The end of the world is a popular refrain in fiction and film. While it may feel like a fairly modern phenomenon, it is actually part of a long literary tradition, from the great floods of the Bible and the Epic of Gilgamesh, both dating back to somewhere between 1000 and 2000 BC, through nineteenth century classics like HG Wells’s The Time Machine, right up to recent cult hits such as The Walking Dead.

There are all sorts of theories about why we find apocalyptical stories so fascinating, but for me, it’s about taking human characters and placing them in extreme situations, where all their quirks and characteristics are thrown into sharp relief. How do people react in life-or-death scenarios? What sort of society would rise from the ashes of the old world? What kind of morality would remain?

No matter how distant a particular vision of the future might be, I’m always looking for those recognisable human moments, those acute little observations that make me think Oh yes, that’s it. That’s how it is.

Authors are endlessly creative when it comes to orchestrating an appropriate apocalypse for the particular needs of their characters and their story. Here are five very different apocalypses (now there’s a word that’s not often pluralized) in five very different books. Some of these worlds end in a single cataclysmic event, while others involve a slow fade-out, but they all have strong characters and sharply-drawn observations about what it means to be human.

Nod by Adrian Barnes

A brutal, unflinching look at what lies beneath the trappings of civilization. Overnight, the vast majority of the world’s population stops sleeping. The main character is one of the few remaining “sleepers,” and he is forced to watch as society disintegrates with terrifying speed. The author describes the desperation of the sleepless with a stark clarity that’s just a little too real for comfort. Most people will have experienced a bout of insomnia at some point in their lives, so, unlike many end-of-the-world scenarios, this one feels very close and very possible. Probably not one to read just before bed…

The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell

I wasn’t entirely sure whether this one belonged on this list, but I decided to squeeze it in anyway. The book as a whole isn’t an apocalyptical tale, but it does end with the disintegration of society as we know it. Over the course of the book we see the main character, Holly, grow from a teenager in the eighties to an old woman, trying to scrape a living in a world where the power has largely gone off, sinking human civilization into a time of “Endarkenment.” A frightening and realistic portrayal of humanity clinging onto the last fragments of their old way of life, while realising, too late, that this particular end-of-the-world situation was entirely man-made, and quite possibly avoidable.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

The fatal virus is a popular fictional device, but Emily St. John Mandel handles it with a light touch, focusing on the individual stories, both of those fated to die in the pandemic, and those destined to survive beyond the ending of the old world. Some classic apocalyptical themes—religion, brutality—are woven together with some more unusual elements, such as the travelling theatre at the heart of the story, and the eponymous Station Eleven comic. This is ultimately a story of hope. No matter how bleak things might be, people will still find beauty in the world.

The End of the World Running Club by Adrian J. Walker

This is another book where the experiences of the main character at times brush just a little too close to real life. The main character, Ed, is a husband and father, but struggles with what that means. When the northern hemisphere is reduced to rubble by a deadly meteor strike, he has to find a way to balance family life with basic survival. For me, one of the enduring images is that of Ed frantically searching for his older child’s favourite cuddly toy while a screaming horde claw at his front door and meteors streak towards the Earth. By turns a roar of defiance against the brutality of a broken world, and a lament for everything left undone and unsaid, this book tugs at your emotions in some unexpected ways.

The Chimes by Anna Smaill

I’m not sure quite how to describe the end-of-the-world scenario in this unique story. It’s something to do with music and memory, and quasi-religious order who use a giant instrument to essentially wipe people’s minds at the end of each day, leaving them with only the most basic understanding of their own identity and purpose. Music is the most important thing in this world, and the author’s skillful world-building focuses on musical language and imagery. Beautifully written and slightly elusive, this is something very different to most apocalyptical or dystopian tales.

Anne Corlett is originally from the north-east of England, but sort of slid down the map, ending up in the south-west. Her articles and short stories have been published in various magazines and anthologies and her debut novel, The Space Between the Stars is out June 1st in the UK and June 13th in the US. She lives just outside Bath with her partner and three young sons. One of these is currently trying to facilitate the writing of her second novel, while the other three are doing their level best to prevent it.

This week, we’re rereading “The Borders of Infinity,” the third novella in Borders of Infinity. Together, “Borders” and “Labyrinth” provide the explanation for those cost overruns that Illyan is looking into. The story was first published in 1987, in a Baen anthology titled Free Lancers. As an introduction to Miles, “Borders” works well on its own; This is the story where Miles arrives at the Dagoola IV prison camp empty-handed, quickly loses his clothes, and then saves everyone. He’s like a leprechaun who can pull combat drop shuttles out of his butt.

This reread has an index, which you can consult if you feel like exploring previous books and chapters. Spoilers are welcome in the comments if they are relevant to the discussion at hand. Comments that question the value and dignity of individuals, or that deny anyone’s right to exist, are emphatically NOT welcome. Please take note.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

It’s entirely possible to enjoy the story without having read Cetaganda first, which is a good thing because Cetaganda didn’t hit the shelves until 1996. But the novel offers some fun background for “Borders.” The Marilacan Embassy hosted the reception Miles and Ivan attended on the first evening of their visit to Cetaganda. That was the site of Ilsum Kety’s initial attack on Miles through the mechanism of Ghem-lord Yenaro’s art installation. On that occasion, Ambassador Vorob’yev explained to Miles and Ivan that Marilac had been accepting Cetagandan economic aid, believing that they were located on a natural border, and that the Cetagandans wouldn’t attack an ally.

Oops.

The wormhole jumps in Marilacan space are not so much a natural border as a direct route through to wormhole-rich Zoave Twilight. In hindsight, that thing with the sculpture looks like an early move in an Otto von Bismarck-style effort to isolate Marilac diplomatically prior to waging a short victorious war.

I can’t tell how long the war was for the Cetagandans, but it seems to have been a refreshing change from their humiliating defeat at Vervain. I would think that, at this point, the Cetagandans should be able to identify an individual to whom their Emperor awarded an Order of Merit, but whether or not they should, they quite evidently don’t. I like headcanon, so I’m entertaining the possibility that the Council of Counts may have had Miles’s adventures on Cetaganda in mind when they sent Illyan to look into the Dendarii’s finances. There is no evidence of any of this in “Borders” itself, because most of the story takes place in a bubble.

THE PLAN

The Dagoola IV prison camp is holding Marilacan prisoners of war. Miles is going in to rescue Colonel Guy Tremont, the Hero of Fallow Core, who Barrayar hopes will lead the Marilacan resistance. Elli Quinn and Elena Bothari are undercover with the Cetagandan authorities so they can monitor Miles and coordinate extraction. Miles is claiming to be a Marilacan soldier. In the camp, he claims to have been a clerk. All the other prisoners at Dagoola IV were elite combat troops, so this reads as a cover, and draws a lot of attention to Miles as a mystery. When Miles arrives, Tremont is dying. Miles has to improvise.

The prison camp itself is like Plato’s Cave. Inside, prisoners are isolated. They can’t see what’s happening in the outside world. But in Plato’s Cave, the guards carry objects across a walkway, and the prisoners use shadows to try to guess what the objects are. At Dagoola IV, there are no visible guards. The only shadow of the outside world is confinement itself. A few characters suggest to Miles that the Cetagandans are constantly watching and monitoring. A stack of ration bars arrives at a random location around the perimeter of the bubble twice a day. The Cetagandans can shrink the bubble, or remove the air to punish prisoners. But for the duration of “Borders of Infinity” they don’t. The camp is the whole world, and the prisoners turn on each other.

Miles seems like a shadow of the outside world, a situation that is fraught with both danger and opportunity. The most obvious explanation of Miles’s mystery is that he is a Cetagandan spy. The idea that he is on a rescue mission may offer hope, but is too dangerous to acknowledge. Miles finds an ally to help him with this; He encounters Suegar shortly after losing his clothes. Suegar possesses the only piece of writing inside the camp—a tiny fragment from A Pilgrim’s Progress. I’m a cultural Protestant, but mostly lapsed, and my only prior exposure to A Pilgrim’s Progress comes from reading Little Women as a child. Suegar and I are not well-equipped to comment on this as allegory. I prefer to see it as a faint shadow of the outside world, and just as Plato warned, the prisoner who sees what others cannot or have not seems mad to his comrades. Nonetheless, Miles fits himself into Suegar’s one-man cult of hope and builds more alliances from there.

This is a story that emphasizes Miles’s resourcefulness. Miles has a crucial resource the other prisoners don’t—he has reason to believe that he is in contact with an outside world that is concerned with his welfare. He needs to convince the other prisoners that they are too. Rescue is not just about having shuttles, but about preparing for them. Miles can do that too. Having failed to rescue Tremont in time, Miles finds more leaders for Marilac’s resistance. As one does.

The story’s final blow is about what Miles can’t do. On the last shuttle out of camp, Miles’s shuttle faces heavy Cetagandan fire, and has to take off with the hatch jammed open. Miles’s Dendarii bodyguard, Lt. Murka, has been killed by the Cetagandans. His Marilacan bodyguard, Beatrice, sacrifices her life to unjam the door and save Miles and the rest of the prisoners. I just read Ethan of Athos, so I’m halfway into the Miles/Elli romance, but Miles hasn’t read that book, and he is half in love with Beatrice when she falls to her death. The moment when he tries and fails to grab her as she falls will haunt him for years.

Miles has spent most of Borders of Infinity with the Dendarii. Next week, the Dendarii will come into uncomfortably close contact with Miles’s Barrayaran life, in Brothers in Arms, the only adventure that required Miles to take on both roles at once.

Ellen Cheeseman-Meyer teaches history and reads a lot.

We’re pleased to share Kate Elliott’s introduction to Liz Bourke’s essay collection, Sleeping With Monsters—some of which are taken from her column here at Tor.com. Bourke’s subjects range from the nature of epic fantasy—is it a naturally conservative sort of literature?— to Mass Effect’s decision to allow players to play as a female hero, and from discussions of little-known writers to some of the most popular works in the field.

Bourke herself writes that the collection’s purpose is ”to be a little loud and angry. To celebrate the work of women in the science fiction and fantasy (SFF) field. To offer a snapshot, a limited glimpse, of what I think is best, most fun, most interesting.” A provocative, immensely readable collection of essays about the science fiction and fantasy field, from the perspective of a feminist and a historian, Sleeping With Monsters is an entertaining addition to any reader’s shelves, available July 1st from Aqueduct Press.

Sleeping With Monsters
Introduction

Back in the Neolithic before the rise of the World Wide Web and the later explosion of social media, science fiction and fantasy review venues were few and far between. Seen from the perspective of an outsider, they were curated as objective stations where a few well-chosen and perspicacious reviewers might wisely or perhaps in a more curmudgeonly fashion guide the tastes and reading habits of the many. There is a kind of review style that parades itself as objective, seen through the understood-to-be-clear lens of earned authority, judging on the merits and never bogged down by subjectivity. Often (although not always) these reviews and review sites took (or implied) that stance: We are objective, whereas you are subjective. Even if not directly framed as objective, such reviews had an outsize authoritativeness simply because they stood atop a pedestal that few could climb. Controlling access to whose voice is seen as authoritative and objective is part of the way a narrow range of stories become defined as “universal” or “worthy” or “canon,” when a few opinion-makers get to define for the many.

The rise of the world wide web and the explosion of social media changed all that. As voices formerly ignored or marginalized within the Halls of Authority created and found platforms from which to speak, to be heard, and to discuss, the boundaries of reviewing expanded. Anyone could weigh in, and often did, to the consternation of those who wished to keep the reins of reviewing in their more capable and superior hands. Influenced in part by the phrase “the personal is political,” many of these new reviewers did not frame their views as rising atop a lofty objective spire but rather wallowed in the lively mud of their subjectivity, examining how their own perspective shaped their view of any given narrative whether book, film and tv, or game.

It was in this context (in the webzine Strange Horizons, to be exact) that I discovered the reviews of Liz Bourke. Gosh, was she mouthy and opinionated!

I am sure Liz is never as blunt as she might be tempted to be; at times the reader can almost taste her restraint. Nevertheless, some of her reviews may make for uncomfortable reading. She jabs at issues of craft and spares no one from criticism of clumsy verbiage, awkward plotting, clichéd characterization, and lazy worldbuilding. She consistently raises questions about the sort of content in books that for a long time was invisible to many reviewers or considered not worth examining. Uncovering the complex morass of sexism, racism, classism, ableism, religious bigotry, and homo- and transphobia that often underlies many of our received assumptions about narrative is right in her wheelhouse. She says herself that this collection “represents one small slice of one single person’s engagement with issues surrounding women in the science fiction and fantasy genre,” and she uses this starting point to examine aspects embedded deep within the stories we tell, often aiming a light onto places long ignored, or framing text and visuals within a different perspective. In her twinned essays discussing how conservative, or liberal, epic and urban fantasy may respectively be, she both questions the claim that epic fantasy is always conservative while suggesting that urban fantasy may not be the hotbed of liberalism that some believe it to be: “popular fiction is seldom successful in revolutionary dialectic.”

Strikingly, she is always careful to reveal her subjectivities up front by making it clear she has specific filters and lenses through which she reads and chooses to discuss speculative fiction and media. For example, she introduced her Tor.com Sleeps With Monsters column by stating up front her intention to “keep women front and center” as subjects for review in the column. She writes (only somewhat tongue-in-cheek) that “Cranky young feminists (such as your not-so-humble correspondent) aren’t renowned for our impartial objectivity.” When she writes about the game Dishonored, noting its gender limitations, she concludes: “And if you do shove a society where gender-based discrimination is the norm in front of me in the name of entertainment, then I bloody well want more range: noblewomen scheming to control their children’s fortunes, courtesans getting in and out of the trade, struggling merchants’ widows on the edge of collapse and still getting by; more women-as-active-participants, less women-as-passive-sufferers. I would say this sort of thing annoys me, but really that’s the wrong word: it both infuriates and wearies me at the same time. I’m tired of needing to be angry.”

By refusing to claim objectivity, her reviews explode the idea that reviews can ever be written from a foundation of objectivity. People bring their assumptions, preferences, and prejudices into their reading, whether they recognize and admit it or not. The problem with reviews and criticism that claim or imply objectivity is that they leave no room for the situational but rather demand a sort of subservience to authority. They hammer down declarations. By acknowledging there are views that may not agree with hers, Liz creates a space where the readers of her reviews can situate their own position in relationship to hers, as when she enters into the debate over canon and declares that “canon is a construct, an illusion that is revealed as such upon close examination.” She goes farther, as in her essay on queer female narrative, to specifically discuss the question within the frame of “the personal narrative and me” and how “the politics of representation” and the presence of queer women in stories changed her own view of herself.

As a reviewer Bourke talks to us as if we’re in conversation. What a pleasure it is to read pithy reviews of often-overlooked work I already admire, as well as to discover books I need to read. She enthuses about writers whose work is “arrestingly unafraid of the tensions at its heart” as she writes about Mary Gentle’s The Black Opera, and devotes a series of reviews to the ground-breaking 1980s fantasy works of the incomparable Barbara Hambly. She can be angry, as when discussing the use of tragic queer narratives in fiction as “a kick in the teeth,” and express disappointment in writers who trot out the tired old argument that “historical norms may limit a writer’s ability to include diverse characters.” But there’s also room for a lighter-hearted examination of, for example, C. J. Cherryh’s Foreigner series in an essay that analyzes how the hero of the series, Bren Cameron, “rather reminds me of a Regency romance heroine—not for any romantic escapades, but for the tools with which he navigates his world.” Her argument invites us to consider our own reading habits—the Regency romance as descended through Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer has become a sub-genre read and loved by many within the sff community—and thereby to see how cross-genre reading casts its influences.

This aspect of dialogue creates immediacy and intimacy as well as disagreement and even indignation. But think about what it means in the larger sense: situationally-oriented reviews create interaction. Just as every reader interacts with the text or media they are engaged in, so can reviews expand on that interaction. And if that makes Liz Bourke a rabble-rouser who pokes a stick into people’s cherished assumptions and encourages us to examine and analyze and to talk with each other, then we are the more fortunate for it.

Excerpted from Sleeping With Monsters © 2017 by Liz Bourke

In fall of 2016 fantasy author Brandon Sanderson officially revealed in the Arcanum Unbounded collection that almost all of his books take place in a single cosmos, known as the “Cosmere”. Along with charts of each star system known about in the Cosmere, the book hinted that characters from the Mistborn, The Stormlight Archive, Elantris, and Warbreaker series had already begun quietly appearing on other worlds (i.e. other books) within Sanderson’s fictional universe.

These “worldhoppers” hold the secret to the larger epic underpinning Brandon Sanderson’s novels and stories, so I got curious…what do we know so far about them?

For new readers: There are some spoilers ahead, but nothing that gives away the ending of any of Sanderson’s stories or novels.

First some basics, from Martin Cahill’s “Let’s Talk About Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere“:

…a long, long time ago, there was a singular entity that went by the name/title of Adonalsium. From what little we know, it was a celebrated force of life and creation. But something happened and Adonalsium was shattered into sixteen shards, each of them containing a single aspect of Adonalsium’s cosmological DNA and power, with both positive and negative aspects contained within.

Present at the Shattering of Adonalsium were sixteen individuals, who found the Shards left from the catastrophe and took them up, gaining immense power, and essentially ascending to godhood. With this newfound power, the Shardholders went off to do whatever it is that gods do.

With a consciousness to direct them, many of the Shards began to Invest their magic and influence in certain planets or peoples. Every Shard impacts a planet in a way that allows certain individuals to tap into its own distinct magical power.

Sixteen!? That puts the list of known worldhoppers in the double digits already. If we combine this lore with the charts and information from Arcanum Unbounded, plus tidbits from the novels and stories, we can make a speculative “relationship chart” of The Cosmere-We-Know-Of-Thus-Far.

Note 6/6 4:19 PM: We’ll be updating these charts and this article soon with more accurate info. Below is the initial version of this article.

Shardholders

Note: These are all of the planetary systems and Shards that we know of at this point. These charts have been created to highlight the relationships between the planetary systems and as such do not reflect the accurate physical proximities and locations of these systems.

Now we can “see” magical power being seeded on different worlds visited by the Shardholders/Shards, creating either purposefully or inadvertently the Cosmere in which Sanderson’s epic tales take place.

We’re missing a key element for the spread of magic throughout the Cosmere, though: the timeframe. Which Shards got to which planets first? Did they all leave the Yolen system at once or did they go in stages? Do the events of Mistborn take place before or after the events currently unfolding in The Stormlight Archive books? How long does it take for a Shard to make the journey to another system? How long does it take for a Shard’s power to affect the planet and its population?

We don’t know for certain in what order the Cosmere planets were affected, nor do we know if that information would matter. In addition, we don’t yet know if a Shard’s effect on one planetary system would influence events on another Shard-inhabited planetary system. In essence, if a fight between Shards on Roshar (Stormlight Archive) would affect events on Scadrial (Mistborn).

This is where another type of worldhopper becomes important to this unfolding origin story.

Observers

There are certain individuals within Sanderson’s Cosmere books who can use magic and hop between worlds, but who aren’t Shardholders. These frequent observers jump from world to world within the Cosmere, bringing context and knowledge of the larger universe and in some cases influencing events. Thus far, the most ubiquitous of these observers has been an individual most commonly known as Hoid. And he’s been very busy, apparently. Here’s what we know of his own voyage throughout the Cosmere:

Recently, readers have become aware of a more passive worldhopper who chronicles the aspects of worlds touched by a Shardholder and constructs the Ars Arcanums of their magic systems. Her name is Khrissalla. It’s probably safe to assume that she has visited every world we’re aware of (and probably many we’re not), but here are the worlds we know for certain that she has visited and chronicled.

These two are our gateway into the mystery of this larger star-spanning Cosmere epic. They investigate along with the reader and are in turn investigated by the reader. They seem to know everything and yet how much of the Cosmere have they really explored? How quickly? In what order? Hoid seemingly hails from the same planet as the Shardholders, and may have been present at their creation, yet it feels safe to say that Hoid chases after the Shardholders. That Hoid perhaps kicked off a second wave of worldhoppers who measure and observe.

There also seems to be a newer type of worldhopper emerging, influenced by the travels of Hoid, Khrissalla, and other “first generation” observers.

Activists

The Cosmere wiki Coppermind has a list of known and suspected worldhoppers that, when looked at altogether, seems to hint at a forthcoming point in the evolution of the Cosmere where the technique that allows “worldhopping” becomes increasingly widespread, maybe even to the point where it becomes mundane. (This may also mean that knowledge of the Shards becomes commonplace, but that’s not necessary. After all, one doesn’t need to know how trains came into existence in order to take one.)

This widespread knowledge may be a consequence of the travels of observers like Hoid and Khrissalla. Hoid tends to empower individuals on the planets he visits in order to direct events to his liking, and Khrissalla is literally recording all magical techniques that she comes across. Both of them leave knowledge behind, and over time this knowledge would propagate out to other individuals and groups who bring a variety of personal motives. One worldhopper could desire to join the fight against Odium, while another chases their family’s killer across the stars. The motives don’t even need to be that dire. We could see worldhoppers who are tourists, or are merchants trying to get rich quick.

The majority of the worldhoppers on this list are very minor characters, and some aren’t even characters at all, which suggests that the number of worldhoppers in Sanderson’s Cosmere will eventually become too large to track on an individual basis. If you combine the travels of the Shardholders, observers, and these activists, you’re already somewhat forced to limit your tracking to only notable individuals or groups.

Although this chart doesn’t show every known (or suspected) worldhopper in Sanderson’s Cosmere, and although it’s not limited to a single timeframe, charting out movements between planetary systems still reveals some interesting new questions that may be answered by future novels.

1. What the heck is going on with Sel (Elantris)?

We’ve only gotten one and a half stories set on the Cosmere planet of Sel, the novel Elantris and the novella The Emperor’s Soul, and both of those focus on specific countries and timeframes on that planet. Since Mistborn and The Stormlight Archive are epics that involve their entire planets, the events in Elantris seem less of a concern by comparison.

And yet everyone goes to Sel! Three Shardholders! It’s Hoid’s first stop and seemingly where he meets Khrissalla, as well! And you’ve got a small group of worldhoppers who keep bouncing back and forth between Sel and Roshar (Stormlight), too!

There’s clearly a party on Sel and we haven’t (yet) been invited.

2. How do the events on Scadrial (Mistborn) and Roshar (Stormlight) line up?

Considering how both The Stormlight Archive and Mistborn series are planned to hit or exceed 10 novels, there’s probably a really big detailed spoilery answer to this question. But let’s speculate anyway!

So far, the only world that Hoid and Khrissalla are known to have visited twice is Scadrial, which means that the radical progression of the society on Scadrial probably affects whatever their larger agenda is. (Scadrial is also the only world we know of that has done something truly unique with its Shardholders, something that may become a blueprint for solving the larger struggle throughout the Cosmere.)

Hoid is far more active on Roshar, however, and treats it as a front line in his agenda due to the active presence of Odium, a villainous Shardholder, on the nearby planet of Braize. We won’t know how this struggle between Hoid and Odium plays out for a while, since The Stormlight Archive series is still in the initial stages of its great unfurling.

But we know that Hoid leaves Roshar at some point to visit Scadrial, so when during The Stormlight Archive’s timeline does this happen? Will the struggle go so poorly on Roshar that at some point Hoid feels obligated to Gandalf-away for reinforcements on Scadrial? How would that even work, considering the state of Scadrial? Do the two series line-up in the larger timeline at all?

3. Where are the other 7 Shardholders?

We know of the “current” whereabouts of 9 Shardholders. We know of two others beyond the 9, but not where they are. And then there are 5 Shardholders we don’t know anything about at all, meaning there’s at least one other high profile world of magic users in Sanderson’s Cosmere that hasn’t been revealed whatsoever; a Planet X!

