, and that the soul of man was like a candle that guttered in the wind and was gone forever. But because she had seen her mother and father lying dead. She had seen the terrible emptiness in their waxlike faces, and she knew that nothing was left of them in any world.

The High Priestess turned to the waiting ranks of the Sisters and beckoned.

It was time.

Seven of them walked forward: the newest of the novices, who had been with the Sisters only a year and never taken part in any solemn sacrifice before.

The ceremony was simple. They would kneel before the High Priestess, take the knife from her hands, and slice a single cut into their forearms. Their blood would mix with the blood of the sacrifice, signifying their willingness to pour out their lives serving the gods and protecting Viyara through magic that could only be bought in blood.

Inyaan went first, her face a haughty mask. But when she fell to her knees before the High Priestess and took the knife, her hands were shaking. Perhaps she was realizing that even the sister of the Exalted would someday die.

Sunjai went second, and kept her dimples all the way through, but that was hardly surprising. If she had any understanding of her own mortality, Runajo had never seen it.

Then it was Runajo’s turn.

She walked forward, but it almost felt like floating. Her arms and legs were cold and numb.

This was the moment. This was the choice. If she carried out the ceremony correctly, it would be her first initiation. There would be seven more years before she became a full Sister.

She couldn’t bear waiting that long. To be silently obedient one day longer.

Her fingers wrapped around the handle of the knife. She looked at the blood, at the dead man’s gaping wound, at the crowd and the city, the far-off mountains already ruled by death and the blue sky above them.

She raised her left hand. She didn’t make the simple slice she was supposed to; she carved the circle of binding as she spoke the oath she was not meant to swear for another seven years: “By Ihom’s breath and Amat’s silence, I bind myself to the fate of thorns.”

It was a sacred and irrevocable vow. It was blasphemy to speak it before the High Priestess had declared her worthy. And Runajo had just done so in front of all of Viyara.

In the silence that followed, she thought, I hope they at least wait for my trial before they sacrifice me.

3

At last his father was going to come watch him duel.

Paris was in the practice yard before dawn, his arms burning as he ran through the parry he always stumbled on.

He knew he should still be sleeping. Weeks ago, he’d made a plan for this day, and it had included a sensible amount of sleep the night before, and only a brief warm-up in the morning, so that he would be in optimal condition to display his skills.

But no matter how carefully still he’d lain in bed, he couldn’t manage to sleep for more than a few minutes at a time. He kept thinking of what exactly he would say to his father after he lost. He had worked out his speech weeks ago—had written it down, even, and then promptly burned the paper—but he couldn’t stop repeating it to himself, and wondering if there was a better way to say it.

It was a relief to give up on sleeping, get out of bed, and run down to the practice yard. He knew how Master Trelouno would attack: he would use all the techniques that Paris was worst at countering. That was how they trained every day, and the fact that Paris’s father was coming to inspect his progress would not make Master Trelouno go easy on him.

His rapier was shaking. With a gasp, Paris lowered the sword and staggered over to one of the benches at the edge of the practice yard.

The sun had just started to rise; light streaked the sky, though it hadn’t yet broken over the walls of the Academy. From outside, he could hear the clattering steps of a City Guard patrol—and there was the low note of a gong: they were bringing up bodies from the Lower City.

Paris grimaced and made the sign against defilement. The Guard was coming straight through the center of the Catresou compound, because they wanted to remind them what happened to people who defied the Viyaran laws about the proper disposal of dead bodies. Because they thought—like everyone else in the city—that the Catresou were only one step away from criminals who stole corpses and boiled them down to sell the bones on the black market.

As the sweat dried on his skin, he started to shiver in the early-morning chill. With a sigh, he stood and walked stiffly down the marble corridors to the mess room, where a few other students were already eating corn cakes and tea. Like Paris, they wore the uniform of the Academy: dark trousers, white shirt, and a red doublet, with a half face mask of plain cloth.

He sat by himself, as always. For once the solitude didn’t hurt: he needed to be alone, so he could go over the speech he would make after he lost the duel.

Everybody knew Paris was going to lose, because Master Trelouno always made the final exam as difficult as he could, and Paris was—as Master Trelouno liked to say—“perfectly adequate.”

No less, but no more.

So Paris was going to lose this duel, just like he would lose his official duel against Tybalt in two weeks. He would never be the Juliet’s Guardian.

