Temper is Nicky Drayden’s second novel. Her first novel, The Prey of Gods, was a weird and inventive thriller that combined fantasy and science fictional elements. Temper is a standalone work in a new setting, one that involves fantasy, religion, and a touch of steampunk SF. This review will contain spoilers, because there’s absolutely no way to talk about even half of this book without them—much less the more interesting half.

In a nation reminiscent of South Africa, almost everyone is born as a twin. Seven vices are divided between each pair of twins, so that one twin always has more, and one, less. The vices are complemented by their alternate virtues.

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Auben Mutze has six vices. His brother, Kasim, only has one. Though both brothers live in an underprivileged part of town, Kasim’s single vice is a ticket to a better life, at least eventually. Auben, on the other hand—for all that he’s smart and charismatic—doesn’t have nearly the same likelihood of making a better future. When Auben starts hearing voices—voices that encourage him to give in to his dangerous side, to do things that are actively harmful—it threatens his bond with his twin. But Kasim has also been hearing voices, voices that drive him to dangerous excesses of virtue.

The boys gradually realise that they have each been possessed by the original godly twins: Grace and his demonic opposite, Icy Blue. Seeking an exorcism leads them to discover that the man they always thought of as their uncle, a wealthy and successful man who has never offered them any tangible support, is their father. Looking for ways to understand and combat their possession, they blackmail him into getting them accepted to a very fancy, very expensive religious school where they can research the problem—but at Gabadamosi Prep, they’re outsiders until Kasim catches the attention of a famous Man of Virtue, and begins to be hailed as an incarnation of Grace himself. Meanwhile, Auben is craving blood and feeling compelled to do murder. The twins’ relationship is strained to the breaking point when Kasim tricks Auben into a ritual that strips Auben of his last “virtue,” replacing it with Kasim’s vice, and the brothers become Grace and Icy Blue—and Kasim-turned-Grace strips the vices from the virtuous twins and gives them to the “lesser” twins, banishing them from their homes—and turning the gender-mixed twins, the kigen and androgynous, into male- and female-bodied.

Reconciliation seems impossible, not just between the twins, but also between Auben and his fanatically secular mother. Despite being mostly godlike, and building a city for his followers—a thriving, compassionate city, one that has achieved a lot of success—Auben still has human emotions appropriate to a college-age young man. He wants to reconcile with his mother: he wants evidence that she ever loved him. And he wants, too, to reunite with his brother.

In the end, he’ll get his brother, at least. Kasim makes a terrible incarnation of Grace. Maybe they were wrong about which brother was supposed to end up with the vices?

Temper, like Prey of Gods, is a weird novel. (Weird seems to be Drayden’s bailiwick.) It’s more fun and less philosophical than Miévillean New Weird, but it shares some of the same approaches to SFF, especially in the co-existence of magic and science, the liminal and the everyday. And Temper is willing to make space for its world to be queer and brown, to affirm the presence of trans folks, and to examine divides of class and the connections—and ruptures—of family.

Because this is a novel about family, in the end. About difficult relationships, and rejecting—or claiming—them anyway, and about somehow trying to make it work.

Temper is slow to start. The early chapters are hard going: Auben can be an unappealing little shit of a teenager, just like many other teenagers, and Temper frontloads Peak Adolescent Boyness. That’s not really my scene. It does warm up—and the pace speeds up—once we hit the possession plotline (and the secret father plotline), and gains momentum from there. Temper is told from Auben’s point of view, and his voice is a strong one, though occasionally irritating. On the other hard, some of the ways in which Temper is inventively weird are ways that jar one’s narrative expectations: for example, one expects a confrontation to be the story’s climax, rather than the growth and reconciliation that form the true climax and denouement. This is not a bad thing, but makes Temper a novel that requires more from its readers than a more conventional SFF novel.

On the whole, I enjoyed it. I think Drayden is developing into a really interesting writer, and I look forward to seeing more of her work in the years to come.

Temper is available from Harper Voyager.

Liz Bourke is a cranky queer person who reads books. She holds a Ph.D in Classics from Trinity College, Dublin. Her first book, Sleeping With Monsters, a collection of reviews and criticism, was published in 2017 by Aqueduct Press. It was a finalist for the 2018 Locus Awards and is nominated for a Hugo Award in Best Related Work. Find her at her blog, where she’s been known to talk about even more books thanks to her Patreon supporters. Or find her at her Twitter. She supports the work of the Irish Refugee Council, the Transgender Equality Network Ireland, and the Abortion Rights Campaign.

Short fiction is awesome.

No, seriously. I am of the opinion that there are few things in life better than a perfectly executed short story. Creating an expertly paced short story, that makes you care about its characters, understand its world, and be invested in its central conflict—all within the space of 7,500 words—is no small feat. What follows are six pieces of subversive short fiction—stories that have captured my heart and imagination (in less time it takes to ride the subway to work, no less). These are stories that stretch the definition of “fiction” and play with format; they are stories that defy convention and sometimes even storytelling logic.

“Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers” by Alyssa Wong (Nightmare Magazine)

Alyssa Wong is a multi-award winning author for so many of her works of short fiction. This particular story, about that Tinder life in New York City, about hunger, about friendship, and home? Oh, it’s so twisted and sick and, like its main character, you can’t help but want to eat every last drop of it up.

“The Husband Stitch” by Carmen Maria Machado (Granta)

With stories that are eerie yet rooted in the familiar, Carmen Maria Machado is one of the most disturbing and incisive short fiction writers today. In “The Husband Stitch” she examines the urban legend of the woman who wears a ribbon around her neck, who tells her husband time and time again that he may not touch it or remove it. This particular version of the story examines the path to conventional, heterosexual marriage—and the horror therein.

“Rib” by Yukimi Ogawa (Strange Horizons)

Yukimi Ogawa is one of our favorite authors because her work is unexpected, often horrific, and always enthralling. Weaving Japanese folklore in with the new, the weird, and science fiction horror elements, Ogawa’s body of work is prolific and evergreen. In “Rib,” Ogawa employs a yokai main character—a hone-onna, or skeleton lady—who befriends an orphan, and subverts expectation of the bond between monster and child.

“Application for the Delegation of First Contact: Questionnaire, Part B.” by Kathrin Köhler (Book Smugglers Publishing)

This is a short story that we published back in 2015, after setting up an open short story call for tales that entertained the theme of “First Contact.” Katherine Köhler’s short story came in the form of several questions—an application form that one would have to fill out for consideration to be included in the Federation’s Delegation of First Contact with alien species. The questions Köhler asks range from the poignant to the absurd, and every single one of them makes you think about what it means to be a sentient, intelligent creature in the cosmos.

“Cat Pictures Please” by Naomi Kritzer (Clarkesworld)

This short story from Naomi Kritzer won the Hugo Award in 2016 and for good reason—it’s a short story about an AI that is obsessed with cat pictures. Responsible for improving the algorithm that powers a Google-like search engine, this AI learns about its users and conducts its own experiments–naturally predisposed to those humans who upload a lot of cat pictures. By turns silly and serious, “Cat Pictures Please” is never what you think it will be—and isn’t that part of the joy of subversive short fiction?

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“The Water That Falls on You From Nowhere” by John Chu (Tor.com)

John Chu’s Hugo Award-winning short story is speculative fiction that takes a simple premise—water that falls on you, from nowhere, when you lie—and uses it to examine the intricate bonds between a son and his family, and his love. This is a quiet story about love, insecurity, and trust, and we love every beautiful word of it.

So there you have it! Six short stories that defy convention and expectation—are there any favorites that you have to recommend?

This article was originally published in September 2017.

Thea James is a Hapa Filipina-American who works for Penguin Random House by day, and is a Book Smuggler by night. When she’s not at The Book Smugglers or swamped in pending papers and proposals, she can be found blogging over at Kirkus with her Book Smuggler colleague Ana Grilo. (If she’s not there either, try the local bar.)

Nalo Hopkinson’s “Fisherman” was the first trans story I ever read where the trans character wasn’t an extraterrestrial or the product of futuristic biotechnology. The story made a significant impression on me, and so it occurred to me to take a look at Skin Folk, the collection where it first appeared.

Nalo Hopkinson is a cis queer Afro-Caribbean writer of speculative fiction who has lived in Jamaica, Guyana, Trinidad, Canada, and is currently living on the West Coast of the U.S. Besides many novels, she has had multiple short story collections published, most recently Falling in Love with Hominids—while this book, published in 2015, is too recent for me to include in this column, I would like to warmly recommend it. Skin Folk was Hopkinson’s first collection, yet it doesn’t come across as immature—the stories are confident, written with a strong and determined voice.

Five stories of the fifteen included in Skin Folk had been unpublished prior to the collection—including the later quite widely anthologized “Fisherman.” This is a slightly higher ratio of unpublished pieces than is common in single-author collections, but the original stories are not in any way weaker than the reprints. To the contrary, they are experimental and daring… As I often find myself saying, this phenomenon demonstrates that markets used to be much less open to unconventional work by marginalized (often multiply marginalized) authors.

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By and large, the pieces in this collection are confidently boundary-pushing, and come across as fresh even today. Many engage with Caribbean themes and settings, with or migrant experiences. Hopkinson combines a variety of Caribbean and Anglo dialects of English in the telling, and offers perspectives which remain severely underrepresented in English-language speculative fiction almost two decades later. (I would like to refer the interested reader to Tobias Buckell’s bibliography of Caribbean SFF.) Queerness is occasionally the main theme, but it also appears in the background of some stories, matter-of-factly. Here I’m mostly going to discuss the queer aspects of these tales, but I could write an entire set of essays approaching this multifaceted work from different angles—it draws one in with its complexity.

“Fisherman” is the most unambiguously queer of these stories, and also probably the least speculative—the author mentions in the brief preamble that it only has a very small speculative element involving mutant fish. The story follows K.C., a young Black fisherman, who finally works up his courage to become a client of a sex worker, like his fellow fishermen regularly do. We follow the events from his perspective (and through his dialect), and we find out that he’s not like the others. K.C. was assigned female at birth, and his fellows all know of this. He has conflicts not only about his own body, but also his place in society—and yet, the story has a positive, hopeful outcome. It also offers a subversion of the naked trans reveal trope: the careful reader can come to the realization that K.C. is trans before his sex partner does, and the story begs for at least one reread.

Another piece in the collection, “Ganger (Ball Lightning)” plays with gender and eroticism in an entirely different way. Here, a Black man and a woman are trying to add novelty into their longstanding relationship, to keep their routine from growing stale. They decide to experiment with science fictional skin suits that amplify tactile sensations. Once the suits have molded to their bodies, they swap them out, thus enabling each of them to briefly experience the sensations of having the other’s body shape, including genitals. This is very much a story of cis people experimenting and finding they got more than what they bargained for—when they don’t follow the instructions, the story takes a turn into horror. I had a small gripe here, in that the story briefly plays into the potential monstrosity of a being with two sets of genitals, but only briefly. There is plenty else to appreciate, including the very honest and startled dysphoria of a cis person not dealing well with unmatching genitals (!), and also the engagement with race issues. The man of the couple, Cleve, confesses that he is apprehensive about dirty sex talk because he is a large Black man, and doesn’t want to appear threatening: “I ‘fraid to use harsh words, Issy, you know that. Look at the size of me, the blackness of me. You know what it is to see people cringe for fear when you shout?”

Sometimes queerness only appears tangentially. In “Something to Hitch Meat To,” the protagonist Artho works as a graphic designer for a porn company, and many of the employees are either stated to be queer or are queer-coded in some way—while they produce porn aimed at the straight and white gaze. Artho feels conflicted, and the plot examines his internal turmoil as he comes to meet a spiritual being and acquires unusual abilities.

Many of the stories have little to do with queerness, or even sexuality. For example, the strikingly experimental “Under Glass” presents a postapocalyptic world saturated with glass splinters, and a girl whose electronic device is a gateway to another life. If you’ve ever found yourself stunned by just how much damage a tiny piece of glass can wreak, you will either nod along in agreement or have terrible nightmares after reading this piece; it has some of the most memorable worldbuilding I’ve come across recently.

Hopkinson’s work also explores the edges of sexual behavior in general, sometimes with a generous helping of horror. In “The Glass Bottle Trick,” a woman finds out the terrible secrets of her husband in a story that combines Caribbean folklore and the European Bluebeard legend. But possibly the most chilling story in this vein is “Snake,” about child abuse from the point of view of the abuser. While mundane and magical forces come together to rescue the abuser’s latest victim, we’re still subjected to his thought processes and his scheme to kidnap a young girl.

Overall, this collection feels strikingly contemporary, even though it’s almost two decades old at this point. It’s diverse in multiple respects, unapologetically queer, and body-focused in a way that ranges from the sensual to the sexual to the utterly terrifying. I strongly suggest you pick it up, and if you’d like to support Nalo Hopkinson in creating more fiction (as well as other things), she has a Patreon, too. Next time, we’ll be back to novels, and the far reaches of outer space!

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

The 2010s and the 1970s are similar in many ways: questionable fashion choices¹, U.S. presidents under investigation, Canadian prime ministers named Trudeau, the possibility that nuclear tensions might flare up at any moment. The two decades share something else, as well: during both of these decades, it became easier to discover classic SF. In the modern era, we are seeing ebook reprints mining the output of the past. In the 1970s, we had paper reprints, such as the variously titled Ballantine (or Del Rey) Classic Library of Science Fiction.

As with Timescape Books, the Classic series was largely due to the astute market sense of one editor. In this case, the editor was Judy-Lynn del Rey (she may have had an occasional assist from husband Lester²). Under her guidance, Ballantine and later the imprint that bore her name became a signifier of quality; readers like me turned to her books whenever we had the cash³. The Classic Library of Science Fiction helped to firmly establish the Del Rey publishing house.

Each volume collected the best short stories of a well-known SF or fantasy author. I’m discussing a slew of authors in this essay—alphabetized, because trying to list them in chronological order proved unexpectedly complicated.

The Best of James Blish

Futurian James Blish (23 May 1921–30 July 1975) may be best known these days as the author of the Cities in Flight series (They Shall Have Stars, A Life for the Stars, Earthman, Come Home, and The Triumph of Time), and his After Such Knowledge series (A Case of Conscience, Doctor Mirabilis, and The Devil’s Day.) Back in the 1970s, many fans knew him as the person doing the Star Trek collections of stories based on the original series. Blish was convinced that SF need not be bound by its pulp origins and published SF criticism under the pen name William Atheling, Jr⁴.

The Best of Robert Bloch

Robert Bloch was a member of the Lovecraft Circle. He published in many genres: mystery, horror, SF, true crime, and more, and was awarded the Hugo, the World Fantasy, the Edgar, and the Stoker. Bloch’s Psycho was the basis for the Hitchcock film of the same name.

The Best of Leigh Brackett

Pulp-era SF was not known for friendliness to women authors, and Leigh Brackett was one of the few women authors of that era. She is known for her planetary romances, many of which shared a setting. Brackett was also a skilled screenwriter, known for her contributions to The Big Sleep, Rio Bravo, Hatari!… oh, and an obscure little film called The Empire Strikes Back.

The Best of Fredric Brown

SF and mystery author Fredric Brown was the master of the comic short-short, works so brief that he might spend more on the postage to submit the stories than he could make from the subsequent sale. Among his best-known stories are “Letter to a Phoenix” (which has not aged well), “Arena,” and “Knock,” which begins: “The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door…”

The Best of John Brunner

John Brunner’s fiction covered a spectrum ranging from morose to intensely gloomy. Readers intrigued by this collection who want to enjoy his strengths at novel length should seek out Brunner’s thematically-related SF standalone novels: The Jagged Orbit, The Sheep Look Up, Stand on Zanzibar, and The Shockwave Rider. Each book tackles One Big Issue (racial conflict, pollution, overpopulation, and future shock, respectively).

The Best of John W. Campbell

Before he was an influential editor and Patient Zero for several infectious pseudo-sciences, John W. Campbell was a successful writer. His efforts ranged from mood pieces like “Twilight” (not the vampire novel) to star-smashing shoot-em-ups like The Ultimate Weapon. His best-known work is “Who Goes There,” an unsympathetic look at the challenges of assimilation.

The Best of Hal Clement

Depending on how narrowly one defines hard SF, the amiable Hal Clement may have been the only hard SF author featured in this series. He could wring a story out of a phase diagram. He wrote about non-Earth-like worlds: planets whose gravity would reduce humans to paste, worlds where we would puff into heated vapour.

Current exoplanet research suggests that we are living in a Hal Clement universe.

The Best of L. Sprague de Camp

Arguably the dapperest man active in science fiction, L. Sprague de Camp wrote both fiction and non-fiction. He published sword and sorcery, planetary adventure, necrolaborations⁵, and humorous bar stories (which I found less funny than intended. Though perhaps that was due to the fact that I was reading this book at the time of my father’s funeral.)

