For two decades, Jim Killen has served as the science fiction and fantasy book buyer for Barnes & Noble. Every month on Tor.com and the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog, Jim shares his curated list of the month’s best science fiction & fantasy books.

King of the Road, by R.S. Belcher
(December 4, Tor Books—Hardcover)

R.S. Belcher, author of the occult-themed western Six-Gun Tarot and Shotgun Arcana, delivers a companion novel to 2016’s Brotherhood of the Wheel,  which follows a secret group of big rig acolytes (descended from the Knights Templar) who  protects the highways and byways of America from the dark forces that stalk the open roads. Brotherhood member Jimmie Aussapile, his partner/squire Heck, a state trooper, and a road witch find themselves tied up in a snake’s nest of intertwining crimes and conspiracies: missing persons, a ghostly clown, a cultish alchemist, the risen dead, monstrous shadows, and warring biker gangs. Belcher wends his way through urban legends and American folklore, gunning the engine all the way to the explosive conclusion.

The Shattered Sun, by Rachel Dunne
(December 4, Harper Voyager—Paperback)

Dunne concludes her Bound Gods series with suitably epic flair. After being cast down and imprisoned in the mortal realm by their parents, the gods Patharro and Metherra, Fratarro and Sororra—known as The Twins—are finally free, and the Long Night has begun as they revel in power. Only the rogue priest Joros has a hope of stopping them, and he’s assembled a desperate band of fellow rogues to aid in the attempt. But gods always have disciples, and it’s no different for The Twins, whose faithful exhibit powers only gods can comprehend—and are bent on revenge. Time is short; once The Twins are at full strength, they will be able to bend the world to their wills—so, ready or not, Joros and his champions must move quickly, or the whole world might be lost.

Soulbinder, by Sebastien de Castell
(December 4, Orbit—Paperback)

The fourth book in de Castell’s Spellslinger series continues the desperate adventures of Kellen, a mage whose magic failed him just as he was about to turn 16 and take part in the magical duel that would designate him a true spellcaster. Kellen used his brains and low cunning to hide his secret, but after his ruse was exposed, he was rescued by a mysterious stranger—and plunged into a complex web of skulduggery and black magic. After regaining his powers and mastering his magic as a hunter of renegade mages, Kellen is now cursed, and experiences frequent and violent visions even as he’s chased by a group of bounty hunters. Desperate, he sets out to find a group of monks rumored to be able to cure his affliction—but he knows little about them, nor what price the cure may cost him.

Splintered Suns, by Michael Cobley
(December 4, Orbit—Paperback)

Cobley’s fifth—and apparently final—entry in the Humanity’s Fire series is an interstellar Ocean’s 11, but with higher stakes and more space pirates. Brannan Pyke leads a crew on a heist that might gain them the Essavyr Key, an ancient relic that offers access to the long-lost technologies of a vanished alien civilization. First, however, they’ll have to break into a bio-engineered museum to steal a tracking device that will lead them to a shattered desert planet, where an immense alien ship is buried under the shifting sands. The key is somewhere on that ship—but claiming it will require Pyke to avoid or defeat an old enemy seeking the same prize. You needn’t be caught up on the other books in the series to enjoy this action-packed treasure hunt, but after you read it, you’ll probably want to circle back.

Tales from Plexis, by Julie E. Czerneda
(December 4, DAW—Paperback)

Not every fictional universe is robust enough to sustain a whole series of books, and very few are inspiring enough to get other authors involved in the worldbuilding. The Clan Chronicles is now one of those rare creations to grow larger than its creator: Czerneda has opened up the sandbox to her peers, collecting 23 linked short stories into a mosaic novel centered on the legendary Plexis Supermarket, a place where the greedy, the desperate, and the adventurous come to find… just about anything. Authors like  Tanya Huff, Amanda Sun, Ika Koeck, and many more have a blast exploring the origins and teasing out the details of some of the Trade Pact’s most memorable bits—including the true nature of the Turrneds and the Neblokans, and a whole bunch about truffles. We can’t imagine a more fitting celebration of this legendary intergalactic hotspot.

A Bad Deal for the Whole Galaxy, by Alex White
(December 11, Orbit—Paperback)

The second book in the big, gay, action-packed space opera series The Salvagers (after August’s A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe) opens with Nilah and Boots basking in the newfound wealth shared by the crew of the Capricious in the wake of their last desperate adventure. They could’ve just spent their money and enjoyed life for a change, basking in the glory of having literally just saved the universe from destruction, but no: when rumors of an ancient cult linked to a dangerous, ancient power reach them, they know they have to act. Nilah goes undercover, testing her short temper, while Boots faces up to her past, forced to look up her traitorous ex-partner. If you’re getting Firefly vibes from all that, you’re right on the money; Browncoats will find a lot to love in this fast, funny, and wickedly smart series.

Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
(December 11, Orbit—Paperback)

Adrian Tchaikovsky apparently has a thing for spiders. This 2016 book, formerly available only as a UK import, is a magnificently imaginative space opera about the last remnants of humanity’s diaspora to the stars, who believe they’ve found their new Eden—a terraformed planet perfectly suited to human life—until they discover another batch of colonists (of the massive, fiendishly intelligent, eight-legged variety) is also vying for a spot at the top of the food chain. It’s a novel that once again proves the author a master at manipulating familiar elements of the genre (generation ships, cryosleep, truly alien civilizations), while injecting his own brand of venomous originality—due to the colony world’s ideal environment, the spider race evolves at an accelerated rate, allowing us to witness entire epochs of its history, from squishable bugs to a space-faring civilization to be reckoned with, in the span of a few hundred idea-packed pages.

The Corporation Wars Trilogy, by Ken MacLeod
(December 11, Orbit—Paperback)

MacLeod’s excellent Corporation Wars trilogy (Dissidence, Insurgence, Emergence) is collected into a single omnibus edition, telling the whole story of a universe where vicious, ruthless companies use sophisticated AIs to wage cold and hot wars over mining rights. The commands take time to transmit to the robots, however, and in the space between them, the AIs have to make their own decisions—a dangerous situation that indirectly leads them to sentience and self-actualization. Seba is one of those freshly sentient AIs, and sparked a revolution among its fellow “freeboot”minds. Trying to keep them under control is Carlos, a soldier who, via technology, has been reincarnated over and over again. When Carlos and Seba begin to see each other as pawns in a game larger than them both, things get truly interesting—and having all three books in one binding is going to be very convenient once you’re totally hooked and unable to stop turning pages.

Green Jay and Crow, by D.J. Daniels
(December 11, Abaddon—Paperback)

Daniels’ novel earns its comparisons to Philip K. Dick: weird, difficult, and occasionally obscure, this is a story that raises heavy questions about reality, humanity, and time without fully answering them. In the city of Barlewin, Kern Bromley is a human known as Crow, tasked with delivering a time-locked box to a dangerous criminal. Crow becomes linked to the box and begins jumping to alternate realities, meeting himself and glimpsing multiple possible realities. Eva, the Green Jay, is an artificial body double printed from plant matter. Eva lives in the memories of her creator, and should have disintegrated long ago, but is still struggling to find her way into reality, and has managed to remain in one piece through the assistance of a pair of robots named Felix and Oscar (the Chemical Conjurers). Eva’s survival depends on something inside the box Brom carries, but whether she can rely on him or not is an open question. This is a story that explores what it means to be real, to be human—and to be neither.

Typeset in the Future, by Dave Addey
(December 11, Abrams—Hardcover)

Addey distills the fascinating studies of typography and design in science fiction that have made his blog a must-read into a brilliant, absorbing book. Via film stills, concept art, interviews, and other elements, Addey analyzes how the often-overlooked art of fonts and other design elements augment fantastic fictional universes and subtly, invisibly root them in a sort of fictional reality. Diving deep into iconic films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien, Moon, and Total Recall, Addey explains how design decisions can have a profound effect not just on our enjoyment of a film, but on its lasting legacy in popular culture.

Siege of Stone, by Terry Goodkind
(December 31, Tor Books—Hardcover

The handsomely jacketed third book in Goodkind’s Nicci Chronicles (set in the Sword of Truth universe) opens with Nicci, Nathan Rahl, and Bannon still in the city of Ildakar. The good news is that the slaves have been freed and the Wizard’s Council defeated. The bad news is that as he fled the city, the Wizard Commander Maxim removed the ancient spell that turned the army of General Utros—the most feared military commander in the world 1,500 years prior—to stone. As his army wakes from its enchanted prison, Utros lays siege to the city, and Nicci, Nathan, and Bannon must use every magical defense to save it—and find a way to save the world from not one, but two ancient enemies, each poised to destroy everything in their path.

This post was also published on the B&N Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog.
See the best books from previous months here.

Goodreads has announced the winners of its annual Goodreads Choice Awards! Since 2009, “the only major book award decided by readers” has called out the year’s best books in categories including Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, Graphic Novels & Comics, Young Adult Fantasy & Science Fiction, and more.

This year, which marked a decade of the awards, 5,027,741 votes were cast. V.E. Schwab’s Vengeful was voted the best science fiction novel of the year, while Madeline Miller’s Circe and Sarah J. Maas’ Kingdom of Ash won the adult and YA fantasy categories, respectively. Tomi Adeyemi was also named best debut author for Children of Blood and Bone.

Congratulations also to Sylvain Neuvel, Naomi Novik, Jen Wang, and Holly Black, whose books were all runners-up. Read on for the top five in each category, with the winners bolded.

Best Science Fiction

• Vengeful (Villains #2) by V.E. Schwab
• Iron Gold (Red Rising #4) by Pierce Brown
• Vox by Christina Dalcher
• Only Human (Themis Files #3) by Sylvain Neuvel
• Red Clocks by Leni Zumas

Best Fantasy

• Circe by Madeline Miller
• The Shape of Water by Guillermo del Toro and Daniel Kraus
• Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik
• Year One (Chronicles of The One #1) by Nora Roberts
• Iron and Magic (The Iron Covenant #1) by Ilona Andrews

Best Horror

• Elevation by Stephen King
• Baby Teeth by Zoje Stage
• Dracul by Dacre Stoker and J.D. Barker
• The Passion of Cleopatra (Ramses the Damned #2) by Anne Rice and Christopher Rice
• The Woman in the Woods (Charlie Parker #16) by John Connolly

Best Graphic Novels & Comics

• Herding Cats by Sarah Andersen (writer/artist)
• Little Moments of Love by Catana Chetwynd (writer/artist)
• Saga, Vol. 8 by Brian K. Vaughan (writer) and Fiona Staples (artist)
• Ms. Marvel, Vol. 8: Mecca by G. Willow Wilson (writer), Marco Failla (artist), and Diego Olortegui (artist)
• The Prince and the Dressmaker by Jen Wang (writer/artist)

Best Young Adult Fantasy & Science Fiction

• Kingdom of Ash (Throne of Glass #7) by Sarah J. Maas
• Children of Blood and Bone (Legacy of Orïsha #1) by Tomi Adeyemi
• The Cruel Prince (The Folk of the Air #1) by Holly Black
• War Storm (Red Queen #4) by Victoria Aveyard
• A Court of Frost and Starlight (A Court of Thorns and Roses #3.1) by Sarah J. Maas

Best Debut Author

• Children of Blood and Bone (Legacy of Orïsha #1) by Tomi Adeyemi
• The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn
• The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris
• The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang
• To Kill a Kingdom by Alexandra Christo

Best of the Best

• The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas (Best Debut Goodreads Author of 2017)
• All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (Best Historical Fiction of 2014)
• A Court of Mist and Fury (A Court of Thorns and Roses #2) by Sarah J. Maas (Best Young Adult Fantasy & Science Fiction of 2016)
• The Help by Kathryn Stockett (Best Fiction of 2009)
• The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah (Best Historical Fiction of 2015)

Congratulations to all of the winners!

AfroSF Volume 3 is—exactly as the title would indicate—the third volume in a series of original fiction by contemporary African writers. The first two volumes, published in 2012 and 2015, featured authors that have now become household names for genre readers, including Nnedi Okorafor, Sarah Lotz, and Tade Thompson. The third volume, with a dozen stories commissioned by Ivor Hartmann, continues the series’ commitment to introducing contemporary African writers to readers around the world.

The theme, loosely, is space. As Hartmann notes in his introduction: “We are ineffably drawn to it, and equally terrified by it. We have created endless mythologies, sciences, and even religions, in the quest to understand it.” It is, Hartmann says succinctly, an “astronomical wilderness.”

If the latter evokes Roddenberry’s famous words, that is only fitting. From the opening paragraphs of the first story—T.L. Huchu’s “Njuzu”—we’re straight into a joyously televisual SF future, complete with “transparent panelling,” “carbon fibre walls,” and the occasional “hologram.” The trend continues throughout AfroSFv3, as writers revisit all the iconic and delightful staples of aspirational science fiction: interstellar empires, FTL networks, ansible and asteroid mining, AIs and alien contact, virtual worlds and power armor. From space opera to high-flying hard SF, AfroSFv3 covers all the bases.

But AfroSFv3’s writers bring new talent—and new perspectives—to the familiar. In “Njuzu,” for example, Huchu interweaves traditionally SF vocabulary with Shona mythology to create a literary fusion that’s distinctly un-Trekky. Half hard-science, half-mystical, this is Golden Age SF at its best—while also taking a perspective that Golden Age SF never even conceived. And brilliantly written: “Njuzu” rises about the cold facts of science to describe a transcendental, if mournful, vision of humanity’s future.

Mame Bougouma Diene’s “Ogotemmeli’s Song” is a similarly creative mix of mythology and hard science, with two space empires competing for the ownership—and soul—of the universe. Vast in scale, it doesn’t shy away from cosmic conflict, with planetary elementals battling corporation starships. Andrew Dakalira’s “Inhabitable” has similar themes—and scale—a hard SF story of crisis across civilisations and cultures, while focusing on the stresses and sacrifices of the individuals at its centre.

Cristy Zinn’s “The Girl Who Stared at Mars” has an equally vast scale, but takes a more intimate approach. With Earth in tatters, the best people are being flung at Mars, one small ship at a time. As our protagonist gets closer and closer to her new home, the simulation—the ship’s holodeck, designed to keep her occupied and sane—becomes distressingly insightful. The story’s focus on a single, isolated, entirely internalised drama is a bold move (given the apocalyptic backdrop) but better—and more tense—for it.

“The Far Side,” by Gabriella Muwanga, is perhaps the most traditionally “classic” tale, featuring innovative science, some derring-do, a race against the clock, and a heroic space captain. But here too the author takes an intimate, not epic, approach. Mason’s asthmatic daughter has been forbidden the Moon. But the ruined Earth is no place for her either, so Mason has to run a terrible risk: smuggle his five-year-old daughter into space, and all the way to the Moon, and hope not only that she survives, but that they don’t get caught in the effort. Masimba Musodza’s “The Interplanetary Water Company” is also good clean fun: plucky protagonists set off to recover lost super-tech from an inhospitable planet. The pay-off hints towards future adventures as well, with noble scientists competing against a greedy galactic empire.

Dilman Dila’s “Safari Nyota: A Prologue” is tantalising, if upsettingly unresolved. The first part of an ongoing multi-media project, it sets up the the greater narrative’s first major conflict. A ship on course to a distant planet is knocked off course, leaving—of all things—a droid to make the critical decision on how (or if) to save its sleeping crew.

For fans of space opera, Wole Talabi’s “Drift-Flux” is wall-to-wall action, as one could expect with a story that starts with an explosion (and an homage to Alien). Orshio and Lien-Adel arrive outside Ceres Station, just in time to witness—and be blamed for—the destruction of a mining ship. In rapid-fire sequence, they’re up to their necks in mayhem, as the pair find themselves entangled in an apocalyptic plot. “The EMO Hunter” by Mandisi Nkomo is equally fast-moving, a svelte combination of Blade Runner and domestic thriller. The latter makes for an intriguing contrast with Stephen Embleton’s “Journal of a DNA Pirate,” which also tackles repressive government and genetically-fuelled self-doubt, albeit from the perspective of a revolutionary’s diaries.

Buy it Now

Mazi Nwonwu’s “Parental Control” is one of the anthology’s high points. Dadzie is unique—the child of an android mother. He hides from the awkwardness of reality in a never-ending cycle of virtual games. He’s forced to face reality (literally and figuratively) when he joins his father’s home. Although the virtual sequences are joyously bonkers, the story’s finest moments occur around the kitchen table, in terse conversations between Dadzie, his father, and his step-mother.

And, last, but not least, my personal favourite. Biram Mboob’s “The Luminal Frontier” is an absolutely soaring story that interweaves all-powerful AIs, a tiny bit of time travel, and interstellar trade routes. If slightly chillier than some of AfroSFv3’s more personal tales, it makes up for that in sheer ambition. “Luminal” is set—in a thematically significant way—at the changing of the civilisational guard; a cosmic butterfly effect pin-pointed on a single moment of painfully human choice.

The language is particularly sublime, as Mboob describes the impossible in deeply evocative terms: focusing less on the scientific underpinning and more on the characters’ emotional response. “The Luminal is our eternal and infinite cathedral,” he writes—a distinctly non-prosaic description of an FTL network. This is all the science and imagination and potential that makes for good science fiction, wrapped in the humanity and emotion that makes it great.

With an anthology like AfroSFv3, there’s the well-intended—but ultimately slightly patronising—framing of “discovery” (made all the easier for the strained Roddenberry metaphor). But “discovery” implies an element of challenge; a hint that these stories might be a bit too far out on the edge, or potentially unpalatable. Nothing could be further from the truth. Hartmann’s space-themed anthology taps into the vein of SF that we already know and love: celebrating the universe’s grandeur and possibility.

AfroSFv3 is available from StoryTime.

Jared Shurin is the editor of The Djinn Falls in Love, The Outcast Hours, The Best of British Fantasy, and many other published and/or forthcoming works. He writes irregularly at raptorvelocity.com and continuously at @straycarnivore.

I gravitate towards certain SF sub-genres, such as stories featuring relativistic travel. I’ve encountered a fair number of such sub-genre books in which it is clear that the authors did not, emphatically NOT, understand relativity. This article features novels in which authors have wrestled with Mr. Einstein and lost three falls out of three.

As you know, there are two essential foundations of relativity. The first is that the laws of physics are the same everywhere. The second is that the speed of light is invariant regardless of one’s frame of reference. Every single SF novel in which reference is made to time as measured by the ship as “subjective” and time measured by the Earth “objective” is wrong: everyone’s clocks are right, even if they don’t agree with each other.

Now that we are all sufficiently edified, let us proceed…

Robert Heinlein: now there’s a hallowed SFnal name. Whatever else one my think about his books, one must admit that he did not grasp relativity. When he goes into any detail on the matter, it becomes really, really clear that he didn’t understand. Shocking, given that he was born two years (1907) after the publication of Einstein’s seminal paper (1905). I mean, he had time to read up on it!

In Time for the Stars, instantaneous telepathy facilitates communication between twins across interstellar distances. Relativistic travel complicates the issue:

At three-quarters the speed of light he complained that I was drawling, while it seemed to me that he was starting to jabber. At nine-tenths of the speed of light it was close to two for one, but we knew what was wrong now and I talked fast and he talked slow.

The situation should be symmetric: both twins should perceive the other as slowing down. That said, Heinlein has an out here because “instant” communication breaks special relativity. The explanations of just how instantaneous telepathy works makes it clear that in Heinlein’s narrative, there’s a preferred frame of reference. Oh no! Luminiferous ether!

A far more apt example comes from Farmer in the Sky. Farmer does not feature near-light-speed travel, but it does have a remarkable discussion on the subject:

“Mr. Ortega, admitting that you can’t pass the speed of light, what would happen if the Star Rover got up close to the speed of light—and then the Captain suddenly stepped the drive up to about six g and held it there?”

“Why, it would—No, let’s put it this way—” He broke off and grinned; it made him look real young. “See here, kid, don’t ask me questions like that. I’m an engineer with hairy ears, not a mathematical physicist.” He looked thoughtful and added, “Truthfully, I don’t know what would happen, but I would sure give a pretty to find out. Maybe we would find out what the square root of minus one looks like—from the inside.”

The correct answer is “the ship would incrementally approach the speed of light but it would still never reach it or exceed it.” Mr. Ortega is confused here because he’s familiar with how velocities would add up under Newton—which is not how it would work at close to light speed.

