Good day (or night depending on your time zone), faithful rereaders! Welcome back to Roshar for a… well, I was going to say “a very special episode of the Oathbringer Reread,” but let’s be honest, there’s nothing too terribly special going on in this chapter, unless you count parental abandonment “special.” We’ll be doing a bit of theorizing about the Thrill as well as lots of discussion about the Kholin family dynamics, so roll up your sleeves and prepare those comments as we dive in.

Reminder: we’ll potentially be discussing spoilers for the ENTIRE NOVEL in each reread. There are no broader Cosmere spoilers in this particular article, but if you haven’t read ALL of Oathbringer, best to wait to join us until you’re done.

Chapter Recap

WHO: Dalinar (flashback)
WHERE: Somewhere along the southern part of the Alethi-Veden border
WHEN: 1155, eighteen and a half years ago

Dalinar is returning to camp, exhausted after a long battle, when he hears an unexpected voice. Evi has come to visit after not having heard from him in a long time, and she’s brought both of his sons along—Adolin, who is old enough to talk, and little Renarin, whom Dalinar hasn’t even met.

The Singing Storm

Title: After His Father

“Re,” Evi said. “From my language. Nar, after his father. In, to be born unto.”

AA: The title quotation comes from Evi’s explanation of Renarin’s name; poor girl, she tried to make a good Alethi name. In context, though, Adolin is the one who takes after his father. His toy sword, his salute, his desire to win his own Shardblade, all show a child who wants to be like Dad.

Heralds

The sole Herald for this chapter is Talenel: Herald of War, Soldier, patron of Stonewards, with the divine attributes of Dependable and Resourceful.

AA: We need look no further than the first two titles to understand why he’s here; this chapter is about Dalinar as the soldier, and little Adolin who wants to be one. We could throw in “Resourceful” too, given Dalinar’s thoughts about the resources and planning that go into a successful military campaign.

Icon

Kholin Shield, Inverse—reflecting a flashback chapter

Stories & Songs

In fact, through his exhaustion, he was surprised to find that he could sense [the Thrill] still. Deep down, like the warmth of a rock that had known a recent fire.

AA: Such a cozy description of such a hostile entity. ::sighs::
Let’s look at the odd behavior of the Thrill here. Previously, we’ve seen Dalinar actively try to bring on the Thrill, and it dissipates soon after the fighting is over. This time, the fighting is long done, he’s exhausted, his Shardplate is removed, he’s resting… and it’s still there. Not raging, but still there, still connected to him.

That was Evi.

He leapt to his feet. The Thrill surged again within him, drawn out of its own slumber.

AA: Still connected, though he’s now dozing after receiving reports. Did it surge because of Dalinar’s adrenaline rush, or is it reacting directly to Evi? I assume the former, but I’m not 100% convinced. In any case, I think the Thrill is partially responsible for the way he roars at her.

AP: I’m not sure that the Thrill is entirely to blame here. Evi cringes away from Dalinar when she enters the tent, which indicates to me that this is perhaps something she is used to dealing with.

AA: Not entirely, sure, but the way it was described as “surging” makes me think that his reaction is Thrill-enhanced. (I don’t know about you, but I’d cringe away if my husband started roaring at me—not “because I’m used to it” but because it never happens and it would freak me out.) Not that it matters; it’s Dalinar’s lack of self-control either way.

He stood up, feeling … what? … The Thrill, still squirming deep down. How had it not dissipated since the battle?

AA: Still here—after a long conversation, a backrub, and a walk across the camp. Dalinar himself is surprised by it—and I don’t ever recall anyone thinking of the Thrill as “squirming.” That’s bizarre—and I wonder if it’s a reminder to the reader, and perhaps a hint to Dalinar, that it’s an actual entity rather than just a sensation.

Dalinar smiled, then stood up and dismissed Oathbringer. The last embers of the Thrill finally faded.

AA: That took a long time. Why? What is the significance? Why is it different? What has changed? It’s possible that this is coincidentally where Odium decided to set the hook, to form a deeper bond between Dalinar and Nergaoul; within the plot, I can’t think of any other reason. As a literary device, this is obviously setting us up for the way the Thrill stays with Dalinar throughout the Rathalas ambush and battle, since it would be awkwardly convenient to have that be the first time it stays with him for an extended time.

L: I wonder if it’s because he’s physically closer to the Unmade’s “body.” Proximity must play some part in the Thrill, right?

AP: I had the same thoughts about proximity.

AA: It could be. We had evidence from multiple perspectives that it was getting harder to trigger out on the Shattered Plains, and then in WoR we learned that it had flared in Jah Keved during their civil war. Taravangian was convinced that it was a matter of proximity of the Unmade, and thought that it had moved from the Shattered Plains to Vedenar. That wouldn’t be relevant eighteen years ago, though. So… maybe?

Relationships & Romances

This was his warcamp—here he was the Blackthorn. This was the place where his domestic life should have no purchase on him! By coming here, she invaded that.

L: This makes me so angry. It’s like the concept of the “man-cave”—a place where a man can “escape” from domestic life of wife and children. But in so doing, it’s implied that the woman continues to bear the burden she has all along anyway. She gets to clean the house and raise the children and cook the food, and that’s precisely what’s happening with Evi, here. Dalinar gets to go out and be “free” while she stays home to do the work that they should be doing together.

Okay, so… I admit I’m looking at this from a very modern feminist perspective. This isn’t how society would expect things to work in Alethkar, so it’s not really fair to judge Dalinar based on expectations that are entirely outside the norm of his society.

It still grinds my gears, though.

AP: Actually, I think that’s totally valid. He is choosing not to follow Alethi tradition, which would be to bring Evi with him. Even by Alethi standards he’s being a selfish jerk here. Evi’s rightful place is to be in the warcamp acting as a scribe and administrator. He’s not upholding his end of the deal.

AA: Alethi standards wouldn’t call this “selfish,” though. More like “stupid”—because by not having his wife there, he has to rely on other women for things that his wife would normally do. I’m not saying it’s not selfish; just that the Alethi wouldn’t call it that. Here’s his reason in his own words, though:

It would be good to have a wife with him, to scribe as was proper. He just wished that he didn’t feel so guilty at seeing her. He was not the man she wanted him to be.

AA: It’s guilt. He avoids her because of his own insecurity, not because he actually dislikes her. In a way, it’s selfish—in that he doesn’t feel so guilty about not living up to higher ideals, if she’s not there to remind him.

L: Okay, that’s a good point, though I don’t think it’s all guilt.

AP: Why not both? His affront at Evi invading his space is selfish, and he does, in his better moments, feel guilt that he’s not being the person he should be.

AA: Along with insecurity, guilt, and/or selfishness, I doubt it occurred to him that she’d want to be there instead of comfortably at home. She’s not Alethi by birth, and she’s built along much more delicate lines than Alethi women—both physically and emotionally. Toh certainly doesn’t want to be out there on the battlefield (which is a good thing), and Dalinar could readily assume that Evi doesn’t want to either. That’s a big part of Dalinar’s problem with Evi: he rarely thinks about what anyone else might want, except Gavilar. Or Navani, of course.

L: Empathy is most certainly not Dalinar’s strong point. Come to think of it, even present-day-Dalinar isn’t really terribly empathic. He cares about other people, yes, but… does he ever really put himself into their place in order to try to understand them? I can’t think of an instance in which he did. (This isn’t necessarily a critique so much as an observation of his character.)

AA: The single example that comes to mind is a few flashbacks ago when he was angry at Gavilar for ignoring Navani’s excitement about her researches.

“Navani said I should come,” Evi said, “She said it was shameful that you have waited so long between visits.”

AP: Good job, Navani! I think this highlights that even without bringing modern ideas of feminism Dalinar isn’t behaving appropriately here. He didn’t even respond to name his son.

AA: Their early interactions were awful, but from what she’s said in the main timeframe, it’s possible that by now Navani has come to like Evi, or at least wish her well. That said, I still look with suspicion at anything Navani (or worse, Ialai) recommends to Evi. I’m never confident that they’re telling her the whole truth. Did she really think Evi should go, or did she just think it would be a good joke?

AP: Hmm, I’m the opposite. Narratively I trust Navani much more than Dalinar.

L: I’m with Alice on this one, I absolutely don’t trust past!Navani.

“Renarin?” Dalinar said, trying to work out the name. “Rekher… no, Re…”

“Re,” Evi said. “From my language. Nar, after his father. In, to be born unto.”

AP: I like the different takes on Renarin’s name between Dalinar & Evi’s culture. To Evi, she has named him “Re, born unto (Dali)Nar”. From Dalinar’s perspective it’s “Like one who was born unto himself,” which does suit the young man he grows up to be, not really fitting into Alethi society. I hope to see Renarin forge more of his own path.

AA: As noted above, Evi stepped outside her own culture to come up with an Alethi name for Renarin. Rirans seem to have simple names, if Evi and Toh are any indication. (Ym, the Iriali shoemaker, has an even simpler name.) I wonder if she explained her reasoning to Navani and got her approval, or if she just did her best on her own.

“And little Renarin has never even met his father.”

L: It absolutely kills me that Dalinar has never met him. It explains so much about poor Renarin and how he views himself.

AA: Well, he’s only about a year old, so this wouldn’t affect their later relationship—or it wouldn’t, if Dalinar had chosen to handle it differently from here on out.

L: True. IF he’d chosen to. ::eyeroll::

“You didn’t answer,” Evi pointed out, “when I asked after a name via spanreed.”

How had Navani and Ialai allowed this travesty of a name?

L: Way to completely sidestep the question of blame at hand here, Dalinar. Why didn’t you find time to answer your wife’s messages?

AA: This (and the previous) was where I got mad, especially when combined with Dalinar’s earlier thought that he had “several letters from Evi that Teleb’s wife had read to him, with several more waiting to be read.” Not only has he lost track of the time since he was home, he hasn’t bothered to listen to multiple letters from his wife. Evi specifically says Adolin hasn’t seen his father in “over a year,” and Renarin is old enough to be walking. Has Dalinar been back to Kholinar since Renarin was conceived? Obviously he was aware that he had a second child, but that seems to be the extent of it.

“I wish to be a more Alethi wife. I want you to want me to be with you.”

AP: Oh Evi, this is heartbreaking.

L: I know, it’s so sad! It sucks because she deserves so much better. She deserves the man Dalinar becomes, but he could never become that without her loss. Which… huh. I hadn’t really thought of it in these terms before now, but… Evi’s pretty much the definition of a fridged woman, isn’t she? (Warning, that was a TV Tropes link, enter at your own risk.) In case you’re unfamiliar with the term and don’t want to fall down the TV Tropes rabbit hole, a “fridged” woman is a character whose only role in the story is to die (or be horrifically maimed) in order to inspire the protagonist. It’s considered problematic because of just how prevalent it is, and how overwhelmingly it’s women who are the ones to die for no purpose other than to spur someone else on to greatness.

AP: Oh absolutely, Evi’s whole part in the narrative is really sad. And even after everything, Dalinar didn’t really love her, and part of his guilt later is that he got a lot of credit for mourning his wife so deeply, when really he just couldn’t remember. It’s nothing like what he has with Navani, who has her own role in the narrative apart from her relationship with Dalinar. Sanderson has had a fair amount of criticism for how he wrote women earlier in his career, and thankfully most of the women in Stormlight Archive have their own agency, but I do feel like he failed Evi.

L: At least he has other women in the story with agency, who aren’t cardboard cutouts of tropes. I think fridging is marginally more acceptable when there’s a more gender-balanced main cast, but that’s my personal opinion on the matter.

AA: I don’t think Sanderson failed Evi at all. While her primary role (which we only see in flashbacks, mind you) was to set up Dalinar’s trip to the Nightwatcher etc., she was a woman who made her own decisions. We don’t yet know why she and Toh decided to run away with her Shardplate, but they left their home and traveled across the continent looking for sanctuary. Beyond that, IMO she did far more than just “die to inspire Dalinar.” She gave him a different perspective on the world, she framed the character of their sons, and in significant ways she shaped his character, even before her death. Ultimately, she made her own choice to do something she knew Dalinar would hate, when she went to Talanor to try to convince him to surrender. While she couldn’t know whether Talanor would offer parley nor whether Dalinar would accept it, it was her own independent choice to take the risk and go. She died for her decision. Yes, Dalinar did have a significant character shift as a result, but I see Evi as much more than a “fridged woman” trope. Personally.

AP: The point is that none of that is shown. We only have Evi as she exists from Dalinar’s, and Adolin’s, perspectives. She literally only exists in the narrative in the memories of the men whose lives she affected. It may be that in later books we are shown her heroic/villainous actions in leaving Rira with her brother, but for now, she got fridged.

AA: Gavilar only exists in the memories of others, too. Does that make him a fridged man?

Despite his harsh words, she unbuckled the top of his gambeson to get her hands under it, and began rubbing his shoulders.

It felt wonderful. He let his anger melt away.

L: This is definitely reading between the lines because Sanderson just… doesn’t write about this stuff, but they do seem to have mutual chemistry and sexual attraction, based on this and other little (tiny) hints scattered throughout. It appears to be all they have, really, except for Dalinar’s occasional desire to be “better” for her sake.

AP: That’s a lot of reading between the lines. It could also be Evi attempting once again to be a “good” wife.

L: I can’t help it, I was an English major, my entire college career was spent picking nuances out of tiny little hints! I can’t seem to untrain myself.

AP: Which is funny, because I do the same thing, but what I get from Evi are abused spouse vibes. She tries really hard to make Dalinar happy, without understanding what that really means to the Alethi.

L: That’s a completely fair reading of the situation as well. It could go either way, honestly, though basing it solely on textual clues I’d lean more towards your analysis. I’m tin-foil-hatting it.

AA: Well, I’ll disagree with you both, then. I think there are a number of indications that, while theirs is far from a perfect marriage relationship, they do care for each other in a meaningful way. Dalinar is really, really bad at understanding his foreign wife, and Evi is wildly out of her element among these aggressive Alethi, but they do care about one another.
There’s always been a physical attraction on Dalinar’s part; that was one of the first things he remembered when things started coming back. We should also not forget “So long as he could be a hero to this woman.” Her opinion of him, then and now, matters to Dalinar; he just doesn’t know how to balance his addiction to the Thrill, his duty to his brother, his innate enjoyment of battle, and his desire to please his wife. Sadly, the last one has the least leverage, since the first three team up so well against it.

As for Evi, of course she struggles to understand how to be a “good wife” to this Alethi berserker. You don’t simply abandon everything you ever learned because you move to another country; however much you consciously try to comprehend and emulate the culture you enter, there will always be assumptions and expectations that you don’t even think about until there’s a conflict. At this point, they’d only met about seven years ago, and have been married for six. (Correction: I’m not sure where my maths went, but they had met about twelve years ago, and have been married for about seven.) I don’t know about you two, but when I’d been married for six seven years, I had a lot left to learn about my husband, myself, and marriage in general. (For that matter, at 31 years I still have a lot left to learn.)
Which of those three views Sanderson had in mind, we don’t know and he probably won’t tell us. He seems to like letting us interpret these things as we choose. But I’m standing by my interpretation.

AP: Caring for each other and actually having chemistry are not the same. And you can care for your spouse and still fall into abusive patterns of behavior. It’s nothing like the relationship he is shown to have with Navani later where I do think there is a deeper fondness and mutual respect as well as physical attraction. Dalinar and Evi are a poor match.

[Adolin] got down safely, walked over.

And saluted.

L: My heart.

“He asked the best way to talk to you,” she whispered. “I told him you were a general, the leader of all the soldiers. He came up with that on his own.”

L: Sweet little Adolin, wanting to connect to his father so very badly, even this young!

AP: It’s telling that even at a very young age Adolin is able to connect to his father in a way that Evi can’t.

AA: I’m destined for the role of contrarian this week; it’s becoming comical. I think this moment is incredibly cute and all, but I still retain my first reaction to this scene. Dalinar seems nonplussed, and Evi is delighted by Adolin’s precociousness, but I can’t help thinking this is not a healthy greeting from a five-year-old who hasn’t seen his father for over a year.

L: In our society, no. But in Alethi society, where war is so predominant and soldiers are viewed as heroes?

Dalinar waited for the excitement he’d felt before, upon meeting Adolin for the first time… but storms, he was just so tired.

L: Poor Renarin. Always second, always overlooked, always on the outside. I’m so glad that he has Adolin for a brother, because at least he cares about Renarin instead of ignoring or bullying him like most older brothers in stories like this would do.

AP: Agreed, I very much like reading about their relationship.

AA: Yay! I get to agree!

“I’ll win you one in war, son.”

“No,” Adolin said, chin up. “I want to win my own. Like you did.”

L: He so wants to emulate his father—like most children do.

Bruised & Broken

Out here, he had a reward. At the end of all the planning, the strategy, and the debates with generals, came the Thrill.

AP: Dalinar is as much of a junkie as Teft, but he doesn’t realize it.

L: Not yet, anyway.

Places & Peoples

He’d crushed the Herdazians—sending them back to start a civil war, securing the Alethi lands to the north and claiming the island of Akak.

AP: Poor Herdazians. :( But also, this fits with Lopen’s family leaving Herdaz and settling in Alethkar when he was a baby. I hadn’t made the connection that it was Dalinar’s fault.

L: Well, Lopen certainly doesn’t seem to hold it against him.

