Debut author Jenn Lyons has created one of the funniest, most engrossing new epic fantasy novels of the 21st century in The Ruin of Kings. An eyebrow-raising cross between the intricacy of Brandon Sanderson’s worldbuilding and the snark of Patrick Rothfuss.

Which is why Tor.com is releasing one or two chapters per week, leading all the way up to the book’s release on February 5th, 2019!

Not only that, but our resident Wheel of Time expert Leigh Butler will be reading along and reacting with you. So when you’re done with this week’s chapter, head on over to Reading The Ruin of Kings for some fresh commentary.

Our journey continues…

9: Souls and Stones
(Kihrin’s story)

I woke to pain and the rhythmic seesaw of The Misery under sail. I had been jammed into one of the child-sized bunks, naked again, with Teraeth’s black robe draped over me as a makeshift blanket. The man himself leaned against the cabin wall, his expression sullen. His mother, Khaemezra, sat next to my bunk, pressing a wet cloth against my face.

“Ow,” I said. Khaemezra had healed my wounds, but everything hurt—a sore, achy, pulled-muscle hurt.

“You’ll be happy to know you’ll live,” Khaemezra said, sounding amused about the matter.

“At least for now,” Teraeth said. “No telling what the future holds with your talent for getting into trouble.”

“Right, because I asked for this.” I swung my feet out of bed and wrapped the robe around my middle, although it was a bit late for modesty. I attempted to ignore Teraeth and concentrated on his mother. “I should say thank you for saving me from that gaesh attack, but I have to go back to my favorite question: what do you people want from me?”

She smiled. “A better question: how did you survive disobeying a gaesh when no one ever does?”

I hesitated. “What? Wait, but I …” I cleared my throat. “I thought that was your doing?”

Khaemezra shook her head. “Oh, no.”

“Then how—” I put my hand to my throat. The necklace of star tear diamonds was missing, probably reclaimed when they had removed the robe. The Stone of Shackles, however, remained.

She saw the gesture. “Yes, I suspect it was the stone too. It protects its wearer, although it doesn’t do much to mitigate pain. You might wish you were dead.” Khaemezra continued, “Juval was the one who gaeshed you, wasn’t he?”

Yeah, I wasn’t going to fall for that twice. “Don’t be silly.”

Teraeth frowned. “Then why—”

Khaemezra held up a hand. My gaesh charm dangled from her fingers. “You may answer honestly, dear child. I’ve removed the previous prohibitions.”

Teraeth must have given her the gaesh while I was unconscious.

“Oh, well in that case, sure, Juval had someone summon up a demon and that’s who gaeshed me.” I waited for a second, but I didn’t seem inclined to go into convulsions, so I continued. “Juval was furious when he realized he’d been tricked into committing high crimes against the Quuros Empire. It’s not like they’d just smile and dismiss putting a Quuros prince in the rowing galley for a season as ‘just a misunderstanding.’ I convinced him that if he killed me, the priests of Thaena would just lead the Quuros navy to his sails even quicker. He figured ripping out my soul also solved the problem.”

“Being gaeshed doesn’t rip out your soul,” Teraeth snapped.

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“Oh, I’m sorry,” I replied. “Is that personal experience talking? You’ve been gaeshed? Or have you just gaeshed a whole lot of people? I bet it’s the latter one, huh?”

“The Black Brotherhood doesn’t engage in slavery.”

I couldn’t stop myself from laughing. “The kind auctioneers back in Kishna-Farriga might beg to differ. Didn’t you have reserve seats?”

“We buy vané slaves to free them, not to gaesh them,” he retorted.

“Is that so? Is that what your mother here did with Miya? Freed her? And how do you finance an operation like that? Good intentions? Or do you have a couple dozen more star tears back home?”

“No, but if you’d like to keep stealing them back, we could work something out.”

“Quiet, both of you.” The old woman clucked her tongue. “Teraeth, go upstairs and ask the Captain how many days until we reach Zherias.”

He glared at me a moment longer, his expression righteous. “We don’t sell slaves.”

“Whatever you say, Master.”

“Teraeth, go.”

He nodded to his mother, his brow furrowed. He spared me one last parting glare and left.

I looked sideways at Khaemezra. “He’s adopted, right?”

The corner of her mouth twitched. “He has chosen to take after his father.”

That stopped me. I’d asked rhetorically. Teraeth was clearly not Khaemezra’s blood kin. “Night and day” was an apt metaphor for the pair. He was one of the Manol vané. She was a Kirpis vané.

At least, I thought she was. A woman who lived and breathed illusions could look like anything she wanted.

I grimaced, rubbing damp palms on the fabric of my robe. “I can’t trust you. I know where those star tears came from.”

“As do I: the hoard of the dragon Baelosh.”

I blinked. “Excuse me?”

“The hoard of the dragon Baelosh,” Khaemezra repeated. “Where they were stolen by Emperor Simillion. After he was murdered, the jewels were locked up with all the other priceless artifacts, in the center of the Arena in the Quuros capital. Centuries later, Emperor Gendal gave the necklace of stars to a striking Zheriaso courtesan whose beauty matched the night sky, and she used the jewels to buy her freedom. When her former owner, a man named Therin, was off having adventures with his friends, he used the necklace to save the life of a vané woman who was about to be executed. He offered to trade the necklace for ownership of the woman’s gaesh—and his vow that she would never return to the Manol.” She smiled. “That’s how the necklace came to me.”

“So you don’t deny that you sold Miya—” I halted. “Execution? She was going to be executed?”

“We call it the Traitor’s Walk. The condemned is gaeshed and forced into the Korthaen Blight. It may sound like exile, but trust me, it’s a death sentence. No rebirth. No Returning.”

“And you thought, ‘Why not make some metal on the side?’”

She scoffed. “I’d have sold her for a handful of glass beads and a broken twig if meant she didn’t end up spitted on a morgage pike, while demons feasted on her soul. I was there when she was born. I watched her grow up. Watching her die would have broken my heart.” The sadness in Khaemezra’s eyes seemed too heartfelt to be anything but genuine.

“You … you know Lady Miya then?” I had assumed their relationship was more … professional. I mean, Dethic the slaver back in Kishna-Farriga “knew” me, but I don’t think he’d have gotten broken up by the idea of my death.

She didn’t answer at first. She turned away and looked to the side and I…

I recognized that gesture, that look. I’d seen it before, even if neither woman looked anything alike. Khaemezra didn’t look like Miya any more than she looked like Teraeth, but something about their manner was so alike, that I recognized the connection immediately.

“Holy thrones, you—” I gaped. “You’re related to Miya.”

She blinked and turned back to me. “How observant. Yes. She was my granddaughter.”

Oh. OH. “How could you? To summon up a demon and watch as it ripped out part of your granddaughter’s soul…”

“Oh, no. I’m not like your Captain Juval. I didn’t order some lackey to summon a demon,” she said. “I gaeshed her soul myself. I used that.” She leaned over and tapped the Stone of Shackles at the base of my throat.

I stared at her in horror. “No, you can’t—this can’t—”

“You probably thought that bauble was a tsali stone, assuming you understand what a tsali stone is. It is not.” She flicked her hands away as if brushing away evil thoughts. “There are eight Cornerstones. Two stones for each of the four founding races. Each different, each with a different awful set of powers, each meant to usurp one of the Eight Gods.” Khaemezra chuckled, low and evil and without any warmth. “They failed in that at least. I’ll take my comforts where I can.”

“I don’t understand. Are you saying I could use this to gaesh other people? But I am gaeshed!”

“So? The Stone of Shackles cares not if your soul is divided or whole, only that it is here on this side of the Second Veil. Listen to me, because this is important: that glittery rock on your chest embodies a concept, and that concept is slavery. Every slave who has ever crawled or squirmed or died at the end of a lash feeds it, just as every death feeds Thaena. You wear an abomination around your neck and it makes the world a more terrible place by the fact of its existence.”

I felt lightheaded and dizzy. People had tried so hard to get me to remove that damn stone. At that moment, I wanted to take it off and throw it across the cabin—more than I had ever wanted anything in my life. I reached for the knot at the back of my neck, fingers scrambling in a panic. “And you used this on your granddaughter? I want it destroyed. I’ll smash it. I’ll break it—”

“As easy to kill a god, dear child. No weapon you own is up to the task. Besides, it protects you. The Stone of Shackles saved your life just a few minutes ago. Your enemies believe they cannot kill you so long as you wear it; that the power of the Stone of Shackles would twist such an act to mean their deaths and not yours. Why do you think I gave it to Miya? As for why I used it on her, I had my reasons. Leave it at that.”

That stopped me cold. Khaemezra was right, of course. The necklace couldn’t be taken by force; it had to be freely given.

Also, she’d just given an order.

I forced my hand away from the stone. “Is this what Relos Var wants? The Stone of Shackles?”

Khaemezra sighed. “No. I doubt he cares for that particular trinket.

He seeks something other than a magic necklace—your destruction.”

“But why does he want to kill me? I’ve never met him, or done anything to him.”

She smiled at me in a grandmotherly sort of way. “Dear child, I did not say he wants to kill you.”

“But you said—” I stopped and felt cold. As a priestess of the Death Goddess, she wouldn’t be imprecise with any phrasing concerning murder.

“Killing you would be a sloppy mistake, one that puts you back in the Afterlife, to be reborn or Returned.” She reached over and patted my knee. “Understand, it was pure luck …” She nodded at me. “… pure luck, that we had any idea about this auction. A source overheard Relos Var discussing the sale, and relayed that information to us without understanding its significance. However, I don’t know how he knew you would be there.”

“He could have heard about my kidnapping. I’m sure half of Quur knows I’m missing by this point.” I grimaced. “How he knew to go looking for me in the Kishna-Farriga slave pits though … if Darzin knew where I was—” I paused. “Darzin’s found me before. Could he have ordered this Relos Var person to collect me once he knew my location?”

She blinked at me and then laughed, awful and loud. “No.”

“But—”

“Darzin might be Relos Var’s lackey, but never the reverse. Prior to this you have met small men with small ambitions. But Relos Var? Relos Var is a Power, one of the strongest in the whole world.”

“Thanks for telling me. I’ll sleep so well tonight.” I swallowed. “Why me, again?”

“There’s a prophecy.”

I stared at her.

Khaemezra stared back.

I blanched, looked away, and reminded myself not to get into staring contests with High Priestesses of death cults. “I don’t believe in prophecy.”

“Neither do I. Unfortunately, Relos Var seems to take these prophecies seriously, so I must as well. And in the meantime, I would like to train you and make sure that the next time you run into trouble, you will be better prepared.” She smiled. “I’ll think of it as a favor to Miya.”

“No thanks, I already have a—” I started to say, I already have a goddess. I couldn’t spit out the words.

She noticed the pause and her eyes narrowed. “Yes, Taja is your patron. But despite our origins, worshiping the Death Goddess is not a requirement for admission into our order. I seek a soldier, not a priest or fanatic. The Goddess of Luck will not object to your training at our hands.”

I closed my eyes and shuddered. “I don’t give a fuck what Taja wants with me.”

When I opened my eyes again, Khaemezra stared at me with open contempt.

“Fool,” she whispered. She’d used much the same tone with Relos Var.

Blood warmed my cheeks. “You don’t understand what I’ve been through—”

“What is it about the idiot men in your family that you are all such fools? Stubborn. Mule-headed! If one of the Sisters chooses to give you her grace, do you think you can walk away from a goddess? That you can say ‘Bah, a bad thing has happened to me, fie on my goddess forever’? Taja walks with you as much now as she ever did. She protects you and comforts you, and if you will not see it, that is not her doing.”

I rolled my eyes. “Exactly what I’d expect a priest to say. Easy words when you don’t sit here gaeshed, with the dried blood from flayed skin still staining your back. She … She …” I realized I shouldn’t say the words, but the damage hurt. What happened to me still hurt. Khaemezra may have healed the damage to my body, but the damage to my emotions, my soul, still festered, hot and raw.

I leaned forward and finished the sentence. “She betrayed me.”

Khaemezra’s nostrils flared. “You’re mistaken.”

“The Quuros navy had found me.” I gestured toward the hull of the ship. “I’d spent months huddled in the rowing galley downstairs, praying the slave masters didn’t remember I was there, and then the navy arrived, looking for me. And what happened? They couldn’t see me. The one time in my life I didn’t want to be invisible. I watched as that navy captain looked right through me, even though I was exactly who he was looking for—the only yellow-haired bastard in the room. That was the moment I realized that my goddess didn’t want me rescued.”

“Of course not. Going back to Quur would have been a disaster.”

“A disaster?” I tried to keep my voice a careful neutral.

Khaemezra glanced as me, narrowed her eyes, and I knew I’d failed. She saw the anger as clearly as if I’d lost my temper outright. “Return to Quur and you die.”

“You don’t know that.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Oh child. You think so?”

“I do. I had a plan. It would have worked. Instead, people I love are probably dead.”

“Yes. Some are. Far more would be dead if you had stayed. I know that. I know that far better than you.”

I looked at her.

“What was it you said, not five minutes ago? About how you convinced Juval not to kill you outright? The dead keep no secrets from the Pale Lady.”

“Yes, but I was lying to Juval. The lady’s priests weren’t looking for me—my grandfather hadn’t been an active priest of Thaena since before I was born.”

“He’s not the only one who speaks to her.” She paused, as if deciding to change tactics. “I am well familiar with Darzin D’Mon, the one you call ‘Pretty Boy.’ Do you know why?”

Without waiting for my answer, she continued. “He once sought access to our order. He once sought to be part of the Black Brotherhood, to seek solace from his imagined pains and injustices in the embrace of the Lady of Death. She refused him as an unworthy suitor and, like an unworthy suitor who would force himself on a lady who does not love him, he obsesses over her. He glories in murder, each one an offering to a goddess who does not seek them, each innocent life a rotted rose left before Thaena’s gate. Had you been able to go through with your grand plan, he would have added another flower to his macabre bouquet.”

“You still don’t know that.”

“Oh, I do.” She shook her head. “At least once a week, sometimes more, your ‘Pretty Boy’ goes to the Winding Sheet in Velvet Town. As someone who grew up in that part of the Capital, I trust you are familiar with that particular brothel and its reputation?”

My mouth tasted like ash. “I know what they sell.”

“Once a week, ‘Pretty Boy’ makes a special request, one difficult to fulfill, so it requires the services of a priest of Caless to make sure that the young men provided are exotic: gold-haired and blue-eyed. Just like you. Temporary, but the illusion need not last for more than a few hours. Would you like to know what ‘Pretty Boy’ does with his pretty boys? How many mangled flowers he has left on the lady’s doorstep?”

I looked away. “No.” Damn me though, I imagined well enough. The catamites and whores of the Winding Sheet aren’t rented, but purchased.

One does not rent something whose purpose is to be destroyed.

I shuddered.

Khaemezra stood up. “Please think on my words. We are not your enemy, and you are in dire needs of friends. Sooner or later, you will have to trust someone.”

After she left, I sat there with my fist wrapped around the Stone of Shackles and thought about my options. I had no way to tell what had happened to my real family, if Ola still lived. I had no way to tell what had been done to those I loved while I traveled in chains to Kishna-Farriga, or what might still happen while I was under the Black Brotherhood’s control. Training, Khaemezra had said. Maybe they would train me. Maybe not.

More than anything, I wondered how much of what I had just been told was truth, and how much was lie, and if I had any way to know the difference.

Excerpted from The Ruin of Kings, copyright © 2018 by Jenn Lyons.

Hello, Tor.com! Enjoying yourself this fine December Tuesday? Heard your 11111^th rendition of Jingle Bells yet? Ready to murder something yet? Well, don’t do that; instead, come read about something that has nothing to do with Christmas or holidays or bells whatsoever—this blog! I am here for you, my peeps.

This blog series will be covering the first 17 chapters of the forthcoming novel The Ruin of Kings, first of a five-book series by Jenn Lyons. Previous entries can be found here in the series index.

Today’s post will be covering Chapter 9, “Souls and Stones”, which is available for your reading delectation right here.

Read it? Great! Then click on to find out what I thought!

Okay, so wow there was a lot of information dispersed in this chapter. Which is good, since that’s only what I’ve been asking for since the beginning, but it’s a lot to take in, and some of it is more confusing than it is illuminating, but that’s probably only to be expected at this stage of things.

But first things first: Oh look, Kihrin lived, yay!

Though (apparently) he wouldn’t have if he hadn’t stolen a magical necklace that’s (apparently) very invested in his survival. So, you know, good call on that particular feat of thievery, I guess?

Or maybe not, given the later revelation that the Stone of Shackles is very aptly named:

“There are eight Cornerstones. Two stones for each of the four founding races. Each different, each with a different awful set of powers, each meant to usurp one of the Eight Gods. […] Listen to me, because this is important: that glittery rock on your chest embodies a concept, and that concept is slavery. Every slave who has ever crawled or squirmed or died at the end of a lash feeds it, just as every death feeds Thaena. You wear an abomination around your neck and it makes the world a more terrible place by the fact of its existence.”

