Around the world, leaders and notorious criminals alike are mysteriously dying. A terrorist group promises a series of deaths within two months. And against the backdrop of the apocalypse, the lives of a small shattered family and a broken soldier are transformed in the bustling city of Atlanta.

Olympia Dorsey is a journalist and mother, with a cynical teenage daughter and an autistic son named Hannibal, all trying to heal from a personal tragedy. Across the street, Ex–Special Forces soldier Terry Nicolas and his wartime unit have reunited Stateside to carry out a risky heist that will not only right a terrible injustice, but also set them up for life—at the cost of their honor. Terry and the family’s visit to an unusual martial arts exhibition brings them into contact with Madame Gupta, a teacher of singular skill who offers not just a way for Terry to tap into mastery beyond his dreams, but also for Hannibal to transcend the limits of his condition. But to see these promises realized, Terry will need to betray those with whom he fought and bled.

Meanwhile, as the death toll gains momentum and society itself teeters on the edge of collapse, Olympia’s fragile clan is placed in jeopardy, and Terry comes to understand the terrible price he must pay to prevent catastrophe.

A broken family struggles to hold itself together against a plot to unleash global genocide in Twelve Days, a paranormal thriller from master storyteller Steven Barnes—available June 27th from Tor Books.

Prologue

The document, which came to be known as the Dead List, first appeared on December 12, on Web sites hosted by servers in London, New York, Hong Kong, and Johannesburg, paid for with untraceable debit cards registered to false names. Some indications exist that the orders may have originated in Jakarta, but little else of consequence can be determined:

TO THE PEOPLE OF THE WORLD:

For too long you have ignored the teachings of the one true God. He has tired of your ignorance and blasphemy. And as has occurred thrice before, there shall be a mighty Reaping.

So that you might have time to repent your sins, the Reaping will occur in stages, slowly at first, then more rapidly, a righteous tsunami carry ing all corruption before it. Only the Elite will be spared, to continue life in a sterilized world.

In accordance with prophesy, it will happen in this fashion: on December 13, our high holy day, one sinner will die. On the second day, two will perish. Then four, then eight, and then sixteen, doubling every day until the world is cleansed.

Some of these first men and women will be known to the world. Most will not. As all have sinned, none but the Elite will be spared. It is too late to join us. If you are Elite, you know already who you are.

So that the world may know and tremble, the first to die are published below. Some of these names were extracted from the excellent list “The One Hundred Worst Unindicted Criminals,” published in the July edition of the American Rolling Stone magazine. Others are upon a list to follow. And others, for reasons that will be known in due time, are secrets known only to the Elite.

The wicked will be punished. It is so that all may understand and tremble at the terrible justice to come that the despoilers upon this list will be numbered among the first.

One the first day. Two the second. Four the third. Then eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Until our Christmas gift to the world, delivered on December 25— Freedom. You will enjoy the end of days without domination by governments or false religions. On that day, among other sinners, the following will die:

• The bishop of Rome
• The prime minister of England
• The prime minister of Israel
• The president of the Executive Yuan of the People’s Republic of China
• The chairman of the Federal Reserve
• The president of the United States

All other world leaders will follow in turn. All mortal men and women, save the Elite, will follow. There is nothing any of you can do to prevent this. No medi cations, countermea sures, or fortresses can protect you. There is nothing any of you can do to save yourselves, or change the inevitable. This warning is only given so that those who are capable might save their souls with prayer.

Merry Christmas

Chapter 1

December 14
5:37 am. PST
Mexico City

The offices of television station XTRB were located in a two-story brick building nestled between a sleepy residential district and a commercial section of Mexico City known as El Corredor. The building had once been a carniceria, rebuilt in the 1990s during an uptick in the Mexican economy, responding to the needs of a society driven more by communication than consumption of albondigas.

The tide of XTRB technicians, artists, and office folk ebbed and flowed at all hours. At first this had seemed a remarkable thing, but in time the formerly sleepy neighborhood had grown to take its renaissance in stride.

Not today. Today the neighborhood was already abuzz, aware that something very special was about to occur.

Former governor of Chihuahua Ramone Quinones, a man not seen in public since his indictment for drug trafficking and murder, was on his way.

Death followed closely behind him.

