From the wondrous mind of Brooke Bolander, the author of The Only Harmless Great Thing, who “shares literary DNA with Le Guin” (John Scalzi).

After the world’s end, the last young human learns a final lesson from Earth’s remaining animals.

Pretend you are the land. Pretend you are a place far away, the last vibrant V of green and gold and tessellated rock before the sea and sky slither south unchecked for three thousand lonesome turns of a tern’s wing. Once upon a time the waters rose to cut you off from your mother continent, better independence through drowning. Some day soon, when the ice across the ocean turns to hungry waves, all the rest will follow, sliding beneath an oil-slick surface as warm and empty as a mortician’s handshake.

But that does not concern us—yet. You are the land, and today you are here to bear witness to a story four million years in the telling as she closes her eyes for the final time, striped haunches slowing their rise and fall as entropy hoists another tattered victory flag.

Thylacinus: from the Greek thýlakos, meaning “pouch” or “sack.” You have made her into your own image, a unique beast neither wolf nor tiger but its own striped singularity. No one at the zoo is qualified to sex such a creature. They dub her Benjamin, short omnivorous ape jaws unequipped to pronounce her true name even if anyone ever thought to ask.

The cage is very hot. There is no shade. When night falls there will be no shelter against the unseasonable cold. She paces and pants, her shadow writing the future across concrete in angular calligraphy. Beyond and through the chicken wire bland faces peer, unable to make any sense of the warning in her trot, the glassiness in her staring eyes.

But you are the land, and you read the message loud and clear: a missive from the place between being and not; a signal from the space between the final breath and whatever comes after.

Auntie Ben pats makeup over her stripes every morning. The last neighbors moved on years before, the only folks left to see are Martha and Doris and Linnea, but Auntie Ben, she has her habits. In the end, the only sense you have to make, she tells Linnea, is to yourself. And so: delicate little dabs along the lean, dusky line of her jaw, up the cheekbones sharp as taxidermy knives, all the way to her forehead, where hair the color of dirty sand dangles listless, fabric on barbed wire. Nobody knows where she found the powder. Nobody asks. Maybe it was waiting when the three arrived, like the vanity and the three beds and the yellow farmhouse itself.

“Every mammal’s got stripes,” she says. “Even you. Fella named Blaschko found ’em. Somewhere back along the line, your people took ’em off as easily as I shuck my own skin, buried them in a cigar box out back. If you could find that box again, you’d find your stripes, sure as fleas and fresh blood.”

Linnea asks Doris if this is true. Doris is stout and cheerful and most likely of the three aunties to give a true answer. She cooks, she straightens, she drives the pickup to what passes for a town these days to pick up supplies. She does not work on the ship. She lacks the imagination, she says; she was never that great at flying to begin with. The little cedar chest at the foot of her bed more often than not stays closed.

“There’s no telling with Benny,” she says, scratching at her round, flat beak of a nose. “She’s always been a reader, that one. You don’t look like you got stripes to me, though. Humans come in all shapes and sizes—most of ’em hairy or hungry, terribly hungry, how can such skinny things gobble up so many?—but I never do believe I’ve seen a striped one. Then again, not a lot of them around to study anymore ’cept you, little chick.”

She doesn’t bother climbing to the roof gables to ask Auntie Martha, staring sadly up at an empty fading sky as bronze-and-violet as her hair. Instead, Linnea wanders back inside and stands alone in front of the vanity mirror, searching for invisible stripes. The light through the bedroom curtains is a washed-out yellow, like paper or preserved hide or the end of a long, hot day.

They never say how they got together, Linnea’s three aunties, or where they hailed from before finding her and feeding her and fetching her home, lucky orphan among grubby roadside hundreds. She doesn’t remember faces before theirs. There was a gas station with busted windows. There was a little scratched spot in the dirt beneath the old pumps where she slept at night. There was potato crisp grease, tangled hair, and the occasional sandstorm. Beyond that, Linnea’s memory is a skull picked clean; shake it and hear leaves rattle inside.

That’s okay. Now is good. Back Then was probably not-so-good. And as to what lies ahead…No. Linnea keeps that lonesomeness locked down tight as any auntie’s chest. Now is good; the rest doesn’t matter.

Endlings make for strange bedfellows, Auntie Ben often says, pounding away at sheets of rusted tin atop the rickety rope ladder. She keeps a red bandana faded to the color of bared gums tied around her forehead. Her overalls are so stitched and crookety-patched (Doris does her best, but her fingers are too thick and strong and her eyesight too bad not to mangle such tiny work) they look like a quilt tossed over her long, lean self. She keeps all her tools in a denim pouch against her belly, saws and nails and a gone ghost forest worth of toothpicks forever tumble-scattering to the dusty ground far below. Auntie Ben has a lot of teeth to keep clean. When there were fresh bones to gnaw, she says, wistful, there was no need for toothpicks.

“Wombat feet,” she says. “Those always did the best job. Itty-bitty little bones, but sturdy.” A sigh, a shake of the head. Back to soldering a seam, goggles pulled safely down, impossible jaw firmly set.

Auntie Martha mostly draws star charts, sitting atop the farmhouse with paper and pen. Sometimes she sings. Her voice is croaky and harsh and the words make no sense to Linnea: endless repetitions of the same sound tunelessly unreeled, keeho keeho keeho kee! Sometimes she cocks her head afterward, almost like she’s waiting for a response. Nothing ever halloas back. Just the windmill creaking, the screen door slamming, the bang-bang-bang-bang of Auntie Ben’s hammer smashing dusk’s purple hush to pieces like a carelessly laid egg.

Pretend you are the sky. Pretend you are a sky the faint peach and dusty slate of a dove’s wing, folded protectively over darkening fields of corn and cities where yellow lights wink on like punctilious fireflies. Some day soon you will wither and broil. Those newly-hatched smokestacks on the horizon will slide beneath feather and skin and subclavius muscle with a hypodermic’s lethal care, a payload of jaundice injected with a belch and a billow, and the resulting buildup of toxins will ensure nothing bigger than a botfly ever darkens your horizon again. Your decay will smother the world, a dead bird huddling over an empty nest.

Soon, but not today. Today you are full of life—screech owl and nightjar, cranefly and bat. They know the spaces between stars. Even the ones locked fast in cage and crate can feel the wheel turning, seasons brushing shoulders on the subway. Away I must be going, they say to the bars and the locks, the cold iron that batters the breath from their hollow bones. I’ve had a lovely life here, but spring waits for no one, and I really must insist—

Even when all the rest are gone, millions blasted from your breast and returned as smoke, she feels the pull and calls to you. Every autumn for twenty-nine years, right up until the day of her stroke. The zookeepers hang the name of a dead president’s wife around her foot like a wartime message, hoping for domesticity, but she is still Ectopistes migratorius, traveler in name and nature.

She hears the sound of phantom wings and hurls herself against the ceiling, desperate to take her place in the thunder. Her tired old body is the color of a bruise.

I’m coming, she whirrs, again and again. Wait for me! I know which way to go!

Buy it Now

“Once upon a time,” Auntie Ben says, seated beside Linnea’s bed, “there was a cage. But that cage is rusted all to hellfire and back now, and the men who built it are bones in the dust so dry not even a dark-flanked yearling would stop to take a sniff. Nobody remembers a damn thing about those men. Nobody remembers their chickens, their guns, or their stupid cage with the concrete floor. But they remember us, my little naked joey, sharp-toothed pride of my pouch. We were beautiful and strong. Our stripes left long shadows across their minds. There were plenty left to remember us, but who will be left to remember your kind?”

“Once upon a time,” Auntie Doris says, “—and oh, it was a long time ago, fresh fruit and green grass and the Rats and the Dogs not yet come—there were nests! Nests on the ground, can you imagine, beneath trees that dropped nuts so close you didn’t have to stretch your neck out far to take them. We laid our eggs where we pleased. But then the Men came—yesyes, and the Rats, and the Dogs, the terrible slavering Dogs—and the guns went bark bark bark all the live-long day. Our nests and our eggs and our fine fat selves, we dwindled down to nothing.

“But do they remember us now, sweet milk of my crop? Bless my gizzard and claws, they do! Those hungry men stopped being hungry, oh, ages ago, and their guns and their clubs rotted like rained-on feathers. Nobody remembers much at all about them and their growling bellies, but they remember our name, you’d better believe they do. There were plenty left to make our name round and fat, but mercy, who will be left to remember your kind?”

“Once upon a time,” Auntie Martha says—her voice is so soft you have to bend your eardrums low to pick up the words, a halting thing much gentler than her evening song—“we were a thousand. We were a million. We were many, and we blotted the sky with Ourselves. We flew where we pleased, and where we flew was pleasing. We followed the starmaps, the pull in our heads that said Go here! Go here!

“But the guns brought us down, by the thousands and the millions and the many. We lost the stars. We lost ourselves. But d’you think, little squab of my breast, that they could ever forget the sound of that many wings blotting out the sun? There were plenty of mouths and memories to pass on the beating of a million wings that was our name. As to who or what will be left to remember your own kind, dwindling with no wings to bear them away…”

Auntie Martha shakes her head.

“We were many too, once,” she repeats, barely a whisper. “I really am sorry.”

Linnea has a voice, too, but she doesn’t use it much. The inside of her head is a safe place, full of futures that will never happen so long as she keeps her words under lock and key. You open doors when you say things. There’s no telling what will come out of them, or where they may carry you off to in their jaws. Linnea likes it here; she has no desire to be stolen away. The days flash by unmarked—fur-yellow, feather-purple, rust-red—and change comes in slow, sneaky bursts, the space between looking away and turning back, moments of distraction. The earth grows a little more cracked. The ship teeters a little higher into the brassy sky. The wars Elsewhere, according to the dying radio in the kitchen, are running out of bodies.

“All things run out eventually, unless you outrun them first,” says Auntie Ben. Her shadow isn’t a woman’s and leaves no question as to her identity, falling snout-to-tail down the wooden work platform. “Your people were never canny enough to plan for the one nor fast enough for the other. Poor sods. Be a love and fetch me that pair of metal shears from out the kitchen, will you?”

Linnea does as she’s told, crossing the hardpan between farmhouse and building site at a gallop so the ground doesn’t burn her bare feet. Her own shadow is small and knobby-kneed and very much human.

Pretend you are the sea. Pretend you are a life-filled veil of green and gold and black and blue covering 70 percent of the land and most of its mysteries. Some day soon you will choke on refuse. A growing knot of bottles and bags and tires and zipties and rubber duckies and microbeads and bright plastic bric-a-brac will catch fast in your throat, suffocating all life from your deep places. You’ll bloat like a dead thing, an albatross chick’s belly packed tight and stretched grotesque with all the indigestible junk you’ve been fed. And when the last coral has withered—when the final whale has sung her question to an empty abyssal plain and there’s not even a hagfish left to mourn her passing—you will rise primeval, stinking of pig effluent and rotting fish, mercury and motor oil, an entire undead ecosystem marching on the cities of the coast.

Soon, but not now, and not for many ages yet. Today you are bursting with so much life the men who ride your waves in their great wooden ships cannot conceive of an end to it all. They match the seeming limitlessness of your largess with an equally insatiable hunger, seeking and searching and grasping. The world has never seen anything like it. There is no time to prepare; blink and they’re pulling ashore with axes and dogs and fire. Sink their boats and six hundred more will follow. Flood their encampments and they simply sail to the next island, rats and pigs ravaging in their wake.

You have protected this rugged little hunk of jungle and sand well. The animals here are special, coddled by your sheltering blue arms until they barely remember what fear is. The birds nest on the ground and lay their wings aside unused, for of what possible use are wings when there’s nothing to flee? Round and happy is Raphus cucullatus. Round and happy you would have them forever, your little flightless flock, but you cannot rage hard enough or squall fierce enough to stop what’s coming.

Hobnailed sailor’s heels in the white sand, clomping up the waterline. A crunch and a thud; the first pair of curious eyes dimmed.

The killing doesn’t stop for years. Axes ring and the fires burn and the rats and the pigs pick up where the clubs and machetes leave off, shattering eggs and snatching chicks even after the first settlers grow bored and Abel Tasman bobs away to wreak civilization on other untouched shores. They eat until there’s nothing left of the flock but white sticks in your surf.

They capture a few of the young birds alive and send them back across your waters. The last will be put on display as a public attraction, a curiosity kept in a dank, dark little chamber at the back of a shop. She will huddle into herself, feathers fluffed to ward off the chill of this gray place so far from her tropical homeland. The people who pay their pennies to see her will laugh at how round she looks, how plump and silly and vacant-eyed.

Nobody left to speak through the kitchen radio. No more words. What’s left of the nearby town dries up with the rain. They take what they want from the abandoned shops and load it into the pickup and there’s not a soul left squatting inside or out to squint twice at the theft.

Linnea snoops in the cobwebs and cupboards while they loot, because once upon a gas station that was how she survived and sometimes she misses the taste of greasy crisps and dime-store jerky. There are newspapers, but they’re all from a long ways back and fat as ticks with bad tidings. There are old weather almanacs, but past a certain printing they all run a woeful rut into the dirt: rising tides, rising dust, rising temperature lines the color of sunburn. There are photographs, but they’re not from a world Linnea knows. There are clocks, but nobody’s left to wind them.

There aren’t any crisps left, either. Just plastic crinkling in the creosote bushes, as mournful in its own way as Auntie Martha’s evening songs. Linnea licks the sweat salt off her lips as they drive home, the three aunties crammed into the cab and her alone in the bed with the wind and her thoughts and the wide-stretched sky.

The first passenger is waiting when she runs downstairs for breakfast, seated at the table next to Auntie Ben like that’s the way things have always been. A muscular, sturdy, broad-shouldered lady, with slate-gray hair and a big sharp nose and tiny red-rimmed eyes behind wire spectacles, thick lips drooping southward in a permanent scowl.

“This is Fatu Ceratotherium,” says Auntie Ben. “She’ll be staying with us for a while, helping out with the ship until it’s done.”

Fatu squints down at Linnea, snorts, and continues turning the pages of the book she holds, muttering something about humans under her breath. Linnea is glad to excuse herself and escape outside. Nothing’s changed there overnight, at least. Since it’s early and the ground is still cool she visits the gorge behind their property, something hard and hot bubbling beneath her chestbone.

It’s a new feeling. Change has planted it there, and she feels more change building where she can’t quite see it. Good things—crisps, soft beds, kindly aunties who keep your hair free of snags—can never ever stay when change is on the move. If it was a thing she could bite, she would bite it. If it was a thing she could throw rocks at, she would chuck pieces of flint until her arm fell off. But there’s nothing to do but wait for whatever is coming.

So she screams.

She shrieks into the canyon until the echo makes a pack of her, big and mean and capable of keeping things the way they are forever. She shrieks until her throat gets raw inside and the sun heats the ground beneath her enough to be uncomfortable. She doesn’t cry, because that’s a waste of moisture and she’s frustrated and angry, not senseless. But she yells. She even uses a few of the more interesting words she remembers from the walls of the gas station restroom while she’s at it. And it does make her feel a little better, eventually. Not much, but enough to ease the feeling in her chest.

“They’ll never come back no matter how loud you call, you know.”

Another change: Auntie Martha is off the roof, right in the middle of the day. She lights a hand on Linnea’s shoulder, delicate but with a surprisingly strong grip.

“No, they’ll never come back, little squab of my heart,” she continues in her gentle singsong. “The nest is scattered and the shell is crushed and in the case of your people, they did it to themselves. But it…it does feel good to try, doesn’t it? You always hope something other than your own voice will fly back. And isn’t it always worth trying? Just in case?”

They’ve done their best, her aunties. There’s a gulf between them that no ship can cross, but they’ve tried very hard, and they love her despite her humanity. Linnea gropes for words, a shape to fold her feelings into. Her voice sticks like a rusted pump drawing up dust from an empty well.

“If I call,” she says, “will you come back?”

They watch the question drift to earth together. Auntie Martha sighs, soft as eiderdown, and wraps her arms around Linnea.

“Oh, little squab. Little naked thing.”

More passengers arrive—not just two-by-two, but in ones and threes and severals, all more or less shaped like human women. The radio crackles static, the horizon sizzles with heat, and the farmhouse fills with the noise of idle waiting room chatter. Figures with shadows like frogs and parrots and long-necked tortoises loiter on the porch, smoking and waiting for sundown. Some help Auntie Ben with what’s left of the ship’s construction, hammer-hammer-saw-slam-bang. Others walk the halls at night, pacing with an impatience you can feel sparking off their soles like blue lightning. The air, Auntie Doris says, feels like a chick is pecking gentle-like on the other side, looking for the best place to lay into the world’s shell with its egg-tooth.

“I still don’t see why it has to be a ship doing the cracking, though,” she adds, looking as disgruntled as she ever gets. “I don’t trust ships, even the kind that don’t go on the water. No telling what a ship will unleash, no no no there never is.”

Linnea tries to stay out of the way, but it’s hard when there are so many others around. She takes to sleeping on the roof with Auntie Martha, whose skinny fingers are an ink-stained blur now from sundown to first light as she makes her charts. Scritch-scritch-scritch goes the fountain pen, spinning delicate spider silk lines between stars. The house below them hums hot, creaky impatience in its sleep. Further out in the yard, listing in its scaffolding, the ship looms black and blue.

“Nothing has an ending. Not really.” Auntie Martha says little while she works, which means she says little at all these days. When she does bother speaking, Linnea listens, hoarding every word against future silences. “Hatching is not the end of what lies inside the egg, only the end of the shell around it. There’s no flight without the shatter, and no flock without the flight. What we’re made of will go on. A fledgling in some other place and time will look up for guidance and maybe see the path we leave behind, even when all of this as it is”—she flutters her free hand at the darkened desert—“dries and blows away. Change is comforting, in that way.”

Linnea casts a wary eye at the night. She tucks her knees in tighter beneath her chin.

Pretend you are the wind. Pretend you are the inhalations and exhalations of the land, the breath of tortoise and tree twisting windmill and grass blade alike. Some day soon you will kill everything you touch, spreading a mushroom cloud’s poison seed from desert to delta to distant island. Death will fruit as heedlessly cheerful as any invasive species mankind has ever sown, unconcerned with distance or climatological delineations, and the world will slowly return to silence. All the world’s a graveyard. Like the last soldier in some grim and cautionary fairy tale, you are tasked with whistling past its gates forever.

Soon—very soon, the thoughtful pause before a clock’s hand flicks to midnight—but not yet. Today there is still life, although it’s a scraggletailed, desperate kind of thing, struggling to grow through a coating of red dust. You blow past caravans of ragged scrabblers, towns and communities clinging to civilization like cubs clutching at a dead mother’s fur. You sweep through pockets of memory and unreality. Ghosts and grit tumble down empty highways. Sometimes they clump into things with form and will; old spirits crossing an older landscape, psychopomp trompe l’oeil. The border here is very thin. History overlays it all like a second skin, a hidden shape the eye has to unlearn everything to recognize. See the beast with stripes like a cat and jaws like a wolf? See the glaciers that carved the horizon? See the people who lived here before, their homes and their handprints, the blood they spilled in the sand?

Old roadsigns rattle and dance as you pass. Junk food containers whirl. Beside the long black scar of the highway is a gas station.

You pause to brush the little girl’s bangs back from her face. She’s lost in concentration, momentarily distracted from hunger by the task at hand, sunburned forehead creased. Her hands work the old candy bar wrapper into triangles, pyramids, arrows, flaps and furrows, halves and planes. An alchemy of geometry, transmuting garbage into a kind of escape.

At last she finishes her spell. It sits stately in her palm for a moment, a crinkled paper bird smudged by dirty fingerprints and time. She lifts her hand to you as you pass and you take the little gift, touched by the gesture.

“Goodbye,” she says. You keep on moving as always. The paper bird soars. “Goodbye.”

The farmhouse is at full capacity, as full of visitors as it can manage—restless bodies crammed cheek-to-jowl, wood-and-brass chests of varying sizes stacked in corners and jammed beneath beds. Linnea isn’t the only one who sleeps outside now. They spill down the porch and into the front yard on rude pallets, shaking sand from their ears and hair when the brassy bright mornings come. It’s very hard to avoid their eyes; there are so many of them, and they are all so watchful of her two-leggedness. The ship—finished, Auntie Ben says, as it’ll ever be, and as it’ll ever be will do just dandy for their purposes—strains at the sky. The nights grow cold and brittle.

Linnea lurks around the edges, hugs corners, and spends most of the days remaining with a fist-sized knot churning in her stomach. The passengers move their trunks and their bedding to the foot of the ship. The farmhouse deflates a little. The knot in Linnea’s stomach stays the same; deep in her heart she knows what’s coming, although not one of her aunties says a word. When their chests finally vanish from the bedroom as well one afternoon, it’s almost a relief. Three square holes in the dust at the feet of the three neatly made beds, hardwoods darker there than their surroundings. Like shadows burned into pavement, or the white chalk outline of a hand on blood-red clay.

She has no trunk, no locked box with her name on it and her true skin inside. Her shadow is nothing if not honest. It drags at her heels as she walks—no running this time—down to the gorge. There is no memory of being left behind in her head, but there is a feeling, and it has all the contours of something well-worn and familiar.

Someone is already at the canyon’s edge when she arrives. Big, broad-shouldered, gray-haired—Fatu. Linnea thinks about leaving. She thinks too loudly and too slowly, and Fatu notices her. Linnea waits to be ignored, dismissed, or snorted at. Fatu’s never had time for anything much other than working on the ship, and no time at all for a human child, no matter how beloved of her hosts. After their first meeting Linnea had done her best to stay out of Fatu’s way. Up until today she had proven pretty good at it, too.

Instead, Fatu wordlessly waves her over with a blocky hand. They sit together in silence, big and little legs dangling over the gorge’s lip. To their left the sinking sun is an angry, infected red.

“They lied about my kind when they first saw us. Dumbest damn thing.” Fatu doesn’t take her eyes off the horizon as she speaks. Her voice is a rumble Linnea feels in the unmapped interior of her chest. “This was Wayback, before cameras or jeeps or automatic weapons or any of that sort of shit. You know how many horns they said we had, when they sent word back home? Or where they said we had them growing from? Some peabrain blinder than my grandam drew a picture, and that picture, it grew some legs. It ran far. Soon everybody thought the lie was truth, all on account of one silly, stupid drawing. Nobody there to correct them. Nobody around to tell the true story, and it wasn’t as if we could speak for ourselves.” She halfheartedly flicks a pebble into the chasm. “Lies are like ticks. If you have no birds to pick ’em off, they breed, and they suckle, and they turn your world sickly. Your vastness shrinks. Your skin gets thin and pale. Soon, all you’re left with is…unicorns.”