The land here was lush compared to Kholinar. The thick grass was broken by sturdy stands of trees, and tangled vines draped the western cliff faces.

AA: There’s nothing hugely significant about this, other than that as you go west, vegetation flourishes. After spending most of the first two books on the Shattered Plains, and much of Oathbringer in Urithiru, it’s good to remember that not all of the planet is stark and inhospitable.

Meaningful/Moronic/Mundane Motivations

… he no longer had Gavilar to do the hard parts of this job. Dalinar had camps to supply, men to feed, and logistics to work out.

AA: Dalinar has matured. He used to be impatient with Gavilar, Sadeas, and their planning, and delighted in going rogue on them. Now he’s doing the planning. I like the change in him—but even more, I like the fact that Sanderson deals with it. Logistics as a discipline just isn’t sexy; many authors ignore it unless they need to justify an otherwise stupid delay in the timeline. That bugs me, so I’m glad to see it addressed. Also, Dalinar only has one Soulcaster, which he must reserve for emergencies instead of treating it as an infinite bag of food-holding, and it makes sense. In the “future,” the army took many of the kingdom’s Soulcasters to the Shattered Plains; this far back, though, Gavilar wouldn’t have had many, and couldn’t afford to risk them in border skirmishes.

“Could you not…let them surrender to you?”

AP: Oh Evi, you really don’t understand war. I wanted to include this because of how well it foreshadows what happens later in the Rift.

L: It’s actually really endearing to me how naive she is. Would that life could be that simple, you poor innocent child.

“I remember you. We talk about you every night when we burn prayers. So you will be safe. Fighting bad men.”

AA: I’m going to copy in my beta reaction to this: “Awww. Aside from being cute from Adolin, I love that Evi is teaching her sons to love and remember their father, and to think of him as a hero and a great general, even when on a personal level he’s being a pig to her. I really, really like Evi, and I’m going to ugly-cry all over the where, when she dies. You have been Warned.”

I did, of course. This also foreshadows a later flashback (Ch. 94), when Dalinar rails to himself over “how many lies about him [she had] stuffed into their heads,” only to find out that she’d done just the opposite of what he expected. She’d taught them, indeed, that he was “The only honest officer in the army, the honorable soldier. Noble, like the Heralds themselves. Our father. The greatest man in Alethkar.” Well, okay, maybe she had stuffed lies about him into their heads—but not the ones he thought.

Quality Quotations

The breastplate was cracked along the left side, and the armorers buzzed, discussing the repair. As if they had to do something other than merely give the Plate Stormlight and let it regrow itself.

AA: As if.

He’d somehow assembled “armor” from strings and bits of broken rockbud shell.

AA: Awww. We get to see his early interest in both fashion and fighting. Go, tiny Adolin!

… The boy spoke clearly—and dramatically—as he described his fallen enemies. They were, apparently, evil flying chulls.

AA: I love this child. Also, when do we get to see the legendary evil flying chulls?

L: Closest I can get, though FAR from evil.

AP: Voidbringers covered in carapace?

L: Oh shit, Aubree going for the serious foreshadowing while I go for silly memes. Well done.

Okay, we’ll stop arguing now, and let y’all take over in the comments. Just be sure to argue with the opinions and not attack the people, mmmm-kay? Thanks!

In case you missed it, earlier this week we posted the 1000th-member-celebration questions Brandon answered for the Storm Cellar. It’s at comment #105 in the Chapter 50 & 51 reread. Some interesting stuff there…

Looking ahead to next week, we’ll be reading Chapter 53, joining Jasnah and a flock of scholars, stormwardens, Radiants, and a few oddballs in the basement library again. Confrontations and discoveries, ahoy!

Alice has one small bit of advice for you from a friend’s recent winetasting: “Never yuk on someone else’s yum.” Take it to heart, for it is deep and profound, and tastes good with ketchup. (Oh, oops, that’s about meddling in the affairs of evil flying chulls, isn’t it? Something like that. Sorry.)

Lyndsey finally has a working outline for her NaNoWriMo novel, and not a moment too storming soon. If you’re an aspiring author, a cosplayer, or just like geeky content, follow her work on Facebook or her website.

Aubree is. Or is not. Best not open the box to check.

“Acting per se, like all art, is a process of abstracting, of retaining only significant detail. But in impersonation any detail can be significant.” – The Great Lorenzo, Double Star by Robert Heinlein

In Robert Anson Heinlein’s Double Star (1956), the down-on-his-luck actor “The Great Lorenzo” (aka Lawrence Smythe) is recruited by the frantic political team of John Bonaforte, a VIP in solar system politics who has been kidnapped to cause a diplomatic crisis. Hired to impersonate Bonaforte, over the course of a series of escalating complications, Smythe not only becomes sympathetic to Bonaforte’s politics, but inhabits his role so perfectly that when Bonaforte drops dead on election night, Smythe permanently becomes Bonaforte. It is a light-hearted comedy about topics near and dear to its author’s heart—politics, space travel, moralizing, and shaving the numbers off of old tropes (in this case the classic body double plot)—that won the third ever Hugo Award for Best Novel and is widely regarded to be Heinlein’s best novel.

By 1956, Heinlein’s own Golden Age was in full swing, having “domesticated the future” for science fiction fans for the preceding twenty years through his straightforward prose and dedication to technical accuracy, making it easy for readers to visualize what a future among the stars might look like. John W. Campbell’s Astounding was the market paying generous (at the time) per word rates, enabling his contributors to make a living writing (provided they adhered to his domineering editorial vision), and the most successful writer in the Astounding stables by far was Heinlein. He would directly and indirectly pave the way for other writers to flourish in his wake, and for science fiction to flourish in general, becoming “worthy of adult readers and adult writers,” as Philip K. Dick put in a 1970 fan letter to Heinlein. As such, the story of the evolution of science fiction from its Golden Age origins is also the story of Robert Anson Heinlein.

Similarly, the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 represented a similar “domestication of the future” for biology, as it gave biologists a platform upon which working hypotheses could finally proliferate. Thanks to the influx of physicists and chemists into the field, it came at a time when the tools biology had at its disposal had become more sophisticated, thereby allowing scientists to ask more sophisticated questions. Because of this, no other science, not even physics, ever expanded as much as biology did in North America and Europe from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, leading to the expansion of labs, larger conferences, more competition, more conversation, and a proliferation of publications. And foremost among the questions being posed was how did this repetitive, double helical, “mirror image” molecule propagate itself from generation to generation and account for all the diversity around us?

Heinlein always claimed that the aim of his fiction was to get his readers to question everything, a tendency seemingly belied by his military background. Born in 1907 in Kansas City, Missouri to a large, impoverished Methodist family, he started work at a young age to support himself while reading everything he could at the public library, finding favorites among Horatio Alger stories, Mark Twain, and Rudyard Kipling. Aspiring to becoming an astronomer, his only option would be through entering military service; through hard work and persistence, he secured a spot at the U.S. Naval academy at Annapolis in 1924. In 1934, he was honorably discharged after contracting tuberculosis. Living in Los Angeles with the Great Depression in full swing, Heinlein became involved in the left-wing progressive End Poverty in California political movement, which aligned with his well already well-developed moral sense of social responsibility (he was also a lifelong nudist and non-monogamist, and associated with Jack Parsons—a famous rocket scientist and follower of Aleister Crowley, who was labeled a subversive by the military). But after Upton Sinclair’s failed bid for Governor and Heinlein’s own failed campaign for a seat on the State Assembly, in 1938, at the age of 31 and with only his military pension to pay the mortgage on their home and support him and his second wife, Leslyn, he turned to science fiction (having become a fan of the genre while in the Navy) to reach a wider audience with his ideas.

In the meantime, James Watson and Francis Crick’s 1953 paper “Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: a Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid,” included one of the biggest understatements in the history of biology: “It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.” The mechanism of copying DNA so that its nature would be conserved from cell to cell, generation to generation, is one of the two requirements of a hereditary material (other than being the blueprint of an organism). It is not uncommon in biology for form to imply function, and what Watson and Crick implied with their sentence is that for the hereditary material to be comprised of two perfectly complementary strands, one strand might act as the template for the other. If one were to separate the strands, any copies made would perfectly match its separated twin, indicating a ready mechanism for propagation. However, just as Watson and Crick’s model was only a theory in the absence of Rosalind Franklin’s X-Ray photographs to support it, so would the theory of DNA replication require experimental verification that would represent the beginnings of the field of molecular biology.

Heinlein’s career as a writer also contained a number of beginnings in science fiction. Campbell had only been full editor of Astounding for a few months before he bought Heinlein’s first story, “Life-Line” in 1938. Heinlein quickly learned to write to Campbell’s tastes and through correspondence over his stories, struck up what would become a lifelong friendship. Over the next twenty years, Heinlein wrote almost exclusively short fiction for the pulps (as they were the only venue for science fiction at the time), and published primarily with Campbell (selling his Campbell-rejected stories to less well-paying markets under various pen names). By the time America entered World War II, Heinlein was established as the central voice of science fiction, but he felt stifled by Campbell’s inflexibility when it came to taboo topics Heinlein wanted to write about—notably sex, religion, and non-monogamy. After volunteering for the war effort (acquiring a distaste for bureaucracy at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, but meeting his future third wife, Virginia “Ginny” Gerstenfeld), Heinlein set his sights on higher-paying markets and became the first to publish a science fiction story in a “slick,” selling “The Green Hills of Earth” to The Saturday Evening Post in 1947.

Another Heinlein first was writing and acting as technical consultant on the 1950 movie Destination Moon, the first modern science fiction film, which won an Oscar for its special effects, (the Hugo award statue is based on the rocket from the movie). But Heinlein’s most important legacy was bringing science fiction to the juveniles, where he took the adventure story into space, writing nine books between 1947 to 1959 filled with projections of his own childhood embodied in the resourceful, bootstrap-lifting boys with can-do attitudes who used logic and their internal moral compasses to overcome obstacles and see the galaxy—stories which had an enormous impact on the Boomer generation growing up reading them.

Just as impressively resourceful was the pair of biologists, Matthew Meselson and Franklin Stahl, who devised “the most beautiful experiment in biology.” At the heart of the question of DNA replication was the method: did the strands act as direct templates upon which copies were built (semi-conserved replication), or were the strands broken down and reassembled? Or perhaps they never separated at all (conserved replication) and were copied by some other mechanism? So, when Meselson and Stahl first met in 1954, they wondered if heavier radioactive isotopes could be used to tell the copies from the originals. The technique had been in use by biochemists for some time to track the products of enzyme reactions, but the question was how to separate such small molecules. It wasn’t until they were both working in Linus Pauling’s lab at Caltech in 1958 when Meselson heard about density gradient centrifugation, where a sample is added to a liquid gradient of different density salts and spun at high speeds until the samples descend to the corresponding density in the gradient. If they allowed DNA to replicate in the presence of radioisotopes, they could determine which was true: if there was one heavy labeled band, the parent strands were destroyed; if there was one heavy band and a light unlabeled band, replication was conserved; but if there was a heavy band and medium band, semi-conservative replication was true. The resulting pictures clearly showed a band in the middle. DNA replication, then, was semi-conservative—a beautiful confirmation of form denoting function.

While Meselson and Stahl were locked in a room by biophysicist Max Delbrück to write their paper on DNA replication in 1958, Heinlein was aspiring to his own alignment of form and function: namely, to use the platform of his fame to finally talk about the ideas editors had been resisting in his stories for decades. This came at a time when science fiction was changing—when paperbacks had become dominant, and readership was exploding (magazines had been largely done in by television and comic books during the ’50s)—and the Space Race was intensifying interest in science fiction. Unfortunately, Soviet successes with Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin, and events like the Cuban Missile crisis took their toll on Heinlein’s optimistic view that the world was inherently just and humanity would soon set out to explore the stars. While his ideas of individualism and self-responsibility remained prominent in his fiction, he became bitter over nuclear disarmament, believing the only solution was to carry the bigger stick and be willing to use it.

This lent the first novel of his middle period, Starship Troopers (1959), overtly fascist overtones (it nonetheless won the Hugo in 1960). Soon after, he wrote two other Hugo-winning novels—Stranger in a Strange Land (1960), a treatise on sexual freedom and self-responsibility, and the culmination of a decades-long attempt to write Mowgli as a Martian, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966), an homage to the American Revolution set in a Lunar anarchist utopia whose victory comes from flinging rocks at the earth until they grant their Independence. Thanks to the paperback trade, Heinlein became a bestselling author during this time, finding abundant new fans in the military, hippies, and libertarians alike. While Heinlein claimed his books were meant to challenge his readers’ beliefs without espousing any specific messages, Isaac Asimov said of Heinlein in his memoir, “He did not believe in doing his own thing and letting you do your thing. He had a definite feeling that he knew better and to lecture you into agreeing with him.” While his politics had always been apparent in his fiction, his writing in this period began to sacrifice plot and character in favor of a more didactic style. And whatever angle readers were coming from, science fiction and Robert Heinlein had become a part of the cultural lexicon.

While Meselson and Stahl were discussing radioisotopes, a researcher with extensive experience with the technique was approaching the question of DNA replication from his own different angle. Arthur Kornberg, a Polish-born biochemist at Washington University, took an Oswald Avery-like approach to identifying the cellular components necessary for DNA replication. Kornberg had expertise in enzyme purification and energy metabolism, and knew an enzyme was responsible, and energy was required for the replication process. He took bacterial cell extracts, added ATP (a small molecule used as energy in cellular reactions) and radioisotope-tagged nucleotides in order to track DNA assembly. He found a DNA-template was required as a “primer” (showing synthesis was not spontaneous), and subsequently purified the enzyme responsible, which he called DNA polymerase. Using this cocktail, he synthesized DNA from any number of sources, and—after a few short-sighted editors rejected his initial paper—it was accepted in 1958, and Kornberg won the Nobel Prize in 1959. His research group would later demonstrate that DNA made faithful copies that indeed ran complementary to one another, just as Watson and Crick’s model had predicted.

Heinlein’s late period begins in 1979 after a nearly decade-long hiatus, which included relocating to California, the building of a new house, and repeated bouts with various illnesses, including invasive surgery to correct a perforated bowel, which required a blood transfusion to keep Heinlein alive. The bulk of his efforts from the 1970s until his death centered around activist efforts to increase the pool of volunteer blood donors (particularly at science fiction conventions), as an advocate for the space program, and having his voice heard on the Reagan administration’s Citizens Advisory Board, where he threw his support behind the failed “Star Wars” strategic defense program. During this period, Heinlein wrote five novels, many of which were extensions of his future history series, except with an even stronger didactic style and a focus on the exploration of various sexual taboos, including incest. While his back catalog continued to sell well, Heinlein never returned to form, and after suffering complications from emphysema and congestive heart failure, Heinlein died at home in 1988 at age 81.

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While DNA replication may seem like a minor corner of biology, but its importance can’t be overstated: the work in this area illuminated the basis of all genetic variation on earth. Any errors made during DNA replication could explain the spontaneous appearance of new traits in species. Coupled with selective pressure, DNA replication is the stuff of evolution. Not only that, but a revolution in biology occurred in 1983 when Kary Mullis, a chemist working at one of the first biotech companies, built upon Kornberg’s findings to replicate a specific region of DNA in a series of water baths with a technique called Polymerase Chain Reaction, allowing molecular biologists for the first time to copy specific regions of DNA. Mullis would win his own Nobel Prize for this work in 1993, and it is now a standard procedure used in every molecular biology lab around the world.

Heinlein’s legacy is far-reaching and multifaceted. He coined terms like astrogator, Waldo, and grok (to name a few), his juvenilia inspired a generation of engineers, scientists, and science fiction writers, and his middle-era books became the voice of a disaffected generation who was looking for something bigger to believe in—be it the protection and guidance of a strong military, and/or the freedom to live however individuals please in peace with one another. Reading his books today reveals a complete obliviousness to privilege, and an approach to writing female characters that attempts to be progressive but does not hold up at all well, getting bogged down in gendered stereotypes and objectification. It’s important to note, however, that he was thinking and writing about these topics often before there were national dialogues about them. Regardless of whether you agree with the politics or not, they’re books that inspire argument. Heinlein’s writing was the template against which science fiction writers and stories proliferated like so many complementary strands of DNA.

For our next article, we’ll see how another piece of the central dogma falls into place by exploring the relationship between DNA and RNA, and explore the life of another central figure in the Golden Era of science fiction: Isaac Asimov.

Kelly Lagor is a scientist by day and a science fiction writer by night. Her work has appeared at Tor.com and other places, and you can find her tweeting about all kinds of nonsense @klagor

I grew up with dragons and scholars: the rồng, the dragons of my mother’s and grandmother’s tales, old and wise spirits that lived beneath the rivers and seas who brought rain and floods to bless the fields and the harvest. Rồng are a meld of animals: they have the antlers of a deer, the mane of a lion, the body of a snake, though they also have short, stubby legs.

They can be born from eggs, but the legend I grew up with was that of the Dragon’s Gate, which is a waterfall at the top of a legendary mountain. Carps can swim upstream against the current, but they have to be strong and brave to leap over that final waterfall, and those who do transform into a dragon: the dragon’s scales are meant to recall their origin from the fish.