That was all right. The Juliet was much, much more important to the Catresou than Paris would ever be. The spells laid upon her since birth let her sense anyone who had shed their clan’s blood and compelled her to avenge it. And the Accords drawn up between the Old Viyarans and the other two high houses gave her the right to exact that vengeance.

But she was more than their protector, or their guarantee of respect in a hostile city. She was their justice. While she lived, and carried a sword, they were free. She deserved to have the very best to guard and guide and treasure her.

But Paris didn’t want to be forced into the City Guard the way the other Academy failures were. He’d seen it happen to other boys. Some came home with broken ribs, flinching at every sudden noise. Some renounced the Catresou entirely, and bought an easy life by losing all chance to walk the Paths of Light after death.

Paris couldn’t bear either of those fates. But the only person who could save him was his father.

His speech had to be perfect.

Father, he thought. But no, that might sound impertinent. My lord Father. We both know I will never be Guardian.

Did that sound too defeatist? He knew his lack of ambition was a disappointment, but he would have just lost a duel. Father would not be in the mood for false bravado.

But it would dishonor our family if your only son was sent to the City Guard. You see that I have some skill with the sword. And Master Idraldi can tell you that I have read all the lore and history recorded about all the Juliets who ever lived. Surely it would be most honorable to our family—and most useful to our clan—if I were made Tybalt’s assistant. I could help him care for the Juliet. I could be useful.

I could be useful.

Possibly he should mention that there was precedent? The Juliet had once had an entire entourage: only one Guardian, but up to seven other men to fight beside her as she dealt out justice to all who shed Catresou blood.

But that was generations ago, before the Ruining and the flight to Viyara. Father had never cared much for tradition.

The city bells started tolling. It was time.

Paris didn’t run back to the practice yard. There were rules against running in the halls, and he wanted another moment to go over the plan in his head.

It was going to work. However disappointed his father was in Paris, he cared about the honor of their family, and it was shameful to send a son to the City Guard. Making him assistant to the Juliet’s Guardian was the perfect solution.

Paris realized he was nearly running, and he forced himself to slow down before he walked into the practice yard.

Master Trelouno was already there, wearing his customary black and the steel mask that stopped right at his nose so that his drooping red mustache and goatee would be visible.

Next to him stood Paris’s father.

Lutreo Mavarinn Catresou was one of the five lords of the Catresou; he wore the sleeveless red cloak of state at all times, along with his elaborate mask of black velvet and silver filigree. Paris had seen his bare face perhaps five times; going barefaced was a gesture of equality or affection, and his father held very few people in either.

Paris’s heart thudded as if he were already fighting, but he drew his rapier and saluted smoothly. “My lord Father.”

His father and Master Trelouno exchanged a look.

Something was wrong. Paris could feel it, and he tried desperately to think what he could possibly have done. He wasn’t late; the duel was supposed to be at the quarter bell, and it hadn’t rung yet. He knew he had saluted correctly, and he knew that here in the practice yard it was correct to salute.

What had he done?

They were looking at him now. They seemed to be waiting.

He took a step forward. “I am very honored—my lord Father—to show you what I have learned—”

He snapped his mouth shut. The words were so inane, he wanted to cringe. He was supposed to be saying something else. He was supposed to be doing something else, and he would happily do anything if they would just tell him—

His father heaved a deep sigh. “That won’t be necessary.”

“Oh,” said Paris.

For one dazed moment, he didn’t feel anything. It was like the time he had bungled a lunge particularly badly and smacked his forehead against the hilt of Master Trelouno’s rapier. Everything felt numb and ringing.

The next moment, he realized that he was less than a pace away from his father, saying, “You cannot mean to withdraw me from the competition. It would be the worst possible disgrace for our family, and yes, I am perfectly aware it is a foregone conclusion that I will not defeat Tybalt, but if you would just let me explain—”

“Tybalt is dead,” said his father.

Paris blinked. “What?” he said.

“Don’t leave your mouth hanging open, boy,” his father said impatiently. “Tybalt was killed last night in a duel with some Mahyanai boy. You’re going to be the Juliet’s Guardian.” He looked Paris up and down. “In two days, may the gods help you.”