OH GOOD, THAT’S LOVELY. Gosh, who wouldn’t want to realize they’re wearing a physical manifestation of one of the worst inventions in human history around their neck? UH, ME, THAT’S WHO. Ye gods.

Speaking of which, I have no idea what it means that these Cornerstones are trying to usurp the gods, that seems… odd. And also, not a good idea. Presumably we’ll get more information on that later.

[Kihrin:] “Oh, well in that case, sure, Juval had someone summon up a demon and that’s who gaeshed me. […] Juval was furious when he realized he’d been tricked into committing high crimes against the Quuran Empire. It’s not like they’d just smile and dismiss putting a Quuran prince in the rowing galley for a season as ‘just a misunderstanding.’ I convinced him that if he killed me, the priests of Thaena would just lead the Quuran navy to his sails even quicker. He figured ripping out my soul also solved the problem.”

Well, at least we’re no longer beating around the bush about the whole “Kihrin is of royal blood” thing. I mean, various previous chapters hinted about it pretty strongly but this is the first time it’s been said in so many words.

This also seems to (kind of) clear up whether Kihrin had been gaeshed and sold into slavery on that night in Kazivar House, or if it happened later; apparently it was later—i.e. on The Misery. What is still not clear is what happened in between the time Dead Guy sent the (first?) demon after Kihrin in the house, and how he ended up stowing away (?) on Juval’s ship and from there getting gaeshed and sold into slavery. Evidently some shit went down in the interim, y’all, I’m just saying.

Also not clear: what the deal is with this Miya person, who is (apparently) Khaemezra’s granddaughter? And yet who is also someone Kihrin seems to feel very strongly about? Bizarre. I’m not sure, but I don’t think Miya’s been mentioned before this point, so basically all of Kihrin and Khaemezra’s back and forth about her was pretty confusing, honestly. I’m assuming she is involved in this interim period we as yet do not know anything about, but we’ll see.

Also gross: the story about Pretty Boy aka Darzin D’Mon and what he likes to do with rentboys. Ugh. I have to say, I’m having trouble even figuring out how a brothel that exists to sell off its wares for perverted murdering purposes even stays in business. Why would anyone go work there, no matter how desperate they might be, you know?

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There was a lot more, but the upshot of it all is that there’s still an awful lot we don’t know about Kihrin and his heritage, and what his “plan” was that presumably involved that heritage, and why Khaemezra thinks it was a damn good thing Kihrin’s plan went to shit. I don’t know whether Kihrin should trust her, really, but (a) people who free slaves, even if only slaves from one particular race, are probably better than the alternative, and (b) training of any kind sounds like it’s better than the alternative, too. Assuming it’s all on the up and up, of course. Which is the big question, isn’t it.

Hopefully, the Black Brotherhood is what Khaemezra says it is. If they are, Kihrin’s lot may be significantly improved; if not, Kihrin is in some pretty deep shit.

“Why me, again?”

“There’s a prophecy.”

Dude, there’s always a prophecy. Prophecies, I feel safe in saying, are assholes. Never met one that didn’t epically fuck up the life of some poor farmboy/street urchin/hobbit/scullery maid who was just trying to make a living over here, man, why you gots to be like that? Fuckin’ prophecies, amirite?

Rite! And that’s what I gots for this one, kids. Did I miss anything? Let me know! And also: Be well, stay safe, avoid and/or wallow in the holiday spirit as your spirit sees fit, and I’ll see you next week with the next chapter! Cheers!

Let’s talk about doors for a moment, you and I.

Let’s talk about the power of something closed, whether or not it’s been forbidden; the mystery of the trapdoor that leads up into the attic, the powerful draw of the locked hatch that leads down into the cellar, the irresistible temptation of someone else’s fridge or medicine cabinet. We want to know what’s on the other side—and I don’t mean we want to be told. We want to see. We want to look with our own eyes, and know that no one can take that looking away from us. People are curious. It’s one of our defining characteristics. We want to know.

Children’s stories are filled with doors just begging to be opened, and some of the best and most beloved of those stories are about opening those doors. About traveling over the rainbow to a magical, Technicolor land where they, as the chosen ones, can finally make a difference. About discovering a secret, magical destiny that makes everything worthwhile.

We all know the way these stories go—enough so that I’m willing to bet everyone reading this thought of at least one story during the preceding paragraph, and that those stories didn’t always match up with the ones I was thinking of. (My story about the rainbow, for example, was the original My Little Pony, where a farm girl named Megan was chosen for her smarts, her spunk, and her opposable thumbs to defend Ponyland. She helped the Ponies kick the Devil’s ass.) The chosen one (or chosen few) travels through the door to the magical land, fights whatever evil is lurking there, and then returns to their home before their parents have the chance to worry.

Wait…what? I don’t know about the rest of you, but if I’d been chosen to travel to a land of talking horses and magical adventures when I was nine, I would have been homesick for like, ten minutes before I got down to the business of having magical adventures with talking horses. I would probably have realized eventually that deserting my family to save the world was an asshole thing to do, but by that point, I would have been in my late teens, with no idea what humans were actually like, and would probably have decided to stay exactly where I was rather than complicate everyone’s life by going back.

(It’s probably telling that my favorite portal fantasy of recent years was Catherynne Valente’s excellent The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, wherein September takes one look at her personal magical land and goes “Yes. This one. I’ll take this one.”)

Portal fantasies are a uniquely immersive form of escapism. Here is someone just like you—yes, you, no matter who you are, they’re just like you—who opens the right door or falls down the right rabbit hole or solves the right riddle, and is rewarded with a world that is so perfect for them that it might as well have been designed as a learning experience by some all-seeing author. Children get to be heroes. People with nothing get to have everything. And at the end, the chairs are put on the tables and the lights and turned out, and everyone goes home saying “Good job, see you next time.”

But what about those kids?

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What about the chosen ones who find out that they’re less lifelong companions, and more Christmas puppies, abandoned as soon as they aren’t little and cute anymore? What about the chosen ones who can’t get over what they’ve seen, what they’ve done, what they’ve been required to do? For me, the unrealistic thing about Narnia wasn’t that they found it at the back of a wardrobe; it was that only Susan eventually turned her back on something that had rejected her so utterly and unforgivably.

But. But.

If every portal fantasy starts with our world—not just the Dorothys and the Pevensies and the Wendy Darlings, but the Megans and the Sarah Williamses and the kids from Dungeons and Dragons: The Series—then how many damaged, traumatized former “chosen ones” would we have to deal with? There’s an XKCD strip that perfectly sums up the problem: “Well, I guess I spend the rest of my life pretending that didn’t happen, or knowing that everyone I love suspects I’m crazy.” How do they find a way to cope?

I wanted to know. Once I’d really started thinking about it, I needed to know. I’ve done my share of therapy, and part of the healing process is being around people who’ve had similar experiences, which gives them the empathy to understand what you’re going through. So shoving a bunch of these people together and watching what happened was only natural. Only Daryl Gregory went and wrote We Are All Completely Fine, which is (a) majestic, and (b) about a specialized form of group therapy, which meant that was out. Dammit.

Where else do you find kids with similar experiences? Camps…and schools. Especially boarding schools.

Enter Eleanor West’s School for Wayward Children (and its sister school, which will be detailed more in future volumes). Eleanor was a chosen one too; she knows how much it hurts when the doors swing closed, when the clouds come back and the rainbow disappears. She knows how to help the kids whose magical worlds have left them, possibly forever, and she’s willing to devote her life to doing whatever she can to lessen the sting, at least until she finds her own way back. Because that’s what her school is all about: finding a way to live with it, and finding the way back home.

Every Heart a Doorway is about doors. Doors we open; doors we close; doors we see in a dream and can never seem to find again. It’s about the things we share and the things we can’t share, and how they connect to each other. But mostly, it’s about me when I was six years old, watching in amazement as a blue box appeared in front of a girl who was just like me—just like me—and offered her the universe. It’s about a blonde girl being carried over the rainbow by a pink Pegasus, and a teenager offering her baby brother to the Goblin King. It’s about the friends of my childhood, and finding a way to check in on them, and the stories that they represent, now that we’re both a little bit older, and a little bit wiser, and a little bit more lost.

Doors are important.

What we find on the other side matters even more.

The Wayward Children 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
This article was originally published in January 2016.

New York Times bestselling author 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 is available from Tor.com Publishing

Even today, even in the era of mainstream geekdom and publicly embracing guilty pleasures, I still cannot recommend two formative pieces of genre work from my childhood (the mid-’90s to early ’00s) without caveats. One was the first book series that I committed to with unabashed zeal, buying new installments monthly and absorbing myself in its world (nay, universe) for half a decade. The other was the TV series that first brought me online reading and then writing fanfiction; it was also my first lesson in the exhilaration-followed-by-disappointment of seeing a beloved series come back from cancellation not-quite-right. Animorphs and ReBoot shaped me as a fan and a writer; they were the first places where I learned how to make your characters grow with their audience, and how to depict war and its indelible consequences.

They are also cheesy as all get-out, with their ’90s-tastic Photoshop morphing book covers and CGI characters rapid-fire riffing on pop culture. But it was this unapologetically cartoonish packaging that made both series brilliant Trojan horses of a sort, ferrying impressively dark tales of trauma and recovery they might not have otherwise gotten away with.

Animorphs: Puberty Has Nothing on Morphing

“My name is Jake,” the leader of the Animorphs opens #1 The Invasion, first published in 1996. “That’s my first name, obviously. I can’t tell you my last name. It would be too dangerous. The Controllers are everywhere. Everywhere. And if they knew my full name, they could find me and my friends, and then… well, let’s just say I don’t want them to find me.”

In each subsequent book, whichever Animorph is narrating reiterates the same script, with the above introduction followed by some variation on this boilerplate text:

We can’t tell you who we are. Or where we live. It’s too risky, and we’ve got to be careful. Really careful. So we don’t trust anyone. Because if they find us… well, we just won’t let them find us. The thing you should know is that everyone is in really big trouble. Even you.

“They” are the Yeerks, alien slugs who worm their way into hosts’ brains—the victims then renamed Controllers—and seamlessly usurp their lives. As Jake and his friends soon learn, the Controllers could be anyone from their principal to Jake’s brother to a public figure promoting “The Sharing”—a community organization that, in between the barbecues and peer counseling, is a front for the Yeerks to learn about human society and recruit new members. And that “big trouble”? Is the Yeerks infiltrating Earth one body at a time while the planet’s only hope, the distant noble race of Andalites, do fuck-all to help.

The Animorphs’ opening monologue is hyper-dramatic, the equivalent of a child waving you close with urgent whispers that they have a secret, except they can’t actually tell you the secret. And the fact that it repeats in every single book (remember, these were published monthly) causes the reader to gloss over its warning, despite the actual seriousness of the increasingly messed-up adventures and battles in the ongoing war: Storming Yeerk pools every other week. Traveling to Area 51, to Atlantis, to a whole other planet. Hopping through time to wipe out an entire race during the era of the dinosaurs, or to debate whether or not to kill a non-Nazi Hitler in alternate-universe World War II. Imprisoning sociopathic “sixth Animorph” David as a rat, or negotiating with pacifist Yeerks who want the power to morph so they can escape the war. All while juggling their cover stories as typical teens who are totally not the only thing standing between the Yeerks and world domination.

Even as a kid, I knew the intro was eyeroll-inducing… but as an adult, I attempted to reconsider it from the Animorphs’ perspective: Imagine the all-consuming paranoia upon discovering that any stranger or loved one you encounter could be controlled by an extraterrestrial. You are a teenager; you’re already mistrusting authority figures, and then you find out that your parents, teachers, coaches, etc. can no longer be relied upon as confidantes, as protectors. Of course you’re going to be hyper-vigilant about protecting any hint as to your identity, because the alternative is at best slavery and at worst the end of all humankind as we know it.

This belated realization of the greater depth to the Animorphs series reflects the same sentiment I’ve seen echoed in a half dozen different pieces discovered in my research: Wait a minute, no one told me the Animorphs books were fucked UP. And yet, it’s right there on the cover—sort of. See, people liked to laugh at the super-cheesy, cartoonish morphing illustrations while never actually cracking open one of the books. That design has even become its own meme (and brought me this Pitbull morph, one of my favorite things on the Internet). But the reality of morphing, for our heroes, could not be further from these cartoonish covers. Like when Cassie becomes so traumatized by the termite’s hive mind that she attempts to demorph inside a log. Or when Rachel-as-grizzly-bear falls on an anthill and starts getting eaten alive, demorphing while screaming. And who could forget the ant that somehow gains the morphing ability and morphs into a human only to scream in agony at gaining individuality until it dies?? FUN TIMES with the Animorphs… but also, these were stories that, rather than talk down to their audience, actually explored the grisly consequences of this great and terrible power.

It’s a classic case of judging the book by its cover; only those who actually looked beyond the cheesy illustrations were privy to the gruesome passages within. I couldn’t say if this was an intentional marketing move on Scholastic’s part, but the alternative would certainly not have helped get as many books in hands: Give the books more fucked-up/grimdark covers, and you would have either gotten a more niche subset of youngsters interested in picking them up, or have alerted parents to more closely police what their kids were reading.

It was the perfect combination: Draw readers in with childlike wonder and intrigue, then reward their intelligence with more adult stories.

ReBoot: All Fun and Games til Somebody Loses an Eye

“I come from the Net,” Guardian Bob intones in the opening credits for ReBoot season 1, which first aired in 1994, “through systems, peoples, and cities, to this place… Mainframe. My format: Guardian. To mend and defend. To defend my newfound friends.” (That’s local small business owner Dot Matrix and her annoying but endearing little brother Enzo, who has a penchant for jumping on his role model and spouting such groan-worthy catchphrases as “alphanumeric!”) “Their hopes and dreams. To defend them from their enemies.” (Viruses Megabyte and Hexadecimal, who keep trying to open portals to the Net to infect it, only to be foiled every week. What wacky fun!)

ReBoot’s premise is that inside your ’90s-era computer are dozens of systems that operate like cities, populated by sprites and binomes just trying to get by through system updates and the User (that’s you) dropping down game cubes for them to play. Nearly episode revolves around the User introducing a new game into Mainframe, forcing whoever gets caught up within the cube to play out the game as NPCs, rebooting into new costumes and personas, whether the scenario in question is a riff on Mad Max or Evil Dead. And if they lose? Oh, they just get transformed into melty little slugs called nulls, and that entire sector of Mainframe basically gets nuked.

The series never pretended at coolness, instead opting to cram in as many puns, jokes, and pop culture references as they could into that pixilated space: Mainframe’s main drag is called Baudway; there’s a walking, talking (Mike the) TV spouting infomercials; season 1’s memorable “Talent Night” episode features both a “take my wife, please” joke in binary and a three-minute guitar duel between Bob and Megabyte just because.

But by the end of season 2 and start of season 3, the show grows the fuck up, both figuratively and literally. What was previously an episodic Saturday morning cartoon becomes a grimdark serialized drama. To wit:

• The wild, untamed Web rips a portal into Mainframe, forcing Bob to team up with Megabyte to close it.
• Instead, Megabyte betrays Bob and throws him into the Web, staging a coup to take over Mainframe.
• Dot becomes the resistance leader, while Enzo takes on the role of Guardian and fumbles his way through winning the games.
• Slowly, they regain some control and build hope that they will overcome their virus overlords.

And then the User wins.

Enzo enters a brutal fighting game that is simply impossible; he does his best, and he still loses. This 10-year-old boy, right as he is starting to believe in himself, gets his eye ripped out, then is forced to become a part of the game rather than get nullified. Except that as the game cube departs Mainframe and craters the neighborhood in which it stood, that’s all that Dot sees: the destruction, and no bodies. She is convinced that her little brother is dead.

And as season 3 goes on, he might as well be: As Enzo and his best friend AndrAIa game-hop from system to system, trying to hopscotch their way back to Mainframe, they grow up at an astonishing rate, something like a year for every month—so that a year later, Enzo is a hulking, bitter mercenary in his mid-twenties who goes by the name of Matrix. His every action is an overreaction: At best he’s surly, at worst he’s trigger-happy to the point where he pulls his Gun on nearly every character in the series. He doesn’t know how to have a drink, or a conversation, without threatening bodily harm. For the season 3 arc where he narrates the intros, he identifies himself not as a Guardian but as a renegade—part refugee, part defector.

His behavior and baggage are all so extreme as to veer into the laughable, but they’re also all signs of post-traumatic stress. Enzo lost his eye because of his inexperience, so Matrix replaces it with a cybernetic eye linked to Gun, so that he will never make that mistake again. He strips himself of his Guardian credentials before anyone else can, yet if you look closely at his outfit, you can see that he keeps his arm bracers, looping them to his bulging muscles rather than discard them. He possesses a nearly pathological hatred of being identified as Enzo that belies his terror of his former self: “Number 7,” a riff on The Prisoner, puts Matrix on trial in his own subconscious as Little Enzo confronts him with a list of his failures. The renegade cannot shoot his way through his greatest fear that the ones he loves, who he’s fighting to return to, will never forgive him for what he did to survive.