Dragons and humans don’t have a clearly delineated boundary: in Vietnamese folklore, many creatures can take human shape, and dragons are no exception–though their human shape will be fierce and fanged, sometimes with antlers, sometimes with scales or a mane. Indeed, one proverb the Vietnamese use to refer to themselves is “Con Rồng, cháu Tiên” (“children of dragons, grandchildren of immortals”), because Vietnamese people (and the first kings) were descended from the union of dragon prince Lạc Long Quân and mountain immortal Âu Cơ.

The other mainstay of the stories I was told were the sĩ/quan, the scholar-officials of Vietnam: in most of the tales that I know, the scholars are poor and not yet risen to official status. They live in poverty with their aged mothers, and study the classics in order to pass the Metropolitan examination and get an official post away from their village. They study words and language and the classics, and everything written is so important it might as well be magic.

In the fairytales or fantasy I consumed, I seldom found these. The dragons I read or saw on screen were fire creatures, and overwhelmingly malevolent forces to be killed. They were Smaug in Tolkien’s The Hobbit, greedy and quick to anger, rising from the heart of the mountain to devastate a town. They were hapless pets, fire beasts with hoards, malevolent and strong, subsisting on (it seemed) kidnapping maidens. Even the sentient ones were either alien creatures, or down-to-earth and pragmatic, with none of the awe I associated with my dragons.

The scholars were wizards, and tended to be sidekicks. Knowledge and books came in handy sometimes, but birthright or battle prowess trumped it, and the underlying expectation was that wizards or magic-wielders were separate from the temporal ruling class (these could have magic, but it was a birthright rather than acquired knowledge). They were the analogue of priests rather than political officials, and when they did rule they were dark and evil and barely human anymore.

And yet, in some places, I caught a glimpse of the dragons and scholars of my heart. Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea Quartet has dragons that breathe fire, fear drowning and are the enemies of mankind, but they are as beautiful, and the language they speak is that of magic that remakes the world. By the time I read Tehanu, and the dragon Kalessin comes to rescue Ged and the chlid Tehanu is revealed to be a dragon herself, I was entranced. In Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic, the dragons of the Wyrmberg are summoned by an act of imagination—and I still hold my breath when hapless tourist (and Asian analogue) Twoflower, who’s long been fascinated by dragons, summons his own dragon and uses it to rescue his companion Rincewind.

And, of course, there is Haku in Spirited Away. He’s a Japanese dragon who also has a human shape, but so much about him is familiar, from his general shape to his backstory: he is a river spirit who has forgotten his name, and whose river is now under buildings. Towards the end of the story, Chihiro flies on Haku’s back, and remembers falling into the river as a child—and there’s a brief glimpse of a serpentine body underwater, and a child’s shoe carried away by the wild force of the river. That scene never fails to give me shivers.

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I also found scholars in my books: Patricia McKillip’s Alphabet of Thorn is set in a library, and the main character Nepenthe is an archivist in training who finds a mysterious book and gradually figures out that the language of the book itself is magic. At the end, she makes the choice of staying in the library rather than the empire offered by her time-travelling parents—something the old scholars would definitely have approved of! And though Mr Norrell in Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is short-tempered and disagreeable, I fell in love with the novel the moment we entered Norrell’s library of magic books.

I wanted to write my own version of this: something that would speak to both the books I loved and the stories I was told. I wanted to write for my ten-year-old self, who so desperately yearned to see herself in stories that she rewrote comic books and movies so that she, too, would get to hold a lightsaber.

In the Vanishers’ Palace is a retelling of Beauty and the Beast, but I’ve kept only the frame of a woman given against her will to a fantastical creature. The Beast is Vu Côn, a dragon, a cold and aloof river spirit attempting to heal a broken world, who can easily shapechange between dragon and human form; and Beauty is Yên, a scholar who by all standards is a failure—not possessed of magic in a world where writing itself is magical, and unable to pass the state examinations which would have been her pathway to power and safety. And the palace itself is a merge of Escher-inspired dizzying architecture, but combined with the more classical layout of Huế’s imperial citadel.

I wrote In the Vanishers’ Palace because I wanted to put the stories of my heart into fiction.

Oh, wait: I lied about only keeping the frame of the fairytale. I kept the magical library from the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast, too—because I just couldn’t resist that particular temptation!

Read an excerpt from In the Vanishers’ Palace here.

Aliette de Bodard lives in Paris, and writes speculative fiction: her short stories have garnered her two Nebula Awards, a Locus Award and two British Science Fiction Association Awards. She is the author of the Dominion of the Fallen series, set in a turn-of-the-century Paris devastated by a magical war, which comprises The House of Shattered Wings (2015 British Science Fiction Association Award), and its standalone sequel The House of Binding Thorns (2017 European Science Fiction Society Achievement Award). Her latest is In the Vanishers’ Palace, a dark retelling of Beauty and the Beast where they are both women and the Beast is a dragon.

I watch a lot of horror movies. However many you’re thinking right now, I regret to inform you that you have woefully underestimated the number of horror movies that I have watched in my lifetime. I watch a lot of horror movies. My earliest cinematic memories involve horror movies—Alien when I was three years old, sitting on my uncle’s lap in the living room of our old apartment; The Blob after a midnight trip to the emergency vet to have a cattail removed from my cat’s eye; Critters in my grandmother’s living room, elbows buried in the plush beige carpet, dreaming of marrying the handsome red-haired boy in the lead role. So many horror movies. The only form of media that has arguably had more of an influence on me than the horror movie is the superhero comic book (which is a whole different kettle of worms).

The standards of horror have changed with time, of course. The things we’re afraid of now and the things we were afraid of fifty years ago are not the same, and neither are the avatars we choose to face those fears. We’ve gone from jut-jawed heroes to final girls to clever kids to slackers who somehow stumbled into the wrong movie, and when it’s been successful, it’s been incredible, and when it’s failed, we haven’t even needed to talk about it, because everyone knows. But there’s one ingredient to a really good horror movie that has never changed—that I don’t think ever will change—that I think we need to think about a little harder.

Sincerity.

There’s a point in Creepshow II where a beautiful girl has been grabbed by the oilslick monster that lives on the surface of an abandoned lake. It is eating her alive. She’s awake, aware, and screaming. Her friends are freaking out, because that’s the reasonable thing to do under the circumstances. But none of them are refusing to commit to the moment. The monster is there. The fact that the monster looks like an evil pudding doesn’t change the fact that the monster is there.

There’s a moment in Slither where the mayor of the small town under siege by alien invaders loses his temper because there’s not a Mr. Pibb in his official mayoral car. He has seen people die. His own life has been threatened. He may not last until morning. He just wants his Mr. Pibb. It’s one of the most fully committed, most human moments I have ever seen in a horror movie, and it did more to sell me on the terror of the situation than all the overblown confessions of love in all the sequels in the world.

Sincerity. Completely committing to the situation, no matter how silly. Whether chased by giant snakes (Anaconda), or super-intelligent sharks (Deep Blue Sea), or a flesh-eating virus (Cabin Fever), or even Death Itself (Final Destination), sincerity can be the difference between a forgettable Saturday night special and something that you’ll find yourself going back to. “So bad it’s good” is a phrase most often applied to horror movies with the sense to be sincere.

I find this is true of most mediums. The Care Bear Movie holds up surprising well, because it had the guts to completely commit to its source material; so does the original V. Some newer material falls apart on re-watching because it never figured out how to be sincere. Fully committing to the topic at hand, on the other hand, gives you something worth revisiting a time or twelve.

We scare because we care, after all. Caring counts.

This article originally appeared in the Tor/Forge newsletter in April 2016. Join the mailing list here.

Seanan McGuire is the author of the October Daye urban fantasy series, the InCryptid series, and several other works, both standalone and in trilogies. She lives in a creaky old farmhouse in Northern California, and was the winner of the 2010 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. In 2013 she became the first person ever to appear fives times on the same Hugo ballot. The Wayward Children novella series —Every Heart a Doorway, Down Among the Sticks and Bones, Beneath the Sugar Sky and the forthcoming In an Absent Dream—is available from Tor.com Publishing.

At the end of Malice of Crows, Rhett experiences a loss so devastating, he doesn’t think anything could ever be worse. Treason of Hawks proves him wrong time and time again. In fact, “worse” is an understatement. Rhett goes through hell physically, psychologically, romantically, emotionally.

The fourth and final book in Lila Bowen’s excellent Shadow series picks up right where the third book left off, and never lets up on the tension. Wicked Ranger Haskell and his band of brutes are harrying Rhett’s trail as a gang of chupacabras taunt his motley crew. Meanwhile, an unknown fiend is picking off the people from Rhett’s past, leaving them dry, desiccated husks. And on top of all this, supernatural beasties from all across Durango are making their way to Rhett’s camp at Inès’ mission. Something is drawing them to the Shadow, and whatever it is, the Shadow knows not everyone will make it out alive. All he wants is a quiet life of cattle ranching and romancing Sam, but what Rhett wants and what the Shadow demands are two separate things. The fight of his life is coming … and Rhett isn’t ready.

With Rhett, Lila Bowen demonstrates once again how adept she is as writing difficult characters. Rhett is easy to love but not easy to like. He makes plenty of bad decisions, doesn’t think things through, and often acts on selfish impulse rather than strategic planning. These could be faults, but Bowen weaves them together in such a way that they feel like traits instead. Rhett is who he is, recklessness and all. He is a fundamentally good person trapped in a terrible situation where every choice will benefit some at the expense of others. All he can do is try to mitigate the harm as much as possible.

Rhett is also gruff and grumpy much of the time, yet he is also learning to compromise and lead. Some of it’s just his naturally cantankerous way, but most of it comes from holding on too tightly to gender stereotypes. After his awful childhood, it’s no wonder he has such a limited perspective on what women can do. And given that his freedom came part and parcel with taking on a male identity, it’s obvious why he has such stringent views on what women can’t do. Setting aside those biases is tied to settling into his maleness, becoming comfortable with his body, and shedding the twin stains of toxic masculinity and the patriarchy.

In the past I’ve argued that the Shadow series reads more like young adult fantasy than adult fantasy. Rhett’s journey through various identities—from Nettie to Nat to Ned and now Rhett, with the Shadow uniting them all—to me read like YA bildungsroman. The language used, the lessons learned, and the framing of Rhett’s discoveries about himself and what he wants, were about as YA as it gets. With Treason of Hawks, Bowen leaned hard into adult. Nothing about it even remotely hints at YA. Rhett may be a teenager, but he’s a grown man as far as he and the fourth book are concerned. Rhett knows who he is now. He’s learned all he can about his destiny, identity, and personal ethics. He has a goal and sets out to achieve it. Everyone sees him as a confident adult rather than a scrappy kid in over his head. As much as I love reading young adult fiction, and as much as I think reading Wake of Vultures, Conspiracy of Ravens, and Malice of Crows as YA work pretty well, I loved Treason of Hawks as adult fiction even more.

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The only noteworthy glitch in the structure of Treason of Hawks was that for much of it, I kept forgetting this was the last book. The first two-thirds read like the fourth book in an ongoing series, but not until the remaining hundred or so pages did it coalesce into the final installment. I’m not entirely convinced the way the conflict was resolved is strong enough to close out the series. There was a lot of bringing back old characters and coming to terms with things, but upon reflection, Treason of Hawks felt less like the climax of four books worth of mounting tension and more like tying up loose ends.

The misalignment was in large part caused by the reveal of the Big Bad. I would’ve liked to see more seeding of the Big Bad in previous entries rather than dropping them in at the last minute. Bowen has a series-wide habit of withholding—the main antagonists were similarly absent from large chunks of the other books. In this case I think it did the story no favors, particularly when the villain was more caricature than character.

Fortunately, the character work on the rest of the cast is so superb that it makes up for everything else. Every time someone I loved was dusted, my heart lurched in my chest. I don’t generally cry at books, but it’s a testament to Bowen that I felt the deaths of her characters so deeply that I was nearly brought to tears.

Overall, Treason of Hawks is a strong story that soars when it finally gets around to dealing with issues that have been piling up throughout the series. With high octane action and irresistible characters, the Shadow series is one of the best weird west fantasies out there. I’m sad to see Rhett go, but I’m glad that his final story is as good as this one.

Treason of Hawks is available from Orbit.

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.

Who doesn’t like kittens? Kittens are what cats used to be before the irony of a two-legged universe got to them, making them the moody judgmental purring balls of fur they are today. Kittens are fun. Kittens are daring. Kittens are little evil feline ninjas with razor teeth and spikey claws. Kittens wake up every morning and treat the world like it’s their own personal frat house and the air is spiked with catnip. I love kittens. I also love me righteous protagonists in books and comics. So, I was wondering the other day—I’d trust these folks to save the world, but would I trust them to babysit a kitten?

Dune — Frank Herbert

Paul Atreides of Dune was my first choice. He’s from a royal house. He’s brave and does mostly good for people. He wants to bring water to the downtrodden. But then I also remembered that he’s at the center of a terrorist cult and rides giant death worms through a desert on a planet that’s mined for its drugs. Would I really trust the life of my kitten to a terrorist-death-worm-riding-drug-peddler?

First Law Trilogy — Joe Abercrombie

So, I went the other direction. Instead of a nice guy, I thought of a bad guy, because Danny Trejo proved that bad guys can really be soft and cuddly at times. I tried to picture Logan Ninefingers from Joe Abercrombie’s First Law Trilogy and Red Country, sitting in the corner of a smoky tavern, drinking a flagon of ale, and petting a kitten that’s sitting on his chest. I picture it as a nice peaceful scene, right up to the point where a group of lads with shiny new swords spot him and are eager to try their fresh off-the-shelf-weapons on the King of Killers. Somewhere between Logan’s berserker rage and him chewing the face off of one of the eager lads, the kitten gets under the feet of too many hobnailed boots and well… I’ll just stop right there.

The Stormlight Archive — Brandon Sanderson

Who can I trust, then? Having just read Brandon Sanderson’s book The Way of Kings about shards and monsters and bright eyes, his hero Kaladin came to mind. He was a decent warrior and a pretty solid bloke. Except of course for his deep emotional scars and his desire to protect and serve a Tinkerbell-like creature—an Honorspren named Syl. That’s sort of like a kitten, I suppose, except it flies through the air and does some magical stuff, which means it’s really nothing like a kitten. In fact, I could see that damned Spren becoming Butt-Hurt-Spren because of Kaladin’s attention on a new kitten. After all, it’s Syl’s connection to Kaladin that grounds her and makes her able to think clearly, unlike her Windspren cousins, which would definitely make the kitten a threat. One moment Kaladin is petting the kitten, listening to it purr as it rests on a cushion beside him, the next the kitten is being carried to ten thousand feet by the spren who then returns it by dropping it from an impossible height.

The Sacred Throne — Myke Cole

What about Myke Cole’s Heloise Factor? She’s a simple gal that gets strapped into a war machine and rips through some high-falluting religious types. She definitely would have the kittens best wishes in mind. She’d most certainly want the kitten to be safe and happy. I imagined the kitten in her metal hands all secure and cool. But then I remembered all of her interactions in The Armored Saint, Myke’s first book of her fantasy series. Didn’t bad things happen to pretty much everyone around her? Wasn’t she sort of like the Joe Btfsplk of fantasy books, a continuous dark cloud following her and promising that bad things were on the way? And this was the person who was going to be trusted to keep a kitten alive?

Desolation Jones — Warren Ellis

Why do the kittens keep ending up in bad ways? Are literary heroes so focused on being heroes that they can’t be nurturers? Can’t they be trusted to take care of a simple kitten? So, I thought I might flip the script. Instead of trying to find a hero to babysit a kitten, why not see if a kitten can be the one babysitting? It didn’t take long for me to think of the most messed up character in the history of heroes and anti-heroes—and it was none other than Warren Ellis I thought of, and his eponymous character Desolation Jones. The sole survivor of a the “Desolation Test” where he was forced to stay awake for one year and subjected to endless scenes of death, his body physically changed so that he’s now weak, frail, has to avoid direct sunlight, is forced to abuse drugs, has hallucinations of bloody naked angels, and has to wear an oxygen mask most of the time. All in all, Jones is a victim, and shouldn’t all victims have a nice little kitten to pet and make purr? Remember that kittens are really little evil ninjas in training. Maybe if the bad guys came to do something to Desolation Jones, Desolation Kitty would stand up and take a few swipes at them. Desolation Kitty—doesn’t that have a ring to it?

And if not, if something bad ended up happening to the kitten, it still has eight lives left. Maybe that’s the reason cats have nine lives: you just can’t find good heroes nowadays—heroes who you’d trust with the simple task of taking care of a kitten. I know none of my heroes would be able to handle it. From the guys on SEAL Team 666, to the grunts who tried to save the world in the Grunt Life series, to my new heroes in Burning Sky who aren’t even sure they’re in the right reality, I just can’t seem to write a hero who I’d trust to babysit a kitten.

And maybe that’s it. Maybe kittens aren’t meant for heroes. Maybe kittens are meant for the rest of us—maybe so that we can pet them and hear them purr while we read about heroes who really have little time for such luxuries because they are too focused on saving whatever fictional world they find themselves in.

Weston Ochse is a former intelligence officer and special operations soldier who has engaged enemy combatants, terrorists, narco smugglers, and human traffickers. A writer of more than 26 books in multiple genres, his military supernatural series, SEAL Team 666, has been optioned to be a movie starring Dwayne Johnson. His military sci-fi series, which starts with Grunt Life, has been praised for its PTSD-positive depiction of soldiers at peace and at war. His fiction and non-fiction has been praised by USA Today, The Atlantic, The New York Post, The Financial Times of London, and Publishers Weekly.