* * *

Carlos Garcia had been a producer since the day he had learned it paid more than managing a publisher’s ware house, or more specifically since his sister had married the owner of XTRB. As his mother had often told him, “Fortuna favorece a los que se casan de riqueza”: Fortune favors those who marry well.

And of course, their brothers.

Generally, Garcia considered his new position a decided improvement over the old, but today he realized that his ordinarily focused but intense mood could best be described as “flustered,” and that some other emotion lurked just beneath the surface. To his surprise, that emotion seemed to be fear.

As had become his habit in recent months, he vented his anxiety upon Sonia Torres, the tall, slender lovely who anchored the morning talk show. During the seven months of their volcanic affair, it had often seemed to Garcia that her body was a husk filled with live coals. In many ways they were two of a kind. Sonia shared his own fierce ambition, as well as his amorality and political agnosticism, a general disinterest about anything except rungs on the ladder of success. There were times when there seemed nothing of softness or femininity about her at all. In comparison with Teresa, the slack, unresponsive wife who awaited him at home, Sonia was indeed firm. Sinewy. Possessed of that sort of feral strength a man needed to feel, a web of passion drawing him into her fire. At times, the memory was almost more visceral and immediate than he could bear.

But while at work, they could never acknowledge or suggest anything of the passion they had shared. That had been the arrangement when their affair began, and neither of them had ever violated it, regardless of how much he might have yearned to.

So instead of confessing that he wished he had been able to awaken next to her, even once, he barked complaint. “Get that damned shine off your cheeks, Sonia! Damn it! Makeup!” She arched one sculpted eyebrow at him, perhaps believing imperfection impossible for such a golden creature as she. Sonia nodded at the makeup girl who hovered at the side of her chair as she tested her mic, and pored over her prepared statements.

Their director, Manny Vasquez, was a short, skinny guy whose major claim to fame was that, as a boy, he had brought coffee to the great Cantinflas on the set of his last movie, El Barrendero. How many times had they had to listen to that mess! Cabron!

Now, the little man was all nerves. “Have you heard from Quinones?” he asked. “Is this still happening?”

Garcia nodded. “They called me fifteen minutes ago. He’s on the way from Juárez International.”

Vasquez sighed hugely. “I don’t see how we’re going live if—”

Before he could finish, the studio’s double doors opened, and an intern whose name Garcia could never remember popped her head in. “Thirty seconds to convoy!” she said.

Despite his staff’s veneer of professionalism, the excitement was infectious. He sighed. Even the glacial Sonia seemed to ovulate at the very thought of meeting the drug lord. It was true: “El que no transa, no avanza”— loosely: You’re not going anywhere if you don’t cheat. His mother had said that as well, bless her mercenary heart.

Reluctantly, he sidled over to the street-side windows in time to see the black motorcycle procession pulling into the spaces marked off with red cones. A black limousine half the length of the block itself miraculously navigated the turn and slid into the underground garage.

He huffed and ran his fingers through his hair. With one last angry glance at Sonia, Carlos Garcia sprinted for the elevator.

* * *

Twenty-five seconds later the elevator opened on the underground level. Even before the steel slabs parted, Garcia felt the energy wash through the door. Despite his anxiety and thwarted lust for Sonia, he had to admit that XTRB had scored a tremendous coup. Quinones was scheduled to appear in court in just four hours, at ten o’clock. The morning news show created buzz, and Garcia reckoned that Quinones was doing every thing in his power to poison the jury pool, tainting and confusing the narrative that he had abused the privileges of office to enrich himself in the business of narcotraficante. In a moment, the parking garage boiled with bodyguards and assistants. Steel-and Kevlar-reinforced Mercedes-Benz SUVs with deeply tinted windows and police cars driven by off-duty officers crammed the garage. Bulky men with eyes like chips of black ice were positioned like a line of concrete slabs as the limo pulled along the wall, blocking ten parking spaces that had been set aside with red traffic cones.

The engine died. The door of the limo opened and a tall, elegantly handsome man exited.

With all his heart, Garcia yearned to despise Quinones. There were so many reasons to do so. From the crimes he had been accused of, to his hand-tailored Bijan Pakzad suits (identical to one worn by American actor Tom Cruise and Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto), to his perfect physical condition (said to be the result of three miles of daily ocean swimming under the view of snipers recruited from the Grupo Aeromóvil de Fuerzas Especiales, Mexican Special Forces soldiers. Perfectly competent to deal with rival narco traffickers but Garcia wondered how they were with sharks).