Fatu spits this last word from her mouth like a nettle. She chews on her bottom lip for a moment, brow furrowed, nostrils flared. Linnea waits.

“A unicorn is a fine fiction,” she continues, eventually, “but it isn’t me.”

On the final night, they build a fire in the ship’s shadow. They open their chests—their trunks and their suitcases, their valises and chiffoniers—and they tell stories.

A dark-skinned woman with green hair and curved lips is the first to unlock hers. Inside is a cloak covered in emerald feathers, neatly folded. She pulls it over her shoulders with an eye-dazzling flourish. In the darkness between blinks—in the waver of heat off the bonfire—she melts and changes. Now she is a green and red parrot, perched on the trunk’s open lid.

Her audience leans in.

“I was a hundred,” she says. “I was a million, although I did not know what million meant. Our forests were as green as our feathers, and just as numerous. The fruit was sweet, the chatter of my flock sweeter. ‘Silence’ was another word we did not know the meaning of, and we were happier for it. Loudest of all those millions was my mate. There was no nut her beak could not shatter. We raised many clutches together, fine and strong and shrieking.”

She lets that picture hang in the air: a green place filled with the screams of a happy, prosperous people, wings flashing in the dapple. Linnea, who has only ever known red dust, cannot see it no matter how hard she tries.

“They cut the trees down, one by one, and my people soon followed,” she finishes. “Those hills are bare now. They know the meaning of silence.”

A pause, and the parrot flies into the fire. Only her shadow emerges from the flames. It flaps into the high scaffolding surrounding the ship, lands, and waits.

The next to step forward is sharp-faced and angry and almost as short as Linnea herself. She yanks her furry brown hide from inside its chest—no nonsense, no pause for dramatic effect. A blur and a noise like teeth clicking together and a shrew glares up at the crowd with eyes like glass splinters, daring interruption.

“THE SONS OF BITCHES PLOUGHED UP MY BURROWS!” she yells. If her body is small, her voice is more than loud enough to say what needs saying. “THEY BUILT APARTMENTS THERE! APARTMENTS! GOOD RIDDANCE TO THE LOT OF THEM! I HOPE WHAT’S LEFT OF THE BUNCH ENJOYS THE MISERY THEY’VE MADE!” She shoots Linnea a triumphant, bitter look and stomps one of her little feet for emphasis before skittering into the flames. Her tiny shadow is swallowed up entirely by the ship’s massive one.

There are stripes on the cheeks of the third, and an expression that says she’s never dabbed makeup over them and might sooner cut off her own head than entertain the thought. She holds her chin high as she changes, higher still as she speaks. Her voice is a razor wrapped in velvet.

“They took my forest,” she says. “They took my prey. They took my people’s skins. Not my skin, but that didn’t matter too much in the long run, now did it?” Her tail-tip swishes. “Their fear was deadly enough, but their admiration was what crushed the windpipe. There’s nothing worse for continued survival than their wanting to be like you—to touch you, to possess you. Once they get it into their heads that you’re ‘special’…”

The tigress shakes her head disgustedly. She stalks off to meet her fate.

One by one they stand and have their say. One by one the cluster of shadows beneath the ship’s bulk thickens. Scale and fin, feather and fur. A woman with black and yellow hair and a voice like many voices buzzing together. Leather-faced, leather-skinned aunties with slow-spoken, toothless mouths. Enormous Fatu. The fire takes them all, changing them, and their stories are all different and yet, at the heart of things, all the same. Linnea watches with growing apprehension, fear coiling inside her. She cannot decide which is more terrifying: walking into the fire or being left out of it.

The sky lightens. The group thins. Three left: Auntie Ben, Auntie Doris, and Auntie Martha. Linnea wants to cry out NO!, but something solid seems lodged in her throat.

Auntie Ben goes first. With a fond, wry smile, she retrieves her skin. A long-jawed, rangy thing, neither wolf nor tiger, with stripes on her ragged flanks: that is the true shape of Auntie Ben.

“I’ve told my story about as often as anyone cares to hear it,” she says. “We were strong and swift and lived freer than scrub seed. Men came. They did what men carrying guns do. Just to add insult to injury, they stuck the last of us to die in a bloody concrete cage as a way of saying ‘sorry.’ I’m tired of blathering on about that, though. If it pleases you all—hell, even if it doesn’t—I’d rather never think about it again. I’d rather kick sand over this dead place and head for the stars, where other somewheres might be in need of fur and feathers and sharp, smart jaws full of teeth. Chicks leave the nest and joeys leave the pouch. It’s just about time for all of us to do the same.”

She doesn’t step into the fire. Not yet. Instead, she pads across the open space, stripes rippling across lean muscle. She keeps on coming until she’s so close Linnea can smell the dusty musk and fur scent of her. It’s a wild reek—which makes it slightly unnerving—but it’s also Auntie Ben, which makes Linnea abruptly sob and fall forward to hug the rangy creature around her rough neck. Auntie Ben allows the mauling, good-natured as always.

“I know you’re afraid of changing, little one,” she says softly. “Your people never were any good at it, and you’ve seen how that turned out. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say that’s why you’ve got no skin of your own, poor naked mite.” A long pink tongue flicks out to touch Linnea on the cheek. “But whether you go or stay, change is coming for you, and it can either be the one you choose or the one you don’t. Which is it gonna be? Think you can manage the trick?”

Linnea tries to say yes. She tries to mean it. But the fire and the unknown behind it and her fear of both (she’s so afraid, she can’t help it, her knees are shaking and they won’t stop) turn her attempted “yes” to a lie, and the lie clots sour and solid so that not a word can get around it. Auntie Ben watches her struggle, unable to offer help or assistance or meaningless, soothing words that might also be lies.

Gently, firmly, she pulls away and steps back.

“It’s up to you,” she says. “We’ve done all we could.”

The creature Linnea knows as Auntie Ben turns and trots into the fire. Her shadow gives Linnea a final featureless look over its shoulder before taking her place in the crowd of shades.

Auntie Doris comes next, as serious and wide-eyed as Linnea’s ever seen her. A click of the lock and a snap of the hinges and here’s her own true self: a thick-beaked, long-necked, goggle-eyed bird with a fat, squat body and wings more like suggestions than anything approaching useful appendages. She takes a look at herself—the stout legs, the powerful claws—and chuckles fondly.

“Round as an egg, round as an egg, bless my bottom feathers. And what better way is there to be? Flight isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, no no no. I see plenty of them’s got that power standing in the ranks, and you see how well that served them. They’re passing on through the fire, same as I.” A firm nod of the bulbous head. “I admit to mistrusting fire. When the men came to our lands they carried it, and I can still remember the smell of all my aunties and uncles and cousins a-roasting over it. But they’re all gone now, and so are all those hungry, hungry men. Nothing left but my poor Linnea, and we raised her better than all that, didn’t we, girls?”

She waddles closer. Linnea hugs her as well; soft feathers over surprisingly hard muscle, like a silky, affectionate fireplug.

“You learn things, being so low to the ground,” she says. “You learn to be sturdy. You learn how to appreciate the earth you’re planted on. Nobody ever knocked me down with any club! If I settled my bottom, it was always my own decisioning. That’s important. Whatever you do, you just remember that, love. You settle your bottom where and when you feel like it. We’ll understand if the fire is too much to ask, but oh, we will miss you.”

A final affectionate butt of the head, a long, fond look, and away she goes, at as stately a pace as one of her kind can muster. She flinches at the fire’s edge—remembering those earlier fires, maybe; the dogs and the rats and the hungry sailors—but only for a moment. Auntie Doris is stronger than she looks.

Auntie Martha’s trunk is lined with yellowing maps of the stars, and the feathers of her cloak are the slate-and-peach of the pre-dawn sky. She settles on Linnea’s shoulder with a whistle-whirr of wings.

“We were more like your kind than all the others, in our way,” she says, close to Linnea’s ear. “So many of us we blotted the sun and stripped the branches. But we exist to learn, and to change in the learning, in the hopes that some day we may find ourselves changed enough to tell our stories and tell them honestly, no matter how much that may sometimes…sting. Then we can become something else, and fly on.” Her claws dig through the thin fabric of Linnea’s shirt. “I am uncomfortable with all this talk of decisions. There’s nothing wrong with needing more time. Hatchlings grow their feathers when they will. Do you feel your people are ready to have their story told?”

Linnea looks at the shadows and the rocket. She stares into the fire. All she knows is potato crisp wrappers and garbled voices on the radio. The aunties gave her love, but in their love they neglected many things.

“There are some things that cannot be taught, only learned,” Auntie Martha says, as if hearing the thoughts rattling around in her head. “That was not our story to tell, little fledging. We’re ghosts, and you are still alive, but we love you, and that makes the letting go hard. No one—not even those you care about, neither I or Ben nor Doris—can or should force you into a change you aren’t prepared for. It has to be your own decision, in your own time.”

She fluffs her feathers and rubs her head against Linnea’s cheek.

“Remember our stories while you learn your own,” she whispers. “I left star-charts for you; they’re in the bedroom in a box beneath my bed. I carry my own in my head, the same as my people always have.” A note of pride. “Catch up when you’re ready, and no sooner. Be good. Remember we love you.”

Shades marching two-by-two onto a shadowy ship—shadows of tiger and thylacine, dodo and dingo, elephant and sharp-horned rhinoceros. They hop and fly and pace up the gangplank in silence. The fire beneath them dies to embers as the light in the east grows and the last disappears inside, the rusted old hatch slamming shut behind them with a clang.

Nothing happens, at first. Then there’s a slow rumbling from within the rocket’s guts, a rust-rattling, bolt-testing shudder that grows and grows and grows until the entire ship and all the ground around-abouts it are shaking like a penny in a tin can. The first red rays of the sun set fire to the scaffoldings and fins, the soldered seams that patch the scavenged eyetooth-length of the thing together. Orange dust rises like smoke. The long, pointed shadow at its base jitters faintly.

The ship begins to topple over. At the same time, its shadow pulls itself free of the dusty ground, ascending with a noise like a hurricane wind made up of the calls of every animal to ever creep or crawl or flap or low, a joyous, cacophonous menagerie. It lifts higher and higher, charging to meet the dawn as, far below, the ship collapses completely. The air is full of sand and twigs and old litter picked up by the whirl—candy wrappers, plastic bags, feathers. Chunks of scaffolding tumble-bang to earth end-over-appetite, adding their own clattering boom and roar to the morning as the shadow pulls away. It is a cloud—a bird—a mote swimming across the eye—and then it is nothing at all.

The triumphant menagerie song fades to an echo. A trick of the wind, occasionally interrupted by another piece of the ship’s struts coming down with a tooth-rattling thud.

Goodbye.

Every morning she gets up and brushes her own hair, makes her own bed. She eats a breakfast of whatever she’s scavenged the previous day. There are no potato crisps, but the aunties taught her long ago all was left that could be plucked, pecked, swallowed, or snapped. If the weather’s good, she takes the pickup out looking for pieces of story—diaries of neighbors, scraps of old newspapers, history books. If it isn’t (and frequently it isn’t; the storms grow worse as time spreads like a puddle), she spends her afternoons huddled in the root cellar, thinking about everything she’s learned.

She watches the seasons turn until there are no more seasons, just days, hot and identical when they aren’t memorably violent. She outgrows her clothes and takes new ones from the abandoned town. The kitchen radio coughs dry static for a little while longer before dying completely. One night the sky dances with cloudless lightning the color of blood, a crackling red net stretching from horizon to unseen horizon. The next morning the pickup won’t start.

From then on Linnea walks everywhere she needs to go. She wears out every pair of shoes the town’s got left and then her feet get as hard and tough as everything else in the dying world.

Old warnings unheeded, predictions shrugged off, smokestacks belching into the sky. Extinction. She learns new words.

With the pickup broke down, food gets harder to find. Linnea’s ribs are a ladder leading directly to her throat. She dreams of the tastes of all the good things she’s ever eaten—canned corned beef, a soda she found in a vending machine once, the beloved and well-worn potato crisps. She dreams of constellations with stars like stripes along their flanks. She dreams of an airship, a low-swung thing with a sagging canvas belly above and a wooden deck below.

When she wakes from the last, she has a blueprint in her head. She’s no longer hungry or thirsty. She has all the energy in the world, a mind overflowing like a rain bucket with stories.

You’re changing, Auntie Martha might’ve said, pleased. You’re learning, growing your feathers. You’re almost ready to fly.

Saying goodbye stripped Linnea of her fear. Once the worst comes to pass, what else is there to fret about?

Now all her energy focuses on building the airship. It becomes an obsession. She gathers old sheets, pulls the curtains from the bedroom windows, raids houses and boarded-up hotels for their linens. She stitches them all together (when did she learn to sew?) into a giant patchwork bag. It gives her no free time to spend missing the aunties or thinking about food. She sits cross-legged in sandstorms with her needle and thread, head down, turning quilts and blankets to wings. She no longer feels the sun on her back or the hot wind in her hair. All that’s left is determination.

Catch up when you’re ready, and no sooner.

The farmhouse loses its clapboards. The airship gains ribs and struts and a sturdy wooden basket in a cheerful, peeling yellow. Propellers are pried off fishing boats that will never see water again. There are parts of the construction that Linnea cannot recall clearly the next day; a dark spot in her mind’s eye and the patchwork bag is stretched and nailed firmly over the frame and she has no memory whatsoever of how it got there. A feeling of finality builds. It pushes everything else out like a cat expanding to fill a sunny windowsill.

A night comes when the moon is as full and fat and yellow as a disc of dry bone in the sky. Everything is spilled ink and ivory. The airship squats near what’s left of the original rocket, waiting for Linnea as she steps out her front door. Not a sigh of wind disturbs the becalmed world. It’s as still and breathless a night as she’s seen in an unreckoned amount of time—a listening audience, a girl waiting for a bedtime story.

Or a conductor waiting for someone to fish out a ticket. She’s got no skin but her own to draw on; humans traded their stripes for words long ago.

“We weren’t very good at this,” Linnea says to the darkness.

After going so long without speaking or hearing another voice, the sound of her own voice lands like a teacup kissing concrete.

“The man who built this house used to hit his wife. He died a long time ago, before the aunties moved in, but I still know that somehow. I know a lot of stuff now. I know all the things I learned and all the things I didn’t.” Linnea lets her gaze wander over the familiar front porch landmarks—the abandoned wasp nest in the shadowy upper left corner, the pillars sandblasted down to bare, dried wood. She thinks she sees movement out of the corner of one eye. A dark bipedal shape beneath the airship’s bulk, an absence of moonlight clinging to memories of alarm clocks and apple pie. Another joins it, then another.

“I know why me and all those other kids were living around the gas station,” she continues. “I know where all the grown-ups went. I know why they went there, and why they never came back. I know why they stopped talking on the radio, and it’s all…so…dumb. Nobody would listen to one another, not even to the people they loved. Maybe they weren’t scared enough. Maybe they were scared of the wrong things. They didn’t have Auntie Ben and Auntie Martha and Auntie Doris to teach them about stuff and they wouldn’t have listened anyways, but…”

There are so many stories buzzing inside Linnea’s head it’s hard to hold on to the frayed length of her own thoughts. She gropes and pushes aside other people’s memories until she finds the end of it again. The little cluster of flickering shadows around the airship’s hull is thicker now. The patchwork bag shudders and stirs with a faint hiss.

“We weren’t very good at this,” she repeats. “And we took everybody else with us. But we weren’t all bad. We had potato crisps, and ice cream, and we built farmhouses and wrote songs and told stories. Maybe next time will be okay. Maybe we’ll turn into something better at changing once we fly.”

There is a noise—a rising wind, a thousand whispers, a sliding of fabric and a slither of inflating canvas. The horizon in the direction of the abandoned town seems to ripple.

Linnea steps off the porch into the moonlight. She strides across the yard, vaults the fence, and doesn’t stop until the shadow of the rising airship reaches out to swallow her own.

Pretend you are the land—the empty sea-lapped cities with their blank skull eyes, the blasted green glass wastes, the skeletal forests. The desert, as red and uncaring as ever. Do you feel the shadow cutting a nightjar’s swoop across your foothills? Do you see the airship that throws it, nosing noiselessly across the face of the moon?

Ghosts rise to meet the vessel, sinuous as smoke and blue as pilot flames. They cluster thickest over the cities, but even in the empty parts of the world there are always a few hurrying to catch up. The airship moves with the graceful, unbothered patience of a whale hunting for krill. It is a black mouth with a belly big enough for all of humanity, filtering souls from a night that seems endless. No need to rush, it whispers, but even in extinction humans are terrible at altering their old habits.

(Remember whales? Remember nightjars? Remember life in the sea and the sky?)

It takes forever. It takes no time at all. It crosses all the whens and wheres, all the should-have-beens and never-wills. Whoever or whatever stands at the wheel has a steady, tireless hand. The gathering goes on for exactly as long as it needs to, until there’s nobody else left to claim. The moon sets and the stars rise; so, too, does the airship. It sets a course for a constellation shaped like a long, lean predator, distant flickering suns dotting its purple flanks like stripes.

Drifting gently upward

(Remember balloons? Remember letting go of your first in the parking lot of some forgotten bank, tearfully saying goodbye as it climbed and climbed and the sun turned it to a bird?)

distance shrinks its size, taking memories of telephones and coffee tables and radio broadcasts along with it. First kisses, last breaths, friendships and fallout and fires blossoming on the horizon—they dwindle and dim, going back to the darkness all thoughts and stories come from. A final pulse of ancient light from a dead star—red-blue-green—and there’s nothing left to see and no one left to remember they ever saw it.

Pretend you are the land. Goodbye, you say, slamming a screen door in the wind. Goodbye. Better luck next time.

Text copyright © 2018 by Brooke Bolander
Art copyright © 2018 by Victo Ngai

Brandon Sanderson may be known for his works of epic fantasy, but they’re certainly not all that he writes. With the release of his Legion omnibus forthcoming, as well as his new science fiction young adult novel, Skyward, due out later this fall, I wanted to highlight those works that exist outside the Cosmere (the name for Sanderson’s inter-connected universe of epic fantasy stories). If you enjoy science fiction, superheroes, strange magic, libraries full of secrets, and multiple personalities, then it’s time to learn about the other side of Sanderson!

The Reckoners is a completed trilogy (Steelheart, Firefight, and Calamity) about murderous superheroes and alternate realities, and features a young man who really doesn’t know how to tell jokes. David was young when the Epics—people with superpowers— started manifesting. Except when they used these powers, they turned bad. And the worst of them all is Steelheart, an Epic who declares himself Emperor of the city once known as Chicago. David lost his father because of Steelheart and has been training his whole life to make him pay. He joins up with the Reckoners, a group of humans dedicated to the same thing he is: resistance, revolution, and ridding the world of Steelheart. Although the original trilogy is completed, Sanderson has been teasing a possible return to this universe in another trilogy called The Apocalypse Guard, though that will be its own separate story.

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If you want spaceships instead of superpowers, keep an eye out for Skyward this fall. Spensa is a young girl whose living on a devastated planet, made so by the war machines of the alien Krell. She dreams of being a pilot, but the legacy of her father, a deserter, follows her wherever she goes. When she finds a ship of her own, she’ll have to figure out a way to fly. While this isn’t out yet, it sounds like a great science fiction adventure, with Sanderson’s signature worldbuilding, told through an alien milieu.

If you like fantasy, but aren’t sure you want to dive straight into the Cosmere, then these next two series are right up your alley. Taking place in an alternate America, The Rithmatist follows the adventures of a young boy named Joel who goes to a magic academy, except he’s not allowed to learn magic. Learning Rithmatics, the science behind infusing life into two-dimensional chalk-drawn figures, is forbidden to Joel, who must content himself with sneaking into classes when he can. But when students begin to go missing, he and his friend Melody have to rise up to the challenge, and work together to not only learn the magic of Rithmatics, but find out what’s happening in their school. Sanderson is well known for creating worlds that stand on their own, and here, where Wild Chalkings stalk the world, and magic is just a powerful will meeting a piece of chalk, he gives us one of his quirkiest worlds.

And if this sort of mathematical world isn’t to your tastes, there’s also his middle grade Alcatraz series. Alcatraz is a foster child, and a nebbish sort who one days finds a bag of sand addressed to him in the mail—it’s his inheritance in the fight against the evil Librarians that run the world. When his real grandfather shows up, Alcatraz learns the truth: he’s from a long line of magicians and freedom fighters who work to stop the plots of the Librarians whenever they can. Along the way, Alcatraz will learn the truth about his sand and his family, and may actually save the world. Aimed for a younger audience, and certainly more in the vein of a family movie, the Alcatraz series is five books of fun, adventure, and humor, all with the tell-tale signature of Sanderson’s break neck pace and plot.

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If you prefer more of an adult science fiction story, let’s steer you towards Legion, collecting the first two Stephen Leeds novellas as well as the brand new one to conclude the series. Stephen Leeds, nicknamed “Legion,” has a bit of a special talent: he can generate different versions of himself, hallucinations, or “aspects,” complete with their own personalities, and with those personalities, skills. He can then utilize anyone he thinks up, which he does often, when on a job, or running from someone trying to kill him. A little more adult, a little more serious, but with plenty of creativity as Sanderson pushes the ideas of Legion’s mental abilities and the aspects he can make of himself. (You can read an excerpt from the first novella here.)

While the Cosmere may be vast, so too, is Sanderson’s creativity, and if the above list is any indication, there’s something for everyone in his lexicon. As we’re between Stormlight books, now is the perfect time to try something new!

Martin Cahill is a contributor to Tor.com, as well as Book Riot and Strange Horizons. He has fiction forthcoming at Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Fireside Fiction. You can follow his musings on Twitter @McflyCahill90.

It’s been over ten years since Casino Royale and the debut of Daniel Craig as James Bond, which means we’re overdue for a new 007. The British tabloid the Daily Star published a rumor that Bond producer Barbara Broccoli thought it was time some diversity was brought to the role and director Antoine Fuqua suggested that Idris Elba was his top choice.

Elba himself has publicly campaigned for the role for years, in 2011 saying “I’d not only get in the cab, but I’d take the taxi driver out of the car, hostage. The taxi, jump out while it was moving, jump onto a pedal bike that was just past the door as I got on it, and then get onto a plane—on the wing—land on top of Sony Studios, slide through the air conditioning, and land in the office.” And he further added fuel to the fire on Sunday by tweeting, “my name’s Elba, Idris Elba.”