4. Does the planet Yolen still exist?

No one ever seems to go back there and it’s the location of a god splitting into shards, so…

Follow-up question: If the planet, or its entire system, was destroyed then is the Cosmere full of Yolenite (Yolenean?) refugees? Where might they have settled? Is every human in the Cosmere a descendant of Yolen refugees? If the Yolen refugees all evacuated to the same planet, perhaps this is part of the larger story of what’s occurring on Sel?

 * * *

I should stress that these maps are based on the tidbits of info we’ve gotten thus far and aren’t canon. There are so many more books yet to come in the Cosmere that all of this speculation could end up looking very preliminary, like trying to predict The Lord of the Rings based on the hobbits’ trip to Bree.

Still, it’s fascinating that we’ve already gotten evidence of so many worldhoppers within Sanderson’s books, and it’s illuminating to see them charted out.

Hopefully the forthcoming Stormlight Archive volume Oathbringer will drop lots more clues to the state and structure of the Cosmere!

(Seriously what is up with Sel?)

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

Can one man stand against an entire planet? You might not think so, until you consider the fact that a tiny wasp can distract a driver and cause him to destroy his vehicle. Many works of fiction center on irregular warfare, as the subject offers myriad opportunities for tension and excitement, and I can’t think of any premise as engaging and entertaining as this one. In portraying many of the tactics of irregular warfare, however, the book also takes us into morally dubious territory—a fact made even more clear in the wake of recent events.

Wasp, written by Eric Frank Russell in 1958, is a classic from science fiction’s golden age. The novel demonstrates the type of havoc that a well-trained agent can unleash behind enemy lines, and illustrates the tactics of irregular warfare in a way that is informative as any textbook. Russell’s voice keeps the narrative interesting and exciting, and it stands as one of his best-remembered works.

About the Author 

Eric Frank Russell (1905-1978) was the son of an instructor at the British Royal Military College at Sandhurst. In the late 1930s, he began contributing to American pulp science fiction magazines, most notably Astounding. One of his stories was featured in the first issue of Unknown, a magazine intended to serve as a fantasy companion to Astounding. He was a devotee of the works of Charles Fort, an American writer who was interested in the occult and mysterious phenomena, the paranormal, and secret conspiracies, and Fort’s theories influenced many of his tales. He wrote in very clean, crisp American-inflected prose that was often colored with a satirical tone. He became a favorite author of Astounding’s John Campbell, and his work frequently appeared in the magazine. He was a WWII veteran, but there are conflicting stories about the nature of his service—some sources claim he worked in communications for the RAF, but others say he worked in Military Intelligence. After the war, he became a prolific writer of science fiction in both short and long forms, and in 1955 his story “Allamagoosa” won the Hugo Award.

My own initial exposure to Russell consisted primarily of three works. The first was “Allamagoosa,” the story of a crew of a starship that falsifies an inventory report to try to hide a discrepancy, only to create problems far worse than any that would have resulted from an honest report. That story stuck with me, and during my own military career, I thought of it every time there was a choice between making an honest report that might lead to trouble, and a false one that might have obscured a problem. The second work was the story collection Men, Martians and Machines, which followed a ship with a crew of robots, humans, and Martians sent out to explore new (and often hostile) worlds. I probably read that one at too young an age, because some of the images of those hostile worlds stuck with me for years. And the third work is the subject of this essay: the espionage tale Wasp, which is probably Russell’s best known book. Wasp is a compelling story whose movie rights have been optioned twice, without ever being filmed. The first time was by Ringo Starr on behalf of the Beatles’ Apple Corps in 1970, and the second time by author Neil Gaiman in 2001. The NESFA press, in its efforts to keep older SF works available in collector’s editions, has published two volumes of Eric Frank Russell’s work, Entities (which contains Wasp, among other novels) and Major Ingredients (a collection including many of his short stories).

Wasp

The book opens with the protagonist, James Mowry, being called into the office of a government official named Wolf, who wants him to go behind the lines and impersonate a member of the Sirian Combine. The Sirians are at war with the Terrans, and things are not going well for humanity, which needs time to build up its forces and prevent them from being overwhelmed. Sirians are similar enough to humans that some minor plastic surgery and skin dyes can allow a human to impersonate them, and their level of technology is very close to that of the humans, as well. As someone who lived on a Sirian planet before the war, speaks the language, and has the right physique and temperament for independent duties, Mowry is asked to volunteer for training in irregular warfare, preparing him to infiltrate and disrupt the war effort, buying the time that Terra so desperately needs. After a short training course, Mowry is dropped into a wooded area on the planet Jaimec, where he establishes a base in a cave. He has printed materials purporting to be from a Sirian anti-war movement, significant amounts of counterfeit cash, a variety of identity papers, weapons, and explosives.

His main opponents will be the Sirian secret police, the Kaitempi, an organization that is not above using brutal tactics to crush dissent. His own efforts will be focused on convincing the officials and population of the planet that the Dirac Angestun Gesept, or Sirian Freedom Party, is a real and viable organization (and not just a single man running a massive con game out of a cave). His first efforts consist of spreading rumors and distributing stickers around the city. On a trip to another city, Mowry runs into a Kaitempi Major, who he trails to his home and kills. The identification documents and other material he steals will become important to his future successes. He evades attempts by the authorities to capture him, and begins to see signs of his success in increased police activities. Mowry also makes contact with members of the criminal underground, who he hires to start assassinating officials listed on materials he took from the Major. He sends out threatening letters to government officials and organizations.

Mowry lies, manipulates, and deceives everyone he encounters. He begins to jump from identity to identity, and lodging to lodging, as the Kaitempi increases its efforts to neutralize the mythical D.A.G. He hires criminals to plant devices that will make the Sirians think their communications have been compromised; when one of his criminal associates is captures, he engineers a jailbreak that generates all sorts of chaos among local officials. While the Sirians continue to insist that the war effort is going well, Mowry is able to read between the lines and see the truth. When he’s told that invasion is imminent, he steps up his efforts, mailing explosive packages to various locations and planting explosive mines to destroy commercial shipping. By ramping up his efforts, however, the dangers also increase, and it is very likely that he will not survive to see the fruits of his labors.

Irregular Warfare

Irregular tactics have always been part of warfare, as opponents work to find and exploit any advantage over their foes. A newer term is “asymmetrical warfare,” which makes it clear that the goal is to apply your strengths to the enemy’s weaknesses. Instead of utilizing conventional military forces in order to attack similar competing forces, this type of strategy often involves personnel in disguise operating behind enemy lines. It is a tactic that favors offense, as the attacker gets to pick their targets, while the defender must apply efforts across the board. There were many irregular forces deployed during World War II, including Germany’s Brandenburg Division, the American Office of Strategic Services, and the British Special Air Service. Many of the tactics violate the Laws of War, and those caught engaging in irregular tactics can be subject to immediate execution. When tactics expand to include indiscriminate attacks, or deliberate attacks on the innocent and non-combatants, they cross the line into what we today call terrorism.

In his works on protracted warfare, Mao Zedong made it clear that irregular tactics cannot win the conflict, but they can disrupt the opponent’s efforts while building capabilities to challenge the enemy in a conventional conflict. And this is precisely the tactic Mowry’s handlers explain to him: the Terrans need breathing space to build up their strength, which the “wasps” can provide. We see Mowry walking through the various stages of irregular tactics, from disinformation to assassination and finally to indiscriminate attacks using package and letter bombs, and deliberate attacks on civilian shipping. By the time Mowry has moved on to tactics that violate basic moral principles as well as the established Laws of War, we have already grown to sympathize with him as a character—but it is clear he has completely crossed those lines by the end of the book.

A Whole New Perspective

Sometimes, you re-read a book and find things just the way you left them. Other times, you find surprises—and it’s not the book that has changed, it is your viewpoint that has changed. When I first read Wasp as a high school student, I think what attracted me to the story was that James Mowry was yet another example of an archetype often encouraged by John Campbell: the “competent man,” who might not fit in well with normal society, but who could be counted on to get the job done in whatever situation he finds himself. The plucky earthman, whose wits and determination could be counted on to prevail over even the most technologically advanced alien societies.

Unsurprisingly, the book has not held up well in assuming a paper-based bureaucracy, and many of the tactics it portrays would be impossible in a computerized information-based society. The book also had a completely all-male cast of characters, not unusual for a war story in its day, but totally jarring today.

The information that Neil Gaiman liked the book enough to option its film rights also triggered a realization. As shown by the large roles that Loki and Anansi play in American Gods, Gaiman clearly has a soft spot in his heart for trickster archetypes, and I am sure this is one of the aspects of Wasp that appealed to me during my teen years—the idea of someone cleverer than those around him creating chaos, and turning adult society all topsy-turvy. Gaiman abandoned his efforts to write a script for the story after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which leads me to my final point.

The biggest change in the years since the book was written is that, from a modern viewpoint, it is impossible for the reader not to sympathize with the Sirians. After all, we have recently seen international rivals attempt to disrupt elections with disinformation. We’ve also seen far too many indiscriminate attacks on civilians over the past few decades. No longer are the enemies portrayed in the book faceless opponents, alien and unsympathetic. Instead, they look and feel a lot like us. The moral ambiguity of the book now feels like a punch in the gut, and overshadows any admiration we might have for the cleverness of Mowry and the organization that trains and supports him. He might be fighting for “our” side, but does so in ways that make us deeply uncomfortable.

Final Thoughts

Eric Frank Russell is not a name that is instantly familiar to younger readers of science fiction today, but he was a major voice in the field during his heyday. His works were clever, witty, and thoughtful. If you haven’t read them, they are certainly worth a look.

And now, as always, I relinquish the floor to you. If you have read Wasp, what did you think of it? I’d also be interested to hear when you read it, and if that had an impact on your opinion of the work. Do the ends pursued by the “wasps” justify their means, in your opinion? And if you want to talk about any other works by Russell, I’d be glad to hear that as well.

Alan Brown has been a science fiction fan for five decades, especially science fiction that deals with military matters, exploration and adventure. He is also a retired reserve officer with a background in military history and strategy

Imagine you star in a movie that is widely considered to be one of the greatest fantasy films of all time. The movie has your name in the title. You are the character whom the whole story revolves around, a story told to a sick little boy in need of a distraction as he lays in bed, home from school. You are the two most important things for a fictional woman to be according to societal standards: beautiful and marriageable.

And you’re also a princess, because that’s how these stories always work.

Spoilers ahead for the Wonder Woman film.

Those who know the secrets of William Goldman’s The Princess Bride know that he started writing the story for his daughters, one who wanted a story about a bride and the other who wanted a story about a princess. He merged those concepts and wound up with a tale that didn’t focus overmuch on his princess bride, instead bound up in the adventures of a farmboy-turned-pirate, a master swordsman in need of revenge, a giant with a heart of gold, and a war-hungry Prince looking for an excuse to start a terrible conflict. It was turned into a delightful movie directed by Rob Reiner in 1987.

The princess bride in question was played by a twenty-year-old Robin Wright.

She was as masterful in the role as the script permitted, a haughty young woman who doesn’t trust enough in love and then, once proved wrong on that front, never doubts its power again. She tells off the powerful prince, she waits for her beloved Westley, she jumps into Fezzik’s arms and rides off with her rescuers. She is every inch the romantic heroine that she must be. But Princess Buttercup’s story is not her own. It is Inigo Montoya’s, it is Fezzik’s, it is Miracle Max’s. It is the story of Prince Humperdink’s defeat and Count Rugen’s much-deserved comeuppance. It is the story of Westley and Buttercup’s love, but even that story is more concerned with all that Westley was willing to go through in order to will their happy ending into being.

Still, this princess bride mattered to many, and does to this day. Buttercup alongside Westley is a symbol of love so potent that even cynics are not immune to their charms. Her poise and fierceness are captivating, even as the film spends its emotional coin on the pit of despair and Inigo’s love of his long-dead father. And Robin Wright has led a stunning career, full of complicated and sometimes frightening roles. Most of them appear in serious dramas, riddled with complex intersections of human lives and politics. Nothing of The Princess Bride’s specific make and model (aside from a queen in a very odd retelling of Beowulf).

And then Wonder Woman finally found her way to the big screen with her origin intact, and Robin Wright emerged as General Antiope, sister of Queen Hippolyta and aunt to young Diana. In this film, she leads an army, and when her niece is forbidden by her mother to learn their ways of combat, Antiope takes it upon herself to train the girl without the permission of her queen. When they are finally discovered, the general berates the queen for leaving her only child unprepared for the future… and is given permission to continue the training program, despite her disobedience. She spends roughly centuries (millennia?) preparing the princess of Themyscira for her destiny, her calling—to be the greatest warrior the Amazons have ever produced. General Antiope, perhaps more than anyone on that island, shapes Diana into a woman who can inspire hope and empathy in others, who can venture out beyond their shores, who can put an end to world wars.

This casting choice may have been made out of amusement or even in the name of fun, but it doesn’t change the fact that Princess Buttercup is now an Amazon warrior. Princess Buttercup is the queen’s right hand. Princess Buttercup tells her sister that she is wrong to keep Diana from her heritage because she already knows what happens to women who cannot fight for themselves—

—they wind up locked away by a prince who demands their hand in marriage while he simultaneously plots their murder.

It is impossible to watch Wonder Woman without imagining what ever happened to Buttercup. What she would have survived, endured, and come to stand for as the years went by. And in that imagining, Antiope is the whispered possibility that many of us never dared to dream. What if she had grown in strength and stubbornness and power until she could train one of the greatest warriors of all time? What if Buttercup, who believed so desperately in love, had passed that wisdom on to a young girl who would hold that belief in trust for every person she met? What if that line between a princess bride and Princess Diana is as thin as a page in a storybook?

When we are very young, many of us hope to be loved as Buttercup was loved, or at least to experience some of the adventure she found. But when we are older, when we have a little more life under our belts, many of us look toward greater legacies. We hope to fight for things that matter, to teach others to do more than we could, to be good leaders and good friends. Antiope is Buttercup all grown up, with skills and discipline to match, and all the love and camaraderie she could ever need. This progression seems not just plausible, but essential. It is an epilogue of a different kind.

These women herald from different universes entirely, but this is the metafictional tale that binds them, a beautiful turn that was three decades in the making. We now live in the multiverse where one of the most beloved fairy tale princesses bloomed into the general who showed one of the world’s greatest superheroes how to fight. How to lead. How to spread the strength and compassion of her people to each life she touched. Princess Buttercup’s legacy didn’t end with a kiss, but with a sacrifice for another woman whom she loved more dearly than life. Whatever feats Diana accomplishes will be owed to that sacrifice, that bond, that love. It is little surprise that she turned out to be so spectacular; she had the most knowledgeable mentor conceivable lighting her way.

This possible future, this twist in the fabric of reality, is not a version that anyone could have predicted as the years passed. Yet somehow it feels right, or even righteous. Like a particularly beautiful chord progression, or a coat that somehow fits better long after you bought the thing. Of all the outcomes, we somehow received the reality where Buttercup moved on to master archery and serve an Amazon queen and command legions. We learned what life was like after the Fire Swamp, after the sham wedding where you never get the chance to say “I Do”, after the grandfather closes the book on your story because no one ever bothers to write past love’s triumph.

Sometimes you play a small part in a story with your name on it and get your happy ending—and sometimes you go on to play the largest part of all in the creation of a Wonder Woman. The thought that a Buttercup could morph over time into an Antiope is perhaps the greatest comfort of all, in a world where women’s roles are often limited and limiting. Let us be princesses, but let us be generals too. Let us be loved by farmboys, but also by our sisters. Let us live in stories made to heal, but also in stories made to marshal bravery, fortitude, and wisdom.

Let us keep our fairy tales, but live our lives to heights that are nothing short of mythological.

Emily Asher-Perrin hopes that she’s halfway to living her best Antiope life. You can bug her on Twitter and Tumblr, and read more of her work here and elsewhere.

I’m really late to the party when it comes to Malka Older’s astonishing debut Infomocracy. It came out last year to no small degree of fanfare and acclaim. It was a finalist on the Locus Best First Novel list as well as featuring in several “Best of 2016” lists.

I can’t believe I missed it. On the other hand, this does mean I don’t have nearly as long to wait for the sequel. (Null States, forthcoming in September.)

Infomocracy is a science fiction thriller. Set in a quasi-utopian future (utopian, at least, to the extent that no one has experienced a war in twenty years), it’s all about an election. An election that involves the whole world, for almost the entire world is now divided into political units of one hundred thousand people, called “centenals.” The system is mediated and overseen by a theoretically neutral entity called the Information. The Information is a search engine on steroids, providing real-time curated near-instant information to almost everyone about almost everything. (It also appears, as far as I can tell, to control a global currency.) Every ten years, every centenal elects a new government, which may be locally based, mid-sized, or a giant global contender for the “supermajority” of centenals. That centenal then is administered by whatever government they have individually chosen.

(As an inhabitant of a parliamentary democracy, in which we expect—or at least hope for—an opposition to hold our government to account, and where if the government loses a significant parliamentary vote, it tends to trigger a new election, this is a rather horrifying vision of how government could work. Your choice after the election is apparently to either put up or move. But it is interesting.)

In this setting, the narrative follows four significant viewpoint characters as they navigate an election season in which somebody—or possibly several somebodies—are trying to steal the election, and in which one of the competing governments is dog-whistling about war.

Ken is a young campaign researcher (an undercover campaign researcher) for Policy1st, a government that believes in fairness and transparency and putting policy first (naturally). He discovers that one of the other governments, Liberty, is quietly and deniably speaking to old nationalist sentiment, dog-whistling about revolution and expansion. Liberty is one of the front-runners for the supermajority in this election. Many election-watchers are concerned about the supermajority, for it has been held by the same party, Heritage, since the beginning of the microdemocracy system, and if Heritage continues to hold the supermajority, some people fear that it may become a tyranny by default.

Ken’s life intersects with that of Mishima, an Information agent and special operative/analyst who sees patterns in the data. (She has a “narrative disorder.”) The Information is like a suped-up Google crossed with the UN: not a government, it seems to try to keep the other governments honest. Mishima is trying to make sure that nothing disrupts the election, but her analysis—that Liberty is undercutting the democratic norms by playing to old expansionist and warlike sentiment—is not taken seriously by her superiors. But when cascading disasters and enemy action takes its toll on the election process, Mishima and Ken will be in mortal danger—and at the heart of efforts to make sure there’s an honest vote.

Ken and Mishima and the election system itself are the main characters of Infomocracy. Rounding out the cast are Domaine, a sort-of-anarchist activist who doesn’t believe that the system as it stands is sufficiently democratic, and wants to destroy or reform the current system; and Yoriko, a taxi-driver in Okinawa who gets caught up in the political machinations, but really just wants to get on with her job and raise her children.

Older’s world is an international and inclusive one, and her characters are compelling and believable, intensely human in their fears and desires. (And Mishima is utterly badass and a bit terrifying). Infomocracy‘s setting is a fascinating what-if for democratic political development. Older constructs a taut thriller around the disruptive forces acting on an important election. Some parts of it are less well-thought-through than others, but it is still a stunning debut. I look forward very much to seeing the sequel.

Liz Bourke is a cranky queer person who reads books. She holds a Ph.D in Classics from Trinity College, Dublin. Her first book, Sleeping With Monsters, a collection of reviews and criticism, is published by Aqueduct Press this year. Find her at her blog, where she’s been known to talk about even more books thanks to her Patreon supporters. Or find her at her Twitter. She supports the work of the Irish Refugee Council and the Abortion Rights Campaign.

I recently read Chalk by Paul Cornell and Six Stories by Matt Wesolowski in quick succession and both left marks. Chalk centers on the reminiscences of Andrew Waggoner, looking back on the horrific bullying he suffered at school and the equally horrific, possibly supernatural, action he took in revenge. Six Stories is a podcast in book form, interviewing six people connected to the still unexplained death of a teenager found out on the moors in the early 1990s.

Both books are fiercely clever examinations of rural adolescence and the things it can do to you. I saw familiar beats in both, recognised characters between the narratives, but most of all, I was captivated by the fictional space they share. The setting of Six Stories is left a little geographically ambiguous but the moors that Waggoner rampages across are in Wiltshire. It’s hard not to feel their calm, vast spaces are the extrusion into the novel’s space of the metafictional common ground it shares with Six Stories. That common ground, and what really happens when you go wild in the country, is what we’ll be looking at here…

Both novels are oral histories. Chalk, the novel, exists in its own universe in some form. We don’t know for sure if Andrew is writing everything down for an audience, crafting a manuscript, or just weaving the story for himself. We do know, especially in the way the novel folds in his father’s love of storytelling, that he’s telling the story. The ambiguity of how, or who it’s being told to, is strangely fitting both in terms of the novel’s own inherent ambiguity and for the purposes of this essay. The story is out there, somewhere. Where, and who it’s aimed at isn’t as important as its existence, a fact reflected in the redemptive/therapeutic way that Andrew approaches the telling.

Six Stories has a more rigid and more outward facing structure, which bakes its ambiguity in as well, but does so for slightly different reasons. The fact that it’s essentially a podcast in text form means that a structure is mandatory. We get six accounts of the same events, all at either one or two removes. The first remove is time: the interviewees all reminiscing about events that define their lives up through the present day but which have, at least, stopped happening. The second remove is present in the comforting anonymity of talking across Skype, or into a microphone to an audience who you can neither see nor even guess the size of. Six Stories gets a lot of logistical stuff about podcasting either wrong or fluffed for the sake of drama, but that feeling is perfectly captured: confessional reassurance shot through with dark espresso shots of adrenalin.

That distance also allows both works to explore one of the elements that ties many of us together and certainly puts the two novels firmly on the same thematic playground (but, perhaps, on different sides…): both are sporadically and sickeningly violent in very different ways. The manner in which Andrew is maimed in Chalk is a literal and metaphorical breaking point for him and the novel alike. It’s one of those complex moments where horror becomes a flash bulb image of itself, the negative space left by the physical violence arguably as disturbing as the violence itself. You want his parents to find out, you want him to see a doctor, to be mended, to stop feeling the dreadful sensation of blood in his underwear. But Andrew, and the novel, are both trapped in the polite lie that sits at the heart of growing up: he’s caught in the center of a story where he’s a good boy. Good boys don’t suffer genital mutilation. Good boys don’t cause a fuss. Good boys get good grades and go on to greater things and the only person who notices their wounds is themselves. That’s the tragedy at the center of everything in Chalk, the involuntary social armor embodied in the old Del Amitri lyric:

Nothing ever happens, nothing happens at all…

The needle returns to the start of the song and we all sing along like before.

Andrew is thrown sideways and bleeding out of the narrative he thinks he’s in. His survival measure, as we’ll see, turns out to be something which only wounds him further.

The violence in Six Stories is less visceral but no less brutal. The Rangers, the club centered on outdoor pursuits that the main characters are part of, is an idea as lovely as it is naive. As the novel continues we see not only that eventual victim, Tom Jeffries, curdled the group from the inside out but that it was already well on the way there before him. That closed-fist, chambered punch feeling of late adolescence is in the DNA of Six Stories and its characters. The constant sense that something is about to happen. The increasingly loud voice telling you to MAKE something happen.

Just what happens and how much of it is real is very much open to debate. Both novels can be read in two different ways; the first is that everything we see depicted is metaphorical. That the terrifying “Marsh Hag,” Nanna Wrack—the story the Rangers tell one another as a test of nerve and cruelty—is nothing more than that. And that Waggoner, the persona that Andrew creates, is his way of dissociating himself from the horrific trauma he’s suffered and the simple fact that the wound, and the person who wounded him, are still part of his life.