Quinones was perfectly dressed and coiffed, as if he had hosted a dinner party immediately before heading to the studio. The only concession to morning rust was the slight stretch he gave, a twist, almost a preparatory dance motion, as he stepped out of the limousine. His smile bristled with blindingly white teeth, except for one tooth on the left side, which was ever so slightly discolored.

And damned if that didn’t somehow increase his charm.

“Just in time,” Quinones said. The narco lord’s voice was higher, lighter than Carlos Garcia had expected. He took an absurd and childish pleasure in noticing that. He himself possessed a deep, manly voice. One of Quinones’ bodyguards interposed himself between the former governor and the producer, then stepped back when Quinones shook his head and extended his hand. “Mr. Garcia. Good to meet you again.”

“Again… ?” Garcia was taken aback. He had never met the governor.

“Yes.” A secret, perfect smile. “Some years ago. You delivered cartons of books to a signing. This was shortly after I became a councilman.”

Delivered books? A tiny memory wormed its way to conscious awareness. Perhaps fifteen years ago, when Garcia was managing the ware house. An emergency call, extra cartons of first editions needed for an autographing by a councilman who had been married to a film star who had recently lost a battle with cancer. The story of their May-December romance, Quinones nursing the faded beauty through her heroic but ultimately futile struggle. The memoir had sold only moderately well, but had shaped public perception, and represented the beginning of Quinones’ rise. He had inherited her wealth… and that wealth had quite possibly funded his first major heroin purchase. Those profits had funded his expansion into cultivation and refinement.

Or so the rumors declared.

Was the man a gigolo? Garcia had totally forgotten the meeting. Had not read the book. Now he wished he had. The fact that Quinones remembered him, when they could only have possibly met for seconds, was intimidating. He began to reinterpret what he thought he knew about the governor.

In a phalanx, they headed toward the elevator.

* * *

XTRB would have Quinones for twenty minutes only, and ninety seconds of that was already evaporated. Sonia Torres punched the intercom button and announced: “All right! He’s on his way! Every body get ready. Don’t fuck me up!”

The elevator doors opened, and two men the size of double-door refrigerators stepped out, followed by Quinones, strutting like a lord. As if he was ever on the verge of flipping a peso to the peasants. Carlos Garcia, an adequate lover and the toughest producer with whom she had ever worked, was following Quinones like a duckling waddling behind its mother. What in the hell had happened that could transform him from bull to steer in ninety seconds? Madre Dios. The interview had not yet begun, and already she was off balance.

“Ramone Quinones,” he said, extending a cool, flat hand.

“Governor Quinones, I’m so happy you could make it.”

“My plea sure,” he said. His smile was so intimate, so open, as if the two of them had just tumbled out of bed together.“Where would you have me?”

The sexual implication was obvious, and she hated the voice in her head that answered: here. There. Wherever you want. Whenever you want.

Oh my God.

What she said was, “ We’re set up in studio three. Follow me, please.” As they walked, she contrived to brush the back of his hand with hers. The resulting spark was more than static electricity, she was quite certain.

She smiled up at him. He was tall enough that she had to look up to meet his eyes, even in heels. She liked that. “You have a flair for the dramatic, sir.”

“Essential in my line of work,” he said. Was he about to confess? Where was the damned camera? She fumbled out a question. “As… ?”

“A politician, of course.”

A trap. A joke. He was toying with her. She suspected that much of life was a game to him. The room was filled with assistants, and assistants to assistants.

“Every one in their places! One minute!”

Quinones was not the sexiest man Torres had ever met, but he came disturbingly close. She protected her sense of attraction with emotional ice, a tactic that had worked in the past, and one with which he was probably very familiar indeed.

“So glad you could join us, Governor.”

“How could I stay away? I wished to see if you were as charming in person as you are on the television.”

Very nice. Standard flirtation response. “And?”

“I am seriously considering hiring you to read me the news every morning.” She wanted to ignore that, but when a man reputed to be worth over twelve billion pesos mentions employment, it was wise to pay attention. She felt the skin beneath her collar heating up, and in case her face was flushing, engaged in enough paper-shuffling to conceal it.

“Thirty seconds!” her assistant said.