Now, all of this “news” is purely guesswork. There’s been no official announcement, but it’s hard to think of an actor better suited to play Bond than Elba. He’s English, mid-forties, and known for being famously, irresistibly handsome. He has a distinguished career playing characters who are equal parts charming and menacing, such as drug kingpin Stringer Bell on The Wire and apocalypse canceller Marshal Stacker Pentecost in Pacific Rim. And he has a fun social media presence that allows him to engage with his fans while playing on his larger-than-life persona.

So: the only “problem” with Elba taking on the role of Bond is his skin color. There are many 007 “fans” that will not accept a black James Bond. For these (let’s just say it) racists, a Bond of African descent just can’t work; as Rush Limbaugh put it, “James Bond is a total concept put together by Ian Fleming. He was white and Scottish. Period. That is who James Bond is.”

To these people, a black Bond is unacceptable because, at his heart, Bond is a straight white male power fantasy, a reactionary counter to the end of the British empire and the rise of civil rights movements around the world. As former colonies became their own countries with power to rival Great Britain, and women and racial minorities were claiming their place at the table, it was comforting to believe that only a white man, drinking and screwing his way around the globe, could actually save the world.

This reactionary fantasy is even present in 1995’s Goldeneye, where M correctly identifies Bond as “a sexist, misogynist dinosaur. A relic of the Cold War.” The moral of Goldeneye, then, is that the world needs a misogynist dinosaur to save it and that it’s not Bond who has to change with the times: it’s the world that has to accept him.

But the fact is that Bond has constantly changed over the last fifty years. 007 hasn’t been played by a Scot since Sean Connery, and it’s impossible for any Bond since Timothy Dalton’s to be literally the same character as the one in From Russia with Love (unless some sort of regeneration is going on, but let’s not go there right now).

Even when the same actor plays Bond for a period of time, he shifts his characterization over the course of his tenure. Connery’s Bond in Dr. No is a drunk screw-up, the kind of agent who gets sent to Jamaica because a scientist has wandered off, and two films later he’s a suave superman sent to foil the greatest gold theft in history. Craig’s Bond in Casino Royale is a brutal thug uncomfortable in the high class world of Le Chiffre, and two films later he’s a suave superman coming out of retirement to save MI6.

It’s inevitable that a new Bond will not adhere to Ian Fleming’s “total concept.” By casting Idris Elba (or another actor of color), Broccoli and Fuqua can blow up the racist heart of the Bond films—the flawed tenet that only a white man can save the world. That only a white man can be smart, strong, sophisticated, and suave enough to be a super spy. That only the people who have always controlled the world can continue to save it.

I’d say that casting Elba would drag Bond into the 21st century, but the fact is this radical rebranding of Bond should have happened twenty years ago. The response to “you’re a misogynist dinosaur” shouldn’t ever be “you’re right and I’m proud.” It should be to say, “Holy shit, you’re right, I’d better get with the times.”

With that in mind, casting Elba (who, again, I think would be a great choice to play the part), might not be going far enough. Why not a woman? Why not someone queer? Craig campaigned for Bond to have a homosexual romance for years, all of which amounted to one throwaway line in Skyfall. Bond is a power fantasy, will always be a power fantasy, but why should he remain a fantasy for just a straight white male minority? Shouldn’t everybody get to play at getting drunk, getting laid, and saving the world—and looking amazing while doing it?

Steven Padnick is a freelance writer and editor. By day. You can find more of his writing and funny pictures at padnick.tumblr.com.

I was lucky enough to grow up in an age when people weren’t as worried about safety. Especially transportation safety. That’s why:

• I remember the brief glorious moment of flight when jumping an old beater car over a railway crossing, followed by the thud when the engine falls out on touchdown;
• I know the exact sound of a windscreen and face collision after an abrupt stop;
• I know how fast a VW Beetle has to take a corner before the kid riding the running board flies off;
• I can boast of walking four miles through a blizzard after breaking four ribs in a mid-winter car wreck.

It was a glorious time to be alive.

Science fiction offers even more exotic transportation choices—choices that even I would avoid. Here are six of them.

The Orion Drive

Poul Anderson’s Orion Shall Rise (1983) is a tale of conflict between technological exuberance (on the part of the Northwest Union) and technological prudence (on the part of the conservationist Maurai). The Northwest Union is planning to use what advocates might call “externally pulsed plasma propulsion” and skeptics might call “riding a series of small nuclear explosions from which your pusher plate may or may not protect you.” The Orion drive was an actual proposal, the brainchild of Ted Taylor and Freeman Dyson. It offered a rare combination of high Delta-v and high acceleration at the cost of, well, pretty much everything implied by “a series of small nuclear explosions.”

Advocates of Project Orion were sure that the engineering challenges were surmountable, but since the Partial Test Ban in 1963 effectively doomed efforts to build one, we will never know. We can only guess. All I know is that I wouldn’t ride a spaceship where the barrier between me and a nuclear detonation, even a very small one, was an ablative plate assembled by the lowest bidder¹.

Matter-to-Energy Conversion

Steve Gallacci’s Albedo: Birthright (1985) is a sequel to his mil-SF comic, Albedo: Erma Felda: EDF. It is set in a time when civilization was recovering from an interstellar dark age. Its characters sometimes gain possession of imperfectly understood ancient technology. Ancient starships seem to offer renewed access to the stars but…there is a catch. The ships are powered by total conversion of matter to energy. Failure modes include turning all matter in contact with the power plant into energy. This is bad enough if the starship is still in deep space; it’s worse if it’s on a planet at the time².

Hyperspace

John E. Stith’s Redshift Rendezvous (1990) features journeys through a hyperspace where the speed of light is only ten meters a second. While this does allow space travel (as well as Mr Tomkins-style physics lectures), I don’t think it would be a good idea. At least not for meatsack me—my biochemistry has been honed by billions of years of evolution in an environment in which the speed of light is about 300,000 kilometers per second. I am not at all convinced that said biochemistry would keep functioning if you changed a fundamental physical constant.

Subatomic Particle Energy

Bob Shaw’s A Wreath of Stars (1976) and Gregory Benford’s The Stars in Shroud (1978) use similar conceits, if for rather different purposes. In Wreath, conversion from regular matter to anti-neutrinos³ affords its protagonist escape from an irate dictator. He finds himself in an intangible world (which is doomed, so it wasn’t much of an escape). In the Benford novel, conversion to tachyons allows faster than light travel. In addition to issues I will discuss in a later essay, both of these technologies have the same apparent drawback, namely: unless the process is absolutely instant (I don’t see how it could be) this would probably shear all the complex molecules and chemical structures in one’s meatsack body, as different bits are converted at slightly different times. Do not want to be converted to mush, fog, or plasma. No thanks.

One-Way Teleporters

Lloyd Biggle, Jr.’s All The Colors of Darkness (1963) and Harry Harrison’s One Step From Earth (1970) both use teleportation devices whose portals are one-way only. When I was young, I worried about what might happen to molecular bonds as one passed through a one-way barrier that was impervious to forces in the other direction. Later in life I decided that these were event horizons and might permit safe transit. What kills you in a black hole isn’t the event horizon but the tides and the singularity. BUT…what happens to someone halfway through one of these if the person behind them becomes impatient, grabs the traveller by their backpack, and yanks them backwards? What happens if you trip while partway through? (Nothing good, is my guess.)

Transporters

Finally, I am leery of any teleportation system that depends on destructive scanning and distant replication; examples range from Anderson’s The Enemy Stars (1958) to some versions of Star Trek. Very small errors could result in unpleasant consequences, as demonstrated in that unimpeachable historical document, Galaxy Quest:

There are other problems with this mode of transport. Consult your friendly internet for a whole lot of angry argument re: this matter.

This segues into a worry I had as a six-year-old: does identity survive when every atom of one’s body is replaced? This occupied my thoughts quite a lot in 1967 and 1968, as my seventh birthday was approaching. My parents had once mentioned that all the atoms in one’s body were replaced every seven years. They neglected to add that this was a continual, gradual process⁴. I was under the impression that it would happen all at once on my seventh birthday. I wasn’t at all sure I’d still be me afterward. Although I could see why the duplicate might think it was.

Now, I think continuity of identity over the years is merely comforting illusion—still, I am not stepping into a zap-and-duplicate teleporter. But don’t let me stop you.

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1: Merely declining to use the device wouldn’t necessarily protect you from it. Externalities of the Orion Drive included non-zero death rates from fallout and the chance that one could fry satellites in orbit. But of course in those days, there was no globe-spanning satellite network. Most of the radioactive debris from higher altitude detonations would end up in Canada and other polar latitudes, where nobody associated with the project lived. An acceptable cost.

2: Murray Leinster’s much earlier Proxima had a very similar arrangement and an actual, on-stage, demonstration of the failure mode.

3: Bob Shaw was not a hard-SF author.

4: Similar confusion reigned when my parents relayed to me the sad news the family cat had been run over by teenagers. I am very, very literal-minded. I was not told that the teenagers were riding in a car at the time.

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.

The Million is the latest work by acclaimed science fiction author Karl Schroeder. It’s related in setting to his 2014 novel Lockstep: the lockstep of that title plays a significant role in The Million.

One million people live on Earth, wealthy custodians of its culture, heritage, architecture and lands. They are the Million, their numbers restricted by treaty, their lifestyles lavish. They want for nothing—but they’re custodians for the ten billion humans who live in the lockstep, who sleep in suspended animation beneath Earth’s cities, waking for a month every thirty years in order to participate in an interstellar society where no faster than light transport or communication exists.

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Gavin Penn-of-Chaffee is an illegal child, an orphan from the lockstep raised in secret among the Million. The only people who know of his existence are his adoptive father and his adoptive brother Bernie. Bernie has difficulties interacting with people, and Gavin tries to protect and support him as best he can—but when Gavin isn’t allowed to reveal his existence to other people, that support is limited.

When their home is attacked, their father murdered, and Bernie framed for it, Gavin’s only chance of finding justice is to disguise himself as Neal Makhav—a dead young man—and hope to show up to Bernie’s trial. But Neal Makhav is expected at the School of Auditors, the police and investigative force dedicated to maintaining the treaty between the Million and the Lockstep, and making sure that visitors—like Gavin—cannot infiltrate the Million. At least one member of the Million knows what lies beneath Gavin’s masquerade, and is blackmailing him into performing tasks for him, and the School assigns Gavin, like all of its students, a mysterious voiceless bot that follows his every move and will be part of the decision on whether he passes or fails. In the heart of an organisation whose very purpose is dedicated to unmasking people like him, Gavin feels the walls closing in.

In the School of Auditors, Gavin makes the acquaintance of fellow trainee Elana Devries, from one of the most powerful families of the Million, with whom he develops a relationship that’s part rivalry, part alliance, part friendship. Elana’s interest in him extends to investigating his secrets, and when a conspiracy within the auditors ensnares Gavin to keep him out of the way until Bernie’s trial, that makes her a target, too.

It turns out that the conspiracy within the auditors may threaten everything the Million believe is true about how well the treaty between them and the lockstep is maintained. And how much it is, in fact, honoured. Gavin and Elana have to make sacrifices and confront hard truths, and The Million ends on a note that definitely allows for sequels.

I’d like for there to be sequels. The Million is a tightly-plotted gem of a novella, part thriller and part coming-of-age. It’s told from both Gavin and Elana’s points of view, and they both have distinct, appealing voices. They’re compelling characters—Gavin as an outsider by upbringing, Elana very confident in her position but knowing that she’s overshadowed by her more flamboyant sister—and in many ways, fascinating ones. And although the other characters don’t have as much time on the page, they come across as distinct, interesting individuals—even the ones who are very definitely assholes.

And The Million’s worldbuilding adds another layer of interest. Two societies, living (or not) side by side, who only interact once every three decades. There’s a lot of potential for intrigue here.

I really enjoyed The Million. It’s fast, fun, occasionally thought-provoking, and deeply entertaining. More, please.

The Million is available from Tor.com Publishing.

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.

Welcome back to the Wild Cards reread! We’re picking up with One-Eyed Jacks (Book VIII), which begins the third Wild Cards trilogy. Originally released in 1991, the Tor reprint comes out on August 7^th with two new stories. As usual, separate authors wrote the individual chapters, which are tied together by a linking story. For the record, I’m reading this somewhat infamous trilogy for the first time (and I’m using the Tor reprint).

The action starts in 1988 and covers more than a year. The major plot thread is the “Jumper” storyline: A group has the power to jump into other people’s bodies to control, humiliate, and even murder them. These evil-doers also happen to be teenagers—it’s the 80s after all. Stranger Things, indeed.

Throughout the book, you get the real sense that the authors as a group were feeling and reacting strongly to the changing times. Statements such as “but these are the ‘80s” make a continuous refrain, Oddity considers the past and recognizes that “those were different times” (321). It’s the beginning of the Bush era, with a cultural shift taking place in the U.S. towards a more conservative, anti-drug, anti-wild card world. As one man explains, “the lines are getting drawn. If you’re for aces and jokers, you’re looking for trouble.” (418)

Chapter 1 (Interstitial Jerry #1)

In the short first chapter we’re introduced to Jerry, aka The Projectionist. He can change his form to look like other people. He got into some trouble previously back when he spent 20 years as a fifty-foot tall ape in Central Park Zoo. Now he’s back to his original self (unaged), living with his brother (Kenneth Strauss of the Latham, Strauss law firm) and Kenneth’s wife (Beth), and feeling lost and adrift. He’s obsessed with the prostitute Veronica.

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Chapter 2 (Major Cody Havero)

Cody arrives in NYC to interview for a job at the Jokertown Clinic. She’s a one-eyed Vietnam vet and wildfire medic. A highly qualified doctor, she’d been a medic (“combat cutter”) in Vietnam, at Da Nang and Firebase Shiloh. I’ve always wanted to know more about the Joker Brigade, and Cody really begins to fill out the picture. A joker sergeant recounts: “Nobody gave a rat fuck about us. Attitude was, we get killed, that’s one less freak fouling the gene pool” (30). Injured joker soldiers would be taken to a ‘special’ facility: “Problem was, this ‘facility’ seemed to be located an hour’s flight out across the South China Sea. No muss, no fuss, just a thousand-foot-high dive into a telegram home to Momma” (31). Cody manages to put a stop to it and becomes the hero doc of the Joker Brigade.

Blacklisted from the medical profession for her stance on joker medical treatment, her only option now is to work for Tachyon. She’s a nat (or at least she thinks she is). On the subway she sees a monstrous and dangerous joker/ace preying on women; it has the ability to make women transform, then rapes them and eats them. Lost in NYC, she’s pursued by the monster joker. She battles the creature, but Tachyon helps her kill it.

Without question, this is my favorite female POV chapter of the entire series: Cody’s capable, tough, no-nonsense—a hero and a champion. Her story is a wonderfully-written, sophisticated portrait of a real woman, with a viewpoint and background unlike anything we’ve seen in the Wild Cards world prior to Book VIII. The only thing that I disliked was the implication that some sort of amorous future might exist between Tachyon and Cody. That seems a bit inconsistent with her character, given that she’s too much of an experienced badass to put up with him.

One other thing I loved about this chapter is that we get our first look at the indigenous North American understanding of the wild card. Cody says, “They view the world as a living being, as much so as humanity itself. They see what the wild card does to people, they wonder if it can twist—even murder—the planet the same way” (37, see also p. 47). It’s a fascinating new conception of the wild-card virus’ impact on the world.

Chapter 3 (Interstitial-Jerry #2)

Jerry meets with his doctor Tachyon, then attends Hiram’s Wild Card Day dinner at Aces High with his sister-in-law Beth as his date. He sees Veronica there with Croyd. Later he changes his appearance and hires her for the night, but can’t go through with it.

Chapter 4 (Trudy Pirandello)

Trudy’s chapter is one of the new stories added to the older novel as part of its new reprint. In this chapter, the secret ace Trudy attends a Republican fundraising event in order to steal some treasure. She’s a thief, specializing in jewelry, artworks, and luxury items; her power allows her to teleport items from one location to another (e.g., her purse). The dinner takes place in the Golden Tower of real estate mogul Duncan Towers (i.e., Donald Trump), in Catherine the Great’s famous Amber Room, purchased from the Soviets and installed in Towers’ gaudy skyscraper. Also in attendance is Jessica, the girl who can miniaturize living things, and Croyd, whose current power enables him to animate inanimate objects, making them come alive. The three aces join together to steal the entire Amber Room and embarrass Towers.

To be honest, I had trouble with this chapter. It exhibits the danger of adding present-day works to older, previously published books. Usually the writing in the Wild Card books plainly represents a particular era, when a group of authors were all working together to tell a story which invariably reveals concerns and worldviews germane to that time period. The present chapter patently derives from the beginning of the Trump presidency, and it fantasizes about Trump’s humiliation and viciously insults him (and the Republicans: Dan Quayle’s wife is “horse-faced”). It criticizes Trump for greed, ostentatious displays of wealth, selfishness, lack of taste, and for his appearance. Rather than a political or social commentary, the chapter is one large ad hominem attack, calling Trump/Towers a “cartoon frog” (79) with an unnatural appearance, who “lov[es] the sound of his own voice” (82), a fondler of sculptures’ breasts, “an orange dragon with a blond toupee” (109). Even for those on the left (full disclosure: like me), this chapter will likely come across as mean-spirited and cruel. For me, it just didn’t fit with the rest of the book.

Chapter 5 (Veronica)

We’ve met Veronica several times before One-Eyed Jacks. Veronica was one of Fortunato’s prostitutes, unknowingly infected during the Typhoid Croyd epidemic. She’s unhappy and empty, forced to see a doctor (Hannah) about her rampant heroin addiction. Veronica realizes that not only has she never enjoyed sex with men, but that she is a lesbian. She falls desperately in love with Hannah, moves in with her, and quits her prostitution job. Sadly, Hannah is suddenly possessed—someone else controls her body—and murders a bystander before she is left alone in her body again. Veronica comes undone. Thanks to a run-in with some condescending dude, she has something of an angry feminist moment, and it’s then that her card turns. It’s not clear yet what her power is, but it involves electricity and causes men to collapse. She rushes to the prison to break Hannah out of jail—only to discover that Hannah had been possessed again and hanged herself in her cell. Overall, I rather like Veronica’s feminist awakening, though there are a few hints that this depiction is going to go the direction of the man-hating “Feminazi” stereotype, which I really hope isn’t the case. Back in the ‘80s (and ‘90s), the label “feminist” was consistently applied with scorn, though, so I’m interested to see how Veronica develops.

Chapter 6 (Interstitial Jerry #3)

Jerry keeps looking for Veronica. He hires Jay Akroyd to help him find her and to investigate Hannah’s death, recognizing that David Butler, one of the Jumpers, is a suspect.

Chapter 7 (Ben Choy)

After a long wait, this chapter finally brings us a Lazy Dragon story. A Chinese-American ace who works for the Shadow Fist Society, Ben Choy longs for a closer connection with Chinese culture and has named his ace after a character from Chinese literature. Like the 16^th century Lazy Dragon, our ace is skilled at disguises and is sent on a quest to steal a prized artifact. A new power in the Shadow Fist Society (Leslie Christian) commands him to recover a stolen packet of rapture and then transport it to Ellis Island. The most significant thing we learn about Ben while he undertakes the task is that he shares his body with his sister Vivian. Ben takes the form of a lethal dragon to recover the drugs, then a polar bear to swim them across to Ellis Island. There, he discovers a crew of jokers squatting in what’s today the Immigration Museum. Surprisingly, the Wild Card stories have not visited Ellis Island previously. In addition to jokers, David Butler and his teenage crew also live there—and they have the ability to project themselves into other bodies (‘jump’). One jumps the polar bear. Ben is pushed from his ursine body, and while disoriented, his sister Vivian takes over the driver’s seat back in the apartment. Their body becomes female.

Chapter 8 (Interstitial Jerry #4)

Jerry watches the verdict announcement in Hiram’s trial. There’s a plea bargain—guilty of involuntary manslaughter—and the judge gives him the astonishingly light sentence of five years’ probation. As a response to the verdict, riots break out in Jokertown that night, a fictional detail anticipating the real-life Rodney King riots that occurred the following year (1992). Jerry witnesses David inciting a mob and tries to enlist Tachyon’s help to catch him. David goes on the run.

Chapter 9 (Mark Meadows)

Mark (Captain Trips & Co.) gets served with court papers; his ex-wife Kimberly seeks custody of Sprout. She’s engaged St. John Latham as her attorney; Mark hires Dr. Pretorius. His new lawyer makes it clear that Mark is unlikely to keep custody, what with his headshop, weed-smoking, and wild cards ways. Mark straightens up his image. He goes clean as well, all except for those magic powders that release his alt-personalities. Meanwhile, Kimberly visits Sprout and Mark on a series of pseudo-dates, during which we get a psychological glimpse at her character. Previously, she’d been presented in a rather one-sided way, but here she gets some depth. The custody trial is vicious on both sides. In desperation, Kimberly allows Latham to set Mark up in order to publically reveal how dangerous he is. Latham sets an apartment on fire with a little girl trapped inside. Mark transforms and saves her. When Kimberly realizes that she almost caused the death of someone else’s daughter, she cracks and ends up in a private clinic. Because everyone has witnessed Mark taking drugs to become an ace, the judge remands him to the DEA and declares Sprout a ward of the State. Mark escapes and goes on the lam.

This is by far the most mature Mark Meadows story yet. Rather than fighting a villain or other crisis, Mark must face off against real life and adulthood. He wrestles with the changing times and his own identity.

Chapter 10 (Interstitial Jerry #5.1)

Jay Akroyd fills Jerry in on his investigation into David Butler. Jerry heads off to spy in Latham’s office, wearing Latham’s face, and has sex with Fantasy while he’s disguised as Latham. This is very much a Revenge of the Nerds moment (i.e., Lewis dressed as Darth Vader having sex with the cheerleader). Fantasy did not consent to have sex with Jerry; she consented to have sex with Latham. Therefore, Jerry is a rapist.

He goes home and feels sorry for himself because women don’t like him (can’t imagine why), before having a fight with Beth. She lays into him: “You’re not just lazy, you’re an emotional six-year-old. You don’t see anyone’s feelings or needs but your own. And you’ll never get along with women as long as they’re just something you do to make yourself feel more adequate” (269). Guess she doesn’t realize that he’s also a rapist! Jerry moves out.

Chapter 11 (Lady Black)

Like Trudy’s story, this chapter’s one of the new additions added to the original book. It’s about Joann Jefferson, an ace who works for SCARE and has the dangerous ability to absorb energy from the world around her (including people). She’s buds with the recovering Billy Ray, but gets called up to NYC to investigate a wild card mystery for the NPS. Animal skins have been showing up with nothing inside them. Joann discovers that the culprit is a homeless kid who sucks out the animal’s insides. She tries to get him help at the Jokertown Clinic, but the kid doesn’t want it. What he does want is to be accepted at Ellis Island. When she sees the kid try to suck on the joker ferryman Charon, Joann has to step in, but she accidently kills him.