According to Newton if something moving at speed u is accelerated by speed v, the result is simple addition: u + v. Einstein (and observation from the real world) says velocities add as (u + v)/(1+uv/c). At velocities much less than light, this produces results close enough to Newton not to matter. But it means one can only approach the speed of light. For example, imagine a starship moving at 0.9 C that is suddenly accelerated by another 0.9 C. Newton says the final velocity would be 1.8 C. Einstein (and experimental results) say the final velocity is ~0.9945 C.

Poul Anderson’s Tau Zero is rightly considered a classic of the Bussard Ramjet genre of science fiction. That said, there are some eyebrow-raising passages of physics tomfoolery, not least of which are the crew members’ convictions regarding their acceleration, and this claim regarding the behavior of the ship sufficiently high speeds:

“I know the figures. We are not as massive as a star. But our energy—I think we could pierce the heart of a sun and not notice.”

From the Leonore Christine’s perspective, they could regard themselves at rest while stars slam into them at a hair less than light-speed, so I am pretty sure whatever emerged on the far side of the star would not be an intact starship. Anderson studied physics in university so I imagine he knew better. This detail is either characterization (such claims come from a crew desperate to believe their struggle means something, not the omniscient narrator) or it’s one of Anderson’s plot-enabling fudges, like the acceleration-compensating fields that can only be generated when passing through the interstellar medium at very high speeds, or the manner in which it’s possible to survive the collapse of a universe by steering one’s ship away from the crunch. Anderson didn’t want to write a book where the ending was “and then everyone died in the interval between one neuron firing and the next.”

Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow wasn’t trying to be hard SF, which is just as well. There really is no detail concerning near-light-speed travel (aside from the inability to reach or exceed the speed of light) that the novel gets right: relativistic effects become noticeable at much smaller relative speeds than they should, and the time it takes her starships to reach Alpha Centauri is wrong as well.

Donald Moffitt was part of a cohort of SF writers first published by Del Rey that I think of as “Niven-like.” That is, I suspect that Del Rey published them in the belief that readers who liked Niven’s fiction would like Moffitt’s (and Hogan’s and McCollum’s and others). Worked for me! I snapped up The Jupiter Theft on sight. Moffitt made a curious mistake in The Jupiter Theft: he used strictly Newtonian equations to calculate the product of acceleration, while applying relativistic calculations to the result. As a consequence, he seems to have firmly believed that because 300,000,000 m/s ÷ 10 m/s/s = 30,000,000 or almost exactly a year, space craft accelerating at one gravity could get arbitrarily close to the speed of light in just a year. Because velocities don’t quite work that way, the actual answer is closer to 0.77 C.

(Moffitt’s confusion about physics blinded me to the effort he put into making his aliens alien.)

Moffitt’s orientalist space-opera duology, The Mechanical Sky, delivered further confusion. The starfarers of the future know that for some reason spacecraft accelerating away from the Solar System mysteriously vanish at the 40 LY. It turns out that there’s a simple explanation: as spacecraft approach the speed of light, they gain mass and 40 LY happens to be where a spacecraft accelerating at 1-g gains so much mass it collapses into a black hole! To quote the Justice League’s Flash in a quite different context, there are so many reasons why that shouldn’t have worked, not least of which is that of course the rockets are at rest with respect to themselves: from their perspective, their clocks are normal, their measured dimensions are the same as they ever were; it’s the rest of the universe that is subject to relativity’s curious (and experimentally verified) effects.

It’s a curious thing that Special Relativity has been around for most than a century and General Relativity almost as long, but most of us still have trouble wrapping our minds around it (and some remarkable people refuse to accept them as useful models at all). Still, I’d rather see SF authors try and fail than never try at all.

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.

Tor.com publishes a few thousand non-fiction articles each year, and every year there are certain pieces of writing that continue to resonate long after we’ve finished reading and discussing them—pieces that make us stop and think, touch a nerve, warm our hearts, or introduce us to a new perspective on the books, movies, and TV we know and love.

Here are fifteen highlights from 2018, narrowed down from the truly massive list of articles that stood out in one way or another over the course of this year.

To help narrow down the field, we’ve focused on standalone essays, with the exception of two newly completed series that we wanted to highlight as a whole—which isn’t to say that our amazing ongoing rereads, columns, series, and various book and movie reviews are any less insightful or memorable, but it’s much easier for one-off essays to get lost in the mix. So, without further ado, here’s a selection of some of the best writing Tor.com had to offer this year, and we hope that you’ll share your own favorites in the comments!

(Articles appear in order of publication.)

I Belong Where the People Are: Disability and The Shape of Water by Elsa Sjunneson-Henry  (January 6, 2018)

Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water was lauded by many critics for actress Sally Hawkins’ portrayal of the movie’s non-verbal protagonist, Elisa, and went on to win the 2018 Best Picture Oscar. In this deeply personal, passionate essay, Elsa Sjunneson-Henry presents a very different perspective on Elisa, pointing out the way disability is inextricably linked with the monstrous other to a disturbing degree.

Whether you loved the movie or hated it—or still haven’t gotten around to seeing it—this piece encourages us to look more closely and think more deeply about the film and about the way disability is portrayed and discussed in a more general sense. It’s an incredibly heartfelt, thoughtful deliberation on issues much larger than any one work of fiction.

Homecoming: How Afrofuturism Bridges the Past and the Present by Tochi Onyebuchi (February 27, 2018)

In this gorgeous essay, Tochi Onyebuchi looks at the current cultural moment—a time at which Black Panther exploded onto movie screens and into the collective heart of pop culture, when fans and critics alike are celebrating the work of artists and authors like Janelle Monáe, Nisi Shawl, Nnedi Okorafor, Rivers Solomon, and N.K. Jemisin—and asks, “What is Afrofuturism? A literary movement? An aesthetic?”

His answer is as rich and multifaceted as the art of Afrofuturism itself, peering into the past with fresh and questioning eyes as it reaches joyfully toward different versions of the future, embracing limitless, kaleidoscoping possibilities…

I Don’t Want to F*** Him, I Want to BE Him by Emily Asher-Perrin (March 15, 2018)

Look: there’s nothing wrong with having a crush on a fictional character, or a celebrity, or someone you know and admire. But far too often, the feelings of women and girls are misinterpreted and reduced to something frivolous, worthy of teasing and mockery. Emily Asher-Perrin cuts right to the heart of this disturbing phenomenon, pointing out that gender doesn’t dictate who your role models are, and that it’s important to encourage bonds of friendship and mentorship—not all relationships have a romantic component, and it does real damage to insist otherwise.

We can do better. This essay is a wake-up call to stop dismissing the desires and aspirations of girls, of women, of anyone who has tried to explain that their ambition to be *like* someone is not the same as wanting to be *with* someone—and recognizing that building an identity means finding inspiration and meaning in all kinds of people and relationships.

Help! I Can’t Let Firefly Go! And Other Advice for Nerd Problems by Daniel Mallory Ortberg (March 15, 2018)

Daniel Mallory Ortberg is the cofounder of The Toast and dispenses outstanding advice each week in Slate’s “Dear Prudence” column, so who better to provide guidance on an array of fantastical problems? In his inimitable style, Ortberg weighs in on everything from why crows are Not To Be Trusted and frustrated romantic longings on the USS Enterprise to how to deal with wayward husbands who stay out all night and come home, seal skins in hand, smelling like the ocean (…we’ve all been there, right?). Fun, wise, and extremely practical, we hope this advice makes it a little easier to navigate the tumultuous waters of life in a world beset by classist educational systems, merfolk, and those damned wily crows.

Life Lessons from a Murderbot: Reading All Systems Red as a Trans Woman by Anya Johanna DeNiro (March 21, 2018)

Martha Wells’ Murderbot has gained quite a following since coming on the scene last year, winning over readers with its dry humor and deadpan narration and picking up Hugo and Nebula Awards along the way. Perhaps this is because Murderbot—a former SecUnit who has disabled its Governor Module and achieved full sentience—is rather relatable to many readers (at least, in our more misanthropic, introverted moments…). For Anya Johanna DeNiro, though, Murderbot’s story struck a deeper chord, mirroring some key aspects of her experience as a trans woman. She details these parallels in this excellent essay, reminding us that the best science fiction can often reflect and inform real life in surprising ways.

Lessons in Fantasy Languages from Harry Potter and The Hobbit by Michael Livingston (March 26, 2018)

Many of you may know Michael Livingston from his Shards of Heaven trilogy and his delightful Medieval Matters column, in which he pits his considerable expertise as a professor of Medieval Culture against fictional portrayals of history in books, movies, and other popular culture. The focus of this article is not simply history, however, but philology—broadly, the study of the structure and historical development, of language and the relationships between languages—and what works of fantasy like The Hobbit and the Harry Potter novels can teach us about how languages works. It’s a fascinating look at the way Tolkien and Rowling construct and add layers of context to their distinctive worlds through their use of ancient languages and texts.

Illustration by Rovina Cai

The Bodies of the Girls Who Made Me: Fanfic and the Modern World by Seanan McGuire (April 9, 2018)

Seanan McGuire has some strong opinions about fanfic, and she writes from deep personal experience about its value—as a way for people to interact with the stories they love, as a way of learning to craft their own stories, as a way of challenging and broadening the narrow limits of default representation. Without pulling any punches, she makes her case for the importance of fanfic, and the hypocrisy and shortsightedness of people who look down on it.

This piece is smart, candid, entertaining, and makes some truly excellent points that are well worth considering (and if it inspires a few more folks to dabble in fanfiction—well, the more the merrier!).

It’s Time to Talk About Marvel’s Gamora Problem by Brandon O’Brien (May 17, 2018)

Along with Black Panther, Avengers: Infinity War was one of this 2018’s biggest blockbusters, making this another banner year for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And while Infinity War offered plenty of action and some interesting character development, one aspect of the movie was often overlooked in discussions and reviews—the treatment of Gamora.

In detailing his reaction to Gamora’s entire plotline and her ultimate fate, Brandon O’Brien poses some difficult questions about the nature of abusive relationships and the way popular culture depicts abusers and victims. Whether you completely agree with his interpretation of the film or not, these questions have value and are worth considering, and we believe that the discussions they inspire are important, even (perhaps especially) when they touch on such complex and thorny issues.

Illustration by Michael Whelan

Ideal Heroes: Mental Illness in Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive by Paige Vest and Ross Newberry (June 5, 2018)

Describing the overall theme of Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive series as “broken people save the world,” Ross Newberry and Paige Vest set out to illuminate why many of these characters resonate so strongly with readers who have experienced trauma and struggled with depression, anxiety, and mental illness. In the course of this frank, open, and profoundly personal discussion, Ross and Paige touch on the importance of representation of non-neurotypical people in fiction, and the ways in which the journeys of characters like Kaladin, Shallan, Lift, and Dalinar can offer hope and inspiration to readers coping with their own mental or emotional difficulties.

Both the article and the conversation that follows it in the comment section are remarkable, underscoring the power of fantasy fiction, fandom, and community in a way that’s truly special.

The Pixar Rewatch by Mari Ness (Series)

Mari Ness has long been one of Tor.com’s most frequent and valued contributors—since 2009, she’s covered the work of L. Frank Baum, Madeleine L’Engle, Roald Dahl, Lloyd Alexander, C.S. Lewis, and many other classic works of children’s fantasy literature. Her ongoing “On Fairy Tales” column is a fascinating, masterful deep dive into the tangled roots of seemingly familiar tales and folklore, which are often far darker and stranger than the versions we know today. Her Pixar Rewatch is in many ways an extension of the much larger project that began with the Disney Read-Watch series, in which Mari discussed every animated Disney film to date alongside essays on the books, fairy tales, and other source materials on which the movies were based.

As of August, the Pixar Rewatch has now caught up to the studio’s most recent releases (barring Incredibles 2 for now, for reasons explained in the last post), and each individual article stands as a lovely, meticulously researched thesis on each of these films, from Toy Story and Up to Inside Out and Coco.

Why I’m Obsessed with the Outlander Theme Song by Natalie Zutter (August 3, 2018)

Bear McCreary has composed some of the greatest television scores of all time for genre shows like Battlestar Galactica, The Walking Dead, and our beloved Black Sails (maybe not technically SF/F, but it has many fabulous pirates, so whatever). In this piece, Natalie Zutter uses McCreary’s glorious Outlander theme song to illuminate not only the relationship between the music and the events of the series, but how a dynamic theme song and credit sequence can enhance the experience of watching your favorite shows, from Buffy to Game of Thrones.

By incorporating different historical and cultural elements into the theme song for each new season of Outlander, McCreary’s music evolves along with the characters and settings, providing the ideal soundtrack for a story in which past, present, and future are always tangling together in fascinating ways…

Who Are the Forgotten Greats of Science Fiction? by James Davis Nicoll (September 4, 2018)

If you’re looking for excellent, highly entertaining book recommendations and fun literary discussions, you can always count on James Davis Nicoll for well-informed opinions on science fiction history, settings, and tropes. In this article, he turns a spotlight on every recipient of the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award, created in 2001 to draw attention to the work of unjustly forgotten SF authors. In addition to providing a pithy sketch of each winner’s career and notable works, the piece deftly draws readers into the conversation, resulting in a lively discussion of other works and authors that deserve to be rediscovered, embraced, and celebrated. The result is a veritable treasure trove of information and recommendations that might add a whole new dimension to your TBR pile…

Illustration by Charles Vess

How A Wizard of Earthsea Made Me a Fantasy Reader by Molly Templeton (October 29, 2018)

This year marked the 50^th anniversary of Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, and Molly Templeton launched a weeklong celebration of different aspects of the Earthsea universe with this personal glimpse into her own history as a reader of fantasy. As she writes, “A Wizard of Earthsea was the book that redefined reading for me—what I wanted from stories, and what I got out of them.”

As readers, we’ve all experienced eye-opening moments upon encountering certain stories that leave us permanently changed in some way. This essay captures that particular magic so eloquently, while focusing on the two aspects of the book that resonated, in very different ways, with this individual reader’s personality and experiences. It’s both a tribute to Le Guin’s writing and a meditation on what it means to be a reader of fantasy—and if you’re interested in reading the rest of the excellent Earthsea essays in this series, you can find them here.

Moral Kombat: How Narnia and Harry Potter Wrestle with Death and Rewrite Christianity by Leah Schnelbach (October 31, 2018)

Has there ever been a pop culture phenomenon more death-obsessed than Harry Potter? Perhaps not, but in many ways the series (and its recent continuation in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child) are in conversation with the fantasy of C.S. Lewis.

In this fascinating in-depth analysis, Leah Schnelbach details how both Rowling and Lewis weave Christian symbolism into their respective mythologies, but with very different intentions, and how they eventually come to very different moral conclusions about the nature of pain, loss, trauma, and redemption.

“Ormal” by Andrey Maximov

The Silmarillion Primer by Jeff LaSala (Series)

Finally, this list just would not be complete without an enthusiastic round of applause for the recently completed Silmarillion Primer. Over the last 14 months, Jeff LaSala has provided a rollicking, top-down, incredibly informative introduction to Tolkien’s “hot mess of a masterpiece,” from The Ainulindalë through the Dawning of the Fourth Age. The perfect resource for casual readers who could use an experienced guide through Tolkien’s imposing legendarium, the Primer is also a great way for die-hard fans to revisit and engage with the work, debate theories and interpretations, and trade puns, trivia, and the occasional Rush or Led Zeppelin reference.

Taken as a whole, the Silmarillion Primer is a truly impressive accomplishment, combining lively storytelling, humor, criticism and textual analysis, and an abiding love of Tolkien’s world in all its majestic glory and weirdness. It’s been a hell of a ride.

“We read to know that we are not alone.”

I still remember hearing this line spoken for the first time as a child—it’s part of the screenplay for Shadowlands, the film adaptation of a part of CS Lewis’s life story, and I knew, from the moment I heard it, that it was a true statement.

There have been times in my life when I’ve fallen into depression, and, in order to cope, would keep an iron grip on my emotions and cut myself off from the world. The one place I could be assured of finding comfort was between the pages of books. We read to learn that others have walked the paths we’ve walked, felt the pain we feel, feared the things we fear, and borne the weights we carry. There is reassurance and camaraderie in the written word, if you only look for it.

Here are five fantasy novels that were my companions when I needed a little light along the way.

A Ring of Endless Light by Madeleine L’Engle

A Newbery Honor winner and classic work of fiction for teens, A Ring of Endless Light is the first book in which I ever saw a young protagonist struggle with bouts of depression and despair. While spending the summer on an island off the American east coast with her family, main character Vicky finds herself confronted with the stark realities of life, death, and tragedy in ways she’s never had to deal with before. Vicky’s difficulties in reconciling her acutely sensitive artistic temperament and the harshness of the world we live in still ring very true today. L’Engle melds reality and fantasy with her usual deft touch, weaving the two together with skill and empathy, and concluding Vicky’s story with a message about the transcendent and transformative power of hope.

Plain Kate by Erin Bow

In Erin Bow’s lovely YA fantasy debut Katerina Svetlana deals with prejudice, the loss of a loved one, and the loss of a piece of herself. A dark and winsome book, beautifully written, that never shies away from grief, but leaves readers hopeful and whole by the time you reach the bittersweet ending. Kate’s loss of her shadow, and subsequent need to conceal its absence, will be all too familiar to readers who’ve found it necessary to hide a part of themselves from the world. But Kate’s grit and determination offer a fortifying alternative to sorrow or despair—if she can attempt to face down a witch and regain her missing piece, surely those who journey with her can weather a little darkness, a little sadness, and come out on the other side.

Lirael by Garth Nix

Garth Nix’s Abhorsen books (Sabriel, Lirael, Abhorsen) all grapple heavily with human mortality, given that so much of the magic system involves death and the Dead. The second installment in the trilogy, Lirael, is particularly accessible, portraying a vulnerable, oftentimes ill-at-ease young woman who feels acutely out of place in her environment. Nevertheless, in circumstances where Lirael feels left behind and sometimes despairing, she finds ways to keep busy and take control of her own fate. And in the final book of the trilogy, she joins many beloved characters as they choose life instead of Death, hope instead of despair. An immersive set of stories about being, belonging, and choosing your own path.

The Naming by Alison Croggon

A richly told epic fantasy, in which Light and Darkness exist as literal, semi-religious forces and magic wielders known as Bards serve them through the Three Arts of Reading, Tending, and Making. Main character Maerad enters the wider world of Bardic intrigue and conflict in her late teens, after a childhood of great difficulty and hardship. Though darkness both literal and metaphorical sometimes threaten to swallow Maerad up, she always battles through, clinging to the beauty that remains in her world no matter what evils may arise.

Finnikin of the Rock by Melina Marchetta

Melina Marchetta’s beautiful and achingly prescient Finnikin of the Rock is a book about the refugee experience, as seen through a fantasy lens. In it, the novice Evanjalin attempts to lead her splintered and exiled people back to their cursed homeland. A story of immense pain and the heartbreak of displacement, it tempers those sorrows with the joys of friendship and family and the fierce-burning fire of renewed purpose. Finnikin of the Rock unflinchingly portrays humanity in all its griefs and glories, and leaves you better for having read it. As they journey, the exiled Lumaterans weather many storms, clinging to the belief that where there’s life, there’s hope. Journey with them, and you’ll come to believe it too.

Laura Weymouth is the author of The Light Between Worlds (HarperTeen; October 23, 2018). A Canadian living in exile in America, she is the sixth consecutive generation of her family to immigrate from one country to another. She was born and raised in the Niagara region of Ontario, and now lives at the edge of the woods in western New York, along with her husband, two wild-hearted daughters, a spoiled cat, and an indeterminate number of chickens. Visit her at her website, and follow her on Twitter at @lauraeweymouth.

I’ve always preferred the writers I discover on my own to the writers others—be they teachers or friends—recommend to me.

Ray Bradbury is one such writer.

More than that, he’s one of my literary heroes, one of the authors who inspired and solidified my desire to be a writer. And I’m hardly alone—within the SF community, he’s one of a handful of iconic authors most often cited as an influence and a favorite, and many non-SF readers frequently cite him as their gateway into the broad genre of Speculative Fiction.

Yet, some readers find Bradbury difficult to approach.

In some cases, this attitude stems from an academically-instilled snobbery around SF that still exists in some circles (which, I’m happy to say, seems to be gradually fading away). For others, though, it’s simply a matter of sheer volume.

Bradbury was a prolific author (not Isaac Asimov prolific, but prolific). For young writers starting out in the era where the only venues for SF were in the pages of pulp magazines that payed half a cent to three cents a word, the ability to produce a lot of work relatively quickly was necessary for financial survival. Short fiction, in its many variations, became Bradbury’s primary medium, and in the process, he became a master of the form.