Excerpted from Bright Smoke, Cold Fire © Rosamund Hodge, 2016

We want to send you a copy of Brian and Wendy Froud’s The Pressed Fairy Journal of Madeline Cottington, available September 27th from Abrams!

Renowned artist/author duo Brian and Wendy Froud present, for the first time, the backstory of Cottington Hall and its intriguing inhabitants: the Cottington family and the faeries living among them. The rise and fall of this eccentric British family gives us humorous, and sometimes tragic, glimpses into how the Cottingtons became inexorably entwined with the faeries during the late 19th and 20th centuries. When a descendant, Maddi, visits the Cottingtons’s dilapidated hall, she finds herself caught up in a story of intrigue and mystery. While reading the letters and journals of her ancestors and discovering a wealth of inventions aimed at allowing humans to visit the fairy realm unharmed, Maddi slowly becomes aware of the faeries and their world.

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As I Descended is Robin Talley’s third novel, following Lies We Tell Ourselves and What We Left Behind, and it’s her first in a speculative vein. As in her previous work, As I Descended is a young adult book with queer girl protagonists; in this case, Maria and Lily are a couple at an exclusive boarding school, but aren’t public about their relationship. This is, however, just one of the conflicts in the book—which is perhaps best described as “lesbian boarding school Macbeth,” complete with ghosts, predictions, and the twists of a traditional revenge-tragedy.

Maria is in need of the coveted Kinglsey Prize, a full scholarship ride to a university of her choice, to be able to attend college with Lily after their graduation from Acheron. However, Delilah—the most popular girl in their class—is at the top of the prize list, even though she doesn’t need the financial support at all. Maria and Lily, with the help of spirits that Maria can communicate with, hatch a plan to knock her down a peg. The problem is that the ghosts might not be as neutral or helpful as our protagonists would like to believe.

It’s unfortunate, but in the end, I wasn’t particularly impressed by this novel—despite the fact that it has, on the surface, all of the things that tend to grab me as a reader. The plot drives the text in a manner that doesn’t give Talley much room to explore the world or characters. While there are moments that are deeply compelling, such as at the end when Maria realizes that the spirits have never been on her side, but as a whole, I was disappointed and expected more from this particular book. “Diverse queer young adult Shakespeare riffs set at a boarding school” sounds like it would be the best thing I’d read this month, but that wasn’t the case.

One of the significant issues with As I Descended is Talley’s prose, which is perfectly passable in terms of its structure but is so thoroughly prone to over-explanation that it frequently feels like watching the author move a set of dolls around a set while telling the reader how those dolls are meant to be reacting. There’s little sense of internal conflict that isn’t flatly given as an explanation, and there is nothing left for the reader to parse or immerse themselves in. There are scenes where the action, at least, transcends the problem of telling—but those aren’t frequent enough to change the overall experience of reading the text.

There’s also something that itches at me about the characters, as a result of this flatness in the prose: because of that doll-like quality, the intentional diversity of the cast feels a bit less then authentic or well-realized and more like a set of boxes to tick off. Lily is disabled; Maria is Hispanic; Brandon is fat; Mateo has conservative parents. But instead of these being thorough parts of their personalities—things that feel like the source of self and conflict and are traits that interact with and feed back into the social world around them—it feels like these traits were just chosen arbitrarily and tacked on.

I’d have appreciated, for example, getting more of a sense of the function of class and cash at Acheron; instead, it’s sort of mentioned, but rarely serves a purpose narratively or socially. The same for race—Talley’s worldbuilding notes that Acheron was opened as an option for wealthy whites to send their children away from desegregated schools, and that it’s on the grounds of an old plantation, but this too doesn’t have much development in the text. The most interesting characters, to me, were actually tertiary as best: Austin and his little sister Felicia, who have about as much development as our protagonists but seem to have more potential internality simply because we aren’t given the rundown on their motivations like a dossier.

(Spoilers ahead.)

There’s also something hard to pinpoint, but the character of Brandon is an example: while the book is attempting to challenge tropes and be inclusive in some specific directions, it falls down hard on the job at others. Brandon manages, even in a queer novel that acknowledges people think of him this way, to step into the narrative role of “gay best friend who dies” for a female protagonist. If he’d had more development, or been used as a single thing other than a plot device, this wouldn’t be an issue for me—it’s a revenge tragedy, I expect people to die left and right. It’s the sense that these characters are archetypes rather than people, and in this case, that archetype is not one I appreciate seeing replicated in a book that seems to be trying to avoid those tropes.