After a successful inaugural year, The Neukom Institute for Computational Science at Dartmouth College has announced the 2019 Neukom Institute Literary Arts Awards. Established in 2017, the award honors speculative fiction works in book form (debuts and otherwise) as well as plays. It also recognizes the relationship between science and the arts, the latter which the award website describes as “[a]cting as gadfly for the good, provocateur and satirist when the sciences overreach, but also far-seeing prophets of scientific potential.”

The inaugural winners were Juan Martinez for Best Worst American (in the debut category), Lavie Tidhar’s Central Station and Corinne Duyvis’ On the Edge of Gone (in the open book category), and Jessica Andrewartha’s play Choices People Make.

“It was exciting to see such a diversity of entries with many different takes—from authors of many different nationalities—on speculative fiction,” said Daniel Rockmore (Associate Dean for the Sciences, Dartmouth College, and Director, Neukom Institute for Computational Science at Dartmouth College). “This established a great precedent that we hope to repeat as we accept submissions for the current awards cycle. As our inaugural shortlist shows, we received exciting new work from well-known authors like Kim Stanley Robinson as well as fascinating work from new authors including debut winner Juan Martinez. Our winners represent three different genres and shared a theme of hope for the future and the enduring nature of the very human quest for connection.”

At the awards ceremony earlier this month, moderator Maria Dahvana Headley (The Mere Wife) described the books as all having “deeply human grounding in emotion, in longing, in love, in relationships between each other. Which is a really interesting place to begin in thinking about this as a speculative fiction and futuristic prize… The idea that we would still remain people who love other people was, for me, the unifying theme.” She went on to say that “I find these books very hopeful. They were full of recognition of people who are not currently being recognized in our societies in every kind of way. This list of winners is the same thing. It’s people who are, in American circles, often not as recognized.”

You can watch the entire panel here:

Speculative fiction is more relevant than ever, Rockmore told us: “We seem to be at an important historical decision point about the future direction of society both in the large and the small. Speculative fiction shines a light not only on the possible futures of our world, but also the parts of our current world that could grow to drive the future; the Neukom Awards are meant to honor and support that important literary tradition. The best speculative fiction immerses the reader in these imagined worlds and by doing so encourages the reader to ponder if this is the kind of world she/he wants to inhabit—or wants future generations to inhabit. Literature is perhaps one of the last bastions of this kind of thoughtful and transparent consideration of the future in light of the present. It is both relevant and important.”

The submission window recently opened for the second year of the Neukom Institute award. Asked how they are approaching the second season, Rockmore responded, “We are not just award judges, we are readers. We can’t wait to read the next crop of speculative fiction that is being submitted for the second Neukom season. We are hoping that we can build on the success of the inaugural year of the Neukom Institute Literary Arts Awards to gather an even stronger and broader collection of submissions for this year. We continue to welcome speculative fiction in all of its many forms and look forward to continuing to bring greater attention to this important genre.”

Eligible books include any works published no earlier than June 1, 2016 or under contract to be published no later than December 31, 2018; the submission deadline for all three awards is December 31. More detailed submission guidelines here. The awards will be announced in spring 2019.

At the entrance to the town they put on visibility. It made them no warmer, and impaired their self-esteem.

In the last decade of her life, author Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893-1978) told an interviewer that “I want to write about something different.”

That different turned out to be fairy tales. Warner had played with themes of magic and enchantment in her work before, and always had an interest in folklore, but for this project, she tried something a bit different: interconnected stories of other and fairy. Most were published in The New Yorker from 1972-1975, and collected in the last book printed in Warner’s lifetime: Kingdoms of Elfin (1976). Regrettably out of print for decades, the collection is now being reissued by Handheld Press, with a foreward by Greer Gilman, an introduction by Ingrid Hotz-Davies, and extensive footnotes by Kate McDonald.

Warner came from a comfortable, well-educated family. Her father, George Townsend Warner, a history teacher at Harrow School, took over his daughter’s instruction, and allowed her full access to his extensive personal library. The result was an interest in history that Warner never lost, and which comes through in many of her works—including Kingdoms of Elfin. In 1917, she began her own career working as a researcher of music for the ten volume Tudor Church Music, work that allowed her to call herself a musicologist for the rest of her life. She also wrote poetry, fiction and biography, including a biography of T.H. White.

Despite this distinguished literary and research career, she arguably became best known for her personal life as one of London’s Bright Young Things. In the 1920s, she (like many others in her social group) scandalized many when she started a passionate relationship with a married man. Those scandals grew when, in 1930, she continued with a fierce relationship with poet Valentine Ackland (1906-1969) whose life and work explored issues of gender. Ackland, born Mary Kathleen Macrory Ackland, called herself a woman and used the pronouns “she” and “her,” but changed her name to something less obviously gendered, and usually wore male clothing. It’s possible that had Ackland been born a hundred or even fifty years later, she would have identified as non-binary or trans, and happily embraced the singular pronouns “they” and “them.”

Alarmed by the rise of fascism, the two joined the Communist Party and remained politically active throughout World War II. After the war, Ackland began drinking heavily and sleeping with other women, but stayed with Warner until Ackland’s death from breast cancer. Warner never lived with another woman again.

The stories in Kingdoms of Elfin were written after Ackland’s death. An interconnected series of tales, they can be read as standalones, or as a group. Later tales often reference characters or places from previous tales, but never assume that readers have read the previous stories—possibly because most were originally published in The New Yorker, where Warner and her editors could not be sure that readers would have seen, much less read, previous issues.

I cannot say just how much of Warner’s life is reflected in these tales. I can, however, say that the stories often sound exactly like the sort you might expect from a trained historian and scholar. They are littered with references to various historians, ancient, modern, real and imaginary, along with frequent acknowledgements that these historical accounts have often been disputed, as well as an occasional discussion about a historical point or other, or an offhand observation that a “true” British name has been lost beneath a Latinized form, or a reference to Katherine Howard’s ghost as a quite real thing.

This sort of approach not only helps to create an impression that Warner’s imaginary kingdoms are, indeed, quite real, but also gives Warner the chance to poke fun at her fellow scholars—and also, from time to time, make a pointed comment about the very male and British gaze of those scholars. It works, too, as a way to use fairy tales as historiographic and scholarly critique.

But it’s not all historical stuff—Warner also slides in some teasing observations about poets (she was, after all, a poet herself)—glowing descriptions of (some) birds, and rich descriptions of food. I don’t know if she cooked, but I can say she enjoyed eating. And interestingly, despite all of this history, and an almost offhanded insistence that Katherine Howard’s ghost is quite, quite real, many of the stories are not rooted in any specific time—one tale does partly take place in a very firm 1893, in Wales, but that is the exception, not the rule.

But if they are not rooted in any specific period, her tales are rooted to very specific places, and very deeply in folklore and fairy tale. Specifically and particularly British folklore and fairy tale, but Warner does occasionally leave the British Isles to study a few European countries and the Middle East. Familiar characters such as Morgan le Fay, the Red Queen from Alice in Wonderland and Baba Yaga get passing mentions; a few characters, like Thomas the Rhymer, receive a bit more attention. Most of her characters are fairies, humans, or changelings—that is, human children stolen away by fairies, and the fairy children left in their places to try to make their way in the human world. But the occasional Peri slips in, along with Hecate and one rather scandalous ghost.

That rooting in folklore and fairy tale, along with the frequent references to specific fairy tale traditions and histories, means that her tales feel less like an attempt to create a new mythos or history of fairies, much less a new secondary world (in contrast to, say, her equally erudite fellow Brit J.R.R. Tolkien), but more an attempt to correct previous histories. She spends considerable time explaining, for instance, that the common belief that fairies are immortal is quite wrong: they are long lived, but they can certainly die. And in these stories, often do. She also quibbles with other details of fairy customs as related by human scholars.

But as described, her fairies also sound as if they’ve stepped directly out of Victorian illustrations—her fairy queens, for instance, are usually beautiful, and slender, with long shimmering wings, which most of them never use. Warner also works with the common belief that fairies, unlike humans, have no souls. In her account, this soulless nature has consequences, largely beneficial ones from the fairy point of view: as soulless creatures, they do not believe in an afterlife, and therefore, do not worry about might happen to them after death. A few still end up in church buildings for one reason or another, and two—for reasons I won’t spoil—(sorta) end up running a couple of bishoprics in England, but in general they find themselves puzzled or indifferent to religious matters, something that allows Warner to play with ideas of atheism and to lightly mock religion, religious practitioners, atheists, and agnostics.

But very much like the way the fairies of the French salon tales frequently sounded and acted like French aristocrats, the inhabitants of Elfin often sound like they’ve stepped straight out of Downton Abbey. Including the ones who live in France. Including the ones that take place outside the actual kingdoms of Elfin, or just on its edges—the places where humans and fairies may end up interacting, not always for the best, as when a fairy ritual of moving a mountain around does some accidental damage to a mortal who was, understandably, not expecting the mountain to move at all. And including the ones where fairies wander from their homes—sometimes purposefully, sometimes by exile—and accidentally find themselves someplace else.

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I’ve made these tales, I fear, sound rather boring, like dry history or scholarly literature. And, to be fair, the stories here tend to be slow reads, the sort you read for the joy of the language, style, not the plot. Oh, yes, these stories do have plots—unpredictable plots at that, since the cold, soulless, often accidentally cruel fairies do not always act or speak in unexpected ways. As when a fairy is told that he must prostitute himself out to a human man to allow his four companions to survive, with the comfortable assurance that it is far easier to submit to a man than to a woman. (In the end, the fairy making that assurance is the one to stay with the man.) Unexpected since I couldn’t help feeling they had other options—but even fairies need food and drink. Or the way that, in “The Occupation,” a few humans do realize that they might—just might—have fairies in their midst. Or the fate of that mountain that keeps getting moved around.

That unexpectedness does, to repeat, include moments of brutality and cruelty—these are stories about soulless fairies, after all. So it’s not entirely surprising, for instance, that Elphenor and Weasel become lovers about thirty seconds after they first meet—and after she slaps his face and he pulls her down to the ground in response. And as Warner warns readers early on, fairies can die, often not gently. Several moments—as in a scene where a fairy child is pecked to death by seagulls—are pure horror. These are

Not all of the stories quite work as stories, alas—indeed, one only “ends” because, well, a new story starts on the next page, which is not really the best way to end a story. And as said, this collection can make for slow reading. But worthwhile, I think, for the sentences with odd, sharp beauty, like these:

Ludo had been blooded to poetry at his mother’s knee.

I think something similar could have been said of Sylvia Townsend Warner.

One word of warning: one story, “Castor and Pollux,” does have an anti-Semitic statement. In context, it’s meant as a reference to Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, but the use of the plural gives that reference a much broader and more chilling meaning. This same story also includes the death of a woman in childbirth, a death that in context rather uneasily reads as a punishment for sexual behavior, and a later attempt to murder children. Some readers may simply want to skip this tale.

Mari Ness lives in central Florida.

We want to send you a galley copy of Mirah Bolender’s City of Broken Magic, available November 20th from Tor Books!

Five hundred years ago, magi created a weapon they couldn’t control. An infestation that ate magic—and anything else it came into contact with. Enemies and allies were equally filling.

Only an elite team of non-magical humans, known as sweepers, can defuse and dispose of infestations before they spread. Most die before they finish training.

Laura, a new team member, has stayed alive longer than most. Now, she’s the last—and only—sweeper standing between the city and a massive infestation.

Comment in the post to enter!

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY TO ENTER OR WIN. A purchase does not improve your chances of winning. Sweepstakes open to legal residents of 50 United States and D.C., and Canada (excluding Quebec). To enter, comment on this post beginning at 3:30 PM Eastern Time (ET) on October 18th. Sweepstakes ends at 12:00 PM ET on October 22nd. Void outside the United States and Canada and where prohibited by law. Please see full details and official rules here. Sponsor: Tor.com, 175 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10010.

The One granted the world the gift of the Claim, holy words used to summon magic. Arian is one of those who can wield it: the daughter of linguists raised in a scriptorium, her entire life has been dedicated to the Claim. In fact, Arian has been one of the Companions of Hira—a group of women who study and use the Claim—since she was a child. But across Khorasan, a man known as the One-Eyed Prophet has led the rising Talisman group in a campaign to dominate civilization, subjugating the women of Khorasan and destroying libraries and knowledge in the process. The Companions seek to overthrow the Talisman—but they need a text called the Bloodprint first.

Spoilers for The Bloodprint, book one of the Khorasan Archives, follow!

At the end of The Bloodprint, the book sought by Arian and her fellow Companion Sinnia slipped from their grasp—quite literally, in Arian’s case—and Arian, Sinnia, and the Silver Mage Daniyar must fight to escape the clutches of the Authoritan and reclaim the Bloodprint from Rukh, the Black Khan… even as the Khan fortifies his city, Ashfall, against the Talisman’s impending assault.

Despite the dramatic opening, The Black Khan begins much more slowly than The Bloodprint. The revelations at the end of The Bloodprint made the next moves of the story unsurprising, since the novel’s ending limited the options of the perspective characters—though The Black Khan expands its cast of perspective characters to include members of other factions and with motivations at direct odds with Arian, Sinnia, and Daniyar.

The plot begins to pick up as the Talisman threat to Ashfall begins to gain traction, taking the cast across the lands of Khorasan. Ausma Zehanat Khan’s worldbuilding in The Bloodprint was gorgeous, and she continues to flesh out Khorasan in The Black Khan: the novel’s setting ranges from North Khorasan, the walled-off land the Authoritan rules, to the Black Khan’s holding of Ashfall far to the southwest. The Bloodprint, on the other hand, primarily tracked Arian and Sinnia’s journey from the Citadel of Hira east to the Wandering Cloud Door, south of the wall that separates North Khorasan from the other lands, making the settings of The Black Khan gorgeously different from its predecessor.

The writing describing the clothing, setting, and texts that populate the world is also incredibly rich, especially in the decadent settings of the Authoritan and Black Khan’s courts. As the First Oralist of the Companions of Hira, Arian’s role in the story—and among the citizens of Khorasan—is often emphasized by her appearance: while as a prisoner of the Authoritan she’s dressed in clothes meant to humiliate her, Arian otherwise tends to wear clothing and jewelry considered fitting for her position and status.

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Another great strength of the Khorasan Archives series so far is its exploration of faith, religion, and how those in power adhere and abuse both. Faith in the One and in the Claim enables the wielding of its magic, yet the characters who wield power of any kind—the magic of the Claim, political power, or the power of religious office—each perceive and address faith and religion differently. Arian follows the spirit of the Claim and the rules of the Companions, if not quite the letter; Ilea, the leader of the Companions, views religious rules and restrictions as something she can bend to her own will and desires. More villainous characters such as the One-Eyed Prophet and the Authoritan twist the Claim as well as the tenants of religion to turn its results into the opposite of its meaning or intent, perverting or “occulting” the Claim itself. The message of the book is emphasized in a passage of the Claim recited near the end of the book: “Whatever good befalls us is from the One, whatever evil is from ourselves.”

Power is a major theme of the series and focused on with more intensity in The Black Khan. The machinations of power, both magical and political, are a focus of both the Authoritan arc in the first act of the novel and the Ashfall assault arc in the third act. Possessing power isn’t what makes a person evil, but rather the desire to gain more power—an idea only emphasized by the key passage of the Claim quoted above. The Black Khan wrestles with power in a very different manner than The Bloodprint: while the latter focused on how power is stripped away via destruction of knowledge and the decline of literacy, the former examines the pursuit of power and the price paid—both by the seeker and by the seeker’s demands.

The Khorasan Archives series is an excellent one for readers fascinated with preservation of artifacts and the power of language, and The Black Khan takes readers even deeper into an exploration of precisely how the power of language is preserved through both artifacts and people. Despite its rocky start, The Black Khan is still recommended reading for fantasy fans seeking their next epic fantasy read.

The Black Khan is available from Harper Voyager.

Feliza Casano writes about science fiction, manga, and other geeky media around the internet. She currently lives in Philadelphia, where she moderates two book clubs and lines her walls with stacks of books. Visit her online or follow her on Twitter @FelizaCasano.

We’re excited to share the cover and a preview excerpt from M.T. Hill’s Zero Bomb, a startling near-future sci-fi mystery focused on the real-world issues of increased automation, state surveillance, and how a society reacts when technology replaces the need to work.

Zero Bomb publishes March 19, 2019 with Titan Books.

The near future. Following the death of his daughter Martha, Remi flees the north of England for London. Here he tries to rebuild his life as a cycle courier, delivering subversive documents under the nose of an all-seeing state.

But when a driverless car attempts to run him over, Remi soon discovers that his old life will not let him move on so easily. Someone is leaving coded messages for Remi across the city, and they seem to suggest that Martha is not dead at all.

Unsure what to believe, and increasingly unable to trust his memory, Remi is slowly drawn into the web of a dangerous radical whose ‘70s sci-fi novel is now a manifesto for direct action against automation, technology, and England itself.