The other way of reading these stories is simpler: everything is true.

Andrew Waggoner’s pain and trauma awakens an ancient intelligence coded into the hills of Wiltshire. It creates, for him, an identical double that is able to do everything he is unable or unwilling to. It shields this double from perception, just enough for it to not be noticed. It then uses Andrew’s need for revenge to break the accepted rules of modern reality in the hope of bringing back an age of blood and violence, powered by sheer adolescent fury. This leads to a series of increasingly brutal incidents at the school, and to elements of modern culture becoming unusually attuned to the flow of time.

Meanwhile, in this reading of Six Stories, Nanna Wrack is real. Something deathless and horrific stalks the countryside and the Rangers fall foul of it and of its passing.

Readers looking for certainty aren’t going to find it. Readers looking for stories that examine metaphors and delve into psychological fortifications as the site where natural meets supernatural are going to be much happier. Waggoner is Andrew’s healing process given form, his anger held at one remove in a massively British way. Nanna Wrack is an excuse, a collective hallucination talked/willed into existence by children who want to burn the world and, more importantly, want a reason why they need to cause this destruction, and worse, are able to.

That restlessness is matched only by their cruelty. Jokes at other people’s expense, jokes at one another’s expense, and a carousel of hormone-drenched romance all hurtle past as the Rangers make their way into their final, catastrophic orbit. Bullies become victims, victims bullies, and the survivors of both novels are marked indelibly by their experiences and their relief, and guilt, at surviving them. Physical and mental scars abound and the grown characters of both novels are still, to varying degrees, defined by the actions of their childhood selves. That motivates them to tell their stories, to return to the feral countryside where they lost, if not themselves, then their illusions about who they thought they were.

Meanwhile. Chalk‘s Waggoner stalks the hills of an endless summer filled with the promise of violence and the sense of something terrible and magical in the air. There’s a late sequence in particular in which a schoolyard fight metastasizes—it feels less like a character beat and more like a howl held for the entire book and finally released. There’s something of Graham Greene’s “The Destructors” to this sequence in particular: violence as destination, destruction as creation. Breaking something apart to make it work a different way, or using that process of destruction to break something other than yourself.

Six Stories goes a slightly different route. The cruelty here is at one remove, the scars healed over but no less apparent for the time that’s passed. What we know for sure we know by accretion rather than by direct, if perhaps unreliable, experience. Tom Jeffries was a victim. Tom Jeffries was a viciously abusive bully. Tom Jeffries was both. Where the feral, wild side of Chalk is embodied in both Waggoner and the almost hallucinogenic brutality that frequently possesses the narrative, the wild side of Six Stories is more predatory and considered. Chalk is a book about the moment before the punch is thrown. Six Stories is a book about the marks the punch leaves, decades later. Both are lost on the moors of amorality, running headlong into the feral, unfettered world of wild adolescence where someone you hope is Peter Pan waits for you with blood on his teeth and the skin torn from his knuckles.

The bravest thing about both novels is that both of them, to varying extents, remain lost out there. Andrew and Waggoner get their vengeance up to a point and no further. The world—whether through the pains of adolescence, the magic of pop music divination, or the impossibly old things that wait on the moors—breaks and then rebuilds itself. Each book and its leads walk right up to the edge of the deepest darkest woods and don’t quite step inside. It’s an intensely brave, muted way to end a novel and one that maps onto the ageing process with subtlety and even grace. We experience things at this time in our lives that scar us for decades to come. Andrew’s experiences leave literal scars, the embodiment of his masculinity permanently altered in a way that’s inextricably connected to his permanently altered view of the world. He never heals. Or rather, he never returns to normal. Because in the end, we all heal, even though there are times when we are desperate not to. But those experiences place him outside his own life. He remembers, too. He writes the book to remember the rest and, perhaps, to exorcise himself. A story carved in chalk—ephemeral, distinct, obtuse—but definitively there. Metaphor and memory, scars and recompense, all out on the moors and howling at the moon.

Where Chalk‘s Fortean approach enables and justifies this ambiguity, Six Stories isn’t as lucky. There’s a reveal in the final sixth of the book that is very well handled until it isn’t, and at the two or three points the novel creaks, it creaks very, VERY loudly. It’s interesting that the biggest issue is directly tied to the podcast narrative structure. In order for the book to land, the sixth act requires a frankly astounding cascading failure of systems that simply don’t break that way, ever, to take place. As a professional podcaster, that’s where I go into full-on eye roll territory. But purely as a story, it works. Barely.

Despite this, the novel still delivers an ending with surprising, and chilling, force. The killer isn’t Nanna Wrack. But Nanna Wrack and the killer may be both have been active on Scarclaw Fell at the same time and there’s a recurrent image through the novel that haunts the characters and readers alike: something that is either a man dragging a huge rucksack or something inhuman dragging itself across the moor. A shadow where there’s nothing to cast it. A blot on the landscape that stains everything behind it. That’s where the uncertainty in Six Stories differs from the supernatural ambiguity of Chalk. One leaves you with the feeling that something colossal and strange has brushed against the world. The other leaves you hoping that’s the case, because the other option is human and small and tragically, utterly broken.

Six Stories and Chalk use common experiences to tell uncommon stories. Both novels find the absolute worst in their characters and combine those depths with the tired, battered hope of endurance. By itself, that would be interesting, but coupled with the deliciously ambiguous approach both take to the supernatural, the effect is utterly haunting. Neither book is easy. Both books will stay with you. As they intend to. As they should.

Chalk is available from Tor.com Publishing.
Six Stories is available from Orenda Books.

Alasdair Stuart is a freelancer writer, RPG writer and podcaster. He owns Escape Artists, who publish the short fiction podcasts Escape Pod, Pseudopod, Podcastle, Cast of Wonders, and the magazine Mothership Zeta. He blogs enthusiastically about pop culture, cooking and exercise at Alasdairstuart.com, and tweets @AlasdairStuart.

In the medium of comic book storytelling, superheroes are but one of many genres that the form can be used for. But unlike nearly every other genre that’s told using words, pictures, and panels, superheroes don’t necessarily translate into prose all that frequently. There are a few exceptions—the George R.R. Martin-created Wild Cards series, Austin Grossman’s novel Soon I Will Be Invincible—but, by and large, the number of novels about the lives of superheroes isn’t a massive one. It’s hard to say why: perhaps the archetypes of the genre are so well-established that they’re nearly impossible to avoid; perhaps it’s just harder to translate these kinds of stories into prose, as opposed to film.

That isn’t to say it’s impossible. As befits a book that takes its title from Superman’s secret base, Jonathan Lethem’s novel The Fortress of Solitude included a subplot about a ring that bestowed powers on its wearer. The result was a strain that blended superheroic DNA with a heavy dose of magical realism. And two new novels, Eugene Lim’s Dear Cyborgs and Fiona Maazel’s A Little More Human, each invoke superheroics alongside more urgent societal concerns. Though the two books are very different, both Lim and Maazel riff extensively on the nature of superheroes even as they introduce fictional superhumans of their own.

On the surface, Maazel’s novel handles superheroes in a straightforward way: protagonist Phil Snyder has a side gig dressing as one of the heroes from a popular series about the adventures of a super-team. Later in the novel, he talks about how the costumes he’s sent from the parent company act as a kind of a market research for upcoming films featuring the heroes in question. But for all that he’s a fake superhero, Phil also has superpowers of a sort: he’s able to read minds. That isn’t the only way Maazel riffs on tropes of the genre, either. Phil works at an experimental medical facility, and several of the patients there have been given high-tech prosthetics that take them into borderline-science fictional territory as well–one of the patients is even nicknamed “X-Man.”

Throughout the novel, there are references to double lives and alter egos—to say nothing of the title A Little More Human itself. The novel can, at times, read like Maazel has remixed and deconstructed a superheroic narrative, hitting some of the same beats and changing others into wildly different configurations. That comes off strongest in Phil’s own life, where the juxtaposition of his superheroic career and his more mundane life is itself juxtaposed with his penchant for getting blackout drunk. This, in turn, leads to a question of whether he attacked a woman in such a state—and there’s an uneasy situation established wherein the novel’s protagonist is at worst a rapist and at best wildly irresponsible in his drinking. Double lives aren’t only for superheroes—and the secrets people keep from those closest to them are frequently of a much less redemptive nature.

Lim’s Dear Cyborgs also uses the idea of superheroes to address urgent contemporary concerns. Questions of activism and the effectiveness of protests both come up repeatedly over the course of this book’s many levels. Occupy Wall Street is referenced specifically: “On October 6, 2011, we’d met and gone to Zuccotti Park after work to walk among the protestors,” one character recounts early on in the novel. And, later on, there’s also a flashback to the 2003 protests against the war in Iraq.

Lim’s novel blends moments of outright realism with others that venture into the pulp-inspired: there are characters named Boss Car and Ms. Mistleto, for instance. Those two elements of the novel coexist in a way that sparks considerable narrative tension. At one point, a location is identified as “Diaspora City,” which certainly seems like the sort of place in which spandex-clad adventurers take to the skies and do battle–but the names of some of its neighborhoods are taken directly from the borough of Queens.

Dear Cyborgs isn’t an easy book to summarize: its disparate plot threads include one character’s memories of a lost childhood friendship, the juxtaposition of pulp heroes and villains with real-world activism, and a brief summary of the case of civil rights activist Richard Aoki, whose role as an FBI informant was revealed after his death. One short chapter begins with the words “In an alternative universe,” and the way that these narratives are nestled creates an innately layered approach to experiencing the novel. Its assorted plotlines come back to questions of identity, of activism, and of the nuances that terms like “hero” and “villain” leave little space for.

The fact that the book is largely structured as a series of monologues and reminiscences further blurs the lines between its realistic and fantastical aspects. The novel’s first chapter is titled “Origin Stories,” and it references both Chris Claremont’s run on X-Men and Philip K. Dick’s VALIS. While it would be tempting to call Lim’s novel a fusion of those two influences, that wouldn’t be entirely accurate—but neither would it be inaccurate to say that both works are certainly in its creative DNA.

For decades now, superhero comics have endeavored to address the relevant sociopolitical issues of their day, whether metaphorically or literally. Generally, the former has endured, while the latter can seem incredibly dated after a short period of time. What both Maazel and Lim have done with their novels is to examine a host of contemporary concerns through the lens of superheroes, but further skewed via various prose devices. These are stories that could only be told via fiction, but they’re also stories that wouldn’t exist without a long history of comic book storytelling. That, too, is a nifty paradox—but it’s one that makes for deeply rewarding reading in the case of each novel.

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

Neil Jordan’s Carnivalesque gets straight to the point: 14-year-old Andy goes to the carnival with his parents. They haven’t really been getting along, things can be stressful but everything is about average in their lives—they don’t seem to be particularly special and at this point, neither does Andy. In the Hall of Mirrors, though, something strange happens—the mirrors seem to be portals of sorts, and Andy is sucked in through them, and trapped. No one knows he’s missing, because a doppelgänger of him walks away from the mirror, joins his parents, and goes off home, leaving Andy behind in this strange new world.

Andy remains stuck inside the mirror until one of the carnival’s aerialists, Mona, somehow pulls him out, names him Dany, and fairly seamlessly absorbs him into her carny family. Mona looks like a teenager, but of course in the carnival, nothing is quite what it seems, and it isn’t long before Andy starts to work this out, as he realises that the rope he has been given to hold Mona safe is instead tethering her to the ground while she flies across the trapeze. Andy learns more about the origins of the carnival, about the strange “mildew” that grows on the rusty metal of the equipment and how it has a special purpose. Mona and the other carnies are ancient, magical beings, the last of a dying race who still have one terrible enemy to contend with. Andy, it seems, is much more than an average boy trapped in a mirror—he may be more special than he knows. While the changeling Andy isn’t quite right, the “real” Andy (who is now Dany) does not remain the same ordinary boy either. For all his star-struck wonder at the marvels of the carnival, it becomes evident to the carnies and to him that his being at the carnival was nothing random.

While Andy-now-Dany explores the carnival and in doing so, himself, the changeling child attempts to blend into the real Andy’s home and life. The old Andy and his mother were close, and when faced with the less forthright, less open and straight up cold new Andy, Eileen is very disturbed. At first she tells herself that these changes were inevitable with the onset of puberty—all adolescent boys drift away from their mothers. Even the psychiatrist she takes her son to tells her that it’s not him, it’s just her own anxieties at play. We know there’s something more to the situation, of course, and so watching Eileen’s self doubt grow and consume her sense of self is incredibly sad and frightening—just as frightening as it is to see the changeling child enter the “real” world by way of a carnival mirror, a strange, warped shadow of Andy almost, a not quite right, uncanny version; a sort of Rosemary’s Baby switch to potential evil.

Is this a story about adolescence? Yes, and more so about how a mother can feel left out of her own child’s entry into adulthood. Is it about more than that, a complicated fairy tale about ancient beings? Yes, that too. The problem is that there feels like a fracture between the two, a strange dissonance in the story that distracts from the wonder it aims for. Much of it is prettily written, and there are some very effective conceits, but something feels cold.

Neil Jordan, interestingly, is the writer of the films The Crying Game, Interview With a Vampire, The Butcher Boy, Byzantium, and Angela Carter’s The Company of Wolves. It is Carter’s works like Wise Children and Nights at the Circus, of course, that inform a great many readers’ experience of carny literature, alongside Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love. It would be unfair to compare Carnivalesque to Carter’s classics, but it is hard to not hope for more from Carnivalesque. It’s a complicated, challenging novel, but perhaps without the wonder and awe that it was aiming for.

The trouble with Carnivalesque isn’t just that it’s a slow burn novel. It’s also that the final burn, when it eventually arrives at its peak heat, simply doesn’t feel hot enough. There’s plenty of creepiness, many strong visuals that will leave your skin crawling, but they somehow still don’t feel enough to bring the story to the sort of dramatic finale that moves you, even if it is a quiet sort of dramatic you’re hoping for. As one of the carnies says, “there is no why…there is no because; there is just the show.” That should be enough, but it isn’t. Not quite.

Carnivalesque is available from Bloomsbury.

Mahvesh loves dystopian fiction & appropriately lives in Karachi, Pakistan. She writes about stories & interviews writers the Tor.com podcast Midnight in Karachi when not wasting much too much time on Twitter.

If J. K. Rowling had given Jasper Fforde permission to document a decade of derring-do in Diagon Alley, the result would read rather like Rotherweird, an appetising if stodgy smorgasbord of full English fiction set in a town unlike any other.

Like everyone else, Oblong had heard of the Rotherweird Valley and its town of the same name, which by some quirk of history were self-governing—no MP and no bishop, only a mayor. He knew too that Rotherweird had a legendary hostility to admitting the outside world: no guidebook recommended a visit; the County History was silent about the place.

Yet Rotherweird is in need of a teacher, and Oblong—Jonah Oblong, whose career in education to date has been a disgrace—is in need of a job, so he doesn’t ask any of the questions begged by the classified ad inviting interviewees to the aforementioned valley. Instead, he packs a bag, takes a train, a taxi, and then—because “Rotherweird don’t do cars,” as his toothless chauffeur tells him—”an extraordinary vehicle, part bicycle, part charabanc, propelled by pedals, pistons and interconnecting drums,” and driven by a laughably affable madman.

Need I note that nothing in Rotherweird is as it seems? Not the people, not the public transport, and certainly not the place, as Oblong observes as his new home heaves into view:

The fog enhanced the feel of a fairground ride, briefly thinning to reveal the view before closing again. In those snapshots, Oblong glimpsed hedgerows and orchards, even a row of vines—and at one spectacular moment, a vision of a walled town, a forest of towers in all shapes and sizes, encircled by a river.

It’s here, in lofty lodgings and under the care of his own “general person,” that Oblong is installed after he’s hired as a history teacher. But the position comes with one stickler of a condition: he has “a contractual obligation to keep to 1800 and thereafter, if addressing the world beyond the valley, and to treat Rotherweird history as off-limits entirely. Here he must live in the moment. Private speculation could only lead him astray.” And if you venture too far off the beaten path in Rotherweird, you might just end up disappeared—the very fate which befell Oblong’s incurably curious predecessor.

Oblong’s hapless arrival in the valley coincides with the entrance—from the sinister side of the stage, let’s say—of another, markedly more meddlesome outsider, who moves into a manor house that’s been strictly off-limits for as long as any of Rotherweird’s many residents can remember. Moolah opens many doors, of course, and Sir Veronal Slickstone has more than enough money to make the mayor look the other way.

More than enough to do that and then some, I dare say, as Slickstone’s wife and son—actors playing elaborate parts proposed to them in the prologue—would attest, if only he hadn’t sworn them to silence at the same time as procuring their compliance. So situated, Sir proceeds to buy the local bar, the better to eavesdrop on all the gossip, before giving a great many guineas to Rotherweird’s greedy antiques dealer in exchange for four strange stones found in a place called Lost Acre: a place—here but not here, if you see my meaning—that may be the key to the unravelling of the entire valley.

The mystery of Rotherweird’s forbidden history is engrossing early on in the novel—the first by QC Andrew Caldecott, though he has, as an “occasional playwright,” dealt in drama in the past—but the longer it goes on, the less appealing said secrets seem, sadly. First the town’s origins are teased, then they’re doled out, piece by piece, in a series of dreams… but Rotherweird’s residents still have to stumble upon their own discoveries, before gathering to discuss, in endless depth and detail, what they’ve learned, not to speak of what these mysteries might mean.

In short, Caldecott suggests, then shows, then tells, and that’s all very well—but then he tells us again, in case we hadn’t quite caught on, then again for good measure, by which point, I’ll be honest, my patience had worn thinner than my grin.

There’s good reason to grin in the early-going, though. Rotherweird isn’t just fascinating in its first act, it’s also funny. Oblong’s oafish entrance sparks off a riotous romp, wittily written, and the other characters we meet in this section of the text, from Vixen Valourhand to Sidney Snorkel, are either equally quirky or morally murky. Alas, they are little more than that, in no small part because the cast expands and expands until the stars of the narrative—never mind the best of the bit players—are hard to pick out from the crowd.

That’s Rotherweird through and through, in truth. It starts off strong, loses its focus after a fantastic first act, surrenders its momentum whilst meandering in the middle, before the curtains come down on a set-piece that isn’t an ending so much as it is scene-setting for the sequel.

That come the conclusion “the company had only scratched the surface of the connections between Rotherweird and Lost Acre” should be exciting, I’m sure. Instead, it’s an exhausting thought. Who knows? Perhaps I’ll have gotten my appetite back by the time Wytnertide is in the wild, but like that big breakfast we began with, as good as this particular book looks, and as delicious as it is initially, it mistakes quantity for quality, leading to a mediocre meal that may have been great if it had only been served on a smaller plate.

Rotherweird is available from Jo Fletcher Books.

Niall Alexander is an extra-curricular English teacher who reads and writes about all things weird and wonderful for The Speculative Scotsman, Strange Horizons, and Tor.com. He lives with about a bazillion books, his better half and a certain sleekit wee beastie in the central belt of bonnie Scotland.

“Bourbon, Sugar, Grace” by Jessica Reisman is a science fiction novelette about Fox, a young salvager living in a mining colony on an inhospitable planet abandoned by its owners once the mines were shut. When Fox is hired to find an object lost in a recent accident, she finds a mystery, an opportunity, and trouble.

I can do this. Indomitable, indomitable, in the Sloe Ghost’s image are we, indomitable. I can do this, this can I do, Fox repeated Pisque’s Litany in her head. From where she stood on the Furrow bank, the train car upended in the toxic sludge of a gurge-sink looked a long distance away.

Fox backed up several steps, ran, leapt.

She just missed the top end of the car and slammed into the tilted side, fingers flexing in her sticky gloves as she gripped a side rail. One of her booted feet slipped its purchase and she hung a moment until she found another bit of purchase on a window’s edge.

The train car had been wrecked several days ago as it traveled the Furrow line. A gurge, geo-spasm of this stressed and over-mined region of the rocky planet Fox’s people called Sloe, erupted under the train car without warning, taking it into the air, half-swallowing it down, and leaving a toxic sludge pit in the middle of the Furrow’s dry canal.

The Furrow line was shut down until such time as the council had the resources and give-a-shit to fix it, and too bad for the few mining techs left at the up-Furrow settlement who needed it for transport to Drumtown.

The Furrow ran through an expanse of folded rock like a giant shawl dropped by a passing cosmic grandmother. Currently it was hazed with low, clinging fog. Sloe’s brief early morning light curled through the thin, tech-assisted atmosphere.

Fox clung to the side of the train car, gripping the rail with both hands, one boot toe with precarious purchase, other foot searching for another bit of support.

Then her oxygen filament glitched. Her breath caught as the implant’s function stuttered. Fox dragged at suddenly too-thin air. No! Not now! There was one long, horrible moment of suffocation as her body tried to pull enough breath out of Sloe’s atmosphere, and then a gasp as the filament kicked back in. Fox closed her eyes and savored filling her lungs freely, muscles unclenching.

She inched herself up to the car’s rear door, wrenched open by the rescue drone that had lifted the few passengers—alive, dead, and in-between—out.

As her boot found another divot, Fox solidified her grip and pushed the last few inches to crouch atop the upended car. She peered through the hole where the door had been, then dropped into the car, the tough material of the mine suit she wore fending off the jagged metal edges of the opening.

The thin light of Sloe’s sun cast streamers through wreckage. Fox used the seats like rock outcroppings and came down to the opposite end of the train car. With one hand to a blood-streaked seat back, she slipped the scanner out of the suit’s hip pocket. Ryuu had cobbled it together specially for this salvage. Fox thumbed the seek switch on the finger-sized unit, not sure exactly what she was looking for; the scanner would supposedly identify it and Ryuu’s customer would pay a generous fee for it.

Debris littered the area around Fox’s feet in the corner of the car, a busted cool-pail with the rotting remains of someone’s lunch spilled from it, a mining tech’s helmet with basic data eye-screen, cracked, a crumple of kid’s blanket with holo-patterns of spin ships slipping through it. Other debris lodged above, between the seats and the curve of the train car’s side.

Ryuu’s scanner did nothing as she skimmed it over all the wreckage in her immediate vicinity. It wasn’t until she was halfway back up the car, using the seats to climb, that the scanner began to beep in her hand, speeding or slowing as she waved it this way and that. Fox climbed a little more, scanned a little more, and eventually found a small object wedged between a seat and the curved wall.

After trying to lever it out from above, she dropped down a seat and pushed from beneath. With a screech as it scratched the side, the object popped free and slid off the seat. Fox shot out a hand and caught it. At first glance it was just a rock, an oblong that fit in Fox’s gloved palm. There was a little bit of glint in the rough surface, but nothing to indicate it was more than a rock. Rolling it over, though, revealed an odd inset of fine, colorless crystal in the form of an organic-looking spiral—spiral amoeba was the thought that came to Fox.

She ran a gloved finger over the crystal facets; a pulse of sheen went through the spiral. Fox froze, but after a beat, nothing else happened. She tucked it into a secure inner suit pocket just beneath her breasts.

She was coming over the jagged edge of the opening at the top when a groan and a shift of the train car told her the gurge was still active. The car sank a hand span further as the sludge burped up a slow roil of bubbles. Fox’s lungs and eyes burned.

The car had shifted away from the bank. Fox eyed the new distance.

I can do this. Pisque and the Sloe Ghost, please.

From a low crouch at the very edge of the leaning car, Fox leapt. The upper half of her body hit the bank’s edge and she grabbed hold of rock and crusted sand. A moment of internal crowing, I can do this—

—and then pain burned a signal up her lower hanging leg as it dragged in the sludge.