Torres settled into the canvas chair emblazoned with her name. “I’ve been told to confine myself to the approved questions.” For a moment the query, which might have seemed utterly innocent, or even conciliatory, triggered something else in Quinones. Anger perhaps. Or fear?

“And,” she continued carefully, “just before I came on, I was informed of a death threat against you. Do you mind if we discuss that?”

“I heard of this list.” Annoyance tightened his voice. “The pope is also to be found upon it. Ordinarily I would be amused to be mentioned in such august company, but this is a bad joke, and the height of poor taste. We may speak of this after we conclude our interview.”

“But not on the air?”

He smiled. “That might be best.”

The makeup girl hovered around him, a hummingbird seeking nectar. He touched her arm. “Making me less hideous?”

She flushed at the contact and giggled.

Torres had to admire Quinones’ skill. He used his sex appeal as she did, and she had met few men who were as facile at that as the average woman. Such confidence stirred curiosity within her, triggering a warm, soft sensation between her thighs. Despite her control, she began to imagine the two of them together in bed. Wondering about the touches, tastes, rhythms, and scents.

Damnation.

“Ten, nine, eight, seven— stand by. And… we are live.” The monitors buzzed, and the titles scrolled.

Their announcer spoke, a ghostly voice booming from the corners of the studio. “Welcome to This Week, coming to you live to night from Mexico City. And now our host, Angelina ‘Sonia’ Torres!”

The monitors cut to Torres. She flipped the switch in her head, conjuring a brilliant smile. “Welcome to This Week. On this morning’s live broadcast, we have a very special guest, former governor Ramone Quinones of Chihuahua. Governor, the first question I have is: you’ve been notoriously private since you left office. Why, after so long, have you finally agreed to be interviewed?”

What ever momentary discomfort he had experienced had flown. “Ms. Torres, as you know, certain legal matters will soon commence. I thought that it would be best to give my side of the story.”

Something within her blossomed, warming. This was one of the greatest moments of her career. Torres barely noticed as the cameramen jockeyed about to find the right angles. “You won’t be tried in the court of public opinion, sir.”

“True. But I still want to present my story in my way, in my own time.”

“Then please,” she said. “Tell us your view of the charges.”

“Let’s have camera two,” the director whispered in her earpiece. Instantly, she adjusted her profile.

“As we know,” Quinones began, “the narcotics industry has long been a cause of friction between Mexico and the United States. When progress doesn’t match what ever is demanded in the editorial sections of their failing newspapers, when inept response to domestic catastrophes or the latest bedroom scandals necessitates a distraction, they need a… I believe the term is ‘fall guy.’ ”

She had anticipated that comment. “So you are maintaining total innocence?”

“Oh, no,” he said. “I’m guilty.” A pause for effect. “Guilty of accepting donations for my children’s charity. Guilty of paving roads and building bridges in flood-ravaged sections of rural Chihuahua.”

She wanted to laugh, but despite her doubts, he remained seductively sincere. “Governor…” she began, but he soldiered on.

“And guilty of having old friends who are rumored, rumored only I must insist, to be involved in narcotraficante. These three things: money, works, and associations, are all that some norteamericano journalists have to accuse me of being a notorious man.”

She decided to split hairs. The questions on her sheet were specific to his conflict with the Mexican legal system, but where the district attorney had limited authority to speculate upon things he could not prove, a journalist could go quite a bit further.

“What of the murders?”

He almost smiled. Almost. But the expression was concealed beneath a put-upon air. With irritation, Sonia realized that she was the one who had stepped into a trap.

“Our friends north of the border love their chemical entertainments. And are willing to pay almost any amount to obtain them. That amount of gold attracts greedy men. And where there is greed, violence often follows. It is I, and the citizens who entrusted me with their governance, who feel insulted that so much of this has happened in our state. But these men, these…”

He paused, shaking his fingers as if suffering a cramp. “Excuse me,” he said. Something different had crept into his voice. Unless she was mistaken, he was being au then tic now, the play-games over. Had her question touched something she hadn’t anticipated? Excitement percolated. A predatory hunger within her, some relic of a once keen journalistic instinct shook itself to wakefulness and bared its teeth.

“I was saying. These men try to cast me as a villain in a drama they… they themselves…”

He blinked, flinched as if dealing with a sharp blow to the stomach, and shook his head hard, twice. His eyes were unfocused. Quinones cursed and tore off his microphone, stood up to stretch his left leg. He wasn’t looking at her, or at anything at all. Was the man sampling his own supply? Had he come to the studio high, for God’s sake?