Cover art and design by Julia Lloyd

Remi doesn’t know much about art, though he’ll blag his way through a client briefing to win a delivery contract. But by doing this job, he’s part of the scene’s nervous system. When you’re creating under a government that demands to see it all, you have to adapt. To paint or cartoon or write books these days is subversive at the very least, and to shift it through the city is not simple complicity—it’s open defiance. Remi reckons about half of his traffic is typed or handwritten manuscripts, and the demand for grey couriers like him is only growing. The current buzz on deep channels is that foreign embassies have cottoned on and started paying big, if certain assurances are met. If the art market takes a whack—if there’s another big crackdown, say—Remi might yet explore that route himself.

The commute only intensifies as he cycles on with the manuscript. His bug is flashing the directions, but he knows these roads, counts the miles instead through personal nodes: the pubs, the automated bookies, the empty temples and mosques and synagogues, the libraries-turned-flats, the sets of traffic lights you can safely skip. Graffiti tags and fissures in tarmac on certain roads. Grids and H-for-hydrant signs making for esoteric markers and signals.

Then he’s waiting at a heavy junction, caught in electric traffic. Sandstone brick surrounds, Georgian everything. You can tell a wealthy enclave by its heavy gates and partially exposed gun-turrets—is this really Mayfair, already? He scans the run of luxury shops while his bug traces a lazy helix above his head. He admires another rider’s cycle as it pulls alongside him at the lights, a sliver of a thing with a carbon-fibre frame. Next to the two of them, a driverless car paused so perfectly on the dashed nav line it could be screencapped from an advert. Remi and the other cyclist share a cautious smile as they notice simultaneously the passenger asleep on the car’s rear bench.

Then to the traffic lights, foot on the front pedal, and back to his idle quantifying. What makes this city? What makes it breathe? Remi has some ideas: the crane verticals and cables; the old and new in visible sedimentary layers, history compressed and overflowing from the grids; blues and reggae and old-school jungle from open windows and passing cars; a grimjazz band practising in the middle distance, steady cymbal wash; a food courier arguing futilely with a driverless white van; a steaming coffee outlet selling weed and beta-blockers; lads outside a takeaway sharing shock-joints and quiet dreams; a mobile shop blinking deep cuts on stolen derms; hidden London delineated by the warm vanilla lights of bedsits above shops; sleazy-hot London with its shapeless blood-glow; sex bidding and street shouting; the wealthiest Londoners slipping by undetected in silent taxis—

‘Hear that?’ the other cyclist asks him.

Remi pulls down his breather, wipes the condensation from his top lip. ‘Sorry?’

The other cyclist nods. ‘That noise. You not hear it?’

And then it comes again, and Remi does. A sad pop, like someone closing a door in another room.

‘What the hell’s that?’ the other rider asks.

‘Tunnel works?’ Remi shrugs and looks at the ground. ‘I dunno.’

The other cyclist shrugs back. Not cold, or even polite, Remi understands, but familiar. The death-spiral fraternity of cycling in London.

Again comes the popping sound. A series of popping sounds. ‘Seriously!’ the other cyclist says. It does sound like it’s coming from beneath them, but it’s too clipped to be a passing Tube train, and Remi’s sure they stopped tunnelling work to repair the collapse at Tottenham Court Road.

Once more the noise comes, this time much closer. Remi squints at the other rider. The lights turn green and the driverless car glides away. Remi and the other cyclist wordlessly mount the pavement, intrigued or unsettled enough to hang around. They both lean on their tiptoes, holding the traffic light post. Their bugs begin to fly in tight circles around each other, as if they’re conspiring.

‘Right then,’ the other cyclist says, gesturing to the bugs. ‘That’s no good.’

Remi grimaces. The bugs often know.

Then the smog draws closer, dry and sour, and the popping sound is all around them. The driverless car has faltered in the box junction, its motor screaming painfully. The passenger has woken up and is banging on the windows. Without saying anything, Remi dismounts his bike and props it against the post, and the other rider does the same. Together they approach the car, stilted by adrenaline. There’s a smell of hot wires. Other vehicles start to beep as the traffic lights turn red again. Remi’s bug emits a shrill alarm to warn him he’s abandoned the manuscript case.

Remi heads directly for the car. ‘You all right?’ he calls, mouth sticky. Behind them, doors are hissing open, other voices rising. Pap-pap-pap from the driverless car’s front end.

Closer, the offside window, and a pair of thick boot soles fill the glass. The passenger on his back, kicking at full stretch, because the car’s cabin is filling with smoke. ‘Jesus Christ,’ Remi manages. And now the car’s reverse note sounds, hazards glitching on and off. Remi instinctively steps away just as the driverless car accelerates, brakes to a pause, and restarts itself. Before he can react, the car swings away from the box junction and turns to face the mounting traffic. To face Remi.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Remi says.

The passenger window glass gives and speckles the road, and then the car comes at him.

Excerpted from Zero Bomb, copyright © 2018 by M.T. Hill

Has this ever happened to you? You’re living on a perfectly good planet in orbit around a perfectly acceptable star—and then suddenly, the neighbourhood goes to crap and you have to move. For a lot of people, this means marching onto space arks.

Recapitulating Noah on a cosmic scale is such a pain, though. All that packing. All that choosing who to take and who to leave behind. And no matter how carefully you plan things, it always seems to come down to a race between launch day and doomsday.

Why not, therefore, just take the whole darned planet with you?

(Warning: spoilers for books that are all insanely old venerable.)

Of course, this raises the question of how to do this without destroying the world. You could just slap rockets on one end of the planet (and at least one author did) but the side effects of that method could well be…undesirable. Authors have wrestled with the problem and come up with answers ranging from the utterly implausible to the somewhat less plausible.

For E. E. “Doc” Smith, the solution was easily enough. Simply have supremely intelligent aliens provide humans and other races with the means to negate inertia, through the use of engines that could be scaled up without limit. Put down on paper like that, it seems so obvious . To quote A Mighty Wind, “You would make that conclusion walking down the street or going to the store.”

But…even though shuffling planets into stable orbits in Goldilocks zones would be a wonderful first step towards terraforming, Smith’s characters instead focus on moving planets into Goldilocks zones to smash them into other planets inhabited by nogoodnik species. Nothing says hello like a planet in the face at half the speed of light, unless it’s a planet of negative matter in the face, etc.

Smith was writing about a cosmic war. Stanley Schmidt’s Sins of the Fathers involved an unfortunate industrial mishap in the core of the galaxy, one that converted the Milky Way into a Seyfert galaxy (which were all the rage back in the 1970s). The Kyyra (the aliens responsible) had been methodically working their way through the Milky Way giving as many races as possible the means to escape. Unfortunately for Earth, the means by which the Kyrra chose to do this was time-consuming; by the time they got to us, a lethal wave of radiation was very nearly upon the Earth.

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Rather remarkably, given that the setting does have faster-than-light travel (necessarily, because otherwise the first warning Earth would have got that a lethal wave of radiation was on the way would have been the arrival of said lethal wave of radiation), the Kyyra don’t simply slap a Smith-style FTL drive on the Earth. Instead, they use a much more conventional (although highly advanced) means of reaction propulsion: big-ass rockets on the South Pole. Schmidt helpfully provided the math arguing that one could attach a rocket to Earth sufficient to accelerate it enough to save the planet without also rendering it lifeless in “How to Move the Earth” in the May 1976 Analog. Well, sorry…

Larry Niven’s A World Out of Time returns to the war theme. It also marries Smith’s love of spectacle with Schmidt’s desire for a patina of plausibility. The Solar System of several million years from now has been radically transformed. The Sun is a red giant well ahead of schedule and the Earth is in orbit around Jupiter. How did this happen?

[Highlight for spoilers]: Niven postulates a humongous fusion rocket. But rather than stick it on the Earth, with all the issues that would raise, he places it in Uranus, then uses the gravity of the dirigible planet to move the Earth. Enemies of the Earth had used similar methods to hurl a planet into the Sun, thus the premature red-giantism.

[End spoilers.]

As it happens, while we seem to be short on universal wars and galactic-scale mishaps, there is at least one reason why we might want to think about how to move the Earth . Stars like our sun grow brighter as they age. Not terribly quickly—about one percent per hundred million years—but enough that the Earth may be uninhabitably hot in just a billion years (plus or minus). Given that the Sun won’t become a red giant for another five billion years, that seems … wasteful. Why not simply move the Earth farther from the Sun to compensate for the increased luminosity?

Thanks to people like D. G. Korycansky, Gregory Laughlin, Fred C. Adams (authors of Astronomical engineering: a strategy for modifying planetary orbits) we have some idea of what moving the Earth might entail. It turns out to be surprisingly reasonable (bearing in mind “it” is moving an entire world literally the size of the Earth): a suitably large intermediate body (a main belt asteroid or a Kuiper Belt Object) is used to transfer momentum from Jupiter to Earth. Jupiter drops a little; the much smaller Earth rises away from the Sun by more. One encounter every six thousand years might be all that’s needed .

It would be tremendously cool if we had evidence of a Galactic Club in the form of regular adjustments in Earth’s orbit (if only because if the Earth had been moved over the last few billion years, it would help explain the cool sun problem). Rather irritatingly, when I asked around I was assured we’d be able to tell if someone had been engineering our orbit and that there is no such evidence. How vexing. Really letting the side down, Galactic Club .

This is all rather academic for a species that thinks in terms of weeks or months, but still, we might not be the only technological species to occupy the planet over the next billion years. Perhaps one of our replacements will have the necessary time-binding horizons to get the job done.

1: It does seem a bit odd that inertialess matter travels at superluminal speeds and not the speed of light. Presumably the handwaving math would explain why it works like that.

2: Two. “BECAUSE IT WOULD BE AWESOME” is also a valid reason.

3: Or, if you don’t like the idea of regular near-misses from dinosaur killers, there’s also the option of much more frequent encounters with smaller objects. One wonders if one could use a similar method to shuffle worlds like Mars and Venus into more useful orbits. And if any SF author has set their stories in a well-managed solar system, cultivated like a garden… No recent examples are coming to mind, but my memory is notoriously poor.

4: Lots of SF uses one impossible idea to good effect so if you can hang a story off that idea, feel free to use it. Ideas are cheap.

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.

Happy pre-Halloween, Tor.com! In celebration of the encroaching Pumpkin Spice Day, please accept this humble offering of one of the Butler Sisters’ all-time favorite holiday movies: 1993’s Hocus Pocus! Whoo!

Please note that as with all films covered on the Nostalgia Rewatch, this post will be rife with spoilers for the film.

And now, the post!

Okay, so, let’s go ahead and cut to the chase.

This is not only the best part of Hocus Pocus, it is one of the best non-horror Halloween scenes ever:

A bold claim, Leigh, you cry! But wait, I have supporting evidence! To wit:

1. This scene has Bette Midler singing while dressed as a witch in it.

KEW EE DEE, BEACHES.

I’m actually not kidding. The Divine Miss M may no longer have quite the fame or presence in the pop culture zeitgeist she did in her heyday, but her heyday was glorious. No one who grew up in the 80s and 90s could possibly have hoped to have missed the awesomeness of Bette Midler; even the heinous overplayed ubiquitousness of “Wind Beneath My Wings” does not dampen my love of the memory of (just for example) watching her wheelchair mermaid zoom around the stage in magnificent, beautiful ludicrosity.

A genuinely brilliant musician who is also a genuinely brilliant comedian is a rare beast indeed, and Bette Midler is one of the few who can claim the distinction. How many times can you say you’ve watched a musical number that cracked you up while also giving you chills? Not many, if you ask me. And as silly as it was, that last run of notes Bette sings in the above scene gives me goosebumps every time I watch it.

The clip I used is interesting for another reason, which is that whoever posted it edited and manipulated the video and audio to focus on the number itself, and ignore the plotty kid-related bits as much as possible. Which is oddly apropos, since my sisters and I agreed that even when we first saw it in 1993, we identified with and enjoyed the adult actors in the movie far more than the soi-disant child actor protagonists who are nominally the focus of the film.

Basically, watching Bette Midler, Kathy Najimy and Sarah Jessica Parker bounce around and have a fabulous time being comically evil witches is the best thing ever. (And it seems that Bette, at least, agreed: she’s said that of all the films she’s been in, Hocus Pocus was her favorite.) Everything else was just a support system for making that happen, as far as I am concerned.

Fun fact: This is SJP’s second appearance in the Nostalgia Rewatch (the first time was in Flight of the Navigator). More importantly, her portrayal of a Salem witch turned out to be startlingly historically accurate, as it transpires that one of her ancestors narrowly escaped being burned at the stake as a witch during the Salem witch trials. Whoa.

As an aside, SJP tends to get rather pooh-poohed in terms of being a comedian, probably because she’s pretty and people have a weird prejudice against admitting that pretty people can also be funny, but I don’t care how much you might hate Sex in the City, this movie proves that she is hilarious. Fight me.

And Kathy Najimy, of course, is a comedic treasure and always has been.

Najimy will forever have a special place in my heart for her supporting roles in three movies: this one, of course, Sister Act, and Soapdish. (Interestingly, Bette Midler was supposed to play the lead in Sister Act, but ultimately turned down the role and it went to Whoopi Goldberg instead. I am glad it worked out that way because Whoopi was fabulous, but I can’t help wishing I could also have the alternate universe version in which Bette played the character too.)

There are no good video clips out there of it that I have been able to find, sadly, but Hocus Pocus’s cameo scene featuring real-life siblings Garry Marshall and Penny Marshall, both formidable actor/producer/directors in their own right, is also pure comedy gold, and the movie is worth watching for this scene alone, if you ask me. My sisters and I have seen this movie any number of times, and every time this scene comes up we giggle madly all through it. RIP, Garry, you were the bomb.

Props must also be given to actor-and-contortionist-and-expert-prosthetic-makeup-wearer Doug Jones, who is probably best known these days for his roles in various Guillermo del Toro films (Pan’s Labyrinth EEEEEEK), but is also memorable here as Winifred Sanderson’s unwilling zombie ex Billy Butcherson.

Jones claims that the moths that flew out of his mouth when he cut the stitches holding it closed were real and not a special effect, but I remain sort of skeptical of that. If true, though: ew.

Relatedly, the costumes and special effects in general for this movie were surprisingly good, if not necessarily spectacular. We agreed that we loved how the Sanderson sisters’ outfits in particular skillfully rode the line between being comedic and cool, and how well they conveyed the concept of “witch” without hewing to any of the more dreary stereotypes of what that look should entail.

Hocus Pocus, I was a little surprised to discover, was something of a critical and box office disappointment when it was originally released in 1993, but over the years it has built up a devoted following, to the point where annual Halloween viewings of the film are considered essential seasonal fare for both kids and adults. Naturally, then, we had Nephew Remy sit in for this showing of it, and asked his opinion.

REMY: I liked it a lot. I liked the cat and the witches and when the zombie fell asleep.

LIZ: Did you think it was scary?

REMY: No, it was funny.

LIZ: Which part was the funniest?

REMY: When they burned up in the flames!

LIZ: …

Kids, man.

In conclusion: I can’t imagine that you haven’t already seen this movie, but if for some bizarre reason you have thus far managed to avoid it, my advice to you is to quit being stubborn and just watch it already, because it is awesome. Just wait patiently through the mostly unimportant (if vaguely endearing) kid/plot bits, and join the rest of us in delighted squee at the hilariously-evil-and-ultimately-properly-punished antics of the Sanderson sisters, some of the most adorable Disney villains to ever be.

Originally published in October 2017.

In 1940, the United States hadn’t yet entered the war after the War to End All Wars, but two comics creators didn’t like what they were seeing. Two young Jewish men, who were born Hymie Simon and Jacob Kurtzberg, but who changed their names to Joe Simon and Jack Kirby to better assimilate, saw what the Axis powers were doing to Europe in general and to their fellow Jews in particular, and were angry and frightened.

And so, in December 1940, Captain America #1 debuted. Dressed in a costume with a flag motif and carrying a red-white-and-blue shield, the cover of the first issue had Cap punching Adolf Hitler in the face. The character was very polarizing—Simon and Kirby got several death threats interspersed with the avalanche of fan mail, as there were plenty of people in this country who wanted to stay the hell out of the fighting overseas—but ultimately proved hugely popular, especially after the bombing of Pearl Harbor a year later put the U.S. in the war.

After an awful movie serial in 1944, two terrible TV movies in 1979, and a 1990 film that never got (or deserved) a theatrical release, Captain America finally got a proper feature film seventy years after Pearl Harbor.

Captain America was by far Timely Comics’s most popular character, inspiring a fan club (the Sentinels of Liberty) and tons of other merchandise, not to mention that crummy movie serial. After World War II ended, however, his popularity waned, with his title ending in 1949. They revived the character in 1953 and showed him fighting Communist agents, but it only lasted a year.

When Timely—becoming known better as Marvel Comics—started their little superhero revolution in the early 1960s, Kirby and Stan Lee decided to bring Cap back in Avengers #4, establishing that he was in suspended animation in the Arctic since the end of the war. (The 1950s version of Cap and his sidekick Bucky was ignored initially, and then retconned in a 1972 story by Steve Englehart as a pair of knock-offs. That Cap and Bucky went nuts, with Cap dying, and Bucky being cured of his insanity and becoming the hero Nomad.)

Cap quickly became the heart of the Avengers, and also thrived in his own adventures. Initially sharing the Tales of Suspense title with Iron Man, with the hundredth issue in 1968 it was retitled Captain America, with Iron Man getting his own separate title.