The Best of Lester del Rey

Lester del Rey was both editor and writer. I’m not a fan of his fiction; I’ve always been baffled by the popularity of “Helen O’Loy,” which features a romantic triangle that included a mass-produced robot.

The Best of Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick may be best known today as the person whose work has provided material for quite a few movies. He wasn’t big on objective reality as most of the rest of us understand it. He saw depths within depths masked by a thin scrim of illusion. His prose was often energetic, if poorly disciplined.

The Best of Raymond Z. Gallun

Raymond Z. Gallun got his start at age eighteen, when his 1929 “Space Dwellers” was published. His fiction always showed its pulp-era roots—but sometimes rose above them, as it did in his story “Old Faithful.” After a hiatus beginning in the 1960s, Gallun resumed writing, and he was an active writer well into the 1980s. Not quite Jack Williamson’s eight-decade-spanning career, but still pretty darn impressive.

The Best of Edmond Hamilton

Edmond Hamilton specialized in star-smashing adventures. His prose style was workmanlike at best; his science background was nil. However, he wrote impressive spectacles with high body-counts.

The Best of C. M. Kornbluth

Often found collaborating with Frederik Pohl, C. M. Kornbluth’s bleak, misanthropic fiction allowed magazines like Galaxy and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction to nudge SF away from Campbell’s vision of a world populated by gung-ho, crew cut-sporting scientists and adventurers. His “The Marching Morons” may be tied with “Harrison Bergeron” for the story most sympathetic to self-pitying nerds. The guy had talent and wrote great stuff. It’s a shame that the long-term effects of his World War Two experiences led to his premature death in 1958.

The Best of Henry Kuttner

Henry Kuttner was Mr. C. L. Moore. Thanks to Moore and Kuttner’s habit of poorly documented collaboration, it can be very difficult to establish which of them wrote what. Kuttner’s style was slick, his worldview often cynical, and his fiction often quite funny. He also had an eye for talent: he helped Brackett first see print.

Kuttner died in 1958; given how much smaller the field was in those days, losing two authors of Kuttner and Kornbluth’s stature in just two months must have been a disappointment to fans.

The Best of Fritz Leiber

Leiber started publishing in the pulp era; like so many other pulp writers, he was active in many genres. He wrote several books that have been recognized as genre classics. The Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser books are sword and sorcery classics; The Big Time is a time-travel classic; A Spectre is Haunting Texas is dystopian; Conjure Wife is fantasy. Leiber was also an actor, playwright, poet, and essayist.

The Best of Murray Leinster

Like Leiber, Murray Leinster (Will Jenkins in real life) wrote in many genres. Over the course of his career, he wrote more than a thousand pieces (novels, stories, essays, plays, etc.). He wrote SF, mystery, romance, Westerns, adventures. He wrote for print, radio, and television.

SF fans may be interested in his story “First Contact,” in which humans and aliens attempt to negotiate peaceful relations. Fans of alternate history may be interested to know that the Sidewise Award for Alternate History takes its name from Leinster’s “Sidewise in Time.”

The Best of C. L. Moore

Many of the women working in early SF have been left out of histories. C. L. Moore is one of the exceptions. While her later work is inextricably entangled with that of husband (Henry Kuttner), she was already a star when they married. (In fact, it was the quality of her writing that first interested Kuttner.)

What may interest modern readers: the Northwest Smith stories, which feature a handsome doofus who never met a pretty woman whose death he could not inadvertently instigate. Also her fantasy stories starring warrior Jirel of Joiry, who once fed a vexatious suitor to a demon. One series (Northwest Smith) is SF and the other (Jirel) is fantasy, but they did take place in the same setting, if many centuries apart⁶. SF or F? Often a matter of interpretation.

Moore would have been the second woman named SFWA Grand Master, had her second husband not intervened. She had developed Alzheimer’s in her old age; he was afraid that she would not be able to cope with the ceremony.

The Best of Frederik Pohl

Frederik Pohl had a seventy-five year career during which he was active in almost every possible niche in SFdom as a writer, editor, and fan. (I don’t think he was an artist but I may have missed something.) He won a string of Hugos for his work as magazine editor. While working for Bantam books, he championed classic works such as Delany’s Dhalgren and Russ’s The Female Man. As a writer, he co-wrote classics like The Space Merchants; he also won Hugos for his solo works. He was long active as a fan; he barely missed being there for the very first WorldCon due to some particularly bare-knuckle fannish politics. He was widely known, respected, and liked. He was celebrated in Elizabeth Anne Hull’s tribute anthology, Gateways.

It was an honour to be utterly crushed by him for a Best Fan Hugo in 2010. After all, I was the one who pointed out that Pohl was eligible in the first place.

The Best of Eric Frank Russell

Eric Frank Russell may have been seen as a comic writer, but his satires could have dark overtones. His novels often suggested that there was far more to the universe than we knew, and that additional knowledge would not bring comfort. Despite this, his work was occasionally warm and life-affirming.

The Best of Cordwainer Smith

Cordwainer Smith was the pen name of Paul Linebarger: soldier, expert in psychological warfare, East Asian scholar, and godson of Sun Yat-sen. Smith drew on his Asian expertise when writing SF. His works were far from typical of the SF being published in North America at the time.

The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum

Isaac Asimov compared Stanley G. Weinbaum to a supernova. This was apt both as to brightness (stellar career) and brevity; Weinbaum published for less than two years before he died of cancer. Many of his SF works share the same planetary SF setting, which included a tide-locked Venus and the curiously habitable moons of Jupiter.

The Best of Jack Williamson

Jack Williamson’s career spanned an astonishing eight decades, from the 1920s to the 2000s, from the pulps to modern times. He wrote classic fantasies like Darker Than You Think, epic space operas like The Legion of Space, and interplanetary thrillers like SeeTee Shock. Readers might enjoy his story “With Folded Hands, in which humans are gifted with all the solicitous robotic caretaking they could desire…and perhaps more.

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1: OK, only because “questionable fashion choices” is a cross-generational universal. But still, what were we thinking? Shirts made of solidified napalm and tragic sideburns were just the beginning of the horror.

2: Not that Lester was a mere hunky sidekick. He edited Ballantine/Del Rey’s fantasy line and like his wife, had a keen eye for commercial potential. It just goes to show that some SF hubbies are more than just sultry eye candy: all you male SF writers/editors coasting on your looks, try harder!

3: And we had to be judicious in our spending back then. Post-oil-crisis inflation meant that paperbacks could cost as much as a dollar ninety-five! I remember clearly the day I purchased a book for exactly ten times the amount I had spent on my first mass market paperback. I also remember the glazed look on the face of the bookstore clerk as I explained at length the interesting fact that years before he was born, books cost as little as seventy five-cents.

4: I will put this down here and maybe nobody will notice it. Unlike many authors who are called fascists simply because they are political troglodytes, Blish really was a self-described “paper fascist.” Judging by the intro for his fascist utopia A Torrent of Faces, he didn’t think much of the prior art in the fascism field.

5: My coinage for collaboration with a dead author, sans benefit of medium or Ouija board.

6: Thanks to time travel, Northwest did cross paths with Jirel, whose reaction to his rugged, useless charms can be best summed up as a derisive snort.

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

When we had last left our favorite Murderbot, it was fleeing, leaving the beginnings of a comfortable life behind, before that life had even started—departing PresevationAux and Mensah, who had given Murderbot a path out of being a SecUnit. But what is a Murderbot, whether sentient or not, who doesn’t do murderbotting? Is this the Artificial Condition indicated in the title?

No—Murderbot is on a mission to discover what happened in the “incident” in which, not yet sentient, it killed lots and lots of clients in a mining facility and had its memory partially wiped. There is a trauma that haunts Murderbot now that it’s alive, awake, and in possession of a conscience, however snarky it is. In the previous installment of the Murderbot Diaries, All Systems Red (which  I wrote about here), Murderbot was just beginning to find its footing, with a newfound sense of emotional agency, and a sense of belonging to something that’s more than a purely contractual connection. In the midst of forging this new identity, however, the very conditions that allowed it to form new bonds also opened up these old wounds, and so it had to leave the comfort of what it was just beginning to know.

So after you’ve ever given up everyone you’ve ever cared about and you set out on your own—what about the other people who come into your life? Even if you don’t want them to?

Enter ART.

***

I know this might be hard to believe, but trans women aren’t a monolith.

Little did I know this when I first came out! I had been, like so many other people, inundated with a flattened (and whitened) depiction of trans women in just a few narrow stereotypes. The best I thought I could hope for was to aim for a kind of earnest stereotype that was just entering into broad public consciousness—one who ascribed pretty closely to a sincere trans woman hoping to “pass” and not rock the boat.

Of course, this got gloriously shot to hell once I started meeting other trans women. Yes, we often joke about all knowing each other—about all liking roller derby and tube socks and working in IT. But I can assure you, this is not the case.

What’s more, some trans women are irascible. Some are “difficult.” (Often for really excellent reasons, including targeted street violence, harassment, and lack of access to health care, for example.) Some trans women are difficult, but you still want to be really good friends with them, even if you don’t know it yet. And of course, you’re not going to click with everyone, or even with a lot of people. There’s a difference between being “difficult” and worth someone’s time and being toxic.

Friendship is tricky when you are first fully becoming yourself.

When Murderbot gets transport to the mining facility on an empty research vessel—using its vast media library from Space Netflix as a form of currency—it thinks little of it. Murderbot doesn’t remotely consider that the transport ship it’s smuggled itself on-board could possibly have its own wants and needs.

However, it soon realizes that it’s made a huge mistake: ““How the hell was I supposed to know there were transports sentient enough to be mean?”

How indeed, Murderbot? How indeed.

***

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ART—a Murderbot-derived acronym for “Asshole Research Transport”—is sarcastic; or at least Murderbot reads every attempt at communication as sarcastic. With the amount of processing power ART has, and with the fact that Murderbot is hanging out in its belly for the duration of a long journey, Murderbot is forced to engage with it. In a cascade of “oh shit” moments, Murderbot slowly realizes that ART wanted company on the long voyage…which is the last thing Murderbot wants.

As in All Systems Red, creating relationships in the midst of boredom, usually through the copious use of Space Netflix, plays a huge part in the narrative. It’s their shared enjoyment of Murderbot’s favorite serials that draws ART out of its shell (Murderbot notes that some metaphorical hand-holding is required when ART became “emotionally compromised by a fictional media serial.”). And it’s the way an unlikely friendship develops.

ART has no qualms about asking Murderbot tough questions. It’s difficult when you’ve worked hard to establish an identity, however fragile it may be, and other queer people start poking holes in it. Even out of concern.

“You will be identified as a SecUnit.”

That stung a little. “I can pass as an augmented human.” Augmented humans are still considered humans. I don’t know if there are any augmented humans with enough implants to resemble a SecUnit. It seems unlikely a human would want that many implants, or would survive whatever catastrophic injury might make them necessary. But humans are weird. Whatever, I didn’t intend to let anyone see more than I absolutely had to.

“You look like a SecUnit. You move like a SecUnit.”

To me this stung as much as anything I’ve read in awhile, because this is a conversation about passing. And you don’t really want to hear about passing from someone else who is in a not-quite-similar situation as yourself.

What makes this so difficult is—let’s say you do want to pass, as fraught with peril as that concept is. Maybe to blend in at a new job, or maybe it’s an issue of survival, of not wanting to be harassed on the street (or in the case of our Murderbot, being captured for being seen as a rogue SecUnit). Such advice about eyeliner or posture or voice pitch or whatever, when unsolicited from a cis person, is nigh well unbearable. But when it comes from someone who’s been more or less in the same boat as you, it can be frustrating because it can be right. Or at least right-ish.

And maybe it’s not only your new friends that are stubborn.

So ART literally helps Murderbot to pass: in its medical suite, it shortens Murderbot’s arms and legs (all SecUnits have a uniform height), and to essentially create “a list of biological features that humans might notice subliminally.” (Such as hair; this was especially poignant, as getting rid of the hair you don’t want and growing the hair you do want can be a constant battle as a trans woman.)

Murderbot has to trust ART to implement these changes. It’s desperate enough to place part of its—how else do I put this—transition into ART’s metaphorical hands. The impetus behind the decision being that Murderbot has places to go, and places to be. Theory is wonderful, but actually putting one’s body on the line to try to meet important goals is another story altogether.

***

Murderbot’s goal, then, is to investigate the horrendous mining incident, which led to it hacking its Governor Module. And here is where ART really shines. Despite all the snarkiness and the borderline frenemy status between these two non-humans (ART seems to gain a great deal of satisfaction from telling Murderbot “I told you so”), ART puts its, er, money where its mouth is, and acts as Murderbot’s constant virtual companion while it orbits the mining colony, providing constant backup during the investigation, which of course becomes a lot more complicated than Murderbot had originally expected.

ART is a striking reminder that it’s not always the most outwardly “nice” peers who are the most reliable friends. Rather, it might be someone who’s irascible, pedantic, or “difficult” that will offer support and loyalty when it’s most needed. Those outward traits and apparent hostility don’t exist in a vacuum, however, and often mask a deep desire for connection—and ART just does stuff for Murderbot, like sterilizing surfaces and destroying evidence once things go south. And although those two go their separate ways, Murderbot is emotional at its departure. Murderbot itself is well aware of how it puts up its own masks and barriers to keep others from getting to know it better. Changing one’s entire life and mode of being takes time. But Murderbot discovers that it can still keep, and perhaps reconfigure, those barriers, while still being helpful and even grateful to others it comes across in its travels. That is perhaps the strongest lesson of Artificial Condition—that you don’t have to be perfect, or perfectly open, in order to care for others.

Anya Johanna DeNiro writes, among many other things, YA novels about the adventures of young trans women. She also recently released A Bathroom Myth, a pay what you want Twine game as a fundraiser for the Transgender Law Center. For the most part, she can be found online at Twitter @adeniro.

Earlier this year, author V.E. Schwab delivered the sixth annual J.R.R. Tolkien Lecture on Fantasy Literature at Pembroke College, Oxford. With her permission, we are proud to present the text of that lecture; you can also find a complete video of the lecture and the excellent Q&A session that followed here, and also embedded below.

I have a confession to make:

I haven’t read The Lord of the Rings, or The Hobbit. I do not consider myself a well-versed fan of Tolkien, let alone an expert. I have nothing against the titular author of this lecture series, of course—in fact, when I was awarded the immense opportunity of delivering this talk, I considered dropping everything to read those books. Not because I wanted to, but because how could I step up to this podium otherwise? Fluency, if not fandom, felt expected of me.

Which is exactly why, in the end, I chose not to. I have a very strong belief that reading should be an act of love, of joy, of willing discovery. That when we force someone across the wrong literary threshold, we risk turning them away instead of ushering them through.

I was at a book conference earlier this year, on a panel, when this idea came up. The concept of gateway books. The stories responsible for making us into readers. Ironically, it was the topic of Tolkien that set the debate off. A male author on the panel said—and I’m paraphrasing because I wasn’t taking notes, but the words are more or less burned into my mind—he said that a person shouldn’t be allowed to consider themselves a lover of science fiction or fantasy if they hadn’t read Tolkien. That his work should be required reading.

Required reading. A dangerous label, that. As the Guest of Honor at this conference, and as someone who’s already admitted to you that she hasn’t achieved that designation, I challenged him. Why? Why was Tolkien the threshold, the marker, the metric by which membership in this club should be determined? And the author said, simply, “Because he made me a reader. Because without him, I wouldn’t be here.”

Which is wonderful, for that author, and for anyone who found their way to reading via Tolkien’s hallowed halls. But there isn’t one door through which we must find a love of reading, or nothing. In fact, such a prescription is dangerous, limiting. What happens, when a budding reader is handed a book and told, if you don’t love this, you don’t love fantasy? Setting aside the fact it’s unfair to put that much weight on one book, it is equally unfair to put that much pressure on one reader.

I told the man on the panel I had never read Tolkien, and he looked at me not with derision exactly, but with such open astonishment, as if wondering how I found my way into that chair, onto that panel, into the building, onto the pages of books, without him. And I simply said, “I found another door.”

It didn’t seem to occur to him there could be more than one. But that is the beauty of readership. It does not matter how we find our ways in—Boxcar Children, The Bourne Identity, Anne McCaffrey, or Stephen King. What matters is that we find them.

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I was eleven when I found my door. An only child and over-achiever, I was a capable reader, but not an enamored one. I’d yet to find a story that could make the pages of a book disappear, one that could make me forget I was looking at words on paper the way a good movie makes you forget the cinema seat, the edges of the screen.