Our queer girl protagonists, of course, also both die—while Delilah, in a twist, survives through the end; she wakes from her coma when Maria kills herself to save Mateo from her own machinations. I suspect that if Delilah hadn’t survived either, this would have felt natural and like the conclusion of a proper revenge-tragedy, with Mateo the only surviving member of the central plot cadre. He was, after all, Brandon’s boyfriend and the goodhearted heir to the throne, in the Shakespearean drama sense. Delilah’s survival feels, however, a bit cheap, and it also makes me feel very strange about the deaths of Maria, Lily, and Brandon.

In short, As I Descended is trying—but it’s trying rather too hard, and attempting to telegraph it all to the reader as clearly and directly as possible rather than letting the reader do the work. While the ghosts and the boarding school setting are intriguing, and there are moments where cultural details like Maria and Mateo’s shared knowledge of La Llorna come through, overall this one didn’t work for me.

As I Descended is available now from HarperTeen.

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

Stranger Things takes place in a fictional town in Indiana.

And Parks and Recreation takes place in a fictional town in Indiana.

Town rich kid (turned mostly nice guy) Steve Harrington sports towering, Everest-like hair.

Spoiled man-child Jean-Ralphio Saperstein also rocks high hair.

When the internet turned its flaming eye on surprise Netflix hit Stranger Things, it was quick to notice these connections, and soon a rumor sprang forth that Steve Harrington was Jean-Ralphio’s dad. And now, thanks to time travel (possibly via a Delorean, since that will continue Stranger Things’ ‘80s fetish) the two have met! And if you click through you can see Steve Harrington teaching Jean-Ralphio how to shave.

See? The resemblance here lies not just in their appearance, but that Steve Harrington, having just traveled through time to meet his adult son, would try to angle a perfect mirror-selfie to document this moment.

I can only assume that this was preparation for a stellar night out with Tom Haverford at Snakehole Lounge.

I’m going to go further: Looking at Jean-Ralphio, I also detect a resemblance to Nancy, Steve’s high school sweetheart. I’m going to work under the assumption that Jean-Ralphio is Steve  and Nancy’s kid, and that Steve and Nancy’s relationship went south sometime in the early ’90s. (Their divorce can be another classic Duffer Brothers Spielberg homage, after all.) Nancy moves to Pawnee for a fresh start, remarries, step-dad Saperstein legally adopts Jean-Ralphio, and now poor Steve, his guts churning with Glenfiddich and remorse, resorts to time travel to share a bonding moment with his estranged son.

It all connects, and I’m going to hope that it leads to a young Ron Swanson battling the Demogorgon in the next season of Stranger Things.

(Actually Ben Schwartz and Joe Keery just met up to do this fantastic photo shoot, and Schwartz posted said photos to Twitter, but I think the time travel version is more fun.)

[via Paste!]

A friend of mine who had never watched Star Trek in any form recently decided—my endless nagging may have contributed—to check out The Next Generation. Halfway through season two he asked me, “Why do the characters start each episode acting like none of the previous episodes ever happened?”

For our purposes that’s a good definition of the “reset button.” (Some might say it’s a “soft” version of the reset button. The “hard” version would be instances of timeline modification that actually erase the events we’ve seen, or something equivalent. Star Trek: Voyager was often accused of both types of resets—more on that below.) Accustomed to modern serialized shows like Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, Orphan Black and Breaking Bad, the fact that, for example, Picard could uncover a conspiracy at the highest levels of Starfleet (“Conspiracy”), or Counselor Troi could become pregnant with an alien (“The Child”), or Data could be “possessed” by an egomaniacal scientist (“The Schizoid Man”) and then never again address these experiences, was both perplexing and frustrating for my friend.

And yet TNG remains a beloved series, one that’s been painstakingly re-mastered and released in Blu-ray (2012-2015), and will surely be much celebrated next year, during its thirtieth anniversary.

Could the reset button be a contributing factor to the show’s success?