Marvel’s attempts to do Cap right on film in the 21st century were stymied initially by a lawsuit brought about by Simon over rights to the character (Marvel and Simon eventually settled), and then by the writers strike of 2007. Eventually, however, the film got greenlit. The original intent was to have half the film take place during World War II and the other half in the present day, but that was quickly abandoned for a straight-up WWII pic. (Perhaps they recalled that that formula didn’t exactly work the last time they tried it.) Joe Johnston—who had directed October Sky and The Rocketeer, both period pieces—was hired to direct, and he brought in Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely to write the script. Markus and McFeely have since become two of the go-to writers of the Marvel Cinematic Universe—they would go on to write the subsequent two Cap films, the two Avengers: Infinity War movies, and Thor: Dark World.

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Chris Evans was cast in the title role, for which Ryan Philippe, Ryan Krasinski, and Sebastian Stan were also considered. Stan wound up being cast as Bucky, with Hayley Atwell as Peggy Carter, Tommy Lee Jones as Colonel Phillips (a minor character in one of the 1960s expanded retellings of Cap’s origin), Stanley Tucci as Dr. Erskine, Hugo Weaving as the Red Skull, and Toby Jones as the Skull’s right hand Arnim Zola (in the comics, Zola is a geneticist who experimented on his own body, giving him a face on a TV screen in his chest—there’s a visual reference to that in the movie). Returning are the characters of Howard Stark from Iron Man 2, played as a younger man by Dominic Cooper, and Samuel L. Jackson from Thor as Nick Fury. Neal McDonough, Derek Luke, Kenneth Choi, Bruno Ricci, and JJ Feild play the Howling Commandos, though they’re never referred to as such.

Originally, the Howling Commandos were a diverse group of soldiers under the leadership of Sergeant Nick Fury, who would go on twenty years after the war to become the head of S.H.I.E.L.D., with several of his commandos working for him at the spy agency as well. The Fury connection is dropped for the movie, with the team led by McDonough’s “Dum Dum” Dugan, complete with trademark mustache and bowler hat from the comics.

Bucky’s backstory was changed from the comics as well, using elements of the “Ultimate” line’s version of Bucky, and also combining the mainline Bucky with that of Arnold Roth, who was established as Rogers’s childhood friend who protected him from bullies, as Bucky does here.

And the Red Skull was altered—while he keeps the comics’ version’s real name of Johann Schmidt, he is no longer a lower-class citizen raised to prominence by Adolf Hitler with no special powers. Instead, he’s a scientist who leads Hydra (thus combining the Skull with Baron Wolfgang von Strucker, who ran Hydra during the war in the comics), and he also is given the Super Soldier Serum that is later given to Rogers, though it has the side effect of turning his skin red and his face into a skull shape. (In the comics, the Red Skull is a normal-looking person wearing a mask.)

Also, for reasons passing understanding, Rogers’s home neighborhood was changed from the Lower East Side—the section of Manhattan where Jack Kirby was born and raised—to Brooklyn for no compellingly good reason. Since the character’s co-creator was from the Lower East Side, to move his home to Brooklyn seems pointless and arbitrary, and an insult to “King” Kirby, especially since the popularity of this version of the character has led to a Cap statue being placed in Brooklyn, because that’s supposedly his home—but it isn’t. In the canonical source material of the character, he’s from the Lower East Side, dagnabbit. It’s also hugely disappointing that seminal Cap writers Roger Stern (who established a lot of Rogers’s pre-Cap background), J.M. DeMatteis (who gave the Skull the Johann Schmidt name, and generally wrote the quintessential Cap-Skull confrontation), and Fabian Nicieza (from whose The Adventures of Captain America miniseries this movie takes a great deal) didn’t get a “special thanks to” credit at the end along with various other Cap scribes.

Evans and Jackson will next appear in Avengers. Atwell, Stan, and Jones will next appear in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Cooper and McDonough will next appear in the Agent Carter one-shot as well as the Marvel’s Agent Carter TV series that spun off from the one-shot. The Red Skull will reappear, played by Ross Marquand, in Avengers: Infinity War.

Simon’s grandchildren attended the premiere of this movie in July 2011, and called their grandfather at home when he was announced as the creator. Simon died later that year at the age of 98.

“I knocked out Adolf Hitler over two hundred times”

Captain America
Written by Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely
Directed by Joe Johnston
Produced by Kevin Feige
Original release date: July 19, 2011

In the Arctic, two agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. are summoned to the site of a large vessel that has been uncovered by the changing landscape of the ice floes. They drill their way into the massive metal conveyance and find a person holding a red-white-and-blue shield frozen in ice.

Flash back to 1942. In Norway, Johann Schmidt, the head of Hydra—the deep-science arm of the Nazi Party—invades a small town where an old man is guarding the Tesseract. An object of great power that once was part of Odin’s trophy room, it has been hidden on Earth for generations behind a relief sculpture on a wall of Yggdrasil, the World Tree of Norse myth (and which Thor explained to Jane Foster one movie ago is a symbol for the links between worlds that are linked by the Bifrost). Schmidt takes it back to one of Hydra’s redoubts in Europe, where his chief scientist, Dr. Arnim Zola, is able to harness the Tesseract’s energy into weapons.

In Brooklyn, Steve Rogers is a short, skinny young man who keeps trying to enlist in the Army, but is rated 4F. He’s tried at several different recruitment centers, giving a different home town each time, and routinely rejected. He also is regularly bullied, refusing to back down but allowing himself to get beat up repeatedly and just getting back up. On the most recent occasion, he’s saved by James Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes, his best friend. Barnes has successfully enlisted, and is going to join the 107th as a sergeant. The night before he ships out, they go to a World’s Fair-type exhibition, where young Howard Stark demonstrates a prototype for a flying car (which doesn’t quite work). Rogers tries to enlist again, and this time his eagerness is noticed by Dr. Abraham Erskine.

Erskine is a German scientist who came to the U.S. after being drafted by Hydra to create a super soldier. His formula was used on Schmidt, and Erskine has brought it to America, working with the Strategic Scientific Reserve on Operation: Rebirth. The SSR, under Erskine, U.S. Army Colonel Chester Phillips, and MI-6 Agent Peggy Carter, are trying to create super-soldiers for the Allies. The other candidates to be the guinea pig are all able-bodied soldiers. Phillips is less sanguine about Rogers, and really only allowed him as a favor to Erskine. However, Rogers proves his intelligence and courage in due course. The former when he’s the first person in seventeen years to successfully bring down a flag from a pole. (Everyone else tries and fails to climb the pole. Rogers removes the pin and screw holding the pole up so it falls to the ground, and then he easily removes the flag.) The latter when Phillips throws a grenade into the midst of the soldiers, and everyone runs—except Rogers, who jumps on top of it, urging everyone else to get to safety.

Finally, Rogers is taken to a secret base in Brooklyn. Erskine has explained that he chose Rogers because the formula amplifies what’s already there. It made Schmidt from a bad person into an evil person, and he’s convinced it will take Rogers’s innate goodness and expand it.

The experiment is a success, using Erskine’s formula and hardware provided by Stark. Rogers is now bigger and more muscular. (When Carter asks how he feels, he says, “Taller.”) Unfortunately, the representative from the State Department, who accompanied Senator Brandt, turns out to be a mole from Hydra. He shoots Erskine and dozens of other agents, steals the formula, and flees the scene. Rogers and Carter give chase. Carter takes out the assassin’s driver with a brilliant shot, but the assassin steals a cab and drives away. Rogers pursues on foot, eventually arriving at the Brooklyn Navy Yards, where the bad guy has a mini-submarine waiting for him. Rogers swims after him, ripping the cockpit open and bringing the saboteur to the surface. But he has a cyanide pill in a hollow tooth, which he swallows before he can be captured. His last words are, “Hail Hydra.”

Stark has never seen technology like the submarine. The SSR is going to the front lines to take the fight to Schmidt. Rogers isn’t going with them, however, as Phillips wanted an army and all he got was one soldier. He wants to send him to Alamogordo, but Brandt has another idea.

Rogers is put in a flag-themed costume, given a flag-themed shield, and he goes on a USO tour around the states, encouraging people to buy war bonds in the guise of “Captain America,” ending each show by socking an actor playing Hitler in the jaw. There are also propaganda movies starring Cap, comic books, and more.

While the shows are a hit in the U.S., when Brandt sends him overseas, he’s less well received. The soldiers don’t want to hear from a guy in tights, they just want to see the dancing girls. Carter visits him between shows, and tells him that the soldiers he’s talking to are all that’s left of the 107th, which took on Hydra and got creamed. Rogers goes to a pissed-off Phillips asking if Barnes is one of the casualties. Phillips has no plans to mount a rescue of anyone Hydra has imprisoned, as they would lose more people than they’d save with an assault—and, Phillips adds, Rogers would know that if he wasn’t a chorus girl.

Encouraged by Carter, who like Erskine and Rogers himself believes that Rogers is meant for better things than being, well, a chorus girl, Rogers decides to mount a one-person rescue. Stark flies him behind enemy lines in his private plane, and Rogers manages to infiltrate the Hydra base, free a bunch of soldiers (including Sergeant Timothy “Dum Dum” Dugan), and grab a piece of technology that uses the Tesseract.

Upon seeing that Rogers and the freed soldiers are making short work of his people, Schmidt sets up the base’s self-destruct. Before he and Zola flee, they confront Rogers and Barnes (who was being experimented upon by Zola). Rogers discovers that Schmidt’s face is a mask covering a skull-like face and red skin, a side effect of Erskine’s earlier version of the formula.

Rogers and the various soldiers trudge back to camp. Phillips—who has already read Carter the riot act—is impressed despite himself. Rogers is given a medal, though he ducks out on the award ceremony (which is attended by a general who looks just like Stan Lee).

While freeing Barnes, Rogers saw a map that shows all of Hydra’s bases. Phillips agrees to let Rogers and a hand-picked team go after those bases. That team includes Dugan, Barnes, and many of the other soldiers he freed. Carter also flirts a bit with Rogers, who isn’t used to it. (He later is ambush-smooched by a female private, the sight of which doesn’t please Carter all that much.)

Stark provides Rogers with a better shield than the one he was using on stage, this made of vibranium, and a more practical version of his star-spangled outfit. Over the next several months, Rogers and his commando team make mincemeat out of Hydra. They go after a train that Zola is riding on, and manage to capture the scientist, though at the cost of Barnes’s life.

Phillips questions Zola, who is the first Hydra agent they’ve captured who didn’t swallow a cyanide pill. Zola explains that Schmidt has tremendous power at his disposal and he will display it first by wiping out several major U.S. cities. Zola reveals the location of the main Hydra base (which wasn’t on the map Rogers saw) from which he will launch his carrier.

Rogers goes in on a motorcycle with a frontal assault, letting himself get captured, which distracts Hydra long enough for the commandos to attack, backed up by Phillips, Carter, and a ton of soldiers. Schmidt takes off in the carrier, but Rogers is able to leap aboard the landing gear with help from Phillips and Carter (the latter gives him a kiss before he does so). He takes out the Hydra agents who were to fly the smaller craft to the cities to destroy them, and then gets into it with Schmidt. Rogers tosses Schmidt into the containment unit for the Tesseract, which shatters it, letting the object free. Schmidt makes the mistake of picking it up, and it displays a spacescape on the vessel’s roof and seemingly disintegrates him. (We’ll find out in Infinity War that it instead transported him to the planet Vormir.) Rogers can’t let the plane crash land in New York City, so he has to put it down in the Arctic where no one will get hurt. He stays in radio contact with Carter to the end, with them agreeing to go dancing the following Saturday.

Stark spends the next several years searching for Rogers, but finds only the Tesseract. (Which explains why S.H.I.E.L.D. had it in the post-credits sequence of Thor, and also what Stark and Ivan Vanko used as the basis of their ARC reactor design, as seen in Iron Man and Iron Man 2.) When the war ends, everyone celebrates, except for Carter, Dugan, and the commandos, who drink a toast to “the captain.”

In 2011, Rogers awakens to find himself in a hospital room, a baseball game on the radio. But it’s a game from 1941 that Rogers attended, so he knows the room is a fake. (For that matter, the alleged 1940s nurse has entirely the wrong hairstyle.) He breaks out and runs into the street, only to find himself surrounded by technology he’s never seen before. He’s confronted by Nick Fury, who tells him that he’s been asleep for seven decades. Rogers wistfully says that he had a date…

In the post-credits scene, Fury tells Rogers that he has a mission for him, and then we get a bunch of scenes from Avengers.

“He’s still skinny”

Aside from the whole Brooklyn thing, there is nothing about this movie that I don’t simply adore.

First of all, the script entirely gets Steve Rogers. All we knew about him when we first met him in 1940 was that he was 4F, a sickly young man who still wanted to serve his country. Over the years various folks (Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in the 1960s, Roger Stern and John Byrne in the 1980s, Fabian Nicieza and Kevin Maguire in the 1990s) added more and more to his backstory, establishing the crippling poverty he grew up in, but also that his parents (Irish immigrants) instilled a sense of patriotism and belief in the American dream in him.

The First Avenger doesn’t really deal with the poverty, instead focusing on Rogers’s physical infirmities and determination to stand up to bullies, whether it’s the jerk who won’t stop talking over the newsreels in the movie theatre or Adolf Hitler and Johann Schmidt. Evans absolutely sells this aspect of Rogers’s personality, which is especially impressive since he did the whole thing while green-screening and being computer manipulated into a tiny person and generally probably completely unable to interact properly with the other people on the screen with him. Yet the F/X never get in the way of the characterization, and Rogers comes across as completely honest and true.

And that’s only the beginning of the work Evans does, as he never loses sight of Captain America’s optimism, his intelligence, his compassion, his willingness to stand up for what’s right. In the wrong hands, Cap can be corny, he can be bland, he can be incompetent, he can be naïve, but when done right, he’s a human symbol, and both those words are important. In this movie (and subsequent ones), he’s very much done right, a credit to both the writing and the truly amazing acting that Evans does. He’s inspirational without being hackneyed, noble without being goofy, compassionate without being weak.

Evans is surrounded by a superlative cast, who all support Cap, but provide excellent characterizations beyond that. Stanley Tucci’s Erskine is a delight, full of so many nice touches—responding to Rogers’s query asking where his German-accented self is from with “Queens,” ruefully saying there’s less Schnapps left than there should be the morning of the test, and so on—but also a subdued passion that matches that of Rogers. Tommy Lee Jones is his usual amazing self, bringing an acid cynicism and snottiness that contrasts nicely with Rogers’s earnestness. (He also gets many of the film’s best lines, delivered with Jones’s expected perfection.) Hugo Weaving, for the second time in this rewatch, has portrayed an iconic comics character with far better talent than I’ve seen him evince in other genre roles (he was one of many reasons why I hated The Matrix, and his Elrond was dreadful). His Schmidt has a calm intelligence and a ruthless practicality that makes him incredibly scary. Sebastian Stan’s Barnes is a solid friend and comrade, his easy camaraderie with Evans’s Rogers showing a deep abiding friendship, a bond that will continue through several more movies. Dominic Cooper’s Stark is his son’s father, as the hints of the elder Stark’s seamier side that we saw in the “gag reel” Tony Stark watched in Iron Man 2 are in full force in the younger version. (Hilariously, Cooper’s Howard Stark is much closer to the 1960s version of Tony Stark than Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony was in his two movies.) Neal McDonough’s Dugan is perfect, and I deeply regret that we didn’t get a TV miniseries or a movie or something that was just Dugan, Carter, and the howling commandos continuing to fight the good fight in WWII after Cap stopped Hydra. (As it happens, my favorite episode of the great, underappreciated Agent Carter series is the one McDonough guest stars in as Dugan.) The rest of the Howling Commandos don’t get much to do, but create interesting characters in a very short amount of screen time. (My favorite is Kenneth Choi’s Jim Morita, who whips out his dogtags with practiced frustration when Dugan questions his being freed with the others with a cranky, “I’m from Fresno, ace.”)

And then we have what may be the single greatest character in the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe, Hayley Atwell’s superlative Agent Peggy Carter. A role that could easily have just been the generic female lead is instead a strong, worthy character. As a woman struggling to succeed in a male-dominated field, she understands Rogers’s struggles trying to fight the good fight while being restricted, though in his case the restriction is physical rather than sociological. In particular, I like the fact that Carter very obviously starts to fall for Rogers before the experiment—what impresses her is the intelligence, the fortitude, the willingness to do whatever is necessary to do what’s right. And when all hell breaks loose after the experiment, Carter is the one who reacts the fastest, even taking out one of the saboteurs with a perfectly placed head shot. And in the end, she’s right there with Phillips and the rest storming Hydra’s base. Atwell will continue to shine, showing up in a one-shot, briefly in the next Cap movie and in Ant-Man, on an episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and her funeral is a pivotal scene in Civil War, but it’s on her own tragically short-lived TV show that she has truly proven herself as the rock star of the MCU, and it’s a pity that it didn’t get the ratings it deserved.