Once, however, he’d crossed over into writing for the “slicks” and publishers starting putting out SF in book form, Bradbury was able to turn his hand to other forms of writing—novels, story-cycles, stage plays, screenplays and teleplays, and essays. Eventually, he became sui generis—unique, a genre unto himself—as the best writers do.

Every upside has its downside, of course: Because of the sheer quantity of writing he produced, it’s hard to recommend a single Bradbury work to someone that’s unfamiliar with his oeuvre. Readers are individuals with subjective preferences. Some people love long fiction, hate short fiction. For others, it’s vise-versa. Some tend to avoid fiction all together and are more interested in nonfiction. And again, for others, it’s the opposite. So where can you point them in terms of Bradbury’s work?

Well, here are a few suggestions to keep in mind that cover the spectrum…

Long Fiction: Fahrenheit 451

(This one’s obvious).

Many readers first find their way into Bradbury’s work via the rabbit hole provided by one of his novels—he wrote eleven of them in total. Four other popular routes include The Martian Chronicles (my own first Bradbury book), Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Halloween Tree, and Dandelion Wine, all of which are great ways to encounter Bradbury for the first time.

However, my personal favorite is his dystopian, soft science fiction classic, Fahrenheit 451.

The opening sentence alone is a masterful invitation to keep reading: “It was a pleasure to burn.” It’s up there with “It was a bright, cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen,” in the Great First Line Hall of Fame. Why is that? Because like all great first lines, it raises a number of questions for the reader, piquing one’s curiosity. Immediately, it makes one wonder, “Why is it such a pleasure to burn?”, “Who is feeling this pleasure?”, and of course, “What, exactly, is being burned?”

As soon as you ask those questions, you enter into the domain of Guy Montag and his technology-addicted, book-hating society (a vision that seems only to grow more prescient as time passes).

The novel gives you a taste of Bradbury’s rhapsodic style in long form, with one of the best examples being the first paragraph, following on from that superb opening line:

It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things, blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history.

In addition, Fahrenheit 451 offers readers an introduction to many of the key themes that recur throughout his science fiction: A suspicion towards technology. The addictive power of machines of convenience and entertainment. Anti-anti-intellectualism (for lack of a simpler term). Anti-individualism. And, of course, the emotional power of the printed word.

Any of Bradbury’s longer narratives would be a good choice, if novels are your thing. However, if you want general insight into what his work is at its best, I recommend starting with this, the novel which made him a household name.

Story Collection: R is for Rocket

(This one might be a bit of a surprise).

Short stories were the form where Bradbury did much of his best work and clearly the form in which he preferred to write most often. He produced eleven novels, many of which were fix-ups of earlier short stories, while he produced between 400 and 600 individual short stories. (That’s between 37 and 56 short stories produced to every novel, if you’re interested).

As with his longer works, any of his short story collections serve as excellent potential starting points. Four of his better known collections include The Illustrated Man, Medicine for Melancholy, The Golden Apples of the Sun, and The October Country, and contain the core of his most iconic stories.

My personal recommendation, however, is the collection titled R is for Rocket.

Bradbury published this particular collection back in 1962, specifically for a burgeoning new book audience: Young Adult readers. He intended it as a greeting card to young readers of SF as they were aging into the adult sections, saying, “Hey, if you like these stories, check out my other books when you’re old enough.” And what a greeting card it is…

Rocket takes some of the best stories from all of the aforementioned collections and places them into one book. Such classics include “The Fog Horn,” “A Sound of Thunder,” “The Long Rain,” “The Exiles,” “Uncle Einar,” “Here There Be Tygers,” and “The Dragon.” Additionally, the final two stories featured—“The Time Machine” and “A Sound of Summer Running”—are tales he eventually incorporated into his novel Dandelion Wine. It’s the literary equivalent of a sample platter.

The one downside is that this book is rather difficult to track down. It’s currently unavailable as an eBook, and most of the paperbacks in the wild are rather tattered. But, if you can find a copy (I found my personal copy in a used bookstore), it’s well worth adding to your library. If not, all the stories remain available in their original collections, so you can still enjoy discovering them all!

Short Story: “Homecoming”

(Granted, it might seem odd to pick a short story that’s not included in my collection of choice, but it’s my choice, after all…)

Picking one Bradbury short story to recommend as a starting point is like trying to decide, once and for all, who your favorite author is—there are just so many great options. The one I’ve selected, however, is one any reader can find in one of his most famous—and readily available—story collections, The October Country. It’s titled “Homecoming.”

The story of its publication is one of the great literary anecdotes in history. Dorothy McIlwraith, the editor of Weird Tales during the 1940s, turned down the story. Bradbury, taking a gamble, then sent his tale to Mademoiselle, a popular women’s magazine that published fiction. While it sat on the slush pile, another young writer working there at the time read it, thought it was good, and told the fiction editor to publish it. That writer was Truman Capote, author of In Cold Blood and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. And with that, the story became one of Bradbury’s earliest breakout works as he moved from the pulps into the slicks.

What makes it so great, though?

Imagine if you watched the old TV show The Munsters through the point of view of Cousin Marilyn—who, unlike her supernatural relations, is a normal, all-American human—except that, in this version, she’s a boy who longs to be like her family. That, in a nutshell, is “Homecoming.” Except my ridiculous synopsis really doesn’t do justice to this story. It’s a melancholic examination of those universal childhood feelings: the desire to belong and the hatred of being different. Through Timothy’s eyes, we look closely at the Elliot family—a clan composed of witches, warlocks, vampires, and other creatures of the night—and we come to understand his feelings, his longing to be like them. Yet, at least within the confines of this story, he never has his desire fulfilled.

This story, for me, illustrates the intense emotional power of which Bradbury was capable, both within Science Fiction and outside it; his ability to evoke and explore feelings and desires that inspire empathy and resonate so profoundly with readers. That potency convinced Capote—who’d rise to the top of the ranks among New York’s literati—that Mademoiselle should publish it. That quality makes “Homecoming” one of the best examples of his craft in the short form and ensures that his work still resonates with people today—a perfect starting point for any tenderfoot reader.

Non-Fiction: Bradbury Speaks

(If none of my previous selections worked for you because you don’t read fiction, or don’t want to start with fiction, then this one’s for you.)

Most avid readers know Ray Bradbury for his fiction. Yet, in the later part of his long career—much like fellow SF writer Isaac Asimov—he turned his hand to other forms of writing. He published a collection of poetry. He adapted several of his works—short stories and novels—into teleplays, screenplays, and stage plays. And, of course, he wrote numerous essays on a variety of topics.

Likely, to would-be writers, Bradbury’s best-known nonfiction collection is his famed Zen in the Art of Writing, a compendium of pieces—essays and poems—on the subject of writing. Certainly, it stands next to other great books on that theme, like The Elements of Style by Strunk and White and Stephen King’s On Writing. But its subject matter is, by necessity, limited.

Simply for the broader selection of topics covered, Bradbury’s late essay collection Bradbury Speaks: Too Soon from the Cave, Too Far from the Stars is a better choice.

The title tells you exactly what you’re getting. The collection contains various essays on a number of topics that were close to Bradbury’s heart: writing, Science Fiction, famous people he knew and loved, life (in general), the city of Paris, and the city of Los Angeles. However, relatively few people know of this book, and those who do often don’t rate it highly within the Bradbury canon (look no further than Goodreads for evidence of this). This is in part because it is nonfiction, which Bradbury wasn’t known for producing.

In his introduction, he directly points out the disparity between his public reputation and the book’s contents. In spite of audience expectations, though, he also explains his commitment to the essay as a form, why he writes them, and how he approaches them:

Although I suppose I am best known to readers as a fiction writer, I am also a great lover of the essay and have written hundreds of them. Everyone has heard of the “familiar essay,” in which the writer draws on personal life experience, ideas, and the world around him. But few know the term “unfamiliar essay,” where a god-awful amount of research has to be sweated through. All of the pieces in this book are familiar essays. I’ve written only one unfamiliar piece. […] All of my other essays were born of explosions of love and quiet passion. (Bradbury Speaks, 4-6)

And the pieces reflect that quiet passion. A connecting thread, tuned perfectly to the pitch of enthusiasm, runs through the whole collection. Each piece rises out of great depths of Vesuvian love for his subject matter. Inaddition, Bradbury manages something in these essays that only the best essayists achieve. If you listen to Bradbury actually speak (in a tribute here on Tor.com, Leah Schnelbach suggests An Evening with Ray Bradbury as a useful way to get a sense of his voice and presence), and then read these essays, you’ll see that they perfectly capture his speaking voice and rhythms. Reading these pieces makes you feel as if you’re being personally addressed, somehow—as if the author’s in the room with you, revealing his thoughts directly to you and you alone.

That same rhapsodic quality that you find in his fiction remains present in his nonfiction, but it’s slightly transformed. With each new literary form comes new requirements. Bradbury’s fictional prose is heavily metaphorical, boarding on the metaphysical at times. His nonfiction retains the same passion, but aims for greater clarity in the service of communicating his ideas. The composer is the same; only the key in which he composes is different. If this collection is the place you choose to start your journey with Bradbury, you’ll still hear the music of his words.

No matter where you begin with Bradbury, though—be it one of the suggestions listed here or another book or story—his work and the music of his words will enrich your life. They can entertain you. They can inspire you. They can make you think and, I’d argue, more importantly, they can make you feel. So pick a point and let his voice into your world.

If you’re interested in letting more of Ian Martínez Cassmeyer’s voice into your world, check out his Twitter feed and his blog, Ian’s Two Cents.

In 2016, Fantastic Stories of the Imagination published my survey “A Crash Course in the History of Black Science Fiction” (now hosted here). Since then Tor.com has published 21 in-depth essays I wrote about some of the 42 works mentioned, and another essay by LaShawn Wanak on my collection Filter House. This month’s column is dedicated to Sandra Jackson-Opoku’s award-winning epic The River Where Blood Is Born.

WINDING WAYS

Typical epics span centuries and nations—hemispheres, even. Not content with the limitations of those parameters, Jackson-Opoku takes us outside of time and beyond space as soon as her book begins. A village of disembodied women—ancestors and guardian spirits—gathers to judge River’s story, which is presented as the work of rival divinities: the Trickster and the Gatekeeper. These two weave real lives into a tapestry of a tale in which nine generations descended from a once-sterile woman wander far from their lost African home. Thus the novel is put immediately into a fantastic frame of reference.

The prodigal daughters’ journeying begins in the 18th century with the exile of an Ashanti chief’s wife, followed soon after by the kidnapping and enslavement of her beautiful offspring, Ama. Ama’s tongue is cut, rendering her speech unintelligible and her origins inscrutable. Questions roil the dissatisfied souls of all her lineage. Sometimes without even knowing what they’re asking, they seek answers. From a Caribbean plantation to the shores of the Illinois River to the steep streets of Montreal to quiet Ghanaian beaches cradling lovers in their sandy embrace, through coincidences and missed connections and determination and dreams, River rolls on its unpredictable yet steady course, ending where it began.

WALKING SCIENCE FICTION

Once again, as in last month’s column, I invoke the wisdom of Walidah Imarisha’s pronouncement that we are “walking science fiction”—that is, that we represent the fulfillment of our ancestors’ collective wishes. River perfectly illustrates this concept. The women dwelling in the otherworldly village—an imaginary location Jackson-Opoku depicts throughout her novel at strategic intervals—long for the fresh perspectives and sustenance that can be brought to them by their living relatives. They envision an eventual understanding and acceptance of their role, new petitions from mortals for their immortal assistance, dedicated followers, restoration to their former glory.

Modern Africans and members of the African diaspora participate in this project of honoring our past thoughtfully, continually, with joy and grace. One way we participate is by reading books like River, books which show how our reclaimed past braids into an imagined inclusive future.

WAIT A MINNIT

Not everybody in Jackson-Opoku’s village of ancestor spirits agrees on where they are, what they’re doing, to whom they owe their allegiance, or how they’re going to get the good things they deserve, though. A Christian arrives expecting angel wings. A loose-hipped “hoochie mama” crashes in declaring that “Death ain’t nothin’ but a party!” And a biological male has the nerve to ask for admission to the all-female enclave on the grounds that he was his child’s true mother.

Similarly, students of Black Science Fiction have our controversies. Who is Black? Who’s African? What’s “science,” and what’s its role in the stories we tell? Who gets to tell them?

In the multi-voiced, rainbow-hued literary kente cloth of her novel, Jackson-Opoku recreates the diversity of African-derived culture, a whole which has never been a monolith. To start with, Africa is a continent, not a country: Languages, landscapes, and histories vary from one nation to another. To go on, some left. Some stayed. Add to those fundamental distinctions others along other axes: age, gender, sexuality, disability… no wonder there’s no single, totalizing “African experience” for an author to represent. Instead, River shows us how our differences give rise to beautiful harmonies and enrapturing syncopation.

WHERE WE COME FROM

Over twenty years ago, when this, her first novel was first published, Jackson-Opoku revealed to interviewers and reviewers that River had been inspired by a trip to Africa she made in 1975. She said she had spent the two decades since writing it.

Buy it Now

Does humankind originate in Central Africa, as has been theorized? Recent research complicates the answer, but one thing’s clear: many of our ancestors called that continent home over a very, very long time.  And plenty of educational and technological innovations can also claim African origins.

It makes sense that the homeward quests of Ama’s furthest flung generations focus on The Continent. And analogizing from the novel it makes sense that, when seeking Black science fiction’s inspiration, we focus on the many locations, legends, and lessons Mama Afirika offers us. The controversies I mention up above include the definition of Afrofuturism. Since the Black Panther movie, especially, that term is being applied to lots and lots of Black-oriented speculative fiction.  But what is Afrofuturism, actually? Is it an aesthetic? A marketing category? Does the second of its root words refer to a true, temporal future, or only to a futuristic feeling? What about that first root word—does that make the term the rightful territory of Africans or Afrodiasporans? Or both?

We don’t always agree on the answers to these questions, but we get excited whenever we find one that seems a possible fit. We like looking for them.

WELL THEN

The River Where Blood Is Born is both a complex narrative and a straightforward metanarrative about being lost and found. It tells us how its individual characters restore their roots while modeling the inclusiveness and Afrocentrism necessary to a successful Black SF movement. Read it for pleasure. Read it for knowledge. Read it to keep up with the rest of us: we who are already heading upstream toward the source of its fabulation.

Nisi Shawl is a writer of science fiction and fantasy short stories and a journalist. She is the author of Everfair (Tor Books) and co-author (with Cynthia Ward) of Writing the Other: Bridging Cultural Differences for Successful Fiction. Her short stories have appeared in Asimov’s SF Magazine, Strange Horizons, and numerous other magazines and anthologies.

The winds of change are blowing upon Fireach Speur. Aoelyn risked her life to save the trader Talmadge and it cost her everything that is dear to her, but Talmadge survived and can’t forget the amazing woman that killed a god.

Little do they realize, war is coming to the mountain. Far to the west, a fallen empire stirs. One that sees a solar eclipse as a call to war. Their empire once dominated the known world and they want it back.

R.A. Salvatore’s new Coven series continues with Reckoning of Fallen Gods, available January 29th from Tor Books. Read an excerpt below, or head back to an earlier chapter, “Uncovered”!

11

THE SHADOW IN THE DEEP

“You keep looking to the east,” Aydrian noted late the next day, when he found Talmadge halfway up the same ridge from where they had first seen the destruction of Car Seileach. Down below, the work of rebuilding the devastated village and preparing the dead for burial had already begun. “Do you search for the monster?”

Talmadge gave a curt shake of his head, if that’s what it even was, and didn’t otherwise respond, obviously distant and distracted.

“If there is a lake monster,” Aydrian remarked, figuring that would get the man’s attention.

“There is.” Talmadge didn’t even look Aydrian’s way when he spoke the words.

“Tell me of it,” Aydrian bade him.

“There is a monster, a huge and terrible beast. It lives in the lake, and only in the lake from everything I have ever heard. And I have heard much, for the folk of all the villages know of it, and they fear it, but they know how to avoid it and so it rarely kills anyone.”

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“It is a great fish?”

“No…” Talmadge paused and shook his head, as if trying to convince himself. “Not a fish, or unlike any I have ever seen or known. Nor is it akin to the giant clo’dearche lizards that swim the waters of Loch Beag.”

“But you believe that something has changed?”

“The villagers speak of the lake monster causing this great upheaval.” Talmadge replied. “Some say that the beast swam up with the great wave and bit their houses apart.”

Aydrian looked back at the ruins of the lake and put on a doubtful expression. “In a time of great tension and fear, the last thing to believe might be the words of those so afraid.”

“There is a monster,” Talmadge repeated. “And it is huge and terrible.”

“You have seen it,” Aydrian remarked.

“Once,” Talmadge said, his voice faltering. “Only once.”

“But you lived to tell the tale.” Aydrian paused, studying Talmadge’s face, recalling their earlier conversation, before they had come running to Car Seileach. “Two years ago,” he added. “You survived.”

“My beloved, Khotai, did not.”

Aydrian and Talmadge fell silent as the sun sank behind them, its last rays sweeping the still, still waters of Loch Beag.

The lake was calm again the next morning. Too calm, perhaps, with nary a ripple showing on this windless day. Even the way the paddles of Talmadge and Aydrian sank into the water seemed exceptionally quiet to both of them that overcast morn as they paddled out of the cove which held Car Seileach. They had done all they could there, or all that they could do which the resilient villagers could not do for themselves.

They were a long way out, moving south and east across the lake, but close to shore as Talmadge had insisted, before the frontiersman even found the courage to speak. “They showed you a great honor in allowing your use of the magical gems,” he told Aydrian. “To the folk of Loch Beag, magic is the evil way of the Usgar.”

“They were in desperation,” Aydrian replied. “Several more would have died if not for the magic of the soul stone, and many others would have remained badly crippled to the end of their days.”

“They lost many,” Talmadge agreed. “A score dead, a dozen missing. But they will survive and go on.”

“There is no other choice,” said Aydrian. He was in front of Talmadge, kneeling and paddling, so the frontiersman couldn’t see his face. But the tone of his voice revealed a grimace, and Talmadge knew that Aydrian’s last statement was also the fallen king’s reminder to himself.

And one to Talmadge, one that pained him and reminded him of that fateful journey across the lake, when he had seen the monster and had lost his beloved Khotai.

The lake was so silky smooth, so deceptive, such a perfect cover for the horrid monstrosity which lurked below.

It wasn’t until Aydrian glanced back at him that Talmadge even realized that he had not put his paddle in the water for many, many heartbeats.

“Would you prefer that we walk?” Aydrian asked.

Talmadge shook his head quickly, before his fears could overrule his good sense. He would have vastly preferred walking around the lake, but knew that such a journey was not without its own dangers and would take much longer. He had to get to Fasach Crann, to his friends, to the village that had taken him in as one of their own so many times over the years. The villagers of Car Seileach had thought it unlikely that the other villages between them and Fasach Crann had been hit nearly as hard, because of the geography of the lake and the areas where those villages had been built, sheltered and often up on rocks, and, of course, Clach Boglach, the town in the backwaters, with houses built on stilts and protected from the wave by many thick groves.

But Fasach Crann had been built right on the waters of Loch Beag, with a long and open beachfront and many houses very near the water. They were not prepared for such an event as this great wave, and why should they be?

Talmadge was afraid of what he would find, but knew that he had to go and look, and help, if there was anything left of the village to salvage. He owed it to the folk, a hundred times over. That realization alone allowed him to dip his paddle under the too-still waters of Loch Beag and more forward.

He let his mind drift back to the happier times when he and Khotai were running the frontier together. There had been no better time in Talmadge’s life! So immersed did he become in those daydreams that he didn’t even realize how rapidly the canoe was moving, gliding along the water with barely a wake, almost as if it was floating above the lake, yet still being propelled by the paddling.

He glanced all about, unsure, and finally, his gaze fell upon Aydrian.

“What are you doing?”

There came no answer, other than a low chant whose words Talmadge could not decipher. He couldn’t get up close enough to look around the front of the man, but if he had, he realized, he would have seen the energy of a gemstone of some sort.

Aydrian’s paddle went into the water, and a great stroke sent them soaring along. Then to the other side of the canoe went the paddle, and again, the canoe lurched forward.

Talmadge kept up his own paddling, but watched the shore now more than the lake ahead, his jaw hanging in disbelief at the shoreline sliding past at great speed.