She managed to drag herself up over the edge of the bank—no, I can’t—before the pain whited out her mind.

Fox had been four when she and her moms got their oxygen filament implants and came to Sloe. When she was ten, her moms quit the mines—they always said quit, but everyone knew most of the tech jobs petered out as mining operations pushed past the edge of safety and their area of Sloe became a geothermal lacework, creating the gurges. Fewer techs were needed as one mine after another tapped out. Her moms, Ohnee and Taf, moved themselves and Fox from the up-Furrow miner settlement to a burgeoning co-op in Drumtown. The co-op had taken over the unused silo at one edge of Drumtown to work on resource and support streams independent of the mining combine.

Sloe—Planet 3010SL08—was uninhabitable beyond the combine’s atmosphere mixers, sunk into the rocky surface marking out 250 square kilometers with Drumtown roughly center.

Humans had been on Sloe for twenty-two years standard, twelve longer than they were meant to. They were confined to the area within the combine’s ring of atmosphere assisters, sunk like sentry columns of tech in the planet’s rock. Once the area had been mined of its resource minerals to the point of instability, turning the local geologic layers into lace and giving rise to the gurges, the combine was to have lifted off the human techs, scientists, engineers, and administrative personnel overseeing operations at seven different mining stations within the ring. First there were technical delays; then in-combine political delays, and then more technical delays. Eventually, it became clear that the mining combine had all but abandoned them. They still got the automated drops of survival supplies, meds and food basics, but queries on disembarkation updates were lost in the bureaucratic cloud.

Children were born, jobs tending the mining bots ran thin, and the need for habitation structures ran ahead of the process for approving it. The limited supply of oxygen filaments dwindled.

It was her moms who told her the story of Pisque and the Sloe Ghost, tag-teaming it at more than one bedtime.

“And so Pisque followed the voice of the Sloe Ghost, deep into its place, in the rock and ore and flow of Sloe,” Ohnee—the mom who’d borne her—would say.

“In the mines, where the lights ran out and the dark was all,” Taf took it up, using his long dark hair like a curtain about them as he leaned his face close to Fox’s, his dark eyes serious, brows raised, “down there the Sloe Ghost seeped back into the rock and said to Pisque, from all around her, ‘Everything must breathe, even rock.’” Taf’s voice always went woo-y and slippy on the Sloe Ghost’s words. Fox loved Taf’s hair, soft and shining dark, and his face like a beautiful story itself. Fox’d gotten Ohnee’s fuzzy hair, but Taf’s eyes.

“Pisque called back to the Ghost,” Ohnee picked it up, “‘Tell me what you mean, Ghost!’”

“Then the Sloe Ghost poured out its lament. And Pisque knew what she had to do.” Taf’s voice always sank here, to a sweet-rough whisper. “The thing that needed doing. Pisque gave the Ghost her breath.”

Metal taste of blood in her mouth. She’d bitten her tongue. Rocks dug into her cheek and palms.

Then a flash of pain from her left calf.

Fox rolled to her back, jaw clenched against escalation in the pain—

—which didn’t come.

Sitting up, Fox drew a deep breath and looked at her leg. It was ugly. The boot had protected her foot and ankle, but the suit had melted through in places on her shin, the leg burned dark red and puffy and bleeding sluggishly along cracked skin.

She should be screaming in pain. Instead there was just a low ache, an afterthought or memory of pain.

Judging by the level of light in Sloe’s layered haze of assisted atmosphere, it was late morning. She’d been out a little while. She got herself standing, every moment expecting the pain to kick in. It didn’t. Am I in shock?

She put a hand to her diaphragm, over the salvaged object; still secure.

The hike out here had taken her the entire previous night. No matter how little of the pain signal was reaching her, a return hike all the way back to Drumtown wasn’t a high-magnitude plan.

It was, however, the only plan she had.

By the time Fox reached the Pyres, a gathering of stone pillars rising into the thin air in cock-eyed cubic tumbles, it was night. The Pyres ran along one side of the Furrow for five kilometers. The light reflecting from Sloe’s three planetoid companions and the heavy spill of stars visible between drifts of cloud cover cast multiple shadows through the Pyres. A low fog obscured the ground.

The lack of pain from her leg was worrying. It wasn’t numb, or dead; something was between her and the sensory input.

A hard, human-made light flashed ahead, cutting a path by the Furrow. Some instinct nudged Fox back from the open space to hide among the Pyres as a transport came along, a heavy, roller-wheeled explorer. Not miners; only combine scientists, up-aboves, and their agents—flaks—had access to such a thing.

She watched the transport pass, nosing along the thin stretch between the Furrow and the Pyres. She couldn’t make out the occupants, only that there were two.

Fox limped on. In another hour she reached the number two mine and the station that had served it, both shut down. She came up behind the station, a deserted fab among the Pyres, from out of the rock forest, walking the path worn by mining techs between station and mine entrance. Equipment had been flown in by remote units, but humans had beaten this path.

Despite the muted pain signal, Fox felt ragged as the bed of a ripped out tooth. She crept through the empty station’s several rooms—meeting room, cantina, locker room. Graffiti scrawled over the degraded inset panels for notices on mine conditions, schedules, combine news; traces of the panels’ luminosity remained, leavening the dim.

Settling onto a bench that was part of one of the fab’s molded walls, Fox drifted, a tang of pain in her mouth, thoughts floating into patchwork corridors and dead-end alleys. Her moms appeared and wandered nearby, disappeared, reappeared. Ohnee said, “What’s that in your skin, Foxy girl?” Taf said, “She’s taken up molecular patterning, m’love.”

Molecular patterning was something speciationists did. It was also, indirectly, why Fox had left the co-op—before she could be kicked out. That and the fact that she and Jope, the co-op’s administrant, never had got along. Some people you just took against, they put your hackles up and you theirs, and that had been Fox and Jope since she was a headstrong ten-year-old.

By the time she was eighteen, she’d been salvaging for a few years. The co-op’s resident speciationist had asked her to find a sample of a particular mineral at one of the closed mine sites, and sent her son Attar, a little younger than Fox, along to test the samples on-site so Fox wouldn’t have to haul back any useless ones. Attar’s oxygen filament had glitched. It was one of the times a glitch was fatal; the filament died. She hadn’t been able to get him back to Drumtown quickly enough. She still woke up sometimes feeling Attar in her arms, wheezing for breath, and then—not.

That was when Fox started drinking the grain alcohol some co-op and other Drumtown residents made. It softened the hard edges, the ones inside, that hurt. It also made her sloppy, which led to the biggest fight she and Jope had yet had. He’d been right, and she’d known it, but he was so wrong in his rightness that she couldn’t, wouldn’t, back down.

Graceless, that’s what Jope had called her in the last argument they had before Fox left the co-op, graceless—a disappointment to him, the co-op, her moms, to Pisque and the Sloe Ghost.

Something woke her. After a moment she realized it had been a slant of light, moving over the station wall. Then she heard voices. The people in that transport, heading back to Drumtown.

Keeping to the shadows in the front room, Fox could see them standing outside their transport, its head beams cutting the night: a man and woman in the pale suits of combine flaks. The man was peeing against the platform side.

Their voices were clearer, but Fox couldn’t make out what they were saying.

Then, suddenly, she could.

“…back without it.”

“Who would have gone after it?”

“A hired scav, obviously; there’s only a few. We’ll start with them. You done yet?”

“Does it look like I’m done?”

“You pee a fuck ton. You should have that checked.”

“Slag off, Blanchard,” peeing man replied, but it was without sting. He was a tall guy with long features as laconic as his attitude, dark skinned as Fox. Folded in half he would still have been taller than Fox. Blanchard, the woman, was medium height, medium build, medium-pale skin, medium everything, the sort of flak you lost sight of even as she spoke to you. She stood there, stolid and unmoving, except for one hand, which fiddled restlessly with a slender cylinder device, flipping it in her fingers back and forth.

Fox recognized the device, oh-eight-sixers or wheezers, people called them. Triggered, it emitted a signal on a targeted beam that interrupted the functioning of oxygen filament implants. Fox rubbed her chest, above the left pulmonary artery, which was where the filaments were implanted. She’d had hers since she was four. Technically it was mining combine property. Like the mining colony itself, they’d never been meant to last so long. Drumtown had a limited supply, reserved now for any children born on Sloe; no replacements were available.

Peeing man shook off and tucked himself away. For a moment, Fox could smell his piss and the heavily spiced food he or Blanchard had recently eaten. She could hear the device flipping through Blanchard’s fingers, the sloughing tick of the transport, and the soft rolling of drops condensed from the fog dripping to the ground from the vehicle’s body.

Fox drew back against the wall, heart hammering as she freaked out at the over-boosted sensory input. Then it faded. In that moment, the pain from her leg flared, sick dizziness washing up with it. Slowly, the pain receded again, behind the veil of…something.

The little oblong of rough rock with its spiral amoeba that nestled in her jacket, close to her skin—Fox very much suspected.

The flak’s voices barely carried now and she caught only a word here and there. Her heart slowed as she breathed through the panic.

Crap.

“A combine scientist put me onto it, geologist, yeah?” Ryuu had said. “One of the passengers was carrying something interesting and she wants it.”

“And ‘it’ is what, exactly?” Fox asked.

Ryuu shrugged. “Something small, dunno. She says she’ll pay big. We can help your moms and the co-op get the collectors replaced properly through Jope’s connections—you know the council isn’t going to do anything about it. Maybe even”—half a breath hesitation—“a supply of new filaments.” When Fox didn’t react to that, he continued the sales pitch. “This way it gets done. You can do it—you’re the best salvager I know, yeah?”

The taste of that hope—the hope of doing something right for her moms, for the co-op, was intoxicating. Better than the warm, calming rush of any alcohol.

“Ryuu, there’s only a handful of salvagers on Sloe.”

Ryuu grinned. “Yeah.”

Yeah.

Fox sank down to the floor. When she heard Blanchard and peeing man leave again, she slipped the rock out of her suit.

It was warm from proximity to her skin. The colors in the crystalline amoeba on one side had changed from when she’d first looked at it. Indigo was blushing into the colorless material, a slow, inky bleed.

She turned it in her fingers, examining it in the faint light from the degraded notices.

“What are you?” she asked.

A warm pulse washed through her senses, calling up all good things—a hug from Taf, a good swig of Ryuu’s best alcohol, a deep breath of pure air, Ohnee’s hands massaging her scalp as she retwisted her hair—all at once. Every endorphin associated with sense comfort showered like light through her brain.

Fox’s usual salvage came from the closed mines and abandoned study sites; she scavenged things that facilitated the continuation of life in a settlement they’d only been meant to inhabit for, at most, a decade. Bits and pieces of prefabs and old equipment; there wasn’t anything of value beyond that to be had on Sloe—until this, whatever it was. Stupid. Damn you, Ryuu. And damn your ownself, too, Fox. Stupid.

Out beyond the ring of combine atmos equipment sunk into the rock of Sloe, the small planet was not habitable at all without full deep space suit, kit, and sealed habs, items to which no inhabitant of Sloe had access.

She came limping into Drumtown with the earliest suggestion of dawn scratching across the sky. As she reached the richer air of the settlement, she imagined she could feel the filament sigh in relief as its load lightened, boosted by Drumtown’s higher oxygen content. The squat buildings and blocky towers, all furred with algae, gained a brief grace in the light. Soon enough, as she made the shelter of her own tiny cubby on the dregs of her energy, the usual pall fell as the planet’s sun rose past the thick recursion of the assisted atmosphere.

Falling onto her bunk, Fox lay still, just breathing, before she pulled off her gloves and struggled back up to get the med kit from the water closet, a few feet away. She grabbed a supplement bar, refilled the water bulb—long since emptied in the trek home—from the distiller, then hobbled back to the bunk.

She was queasy, but ate the bar anyway, for grounding. Then she looked at her leg. Shit shit shit. She soaked a cloth in water with some biotics from the kit and put it over the place where the remains of the suit leg were stuck to her blistered skin.

Fox sucked in a breath at the apprehension of pain, but pain stayed at a distance.

Sweat dripping from her face and her hands trembling, she picked all the bits of the suit out, treated the burned sores, then sprayed the leg with synth bandage. She drank down more water and lay back trembling.

Sliding a hand into the loosened front of the suit, Fox took out the rock and set it on the bed. As she withdrew her hand, pain from her leg bit so hard she cried out, sucking the yell back on a curse.

Hand back on the object, pain receded.

Fox fumbled several pain killers out of the med kit, downing them and staring at the rock, inert and innocuous-seeming on her bunk.

Fox knew that, unlike Pisque in the story of the Sloe Ghost, she didn’t always do the right thing at the right time. She heard Administrant Jope’s voice in her head, graceless. Fox had fucked up, drinking when she shouldn’t. She moved out of the co-op before Jope could kick her out, leaving to save face for her moms, so they wouldn’t have to intervene.

And now, looking at the rock and considering the small, deep tug she was beginning to feel for it, Fox dug out the bottle of alcohol she’d been saving. She knew it was the wrong thing to do, at the wrong time. But she needed that swallow of familiar, warm calm.

It was a bottle of the mash liquor Ryuu made. He used the corn speciation the co-op grew in its hydroponics and aged it in scorched casks of wood—rare as rare could be, that—out of some gravity well. Fox had salvaged the casks from the remains of a storage fire. The resulting alcohol was dark and smelled like smoke and memory and drank far too easily.

Sometime later, Fox lay on her stomach, the heavy slag glass bottle she’d been drinking from listing in one hand as she leaned on her elbows, examining the spiral amoeba in the rock.

Several drops of amber liquor splashed onto it. The rock gave a tiny jolt, barely there, and the color in the crystalline spiral bled from indigo to gold, glowing briefly. Fox stared at it, waiting, but that was all. Once more it was inert, though touching it still played havoc with her senses, distancing the medication- and alcohol-dulled pain from her leg even further, bringing sounds from outside her cubby closer—the churning rhythm of the nearby turbines, her neighbors’ voices.

A few hours later, as Sloe’s short span of daylight sank into the long dusk of its twilight, Fox went to see Ryuu. She tucked the rock safe away on her person, not wanting to leave it in the cubby.

As she came out a side door into the chill, a prickle across her shoulders and the backs of her hands made her keep to the darkest shadow in the alley. Leaning against one wall, the algae cold against her cheek, she watched two shapes enter her building—which was nothing more than three floors of cubbies—from the street. Blanchard and peeing man—his height and curved slouch were distinctive. And in Blanchard’s fingers, the wheezer glinted as she flipped it back and forth. Cold sweat shivered Fox’s skin, a flush of fear, her breath shortening merely in reaction.

She pressed back against the algae, and then faded down the alley, slipping into the maze of unregulated structures sprawled up and down Drumtown’s cratered terrain. The structure with her cubby sat roughly center of town.

Drumtown’s alleys and byways ran between makeshift, puzzle-boarded walls of printed metal alloy and scavenged mineshaft panels—some scavenged by Fox—patched with ceramsteel castings and haphazardly grown over with a chemical lattice for algae. The walls leaned close as Fox navigated a path. Scents of cooking and the humid fetor of humans living in what was essentially a closed and artificial atmospheric system. Clashing threads of music and conversation, argument and rhythms of activity reached her and, once, then twice, close, breathless words of intimacy.

The fog drifted through Drumtown, familiar to Fox as the sound of her moms’ voices. Ryuu lived at the opposite edge of town from the co-op. Because the liquor Ryuu made provided a much needed pressure valve on Sloe’s population, what there was left of authority—the council—cut him some leeway in the matter of resource and energy consumption.

Ryuu’s cave was an igneous bubble in the side of a crater, a rough curl of rock overhanging the entrance, where he’d put in an old ship panel as a wall, with a hatch for a door. Fox climbed over the lip and into the flicker of light from a metal sander as Ryuu worked on something. The cave had three chambers: this one, uneven walls dark green with algae, had a long table and shelves of tools, bits of tech, and the projects and jobs Ryuu was working on, all in various states of construction or deconstruction; the room at the back of the workshop, little bigger than Fox’s cubby, was his living space; and under that was a hole dug with bots where he distilled and aged the liquor.

Ryuu bent over a sander, sparks and lines of light reflecting in the scratched visor obscuring his face.

Fox waited until he took a break. Ryuu was comfortable and stolid, his skin the same light ochre as the striations in the formations of the Pyres. He and Fox were the same age; she’d known him forever.

“Ryuu.”

He looked around, visor reflecting light, shelves, then Fox, in a curve.

“You get it?”

Arms folded across her chest, Fox gave a nod.

Ryuu sat back on his stool and lifted the faceplate to perch on his head. “What’s wrong?”

“Ry, this thing is something…alive? Maybe? It’s…” Fox shook her head, chewed her lip. “And two combine flaks are looking for it. They came to my cubby.”

Ryuu’s brows rose. “You’re—are you okay?”

“They just missed me, I’m fine.”

His gaze flickered to her leg, but he said only, “Huh,” and sat, clicking his tongue—thinking, Fox knew, but she wasn’t feeling patient.

“Exactly what did the scientist who set you on this salvage say, Ry? These were combine flaks—they’ve never given a damn about any salvage before.”

Fox suddenly remembered, picturing it in her head, the bottle she’d left on her bunk, a finger’s worth of dark liquor remaining, the little star and barrel symbol Ryuu etched into the slag glass as a label cutting a facet of light out of the dim.

It wasn’t a secret where Sloe’s best liquor came from.

“Shit.”

“Yeah?”

“They’re gonna come here.”

“So”­—Ryuu gestured with the hand not holding the sander—“I’ll contact the customer and we’ll do the handoff now; let the flaks hash it out with her. If they get here before, we just give it to them, yeah? It was a nice dream, getting new collectors for the co-op, but—” he shrugged.

Fox rolled her shoulders, feeling angry and stubborn—downright recalcitrant, she heard Ohnee say in her head, as she had when Fox was small—and unsure why.

Weird sense-manipulating qualities aside, even possible proto-life aside, it was just some salvage.

Ryuu’s scientist was in the med clinic, and had been since the train accident. Turned out, she’d been the one carrying the amoeba rock on the train.

She was a woman with hard muscles under doughy flesh. Her pale hair was shaved close, her face an interesting cross between pointy-featured and flat-planed. Currently, she sported dark hollows under the eyes, cuts and bruises still showing under synth skin. Her left side was bandaged from waist to knee.

The med clinic was in one of the original hab structures at the center of Drumtown. It smelled of the generations of algae that had lived and died on the walls, lattices replenished countless times.

Fox and Ryuu stood by the scientist’s cot, nodding to the on-duty med tech as he cautioned them about tiring the patient and then left. Movable screens provided privacy, diffuse light slanting through the shadows from collector panes in the walls.

“You have it?” These were the first words out of the scientist’s mouth. She had the irritated, querulous tone of someone who’d been laid up and rubbed raw by injury and inactivity.

Ryuu looked at Fox and Fox shifted. She slid a hand into her pocket and grasped the rock, pulled it out, and then just stood, frozen.

The scientist held out her hand. Fox’s hand with the rock in it stayed where it was, hovering.

Slowly, the woman lowered her hand. She frowned. “It got to you, didn’t it?”

Fox swallowed. “What is it?”

The scientist grimaced, rubbing at a spot above her bandages. “I’m an astromaterials geophysicist. The combine has had me poking around in the closed mines and sites of geothermal reactivity”—the gurges, she meant—“for some time now. Since about the beginning of colony overstay.”

She let that hang a moment. “Then I found that”—she lifted her chin toward it and hesitated before finishing—“rock. Near the gurge sinks of the Outlier.” The Outlier was mine number seven, furthest out from Drumtown.

Fox rolled that around in her mind, clutching the amoeba rock and staring down at it.

Ryuu, always quick to leap from fact to conclusion, said, “Are you telling us that rock is why the combine abandoned us here—hoping someone would find it?”

With the rock in her hand, Fox could hear the scientist’s heart beating, the push of her blood, and sense Ryuu’s curiosity and concern as little touches and twitches on her skin.

“The toxic lace at the Outlier is treacherous—and there were multiple meteor strikes recently, making it worse. The mine itself is off limits; but that’s where the combine told me to go.” Her mouth worked a moment, as if she would say more, but the words stuck in her throat. Instead, she picked up a worn, grimy link globe from beside the cot and cupped it in one shaking hand—shaking with rage, not weakness, Fox thought.

“Outlier recording bex-alpha-eight.”

The muted, layered colors of Sloe’s twilight sky and a stretch of barren terrain softened by low fog filled the space over the scientist’s cot. Whip sound of wind, hiss of sand over rock. It had been recorded from the shelter of the mine entry, it looked like, and the perspective put the link globe affixed to the scientist’s suit at the shoulder. A counter that seemed to hover in the middle distance along the bottom of the recording showed time elapsing, date, location coordinates.

The feed turned into the mine entrance, beam cutting a hard angle over rock, into darkness.

“Skip to index four-seven-nine,” the scientist said.

The recording jumped. Down in the mine. The link globe’s beam showed rock debris, bits and pieces of the wreckage of the mine, then went around a fenced-off gurge sink, toxic heat waves smoking off it. Along a rock strewn corridor, more gurge disruptions and crumbling patches, to what looked like…it took Fox a moment to resolve what she was seeing: a section of mine wall had sheaved open like a split geode. A suggestion of faceted, rough crystal and a low-simmering glow came from within it.

Fox held her breath as the recording led them inside the split. The rock and crystal flickered with a kind of luciferase veining through all the matter within.

The scientist climbed over rough, veined cubes and facets of rock and crystal. The veining intensified to a knot at a central point in the heart of the split. Gloved hands hesitated before them, then reached into the heart of the veining, where the rock was crumbled into smaller cubes and rubble, and dug. What should have been hard rock matter sloughed away from the scientist’s hands, oily looking, fresh flickers of luciferase veining were revealed and then an oblong rock, the glinting in its rough surface fading as it came into the air. The scientist picked it up and turned it in gloved hands. The amoeboid spiral on one side was dark and rough, crystalline facets snagging the globe’s beam.

The scientist switched off the globe and the holo image went out, leaving the med clinic dim and flat.

“Whoa,” Ryuu breathed.

“I was taking it to the only exo-biologist on planet; he’s shacked up with one of the mining techs still living out at Furrow’s end. And fucking Sloe tried to swallow the train,” she gestured at the cot.

“That rock is the key to making the combine lift us off this rock—they want it, badly.” She looked up at Fox. “Whatever it is. It doesn’t matter if it’s—” She waved her hand.

“If it’s what?” Ryuu said. When neither of them answered, he said, “Well fuck the combine anyway—we do all right for ourselves.”

The scientist shook her head. “You have no idea how fragile our existence is.”

“Course I do,” Ryuu said. “But it always is, yeah? There’s not that much more guarantee on a habitable planet, a station, or a spin ship.”

“There’s far more guarantee, more opportunity, more civilized daily life—on any central planet or station—but you two wouldn’t remember that.” She shook her head. “You’re really Sloe’s children.”

Fox held the rock, fingers curled around it. It was warmer, in the chill of Drumtown, than Fox’s own body heat could account for.

Then she smelled a distinct, sharp funk and heard Blanchard’s voice, “You’re killing me, man, again?” as peeing man pissed against the outside wall of the med clinic.

“Two flaks,” Fox said, “outside.” She lifted her chin. “They followed me somehow—they’re here for the rock, aren’t they?”

The scientist cursed. “If they take it we have nothing to bargain with. We need it for leverage with the combine.” With a sharp gesture, she said, “Go.” When Fox hesitated, she flung out her hand. “Go. I’ll tell the flaks we need assurances from the combine.”