On the one hand, everything about this character is turned up to 11. On the other, anything less would not have hammered home the irreversible effects of war.

You Can’t Go Back

When author K.A. Applegate wrapped up Animorphs in 2001, with one of the Animorphs dead and the PTSD-ridden survivors facing their own possibly violent end, readers struggled to understand why, some even lashing out at the series’ conclusion. Applegate responded to their negative pushback with this letter that, even if you never read the series, still tells you everything you need to know about how badass she is:

I’m just a writer, and my main goal was always to entertain. But I’ve never let Animorphs turn into just another painless video game version of war, and I wasn’t going to do it at the end. I’ve spent 60 books telling a strange, fanciful war story, sometimes very seriously, sometimes more tongue-in-cheek. I’ve written a lot of action and a lot of humor and a lot of sheer nonsense. But I have also, again and again, challenged readers to think about what they were reading. To think about the right and wrong, not just the who-beat-who. And to tell you the truth I’m a little shocked that so many readers seemed to believe I’d wrap it all up with a lot of high-fiving and backslapping. Wars very often end, sad to say, just as ours did: with a nearly seamless transition to another war.

So, you don’t like the way our little fictional war came out? You don’t like Rachel dead and Tobias shattered and Jake guilt-ridden? You don’t like that one war simply led to another? Fine. Pretty soon you’ll all be of voting age, and of draft age. So when someone proposes a war, remember that even the most necessary wars, even the rare wars where the lines of good and evil are clear and clean, end with a lot of people dead, a lot of people crippled, and a lot of orphans, widows and grieving parents.

If you’re mad at me because that’s what you have to take away from Animorphs, too bad. I couldn’t have written it any other way and remained true to the respect I have always felt for Animorphs readers.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the same year saw ReBoot’s fourth and final season nearly seamlessly transition to another war of its own. Though not before both Matrix and Bob are confronted with nightmarish younger versions of themselves: When Mainframe reboots itself, a backup copy of little Enzo is created; later, a season 2-era Bob emerges from the Web, claiming that he found a way to survive without becoming mutated like the real Bob. Despite being copies, these more “whole” versions are more readily welcomed back into society, leaving both veterans feeling like strangers in their home. Oh, and then Dot nearly marries the younger Bob, before he is revealed to be Megabyte in disguise.

Season 4 veered awfully soapy more than once, in ways that made even diehard fans like myself cringe. But again, behind that cheesiness was an examination of the characters’ real traumas. Bob has had to constantly adapt to impossible situations, has more than once given pieces of himself away in order to save his friends… and then he gets rejected. Matrix does the unforgivable to survive and grow beyond his weaker self, only for a backup to reassert itself as the “real” Enzo. Even Dot’s bonkers plot makes emotional sense: Here is someone who spent a year believing that both her younger brother and her could-have-been love were dead, who had to harden herself against the hope that they had somehow made their ways back. Of course she would cling to familiar figures, to the security of a time before the Web World Wars, before Megabyte revealed his true intentions. But the lesson here—the same thing that the surviving Animorphs carry with them—is that yearning for those former selves will only impede the healing process.

Subtlety was neither series’ strong suit, but it’s not a particularly subtle lesson. Both Jake Berenson and Enzo Matrix lose their childhoods to heroism, initially playing at some archetypal mature protector role and then actually stepping into it in the absence of any capable adults. Neither is punished, per se, for his initial naïveté, but nor is he granted the opportunity to reverse the trajectory of his life. With the power granted by a morphing cube or a Guardian icon comes responsibility, comes a clear-eyed acceptance of the consequences of playing—and then not playing—hero.

That sensibility, that respect, was extended to Animorphs and ReBoot’s viewers. Neither series is a cautionary tale; on the contrary, both establish the message that it is good and important to take on heroic roles, to emulate these beloved characters. But both K.A. Applegate and the creators of ReBoot (Gavin Blair, Ian Pearson, et al) would have been remiss if they had not emphasized the sacrifices and life shifts that come with war. Both series about transformations magical—the wonder of morphing into animals, the thrill of rebooting into new game characters—and mundane inspired their respective audiences to step up just as bravely in the real world, but also to accept that it means leaving behind a former self. What brilliance to dramatically alter their own tones, their stories and stakes, in order to teach this lesson.

When Natalie Zutter went to college, her mother made her choose between getting rid of her Young Jedi Knights and Animorphs books. She chose the latter (c’mon, she wasn’t going to buy them again) and thankfully married someone with his own YJK collection. She looks forward to her one future opportunity to introduce Animorphs to someone (i.e., her future children) without cringing. Share your favorite cheesy-but-traumatic ’90s nostalgia with her on Twitter!

I’ve spent the last two years studying the typography and design of science fiction movies for Typeset in the Future, available in all good bookstores now from the lovely folks at Abrams. My studies have given me huge respect for the worlds these films create—their feats of visual storytelling are nothing short of amazing, creating cinematic visions of imagined worlds for which every detail must be realized on screen.

I was intrigued, therefore, when Tor.com invited me to apply the same approach to classic science fiction novels. These books, I’ve come to realize, have an even greater challenge to overcome when visualizing their future. A novel has just a single wraparound opportunity to picture its imagined world. Done well, a great sci-fi cover can seed an entire universe of visuals in a reader’s imagination, giving the brain’s internal SFX department all the material it needs to extrapolate during reading. Let’s take a look, then, at the design and typography of five classic cover designs—and how they bring their imagined worlds to life.

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin (Penguin Classics, 2016)

Ursula K. Le Guin’s landmark (and Hugo- and Nebula-winning) The Left Hand of Darkness deals with sexual ambiguity, exile, and the need for cultural understanding on a barren, ice-bound world where survival itself is a daily challenge. Alex Trochut’s cover for Penguin’s 2016 edition heads my list because of its intriguing minimalist treatment, relying solely on typography to conjure the mood of this hugely influential sci-fi novel.

In Trochut’s treatment, the title’s words are duplicated, sliced, and transparent, conjuring the shifting gender identity of the planet’s androgynous population in an ice-blue frosted hue. The title is not immediately readable from a casual glance—it forces you to look again, to reconsider your interpretation. It’s a brave move for a cover in any genre—making a book hard to identify across a crowded bookstore is not usually a publisher’s first choice. Nonetheless, the treatment suits the ambiguity of Gethen perfectly, alienating the reader while at the same time drawing their intrigue.

Squeezed between the shifting titles are the names of Le Guin and series introducer Neil Gaiman, both of which are sliced to remove essential elements—the bars of the “A” and “E”—to make them feel more alien to readers. This is a recurring trope in sci-fi typography, in which designers selectively extract lines and elements from individual glyphs to move them away from their humanist, hand-written origins. It’s an intriguing experiment in recognizability and minimalism—how much can we remove from a letter, while still just keeping it recognizable?

The back cover of the novel features a stylization of an Androgyne symbol. In a reflection of the sliding-scale nature of gender and sexuality, there is no one definitive symbol that represents androgyny, and this is therefore a designer’s interpretation, merging the traditional Mars and Venus symbols in a style in keeping with the overall typography of the cover. (It may also remind you of Prince’s reinvention as the Love Symbol in 1992, for which a custom typeface had to be created and mailed to the world’s music press.)

The Left Hand of Darkness is one of six designs created by Trochut for a 2016 Penguin Galaxy sci-fi miniseries. Other designs include some glitched-up type for William Gibson’s cyberpunk Neuromancer, and a hyper-chopped 2001: A Space Odyssey for Arthur C. Clarke’s novelization, with the added complication of a 90-degree rotation to further challenge readability. (The rear of this book cuts the name even deeper, reducing it to a mere geometric puzzle.)

Front covers for the Penguin Galaxy series, 2016.

Trochut’s rear cover for Dune is even more stylized, adapting a single geometric pattern to form the letters D, U, N, and E via the simple act of rotation. (Its relegation to the back cover suggests that this was perhaps a stylization too far for bookstore recognizability, even for this adventurous series.)

Back covers for the Penguin Galaxy series, 2016.

Isaac Asimov, Foundation trilogy (Panther Books, 1979)

Isaac Asimov’s Foundation has been reissued countless times since it began as a short story series in Astounding Magazine in 1942. For me, its most striking covers are those from the 1979 Panther Books UK paperback edition of the original Foundation trilogy, featuring a spacecraft triptych by British sci-fi artist Chris Foss.

There’s a lot to love here. The lowercase “asimov” is wonderfully stark, set in super-chunky Kabel Black (a geometric sans-serif in the Bauhaus style, designed by Rudolf Koch in 1927). There can be no greater proof of Isaac Asimov’s sci-fi fame that the books don’t even bother to tell us that he’s called “Isaac.” (There are few authors for whom dropping their first name entirely would do no harm to recognizability—you could probably get away with “TOLKIEN”, but the “J.R.R.” would be missed, because its idiosyncrasy is part of the author’s brand. And you definitely couldn’t run “MARTIN” without the “GEORGE R.R.”.)

It does no harm to these cover designs that Asimov’s surname has an innately alien, otherworldly feel for Western readers, with its unusual spelling deriving from Isaac’s Russian father scribing their family name (Азимов) with an “S” rather than the more common “Z” when arriving in the US. Shrewdly, Isaac recognized the value his surname’s recognizability could have for his career, and kept his father’s unusual spelling, ultimately leading to the distinctive cover design seen here.

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(As an aside: his father’s unusual spelling also provided the inspiration for a little-known Asimov short story, Spell My Name with an S, in which a Polish-American nuclear physicist is persuaded to change his name from Zebatinsky to Sebatinsky. In an early example of what we now know as the butterfly effect, this small change sets off a chain of events that ultimately leads to Earth avoiding an all-out nuclear war.)

After the fantastic Kabel typography, it’s probably best if we skip the disappointing choice of yellow Helvetica for the titles of the books, and move on to those ship designs. Artist Chris Foss paints spacecraft like no other, and his Foundation triptych—really one painting, not three—is just one entry in a series of Asimov commissions for Panther Books. This particular painting was inspired in part by Foss’s fascination with sea creatures—as he states in an interview for his 2011 anthology Hardware, “My spaceships quite deliberately evoke certain animals. It’s not an accident that there’s a big spaceship that looks like a guppy in the Asimov Foundation Trilogy.”

Despite its striking beauty, the primary issue with Foss’s Foundation painting is that not much of Foundation is actually set onboard a spaceship. This mismatch may be due to the fact that at the time Foss was painting upwards of three book covers a week—a process that did not leave time for actually reading the books to which the covers belonged. In another Hardware quote, Foss notes that at the time, “One of my art directors would phone me up with a job and say, ‘Chris, we need another Asimov,’ so I’d ask, ‘What do you need?’ He’d say, ‘The last one was blue, so give me a green one.’”

Foundation’s covers may be a slight extrapolation of the trilogy’s space-based navy battles, but that doesn’t stop them from capturing the grandeur of an empire at war with itself. It’s a testament to the series’ enduring popularity that a disk containing Asimov’s Foundation series is now in orbit around Earth, onboard Elon Musk’s recently-launched Tesla Roadster. (It is sadly unclear as to whether Foss’s artwork also made it into orbit.)

“Loss of Signal” by S. B. Divya (A Tor.com Original, 2018)

Yes, that’s correct—cover #3 is from a Tor.com short story. (I swear they’re not paying me to include it in the list.) I discovered this cover entirely by chance while researching this article, and immediately fell in love with its design. Our vantage point is from the far side of the moon, with the Earth a small near-white disc in the distance—a neat inversion of the expected relationship between these two celestial bodies, and one that is not without sci-fi precedent.

The cover’s inverted planetary relationship evokes “Earthrise”, a famous NASA photograph taken onboard Apollo 8 by astronaut Bill Anders.

“Earthrise” taken by Bill Sanders onboard Apollo 8 on December 24 1968.

“Earthrise” itself was pre-empted by the opening sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey, released some nine months before Apollo 8 became the first manned flight to orbit the Moon. 2001’s credits take a similar far-side-of-the-moon vantage point, to remind us just how tiny we are in the universe.

Like “Earthrise” and Loss of Signal, 2001’s intro shows our home planet far in the distance, small and insignificant when compared to the moon’s barren surface in the foreground. Both images require viewers to consider their place in the universe from an entirely alien vantage point, far from the comforts of home. It’s an entirely appropriate feeling for S. B. Divya’s story of the first human mind to circle the moon without a body in tow.

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (Penguin Books, 1972)

David Pelham’s 1972 cover design for A Clockwork Orange.

David Pelham’s artwork for A Clockwork Orange, created in 1972 for Penguin Books, has become one of the best-known (and longest-lasting) sci-fi book covers of all time. Originally created overnight, after Pelham (then Penguin’s fiction art director) was let down by a cover artist, it remained in use as a Penguin cover until as late as 1996.

Pelham is no stranger to science fiction—he’s also the artist behind Penguin’s equally recognizable J.G. Ballard covers, which I imagine can be found in more than one tor.com reader’s collection.

A selection of David Pelham cover artwork for Penguin editions of J.G. Ballard’s sci-fi works.

For A Clockwork Orange, Pelham’s cog-eyed droog captures both the clockwork of the title and the open-eyed mascara of Stanley Kubrick’s just-released 1971 movie, paired with some mechanistic yellow Eurostile Bold to match the illustration’s emotionless style.

Eurostile is the all-time classic sci-fi movie typeface, with its Bold Extended variant in particular acting as a short-hand for The Future ever since 2001: A Space Odyssey plastered it across HAL 9000’s interfaces. (Indeed, Eurostile’s recurrence in sci-fi was what first led me to write Typeset in the Future, as a study how typography’s unique combination of aesthetics and communication make it such an effective design shortcut.)

Eurostile Bold Extended on HAL 9000 terminals onboard the USS Discovery in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Despite its movie omnipresence, Eurostile is unusual on book covers, even those contemporaneous to A Space Odyssey. Perhaps this is form dictating function—a widescreen movie set in the vastness of space suits a widescreen typeface such as Eurostile Bold Extended, whereas the portrait cover of a novel does not. Nonetheless, Eurostile’s mechanical nature—inspired by synthetic, man-made architectural shapes of the 60s, and based on the mathematical concept of a super-ellipse—makes it an ideal pairing for Pelham’s stark design.

Stranger Things (Netflix, 2016)

The Stranger Things opening credits logo.

For #5, I’m going to cheat a bit—okay, actually, a lot—and avoid picking a single novel. Instead, we’ll look at how fantasy horror TV show Stranger Things plays on our affinity for classic genre covers as a shortcut for evoking its own particular mood.

The opening credits for Stranger Things are entirely typographic, with plain white ITC Avant Garde overshadowed by dramatic red ITC Benguiat, accompanied a bassy synth-audio moodscape.

It’s no surprise to discover that the title’s designers took Richard Greenberg’s iconic Alien credits as an inspiration. Stranger Things’s outlined glyphs are as unrecognizable as Alien’s floaty text blocks at first, only forming themselves into actual letters once the viewer’s comfort level has been suitably eroded.

The first five builds of Alien’s opening credits logo. At this stage, the word ALIEN is almost indiscernible.

If the choice of Benguiat feels familiar, it’s entirely deliberate on the part of the designers. In addition to appearing on the covers of classic Choose Your Own Adventure books and 90’s editions of Isaac Asimov novels, Benguiat was used on Stephen King movie posters and book covers throughout the era in which Stranger Things is set.

Cover of Space Patrol by Julias Goodman (Bantam, 1983), showing extensive use of ITC Benguiat.

Cover of The Robots Of Dawn by Isaac Asimov (paperback reissue by Bantam, 1994), using various weights of Benguiat.

Original one-sheet US movie poster for Stephen King’s Children of the Corn (1984), showing copious amounts of ITC Benguiat, much of it in a Stranger Things orangey-red.

In a subtle yet genius move, Stranger Things takes this association beyond the typographic, borrowing from the layout of books such as (appropriately enough) Needful Things, on which the baselines of the S and N in STEPHEN are dropped below the rest of the word. Combined with a conveniently placed “ING” in “THINGS”, the Stranger Things typography subliminally evokes the memory of every Stephen King horror fantasy you read as a child, giving its directors a ton of emotional association completely free of charge.

First edition cover of Stephen King’s Needful Things (Viking, 1991). While it’s not set in Benguiat, the dropped S and N in STEPHEN are nonetheless an inspiration for the Stranger Things title layout.

Side-by-side comparison of the Needful Things author layout and Stranger Things title, showing their similarly-placed characters and similarity.

As we’ve seen above, a sci-fi cover must both grab the imagination across a crowded store, and communicate its contained world in a single iconic image. Movies may be impressive, but they have hours to transport their viewers into the future; books have mere seconds to achieve marketing, storytelling, and world-building in a single passing glance. Get it right, however, and a cover transforms into more than just a binding—it becomes a memory of the pages within, indelibly remembered as a favorite book, distilled.