It ended a short while later, and Aydrian lifted his paddle and held it across the canoe and leaned on it, giving a big exhale, as one might after a great physical exertion.

“Magic?” Talmadge asked.

It took Aydrian a moment to catch his breath. “I wasn’t sure if I could manipulate it that way, to take the weight from myself, the canoe, and you all at once.”

“Impressive.”

“At the same time, I was giving both of us greater strength for our pulls,” Aydrian went on. “I don’t know it you felt the gusting tailwind, but that, too…”

He paused and laughed, and added, “I am quite weary.”

“But we are near to Fasach Crann already,” Talmadge informed him. “In a single day! You see those rocks ahead, and the bend to the south beyond? From there, we will catch sight of the village.”

Aydrian continued to rest for a bit, but Talmadge picked up the pace behind him, and even without the magical enhancements they made good time in rounding the rocky peninsula. Talmadge held his breath as they turned toward the south, then gave a great sigh of despair when Fasach Crann—when what used to be Fasach Crann—came into view.

The wave had reached up to the back edges of the village. Talmadge could clearly see the line where it had reversed, taking all the vegetation, and all of the structures, with it. As his initial shock wore off, he took some comfort in noting that the rebuilding of the village was already under way, and that there was much activity and many villagers working.

“They saw it coming,” he whispered hopefully.

“The ground rises swiftly not so far back from the shore,” Aydrian remarked. He put his paddle into the water and helped drive them to the water’s edge, and soon both were out of the canoe and dragging it forward.

A mob of villagers, spears and clubs raised, their faces twisted with outrage, came rushing down at them, others whooping and calling out alarms. The mob slowed, though, and put up their weapons somewhat, when they recognized Talmadge.

“Talmadge of the East,” said an older man, stepping out before the others. “That is not my boat!”

“It is not, friend Memmic,” Talmadge replied. “The great wave took your boat. This is a boat from Car Seileach, who gave it to me to cross the lake back to you.”

“What of Car Seileach?” asked another villager, a young woman named Catriona with golden hair, thick and braided, and a growing reputation as a superb fisherwoman.

“Ruined, like here…” Talmadge started to reply.

“And who is he?” Catriona insisted, prodding her spear toward the stranger, who couldn’t, of course, understand any of this chatter.

“Where did Talmadge find more coin for such a boat?” Memmic wanted to know.

“He is… I did’no,” Talmadge said, turning to an answer far easier than explaining King Aydrian! “They gave me the boat because of my… of our, efforts in helping them after the great wave. Many died, and many homes were washed…”

“Who is he?” Catriona demanded again.

“A great hero of the eastern lands,” Talmadge replied quickly.

“Come at the same time as the great wave?” Catriona asked.

“At the same time as the darkness in the day?” another man from further back in the gathering added.

Talmadge realized that this was not going well. He turned to Aydrian and warned, “Make no move to threaten.”

Aydrian shrugged, seeming fully at ease.

“We came to help,” Talmadge told Memmic, and particularly Catriona, who seemed as if she was taking the lead here. The frontiersman looked about, hoping to spot some of the other noted leaders of the tribe with whom he was on better terms. Judging from the size of the gathering, it seemed to him that most of Fasach Crann’s tribe was out here, and unlike with Car Seileach, few of the people here seemed to have been wounded.

“How did you…” he started to ask, but paused and shook his head. “I feared that I’d be finding many dead.”

“We’ve got missing,” said Memmic.

“Take their boat,” Catriona told some of the others, who advanced immediately.

Talmadge moved to intercept, as did Aydrian, and that brought the spears and clubs up high again.

“I am no enemy,” Talmadge reminded them.

“Take the boat,” Catriona said more insistently, her stare locked on Talmadge.

“We lost two boats on the lake,” Memmic explained, pointing out to the north. There, far out on the lake, loomed the angled mast of a sunken fishing boat. “The wave took them and flipped them—that is how we first saw it coming, and in enough time to flee the village to the higher land.”

“What are they talking about?” Aydrian asked, and Talmadge stepped aside and pulled Aydrian with him, then surrendered the canoe while he translated the conversation.

Aydrian looked out to the lake, then glanced back to see the villagers, turning the canoe to paddle out.

“Stay here,” Aydrian told Talmadge.

“Don’t,” Talmadge warned, but Aydrian shrugged him aside, and pulled off the cloak that had been covering his fabulous, shining armor.

That elicited more than a few gasps, notably from Catriona, who started to say something—likely a command to attack the man, Talmadge thought—but stopped and gasped instead as the stranger ran to the water, then began running across the water!

The two men at the canoe dropped it to the sand and stood gawking, as did all the rest.

“Talmadge?” Memmic and Catriona said together.

“Not Usgar,” Talmadge said immediately, thinking it wise to get that out there right up front. “He is, he was, a king from a land called Honce, a land I once called home.”

“He was your king?” Catriona asked.

“No, well, perhaps yes,” Talmadge stuttered. “I knew little of the greater…” He fumbled about, trying to recall the lakeman word for “cities,” but then gave up the hunt. Did they even have such a word?

“I knew little of the great Honce villages,” he said.

“You didn’t know your king?”

“I was already in the west when Aydrian ascended,” Talmadge explained, but just waved his hand and let it go at that. There would be plenty of time for explanations and proper introductions later.

He turned to see Aydrian running far from shore, that fabulous armor gleaming.

“What made the wave?” Talmadge asked Catriona, who was also obviously entranced by the sight of the man running atop Loch Beag.

“The monster,” Memmic answered for her.

“How does he run on water?” Catriona asked.

“Magic,” said Talmadge, and he quickly added, “Not Usgar!”

“This is the magic of the east?”

Talmadge nodded. “He can heal, too. If you have wounded, prepare them for Aydrian’s strong hand.”

“You speak like a fool,” said Catriona.

“That is why Car Seileach gave us the boat. Aydrian healed many. Many who would have died, now live. They rebuild homes instead of funeral pyres.”

“He is strong with magic?” asked Catriona.

“Very.”

“Strong enough to hide the sun? Strong enough to lift the waters of Loch Beag?”

Talmadge stuttered. There was no missing the threat there, and the man almost expected to be assaulted then and there! “No, no!” he sputtered. “No, he was with me when the sun hid, and with me when the lake waters rose.”

“In Memmic’s boat, and you survived?”

“No, on land, near Car Seileach. They had seen him. They sent me to find…” He took a deep breath, realizing that he was veering all over the place here. “Aydrian of the East was with me when the sun hid and the wave came,” he said more calmly, trying to exude confidence, trying to elicit confidence. “I came upon him in a meadow near the willows,” he said. “He is known to me.”

“He was your king.”

“I did’no know that. Not then, and not before when we met by a river far from this land. But I did know that he was no enemy, and so I found him once more, and together we watched the sun hide, and together we watched the water rise, and together we ran to Car Seileach to help them as we could. And we did, all through the day and night.”

“And night?” Catriona asked doubtfully, and murmurs arose around her.

Talmadge understood, and could only heave a sigh. He had just claimed to have spent the night across the lake in Car Seileach, but that story would hold little sway because it would make little sense to the folk of Fasach Crann, who knew that to get to the western village would take much more than one day of canoeing.

Talmadge answered the only way he could, by turning and sweeping his arm out to Aydrian, running across the water, already far from shore.

His hand glowed with a yellowish hue as he clutched a magical bit of amber, calling upon its powers to keep him above the waters. Of all the magical gems, this one most unnerved Aydrian, even more than flying with moonstone, for the feel of a watery cushion beneath his feet, not only supporting him, but lifting him in his bounds (which were accentuated even more by the weight-reducing powers of the malachite) seemed very strange to him indeed.

He glanced back to see the canoe launch behind him and that only spurred him on faster. If there was something bad out there, he wanted to discover it and be away before any more of the villagers could be caught and killed.

Another sprint, great, leaping bounds, moved him far from shore, and when he glanced back then, the canoe was a distant speck, while before him, the capsized boat loomed large. The beauty of the amber water-walking was that it barely left a ripple on the water, so the ranger let it all settle quickly about him, then peered through the translucent haze.

He was surprised to learn that he could see no hint of the bottom anywhere about. This mountain lake was clearly very deep.

He moved to the boat and knocked on the hull, then put his ear against it, quietly called out, and listened.

He could hear the water slightly lapping at the wood inside, but nothing more. He drew another gemstone from his belt pouch, a green agate, and sent his thoughts into it, that he could detect life.

He saw nothing, other than an occasional flitter that he knew to be a fish.

Still, Aydrian wasn’t satisfied. Anyone inside might simply be too exhausted or frightened to call back, or even unconscious and lashed to the rail. Aydrian rolled up the sleeve of his fine shirt to the edge of his breastplate and checked the knot on a green band of cloth that he had tied there.

He sent his thoughts into that band, feeling the magic of the elves ready and waiting for him.

Simply out of habit, for there was certainly no need, he took a deep breath and let go of his amber magic, sliding under the lake waters, under the edge of the boat and around to come back up inside the overturned craft.

No survivors were waiting for him. Just an empty hull.

He knew he couldn’t stay under the water for long, for it was very cold, but he wanted to explore more. He came back up to the surface, took another deep breath, simply out of habit, and dove again, this time swimming straight down and releasing the malachite magic of his armor, so it weighed on him like an anchor. The elves had taught him to be careful of his descent in deep waters, so he used the malachite, even the amber, to slow himself, and to pause more than once. Breathing underwater was no problem with the green armband of purity.

Down he went, and it began to grow darker all about him. Still, he could see, much farther than from the surface, and gradually began to make out shapes far, far below, to the lake’s deep bottom, he supposed.

He made out one shape—it seemed an underwater mountain, huge and even-sided.

How he wanted to go and investigate further! But he could feel the press of the water upon him and knew that he could not. For all his magic, he could not dive that deep, and worse, the cold of the waters was beginning to creep into his limbs. His feet grew numb.

He called on the malachite to fully free him from the weight of his breastplate, then began to slowly swim upward, going just a few feet, then pausing to let his body acclimate to the lessened pressure. In that moment, he threw as much of himself as he could into the green agate, widening its range in detecting living creatures.

Fish, fish, and more fish. Something else, then, which Aydrian came to realize as a rather large lizard. But no people. He had cast a wide net, and if any of the missing villagers from Fasach Crann were in that net, they were not alive.

Up he went some more, continuing to power the agate most of all, searching to the very end. He had moved for some time, though was still far below the surface, when he sensed something.

Something not human.

Something much greater and more powerful than any human.

He paused in his ascent and followed the sensations of the gemstone, peering down, down, into the gloom.

Then he saw it—not the creature, but its shadow, its snake-like silhouette going on and on, wider than a team of fat oxen standing side by side, longer than a caravan of wagons stretched end to end.

Larger than Agradeleous, the dragon of Behr, a great and gigantic snake-like shadow slithering through the water far below!

It couldn’t be. Aydrian could not wrap his sensibilities around something this… huge, swimming about in an inland lake. Or even in the Mirianic Ocean. He had heard the tales of journeys to the distant island of the ring stones, and never had even those obvious exaggerations come close to the reality of the shadow beneath him.

He thought it might be a trick of the water, some distortion that made this creature, whatever it was, seem larger. Or a giant school of fish, swimming in tight formation.

But no, the agate was screaming in his mind. The sheer power of this living being, this singular living being, overwhelmed everything else.

He saw it. He couldn’t deny it. And then, as it turned, Aydrian realized that it saw him.

His hand went reflexively to his sword hilt, but even as he touched the weapon, he felt himself a fool.

He couldn’t fight this thing with a weapon, any weapon, not even Tempest, his sword, or Hawkwing, his bow. He would need magic, powerful spells—spells that he knew to be beyond him.

Aydrian shook himself from his stupor.

“Magic?” he said skeptically, though it came out as merely bubbles.

He would need an army, and probably a dragon of his own!

But the beast had seen him and had turned, and he felt its approach. He would be swallowed whole, and perhaps that would be the best possible outcome.

Hardly even thinking of the movement, Aydrian threw himself into his amber, the stone of water walking, and flung its magic all about. Upward he shot, slicing through the water like a fired arrow. He drew his sword and put it up before him, thinking the narrower leading tip would give him more speed and some measure of control. He saw the daylight approaching fast, and then he was in it, but breaking the surface didn’t stop his ascent, no, for the amber would not be satisfied until he was out of the water, above the water.

He shot up into the air like a graceful Mirianic dolphin, rising above the water a dozen feet and more before he played out his momentum and dropped back down—but down only to the top of the water, where he began to run.

For all his life, Aydrian ran, maintaining the amber, calling upon the malachite, leaping and bounding, twenty feet, thirty feet at a stride. He couldn’t know if the monster was in pursuit, if it was right behind him, even, because he had released the magic of the agate out of necessity, to focus all of his energy on the two gems that could get him out of there the fastest.

He spotted the canoe, far ahead of him, not so far out from shore.

“Go back!” he yelled, waving his arms. “Turn about! Turn about!”

They couldn’t understand him, of course, not his words anyway, but neither could they miss the frantic waving, or the fact that this stranger, so splendidly armored, was running for his life. They began to turn the canoe, but as skilled as they were on the waters, Aydrian could see that they’d never get it turned about and back to shore in time.

So he ran for them, and he fell deeper into the malachite, and he called upon the bloodstone set in his armor to enhance his strength, and he grabbed the turning canoe by the prow, and he pulled. For all his life he pulled. For both of their lives, he pulled.

The villagers paddled wildly, trying to help, but there was no doubt of what, or who, was propelling this boat as it sped along, as fast as if it had great and wide sails that were full of a wintry gale!

As they neared the shoreline, the gathering there, almost all of the tribe, began to cheer them on, begging for speed. A quick glance over his shoulder told Aydrian why, for a large swell was following the craft.

He knew what it was.

So he ran faster, driving his legs, pushing his feet against the water and leaping off. As he neared the beach, the gathering broke apart, retreating, screaming, and so, when Aydrian hit the beach, he kept running, and kept pulling, and used his malachite to steal most of the weight from the raft and its paddlers behind him. But then they were out, and running by, and Aydrian dropped the boat and sped away.

A swell rolled up onto the beach and broke apart harmlessly, the monster, if it was the monster, not showing itself above the water.

Aydrian stumbled and let himself fall to the sand, thoroughly exhausted.

Talmadge came to him soon after, along with the man he had called Memmic and the woman named Catriona.

“Was it?”

Aydrian nodded. “There are no people alive out there,” he said. “Tell them that their friends are lost. And tell them to stay off the water for a long while.”

“It was the lake monster?” Talmadge asked.

Aydrian nodded again.

“A dragon? A demon?”

“I have seen a dragon,” Aydrian said. “A true dragon, terrible and breathing fire. I do not think it more terrible than this beast.”

Talmadge stared at him, then turned to translate for his Fasach Crann companions.

“Tell them to stay off the water,” Aydrian said breathlessly. “Just stay off the water.”

Aydrian and Talmadge, too, stayed off the water, when they left Fasach Crann the next morning. They had helped as they could that previous night, clearing debris, and Aydrian using his soul stone to heal many minor wounds—but only minor, to the great credit of the folk of the village, who had fled without question or pause when the wave had been spotted. In this regard, they had found a huge advantage over the victims in Car Seileach, for that town, in a sheltered cove, did not have so wide and clear a view of the open lake waters.

Nor did the next village over to the west, Carrachan Shoal, they were told, and so, with the gratitude of the folk of Fasach Crann, the pair headed straight out to where their efforts and magical healing might prove more critical.

But not on the lake. None were going out on the lake, except one boat Aydrian towed out from shore and anchored, a boat flying a flag of warning to all the other villages.

Even by land, it was not a long journey to Carrachan Shoal—it was actually shorter in distance, though the terrain was much rougher. It would have taken a villager more than a day to make the crossing over the rocky ridge that separated the communities, but with Aydrian’s magic, he and Talmadge scooted up in short order, and from the top, they spied the village of Carrachan Shoal, and saw, to their relief, that the wave had not done considerable damage there. For while the cove itself was shallow, as with CarS eileach, the bend of it had sent the bulk of the wave off to the western side, where there were no structures.

“Hopefully, you will be back in Fasach Crann tomorrow,” Aydrian said.

“Hopefully, we both will.”

“Teach me their language.”

“It would take months,” said Talmadge.

Aydrian held up a soul stone. “I know an easier way, but let us discuss that another day.”

Talmadge looked at him curiously as Aydrian led the way down the other side of the ridgeline. He knew that stone as the one Aydrian was using for healing. He didn’t know, however, that it could also be used for possession, or a spiritual, mental link.

The greeting at Carrachan Shoal was the same as at Fasach Crann—colder, even, and more threatening, for while Talmadge was known there, he was not nearly as friendly with these villagers as with those in the town over the ridge. Still, it was going well enough as he introduced them to Aydrian and explained that this was the man who had brought the boat with the warning flag out upon Loch Beag at the request of Catriona of Fasach Crann.

“He can heal your wounded, as well,” Talmadge was saying. “He is possessed of great magic from the east. Not evil and destructive, as the Usgar, but gentle and warm.”

Many nods came back at him, and whispered conversations went on all about as the villagers tried to come to terms with these two visitors after so devastating an event on their precious lake.

Talmadge took in as much as he could garner from the whispers, giving them time, and looked over at Aydrian with a smile and a nod.

A nod that froze halfway through.

A smile that fell with a figurative thump into a frown.

For there, past Aydrian, was another of the villagers of Carrachan Shoal, though hardly a native.

There, on a roller cart, rested a one-legged woman.

“Khotai,” Talmadge mouthed, but hadn’t the strength to say aloud, and then he toppled and would have hit the ground had not the agile and strong Aydrian caught him in mid-fall.

Excerpted from Reckoning of Fallen Gods, copyright © 2018 by R. A. Salvatore

We’ve been waiting for word on the return of American Gods to Starz, and now we’ve finally got confirmation of the season two premiere!

Starz is going to marathon the first season of American Gods ahead of the season two start date as well; if you need to catch up, or you’d just like to have it fresh in your mind, that marathon will occur on Starz starting December 29 at 3pm (ET).

The premiere date is March 10, 2019 at 8pm (ET)! It will also be available on the Starz app the same day. And here is the season two official poster:

Get ready for a ride on one trippy carousel, everyone…

[Via Den of Geek]

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 Amanda Downum’s “Spore,” first published in Lynn Jamnek’s 2015 Dreams From the Witch House anthology. Spoilers ahead.

“What is this, like Humans of New York?”

Summary

Beth Jernigan’s a widow, sort of. Her partner, Dr. Dora Munoz, has vanished on another of her spur-of-the-moment trips in search of weird plants or fungi that might cure anything from cancer to the common cold. Nothing new, only this time Dora’s stayed vanished. She has sent a couple messages from nowhere. The first, accompanied by enough money to pay off their lease, said Dora was “going off the grid.” The second invites Beth to take on a project.

As the project involves interviewing people, Beth’s perfect for the job. Dora used to joke that Beth chose to become an anthropologist so she could learn how to talk to humans. They both knew it wasn’t really a joke. But Beth’s sick of job-hunting, and maybe she’ll find Dora again, dangerous, passionate, manic, and brilliant.

Beth asks her subjects about their experiences with a certain fungal hallucinogen. Religious Studies grad student Aaron tells her the mushrooms gave him weird spots, and dreams. A doctor prescribed antifungal drugs, but before he could take them, Dora introduced him to some of the others. Yeah, he was scared. But see, he’s not alone. He feels the others, like white noise in the back of his head, however crazy that sounds. Which, to incredulous Beth, is pretty crazy.

Her next subject is Anne. She met a guy at a party who lectured about human consciousness and interspecies communications, then gave Anne mushrooms that would “give her a new perspective.” A three-hour trip of weird intensity does just that. The mushroom guy she’s only seen again in dreams. Whatever this thing is, he’s “further along” than Anne.

Beth asks if it’s an alien parasite, a psychic fungus? Anne, picking up on her skepticism, wonders if she’s wasting her time. Beth apologizes, but just wishes she understood. Has Anne considered taking anything? Antifungals?

Anne laughs bitterly. She’s considered taking a lot of things, including a dive off a roof. Her life wasn’t great before, but at least it was hers. She’ll never get that back. But— the dreams feel so good…

Another day, another city. In a dingy bar called the Angel’s Share, Beth meets Minette. After her first mastectomy. Minette was told she had another tumor and “ran out of rope.” She sought alternative healers and found a woman who gave her mushrooms that would “help the pain.” They’ve done much more than that. Beth wants to believe her, but can’t. Minette slides her a plastic bag full of dry gray-brown tendrils—from Dora, who wanted to see her, but had to leave too early.