Fox and Ryuu slipped out another side of the clinic hab and into Drumtown’s maze. Ryuu peeled off to confuse things if the flaks followed, while Fox threaded the tangle of byways toward to the one place she knew that would both welcome her and provide a thin layer of security: the co-op where her moms lived.

It was full dark, and though there were lights here and there, Fox navigated as much from memory, the map in her mind, as by sight. And the boost in her senses from the rock—every algae-furred wall was a presence she felt on her skin, the distant sift of wind over the open spaces surrounding town reached her, haunting as the voices of interstellar space.

She came out past a series of jutting crater artifacts, curved and broken rock, to the ramp that went to the co-op’s entrance at the base of a silo, the landing site’s original equipment warehouse. A woman straightened from a slouch by the entry at the top of the ramp.

Fox had salvaged almost every panel and bolt of the ramp.

“Ayo,” Fox greeted the woman and Ayo slung the puffer gun she carried back and resumed slouching with a lift of her chin in greeting. Her gaze returned to scanning the area before Fox passed her. Fox knew there was another guard, up above, in the shadows.

Inside, the productive, ordered chaos of the co-op slipped around Fox, familiar as an old jacket. The silo had been converted over time with a ring of multiple levels. Variously salvaged and crafted walls and screens created cubbies and networked spaces for individuals and families, with community space, dedicated hydroponics, and workspace on the first level, from which there was a view all the way up past the circling floors to the silo’s domed, collector-paned roof. Sometimes, on rare, clear nights, you could see stars. Every wall or screen that could support it grew vertical crops of lettuce, beans, edible flowers, speciated rarities. The watering and reclamation systems were brutally complex.

It was as quiet now as it generally ever got, most inhabitants settling in for the night. A child shrieked a laugh somewhere above. Fox nodded to several people, some working, some just sitting and talking; the late-burning hydroponic lights glowed behind crop-spiky walls.

The stairs up to each level were more patchwork. The last set, to the top level where Fox’s moms had their place, creaked, in need of shoring. Down a short corridor, past two other cubbies, around a screen.

Her moms sat at the little table, a covered oil lamp between them limning their hands and faces, Ohnee’s bush of hair, a sheen on Taf’s braids. The third chair was still there. Her moms kept it for guests, but it was also, always, Fox’s chair. She slid into it.

“Hi, Foxy girl,” Ohnee said, a flash of teeth in her dark face, and Taf leaned over to wrap an arm around Fox’s shoulder and hug her to him, his warm scent—the speciated miniature sandalwood he grew in wall pots—calming. His hair was in two long braids and he wore his much mended kimono of fee silk that Fox had always loved. The worn silk was violet, originally stitched with tiny amber and green beads, though few of them remained, in figures that Taf said were foxes, the old earth mammal for which they’d named her.

Ohnee was watching her, and Fox dropped her gaze to the table. Ohnee made an mm-hmm noise. “What’s wrong?”

Fox pulled out the amoeba rock, set it on the table between her hands, and told them about the last night and day. When she got to the part where she got hurt, they insisted on inspecting her bandaging job. Then they made her eat. At the mention of the rock’s reaction to the drop of Ryuu’s liquor, though she elided somewhat over getting drunk, Fox felt them exchange a glance past her. When she got to the end, they sat, mulling it all over.

“Well,” Ohnee said eventually, “I think we can expect these flaks will be referred to Jope and Jope will be up here wanting your rock in the morning. Pretty sure whoever’s on security won’t let the flaks in during the night, though.”

“It’s Ayo,” Fox said. “But the one flak, Blanchard, she has that wheezer.”

“She uses that on Ayo and whoever’s got angel duty will take her down,” Ohnee said, referring to the second, up-above guard always posted. “We’ve got the night, and you need to sleep, child.”

Fox’s fingers rested on the amoeba rock’s rough curve. “I should trade it to the combine, shouldn’t I? In exchange for whatever we can get out of them.” She closed her eyes, listening to the winds. “Where will we go if we leave Sloe? Or—what should I ask for—should I leave it to—to Jope?” Jope, fuck.

Taf made a thoughtful noise. He put out a hand, fine-boned and elegant despite the mining scars, and set it gently on the rock between Fox’s hands. An expression that Fox couldn’t read shivered over his features.

“Taf?” Ohnee frowned, glancing at the rock.

“‘Life exists in more forms than we can predict or comprehend,’” he said, voice soft as the silk of his robe.

Ohnee was still frowning. “What’s that from? And why are you quoting it?”

“A monograph on biodiversity by a long-dead speciationist.” He drew his hand back. “What do we think the combine will do with Fox’s rock?”

Ohnee pursed her lips. “Are you saying we should care?”

Taf looked at Fox.

“I care,” Fox said, as much to the rock as to her moms. “But—I want to, I need to do the right thing. For you guys and the co-op and—everyone.” The right thing at the right time. Please Pisque, let me not be graceless in this.

Unwilling to let the rock go, Fox slept with it tucked between one arm and her body. Curled up on her old cot, she was secure in the knowledge that she’d hear any approaching problem well before it arrived.

The defining feature of the small space that Ohnee and Taf made home was a panel of flexi—one of Fox’s earliest finds—set into the outside wall. It gave them a window overlooking the ice and breccia sea that edged part of Drumtown.

When she woke, Fox stared out over the sea’s frozen waves, low fog snugged into its jagged undulations, shadows sharp and long over the deeper troughs. The ice and breccia shifted, minutely, slowly, over time; some wit had dubbed it the Sloe Sea and it had stuck. Fox could just see the edge of the co-op–run ice-dredging works, which fed Drumtown’s supplemental water supply. The window shuddered and flexed in the wind off the sea; the whole silo shook with it sometimes, a music of her childhood.

It was shortly after the window’s installation that Fox had moved out of the co-op, after her disagreement with Jope. Moved out before she could be kicked out.

Hearing the sounds of Taf and Ohnee up and about, she rolled over.

“You guys owe me.”

Taf set a bulb of tea beside her and kissed her forehead, stood back up in a rustle of silk. “We gave you life, darling.”

“Yeah, but I gave you the best view in Drumtown.” She sat up cross-legged, the rock in her lap. “Any word?” she asked Ohnee, who sat at the table with her own bulb of tea.

“Nothing. Your flaks probably had to check with whoever sent them. Like I said, combine is leery of messing with us since the last dustup.”

“Been thinking about it,” Taf said from behind the bedroom screen. “I think it was probably Tilson who sent them. Some on the council think Tilson knows the real reason the combine kept us on Sloe.” Tilson was the highest combine exec on Sloe. Taf, who cultivated connections wherever he could, had some on the council. He emerged clothed in loose thermals that he managed to make look elegant.

Fox traced a finger over the spiral amoeba, listening in on bits of other conversations in the huge silo, feeling multiple shifts of air and motion on her skin. Someone on the next floor down was grinding their teeth in sleep, and over on the other side of the silo, old Minch was playing her viola. If Fox focused, she could feel the settling of the morning fog over the Sloe Sea.

Closer, Taf was sprinkling date sugar—another of the co-op’s contributions to the Drumtown economy, made from a date speciation grown in its hydroponics—on warm corn cakes.

“The combine,” Ohnee went on, “gave up its right to any Sloe salvage when it abandoned us. Tilson’s a suit leak for being loyal to them, but that’s his affair.”

Fox frowned. “I’m sorry I brought trouble on you guys. I just…”

“What trouble, a couple of flaks?” Taf waved a hand with a dismissive t-cha. He’d loosened his braids and his hair hung like rippled dark water as he set plates of corn cakes on the table.

Fox took her seat, one hand still on the rock, which she set by her plate. With her other hand she put a finger to the date sugar on the cakes, pressing to collect a finger full of the sticky grains and put the finger in her mouth as she had since she’d been a child.

At the rich burst of sweetness in her mouth, a jolt translated between the rock and her hand, all through her. The spiral amoeba flushed from indigo into spectrum, blue to green, gold, orange, crimson, rose.

In the ensuing silence, Fox heard several pairs of boots on the stairs, accompanied by familiar voices. One was Jope; the other two were Blanchard and peeing man.

“Jope’s coming with the flaks.”

Taf stood and gathered his hair in a twist. “Right. I’ll put on the kettle for more tea.”

It was all very civil.

“Tilson says we can get replacement of the collectors and a new generator,” Jope said, seated in Taf’s chair, big hand curled like a five-legged rock spider about a bulb of tea. He inclined his head in Fox’s direction. “So, you can see why I had to bring this to you—” He leaned forward then and actually looked at Fox. “You’ve always put the co-op first, Fox-girl, I know you have, and your people.”

“Jope,” Ohnee said, on a note of warning. She sat in her usual spot and Fox took some strength from her Ohnee-ness. Taf leaned against the counter, arms folded.

Blanchard stood behind Jope, menacing in her block-of-bland-protein way, while peeing man—whose name was Voisin—sprawled, gangly and impertinent, on Fox’s cot.

Fox folded her arms, mirroring Taf, feeling the rock inside her suit. “Not good enough. Collectors, generator, a supply of new filaments—and transport off Sloe. Or no deal.”

Voison, nee peeing man, rubbed a finger over one eyebrow and said, “Technically, everything in the mines is combine property.”

“Technically,” Taf echoed him, “the combine was contractually required to have lifted us off Sloe when the mines closed. So­—”

“—technically,” Ohnee chimed in, “the combine has forfeited its right to much of anything.”

“Hey now,” Jope said, spreading his hands, “we’re dealing in good faith here, aren’t we?”

Fox grit her teeth, then repeated, “Collectors, generators, filaments, transport—” she paused, thinking of what Ryuu had said about their life on Sloe, about her moms and how they’d worked to make a life here, and then added, “for those who want it—with automated shipments to continue.”

Jope drew a breath and said, “Girl,” but Blanchard leaned forward and dropped a hand on his shoulder, stilling him.

“I believe Tilson can agree to that,” she said.

“But can the combine be trusted to actually deliver?” Ohnee’s mutter wasn’t quiet.

Jope rubbed a hand over his mouth, clearly somewhat taken aback by Blanchard’s capitulation. He gave Fox a narrow stare. “What is this thing?”

“Yes,” Blanchard said, “time to produce the object, I believe.”

“No,” Fox said and felt the ripple of reactions through all present, muscles tightening, blood rushing as heartbeats sped up. “We need guarantees.” Her senses soaked in data from everyone in the room and she knew it was all down to the rock. It was waking up, had been for a while now.

“Agreed,” Ohnee said. “The combine hasn’t banked any trust with us.”

“We’re giving you your guarantee,” Blanchard said.

Fox examined the flak’s face, the twitch of a muscle in her cheek, the steadiness of her gaze. She felt a prickling awareness of muscle tension and shift, watched Blanchard’s hand.

Jope looked from the flak to Fox. “Is transport off Sloe really on the table here?”

Both flaks nodded once and Blanchard said, “It is.” They had sub-aural com contact with Tilson, Fox realized.

Jope breathed out, looking like he’d been hit by a pocket of heavy gee.

Fox tried to imagine life elsewhere, off Sloe, in the glamorous wider universe she’d been told about, but remembered only in vague imprints and flash-stills from her four-year-old self’s mosaic bits of memory.

She looked at her moms and realized they’d never really expressed any urgent desire to get back to that universe, to leave Sloe. There were those who did—like the scientist who found the rock, like Jope—but many who didn’t, who had made Sloe home, through bitter hard work, cussedness, and tenacity. They’d made it theirs.

It could all go sideways tomorrow, but it was home.

The right thing. Pisque, what is the right thing? She felt the rock—she wasn’t sure what it did, but a flush went through her, richer and smoother than clean oxygen or Ryuu’s liquor.

“What are you waiting for?” Blanchard said. “Show us the object.”

“From what Fox and that scientist say,” Taf said, “it’s not just an ‘object.’”

Blanchard shifted. “So what?”

Fox’s gaze hadn’t strayed from Blanchard’s hand. Now she watched as that hand—triggered by something in Fox’s expression, she thought—moved to a pocket.

Out came the wheezer.

And Fox knew what the right thing was. She met Blanchard’s pale gaze. “So, you and the combine, you can kiss Pisque’s sweet ass.”

Jope raised his hands as Blanchard took a step toward Fox. “Calm now, just give us some time. No need for that. Fox girl—” He broke off as Ohnee stood.

But Blanchard tapped a brief staccato into the wheezer, aimed at Fox. Fox’s breath caught, lungs going tight.

Pulling a long, wheezing breath, Fox shook her head.

Everything slowed down, the moment tunneling down into the contact between her and the rock. Warmth reached up from it, over her heart into her throat, easing straining lungs; suddenly she could breathe, whatever signal Blanchard’s device sent rendered null.

The rock was suddenly so warm it almost burned and Fox pulled it out of her suit. She ran her fingers over its rough surfaces, the intricate facets of the spiral amoeba, felt the pattern and energy of it pressing into the world, waves that never stopped.

Life, in more forms than they could predict or comprehend.

Fox closed her eyes, lifted the rock to her mouth and whispered on a breath—precious, remarkable breath—“Go.”

Her blood beat hard in the vast splinter of a moment before the rock shivered open in a flash of heat. Fox opened her eyes.

Rock debris fell away, a sift of thick, geologic dust. The air filled with scents, smoky liquor, date sugar, and something sweet as a kiss, endless and deep and wonderful as nothing else, something Fox couldn’t name.

A shout of life and vibrancy spoke in tattoo over her skin. Sharp breaths and curses came from around the room, as that tattoo of life touched each of them.

The vibration of the air escalated into singing, sub-aural, so low and deep it hurt. Blanchard cursed as the wheezer went to pieces in her hand. The flexi window shattered on the thrum and cold wind whipped in.

Fox could still feel it in all her senses, the entity that had been the rock. Then her senses were her own—but for a wisp of promise and the knowledge that it was still there, with them on Sloe, that it wouldn’t abandon them.

Her leg really fucking hurt.

“Bourbon, Sugar, Grace” copyright © 2017 by Jessica Reisman

Art copyright © 2017 by Jon Foster

For this month’s Ghibli Rewatch I’m changing the format a bit. Rather than going through each film chronologically, I’ll be looking at the shared themes of two Ghibli classics, and discussing how the films changed the studio.

One film is Hayao Miyazaki’s ebullient My Neighbor Totoro; the other is Isao Takahata’s devastating Grave of the Fireflies. The two directors worked on their projects simultaneously, and the films were ultimately released in Japanese theaters in 1988 as a double feature. I have decided to try to watch them back-to-back, to recreate the experience of the unsuspecting Japanese audiences who were about to watch one of the most heartbreaking films of all time, and then meet a creature who would quickly become a new icon of Japanese childhood. Will I get through them both? Will I get emotional whiplash during a double feature? Read on to find out.

Historical Background

Studio Ghibli was officially founded after the success of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Its first film was an original creation of Hayao Miyazaki’s, Castle in the Sky. A few years after that film, Miyazaki and his friend and collaborator, Isao Takahata, decided they would each tackle a film to be released in the same year. Miyazaki was not yet the animation god that he is now, so when he told people that his next movie would be a highly personal, almost drama-free work about two little girls and forest spirit, bottom-line-minded business men didn’t see the appeal. Meanwhile, Takahata wanted to adapt a bleak short story: Akiyuki Nosaka’s Naoki Prize-winning Grave of the Fireflies, written in 1967.

Grave of the Fireflies follows a young brother and sister fighting for survival in Japan during the last months of World War II. It’s based on Nosaka’s own tragic childhood, particularly on the deaths of his two sisters, both of whom died of malnutrition during the war. The second sister died after their father’s death in the 1945 Kobe bombing left Nosaka her sole caretaker, and he wrote the story years later to try to cope with the guilt he felt. Takahata wanted to tackle the story as an animated film because he didn’t think live-action could work – where would a director find a four-year-old who could convincingly starve to death on camera? But Takahata thought it would make for a dramatic feature, one that would show the young studio’s range. There was also a connection to Takahata’s childhood that I’ll detail below.

Totoro also came from his creator’s childhood: Miyazaki would draw a rotund bear/cat hybrid as a boy, and in the 1970s began drawing the adventures of a young princess who lives in the woods with a similar, slightly-less-cuddly, beast. That princess was eventually divided into two characters—one version of the princess became even more feral, and evolved into Mononoke Hime, but the other became a six-year-old girl who met a softer version of Totoro—and who was later again divided into the characters of Mei and Satsuki as they appear in the finished film.

Miyazaki set the film in Tokorozawa City in Saitama Prefecture, which had once been lush farmland, but in the late 1980s was being swallowed by the sprawl of Tokyo. He set out to make a film about childhood innocence, where the only antagonist—the mother’s illness—was already being defeated, and where neighbors—whether human or forest god—took care of each other. The problem was that studio execs weren’t sure that a film about innocence, starring a big furry god that their director had just made up, would set the box office on fire.

Toshio Suzuki, the not-nearly-sung-enough genius producer, was the one who suggested a way to fund both of their films projects: Shinchosha, the publisher of Grave of the Fireflies wanted to break into the movie business. Perhaps they’d pay for a double bill? This would allow Takahata to adapt the story into a faithful, feature-length film without having to deal with the difficulties of live action, and Miyazaki would have backing to make his whimsical forest spirit movie. Plus, they argued that teachers would likely arrange school outings to show their charges the historically significant Grave of the Fireflies, thus guaranteeing that the double bill would have an audience.

This worked…to a point. The films were made and released together, but the studio quickly found that if they showed Totoro first, people fled from the sadness of GOTF. Even swapping the films didn’t exactly result in a hit. It was two years later that Studio Ghibli became the iconic studio we know, thanks to a merchandising decision that ensured their success, but more on that later. The films are both masterpieces of economy, and creating extraordinary emotional tapestries out of tiny details. I rewatched the two films in the correct double feature order to try to recreate the experience of those poor unsuspecting Japanese audiences of 1988.

Grave of the Fireflies, or, Abandon All Hope

I should start by mentioning that I swore a blood oath to myself that I would never watch Grave of the Fireflies again.

I watched it again for this post.

I started crying before the opening credits.

Now, I don’t cry. I know people who sob over movies, books, PMS, sports, The Iron Giant…I am not such a person. But this movie opens with the death of a child, and gets worse from there. So in all seriousness, and all hyperbole aside, the following paragraphs and images are going to be about the death of children, so please skip down to the Totoro synopsis if you need to. I’ll be talking about Grave again further down, and I’ll warn you there, too. In the meantime, here’s a gif of older brother Seita trying to amuse little sister Setsuko after their mother is injured in an air raid:

Spoiler alert: it doesn’t work.

Isao Takahata has never been lauded to the same extent as his colleague Miyazaki. He joined Toei Animation right out of university, and worked on television throughout the 1960s and ‘70s. He began working with Miyazaki on his feature directorial debut, Hols, Prince of the Sun, in 1968, but when the film underperformed he ended up back in TV. He and Miyazaki teamed up for an adaptation of Pippi Longstocking that never got off the ground, and for a successful series titled Heidi, Girl of the Alps. He came aboard Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind as a producer, and then produced Studio Ghibli first feature, Castle in the Sky, before tackling what was only his second feature-length animation as a director, Grave of the Fireflies.

Takahata’s attachment to Grave stemmed largely from the events of his own childhood; as a nine-year-old boy, the future director lived through the horrific bombing of Okayama City, and drew on his own experience for the film. He and his ten-year-old sister were separated from the rest of their family, and fled through the city as it burned. “As I was running, more and more all around me, something would get hit, so the running would get more and more confusing. I’ll go this way, I’ll go that way, and then something was bursting into flames all around… there were places where they kept water to put out fires, and you’d pour it on yourself. But it would dry instantly. So what were we to do?” The two managed to reach the river, but along the way Takahata’s sister was wounded in an explosion, and Takahata’s feet were punctured by glass and asphalt that were melting in the heat.

This experience shows through in Grave, as the film’s early air raid sequence is one of the most harrowing events I’ve ever seen in on screen. In the last months of World War II, Seita and his little sister, Setsuko, are living an uncomfortable but manageable life with their mother. Seita believes the Japanese fleet is unstoppable, and his father is an Army Captain, so the family gets a decent ration of food and benefits from the military. This changes in an instant, however, when the children’s mother is grievously injured during an air raid. She dies from her wounds, but not before we get to see this:

Seita spends the next few months trying his best to care for Setsuko, always assuming that his father will be coming home. First, the two children go to live with a horrible abusive aunt, who starts off playing nice because she—like all the characters—thinks that Japan will win, and that the military will come home and those who supported them will be showered with rewards. As the weeks roll on, however, and Seita continues writing unanswered letters to his father, the money dries up, and so does the aunt’s tolerance. She begins needling Seita for going to the bomb shelter with the women and children, and for not working, despite the fact that there aren’t any jobs for him.

Seita finally decides to move into a lakeside bomb shelter with Setsuko. On paper this seems like a terrible decision, but Takahata uses perfectly escalating moments with the aunt to show just how bad life has become, until their escape to the shelter comes as a glorious relief. This makes it all the worse when the knife twists a few scenes later: Japan has begun to lose the war. Seita has money in the bank from his mother’s account, but no one is taking yen, and the kids have nothing to barter. He starts looting during air raids, but that means putting himself at risk, and leaving poor Setsuko alone for hours at a time. Finally he begins stealing. Throughout all of this Setsuko gets skinnier and skinnier, and breaks out in a rash.

No adults help. At all. Everyone is too concerned with their own survival. The one glimmer of “hope” comes when Seita is caught and beaten for stealing—the police officer takes his side and threatens to charge his captor with assault. But even here, the cop doesn’t take Seita home, or give him any food. Finally Seita goes into town, and is able to buy food, but while he’s there he learns that the Japanese have surrendered, and that the fleet has been lost. His father is dead. He and Setsuko are orphans.

But wait, there’s more!

He arrives home, and finds his sister hallucinating from hunger. He’s able to feed her a piece of watermelon, but she dies later that day. The film doesn’t specify how long Seita survives after that, but it seems like he’s given up. He spends the last of his mother’s money on Setsuko’s cremation, and finally dies at a train station just as the U.S. occupying forces are arriving.

So.

The one lighter element here is the film’s wraparound narrative. The movie opens with a child dying—Seita’s collapse in the train station. His body is found by a janitor, who also notices that he’s clutching a canister of fruit drop candy. In a genuinely weird touch, the janitor opts to throw the canister out into a field, by using a perfect baseball player’s wind-up and pitch motion. Is this a nod to the encroaching American culture? Because it creates a horrific jarring, callous moment. A child has died alone and unloved, but life is going on, this janitor is a baseball fan, and America is at the doorstep. As soon as the canister lands, Setsuko’s spirit comes out of it, and waits for her brother. He joins her a moment later, and the two travel together on the train (the normal Japanese subway, not like a spectral train or anything) and they go to a lovely hill above Kobe. The film checks in with the spirits a few times, and closes on them sitting together on a bench, watching over the city.

Again, the brightest spot in the film is the fact that you get to see the kids as happy-ish ghosts. Earlier, the sequence of their move into the bomb shelter is disarmingly lighthearted, at least at first. The kids catch fireflies and set them loose in their bedroom as lights, but of course by morning the insects have all died. When they reunite as spirits they’re surrounded by clouds of fireflies again—but are these living insects, lighting the ghosts way? Or are these spirits, too?

But even these fleeting moments of joy are brought back down by the ending. Seita and Setsuko have been reunited, and seemingly have an infinite supply of fruit candy to share, but they’re also doomed to sit on their bench watching life unfold without them. This creates an extraordinary feeling of weight. Like all modern countries, Japan’s glittering present was built on the bones of its wartime dead. The prosperous country that Takahata lived in, and the industry he worked in, both sprang from a post-war economy, with the loss of war forever hanging in the background.