Chapter 12 (Interstitial Jerry #5.2)

Originally this section was part of the previous interstitial, but it was separated out when Joann’s chapter was added. Jerry decides he has nothing left to live for and plans to go after David in a suicide run. He fails in his efforts to kill David.

Chapter 13 (The Oddity: Evan, Patto, and John)

This chapter finally gives us the Oddity’s story. Originally three people engaged in a polyamorous relationship, the wild card merged them together in 1973. Sixteen years later, they still occupy three shifting bodies painfully forced into one. Their three minds share the physical agony and rotate control of the body. They come across David and company terrorizing a joker. David jumps into the Oddity and switches places with Patti, and the other jumpers whisk David’s body back to Ellis Island (“the Rox”). Patti is able to wake up and overhears that David (“the Prime”) can share the jumping ability with others by having sex with them. Both David and Bloat tempt Patti and Evan with new bodies and freedom from the Oddity. When the trio make it to Ellis Island to rescue Patti, David jumps back to his own body and is killed by Evan. Patti, Evan, and John are happy to be reunited despite the pain and lost chance at freedom. The experience of separation reinforces their love for each other.

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Chapter 14 (Interstitial Jerry #6)

Jerry attends David’s funeral in disguise. He sees Latham sobbing in the bathroom. He continues his efforts to be a detective.

Chapter 15 (Tachyon)

Tachyon’s story takes place a year after Cody’s arrival at the Clinic. Blaise and Cody’s son have become friends, and Tachyon is still sweating Cody. I’ve lost track of how many Tachyon-love stories there’ve been so far. Cody hasn’t given in, but she’s sadly not averse to the idea. DON’T DO IT, CODY! Also turns out that Blaise is obsessed with her, and he really hates his grandfather. Blaise gifts Cody with stolen jewels and declares his love for her. After she knocks him down a notch, Blaise attempts mind-control-forced sex with her, but Tachyon saves the day. His grandson goes on the run and joins those other rebellious hoodlums, the jumpers. In an initiation ceremony, the unnamed Prime has sex with Blaise in order to give him jumping powers; we can assume that the guy is David and that he’s probably in Latham’s body.

Chapter 16 (Interstitial Jerry #7)

Jerry’s brother Kenneth begins to worry about Latham’s hold over him. Jerry has to register with the government, which is trying to conscript and control wild cards. We learn that the government has a joker classification system. Useful ones are called “type-two jokers”. At lunch with his brother, Kenneth is possessed by the jumpers and killed.

Chapter 17 (Fadeout)

Philip Cunningham’s story gives us a more detailed look at some familiar characters from the Shadow Fist Society, as well as adding some cool details about wild card powers (like Warlock’s “death wish”). A week before he and Warlock attempt their coup, Cunningham finds Kien Phuc murdered in his office. Finally! Able to determine that a redhead (Blaise) killed Kien, Cunningham engages in a struggle for control of the organization (goodbye, Sui Ma). Latham leads him and the Werewolves to Blaise’s new lair in a Bowery theatre to collect Kien’s head so that Deadhead can eat it. He underestimates the teenage posse, though. Leslie Christian turns out to be in league with them…except these are jumpers, so Christian isn’t Christian at all, but actually Kien! Damn it! Didn’t see that one coming. Warlock turns on Cunningham and the chapter ends with Fadeout’s death.

Chapter 18 (Interstitial Jerry #8)

Jerry plans a hit on Latham and is able to catch him in his apartment. Latham-David is there with another jumper, who jumps into Jerry. His shape-changing body ousts her, though, and he’s able to get away. Meanwhile, Beth and Jerry have become friends again during the grieving process, in the wake of Kenneth’s death. She moves into Jerry’s apartment. He feels like he’s finally grown up a little, and has learned something about love.

So, that’s One-Eyed Jacks. As a first-time reader, I thought this was a solid start to a new trilogy. The jumpers are a dastardly group, but so far they’re rather on the gentle side (compared to villains like the Astronomer, Puppetman, and Ti-Malice). It seems pretty clear, though, that now that Blaise has joined them, they’re moving to the Dark Side with a quickness. They’re consistent with wild card Big Bads up to this point in that their powers involve controlling other people against their will. Reading about the jumpers reinforces to me how interested the original authors were in issues of hidden identities, control-of-self, and personhood. Just think of how frequently that comes into play here: Jerry can impersonate anyone, Cody’s monster changes the appearance of his victims, Lazy Dragon has a sister living inside him, Mark Meadows transforms into different personalities, the Oddity is three people combined in one, Blaise can control the minds of others, and now the jumpers permanently inhabit other bodies (David-Latham, Kien-Christian).

Stay tuned to see where the trilogy takes us next with Jokertown Shuffle.

Katie Rask is an assistant professor of archaeology and classics at Duquesne University. She’s excavated in Greece and Italy for over 15 years.

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

This week, we’re reading Margaret Irwin’s “The Book,” first published in 1930 in The London Mercury and collected in The Weird (Tor Books, 2012). Spoilers ahead.

“From among this neat new clothbound crowd there towered here and there a musty sepulchre of learning, brown with the colour of dust rather than leather, with no trace of gilded letters, however faded, on its crumbling back to tell what lay inside.”

Summary

One foggy November night, bored by his detective story, Mr. Corbett searches for more palatable bedtime reading. The dining room bookcase holds a motley collection: Mrs. Corbett’s railway stall novels, 19th-century literature from Mr. Corbett’s Oxford days, children’s fairy tales. Here and there looms a real tome “inhospitably fastened with rusted clasps.” Corbett fancies these “moribund survivors” of a clerical uncle’s library exhale poisonous breath oppressive as the fog. Is it further fancy to extract a Dickens, return for Walter Pater, and find Pater leaning into a space much too larger than the one he left?

Nonsense. Reading will calm his needlessly ruffled nerves, except… Tonight, under Dickens’ sentimental righteousness, he senses a “revolting pleasure in cruelty and suffering.” In Pater he sees “something evil in the austere worship of beauty for its own sake.”

Breakfast finds him better, until he notices there’s no gap in the bookcase. Younger daughter Jean says there’s never a gap on the second shelf—no matter how many books one takes off, it always fills back up!

After deciding his insights into Dickens and Pater prove he has keen critical powers, Corbett begins to enjoy dissecting revered authors down to their basest motivations. What a pity he’s only a solicitor—with his acute mind, he should have achieved greatness! Even his family’s unworthy: Mrs. Corbett a bore, Dicky an impudent blockhead, the two girls insipid. He secludes himself in books, seeking “some secret key to existence.”

One of his uncle’s theological tomes intrigues him with marginalia of diagrams and formulae. The crabbed handwriting is, alas, in Latin, which Corbett’s forgotten. But this is the key; he borrows Dickie’s Latin dictionary and attacks the manuscript with “anxious industry.”

The anonymous, untitled manuscript ends abruptly in blank pages. Corbett stumbles on a demonic rite. He ponders its details and copies the marginal symbols near it. Sickly cold overwhelms him. He seeks Mrs. Corbett, finds her with the whole family, including Mike the dog, who reacts to Corbett as to a mortal foe, bristling and snarling. Wife and children are alarmed by a red mark like a fingerprint on Corbett’s forehead, but Corbett can’t see it in the mirror.

He wakes next day rejuvenated, confident his abilities will elevate him above his associates! He keeps translating the book, apparently the record of a secret society involved in obscure and vile practices. But in the smell of corruption wafting from the yellowed pages, he recognizes the scent of secret knowledge.

One night Corbett notices fresh writing in modern ink but the same crabbed 17th-century handwriting: “Continue, thou, the never-ending studies.” Corbett tries to pray. The words emerge jumbled—backwards! The absurdity makes him laugh. Mrs. Corbett comes in, trembling. Didn’t he hear it, that inhuman devilish laugh? Corbett shoos her off.

The book has fresh-inked instructions every day after, generally about wild investments. To the envious amazement of Corbett’s City colleagues, the investments pay off. But it also commands Corbett to commit certain puerile blasphemies. If he doesn’t, his speculations falter, and he fears even worse consequences. Yet it remains his greatest pleasure to turn the book’s pages to whatever its last message may be.

One evening it’s Canem occide. Kill the dog. Fine, for Corbett resents Mike’s new aversion to him. He empties a packet of rat poison into Mike’s water dish and goes away whistling.

That night Jean’s terrified screams wake the house. Corbett finds her crawling upstairs and carries her to her room. Older daughter Nora says Jean must have had her recurring nightmare of a hand running over the dining room books. Corbett takes Jean on his knee and goes through the motions of soothing her. She shrinks away at first, then leans into his chest. An uncomfortable feeling grips Corbett, that he needs Jean’s protection as much as she needs his.

She dreamt of the hand leaving the dining room and gliding up the stair to her room, where it turned the knob. Jean woke then, to find the door open, Mike gone from the foot of her bed. She ran and found him in the downstairs hall about to drink. No, he mustn’t! Jean ran down to Mike, was grabbed by a HAND, knocked over the water dish in her struggle to escape.

Back in his room, he paces, muttering that he isn’t a bad man to have tried to kill a brute who turned against him. As for meddling Jeannie, it’d be better if she wasn’t around anymore.

Boarding school’s all he means, of course.

Or not. The book opens to a fresh injunction: Infantem occide. He clutches the book. He’s no sniveller. He’s superior to the common emotions. Jean is a spy, a danger. It would have been easier before he held her again, his favorite child, called her Jeannie, but it’s written in the book.

Corbett goes to the door. He can’t turn the handle. H bows over it, kneels. Suddenly he flings his arms out like a man falling from a great height, stumbles up and throws the book on the fire. At once he begins to choke, strangled. He falls and lies still.

The City men suppose Corbett committed suicide because he knew his speculations were about to crash, as they do simultaneous with his death. But the medical report shows that Corbett died from strangulation, with the marks of its fingers pressed into his throat.

What’s Cyclopean: Among the Corbetts’ books are musty sepulchres of learning, moribund and inhospitable amid the swaggering frivolity of children’s books and chastely bound works of nineteenth century literature.

The Degenerate Dutch: The initial hints of The Book’s influence on Mr. Corbett start with self-congratulatory judgment of authors’ mental states or simply their femininity: Treasure Island represents “an invalid’s sickly attraction to brutality, and other authors have “hidden infirmities.” Austen and Bronte are unpleasant spinsters: a “sub-acidic busybody” and a “raving, craving maenad” with frustrated passions.

Mythos Making: The Book has the Necronomicon beat all to hell (perhaps literally) for unpleasant side effects of reading. Yes, even Negarestani’s version. It may even give The King in Yellow a run for its money.

Libronomicon: The Book manages to insinuate its corruption into, among others, Dickens The Old Curiosity Shop, Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean, and Gulliver’s Travels.

Madness Takes Its Toll: Once The Book has its claws in Mr. Corbett, it seems to him that “sane reasoning power” should compel him to carry out any of its commands.

Ruthanna’s Commentary

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Books are dangerous. They can inspire, instruct, and shape the way we interpret the world. Their pages may transmit ancient secrets or ideas for massive change. Irwin, writing at just about the same time Lovecraft was scribbling notes about Al-Hazred’s masterwork, comes up with what should be the most forbidden of tomes: a book that not only worms its way into the minds of readers, but corrupts other books! I’d count that as a clever idea even if it came out last month instead of 88 years ago.

So even before The Book comes on screen, we get corruption as the suck fairy, revealing (or creating) horror within the most innocent books. Whether revelation or creation is left ambiguous—after all Mr. Corbett’s newfound judgment reflects claims he’s already heard from critics. (Untrustworthy creatures themselves, of course.) Perhaps there really are terrible things to be found beneath the surface of any book—all haunted, all dripping with Robert Louis Stephenson’s “morbid secretions.” And Corbett, alas, is picking up absolutely terrible coping strategies for being a fan of problematic things—worse than denial of the problems whole cloth, his smugness over being so brilliant as to notice them in the first place.

And that’s how The Book makes the leap from its fellow volumes to the human mind. It builds on every person’s propensity for arrogance, pride, and judgment. Mr. Corbett is no scholar of mysteries. He’s a solicitor, a financial adviser. What happens to him, the story makes clear, could happen to anyone. And overconfident financial speculation is, of course, a symptom of dangerous supernatural influence recognizable even today. Perhaps someone fished a few pages out of the fire and passed them around Wall Street?

Again and again, Irwin rejects the idea that there’s something especially vulnerable about Corbett, or that the reader might imagine themselves especially invulnerable. Everything that Corbett does is thoroughly human. The Book describes vile rituals that most authors would exoticize—Lovecraft would probably have ascribed them to the general cult of brown people, worldwide, who worship Those Gods Over There. Irwin tells us, instead, that “his deep interest in it should have convinced him that from his humanity at least it was not altogether alien.” No one is immune. No stage of civilization, no particular race, no particular culture. Commands from the book “might be invented by a decadent imbecile, or, it must be admitted, by the idle fancies of any ordinary man who permits his imagination to wander unbridled.”

And yet, Mr. Corbett does ultimately resist, and sacrifices himself for a sentiment that his reading hasn’t entirely managed to excise. And this, too, is not particularly special, is not limited to some subset of humanity. Everyone is vulnerable, but no one can claim they didn’t have a choice in the matter, either.

“The Book” also makes Corbett not-special in another way: though he’s the point of view throughout, the story is constantly aware of other people’s perspectives on what’s happening to him—sometimes by telling us directly, sometimes by showing reactions. It’s a study in the distinction between narrative and narrator, and in depicting a world that completely fails to support the most vile attitudes expressed by characters.

There are modern stories—plenty of them—that don’t manage this distinction, or that lack Irwin’s grasp of how people are persuaded into terrible behaviors one shift of attitude and one small corruption and one “I am not a bad man” at a time. Every step of Corbett’s descent rings true, and therefore the horror rings true. By the time he got to the occides (brr!), I was on the edge of my seat. And cheered when he threw the thing into the fire—and hoped like hell he had a good roaring blaze going.

Anne’s Commentary

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Gather round, guys, in a tight hunched-shoulders circle that excludes the unworthy prying hordes, for I have an ancient and powerful secret to reveal. Ready? Here it is:

We readers of weird fiction are freaking masochists.

That’s right. Why else would the BOOK, the TOME, the MANUSCRIPT, the GRAVEN TABLET, be practically mandatory features of the weird story—hence Ruthanna’s weekly headcount in our Libronomicon section? And why, practically invariably, would the BOOK, TOME, MS, TABLET be dangerous? The doorway into brain-warping dimensions, an open invitation to unpleasant guests, a sure trigger of madness?

Guys, we can face this together. We love to read. We love books. Even scary books. Even monstrous books. No! Especially monstrous books!

Okay, breathe. We’re okay. We don’t mean real monstrous books. Just fictional ones. Like Margaret Irwin’s, which though it lacks an exotic or tongue-twisting name like Necronomicon or Unaussprechlichen Kulten, has just as devastating an effect on the reader as those infamous grimoires. What powers her tale, bringing the terror of the TOME closer to home, is the reader-protagonist she chooses. Mr. Corbett, solicitor, husband, father, dog owner, is as Everyman a middle-class guy of the circa-1930 London suburbs as one could wish. He’s definitely no Lovecraftian protagonist, a solitary aesthete haunting out-of-the-way bookshops or an academic for whom books might be ranked a professional hazard. Too bad for Corbett he had a Lovecraftian protagonist of an uncle, whose estate insinuated a poisonous book in his otherwise harmless home library. Poisonous, because possessed by the will of its 17th-century author, rather like Ginny Weasley’s notebook is possessed by a bit of Tom Riddle’s splintered soul. Also like Ginny’s notebook, Corbett’s writes to him in real time.

This is not good. As Mr. Weasley warns: “Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain.”

Or if you can’t see the spectral hand it uses to rearrange your bookcase and poison anything shelved near it. The manuscript’s poison is exquisitely insidious, too. It discolors the contents of infected books with its own profound cynicism—humanity is corrupt and brutish to the core, don’t you see it now, under the civilized veneer of Dickens’ sentimentality or Austen’s sprightliness? Even the people in the children’s picture books warp evil under its taint. They make Jean cry, for she’s a sensitive. She sees the spectral hand at work in her dreams.

Corbett’s initially put off by the way the book warps his sensibility. But the joys of cynicism grow on him, for one cannot look down on someone else without ascending first to a superior height. He’s an ordinary guy who’s been pretty much content being ordinary, who’s pretty much benignly envious of successful peers. The book seizes on that weak spot of “pretty much.” It convinces Corbett he’s extraordinary, underappreciated, but that will change. The Master of the book will lead him to his rightful eminence, if Corbett will shed the foolish inhibitions of those other human sheep, including his wife and children. Ought one standing on the threshold of ancient and powerful secrets spare even his favorite child?

What could the book and its ghost-author, offer Corbett that would be worth sacrificing his Jeannie? Oh, secrets, ideas, knowledge, insights, which are after all what books contain, because they contain the words, words, words that Hamlet bemoans, our bedeviling thoughts given aural and visual form. Units of exchange. Communication. Gifts. Or viruses.

Thought, knowledge, idea. Words, put down in wax or stone or ink on paper. On indestructible pages in metal files, to be shelved in the eternal libraries of the Yith. Books are precious or perilous because they pass on ideas. Knowledge. Thought. Which then recombine with the reader’s own ideas, knowledge, thought, to become more precious or perilous.

In Mr. Corbett’s case, the recombination’s so perilous his only out is to burn the book in a last paroxysm of former identity, core self.

A tragic win for the Light, but still, I hate it when the big bad book eats fire at story’s end. Which probably means I shouldn’t lead the Perilous Books SWAT Team, guys. While we’ve got our heads in this circle, let’s pick someone else.

If, in this crowd, we can find anyone. [RE: Okay, I admit it was pretty uncharacteristic for me to cheer a book burning. Maybe The Book is corrupting me too. The horror! And the intrigue of the paradox.]

Joanna Russ’s praise of this story reminded us how much we like her stuff too, so next week we return to The Weird for “The Dirty Little Girl.”

Ruthanna Emrys is the author of the Innsmouth Legacy series, including Winter Tide and Deep Roots. Her neo-Lovecraftian stories “The Litany of Earth” and “Those Who Watch” are available on Tor.com, along with the distinctly non-Lovecraftian “Seven Commentaries on an Imperfect Land” and “The Deepest Rift.” Ruthanna can frequently be found online on Twitter and Dreamwidth, and offline in a mysterious manor house with her large, chaotic household—mostly mammalian—outside Washington DC.

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

Jane Kamali is an agent for the Justified. Her mission: to recruit children with miraculous gifts in the hope that they might prevent the Pulse from once again sending countless worlds back to the dark ages. Hot on her trail is the Pax—a collection of fascist zealots who believe they are the rightful rulers of the galaxy and who remain untouched by the Pulse.

Now Jane, a handful of comrades from her past, and a telekinetic girl called Esa must fight their way through a galaxy full of dangerous conflicts, remnants of ancient technology, and other hidden dangers…

We’re excited to share an audio excerpt from Drew Williams’ The Stars Now Unclaimed, as read by Brittany Pressley.

The Stars Now Unclaimed is available August 21st from Tor Books. You can find the audio edition with Macmillan Audio, or get the print and ebook editions at the links below!

Author Burgandi Rakoska snared our hearts today when we discovered this Tumblr post about post-school Harry Potter figuring out adult life after being a Chosen One. The unlikely friendship that he forms with a familiar older woman will undoubtedly bring a tear (or two) to the eye.

Prepare to have feelings:

Obviously fantasy enthusiasts and authors have long circled back on the raw deal bestowed upon Susan Pevensie at the end of the Narnia series, but there’s something particularly moving about Susan and a young Harry getting to bond over how they’re treated in their respective realms. The level of scrutiny that both of them faced as children is deeply painful to witness as readers. The thought that they could offer each other some measure of comfort in that connection is a little like balm on a wound.

Check out the rest of Rakoska’s Tumblr and take a peek at her fiction, too!

Alice: Welcome back to the Oathbringer reread—for two chapters this week. First we’ll go back in time with Dalinar in the early years of his marriage, then we’ll rejoin Bridge Four on the Shattered Plains for a series of poignant scenes. (Also known as “In Which Alice Cries a Lot”)

Lyn: (And “In Which Lyn Joins Her And They Are Both Sobbing Messes Together) Also, fair warning, this is a long one, brightlords and ladies. There’s a lot to unpack in these two chapters—a lot of pain, a lot of healing, and a lot of familial love.

Reminder: we’ll potentially be discussing spoilers for the ENTIRE NOVEL in each reread. There’s a little bit of overarching Cosmere discussion in The Singing Storm section, specifically regarding the epigraph. If you haven’t read ALL of Oathbringer, best to wait to join us until you’re done.

Chapter Recap

WHO: Dalinar; Rock
WHERE: Kholinar; Shattered Plains
WHEN: 1149, Weeping (24 years ago); 1174.1.6.1 (same day as Chapter 35, a few hours later)

In Chapter 36, Evi is pregnant with Adolin and she and Dalinar have a discussion during the Weeping about religion, war, and Dalinar’s character. Gavilar appears at the end and it is revealed that Dalinar didn’t actually kill the boy in the Rift, and now the area is in rebellion.

Chapter 37 revolves around Rock, who is busy making stew for Bridge Four as they practice being Radiant. Kaladin helps Hobber to learn to breathe in Stormlight, and his paralyzed legs are healed. Renarin joins them, and Kaladin agrees to join Elhokar on his mission to Alethkar in 20 days. In the distance, a group of honorspren watch and assess as Bridge Four practices. Then, finally, Rock spies the approach of a caravan—his long-estranged family, come to join him at last.

The Singing Storm

Titles: Hero; The Last Time We March

A: These have to be two of my favorite titles in the book. The first comes from this line:

In that moment, he didn’t care. So long as he could be a hero to this woman.

As I think I’ve mentioned before, we had the opportunity during the beta to suggest quotes from the chapter that we thought would make good titles. In this case, the first suggestion on the list was “Hero,” which I promptly upvoted. I did make a different suggestion (As White As a Sun at Night), but with the comment “Partly I think this is just funny, and partly I think it fits the unexpected nature of the sequence of Dalinar’s feelings. But I still like ‘Hero’ better. Please make it ‘Hero,’ because that line made me cry.” You know, it still does, and I’m so glad Emily went with that!