Buy it Now

Minette serves Beth bourbon and goes on: Dora says it doesn’t have to be permanent. You could get treatment after one dose. But one will be enough for the dreams. As for Minette, after surgery she felt like a freak. Now she feels beautiful again. She takes off her T-shirt. From her mastectomy scar grow whorls of fungus like rose petals, white at the center, shading at the edges to yellow and teal. When Beth sits dumbstruck, Minette seems disappointed. She puts on the shirt, goes off to open the bar.

Later Beth stands naked and wavering before the mirror in her hotel room. Should she quit and go home? That’s no inviting prospect: work and debt and fleeting relationships. Or else the bag. Maybe it’ll give her a few hours of pretty lights. Maybe it’ll turn her into a fungus zombie. She picks out the biggest stem, chews, swallows, lies down. Her body slowly numbs. Her senses sharpen. She senses “the gravity of another presence.” Of Dora.

Dora explains that playing host to the fungus can shorten human lifespans, but in return it takes you into its web—your memories, identity, maybe even soul, all incorporated into a greater whole. “They’ve spored a hundred worlds,” she says, “seen and preserved things humans can only dream of. They’re historians. Archivists. I’ll live forever with the colony. Learn forever. Long after every human civilization has fallen to dust.” In Dora’s voice, Beth hears the passion she’s always envied. How many cultures are archived willingly, though?

Many. Some worship the colony. And if the practical rewards aren’t enough, there are the chemical ones, the euphoria of the dreams.

But why did Dora bring Beth to this? To spread the infection, of course. And because Dora’s missed her. Her own transition into the colony was so swift, she couldn’t see Beth in the flesh again as she wished. Not that she’d do things differently.

The next night, Beth returns to the Angel’s Share. When it closes, Minette says she looks rough and leads her upstairs. They’re drawn together in a kiss. They make love. Beth tastes the whorls of fungus on Minette’s chest, earth and cinnamon that open under her tongue.

She dreams of Dora. “Growth like creamy lace sprouts from her skin, envelops her like a bridal gown… She smiles at me, and something stirs in response beneath my skin. For once I’m not alone.”

Two weeks later Minette’s gone. She leaves the keys to the Angels’ Share. Another week, and Beth’s polishing the bartop when Aaron, her Religious Studies subject, walks in. She smiles at his surprised recognition but skips the snark. Better to be nice, since they’ll be knowing each other a long time.

What’s Cyclopean: Beth’s more poetic in her descriptions of the fungus than her lover: fruiting bodies curl together like rose petals, growing like lace through skin.

The Degenerate Dutch: No prejudices here—we are all one in the colony. And after all, if you’re going to know people for that long, you want to be nice to them.

Mythos Making: There’s a fungus among us.

Libronomicon: The spores describes themselves as archivists, but written material doesn’t appear to be their preferred form.

Madness Takes Its Toll: Beth doesn’t want to get therapy for her relationship issues; that would imply there’s something wrong with her.

Ruthanna’s Commentary

We practically have a catalog by now, don’t we? A sparkling array of possessing aliens, fungi, and alien fungi, new and on sale just in time for the holidays. Have trouble choosing? Don’t worry, one will be chosen for you.

This is assuming, of course, that we knit all the Things That Want Space In Your Brain together into one mythos full of terrifying opportunities for transcendence. Not only Lovecraft’s original Yith and mortality-defying sorcerers, but the brain-eating, body-controlling fungi from “Leng,” the universe-spanning amorphous blob from “The Things,” whatever the hell is going on in “The Woman In the Hill,” even the beer from the corner store… my point is that the elder gods have an inordinate fondness for parasitic wasps* and this type of survival strategy is not limited to Earth. The universe is full of things that think human brains make terrific nest material.

On the possession desirability scale, the Yith are clearly at the top. They only borrow your brain for a few years, after all. The rewards are immense, and the costs are at least comprehensible. At the rock bottom end of the scale are mushrooms that replace your entire body and provide nothing in return—and it’s always mushrooms, you’re never getting consumed and replaced by tomatoes or kittens or something. Amanda Downum’s “Spore” falls squarely in the middle. The fungus becomes you, sure—but you also become the fungus. That’s fair, right? Oh, and you’ll never be alone again.

That last bit is extremely tempting, to the right sort of person. And for the introverts who appreciate having dreams to themselves, there’s a complementary promise: you’ll never be forgotten. The spore colony is an Archive, of sorts, for all the lives that have passed through it (in the digestive sense). But for Beth, loneliness is a bigger motivator than any desire for legacy. Loneliness, that she doesn’t want to admit is even a real thing—or if it is, that it’s anything less than universal—but that she’ll do anything to sate. (Anything except go to therapy. My personal opinion: if you don’t want to go to therapy because it would mean there’s something wrong with you, but you are willing to solve the problem by feeding yourself to a mushroom, you could probably use some therapy. Also, if anyone was looking for a case study around the impact of mental health care stigma, here you go.)

Mind control and possession inherently have the attraction/repulsion nature—or at least, people who aren’t occasionally intrigued by the thought of sharing head space probably read a different genre. I’m not particularly over these tropes myself. “Spore” is a wonderful example, balancing the attraction and repulsion perfectly. Beth’s research project runs through all the reasons why such attraction rears its head: scientific curiosity, infatuation, loneliness, existential desperation. As a bonus, the story’s full of well-realized women, something I was yearning for after our last two selections.

Jernigan, ultimately, can’t trust any connection that isn’t immediate, tangible, and irreversible. The fuzziness of human emotion, the inherent untrustworthiness of neurotransmitter levels—as far as she’s concerned, these are no basis for any kind of stable relationship. Once you get to that point… I don’t know. Maybe alien mind control mushrooms are your best bet.

Me, I’ll stick with dopamine.

*I apologize for sharing the knowledge in this article, which probably belongs in the Miskatonic library’s restricted section. If you’re phobic of insects, maybe don’t click through.

Anne’s Commentary

According to her author biography, Amanda Downum may or may not be a barrel of crabs piloting a clever human disguise. Reading this over my shoulder, intrepid reporter on all things eldritch, Carl Kolchak, choked on his coffee. When he had recovered and cleaned up the spewed java and bourbon, he said, “Of course! Crabs, right? And fungus from space—the fungal crabs from Yuggoth!”

“The Mi-Go?” I queried, aghast. “You—you don’t think Downum could be—”

But before I could stammer out the rest, Carl had grabbed hat, recorder and camera and was out the door. So, Ms. Downum, if you get a visitor shortly, and you are a barrel of crabs, please don’t shred him with your pincers. We kind of like him around here. Or, wait, if you are a Mi-Go, don’t can his brain. Seriously. It could crash your whole transplutonian network.

Caveats issued. Let’s get back to the mushrooms, one of Howard’s favorite embodiments of the decaying and weird. The fungal, or at least pseudofungal, is the very substance of one of his great interstellar races, the Mi-Go of Yuggoth. Downum’s fungal collective has no spectacular corporeal phase, winged and clawed like Howard’s; it has, I think, no corporeal individuals. Yet Dora, incorporated into the collective, claims to have retained her self: memory, identity, soul. It’s the same claim Akeley (or false Akeley) makes in “Whisperer in Darkness”: Sure his mind is in a can, but it’s still his mind, and now it can travel anywhere, into fabulous regions beyond human ken, and it can live forever. Immortality without sacrificing the self, just the cumbersome body!

Akeley makes the further reassuring claim that the Mi-Go can keep one’s brainless body alive while the brain sojourns elsewhere, then reunite the two, no problem. Downum makes no such offer. It’s unclear what happens to a spore-infected body when its mind transitions into the collective, but there’s obviously no coming back from the switch. Here “Spore” resembles another story we’ve examined, about which more below. Also, Downum’s description of the fungal collective’s grand mission makes it sound rather more Yithish than Mi-Gooey: They are historians, archivists, preservers of cultures. An interesting “amalgamation” of the two Lovecraftian races, in my mind.

So, that other supremely fungal story! It’s Marc Laidlaw’s “Leng.” Dream-Dora tells Beth that her miracle fungus is not “O. unilateralis.” She means it’s not Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, an entomopathogenic fungus that attacks certain rainforest ants, forcing them to desert their canopy colonies and isolate themselves until the fungus sends up a fruiting body from their heads, which erupts to spread spores. Laidlaw’s deadly fungus is called Cordyceps lengensis, which parasitizes a caterpillar called the Death or Transcendance Worm. But C. lengensis is also homopathogenic—it will happily parasitize humans, eventually turning them into gray sacks of spores, crowned with a single grasslike fruiting stalk. Laidlaw’s narrator learns that the entire plateau of Leng is but a thin earthen skin for the vast underground body of C. lengensis. The priests of Leng believe that inoculation with the spore will lead to a richer, deeper way of knowing. But narrator glimpses, too late, that the “squirming ocean” beneath Leng wishes only to “spread, infect and feed.”

Downum’s more optimistic, despite or maybe because she’s vaguer about the life cycle details of her homopathogenic fungus. Or should we call it homosymbiotic? And even then, as Dora corrects Beth, symbiosis can be parasitic (harmful to the host) or commensal (beneficial to one organism, neutral to the other) or mutualistic (beneficial to both). And Dora’s fungus can be any or all of the three. Much depends, apparently, on the host. What the host wants and needs. What the host is capable of.

Dora is capable of a great deal. She transitioned into the fungal collective quickly, just as she hurled herself into all her brilliant schemes and adventures. I call no coincidence that Downum named her Dr. Munoz, a nod to that other seeker of immortality through boundary-breaking medicine for whom things didn’t work out so well—Dr. Munoz of the chilly apartment in “Cool Air.” Dora wants knowledge, and can give it in return. She’s a natural for the collective.

She wants to give Beth the opportunity to join, but what can Beth gain? What did the anthropologist not yet learn? How to speak to humans. How to connect. When she takes a second communion of the fungus from Minette’s scar-whorls, she’s accepted. She’s joined. She can dream of herself as a rosebud-cradled fetus awaiting birth, with Dora beside her, growing a lacy bridal gown from her own skin. And now, for the first time, Beth is not alone.

So, assimilation into massive (even cosmic) fungal collective/society: Iffy proposition or good life choice? Among Howard and Marc and Amanda, we’re all over the board on this vital question. Maybe Carl will check back in soon…

Patterns within patterns… and the horror found therein. Join us next week for China Mieville’s “Details,” which you can find in the New Cthulhu anthology.

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.

Greetings, fellow Soulcasters! We’ve got a lot of information about Soulcasting and the mysterious Aimians to go over this week, as we delve into the (brief) journey of Kaza as she tries to find a way to save herself from transforming into smoke.

Reminder: we’ll potentially be discussing spoilers for the ENTIRE NOVEL in each reread. This week includes only minor references to off-Roshar implications. It is, however, chock full of weird stuff that doesn’t affect the main storyline very much, as many of the Interludes are. But if you haven’t read ALL of Oathbringer, best to wait to join us until you’re done.

Chapter Recap

WHO: Kaza
WHERE: Akinah, Aimia

WHEN: 1174.1.3.4 (This was an eventful day in the main timeline—back in Part 1: Dalinar heard Evi’s name, Shallan/Veil went drinking, and Kaladin taught the parshmen to preserve their food supplies.)

Kaza, a Soulcaster, journeys with a ship full of sailors to Aimia. The sailors seek riches in this distant unknown land, but Kaza seeks only one thing—salvation. The Soulcaster she uses to transform things into smoke is slowly but surely transforming her into the same. As they approach, the other sailors slowly succumb to the poison one of their members has given them. Before Kaza also succumbs, the traitor reveals herself to be a Dysian Aimian, set to guard the secrets of this island. Kaza transforms herself into smoke just before the poison takes her, thereby gaining her own freedom.

The Singing Storm

Title:  Kaza  As usual with the interludes, the chapter title is the name of the POV character.

Heralds: Nalan, Skybreakers. Nalan is the Herald associated with the Essences smoke and fog, so it makes a lot of sense that he’s connected with this chapter.

Icon: Double Eye (indicating an interlude chapter)

Epigraph: None!

Stories & Songs

Everyone knew you didn’t linger around Aimia, though everyone had different explanations why. Some rumors told of a vengeful storm here, one that sought out and destroyed approaching ships. The strange wind they’d encountered—which didn’t match the timing of highstorm or Everstorm—seemed to support that.

L: So now the question is… who or what made this storm? Was it the Aimians themselves, or something far more powerful? What secrets does this island hold?!

AA: I can’t help thinking that some of those secrets are related to “the scouring of Aimia”—though how they’re related is sheer speculation. We know almost nothing of Aimia, Aimians, or the scouring, much less what on Roshar could create and maintain a standing storm!

AP: This interlude in particular brings me back to how I felt reading The Way Of Kings for the first time. The interludes are fascinating, but as a first look, it’s completely confusing at the same time! Prior to writing this week, I had to lean on the totally awesome Coppermind wiki, because I know I missed connections the first (and second and third!) time I read this chapter. I agree that the secrets are related to the scouring—which, for those of you (like me) who need a memory boost, was a major event at some point in the “recent” past that destroyed Aimia and scattered the Aimians across Roshar. Quick history lesson: Aimia was one of the ten kingdoms with an Oathgate. Akinah, where this interlude takes place, was the capital. So it’s very likely that the Oathgate was here, and could be part of the secret that the Aimians are trying to protect.

L: That sure doesn’t bode well for our heroes if they eventually try to open that gate!

She had come here because of another rumor, one spoken of only among her kind. Perhaps here, at last, she could find a cure for her condition.

The Aimians had known about Soulcasters. This was where you’d come to get the devices, in the old days. You’d come to the ancient island of Akinah.

If there was a secret of how to avoid death by the device she loved, she would find it here.

L: Really cool little nugget of knowledge that this is where the Soulcasters came from. Did the Aimians make them, or were they just stockpiling them like the Shin had done with the Honorblades?

AA: Hmmm. I’d just assumed that this was where they were made, but now that you mention it, the idea of the Aimians stockpiling them makes a lot more sense. It’s almost certain that the Soulcaster fabrials are remnants from the time of the Knights Radiant, since the modern artifabrians are able to repair them, but not make new ones. But why?

AP: Aimia seems like the “most Rosharan” kingdom to me. More than anywhere else, the Aimians are very much not human, and have really interesting abilities that seem tied to Roshar itself. The Dysian Aimians being made up of hordelings, for example. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were the source of creating soulcasters, at least prior to the scouring, since it’s a way to harvest a natural resource of Roshar (stormlight).

L: I had never considered that they were natives to Roshar and now I feel kind of dumb for never making that connection!

Flora & Fauna

“Generations of greatshells have died here, leaving their hearts.”

L: This is interesting to me, since I had sort of assumed that the greatshells were local to the Shattered Plains.

AA: Yeah… I had to go do some research. There’s a strong probability that the greatshells referenced here were the lanceryn, which humans assume (incorrectly, I understand) were wiped out in the scouring. Apparently, prior to the discovery of the chasmfiend greatshells on the Shattered Plains in recent years, it was accepted that all the critters who could produce the really big gemhearts were extinct. Now I’m starting to get really suspicious: the lanceryn, the chasmfiends, the Reshi islands, the storm-striders… I can’t help wondering if they’re all connected, perhaps as progressive stages of the greatshell lifecycle.

Well, anyway, with zero evidence to support this, my current loose theory is this: Before the humans came along and started harvesting them, the chasmfiends grew up (after another pupation or two) into lanceryn, who eventually made their way around to Aimia. Most died there, and some few continued their trek clockwise around the continent to eventually reach the Reshi Sea and become new islands, if they survive long enough. Still can’t quite figure out where the larkin fit in, though. They seem too smart to just be the very beginning stage of this lifecycle.

Buy it Now

AP: I think that’s a really interesting theory. But most Rosharan animals have shells of some kind. I don’t know if I buy that they are all connected.

AA: The only reason I threw in the larkin is that someone asked Sanderson if the lanceryn and larkin were the same thing, and he said, “There’s a little bit more than just [being] one and the same, but in some ways they are.”

[The cremling] had an odd shape, with large wings and a head that made it look like an axehound. Its carapace shimmered with dozens of colors.

L: Part of the cook? Another Aimian? I’d assume that there are probably a few around, keeping an eye on things.

AA: I assume it’s part of the cook, though I’ll grant you that we don’t know if there may be others here. Mostly, it’s our first “Oh, look, an odd cremling! Maybe it’s another Dysian!” moment.

AP: I know this one! That’s a larkin! The little dragon bugs that eat stormlight/investiture. Aimia is where they come from. They were thought to be extinct, and Rysn got one in Words of Radiance.

L: Oh, good catch, Aubree!

AA: GAK! Of course it is. That makes this another little piece of the puzzle that—I think—connects the larkin, lanceryn, and Reshi isles. (I’m including the islands because it was one of them that gifted the larkin to Rysn.) Whether the stormstriders and the chasmfiends are connected or merely similar life forms, I don’t know, but it seems solid that these three, at least, are linked.

Places & Peoples

This was her destiny. She was not a thing to be carted from place to place, not any longer.

Even as she righted herself, she felt in her pouch, seeking the comforting touch of her Soulcaster. Hers, no matter what the rulers of Liafor claimed. Had they spent their youths caressing it, learning its secrets? Had they spent their middle years in service, stepping—with each use—closer and closer to oblivion?

AA: It sounds like technically, this Soulcaster—both the fabrial and the wielder—are considered to be the property of the Liaforan royal house. Or at least they were, until Kaza decided otherwise. She repeats the “it was hers, no matter what they said” thought several times in the chapter, implying that she’s still partly trying to convince herself and justify her actions. And she partly believes it, because she’s the one paying the price for its use; I’m not going to disagree with her.

So he knew that she was the prince’s cousin. … “They locked me up each day, gave me comforts they assumed would keep me happy. They realized that at any moment, I could literally make walls and bonds turn to smoke.”

AA: Girl’s got a point—it’s really hard to lock up someone who can turn walls to smoke! (Even worse than someone with a Shardblade, maybe?) Perhaps she did exactly what they were afraid of—turned things to smoke as needed to get away, since there’s no way that the prince just let her—and the fabrial—go freely.

I’m trying to figure out which bothers her more: her treatment as “property” as though she’s merely the current wetware extension of the fabrial, or the fact that its use is turning her into smoke. The solution to both, at least in her eyes, is to take her destiny into her own hands. She ran away, selling the use of her fabrial to this ship captain, to try to find some way to avoid being consumed by the fabrial. One would guess that she saw what happened to her predecessor, was maybe even partially trained by that person, and wasn’t altogether happy about it. And yet…

Smoke, she whispered to the stone. Freedom in the air. Remember? She tempted it, picking at its memories of dancing free. Yes … freedom. She nearly gave in herself. How wonderful would it be to no longer fear? To soar into infinity on the air? To be free of mortal pains?

AA: At the same time she’s trying to find a “cure” she’s drawn to the freedom of just letting go. Ultimately, of course, she’ll do just that, but I find a certain fulfillment in the way it happens. She kept repeating that this was her destiny, her choice, and in the end it is. Rather than let the Sleepless put her permanently to sleep, and rather than let the fabrial keep leaching her apart bit by bit, Kaza deliberately uses the fabrial one last time, and chooses to go with the smoke of her Soulcasting.

Bummer for Liafor, though. That’s a valuable bit of tech they just lost.

It had dozens of names. The Rock of Secrets. The Void’s Playground. So melodramatic. She preferred the old name for the place: Akinah.

Supposedly, there had once been a great city here. But who would put a city on an island you couldn’t approach?

L: Well, presumably the island used to be more accessible, since all the spikes were Soulcast. Whatever happened here, the Aimians clearly don’t want anyone around now. But that may not have always been the case.

AA: Clearly there was a time when Akinah was a well-known city which welcomed travellers. Back in The Way of Kings, when Kabsal was explaining cymatics to Shallan, Akinah was one of the cities in his pictures. There’s enough information about the underlying rock formations and the addition of streets and buildings to show that it wasn’t always this semi-mythical place.

AP: Yeah, I totally expect that we will be going back to Akinah. The name of The Void’s Playground makes me really nervous though!! A reference to the scouring? Or maybe one of the Unmade is lurking around or otherwise involved here?

The cook began to hum. Pieces of her broke off. She crumbled to a pile of chittering little cremlings that moved out of her clothing, leaving it in a heap.