As an American who was raised by her Dad to watch WWII-era classics, watching this movie a decade ago was my first time seeing an entirely Japanese perspective on the war. (I did have a mild Empire of the Sun obsession back in middle school, but even there, while Japanese culture is respected, the British and American POWs are clearly the heroes of the film.) And while I knew the statistics on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was still eye-opening to see Japanese civilians gunned down by fighter pilots, towns set on fire, children slowly starving to death from a lack of resources. While Takahata has said that he doesn’t intend the film to be “anti-war” it’s impossible to watch it and not see that whatever the ideologies at stake, it’s innocent children who suffer.

So in the name of innocent children, I’m going to move on to Totoro now, OK? I do think Grave of the Fireflies is an extraordinary achievement, and I think people should probably try to watch it once. I think it should be used to Ludovico world leaders before they authorize acts of war. But I also don’t like dwelling on it.

My Neighbor Totoro, or, Picking Up the Tattered Remains of Hope and Wrapping Them Around You Like a Warm Blanket On a Cold, Rainy Afternoon.

My Neighbor Totoro is set in the late 1950s, in an idyllic version of Miyazaki’s neighborhood. It’s possible that this film, like Kiki’s Delivery Service, takes place in a timeline where WWII was averted—if not, it’s barely a decade after the sad deaths of the children in Grave of the Fireflies, but it might as well be a different world. Here the sun shines, people live in quiet balance with nature, neighbors check in on each other, and elderly ladies happily care for a stranger’s children.

Satsuki and Mei Kusakabe move out to the country with their university professor father in order to be closer to their mother, who’s in the hospital with an unnamed illness. (She probably has tuberculosis—Miyazaki’s mother fought tuberculosis for years during the director’s childhood.) When we see her she seems OK—weak, but recovering. Both parents are loving and understanding, the neighbors are welcoming, and Nature, as we soon learn, is actively benevolent. This is that rare jewel—a story with no villain, no needless cruelty, and only a tiny hint of conflict.

The kids spend moving day rushing from room to room screaming with joy at literally everything they see. The meet Nanny, the elderly next-door neighbor, and chase Susuwatari—wandering soot or soot sprites (endearingly dubbed as “soot gremlins” in some versions of the film)—that have moved in since the house was empty. And here’s our introduction to the film’s philosophy: the kids see the soot sprites. They tell their father. Nanny and their father completely and unquestioningly accept the soot sprites’ existence. From here on we’re in a world with magic creeping in at the edges, in much the same way that the abject horror of GOTF crept in gradually, here a sort of healing magic seeps into the children’s lives. They’ve had a rough year. Their mother being hospitalized with an illness that’s often terminal, their father picking up the slack at work and at home, a move, and for Satsuki, an abrupt push from being Mei’s sister to being her caretaker. But here in the country, they’re surrounded by people who love them immediately, including the king of the forest.

Mei finds the small Totoro and pursues him into the forest. Like Alice before her, she falls down a hole, and finds herself in a strange world. Not a wonderland, however, simply the Totoro’s den. Everything about this scene is designed to feel safe. The snoring, the squishiness of the Totoro’s stomach, the whiskers, the button nose—you can feel his warmth radiating through the screen. OF COURSE Mei climbs up and falls asleep on him. OF COURSE he doesn’t mind. Like an old nanny dog who sits patiently while a baby tugs her ears, Totoro understands that the small loud pink thing means well.

And while this is a very sweet child’s story, where the film vaults into all-time classic status is when Mei tells Satsuki and her dad about Totoro. They think she’s dreamed him at first, and she gets upset. She thinks they’re accusing her of lying. And Miyazaki, being a filmic miracle worker, stops the film dead in order to let Mei’s anger and feeling of betrayal settle over everyone. This isn’t a film for grown-ups who can laugh away a child’s emotions, or wave their reactions away as tantrums or silliness. Mei is four years old, and she’s just told the people she loves most about an amazing adventure, and they don’t believe her. This is a tragedy. Maybe even a more concrete tragedy than her mother’s nebulous illness. And because Miyazaki is creating the world as it should be, Professor Kusakabe and Satsuki realize they’ve messed up.

They both reassure Mei that they believe her, and follow her to the base of the camphor tree that hides Totoro’s den. There’s a shrine there, and Professor Kusakabe leads the kids in bowing and honoring the gods of the shrine. This is the correct way to interact with Nature. Mei has been given a great gift—a direct encounter with the King of the Forest—and rather than ignoring the gift, or assuming it’s a hallucination, Professor Kusakabe makes this a special and solemn moment for the kids…and then races them back to the house for lunch, because kids can only stand so much solemnity. This becomes an ongoing theme in the film. My Neighbor Totoro would probably not be considered a “religious” children’s film in the Western sense the way, say, The Prince of Egypt would be. But Totoro is a forest god, and Miyazaki makes a point of stopping in at shrines around the countryside. Even the famous scene of Totoro waiting at the bus stop with the girls only comes after Mei decides she doesn’t want to wait in an Inari shrine.

At another point, when the girls are caught in a rainstorm they take shelter in a shrine dedicated to the boddhisatva Jizō (more on him below) but only after first asking permission. It’s one of the ways that Miyazaki builds the sense that the humans in the story are only one part of the natural and spiritual world around them.

One of the most striking things about this rewatch for me was that I went in remembering Totoro as a fundamentally sunny film, but in scene after scene the kids and their dad are stranded in torrential rains, or frightened by sudden, blustery winds. Nanny lectures the girls on farming techniques, and most of the neighbors spend their days working in the fields. These are people living a largely pre-industrial life, rising with the sun, working with the earth, growing and harvesting their own food, and sleeping in quiet rooms with only the sounds of frogs and crickets around them, rather than the buzz of radios or televisions. Though Miyazaki himself denies that the film is particularly religious, he did thread Shinto imagery throughout the film, and the Totoro family can be interpreted as tree spirits or kami. The tree is set off from the forest with a Torii, a traditional gateway, and wrapped in a Shimenawa—a rope used to mark a sacred area from a secular one. When Professor Kusakabe bows, he thanks the tree spirit for watching out for Mei—Totoro responds to the reverence later by rescuing her—and tells the girls about a time “when trees and people used to be friends.” Underneath that friendliness, though, is a healthy amount of awe. The children are at the mercy of Nature just as their mother is at the mercy of her illness. They are reverent toward Nature, and even when it comes in a cuddly form like a Totoro or a Catbus, it is still powerful and a little unsettling.

The only conflict comes in halfway through the film. Mrs. Kusakabe is finally well enough to come home for a weekend visit, and the girls are obviously ecstatic. They want to show their mother the new house, and tell her all about Totoro. When they get a telegram from the hospital Miyazaki again treats this through the eyes of the children. Telegrams are serious, only one family has a phone, Professor Kusakabe is at the university in the city. Each of these things build into a frightening moment for the children—has their mother relapsed? In this context it makes sense that Satsuki snaps at Mei. She’s shouldered a lot of the responsibility for her little sister, but she’s also a child missing her mom, and terrified that she’ll never see her again. So Mei, feeling completely rejected, fixates on the idea that her fresh corn will magically heal her mother and runs off to find the hospital. This goes about as well as you’d expect, and soon all the adults in the area are searching for Mei—with Nanny particularly terrified that Mei has drowned in a pond after she finds a little girl’s sandal.

Professor Kusakabe, en route to the hospital and thus unreachable in a pre-cellphone era, has no idea anything has happened to his children—he’s just rushing to his wife’s side to make sure she’s OK. Without the addition of magical Totoro this would be a horrifically tense moment. Is the children’s mother dying? Has Mei drowned? Has this family suffered two enormous losses in a single afternoon? But no, Satsuki, rather than relying on modern tech or asking an adult to take her to the hospital, falls back on her father’s respect for Nature. She calls on Totoro, who immediately helps her. Nature, rather than being a pretty background or a resource to exploit, is active, alive, and cares for the children.

Totoro was a decent hit, but it also had its share of issues coming to America. After a U.S. distributor made massive cuts to Nausicaä, Miyazaki decided that he wouldn’t allow his films to be edited for other markets. This led to two moments of cultural confusion that may have delayed the film’s arrival in America. First, the bathtub scene, where Professor, Satsuki, and Mei all soak in a tub together. According to Helen McCarthy’s study, Hayao Miyazaki: Master of Japanese Animation, many US companies were worried that this scene would be off-putting to American audiences, since it’s far less common for families to bathe together, particularly across gender. The other scene was a bit more innocuous. When Satsuki and Mei first explore their new home they yell and jump up and down on tatami mats. This would probably just look like kids blowing off steam to a US audience, but it’s considered a bit more disrespectful in Japan, particularly in the film’s 1950s setting. But after the issues with the U.S. edit of Nausicaa, Miyazaki refused to let anyone cut Studio Ghibli’s films. Ultimately, the first English dub was released in 1993 by Fox Video, with Disney producing a second English version in 2005.

Grave of the Fireflies, meanwhile, was distributed to the U.S. (also in 1993) through Central Park Media, and I found no evidence that anything was edited from the film in any of the releases, but the film has also never gained the cultural traction of its more family-friendly theatermate. The films were never shown together in the U.S., so while they were paired in Japanese consciousness, many U.S. anime fans don’t realize they’re connected. I think it’s is interesting though that a scene with a family bathing together was considered potentially offensive, but scenes of U.S. warplanes firing on Japanese children went unchallenged.

Are My Neighbor Totoro and Grave of the Fireflies in Conversation?

All cry/laughing aside, watching them as a double feature was a fascinating experience. Apparently when they planned the feature in Japan, they noticed that if they showed Totoro first, people would leave early on in Grave because it was too much to take after the joy of the other film. If they swapped them, Totoro could lighten the mood enough for people to experience both films. I recreated the latter experience, but what was weird was that watching Grave of the Fireflies first changed the way I saw Totoro.

First of all, the films have a lot of elements in common. Both feature a pair of young siblings—in Grave Seita is 14 and Setsuko is 4. This ten-year gap makes Seita unquestionably the adult figure to Setsuko, but he’s still too young to function as a young adult in society. His only aspiration seem to be to follow his dad into a career in the military, which the audience knows is an impossibility; Seita has no other skills, and his schooling has been interrupted by the war and their displacement. Even going in we know he can’t just find a job and raise Setsuko after the war. In Totoro Satsuki is 10, and Mei is 4. The gap isn’t so large…but, as in Grave, their parental figures are mostly absent. Their mother is in a hospital for tuberculosis, and their father, a professor, is absent-minded and clearly overwhelmed by life as a semi-single dad. Satsuki has taken over many of the domestic chores—not because her father is pushing her into the role, but because she wants to make her parents proud, and prove herself as a young adult rather than a child.

In both films the experiences are filtered entirely through the children’s point of view. Thus the young siblings trying to sing and play piano together, and capturing fireflies, despite the war raging around them; thus the utter stubbornness of a four-year-old who just wants her mom to come home from the hospital. On a more macro level, Grave portrays the destruction of Japanese cities during World War II, and how that destroys the innocence of two particular children. A decade later in Totoro, Japan has seemingly recovered from the war, and the film features lush fields and forests… but modern Japanese audiences know that this neighborhood (Miyazaki’s childhood neighborhood) has since been swallowed by Tokyo’s suburbs.

After the bleakness of Grave, I found the sweetness of Totoro both incredibly uplifting, and kind of suspect—and a bit eerie, as both films feature camphor trees, but we’ll get to that in a second.

The most heartbreaking moment of the double feature for me was the search for Mei. (Note: the following two paragraphs might ruin Totoro for you, so skip down if you need to.) Every other time I’ve watched the movie I’m emotionally invested, sure, but I know it turns out OK. After building the suspense around Mei’s disappearance, Miyazaki even includes a shot of her sitting with statues of the bodhisattva Kṣitigarbha, known in Japan as Jizō, or Ojizō-sama, who is the guardian of children (and firefighters, but that doesn’t come up here) so an audience watching this film in Japan will recognize those deities, and will know that they’re watching over Mei. It was seemingly this shot that inspired the disturbing “Totoro is actually a god of death” legend from a few years ago. In addition to watching over living children, Jizō takes care of children who die before their parents, or who are miscarried or aborted. Since they aren’t able to cross into the afterlife, they would technically be required to stack stones on the bank of the Sanzu River, um, forever, which seems harsh. Jizō takes care of them and teaches them mantras until they’ve gained enough merit to cross over, and since he’s seen protecting Mei multiple times, it added to the idea that he and Totoro were ushering one or both of the children into death. Personally I reject this theory because I hate “main character was dead/dreaming/insane/in a coma the entire time narratives”—they’re almost always lazy, and simply undercut any emotional connection that the film or book has built with its audience.

Having said that, though, investing in Totoro immediately after Grave of the Fireflies cast a shadow over how I saw the film. Here the entire community pitches in to dredge the pond when they think Mei has fallen in. When one of the farmers thanks them all for their hard work, another replies, “It could have been any one of us.” I actually started to cry again, because all I could think of was the contrast between that sentiment and the way all the adults kept their heads down and ignored Seita and Setsuko in Grave. Even worse is the next sequence, when Satsuki asks for Totoro’s help. He calls the Catbus, which seems more friendly than creepy now, and he flies through the air and rescues Mei, who is still sitting with the Jizō statues. The sisters share an ecstatic hug, and then Catbus goes the extra mile and takes them to see their mother (who is just getting over a slight cold) before taking them back to Nanny. Everything’s fine. Except this time… Mei’s rescue felt too fantastical. Even though I’ve watched this movie many, many times, and I love it, I realized that a part of me was waiting for Satsuki to wake up from a dream sequence to learn that Mei had drowned in the pond, and that the happy ending was only in her imagination. Watching Totoro this time, in the shadow of Grave of the Fireflies, changed my emotional experience. I don’t recommend it.

So about that Camphor tree…In Grave, Seita lies to Setsuko about their mother’s death for a while, hoping to give her the news in a gentle way. She finds out anyway, and he tries to soften the blow by lying again, this time telling her that their mother is buried beneath a lovely Camphor tree, and that they’ll visit her after the war. (In reality, their mother’s ashes are in a box that Seita carries with him, and seems to lose, before the film ends.) Guess what kind of tree Totoro lives in? Yeah, it’s a Camphor. And Totoro just happens to be accompanied by a middle-sized Totoro, and a small Totoro. And the small Totoro just happens to be the one that attracts Mei’s attention in the first place.

So I’ve just decided that the Grave of the Fireflies characters were all reincarnated as Totoros. Big Totoro is Mother, the Middle Totoro, always the caretaker, forever collecting acorns for Baby, is clearly Seita, and Baby Totoro is Setsuko—the one who first befriends a little girl who’s the same age she was when she died.

And if I’ve just ruined My Neighbor Totoro for you I’m sorry, but how much better is Grave of the Fireflies now? If you watch the movie believing that they all get to be Totoros in the end, you might just get through it.

The Cuddliest God of the Forest and the Legacy of Studio Ghibli

I mentioned earlier that, even with the double feature, neither film did quite as well as the studio hoped. Studio Ghibli’s success wasn’t sealed until 1990, when the board grudgingly OK’d a line of plush toys based on Totoro. These toys proved to be a goddamn tractor beam to children across Japan, and sales from the toy division kept the studio fiscally sound while Miyazaki and Takahata were able to craft new stories rather than having to churn out product. (Those toys are still a tractor beam—I cannot count how many Totoro-themed things are in my house, and I may have clapped, loudly, when he appeared onscreen during Toy Story 3.) I think I’ve made it reasonably clear on this site that I have…reservations…about capitalism. I think society’s turn toward corporatization has had a negative impact on art, childhood, farming, youth culture, the working class, the environment, individual expression, end-of-life care, and the basic ideas of what makes us human.

But…

I mean…

Even I have my weak spots.

Now, perhaps you’re asking yourself “What of Grave of the Fireflies? Is there any merch I can purchase to commemorate my viewing of that classic film?” You might be shocked to learn this, but there is! Or, at least there was at one time. Both films are resolutely dedicated to presenting a child’s point of view. in Grave, Setsuko doesn’t understand a lot of what’s happening to her and her brother. She just knows that she’s hungry and scared, and responds the way a child would to any instance of being hungry and scared. Sometimes she tries to be stoic, but just as often she cries and throws tantrums that Seita, who knows the gravity of their situation, can barely tolerate. One of the saddest elements of the film is the way he carefully hoards their last symbol of life before wartime, a tin of Sakuma fruit drops.

The fruit drops have been made by the Sakuma Candy Company since 1908, and the tins, which are often released with limited edition artwork, have become collectors items. You’ve probably guess where this is going: yes, they have released Grave of the Fireflies-themed tins.

No bug spray yet, which, come on.

I think this is an interesting way to commemorate one of the small joys the kids have in the film, but I think I’ll stick with my Totoro plushie.

So, I made it! I rewatched Grave of the Fireflies, and while it certainly colored my viewing of Totoro, my love for the King of the Forest is undiminished. Both of these films would have been extraordinary achievements on their own, but paired they showed that Studio Ghibli, with only one feature under their collective belt, could create a range of stories from a gut-wrenching drama to one of the sweetest, most effervescent children’s movies ever made. Both films, while initially not that successful, have since been acknowledged as all-time classics of anime. Over the next thirty years, they tackled coming-of-age stories, romances, medieval epics, and fairy tales, and continued their dedication to complex female leads, environmental theme, and gorgeous animation. I can’t wait to dive into the next essay, when I discuss Studio Ghibli’s two very different coming-of-age tales: Kiki’s Delivery Service and Whisper of the Heart!

But I think I’m renewing my ban on movies about war orphans.

Leah Schnelbach has a new life goal: night gardening with Totoro. Come follow the seeds and you will find…not an adventure, but Twitter!

Over nearly a decade, Seanan McGuire has established at least seven different fictional worlds, from faeries in the San Francisco Bay Area to examinations of what happens after “happily ever after”, and what civilization might look like post-zombie apocalypse. She regularly writes for at least five of these universes—there are so many that she needs another name to write them all!

Part of what makes McGuire’s work so engaging is that she pulls from preexisting folklore and pop culture and remixes these elements into wholly original worlds: St. George vs. the dragon, superheroes, marketing agencies, medical scares and scandals, fairy tale narratives that decide what the characters do instead of the other way around. Her Wayward Children series—Every Heart a Doorway and the upcoming Down Among the Sticks and Bones—opens multiple doors into a variety of portal fantasies. Similarly, you have seven doors in front of you—see which world(s) suits you best.

October Daye

Rosemary and Rue | A Local Habitation | An Artificial Night | Late Eclipses | One Salt Sea | Ashes of Honor | Chimes at Midnight | The Winter Long | A Red-Rose Chain | Once Broken Faith | The Brightest Fell | Night and Silence | The Unkindest Tide

Part-human, part-fae, changeling October “Toby” Daye has always moved between worlds: She’s grown up in the Summerlands, come of age at the Home for homeless changelings, tried to make a life in San Francisco with a human husband while simultaneously working as a knight in the Faerie Kingdom of the Mists overlaying Northern California. But after a faerie curse steals fourteen years of her life—and cuts her off from her family—Toby is ready to embrace only the human side of her heritage. Too bad that a dying fae geases her via answering machine into solving her murder and therefore returning to the Kingdom of the Mists. But why are they so happy to have her back?

Spells via modern technology—these are the kinds of intersection you see in great urban fantasy. Grounding the story in a familiar city makes for fascinating explorations into Faerie; for instance, did you know that the Japanese Tea Gardens in Golden Gate Park is actually a Fae kingdom masquerading as tourist destination? Toby’s new life begins in 2009, when the series began, and has continued on for nine books full of Cat Kings, Banshee/Siren Queens, kidnappings, gaslighting, and human police who just don’t get it. McGuire has plans to write at least four more volumes, though she’s open to adding in adventures; as she explained in a recent Reddit AMA, “I know exactly where the ending is. We veer left or right sometimes, to spend a little while exploring interesting landmarks (see! The Biggest Ball of Twine in Urban Fantasy!), but I always have my eyes on the final book.” And yes, they’re all named after lines from Shakespeare plays.

Available from DAW Books.

InCryptid

Discount Armageddon | Midnight Blue-Light Special | Half-Off Ragnarok | Pocket Apocalypse

Cryptid, noun:
1. Any creature whose existence has been suggested but not proven scientifically. Term officially coined by cryptozoologist John E. Wall in 1983.
2. That thing that’s getting ready to eat your head.
3. See also: “monster.”

The Covenant of St. George was tasked with eliminating cryptids, the “unnatural” creatures not allowed on the Ark when the world ended the first time. But when Alexander and Enid Healy suffer a crisis of conscience, they defect from the Covenant and turn their skills toward protecting the cryptids. Not that the cryptids are entirely innocent, either…

Cryptozoologist, noun: Any person who thinks hunting for cryptids is a good idea. See also “idiot.”

The Healys’ choice, though it claims their lives, ripples down through the generations. InCryptid follows jill-of-all-trades Verity Price: ballroom dancer, former reality TV star, and journeyman cryptozoologist reluctantly spends her spare time protecting cryptids from the Covenant of St. George. Despite her knowledge of the cryptids world, Verity just wants to work on her dancing career… but Dominic De Luca, her on-again/off-again boyfriend and a member of the Covenant, keeps tipping her off to cryptids who need her protection. And she’s just one member of the cryptozoologist family; her brother Alexander Price and cousin Sarah Zellaby have their own agendas, as well.

Compared to the October Daye series, InCryptid is a more open-ended world—McGuire said on Reddit: “[T]he ending is a little more malleable, because every member of the family has their own natural end-point, in addition to the ending for the overall family story. So Verity may have an ending long before Antimony does, and everyone may finish before Elsie. That sort of thing. There, I make sure I know how each family member ends once their turn comes up, and otherwise let the metaplot go where it will.”

Available from DAW Books.

Velveteen vs.

Velveteen vs. the Isley Crayfish Festival | vs. The Coffee Freaks | vs. The Flashback Sequence | vs. The Old Flame | vs. The Junior Super Patriots, West Coast Division | vs. The Eternal Halloween | vs. The Ordinary Day | vs. Patrol | vs. The Blind Date

What if superheroes didn’t work alone, but were united under one organization—not a league of justice, but an actual corporation? Velma “Velveteen” Martinez is one of many gifted youngsters “adopted” by The Super Patriots, Inc., which nurtured her powers and made her their sweetest, most marketable superpowered asset. But when Velma decides to graduate from superhero adolescence and spend her adulthood as a civilian, the Marketing Department doesn’t take kindly to losing its investment.

Not surprisingly, McGuire’s take on the superhero genre is wonderfully meta: Velma herself realizes that the stock tropes shaping her superhero life—including a big friend breakup in her teens—are all engineered by the Marketing Department. Rather than turn to The Super Patriots, Inc. for instructions on how to use her powers, she takes to fan forums for guidance. When her decision to leave SPI brands her a supervillain by the media, Velveteen bands together with other misfits who “washed out” or otherwise cut ties with SPI in order to defend against attacks on their lives… and their reputations.

Available online and in collected editions from ISFiC Press.

Indexing

Indexing | Indexing: Reflections

In McGuire’s world, you don’t tell fairy tales—fairy tales tell you. That is, the narrative of your favorite Brothers Grimm and Disney stories is a magical force that will stop at nothing to act out a particular story, no matter the collateral damage. That’s where the ATI Management Bureau comes in; with the help of the Aarne-Thompson Index, they identify and stop these memetic incursions before they rack up victims on their way to happily ever after. Because while HEA might mean a true love’s kiss or an evil queen defeated, the innocent bystanders make up a pretty high body count.