And then a family friend called my mum. She was at a bookstore in Southern California, and there was an author there signing her debut novel. It was geared toward kids my age, and the friend asked my mum if I might like a signed copy. My mother, knowing I wasn’t a passionate reader, but not wanting to be rude, said yes, sure, that would be nice, and a week later, the book arrived in the mail.

It wasn’t very thick, but it had an illustration on the front of a boy on a broomstick, flying through an arch. If you haven’t guessed, it was called Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (well, Sorcerer’s Stone—this was, after all, in the States). The author, the one my mother’s friend just happen to stumble on in the bookshop, was of course, J.K. Rowling.

This sounds like the beginning of a familiar story, I know.

So many of my generation owe a debt to Rowling: for fostering a love of story, but the simple fact is that without her, without that series, I’m not sure when I would have developed a fondness for books. Certainly not until much later. Harry Potter was the first time when I fell in love. The first time I forgot I was reading words, because I felt like I was watching a film inside my head. The first time I forgot where I was. Who I was. Harry Potter—and J.K. Rowling—provided me my first taste of true narrative escape, and from that moment I was hooked. Mesmerized by the idea that someone could use words that way, to transport. The alchemy of translating letters into stories. It was, pure and simple, magic. And it made me a reader. It was my door.

But I would never set those books before someone and say, “If you do not love these, you are not a reader. If these do not speak to you, you are not one of us.” Because it does not matter which door you take, so long as you find one. Some of us find the door young, and some don’t. My father, who is 69 years old, has found his love of reading in the six months since he’s retired, proving there is no expiration date on doors.

Nearly twenty years after I stepped through my own, here I am.

People often ask me why I write fantasy. I used to only have one answer. Because I grew up wanting the world to be stranger than it was. Now I think, what I meant, what I mean, is that I also wanted it to be more.

I was the kind of child who scoured the piled stone hills behind my grandmother’s house in Tahoe, looking for cracks shaped like doorways, grooves shaped like keyholes. I would run my hands over the rocky surface and try to remember a magic I’d never known. A password I convinced myself I’d simply forgotten. I told myself that if I could just remember the right word, the door would open, and I would find that other world I was so convinced was there. That was my youth—spent looking for doors. Not because I was unhappy—I had the kind of loving upbringing that registers in your memory as a painting instead of a film, a still life. My mother is a dreamer, and my father is a diabetic, and aside from her occasional outbursts and his occasional episodes, it was a perfectly stable, if rather solitary, childhood.

I searched for ways out not because I was miserable, or lost, but because I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more. That the world was bigger and stranger and more magical than the one I could see. I suppose, in some ways, it was my version of faith. A belief in something you cannot see, cannot prove. But you search for it all the same.

I grew up wanting the world to be stranger than it was, in large part because I hadn’t found my place in the version that was. Or rather, because I’d only found my place in the pages of books. I wanted to be Alanna, and Hermione Granger. I wanted to be Jason Bourne, Jonathan Strange, Katniss Everdeen, King Arthur, and Sabriel. I wanted to be powerful, and important, and free. I wanted to find the keys to the world. I wanted to see myself, and be someone else at the same time, wanted to be reinvented as someone stronger. I never went looking for happiness, never folded myself up in romance.

What I wanted were the adventures.

I wanted to wander the world of the dead, wanted to cast spells, and wear battle armor, fight spies and topple empires, and tap into the well of magic I knew was inside me, waiting to be woken, the same way I knew the world was big and strange, even if I couldn’t see it yet.

That is the power of fantasy. Of fiction. Of story. Of words.

We’re taught in school to use words carefully, to use them kindly, to use them well. But we are never truly taught—at least not in a classroom—how much magic they truly have.

I discovered that magic first as a reader. But it wouldn’t take me long to realize that the power words held over me was a power I could wield. Once I discovered that, I was unstoppable. Insatiable. I still am. Creativity is not only a potent magic. It is also an addictive one.

Before I was born my mother had a prophecy read over me. It was that kind of family. It wasn’t the most generous prophecy, but it was incredibly specific. Some pieces were unsettling, and some were startlingly accurate—I would be from the beginning an outsider, a keen observer, a social mimic, lost inside my own head—but the part I loved best was the part where the psychic said I would have a gift for words. A gift she wasn’t sure I would use for good. She predicted I would either become a cult leader, or a novelist. And whether or not you believe in any of this, it never fails to delight me that spinners of stories rank with swayers of minds and faith. A cult leader, or a novelist. The power to move masses. To hypnotize, or indoctrinate, or enthrall. Words are powerful things.

I often joke that writers are the gods of their own world. We are certainly its most adept magicians. Many authors talk about finding their way through their stories, about the mystery and the surprise and the reveal. They speak of their stories as things that already exist, entities waiting to be discovered, uncovered, explored, understood. They see themselves as mediums. Conduits.

But I have always seen myself as a conjurer.

Putting piece after piece, ingredient after ingredient, into the cauldron until the spell takes shape, the contents become more than the sum of their parts. That’s what spirits are, in bodies, that unquantifiable spark. That’s what stories are, too. They are what happens when ideas and words thread together into something more. A sentence is letters plus spaces plus meaning. A story is a sentence on a larger scale. It is alchemy. The transmutation of one element into another through some variable combination of method and madness. Impossible to quantify the ratios because they are different for all of us.

Believe it or not—and it’s becoming harder to believe some thirteen books in—I never set out to write novels. I’m an intensely visual person—I see everything before I write it down, I block and choreograph every beat, roll through the seconds of mental film, cut to different cameras in my head, different angles. Every scene comes with its own color palette. Every moment comes with an underlying soundtrack. I was a decent artist, but I couldn’t find a way to fully bring what I saw to life using pens, ink, paint. So I wrote.

When I was a kid, I would write screenplays, and then force my friends and neighbors and family to act them out, just so I could see the story played out before my eyes instead of behind them.

As I grew up, I became more attached to the words themselves, as if each one were indeed part of a larger incantation. There was magic in order, and cadence, syllable and flow. For years everything I wrote came out in meter and verse. Poetry felt like the most distilled form of power. I was fifteen when I won my first poetry contest.

I still remember the poem, its eight short lines woven into the fabric of my memory:

Perhaps the moon
Is in the sea
Reflecting up
Against the sky

As night beams bathe
In ocean waves
And all the stars
Swim by.

I loved poetry, but as the stories in my head grew more and more elaborate, I knew I hadn’t found the right form. It wasn’t until I got to college—wasn’t until I’d tried short fiction, and non-fiction, and micro-fiction, and screenplay, and journalism, before I realized why I hadn’t tried to write a book.

I was afraid. Afraid I didn’t have the attention span. Afraid I wasn’t smart enough to build something that large. Afraid it would collapse. Afraid I would fail. Luckily for me, I have a rather adversarial nature when it comes to fear. I had a fear of heights, so I went skydiving. I had a fair of change, so I cut off all my hair. I had a fear of leaving home, so I backpacked through Europe. I had a fear of failing to write a book, so I sat down, and started.

I wrote my first novel, and it was terrible, as all first novels should be. But it was a start. And the high of not only starting a story, but finishing it, was the most addictive sensation. I was hooked.

Since that first foray, I’ve always written fantasy. Now and then I’ve tried to dip my toe in realistic fiction, but within a few chapters, I invariably find myself longing for a demon, or a ghost, a way to make the world stranger.

Fantasy, it must be said, is a very large umbrella. Some insist on breaking it down into further, smaller shelters—speculative, high fantasy, second world, urban, supernatural thriller, fairy tale, magical realism, and so on. And yet, for such a broad concept, we too often seem to have a narrow vision of it. It need not always have wizards or dragons, necromancy or magic or chosen ones or worlds we cannot touch.

I have written about witches on the English moors. Libraries where the dead are shelved like books. Superpowers born of near-death experiences. Elemental magic in alternate Londons. Cities where violence breeds monsters.

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When I say fantasy, I simply mean, a story in which one foot—or heel, or toe—is not planted on firm, familiar ground. But my favorite fantasies are the ones where the other foot is, where the line between the known and the new, the observable reality and the strange fantastic, is dotted, blurred. It goes back to my childhood, searching those Lake Tahoe hills for cracks in the stone that might be doors. Because a fantasy set entirely in another world is an escapism with limits. You can read about it, sure, but you can never really get there. A fantasy with a door, a portal, a way in, that breeds a different kind of belief.

It is the difference between Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Middle-earth is accessible only on the page. But Narnia had a door in the back of a wardrobe. That wardrobe is not simply a piece of furniture, it is an object that instills doubt—doubt that the world is as simple or mundane as it seems—the kind of doubt that makes a child climb into every cupboard and armoire they can find, looking for doors. When we make readers doubt their own reality, even a little, we grant them hope for a different one.

Writers of fantasy possess a special kind of magic.

We have the ability to change the world.

Writers of the speculative have the incredible opportunity to speculate. To reinvent and reimagine. We have the power to create spaces where diverse readers can see themselves, not only as tangential, but as essential. Fantasy authors have the opportunity to tell stories about characters whose real-life analogs are so often cast to the outside edges of the narrative, and to center those too often relegated to its fringes.

Which is why it’s disheartening, if I’m being generous, and maddening, if I’m being honest, to see so many new stories conforming to such old conceits. To see so many contemporary fantasy authors subscribing to antiquated models, either because of nostalgia, or the ease of well-worn roads, or, more likely, because they still feel adequately represented by them.

What a waste. The most beautiful part of writing fantasy is the freedom, not from rules—because we all know that good stories need good worlds, and good worlds, whether they’re rooted in fantasy, sci-fi, or realism, require solid scaffolding—no, not from rules, but from the exact details of the present we inhabit.

We have the opportunity to subvert the established tropes, to redefine power, to conceive of social landscapes and climates perpendicular to the ones in which we live. Fantasy allows us to explore the strengths and weaknesses of our own world through the lens of another. To draw a concept from its natural framework, its classic, well-worn context, and examine the underbelly of the idea. To restructure, and re-center. Fantasy affords the luxury of close examination—of the self, and of society—laid within a framework of escapism. It can be a commentary, a conversation, and it can simply be a refuge.

Good Fantasy operates within this seeming paradox.

It allows the writer, and by extension the reader, to use fictional and fantastical analogs to examine the dilemmas of the real world.

But it also allows the reader to escape from it. To discover a space where things are stranger, different, more.

In my opinion, there is no such thing as pure Fantasy.

Fantasy, like all stories, has its roots in reality—it grows from that soil. Stories are born from “what if…”, and that is a question that will always be rooted in the known. “What if…” by its nature is a distillation of “What if things were different?” And that question depends on a foundation of what we want them to be different from. In that sense, all fantasy is in conversation with a reality we recognize. It is a contrast, a counterpoint, and in my opinion the best fantasies are those which acknowledge and engage with that reality in some way.

Perhaps that means we see the world we are leaving—we board the train to Hogwarts, we step through the wardrobe—or perhaps we simply acknowledge the foundations on which our story is born and from which we are departing.

I’m not advocating for fantasy as an overt metaphor. The questions and counterpoints need not be the driving force of the narrative—as with Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness—but that question, “what if…?”, is strongest when it challenges the world we already know, and finds a way to pivot from it. To ask more interesting questions. To tell new stories.

Because, I must confess, I am tired of one true kings.

I am tired of stories centered around a young white man learning how to wield power, as if the real world doesn’t already do enough to prepare them.

I am tired of stories where women are either princesses or whores or manic pixie dream girls who have no story of their own but exist only as plot devices, obstacles, or pit stops on the quest of the male lead.

I am tired of stories that look and feel, act and behave, exactly like the world in which we already live, because they subscribe to the same conceptions of hierarchy, the same delineation of power, the same accepted norms.

And as tired as I am, I cannot fathom how tired some of my colleagues are. What seem like hills to me must be mountains to authors of color. I know that. I can only hope that, in helping to create commercial fantasy that breaks these old molds, I can also make space for others to do the same. Hold open a door.

I love this space, I love fantasy, and I love what it has the potential to become. There is this fear I sense from authors—most of them white, straight, male—as if moving forward means leaving the past—their past—behind. And perhaps, in reality that is true, but in fiction, the rules do not apply. The old is not erased by the new, it is not replaced by the new. It is only made better, stranger, more.

And that is why I write fantasy, why I’ve always written fantasy, to make the world stranger than it is, better than it is, more than it is. I write fantasy because I want to feel the way I felt when I stood on my grandmother’s stone hills, searching for doors. The way I feel when the air suddenly shifts and I can smell the energy in our world like the beginnings of a brewing storm. I don’t write to create a magic that isn’t there. I write to access a magic that is. To amplify it so that others feel it, too.

I write fantasy to make cracks in the foundation of a reader’s expectations, to challenge the solidity of their assumptions and beliefs.

I write fantasy because I want to bolster the believers, and make the skeptics wonder, to instill doubt and hope in equal measure. To help readers envision a time, a place, a world in which fantastical concepts like magic, or immortality, or equality, seem within reach.

My favorite stories are the ones laid like gossamer over our own world. The ones that make magic feel close at hand, that promise us there is a door, even if we haven’t found it yet. The ones that make us doubt our senses. The way a paranormal experience, or a near-death experience, or a spiritual experience, makes a cynic doubt their own established and accepted truths.

One of the most satisfying experiences I’ve ever had revolves around my novel, Vicious. It is a book about two pre-med students who discover the key to superpowers are near-death experiences—that the proximity of fatality can trigger a permanent adrenal shift. I threaded my magic through science. Took what is, and nudged it just a measure into what could be, and about three months after that book came out, I got an email from a man, who couldn’t sleep until I told him the truth: was any of it real?

A full-grown adult sent me an email in the middle of the night, because the question, the idea, the what-if, was keeping him awake. He was sure—he was almost sure—but the doubt had crept in like kudzu in the South, peeling up the clean foundation of his mind as it made room to grow.

I wish believing were always that easy.

I wish I could write a reality that was kinder to so many of those reading my work. Wish that, like in A Darker Shade of Magic, the strength of one’s power was more important than who they loved. I wish that I could center women and LGBTQ and people of color in the real world as easily as in my books.

But until that day, I am committed to doing it in fiction.

I will write powerful women, and princes in love with princes, and worlds where the monsters that plague our own have shapes that can actually be fought, bested. I will write flawed people because people are flawed, and I will write books where those who are so often relegated to sidekick or token or object are centered in the narrative, where they have their own agency, their own power, their own story.

I will write what I love, and what I long for, in the hopes that for someone, it might be not only be a way out, but a way in.

In short, I will write in the hopes of writing someone else a door.

Victoria “V.E.” Schwab is the bestselling author of more than a dozen books, including the Shades of Magic series and This Savage Song. Her Villains series, which began with Vicious, continues this September in Vengeful. Her work has received critical acclaim, been featured by EW and The New York Times, been translated into more than a dozen languages, and been optioned for TV and Film.

This is a beautiful book, beautifully written, infused with love of horses. It’s a lovely story in the mode of Watership Down and The Wind in the Willows, not to mention the Narnia books. Talking animals, strong moral code, more than a hint of the numinous.

When I first read it I enjoyed it, but it didn’t make the powerful impression on me that it’s made on so many others. It’s iconic, people are always begging me to write about it, and so there was no question that I’d include it in this series. But it never made it to my constant-reread rota.

Now I think I understand why.

I’ve never been the intended audience for talking-animal stories. Even as a small child I wanted real animals. Animals that were animals. Not humans in fur suits, with human concerns and human problems. One of my worst nightmares was to dream that I had a real horse, and to have the horse turn into a stick horse. A symbolic representation. Not-real.

Stanton is a horsewoman. There’s no question about that. She writes from experience. She’s obviously had many horses, and her book is about her feelings for them both generally and in particular. And she writes beautifully.

And yet.

Horse people come in many sizes and shapes and philosophies of life, the universe, and horses. In this book, published in 1988, I recognize so much of the horse world I knew then. Big wooden barns with pastures. A particular mix of breeds—lots of Thoroughbreds, some Quarter Horses and Paints, an Arabian or two, and often an Appaloosa for color (but they had a rep for being stubborn and hard to handle). (I loved them, make no mistake. It wasn’t stubbornness so much as low idiot tolerance. And oh, the spots!)

Horse maintenance was of a particular sort. Everybody shod their horses, broodmares included. Bran mashes were a constant—people believed they were good for the digestion, and a warm mash was essential on cold nights. Colic treatment included (and in most places still includes) walking the horse for hours to try to settle its stomach.

Those things have changed over the years. Shoeing is a different proposition, there’s a whole cult of barefoot trimmers (some of whom are wildly antagonistic to the very idea of shoeing a horse), and broodmares may be kept barefoot unless they require corrective shoeing; even those shoes may be pulled before foaling, for the safety of the foal. Bran is now known to strip nutrition rather than add to it, and may actually damage the horse it’s meant to help. And the pony in the book being forced to walk but being denied water—way to add an impaction to the stress colic she already has.