The second title is in this segment near the end of chapter 37:

“No,” he said. “It will be a privilege to carry him one last time, for my family.” … “We take to the skies, Stormblessed. We will walk no more in coming days. This is the end.” … “Ha! Do not look so sad. I left great stew back near city. Hobber will probably not ruin it before we return. Come! Pick up our bridge. The last time, we march not toward death, but toward full stomachs and good songs!”

And that one makes me cry too. What a beautiful scene.

Heralds

For Chapter 36 we have Nale: Judge, Just/Confident, Skybreakers; and Vedel: Healer, Loving/Healing, Edgedancers.

A: For me, Nale reflects multiple facets of Dalinar’s decision nine years before, to leave Tanalan’s young son alive. He made a judgement call then; now Evi praises him for it, while Gavilar is irritated about it—and Dalinar judges that whatever the consequences, it’s worth it to be a hero to his wife. Vedel could represent several things—a healing in their relationship, or Evi’s pregnancy, among others.

Chapter 37 shows Vedel: Healer, Loving/Healing, Edgedancers; and Taln: Soldier, Dependable/Resourceful, Stonewards.

A: These both seem fairly obvious. There is a lot of healing going on here, both physically and emotionally. Not for everyone, but enough to make it a strong theme. There’s not a lot of actual soldiering (just Kaladin helping the wagon folk drive off the Voidbringers), but there’s always an undercurrent of Bridge Four as soldiers, plus the conversation with Renarin and Rock’s own thoughts about himself. Add to that, these guys are dependable and resourceful enough to justify Taln’s presence right there.

Icon

Reverse Kholin Shield (for Dalinar’s flashback); Bridge Four (Rock’s POV)

Epigraph

You mustn’t worry yourself about Rayse. It is a pity about Aona and Skai, but they were foolish—violating our pact from the very beginning.

L: Aona and Skai are the Shards from Sel, the world of Elantris, right? And the violation of the pact was the fact that… they settled on the same world? And if that’s a violation, aren’t the two Shards—Ruin and Preservation—on Scadrial violating the pact too?

A: Sure looks like it to me!

L: What exactly do we know about this pact, anyway? Is it all WoBs, or is there in-text information other than this little snippet?

A: Well, I’m a little behind on my WoBs these days, but I think this might be the first textual evidence of an actual “pact” among the Vessels. The epigraph for Chapter 39 touches on it, at least: Edgli seems to interpret “we would not interfere with each other” to mean that no two Shards should go to the same world. Arguably, Dominion/Devotion, Ruin/Preservation, and Honor/Cultivation would have claimed (originally) that they weren’t interfering with each other, they were cooperating. On Scadrial, we know they eventually failed to cooperate and did indeed interfere; Sel and Roshar present no evidence of a failure to work together that I can recall.

L: And Rayse is the current vessel containing Odium. So why shouldn’t the person the author is talking to worry themselves over him? He seems like a pretty huge threat to… just about everything.

A: I know, right? He’s interfering with everyone he can, and I’d think the writer of this letter ought to be worrying about him herself, rather than telling other people not to worry. It’s possible, I suppose, that she just thinks Hoid shouldn’t worry about Odium and should let the other Vessels take care of the situation, but I’m not convinced of that yet. She sounds more peevish than confident.

Stories & Songs

“If you wish to meet the One in person, you must travel to the Valley,” she said. “There you can speak with the One, or to his avatar, and be granted—”

“The Old Magic,” Dalinar hissed, opening his eyes. “The NIghtwatcher.”

L: Very cool that Evi’s religion deals with Cultivation, if we’re assuming the avatar she speaks of to be the Nightwatcher and the One to be Cultivation herself. She’s misgendered Cultivation, but who’s to say that a being like Cultivation is constrained to one gender, anyway?

A: Maybe Cultivation is one of the originally-a-dragon Vessels! Or something else, for that matter.

L: It’s likely that the gender either was never known by her people, or that it’s been changed over time.

A: Very true. It’s worth noting how much more the western kingdoms accept Cultivation as part of their religion, where the eastern ones call it “pagan” and “heresy” to even acknowledge her existence. Methinks they have a bit to learn…

He closed his eyes, kneading and humming his mother’s song to a beat he could almost, barely, just faintly hear.

L: !!! (Insert Metal Gear Solid alert noise here)

A: I loved this. We’ve been told that the Horneaters have Parsh blood; I’d say it runs strong in Rock, if he can hear the Rhythms.

There were legends of [dark gods like the Unmade] in the Peaks; Lunamor’s great-great-great-grandfather had met with one while traveling the third divide.

L: Now that’s a story I’d like to hear someday.

A: No kidding!! I wonder if we’ll ever get it. And maybe they’re back?

The Peaks, our home … something is wrong. Very wrong.”

A: On a guess, this has to do with Odium’s forces interfering with the Shardpool there? Or an Unmade?

L: Something that I hope we discover soon! I doubt Sanderson would have mentioned it if it were never going to come back, but when we find out? Who knows…

Relationships & Romances

She was a sweet, loving woman who deserved better than the treatment he gave her.

L: Well, on the plus side, at least Dalinar recognizes this. And he does seem to be making an effort to forge connections with her here. He opens up to her more here than he has to anyone else we’ve seen him talk to in these flashbacks, talking about whether he can change, about religion… Their relationship isn’t completely frigid and unloving.

A: I’m always astonished at how much Evi seems to love him. She calls him “beloved” in this chapter, and as much as she’d like him to take a different angle on… well, on life in general, it appears that despite the original reason for the marriage, she really does love him. It’s like she decided if she was going to marry him, she’d throw everything she had into making it work. And Dalinar doesn’t exactly reciprocate, but…

L: He does appear to be trying. I can only imagine how hard arranged marriages like this would be, especially when you’re already in love with someone else. Which leads us to Navani:

[Navani]’d talked and talked about her research into spren, and Gavilar had simply grunted, while making notations in glyphs on a set of his maps. She’d spoken with such passion and excitement, and Gavilar had ignored her.

L: This makes me so sad. I think most of us have had this experience before, or at least, I know I have—talking animatedly about something that we love only to realize we’re boring the person we’re conversing with. And for that person to be your husband? Ouch. And poor Dalinar, sitting there watching this and longing to be with her.

A: Yeah, this was very frustrating to read. Gavilar doesn’t seem to have been interested in his wife’s pursuits AT ALL, and while Dalinar probably wasn’t either, he was at least interested in her. That’s the point where Gavilar completely fails, and it burns me up. You don’t have to share a consuming interest in your partner’s hobbies, but you can at least have the courtesy to be interested in the person.

L: Yeah, it doesn’t seem as if he’s really investing any time or energy into the marriage… past what’s required of him for procreation, anyway. At least Dalinar is kinda sorta trying to form a bond.

“You spared the child.” … “Oh, Dalinar.”

He felt a swelling of pride.

[…]

In that moment, he didn’t care. So long as he could be a hero to this woman.

L: ::sniffle:: He wants to be better, in order to make her happy. There is love there, growing ever so slowly in the poisoned soil of his soul.

A: This was the first chapter where I was really excited about the potential for these two. It had its moments, like this one and the first one you quoted here, that are just hopeful. But at the same time there’s that bit in the middle, where he keeps thinking of Navani and how Gavilar doesn’t appreciate her. Which is true, but he’s a little too personally invested still. It’s never good for a marriage when one partner can’t quite let go of another person.

L: Unless it’s set up as a polyamorous relationship, like in Wheel of Time. And even those have their issues…

A: There’s a lovely bit of foreshadowing here, too. Dalinar is so happy to “be a hero to this woman,” even though he’ll let her down many times and eventually be directly, if unintentionally, responsible for her death. A long way in the future, we’re going to see his nephew step up to this same task. Elhokar will try to save his wife and son, and when it’s clear that Aesudan is beyond his reach, he’ll give his life to “be a hero to the one [he] can save.” And I just got something in my eye…

L: Oh stars and stones… ::sniff::

A: On the more cheerful side, I have to point out that this is where we learn that Adolin is on his way. Baby bump FTW!

Bruised & Broken

“Can’t you just enjoy it, Dalinar?”

“Enjoy what?”

“Your life.”

[…]

“It’s like you only live when you can fight,” she continued. “When you can kill. Like a blackness from the old stories. You only live by taking lives from others.”

L: What a terrifying thought, especially for someone as pacifistic as Evi. Seeing Dalinar this way really drives home to me how very broken he is, but he doesn’t realize it. He’s so focused on death and the Thrill that everything else has lost its flavor. I wonder if, when he was younger, he was the same way? I’d imagine that growing up Alethi did him no favors in this regard.

“Can a man actually change, Evi? Like those spren change?”

“We are all different aspects of the One.”

“Then can you change from one aspect to another?”

L: I mean, this is Dalinar’s whole character arc right here. Changing from a man of violence to a man of justice. In his case, it just takes a little (okay, a lot of) outside influence in order to begin the change.

He remembered that day. He remembered darkening that doorway, the Thrill pulsing inside him. He remembered a weeping child holding a Shardblade.

The father, lying broken and dead behind. That soft voice, pleading.

The Thrill had vanished in a moment.

“He was a child, Gavilar,” Dalinar said, his voice hoarse.

L: ARGH, this moment. This moment made me SO HAPPY. I was so glad that Dalinar had stayed his hand and spared this child. It made his warmongering almost… acceptable, that he still had that spark of humanity and compassion remaining within him.

A: It was a beautiful thing, and I too was delighted that he had not killed that boy. I’ll admit that I thought it might turn out to be a good thing…

L: Until we returned for “Rift Part Two: Inferno Boogaloo,” anyway.

In those chasms, Lunamor had found himself again after a long time being lost. Renewed life, renewed purpose.

L: And so it begins.

A: (Every time that line comes up, I can’t help following it with “There is a hole in your mind.” It’s shocking how many times “a hole in your mind” fits the relevant character in The Stormlight Archive, though.)

“Teft didn’t come back to the barracks last night, sir,” Leyten called, looking uncomfortable.

L: Oh, Teft. :(

Some days, it seemed you couldn’t break Kaladin Stormblessed with all the stones on Roshar. Then one of his men would get wounded, and you’d see him crack.

[…]

“Kaladin,” Lunamor said softly. “This thing we have begun, it is still war. Men will die.”

L: Oh, Kaladin. Poor, poor Kaladin. You can’t save them all, dear heart.

A: But he’ll try. He’ll all but destroy himself, trying to save them all…

L: It kills me to see him do this to himself, but on the other hand… I wouldn’t want him any other way. His dedication to saving others is what makes me love him so much.

…Renarin stepped towards him, as if sitting at the side and watching was his place too.

“Hey! Renarin! … I could use some help with this bread,” Lunamor said.

L: I love how Rock consistently strengthens the bonds of fellowship within Bridge Four. He’s like the glue that holds them together. … Which, knowing stories as I do, makes me very worried for him.

A: Speaking of Rock…

How could he explain this? The bridge runs, the cracks in his soul. How could he explain that the man she’d always said was so strong had wished to die? Had been a coward, had given up, near the end?

A: I’m really torn about where Sanderson is likely to go with this. On the one hand, we’ve got the probability of what you just said about the likely fate of the one who holds them together. On the other hand, we’ve got Rock specifically thinking about cracks in his soul—the kind of cracks that we know open a person to the spren bond. He’s probably going to do both—and then I’ll have to cry my poor eyes out! Again.

He watched, and was glad to hear Unkalaki again, a proper language. Glad that the other men did not speak it. For if they did, they might have picked out the lies that he had told them.

L: This kills me. Earlier I said that he was the glue holding the group together, but this… the fact that he’s lying to them, makes him stand outside the group, a little. He can’t trust them enough to open himself up, to admit his mistakes or his sins or however he sees it. I imagine he’s probably afraid of what they would say or do, if they knew the truth. He can take the pain of the others away, but harbors his own deep inside, unwilling or unable to allow them in to help ease his own burden. All of the bridgemen carry their own bridges within them—Kaladin his guilt over not being able to save everyone, Teft his addiction and his lack of self-worth, etc… Which is why this chapter was so poignant. The bridge is symbolic of the baggage they all carry.

Together they carried the bridge on one final run—reverently, as if it were the bier of a king, being taken to his tomb for his final rest.

A: ::sobbing::

Squires & Sidekicks

A: Heh. Everything in this chapter could fall in here… but I’ll try not to quote the entire chapter. Really.

L: Yeah, this is going to be a long section this week, but that’s fine. All of these characters are important in their own ways, and the companionship of Bridge Four is a central theme for Part 2.

The men of Bridge Four had been augmented by some members of other bridge crews, and even a couple of soldiers that Dalinar had suggested for training. The group of five scout women was surprising, but who was Lunamor to judge?

L: Love that other scouts have joined Lyn! I’d love to learn more about them.

A: I think we see one of them in action later, maybe. We’ll have to watch for them. But I keep wondering whether their presence is surprising to Rock personally, or surprising in the context of the Alethi culture.

Why was Kaladin kneeling before Hobber’s stool, holding out… a gemstone?

[…]

“Being a Radiant isn’t so much about strength or skill, but about your heart. And yours is the best of all of us.”

L: Is Rock cutting onions? I really hope that we see more of Hobber in later books.

A: I can’t not quote this additional bit, because I get caught between cheering and crying every single time I read it:

Several windspren turned toward Hobber, and for a heartbeat Lunamor thought that everything else faded. Hobber became one man alone in a darkened place, fist glowing. He stared, unblinking, at that sign of power. That sign of redemption.
The light in Hobber’s fist went out.

A: We’ve talked a lot about the theme of redemption in the last few weeks, mostly in the context of Dalinar and Moash. Turns out, most of the bridgemen (and a few other folks) feel a need for redemption. We see it in this chapter: Rock, Kaladin, Teft, Hobber, Elhokar, Renarin, Rlain, Leyten, Skar… They’ve all done, or been, or experienced things that left them feeling unworthy and inadequate. To be here, on this plateau, drawing in Stormlight, healing, being accepted, and especially seeing the hope of being chosen by a spren to become a Knight Radiant—I think that’s the proof of redemption they long for.

L: Though for some of them—mainly Kal and Teft, I think—that redemption is going to be more hard-fought for than for others.

A: True. I’m still trying to figure out if it applies to Lopen, and if so, how. But a number of them will not have the difficulty of those two, and I think I might add Rock to the list. He’s got a lot of other issues to deal with—but we’ll talk more about that below.

“Bridge Four is not Windrunners. … It is us,” Lunamor said. “It is me, it is them, it is you.” He nodded toward Dabbid. “That one, he will never hold spear again. He will not fly, but he is Bridge Four. I am forbidden to fight, but I am Bridge Four. And you, you might have fancy title and different powers.” He leaned forward. “But I know Bridge Four. And you, Renarin Kholin, are Bridge Four.”

L: I just… I can’t even with this quote. This sums up the fellowship of Bridge Four so beautifully for me. Bridge Four is family. They stand with one another, even when the going gets tough. Even when the people in the family don’t feel like they belong, or deserve inclusion.

A: ::sniff::

“Of course, nobody says I’m less of a man than my brother, and nobody points out that it sure would be nice for the succession if the sickly, strange younger brother were safely tucked away in a monastery.”

L: Poor Renarin. I always get a bit of a Thor/Loki vibe from these two, with the exception of course being that Renarin is no trickster. He’s just a genuinely kind-hearted good kid, and having to live up to the expectations imposed on him by his father and brother must be utterly exhausting.

A: One of the most difficult aspects of this is that neither Dalinar nor Adolin would consciously lay those expectations on Renarin—not these days, anyway. (Much of this damage was done by Young!Dalinar, of course, who … well, I won’t go there now.) But aside from Dalinar’s early contempt, there’s so much pressure on Renarin just from who Dalinar and Adolin are. They’re so perfectly Alethi, in all the ways he can’t be. (Yes, I know they aren’t perfect. Far from it. But from the outside, in the Alethi context, they look pretty close to it.)

L: Isn’t this so true of human nature, though? The expectations we hold ourselves to are often so much stronger than any that could be imposed upon us by others.

A: Oh, so, so true.

“I’m already the oddest one in this bunch.”

L: ::side-eyes Lopen::

“Oh,” Renarin said. “I don’t know if [Rlain] counts.”

“This thing is what everyone always tells him,” Lunamor said. “Over and over again.”

L: Poor, poor Rlain. This and the part from his POV made me so sad for him, but we’ll get into that in more detail when we get there.

Skar left with a spring to his step. Another man would have felt worse, but Skar was a teacher at heart.

L: We’ll see more of this later, but I love the fact that Skar is such a good person that he’d take joy in helping another to achieve something he wants so desperately.

A: That’s one of my favorite chapters, where it’s Skar’s turn to help everyone. I’m looking forward to that.

Places & Peoples

“What happened to your brother, Rock?”

“My two brothers are well, so far as I know.”

“And the third brother?” Kaladin said. “The one who died, moving you from fourth to third, and making you a cook instead of a soldier? Don’t deny it.”

“Is sad story,” Lunamor said. “And today is not day for sad stories.

A: Kaladin is assuming (likely based on the half-truths Rock told them in the earlier books) that Rock was fourth in line and is now third, making him a cook instead of a soldier. This is going to be proven categorically false near the end of the chapter…

They hadn’t anticipated the cruelty of Torol Sadeas, who had murdered Kef’ha without a proper duel, killed many of Lunamor’s family who resisted, and seized his property.

A: This… oh, I always hated Sadeas, but this is completely despicable. I want to bring him back to life just so I can kill him again.

“Lunamor, what happened? Your note was so terse. Kef’ha is dead, but what happened to you? Why so long without word?”

“What of Tifi and Sinaku’a?” she asked him.

“Dead,” he whispered. “They raised weapons in vengeance.”

She put her hand to her lips…. “Then you—”

A: Rock was the fourth son, but not the fourth of four. He was fourth of six… which is why he could claim that his two brothers are well—meaning his two younger brothers, and leaving out that not just one, but all three of his older brothers were killed when they came down from the Peaks. His wife’s response makes me believe that the theory is probably right: that Rock is now not merely the head of his family, but likely the nuatoma of his clan.

There’s just so much we don’t know about their culture, and we don’t get much clarification here—except for Rock’s personal situation, and even that is mostly inference.

Tight Butts and Coconuts

L: Also known as the “Rock and Lopen appreciation section.”

A: Woooot! I appreciate the Rock and the Lopen.

Lunamor—called Rock by his friends, on account of their thick, lowlander tongues being incapable of proper speech

L: Airsick lowlanders.

“How hard can it be to learn how to fly? Skyeels do it all the time, and they are ugly and stupid. Most bridgemen are only one of those things.”

L: Bless you, Lopen.

“Lopen!” Kaladin called. “You’re supposed to be helping the others, not showing off!”

L: I mean, he’s got a point. Lopen’s not being a very effective instructor, here.

A: Well, he does provide a certain… example of what not to do, right?

“If I am to become a delicate cloud upon the sky, I must first convince the ground that I am not abandoning her. Like a worried lover, sure, she must be comforted and reassured that I will return following my dramatic and regal ascent to the sky.”

L: I have no words for the sheer amazing that is this quote. And for these that follow:

“Don’t worry, dear one. The Lopen is vast enough to be possessed by many, many forces, both terrestrial and celestial! I must soar to the air, for if I were to remain only on the ground, surely my growing magnitude would cause the land to crack and break.”

 * * *

“Ground,” Lopen said, “I will still love you. I’m not attracted to anyone the way I am to you.”

L: ::snort::

A: In this context I have to add one more quotation:

“Perhaps,” Lunamor noted, “when that one is away from too much toxic air, he will be less…”
“Lopen?”
“Though upon consideration, this thing would be sad.”

A: Indeed.

“Huio has changed this thing. I now have to either promote him or push him off side of plateau.”
“Promote him to what?”
“To airsick lowlander,” Lunamor said, “second class.”

Weighty Words

“It isn’t healthy to have a stone curdling in your stomach, still wet with moss.”

L: Well isn’t this a fascinating idiom? Sort of reminds me of a combination of “a rolling stone gathers no moss” and the concept of feeling like you have a stone in your stomach.

“The first step will be to speak the Ideal,” Kaladin said. “I suspect a few of you have already said it. But for the rest, if you wish to be a squire to the Windrunners, you will need to swear it.”

A: I wonder about this. Is it necessary to speak the Ideal to become a squire, or is he assuming this? And either way, Is he inadvertently tying them to the Windrunners, or just to the Knights Radiant as a whole? Obviously all Orders share the same first Ideal, so there’s that, but how much does “intent to be a Windrunner squire” shape their path forward?

Lunamor whispered the Ideal.

L: I find it interesting that he whispers it. Has he already said it, and just doesn’t want to interfere with the rest? Or is this the first time he’s sworn?

A: Personally, I think this is the first time, and he whispers because he doesn’t think it’s appropriate for him. After all, he’s supposed to be a cook, or his clan’s nuatoma, or possibly a slave—but not a Knight Radiant. Or even a squire. This conflict will stay with him through the end of the book, sadly.

“The Surges of Progression and Illumination. I’m not sure how to make the second one work though. Shallan has explained it seven times, but I can’t create even the slightest illusion. Something’s wrong.”

L: Is this because of his corruption, or because the Surges don’t work quite the same way for the two different Orders, I wonder?

A: That’s been the subject of a great deal of theorizing and argumentation. Some believe it’s because Glys is corrupted, and therefore Renarin has access to a different Surge. Some think the corruption damages the access somehow. Some think it’s just that Renarin isn’t ready for it yet. And… all the permutations in between and beyond! I have in the past argued that it’s just because the Surges don’t work the same way for Renarin and Shallan, whether because of personality differences or Order differences, but I’m not sure now. I don’t think we have enough information to do any more than guess.

A Scrupulous Study of Spren

“I’ve always wondered,” Dalinar said. “Are they made of fire themselves? It looks like they are, and yet what of emotion spren? Are angerspren then made of anger?” … “And what of gloryspren? Made of glory? What is glory? Could gloryspren appear around someone who is delusional, or perhaps very drunk—who only thinks they’ve accomplished something great, while everyone else is standing around mocking them?”

L: This is a very interesting question. Have we seen gloryspren rise up around Dalinar in some of his cruelest victories, when others are horrified by his actions? I remember seeing them around Gavilar, but not Dalinar.