What makes the ATI agents so good at their jobs? They’re all touched by the narrative, frozen in different spots of their respective fairy tale stories as quasi-tropes. Henry (short for Henrietta) is a 709, Snow White in a holding pattern, with the otherworldly looks (white skin, red lips, black hair) and pesky birds slamming themselves into her window in some odd form of tribute. Her fellow agent Sloane missed becoming a Wicked Stepsister (315) by inches, but no one trusts her to make coffee or drive a car, lest it trigger her homicidal tendencies. Nevertheless, her averted incursion allows her to sense when the story is trying to cast someone in the central role. Sleeping Beauty (410) cases means everyone falls asleep and then dies; Goldilocks and the Three Bears (171) cases will probably end with someone getting mauled.

Indexing is a serial published by Amazon’s 47North imprint.

Every Heart a Doorway

Every Heart a Doorway | Down Among the Sticks and Bones | Beneath the Sugar Sky

Not content just to control multiple worlds through different book series, McGuire dreamed up a universe composed of countless worlds accessible through all manner of doors. Her first Tor.com Publishing novella (available April 5) subverts the typical portal fantasy story—think Alice in Wonderland, or the Narnia series—by asking what happens after the protagonist saves the fantasy world, and is no longer useful. “Imagine being pulled out of your normal world for a special task […] and then, when it’s over, being thrown back into your normal life, and told that you’re never going to be able to go back to the place where you were special, accepted, happy, and whole,” she explains in a recent interview. Dark stuff, but a necessary coming-of-age story for readers who wished they could cross through a magical wardrobe. In the case of Nancy, the latest portal fantasy castoff, she finds solace in Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children, where she and her fellow misfits are allowed to share stories of the worlds they can no longer access as they grapple with transitioning back to the “real” world.

The best part is, you don’t have to say goodbye to Nancy and the others at the end of Every Heart a Doorway! Down Among the Sticks and Bones—publishing June 13th—follows Jack and Jill through their own portal fantasy, encountering some old friends along the way. The third volume, Beneath the Sugar Sky, will follow in January 2018—bringing with it a new visitor from Sumi’s sunny and chaotic world.

Available from Tor.com Publishing.

When McGuire wants to write science fiction, thrillers, and horror, she turns to her open pseudonym Mira Grant. “I wanted a pseudonym for my science fiction because I wanted to create some ‘distance’ between it and my urban fantasy work,” she explains on her website. “Mostly, I wanted people to judge the Mira Grant books on their own merits, not based on how much they read like something they’d expect me to write. I believe this was the right decision, and I’ve been very happy with my life as Mira Grant.”

Newsflesh

Feed | Deadline | Blackout | Rise | Feedback

While zombie stories endlessly crop up like the pesky living dead they depict, Grant’s Newsflesh series is one of the rare zombie narratives that sets the undead in the context of wholly unique worldbuilding. For one, everyone is infected—with Kellis-Amberlee, the hybrid virus made up of the cure for cancer and the cure for the common cold. KA lays dormant in all mammals… until they die, and amplify into zombies. While the Rising (beginning in 2014) is contained within a few years, it is by no means eradicated: By the time Feed opens in 2040, an entire generation has grown up knowing about zombies—accustomed to regular blood tests, willing and able to shoot at anything amplified, and, in many cases, named after major figures in zombie lore. Take the two main characters, bloggers Shaun (for Shaun of the Dead) and Georgia (for George Romero) Mason. Unlike most stories within this genre, in the Newflesh universe, zombies are a part of pop culture even before the Rising.

But how do people in this world learn about KA in the first place? That’s all thanks to bloggers. While the mainstream media initially shrugged off the first zombie sightings as erratic flu behavior or zombie cosplay, it was bloggers who delivered on-the-ground, no-holds-barred reports about what was really happening. By 2040, people trust bloggers—now split into groups of Newsies, Irwins, Stewarts, Aunties, and Fictionals based on their specialties and writing styles—to tell the truth. If the commentary on virology, zombies, and journalism weren’t enough, Grant also throws in politics: After the End Times, Shaun and Georgia’s blog, follows Republican senator Peter Ryman on the campaign trail, which might more accurately be described as a minefield.

And that’s just the first book! Newsflesh takes some gutsy risks including (highlight text for spoilers) Georgia amplifying, with Shaun having to execute her, the introduction of equally-plausible cloning technology to “resurrect” the dead in an entirely new way, and a taboo incest love story. It’s an incredibly smart, well-researched series that deserves to join Romero’s oeuvre, Max Brooks’ World War Z, and other entries in the zombie pantheon. Good news for old and new fans: 2016 will see the release of two Newsflesh books: Rise, collecting all of the short fiction in the Newsflesh universe; and Feedback, a retelling of Feed from the perspective of the Democratic party.

Available from Orbit Books.

Parasitology

Parasite | Symbiont | Chimera

For her second trilogy, Grant went back to the same question that inspired Newsflesh: How much would you trust a medicine with regulating your body from disease? In this case, it’s SymboGen’s Intestinal Bodyguard: a genetically engineered tapeworm that gives you the proper doses of insulin, estrogen, endorphins—whatever chemical or hormone your body needs to function. For all the ick factor of willingly putting a tapeworm egg in your body, there are the countless tradeoffs: better, more affordable healthcare; not having to remember daily pills or injections; defense against the germs pressing in from outside. Consider Sally, SymboGen’s poster child for incredible success: After a car accident left her in a coma with no chance of waking up, her Intestinal Bodyguard virtually brought her back from the dead.

But not everyone else is so fortunate: Six years after Sally’s miraculous recovery, people start coming down with a strange “sleeping sickness” that looks less like sleepwalking and more like the walking dead. At the same time, Sally and her boyfriend Nathan uncover a vast conspiracy involving SymboGen, Nathan’s supposedly dead scientist mother, and—most terrifyingly—the notion that the tapeworms are sentient beings. Just like in Feed, Grant employs a fascinating narrative device in the first installment, Parasite (highlight for spoilers): Partway through the book, after meeting several hosts completely controlled by their tapeworms, Sally realizes that she is a tapeworm, too. But she suffers a mental break that makes her forget this information until the end of the book.

For all of their zombie allusions, Grant’s stories are based in real science and—even more frighteningly—in the societal shifts that already exist, like our willingness to take whatever pill is needed without questioning what’s in the pill. Putting the thrill in medical thrillers, that’s Mira Grant.

Available from Orbit Books.

It may be hard to pick just one, but which of Seanan McGuire’s worlds is your favorite?

This article was originally published in March 2016, and has been updated with new titles.

Natalie Zutter was so vindicated to read Newsflesh when she was embarking on a blogging career in 2010. You can read more of her work on Twitter and elsewhere.

A good short story collection can be an overstuffed attic, a trunk overflowing with costumes and masks, a cabinet of curiosities. Rather than pulling you into one world and making you love a cast of characters over time, as a novel does, a collection can function like a jewel, each surface refracting light in a unique way, showing you a different part of the world or the human mind. Amber Sparks’ The Unfinished World is a very good short story collection. Each time you think you’ve hit the bottom of the trunk, there’s one more mask tucked away under a tulle skirt; each time you think you’ve seen every curiosity in the cabinet, you come across a stuffed albino alligator or a preserved bear’s tooth hidden in a corner.

The best part? Sparks never lets you get too comfortable. Do you think you’re in some gossamer-winged fairy story, where true love will prevail? Because you might be in a story with a serial killer, or with an unhinged brother, or with a father who cannot love. Sparks will show you a perfect knife with an intricate blade, make you fall in love with its beauty, and then turn it and slice you right down to the heart before you realize what’s happening.

Some of the stories are quite realistic: “The Janitor in Space” is only a help-step beyond our current reality, in which space travel is so routine that NASA has the resources to hire a woman to be a dedicated space janitor, rather than needing trained astronauts to clean up after themselves to save, well, space. “The Lizzie Borden Jazz Babies” is mostly a story about two sisters who grow up along diverging paths, with only a hint of the fantastical. “And the World was Crowded with Things that Meant Love” is, as you would expect, a love story, and a magical one, but it’s also constructed entirely of real world materials.

There are plenty of genre-heavy stories here, too! “Thirteen Ways of Destroying a Painting” deals in time travel, in a perfect way, with a person dead set on removing a classic painting from her timeline for reasons that only become clear as the story unfolds. “Lancelot in the Lost Places of the World” does what is says on the tin, sending Lancelot on a quest to find the mythical land of Prester John. Here the joy of the story is in Lancelot’s absolute dedication to chivalry—faced with being brought to life hundreds of years after Camelot, he undertakes the quest, thinks his way through many perils, and treats all the wild people he meets as potential brothers-in-arms—which all adds up to a portrait of a man who lived by a different standard of hero-dom. This is subtle but wonderfully done.

Sparks is fascinated by our not-so-distant past, when the world was a little more mysterious than it is now. “Birds with Teeth” treats early paleontology as the adventure it probably was. The title story, “The Unfinished World” follows two kids through the first decades of the 20^th century, as their elder brothers explore the Antarctic or are lost in World War I, their sisters become glamorous kept women or furious mothers, the world is wracked with fevers and choleras… Finally, the story washes ashore at the Golden Age of Hollywood, when making a movie was as exotic and thrilling as traveling to the jungles of Africa or South America. Nothing explicitly fantastic happens here (although there is one central mystery which Sparks leaves unsolved) but life itself takes on the flavor of fantasy.

Sparks is particularly good at riffing on other writers in fun, twisty ways. I read “The Fever Librarian” as a Calvino/Borges homage, but Sparks is so down-to-earth and tactile that the story becomes something very different. It posits an otherworldly realm where fevers are catalogued. Like the best of these types of stories, it announces the premise and dives straight in—we never learn what the application process is like for a fever librarian, or who her references were, she is her job. She is the catalogue of every fever that has ever shaken through a person or a society, but she is not allowed to feel those fevers. Unfortunately, she’s beginning to slip. Her private battle with her own fevers is interwoven with historical definitions of different types of fevers from the Egyptians, the Greeks, Abu Bakr ibn Muhammed Zakariya al-Razi, and Charles Mackay. “Fevers” here include everything from medical conditions to fads like goldfish swallowing, waterbeds, and bloodlust in the form of the Crusades. Since Sparks isn’t afraid to tackle real emotion, even at the risk of falling into sappiness, the Librarian’s plight becomes a real, fraught experience for the reader. At the same time, she’s perfectly comfortable with the high concept highwire act of conflating Congo Hemmoraghic Fever with that weird period when Hollywood was churning out beach movies—taking the ancients’ idea that fever was any temporary “passion” whether emotional or physical, which then reminds the reader that the emotional is physical and vice versa.

I saw “Take Your Daughter to the Slaughter” as a particularly American, gun-toting reworking of Angela Carter. The story reimagines Take Your Child to Work Day as a violent bonding experience between fathers and their daughters, with a fair amount of psychosexual subtext bubbling up with all the blood. This story shows off Sparks’ amazing compactness as a writer—it’s not even three pages long, but it packs a centuries-old tradition, werewolf lore, purity dances, and every uncomfortable “dad getting a shotgun for the boys as his daughter reaches puberty” joke into one tight, perfect story.

“Things You Should Know about Cassandra Dee” and “The Process of Human Decay” both use frameworks that could become gimmicky, but each works such a fine balance between the macabre and the heartfelt that they transcend their structures. The first is written as a series of numbered paragraphs that tell a chronological story of Cassandra Dee’s tragic life. The story transcends the structure by announcing at the outset exactly what’s going to happen, but then executing the final act in such an unexpected, and emotionally gutting way that it works completely. “The Process of Human Decay” follows the literal process of human decay, from “Fresh” to “Dry Remains”, but uses that skeleton to explore a human life in all its complexity and desperation.

The longest story in the collection, “The Unfinished World”, clocks in at 78 pages, and shows off the strengths of the long short story. It’s expansive skipping across decades, and introducing us two very different children: the coddled Set, born into a rich, eccentric family and told from an early age that he died and only came part of the way back to life, and lonely Inge, the youngest daughter of a German-Irish family whose patriarch torments her and abandons her after her mother dies in childbirth. Set has a children’s book author for a mother. His eldest brother, Cedric, is an explorer by trade, while middle brother Oliver is a bit nebulous, but also gives Set free run of the Cabinet of the Curiosities that he’s collected in his travels. Oliver’s lover Desmond usually lives with the family, while only Sister Constance is a kept woman and lives in a fabulous apartment in the city. They are the Glass Family by way of Grey Gardens, and I love them all. I especially love that Sparks allows real tragedy to come to them, rather than wrapping them in twee. Inge, made tough by years of neglect and/or abuse, leaves Ireland to travel the world, and the two crazy kids weather World War I, the Spanish flu, the birth of Hollywood, early documentary filmmaking, and a series of tempestuous love affairs. Are they fated to come together? Even If they do, can true love save anyone in the opening decades of our modern world? I’m certainly not going to spoil it.

The entire collection is fun and surprising—in that lovely way that walking along in waist-deep water is fun and surprising when you suddenly step off the edge of a trench, and find yourself kicking through a much colder and darker situation. The Unfinished World will remind you how powerful and self-contained an experience a short story can be.

Leah Schnelbach knows that as soon as this TBR Stack is defeated, another will rise in its place. Come give her reading suggestions on Twitter!

Strictly speaking, The Great Wall of China isn’t a single wall. It’s a complex network of walls, barracks, watch-towers, and other fortifications, and construction on early versions of it might’ve begun more than 2500 years ago. Each of these successive works was, for its time, an astonishing feat of engineering—even if none of them were ever, as the myth goes, visible from space. All of them shared a common purpose, which was to help defend the northern states of China against invasions from various peoples of the Eurasian steppes in and around what is today Mongolia.

This is not quite the story told by Zhang Yimou’s 2016 film The Great Wall, starring Matt Damon, Jing Tian, Pedro Pascal, and Andy Lau—most especially because the real Great Wall has nothing to do with a meteor and rage-fueled lizard dogs from space.

Anyway, let me first say that from a visual perspective this movie can be gorgeous. And, perhaps not surprisingly, the best parts of the film are the set pieces that have become a kind of hallmark of Chinese historical epics. Bright colors. Whipping banners. Waves of extras in perfect choreography. Tracking shots of slow-spinning bolts hurtling through the air. Armed women launching themselves down into the chaos with balletic grace. A squad of gloriously uniformed signal drummers who relay orders in perfect rhythm by playing the drums with nunchucks…because why the hell not, that’s why.

It’s also got a dynamite soundtrack (Ramin Djawadi, whose work you probably know from HBO’s Game of Thrones), and several of the Chinese actors—in particular Jing Tian as Commander Lin Mae and Andy Lau as Strategist Wang—work hard to do something with their roles.

Unfortunately, a lot of the rest of the film doesn’t really work. The story isn’t much of one. Character development is pretty much nil. Plot “twists” are consistently telegraphed way ahead of time. And many of the coolest moments are pretty much stolen from other films: from Tangled’s lanterns in the sky, to the rage-fueled lizard dogs—called the Tao Tei in the film—trying to dog-pile-climb up the Great Wall’s face in World War Z zombie style. (It’s surely not a coincidence that Max Brooks, author of World War Z, is among the story writers in the credits.) Worse, I think, Matt Damon seems to walk through too many of his scenes, and he unsuccessfully tries to pull off some kind of accent that seriously doesn’t work. (I think he was going for Scottish, but it was so in-and-out I couldn’t tell for sure.)

And then there’s the history.

Oddly, when it comes to the history, I was bothered less by the idea of the angry dino-doggies than I was by the various other historical cock-ups in the film. Apparently, I can accept the fantasy of the Great Wall being built to keep out monsters, but I draw the line at the Great Wall hydraulically lifting itself to expose spinning razor blades. I’ve got my own impassable walls, y’all.

One of my biggest issues is the fact that this movie is clearly set upon the Great Wall as we picture it today: an undulating ribbon of stone that flows along crisp ridge-lines. Wide enough for riders, punctuated by square towers whose banners float in the breeze, this Great Wall is visibly and militarily magnificent, and most of it was constructed during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644).

The movie, though, makes clear that it is set around the year 1100, during the early parts of the Song Dynasty (960-1279). Why did they set it so early? I guess because the excuse for getting Matt Damon’s British-ish character William and Pedro Pascal’s Spaniard Tovar over to China is that they’re mercenaries trying to steal the secret of black powder. That’s an admittedly cool idea … except that since no one in Europe knew about black powder at the time, no one would be trying to steal it like this. (Also, the kind of explosive power William and his pals want wasn’t really in use until about a century later, but I’m willing to give the film a pass for that.)

There’s a long list of other little errors, of course, like Damon wearing his armor wrong, metallurgy being capable of making weapons far fancier than would have been possible, or the complete hilarity of William snapping apart a Chinese crossbow to make himself a badass bow. (Because as a medieval Englishman of course he’s like the world’s greatest archer.)

Let me highlight just one of these historical issues, though: the magnetic lodestone that is a major plot point.

I’m going to focus on this one since it gets at two of the Big Issues that folks were worried about when this movie was originally announced: whitewashing and white savioring. These concerns ought to have been expected by the film-makers: the trailers heavily featured a white dude in medieval China, after all, and as a result they certainly lent themselves to a reading of Damon as the white savior who must save the Chinese.

On the worry of whitewashing, I can assure you that the movie isn’t as bad in this regard as it might have looked from the ads and commercials. The purpose of Damon’s character within the plot is most essentially to be that of an outsider. No matter his own abilities, he’s in this movie first and foremost to look on in amazement at the wonder of the Great Wall and the Chinese forces. For that very reason, his role is not one that could have been readily filled by a Chinese actor. No whitewashing here.

Things are more complicated, though, when it comes to the worry that this was going to be a white savior narrative. On the one hand, yeah, Damon’s William does some heroic things, but he’s also pretty consistently overshadowed by Jing Tang’s Commander Lin. So that’s mostly okay, I guess. On the other hand, suggesting that the medieval Chinese don’t understand lodestones and so they only have the one that Western White William has brought them is…well, it’s insultingly the complete reverse of reality. The Chinese were studying magnetic stones as early as the Han Dynasty, around a 1000 years before Damon’s character was a glint in his mama’s eye. By the time of the Song Dynasty—the setting of the film, you remember—Chinese navigators were making regular use of the compass, a technology that wouldn’t show up in White William’s West until around the 13th century. The Chinese knew lodestones, folks. They had them all over the place. They even wrote about them repeatedly, as in the nearly 2,000-year-old work Lunheng (論衡), which includes the line “a lodestone attracts a needle.”

So, yeah, the idea that the Chinese need Damon’s stone to defend their Great Wall from the Tao Tei is, well, pretty straight-up white savior ridiculousness. And not only did the writers do a disservice to Chinese history on this point, but they actually missed an opportunity to do something pretty cool with it. That line I quoted from the Lunheng, after all, is in a section entitled “A Last Word on Dragons“.

I’m not kidding.

As for my last word on this particular dragon, I wanted to point out that—raging eyes-in-shoulders reptilian Cujos aside—there’s a lot of scholarly debate not just about the effectiveness of border walls in general, but also about the Great Wall in particular. The various incarnations of the Great Wall were certainly effective enough to have been built and rebuilt over the centuries. On the other hand, a map of the various walls shows the volatility of the border—the walls were quite rarely built in the same place—and the fact that they were hardly a fully contiguous line. Plus, the history of northern China includes more than a few successful invasions that went over or around the Great Wall.

As I once heard a student say, people were bound to figure out how to build ladders.

In seriousness, the Great Wall seems to have functioned quite suitably as what we might call a day-to-day deterrent. It kept small raiding parties at bay. Concerted attempts to get past it, on the other hand, could be successful, as they were on the part of the Mongols and Manchus. Whether that makes the Great Wall an effective use of the resources that were put into its construction—including the oft-reported figure of a half-a-million forced laborers buried in its works—is a matter that’s over my pay-grade.

For those interested in reading more about these aspects of the real Great Wall of China, though, you’d do well to check out Stephen Turnbull’s excellent 2007 study, The Great Wall of China.

Michael Livingston is a Professor of Medieval Literature at The Citadel who has written extensively both on medieval history and on modern medievalism. His historical fantasy series set in Ancient Rome, The Shards of Heaven and its sequel The Gates of Hell, is available from Tor Books.

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.

Today we’re looking at Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette’s “Boojum,” first published in Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s Fast Ships, Black Sails anthology in 2008. Spoilers ahead.

“Black Alice was on duty when the Lavinia Whateley spotted prey; she felt the shiver of anticipation that ran through the decks of the ship.”

Summary

The Lavinia Whateley (aka “Vinnie”) is a bad-ass space-pirate ship.  She’s also a living creature, an “ecosystem unto herself,” an enormous deep space swimmer with a blue-green hide impregnated with symbiotic algae.  Her sapphire eyes are many; her great maw is studded with diamond-edged teeth; her grasping vanes can furl with affection or grapple a “prey” ship beyond hope of escape.  Like all Boojums, she was born in a cloud nursery high in the turbulent atmosphere of a gas giant.  Mature, she easily navigates our solar system, skipping from place to place.  Eventually she may be capable of much greater skips, out into the Big Empty of interstellar space itself.

Her crew lives inside her, under the iron command of Captain Song.  Black Alice Bradley, escaped from the Venusian sunstone mines, serves as a junior engineer but aspires to “speak” to Vinnie as the captain and chief engineers can.  Because, you see, she loves her ship.

One day Vinnie captures a steelship freighter.  After Song’s “marines” take care of the crew, Black Alice goes on board to search for booty — all valuables must be removed before Vinnie devours the freighter whole.  She discovers a cargo hold packed with silver cylinders she recognizes too well — they’re what the dreaded Mi-Go use to pack human brains for transport.  Captain Song rejects Black Alice’s warning about bringing the canisters aboard Vinnie.  After all, the Mi-Go are rich miners of rare minerals — let them pay Song ransom if they want these particular brains back.

Sensitive as she’s grown to Vinnie’s “body language,” Black Alice begins to notice the Boojum’s not quite herself.  When Song directs her toward Sol, Vinnie seems to balk.  When Song directs her out toward Uranus, Vinnie’s birth planet, she travels eagerly.  Does Vinnie want to go home?  If they continue to frustrate her, will Vinnie go rogue like other Boojums that have devoured their own crews?

Chief Engineer Wasabi sends Black Alice on an extravehicular mission to repair a neural override console anchored to Vinnie’s hide.  Black Alice hopes the repairs will make Vinnie feel better — certainly the Boojum’s flesh looks inflamed and raw around the target console.  The console casing is dented, debris damage Black Alice thinks at first.  Then, watching Vinnie vane-lash her own flank, she wonders if the Boojum damaged the console herself, trying to sweep it off as a horse would tail-swat a tormenting fly.

Black Alice asks Wasabi if they can move the console to a less tender spot.  Leave that “governor” alone, he replies, unless she wants them all to sail into the Big Empty.  Is that what Vinnie longs for then, to begin the next phase of her evolution in the space between stars?

Just get the repairs done, Wasabi says, because company’s coming.  Not welcome company, either, Black Alice sees.  Hundreds of Mi-Go, hideous as the pseudoroaches of Venus, approach on their stiff wings, bearing silver canisters.  Nor do they come to negotiate for the captured brains. As they enter Vinnie, Black Alice hears the screams of her crewmates.  She hopes they’re dying but fears their fate will be worse — the Mi-Go have brought along canisters enough for all.

Black Alice has begun to communicate with the Boojum via hide pulses and patch cables; she explains what’s happening to the crew, what will soon happen to her, how she’s detaching the governor console so Vinnie can go free.  Vinnie offers to help Black Alice.  To save her.  To eat her.  What?  Well, better that than madness in a can.