But for the time, the standard of care was top of the line. If you want to know best practice for horse care in the US in the Eighties, here’s a good example.

Another thing that’s changed over the decades is our understanding of horse color genetics, thanks to the sequencing of the equine genome. Now we can test for a large number of traits including the many variations of color. What that means for the Appaloosa is that we can more reliably predict what colors an individual horse carries in its genes, even if the horse manifests them minimally or not at all. The bare minimum now for an Appaloosa is mottled skin and white eye sclera plus striping of the hooves (though the latter can be iffy if the horse has white leg markings). The horse also, now, has to have at least one registered parent—the registry has tightened up and no longer accepts any horse with the appropriate coloring.

Stanton’s central theme of all Appaloosas losing their color and no longer breeding true wouldn’t be as difficult a situation now as it was before DNA testing. Then again, there’s been an ongoing battle between those who believe all Appaloosas should show visible coloring, and those who believe any horse with Appaloosa parents, whether spotted or solid, should be considered an Appaloosa. So that’s not too far off.

What I don’t quite get from the text is how an Appaloosa can be born with spectacular spotting and turn into a solid buckskin as she matures. I’m not an an expert on the breed, but my observation is that apparently solid foals can color out as they grow, sometimes quite dramatically, but foals born with loud color may “roan out” or turn greyish. (There have been cases of Appaloosas bred to grey horses whose offspring have turned white, but that’s another set of color genetics, unrelated to the Appaloosa color complex.) I haven’t heard of any that turned into vivid solid colors.

And then there’s the few-spot leopard, which is the ultimate breeding cross. It’s a horse who appears to be all or mostly white, but genetically it will always produce color. This only became clear in the 1970s, when a few breeders kept their “white” colts from Appaloosa parents and bred them, and discovered that they were guaranteed color producers regardless of what they were bred to. So complete visual absence of color can conceal genetic treasures. That’s a magic of its own.

One thing I have been told firmly by Appaloosa breeders is never, ever to mix Appaloosa and Paint. It’s not done. So poor Susie couldn’t win even that. Susie is my favorite character; I feel so sad for her because of what happened in the book, but even more so knowing what a real-world breeder would think of the cross.

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All of this is pretty technical, and I find it interesting, but it doesn’t explain why I bounced off this book as hard as I did. Nor is it entirely that our understanding of feral horse herd dynamics has shifted from the belief that the stallion leads the herd to the observation that the herd member who actually makes the decisions is the lead mare. Mares don’t submit to stallions because they’re the lords of creation; even in breeding, when they seem to be submissive, they’re actually controlling the stallion. Their hormonal status determines his reactions. And if they say no, and they aren’t confined or forced, they can enforce the refusal with a pair of killer heels.

That was where I first began to realize why the book wasn’t working for me. The focus on stallions as the superior gender, and on mares as subject to their will and whim, made me go Nope. Nopenope.

Then there’s Duchess, who doesn’t want to be Lead Mare, and who is pretty much railroaded into it. Horses run a gamut from secure-submissive to secure-dominant, that’s true, and the insecure ranges can be the most dangerous and the most endangered, because they don’t know how to react, or trust those reactions. Insecure-dominant will get aggressive when trying to take over, and insecure-submissive will fight when she should back off. So Duchess is probably insecure-dominant, but around the Dancer she’s totally submissive, which is not the behavior of an alpha mare (and I don’t think she’s elected to the post on an annual basis, either). The only time the alpha will let the stallion order her around is when she’s in standing heat, and even then, she won’t take his crap. He learns really fast to ask nicely and take no for an answer.

So there’s a basic philosophical difference there, which made me want to smack Duchess upside the head. And the Dancer. Oh my. What I wouldn’t give to turn him out with my herd matriarch in her heyday. She’d eat him for breakfast. After she kicked his lights out.

But even more than that, which is a basic difference in attitude toward horse personalities and handling, I found myself pulling back from the human-essentialism of the worldbuilding. The horses are not horses, they’re humans in horse suits. They subscribe to human (modern Western) cultural assumptions, including the dominance of the male. Even physically, they keep showing human traits: a furrow between the eyes when a horse is worried (which is not physically possible; there’s some wrinkling directly above the eyes when a horse is concerned, but the forehead can’t move or wrinkle), or tears when she’s grieving (the only time a horse will shed “tears” is when the tear ducts, which drain through the nostrils, are blocked; that’s a medical issue, not an emotional one).

The fundamental principle of this world is that horses are divided to breeds, and humans create and maintain the breeds, while horses (led by the stallions and the male Equus) fight the eternal battle between good and evil—it’s extremely dualistic; there are no grey areas here. And that’s pretty classic for fantasy. It’s also all about the humans. Human-manufactured breeds. Horses submitting to humans, good and bad. Humans create, horses follow along.

And that was the biggest Nope of all. (Aside from the one about Appaloosa being the oldest breed—no, that’s the Arabian, and the historical basis for the claim about Appaloosas is only a century old, so, nope; however, I cut lots of slack for those who love their breed above all others. That’s a horse person’s prerogative, after all.) The breed thing is such a human hangup, and a very recent one at that. There are strong elements of racism and colonialism in it. It’s not a horse thing at all.

Horses on their own tend to live in family groups. They may gravitate toward horses who look like them, for color or shape or size, and who act like them, culturally and socially. What they do not do is make a cult of specific breeds and lineages, still less build their universe around them.

So that didn’t work for me. I don’t see horses that way, though I’m perfectly willing and able to discuss the pros and cons of the different breeds, and I understand closed studbooks, the why and how. But that’s human taxonomy at work, not horse culture or psychology. Horses don’t care. Their world is built around other priorities, few of which coincide with humans’ unless humans force the issue.

And that’s the biggest thing. Horses are horses. Humans are humans. Their worlds intersect, and it can be a wonderful symbiosis. But like the nightmare of the horses turning into plastic toys, I just can’t live in a world in which horses are simply reflections of human personalities and priorities. It’s the fact they aren’t human that I love most about them.

I got through this reread on the strength of the writing, but the worldbuilding was a big Nope. What it did for me was decide the next book I’ll reread—one that’s been on my personal reread rota since it first came out. It’s another story of a buckskin mare caught up in powerful magic, and it’s one of the most accurate depictions of horse psychology that I’ve ever read.

So, next time: Doranna Durgin, Dun Lady’s Jess. Doranna will show us how to do horses as horses—even when magic has done its utmost to turn them into something else.

Judith Tarr is a lifelong horse person. She supports her habit by writing works of fantasy and science fiction as well as historical novels, many of which have been published as ebooks by Book View Cafe. She’s even written a primer for writers who want to write about horses: Writing Horses: The Fine Art of Getting It Right. Her most recent novel, Dragons in the Earth, features a herd of magical horses, and her space opera, Forgotten Suns, features both terrestrial horses and an alien horselike species (and space whales!). She lives near Tucson, Arizona with a herd of Lipizzans, a clowder of cats, and a blue-eyed dog.

Abbey Mei Otis’s first long-form collection, Alien Virus Love Disaster: Stories, is a powerful debut volume published by the perennially impressive Small Beer Press. The book contains twelve stories with publication dates spanning the past eight years, including “Sweetheart” which appeared on Tor.com in 2010. Otis’s fiction has a dynamic blend of contemporary and speculative approaches, diamond-edged and furious in her exploration of power, oppression, and grief.

The titular story also serves as a statement of themes: outsider or abject characters; viral, haunting, gruesome physicality; hunger mixed with passion and crooked adoration; cataclysm before-during-and-after. It isn’t a pleasant or simple experience for the audience. The bodies in Otis’s short fiction are subject to a grim though often lyrical brutality, one step too far for comfort at all times, and their suffering does not generally lead to a positive outcome.

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Otis’s stories fracture reality through a prism of potential—and universally horrible—logical outcomes, pointing to the possible (or probable) failures embedded in the current accepted beliefs, systems, and expectations of the social order. These futures are all possible impossibilities, extrapolations to the nth degree based on the struggles of the here and now: extreme disparities in wealth, time-wasting labor for the underclass, pollution and poison from manufacturing spewed into poor neighborhoods, the animal realities of a flesh body and its wounds/desires/exploitability, and so on.

We recognize it all. It recognizes us. Otis’s prose brings the intense affect of her stories not simply to life but to embodiment—it’s the kind of phrasing and artistry that a reader feels in their guts. Calling it “body horror” doesn’t quantify the full extent of the visceral detail Otis gives through her protagonists’ often-internal, often-narrow point of view. However, the horror of bodies is a throughline in almost all of the stories in the collection: bodies as they are infected or changed, such as in “Alien Virus Love Disaster” or “Blood, Blood,” bodies that are commodified (“Sex Dungeons for Sad People”), bodies that keep on ticking though the world around them has collapsed (“Not an Alien Story” and “Moonkids”).

Embodiment crosses intersections of labor, in Otis’s stories, but also other kinds of production: sexual and emotional, specifically. The emotional experiences of these characters are not separated from their flesh, even when they wish that could be the case like the narrator of “Blood, Blood.” Otis is not speculating in the form of a thought experiment. She is recording a lived existence with dirt, hunger, and sorrow down to the cellular level. It’s something I don’t see enough of in SF but she’s got it on lock. These people feel like people, and it makes their suffering almost unbearable to read.

But purposeful. There’s a political and social purpose to this kind of gruesomeness. Otis isn’t wallowing or shocking the reader. She’s not here to provoke a titter of excitement or taboo. Somehow, she manages to render even the sensual and grimy aspects of her stories with an empathetic, internal shade. The reader isn’t observing from the outside, they’re experiencing from the inside, and that makes a world of difference in the thematic argument of this kind of hard-edged work.

The weakest of the stories is, ironically, the one that does this least well: “Sweetheart,” a brief meditation on a theme rather than the bodied experience of the other pieces. It is also one of the earliest pieces collected here, so through comparison, watching Otis’s work evolve is engaging as well. The blistering skill for observation is still present in the minor details of the characters’ actions and words, but the emotional heft isn’t there yet. However, it very much is in “Rich People.” I had to put the book down for awhile after that one, I was filled with such an incandescent rage and grief. That’s skill, the ability to render Suya’s cruelty to her disappeared husband’s baby and aged mother, her desperation that has slipped past desperation into freefall, the freefall that allows her to simple walk straight into a a garden-party of humans so wealthy that they slaughter exotic animals to sleep inside their carcasses and bond in the viscera.

Again: there is a world of skill in being able to write viscera without descending into shock-jock territory. Otis has that skill.

Another method she uses to evoke her material is abrupt shifts in genre. Kafkaesque sweeps of the fantastic crash into otherwise mimetic stories to create a poetry of dissonance and decay, such as in the brief “Teacher.” The piece dissolves from a scene that could occur in a further-collapsed, near-future version of our current school system to an allegorical, hallucinatory description of diving into the maw of a student’s infected, crumbling mouth to escape a hoard of unquiet dead. These moments of dissolution, of unmooring from even the speculative reality of the narrative structure, contain the most affect. Otis is howling into the void in these pieces and dragging us with her, unearthing a horror that is difficult to reach with realist fiction.

The strength in merging genres and expectations and tropes is this: being able to get at something deeper. Use all the tools in the box to make something new. Alien Virus Love Disaster: Stories does that and does it well with a provocative, gruesome outlook. Otis is staring straight at the ugliest of our possibilities and offering them to the reader as if to say, “change this, change this.”  There’s a healthy dose of fear and disgust, anxious even in moments of beauty like the erotic clash in “Moonkids,” but it’s a set of emotions that feel right for the current moment. It’s a collection that will keep your heart half in your throat and half in your toes, and I recommend it.

Alien Virus Love Disaster: Stories is available August 14th from Small Beer Press.

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.

Welcome back to the reread, where we are dealing with chapter 6 of Diplomatic Immunity. We get to go to the ballet! Nicol will be performing with the orchestra and has arranged a box so that Miles and Ekaterin can watch a performance with Bel and Garnet Five. I love this chapter because I love ballet. It’s one of the legacies of my time in Arizona—Ib Anderson’s production of Don Quixote was life-changing. I also love Quaddies, and this trip to the ballet is a crash course in Quaddie culture. What we saw back in Falling Free was the roots of this culture, born in a struggle in which the only options were freedom and annihilation. This, two centuries later, has clear links to that early history while celebrating contemporary Quaddie autonomy.

So first, I have to point out that Quaddie fashion is AMAZING. Bel is wearing an ensemble that deploys cuffs and slashing in a way that demonstrates the practicality of Tudor fashions in future-space. At least, that is my reading of the doublet and slashed trews with cuffs at the knee. The combination of colors and prints is thrilling—orange and blue, with stars on the sleeves. Nicol is in form-fitting black knits and filmy rainbow scarves, a vaguely goth fairy-princess look that I think must be stunning in free fall. Garnet Five is wearing black velvet with a white lace ruff. Her ensemble reminds me of Victorian mourning clothes. She’s also wearing an air cast on one of her lower arms—a reminder of the reason Miles is here. The dancers are wearing glittery ship knits, which is further proof, if anyone needed it, of my point about ship knits being the most versatile garments ever invented.

Although the focus of the evening is on art, there’s plenty of time for conversation about what’s on the forefront of everyone’s mind—love, and its natural consequence, which is babies. Miles came to this party to make Barrayar look open-minded and diplomatic, so he’s taken by surprise when Garnet Five says that she and Corbeau have talked about children and makes Bel show off their baby pictures. Quaddies and downsiders (which is what Quaddies call people with legs) can have children together using uterine replicators. They have to decide how many arms their children will have before the child can be conceived. Bel didn’t mention this to Miles when they talked about wanting to take the oath of citizenship and stay in the UFH permanently, possibly because Bel didn’t know that Miles is in the grip of besotted impending parenthood. I think if Bel had asked to leave ImpSec service to start a family, Miles would have caved. Bel’s pictures are approximations based on parental facial features because Bel and Nicol haven’t started their baby yet. They have, however, decided that their first child will be a Quaddie girl, so it sounds like Bel’s citizenship is the last stumbling block.

Garnet Five also explains Quaddie naming conventions. The first Quaddies each had a name and a numerical designation. When they escaped, they began a system of single, unique names which were tracked. After several generations there were waiting lists for popular names, so the Quaddies voted to allow name duplication if the name had a numerical suffix. When a person dies, their name number, if they had one, can be reused. Bel knows a Leo Ninety-nine, but most numerical designations are smaller. Garnet Five is one of eight Garnets currently living in the Union. Nicol doesn’t have a numerical designation because she is the only living Nicol.

The performance is not a single ballet, but a collection of short pieces—Miles refers to them as works, reflecting both artistic convention and the value the Quaddies place on work as an ideal. Quaddie dance uses the zero-g environment and takes advantage of the Quaddies’ ability to use multiple sets of hands. In the opening piece, dancers use their hands to create shifting formations while playing drums. It sounds INCREDIBLE—like a cross between Riverdance and synchronized swimming.

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The highlight of the evening is an excerpt from the Quaddie ballet The Crossing, which tells the story of the Quaddie’s migration to Quaddiespace. I sincerely hope that this ballet includes a scene where a work crew uses an ice die to fabricate a vortex mirror. And in my head, it does! I imagine that it’s an incredibly challenging dance sequence and is complicated and expensive to produce, which is why the company isn’t performing The Crossing in its entirety this evening. Instead, they are presenting the pas de deux between Leo and Silver. Leo is danced by a Quaddie performer wearing false legs. Silver is danced by Garnet Five’s understudy. The performance uses apparatus that sound like they would be similar to a jungle gym if they were built in an environment with gravity. Silver is graceful and Leo is clumsy, like an engineer.

Back when the only song the Quaddies knew was about the colors of the rainbow (“He’s the color Quaddie that the spectrum gives!”) I assigned all of my favorite characters in Falling Free their own theme songs. Leo Graf got Tom Petty’s “Free Falling.” Silver’s was “America’s Sweetheart” by Elle King. I didn’t choose a love theme for them because Falling Free isn’t a nineties romantic comedy. The orchestra plays one for them here, but Diplomatic Immunity isn’t a romantic comedy either—Garnet Five invited Miles and Ekaterin to this performance to pursue an agenda. She wants Corbeau freed from jail and discharged from the Barrayaran military. Miles isn’t sure that their relationship will stand the test of time; Garnet Five and Corbeau have only known each other for two weeks, and they’re both young. Miles doesn’t want to encourage their relationship—leaving the Barrayaran military during a term of enlistment carries a number of legal risks—but he does acknowledge to himself that his feelings for Ekaterin were just as sudden and unexpected.