A: Dalinar gets some gloryspren in that first flashback battle, which was kind of a nasty piece of work. Gavilar gets them when he’s delightedly telling his men to “Hail the Blackthorn!” the time that Dalinar beat Kalanor … and came this close to killing Gavilar. Dalinar draws a bunch of them when Adolin is born, when he repairs the temple in Thaylen City, and then they come in flocks and droves during the climax. So… near as I can tell from a quick search, Young!Dalinar only draws gloryspren during a battle that one time, and that happens when he takes down the brightlord, whose honor guard then breaks before the elites.

We’ve debated much over what “glory” actually means in this context, and I don’t think we’re any nearer a conclusion now than we were back in TWoK.

That one did have a sword. A miniature Shardblade.

L: I wonder if they’re just mimicking what they’ve seen of highspren in Shadesmar (but then, the living Blades wouldn’t appear as such over there…)

A: I wonder if their appearance is shaped by Dalinar’s voiced description of them, like their size was locked when Geranid wrote down her measurements of them.

L: Oh, that’s an excellent theory.

They were lesser gods, but still holy. He could see their true shapes beyond the streamers, a faint shadow of a larger creature at the bottom.

L: Well isn’t that interesting. Rock’s the only character I can remember that has mentioned being able to see this… can he see into Shadesmar, a little? If so, how?

A: It ties back to the Parsh blood, I think. Earlier we commented on his ability to hear the Rhythms, and here we have that Parsh ability to see into the Cognitive realm, to some degree.

L: Wait a second. Did I miss that somewhere? Parshendi can see into the Cognitive Realm?!

A: It was never stated outright in the text that I recall, but in WoR, Eshonai’s descriptions of various spren was always more than what the humans saw. I think there were further hints buried in their songs—they’re closer to the Cognitive realm than humans are. (I wonder what Lift sees of this sort of spren, with her Nightwatcher gifts.)

But where is his god? Lunamor could see all spren. Prince Renarin had bonded one, except Lunamor had never been able to spot it.

L: Hmmm. Is Glys playing coy, or does this have something to do with his corruption?

A: Yes. As in, I believe Glys is playing coy because of the corruption. He doesn’t want to be seen, because he wants to be a good Truthwatcher spren but knows Sja-anat has affected him.

L: Yeah, but Rock seems to be able to see the spren even when they don’t want to be seen. Like the honorspren later on, and Syl in book one. So either Glys is more powerful/better at hiding himself than all those other spren, or there’s something more going on here…

A: There’s always another secret.

Gods! Strong gods, like Sylphrena. Glowing a faint blue, they clustered around a tall spren woman, who had long hair streaming behind her. She had taken the shape of a person, human sized, and wore an elegant gown. The others swirled about in the air, though their focus was obviously the practicing bridgemen and hopefuls.

L: Highspren scouting party!

“I can barely remember a voice… her voice, Phendorana, reprimanding me. I got in so much trouble for searching out Kaladin. Yet here they are! They won’t speak to me. I think they assume that if they do, they’d have to admit to me that they were wrong.”

L: I’m so curious about the social hierarchy of the honorspren. Is Phendorana some sort of Queen or something?

A: I wish I knew. I had hoped to see her again in Shadesmar, but we didn’t (so far as we know). I wonder if she’ll show up again. It’d be kind of a hoot if Lyn bonded her, now wouldn’t it? ;)

L: That would be completely weird. To be honest I’d love to see Rock bond her—he already shows the spren such deference, it would make sense that this regal one would be attracted to that…

Quality Quotations

“Today we will not need to scrub the walls, and the life will be as white as a sun at night!”

Evi’s native idioms didn’t always translate well into Alethi.

L: This one’s really cool. It almost reminds me a little of Scadrial, with the ash falling all the time—the first part of this would make total sense there, scrubbing the walls to be white… but a sun at NIGHT? Maybe she means… a star? This is just baffling.

Gavilar waited in the sitting room, dressed in one of those new suits with the stiff jacket and buttons up the sides of the chest.

A: Even before he was born, Adolin was getting an example of fashionability!

a playful windspren whipped at the smoke, making it blow across him no matter where he stood.

A: It all makes sense now.

Numuhukumakiaki’aialunamor

L: Say that ten times fast. (Every time his full name is shown I just have to stare at it in amazement… because I, clearly, am an airsick lowlander.)

Beautiful lights and fallen stars

L: This ranks up there with Dresden’s “Stars and Stones” as one of my favorite phrases. And another one:

Blessed gods of sea and stone.

* * *

“You’re not a king, Lopen,” Drehy said. “We’ve been over this.”

“Of course I am not. I am a former king. You are obviously one of the stupid ones I mentioned earlier.”

A: Lol. (Also, have we addressed this before?)

“Finding a smile on your face, Kaladin Stormblessed, is like finding lost sphere in your soup. Surprising, yes, but very nice too.

A: ::snickers::

It was made of tough wood, Bridge Four was.

L: Continuing the metaphor/symbolism/whatever.

“When you say these things, you are almost not bitter!” Lunamor said. “Ha! Much practice must have been required.”

“A lifetime.”

A: *sigh* And last one, I promise:

Lopen shoved in close and made the Bridge Four salute. It seemed to mean something special, coming from him. Two arms. One of the first times Lopen had been able to make the salute.

Phew! If you’re still with us, thanks for sticking it out! This was certainly a long one, but there was a lot worthy of discussion in these chapters. Chapter 38’s pretty long, so next week we’ll be tackling it by its lonesome. As always, please join us for respectful debate, discussion, and theorizing in the comments!

Alice is wiped out after a rather phenomenal “ladies night out” for Phantom of the Opera. She has very few brain cells left with which to craft a witty bio this week. Good thing she did most of the above writing before going out.

Lyndsey is heading out later today for a photoshoot in Boston for her Star Lord cosplay. Check out her Facebook account for amusing photos of cosplay on mass transit…

Warrior mice, revolutionary pigs, scientifically-minded chimpanzees, and radioactive elephants—some of the most memorable (and ironically, the most human) stories feature anthropomorphic animals at their core. Political history, racial allegories, class tensions, and environmental warnings spring to life when ordinary animals are re-cast as, say, Leon Trotsky, or a heartsick sniper fighting an endless war…

Below, we’ve corralled some of the best animal characters genre fiction has to offer. Let us know your favorites in the comments!

Barsk: The Elephants’ Graveyard and The Moons of Barsk by Lawrence M. Schoen

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A fatherless boy named Pizlo is a member of the Fant—the race of anthropomorphic elephants that have been banished to Barsk, considered a backwater by the rest of the uplifted animals of the galaxy. Humans are a distant memory, but the various animal descendants have proved adept at populating space without our interference. Now an offworld group is trying to break into the Fant’s control of their one resource, a medicine called koph. While his voices push him toward an uncertain future, his father’s best friend, the Fant’s Speaker With the Dead, is using the spirits’ answers to uncover secrets that those in power would prefer to keep hidden. Here anthropomorphic animals and far-future sci-fi combine to tell a heartbreaking story of the elusiveness of truth, and the prison of memory.

Animal Farm by George Orwell

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Obviously, this one holds a place of honor on any list of talking animals. Orwell’s mini-allegory of the Bolshevik Revolution casts pigs as different members of the communist party, while the hardworking horses, cows, and hens stand in for the peasant class—exploited first by feudalism and then by the Party itself. The dogs, once loyal to the humans, become the pigs’ military over the course of a generation, while the sheep blindly follow whoever is in charge. Also, I’m pretty sure the donkey is supposed to be Walter Benjamin? Anyway, never trust anything that walks on two legs! And never give a pig liquor. It turns out that doesn’t end well.

The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells

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Speaking of never trusting anything with two legs… poor Dr. Moreau just wants to be left in peace on his island, where he can genetically modify every animal he can get his hands on. Is it so wrong to want an army of Beast Folk? Unfortunately, the rest of the world isn’t so keen on the Beast Folk plan, so Moreau must pursue perfection alone. His latest experiment, a Puma-Man (ahem), also turns out not to be wholly onboard with his uplifting, and things go a bit pear-shaped. Did I mention that giving transformed animals liquor is a bad idea? Did that come through? Wells used this horrific tale as an attack on the practice of vivisection, as well as pointing out that humans seemed to be slipping a bit in their civilized ways.

The Only Harmless Great Thing by Brooke Bolander

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In an alternate past, elephants are recognized as sapient creatures by their ability to communicate through a trunk-centric sign language called Proboscidian. That doesn’t stop the folks at US Radium from putting a troublesome Indian elephant to work in the factories alongside their female employees, who are slowly dying of radiation poisoning. In an alternate present shaped by a rewriting of Topsy’s tragic death at Coney Island, a young woman attempts to convince the elephants to change their genes and their very purpose in order to help prolong the human race. The fact that she doesn’t speak Proboscidian and must rely on a translator only underscores the exploitative relationship between the (as the poetic interludes describe it) “flat-faced pink squeakers with more clever thinking than sense” and the Many Mothers with “memories longer than stone.” Read an excerpt from the novella here.

The War with No Name Series by Robert Repino

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One day, Morte is an ordinary housecat. He has a crush on a neighbor dog named Sheba, and he loves lying in the sun. But then things start to change. He begins to think more complex thoughts, and chafe against the restraints of life as a cat. Something terrible happens to Sheba’s puppies, and the dog disappears. Suddenly a new world is revealed, one ruled by the Colony, hyper-intelligent ants who want to eradicate the human race. Morte takes on a new role as a warrior, and seems to be dedicated to this new animal-friendly world. But his true motivations are more complicated than that, and when a human claims to know where Sheba is, Morte has to decide what he’s willing to risk for his friend. The book skillfully weaves a post-apocalyptic narrative into an allegory about human society, along with a dash of Unstoppable-Virus-That-Must-Be-Contained. The first two books in the series, Morte and D’Arc, find their true heart in the story of Morte’s unwavering interspecies love for Sheba, while the third Culdesac, follows the adventures of a murderous Bobcat.

The Builders by Daniel Polansky

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A missing eye… a broken wing… a stolen country.

Yeah, the last job didn’t end well.

The Captain’s company has kept a low profile since then, eking out an existence in the shadow of the war they lost. But that doesn’t mean the memories have faded, or even that the wounds have scarred. It’s all still fresh to the Captain. He finally sees a shot at vengeance, but how many of his old company are left? And how many will join the old mouse on one last tour? Opossum sniper Boudica, stoat assassin Bonsoir, and the sinister salamander named Cinnabar all answer his call, but will they be enough to settle the score?

The Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling

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Rudyard Kipling’s stories of survival in the jungles of India have inspired several live-action movies (including one that stars Scarlett Johansson as Kaa, which, frankly, terrifies me) the classic Disney cartoon and, wonderfully, Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book. At the heart of the stories is a man-cub named Mowgli who has to learn to live among various slightly anthropomorphized beasts, including Bagheera the regal panther, Baloo the slacker bear, and Shere Khan, the kick-ass tiger who is vilified for acting like a tiger. The book also includes the heroic tale of Rikki-Tikki-Taavi, so if you want to weep for a few straight hours, Kipling has you covered.

Saga by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples

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The world of Saga includes plenty of magical beings, robots, and talking animals, but the one we truly love is Lying Cat. A giant blue space cat, she’s the companion to a bounty hunter known as The Will and helps him on his jobs by loudly announcing “LYING” whenever someone tries to evade the truth. She’s also a fairly effective enforcer, taking down armed men when necessary. Initially used as a sort of dark comic relief, Lying Cat won our hearts by providing comfort to Sophie, a young girl rescued from a particularly creepy pleasure planet. Later—because we can’t have nice things—we get a single, terrible panel of backstory that throws all of Lying Cat’s life into stark relief.

Tailchaser’s Song by Tad Williams

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Tad Williams’ first novel follows a ginger tomcat named Fritti Tailchaser as he navigates life among other anthropomorphized animals, each with their own cultural traditions, mythologies, and languages. The epic begins when Tailchaser decides to leave the Meeting Wall clan and investigate the mysterious disappearances of cats. The journey soon becomes a full-fledged quest as he gains friends (including the adorably-named kitten Pouncequick, and the somewhat-less-adorably-named crazy cat, Eatbugs) and enemies as he followsthe path to the Royal Court. Tailchaser must face off with villainous Lord Hearteater and the dog-like monster Fikos to save his fellow cats from extinction.

Vic and Blood by Harlan Ellison

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Harlan Ellison’s story cycle featuring Vic (the Boy) and Blood (the Dog) isn’t so much an allegory as it is a bleak postwar dystopia, but there is enough satire in the plot, and enough acidic running commentary from Blood, that we felt like it needed to be here. Vic is the child of scavengers, with no education and little sense of morality. He does what he needs to survive, and since puberty has recently struck, he also does whatever he needs to find women, whether they’re willing or not. He and Blood develop a symbiotic relationship—Blood smells out women, and Vic steals food to share. L.Q. Jones’ 1975 movie adapts the second story in the cycle. Now, you’re going to be shocked by this, but Harlan Ellison voiced some disagreements that he had with the film adaptation, particularly calling out the “moronic, hateful, chauvinist” final line.

Mouse Guard by David Petersen

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Mouse Guard is a long-running comic series about a blissfully human-free medieval world, and the complex society built by sentient mice. The mice managed to overthrow an evil weasel and live in relative peace, and the “Mouse Guard” formed as a brotherhood to protect civilians from other predators, escorting them as they travel through lands that may be unsafe.

The Mouse Guard is made up of a vast array of characters, from Gwendolyn, the leader who oversees the MG’s operations to her assistant Roibin (who is also a poet), to Celanawe, The “Black Axe,” whose prowess in battle has passed into legend, to Sadie, a younger mouse who returns home from the Guard outpost on the Easter Shores with a terrifying skill with daggers. The books riff on the conventions of medieval adventure, while creating a portrait of a complex society that can contain both brutal violence and adorable whiskers.

Carmen Dog by Carol Emshwiller

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In Carol Emshwiller’s picaresque adventure, women begin turning into animals and animals suddenly become women. Pooch, until recently a lovely golden setter, finds herself turning into an equally lovely woman, while her mistress is taking a turn for the snapping turtle. As a loose wolverine rages through the city streets, baffled men try to figure out what’s happening, baffled animals try to adjust to their new lives, and Pooch is forced to kidnap her mistress’ (human) baby and go on the lam to keep it safe from its turtle-mom’s jaws. But now that she’s human Pooch is just starting to figure out what she wants to do with her new life, and that doesn’t include acting as an adoptive mother—she wants to be an opera singer.

Carmen Dog deftly mixes anthropomorphic animals, feminist critique, and sharp humor into a cult class that inspired Pat Murphy and Karen Joy Fowler to create the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award.

La Planète des Singes by Pierre Boulle

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La Planète des Singes—in English, Planet of the Apes—has been adapted into three different film universes that riff on the book’s original premise: a far-future couple happen upon the writings of the human journalist Ulysse Mérou, who documents his time trapped in an off-planet ape society, dwelling on the way it stratifies itself between Gorilla, Orangutan, and Chimp. The 1960s films largely turn the discussion of class into one of racial discrimination, while the current film series shifts the primary focus onto animal rights. (The less said about the Tim Burton reboot, the better.) All versions also touch on the question of what makes us human, in large part by focusing on nuanced ape characters—from the scientifically-minded Zira and Cornelius, to the sympathetic Caesar.

Watership Down by Richard Adams

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Possibly the most traumatic single book on a list of traumatic books, this is an epic adventure starring rabbits. Watership Down began life as a story Richard Adams told to his daughters, but with research he expanded into an epic the echoes the stories of Ulysses and Aeneas. Fiver, a psychic rabbit, has a vision that his warren is going to be destroyed. Only a few rabbits—including his brother Hazel—believe him, embarking together on a quest to find a new home, facing many dangers along the way. Finally, they reach the Watership Down of the title, set up camp, and begin exploring the possibilities of liberating some does from a nearby hutch. The only problem is, the powerful warren next door might try to take it from them… hence horrifying RABBIT WARFARE. Richard Adams rejects the idea that the story is an allegory, but it does act as a commentary on political and military struggles, and the ways a society that focuses on military might to the exclusion of all else might not be the best society, for rabbit or man.

Maus by Art Spiegelman

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On second thought, maybe this is the most traumatic book on this list… In Maus, Art Spiegelman took his father’s stories of the Holocaust and recast them with talking animals: Jews = mice, Germans = cats, and Americans = dogs. This manages to both make the story more immediately readable, and somehow even more horrific, especially when you realize that Spiegelman was drawing on real Nazi imagery that cast Jews as a plague of rats, and that Zyklon B was initially manufactured as a pesticide. This book more than any other convinced a generation of non-comics readers that maybe the medium was something they should take seriously, paving the way for the graphic novel boom of the 1990s and beyond.

Earlier versions of this list were published in November 2015 and January 2018

In this bi-weekly series reviewing classic science fiction and fantasy books, Alan Brown looks at the front lines and frontiers of the field; books about soldiers and spacers, scientists and engineers, explorers and adventurers. Stories full of what Shakespeare used to refer to as “alarums and excursions”: battles, chases, clashes, and the stuff of excitement.

The years spanning the late 19^th and early 20^th Centuries were a time of adventure. The last few blank spots on the map were being filled in by explorers, while the social science of archaeology was gaining attention, and struggling for respectability. And young readers who dreamed of adventure could read about a boy explorer in the tales of Don Sturdy, a series from the same Stratemeyer Syndicate that gave the world stories about Tom Swift, Nancy Drew, and the Hardy Boys. They were among the first—but far from the last—books I read that are fueled by tales of archaeological discovery and the mysterious lure of lost lands and ruined cities.

When you re-read books from your youth, you are often surprised by what you’ve remembered, and what you haven’t. Sometimes the surprise is pleasant, sometimes it is not. When I reviewed On a Torn-Away World by Roy Rockwood, another Stratemeyer Syndicate tale, I found that the book didn’t live up to what I remembered. I am pleased to report that I had the opposite experience with these two Don Sturdy books, which I’d discovered on the bookshelf of my den. They held up well on re-reading—far better than I thought they would.

Some of you may question whether these books are even science fiction, and you may be right: The scientific content is thin, and mostly exists to put the protagonists in exciting situations. But the stories are packed with action and adventure, and there are plenty of mysteries to be uncovered in strange and exotic locations filled with the wonders (and dangers) of nature.

Moreover, re-reading these books confirmed something I had thought for a long time. When I first encountered George Lucas’ Indiana Jones in the cinema, I immediately thought of Don Sturdy and his uncles, traveling the world searching for zoological specimens and ancient treasures. Lucas has always been coy about the influences that led him to create Indiana Jones, but there are many clues in the Young Indiana Jones television series. And in one episode (“Princeton, February 1916”), Indy dates one of Stratemeyer’s daughters, which indicates that Lucas was familiar with the works of the Stratemeyer Syndicate. If Don Sturdy was not a direct influence for the character of Indiana Jones, he certainly grew out of the same tradition that led to Indy’s creation.

About the Author

Like all books published by the Stratemeyer Syndicate, the Don Sturdy books were written under a “house name,” in this case “Victor Appleton,” the same name used on the Tom Swift books. The stories were actually written by a man named John William Duffield. Very little information is available about Mr. Duffield, so this summary relies heavily on his entry at the always useful Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (SFE) website. We know that he lived from 1859 to 1946, and that he did significant amounts of work for Stratemeyer, writing under a variety of house names. He wrote books in the Ted Scott Flying Series and the Slim Tyler Air Stories. He wrote the earliest books in the Radio Boys series, which included factual articles about the devices and techniques used in the stories themselves. He wrote many of the books in the Bomba the Jungle Boy series, which I remember enjoying as a boy, and which led to a series of movies.

From the two books I read for this review, I can make a few other observations: Duffield was a better writer than many of his Stratemeyer Syndicate counterparts, constructing his stories with cleaner and more straightforward prose. While his books relied on some of the clichés and conventions of adventure books of the time, it is apparent that he did his research. The chapter endings encourage you to read further, but not in as blatant a way as some of the cliffhangers in other Stratemeyer books. If he did not visit the Algerian and Alaskan settings of the two books, he clearly read about them, as many of the towns and locales described in the books actually exist. And the books, while they sometimes reflect the casual racism of the time, are not as flagrantly offensive as some of their counterparts.

Archaeologists and Explorers

As I mentioned earlier, the last decades of the 19^th Century and early decades of the 20^th Century were the culmination of centuries of exploration, a topic that always fascinated me as a youngster. Those decades also saw an increasingly scientific approach to these efforts. In my recent review of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, I looked at the emerging science of paleontology. Trophy hunting was giving way to the science of zoology, and treasure hunting was giving way to a more scientific approach to archaeology. I remember visiting the American Museum of Natural History in New York in my youth, and learning about Roy Chapman Andrews traveling the world to collect zoological samples and fossils for the museum, and about Howard Carter opening the tomb of King Tut. Every schoolkid of the era knew the story of Sir Henry Stanley traveling through Central Africa and uttering the immortal words, “Doctor Livingstone, I presume?” We were all fascinated by tales of polar explorers, including Admiral Peary and Matthew Henson’s many Arctic expeditions, and I remember building a plastic model of the Ford Tri-Motor airplane used by Admiral Byrd’s 1929 Antarctic Expedition. Other adventures that caught my imagination were Heinrich Schliemann’s uncovering the ruins of the fabled city of Troy, and Teddy Roosevelt’s travels through Africa, South America, and the American West. I also remember my father’s personal recollections of watching Charles Lindbergh take off across the Atlantic in the Spirit of St. Louis. So, of course, tales like the Don Sturdy adventures were immediately appealing to me.

Science fiction has often borrowed from archaeological adventures. This includes explorers encountering Big Dumb Objects, like Larry Niven’s Ringworld and Arthur C. Clarke’s Rama. Andre Norton gave us many tales involving abandoned ancient ruins and caves full of mysterious artifacts. One of my favorite science fiction stories, H. Beam Piper’s “Omnilingual,” follows archaeologists in an ancient city of Mars as they search for a “Rosetta Stone” that will allow them to read the records of the lost civilization. Even the climax of the movie Planet of the Apes takes place at an archaeological dig where ape scientists have been attempting to discover secrets of past civilizations. And there are many other tales as well, too numerous to recount (you can find a recent Tor.com discussion of SF set in dead civilizations here). There is something awesome and compelling about these efforts to tease out the secrets of the past.

Don Sturdy on the Desert of Mystery

The book opens with its main characters already in Algeria—a refreshing change from stories in which whole chapters elapse before the adventurers finally leave home. We meet Captain Frank Sturdy, Don’s uncle on his father’s side, and Professor Amos Bruce, Don’s uncle on his mother’s side. They are discussing an expedition to cross the Sahara in automobiles in order to reach the Hoggar Plateau, where they might find the legendary Cemetery of Elephants. Captain Sturdy is a man of action, a skilled hunter, and a collector of zoological specimens from around the world. Professor Bruce is a skilled archaeologist, and extremely learned. Don Sturdy himself is only fifteen years old, but already an accomplished outdoorsman and a crack shot. Don believes himself to be an orphan, as his father, mother and sister were aboard the Mercury, a ship that recently disappeared rounding Cape Horn. Thus, Don has found himself under the guardianship of two men who roam the world seeking adventure—something any boy would envy.