The greatest performances in the world will only go so far if the script sucks, but luckily that’s not a problem. This is a prototypical war story, hitting all the beats, but doing so with characters we care about. In fact, the biggest problem with this movie is that, for all that it so completely embraces the trappings of the era (the technology—even that powered by the Tesseract—is still very much mid-20th-century tech, the hairstyles and fashions are completely of the era, the streets of Brooklyn are less refined as befits the time, and Cap’s USO show is 1940s perfection, with “The Star-Spangled Man” a magnificent riff on the music of the period), it isn’t really a World War II movie. I mean, it kind of is, particularly in the early going, but as it progresses, it becomes the SSR (which we’ll later learn is the forerunner to S.H.I.E.L.D.) against Hydra, with the greater war barely acknowledged. Hell, but for the existence of Choi’s Morita, there’s no evidence of a Pacific theatre at all. And I find it impossible to credit that Schmidt was able to continue to function with impunity after disintegrating three of Hitler’s people, an action that is unconvincingly consequence-free for him. Both the Red Skull and Hydra have always been portrayed as an integral part of the Nazi infrastructure, and to have them separate like this is a bit odd. I also think the two-armed salute is a little ridiculous. I can see the story meeting now: “It’s just like the Nazi salute only with both arms so it’s twice as evil!!!!”

Still and all, just as Thor provided an MCU movie that showed it could move beyond the confines of scientists experimenting with things and into more fantastical realms (and also manage without Tony Stark), Captain America: The First Avenger gives the MCU some of the history of superheroing that Nick Fury hinted at in the Iron Man post-credits scene, some of it directly related to what we’ve already seen (the Tesseract, the SSR becoming S.H.I.E.L.D., the background of the experiments on Bruce Banner and Emil Blonsky that tried to re-create Erskine’s formula, etc.). And even without all that texture, it’s a ripping yarn, a rollicking good adventure with great action scenes, superlative characterization, and all of it revolving around a magnificent performance by the lead.

Next week, it all comes together, as we bring Iron Man, the Hulk, Thor, Captain America, and S.H.I.E.L.D. together to face Loki (among others) in Avengers.

Keith R.A. DeCandido knows he’s irrational about the whole Brooklyn thing, but the last straw was when they put up a damn statue. That statue should be on the Lower East Side, dammit.

There’s a point midway through Dale Bailey’s novel In the Night Wood wherein protagonist Charles Hayden ventures out to the forest around the English manor where he and his wife Erin have relocated following a tragedy on the other side of the Atlantic. In his exploration, Charles discovers a part of the forest that seems somewhat different from the rest: some of that can be chalked up to a sense of fundamental wrongness, and some of that can be be ascribed to a difference in temperature. But the sense of two places bordering one another, similar but with fundamentally different properties underlying their very nature, is a convenient metaphor for this novel as well, which is both a story about literary obsession and a story whose twists and turns may well lure in literary obsessives.

At the center of In the Night Wood is a fictional book, also titled In the Night Wood, and by a mid-19th century author with the magnificent name of Caedmon Hollow. When we first meet Charles, it’s as a young boy; he and his mother are at his grandfather’s house shortly after the older man’s death. Charles sees the book on a shelf and is drawn to it; as they depart, he impulsively takes it with him. While studying for a PhD, he goes in search of it in his school’s library; it’s there that he meets a woman named Erin, who turns out to be a descendant of Hollow’s. It’s serendipitous; it’s what could be a called “a meet cute.” Soon enough, Bailey tells us, they’ve married.

When next we see the Hayden family, it is far from a happy time for them. It’s years later. Erin has inherited Hollow’s old house; their marriage has become strained due to the death of their daughter and an ill-considered affair on Charles’s part. And so their relocation to England serves a number of purposes for them: a means to remove themselves from the site of their grief, a way to rekindle their marriage, and a means for Charles to pursue his research into the life of Caedmon Hollow, with an book—the first biography of this cult author—as the potential outcome.

From their arrival, though, things seem generally off. Erin’s penchant for processing her grief through visual art finds her inscribing sinister forms on paper, Charles senses odd presences around, and one of the manor’s staff isn’t acting himself. And there’s a perennial question of how much of Hollow’s menacing, dreamlike novel drew from the local folklore and how much was rooted in fact. The fact that the local pub shares a name—the Horned King—with a character in the novel within the novel seems to be more than an intriguing coincidence.

This is the sort of novel in which characters’ fixation on a fictional narrative proves all too real: Lev Grossman’s The Magicians and Jonathan Carroll’s The Land of Laughs are two relevant examples, and Bailey’s novel falls somewhere in between the two, tonally speaking. He also neatly balances the quotidian and the uncanny; for that, among other reasons, Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin and Kingsley Amis’s The Green Man would serve as two other worthy reference points.

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The exploration of local history and literature becomes a major thread in the novel. Charles meets a woman named Silva North, who runs the local historical society, and she winds up becoming one of the novel’s major characters, as her penchant for knowledge echoes Charles’s. That she’s mother to a daughter who resembles Charles and Erin’s lost child adds another wrinkle to the narrative—as does Charles’s fear that he’ll fall into another affair. Though, to Bailey’s credit, this is more about Charles’s anxieties than a genuine romantic spark between Charles and Silva—who seems more eager for a platonic and intellectual connection than anything.

Bailey’s novel is both a resonant tale of literary obsession and a story of old myths rising violently to the surface of an otherwise rational world. And it largely succeeds at both: its central characters are well-drawn, and its more uncanny aspects never overwhelm the emotional connections Bailey has established throughout the book. This isn’t to say that this book is without some frustrations, however. The handling of Erin’s depression is a particularly tricky aspect of In the Night Wood. It had the paradoxical effect of feeling emotionally correct but dramatically frustrating, leaving one of the novel’s most interesting characters on its margins rather than keeping her more central. Both Erin’s difficulty connecting with her surroundings and Erin and Charles failing to communicate at some crucial junctures felt emotionally true, but also occasionally too convenient for the plot.

Overall, however, Bailey has created an immersive setting, a fantastic sense of building tension, and a group of memorably flawed characters. In the Night Wood’s blend of literary history and sinister secrets was largely gripping throughout; it also left me in the position of many of Bailey’s characters: eager to be enchanted by the mysteries of both versions of In the Night Wood all over again.

In the Night Wood is available from John Joseph Adams.
Read an excerpt here.

Tobias Carroll is the managing editor of Vol.1 Brooklyn. He is the author of the short story collection Transitory (Civil Coping Mechanisms) and the novel Reel (Rare Bird Books).

It’s nearly impossible for me to choose five favorite horror novels. I simply can’t name a favorite (except in one case, as you’ll see below). But I can narrow it down a little and compartmentalize my preferences. In that way, even though I’m certain I’m forgetting something, the slight won’t seem too terribly egregious.

I grew up in rural North Carolina, amidst tobacco fields and scuppernong grape orchards, and in the Missouri Ozarks, amidst scorpions and tarantula herds. Living in those areas, I developed an appreciation for the folktales and ghost stories that run rampant among country folk. That upbringing has wormed its way into many of my own stories. With books like Harrow County, from Dark Horse Comics, I’m able to revisit some of my old haunts, if you’ll pardon the pun.

So, since I’m writing stories of country folk, undead witches, and ghostly apparitions, I thought I’d share some of my favorite backwoods horror books. Admittedly, not everything on this list is straight horror. There are examples of Southern Gothic and fantasy to be found on this list. I could have easily listed William Faulkner or Harper Lee or Flannery O’Connor on this list, I suppose. But there is, in the works I’ve included, a healthy dose of the creep factor that would make you think twice before you go “a-wandering out in the holler” late at night.

The Bottoms by Joe Lansdale

Not a horror story necessarily, but full of horrific themes and creepy imagery. This is a crime story and murder mystery set, like many of Lansdale’s stories, in East Texas. During the Great Depression, a group of kids set out to solve a violent murder. That’s my kind of story. But the addition of a local legend, the Goat Man (who is sort of a Boo Radley boogieman figure) makes this yarn something special. Urban legends can be spooky enough to make your skin crawl. But in my experience, those rural legends are all the more terrifying.

The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre by H.P. Lovecraft

This book served as my introduction to Lovecraft. I still have the yellowed, beat up copy I bought at a Waldenbooks in the mid-eighties. This very same copy of the book was stolen from me and then stolen back in a series of misadventures. That alone makes the book special to me, but it fits especially well on this list thanks to two stories: “The Colour Out of Space” and “The Dunwich Horror.” Not only are these my two favorite Lovecraft stories, but they also show a twisted version of country folk and strange rites practiced on hills in the dead of night that is simply spine-tingling. When I first got involved in writing horror and comics, more than one person would come up to me claiming that they had created a sub-genre of “redneck Lovecraft,” to which I would laugh and show them these stories. The “backwoods” element in horror is often used (by those who just don’t get it) as a gimmick. Used correctly, though, it elevates the story and gives it a personality all its own.

The Old Gods Waken by Manly Wade Wellman

Wellman’s Silver John is a kind of country-folk Dr. Strange or John Constantine. Armed with a silver-stringed guitar and a wealth of folksy know-how, John the Balladeer wandered the Appalachian mountains of North Carolina, facing druids, ancient deities, and black magic. The Old Gods Waken is the first of the Silver John novels, and it is heavy with country-folk hoodoo and Native American folklore. This is a story that shows how the old world and ancient traditions impact the “modern” backwoods world.

Cthulhu: The Mythos and Kindred Horrors by Robert E. Howard

When I first stumbled across this little purple paperback, I thought I found the Holy Grail. Cthulhu stories! By the guy who wrote Conan and Solomon Kane! The story that earns this book a place on this list, though, is “Pigeons from Hell,” a tale of reanimated corpses, axe murders, and voodoo. Two gentlemen taking refuge in an old plantation house in the dead of night? Sign me up! (To read the story, not to spend the night in a haunted mansion. That never ends well for anyone.)

Boy’s Life by Robert R. McCammon

This book is not only my favorite “backwoods horror” novel, but my favorite novel—period. Maybe it’s not a straight horror story, but there’s definitely murder and creepy crawlies and strange goings-on aplenty. The backwoods element is there as well, as the story takes place in and around the town of Zephyr, Alabama, during the 1960s. I know that McCammon drew on his own childhood while writing the book, but this books feels like it was written just for me, drawing on events that happened in my own life. It’s a magical story, equal parts chilling, scary, humorous, charming, thought-provoking, and touching. Amidst all the mysterious happenings, the bizarre townsfolk, and the fiendish villains is a tale of growing up and fighting to keep the magic of childhood alive.

This article was originally published in April 2015 as part of our Five Books series.

Cullen Bunn writes backwoods horror of his own in Harrow County from Dark Horse Comics. His other books include The Sixth Gun, Helheim, and Hellbreak.

There’s no pulling punches when your season’s first trip back to the past is to examine the actions of Civil Rights hero, Rosa Parks. So Doctor Who did not pull those punches. And we are left with a testament to the life of one of the bravest women in American history.

[This review contains an episode recap, so suffice it to say there are SPOILERS.]

Summary

The episode begins with a brief flashback to 1945, when Rosa Parks is kicked off a Montgomery, Alabama bus for entering at the front, where only white people are permitted to enter. Flash forward to 1955, the Doctor and crew have landed in Montgomery due to traces of artron energy the TARDIS is detecting in the area. They go to check it out, but get a rude awakening when Ryan is struck in the face by the white man after he tries to return a dropped glove to the man’s wife. Parks intervenes on their behalf to prevent the situation from escalating, and the Doctor finds traces of artron energy on her. They realize that they have arrived the day before she makes her historic stand on a local bus, which leads to her arrest and starts the bus boycott that sparks the wider Civil Rights Movement in the U.S.

The Doctor traces the artron energy to the local bus depot and finds equipment for a variety of gear from the future, including a temporal displacement weapon. These items belong to a man named Krasko, who turns out to be a recent release from Stormgate prison. He murdered thousands, and the prison only released him after planting an inhibitor in his brain that prevents him from being able to hurt or kill anyone. Without that ability, Krasko decided to jump back in time to “where it went wrong,” to stop Parks’s stand and arrest from taking place. The Doctor realizes that the group needs to do everything in their power to ensure that Parks does exactly has history says—they have to keep the timeline intact.

Krasko tries countless methods of sabotage, from trying to change out the bus driver to breaking down the bus to preventing other passengers from getting on so that it won’t be full. The gang meet him at each turn, foiling him up until the end, when they get on the same bus where Parks makes her stand. They believe they’ve done their work and make to leave, but the Doctor stops them; the bus has to be full enough to ensure that the driver harasses Parks to vacate her seat. They stay and watch her as she refuses to leave and is finally arrested. Once back on the TARDIS, the Doctor tells her companions about the effect Parks had on history.

Commentary

There’s no set up quite like having a companion get assaulted in the first ten minutes of an episode for daring to tap a white woman on the shoulder. In fact, there are many points in this episode that are hard to watch—and that’s as it should be. Racism shouldn’t be easy viewing, even if the intent of the experience is to remind viewers of all the work done and still yet to be done. “Rosa” manages to teach a great deal to those who may not know about Parks and the stand she took on an Alabama bus, but still doesn’t coat it with family-friendly imagery and vocabulary.

In the past, Doctor Who has shuffled back and forth on how much it wanted to address racism. There are episodes that bounce right off it (“The Shakespeare Code”) and episodes where we’ve seen companions antagonized for the color of their skin, though thankfully not brutalized (“Human Nature/Family of Blood”) and there are episodes where racism is crystal clear and criticized (“Thin Ice”)… but this episode is also set in America. Racism functions differently in America, embedded in the origins of the United States and marked by generations of slavery, bigotry, and segregation. This episode needed to be prepared to address that in all its ugliness, and it thankfully didn’t shy away from the issue.

Key to the success of that depiction was the creative team for this episode, co-written by Chris Chibnall with author and former Children’s Laureate Malorie Blackman, directed by Mark Tonderai, and scored by Who’s new composer, Segun Akinola. Having a group of black creators working on this story helped its complexities shine through, rather than leaving us with the sanitized “after school special” on racism, told by white people. The fact that Ryan and Yas are a part of this story helps to highlight the prejudice running throughout; seeing them separated from the Doctor and Graham frequently based on where they can and cannot go is a pointed (and clearly intentional) jab that serves to remind us that the Doctor still has privilege for appearing to be white—which is something that the show could have chosen to gloss over entirely.

Who has helpfully depicted the Doctor learning more and more about how to handle racism in the past decade of its run, and last year’s “Thin Ice” saw the Doctor acknowledge for the first time that his companion, Bill, had reason to be concerned for her safety as a black woman in the past. While the Doctor is oblivious as ever about the general rules anywhere she lands (such as leading her group to sit down in the bar/restaurant where they are angrily told that Ryan and Yas won’t be served), she goes out of her way to let her companions know that she doesn’t expect them to subject themselves to abuse on this journey. She gives them all an out at the start of the episode, suggesting that they wait inside the TARDIS. Later, when Ryan is forced to enter the bus through the back doors, the Doctor tells him it’s wrong and apologizes for how he’s being treated. Not only is this heartening to see but it serves to build a brand new dynamic with this TARDIS crew; there’s more trust here, more mutual respect and consideration.

The villain in all of this is a relatively nondescript angry white man named Krasko, who the Doctor is rightly disgusted and also thoroughly unintimidated by. White supremacists don’t deserve our sympathies or our narrative attention, so the fact that Krasko feels like a cartoon, that he gets little explanations surrounding his beliefs and history seems exactly right. His complexities are irrelevant, should he have any at all. All we really need to know is that he’s a mass murdering racist, who desperately wants to change the past in order to prevent people like him from having to respect the lives of anyone they deem too different.

On the other side is Vinette Robinson’s poised and unshakeable portrayal of Rosa Parks. Though the southern accents throughout the episode get a little wobbly now and then, it’s incredible to see someone bring Parks to life with such intention. When she rescues Ryan from the altercation at the start of the episode that likely would have gotten him killed, it is couched in more history and experience; this is not down to a decision to be non-confrontational, but knowledge of the true cost that comes from even seeming to ignore white privilege. She tells the group about Emmett Till, and warns Ryan not to make that mistake again.

This continues, as the episode follow Ryan and Yas to key into their feelings specifically, and their assessment of how different things truly are in the future. Ryan points out that his grandmother Grace taught him to keep his temper in check as a black man, and he and Yas compare notes on how racism affects their lives. Yas recounts being called racial slurs, even while working as a cop, and Ryan talks about getting stopped by police more often than his white friends. While he bemoans the lack of progress, Yas is a bit more optimistic, noting that without the work of people like Parks, she’d never get to be a police officer.

Later on, Ryan’s chance to spend time with Parks and Dr. King helps him appreciate their work more than he had been able to previously. Both Ryan and Graham talk about Grace in regard to her love of Rosa Parks as an inspirational figure and how she would have reacted to being on this journey with them. (Which really only reinforces the fact that Grace should be there, but I digress yet again on that front.) Yas is forced to confront the specifics of American segregation laws and practices after she is mistaken for a “Mexican,” confused as to whether the word “colored” applies to her in this era, or if it was only meant to apply to black people. The complicated nature of racist systems are shoved into the spotlight, making it difficult for even the Doctor to parse out all the rules. There are tiny moments of protest where she has to use the language of dissent to declare herself against the status quo, and those are equally potent to any of the Doctor’s usual grandstanding; at one point, a local police officer asks if she or Graham have seen “a couple of mongrels” in reference to Ryan and Yas, and the Doctor simply replies, “I don’t recognize anyone by that description.”