Form should follow function: When Paramount was considering the re-launch of Trek on television, neither NBC nor the Fox network “were willing to commit to enough episodes to justify the massive start-up costs involved.” [*] Eventually Paramount went with first-run syndication instead, but what’s relevant here is that having a large number of episodes per season was part of their business model. Successful in the ratings from the start, TNG (1987-1994) went on to air 178 episodes over 7 seasons. The show was not conceived with serialization in mind—quite the opposite—but imagine if it had been: heavy serialization over the course of that many episodes would have meant an exhausting amount of character changes, or the continual rotation of characters, or the kind of reliance on plot twists and reveals we associate with soap operas rather than primetime TV (not that TNG didn’t have its melodramatic, soapish moments, but I digress…).

Most serialized shows today have far fewer episodes per season than TNG. The first season of The Walking Dead, for instance, had 6 episodes, and the first season of Breaking Bad had 7.

One of the first science fiction shows that did feature heavy serialization was Babylon 5 (1993-1998), and even that ended after five seasons, or 110 episodes, because J. Michael Straczynski had essentially told his story. One of the results of Straczynski’s novelistic approach to B5 was that the tone of the show varied a lot less than TNG’s. It was also harder for B5 to gain new viewers as it progressed, since chronology was necessary to understand what was going on. With TNG, viewers could pretty much jump in at any moment. (That was my experience; I discovered the show in its third season and had no trouble following along).

And yet TNG did have some continuity—namely its characters. I like how Brannon Braga describes it: “To me, the show was an anthology show like The Twilight Zone, an opportunity to tell the kinds of stories I was really into, which were mind-bending things. This was a show where you could do anything.” [*] Thinking about TNG as an anthology show helps to highlight one of its strengths: its enormous range of stories, themes, and tones. Such diversity helped keep things fresh (mostly) over the course of 178 episodes.

Morality first: Braga’s comparison to The Twilight Zone is apposite for another reason. Just as that canonical show was heavily geared toward the exploration of moral quandaries, TNG also often foregrounded the morality of its stories. A serialized show, in which each episode works in a manner analogous to a chapter in a novel, will have a tougher time putting on a variety of individual “morality plays” than an anthology show, in which episodes are more closely akin to short stories. These can be expressly designed to highlight a particular issue or subject, and that was often the case with TNG (for example, “Who Watches the Watchers,” “Ethics,” “The First Duty,” and so on).

Psychology and adulthood: While this is still a hotly contested topic, some psychologists believe that our basic personalities don’t tend to change much after the age of thirty, and that while changes continue, they slow over time. I think it’s fair to say that over the course of several seasons of a TV show, many viewers basically remain the same, even if we undergo a few life-altering experiences during that time. Having TNG’s characters remain fundamentally the same throughout, despite their many adventures, could be one reason why it’s easy to empathize with them. Note: I’m not saying this raised the stakes dramatically or led to better storytelling, simply that it may have made it easier for the audience to grasp the characters and feel like they were relatable on an ongoing basis.

Getting out of bed in the morning: Seeing someone cope with all sorts of difficult experiences and essentially emerge undamaged can be refreshing, even inspiring. You watch TNG episodes like “Identity Crisis” or “Violations” or “Schisms” or “Frame of Mind” or “Chain of Command” and think, “If Geordi and Troi and Riker and Picard were able to come out okay from such apparently brutal experiences, I should be able to survive my 3 PM meeting with management on Tuesday.”

And if TNG doesn’t feel immediately realistic on these grounds, perhaps it’s because we’re unfairly judging the characters by our own limited standards. TNG is saying, “These are advanced, 24^th century people. Look at what they can handle. They’re incredibly resourceful and resilient. They hardly ever succumb to self-pity, they continually focus on self-improvement, and no matter what, they keep trekking on. We’ll get there one day.” Escapist, sure, but unlike many of today’s serialized shows, which regularly threaten, traumatize, or outright kill their core characters, TNG’s approach is more optimistic and uplifting. It aligns nicely with Star Trek’s overall hopeful message about a utopian future, perpetuating the aesthetic that drew many viewers to Trek in the first place.

Voyaging home: One reason TNG’s “anthology” approach to storytelling probably didn’t serve Voyager well is that the two series’ fictional mandates were starkly different. TNG’s mission was, famously, “to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no one has gone before.” We were explicitly told that in the opening narration. Voyager didn’t have an opening narration, but if it had, it might been something like “Fleeing from the perils of the Delta Quadrant, the U.S.S. Voyager leads a ragtag crew, on a lonely quest—for a shining planet known as Earth.” While TNG was conceived as an abstract exploration of endless possibilities, Voyager had a concrete mission: to safely get back home. Serialization or heavy continuity would have been a better strategy to chronicle Voyager’s epic journey, and I believe viewers were ultimately disappointed that the show didn’t take that approach. We’re back to function and form; these series had quite different functions, and yet were molded with the same form.