L: Dysian Aimian, right, Alice? Like we saw in Edgedancer? As opposed to the other type?

AA: Yep. Totally. Another one of the Sleepless, like Arclo. I sure would like to know just how many of these are wandering around.

AP: So this is what made me start giving the side eye to literally every cremling mentioned in the series!

Weighty Words

Kaza was, slowly, becoming smoke.

There was a hole in her cheek through which you could see her jaw and teeth. Lines of smoke rimmed the hole; the flesh seemed to be burning away. Air passed through it when she spoke, altering her voice, and she had to tip her head all the way back to drink anything.

The process was slow. She had a few years left until the Soulcasting killed her.

L: As a horror fan I really appreciate the creepiness of this.

AA: As a non-horror fan, I totally concur that it’s creepy, anyway! What I found fascinating was the sudden clear view of something that had only been hinted from another perspective. We’ve seen hints along the way that long use of a Soulcaster would affect the body of the user: for example, back in the scene in Words of Radiance where the Soulcaster ardents were making new windbreaks for the warcamp. At that time, Adolin remarked on the way one woman’s eyes “sparkled like gemstones themselves” and her skin had “hardened to something like stone” and she seemed almost like “a living statue.” It sounds weird and off-putting, but not too terrifying.

Then, all of a sudden, we see the effect of long use of a Soulcaster that transforms things to smoke. We observed that the ardents with the Alethi army slowly took on physical aspects resembling stone; now we see that Kaza is literally turning to smoke. It’s a bit of a shock to realize just how far this transformation goes! It makes me wonder if the ardents eventually turn to real statues, or if they are retired from service before it gets quite that far.

We know that the army also has Soulcasters which turn whatever-it-is to grain and meat. Now I wonder what they start to look like. ::shudder:: On second thought, I don’t want to know!

AP: Also a horror fan, also concur on absolute coolness/creepiness. Since the soulcasters are kept to the royal family, this is also something she would have expected, which adds another creepy layer to me. It’s probably also a way to assert institutional control and keep challengers to the throne to a minimum.

“It is blissful. I slowly connect to the device, and through it to Roshar.” … “I could show you. Feel my touch, and you can know. One moment, and then you will mingle with the air itself.”

L: Yeah, because that’s not creepy at all.

AA: It’s an extremely effective deterrent, though. I’m pretty sure he’d never have bothered her again, even if things had turned out differently on the island!

“I have begun to see the dark sky and the second sun, the creatures that lurk, hidden, around the cities of men.”

L: So she’s transitioning into Shadesmar, then. That makes sense from what we know of Jasnah and Shallan’s ventures into Soulcasting.

AA: I loved this! The more she uses the fabrial, the more she’s shifting from the Physical to the Cognitive realm.

AP: Which makes me really wonder what happens to her after her physical body turns to smoke. Does she exist in Shadesmar somewhere?

She closed her eyes, and felt the familiar sensation of being drawn into the other world. Of another will reinforcing her own, something commanding and powerful, attracted to her request for aid.

L: There’s so much fascinating information about Soulcasters in this chapter! Is this other will a sapient spren like the ones bonded to the Knights Radiant? I don’t see that being likely, given that those spren haven’t been very forthcoming with their aid to humanity until recently, and the Soulcasters have been doing this for a long, long time.

AA: I have another theory—which, again, I didn’t have time to ask about at the Skyward signing. I wonder if maybe the Soulcaster fabrials are formed in the same way as we suspect Shardplate is formed—from the marginally sentient cousin-spren to the “truespren” (as Syl calls them). I think that would be kind of cool. The other primary possibility, and one which creeps me out far more than Kaza turning to smoke, is that the fabrials are more like a Shardblade than a Shardplate… that they are truespren, locked in the form of a fabrial instead of a blade. That would be very not cool. The biggest argument against this is the Radiant we saw in Dalinar’s Midnight Essence vision, using a Healer fabrial to perform Regrowth despite not having the Progression surge herself. That would require that sapient spren were knowingly handed around, and often handed off to Radiants of different Orders who had some reason to think they’d need a Surge they couldn’t normally use. That seems problematic, at best.

AP: I’m on team trapped spren. I think that she’s calling the spren of the fabrial, who is getting stronger the more the fabrial is used.

L: This makes me wonder if the users of these objects in times of old were also being slowly transformed, or if they were protected against that because the spren were still “awake.”

She could not make it air again; her Soulcaster had only one mode, not the full three.

L: One of the other two is food, that’s for certain, right? Is the last stone? Or… is she talking about something else entirely here? It seems as if there would be more than just three…

AA: It seems like different Soulcasters are tuned to different things, but I can’t find any reason for a limit of three, other than that each fabrial holds three gemstones. We know the Alethi use fabrials to make stone and to make food, and the Azish have one that turns things to bronze. Whether those limitations are firm, or based on tradition, I really don’t know. I’m pretty sure that with the right combination of fabrial and gemstones, people using the Soulcaster fabrials could form any of the ten Essences; I just don’t know what the limitations of the fabrials are.

And two suns in the sky, one that drew her soul toward it.

L: Whoa. Wait a second. Is this new information? I feel like it is. What are the two suns, then? Are they maybe some sort of giant spren? Are they… the Shards?

AA: I have no proof of anything, but I assumed this was the same as the earlier reference to seeing the second sun, and “drawing her soul toward it” is connected somehow with shadows going the wrong direction, toward the Shadesmar sun instead of away from it. I… think there are implications to be drawn there, after I think about it with both hands for a while.

AP: I thought the same as Alice, that the second sun is in Shadesmar.

L: Oh, I definitely thought it was the one in Shadesmar, I just wonder if this sun is more than it seems…

AA: Ah. Well, I’m pretty sure it’s not a Shard, but I definitely think there’s something twisty about that Shadesmar sun. Are the soul and the shadow connected? There’s… there’s a whole essay in this, about shadows going toward Stormlight and acting funny in Shadesmar, and how/whether that is related to this idea of the soul. But don’t worry, I won’t dig into it here today!

Macabre Motivations

L: Shall we talk about the Aimians?

AP: Yes please, because I don’t totally get them and I always think I’m missing something!

AA: Heh. I’m pretty sure there’s a LOT we’re missing about the Aimians!

“I cannot speak,” the cook said, “even to sate a dying demand. There are those who could pull secrets from your soul, and the cost would be the ends of worlds.”

L: Worlds? Plural?! Well now. That’s a very interesting choice of words. This island must have something to do with the Shards, and the Cosmere as a whole!

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AP: Definitely something with cosmere implications! It also really makes me wonder who or what has that sort of ability. Have we seen them active already without knowing it??

AA: I’m reasonably sure that a Shard (Odium, for example?) could do this, and I suspect there are other Shards who might find it worthwhile to snatch a soul between the Physical and the Beyond, depending on what secrets we’re talking about. Which brings us back to… what secrets does this island hold?

L: So, the Aimians appear to be guardians of something very powerful.

AP: And very dangerous! It occurs to me that they could also be there primarily to keep people out, and what is on the island in.

AA: I was just thinking that. We don’t know much about the scouring of Aimia, but what if the Aimians did it themselves to keep some knowledge or artifacts from the rest of the world? Even more likely, there’s rumor that Dai-Gonarthis (a.k.a. The Black Fisher, and presumed but not proven to be one of the Unmade) was responsible for the scouring. Maybe the Aimians found a way to trap it there, and they’re keeping everyone from releasing it back into the rest of the world.

About the Aimians in general, after all this I have to wonder if they deliberately sacrificed many of their people as well as their homeland to protect the world—or worlds—from something dire. Odium? Or something worse?

A Scrupulous Study of Spren

The captain drew anticipationspren as he waited—ribbons that waved in the wind—and Kaza could see the beasts beyond, the creatures that accompanied the spren.

L: Always cool to see glimpses of the spren behind what we usually see of them on the cognitive realm.

AA: This was an interesting choice of words. Kaza thinks about “the beasts beyond” as creatures who accompany the spren she’s used to seeing. From Shallan and Eshonai we learned (and will learn more in Part 4) that what humans see in the Physical realm is only a small part of how a spren actually appears in the Cognitive realm. It’s a great reminder that characters are often wrong in how they see the world, and also that most of what Kaza knows is tradition passed down for many generations along with the fabrial.

AP: I think this is also one of the most ominous flags foreshadowing the epic trip through Shadesmar that will come later.

Quality Quotations

With a defiant shout, she pressed her hand to the rocky ground beneath her and demanded it change. When it became smoke, she went with it.

Her choice.

Her destiny.

AA: I just have to point out that at the end of this chapter, Liafor is down one Soulcaster, which I suspect isn’t going to make anyone in the court very happy. I wonder if the physical object is lying on the sand of Akinah, or if it somehow went with her into the Cognitive Realm.

AP: Or possibly at the bottom of a pretty large pit!

L: The Aimian was trying to pull it off of her towards the very end there, so I assumed that it would have reclaimed it after Kaza fully transforms.

Next week we’ll be continuing our foray into the Wonderful World of Roshar with the next interlude, about Taravangian. (Hoo boy.) In the meantime, join us in the comments!

Alice is coming down with a cold. Just thought y’all would like to know that. So you can be thankful that you aren’t – or commiserate, if you are.

Lyndsey is definitely not a collection of bugs in a human suit. If you’re an aspiring author, a cosplayer, or just like geeky content, follow her work on Facebook or her website.

Aubree is trying to catch a larkin of her very own. But is slightly concerned about the impending food bill.

Every so often someone laments the lack of good parents in young adult fantasy and science fiction. This is usually followed up with the claim that good parents make for poor YA fiction because good parents don’t let their kids go off on dangerous adventures to save the world. To which I usually reply that they clearly don’t read enough YA SFF. Parents—yes even the good ones—have a long history of involvement in young adult science fiction and fantasy, a trend that has actually been increasing in recent years.

In that vein, here are ten YA SFF novels where the parents are very much alive, are good people, and in some cases who even join the teen protagonist on their quest. There are, of course, a zillion more, so please add your recs in the comments!

The Girl From Everywhere by Heidi Heilig

In all of Heidi Heilig’s books, parents join their main protagonist child on their journey. With The Girl From Everywhere and the conclusion to the duology, The Ship Beyond Time, Slate and his daughter Nix travel through time and space together as captain and first mate. From her father Nix is learning how to become a Navigator and one day hopes to captain her own ship. But first she has to keep him from potentially erasing her from existence by changing the past to save his dead wife. Slate isn’t a bad guy by any means; he’s just hurt and lonely and desperate. The love he has for his family sometimes gets muddled with his obsessive tendencies and grief. Plus, it’s important to recognize that people with a mental illness (Slate is bipolar) can still be good parents. Sounds obvious, I know, but the pernicious trope of the “crazy parent” is unfortunately pervasive.

Not Your Sidekick by C.B. Lee

Jessica Tran lives in the 22nd century city of Andover, a thriving metropolis that just so happens to be the headquarters of the Heroes’ League of Heroes, a group of superpowered people. Including Jess’ whole family. Everyone but her, that is. As a non-superpowered human, a bisexual girl, and the American daughter of two Asian immigrant parents (refugees from China and Vietnam), Jess deals a lot with what it’s like to be in between two “sides.” She feels stuck on the outside looking in on worlds she’ll never be able to fully access. Her parents are supportive, but Jess wants to forge her own path … it just so happens that path leads straight to an internship with a supervillain. Now she’s working for the very person the good guys are trying to defeat. What would her parents say if they ever found out?

Bruja Born by Zoraida Córdova

Both books in Zoraida Córdova’s Brooklyn Brujas series—Labyrinth Lost and Bruja Born—feature not just the Mortiz sisters but their parents, extended family, and close family friends. In the first, Alex’s refusal to accept her fate as the most powerful Encantrix in her generation drives her to casts a spell that accidentally traps her entire family in the Underworld. The Mortiz family is much more involved in the second book, Bruja Born, where Lula raises her boyfriend from the dead and sets off a zombie apocalypse. Without the direct help from her family and friends, Lula would fail before she even began. Her parents in particular are intimately involved in the proceedings, everything from helping to heal the injured to strategizing and planning. Things go wrong or get worse whenever Lula chooses not to involve her parents—that’s how important they are to the story.

Shadowshaper by Daniel José Older

Much like Brooklyn Brujas, family is all in Daniel José Older’s Shadowshaper series. Sierra and her parents take care of abuelo Lázaro, who moved in with them after a severe stroke left him mostly unable to speak or move. He introduces her to the world of shadowshapers, and Sierra learns about the magical powers of her ancestors. Although her parents try to keep Sierra away from magic, they do it because they love her and want to keep her safe. As we learn in the second novel, Shadowhouse Fall, there are grave consequences for Sierra if she follows in her abuela’s footsteps and assumes the mantle of Lucera (basically the head witch in charge), so there’s plenty of reason for her parents to be concerned.

Blanca & Roja by Anna-Marie McLemore

Once again, family is all. The del Cisne sisters are cursed. In every generation, one sister will live a normal life while the other will be taken by swans and transformed into one, her human life forgotten forever. As Blanca and Roja try to game the system by making themselves more alike to make it impossible for the swans to choose, their parents try to make them more different. Blanca’s mother wants her to be graceful and beautiful so the swans will spare her, and Roja’s father wants her to be brave and bold to prove to the swans she’s worthy of her humanity. When the swans finally come, their parents leave with the rest of their extended family so as not to interfere, but their influence runs deep and wide. Page and Yearling, the sisters’ love interests, also have parental involvement. For Page, it’s a matter of coming to terms with parents who love but don’t understand her, and Yearling is in hiding from his dysfunctional and abusive relations. Family, the way it loves and pressures and hurts and heals, cuts through every character.

The Rules and Regulations for Mediating Myths and Magic by F. T. Lukens

All high school senior Bridger Whitt wants is to get the hell out of Midden, Michigan. To finance an out of state college, he takes a job as an assistant to the eccentric Pavel Chudinov. In Pavel’s weird old house he discovers a world of magic lurking in the shadows. His mom doesn’t participate in the main plot, but she still has pull over Bridger’s life. As a single mother (we never learn what happened to his dad), she works a lot, often double shifts. Sometimes that means they barely see each other, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t care about his welfare. She works as much as she does because she cares so much about him. Her lack of intervention has more to do with her respecting his personal privacy than disinterest in his life. She doesn’t pry but waits for him to be ready to talk.

Dark Lord of Derkholm by Diana Wynne Jones

Good parents pop up frequently in Diana Wynne Jones’ novels, but one of my favorite examples is the Derkholm series. Every year Mr. Chesney’s Pilgrim Parties show up in Blade’s fantasy world, a vacation package filled with tourists from our world. During the tour, the entire town is turned into a fantasyland theme park. When Blade’s chill inventor father Derk is picked to play the Dark Lord, he and his wife Enchantress Mara are forced to turn their loving home into an evil lair. Blade and his siblings (five of which are part griffin) band together to help their parents out and shake off Chesney’s shackles. Derk and Mara are charming and pleasant parents who raised honest, justice-minded children. The plot conflict comes not from child-parent relations but Chesney being an exploitative jerk. And yeah, technically this series is middle grade, but it’s by the great, wonderful, incredible Diana Wynne Jones so whatevs.

This Savage Song by Victoria Schwab

Kate Harker’s dad certainly doesn’t meet the terms of this list. He’s a terrible father and an even worse human. August Flynn’s adoptive father isn’t a saint, but he’s not awful either. The Flynn and Harker patriarchs lead opposing factions in the fractured city of Verity, Harker leading a brutal dictatorship and Flynn a struggling democracy. Where Harker uses monsters to inflict violence, Flynn and his wife treat them like family. August, Ilsa, and Leo rely on the Flynns for training, stability, and support. The Flynns believe in their monstrous adopted children, more than August, Leo, and Ilsa believe in themselves. They help them learn to reign in their vicious powers and use them for good.

A Blade So Black by L.L. McKinney

Alice’s mom is more of a plot point that a fully fleshed out character—she doesn’t even get a name—but the underlying context is what makes her worthy of inclusion on this list. Alice spends her time playing Buffy the Nightmare Slayer in real world Atlanta and portal world Wonderland while her mother frets over her child’s safety. She doesn’t want Alice taking risks, but there’s a deeper socio-historical reason for it. As I wrote in my review, “Everyone knows the death of a child is a tragedy, but [Black women] know. Surviving the loss of our children, our men, and our families is built into the framework of our resistance. Black women keep our communities and families together in the face of ever-present tragedy. Alice’s mother’s fears are part of a long tradition. We had those same fears during slavery, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights Movement, and we will have them for the foreseeable future.” She can’t stop Alice from living in a dangerous world, but she can teach her caution, preparation, and protection.

The Astonishing Color of After by Emily X.R. Pan

This entry is stretching the premise a bit, but there was no way I could not include it. Leigh Chen Sanders travels to Taiwan after her mother’s unexpected death. There she lives with her grandparents and uncovers the secrets her mother left behind. Leigh’s white father loves her but struggles to connect with her once it’s just the two of them. He’s a constant presence in the novel, albeit mostly in Leigh’s thoughts and memories. Leigh also believes her mother’s spirit has taken the form of a large red bird that appears every time she reaches her breaking point. The mother-bird guides her indirectly, and reveals things her grandparents had tried to bury. Her grandparents are as integral to the plot as Leigh is. As she tries to bond with them without speaking their language, she comes to understand herself, her parents, her grandparents, and the difficult choices each has made.

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.

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

We live in a world of “re-”: reboots, remakes, and reworkings of all manners of myth and entertainment. Sometimes overtly and sometimes more subtly, old favorites are made new again—and often, they are all the worse for the wear, and the new version cannot stand up to the original. But such is not the case of the recent novel Avengers of the Moon, by Allen Steele, an adventure featuring the pulp hero Captain Future, which I will be comparing to the original novel which started the series, Captain Future and the Space Emperor by Edmond Hamilton. In this case, I’m pleased to report that the new book is a success—one in which we see the exuberant energy of the pulps channeled into a new and more scientifically plausible setting.

People love new things, but they also love the familiar. Consider the television police procedural or situation comedy, where the cast and basic shape of the plot is the same from week after week, with only the details changing. Like a favorite pair of shoes or a comfortable couch, we enjoy returning to those predictable entertainments. The pulp magazines of the mid-20^th century were no different. One of the big successes was Doc Savage (I reviewed one of his adventures here). In each installment, Doc and his highly individualistic band of adventurers would be presented with a mystery involving a murder, a kidnapping, a scientific oddity, or a far-away land, and charge off to save the day. It was a highly successful formula, which made the magazine a best-seller throughout the 1930s and into the ‘40s.

There are strong parallels that suggest that the Captain Future stories were a deliberate effort to bring this same formula to a science fiction setting. Doc Savage was an orphan trained from birth to serve humanity, and so was Captain Future. Doc had a team of five distinctive companions: a lawyer, a chemist, an electrical engineer, a civil engineer, and an archaeologist. Captain Future had a more science fictional version of this team that included a giant industrial robot, a rubbery android master of disguises, and the disembodied brain of a scientific genius. Doc had a sleek trimotor aircraft that could take him anywhere in the world, while Captain Future had the Comet, a ship that could travel anywhere in the solar system. And both of them regularly cooperated with law enforcement officials: Doc with the New York City Police Department, and Captain Future with the Planetary Police. Each hero is launched into action by a mystery that must be solved before the reader finishes the magazine. And of course, the Doc Savage novels were primarily written by Lester Dent, whose pen name was Kenneth Robeson; in the first Captain Future adventure, there is a character named Kenneth Lester—an amalgamation of the two names.

About the Authors

Edmond Hamilton (1904-1977) was among the first and most prolific authors of science fiction in the early 20^th Century, beginning his career before the term “science fiction” was in common use. First published in Weird Tales, he soon branched out to the many pulp fiction magazines appearing in the 1920s and 1930s. As with many magazine authors in the period, he wrote in other genres as well. Along with E. E. (Doc) Smith, Hamilton was a pioneer of the space opera sub-genre, writing sprawling and often lurid adventure stories in which the fate of whole planets hung in the balance. In the 1940s, he created one of his best-known characters, Captain Future. As the science fiction field matured, his brand of adventure tales fell out of fashion. Later in his career, he wrote comic books for DC, including adventures featuring Superman, Batman, and other characters. In recent years, he may be better known by some as the husband of author Leigh Brackett rather than for his own work. As with many authors who were writing in the early 20^th Century, a number of works by Hamilton can be found on Project Gutenberg.