If you’ve enjoyed exploring the typography and design of these books, and you’re a fan of sci-fi in all genres, be sure to check out Typeset in the Future: Typography and Design in Science Fiction Movies, available today from Abrams Books.

Dave Addey is the creator of the website Typeset in the Future, a detailed, geeky, and humorous study of the design and typography of classic science fiction movies. He is a designer, writer, and software developer based in Santa Cruz, California.

A little while ago, I received an ARC of Alliance Rising, C.J. Cherryh’s collaboration with her spouse Jane Fancher, set in Cherryh’s Alliance-Union continuity—the universe of Cherryh’s acclaimed Downbelow Station (1981) and Cyteen (1988). While I tried to read Downbelow Station years ago, before I understood the rhythms of Cherryh’s work, Alliance Rising is the first work in this particular setting that I’ve ever finished. It spurred me to find a couple more—the omnibuses Alliance Space and The Deep Beyond, available in ebook form—to see just how representative Alliance Rising is of the works in this setting.

Alliance Rising is set in a time of change. Slow-moving change, but change that will prove drastic nonetheless. It may be, in internal chronology terms, the Alliance-Union continuity’s earliest novel, and though this is a collaboration between Cherryh and Fancher, it showcases a concern—common to Cherryh’s other novels—with organisations and bureaucracies, with systems and societies, and how such wider contexts shape the people (ambitious or content, well-meaning or malicious) who operate within them. And with, at times, the minutia of meetings. Cherryh and Fancher deploy an anthropological eye, and it’s almost a surprise when this measured, stately novel concludes in shooting.

Cherryh’s Merchanter’s Luck, originally published in 1982 and republished in the Alliance Space omnibus, is somewhat less stately. A down-on-his-luck smuggler with his own ship and a traumatic past meets and grows obsessed with the scion of a powerful merchanter family—a well-trained ship’s bridge officer who has no chance of ever rising to first in her position, because there are so many other well-trained cohorts ahead of her. She sees in the smuggler a chance to be real bridge crew, with real authority. They end up using each other out of ambition and desperation, but nonetheless forge a real emotional connection—complicated by power struggles both aboard ship and in the world outside, which is just beginning to recover from a war. Merchanter’s Luck alternates between leisurely in pace and practically frenetic, and I find the relationship between the two main characters to be a deeply unhealthy one. But the novel itself is an interesting, engaging piece of work.

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Forty Thousand in Gehenna (1983) was also republished in the Alliance Space omnibus. It’s a very different book to Merchanter’s Luck. Forty Thousand in Gehenna is a multi-generational novel of a colony that failed and then succeeded in ways its founders never envisaged. They build new forms of society in competition and later in collaboration with the native life forms: This is a very anthropological novel (in its latter stages, one of the major characters is an actual anthropologist) but one whose defining through-line is difficult to follow. It might be an examination of society’s various ways of confronting the alien, or it might be a series of questions that have no firm answer, because they’re questions about human nature and what it means to be human—or not. It’s an interesting novel, but it doesn’t ever really come together as more than the sum of its parts. (Tastes have clearly changed since the 1980s, since it was nominated for a Locus Award in 1984.)

I don’t know how eager I am to read more works in the Alliance-Union continuity, but I suspect that at least I’ll be looking out for the sequel to Alliance Rising. It ends on a solid cliffhanger, after all. After some violence and upheaval.

What have you guys been reading lately?

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

We want to send you a galley copy of Charlie Jane Anders’ The City in the Middle of the Night, available February 12 from Tor Books!

“If you control our sleep, then you can own our dreams… And from there, it’s easy to control our entire lives.”

January is a dying planet—divided between a permanently frozen darkness on one side, and blazing endless sunshine on the other. Humanity clings to life, spread across two archaic cities built in the sliver of habitable dusk.

But life inside the cities is just as dangerous as the uninhabitable wastelands outside.

Sophie, a student and reluctant revolutionary, is supposed to be dead, after being exiled into the night. Saved only by forming an unusual bond with the enigmatic beasts who roam the ice, Sophie vows to stay hidden from the world, hoping she can heal.

But fate has other plans—and Sophie’s ensuing odyssey and the ragtag family she finds will change the entire world.

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Each month, the Tor.com eBook Club gives away a free sci-fi/fantasy ebook to club subscribers.

We’re excited to announce that the pick for December 2018 is Ian McDonald’s Luna: New Moon, the first book in McDonald’s saga of the Five Dragons! (The latest volume, Luna: Moon Rising, hits shelves on March 19, 2019.)

In Ian McDonald’s Luna: New Moon, the scions of a falling house must navigate a world of corporate warfare to maintain their family’s status in the Moon’s vicious political atmosphere.

The Moon wants to kill you.

Maybe it will kill you when the per diem for your allotted food, water, and air runs out, just before you hit paydirt. Maybe it will kill you when you are trapped between the reigning corporations-the Five Dragons-in a foolish gamble against a futuristic feudal society. On the Moon, you must fight for every inch you want to gain. And that is just what Adriana Corta did.

As the leader of the Moon’s newest “dragon,” Adriana has wrested control of the Moon’s Helium-3 industry from the Mackenzie Metal corporation and fought to earn her family’s new status. Now, in the twilight of her life, Adriana finds her corporation-Corta Helio-confronted by the many enemies she made during her meteoric rise. If the Corta family is to survive, Adriana’s five children must defend their mother’s empire from her many enemies… and each other.

Luna: New Moon is available from Dec. 11, 12:01 AM ET to Dec. 14, 11:59 PM ET

Download before 11:59 PM ET Dec. 14, 2018.

Note: If you’re having issues with the sign-up or download process, please email ebookclub@tor.com.

If you’re experiencing technical difficulties, email “ebookclub@tor.com”.

All year, Brandon Sanderson fans have wondered what the prolific author’s “secret project” could be, but today’s announcement from io9 has answered that question: Sanderson, a longtime fan of Magic: The Gathering, has written a M:TG novella. Magic: Children of the Nameless explores the connections between Tacenda, a young woman with the power to protect those around her… until she can’t; and Davriel, a Planeswalker of Sanderson’s own creation. And the best part is, you can read the entire novella starting December 12.

io9 shared a synopsis for Children of the Nameless, as well as some insights from Sanderson:

Since the day she was born, Tacenda has been both blessed and cursed. Blessed by a powerful protection spell of unknown origin, she has warded her family and friends against any number of horrors over her 15 years. Cursed because the horrors which visit her small Kessig village are both numerous and frequent. Then, one night, for no reason she can fathom, her sacred song of protection fails. Seeking revenge on the man she believes responsible for the failure and the consequent destruction of everything she loves, she breaks into the manor of the local lord, a known consorter with demons. There she discovers the beginnings of an even greater mystery… starting with the fact the Lord of the Manor is anything but local…

Writing the novella in collaboration with the team at Wizards of the Coast provided opportunities to both write within an existing universe, Sanderson said, and to carve out his own corner of the story: “My editor—Nic [Kelman]—and I decided early on that the way to approach a Brandon Sanderson story in the Magic Multiverse was to give me a lot of freedom. Rather than taking an established character and telling the next chapter in their story, I wanted to section off my little piece of a Magic setting and build my own story, characters, and lore—something that built off what they’d done, and which fit with the rest of their stories, but which gave me a great deal of narrative liberty.”

It turns out that Davriel already existed in some form as a character Sanderson had thought up, inspired by Magic lore. Furthermore, the Wizards team had kept a space open in their plot for a Planeswalker character; so when Sanderson pitched his idea, it was a perfect fit.

And as for Tacenda? Sanderson explained: “The story circles around this idea of what it means to have power, and what does it do to you when you’re too weak despite that power. Her lens is the one through which we see most of the story, as to her, the stakes are very personal.”

The other place that Sanderson found delight in the collaboration was, no surprise, working with the M:TG magic systems: “I am always eager to get my hands on a new magic system, then see how I can bend it, play with it, and approach it from unexpected directions,” he said. “I love the Magic card game, but one of the questions I often ask myself is this: How would these magic spells work in a real-world setting? By necessity, the game’s spells are all about combat. I wanted to ask myself how this magic might instead be used in ways that could never actually be expressed in game mechanics. Things a narrative could do and a game never could.”

io9 has an exclusive excerpt of the beginning of the novella; and the entirety of Children of the Nameless will be available for free download on December 12. More information at the official Magic: The Gathering website.

We’re excited to share the cover for The Ascent to Godhood, the fourth book in JY Yang’s silkpunk Tensorate series—forthcoming from Tor.com Publishing in July 2019.

The Protector is dead.

For fifty years, the Protector ruled, reshaping her country in her image and driving her enemies to the corners of the map. For half a century the world turned around her as she built her armies, trained her Tensors, and grasped at the reins of fate itself. Now she is dead. Her followers will quiver, her enemies rejoice.

But in one tavern, deep in rebel territory, her greatest enemy drowns her sorrows. Lady Han raised a movement that sought the Protector’s head, yet now she can only mourn her loss. She remembers how it all began, when the Protector was young, not yet crowned, and a desperate dancing girl dared to fall in love with her.

Cover art by Yuko Shimizu; design by Christine Foltzer

I’ll admit that, after combing through the Tor.com archives (shamelessly searching for ideas for more articles), when I discovered no one had written about Sam Weller’s biography of Ray Bradbury, my reaction was twofold.

On the one hand, I was incensed. Here was the authorized biography of one of my heroes—one of the faces on my personal literary Mount Rushmore—and nobody had dedicated a word to it. That reaction, however, was short lived as a wave of joyful realization replaced it. If no one else had written about it, then the opportunity to do so could be mine for the taking.

Now, (to be fair to my great host), Tor only established its website in 2008. Weller originally published his biography in 2005. Thus, a three-year-old book was likely not on their radar when they started to publish their reviews and other nonfiction. However, late is better than never. Besides, a book about one of the most important authors of SF deserves to have a couple a thousand words said about it, even 13 years on.

So, what is the best way I can describe Weller’s book?

Well, the cheeky answer is that it’s the ultimate fanboy project.

At the beginning of his introduction, Sam Weller admits to being a total Bradbury devotee: “Like many in [his] generation, [he’s] a lifelong, card-carrying member of the Intergalactic, Time-traveling, Paleontology, Mummies, Martians, Jack-o-Lanterns, Carnivals, and Foghorn-coveting Ray Bradbury fan club.” (Just imagine the size of that membership card).

Weller has been a fan since he was in utero; his father read The Illustrated Man to his mother while she was pregnant with him. His love of the author’s work only intensified when he listened to The Toynbee Convector as he was looking after his mother toward the end of her too-short life (cancer took her in her fifties). The “profound melancholy to one of [Bradbury’s] tales—“Bless Me, Father, For I Have Sinned,”” spoke to him deeply, and in that moment, Weller “felt a kinship, [he] was not alone.” With such devotion already in place, it’s no wonder this journalist from Chicago grew up to be Bradbury’s official biographer.

The more serious answer to the question of how to characterize The Bradbury Chronicles is that Weller’s book is, above all, a thoroughly researched piece of nonfiction. The index of referenced material takes up almost a quarter of the volume (at least in the eBook edition I read). Quotes from other nonfiction works on Bradbury and snippets from numerous interviews punctuate the prose. It’s clear from this thoroughness that, though Weller may have loved his subject like a second father, this opus is no sycophantic piece of pro-Bradbury propaganda. An honest, scrupulously fact-checked work, it evokes an image which isn’t hagiographic but is always unfailingly genuine.

The picture of Bradbury that Weller conjures with his words is, “a contradiction.” (That is to say, he was human).

“He wrote of the far future, but did it with the machines of old cog-and-gear ironclad throwbacks,” Weller writes, “He wrote of the far past with a pained longing, as if to tell us all that our future would only be well served if we looked to yesteryear.”

Indeed, the adult Bradbury was a paradox. Weller explores the many contrary elements in Bradbury’s own character, such as the fact that though he wrote of the future and developing technologies—cautioning us to be mindful of their use as he did—he never learned to drive, nor did he use a computer. He also writes of how, despite living to be a nonagenarian, the author always remained sensitive and sentimental—a child at heart, a real-life Peter Pan. (And that’s only the tip of The Halloween Tree that is Bradbury).

But that’s Ray Bradbury the man; that Bradbury is not the real subject of this book.

The Bradbury Chronicles weaves the important events in Bradbury-the-man’s life throughout the book. This is natural, given that the artist and the man are the same, and the events in man’s life influences what the artist produces. Those life events, however, remain in the background of Weller’s overall story.

The real subject, in the foreground, is a question: how did Ray Douglas Bradbury, a boy born in Waukegan, Illinois during the Jazz Age, who grew up during the Depression in Los Angeles, become Ray Bradbury, the author?

In his collection Zen in the Art of Writing, Bradbury included a poem—one of a number in the section under the heading “On Creativity”—titled “The Other Me.” Its opening lines read:

I do not write—

The other me

Demands emergence constantly.

But if I turned to face him much too swiftly

Then

He sidles back to where and when

He was before

I unknowingly cracked the door

And let him out. (Bradbury, 1-9)

The Bradbury Chronicles is the answer to Weller’s question. It’s the story of the development of that “Other Me,” and the work that “Other Me” eventually produced.

Buy it Now

The book is 26 chapters long, and, in the recent editions, includes an epilogue that covers the events of Bradbury’s life after the book’s original publication in 2005 (he passed away in 2012). Though it has an uneven number of chapters, one can read it as telling two halves of the same story.

The latter half—roughly chapter 13 through the epilogue—covers Ray Bradbury’s long adult life and accomplished career as a writer. It details the events that lead to the publication of many of Bradbury’s most famous works, beginning with his first collection of stories, Dark Carnival. We learn of the circumstances that lead to the publication of The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, and Dandelion Wine. We come to understand the world events and political context that led Bradbury to write his most famous work, Fahrenheit 451; how it began as a short story and grew gradually, fanned by the paranoid flames of McCarthyism, into the novel we know today. We even learn how a single short story titled “The Fog Horn”—published in his fourth collection, The Golden Apples of the Sun—led to him getting the job of writing the script for Moby Dick for director John Huston.

However, the more interesting half of the book—at least to me—is the first half (chapters 1 through 12). In these chapters, Weller enumerates the core experiences and influences of Bradbury’s early life that impacted his later career. He also takes pains to acknowledge the people who were most influential on Bradbury’s development into the writer that Time magazine would one day name “The Poet of the Pulps.”

It is, in short, the “Making of…” section of the book.

The major influences on Bradbury’s career are rooted in his childhood and adolescence. Of course, there were the authors he read growing up: Poe, Baum, Burroughs, Conan Doyle, The Brothers Grimm, Verne, Wells, Wodehouse, and Twain. Later on, Lovecraft, Wolfe, Cather, Porter, Collier, Dahl, Steinbeck, and Anderson joined this amalgam of literary influences. But then there were the present influences, the people in Bradbury’s life who significantly affected him.

The first of these present influences were members of his family. Bradbury’s grandfather, Samuel Hinkston Bradbury (who worked in publishing), loved books and was therefore instrumental in making Bradbury a reader simply by making them abundantly available for his grandson.

His mother, Esther Bradbury, had a love of movies that influenced not only Bradbury’s desire to eventually pen scripts himself, but also influenced his “cinematic” writing style later in life. The two of them “averaged a film a week” when they still lived in Waukegan. (The two films that impacted him the most, because of the outsider characters at their heart, were The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera, both starring Lon Chaney.)

His Uncle Bion’s love of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ adventures featuring Tarzan and John Carter of Mars first exposed Bradbury to the author and to the world of pulp science fiction. Such magazines would one day be the initial outlet for his own early work. And, without the inspiration of Burroughs’ Mars, he might never have written The Martian Chronicles.

Finally, and most importantly, there was Neva Bradbury. “Aunt Neva,” as Bradbury called her, was only ten years his senior, but she was the person who guided his creativity more than anyone else did during his early life. She was a fellow creative who painted, acted, and made costumes, and read prodigiously. She introduced Bradbury to Grimms’ Fairy Tales and L. Frank Baum’s Oz books, fostering and feeding his love of the fantastic and speculative. She was also a fellow outsider in the Bradbury family (Neva was a lesbian during a time when people didn’t openly acknowledge such things). Her empathetic understanding of her nephew’s sensitive and artistic temperament nurtured Bradbury’s imagination and confidence in his abilities, which would serve him well in the future.

After the Bradbury family’s move to Los Angeles, however, the main influences on Bradbury’s creative work were fellow science fiction writers. Originally founded as a correspondence club in 1934 by Hugo Gernsback (for whom the Hugo Award is named), the local chapter of the “Science Fiction League” would eventually coalesce into the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society in the late 1930s. It was while socializing with this society that Bradbury encountered his second major group of mentors: his fellow SF writers.

For the young Bradbury, the three most significant out of this group—which included authors such Edmond Hamilton and fans such as Forrest J. Ackerman—were Robert Heinlein, Henry Kuttner, and Leigh Brackett. Weller writes of these three that, “From Robert Heinlein, [Bradbury] had learned that all good stories are of human begins; from Henry Kuttner, he had learned to cut the “purple” language and not blurt out his ideas until they were written; and in Leigh Brackett, [he] found a dear friend and possibly his best mentor.”