Miles also acknowledges the importance of representation. Quaddie culture celebrates the unique lives, experiences, and abilities of people with four arms (and no legs), and its art and history acknowledge the participation of downsiders in Quaddie communities. Miles and Ekaterin have been wondering if Corbeau and Bel can lead normal lives in Quaddiespace. They can if they want! And it will likely be easier for them than it is for Miles—maybe even easier than it is for Solian and Corbeau—on Barrayar.

Ellen Cheeseman-Meyer teaches history and reads a lot.

The Sea Queen, the sequel to Linnea Hartsuyker’s The Half-Drowned King, is available August 14th from Harper—and to celebrate, we want to send you a copy of each book!

Six years after The Half-Drowned King, Ragnvald Eysteinsson is now king of Sogn, but fighting battles for King Harald keeps him away from home, as he confronts treachery and navigates a political landscape that grows more dangerous the higher he rises.

Ragnvald’s sister Svanhild has found the freedom and adventure she craves at the side of the rebel explorer Solvi Hunthiofsson, though not without a cost. She longs for a home where her quiet son can grow strong, and a place where she can put down roots, even as Solvi’s ambition draws him back to Norway’s battles again and keeps her divided from her brother.

As a growing rebellion unites King Harald’s enemies, Ragnvald suspects that some Norse nobles are not loyal to Harald’s dream of a unified Norway. He sets a plan in motion to defeat all of his enemies, and bring his sister back to his side, while Svanhild finds herself with no easy decisions, and no choices that will leave her truly free. Their actions will hold irrevocable repercussions for the fates of those they love and for Norway itself.

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Saga Press announced today that it would publish The Deep, an Afrofuturist novel based on the song of the same name by rap group Clipping (often stylized as clipping.) which includes Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes. Nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation – Short Form, “The Deep” envisions an underwater culture of the descendants of pregnant African slave women thrown overboard by slavers. Rivers Solomon, author of An Unkindness of Ghosts and a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, will write the novel, to be published in June 2019.

Simon & Schuster’s official announcement describes the plot of The Deep:

The Deep is the story of Yetu, who holds the memories for her people—the water-dwelling descendants of pregnant African slave women thrown overboard by slavers. Her people live idyllic lives in the deep. Their past, too traumatic to be remembered regularly, is forgotten by everyone, save her. But the memories—painful and wonderful, traumatic and terrible and miraculous—are destroying her, so she flees to the surface, to escape the memories and the expectations and the responsibilities, and discovers a world her people left behind long ago. She will learn more than she ever expected to about her own past—and about the future of her people. If they are all to survive, they’ll need to reclaim the memories, reclaim their identity—and own who they really are.

“The Deep” was originally released on This American Life episode #623 “We Are In the Future,” which delved into Afrofuturism:

The idea to adapt “The Deep” to book form came about at Worldcon 2017, when Saga Press editor Navah Wolfe (then nominated for Best Editor – Long Form) met Clipping (nominated for Best Dramatic Presentation – Short Form for their album Splendor & Misery) at the convention in Helsinki, Finland. “The first time I listened to ‘The Deep,’ I knew there were more stories in it,” Wolfe said in the press release. “It’s such a powerful, evocative song, full of layers, and I wanted to help bring those stories to the surface. Working to bring two enormous talents like Clipping and Rivers into conversation with each other to make this book a reality has been an extraordinary treat.”

“Clipping’s ‘The Deep’ is a fantastic feat of storytelling, word play, and literary prowess,” Solomon said. “It’s been such an honor to be a part of transposing this powerful work into written medium—tackling familiar themes of mine (diaspora, collective memory, trauma), while using the vision of other artists as a springboard. How does one begin to capture the poetry of the lyrics, the surreality of the sound effects, and the musicality of the changing tempos? As a writer, you dream of taking on a challenge like this.”

From Diggs, for Clipping: “I’m thrilled that Rivers Solomon heard enough in ‘The Deep’ to use it as a skeleton for such a beautiful and thrilling book. I’ve always thought that ‘good art’ begets ‘good art,’ so reading what Rivers created felt like receiving the greatest of compliments. I can’t wait for people to read it!”

Read more about “The Deep” and its Hugo nomination within the larger context of the awards.

In turn, Clipping will release a vinyl edition of “The Deep,” as well as new music inspired by the book, to coincide with The Deep’s publication in June 2019.

A packed two chapters await us this week in the third installment of the Reading of The Great Hunt. We begin to see the machinations of Tar Valon, and how they are not nearly as united as the people outside the Tower might assume, learn more about politics, and witness several characters sneaking off on their own agendas.

I am very excited to see chapters from Moiraine! It’s different to see part of this story from the perspective from the character who, at least so far, seems to have the most knowledge of what is going on. It was also interesting to watch Jordan manipulate his close third person narration in order to show us Moiraine’s thoughts without giving too much away, and it was very interesting to discover that she and the Amyrlin have a secret plan that no one knows about.

Speaking of the Amyrlin, it took me awhile to make sense of the fact that the office is called the Amyrlin Seat, and that the woman who holds the office is also called the Amyrlin Seat. Calling her the Amyrlin makes sense, but it seems weird to call a person “seat.” I suppose it would be like calling a King or Queen “the throne,” and it does put the focus more on the office than it does upon the person. So perhaps that’s the point; to recognize the office and its duties rather than elevate the person holding it.

In her rooms, Moiraine is dressing in her formal Aes Sedai shawl, which bears the white teardrop emblem of the Flame of Tar Valon and fringe denoting the color of the wearer’s Ajah; blue in Moiraine’s case. She is worried and angry, uncertain why the Amyrlin would have come all this way and concerned about who else she might have brought, and what effect that might have on Moiraine’s plans. There is a knock at the door, and after composing herself and making sure her expresion doesn’t give her away, Moiraine greets two other Aes Sedai, Anaiya, also a Blue Ajah, and Liandrin, who wears Red. Anaiya is happy to see Moiraine, but Liandrin is short with her and complains that Moiraine’s room is warded against their entrance. Moiraine explains smoothly that she didn’t want Shinarian servants messing with her things, and since there were no other Aes Sedai around she didn’t need to think about making an exception for her “sisters.”

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Moiraine has been summoned by the Amyrlin Seat and the three women proceed down the corridors of the women’s apartments, curtsied at by servants as they go. They discuss the fact that three more False Dragons have appeared, and although Liandrin is dismissive, Moiriane reminds her of the destruction that such men can wreck. Aes Sedai died stopping Logain, after all. They stop to talk to the Lady Amalisa, greeting her warmly and encouraging more familiarity than Amalisa intends to treat them with. She invites the three Aes Sedai to visit her gardens, and Moiriane is surprised when Liandrin—who is never very friendly with other Aes Sedai, let alone those outside the White Tower—accepts, Moiraine wonders what the red sister is up to.

As they continue on, Anaiya keeps telling Moiraine the news, how the unrest in Caemlyn has settled with the arrival of spring and how Elayne and Gawyn have arrived safely in Tar Valon, despite having been followed by the Children of the Light for the duration of their journey. They discuss the long tradition of sending the future queens of Andor to study at the White Tower, and how much power Elayne has. Moiraine thinks about how Elayne’s gifts must be kept a secret, that people are already suspicious of Morgause for being trained in and connected to Tar Valon, and that if the people knew Elayne will be a full Aes Sedai they would never accept her. Anaiya also mentions that he Hunt for the Horn has been called in Illian, and that both the Sea Folk and the Aiel are restless, and that there are rumors of fighting on Almoth Plain. When Moiraine tries to theorize on that, Liandrin snaps at her and reminds her that the Amyrlin is waiting.

Moiraine observes the Aes Sedai who accompanied the Amyrlin to Fal Dara; Brown Sisters who are concerned with seeking knowledge, as well as women in Yellow, White, and Green. Moiriane says hello to them, but they don’t reply back, and she feels her anxiety heighten. She is greeted by Leane, the Keeper of the Chronicles, who escorts her in to see the Amyrlin.

Moiraine greets the Amyrlin, Siuan Sanche, formally, calling her Mother and being called Daughter in return. She is startled to see that the Amyrlin already has the gold cube that Moiraine and her companions recovered from the bottom of the Eye of the World, despite the fact that Moiraine had left it under the protection of Lord Aglemar. The Amyrlin tells Moiraine of how they summoned wind and tied to travel faster to Fal Dara, no doubt flooding crops and leaving destruction and strange weather in their wake. She says that that Elayne and Elida, the Aes Sedai advisor to Queen Morgause, are in Tar Valon, and that the Red Ajah are very proud and excited to have been the Ajah who discovered Elayne, who may be the most powerful Aes Sedai in a thousand years. This gains the Red Ajah much status and influence, even if Elayne does not choose Red for her Ajah when the time comes.

Moiraine answers by telling the Amyrlin about Egwene and Nynaeve. She compares Egwene’s abilities as equal to Elayne’s own, and suggests that with proper training, Nyneave’s power will outshine them both. But she is surprised that the Amyrlin seems unaffected by this news; the numbers and strength of the Aes Sedai have been long dwindling, to find three girls with such power in so short a time is a big deal. The Amyrlin instead focuses on the news she received from Elaida, that Moiriane is meddling with a young man who is ta’veren, that Elida encountered him in Caemlyn but by the time she discovered the inn where he was staying, Moiraine had “spirited him away.”  Elida said that the boy was more dangerous than Artur Hawkwing, and because she has the ability to Foretell, those words carried a lot of weight. Two Green sisters even proposed that Moiraine be sent away on a retreat as punishment, a fact that is very surprising given the long alliance between the Green and Blue Ajahs, and the suggestion from the Greens that the Red Ajahs be responsible for Moiriane’s care during that time. Even more shocking is the way that they spoke to the Amyrlin, debating the presence of other Blue Ajah on the voyage, since Leane is of the blue and the Amyrlin was once blue, and even suggesting that she might not be allowed to go at all. This is a shocking thing, since the Amyrlin is understood by all to be of no Ajah, and to speak for all Aes Sedai and all Ajah. Things are changing.

The Amyrlin then sends Leane away, an unusual move, but the Keeper complies. The Amyrlin weaves a ward around the room to protect against eavesdropping, and then drops all the formality and embraces Moiraine, remembering their time together as novices and saying how good it is to have someone who still remembers who she was before she became the Amyrlin Seat. But then things turn serious again.

“Moiraine, if anyone, even Leane, discovers what we plan, we will both be stilled. And I can’t say they would be wrong to do it.”

Just hearing the word is enough to make Moiraine shiver, thinking of what it would be like to have her ability to touch saidar striped from her. Still, she reminds the Amyrlin that what they are doing is what they know must be done, what they have known must be done for twenty years, what the Pattern demands of them, and the Amyrlin agrees, although she muses on the danger of being stripped of her office, and points out that things would be easier if Moiraine had stuck to their original plan, to find the boy, bring him to Tar Valon, keep him safe and guide him.

“Nearly twenty years of planning and searching, and you toss all our plans practically in the Dark One’s face. Are you mad?”

Now that she had stirred life in the other woman, Moiraine returned to outward calm, herself. Calm, but firm insistence, too. “The Pattern pays no heed to human plans, Siuan. With all our scheming, we forgot what we were dealing with. Ta’veren. Elaida is wrong. Artur Paendrag Tanreall was never this strongly ta’veren. The Wheel will weave the Pattern around this young man as it wills, whatever our plans.”

The anger left Amyrlin’s face, replaced by white-faced shock. “It sounds as if you are saying we might as well give up. Do you now suggest standing aside and watching the world burn?”

“No, Siuan. Never standing aside.” Yet the world will burn, Siuan, one way or another, whatever we do. You could never see that. “But we must now realize that our plans are precarious things. We have even less control than we thought. Perhaps only a fingernail’s grip. The winds of destiny are blowing, Siuan, and we must ride them where they take us.”

Shaken, the Amyrlin takes the Horn of Valere from the gold box and reads the inscription aloud, remarking on the fact that prophecy said that it would only be found just in time for the Last Battle. She tells Moiriane that Aglemar was eager to get it out of his possession, saying the temptation to use it was too great. The Amyrlin expresses surprise that the Last Battle could be so close.

“The Karaethon Cycle.”

“Yes, Moiraine. You do not have to remind me. I’ve lived with the Prophecies of the Dragon as long as you.” The Amyrlin shook her head. “Never more than one false Dragon in a generation since the Breaking, and now three loose in the world at one time, and three more in the past two years. The Pattern demands a Dragon because the Pattern weaves toward Tarmon Gai’don.

Moiraine reminds the Amyrlin that the Pattern throws up false Dragons because it demands a real one, the Dragon, but that one he proclaims himself the creation of False Dragons will cease, and that is how they know, for example, the Logain is not the Dragon. She shows the Amyrlin the cuendillar seal, bearing the old Aes Sedai symbol sued when men and women still wielded the Power together. One of the seals on the Dark One’s prison, over which the Amyrlin was supposed to watch, although the secret the Aes Sedai keep is that no Amyrlin knows where the seals actually are. She admits that she noticed Rand in the courtyard, that seeing ta’veren is one of her gifts. To her eyes he blazed like the sun and she was filled with fear. Moiraine promises that he is the one, that he can wield the Power, and that he will stand up in front of the world as the Dragon Reborn.

Moiraine explains her new plan to the Amyrlin, how she has left Rand alone, feigning disinterest in him lest he stubbornly resist her. She plans to ask Perrin and Mat to carry the Horn to Illian, after the Aes Sedai rid him of his link to the Shadar Logoth dagger, and she suggests that Rand would be happy to get away from Aes Sedai and stay with his friends for a little longer before his fear of his power drives him from them. She will ensure their safe travel from a distance, and see to it that Illian is ready for Rand’s arrival. When the Dragon arrives carrying the Horn and proclaims himself, the people of Illian and most of the others gathered for the Hunt will be more than ready to follow him.

The Amyrlin has many more questions but Moiraine reminds her that people will be suspicious if they talk for too long, and promises to contrive another meeting at a later time. She also thinks, privately, that there are things she can’t tell even her dearest friend, and cannot risk the Amyrlin knowing that she is holding things back. They part, and Moiraine does her best to look like she has received a harsh scolding as she passes the other Aes Sedai. She can’t quite managed stunned regret, but anger looks almost as well.

The narrative shifts to Captain Geoffram Bornhald, who is riding with his men to a mystery meeting in a town at the edge of Tambor after being ordered to do so by Pedron Niall, Lord Captain Commander of the Children of the Light, in Amador. Captain Bornhald was not able to learn much about who he has been sent to meet or why, but he was instructed that the journey had to be completed with complete secrecy, and Bornhald is proud that he managed to move two thousand armed and mounted Children without being spotted by any innocent bystanders who would have to be killed to ensure their silence.

Bornhald is startled learn that he men he was sent to meet are Questioners, Children of the Light who use torture to extract confessions from suspected Darkfriends. But Bornhald is one of those who believes that the Questioners decide the guilt of a person before the questioning even begins, and he is displeased by it. He is invited into the village, learning that it has been “pacified” which means, Bornhald knows, that everyone living there has been killed. He is told that there are strangers on Toman Head with a great force, rumored to be monsters, or Aes Sedai, or both, and that the Children are here to bring this area under the Light. Bornhald seems to think that this means that Artur Hawkwing’s armies have returned, but the Questioners are unmoved and he is ordered to see his men settled in the camp. He thinks to himself that they are being used like stones on a board, but he has no idea who is moving them, or why.

Back in Fal Dara, Liandrin shows up unexpectedly in the Lady Amalisa’s chambers. She finds the women reading to each other from a book about courting, and she barges in and throws everyone out to speak to Amalisa alone, then tells the woman off about the dangers of falling into Shadow, even if one believes themselves to be walking in the Light. Amalisa is frightened and thrown off guard, and Liandrin presses this, reminding Amalisa that she is of the Red Ajah, one who hunts men who have been corrupted, not only those who wield the Power but any who have been corrupted, both lowborn and high. Amalisa, inferring that she might be speaking of her brother, Agelmar, throws herself to her knees in panic, pleading that it might be different. In her moment of fear and confusion, Liandrin strikes out with the One Power, exerting a subtle influence that helps bend Amalisa, unbeknownst to herself, to Liandrin’s will.

This was her own special trick from childhood, the first learned of her abilities. It had been forbidden to her as soon as the Mistress of Novices discovered it, but to Liandrin that only meant one more thing she needed to conceal from those who were jealous of her…

It was not a perfect ability; Liandrin could not force anyone to do what she wanted—though she had tried; oh, how she had tried. But she could open them wide to her arguments, make them want to believe her, want more than anything to be convinced of her rightness.