Don is out hunting when he witnesses two men attacking a boy. When he realizes the boy is white like him, he immediately intervenes, and with his excellent marksmanship, drives the attackers away (I am disappointed that race entered into his decision-making in this scene, even if it does reflect the attitudes of the time in which the tale was written). The rescued boy, Teddy, is from New York, and has a sad tale. His father was an explorer in search of the legendary Cave of Emeralds, and was attacked and captured by bandits. One of the Arab members of the expedition had rescued Teddy and taken him in. When Teddy tells his story to Don’s uncles, they immediately decide that their expedition has an additional goal: to rescue Teddy’s father.

Captain Sturdy is planning to purchase not just any vehicles for their expedition across the desert, but half-tracks, newly invented during the Great War, which will allow them to travel through terrain previously thought impassable. By happy coincidence (there are a lot of coincidences in these books), Professor Bruce finds a dependable local guide, Alam Bokaru—only to find he is the very man who had rescued Teddy. He is hesitant to join their expedition, however, because the fabled City of Brass is near their destination, and to observe that city from the back of a camel brings death, according to legend. When the men point out that they will not be riding camels, he reluctantly agrees to assist them. But the men who had attacked Teddy have been lurking, and will hound the explorers throughout their journey.

I won’t go into too much detail about their expedition, but the explorers deal with mechanical problems, encounter tarantulas, get buried by a sandstorm, clash with bandits and brigands, and along the way find clues that point them toward the destinations they seek, along with the fate of Teddy’s father. Many shots are fired, but due to their outstanding marksmanship, the Sturdys are able to prevail without killing anyone (something that, while somewhat unbelievable, keeps a book intended for children from having too high a body count). The adventures are sometimes sensational, but are presented with enough realistic detail to allow you to suspend your disbelief. And a chance encounter late in the book (another of those numerous happy coincidences) brings news that survivors from the Mercury had been found, and so our intrepid adventurers end the book making plans to voyage to Brazil in the hopes of reuniting Don with his family.

Don Sturdy in the Land of Volcanoes

The book opens with Don in his hometown, having been reunited with his family over the course of previous volumes. He helps a young girl who is being forced into a car by a local bully, only to have the car speed through a nearby puddle, covering them both with mud. Then, in the second chapter, we encounter the dreaded expository lump that is a hallmark of Stratemeyer novels, where the author recounts the previous adventures of our hero, complete with all the titles of earlier books in the series. (It occurs to me that this lump may have been added by other hands and not Duffield himself, as the prose feels stiffer than that in the rest of the book). It turns out that this is fifth book of the series, and that the reason we were spared the expository lump in Desert of Mystery is because it was the initial book in the series. We meet the Sturdy’s servant Jenny, whose dialogue is presented in a thick vernacular, and whose purpose is simply to misunderstand things for comic relief (unlike in many other Stratemeyer books, however, she is refreshingly not identified as a person of color). We also learn that the bully’s father has been manipulating property titles in an attempt to force the Sturdy family from their home.

Fortunately, Uncle Frank arrives with a proposition for Don that will rescue him from these domestic concerns. He and Uncle Amos have been commissioned to travel to Alaska, and want Don to help them gather specimens and geological samples from the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes (the fact that the Professor is an archaeologist is overlooked for the sake of the plot in this volume). This valley was created after the eruption of Mount Katmai in 1912, and still exists today in the Katmai National Park and Preserve. Even better, they suggest that Don bring along his old friend Teddy.

They travel across the country by train and step aboard the Margaret, the yacht which they will be sharing with another party of scientists. The boys are interested in the engine room, and while the Scottish engineer gives them a tour, the author takes the opportunity to provide some educational information about steam engines to his young readers. They then encounter a fierce storm, receive a distress call from a sinking vessel, and Don gets a chance to be a hero due to quick thinking (I will point out, however, that large waves break only when water shallows, and so breakers are not generally encountered in mid-ocean). Later, the boys help solve the mystery of a rash of thefts on the yacht, earning the hatred of a seaman who will be a recurring antagonist during the remainder of the tale.

The geological wonders they encounter are very evocatively described, and over the course of their travels they encounter fierce Kodiak bears, Don is almost swallowed up by a deposit of volcanic ash, they survive close shaves with volcanic eruptions, and of course, ruffians are driven off by the obligatory display of crack marksmanship. They also encounter a fierce storm they refer to as a “woolie,” which springs up out of nowhere with hurricane force winds. From my own Coast Guard experience in Alaska, when we called them “williwaws,” I can attest to the fierceness of these sudden storms. The one flaw that irked me in these adventures is that the boys’ packs are described as weighing forty pounds, but seem to have the TARDIS-like quality of being “bigger on the inside,” as their four-man party never lacks for equipment or supplies, and are able to carry out large quantities of animal skins and geological samples.

On their way home, through yet another one of those happy coincidences so common in Stratemeyer books, they discover some crucial information about the man attempting to foreclose on the Sturdy home, and the book ends well for all concerned.

Like the first book of the series, this one was an enjoyable read. The writing is solid, and displays a lot of research, if not personal experience, on the part of the author. There are the usual clichés of the genre, but the book has an overall sense of realism that is so often lacking in other books of the time.

Final Thoughts

In the 1920s, boy’s adventure books were cranked out by the literary equivalent of assembly lines, and quality control over the product was often lacking. The Don Sturdy books, however, stand out because of the quality of the prose and the evidence of careful research and attention to detail. They have their flaws, but have aged far better than some of their contemporaries.

And now I turn the floor over to you: If you’ve read any Don Sturdy adventures, or other tales from the Stratemeyer Syndicate, what did you think? And are there other fictional stories of archaeology and exploration that struck your fancy?

Alan Brown has been a science fiction fan for over five decades, especially fiction that deals with science, military matters, exploration and adventure.

For the past several weeks, Rafe Judkins, showrunner of Amazon Studios’ The Wheel of Time television series, has instituted #WoTWednesday on social media: He’ll share peeks at scripts (just the episode titles, alas) or his marked-up copies of Robert Jordan’s books, as he and the writing staff embark on the epic undertaking of adapting this beloved fantasy series for the small screen.

This week, Judkins was in Fiji, and so for #WoTWednesday he talked about eastern religions and philosophies, most notably reincarnation.

[Note: Mild spoilers ahead for Book 6.]

In an Instagram post at the Sri Siva Subramaniya Temple in Nadi, Fiji, Judkins got to thinking:

For #WoTWednesday this week, since I’m in Fiji where 30% of the population is Hindu (and the 10 dollar coin is actually a mandala of the Kalachakra or “Wheel of Time”) I thought I’d talk a little about the philosophy of the books and what I want to bring out in the series. One of my favorite things about the books is how they embrace eastern religions and philosophies and put them into an epic fantasy context in a way we haven’t yet seen in tv or film. I plan to lean heavily into the concept of reincarnation in the books and have spent a lot of time talking to people who believe in reincarnation to get a feel for how that affects not only your philosophy of the world, but also the every day way you live your life. I’d love to hear, too, about some of your favorite moments from the books that deal with reincarnation or being spun out again by the wheel of time (mine is Birgitte Silverbow’s return). Obviously, yin and yang and balance and duality are important eastern philosophical concepts from the books that I want to bring out in series, but we will save discussions on that for a future trip to China ;)

If he’s mentioning Birgitte he’s obviously on the right track, but what new aspects regarding the Hindu concept of reincarnation might Judkins bring to the internal struggles of our main characters? Interesting food for thought….

Walt Disney’s Three Little Pigs was an instant legend among animators, then just starting to develop their craft. It also was an instant legend among film studios, who saw that for once, a cartoon could be a bigger draw than the main feature.

Naturally, rival Warner Bros had to get into the action, with three different cartoon takes on the three little pigs.

And equally naturally, their first take was a direct slam and parody of their great rival.

Animation director Friz Freleng (1905-1995)—born Isadore Freleng, and occasionally credited as I. Freleng —had actually worked for Walt Disney before Disney was even Disney, in the very early Laugh-o-Gram days. Enjoying the work, he followed Walt Disney to California in 1923 and worked on many of the very earliest Disney cartoons, including those focused on Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. In 1929, he left Disney for reasons that remain somewhat disputed, though his own fabled temper may have made it difficult for him to work for Walt Disney.

At his next employer, Warner Bros, Freleng helped found Merrie Melodies, the cartoon line that, unlike WB’s other cartoon group, Looney Tunes, did not need to feature Warner Bros music, giving animators on that line a touch more flexibility. Freleng worked to master the syncopation of image and music. The Merrie Melodies cartoons also featured something else that Looney Tunes did not: color. Not, at that time, necessarily the best color—Walt Disney had seized exclusive use of the brilliant Technicolor process, initially leaving Merrie Melodies stuck with a rather inferior if decidedly cheaper color process, Cinecolor. But Merrie Melodies had something Disney did not: a voice actor called Mel Blanc, then contracted to Warner Bros radio station. Freleng and Blanc together created a little character called Porky Pig, and then, Freleng headed off to MGM.

From Disney’s Trolley Troubles (1927)

Two years later, he was back at Warner Bros, directing Merrie Melodies cartoons, continuing to do so even after WB technically closed down their animation studio in 1963. Only in 1967, when WB officially ended all of the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons, did Freleng finally stop producing Merrie Melodies cartoons, moving on to the Pink Panther and various animated television specials.

In a rather vicious twist, financial setbacks forced Freleng to sell off the few assets he had not owned by Warner Bros or MGM to Marvel in 1981, who in turn sold those assets to Disney in 2009 as part of their takeover of Marvel Entertainment. It was almost as if Freleng had never left the company. That is, if you ignore all of his major work at Warner Bros.

Back in the early 1940s, of course, no one could or did imagine what Disney would grow into, much less Bob Iger’s later policy of “Buy all the things.” Walt Disney was running an animation studio that, if highly admired for its artistry and technique, was beset by unhappy, often striking artists, along with ongoing financial troubles, thanks to Walt Disney’s insistence on lavishly spending money he often did not exactly have on both new studio space and intricate, detailed animation that no one over at WB could even dream of. Including a little film called Fantasia (1940) which had cost a then-unheard of sum of money and time for an animated feature and promptly bombed at the box office. Freleng figured he could take the time to poke a little fun at his former employer, as long as he kept the cartoon entertaining.

The result, the 1943 Pigs in a Polka, part of the Merrie Melodies line, was not exactly subtle in its attack, opening as it does, with a scene deliberately recalling the ponderous introductions done by Deems Taylor for all of the Fantasia segments. Mel Blanc—er, that is, the Big Bad Wolf—stands on a similar podium, with similar lighting, and like Taylor is dressed in a formal tuxedo, though honesty compels me to admit that the Big Bad Wolf is not exactly rocking the tuxedo look here. He almost manages to look, well, unkempt—possibly because he has chosen not to wear shoes with this fine outfit, or possibly because he is wearing yellow gloves that just don’t match the rest of the outfit, or possibly because bits of his fur are popping out of the tuxedo, or possibly—don’t hate me here—because he’s a wolf, and wolves are just not good at fashion or choosing well-fitting tuxedos. As a final intellectual touch, the wolf wears glasses, just as Taylor did in the film.

Mel Blanc—er, that is, the Big Bad Wolf—then ponderously introduces, in much the same way Deems Taylor had introduced the Fantasia segments, except with more pronunciation errors and in Mel Blanc’s more distinctive tones, the tale of the Big Bad Wolf and the Three Little Pigs, set to the Hungarian Dances by Johannes Brahms. A highly condensed and edited version of Hungarian Dances that I suspect left the ghost of Johannes Brahms desperately wishing that ghosts have the ability to hire lawyers and sue Hollywood studios, but I digress. And to be fair, the same thing could be said—and was said—about all of the musical selections for Fantasia.

Introduction over, the rest of the cartoon shifts into what is on the surface a retelling of the fairy tale of the Three Little Pigs except with a lot more dancing and costume changes and a record player, but what is really an opportunity for the WB animators to parody Disney’s Three Little Pigs and various aspects of Fantasia—most notably the massively criticized Pastoral Symphony segment and the more popular Dance of the Hours segment. The three pigs—helpfully wearing shirts that label them as Pigs 1, 2, and 3—don’t just use the same pipe and fiddle used by the Disney pigs, but are deliberately modeled after the cute little cupids in the Pastoral Symphony section, even striking some similar poses. The Big Bad Wolf not only dons various disguises, as did the Disney wolf, but is modelled after the alligator in the Dance of the Hours segment.

It’s amusing, if you’ve seen Fantasia. If you haven’t—well, the cartoon does contain several other gags, including the one where a watching bird waits for Pig 3 to build a nice brick wall and then comes and puts a straw nest right on top of it, because, bird. And the one where Pig 1 and Pig 2 seem to be falling for the Big Bad Wolf’s seductive dance—only to dart out wearing evil expressions, his costume and, uh, his tambourine, which has somehow turned into two tambourines, and the one revealing that the Big Bad Wolf has somehow or other been balancing a record player on his butt while playing the violin, like, this sort of dedication to a role demands respect. Yes, yes, I know he’s only going to these lengths and using this awkward angle in order to kill the little pigs, but, respect, Wolf, respect.

The cartoon has other minor delights—the way Pigs 1 and 2 manage to twirl themselves into actual knots watching the Big Bad Wolf dance around them, or the way the sticks used by the second pig to build his house are actually matches—allowing the Wolf to use the matches on the straw house later, burning it down instead of blowing it down. Or the way the pigs hand the wolf some mouthwash. Or the way the cartoon and its characters are cleverly, perfectly matched to the music. Oh, the cartoon has the usual Looney Tones/Merrie Melodies incomprehensible moments—I would really like to know why such a small brick house needs an elevator, for instance, although since it’s mocking a cartoon where a pig was playing a piano made of bricks, I suppose I shouldn’t complain all that much. It’s a parody.

And one that’s readily available nearly everywhere, thanks to United Artists’ failure to renew its copyright on time. You can find it in a number of WB cartoon collections and on YouTube and Vimeo.

Parents should, however, be cautioned that the cartoon uses some stereotyped imagery associated with gypsies, presumably because of the “Hungarian” part of the Hungarian Dances, or because the Disney cartoon had also featured the Wolf dressing in stereotyped costume.

Its very existence must have been at least somewhat galling to Walt Disney, who had pioneered the musical cartoon genre with the various Silly Symphony cartoons, but who at this point was not just still losing money on Fantasia hand over fist, but stuck making war cartoons and the deeply weird The Three Caballeros (1944), none of which were exactly projects of his heart.

The next short at least didn’t spend quite as much time mocking beloved Disney projects—though it, too, had a Disney connection, if one that can kindly be called a bit of a stretch. This was the 1949 The Windblown Hare, starring no less of a personage than the great Bugs Bunny himself. The connection? Two of the designers of Bugs Bunny, Charlie Thorson and Bob Givens, had both trained at the Disney animation studios before heading to Warner Bros; Clark Gable, one of the many inspirations for Bugs Bunny, had sung “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf,” from the earlier Disney cartoon, in It Happened One Night (1934).

The Windblown Hare opens on the three little pigs reading their own story, which I must say is a clever way to avoid problems. They immediately realize that they need to dump their straw and stick houses before the wolf arrives—and fortunately find a sucker almost immediately: Bugs Bunny. This is an earlier, rougher, Bugs Bunny, one who is delighted to fork over $10 for a straw house, since he wants something more than his hole. It’s a not particularly veiled reference to a relatively common practice then and now—trapping unsuspecting buyers into paying far more than a property is worth—and ridding the seller of a major problem.

Unfortunately for Bugs, the Big Bad Wolf is also reading the story, anxiously practicing his lines, convinced that he has to follow it, because, well, it’s in the book. He blows down first the straw house, and then the stick house, in both cases, crushed to discover that they do not have any pigs. What they do have is a Bugs Bunny, announcing: “Of course, you know, THIS MEANS WAR.”

War, the way Bugs Bunny does it, involves disguising himself as Little Red Riding Hood and forcing the Wolf to try to catch up to that part of the story. Fortunately, in true Looney Tunes fashion, a convenient sign pointing to a SHORTCUT TO GRANDMA’S HOUSE appears just in time—though the Wolf is running so late that the doesn’t have time to eat an indignant Grandma.

It does not take Bugs and Wolf too long to admit that they are not, actually, Grandma and Little Red Riding Hood, although they do need a bit of classic Looney Tunes chasing before they can finally get down to grievances and realize who the true culprits here are: the pigs. And off they head to the brick house—with a bit of dynamite.

This is not, it must be said, one of the all-time great Bugs Bunny cartoons, or even a second rate Bugs Bunny cartoon, which might explain why although Warner Bros records show that The Windblown Hare was put into production and completed in 1947, it was not released for a couple of years. But like most of the Bugs Bunny cartoons, it’s at least amusing, and I do like the twist of all of the characters interacting with their own story—and deciding that yeah, no, they are going to go with their own plot. Not to mention a version which does not show the first two pigs as lazy fools who deserve their fate, who are only saved by a grumpy if cleverer pig.

But WB saved the best of their Three Little Pigs cartoons for last: The Three Little Bops (1957), released under the Looney Tunes label. Like Pigs in a Polka, it was directed by Friz Freleng, and largely animated by Gerry Chiniquy and Bob Matz. And it just may be one of Freleng’s masterpieces.

Like that earlier cartoon, The Three Little Bops centers on a musical number. But this time, instead of a classical piece, Freleng built the cartoon on an original song, the jazzy, west coast swing “The Three Little Bops.” The song, melody and lyrics, is credited to jazz musician and trumpeter Shorty Rogers, who would go on from here to compose music for various films and arrange songs for the Monkees. Friz Freleng, however, took credit for the script in later interviews, and since the entire cartoon is sung-through, it’s entirely possible that Freleng wrote the lyrics to a melody and arrangement by Shorty Rogers. Considerable confusion also remains over who, exactly, is playing which instrument at any given time, although Shorty Rogers presumably did all of the trumpet bits, and Friz Freleng apparently sung pretty much the entire cartoon.

That makes this, incidentally, the only WB cartoon of the period to not feature the voice of Mel Blanc at least once. I have no idea why—perhaps Mel Blanc was busy recording elsewhere when Freleng and the other musicians recorded the song, or perhaps he just didn’t want to sing. Regardless, Freleng’s choice to sing and direct a cartoon that has no other dialogue except for the song—a song he may have partly written—makes this arguably one of the ultimate Freleng cartoons, if not the ultimate one.

Enough about the credits. The cartoon starts by telling us to “Remember the story of the three little pigs. One played a pipe and the others danced jigs,” immediately contradicting not just the original folktale but all of the earlier pig cartoons, but let us move on. The pigs, we are told, are still around, but now playing music with a modern sound. Which means, it seems, giving up the flute and fiddle for saxophone, drums, guitar, double bass and piano. The drummer pig looks particularly ecstatic throughout almost the entire cartoon, except when he has to switch instruments or throw a wolf out of a dance club, but I anticipate.

Anyway, the pigs are playing, the humans are dancing, and the wolf, impressed with the pigs’ musical talent, announces he’s joining their band. Alas, even in the gifted hands of Shorty Rogers, the wolf is, well, just awful. The pigs toss him out of the club, infuriating the wolf: “They stopped me before I could go to town—so I’ll huff and puff and blow their house down!”

The pigs, unmoved, find another place to play—”The Dew Drop Inn, the house of sticks, the three little pigs were giving out licks!” and look, you know, this is theoretically a kids-friendly cartoon, so I’m just going to leave that there, right along with the Liberace comment, though if you want to read or sing something into this, go right ahead. The wolf, not worried about the implications of the lyrics or Liberace, tries to join the band again. It fails. The wolf blows down this venue too. The pigs conclude, “So we won’t be bothered by his windy tricks, the next place we play must be made of bricks!”

That leaves the wolf with only one recourse: disguises. A recourse that might have worked better had he not, apparently, received his Disguise Training from Wile E. Coyote—the products he uses may not come from Acme, but they have more or less the same results.

On the other hand, once in hell, the Big Bad Wolf finally—finally—learns how to play the trumpet, teaching the pigs—and us—an important lesson about morals and music:

“The Big Bad Wolf, he learned the rule—you gotta get hot to play real cool!”

There’s so much to be said about this cartoon, from its clever incorporation of the original “huff and puff” lines from the original story to this, to its frequently clever lyrics (I’ve left most of the best of them out), to the hilarious disguise sequences, to the sheer joy on the faces of all three pigs, to the way even tiny moments are perfectly syncopated to the ongoing beat, to the indignant square drawn by one of the pigs to describe the wolf, to the way that the wolf tries to join in a jazz/swing music session by… opening music, a complete no-no for jazz groups at the time, to the clever ending.

It helps, too, that pretty much every character in the cartoon is highly sympathetic—the pigs just want to be able to play their gigs in peace, the wolf just wants to play the trumpet, and the humans just want to dance—meaning that the happy ending is satisfying for everyone.

Oh, certainly, I’ve seen an interpretation of the cartoon that reads it as a less happy commentary on white musicians taking over black jazz. And I gotta admit, the moral message here—wanna join a band? Then be evil enough to get sent to hell!—is perhaps not exactly the message most parents want given to their small children. Morality aside, however, I’d still rate this as one of the most entertaining of the classic WB cartoons, and my hands down favorite retelling of the Three Little Pigs, ever.

Audiences did not immediately agree—possibly because the short doesn’t feature any of the well-known WB cartoon characters or Mel Blanc. The song, however, began to be covered by other jazz musicians and artists, gaining popularity in its own right, and reinvigorating interest in the cartoon. Warner Bros eventually included it in their list of the 100 greatest Looney Tunes/Merrie Melody cartoons, which meant various releases on DVD/Blu-ray collections.

That—and Warner Bros’ success at renewing the copyright for this cartoon short on time—also means that this short is considerably harder to track down, but it’s available at both Amazon and iTunes streaming as part of Looney Tunes All Stars, bundled together with yet another cartoon short featuring the Big Bad Wolf—this one the less successful The Trial of Mr. Wolf, that is, the Big Bad Wolf of “Little Red Riding Hood, not Pigs in a Polka or any of the other Three Pigs cartoons, despite looking and sounding suspiciously familiar to all of them and despite having a compass that would allow him to find the homes of the Three Little Pigs. Suspicious. In any case, you can watch both cartoons, or just fast forward to The Three Little Bops, and have a much better time, or just hope that it pops up on Cartoon Network at some point. In any case, if you have any fondness for animation, or pigs, or swing music, I’d recommend giving it a try.