Here, Weller reveals the secret behind Ray Bradbury’s success: hard work, fueled by a persistent desire to improve and succeed. “By his own admission,” Weller writes, “[Bradbury] was a poor writer in high school; his work was too derivative. He imitated rather than trying to develop his own voice, spending his time coping Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves, and Edgar Allan Poe’s tales.” Yet, it was thanks to the advice of his three main mentors in L.A. that Ray Bradbury became Ray Bradbury.

Heinlein told him to keep at it and convinced him that it was best to focus on the human element, rather than the technology, in his SF stories. Kuttner told him to stop being flowery, to shut up and work, and introduced him to new authors (he put Sherwood Anderson’s Winesberg, Ohio into Bradbury’s hands, for example, which later influenced the structure of The Martian Chronicles). And Brackett, for her part, “taught [him] pure story writing.”

In addition to these valuable lessons, Bradbury then discovered a book in Los Angeles’ public library system: Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande. Brande’s book advocated an approach to writing that he adopted as his own: “To write quick and passionately…to trust his subconscious, to not overthink or second-guess his words.” In 1941, he instituted a writing regiment that would serve his career well, which was “to write one short story a week, every week, for a year.”

With all that valuable advice absorbed and a method—his “Other Me”—in place, it should come as no surprise that in July of that year, Bradbury received his first check for a short story from Super Science Stories, for a story titled “Pendulum.” (Bradbury wrote the story in collaboration with a fellow Society member, Henry Hasse). It was, as Emerson wrote to Whitman upon reading Leaves of Grass, “The beginning of a great career.”

And what a career, and life, it was.

…

Besides offering readers the full details of how the events of Bradbury’s life unfolded and came to be, Weller’s book is valuable for more than simply biography. It depicts a story from which other creatives can glean an important lesson about artistic development. Its narrative pulls back the curtain on the Wizard of Oz that is Bradbury. Bradbury was not an innate, creative genius, magically destined from the womb to be somebody…

He had passion and dedication, yes, but he also had guidance. Without the impact of that guidance, Weller might never have written this book about the man and his work (and I wouldn’t have written this essay). The Bradbury Chronicles reminds us that artists are not born—love, from the people around them who nurture their dreams, and love of what they choose to do, makes them into who they become.

Ian Martínez Cassmeyer’s mother raised him and his two older siblings in a household where the word “bored” was understood to mean, “You’re too stupid to find something to do.” If you’re looking for something to do after reading this piece, check out his blog, Ian’s Two Cents, and his Twitter @Ian_SMC. You might not agree with everything he says, but you certainly won’t be bored.

Some Star Wars theories make too much sense not to be true. Such as the very sensible idea that, to Chewbacca, Han is a badly behaved puppy.

You might have stumbled across this theory on Twitter about a year back, where Arthur Chu noticed that to a several-hundred-year-old alien, a human was as good as a pet:

THAT’S why the life debt thing makes sense

You wouldn’t spend the whole rest of your life taking care of another human just because they saved your life once

But you might do it for a heroic dog

— Arthur Chu (@arthur_affect) December 20, 2017

You’ll notice in ANH Ben pretty clearly does all the initial negotiating with Chewie and Chewie basically goes to Han all “Hey! Guess what! I’ve got some NEW FRIENDS who will be staying with us”

— Arthur Chu (@arthur_affect) December 20, 2017

Lol and in the Holiday Special Chewie’s whole family grabs Han in a big hug and say he’s an honorary family member

This makes too much sense

— Arthur Chu (@arthur_affect) December 20, 2017

LANDO: “So hey Chewie, I’m, uh, I’m really sorry, I know I promised I’d look after Han and keep him fed while you were away, but, it’s a long story but, I seem to have lost track of h—“

*cannot finish his sentence on account of his windpipe is being crushed*

— Arthur Chu (@arthur_affect) December 20, 2017

WHAT DID YOU DO WITH MY DOG, LANDO.

The point about Obi-Wan negotiating with Chewie at the start of A New Hope is actually pretty solid:

“He just gets a little grumpy and then he lashes out? But we’ve been introducing him slowly to people, and I think it’s working out…”

The problem is, once you think about it hard enough, you can’t unsee it. This might be the only explanation for Han and Chewie’s friendship that really makes sense of the Wookiee’s devotion to his weird human buddy.

Think about it—can’t you just see Chewie looking to Malla (that’s his wife) after bringing Han back to Kashyyyk for a short vacation, and proudly going, “He can’t speak Shyriiwook, but he understands SO MANY WORDS! Look at ‘im! Who’s a smart boy!” He even pets him after Han is unfrozen at Jabba’s palace:

And then he cuddles him.

This is also probably the reason why Chewie never cared about getting a medal following that Battle of Yavin. His good boy got one! It’s gonna go on his trophy shelf, along with the one he got for “piloting” the Falcon. (Look, Chewie just lets Han think he’s flying the ship. It makes him so happy, that’s all.)

This long-suffering but affectionate relationship really only makes sense when viewed through this prism. Chewie just spends this part of his life trying to stop his dog from barking at Leia and getting into trouble with galactic gangs.

It’s okay, lil buddy. I got you.

This was a pretty decent year new comics, especially for indies and miniseries. Marvel’s constant behind-the-scenes chaos isn’t making it any easier to keep its readers in the face of DC’s post-Rebirth creative revitalization. Image is as good as always, but is facing stiff competition from smaller publishers.

After pillaging my local comic shop and scouring the interwebs, I’ve pulled together the official Pull List Best of 2018. There’s some popular comics and some deep cuts, but all are doing something unique and powerful with the medium. The only eligibility requirement was that it had to be released for the first time in 2018, including the release of the first issue, first time being published in print, or first time being published in English.

What would you put in your top comics of 2018?

On-going

Blackbird (Sam Humphries, Jen Bartel, Nayoung Wilson, Triona Farrell, Jodi Wynne – Image)
Nina Rodriguez is adrift. Her life stalled the night she predicted a deadly earthquake and saw a giant fantastical beast. Sam Humphries’ story of how Nina discovers a secret world of magic and tries to rescue her sister after the beast kidnaps her is very good, but what kicks it up to great is Jen Bartel’s stellar, beautiful art.

DIE (Kieron Gillen, Stephanie Hans, Clayton Cowles – Image)
Given the pedigree of this series’ creators, I knew this would be good, but holy Hera this is so good. Only the first issue is out, and it’s a killer, pun intended. Six teens are dragged into a fantasyland, and only five return. Decades later, they go back to find their missing friend and things get worse from there. Stephanie Hans’ art alone is worthy of placement on a Best Of list.

Euthanauts (Tini Howard, Nick Robles, Eva de la Cruz, Aditya Bidikar – Black Crown)
Death isn’t what you think it is. Thalia Rosewood is inducted into the Euthanauts after a near-death experience staged by the darkly pragmatic scientist Dr. Mercy Wolfe. While the story occasionally veers into the enjoyably impenetrable, the art is so devastatingly gorgeous that it completely makes up for any confusion.

Martian Manhunter (Steve Orlando, Riley Rossmo, Ivan Plascencia, Deron Bennett – DC)
This is hands down the best thing Steve Orlando’s written since his brilliant Midnighter series. Paired with Riley Rossmo’s surreal, painterly art, J’onn J’onzz has never looked so good. Only the first issue is out – one in which Martian Manhunter in his human guise investigates the murder of a family while also flashbacking to his life on Ma’aleca’andra – but it’s mightily impressive.

West Coast Avengers (Kelly Thompson, Stefano Caselli, Triona Farrell, Joe Caramagna – Marvel)
With both Hawkeyes now in Santa Monica – and Gwenpool, Kid Omega, America Chavez, and Fuse – the West Coast Avengers have reassembled once more. This series is another gem from Kelly Thompson, with all her trademark lightheartedness laced with unexpected depth and charming heart. Plus landsharks!

Miniseries

Abbott (Saladin Ahmed, Sami Kivelä, Jason Wordie, Jim Campbell – BOOM!)
It’s Detroit, 1972, and racism, misogynoir, and classism rule the day. Elena Abbott, a Black journalist, pushes back against the city’s leaders with her exposés. But when she starts looking into the coverup of the murder of a young Black man, she falls into a web of dark, violent magic. The story unfolds, one bit of incredible worldbuilding at a time.

Eternity Girl (Magdalene Visaggio, Sonny Liew, Chris Chuckry – DC’s Young Animal)
After a devastating battle where she killed her enemy Madam Atom, Caroline Sharp’s shapeshifting powers went haywire. Unable to die despite several attempts to kill herself, she contemplates a suggestion made by the ghost of Madam Atom: achieve death by destroying the universe. Visaggio’s script is unflinching and unforgiving but earnest, and Liew’s artwork is perfect for Eternity Girl’s shifty world.

Ghostbusters: Answer the Call (Kelly Thompson, Corin Howell, Valentina Pinto, Neil Uyetake – IDW)
Abby, Patty, Erin, and Holtzman are on the hunt for the malevolent ghost of a mad scientist that feeds on people’s fears by trapping them in their nightmares. Fans of the 2016 movie will love this fun little miniseries. It’s as engaging and women-centric as the film, and Kelly Thompson really captures the, ahem, spirit of the characters.

Jook Joint (Tee Franklin, Alitha E. Martinez, Shari Chankhamma, Taylor Esposito – Image)
Brutal and bloody, Tee Franklin takes no prisoners in this vicious miniseries. Mahalia owns the titular club in 1950s New Orleans, but she’s also a witch of dark magic. Her coven targets violent men and eats them alive. Heloise asks for her help in stopping her abusive husband and gets more than she bargained for.

Rogue & Gambit (Kelly Thompson, Pere Pérez, Frank D’Armata, Joe Caramagna – Marvel)
Rogue and Gambit reunite when Kitty Pryde sends them on a mission to infiltrate a couples retreat. Their real goal is to locate several missing mutants, but they might just find love along the way. Theirs is an action-packed romance for the ages, and this miniseries does them the best of justice.

The Seeds (Ann Nocenti, David Aja, Richard Bruning, Adam Pruett – Dark Horse)
Environmental collapse is imminent. The wealthy have isolated themselves while most are trapped in a walled city. Some, however, have escaped over the wall to who-knows-what. Meanwhile, mysterious figures are collecting specimens and things are mutating in not good ways. Dense but impressive and visually stunning yet muted, this is a fascinating series of complex contradictions.

Submerged (Vita Ayala, Lisa Sterle, Stelladia, Rachel Deering – Vault)
Elysia Puente’s brother vanishes the night of a massive storm, and she descends into the bowels of a boarded up subway station to find him. Instead of an abandoned platform Ellie is sucked into the underworld, and that’s when things get really weird. The story is as alluring and surreal as the art, and chockablock with references to Shakespeare, mythology, and Latinx culture.

Graphic Novels and Webcomics

Girl Town (Carolyn Nowak – Top Shelf)
This book collects five self-contained comics. Each story is quirky and thoughtful – in one a woman decides she’s done with men and buys a robot boyfriend instead, in another two girls sneak off to a fantasy market – and brimming with a feminist twist on science fiction and fantasy. It’s deeply Millennial in every way possible and portrayed in a relatable art style.

The Hookah Girl: And Other True Stories (Marguerite Dabaie – Rosarium Publishing)
In this semi-autobiographical graphic novel, Dabaie recounts her life growing up as a Christian Palestinian refugee in the US. Dabaie constantly bumps up against American stereotypes of Arab people and reflects on those interactions with profound honesty.

The Lie and How We Told It (Tommi Parrish – Fantagraphics)
On the surface, this stunning graphic novel is just about two former school friends who spend time catching up after an unexpected reunion at the grocery store. But Parrish delves into masculinity, sexuality, emotional maturity (or immaturity), and the lives and lies we create. Parrish’s art is weird and beautiful, awkward and dreamlike.

My Boyfriend Is a Bear (Pamela Ribon, Cat Farris – Oni Press)
This is one of those comics that is just too silly to pass up. While on a hike in the foothills above LA, Nora is trying to get over a string of bad relationships with men. There she meets a bear – yes, a real bear – who wears hipster band tees and enjoys craft beer. They fall in love, but his impending winter hibernation might be an obstacle too great to overcome. Farris’ delightfully playful style is perfect for Ribon’s whimsical story.

On a Sunbeam (Tillie Walden – First Second)
Emotionally adrift, Mia joins a crew who travel through space rebuilding destroyed structures. While learning the ropes, Mia flashbacks to her teen years in a boarding school where she fell in love with Grace, the girl she lost and hopes to find again. Walden’s phenomenal webcomic gets the print edition it deserves.

Upgrade Soul (Ezra Claytan Daniels – Lion Forge)
Geneticist Molly and her comics creator husband Hank decide to celebrate their anniversary by cloning themselves. Except the clones come out with Molly and Hank’s genius but looking like creepy mutants. As the clones grow, so does both their intellect and monstrous behavior. This is science fiction at its best, exquisitely illustrated with vivid and unsettling panels.

Middle Grade / Young Adult / All Ages

Aquicorn Cove (Katie O’Neill – Oni Press)
Back at their seaside hometown after a damaging storm, Lana stumbles upon a coral reef full of aquicorns. As Lana’s father helps Aunt Mae recover from the storm and Lana nurses a baby aquicorn back to health, O’Neill weaves in a powerful story of loss and letting go.

Nancy Drew (Kelly Thompson, Jenn St-Onge, Triona Farrell, Ariana Maher – Dynamite)
Kelly Thompson makes her fourth (!) appearance on this list with her utterly delightful update of a modern classic. Nancy is lured back to her hometown by a mystery she can’t turn down. She and her bestie Bess team up with the Hardy boys to solve the cold case, but when Bess goes missing all bets are off.

Prince and the Dressmaker (Jen Wang – First Second)
A prince and a seamstress work together to create for him the most exquisite dresses in this charming tale about being true to yourself. Prince Sebastian is never happier than when he transforms into Lady Crystallia, and Frances is never prouder than when she can put her skills to the test and keep Crystallia at the height of fashion. Will his family be as accepting of Lady Crystallia as Frances is?

Spectacle vol. 1 (Megan Rose Gedris – Oni Press)
This murder mystery graphic novel blurs together the paranormal and science with lush, expressive art and an intriguing story. After Anna’s twin sister Kat is killed, she haunts Anna and demands her sibling’s help in solving her murder. Although Anna doesn’t believe in magic, the subsequent events quickly change her mind.

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.

Every year, people who get paid to write on the internet celebrate a very strange ritual: we try to dig up obscure Christmas specials, or find new angles on popular ones. Thus, we receive epic takedowns of Love Actually; assertions that not only is Die Hard a Christmas movie, it’s the best Christmas movie; and the annual realization that Alf’s Special Christmas is an atrocity. These are all worthy specials, deserving of your limited holiday media time. However, I have not come here to ask you to reconsider anything, or to tell you that something you watch each December 24^th is actually garbage—I am here to offer you a gift.

The gift of AD/BC: A Rock Opera.

Created in 2004 by the same people who made Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, The IT Crowd, and The Mighty Boosh, AD/BC: A Rock Opera is a (literally) note-perfect parody of ’70s religious musicals, wrapped in a mockumentary about the making of the musical itself. AD/BC tells the story of the Innkeeper who denied Joseph, Mary, and the not-quite-born Jesus a room in his inn. And more importantly, it features lyrics including: “Being an innkeeper’s wife, it cuts like a knife”; “You call the shots, You made the world, so fair enough, Lord”; and “as the Good Book says, a fella’s gotta keep his chin up when he gets uptight!”—all sung in perfect ‘70s rock style. Because life is meaningless and unfair, Richard Ayoade and Matt Berry only got to make one of these specials, it was only shown once on BBC3, it wasn’t released on DVD for another three years, and it never became a perennial like other, lesser specials.

A taste:

As in Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace (which I’ve written about before), part of the fun is in watching the writers and actors play with the show’s layering—actors portraying actors, acting. Real world actor Julian Barratt is “Roger Kingsman” of The Purple Explosion, who plays Tony Iscariot in the musical; Julia Davis plays “Maria Preston-Bush”—described only as “beautiful”—who portrays Ruth, the Innkeeper’s Wife; Richard Ayoade is “C.C. Hommerton,” a dancer cast as Joseph despite the fact that he can’t sing; and Matt Lucas is “Kaplan Jones,” a professional wrestler who provides the voice for an overdubbed God. The role of the Innkeeper is brought to life by Matt Berry as the musical’s writer-director “Tim Wynde,” who is exactly the sort of velvet-frockcoated, prog-rock nightmare that this decade produced. You can learn more about Tim Wynde’s lyrics, his affair with Preston-Bush, and his falling out with Homerton in the DVD extras if you want, but unlike in Darkplace, where the layers each add more nuance to the comedy, it isn’t strictly necessary here. The only thing that will help you here is an understanding of the intersection of religious spectacle and musical theater.