She tells Amalisa that the three boys Moiraine brought to Fal Dara are very dangerous, worse than Darkfriends, and commands her to have all her servants search the Keep for them. She learns about Padan Fain, and she tells Amalisa that the tales of the Black Ajah are true, so she must speak of this encounter to no one, even Moiraine or another Aes Sedai.

As she leaves Amalisa’s chamber, Liandrin feels as though someone is watching her, but when she sees no one, dismisses it as her imagination. But down in the dungeon, Padan Fain is waiting. The door opens, and he recognizes the figure outlined in the lamplight. His deliverer is not who he expected, but that does not matter, and he grins up at the ceiling, at something “unseen yet felt” and whispers that the battle is never over.

Unless I’m forgetting something, I think this is the first time a the narration has split perspectives within a single chapter. There’s a heck of a lot of set-up here, and the running theme of all three different sections seems to be the maneuvering of certain people into certain positions as part of the greater game. It’s most obvious with Liandrin, who I guess is probably one of those Aes Sedai that Bors noticed in the prologue. She knows a lot about Mat, Perrin, and Rand, and is hunting them with a specificity that I think suggests that she was given the command to do so, rather than out of her own curiosity or desire to undermine Moiraine, or something like that. Her attitude of superiority and status also suggest a Darkfriend’s particular perspective, wanting good people and noblewomen like Amalisa to have to kneel to her, etc. Although I’m sure they don’t have a monopoly on haughty classism in this world.

I wonder if there is an Ajah that is more likely than the others to become Black. I suppose it’s easy to be suspicious of the Red because we know that they are responsible for hunting down and gentling men with the Power. That makes them enemies of our heroes, of Thom Merrilin and Rand especially. And it suggests a bloodthirstiness, I think, through the choice of color and the willingness to do something that results in such pain, even though it is deemed necessary by all Aes Sedai. And then there is the conflict between the Red and the Blue. The reader mostly trusts Moiraine, and the suggestion that the Red Ajah want to have control over her punishment is a chilling one. Even worse is learning that women are also sometimes stripped of their power; the Aes Sedai are a dictatorship, it would seem; there are no opposing institutions presenting different rules or ideas, and even if stilling is a last resort used only on the truly bad, it does throw a bit more shadow on the already distrusted Tar Valon.

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I do wish the narration would just tell me the full difference in the classification of the Ajahs already; we now know the Brown is about the pursuit of knowledge, and we have some sense of the Blue’s priorities based on Moriaine’s, but the Yellow, Green, and White are still a mystery, and it makes it harder to ferret out how the White Tower works. But I suppose that reveal will continue to come, slowly, as the books progress.

And I have been given an awful lot in this section. One assumes in the first book (or at least I did) that Moiraine was acting alone when she left Tar Valon and went in search of the Dragon Reborn off in the outskirts of a town most people paid no heed to at all. Now we find out that she had an ally in her plan, a powerful one, but one who cannot move and scheme without being noticed. This revelation also throws more light on the importance of Moriaine’s decision to turn their journey aside in The Eye of the World, when she learns of Ba’alzamon’s plans to move against it. She wasn’t just taking the boys to Tar Valon because that seemed the obvious move, but because there was a specific plan to hide him there with the Amyrlin. Her choice shows, as she points out to the Amyrlin, how much effect the ta’veren presence has on events, and also, I think, just how desperate Moiraine’s plan was to begin with. There is a  suggestion here that the prophesied return of the Dragon is more of a set of instructions than a prediction of what will happen with or without interference, and a more direct acknowledgement of the cost that will come with the arrival of the Dragon. It has been said or implied before in The Eye of the World that the Dragon’s coming portends doom and destruction, perhaps the end of the world itself, but it’s unclear to me exactly what that means. It’s almost put forth like a sort of end-time event, in which the world will be destroyed either way, but one way ends in the coming of evil and darkness, and the other end is in the arms of the Light. Or perhaps it just means the end of an Age, in which those who lived through it will be all or mostly destroyed but life itself will continue on. Right now it’s hard to say.

It’s also hard to say what the Amyrlin meant when she said that the Pattern demands a Dragon, and so it spits out false Dragons until the real one comes. I don’t understand how the Pattern would focus on  the Dragon declaring himself, as though that is the first moment he exists, rather than the moment of his birth. Why should the Pattern create false Dragons if it has already created the real one? This raises a lot of questions for me about how the Wheel and the Pattern work.

I had suspected that Elyane had the ability to channel, although I’m not exactly sure why. Perhaps because her interest in healing seemed at odds with her destiny to become Queen, perhaps something about her insight and interest in Rand. But I wasn’t surprised to learn that she will be a powerful wielder. I was surprised to learn that Moiraine believes Nynaeve to be much more powerful than either Elyane or Egwene; I had assumed Nynaeve was just older and therefore more experienced, but this is something else. I suspect Nynaeve will always keep her focus on healing, even when she goes to Tar Valon, but I am eager to see what else she chooses to do with her remarkable gifts. No wonder Moiraine thought she was important after she tracked them to Baerlon.

Both the Amyrlin and Captain Bornhald specifically mention stones on a board; the Amyrlin in reference to Elida’s view of those who are not either Aes Sedai or a specific threat, and Bornhald in reference to his own mysterious orders. I know from others’ comments that the series goes on to be quite full of plots within plots and political intrigue, and this seems to be the start of it.

Speaking of Bornhald, that guy is all proud that he didn’t “have” to kill anyone on his way to the rendezvous but his response to learning that an entire village was slaughtered was hardly enough in my opinion. The man believes in the Children and their mission to wipe out Darkfriends enough to blindly follow orders he doesn’t like and doesn’t understand, to fall in line with Questioners, who he believes do their job incorrectly, stupidly, and maliciously, and to put aside the deaths of a whole village of innocent people in, one supposes, the pursuit of the greater good. He may be trying his best to not harm innocents, but in some ways that hypocrisy bothers me more than the other Children who just don’t really care about anyone.

Also can I just remark upon how many “nice” words the people in power have for horrible deeds. The village was “pacified,” male channelers are “gentled” and misbehaving Aes Sedai women are “stilled.” I suppose the people of this world know well the power of words; they don’t say the Dark One’s name, for example, and both nobles and Aes Sedai are well aware of how to play the game of information. Although everyone knows basically what the gentling of men actually is, no doubt the softness of saying the word makes the fact a little bit easier to swallow. Easier to look away from. At least for those in no danger of being gentled themselves.

Next week we will cover Chapters 6 and 7, in which we will see a battle and Rand face a lot of questions, and Lan giving advice, and who knows what else. I haven’t finished reading them yet. See you next week, or down in the comments!

Sylas K Barrett would very much like to know more about Liandrin’s specific speech pattern and can’t wait to see what Padan Fain gets up to next. And by that I mean he knows it’s gonna be bad.

Each month, the Tor.com eBook Club gives away a free sci-fi/fantasy ebook to club subscribers. We’re excited to announce that the first* pick for August 2018 is ACHERON by Sherrilyn Kenyon, creator of the Dark-Hunter universe!

*Yes! There will be two ebooks this month!

He was made human in order to escape death, but in death he was reborn a god…

Eleven thousand years ago a god was born. Cursed into the body of a human, Acheron spent a lifetime of shame. However, his human death unleashed an unspeakable horror that almost destroyed the earth. Then, brought back against his will, Acheron became the sole defender of mankind.

Only it was never that simple. For centuries, he has fought for our survival and hidden a past he’ll do anything to keep concealed. Until a lone woman who refuses to be intimidated by him threatens his very existence.

Now his survival, and ours, hinges on hers and old enemies reawaken and unite to kill them both.

War has never been more deadly… or more fun.

ACHERON is available from August 14, 12:01 AM ET to August 17, 11:59 PM ET.

Download before 11:59 PM ET August 17, 2018.

Coming August 28, 2018…

STYGIAN

The most anticipated story in the blockbuster Dark-Hunter series and a perfect jumping-in point to Sherrilyn Kenyon’s universe.

Stephen Leeds is perfectly sane. It’s his hallucinations who are mad.

A genius of unrivaled aptitude, Stephen can learn any new skill, vocation, or art in a matter of hours. However, to contain all of this, his mind creates hallucinatory people—Stephen calls them aspects—to hold and manifest the information. Wherever he goes, he is joined by a team of imaginary experts to give advice, interpretation, and explanation. He uses them to solve problems… for a price.

His brain is getting a little crowded and the aspects have a tendency of taking on lives of their own. When a company hires him to recover stolen property—a camera that can allegedly take pictures of the past—Stephen finds himself in an adventure crossing oceans and fighting terrorists. What he discovers may upend the foundation of three major world religions—and, perhaps, give him a vital clue into the true nature of his aspects.

A new novella collection from Brandon Sanderson, Legion: The Many Lives of Stephen Leeds includes Legion, Legion: Skin Deep and the brand new, shocking finale to Leeds’ story, Lies of the Beholder. Available September 18th from Tor Books.

Legion

ONE

My name is Stephen Leeds, and I am perfectly sane. My hallucinations, however, are all quite mad.

The gunshots coming from J.C.’s room popped like firecrackers. Grumbling to myself, I grabbed the earmuffs hanging outside his door—I’d learned to keep them there—and pushed my way in. J.C. wore his own earmuffs, his handgun raised in two hands, sighting at a picture of Osama bin Laden on the wall.

Beethoven was playing. Very loudly.

“I was trying to have a conversation!” I yelled.

J.C. didn’t hear me. He emptied a clip into bin Laden’s face, punching an assortment of holes through the wall in the process. I didn’t dare get close. He might accidentally shoot me if I surprised him.

I didn’t know what would happen if one of my hallucinations shot me. How would my mind interpret that? Undoubtedly, there were a dozen psychologists who’d want to write a paper on it. I wasn’t inclined to give them the opportunity.

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“J.C.!” I shouted as he stopped to reload.

He glanced toward me, then grinned, taking off his earmuffs. Any grin from J.C. looks half like a scowl, but I’d long ago learned to stop being intimidated by him.

“Eh, Skinny,” he said, holding up the handgun. “Care to fire off a mag or two? You could use the practice.”

I took the gun from him. “We had a shooting range installed in the mansion for a purpose, J.C. Use it.”

“Terrorists don’t usually find me in a shooting range. Well, it did happen that once. Pure coincidence.”

I sighed, taking the remote from the end table, then turning down the music. J.C. reached out, pointing the tip of the gun up in the air, then moving my finger off the trigger. “Safety first, kid.”

“It’s an imaginary gun anyway,” I said, handing it back to him.

“Yeah, sure.”

J.C. doesn’t believe that he’s a hallucination, which is unusual. Most of them accept it, to one extent or another. Not J.C. Big without being bulky, square-faced but not distinctive, he had the eyes of a killer. Or so he claimed. Perhaps he kept them in his pocket.

He slapped a new clip into the gun, then eyed the picture of bin
Laden.

“Don’t,” I warned.

“But—”

“He’s dead anyway. They got him ages ago.”

“That’s a story we told the public, Skinny.” J.C. holstered the gun. “I’d explain, but you don’t have clearance.”

“Stephen?” a voice came from the doorway.

I turned. Tobias is another hallucination—or “aspect,” as I sometimes call them. Lanky and ebony-skinned, he had dark freckles on his age-wrinkled cheeks. He kept his greying hair very short, and wore a loose, informal business suit with no necktie.

“I was merely wondering,” Tobias said, “how long you intend to keep that poor man waiting.”

“Until he leaves,” I said, joining Tobias in the hallway. The two of us began walking away from J.C.’s room.

“He was very polite, Stephen,” Tobias said.

Behind us, J.C. started shooting again. I groaned.

“I’ll go speak to J.C.,” Tobias said in a soothing voice. “He’s just trying to keep up his skills. He wants to be of use to you.”

“Fine, whatever.” I left Tobias and rounded a corner in the lush mansion. I had forty-seven rooms. They were nearly all filled. At the end of the hallway, I entered a small room decorated with a Persian rug and wood panels. I threw myself down on the black leather couch in the center.

Ivy sat in her chair beside the couch. “You intend to continue through that?” she asked over the sound of the gunshots.

“Tobias is going to speak to him.”

“I see,” Ivy said, making a notation on her notepad. She wore a dark business suit, with slacks and a jacket. Her blonde hair was up in a bun. She was in her early forties, and was one of the aspects I’d had the longest.

“How does it make you feel,” she said, “that your projections are beginning to disobey you?”

“Most do obey me,” I said defensively. “J.C. has never paid attention to what I tell him. That hasn’t changed.”

“You deny that it’s getting worse?”

I didn’t say anything.

She made a notation.

“You turned away another petitioner, didn’t you?” Ivy asked. “They come to you for help.”

“I’m busy.”

“Doing what? Listening to gunshots? Going more mad?”

“I’m not going more mad,” I said. “I’ve stabilized. I’m practically normal. Even my non-hallucinatory psychiatrist acknowledges that.”

Ivy said nothing. In the distance, the gunshots finally stopped, and I sighed in relief, raising my fingers to my temples. “The formal definition of insanity,” I said, “is actually quite fluid. Two people can have the exact same condition, with the exact same severity, but one can be considered sane by the official standards while the other is considered insane. You cross the line into insanity when your mental state stops you from being able to function, from being able to have a normal life. By those standards, I’m not the least bit insane.”

“You call this a normal life?” she asked.

“It works well enough.” I glanced to the side. Ivy had covered up the wastebasket with a clipboard, as usual.

Tobias entered a few moments later. “That petitioner is still there, Stephen.”

“What?” Ivy said, giving me a glare. “You’re making the poor man wait? It’s been four hours.”

“All right, fine!” I leaped off the couch. “I’ll send him away.” I strode out of the room and down the steps to the ground floor, into the grand entryway.

Wilson, my butler—who is a real person, not a hallucination—stood outside the closed door to the sitting room. He looked over his bifocals at me.

“You too?” I asked.

“Four hours, master?”

“I had to get myself under control, Wilson.”

“You like to use that excuse, Master Leeds. One wonders if moments like this are a matter of laziness more than control.”

“You’re not paid to wonder things like that,” I said.

He raised an eyebrow, and I felt ashamed. Wilson didn’t deserve snappishness; he was an excellent servant, and an excellent person. It wasn’t easy to find house staff willing to put up with my… particularities.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve been feeling a little worn down lately.”

“I will fetch you some lemonade, Master Leeds,” he said. “For…”

“Three of us,” I said, nodding to Tobias and Ivy—who, of course, Wilson couldn’t see. “Plus the petitioner.”

“No ice in mine, please,” Tobias said. “I’ll have a glass of water instead,” Ivy added. “No ice for Tobias,” I said, absently pushing open the door. “Water
for Ivy.”

Wilson nodded, off to do as requested. He was a good butler. Without him, I think I’d go insane.

A young man in a polo shirt and slacks waited in the sitting room. He leaped up from one of the chairs. “Master Legion?”

I winced at the nickname. That had been chosen by a particularly gifted psychologist. Gifted in dramatics, that is. Not really so much in the psychology department.

“Call me Stephen,” I said, holding the door for Ivy and Tobias. “What can we do for you?”

“We?” the boy asked.

“Figure of speech,” I said, walking into the room and taking one of the chairs across from the young man.

“I… uh… I hear you help people, when nobody else will.” The boy swallowed. “I brought two thousand. Cash.” He tossed an envelope with my name and address on it onto the table.

“That’ll buy you a consultation,” I said, opening it and doing a quick count.

Tobias gave me a look. He hates it when I charge people, but you don’t get a mansion with enough rooms to hold all your hallucinations by working for free. Besides, judging from his clothing, this kid could afford it.

“What’s the problem?” I asked.

“My fiancée,” the young man said, taking something out of his pocket. “She’s been cheating on me.”

“My condolences,” I said. “But we’re not private investigators. We don’t do surveillance.”

Ivy walked through the room, not sitting down. She strolled around the young man’s chair, inspecting him.

“I know,” the boy said quickly. “I just… well, she’s vanished, you see.”

Tobias perked up. He likes a good mystery.

“He’s not telling us everything,” Ivy said, arms folded, one finger tapping her other arm.

“You sure?” I asked.

“Oh, yes,” the boy said, assuming I’d spoken to him. “She’s gone, though she did leave this note.” He unfolded it and set it on the table. “The really strange thing is, I think there might be some kind of cipher to it. Look at these words. They don’t make sense.”

I picked up the paper, scanning the words he indicated. They were on the back of the sheet, scrawled quickly, like a list of notes. The same paper had later been used as a farewell letter from the fiancée. I showed it to Tobias.