The episode is a reflection on how small actions do change the course of history. Krasko knows that whatever ripples outward if Parks doesn’t make her stand will be enough to throw the timeline off completely, and so TARDIS gang have to work nonstop to thwart every wrench he throws in the temporal nexus. In this moment, Team TARDIS is working to safeguard history… which is, fascinatingly, what Time Lords (the Doctor’s species) are technically “meant” to do. But it’s not simply that; in the moment when it counts, the whole group has to stay on the bus in order for it to be crowded enough for Parks to initiate her protest. They are all dismayed to be counted among the people who perpetuate the injustice in the first place, but their comfort is less important than the timeline staying put.

And when that happens, Doctor Who reaffirms that what Rosa Park is the hero of her own story. Because history is correct when she refuses to move on that bus. Nothing needs sorting, nothing needs mending, it just needs to happen the way it did the first time. This story isn’t about the Doctor fixing time and being the hero along with her friends—it’s about the Doctor stepping aside and letting a real hero get to work.

As in other Who episodes where the accomplishments of real people are celebrated (“Vincent and the Doctor”, “The Unicorn and the Wasp”), the Doctor takes a moment at the end to tell her companions what Rosa’s future looks like. She talks about the struggle for rights that never really ended and the Congressional Medal of Honor she received. And then she introduces them to the asteroid named after her—a testament to the fact that doing the work to assure a better tomorrow for the people who depend on your strength and perseverance will land you amongst the stars… even if they weren’t what you were shooting for in the first place.

Asides and notes to keep about the episode:

• Krasko has a vortex manipulator, just like the one that Jack Harkness and River Song used to use.
• Krasko was also being held in Stormcage, the same prison where River Song was held after “murdering” the Doctor.
• The Doctor gave a mobile phone to Elvis, and he still has it. (Which Doctor, I wonder? It sounds like the sort of thing Eleven would do….)
• The Doctor still can’t quite get used to people calling her “ma’am.” It’s hard to blame her. Ma’am is a weird honorific.
• Nothing is funnier than the Doctor teasing Graham repeatedly that she might be Banksy.

Emily Asher-Perrin wonders how often the Doctor calls up Elvis. You can bug him on Twitter and Tumblr, and read more of her work here and elsewhere.

By nature of the genre, the premise of every fantasy novel asks “what if” questions. What if magic was real? What if children went to school to learn it? What if a pantheon of gods walked among us? As an archeologist and anthropologist, Steven Erikson asked questions about the clashing of cultures and classes, about climate and capitalism, about the relationship between gods and mortals—and not just if magic existed, but if it was available to anyone. What if magical abilities could be learned by anyone, regardless of age, gender, intelligence or skill? As Erikson states, “It occurred to us that it would create a culture without gender bias so there would be no gender-based hierarchies of power. It became a world without sexism and that was very interesting to explore.”

In the same matter-of-fact, almost mundane way that magic simply exists in the Malazan universe, so too does equality among the sexes. It just is—and that’s refreshing.

With an egalitarian magic system as the foundation to the Malazan universe, the subsequent worldbuilding blocks logically fall into place, building upon each other and supporting that central idea. The definition of power extends beyond male physical strength, equalizing roles of authority. The availability of magical healing means less women and children dying in childbirth, and more opportunity for women to contribute to a society without medical or technological advancements. This creates an even playing field in the realm of power and influence, granting equal opportunity for everyone.

The very first magic user we meet in Gardens of the Moon is a woman. Another woman, Tattersail, is a respected sorceress who, although aged and overweight (“The fat lady with the spells” in her own words), enters a romantic relationship with the traditionally attractive male hero of the story. The Malazan Empire is ruled by Empress Laseen. Both her Adjuncts in the course of the series are women and one, Tavore Paran, is in a relationship with another woman. Throughout the books are storylines following sisters and female friendships, matriarchal societies, countless goddesses and queens, female assassins unmatched by their male peers, female pirate captains and several other women in high-ranking positions in different societies. And in a minor but fascinating detail, all military superiors in the series are addressed as “sir” regardless of gender. Erikson could have easily created a gendered honorific but he instead chose to keep “sir”, solidifying that, whether male or female, whoever holds the position is equally deserving of respect. And despite various cultural divisions that arise, these women in positions of power are never questioned by their male subordinates on the basis of their gender. Being female never equates with being seen as weak.

But this is the Book of the Fallen, after all. And though it’s a world of equality and diversity, it sure as Hood isn’t a utopia. Erikson presents his readers with some of the most reprehensible qualities of human nature—acts sometimes so degrading that it’s tempting to turn away. Horrible things happen to these characters, but it’s never driven by discrimination. Gender and sexual orientation are never used purely as plot devices. Of course Adjunct Tavore Paran is questioned and even resented by some of her soldiers, but using her gender or sexual orientation against her would never even cross their minds.

Neither would a common Malazan soldier hate her enemy simply because of their skin colour. Racism and blind hate certainly do exist within the series but it’s most often used as a foil to the diverse Malazan Empire, supporting the theme that diversity is strength. Inspired by the Roman Empire, Erikson explores themes of cultural and ethnic identity with his Malazans. The Malazan Empire doesn’t completely wipe out subjugated cultures, but incorporates them into their own (for better or worse). The Malazan armies are thus made of dozens of races, both human and non-human alike who, for the most part, manage to get along with each other. There’s significant effort made to show the racial diversity of the Malazan Empire, and the main themes of the series overwhelmingly express the idea that diversity is empowering.

Buy it Now

“Diversity is worth celebrating,” says Malazan Imperial Historian, Duiker, “for it is the birthplace of wisdom.”

Diversity in a society brings wisdom and representation brings compassion. And this is what separates Malazan Book of the Fallen from the rest of fantasy. Steven Erikson has spoken at length about compassion being the main theme of his series. To feel compassionate to those who are suffering, we must first be made aware of their suffering. And throughout history, these suffering voices are always the ones least heard by the rest of the world—the forgotten, the outcast, the other. With a cast of characters diverse in their gender, culture and class, Erikson brings many of these unheard voices to the forefront of his work, challenging the reader’s worldview. How do we respond to suffering? How do we maintain cultural diversity while united under one country? How, in a world without Malazan’s magic, do we address the sexism of our own? For while fantasy often begins with a “what if” question, it usually ends with “what now?”

As far as representing every unheard voice in our society, these books aren’t perfect. Gender identity isn’t explored beyond a god who changes their biological sex at will (but with the thin lines dividing male and female roles in many of Erikson’s societies, there’s surely a place for those whose identity doesn’t perfectly align with one or the other). And while the gay male characters are few, their sexual orientation never puts them at a societal disadvantage. So often fantasy presents a perfectly reflective portrait of our own society to address its flaws rather than exploring an alternative. And while many of their contemporaries continue to write epic magic battles and fire-breathing dragons while defaulting to overtly sexist, heteronormative societies because of “historical accuracy”, Erikson has proved that worldbuilding that steps outside of a Eurocentric, patriarchal system can be used as a tool to promote and explore inherent diversity and equality—to show us what reality could look like. It’s a question that’s been asked before, but it’s worth repeating: if fantasy readers can suspend their disbelief to accept the existence of dragons, magic and zombies, shouldn’t they be able to stretch their imaginations far enough to embrace a world where women and minorities exist as active, accepted, and truly equal members of society?

Matt Bandstra is a writer and designer whose poetry collection, Birds in Aquariums, was published in 2018. He can be found sharing art on Instagram and talking about music and the environment on Twitter.

We’re excited to share Richard Anderson’s cover for The Red-Stained Wings, coming from Tor Books in May 2019! Set in the world of Elizabeth Bear’s Eternal Sky trilogy, book two of The Lotus Kingdoms takes the Gage into desert lands under a deadly sky to answer the riddle of the Stone in the Skull…

The Gage and the Dead Man brought a message from the greatest wizard of Messaline to the ruling queen of Sarathai, one of the Lotus Kingdoms. But the message was a riddle, and the Lotus Kingdoms are at war.

Cover art by Richard Anderson

ELIZABETH BEAR was the recipient of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2005. She has won two Hugo Awards for her short fiction. Bear lives in South Hadley, MA.

Photo by Kyle Cassidy

I was lucky enough to get my hands on a copy of The League of Regrettable Sidekicks by Jon Morris, a gorgeous technicolor reference tome that documents some of the worst comic book characters to grace the racks of local grocery stores and dusty comics shops. It occurred to me—these would make superb Halloween costumes, especially if you’re the sort who loves to explain yourself all night to strangers (you know who you are). So here are a few suggestions, if your usual go-tos have failed you.

Note before we begin: Some Halloween costumes can come off offensive if carried off without sensitivity. This list is not meant to condone those practices. Do not use fun and/or odd characters as an excuse to ridicule others, please.

The Raven (Feature Comics and Police Comics — Quality)

The Raven is the guy hanging around in the background while Spider Widow and Phantom Lady duel it out. (Art by Frank Borth from Police #21)

The best part of this costume is that you would be the sidekick of Spider Widow. Scratch that, the best part of this costume will be your green tights. Scratch that, the best part of this costume will be your ten foot wing span and unnerving open-mouthed bird head that your real face will peer out from. And you’re Spider Widow’s significant other! That’s kinda cool, right? You’re like Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor… but weirder! Honestly, if you’re going to fight crime and make the world a better place, why wouldn’t you want to do it in a giant bird costume. Michael Keaton’s performance in that weirdo movie has got nothing on you.

Gaggy (Batman — DC Comics)

(Art by Sheldon Moldoff and Joe Giella, Batman #186)

Harley Quinn has become one of the most popular Halloween costumes these past few years, and it’s easy to see why; the costume can be reinterpreted any number of ways, she’s a fun character who doesn’t suffer (most) fools, and people are strangely enamored of her abusive relationship with Batman’s arch nemesis, the Joker. Wanna one-up every Harley this year? Consider going as Gaggy, another Joker sidekick introduced in the 1966 comics. Gagsworth A. Gagsworthy was notable for being an inspiration to the Joker—he was capable of making the Clown Prince of Crime laugh, and when the Joker laughed, he came up with criminal schemes. He was revived decades later in a far more grisly form, but before that, Gaggy was a crucial part of the Joker’s crew.

Dandy (Yankee Comics — Chesler / Dynamic)

Signed, Dandy! (Art by Charles Sultan, Yankee Comics #2)

If Captain America doesn’t scream “U.S.A.!” enough for you, this is a couples costume you’re sure to love; Dandy, the other half of Yankee Doodle Jones’s fighting duo. Yankee was created from a lab experiment to make a super-soldiery type deal, but the scientist in charge of the project had a teenage son who was also really keen on getting those powers. He ended up getting his hands on the special juice and injecting himself with it, making himself Yankee’s partner. This is a good thing because he’s the brains of the operation—Yankee doesn’t have much direction without him. So Dandy must sustain himself with cake and sarcasm. Mostly cake, it would seem.

1A (Magnus, Robot Fighter — Valiant Comics)

Just kill us all, dammit! (Art by Art Nichols, Janet Jackson, Bob Layton and Kathryn Bolinger from Magnus, Robot Fighter #1)

Lots of robots seem to say “Kill all humans.” What about one that says “Kill all robots” for a change? 1A is the partner of Magnus, Robot Fighter, from the eponymous comic series. Actually, that’s not precisely true—1A raised Magnus from childhood, training him to protect citizens against the more unscrupulous of his kin. So the robot is pretty complex, all things told, though there’s a parental vibe toward Magnus. The point is, 1A is cool and has a name that can be easily confused with steak sauce, which is a great way to puzzle people on Halloween.

Jaxxon (Star Wars — Marvel)

He’s… uh. He’s too tall to be a rodent? (Art by Howard Chaykin and Tom Palmer from Star Wars 8: Eight for Aduba-3)

Look, everyone is trying to have that real deep cut Star Wars costume, the one that proves you know way too much. You’ve seen things; Boba Fett underoos; the Star Wars Holiday Special; Jar Jar tongue lollipops. Whether it’s one of Padmé’s more obscure wardrobe choices, or a crew of jawas, it’s a tough game out there for fans to pick something truly hidden. So your best bet is Jaxxon, a giant green rabbit who hung out with Han Solo in some of the very first Star Wars comics. He’s admittedly not the weirdest member of Han Solo’s “Star-Hoppers,” but he leaves the most obvious impression. A bunny with blasters. You’ve got your opportunity, now is your moment.

Papa (Stuntman — Family Comics, Inc.)

Is Grandaddy’s name also just… Grandaddy? (Art by Jack Keeler from Stuntman #1)

What if you’re super lazy and you forgot Halloween this year, you don’t have the energy, and your kid prefers family matching sets? This short comic in the pages of Stuntman (a Kirby/Simon creation!) feels your pain, and it’s ready to catch you when you fall. Papa is sidekick to his son, Junior Genius (not a gender-specific name, so it doesn’t matter if your kid is a girl, or non-binary, or anywhere in-between). All the kid needs in some nerdy clothes and science-y instruments, and all you need is a pair of jeans and a red sweater that says “PAPA” on it. Literally, that’s it. Then you follow your kid around while they do generally brilliant stuff. And when people stare and insist that you’re not really wearing a costume, you get to drop a trough of Golden Age knowledge on them.

Super-Ann (Amazing Man — Centaur Comics)

Pretty sure she’s an adult, though. (Art by Martin Filchok from Amazing Man Comics #24)

Super-Ann is the world’s strongest girl! She’s partners with Mighty Man, but, eh. Ignore him; he basically cons her into being his sidekick and lets her do most of his dirty work. You don’t need him to pull this one off. All you need is a little retro glam and a cardboard “safe” strapped to your arm. You might need to give yourself a name tag, since she’s not one for flashy spandex or logos. It’s more a fun excuse to wear matte lipstick and find a great green vintage dress while striking power poses.

Frobisher (Doctor Who — IDW Comics)

But he’s not actually a penguin so…? (Art by John Ridgeway and Charlie Kirchoff from Doctor Who: Prisoners of Time #6)

Have you got a penguin onesie that you’ve been dying to break out in public, but annoyed that most people are unimpressed by a simple Kigurumi as a Halloween costume? You’re about to level up, my friend: in the Doctor Who comics, the Sixth Doctor (the one with the rainbow coat) had a companion who was a talking penguin. Well, not technically. Frobisher was actually a shape-shifting alien who chose to take the form of a penguin for some time. He’s met other Doctors on his adventures, too, so you should feel safe running up to any Doctor on Halloween and shouting “It’s me! Frobisher!” You’ll be in good company.

Elf With a Gun, AKA Melf (The Defenders — Marvel Comics)

If you were trying to bring existentialism to comics… this might not be the way to do it. (Art by Sal Buscema, Jack Abel, and Petra Goldberg from The Defenders Vol. 1 #25)

Wait, what??? How… how is this is thing that exists? Who would take a stock Christmas store elf costume and do this to us? The Defenders, that’s who. While the title was going through a fascinatingly disjointed era, this elf showed up across twenty odd issues to off people, seemingly for no reason—and without ever actually crossing paths with the titular heroes. The character died before anything could be revealed about his motivations; a later retcon seemingly explained his presence in part an elaborate conspiracy involving other gun-toting elves, but that was then revealed to be a “cosmic hoax”. Fans have debated the reason for the appearance of this figure for ages, to no avail. The sudden proliferation of Elf On a Shelf only makes this more creepy. If you found a friend willing to don that costume, and maybe the Will Ferrell version, you could wind up with a whole cadre of Disturbing Elves for Halloween.

Super-Hip (The Adventures of Bob Hope — National Periodical Publications/DC Comics)

The guitar is also super. (Art by Bob Oskner from The Adventures of Bob Hope #95)

Have you ever wanted to be a literal embodiment of what “the kids” like these days? If you do—and you also wanted to be sidekick to comedian Bob Hope, for whatever reason—you are gonna love Super-Hip. The best part of this this costume isn’t the mod haircut or the cravat or the guitar, though. It’s the fact that this character literally results from another person “hulking out” into him. Super-Hip is actually Tadwaller Jutefruce, the son of Hope’s old college buddy, and he’s way more interested in his studies than he is in partying like other kids his age. But you will like him when he’s angry, as whenever he gets upset, he transforms into Super-Hip and stops being such a stick in the mud. Party down, youths.

D-Man (Captain America — Marvel Comics)

Big fan of basically everyone, just so we’re clear. (Art by Paul Neary, Vince Colletta, and Ken Feduniewicz from Captain America #238)

Be honest. All you really want to do this Halloween is confuse people with a costume that looks like it should be a ridiculous superhero off-brand knockoff that somehow isn’t. Well you’re in luck, because Captain America once had a sidekick named D-Man whose costume was… puzzling. Half-Wolverine, half-Daredevil, Demolition Man’s costume is more funny for the fact that it’s intentionally derivative. Super strong wrestler Dennis Dunphy actually enjoyed the combo look and never bothered going for his own thing. Cap wasn’t bothered either—well, it’s not his look that’s being borrowed—so he never raised much concern over the strange cribbing. This costume is perfect. Wear it. Baffle friends. Enrage know-it-alls who are convinced that you’ve made an error. Demolish.

You can find many more of these gems in The League of Regrettable Sidekicks, out on October 23rd from Quirk Books.

Emily Asher-Perrin is actually pretty into the idea of Penguin!Frobisher. You can bug him on Twitter and Tumblr, and read more of her work here and elsewhere.