You see, AD/BC isn’t an ’80s pastiche like Darkplace, or an office comedy like IT Crowd, or a surrealist manifesto like The Mighty Boosh—it’s a hyper-specific parody of Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar. And because nothing is more useful than a person excitedly explaining why something is funny, I’m going to tease out the particular matrix of references that make AD/BC a worthy addition to your holiday media canon.

Pretty much as soon as film started, people started using it to tell stories from the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. The Hebrew Bible offers thousands of stories of heroic men and seductive women, hot people doing naughty things and then feeling very bad about it—stories that, thanks to the source material and pseudo-historical settings, could skirt the Hays code and draw the likes of top actors Gregory Peck, Susan Hayward, Charlton Heston, Yul Brynner, Joan Collins, and Gina Lollobrigida. Hollywood producers figured this out, and gave us Samson and Delilah (1949), The Ten Commandments (1956), Solomon and Sheba (1959), The Story of Ruth (1960), David and Goliath (1960), Esther and the King (1960), Sodom and Gomorrah (1962), and The Bible: In the Beginning… (1966), along with others I’ve probably missed. It was a formula that worked well (and provided early TV with reliable Easter/Passover programming too!) because the Hebrew Bible is just dripping with stories of adultery, murder, repentance, heroic sacrifice—it is religion tailor made for Technicolor Cinemascope.

Then you get to the New Testament, which doesn’t lend itself nearly as well to epic film making. Huge swaths of it are just people talking to each other about boring concepts like compassion and empathy. Instead of a bunch of fascinating characters—Moses, David, Solomon, Judith, and Ruth—you just get one guy, Jesus, and he dies partway through, but everyone just keeps talking about him because no one else is as interesting. There’s another problem that you only really get with the New Testament: since the canon was cobbled together from many different gospels with wildly different takes on Jesus’ life and teachings, you have to make a decision when you start work on your New Testament adaptation: do you pick one Gospel and stick with it exclusively? Do you try to merge four different books together in a way that makes sense? Or do you try to tell the story in a way that doesn’t really focus on Jesus so much?

Pasolini’s Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) takes the first approach, by literally transcribing the text and action of Matthew into a black-and-white film featuring non-professional actors. The two great attempts at making Biblical epics about Jesus—King of Kings (1961) and The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965)—both tried the syncretic method, mashing all four gospels together to tell a cohesive story. Both films are long, and a bit overstuffed, with Greatest Story in particular cramming in cameos from people like John “The Centurion” Wayne and Pat “The Angel at the Tomb” Boone. Most studios preferred to take the third route, using side characters to tell the story rather than Jesus himself. So in The Robe (1953), for instance, we learn about how Jesus’ robe impacted the lives of a few Romans. Its sequel, Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954), follows the travails of a Christian gladiator, and in the earlier Quo Vadis (1951) we check in with Peter and a group of early Christians during the reign of Nero. Where the two big-budget Jesus epics sputtered at the box office, these films were hugely popular, probably because they were bound by a sense of reverence. Quo Vadis can announce a belief in Jesus’ perfection, and then leave that off to the side while the audience focuses on the more cinematic story of humans screwing up.

Overtly religious movies mostly fell out of favor by the end of the 1960s. BUT! There were two big exceptions, and they managed to become instant time capsules of a very weird era, while also creating the kind of cheeseball cinema that inspired AD/BC. Godspell (1973) and Jesus Christ Superstar (1973) both tackle the Jesus story head-on, focusing on the last few days of his life, including large blocks of parable and New Testament quotes, but they did it in song. Both films attempt to modernize their stories to hilarious effect. The film adaptation of Godspell does this by setting the action in New York City, where Jesus and his disciples can run around Central Park, dance on the not-yet-complete World Trade Center roof, and hold the Last Supper in an abandoned lot. This, in addition to the folk-pop and the hippie garb, does a pretty good job of screaming “The filmmakers would like you to know that this story is relevant to your life, young person!” in a way that I personally find endearing. Jesus Christ Superstar takes a slightly different route by taking a more worldly approach to their story. Judas (pretty much Jesus’ second-in-command in this version) is a freedom fighter, and many of the disciples want to take up arms against the Romans—Jesus is the only one who’s taking a spiritual view on his mission. Finally, the film goes out of its way to use wacky camera tricks, sets that are obviously sets, and, in a move that’s either brilliant or unforgivably hokey, the entire cast arrives in a ramshackle bus to start the film, and everyone (except Jesus) leaves again at the end, underlining the idea that this is a group of people putting on a show.

Godspell favors folk pop and elaborate dance routines, and their Jesus (Victor Garber) looks like this:

Jesus Christ Superstar went full rock opera, and their Jesus (Ted Neeley) looks like this:

And now, straight from AD/BC, here is Matt Berry’s Innkeeper:

Look at that blue gel! Stand in awe of those flowing locks! But here’s the important bit: does AD/BC coast on being silly? Does it stop with some ridiculous camera tricks and call it a wrap? Nay, not so, gentle readers. It takes all of the above-mentioned religious-movie-history into account, and applies it to a 28-minute long comedy special. It uses the old epics’ trick of focusing on a side story, and chooses to humanize the Innkeeper, who ranks somewhere beneath The Little Drummer Boy in the Nativity’s order of importance. Ayoade and Berry steal Norman Jewison’s camerawork, and clutter their set with light rigs and “mountains” that are clearly crates with blankets thrown over them, thus invoking Jesus Christ Superstar. They take Godspell’s pop-fashion sense and dress background characters in absurdist swimming caps. They genderswap their casting of The Three Wise Men!

That’s all before I even talk about Ruth, the Innkeeper’s Wife (her life cuts like a knife, if you recall) who is a dead ringer for Frieda in A Charlie Brown Christmas. That’s before I get into the specific musical cues, or the way the sets sway when people bump into them, or the fact that Bethlehem’s citizens include both a cab driver and a full time restaurant critic. That’s before we talk about Judas’ dad, Tony Iscariot, who has learned the ways of love from men of the Orient. Or the way Tony and the Innkeeper each get to sing “GET OOOUUUT!!!” just like Ted Neeley does in Jesus Christ Superstar!

Really, I could talk about AD/BC all day, but instead of that, I’ll simply urge you to head over to Youtube and share the gift of “The Greatest Story Never Told” with your family and friends this holiday season.

Originally published December 2015.

Leah Schnelbach agrees with the Innkeeper that running an inn is just mumbo and jive. Come argue theology with her on Twitter!

My foray through Lois McMaster Bujold’s backlist on my site—a foray nowhere near as detailed as Ellen Cheeseman-Meyer’s ongoing reread—reached Komarr recently. One of the elements of the setting impressed me: Bujold’s handling of the centuries-long effort to terraform the planet.

Terraforming is, of course, the hypothesized art of converting an uninhabitable rock into a habitable world. Jack Williamson coined the term in his Seetee-related short story, “Collision Orbit”, published under the pen name Will Stewart in the July, 1942 issue of Astounding Magazine. While Williamson invokes non-existent super-science in order to make the task seem doable, he probably felt confident that terraforming would someday make sense. In the short run, we have seen humans shaping the Earth. In the long run—well, Earth was once an anoxic wasteland. Eons of life shaped it into a habitable planet. Williamson suspected that humans could imitate that process elsewhere…and make it happen in centuries rather than eons. Perhaps in even less time!

Other SF authors picked up the notion and ran with it. It had become clear that Mars and Venus were hellworlds, not the near-Earths of earlier planetary romances. Perhaps the planetary romance could be recuperated if Mars and Venus could be terraformed? And if we made it out of the solar system and found a bunch of new inhospitable planets… well, we could fix those, too.

Back in the 1970s, SF fans could read reassuring articles like Jerry Pournelle’s “The Big Rain,” which proposed terraforming Venus. Invest a hundred billion dollars (half a trillion in modern dollars) and wait a couple of decades. Voila! A habitable planet. We’d be stupid not to do it!

Of course, it’s never as easy in real life as it is in the SF magazines, which is why pretty much none of the Disco Era predictions of crewed space exploration panned out. Though they did produce some pretty art.

Venus can’t be terraformed as easily as Pournelle supposed, in part because he was drawing on a 1961 paper by Carl Sagan—by 1975 it was clear that Sagan had underestimated the extreme hellaciousness of Venus. Also, Pournelle’s estimate that it would take twenty years to do the job turned out to be, um, a smidge too optimistic. Even if all the sunlight hitting Venus could be used to crack carbon dioxide, it would take much, much longer than twenty years to do all the cracking necessary . Algae isn’t 100% efficient. The process would sputter to a stop long before Venus became the planet-sized bomb I describe in the footnote below.

This should not be surprising. After all, it took well over two billion years for oxygen-producing organisms to produce a breathable atmosphere on Earth. Granted, nature wasn’t trying to produce a breathable atmosphere. It just sort of wobbled in that direction over billions of years. Directed effort should—well, might—be able to knock a few zeroes off that time frame. Lamentably, “incredibly fast on a geological scale” still translates into pretty goddamn slow as humans measure time .

Komarr—remember I mentioned Komarr at the beginning?—acknowledges the time issue. Komarr is a lot closer to being habitable than any world in our solar system, but the people who settled it have invested vast sums as well as centuries of effort and the place is still far from being anywhere close to Earth Mark II. Or even Leigh Brackett’s Mars Mark II. It’s even possible that Komarr will never be successfully terraformed, and that better uses for the money will be found long before Komarr ever gets close to being as pleasant as Precambrian Earth.

Although all too many SF authors handwave fast, easy terraforming, Bujold isn’t alone in recognizing the scale of the problem.

Williamson’s aforementioned “Collision Orbit” only mentions terraforming in passing, but it’s clear from passages like—

Pallas, capital of all the Mandate, was not yet completely terraformed—although the city and a score of mining centers had their own paragravity units a few miles beneath the surface, there was as yet no peegee installation at the center of gravity.

—that despite being armed with super-scientific paragravity, transforming small worlds into living planets is a monumental task even for governments.

Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s “Crucifixus Etiam” embraces the magnitude of the effort to turn an implausibly benign Mars  into a new home for humans. He imagines this as a sink for the economic surplus that might otherwise undermine the global economy. It’s essentially Europe’s cathedral projects re-imagined on a vastly greater stage: a project that will take eight centuries.

Pamela Sargent’s Venus trilogy (Venus of Dreams, Venus of Shadows, and Venus’ Children) imagines a near-magic technology that can deal with Venus’ spin (or lack thereof ). The author does acknowledge that even with super-science, the project would be the work of generations, and the people who set the effort in motion would not live to see project’s end.

If one consults an actual scientist (using Martyn Fogg’s Terraforming: Engineering Planetary Environments, for example), one learns that the time scales required for the creation of Garden Worlds  might range from “The Time Elapsed Since the Invention of Beer” to “The Average Lifespan of a Vertebrate Species.” Depressing, yeah? Has any organized human group effort lasted as long as The Time Elapsed Since the Invention of Beer? Certainly not for The Average Lifespan of a Vertebrate Species.

One unorganized human effort, Australian Aboriginal Fire-Stick Farming (which reshaped an entire continent’s ecology), appears to be a serious contender for The Time Elapsed Since the Invention of Beer, if not longer. Perhaps that should give us hope. And perhaps it’s not unreasonable for SF authors to explore what sort of cultures could successfully carry out terraforming projects of realistic duration.

Originally published in August 2018.

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.

Disney•Pixar has announced Onward, a new animated adventure starring Star-Lord and Peter Parker Chris Pratt and Tom Holland as elf brothers searching for lost magic in a “suburban fantasy” world. Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Octavia Spencer also star. While Toy Story 4 comes out in June of 2019, ahead of Onward’s 2020 release, this is Pixar Animation’s next original/non-sequel story since 2016’s Coco.

Aside from the official tweet from Disney, the company also had notorious spoiler-leaker Holland announce the project on his Instagram:

View this post on Instagram

My friends at @DisneyPixar have allowed me to make a very exciting announcement… #onward

A post shared by (@tomholland2013) on Dec 12, 2018 at 9:05am PST

The logline:

Set in a suburban fantasy world, Disney•Pixar’s Onward introduces two teenage elf brothers who embark on an extraordinary quest to discover if there is still a little magic left out there.

“At Pixar we try to create stories that come from some kind of personal truth,” director Dan Scanlon (Monsters University) said in the official announcement. “This film was inspired by my own relationship with my brother.” More context comes from io9’s report at last year’s D23 expo, at which Onward was first announced; because Scanlon’s father died when he was very young, he and his brother had few memories of him, until the day they discovered an audio tape with his voice on it. About the female characters we know little, aside from Scanlon describing Dreyfus’ as having “a warm and loving side,” and “the depth as well as humor” that Spencer brings to her character.

The D23 report also clarifies what a “suburban fantasy world” entails—i.e., a world in which magic had once existed but no longer does. Instead of humans, this world is populated by elves, trolls, and sprites, who live in suburban mushroom houses and fight off unicorn infestations.

Onward comes to theaters March 6, 2020.

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

This week, we’re reading China Miéville’s “Details,” first published in 2002 in John Pelan and Benjamin Adams’ The Children of Cthulhu. Spoilers ahead.

“I don’t remember a time before I visited the yellow house for my mother.”

Summary

Narrator looks back to the time when he, a young boy, served as his mother’s emissary to housebound Mrs. Miller. Roombound, actually, for she never leaves the locked chamber just inside the door of a decrepit yellow house. Mrs. Miller’s other visitors include a young Asian woman, and two drunks, one boisterous, the other melancholic and angry. Narrator sometimes meets him at Mrs. Miller’s door, swearing in his cockney accent. Mrs. Miller remains undaunted, and eventually the drunk shambles miserably off.

Every Wednesday morning narrator visits Mrs. Miller, bringing a pudding his mother’s prepared from gelatin, milk, sugar and crushed vitamins. Sometimes he brings a pail of white paint. These he pushes in to Mrs. Miller through the merest gap of the door, open the merest second. From his brief glimpse inside, he sees the room is white, Mrs. Miller’s sleeves white plastic, her face an unmemorable middle-aged woman’s. While she eats, she answers the questions his mother sends with him: “Yes, she can take the heart of it out. Only she has to paint it with the special oil I told her about.” And “Tell your mother seven. But only four of them concern her and three of them used to be dead.”

One day Mrs. Miller asks narrator what he doesn’t want to do when he grows up. Thinking of his mother’s distress over letters from attorneys, narrator says he doesn’t want to be a lawyer. This delights Mrs. Miller, who warns him never to be tricked by small print. She’ll tell him a secret! The devil is in the details!

After this, narrator’s promoted beyond delivery boy to also reading aloud to Mrs. Miller. She confides in him: The Asian woman courts trouble, messing with “the wrong family.” Everyone “on that other side of things is a tricksy bastard who’ll kill you soon as look at you.” That includes “the gnarly, throat-tipped one” and “old hasty, who…had best remain nameless.” Another day, while the two drunks bicker outside, Mrs. Miller tells him about a special way of looking. There are things hidden right in front of us, things we see but don’t notice until we learn how. Someone has to teach us. So we have to make certain friends, which also means making enemies.

It’s about patterns. In clouds, or walls, or the branches of a tree. Suddenly you’ll see the picture in the pattern, the details. Read them, learn. But don’t disturb anything! And when you open that window, be damn careful what’s in the details doesn’t look back and see you.

The surly drunk grows belligerent, screaming that Mrs. Miller’s gone too far. Things are coming to a head—there’ll be hell to pay, and it’s all her own fault! The following week Mrs. Miller whispers a confession about the first time she “opened her eyes fully.” She had studied and learnt. She chose an old brick wall and stared until the physical components became pure vision, shape and line and shade. Messages, insinuations, secrets appeared. It was bliss. Then she resolved a clutch of lines into “something… terrible… something old and predatory and utterly terrible staring right back at me.”

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Then the terrible thing moved. It followed as she fled into a park, reappearing in the patterns of leaves, of fabric, of wheel spokes. Having caught her glance, it could move in whatever she saw. She covered her eyes and blundered home, seeing it whenever she peeked: crawling, leaping, baying.

Mrs. Miller tells narrator she considered putting her eyes out. But what if she could close that window, unlearn how to see the details? Research is the thing. That’s why he’s reading to her. Meanwhile she lives in a room purged of details, painted flat white, without furniture, windows covered, body encased in plastic. She avoids looking at her hands. She eats bland white pudding. She opens and closes the door fast so she won’t glimpse narrator in all his rich detail. It would only take a second. The thing is always ready to pounce.

Narrator’s unsure how the newspapers can help but he keeps reading. Mrs. Miller confides how the whiteness of her sanctuary preys on her. How the thing “colonizes” her memories and dreams, appearing in the details of even happy memories.

One chilly spring morning, the drunken man’s asleep in Mrs. Miller’s hall. Narrator’s about to retrieve the bowl when he realizes the drunk’s holding his breath, tensing. He manages one warning keen before the drunk throws him into the room, knocking back Mrs. Miller.