“That’s Plato,” he said, pointing to the notes on the back. “Each is a quote from the Phaedrus. Ah, Plato. Remarkable man, you know. Few people are aware that he was actually a slave at one point, sold on the market by a tyrant who disagreed with his politics—that and the turning of the tyrant’s brother into a disciple. Fortunately, Plato was purchased by someone familiar with his work, an admirer you might say, who freed him. It does pay to have loving fans, even in ancient Greece.…”

Tobias continued on. He had a deep, comforting voice, which I liked to listen to. I examined the note, then looked up at Ivy, who shrugged.

The door opened, and Wilson entered with the lemonade and Ivy’s water. I noticed J.C. standing outside, his gun out as he peeked into the room and inspected the young man. J.C.’s eyes narrowed.

“Wilson,” I said, taking my lemonade, “would you kindly send for Audrey?”

“Certainly, master,” the butler said. I knew, somewhere deep within, that he had not really brought cups for Ivy and Tobias, though he made an act of handing something to the empty chairs. My mind filled in the rest, imagining drinks, imagining Ivy strolling over to pluck hers from Wilson’s hand as he tried to give it to where he thought she was sitting. She smiled at him fondly.

Wilson left.

“Well?” the young man asked. “Can you—”

He cut off as I held up a finger. Wilson couldn’t see my projections, but he knew their rooms. We had to hope that Audrey was in. She had a habit of visiting her sister in Springfield.

Fortunately, she walked into the room a few minutes later. She was, however, wearing a bathrobe. “I assume this is important,” she said, drying her hair with a towel.

I held up the note, then the envelope with the money. Audrey leaned down. She was a dark-haired woman, a little on the chunky side. She’d joined us a few years back, when I’d been working on a counterfeiting case.

She mumbled to herself for a minute or two, taking out a magnifying glass—I was amused that she kept one in her bathrobe, but that was Audrey for you—and looking from the note to the envelope and back. One had supposedly been written by the fiancée, the other by the young man.

Audrey nodded. “Definitely the same hand.”

“It’s not a very big sample,” I said.

“It’s what?” the boy asked.

“It’s enough in this case,” Audrey said. “The envelope has your full name and address. Line slant, word spacing, letter formation… all give the same answer. He also has a very distinctive e. If we use the longer sample as the exemplar, the envelope sample can be determined as authentic—in my estimation—at over a ninety percent reliability.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“I could use a new dog,” she said, strolling away.

“I’m not imagining you a puppy, Audrey. J.C. creates enough racket! I don’t want a dog running around here barking.”

“Oh, come on,” she said, turning at the doorway. “I’ll feed it fake food and give it fake water and take it on fake walks. Everything a fake puppy could want.”

“Out with you,” I said, though I was smiling. She was teasing. It was nice to have some aspects who didn’t mind being hallucinations. The young man regarded me with a baffled expression.

“You can drop the act,” I said to him.

“Act?”

“The act that you’re surprised by how ‘strange’ I am. This was a fairly amateur attempt. You’re a grad student, I assume?”

He got a panicked look in his eyes.

“Next time, have a roommate write the note for you,” I said, tossing it back to him. “Damn it, I don’t have time for this.” I stood up.

“You could give him an interview,” Tobias said.

“After he lied to me?” I snapped.

“Please,” the boy said, standing. “My girlfriend…”

“You called her a fiancée before,” I said, turning. “You’re here to try to get me to take on a ‘case,’ during which you will lead me around by the nose while you secretly take notes about my condition. Your real purpose is to write a dissertation or something.”

His face fell. Ivy stood behind him, shaking her head in disdain.

“You think you’re the first one to think of this?” I asked.

He grimaced. “You can’t blame a guy for trying.”

“I can and I do,” I said. “Often. Wilson! We’re going to need security!”

“No need,” the boy said, grabbing his things. In his haste, a miniature recorder slipped out of his shirt pocket and rattled against the table.

I raised an eyebrow as he blushed, snatched the recorder, then dashed from the room.

Tobias rose and walked over to me, his hands clasped behind his back. “Poor lad. And he’ll probably have to walk home too. In the rain.”

“It’s raining?”

“Stan says it will come soon,” Tobias said. “Have you considered that they would try things like this less often if you would agree to an interview now and then?”

“I’m tired of being referenced in case studies,” I said, waving a hand in annoyance. “I’m tired of being poked and prodded. I’m tired of being special.”

“What?” Ivy said, amused. “You’d rather work a day job at a desk? Give up the spacious mansion?”

“I’m not saying there aren’t perks,” I said as Wilson walked back in, turning his head to watch the youth flee out the front door. “Make
sure he actually goes, would you please, Wilson?”

“Of course, master.” He handed me a tray with the day’s mail on it, then left.

I looked through the mail. He’d already removed the bills and the junk mail. That left a letter from my human psychologist, which I ignored, and a nondescript white envelope, large sized.

I frowned, taking it and ripping open the top. I took out the contents.

There was only one thing in the envelope. A single photograph, five by eight, in black and white. I raised an eyebrow. It was a picture of a rocky coast where a couple of small trees clung to a rock extending out into the ocean.

“Nothing on the back,” I said as Tobias and Ivy looked over my shoulder. “Nothing else in the envelope.”

“It’s from someone else trying to fish for an interview, I’ll bet,” Ivy said. “They’re doing a better job than the kid.”

“It doesn’t look like anything special,” J.C. said, shoving his way up beside Ivy, who punched him in the shoulder. “Rocks. Trees. Boring.”

“I don’t know…” I said. “There’s something about it. Tobias?”

Tobias took the photograph. At least, that was what I saw. Most likely I still had the photo in my hand, but I couldn’t feel it there, now that I perceived Tobias holding it. It’s strange, the way the mind can change perception.

Tobias studied the picture for a long moment. J.C. began clicking his pistol’s safety off and on.

“Aren’t you always talking about gun safety?” Ivy hissed at him.

“I’m being safe,” he said. “Barrel’s not pointed at anyone. Besides, I have keen, iron control over every muscle in my body. I could—”

“Hush, both of you,” Tobias said. He held the picture closer. “My God…”

“Please don’t use the Lord’s name in vain,” Ivy said.

J.C. snorted.

“Stephen,” Tobias said. “Computer.”

I joined him at the sitting room’s desktop, then sat down, Tobias leaning over my shoulder. “Do a search for the Lone Cypress.”

I did so, and brought up image view. A couple dozen shots of the same rock appeared on the screen, but all of them had a larger tree growing on it. The tree in these photos was fully grown; in fact, it looked ancient.

“Okay, great,” J.C. said. “Still trees. Still rocks. Still boring.”

“That’s the Lone Cypress, J.C.,” Tobias said. “It’s famous, and is believed to be at least two hundred and fifty years old.”

“So… ?” Ivy asked.

I held up the photograph that had been mailed. “In this, it’s no more than… what? Ten?”

“Likely younger,” Tobias said.

“So for this to be real,” I said, “it would have to have been taken in the mid to late 1700s. Decades before the camera was invented.”

Excerpted from Legion: The Many Lives of Stephen Leeds, copyright © 2018 by Brandon Sanderson.

There’s just something extra special about a backdrop of bubbling lava, snapping tentacles, poisonous forests, sinkholes, cracking ice, an unbreathable atmosphere, or the approach of a blistering sunrise that amps up the excitement factor. The story was probably already pretty good, but now everyone might die on the way to wherever they’re going. And they might die horribly because someone thought it was a good idea to visit Paradise Not.

That someone could easily be me. I have a habit of putting my characters in horrible places and I’m going to place the blame on some of my favorite books and movies. We’ll start with Ursula K. Le Guin, who is known for testing every limit her characters have—and then some…

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

This is not the first book of Le Guin’s I ever read, but the one I remember the best. I find the themes of gender identity refreshingly challenging. But when I talk about The Left Hand of Darkness, I usually end up describing the part where Genly and Estraven spend eighty days traversing the northern Gobrin ice sheet. The environment is unspeakably harsh and Le Guin makes it enthralling. I could feel the fat melting away from Genly and Estraven as they balanced their daily calorie expense against necessary exertion. I shivered when I learned that it doesn’t snow when the temperature drops below a certain threshold. I didn’t ever want to know how cold that must be.

Not lost on me was the fact that the beyond bitter cold was the backdrop for the most important part of the book—Genly and Estraven learning to trust each other. It’s similar to putting two adversaries in a remote cabin with only one way in and one way out—and blocking that entrance with a grizzly. Makes a good argument for even a temporary truce, doesn’t it?

The Chronicles of Riddick

On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have Crematoria! I love this planet and not just because of the suggestion that about five hundred years in the future we’ll still be claiming the best real estate for prisons—in this case, a planet that will freeze your behind by night, only to roast it in the morning. If someone were able to escape the triple max prison buried deep beneath the surface of this abused planet, they’d probably die pretty quickly.

But not Richard Riddick. He and and an old friend plot their escape during the brief window between night and day. As if the terrain weren’t enough—smoking pits of… smoke, crumbling cliffs, falling ash—the sun is rising. The effect is awesome, like a spirograph of light on the far horizon. I won’t spoil the rest, except to note that the highlight of the movie, for me, is when half the party gets stuck by the advancing line of daylight and fiery plumes of lava.

2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson

I love to hike and have aspirations of one day completing more than a single span of the Appalachian Trail. If we had an outpost on Mercury—either underground, or rolling across the surface in advance of the sun as depicted in Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel 2312—I’d probably want to hike there. The book begins with a tantalizing invitation:

The sun is always about to rise. Mercury rotates so slowly that you can walk fast enough over the rocky surface to stay ahead of the dawn; and so many people do. Many have made this a way of life. They walk roughly westward, staying always ahead of the stupendous day.

Robinson goes on to detail how some walkers dally in certain locations to watch the sun spread across the horizon behind them, some so in awe of the spectacle that they almost forget to run farther westward in time to outpace the dawn. There’s also a city called Terminus that rolls around the planet on a train—always ahead of the sun. One of my favorite adventures actually takes place beneath the tracks as Swan takes shelter from the sun only to be trapped for weeks in underground tunnels. Do I need to mention that I’m also fond of perilous journeys?

Master Sergeant by Mel Odom

In Master Sergeant, Mel Odom introduces us to Makaum, otherwise known as the Green Hell. The planet is a maze of vicious vegetation defying every effort at containment. Like the burning sun and endless ice I’ve mentioned above, the jungle is inimitable, and it shapes the entire culture of the planet. It cannot be beaten back, but only be controlled for short periods of time, say for the purpose of clearing a landing pad. It’s a horrific and oppressive environment that leaves you wondering why anyone would want to live there.

Turns out, the planet is rich in natural resources. Of course it is! This is science fiction at its best. Why put the most sought after mineral in the galaxy on a barren rock where anyone can get at it when you can bury it beneath a man-eating jungle on a planet also infested with drug runners and gangs? Seriously.

Master Sergeant is military science fiction, which I also love, and outside the superlative world building also tells a great story. Inclusion on this list, though, is down to the jungle. Imagine a world where you can’t walk a foot without bumping into herbicide and fire resistant poison ivy? Lots of it. Then make it carnivorous. Further imagine how an environment like that would shape your life? I want to write that book. I have notes for that book.

Interstellar

Lastly, let’s talk about Miller’s Planet from the movie Interstellar. Without giving too much away—it’s not a viable choice for colonization. The why of it is what makes it so fascinating, though. Not only is there a severe time dilation effect, meaning that time passes more slowly on the surface than it does outside orbit, but the place is literally one big ocean… and the black hole hovering over the horizon means there are some wicked tides. (The black hole also responsible for the time thing.)

There is land at the bottom of the sea, but both will disappear when the next wave hurtles past—at the height of Mount Everest. Disastrous and not particularly welcoming, but fascinating nonetheless. Ever since seeing the movie, I’ve pondered ways in which such a planet could be made habitable. I’ll let you know if I come up with something.

So, are you ready to visit Paradise Not? Inhospitable environments occur frequently in all forms of fiction—and in our own world—inspiring some of the greatest stories of people surviving against all odds, emerging perhaps damaged, always deeply affected, but also stronger and with greater resolve. These settings are often the ultimate test, and that’s why I love them so much.

If aliens ever do land on Earth, Kelly Jensen will not be prepared, despite having read over a hundred stories of the apocalypse. Still, she will pack her precious books into a box and carry them with her as she strives to survive. It’s what bibliophiles do. Kelly is the author of a number of novels, novellas and short stories, including the Chaos Station series, co-written with Jenn Burke. Her latest release is To See the Sun, a queer SFF Romance featuring two men looking for a place to finally call home and finding it on an inhospitable planet on the edge of the galaxy. You can find her on Twitter @kmkjensen.

Having reached the halfway point in A Darker Shade of Magic, it’s time to reconnoiter and talk about what the magic system in Schwab’s universe seems to convey about the timelines and centers of magical power. We’ve got the four Londons, of course, but the world is vast and magic is all over the place (or was, at any rate). Where could the story take us?

Here are a few of my thoughts so far…

Other Londons

So, real talk. Are there only four worlds, period? Could there be more? Don’t there have to be? My brain is always changing things into science fantasy rather than pure fantasy, so the problem with multiple worlds stacked on top of each other is that my assumption goes right to alternate universes—of which there should be a near infinite amount. How many Londons are there? Were all these worlds affected by the closed doors between worlds? Why don’t they have contact with each other? There are a lot of possibilities, and plenty of other colors that Kell can use to label them.

Egypt

I said it on the last section of the reread, and I can’t really stop thinking about it; if there are natural parts of the world that are special magic sources of energy (like the Thames in each of the Londons), you cannot convince me that the Nile isn’t one of those sources. Myths from Ancient Egypt already frame the river as a source of power and life, so magic is pretty much a given. In fact, if we could just go back in time to Ancient Egypt and see how magic affected its history, that would be great.

North America

How does the development of the “New World” change when you add magic to the mix? In Grey London, presumably things work out about the same, but what might the world look like on Red London’s side of things? Is there still colonial expansion and imperialism, or does the red monarchy basically stay put? It’s possible that Native Americans might never have been displaced by colonists in that world, and North America would be a very different place than the one we see today.

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The Arctic Circle(ish)

Many natural wonders seem like an ideal place for magic to bloom, but nothing screams it perhaps so much as the image of the aurora borealis. Everyone would have to get pretty cold to go see it, but what sort of magic do you imagine the sky would offer? The people who live north of England would have those lights dazzling overhead, and connection to such a source is probably incredibly unique to the world.

Polynesia

We know that brands, tattoos, and symbols pertain to magical power, and that the denizens of White London have a habit of marking their skins in effort to bind magic to them. Knowing this adds another dimension to the concept of tribal tattoos, and it seems likely that they would have additional magical purposes alongside their cultural significance. You can’t help wonder how different parts of the world interact with the same magic, and sea-faring Polynesian peoples are bound to have a completely different way of interacting with such power.

Mount Chimborazo

My assumption—as suggested with the inclusion of the aurora borealis—is that water isn’t the only magical “source.” Perhaps other aspects on the fire-earth-water-air spectrum are sources as well. And what better place to have a magical source than the tallest mountain on the planet? Okay, so Everest has the height count, but in terms of actual distance from the center of the Earth, Chimborazo in Ecuador actually takes that title. (This is because the earth isn’t perfectly spherical, so being closer to the equator changes the game.) You can’t tell me that’s not a magical source.

The Ganges River

The Thames and the Nile are prime contenders, but the Ganges River has been a sacred place for centuries. This also brings up one of my central questions about the series—how does religion and belief fit into this universe? The Ganges is an important site for Hindus and the Nile was intrinsic to Egyptian religion as well. There’s been no discussion of religion, but you have to expect they intermingled at some point, particularly in Grey London. We don’t know was much about potential religious practices in the other worlds, but that must effect how people think of and react to magic. Maybe we’ll hear more about that later….

These were the first ideas that came to me, but there are so many more! I’m fascinated to see where the series goes next.

Emily Asher-Perrin would also like to visit all of these places, so make of that what you will. You can bug her/him on Twitter and Tumblr, and read more of her/his work here and elsewhere.

Mary Robinette Kowal’s novelette “The Lady Astronaut of Mars” won the 2014 Hugo Award in its category. Now Tor Books brings us a pair of novels about Elma York’s life before her final mission: even before Mars.

The simplest way to describe Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Calculating Stars and its sequel, The Fated Sky, is as an alternative history of the American space programme. But that’s not all it is: it’s a story about a young Jewish woman with an anxiety disorder using all the tools at her disposal to gain a place for herself in the astronaut programme, and building coalitions with other women to bring them with her. (It’s also a story about how that young woman, Elma York, benefits from white privilege and puts her foot in it with thoughtless bigoted assumptions, and how she keeps trying to learn better.)