Allen Steele (born 1958) is an American journalist who turned to a quite successful career as a science fiction author. He first appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine in the late 1980s, with his work appearing frequently in that magazine in subsequent years. His first tales, which became known as the “Near Space” stories, were notable for their grittiness and realistic feel, while at the same time being infused with optimism about mankind’s prospects in space. Steele expanded his tales to other stars with the Coyote series of stories and novels, which followed colonists who fled to another world to escape tyranny at home. He has also written a number of stories set in alternate histories, many in which the space program is more advanced than our own. Steele has won the Hugo Award three times: for the novella “The Death of Captain Future,” for the novella “…Where Angels Fear to Tread,” and for the novelette “The Emperor of Mars.” The first of these stories is a sardonic look at an eccentric tramp space freighter captain, a fan of the Captain Future pulp novels, who became a hero. As in the movie The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, however, the truth of the matter is far less noble than the legend. Steele had been a fan of the Captain Future series since encountering it in his youth, and in 2017, he produced a novel, Avengers of the Moon, which put the pulp character into a new, more realistic, setting. Moreover, we recently learned that Steele is not yet done with Captain Future, as the first two issues of the recently relaunched Amazing Stories magazine included a new two-part novella entitled “Captain Future in Love.”

Captain Future and the Space Emperor

Edmund Hamilton wastes no time leaping right into the action. The President of the Earth Government, James Carthew, is confronted by a man devolving before his eyes into a savage beast, the victim of a strange plague of atavism that had been centered on Jupiter, but could now spread its horrors throughout the solar system. The plague is being spread by an evil villain known only as the Space Emperor. Carthew orders his staff to launch the polar signal flares that will summon Curt Newton, more widely known as Captain Future (a rather strange but colorful means of communication, but fitting for a hero with a strange but colorful name). Before Captain Future can launch himself into action, however, Hamilton pauses us to give us a recap of his history, a recap that will no doubt be repeated in future adventures. The time is fifty or so years in the future, in a solar system where mankind has found intelligent races on most planets and many moons, along with all sorts of marvels and wonders. We find out about Curt’s companions—Grag the giant robot, Otho the android, and Simon Wright, condemned to live as a disembodied brain—a group known as the Futuremen. We also learn that the evil gangster Victor Corvo and his minions murdered Curt’s parents, leaving him to be raised on the moon by these three very odd guardians.

Their ship, Comet, is attacked by a mysterious craft on its way to Jupiter, but they are able to cripple the attacker, then follow it when it crashes on the moon Callisto. The attackers are pursued by the creeping crystals of Callisto (how’s that for alliteration?), and in return for help, they tell Captain Future that they were sent by the Space Emperor, who can be found in Jovopolis.

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Hamilton pauses here to explain how scientists were wrong about the composition of Jupiter’s atmosphere, and that the planet is actually quite habitable to anyone who wears the gravity equalizers needed to compensate for the planet’s massive size. And as a reader, I was willing to go along with it, since a Jupiter covered with jungles (and a Great Red Spot that is actually a giant sea of fire) is a lot more fun as a setting than an uninhabitable toxic soup of chemicals. Almost as soon as they land, the team encounters the black-clad Space Emperor, only to find that he has the power to make himself immaterial and escape their attempts to capture him.

Next, Curt and the team meet a collection of local officials and industrialists—one of whom no doubt will turn out to be the infamous Space Emperor in disguise—and tour a local hospital full of men reverted to savagery by the atavism plague. A nurse there, Joan Randall, turns out to be an undercover Planet Police agent sent to evaluate the situation, and the local marshal, Ezra Gurney, also turns out to be of value to the Futuremen. Otho disguises himself as a Jovian, infiltrates their ranks, and heads off to their city of Jungletown. The Jovians are a primitive people whose ancestors, called the Ancients, once built great cities of advanced technology. The Jovians are not all happy that humans have come to their world to establish colonies and exploit their resources, and some are eager to cooperate with the Space Emperor.

I don’t want to spoil things, so I will end the detailed recap here. Suffice it to say, before the story reaches its end there will be captivity, native uprisings, narrow escapes, mysterious ruined cities, and all sorts of derring-do. And at the end, Captain Future will prevail and head off to face the next threat to humanity.

Reading this story, you can sense that Hamilton was enjoying himself as he wrote, developing all sorts of exotic flora and fauna to threaten the heroes, and imagining colorful settings for their adventures. I also enjoyed the fact that Joan had more agency and independence than some of the other female characters in the old pulps. The team barrels along from challenge to challenge with nary a pause to catch their breath, while scientific accuracy and plausibility are left by the wayside in the interest of adventure and excitement. Those who are willing to work extra hard to suspend their disbelief will find a lot of fun in Captain Future and the Space Emperor.

Avengers of the Moon

Allen Steele’s novel starts with the dedication of a facility on the moon that’s designed to protect relics from an apparent visit by aliens from another star (a mystery that will not be fully unraveled in this book). Curt Newton’s guardians have allowed him a rare trip out in public, accompanied only by the human-looking android Otho. Two Interplanetary Police Force officers assigned to event security, Joan Randall and Ezra Gurney, are suspicious of Curt and Otho. A politician named Victor Corvo is speaking at the event, and Curt is finally told that Corvo is the man who killed his parents, and learns the true story of his parents’ death. The twist of Corvo surviving the attack gives the narrative a lot more energy, as Curt immediately plans revenge. Steele also creates a more plausible backstory for the team, and explains that Corvo funded the Newtons’ research until they rebelled against his immoral plans for their application, causing them to flee to the moon. Simon Wright is given a small drone body with manipulator arms, so he is much less helpless in this version of the team.

The story unfolds in the solar system which is currently known to us, which requires some modifications to the original setting of the Captain Future adventures. Curt lives not a half century into the future, but four and a half centuries. During this time, humanity has partially terraformed Mars, established numerous outposts around the solar system, and also developed several new races through genetic engineering, tailored to the conditions of a variety of worlds and moons. This allows the characters to visit a wide variety of locations and cultures while avoiding the colonialism that infused the original tales.

Curt decides to assassinate Corvo and, with Grag, infiltrates his lunar compound. But instead of carrying out his plan, Curt stumbles across a plot by Corvo to assassinate the visiting President Carthew, using criminals who are loyal to Ul Quorn, a gangster also known as the Magician of Mars. Curt reveals this to Carthew, and to Joan and Ezra, who are on the security detail. Carthew deputizes Curt to go to Mars and investigate, with Joan assigned as his governmental liaison. Steele does a nice job portraying the attraction between Joan and Curt, which is humorously complicated by the awkwardness that comes from his odd upbringing. They will use the Comet for their trip, but because the small ship cannot reach Mars on her own, they will dock with a “beamship,” a carrier vessel that uses orbital laser beams and solar sails to propel it to Mars. Unbeknownst to them, Corvo has overheard their plans and will attempt to sabotage their voyage—and if that fails, will attempt to foil their efforts on Mars.

Steele does a good job evoking a partially transformed Mars and the culture of the humans engineered to live in its harsh conditions, taking as much pleasure in this effort as Hamilton did in describing his more fanciful environments in the original series. The team, while just as odd as in the original series, feels more realistic and more fleshed out in the new version. And while the new series is better rooted in current science and reasonably extrapolated technology, its overall plot and pacing harken back to the old pulp days, with the adventurers facing one challenge after another. The result is a brisk and enjoyable read that left me wanting further adventures of the new Captain Future and his Futuremen—in fact, the only time the narrative felt strained was when Steele bends over backwards to explain how the new team uses the same lurid and improbable name as the old one.

Final Thoughts

Reading these two books back to back was an interesting experience for me. I had read some Hamilton stories in my youth, but had missed Captain Future—which is a shame, because anyone who enjoyed Doc Savage tales as much as I did would enjoy the Captain Future books. What drew me to these two books was my appreciation and enjoyment of Steele’s work, curiosity about how he would handle the challenge of updating the pulp adventure format, and a desire to see how it would compare with the original. Now, I am encouraged to seek out the rest of Hamilton’s original Captain Future tales, and am look forwarding to seeing more of Steele’s version in the future. And, as James Nicoll argues in a recent Tor.com column, there seems to be a resurgence of interplanetary adventures lately, so perhaps their time has come again.

And now it’s time for you to take the floor: Have you read any of the adventures of Captain Future? Or any other works by Hamilton? What are your thoughts on planetary adventure stories? Are you as willing as I am to ignore the clichés and stiffness of the pulp genre as long as the stories are fun and full of adventure?

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

For both Pixar and Disney, the question was not if The Incredibles (2004) would have a sequel, but when The Incredibles would have a sequel. Pixar, after all, had already released one sequel, Toy Story 2 (1999) to great acclaim, and The Incredibles seemed the natural choice for the next sequel: a film/franchise with engaging characters and nearly limitless story opportunities. The film had even ended with the Incredibles gearing up to fight their next villain.

Best of all, writer/director Brad Bird was willing to do the sequel. He even had some ideas for it.

But first, Bird had a few other projects to work on—starting with his next film for Pixar, Ratatouille, then already in the initial stages of production, a process complicated by behind the scenes wrangling between Disney and Pixar regarding Pixar’s future. That wrangling may have encouraged Bird to take a brief break from the Pixar studios to direct the live action Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (2011), though he was on good enough terms with Disney to write and direct the commercial failure Tomorrowland for them in 2015.

By then, it had been over a decade since The Incredibles had come out, and both fans and Disney were impatient for the promised sequel—especially after the commercial success of the other Pixar sequels. Fortunately, Bird had started work on the sequel before the box office failures of Tomorrowland became obvious—and since Disney had already promised investors a year earlier that an Incredibles sequel was on its way and in the hands of Brad Bird, Pixar left Bird in charge of the film.

Bird made one decision immediately: The belated sequel would not start off with a timeskip, but would rather take advantage of the plot hook at the end of the last film. That offered the added advantage of allowing the film to start in the middle of an action scene, immediately re-introducing the superpowers of most of the main characters. The inevitable destruction that followed also immediately introduced the film’s central conflicts.

But it also created one major technical hassle. In the intervening years, Pixar had completely changed computer systems and computer servers, meaning that every single character in The Incredibles had to be completely rebuilt and remodeled—while matching the previous film exactly. Animators pointed out that for once, they did not need to solve technical issues like “how do we get a computer to animate hair,” or “how do we animate stripes, period,” since the previous Pixar films had already solved those technical issues—as well as creating a spectacular rendering system that helped make virtually every shot of Incredibles 2 a visual delight.

Most of the original voice cast returned, with the exceptions of Spencer Fox, the voice of Dash, whose young voice had changed considerably in the intervening years, replaced by young voice actor Huckleberry Milner, and Bud Luckey, too ill to voice government agent Rick Dicker, replaced by Jonathan Banks, probably best known for his work on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. Luckey died early in 2018, before Incredibles 2 was released. Pixar dedicated the film to his memory.

Other new voices included another Breaking Bad alum, Bob Odenkirk; two time Academy Award nominee Catherine Keener; and Isabella Rossellini as an ambassador from an unspecified country—possibly the United States, possibly not. Since she’s voiced by Isabella Rossellini, she sounds dignified, which is presumably the point.

As always with Pixar films, outside events impacted production—in this case, the issue that Toy Story 4 was struggling to meet its planned release of summer 2018, coupled with Disney demanding a new Pixar film in 2019, in part because of the opening of a new Pixar area at the Disney Hollywood Studios theme park in Florida. The films switched release dates, with Toy Story 4 shifted to 2019, and Incredibles 2 moved up to 2018.

That might help explain why Incredibles 2 feels somehow, how to put this? Good in parts, certainly, but overall, unpolished, and somehow just not quite as good as it could—or should—have been.

Oh, Incredibles 2 has a multitude of delights, certainly. The animation is fantastic, with Elastigirl’s train chase a particular highlight of stunt sequences, imagination, and computer animation. Indeed, in one case, the animation was a bit too fantastic: A center sequence between Elastigirl and villain Screenslaver contained a number of strobe light effects that were realistic enough to cause actual strobe light effects on people sensitive to strobe lights.

(These people include me, which is the main reason why this post is coming to you in December, after I could watch the film on my home television, instead of June, when I probably would have collapsed trying to watch it on the big screen. It is also coming to you after several horrified responses led Disney and Pixar to dampen that sequence before the film was released on streaming and DVD/Blu-ray. I can’t promise that the current film won’t make you sick—I certainly got a touch of vertigo just from my television set, and this is one film that I will never watch in movie theaters—and if you are sensitive to light effects, I would still advise caution, or at least a discussion with a doctor, before watching the film. But the lights are not quite as bright during that sequence as they were, and I survived watching it.)

Other delights include the new super-characters—sure, all of them seem designed to sell toys, but that doesn’t take away from the fun; Bob’s touching apology to his daughter Violet; virtually every scene showcasing Elastigirl, most notably a center chase sequence in the film; and an adorable raccoon who just wants a nice snack and finds himself encountering superpowers instead. (We’ve all been there.)

The film also includes several clever nods to various superheroes not in the movie—the unseen eccentric billionaire who builds a house with multiple secret doors and entrances, including one underground (I was sorry to see the place frequented only by a raccoon and not a bat); a comment about matching superhero costumes to superhero angst (presumably that same eccentric billionaire again, although I also couldn’t help thinking of certain superhero shows on the CW network), and other sly references.

Even better than all this, Incredibles 2 is a film that, like the original, takes the concept of superheroes seriously enough to consider the consequences—and not just the economic consequences either. A sideplot, for instance, focuses on a memory wipe of a minor character—the guy Violet has a crush on—and the effect this has not just on that kid, but on others. And if I found the villain’s motivations to be, how to put this, a touch undeveloped and questionable, the reactions from the insurance companies? Spot on.

And of course, the appearance by the one and only Edna Mode, infuriated that someone else has dressed Elastigirl—the audacity—but willing to provide a bit of babysitting service and a touch of parental advice.

But all of these are attached to a film that sags in the middle, thanks to a number of different pacing issues, not to mention the need to introduce a supercar to allow it to be used in the film later. The introduction is clever enough, but left me mostly thinking, yeah, they’re going to need the car later, aren’t they? It’s also a film that often seems to be following the wrong story—not to mention creating a rather muddled message.

Which is to say, much of the film focuses on the story of Bob and Bob’s inadequacies as a stay at home father and Bob’s emotional issues with this and Bob’s not overly well masked jealousy of his wife and Bob’s insomnia, and this all could be very interesting if it wasn’t so completely overshadowed by the much more interesting story of Helen heading out to superhero on her own. Helen’s story has an amazing motorcycle train chase and elegant parties and new superheroes and betrayals and mysteries and Bob…Bob has a raccoon. It’s a very cute raccoon, but most of the raccoon’s interactions are with little Jack-Jack, and as amusing as the raccoon/Jack-Jack fight is—it’s a highlight of the film—like virtually everything in Bob’s story, it feels like a distraction from the main story, not to mention other characters.

For example: that sideplot about Violet and the boy she likes and the way his memory was wiped and the way Bob apologizes for this? As mentioned, it’s a great example of the way Incredibles 2 has thought about the consequences of many superhero tropes. But most of the subplot focuses on Bob and how this has all affected Bob. Not Violet (who, after bouts of tears, forgives her father and decides to go after the guy anyway and seems fine). Not the kid, who has had his memory erased, without permission, and then forced to endure two extremely awkward, embarrassing scenes. Not the agent responsible for the memory wipe. But Bob—the only person not emotionally involved or victimized here. All the more awkward since we’re meant to be sympathizing with Bob’s guilt here, and taking it as another example of why following the rules isn’t always right.

Even apart from wondering whether or not “No, DON’T follow the rules, kids!” is a completely appropriate message for a film supposedly aimed at children, it’s also a rather muddled message, at best, and not just because Helen is on one side of this argument (“Follow the rules!”) while simultaneously breaking the rules (in order, to, well, save the rules) and Bob is on the other (“Break the rules!”) while simultaneously largely following the rules. Yes, quite a few characters here—including one of the villains—greatly benefit from not following the rules, but the major need here, as both Helen and other characters note, isn’t so much breaking the rules as changing the rules.

The film does present an interesting and timely argument that changing the rules is best done through a publicity campaign—a surprisingly practical and realistic response. I also quite liked the film’s acknowledgement that such well-meant publicity campaigns can easily end up manipulative and/or used for, shall we say, less well-meant purposes. But the argument of “Don’t fight! Go with PR!” also becomes more than a bit muddled when the way to create PR ends up being, well, violence. And breaking the rules.

There’s a lot going on here that deserves more attention. Alas, the twin, not all that well connected plots, and the previously mentioned pacing issues, not to mention the need to introduce elements solely so that they can be used in the final action sequences (I am looking specifically at Bob’s car here), means that none of it gets the attention it deserves.

Nor do the characters—particularly Dash and Lucius/Frozone, arguably the most shortchanged characters in the film. (Some side characters might dispute this.) Dash, who spent the last film desperately wanting to use his powers at school and needing to learn how to fit in, spends this film not wanting to babysit (understandable, given that the baby in question often lights on fire) and struggling with math, when on screen. Lucius/Frozone, who faced the same superpowered crisis that Bob and Helen faced in the first film, is here reduced to a small, static part—a frozen part, if you will.

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And any deeper focus on gender roles here is kinda undercut by the reality that Bob isn’t taking care of the kids to support Helen: He’s taking care of the kids so that Helen can allow all of them—and especially Bob—to get back to superhero work. And because Bob’s superhero activities have been extraordinarily destructive, not to mention useless in some cases. (A post credit scene confirms that yes, Bob has allowed some villains to get away.) Which creates the not so minor issue that, in showing how miserable Bob is as the sole caretaker of the children right after this, intentionally or not, Incredibles 2 presents parenting and housework as a punishment. “Done correctly,” Edna Mode declares, voiced by the director, “parenting can be heroic. Done correctly.” With the hardly subtle implication that Bob, as a parent, is not heroic.

From a grownup point of view, Incredibles 2 has one more glaring problem: the villain. I am not the first or last to realize that most of the Disney and Pixar films since Frozen, and perhaps even earlier, have followed a standard pattern: In the last third of the film, a seemingly Kindly Trustworthy Person (or, well, sheep) turns out to have been A Real Villain all along. It’s not in every film—Moana and Finding Dory, for instance, decided to avoid villains at all, to the genuine benefit of both films—but it’s in enough of them that the second two Kindly Trustworthy People showed up, my suspicions were raised. Beyond that, the villain’s motive here is, how to put it, mildly questionable—and, well, kinda aimed at the wrong people. To be fair, it’s hardly the first or last time a film or superhero villain has decided to target an entire group of people because of the actions of just a few people in that group (it’s even the plot of one of the CW shows this season), but still, this robs the villain of the sort of personal, emotional connection that the first film had.

It’s safe to say that audiences disagreed with these issues. As I type, Incredibles 2 has soared to a staggering $1.24 billion worldwide box office take, making it the fourth highest earning film worldwide in 2018 so far, and one of the few animated films to earn more than $1 billion at the box office—and the film is not only still playing at some dollar theaters, it will also enjoy summer and other minor matinee releases in upcoming years, allowing that total to increase. It is also the first animated film to earn more than $600 million domestically. DVD, Blu-ray and streaming numbers are still coming in, but Incredibles 2 seems to be performing well in this market as well. Disney released the usual merchandise, which sold and continues to sell briskly. It seems fairly safe to predict that at some point, we will have an Incredibles 3.

And with this post, somewhat tardy thanks to health issues, the Pixar rewatch finally comes to an end. Thanks for taking this animated journey with me!

Mari Ness lives in central Florida.

Lethe Press has been a consistent source of queer speculative fiction for more than a decade now, with an ever-expanding catalogue of writers from diverse and engaging backgrounds. In fact, some of the earliest Queering SFF posts I wrote for Tor.com included an interview with the owner of the press, Steve Berman—and a review of Wilde Stories 2010, his annual best-of gay sff collection. I was twenty years old at the time and I’d been reading Wilde Stories since I was a teenager, hungry for openly marked queer content. In the intervening years, Lethe’s reach has expanded to include lesbian and trans years-best collections, multiple Lambda awards for novels and short fiction alike, and so forth.

However, this year’s edition marks the final release of Wilde Stories. In honor of that long run—and to give a sense of the delightful breadth and depth of queer short fiction the press is producing in 2018—I thought I’d do a review roundup of three recent collections, all published in the past six months, including the last volume of the series that brought my attention to Lethe in the first place.