It’s narrator’s checked coat and patterned sweater that the drunk wants in the room. He pulls narrator himself back into the hall, slams and holds the door closed while Mrs. Miller screams and curses. Her terrified shrieks combine with “an audible illusion like another presence. Like a snarling voice. A lingering, hungry exhalation.”

Narrator runs home. His mother never asks him to return to the yellow house. He doesn’t try to find out what happened until a year later, when he visits Mrs. Miller’s room. His coat and sweater mildew in a corner. White paint crumbles from the walls, leaving patterns like rocky landscapes. On the far wall is a shape he approaches with “dumb curiosity far stronger than any fear.”

A “spreading anatomy” of cracks, seen from the right angle, looks like a screaming woman, one arm flung back, as if something drags her away. Where her “captor” would be is a huge patch of stained cement. “And in that dark infinity of markings, [narrator] could make out any shape [he] wanted.”

What’s Cyclopean: Things are hiding in the details, “brazen and invisible.”

The Degenerate Dutch: Mrs. Miller’s enemies, on top of everything else, call her some nastily gendered insults

Mythos Making: There are things man isn’t meant to perceive—and once you see them, you can’t unsee them.

Libronomicon: Mrs. Miller looks for the solution to her problems in “school textbooks, old and dull village histories, the occasional romantic novel.” Why not, if you can find answers anywhere?

Madness Takes Its Toll: It’s not paranoia if everything really is out to get you. On the other hand, living in a featureless white room isn’t great for anyone’s mental stability.

Anne’s Commentary

Because I am constantly making out faces and creatures and such-like in random cracks and splotches and airy masses of water vapor, I was glad to read that no less a genius than Leonardo da Vinci endorsed the practice:

“Not infrequently on walls in the confusion of different stones, in cracks, in the designs made by scum on stagnant water, in dying embers, covered over with a thin layer of ashes, in the outline of clouds, – it has happened to me to find a likeness of the most beautiful localities, with mountains, crags, rivers, plains and trees; also splendid battles, strange faces, full of inexplicable beauty; curious devils, monsters, and many astounding images. [For my art] I chose from them what I needed and supplied the rest.”

I guess Leonardo never had one of those curious devils or monsters look back at him, as was the misfortune of Miéville’s Mrs. Miller. We may also assume (mayn’t we?) that Leonardo wasn’t a friend of any tricksy bastard from the other side of things like that gnarly throat-tipped chap (Nyarlathotep?) or old hasty the best-left-nameless (Hastur, I bet.) But Mrs. Miller is. Someone guided her studies, taught her to open her eyes and see what’s hidden in plain sight, yet so rarely noticed. She’s a seer among seers, a witch among witches, in Miéville’s urban village. The belligerent drunk seems to be a peer down on his luck, servant of the same “other side” master. Narrator’s mother and the Asian woman seem to be informal acolytes. Others may come just to consult the sibyl.

Who has paid too much for her depth of vision. Once again we’re in the Person Who Sees/Learns Too Much territory. The teeming region of We Learn to Curse Curiosity and Bless Ignorance Too Late. The epigraph for “Details” is from Lovecraft’s “Shadow Out of Time,” but in the Mythos genealogy, this story is much more closely related to Frank Belknap Long’s “Hounds of Tindalos.” Here as there, ancient predators live in dimensions that can come perilously close to our own. Here as there, they fix on prey when they realize they are observed, when they return the gaze of the gazer—to catch their attention is deadly. Miéville’s interdimensional hunters have Long’s beat in this, however: While Long’s Hounds can advance only through angles, not curves, Miéville’s creature can travel through any random pattern Mrs. Miller sees, because she has opened to it the door into her perception.

Into, at last, not only what she sees, but what she remembers seeing or can imagine seeing. While it seems unable to attack though her memories or dreams, it can haunt them. It can drive her toward the miserable desperation narrator begins to witness. Did it matter what he read to her? Probably not. Probably for a while the pretense of “research” was enough, and the sound of a young, sympathetic voice.

So, to find the Hounds of Tindalos, you have to travel back to the deepest deeps of time. Miéville’s beasts prowl much nearer the surface. Intrepid reporter Carl Kolchak and I have downed copious quantities of our drugs of choice (Bourbon and Ben & Jerry’s, respectively) and gazed at a certain patch of mildew on the ceiling of the basement janitor’s closet in the Miskatonic U Library. Below we report our impressions:

Me: Definitely canine.

Carl: Except for the duck.

Me: What duck?

Carl: Over where the drainpipe comes out the ceiling.

Me: Oh. Yeah. The Drake of Tindalos.

Carl: Drake’s good. Rest are mutts. There’s, ah, Dachshunds of Tindalos.

Me: Chihuahuas.

Carl: Hell, no. Shih tzus.

Me: Yorkies.

Carl: Are you going to be serious? There are no Yorkies there. None. But over the spiderweb?

[Awed silence.]

Me: It’s—a Weimaraner.

Carl: That’s it.

Me: The Weimaraner of Tindalos.

[Awed silence.]

Carl: Y’know, that doesn’t look like a duck anymore…

Ruthanna’s Commentary

There are secrets hiding just beneath the surface of reality. Or maybe they’re not hiding—maybe it’s just that you haven’t noticed them yet. You might read the wrong book, or look the wrong way at the patterns in clouds. Hell, you might go on a deep and treacherous quest for the secrets of the universe—is that really so wrong? Do you really deserve what happens when the abyss looks back? Fair or otherwise, though, you can’t unsee. And quite possibly, you’ve disturbed something that doesn’t like being disturbed.

In a cosmic horror universe, this happens a lot. Mrs. Miller, though, stands out from the crowd in a couple of ways. First, in an endless list of men who find out and men who go too far, she’s a woman. Second, her survival time is measured not in days but in years. (Or so I infer from the apparent extent of Narrator’s childhood memories.)

First, the gender thing. There’s a bit of a progression here. Drunk guy calls her a whore—yes, that’s very original, thanks. Mrs. Miller wonders if she really had an important reason to look for answers in the details, or if she was just being nosy—gee, that’s an awfully gender-coded way of describing cosmic-scale curiosity, does Miéville know what he’s doing? And then finally, the story shifts from Hounds of Tindalos references to a woman stuck in the patterns of a wall, and I notice that Mrs. Miller’s house is yellow. Fine, Miéville knows exactly what he’s doing. Brazen and invisible indeed.

Part of what he’s doing, by replacing the archetypal curious-yet-repulsed Lovecraftian narrator, is digging into that trope and turning up some of the humanity. Mrs. Miller, unlike your average Miskatonic U gentleman professor, cries about her fate. Which is pretty reasonable. Her memories, colonized by the devil of the details, are pedestrian and sentimental: a pretty dress, a birthday cake. Yet she’s clearly as powerful as any one-step-too-far sorcerer, and even in her fallen state capable of passing oracular insight to those willing to brave her door (and her jello meals). The fact that she likes pretty dresses doesn’t make her one whit less a scholar, or one whit less doomed.

Except that as mentioned above, she is—almost—less doomed than your average over-curious protagonist. The most comparable is perhaps Halpin Chambers in “The Hounds of Tindalos.” Chalmers attracts the indefatigable attention of the hounds, locks himself in an angle-free room except for the paper he’s writing on, and immediately gets his head chopped off. Blackwood’s man who finds out lasts longer, but isn’t really fighting against his decline. Irwin’s poor reader sacrifices himself deliberately but inevitably. Miller, on the other hand, makes herself a successful angle-free, detail-free room, and makes plans to supply herself with both nutrition and research material. (There are a couple of bodily needs in there that we’re just not going to think about, but presumably she closes her eyes for those.) Smart, sensible, and determined, and it’s not really her fault that the necessary door-openings provide a point of vulnerability.

As the details are Miller’s greatest threat, they’re also the story’s strength. Details of breakfast, of clothes, of cracks in walls. The details of what a child notices and remembers. I love the oracular pronouncements we get to hear, sans questions: We have no idea what Narrator’s mom can take the heart out of, or which three of the seven used to be dead. There are whole other stories, maybe whole other devils, hidden within these brief glimpses, brazen and invisible.

Next week, we turn to a Nigerian take on weird fiction with Amos Tutuola’s “The Complete Gentleman.” You can find it (of course) in reread favorite The Weird.

Ruthanna Emrys is the author of the Innsmouth Legacy series, including Winter Tide and Deep Roots. She has several stories, neo-Lovecraftian and otherwise, available on Tor.com, most recently “The Word of Flesh and Soul.” Ruthanna can frequently be found online on Twitter and Patreon, and offline in a mysterious manor house with her large, chaotic household—mostly mammalian—outside Washington DC.

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

Are you seeing Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse this weekend? (You should, because if the opening half hour shown at New York Comic-Con is any indication, this will be The Greatest Spider-Movie.) We’re even more excited for the film than before, because we’ve just learned just learned that Miles Morales’ first big screen adventure contains a fabulous literary Easter egg: a new fictional book by Black Leopard, Red Wolf author Marlon James!

We here at Tor.com were already ecstatic about Marlon James’s upcoming fantasy novel Black Leopard, Red Wolf (check out Alex Brown’s glowing review) and now we’ve learned that we have the same taste in books as Spider-Man??! This is too much. Ads for a new (fictional) book by James, Babylon Blood Cloth, can be spotted throughout the film—and they indicate a pretty sizable publicity campaign since one pops up on the roof of a taxi:

You can see a better shot of it here, if you’re not distracted by Miles flipping over the cab’s hood:

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse follows Miles Morales as he attempts to adjust to life as a webslinger, while also learning about the existence of the “Spider-Verse,” many, many other Spider-People, and a nefarious plot by the Kingpin that might collapse all of the Verses into nothingness. But like all teen Spider-People, he has to balance his superhero life with life as a student, which leads to the book’s prominent cameo in Miles’ dorm room:

And yes, this is only the film’s second-best cameo, as Stan Lee’s appearance is as heartwarming as you’re hoping it will be.

The running appearances of Babylon Blood Cloth are especially fun because the book’s title seems to be a riff on James’ previous novel, the Man Booker Award-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings, which revolved around a conspiracy to murder Bob Marley. Since “Babylon” is a popular phrase for Western culture in the Rastafari religion that Marley practiced, this could be a clever way to include some of James’ past work, and makes for a nice deep-cut reference for all the lit and fantasy fans in the audience.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse swings into theaters this very weekend, and Marlon James’ epic African-inspired fantasy Black Leopard, Red Wolf hits shelves on February 5, 2019!

Calling all conspiracy theorists! You’re wanted on the Oathbringer Reread this week! We have secret societies, deception among the leadership, calls for murder, charges of idiocy… Yes, if you couldn’t tell, we have a Taravangian interlude this week. Join in to figure out what he’s up to—or at least what he thinks he’s up to.

Reminder: we’ll potentially be discussing spoilers for the ENTIRE NOVEL in each reread. No major Cosmere spoilers this time around, folks. But if you haven’t read ALL of Oathbringer, best to wait to join us until you’re done.

Chapter Recap

WHO: Taravangian
WHERE: Urithiru
WHEN: Sometime after 1174.1.4.3

Taravangian is having a genius day. He fools his testers into thinking that he’s not having a “so intelligent he’s dangerous” day and proceeds to begin tearing up the Diagram, looking for hints and codes that cannot be deciphered when the pages are bound. When Adrotagia calls him out for his deception, he shoves her out of the room and continues, finally coming to the conclusion that Dalinar is not to be killed, now—they’re past that point. Now he must be dethroned as leader of the Coalition, to make room for Taravangian to take his place and hence be in a better place to negotiate directly with Odium.

The Singing Storm

Title: Taravangian

Heralds: Palah; Truthwatchers, Learned/Giving. Ishi, Bondsmiths, Pious/Guiding.

L: So, my guess is that these Heralds are here because this is how Taravangian sees himself. He’s learned (clearly, he’s having a genius day) and he sees himself as guiding the world (or part of it, at least) towards salvation.

AA: There’s a lot of truth to that, Lyndsey, and also that despite his self-perception, he’s doing almost exactly the opposite of the roles he’s claiming. I would also submit that Palah could be a subtle hint that the casual line that the Diagram “hadn’t seen the effect the second son, Renarin, would have” is far more important than it appears at the moment. Ishar also could be a nod toward the repeated references to the Bondsmith that Taravangian is planning to elbow aside. Interestingly, the things he doesn’t understand about Renarin and Dalinar are what make his plans fail.

Icon: Double Eye, indicating an interlude chapter.

Bruised & Broken

The way he thought, breathed, even moved, implicitly conveyed that today was a day of intelligence—perhaps not as brilliant as that single transcendent one when he’d created the Diagram, but he finally felt like himself after so many days trapped in the mausoleum of his own flesh, his mind like a master painter allowed only to whitewash walls.

L: So much about Taravangian makes me sad, but this more than most. It’s almost like he’s suffering from dementia.

AP: I think dementia is a very good comparison. Alzheimer’s patients in particular can “sundown” and be more lucid during the day than in the evening. It can be extremely distressing to them in more lucid moments to know that they are experiencing a cognitive decline and not being able to do anything about it.

AA: The problem with this view of Taravangian is that when he has greater “lucidity” he becomes an absolute monster. In this state, he sort of pities—and totally despises—the person he is when he’s normal; the person he becomes when he actually does experience a cognitive decline, he considers revolting.

L: That’s a fair point, Alice.

“He’s almost to the danger line,” Dukar said.

L: Danger line. Interesting. The supposition here appears to be that the more intelligent someone is, the more dangerous they are. I’m not sure if I buy this. There have been some incredibly intelligent people in our history who didn’t turn into tyrants.

AP: I took this to be a commentary on Taravangian himself, not all super intelligent people. He, in particular, is a danger to others when he has a day that is past the “line”.

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AA: I’m with Aubree on this. The days when Taravangian’s intellect is high, his compassion and empathy are proportionally low. This is not a generality; it’s a specific peculiarity of his unique Boon and Curse arrangement. It’s not merely that he’s “not very empathetic,” either; he gets unreasonably “pragmatic” about other people to the point that he seriously thinks people who annoy him should be summarily killed.

L: Oh, that’s a cool theory. So for him in particular, it’s more like a see-saw. When his intellect goes up, his empathy goes down, and vice versa.

He carried the Diagram into the room, and then shut himself into blissful self-company, in which he arranged a diamond in each corner—a light to accompany that of his own spark, which shone in truth where others could not venture…

L: Wait. What? Is he just speaking in flowery terms of his own intellect here, or is there more going on with this “light”?

AA: IMO, this is reflecting his delusions of godhood. He firmly believes that when he’s having a “brilliant” day, he’s smarter than any being in the Cosmere—Shard Vessels and immortals notwithstanding. He believes—or he’s convinced himself—that he himself is truly the messiah that Roshar needs to save… well, whatever he himself decides is worth saving. On a meta level, I can’t help thinking that the “light” he considers his own intellect is somehow linked to the light that Odium likes to present himself with, but I don’t have anything solid there.

“Get me a copy of the surgeon’s words upon my birth,” he said to those outside. “Oh, and kill those children.”

L: DUDE.

“Are you…”

“No,” he said. “I haven’t become him again. I am me, for the first time in weeks.”

“This isn’t you. This is the monster you sometimes become.”

“I am not smart enough to be in the dangerous zone.”

L: Pretty terrifying that he played them, though I’m glad Adrotagia saw through it.

AP: Yep, and I think this is why they do need a “danger line” for him.

AA: Adrotagia is far wiser than Taravangian… but I worry about what she’ll support just because it’s coming from him. I find it deeply creepy that smart-but-not-compassionate Taravangian is also deceptive. I mean, the whole “kill those children” is awful, but it just shows him openly writing off anyone he considers lesser than himself (which is everyone, of course). The decision to hide his intelligence so they wouldn’t place limits on him… that worries me. No one but Adrotagia can see through it with any degree of accuracy, and I wouldn’t put it past him to deliberately incapacitate her next time so that she can’t stop him.

AP: I think that is a distinct possibility, and now I’m worried for her!

L: Ugh. I hadn’t considered that until now, but now that you mention it… yeah. I can absolutely see him doing that.

He had the cord wrapped around his neck, the surgeon had said. The queen will know the best course, but I regret to inform her that while he lives, your son may have diminished capacity. Perhaps this is one to keep on outer estates, in favor of other heirs.

The “diminished capacity” hadn’t appeared, but the reputation had chased Taravangian from childhood, so pervasive in people’s minds that not a one had seen through his recent act of stupidity, which they’d attributed to a stroke or simple senility.

He’d overcome that reputation in magnificent ways. Now he’d save the world.

L: So this is why he chose to go to the Nightwatcher in the first place. To prove to the people who said he was dim that he wasn’t, that his knowledge would save the world. Not entirely philanthropic, is it? He’s saving the world out of spite.

AA: Hmm. I think he went to the Nightwatcher in desperation, because he believed Gavilar’s visions were for real. The spite and self-centeredness comes out when he’s “smart” because then he loses all respect for “anybody who’s not me.” Granted, that’s got to be present to some degree in his mind anyway in order to come out on days like this, though.