Buy it Now

In 1952, a giant meteorite strikes earth just off the coast of Maryland, USA. The resulting cataclysmic explosion (and tidal wave) destroys much of the American east coast, including Washington DC. Elma and her husband Nathaniel survive due to being far away, on holiday in a mountain cabin, but Elma loses many of her surviving relatives to the tidal wave. Worse than the devastation of the initial strike, however, are the results that Elma and her brother, meteorologist Herschel, calculate that the strike will have on the earth’s atmosphere: after a brief period of extreme cold temperatures, the atmosphere will heat to the point where it will become uninhabitable for human life (just like our climate change problem, but even faster), and there’s no way to tell whether mitigation efforts will work until it’s too late.

In consequence of Elma and Herschel’s calculations, the US government invests in space exploration with an eye to space colonisation. The effort becomes international, and Elma’s mathematical skills (and her husband’s role as chief engineer) mean she’s guaranteed a place in the International Aerospace Coalition’s space programme as a calculator. But Elma’s a pilot, too, and she’s determined to win a place for herself to fly.

The Calculating Stars charts Elma’s journey to becoming an astronaut, as she struggles with sexism and bigotry (the bigotry includes her own assumptions about black men and women), and with her own anxiety and intense dislike of the spotlight, to win a place for herself and for other women as real astronauts.

The Fated Sky continues the story of The Calculating Stars, following Elma through selection for the first demanding multi-year mission to Mars, in which bigotry and public relations continue to play a large role—and on into space, separated from her husband and any community bar the one that comes with her by unimaginable distances. With everything about the mission held in fragile balance, Elma must negotiate her steps carefully to help as many people as possible survive to go home again.

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Kowal’s writing is smooth and compelling, and her characters come to life on the page. Her enthusiasm for the analogue details of pre-mechanical-computing spaceflight is detailed and infectious. But though Kowal doesn’t portray the past as free from racism and bigotry, her vision of a post-cataclysmic United States in the 1950s is fundamentally optimistic and invested in a progressive vision of human history. It seems a little unbelievable that a country still under the grip of laws that partially inspired Nazi Germany (Jim Crow) and dealing with an enormous economic and human toll would be as susceptible to moral suasion and Elma’s particular brand of advocacy as Kowal’s alternative past.

But perhaps that’s the point: Kowal’s novels are kind, about—largely—decent people, most of whom aren’t (or, at least, who don’t think of themselves as) personally strongly racist even if they’re pretty sexist, and who learn to do better, or at least keep quieter. It’s an optimistic vision that does its best to make you feel good about space and the possibilities of human achievement without pretending everything is easy for everyone, and that’s… something.

I’d like to be more enthusiastic about these novels. I enjoyed them a hell of a lot. But right now, I’m finding it difficult to see optimistic visions of past futures with much sympathy, when I so desperately want optimistic visions of the future past today.

Liz Bourke is a cranky queer person who reads books. She holds a Ph.D in Classics from Trinity College, Dublin. Her first book, Sleeping With Monsters, a collection of reviews and criticism, was published in 2017 by Aqueduct Press. It was a finalist for the 2018 Locus Awards and is nominated for a Hugo Award in Best Related Work. Find her at her blog, where she’s been known to talk about even more books thanks to her Patreon supporters. Or find her at her Twitter. She supports the work of the Irish Refugee Council, the Transgender Equality Network Ireland, and the Abortion Rights Campaign.

Star Trek: Discovery has cast its Spock! Ethan Peck will be joining the cast in the iconic role of the USS Enterprise‘s half-human, half-Vulcan science officer. Peck, the grandson of legendary actor Gregory Peck, has previously appeared in ABC Family’s series 10 Things I Hate About You and CW Seed’s I Ship It.

Star Trek: Discovery, which takes place earlier than the original Star Trek, hinted that Spock might be making an appearance when the Discovery came across the Enterprise in its travels. Apparently, Spock will still be chief science officer, but under Captain Christopher Pike, who will be played by Anson Mount. Of course, Spock’s family is already tied to Discovery, as his foster sister Michael Burnham is one of the main characters of the show, so it will be interesting to see how their relationship plays out across the second season of the series.

Showrunner Alex Kurtzman had this to say of the pivotal choice:

Through 52 years of television and film, a parallel universe and a mirror universe, Mr. Spock remains the only member of the original bridge crew to span every era of Star Trek. The great Leonard Nimoy, then the brilliant Zachary Quinto, brought incomparable humanity to a character forever torn between logic and emotion… [W]e searched for months for an actor who would, like them, bring his own interpretation to the role. An actor who would, like them, effortlessly embody Spock’s greatest qualities, beyond obvious logic: empathy, intuition, compassion, confusion and yearning. Ethan Peck walked into the room inhabiting all of these qualities, aware of his daunting responsibility to Leonard, Zack and the fans, and ready to confront the challenge in the service of protecting and expanding on Spock’s legacy. In that spirit, we’re thrilled to welcome him to the family.

Star Trek: Discovery will return to CBS All Access early in 2019.

[via Hollywood Reporter!]

Paxton and the neighbor’s kid are inseparable—sweethearts, even, and Paxton barely six. He doesn’t mind her antennae and clicking mandibles at all….

We’re excited to share Abbey Mei Otis’ “Sweetheart,” originally published on Tor.com in December 2010 and collected in Alien Virus Love Disaster: Stories, available now from Small Beer Press!

Otis’s short stories are contemporary fiction at its strongest: taking apart the supposed equality that is clearly just not there, putting humans under an alien microscope, putting humans under government control, putting kids from the moon into a small beach town and then the putting the rest of the town under the microscope as they react in ways we ope they would, and then, of course, in ways we’d hope they don’t. Otis has long been fascinated in using strange situations to explore dynamics of power, oppression, and grief, and the twelve stories collected here are at once a striking indictment of the present and a powerful warning about the future.

Paxton is your baby boy, born just after you got out of the army, your peacetime child. He turned six last month but already he’s got a sweetheart who lives next door. He makes her crowns out of dandelions and shares his FruitBlaster cups with her. She brings him marbles that hum and lets him position her antennae into funny shapes. He has a lisp that the speech therapist has given up on, and she has clicking mandibles, but in their invented language of coos and giggles they are both poets. They sit out in the yard and very seriously lay grass on each other’s arms, and the sunlight cocoons them.

You and Denise watch them through the kitchen window. Denise is an old army buddy and she gets it. All of it.

You say something like, No surprise he’s got a sweetheart already. Just look at his daddy.

Denise laughs rough and loud. Regular little Casanova, isn’t he? Regular little intergalactic Casanova. Damn. And I can’t even get a date.

You want to date an ET?

She shudders. Lord, girl, don’t joke. Then she bites her lip. Nothing against Pax, of course. It’s super cute.

You nod. They’re just babies, I figure. Sweetheart’s a good thing to have. And he’s a good kid.

She agrees with you and pours the dregs of the margarita pitcher into your glass.

* * *

Buy it Now

You take Paxton and Sweetheart to the water park and lie in a chaise while they jump off the foam pirate ship. Only ten minutes before Pax runs up sobbing.

She won’t come up! I yelled and I yelled, but she won’t!

You fly to the edge of the pool terrified the little alien has drowned on your watch, but then you realize she has gills.

Paxton crouches next to you, wiping his nose. Come up, stu-pid, he shouts at the water. Stupid stupid stu-pid.

Don’t say stupid, Pax. Hush. She’s okay.

You buy them hotdogs and try not to be disgusted when Sweetheart pincers hers into bits and tucks them into pouches on her sides. Pax trumps her by mashing his entire dog into his cheeks and opening his mouth to display it.

They whisper to each other the whole bus ride home. You realize you don’t even know if Sweetheart is a girl.

* * *

At night with his voice full of sleep Pax asks you what love is, and you blather some nothing about caring for someone very very much. He gets serious in the darkness.

Okay, so then, I think I love Sweetheart.

You don’t know why, but you whisper to him, Congratulations.

* * *

Things start to change. On the radio, on TV. Human Pride turns into a big deal with advertisers. Coke does a whole, One People One Planet campaign. The news pundits start asking why so much tax money still goes to the army. It’s been years since there was a conflict, hasn’t it? And don’t we all know where the real threat is? Their voices purr with suggestion, and their eyes flicker toward the sky.

You don’t think Paxton would get what Strategic Containment and Deportation means, but you hide the newspaper headlines from him anyway.

Jesus, says Denise, it’s happening. Just like that. We over there, look at the ones with the tentacles! She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. And I know the ones next door seem okay, but I mean, really. You know?

You do know.

One night police come banging on Sweetheart’s door. Some of the neighbors go out in the street to watch, but you take Paxton into your bedroom and turn the TV up loud. He falls asleep with his head on your stomach. In the morning you say, What the heck, huh. Let’s take a day off school.

It works until seven that evening, when he gets two Italian ices out of the freezer and says, I’m going over to Sweetheart’s.

Why don’t you stay in with me tonight? You try to say it real nonchalant,but he catches on. His chin starts to shake.

I’m going over to Sweetheart’s.

Aliens are in some trouble right now, okay? It’s not safe for you.

Is Sweetheart safe?

Something about his look makes you feel guilty, and feeling guilty gets you a little pissed off. Look. Sweetheart went away for a little while. You can make some new friends, how about. You want to go over to Shira Allen’s? Shira Allen just got a trampoline.

Pax makes a wordless noise and flies to the front door, but it’s locked and with an Italian ice in each hand he’s stuck. He flings himself against the window and leaves snot prints on the glass.

You spout something like, You’ll understand when you’re older. Bullshit, and you both know it. He stiffens and turns, tear-bright eyes spearing through you. I don’t understand now, he screams. His voice so full of rage it’s like music. I don’t understand now.

He flings an Italian ice at you, and melting strawberry sucrose bursts across your chest.

Love explodes in you, how smart he is, how he was once a part of you but is no longer. You step up so close that the red syrup on your shirtfront smears on him as well.

Get in your room this minute, you hiss. You never talk to me that way again.

He slams his door but doesn’t get it quite right and opens it and slams it again. He’s going to hate you for a couple of days; that’s okay. Hate is nothing, hell, you’ve known love. It stampedes through your veins. You could tell him about it. You could tell him you had sweethearts, you had cocoons of sunlight too. You could tell him about his father. You could tell him about the long nights in Delta, the dreams and the grit that never came out from under your eyelids. But you won’t.

In the silent hallway you stare at his closed door. I’m sorry, Pax, you think. I’m sorry, Sweetheart. But you’re not. You’ve seen humans killing humans, and if something can stop that it’s worth it. It’s worth tantrums. Worth a first crush. Worth all the aliens in the universe.

You’d do it even if meant Pax never trusted you again, but he will. He will dry his eyes and open the door. He will grow. He will take Shira Allen to school dances and eat waffle fries with his friends and make JV football. He will hear talk on the radio of uniting against the alien menace and change it to Top 40 without thinking. He will love the feeling of sun on his limbs.

Once in a while, he’ll remember Sweetheart and freeze on the sidewalk, but after a moment he’ll shake his head and keep walking. He will know without knowing, the one thing greater than love. He will live in a world at peace.

Text copyright © 2010 by Abbey Mei Otis
Art copyright © 2010 by Greg Ruth

Yeah, yeah—you’ve already heard no shortage of praise for Chinese science-fiction writer Cixin Liu. But here’s the thing: He deserves all of it. Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy—the remarkable, Hugo-winning series published in America as The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End—is just as mind-bending and breathtaking as its fans claim. (And, not for nothing, those fans include this guy.)

Until this week, the Remembrance trilogy and a scattering of short stories were all that English-speakers had of Liu’s unforgettable work. But with the American publication of Ball Lightning—a novel originally published in China in 2004, and now translated into English by Joel Martinsen, the translator of The Dark Forest—we finally have more Liu.

Is it as good as the Remembrance trilogy? Well… no, but it’s still pretty great. This’ll sound like a backhanded compliment, but I mean it in the best way possible: The only time Ball Lightning disappoints is when one compares it to Remembrance of Earth’s Past.

Buy it Now

Serving as a very loose prequel to The Three Body Problem, Ball Lightning has a far smaller scope: Here, Liu’s focus is almost entirely on Chen, an awkward, obsessive researcher who, at age 14, at the worst birthday party ever, witnessed both of his parents get obliterated by a mysterious, fiery orb. Chen, understandably, is just a bit affected by the incident, and devotes himself to studying the mysterious phenomenon of ball lightning. “Ball lightning had molded me into this form: from that night of terror in my youth, the shape of my psyche had been determined,” Chen explains. “I was destined to live my whole life with a terror no one else could feel.”

As he ages, Chen remains single-mindedly focused on learning the secrets of ball lightning; early on, he describes himself as “a machine in pursuit of a single goal.” That’s on page 17—and, unfortunately, page 17 is about where his character development stops. Luckily for us, Chen’s accompanied by more interesting characters: Alongside befuddled military brass, half-mad scientists, and swaggering helicopter pilots who’d fit right in with the ego-fueled flyboys of The Right Stuff, Chen meets Lin Yun, a morbid army researcher who’s intent on using ball lightning as a weapon, and Ding Yi, a lively wildcard of a theoretical physicist. Ding Yi’s the book’s best character—he pops up later in Three Body—and in Ball Lightning, his curiosity overwhelms any personal and ethical considerations. Unlike Chen’s morose plod toward discovery, Ding Yi’s passion to decode the universe comes with the thrill of social and moral transgression: “Extraordinary research must be advanced through extraordinary measures,” he insists. “Otherwise, in this rigid society, science wouldn’t budge an inch.”

As Ball Lightning clips along, we visit lightning-burned mountaintops, a nuclear power plant seized by terrorists, and an eerie, forgotten outpost beneath Siberia—and all the while, ball lightning seemingly pops in and out of existence at random, inspiring and frustrating Chen and his companions. “The descriptions in this book of the characteristics and behavior of ball lightning are based on historical records,” reads Ball Lightning’s epigraph, but heads up: Things get weird. I don’t want to spoil how weird, but: Things get weird enough that before the real weirdness even starts, Chen’s tossing off observations like, “It was impossible for your spirit not to be affected by watching ball lightning turn group after group of test animals to ash every day.”

That, though, leads to one of Ball Lightning’s quirks: Like the Remembrance trilogy, this book operates at a cool remove, thanks to prose that sometimes feels straightforward and at others feels distant and overly formal. Unless you’re smarter than me and can compare the Chinese and English versions, it’s impossible to know if this stiltedness is Liu’s original intent, a result of cultural differences, a byproduct of translation, or all three. (Translating Liu, it seems, is no easy task: As Ken Liu, a frequent translator of Cixin Liu’s, wrote in Clarkesworld, “Conflict between the author and the translator is present in every act of translation, but it’s especially acute in contemporary passages between English and Chinese.”) When Liu’s dealing with far-out sci-fi concepts, the clunkiness of the prose rarely draws attention to itself—but with human emotion, there’s no avoiding it. “I was unaccustomed to being alone with the opposite sex, or to their refined sensitivity,” Chen explains while spending time with Lin Yun. “But to find those feminine qualities so concentrated in a woman piloting a land mine-equipped car was breathtaking.” Later, after witnessing Lin Yun in a moment of distress, he not-so-helpfully notes, “This episode informed me that her life was far more complicated than I imagined.”

But even in the Remembrance trilogy, beautifully written characters aren’t Liu’s strong suit—he’s more interested in, and better at, cracking open the big ideas of space and time. And in Ball Lightning, he’s drawn to the blood that stains humankind’s greatest discoveries. “All of the major scientific advances this century—aerospace, nuclear energy, computers—are the result of scientists and military personnel, two groups on different paths, combining what their different goals had in common,” Lin Yun tells Chen. Sure, that’s hardly a unique observation, but Liu delivers it with an acidic sting. As is the case with the viciously cold logic of The Dark Forest, Liu’s worlds have no room for sentiment.

Liu himself seems… pragmatically optimistic? “I believe science and technology can bring us a bright future, but the journey to achieve it will be filled with difficulties and exact a price from us,” he told The New Yorker in 2015. “Some of these obstacles and costs will be quite terrible, but in the end we will land on the sunlit further shore.”

That shore is rarely glimpsed by Ball Lightning’s characters, who obsess over the universe’s unknowns for darker reasons: childhood trauma, cruel bloodlust, sociopathic curiosity. As usual, Liu is a master at evoking awe and horror at the scale and strangeness of our universe—but here, he also lays bare why we study it. One of the book’s war-scarred characters might put it best: “All the forces of the natural world, including those that people believe are the most gentle and harmless, can be turned into weapons to destroy life.”

Ball Lightning is available from Tor Books.
Listen to an excerpt from the audio book here.

A writer, editor, and male model, Erik Henriksen lives in Portland, Oregon. He’s written for the Portland Mercury, The Stranger, io9.com, Wired.com, and Tor.com. (Hey! That’s this site!) Learn all you ever wanted to know and more at henriksenactual.com.