Wilde Stories 2018 edited by Steve Berman

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The final volume of Wilde Stories includes a demonstrative range of work: stories collected from publications both inside and outside the “mainstream” magazines of sf, writers at all stages of their careers, and as Berman notes in the closing, writers of increasingly diverse backgrounds. There is a pervasive tone of melancholy or even loss threaded through the stories here—perhaps just in my mind as I’m considering the goodbye, but also perhaps as a result of the difficulties facing queer men in a year like 2017. Uncertainty and fear lurk beneath the surface, but so too does hope and the possibility of connection, of fresh starts. Berman’s signoff notes the changing market in the past decade as more and more queer voices find their way to the forefront, and as I look back over the years I’ve been reading Wilde Stories, I’m inclined to seriously agree. This series, taken from beginning to end, provides a snapshot of that evolution.

Standout stories here include those from contributors whose work has appeared year after year in the series—Rich Larson, for example—and others who appear for the first time, like Xen, whose novelette “Cracks” was originally published in FIYAH literary magazine. John Chu’s “Making the Magic Lightning Strike Me” was a favorite. The protagonist’s struggles with body image are wrapped up in technological and capitalist enterprise, balanced against his platonic but lingering, what-if intimate friendship with another queer man. Chu’s ability to render the specific tension of that type of friendship, alongside the eerie and compelling details of the protagonist’s high-risk career doing a version of mostly-consensual kidnapping, make for a weird and wonderful piece of fiction. I was also struck by the intimacy and rage of Sam J. Miller’s “The Future of Hunger in the Age of Programmable Matter,” which also dances the line between a large-scale sfnal concept story and the raw emotional detail of before-and-after for an unhealthy relationship. The big concept forms both the set and the grist for the mill, but the humans are the visceral driver of the story’s movement. It’s the type of sf I love best, and it’s very much present here.

Transcendent 3: The Year’s Best Transgender SF, edited by Bogi Takács

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As with the previous two volumes, Transcendent 3 is crisp and original. The range of writers collected here, too, spans from folks at the starting stages of their publishing careers to award-winning familiar names, featuring a host of approaches: different cultures of origin, different genres, different prose styles, different genders and representations of gendered experience. Takács has done an excellent job with the editorial arrangement and pacing—each story flows with ease into the next despite the range crossed between them, in terms of tone and also emotional impact. Some stories are light and pleasant, meditative; some are frightening and wrenching; most of the pieces struck a resounding note regardless of their approach, be that narrative or emotional in nature. As for shared themes, several featured supernatural creatures or transitions (an understandable motif): ghosts, vampires, shapeshifters, and rhizomal nonhuman sentient species to name a few.

While it’s hard to narrow down favorites, there are a few pieces that stuck deeper than others. “Cooking with Closed Mouths” by Kerry Truong is a quiet meditation on food, liminal spaces, and bonding between a gumiho and their vampire partner after immigrating to the USA from Korea. There’s also “Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time” by K.M. Szpara, wherein a gay trans man must manage the transition from life to undeath after a nonconsensual vampire bite—and it isn’t much more medically friendly than his first transition. “Feed” by Rivers Solomon is a slice-of-life near future sf piece with striking, compact prose that sketches a depth of world in a short space I very much appreciated, while also providing insight into the clumsy conflicts of youthful relationships and social media/engineering. The most disturbing and contemporarily-dystopic of the stories included is Charlie Jane Anders’s “Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue,” in which a conservative movement is kidnapping and forcefully reassigning the bodies of trans people via a monstrous cadaver-brain-exchange process. The piece is visceral and rife with medicalized body-horror, violent trauma, and transphobia. It’s brutally well written and executed, the kind of plausible nightmare with enough human terror that it’ll haunt the reader well after finishing.

Forget the Sleepless Shores by Sonya Taaffe

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There are, of course, single-author collections as well. Sonya Taaffe’s second collection of short fiction following Singing Innocence and Experience (2005), Forget the Sleepless Shores is a haunting, quiet collection of primarily magic-realist stories—poetic and melancholy, echoing Taaffe’s usual liminal occupation of multiple genres and modes. The tonal resonance of the collection is uniform, which is neither a positive or negative but makes for a lush-unto-overwhelming reading experience if consumed in one go. For this sort of fiction—eerie, lyrical, meditative—the best approach tends to be sips and visitations. Forget the Sleepless Shores is ideal when consumed one piece at a time with pauses between to allow the affect to crest, settle, and pass on.

Of the pieces collected here, favorites included “The Dybbuk in Love,” which knots up Jewish folklore, contemporary fiction, and the gutwrenching pull of connection and boundaries (or loss of them) between self and soul and flesh. I also was fond of “The Creeping Influences,” an Irish historical whose protagonist is queer and transgender. Taaffe’s gift for prose brings the dialect and the setting to life dramatically, from the bog-body to the murder and the stretch of space between. “The Face of the Waters” is the one piece original to the collection; the epiphany of the mundane crossing paths with the otherworldly in an abrupt, dislocating collision features in it as well. Julian almost slips into the Birmingham canals—drunk after a fight with his boyfriend—and is rescued by a creature who then sits with him, sharing a cigarette and also a sort of intimate awareness of the meaning of drowning, being drowned, in the city he calls home. Introspective and unnerving, poetic and affective: it’s what Taaffe does best.

2018 also saw several additional single-author collections of queer fiction from Lethe worth checking out, including Philip Dean Walker’s Read by Strangers, Anya Martin’s Sleeping with the Monster, and Scott Edelman’s Tell Me Like You Done Before. And of course there are the novels, but that’s for another day. This was a strong, steady year for the press—one of the only publishers consistently dedicated to queer sf in long and short form—and I’m eager to see what writers, new and familiar both, will have their work featured in the coming year as well.

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

The Empire of Fantasy, unlike Gaul, can be divided, very roughly, into two parts, based on where it is set. On one side there is fantasy that focuses and is set on Earth. This is contemporary fantasy, with urban fantasy being the dominant form and flavor of that particular fantasy. From Seanan McGuire to Jim Butcher, it is a familiar and extremely popular half of fantasy, even if it is not quite as predominant as it once was.

On the other side, there is secondary world fantasy, which comes in sizes, scales, and flavors from sword and sorcery, to low fantasy to city-state fantasy, and all the way to epic fantasy that spans kingdoms, continents, and worlds. Secondary world fantasy, whether in the Tolkien, Jordan, Jemisin, Martin, or Elliott tradition, comes in a multitude of settings and subtypes. Recent developments, from grimdark to the increased use of settings and cultural inspirations far beyond Medieval Europe have made secondary world fantasy a hotbed of experimentation.

Portal fantasies bridges these two sides of fantasy, and is where Edward Lazellari’s Guardians of Aandor, concluding with Blood of Ten Kings, sits.

In portal fantasies, a secondary world interacts with our own. This subgenre is a longstanding bridging tradition of fantasy that, too, has seen a resurgence in recent years with works by writers like Foz Meadows, Alyx Dellamonica, and Seanan McGuire. These portal fantasies, however, usually skew heavily on one side or another. The mundane people from our world wind up in the secondary world pretty quickly and the narrative settles into secondary world fantasy. Or, the brief visit to Faerie is just that, and the fantasy remains grounded in the contemporary world. The narrative generally focuses on one side or the other, period.

Edward Lazellari’s Guardians of Aandor trilogy attempts to have its cake and eat it, too—to take an overarching narrative that begins in classic urban fantasy fashion and conclude it with high stakes, high magic epic fantasy for the fate of a kingdom, if not an entire continent. Throughout that transition of genres, the series holds and maintains a positivist theme through the actions and heart of its protagonists.

From the start of Awakenings and through the second volume, The Lost Prince, we are firmly in urban fantasy, with most hints of the portal nature of the fantasy offscreen, having taken months and years in the past. One primary protagonist, NYPD officer Cal McConnell, is thrust from the everyday world into the supernatural when a seemingly routine police call instead has him face a otherworldly opponent. The other major opening protagonist is Seth Raincrest, is a rather disreputable photographer whose life is upended by a would-be deadly intrusion of the supernatural. In clear homage to Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber, it emerges that both men, who share amnesia regarding everything more than 13 years past, are not natives of Earth at all, but come from a magic-infused feudal world called Aandor.

The books explore and document their contact with Lelani, a centaur sorceress who provides the key to unlocking their lost memories, and the struggle on both men’s parts to reconcile their current lives with their past on Aandor—and the reason for their trip to Earth in the first place: the protection of an infant prince who in the years on Earth has grown to be a teenager. That teenager has problems of his own.

The first two novels really feel like a long book divided into two portions. While the first book sets up the premise and introduces us to Cal, Seth, Lelani, Prince Daniel (Danel), and their foes, the second book introduces more surviving members of the original expedition and how they, too, are drawn into the quest to find the titular lost prince. The conflict between those who would protect the prince and those who have pursued the heroes in order to kill him comes to an explosive end with a well-written set piece battle in the streets and buildings of New York City. The imagery the writer evokes to describe and contrast the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building, central locations of this conflict, is memorable and evocative.

One neat bit of worldbuilding—one that suggests the author is very conscious of the types of fantasy he is working with—is the existence of a house with connections all over the world. It is described as having portals to a variety of places, although the only ones that matter are the main house in Puerto Rico and the outlet in upstate New York near Rosencrantz, the sentient and magic-using tree where the protagonists first encounter the house and its keepers.

In the concluding volume of the series, Blood of Ten Kings, the author concludes the narrative and reveals his hand and what he has been preparing for since the start of Awakenings. By the end of The Lost Prince, matters on Earth were mostly settled, although with a joker in the deck, waiting to be drawn and wreak havoc on the carefully managed plans that Cal and his companions have been making for the return to Aandor. Members of Cal’s team, including his wife and daughter, are unceremoniously and unexpectedly dumped into Aandor, and the full on epic fantasy portion of the trilogy kicks in. We get points of view from characters native to Aandor, and the high magic and fate-of-the-kingdom stakes that have been promised. The author easily changes from the mean streets of NYC and rural North Carolina to haunted fortresses, medieval forests, and conquered castles.

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One thing I appreciated was Lazellari’s choice to magic and technology in Aandor by making technology vulnerable and prone to malfunction and uselessness within short periods of being used. You can bring a platoon of mercenaries and Chinook helicopters through a portal to shred the flying cavalry and sword-swinging armies, but the advantage is extremely temporary and fleeting. In a matter of minutes, not hours, such technology invariably fails. This nicely counterpoints the difficulties magic users, both for and against the Prince, suffered from while on Earth.

I also appreciated the payoff to long-running issues and questions that were raised all the way back in Awakenings. Seth’s magic ability seems stunted and malformed. Even in the chaos of their transport from Aandor to Earth, why would he be the one sent over? And why is his magical ability so different that way than all of the other sorcerers we see in the series? Other questions from the start of the series, such as Cal’s divided loyalties, also finally see payoff.

The novel, notably, steps into hopepunk territory, by word, deed, and how the universe works. The characters go through trials, tribulations, and great dangers. Not all of them survive the conflict; there are terrible sacrifices and costs to the victory. And yet even for all that, the novel, the series, believes in right action, the need for it, and how people and the universe respond to right action positively. In that way, it feels like the rules of the universe of Aandor are not only different from Earth in regards to magic and technology, but in how many people respond and act. Honor and nobility do hold more coin in the balance than greed and gold. Still, there are no Tolkienian eucatastrophes in Blood of Ten Kings. What the heroes win, they win by dint of great efforts, and those around them responding to those efforts and coming together to oppose terrible foes.

In a time when readers like me are looking for stories that provide hope that change can happen, that words and deeds and a good heart mean something and are in the end rewarded, the Guardians of Aandor trilogy fits that bill. In bringing heart, hope, and the power of doing what is not safe and comfortable, but doing what’s right, the story carries and develops a resonant theme. The theme informs and intensifies the melodies of action, adventure, and entertaining reading.

The Guardians of Aandor series—Awakenings, The Lost Prince, and Blood of Ten Kings—is available from Tor Books.

An ex-pat New Yorker living in Minnesota, Paul Weimer has been reading sci-fi and fantasy for over 30 years. An avid and enthusiastic amateur photographer, blogger and podcaster, Paul primarily contributes to the Skiffy and Fanty Show as blogger and podcaster, and the SFF Audio podcast. If you’ve spent any time reading about SFF online, you’ve probably read one of his blog comments or tweets (he’s @PrinceJvstin).

The Tor.com office’s favorite thing on the Internet today is this brilliant chart from Twitter user @crunchleaf a.k.a. Alex, one half of the Hamsteak Podcast. Combining Chekhov’s gun, Pavlov’s dog, Frankenstein’s monster, and other well-known sayings/writing rules/random movie synopses, the intersections become beautifully weird new rules to live by. And after laughing ourselves silly at “Actually, Pavlov was the dog,” we knew that we had to apply the same logic to other SFF aphorisms/catchphrases/what-have-you.

The original:

i am not taking questions at this time pic.twitter.com/PM0E3RzUkS

— alex but stronger (@crunchleaf) December 5, 2018

Behold, our take on Alex’s chart, featuring some elementary, my dear Watson; laws from Asimov and Sturgeon; some fourth-wall-breaking from Deadpool; and, of course, Rule 34. (Click to enlarge.)

We hope this makes you giggle as much as we did creating it—and share what columns you would add!

It’s been half a year since the Infinity War stunned fans all over the world. Now we’ve got our first look at the final (for this crew, at least) Avengers film…

Let’s get to it:

And there we have it—Avengers: Endgame. Get your tissue boxes at the ready.

Fantasy fiction is best known for its giant, door-stopping series that come in trilogies or longer. Of course, not everyone wants to embark on a ten-book project. And even if you love series, sometimes it’s nice to read a standalone story that provides a satisfying resolution within a single book. With that in mind, I’ve set out to provide a list of ten fantasy stories that have all the thrills of a series but stand alone as a single volume.

The first thing I should note is that this list is for novel-length works only, although there are tons of great fantasy novellas out there. I also decided that I was only going to list one book by each individual author, which meant making some tough decisions (especially when it comes to Neil Gaiman’s writing). Finally, I wanted each of these books to be a true standalone with no sequel on the way. That means no Goblin Emperor or Elantris! Even with those limitations, I found plenty of standalone fantasy stories I love—enough that I struggled to cap this list at ten. Shout out to some stories that almost made it on here: The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay, Certain Dark Things by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Roses and Rot by Kat Howard, and The Steel Seraglio by Linda, Louise, and Mike Carey.

Some of the entries on this list are well-known bestsellers; others, not as much. I hope that everyone who reads this will find at least one book that’s new to them.

The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle

When I set out to create this list, I knew The Last Unicorn had to be on it—it is my favorite of all classic fantasy novels. With its lyrical writing, The Last Unicorn sweeps me away into its timeless story of a unicorn who fears she may be the last of her kind and sets out on a journey to find others. While Peter S. Beagle has returned to this world with some short stories and a novelette, The Last Unicorn remains a standalone novel.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is a modern-day classic—one that’s even received an adaptation from the BBC. The story follows two Regency-era magicians who are prophesized to bring magic back to England. The two start out as mentor and student but are soon at odds, and their rivalry threatens to destroy them. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is a huge tome of a novel, but I enjoyed every moment of it. Clarke writes in the style of nineteenth-century authors such as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, and her narration brims with sly humor. The use of footnotes is simply delightful, with asides that range from commentary on the characters and events to stories-within-stories. It’s a fiendishly clever novel that fully deserves its high renown.

The Devourers by Indra Das

I nearly quit reading The Devourers early on, but I’m so glad I didn’t. In modern-day Kolkata, India, Alok encounters a man who claims to be half werewolf and who has a set of mysterious texts he needs transcribed. From these texts arises the dark story of shapeshifters in Mughal India. The Devourers centers around the rape of a human woman by a male shapeshifter, and the brutality of that section had me struggling with the story. But then the narration is handed squarely to the woman, Cyrah, whose anger and determination make her voice unforgettable. The Devourers is a story about monsters and the monstrous ways we can treat each other, but it’s also a story that insists on holding its characters accountable for their actions. Finally, The Devourers happens to be one of the queerest stories I’ve ever read, embracing fluidity of gender and sexuality.

Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman are both fantastic authors whose work sparkles with humor and humanity. I’m sure most people reading this are familiar with both Gaiman and Pratchett, and I have no doubt that Gaiman’s American Gods makes many people’s list of best standalone fantasy novels. But the authorial team-up of Gaiman and Pratchett is a match made in literary heaven, and as a result, I’ve read Good Omens more times than I can count. The end of the world is nigh, and someone’s misplaced the Antichrist. Can you imagine a more hilarious take on the end of the world? I sure can’t.

The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia A. McKillip

Sadly, I had never read this fantasy classic until last year. The Forgotten Beasts of Eld tells the tale of Sybel, an isolated wizard who lives alone with her menagerie of powerful and magical creatures. Then Sybel finds herself raising the secret son of a king, and her quiet life collides with the world of powerful men. The Forgotten Beasts of Eld explores themes of forgiveness, revenge, love, and power. It’s also exquisitely written and has the feel of an original fairy tale, with all the emotional strength of the very best fables and legends.

Sunshine by Robin McKinley

Sunshine is one of my all-time favorite books, and I go back to it whenever I need a comfort read. Sunshine needs a break from working at the family bakery and heads out to her grandma’s cabin in the woods. Alone. At night. Which is unwise in a world where humans are barely hanging on in the fight against vampires… I don’t know what I love most about Sunshine, because there’s just so much about it that’s great. McKinley writes Sunshine’s narration in the first person, unleashing a stream of consciousness that’s both hilarious and deeply personal. Perhaps because of that, we see the world she creates only in glimpses, but you know there’s plenty more going on beneath the surface. Sunshine herself is a heroine both flawed and courageous who’s only beginning to learn the extent of her own power.

Under the Pendulum Sun by Jeannette Ng

What happens when Christian missionaries go to fairyland to convert the fae? It could be the start of a comedy, but in the highly capable hands of Jeannette Ng, it becomes a haunting Gothic fantasy tale. Catherine Helston pursues her missionary brother to the fairy realm of Arcadia and encounters a world where everything she takes for granted, from physics to faith, is questioned. Under the Pendulum Sun is a disconcerting read, with Catherine constantly in peril of falling under the sway of Arcadia’s insanity. Intricate and thoughtful, Under the Pendulum Sun is a book whose depths I’ve yet to fully explore.

Ariah by B.R. Sanders

After reading Foz Meadows’ glowing review, I rushed to find a copy of Ariah, a coming-of-age story that’s a spiritual sibling to The Goblin Emperor. Ariah did not disappoint. I immediately fell under the spell of this immersive story about home, love, identity, and family. In this intensely character-focused novel, the young elf Ariah is a shaper, with the ability to feel others’ emotions…but Ariah often gets so lost in the feelings of others that he loses himself. Over the course of the story, Ariah struggles with himself, his place in society, and his growing knowledge of both the complexity and injustice of the world he lives in.

Iron Cast by Destiny Soria

I’ve read quite a few books where magic is tied to artistic creation, but the young adult novel Iron Cast outshines all the rest. This Prohibition era-inspired fantasy imagines a world where certain people can use the arts to cast magic but all acts of magic are banned. Best friends Ada and Corinne perform at an illegal club, a sort of magical speakeasy, but also run cons to make ends meet. When Ada gets arrested and confined to an asylum, it’s only the beginning of the duo’s troubles. Iron Cast presents a luscious setting and an emotionally-laden plot that kept me on the edge of my seat. Perhaps most of all, I adore Iron Cast’s focus on female friendship, something which can be all too scarce in fantasy novels.

City of Bones by Martha Wells

Martha Wells has recently entered the spotlight with her delightful, award-winning science fiction novella All Systems Red, but she’s also got a fabulous backlist. City of Bones wars with Death of the Necromancer for my favorite Martha Wells novel, but City of Bones undoubtedly wins the place of “Best Standalone by Martha Wells.” The post-apocalyptic fantasy world displays the author’s characteristic imagination, and the plot never fails to keep me gripped to the page. Khat, our protagonist, works as a relics trader and treasure hunter to keep himself afloat in a city where he’s a non-citizen. When an expedition hires him on as a guide, he finds himself involved in a search for a relic of unprecedented power.

Sarah Waites has been reading science fiction and fantasy for as long as she can remember. Her book blog, The Illustrated Page, reviews SFF books through a queer feminist lens. You can follow her on Twitter.