AP: It seems to be a pretty clear spectrum though, from high empathy to high intelligence. I think on his high empathy days he really does want to try to do good, while on his high intellect days it’s more about power & survival.

L: This is a good observation, that his perception of the event is currently colored by his lack of empathy. Thinking back on it now, I’m willing to bet that less-intelligent Taravangian would have a completely different recollection of his reasons for going.

Also, side note, but this turned out to be a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, didn’t it? Everyone said he had diminished capacity, so he… went and made himself have diminished capacity most of the time.

AA: Frankly, I like him better in that mode.

Squires & Sidekicks

…[Malata and Adrotagia] were growing in companionship as Adrotagia attempted to secure an emotional bond with this lesser Diagram member who had suddenly been thrust into its upper echelons, an event predicted by the Diagram…

L: Interesting that she was involved with the organization even before awakening as a Radiant.

AA: Yeah, I’ve wondered about that. Not only someone already involved, but then she gets chosen for the one Order the Diagram said would suit them. I guess… the Diagram was right that the Dustbringer spren would find their kind of person attractive? It makes sense if I squint a little.

AP: It very much makes me wonder where the information for the Diagram came from. Is it just extreme logical interpolation based on the research Taravangian has already done? Or is it actually supernatural? Because if it’s limited to what someone with Taravangian’s history and resources could figure out on a day with perfect problem solving skills, then it’s still going to miss things because Taravangian isn’t omniscient.

AA: I’ve wondered about that too. If it’s based solely on what Taravangian already knows, and he’s filling in the blanks with logic, plus doing a little further extrapolation, there should be a lot of holes in the big picture. After the first two books, I had assumed it was just “extremely logical and intelligent prediction” based on his existing knowledge, but given the scenes from the end of Oathbringer, I’m now leaning toward supernatural. I just don’t see how Taravangian, no matter how much research he’d done, would have all the information to construct the Diagram as we see it later.

“…Now leave me alone. You’re stinking up the place with an air of contented idiocy.”

He shut the door, and—deep down—felt a glimmer of shame. Had he called Adrotagia, of all people, an idiot?

Well. Nothing to do about it now. She would understand.

AA: I’m adding this in at the last second, so unfortunately Lyndsey and Aubree don’t have a chance to add comments, but this made me so angry. Adrotagia is, on the whole, both smarter and wiser than Taravangian, but he takes her understanding for granted. I’m sure this is largely an artifact of “genius mode,” and if he remembers it in “compassionate mode” he’ll apologize. I’m glad to see, at least, that there’s something deep down that can feel shame.

Places & Peoples

…only four blank stone walls, no window, though it had a strange rectangular outcropping along the back wall, like a high step, which Maben was dusting.

L: Chalk this up as another Urithiru oddity.

AP: I keep waiting to get an explanation of what all of these oddities are actually for!

AA: I know, right? I’m always wondering whether Sanderson has something specific in mind for every one of these things, or if he occasionally throws in a feature just to remind us that we know next to nothing about the place. “Don’t get too comfortable here, kids…”

“Calculating the total surface area for farming at Urithiru,” he said, “and comparing it to the projected number of rooms that could be occupied, I have determined that even if food grew here naturally—as it would at the temperatures of your average fecund plain—it could not provide enough to sustain the entire tower.”

[…]

“You think they advanced the growth by use of Stormlight-infused gemstones, providing light to darkened places?”

L: I’m wondering why they’re not considering Soulcast food as a possibility.

AP: Soulcast food is the obvious answer to me too. But I think there’s probably also a magic greenhouse when they turn the city on.

AA: Soulcasting seems pretty obvious, considering that the original inhabitants didn’t even have to rely on fabrials, but instead had two complete Orders who could just do it. (Side note: I wonder if an Elsecaller or Lightweaver can make better food than the people who use the fabrials.) But I agree with Aubree again; when they get this place fired up and running, there will be plenty of food-growing capacity available.

Weighty Words

L: This doesn’t strictly belong here, but since it doesn’t belong anywhere else either, I’d just like to take a moment to note that while we’re in genius-Taravangian’s point of view, Sanderson employs more advanced and complicated sentence structure than he usually does. The sentences are longer and more varied, thereby implicating subconsciously to the reader that the mind we are in is more advanced.

AA: Hah! Nice catch. I’d noticed the seriously long and involved sentences, which are nonetheless grammatically correct and coherent. I just hadn’t put it together with being in genius-Taravangian’s head.

Meaningful/Moronic/Mundane Motivations

Was there a way he could prevent any but the most intelligent from learning to read? That would accomplish so much good; it seemed insane that nobody had implemented such a ban, for while Vorinism forbade men to read, that merely prevented an arbitrary half of the population from handling information, when it was the stupid who should be barred.

L: Oof. Danger line, indeed. He’s veering awfully close into tyranny territory here.

AA: He’s the most dangerous sort of tyrant, too—the one who firmly believes that he’s doing it for the greater good rather than mere selfishness. This puts a little different spin on C. S. Lewis’s comment on tyranny: “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.” He’s talking about “moral busybodies” when you put that in context, but the last line of the quote is still frighteningly apropos: “The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” Genius-Taravangian isn’t into tormenting people, but he’ll happily kill them if he thinks it’s useful, and he’ll do it with the approval of his own conscience (such as it is). Then Kind-Taravangian will come along and be properly remorseful, but he’ll be completely unable, and mostly unwilling, to do anything to rein in Genius-T.

The initial explanation of the Dalinar paradigm, from the catechism of the headboard, back side, third quadrant. It had been written in meter, as a poem, and presaged that Dalinar would attempt to unite the world.

So if he looked to the second contingency…

The Diagram hadn’t seen the effect the second son, Renarin, would have—he was a completely wild element.

L: Okay, so why is Renarin a wild element, here? Does it have to do with the influence of his corrupted spren?

AP: I wonder if whatever type of spren Glys is can’t be seen by the diagram? Maybe because both can “see” the future to an extent so they cancel each other out?

L: That’s an interesting theory. Sort of like when two Mistborn burned Atium at the same time…

AA: It’s almost like the Cultivation-based Truthwatcher spren, corrupted by the Odium-formed Unmade who isn’t sure she likes belonging to Odium, makes for an unpredictability that the Diagram can’t cope with. Maybe seeing—or interpreting—the future is based on understanding history, but Glys is something with no precedent to guide their interpretation.

“We must not assassinate Dalinar Kholin. The time has passed for that. Instead, we must support his coalition. Then we force him to step down, so that I can take his place at the head of the monarchs.”

L: Yeah. That’s gonna happen, Taravangian.

AA: It came frighteningly close.

“We can break [Dalinar], and I can take his place—as the coalition will see me as non-threatening—whereupon we’ll be in a position of power to negotiate with Odium—who will, by laws of spren and gods, be bound by the agreement made.”

[…]

“We cannot beat the enemy; so instead, we save whatever we can.”

L: Okay so, ignoring the fact that the coalition isn’t likely to hand over the reins of leadership to someone who they view as senile, let’s talk about this “save what we can” thing, because man… this is definitely a point of contention amongst the fans. Some of us think that Taravangian’s noble for making such a difficult choice—the burden of which will fall squarely on his shoulders, should he have his way. Others feel as if he’s jumping to this conclusion far too easily, that there’s another way, he’s just not looking hard enough for it because the “easy” solution has presented itself.

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AP: It’s not that easy. He thinks he’s doing the right thing, and that his sacrifice (mental incapacity) justifies the cost to others as well (shared suffering). But that’s extremely dangerous thinking. Zealots are the most dangerous because they have an absolute conviction that they are doing good while actually doing great harm. Taravangian is so caught up in his own intelligence that he doesn’t think that it’s possible that he may have made an error (or several errors). The first rule of Dunning Kruger Club is that you don’t know you are in Dunning Kruger Club…

AA: He also sees his Diagram-writing self as God, without ever thinking about the source of that knowledge. He has some massive blind spots.

Give me the capacity to save us.

L: So… this might not mean what he thinks it does. Capacity in this context could mean any number of things—it might not mean mental capacity. It could be something else entirely, and knowing what we do of the Nightwatcher’s other deals, I’d bet on that Ryshadium. The Nightwatcher reminds me of D&D campaigns I used to play when I was a kid, where the DM would give us an item that granted wishes, or have us encounter a genie—and then would delight in trying to mess with our wishes to give us something other than what we intended. Now, whether or not the Nightwatcher’s intentions are good is up for debate. If Cultivation is directly involved, like she was for Dalinar and (presumably) Lift, the wishes granted seem to be done with the best intents of the world at large, even if they weren’t quite what the asker wanted. But the Nightwatcher alone? I don’t know. It seems… capricious, to me. Like Loki. I have little to base this on, however, unless Aubree or Alice have any concrete examples I’m forgetting…

AA: No examples I can think of, but I really believe that Taravangian is too quick to accept his Intelligence as The Solution… I think the twist to this is going to hurt him badly.

AP: I don’t necessarily think it’s twisted wishes per se, but that both his enhanced mental and emotional capacity will be important. He just doesn’t see the use of the empathy yet. I also suspect that the “good” and “bad” days are not random, but that he is being given the capacity that he needs for that day’s challenges.

Well, then. Join us in the comments with your thoughts on Taravangian and his Diagrammatic shenanigans! Next week, we’ll be back with Interlude 6: the next installment in Venli’s novella, where some really twisty antics take place and we learn much more about the Fused et al.

Alice is looking forward to her daughter’s school Christmas concert tonight. It promises to be awesome—and not solely because of her daughter’s participation… Heh. Also, she assume’s y’all have heard the news about Sanderson’s mysterious Secret Project by now. If not, check out the blog on his website.

Lyndsey is most certainly not having a genius day, but she gets by. If you’re an aspiring author, a cosplayer, or just like geeky content, follow her work on Facebook or her website.

Aubree is inventing a new language to better express her thoughts about the next interlude.

There’s a weird moment near the end of Shakespeare’s most realist and domestic comedy, The Merry Wives of Windsor, when the plot to expose Falstaff’s failed sexual exploits gets all “Midsummer Nights” dreamy. Suddenly, there’s an enchanted oak tree which is haunted by fairies and a monstrous figure of Herne the Hunter. It’s all a kind of prank at Falstaff’s expense, of course, but it hinges on the fat knight thinking it’s real, and for a few minutes the play feels like its moved into an entirely different genre. The reality of Windsor’s small town doings gives way to the stuff of Puck, Oberon and Titania. It’s as if Shakespeare has gotten frustrated by the mundane, prosaic world of the play and needs to find a little whimsy, even if he will finally pull the rug out from under the fairies and show that it’s all just boys with tapers and costumes.

Until that final act, Merry Wives had been the closest Shakespeare came to writing the kind of drama penned by his friend and colleague Ben Jonson, whose most successful plays were expressly urban, satirical and contemporary. The point at which Merry Wives wanders off into the woods says a lot about the difference between the two writers and how they were esteemed by their culture at the time. Jonson was brilliantly bitter in his humor, particularly in how he exposed social pretension and religious hypocrisy. He was also a classicist, a man deeply committed to the models of art established by the ancients, and he wore his learning on his sleeve.

Indeed, in his dedicatory poem penned for the 1623 folio (the first [almost] complete works of Shakespeare published seven years after the author’s death), Jonson can’t resist backhandedly praising Shakespeare for his genius despite his having “small Latin and less Greek.” The implication—one picked up by other critics for the next couple of centuries—was that Shakespeare was a naturally talented but unstudied writer whose magical forays was a sign of his limited rural roots. For those around him who viewed art in terms of learning and adherence to rules of form and propriety, this was a problem, and when his near-contemporaries were critical of Shakespeare they frequently targeted his fanciful imagination and natural wildness as literary flaws. In 1630, Ben Jonson wrote that Shakespeare “was, indeed, honest, and of an open and free nature; had an excellent fancy, brave notions, and gentle expressions, wherein he flowed with that facility that sometime it was necessary he should be stopped” (my emphasis). Jonson saw Shakespeare’s gift as something which needed controlling, reining in.

Other scholars less persnickety than Jonson praised Shakespeare but felt they had to explain his speculative inclinations and lack of learning. John Dryden observed that Shakespeare “needed not the spectacles of Books to read Nature; he look’d inwards, and found her there,” and Milton spoke of Shakespeare as “Fancy’s child” who would “warble his native wood-notes wild.” That fanciful wildness led Voltaire, in typically neoclassical French mode, to complain that Shakespeare “had a genius full of strength and fertility, natural and without any spark of good taste and any knowledge of the rules. …there are such beautiful scenes, such great and at the same time so terrible pieces widespread in his monstrous farces which go by the name of tragedies.” In other words, Shakespeare was too geeky and yet also insufficiently nerdy.

By “geeky” I mean that Shakespeare was an enthusiastic fantasist who didn’t so much run with what his imagination generated but positively geeked out on the wild, the supernatural and the strange. But he wasn’t a proper “nerd.” Jonson, by contrast, was a nerd to the bone, prone to a kind of seventeenth century man-splaining by way of his extensive classical learning. Theatrically, of course, that could be disastrous, and Jonson came to loathe the tyranny of public opinion which shot down some of the plays of which he was most proud. Still, it’s worth remembering that Shakespeare’s homespun fantasy was not always appreciated in his own time. The diarist Samuel Pepys, for instance, felt comfortable dismissing A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1662 as “the most insipid, ridiculous play that I ever saw in my life.” Much of the subsequent critical response treated Shakespeare’s fantastical elements as best ignored compared to Shakespeare’s “more serious” matters of character, philosophy and social commentary. But one of the great critics of the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson, who was not above criticizing Shakespeare’s work for what he found shocking in it, still recognized that the wildness and imaginative scale of that work outstripped the more restrained and rational drama of his own period, comparing the two in an appropriately nature-inspired metaphor:

“The work of a correct and regular writer is a garden accurately formed and diligently planted, varied with shades, and scented with flowers; the composition of Shakespeare is a forest, in which oaks extend their branches, and pines tower in the air, interspersed sometimes with weeds and brambles, and sometimes giving shelter to myrtles and to roses; filling the eye with awful pomp, and gratifying the mind with endless diversity.”

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The literary establishment’s skepticism about the fantastic is a recurring theme through history, of course, as is evidenced by Tolkien’s frustration over academia’s refusal to talk about the monsters in Beowulf as monsters, so one can be forgiven for forgetting just how central the fantastic and outlandish is to Shakespeare. Consider some of the elements that don’t sit well in the kind of “serious” realist fiction which dominated the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and stand amazed at how frequent and central they are to Shakespeare’s plays. To begin with the obvious ones, there’s the spirits and wizardry of The Tempest, the fairies of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the prophetic witches of Macbeth, and providential interferences in the late romances Pericles and Cymbeline (the latter of which includes Jupiter descending from the heavens on an eagle). There’s Mercutio’s lengthy digression on the dream fairy, Queen Mab—clearly more a product of Shakespeare’s own rural Warwickshire than the urban Verona which is Romeo and Juliet’s setting. Otherwise realist plays hinge on ghosts, not just Macbeth, but also Hamlet, Julius Caesar and Richard III. Shakespeare also blurs the edges of reality with events that feel supernatural even when there’s a conventional explanation, such as in Merry Wives. The most extreme instance is the statue of the sixteen-year dead Hermione, which comes to life at the end of The Winter’s Tale. The play offers just enough explanation to suggest that it’s possible that she never really died and has been in hiding in the interim, but the moment feels magical, possibly because that aforementioned providential interference has stamped the whole story. This is, after all, the play which features Shakespeare’s most famous stage direction: a character exits “pursued by a bear.” That sense of strangeness—things just about possible but odd and unsettling—is a hallmark of Shakespeare in ways that separate him from his contemporaries.

It is this Shakespeare that lives on in spec fic and visual media. As one of the fonts of Western fantasy, he is the one who insists upon that which is most crucial to the form: that tweaking reality, pushing it so that story floats free of the limitations of realism in no way lessens the writer’s reach in matters of character, theme, political, religious or other “serious” resonance. Fantasy easily coexists with the richest of sentence-level writing, the most penetrating character analysis, and the most provocative thinking. Or at least it can. Shakespeare, I think, serves as a model, something for fantasy writers to aspire to, and his undeniable achievement should make it a little easier for the rest of us to embrace our inner geek in the pursuit of artistic excellence and stand up for fancy.

This post was originally published in June 2016 as part of Tor.com’s series of essays on Shakespeare.

A.J. Hartley is the bestselling author of a dozen novels including Sekret Machines: Chasing Shadows (co-authored with Tom DeLonge) and the YA fantasy adventure Steeplejack, available from Tor Teen. As Andrew James Hartley he is also UNC Charlotte’s Robinson Distinguished Professor of Shakespeare, specializing in performance theory and practice, and is the author of various scholarly books and articles from the world’s best academic publishers including Palgrave and Cambridge University Press. He is an honorary fellow of the University of Central Lancashire, UK.