Black Alice enters Vinnie’s vast toothy mouth.  The teeth don’t gnash her, but the trip down Vinnie’s throat crushes her ribs.

The blackness of unconsciousness gives way to the blackness of what?  Death?  If so, death’s comfortable, a swim through buoyant warmth with nothing to see but stars.  Vinnie speaks to her with a new voice, “alive with emotion and nuance and the vastness of her self.”  Black Alice realizes she’s not just inside Vinnie.  She is Vinnie, transformed and accepted, embraced by her beloved ship.  Where are they going?

Out, Vinnie replies, and in her, Black Alice reads “the whole great naked wonder of space, approaching faster and faster.”  As Vinnie jumps into the Big Empty, Black Alice thinks how tales will now be told about the disappearance of the Lavinia Whateley, late at night, to frighten spacers.

What’s Cyclopean: The Mi-Go have “ovate, corrugated heads.” That’s a nice way of saying they’re rugose.

The Degenerate Dutch: Humanity may colonize the solar system, but we’ll still take the most traditional aspects of our cultural heritage with us. For example, slavery.

Mythos Making: Naming your spaceship after Wilbur Whateley’s mama is an interesting life choice. So is crossing the Mi-Go.

Libronomicon: Pirates aren’t much for reading.

Madness Takes Its Toll: It’s rumored that brains go mad in Mi-Go canisters. Doesn’t decrease their value on the black market, though.

Ruthanna’s Commentary

“Boojum” is the first (I think) of an irregular series of Bear/Monette Lovecraftian space opera stories. Together, they address the pressing question of what, exactly, it’s like to become a spacefaring species in a cosmic horror universe. And provide the answer: doesn’t a really close-up view of an uncaring cosmos sound like fun?

It does, at least for the reader. “Boojum” manages to be both fun and dark, melding three separate subgenres (along with the space opera and the Lovecraftian horror, it’s a perfectly cromulent pirate story) into a world where you can worry simultaneously about your suit’s air supply, your keelhauling-prone tyrannical captain, and Mi-Go brain surgeons. Good times.

The Mi-Go are the element of the story taken most directly from Lovecraft. They’re much as described in “Whisperer in Darkness,” including the mention that they, like the boojums, can travel through space freely in their own flesh. And that they have… ways… of bringing others with them. I tend to privately gloss over the specifics of how brains get into canisters in “Whisperer,” because otherwise I get distracted by the screaming of my inner neuroscientist. But if you’re not going to gloss, it’s best to go all the way in the other direction, so I kind of love that they stink up the hold with their fleshy putrescence, and that Black Alice actually opens one up and sees the extracted brain in all its glorious creepiness.

The major change in “Boojum” is the ambiguity of those brain canisters. In Lovecraft’s original, we hear directly from those the Mi-Go have disembodied. They seem brainwashed (so to speak) but coherent, and pretty excited about getting to see the sights of the universe. We never do find out whether “Boojum’s” brains are willing guests or prisoners, companions or trade goods. We just know that the Mi-Go don’t take kindly to them being pirated.

The space opera setting is lightly sketched, giving only the basic background needed to enjoy the ride. Humanity has spread around the solar system, collecting all manner of resources that can be both traded and, um, gently borrowed. There’s more than one way of getting around, with steelships both more common and more slow than the omnivorous bioluminescent horrorships favored by our pirate protagonist. Have I mentioned that I love organic spaceships? They’re such an unlikely trope, but there they are in Farscape and the X-Men’s Brood Wars and random Doctor Who episodes, giving literal embodiment to the sentimental metaphor of ship as living member of the crew. Or poorly treated slave, all too often. Maybe take a lesson from the Elder Things about enslaving entities that can eat you when they revolt?

Calling them boojums invokes yet another corner of literature—the absurdity of Lewis Carroll a distinct flavor from the type of irrationality invoked by Lovecraft. Yet another card in Bear and Monette’s fistful of genres. Maybe the point is that you can’t count on even the level of predictability found in cosmic horror; no danger is off the table. Similarly, there’s little pattern to the naming of boojums. They all carry human names, but not from the same source. Still, Lavinia Whately is an interesting choice. Either this is a world containing both the Lovecraftian canon and real Mi-Go, or that’s the equivalent of naming your ship Mother Mary. I’m inclined toward the latter interpretation, and wonder whether this is an alternate world in which the unmentioned Earth has been “cleared off.”

Anne’s Commentary

After the excitement of Wiscon, or more pertinently, the postcon exhaustion, it was going to take quite the story to perk me up.  Count me perked – what an invigorating tonic “Boojum” was, almost as potent as one of Joseph Curwen or Herbert West’s pick-me-ups!

I already had Elizabeth Bear to thank for my inspiration at the Wiscon panel, “Alien Sex Organs.”  Armed only with yellow and blue modeling clay and shiny beads, I created my very own shoggoth in bloom.  Now I’m itching to do a model of Vinnie.  Bear and Monette mention the cloud nurseries in which young Boojums grow, but where do young Boojums come from?  Are the great space swimmers sexually dimorphic?  Trimorphic?  Asexual?  Do they seek the Big Empty because it’s not so empty after all – plenty of potential mates out there?  Just the kind of pleasant puzzlement a really good alien evokes in the reader’s mind.

The marriage of space (pirate) opera and Cthulhu Mythos is a happy coupling here, I think because the flamboyance of the former and the cosmic horror/cosmic wonder of the latter are so well balanced, no easy feat of tonal blending.  We get outlaws and merchants jaunting about the solar system, and a swampy Venus with sunstone mines and pseudoroaches, and a hint at political unrest in the riots from which Black Alice escapes.  Neatly incorporated into these operatic tropes are Lovecraftian elements like gillies (gotta be Deep Ones, right?) and Mi-Go.  [RE: I’m torn between gillies as Deep Ones and gillies as Golden Age SF Venusians. Both would fit.] An especially neat detail is that most of the ships are named after famous Earth women, which means that in this milieu Lavinia Whateley has earned her rightful place in history (and infamy?) as the mother of Yog-Sothoth’s Dunwich twins.

As befits the center of the story, Vinnie spans both sub-genres.  She’s a pirate ship par excellence, capable not only of overcoming all prey but also of getting rid of the evidence by the elegant expedient of devouring it, to the last screw or scrap of murdered corpse.  And she’s a showy alien, born from the atmospheric tumult of Uranus, huge and dangerously voracious, yet in the hands of canny spacers, the ultimate pack mule, war horse and even pet.

But, oh yeah, how the spacers underestimate her and her kind.  Vinnie is weird beyond their comprehension, and as Black Alice learns, she’s only docile, only obedient, because tormenting mechanical interfaces force her to be so.  Black Alice imagines that Vinnie is fond of her human handlers, the captain and chief engineers.  She interprets the way Vinnie furls her vanes at their pats as affection, but maybe that furling is as much a flinch as the reaction of captive brains to light.  Vinnie has a mind – or many mind-nodes – of her own, and it’s a much more sophisticated brain than she’s given credit for.  She can be trained?  She’s about as smart, maybe, as a monkey?

It’s Lovecraft who could appreciate the inhuman vastness of Vinnie’s intelligence and her drive toward the Big Empty, the Out as she puts it.

And Black Alice, too.  Of all the pirate crew, it’s she who loves Vinnie.  As far as we’re shown, the others either outright exploit her or view her as a biomechanical problem.  Black Alice wants to talk to Vinnie, not just give her orders.  She avoids treading on her eyes or coming down hard on her inflamed flesh.  She perceives Vinnie’s response to the “governor” as pain and the “governor” itself as the tool of a slave master.

I’m afraid Black Alice has some acquaintance with slave masters.  In the absolute power she wields over subordinates, Captain Song is one.  Even so, Black Alice prefers the captain to her former employers in the Venusian mines, as we can infer from her implied involvement in the Venusian riots of ’32.  Riots to gain what?  Fair treatment?  Freedom itself?

No wonder Black Alice sympathizes with Vinnie, and vice versa as it turns out.  After Black Alice learns her fears about the disembodied (enslaved?) brains are true, we see Vinnie’s first response to her, the gift of water.  Junior engineer and ship have something deep in common:  Both are trapped, and both despise the state, for themselves and others.

In Lovecraft we’ve seen characters who find personal freedom by accepting their own alienation from the human norm.  I’m thinking of the Outsider, of the “Innsmouth” narrator, of Richard Pickman.  Black Alice goes a step further by accepting an alienation away from her humanity, an assimilation into Vinnie that is no obliteration of her own identity, for she’s still Alice afterwards, companion, not captive.  Many more Lovecraft characters taste the terrible ecstasy of trips beyond, into the Big-Not-So-Empty, into the Out.  Black Alice goes a step further by reading through Vinnie the “whole great naked wonder of space.”  She shows no fear.  She tells herself not to grieve.

And why not?  She and Vinnie, they are going somewhere, leaving the spacers left behind to shiver over tales of the “lost” Lavinia Whateley.

Next week, we’ll cover super-prolific chemist/mathematician/pulp writer John Glasby’s “Drawn from Life.” You can find it in the Cthulhu Megapack, among other sources.

Ruthanna Emrys’s neo-Lovecraftian stories “The Litany of Earth” and “Those Who Watch” are available on Tor.com, along with the distinctly non-Lovecraftian “Seven Commentaries on an Imperfect Land” and “The Deepest Rift.” Winter Tide, a novel continuing Aphra Marsh’s story from “Litany,” is now available from Macmillan’s Tor.com imprint. Ruthanna can frequently be found online on Twitter and Dreamwidth, and offline in a mysterious manor house with her large, chaotic household—mostly mammalian—outside Washington DC.

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

On July 11th, Tor.com Publishing releases The Delirium Brief, the eighth book in Charles Stross’s Laundry Files series—and to celebrate, we want to send you a set of all eight books in the series, including a galley copy of The Delirium Brief! And to sweeten the pot, books one through seven are autographed!

The Atrocity Archives introduced Bob Howard, a computer-hacker desk jockey who has more than enough trouble keeping up with the endless paperwork he has to do on a daily basis. He should never be called on to do anything remotely heroic. But for some reason, he is.

By the time of The Delirium Brief, Bob Howard’s career in the Laundry, the secret British government agency dedicated to protecting the world from unspeakable horrors from beyond spacetime, has entailed high combat, brilliant hacking, ancient magic, and combat with indescribably repellent creatures of pure evil. It has also involved a wearying amount of paperwork and office politics, and his expense reports are still a mess.

Now, following the invasion of Yorkshire by the Host of Air and Darkness, the Laundry’s existence has become public, and Bob is being trotted out on TV to answer pointed questions about elven asylum seekers. What neither Bob nor his managers have foreseen is that their organization has earned the attention of a horror far more terrifying than any demon: a British government looking for public services to privatize.

Inch by inch, Bob Howard and his managers are forced to consider the truly unthinkable: a coup against the British government itself.

Comment in the post to enter! And while you wait to find out if you won, you might read one of the Laundry Files stories you can find here on Tor.com: the novella Equoid, “Overtime,” and “Down on the Farm.”

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY TO ENTER OR WIN. A purchase does not improve your chances of winning. Sweepstakes open to legal residents of 50 United States and D.C., and Canada (excluding Quebec). To enter, comment on this post beginning at 2:30 PM Eastern Time (ET) on June 7th. Sweepstakes ends at 12:00 PM ET on June 11th. Void outside the United States and Canada and where prohibited by law. Please see full details and official rules here. Sponsor: Tor.com, 175 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10010.

Jokers Wild, the third volume in the Wild Cards series, covers a single day in New York City: September 13, better known as Wild Card Day. Like last month’s Memorial Day holiday in the U.S., Wild Cards Day began as one of remembrance. While Memorial Day initially arose as a patriotic Day of the Dead of sorts, when people decorated the graves of those who had died in the Civil War and later conflicts, on September 13 the Wild Cards world remembers those who gave their lives in an attempt to stop the attack, those who died in the streets, those rewritten by the virus, and those forever changed. As we see in Jokers Wild, however, the holiday is more than that. It is also a celebration of the many subcultures created by Dr. Tod’s attack, and the communities that developed in its wake. Nats might attend the parades, but foremost the day is about jokers, aces, and the victims of the black queen. The parades, parties, and memorials are put on by jokers and aces, with nats left to the sidelines. It is fitting, then, that the same can be said of the artistic representations described in the book.

In Jokers Wild, the authors include something of a meditation on images and artistic portrayals throughout the book. They provide us with a survey of four different sculptural and visual representations which exhibit wild card symbolism and meaning-making.

First, we see illustrations of our beloved friends in the Jokertown parade floats, adding to the revelry and excitement in “deep Jokertown.” Parade floats have a long history in the U.S., appearing in everything from local celebrations, political showcases (first float included in a U.S. inauguration: 1841), and revolutionary demonstrations (suffragette marches). Their modern incarnation can be traced to the urban parades of the late 19^th and early 20^th century, when workers, merchants, and “display artists” constructed floats tied to industry and business. Still, floats can be distinctly local and intensely personal, allowing small groups and communities to express pride, memorialize the past, tell their stories, and create their identity. We see something similar in the Wild Card Day festivities in Jokertown.

Throughout the book, the main POV characters observe these three-dimensional collages in action, either pulled up in preparation for the big day or clogging the streets during the parade. Demise sees “a crepe float of the Turtle.” Fortunato spots other crafted images: “Des, the elephant-faced joker, done up in chicken wire and flowers. There was Dr. Tod’s blimp and Jetboy’s plane behind it, complete with floral speed lines. A clear plastic balloon of Chrysalis floated overhead.”

The Jokertown floats seem to be do-it-yourself creations. Most represent prominent people who have impacted the lives of nearby residents. They have local significance in Jokertown, with Chrysalis and Des being eminent community leaders. The historical theme so common in holiday pageants today is represented by the embodiments of Dr. Tod and Jetboy, the blimp and plane. As to be expected in such a raucously democratic display, we also find pranks and rebellion, most notably in the irreverent float sporting a gigantic double-headed phallus (eventually demolished by the cops). These floats are images of jokers, by jokers.

Just a few pages later, these homemade, exuberant images are juxtaposed with the ice sculptures by creator Kelvin Frost, the art critics’ favorite who dubs his work “ephemeral art.” Commissioned by Hiram for the aces-only party in the restaurant Aces High, they too serve as portraits of important individuals in the history of the wild card virus. In contrast to the kitschy paper crepe floats, many of Frost’s ice sculptures reference distinguished artworks from the past: “Dr. Tachyon pondered like Rodin’s The Thinker, but instead of a rock, he sat upon an icy globe…There were the Four Aces at some Last Supper, Golden Boy looking much like Judas.” The artist even managed to represent Croyd, “a figure with a hundred blurred faces who seemed to be deep in sleep.” Hiram marvels at the expressiveness embodied in the images and their ability to evoke emotions in viewers: “Jetboy stood there, looking up into the sky, every inch the doomed hero and yet somehow the lost boy, too.”

When Jay Ackroyd remarks that the sculptures will sadly melt, Hiram explains, “the artist doesn’t think so. Frost maintains that all art is ephemeral, that ultimately it will all be gone, Picasso and Rembrandt and Van Gogh, the Sistine Chapel and the Mona Lisa, whatever you care to name, in the end it will be gone to dust. Ice art is therefore more honest, because it celebrates its transitory nature instead of denying it.”

We, of course, can say the exact same thing about the Jokertown floats, assemblages of wire, paper, and plastic, soon to be dismantled from their truck beds. In fact, the ephemeral and transitory quality of the floats becomes explicit at end of the day (and book), when the (real) Turtle carries aloft the float of Jetboy’s plane, its shape disintegrating and trailing crepe flowers through the air behind it. One wonders if Frost would recognize the parallel.

The ice artist, an ace, depicts aces, and obviously considers his fellows to be worthy subjects for the greatest artworks in western history. There are no jokers here, no Des or Chrysalis. At the aces-only party, it seems the subject matter remains aces-only as well. The aversion to joker ugliness felt by Frost’s patron, Hiram, finds itself reflected in the iconography of the sculpture. Despite Frost’s pretensions, we find here a reminder that his artwork is truly shaped by the man who pays the bills.

The commercial aspect of wild card art comes into play again when Wraith finds another series of representations in the Famous Bowery Wild Card Dime Museum, available to the paying public for a $2 admission ticket. Rather than the temporary sculptures of the parade and party, in this case we find a permanent and curated installation, although closed for the holiday and patrolled by a museum guard. Its dioramas show wild card history, both worldwide (Earth vs. the Swarm) and local (the Great Jokertown Riot of 1976). Portraits are located in the Hall of Fame, and it is there that we see the kitschy wax statues of Jetboy, the Four Aces, Tachyon, Peregrine, Cyclone, Hiram, and Chrysalis. The art of the Dime Museum is different than that of the parades and the highbrow creations of Frost. In this case, the images are sensational, melodramatic, and designed to draw in customers.

The Bowery Museum is modelled on historical dime museums, such as the real life American Museum created by P.T. Barnum and destroyed in a fire in 1868. Like its predecessor, the Bowery Museum is a bastion of popular culture, its visual likenesses augmented with real life artifacts donated by various figures (like Tachyon and the Turtle) or collected from historical events. Real life dime museums also included “freak shows” that put disabilities on display. The Bowery version flaunts a sobering reality of post-virus life, embodied in the corpses of 30 twisted babies, embalmed in glass jars. The display, oh-so-sensitively entitled “Monstrous Joker Babies,” turns the bodies of dead children into objets d’art. These are portraits of the silenced, the secret, the taboo…the thing that nobody likes to talk about.

Later in the book, Wraith encounters the fourth major example of wild card imagery, the religious iconography sculpted on the doors of Our Lady of Perpetual Misery, Church of Jesus Christ, Joker. Into a visual program heavy with symbolism, the authors channel the theology of A Canticle for Leibowitz, describing the crucified Jesus thusly:

He had an extra set of shriveled arms sprouting from his rib cage and an extra head on his shoulders. Both heads had aesthetically lean features. One was bearded and masculine, the other was smooth cheeked and feminine…The Christ was not crucified upon a cross, but rather upon a twisting helix, a convoluted ladder, or, Jennifer realized, a representation of DNA.

Rather than the prominence given to suffering in traditional depictions of the crucifixion, this new Catholic devotional art emphasizes holy mutation. DNA becomes fundamental to the sacred cosmos and the godly figures that populate it.

Other people portrayed in the illustrations of wild card theology include a double-faced Tachyon. One side of his face was angelic, while:

the other was the leering face of a demon, bestial and angry, dripping saliva from an open mouth ringed with sharp teeth. The Tachyon figure held an unburning sun in his right hand, the side of the angel face. In the left he held jagged lightening.

Note the iconographic detail, that the right and left (sinister in Latin) hands are the “auspicious” and “inauspicious” sides, a symbolism in Western religious art that pre-dates the Romans. Here Tachyon becomes a god and devil both, responsible for bringing evils into the world, but also (depending on your interpretation) a chance for salvation.

Perhaps my favorite piece in this religious cycle is the fresh take on the “Madonna and Child,” a motif in Catholic art that has artistic origins as far back as Egyptian depictions of Isis with Horus. Here the artist shows us:

…a smiling Madonna with feathered wings nursed one head of a baby Christ figure at each breast, a goat-legged man wearing a white laboratory coat carried what looked a microscope while cavorting in a dance, a man with golden skin and look of perpetual shame and sorrow on his handsome features juggled an arching shower of silver coins.

The two-headed Christ child nurses from an angelic Madonna, but rather than the wings of an angel, I wonder if we instead see a representation of Peregrine, that feathered feminine icon (who in future books will become the mother par excellence of an ace with god-like powers). The man with silver coins is Goldenboy, but I’m not exactly sure about the goat-legged man. I think he could be interpreted as several different characters. Who do you think he represents?

While the creators of the sculptures aren’t always made clear, all the imagery is closely associated with those changed by the Takisian virus. What is significant here is that this art was not created by nats. Real life scholars might dub an analysis of these images a “people’s art history” or “art history from the bottom up.”—in other words, rather than focusing on art from the dominant class (or perhaps the dominant DNA?), these images derive from subcultures, from society’s margins. This art was born within wild card culture, and it expresses the voices of jokers and aces. The artists narrate their own histories and myths, deciding for themselves which individuals are meaningful and worth depicting. Especially interesting is the fact that the images do not portray a unified, cohesive picture of the world, but rather a fractured, disparate worldview representing both joker and ace interpretations. I suspect nat scholars would not call this a “people’s art history,” but rather something like a “social history of wild card art”? Or perhaps an “art history of mutation”? I imagine the nat art historians of the 1950s would casually mark its outsider status by labeling it a “history of non-natural art’” (as with today’s delineation between “Western” and “non-Western” art). Opinions welcome, though—what do you think nat scholars would call it?

Regardless of how we label the study of art in Jokers Wild, the four main examples of visual culture described in the book represent a fascinating variety of materials, styles, functions, and creators. The authors gave us a wonderful look at art that expresses the multiplicity of voices in joker and ace communities, and chronicling these voices for us nat readers becomes especially significant given the book’s single-day timeline, as another means of marking the fortieth anniversary of the wild card and driving home the world-changing impact of that date.

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

Everyone gape in completely acceptable awe over Alex Honnold, a man who recently completed the most dangerous rope-free ascension in history when he climbed the Freerider route of El Capitan. This geological formation (often erroneously referred to as a mountain) sits in Yosemite National Park, and is well-known to climbers around the world–but fellow nerds probably know it best as the mountain that Captain Kirk tries to scale at the start of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.

Kirk’s free-solo ascent in Trek V is not a choice that his companions take lightly. On a camping trip with Doctor McCoy and a newly-restored Mr. Spock (who is still recovering memories from that time that McCoy carried his soul around post-Wrath of Khan), Captain Kirk decides that he will climb El Capitan. McCoy waits below, viewing the scene through binoculars and nervously talking to himself about how his irresponsible BFF is “playing games with life.” Eventually, Spock rockets up to Kirk’s level wearing a pair of levitation boots to ask him about the purpose of the risky feat. Kirk tells him that he climbs the mountain it because it’s there.

He then slips and falls, and it is only Spock’s speedy use of the boots that saves Kirk’s life.

Alex Honnold, on the other hand, spent a solid year training for his historic moment. According to National Geographic, Honnold did the climb once with ropes to make certain of every twist and turn, and marked the thing out with chalk. He had a special ledge installed above the door of his van in order to practice hanging by his fingers. He is an expert at keeping his fears at bay, so much so that scientists have studied his brain to learn more about fear:

“With free-soloing, obviously I know that I’m in danger, but feeling fearful while I’m up there is not helping me in any way,” [Honnold] said. “It’s only hindering my performance, so I just set it aside and leave it be.”

He completed the ascent in just under four hours. Nearly three-thousand feet in four freaking hours.

Which is to say, when Kirk decided to climb El Capitan for the heck of it, as a guy who clearly did not train every day of the week for said challenge, it’s really no wonder a Vulcan had to rescue him from certain death. Perhaps Kirk would have done well not to “challenge the rock… challenge death”—as William Shatner himself so succinctly put it in an interview on the set of Star Trek V. (Please recall that Shatner directed The Final Frontier and also helped to develop the story for its screenplay.) Then again, Shatner also believes that people who climb mountains are attempting to have passionate affairs with said mountains. According to the interview, at least.

On that note… you can all assume that if I ever stop dropping this video into posts without warning, I am most certainly dead:

But wait… Kirk isn’t actually climbing a mountain. El Capitan is not a mountain.

*brain implodes*