In the meantime, with four posts dedicated to this fairy tale, I think it’s time to say “Thaaatttt’ssss allllllll fffffffffffffooooooooooolllllllllllkkkks!”

(What? I’ve always wanted to end a post that way.)

Mari Ness lives in central Florida.

Aisha Un-Haad is out of options. Her parents are dead, her brother is dying of a terrible disease, and her sister is about to start working in the dangerous dyeworks. Without money, their lives will get exponentially worse. Aisha does the only thing she can: surrender her freedom to become a mechanically enhanced soldier. Called Scelas, they are living weapons for the oppressive regime that rules the fleet of generation ships on which the last humans live.

Key Tanaka has little memory of her life before becoming a Scela or what drove her to undergo the life-threatening procedure. Aisha wants to protect her family, and Key to unlock her missing memories. In order to do that they and their teammates, willful Praava and awkward Woojin, must join the ranks of the Scela elite. But what happens when they’re ordered to kill, maim, and conspire against citizens at the behest of a corrupt leadership? Body horror, issues of consent, and body dysmorphia abound in this tense novel.

With each chapter alternating POV between Aisha and Key, the reader has plenty of time to get to know their quirks, dreams, and fears. In the beginning, I was all Aisha all the time. Key’s personality was mostly just glowering, but her counterpart had a fresh perspective and intriguing layers. By the end, however, my opinion had flip-flopped. Aisha became the taciturn, grumpy co-star while Key was bursting with energy and drive. On the other hand, Wooj and Praava lack enough character development to make their subplots click, but at least Key and Aisha have other people to bounce off of.

I could’ve also used more exploration. The concepts buttressing the worldbuilding are excellent, but we don’t get to see that much of the actual world. We’re told about how the fleet is stratified into a classist hierarchy of seven tiers, but only get solid descriptions of the interiors and societies of a couple ships. The rest are nothing more than passing names. I have no clue how many ships or people are in the fleet, or for that matter why any fleet would need to dedicate an entire ship to a dyeworks of all things. And given how vital the Scela are to the story, it’s frustrating to have our knowledge of them limited to our quartet and their supervisor. How many Scela are there? Are they mostly adults or young people? How often are Scela created? How could a fleet afford expend so many resources (especially such costly and difficult to manufacture resources) on a procedure that is rarely successful?

Skrutskie has a lot to say about classism in Hullmetal Girls. Those in the lowest tiers live in the worst conditions and do the hardest jobs all so those in the top tiers can live a life of ease and comfort. Those in power have a vested interest in maintaining the system, no matter that it means society as a whole suffers. Talk about real-world parallels.

Although the classism conversation isn’t especially new, the context in which it was placed was refreshing. There are hints of new Star Wars, The Hunger Games, Ender’s Game, The Expanse, and the Battlestar Galactica reboot. The familiarity is comforting even as it makes the plot rather predictable. I’m not convinced the final act fully supports Skrutskie’s point about classism, but if nothing else it’s action-packed and emotional.

What Hullmetal Girls does best is diversity. There’s class differences, obviously. The majority of the characters appear to be Asian and Middle Eastern. Aisha is a deeply religious even though it conflicts with her Scela enhancements. Out of the quartet, only one is cishet; the others are pansexual, trans and straight, and asexual and aromantic. There is a missed opportunity to include disabilities and mental health issues, but frankly the same could be said about just about every YA book.

Queerness often operates as a plot point in fiction, and by doing so it sets up a situation where being queer is the only thing the character is allowed to be. Intersectionality is sacrificed rather than blended in. Fortunately that is not an issue here. No one shames the queer characters, makes offensive comments, demands justifications or explanations, or tries to “fix” them. For Aisha, her religious and class identities have larger impacts on her relationship with the Scela exo—and therefore the main plot—than her sexual, romantic, or racial/ethnic identities, although all are part of who she is.

Buy it Now

Hugely important to me personally is the asexual and aromantic rep. Too often YA chooses one or the other—the character is either asexual and alloromantic or allosexual and aromantic, but usually the former. As an ace/aro woman of color, I practically fell out of my seat when I found out one of the protagonists is like me. Different races but still. Characters are rarely ever asexual and aromantic, and the rate reduces even further with characters of color. In Hullmetal Girls, Aisha is not only ace/aro but she is also happy with her identity. Crucially, so is everyone else. It’s super unusual for a character under the ace umbrella to simply exist with their identity, to not have to justify or explain their identity or have it challenged or discounted by others.

The book could have more deeply explored each character’s experiences with queerness without centering the plot on LGBTQ issues. And good inclusion does not excuse the shakier elements of the novel’s construction. That being said, I get so little positive ace/aro rep that I was more willing to overlook the areas where Skrutskie struggled than others might be. Hullmetal Girls isn’t perfect, but if you want queer teen cyborgs of color battling systematic oppression then you can hardly go wrong.

Hullmetal Girls is available from Delacorte Press.

Alex Brown is a YA librarian by day, local historian by night, pop culture critic/reviewer by passion, and an ace/aro Black woman all the time. Keep up with her every move on Twitter, check out her endless barrage of cute rat pics on Instagram, or follow along with her reading adventures on her blog.

At one point in my new novella The Million, our hero Gavin is crossing Europe by airship. Gazing out the windows, he sees this:

There were no settlements. Elephants, boars, lions, and the ancient bull of legend, the aurochs, wandered at will. Now and then the zeppelin would pass one of the museum cities. Often, nothing remained but the cathedrals, which had been built to last. Some cities had been tended well, and thousands of years of architectural glory were on display, all of it lovingly tended by the bots that walked their plazas and alleys.

Dusk chased the sun into France and Iberia, and the Alps rolled by. Their peaks were the last to catch the light, and the mountaintops blazed like a thousand bonfires for a few minutes before night fell entirely. Now the land below was invisible, cloaked in a blackness it had not seen while the cities had been inhabited. The sky blazed with stars and the Milky Way bannered across them like a conqueror’s flag.

It’s an empty world. But The Million is not a post-apocalyptic dystopia. On the contrary, The Million could be our best hope, and the Earth’s.

There’s a term that futurists use: “the default future.” The default future is what we assume is going to happen, as a matter of obvious fact. Its assumptions are so deeply ingrained that we don’t even know they’re there. For instance, current popular culture typically imagines one of just three possible future Earths: an Orwellian dystopia, a post-apocalyptic wasteland, or a space-faring urban hypercivilization. It seems to be really hard for people to think out of this particular box; the default future of the 1960s was exactly what Gene Rodenberry wanted to challenge when he crafted Star Trek’s future as post-scarcity, post-racist and post-war. At the time, many people were shocked and even outraged at his vision.

I’m as prone to thinking in defaults as anyone; I set Lady of Mazes in a settled Solar system that has a population of seventy billion people—a pretty standard “Tomorrowland” scenario. That made for some great worldbuilding, but at some point, while writing the book, I began to wonder what all those seventy trillion were for:

“You’re wallpaper, Ishani,” said Charon. “You can’t have a thought that a million other people aren’t having, you can’t do anything that a million other people aren’t also doing. It doesn’t matter what you say or whether you live or die because a million other you’s are there to take your place. So why should I care what you do to me? You’re wallpaper.”

I began to realize that I was living in a labyrinth without exits. You see that you have a choice: either exist as wallpaper, and accept that there’s nothing you can do that hasn’t been done before, nothing you can say that hasn’t been said, nothing you can think that a million others aren’t thinking right this second… or else, allow inscape to craft some unique, fulfilling, and utterly unreal fantasy world for you to live in. Any attempt to fight the system becomes part of the system. There is no escape.

One day I thought: why should humanity expand limitlessly? Why not go the other way? …And so, I stumbled out of my own default future.

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In The Million, there are only one million people on Earth; only one million are allowed. This small population has inherited all of humanity’s wealth, history, art and riches. What this means is that the museum cities that Gavin passes over aren’t entirely empty; they are family homes, and the regions he passes—Brittany, Burgundy, Champagne; Fribourg, Lucerne, Bavaria—these are people’s yards.

This might all sound crazy, but I submit that it only seems that way because it’s the opposite of our default future. We assume that prosperity, success, and sustainability are tied directly to growth—of physical wealth, of our mastery of nature, of knowledge and technology—but also growth in population. There was probably a time when this was true: for the struggling empires of the nineteenth century, population was power. At this very moment, it’s probably also true; but is it going to continue to be, even in the near future of our own lifetimes?

Automation is maintaining our quality of life while reducing the need for human labor. Meanwhile, it seems that family sizes naturally decline when women are educated and in control of their own fertility, and people’s nutrition and health care are taken care of. In fact, we’ve got a pretty good idea of the maximum number of humans that will ever simultaneously live on this planet, and it’s not much more than we’ve got now. Walter Greiling projected 9 billion back in the 1950s, and recent projections are similar. Our cities are getting more crowded, but it’s because more people are moving into them, not because there are that many more people. Two billion will join us before the mid-point of the century, and then, we level off.

But should we? Sharing the wealth among nine billion will be hard. In many nations, birth-rates are on the decline. Shouldn’t we encourage that trend?

Here’s a proposal: let’s get smaller. Imagine a future where the economy is increasingly automated and taps into the infinite resources of outer space; and where humanity shares a core of common goods such as Universal Basic Income, Universal Healthcare, and free education. These aren’t fantasies, they’re trends. Now add to this mix a naturally declining population that retains its genetic diversity. The formula for our future becomes: more and more wealth, divided among fewer and fewer people.

In material terms alone, the results are staggering. Imagine if your family owned Paris? Or was responsible for tending the Catskill Mountains? What does wealth mean when robotics, automation and AI mean that each person can have, not money or an income, but his or her own economy? When kids learn history by reenacting the Battle of the Somme with real robot armies? When you don’t watch movies, you have the entire story including sets, car chases and crowd scenes, played out for you by troops of android players?

For some people, whether this is a Utopia or nightmare scenario depends entirely on whether Earth’s remaining million are people they’d approve of. Some cling to the belief that humanity is fighting a titanic struggle, a zero-sum war between civilizations, cultures, races or religions. The Million will be paradise if Our Guys are the only ones left standing, but Hell if it’s the Other Guys.

A funny thing happens, though, when you imagine shrinking our population down like this—to a billion, a million, or even further (though I didn’t call the story The Thousand, that possibility did cross my mind). As our numbers decrease, the value of our diversity increases. The Million is a lens through which we can see ever more clearly, and regret even more, the crimes our ancestors committed in wiping out entire civilizations. The libraries of Alexandria and of the Mayans were burned; thousands of languages have gone extinct, taking with them millennia of wisdom. How much art and music have we expunged over the ages? And if we were to continue? It could all go, save for the bland entertainments of that tiny leftover, a rump human race blinking stupidly in the ruins.

Or, it could go another way.

When you play the game of reducing humanity, the obvious question becomes what quantity do you stop at, and why? What’s the smallest viable future human population? The lower limit isn’t set by population genetics (because we can now bank our DNA to guarantee a pool of diversity), nor by any threat of extinction (because for every credible threat, a rich technological civilization can design a countermeasure). I see two criteria that can help us set the limit; both are interesting, and surprisingly Utopian.

First, as E.O. Wilson has pointed out in his powerful book Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life, our current civilization has wildly overrun our planet’s ecological carrying capacity. We could indulge a post-scarcity fantasy and propose an Earth with billions of people on it who live in a regreened natural world. But we’d have to explain how Earth can be post-scarcity for the trees, grasslands, and animals while we’re still sprawled all over the real estate. Wilson’s solution is to give half the planet back to nature; it’s hard to imagine how to do this without crowding all of us into some kind of planetary ghetto. Reducing our population works better for everybody.

Secondly, there’s that matter of the zero-sum game. The model of civilizational warfare makes no sense if you consider all of our human accomplishments to be treasures. The rope bridges of the Inca and the Egyptian pyramids, the story cycles of the Haida and the paintings of Rembrandt—they’re all part of humanity’s inheritance. The Million could be the inheritors.

How few people does it take to appreciate and keep alive the full splendor of human achievement?—our languages, cultures, artistic and dramatic forms, and knowledge? There’s more than one way to be rich, and while our descendants may inherit increasing material wealth with their declining population, they will risk becoming poor in spirit. That’s the danger.

This is why, in The Million, each citizen is expected to do their part to preserve and celebrate humanity’s history and diversity, even while creating new splendors. Who wants to live in a world where everybody looks and thinks the same, sings the same songs, tells the same stories? The Million are a permanent explosion of creativity, all of them mastering old forms while exploring new ones. From dance to dueling, tea ceremony to architecture, everybody does something. In other words, this is not a future of pointless indulgences and decadent indolence. In this world, the value of the individual skyrockets, because each person is responsible for some part of the very real accomplishments of our ancestors, and has a duty to make their own generation meaningful in turn. The Million work very hard, because they have the heritage of our species resting on their shoulders. They haven’t just inherited our wealth, but have taken on the responsibility for justifying its perpetuation.

This, then, is my answer to the default future. I’ve only just started exploring it; many of the questions I’ve asked above get short-shrift in this first novella. But there’ll be more. Now that I’ve glimpsed it, I’m going to write more stories in this universe, just to see what happens.

Of course, nobody owns the future. I hope you’ll go exploring, too.

Karl Schroeder is an author and futurist whose publications include New York Times Notable Book Ventus as well as the critically acclaimed Virga series. His 2014 novel Lockstep is set in the same universe as The Million.  Karl lives in Toronto, Ontario with wife, daughter, and several eccentric animals.

NPR has done us a great service! In honor of the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, they asked all of us who love being scared to nominate their favorite horror tales, and assembled a fantastic panel of judges to select the 100 most terrifying. Their picks include everything from classics like Dracula, The Haunting of Hill House, and the aforementioned Frankenstein, to more modern scary stories like Let the Right One In, The Ballad of Black Tom, and Experimental Film. We’re especially excited to see a number of friends-of-Tor in this chilling compilation, including Sarah Monette, Victor LaValle, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Nalo Hopkinson, Kai Ashante Wilson, and Ann and Jeff VanderMeer.

Think you can get through all 100 by Halloween?

The choices were divided into categories so you can find your flavor of horror with ease: “Foundational Horror” includes classic tales from Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” to Le Fanu’s early vampire novel, Carmilla. “Cosmic Horror And Weird Fiction” covers H.P. Lovecraft’s sprawling Mythos and its modern interpretations, while “Fantasy And Fairy Tale Horror” helps you meet all of your Angela Carter-based needs. “Real World Horrors” hit a little close to home, and include mainstream crossovers Beloved and The Handmaid’s Tale. Plus, in an ingenious bit of curation, they’ve provided two kid-centric lists: Rosemary’s Baby and other titles under “Creepy Kids” will make you side-eye your offspring, but you can also set them down the path to loving horror with the awesome suggestions in “Scar Your Children: Horror For Beginners.”

It’s also worth noting that out of nearly 7,000 nominations, 1,023 of them were for Stephen King. The panel had the onerous task of narrowing the field down to just one story and one novel from the esteemed author, just to leave room for a few other people.

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And we might be a little biased, but we think the panel was extraordinary in its own right: Stephen Graham Jones, author of Mapping the Interior; Ruthanna Emrys, author of the Innsmouth Legacy series and co-writer of our own Lovecraft Reread; Tananarive Due, author of My Soul to Keep and horror professor whose lecture on Get Out became a viral college course; and the fabulous Grady Hendrix, author of Horrorstör and My Best Friend’s Exorcism, and writer of the now complete Great Stephen King Reread (plus our staff-favorite Under the Dome recaps). The judges also made the fair-minded decision to disqualify their own work, so consider this our recommendation that you go forth and read all of their writing, too.

Head over to NPR to freak yourself out with the full list!

Readers of a certain age may remember the excitement stirred up when various physicists proposed to add a third category of matter to:

• A. matter with zero rest mass (which always travels at the speed of light), and
• B. matter with rest mass (which always travels slower than light).

Now there’s C: matter whose rest mass is imaginary. For these hypothetical particles—tachyons—the speed of light may be a speed minimum, not a speed limit.

Tachyons may offer a way around that pesky light-speed barrier, and SF authors quickly noticed the narrative possibilities. If one could somehow transform matter into tachyons, then faster-than-light travel might be possible.

Granted, that’s a very big ‘if’ and, for reasons explained in this essay, tachyon drives are NOT a means of travel I’d ever use. But hey, the siren song of narrative convenience overrides all the wimpy what-ifs. Sure, getting every single elementary particle comprising the spaceship to transform simultaneously (whatever simultaneously means) could be tricky, but who wouldn’t risk being turned into goo if one could avoid spending decades or centuries travelling between stars? Fred Pohl’s Jem used tachyon conversion to get his near-future humans to a nearby star and the adventure awaiting them there.

Of course, even if tachyons didn’t permit faster-than-light travel, they might facilitate faster-than-light communication. Perhaps it would still take decades to get anywhere interesting, but at least one could talk to other entities on distant worlds. Sometimes, as in a Poul Anderson story whose title escapes me, this could facilitate doomed romances across distances too vast to cross. With a high enough bandwidth, one could even remote-control rented bodies, as postulated in Pohl and Williamson’s Farthest Star.

Farthest Star also explores the notion that one might record someone’s molecular pattern and beam it to a distant location, to be reconstituted there upon arrival. If one didn’t destroy the original while scanning it, one might even be able to create duplicate after duplicate to engage in high risk missions…

That’s all very well for the original. The copies might have a different perspective.

Any faster-than-light travel or communication also has the drawback (or feature, depending on your perspective) of allowing travel or communication with the past. Which leads to some interesting possibilities:

• This could change history: all efforts at reform, for instance, could be annulled by any fool with a time machine.
• Perhaps we would find that history is fixed, and we’re all puppets dancing to a pre-ordained script.
• Or perhaps time branches, in which case it sure is silly to have spent as much time as you did making important decisions while different versions of you were embracing all conceivable options.

The classic example of an intertemporal communication plot would be Gregory Benford’s Timescape, in which a scientist finds out what happens when one beams information into the past. I am not saying what happens, but it’s not happy. (Well, perhaps from a certain point of view…)

A 1970s paper whose title I have forgotten (and spent hours of poking through Google Scholar to find, and failed) drew my attention to another possible application, one that any M/m = e^{delta v/exhaust v}-obsessed teen must have found as exciting as I did. IF we had a means to eject tachyons in a directional beam, we could use them to propel a rocket!¹

Now, these tachyon-propelled rockets couldn’t break the speed of light—though they might get close to it. Regardless of the means of propulsion, the ships themselves are still subject to relativity, and nothing with a rest mass that is not imaginary can reach the speed of light. But what they could do is provide extremely high delta-vs without having to carry massive amounts of fuel.

And the very best thing? If the tachyons emit Cherenkov radiation, then tachyon rockets would emit that blue glow seen in so many cinematic magical mystery drives.

Cerenkov radiation surrounding the underwater core of the Reed Research Reactor; photo courtesy of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission

Tachyon rockets are therefore ideal from the perspective of SF writers². They are, in fact, a replacement for our lost and lamented friend, the unrealistically effective Bussard ramjet.

Curiously, aside from one essay by John Cramer, and one novel, Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War ³, if SF authors did leap on the narrative potential of the tachyon rocket, they’ve been doing so in books I have not yet read. Pity.

Top photo courtesy Argonne National Laboratory.

1: In some frames of reference. In other frames, it would look as if the beam were pushing the ship. Agreeing on what happened and in what order it happened becomes problematic once one adds FTL to the mix—good news for people like me, who have trouble keeping tenses straight from one end of sentence to the other.

2: Well, there are a couple of minor catches. One is that there is no evidence that tachyons exist. Some might go so far as to say the evidence suggests they don’t. As if “there is no evidence this stuff exists” ever stopped SF authors from using wormholes, jump drives, or psychic teleportation. Also, some models suggest any universe that has tachyons in it is only metastable and might tunnel down to a lower state of energy at any moment, utterly erasing all evidence of the previous state of being. Small price to pay for really efficient rockets, I say.

3: “Wait, didn’t they travel faster than light in The Forever War?” I hear you ask. They did, but not thanks to the tachyon rockets. Ships circumvented vast distances by flinging themselves headlong into black holes (called collapsars in the novel). As one does. In The Forever War, this was not a baroque means of suicide; ships did re-emerge from distant collapsars. So, a slightly different version of wormholes. The tachyon rockets in the novel provided the means to get to the black holes, which were often inconveniently far from the destinations humans wanted to reach.

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.

Somaiya Daud’s debut epic fantasy novel Mirage follows Amani, an eighteen-year-old dreamer living in a world controlled by the all powerful Vathek empire. All Amani wants is freedom: freedom to explore, write poetry, and travel to far off places. These dreams are shattered when Amani is kidnapped from her small village and taken to the royal palace, where she must act as a body double for the beautiful, but hated, Princess Maram. Amani’s new life comes with luxury, glamour, and the Princess’s stunning fiance, Idris. But it also comes with the understanding that at any moment, Amani must be prepared to sacrifice her life for the Princess.

Daud stopped by the Macmillan Audio studio to talk everything Mirage: from how her own Moroccan roots inspired this story, to how her writing bridges the gaps between sci-fi, fantasy, and history. She also explained how the audiobook enhances the novel’s poetic language and how Rasha Zamamiri’s narration brings the voices Somaiya imagined for her characters to life.

Listen below!

Mirage is available August 28th from Flatiron Books—get the audio edition here, or pre-order the physical and ebook editions at the links below!

Following the wrap up of Star Wars: Rebels, there are two new animated Star Wars series on the way; one is a revival of the much beloved Clone Wars, the other is a show that leads up to events in the current ongoing trilogy, Star Wars: Resistance.

The first trailer is here!

We’ve got some Voltron-style animation, some Legend of Korra-esque characters, and Poe Dameron to pull the whole thing together. Take a peek:

Given the success of the past two series, the show seems like a sure thing at this point. Granted, it usually takes them about a season for them to pick up speed, so we might have to reserve judgement until we’ve seen a bigger bulk of episodes, but it’s still exciting! Having Poe Dameron around to occasionally help our new heroes bluster through will certainly help things along. Just… don’t think about it… any of it. You heard him.

And we won’t have long to wait on this one! Star Wars: Resistance will premiere on the Disney Channel on October 7th (and will presumably be available to stream or buy thereafter).