Ronald D. Moore has always been fond of continuity, but quickly learned that Paramount wasn’t a fan. He first found resistance to continuity while working on TNG. He recalls, for instance, that when he conceived the episode “Family,” Gene Rodenberry “didn’t like the continuity from “Best of Both Worlds” ” [*] But in retrospect, as I’ve been saying, it may have been to TNG’s benefit that continuity was played down.

Moore later tried to readjust Voyager’s course, but ultimately—and for complex reasons—left the show after a brief stint. Here is Braga again, with some telling comments: “Ron came aboard as a writer and—God, I have a lot of regrets—he came aboard wanting the show to do all sorts of things. He wanted the show to have continuity. When the ship got fucked up, he wanted it to stay fucked up. For characters to have lasting consequences. He was really into that. He wanted to eradicate the so-called reset button, and that’s not something the studio was interested in, because this thing was a big seller in syndication.” [*] In this instance, I think the studio made the wrong call. On the other hand, their decision indirectly helped bring the reimagined Battlestar Galactica into existence, so we can’t complain too much…

“Cause and Effect.” This popular fifth-season episode may be the ultimate triumph of the reset button. In the episode’s teaser the ship is destroyed, and then act one begins as though nothing’s the matter. The show manages to reset itself four times, embedding its own resetting (a “temporal causality loop”) into the story’s narrative structure, and doing it quite compellingly. (Viewers were apparently thrown off by this at first, and called in to ask if something was wrong with the broadcast.) This is one of Braga’s triumphs: he’s taken a storytelling constraint and turned into an engine of drama.

But beyond its craft and entertainment value, I think the show can also be read as a meta-textual commentary on the part of TNG’s writers. Data is able to utilize his advanced positronic brain to send a short message to himself across loops, one so subtle it will be undetected by the rest of the crew. Kind of like the writers smuggling in small bits of continuity across seasons without the Paramount execs catching on, don’t you think? Ron Moore: “We very much wanted to do more serialized storytelling, and we would try to sneak it in whenever possible. You have casual references to other episodes or events or other characters just as part of the fabric of the show, but you had to be careful.” [*]

By the time Deep Space Nine came around, some of those restrictions were lifted, but as mentioned, I don’t think Ds9’s approach would have been optimal for TNG, either. Ds9 deliberately went for a darker, grittier tone, and was constructed around a stationary, relationship-bound premise, rather than an exploratory, star-hopping one.

The future: Discussing Star Trek: Discovery, showrunner Bryan Fuller recently said: “I would strongly recommend that we never do 26 episodes. I think it would fatigue the show. Ideally I would like to do 10 episodes. I think that’s a tighter story.” The show’s initial season has been reported as having 13 episodes.

Gone is the reset button, clearly. But beyond that, can we infer that the show won’t be as uplifting or utopian as TNG? Will it focus less on individual morality tales and more on sequential character experiences? Will its characters be more traumatized? Perhaps. But that won’t necessarily be a bad thing. With sufficient craft and skill, Discovery might help to expand Star Trek’s parameters, and what it means to contemporary audiences. It’s a tall order, but even partial success could make for interesting viewing. Science fiction is inevitably a reflection of its own present, and 2017 will no doubt be very different from 1987. That’s one reality even the most far-flung spaceship can’t escape.

[*] Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman. The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years: From The Next Generation to J. J. Abrams: The Complete, Uncensored, and Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek.

Alvaro Zinos-Amaro writes fiction, of the non-tingler variety, and non-fiction, of the technicolor kind.

Filmmaker Vugar Efendi creates video essays to explore relationships between filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick and Andrej Tarkovsky, to see the ways images from art and sculpture crop up in movies, and to explore thematic elements n the work of director like Terence Malik and Alejandro Innaritu. Now Efendi has shared a montage that takes the viewer through a concise history of stop-motion animation, from silent films through the work of Tim Burton and Henry Selick.

[via Laughing Squid!]