“Governor? Are you—”

“I can’t… something…” His words died in a scream. “My head!” His teeth clamped on his tongue, and in an instant his lips were painted crimson. Fingers tensed into claws and he clapped his palms to his temples, howling pain.

Groaning, Quinones arched backward. The cables in the sides of his neck bunched and crawled, and his cheeks grew gaunt as those Olympic sprinters straining to the finish line, just membranes stretched across a bare skull.

The ex-governor screamed again, then straightened a final time and collapsed. He curled onto one shuddering side like a weeping child.

Torres ignored her director’s voice, or the uproar surrounding her and stood, tottering unsteadily. Sound and sight dissolved in her fog.

Quinones’ bodyguards rushed to him, rolled him over… and then sprang back in horror. His mouth stretched wide in a silent scream. His spine arched violently, a circus contortionist viewed in a fun-house mirror. His fingers splayed and then tensed into tight, clumsy fists. The governor’s muscles knotted and strained, producing muffled cracking sounds, like wooden slats splintering under pressure. Blood seeped from the cuffs of his perfectly tailored Bijan Pakzad pants.

Torres’ vision swam, then swirled, and she collapsed to the ground beside him.

Chapter 2

December 15
6:15 am. EST
Atlanta, Georgia

By the time her alarm’s insistent burr fluttered the morning air, Olympia Dorsey was already awake.

In fact, she had been awake for almost five minutes. She liked waking up before the hostile alarm clock reminded her that another day was upon them.

She groaned, remembering the days, not so long before, when she had possessed the time and energy for dancing until dawn, or more recently, scaling the Atlanta Rocks! climbing wall three times a week. Olympia wondered if she would ever again have such luxury. Or such a sinewy, toned body. So much had changed in the last three years, including the most obvious. The most painful.

Raoul was gone. For three years now, his absence had been more concrete than most of her waking reality.

Wasn’t she supposed to be healing by now? Didn’t Dr. Phil say that after a year, such loss began to recede from immediate consciousness, replaced by new concerns?

Instead, the loss was something her mind returned to again and again, like the tip of her tongue searching out the site of a recent extraction. Something precious had been ripped bleeding from her life, and there was no replacing it.

She rolled, yawning, out of bed, and shuffled downstairs. Olympia planned to turn on the coffee, treasuring the last few moments of peace before family became her primary concern.

No… not minutes. Because eight-year-old Hannibal stood there in the kitchen already dressed in a favorite red Avengers T-shirt and jeans, waiting for her. He was small for his age, with coppery skin and tightly curled hair. His body hadn’t quite caught up with the size of his head, lending him a babyish aspect that broke her heart anew every god damned day.

Even though he didn’t look directly at her, the corners of his mouth turned up in a smile that warmed her darkest moods. His eyes were as darkly choco late as her own skin, and shone even in dim light. God help her, she loved him more than anything in the world. Mothers weren’t supposed to favor children, but that was how she felt, and she prayed that his sister, Nicki, could somehow understand.

Hannibal needed her more.

She hoped he hadn’t been standing there all night, counting cracks in the ceiling or leaves on the artificial plants.

He was drawing again, using the dining room table as an easel, and sheets of butcher paper as his canvas. She didn’t know why he loved to draw houses, mansions, office buildings, apartments… anywhere people lived or worked. Hannibal drew the houses, erased or crossed them out, then drew again as if trying to perfect an image he held in memory, always frustrated, but never stymied. She did not know which was closer to the truth. Hannibal rarely spoke, so she had precious little access to his inner world.

Always the same rough design, although it had grown more refined over the years. By the time he put one of the drawings aside, they sometimes had so many wings and floors that they resembled images from the book Gormenghast. He had done this since he was five, with pencils, paint, crayons, and pens, and at this point all she could do was smile.

Her son… their son… was the center of her life, and God bless Nicki for understanding and not throwing a snit as so many other teenagers might have done. Why does Hannibal get all the attention? Nobody gives a damn about me, or cares if I live or die…

Not Nicki. Never Nicki, thank God.

Hani shuffled toward her, his eyes cast down toward the ground, as if searching for dropped coins. Usually this didn’t cause him to bounce into walls—in fact, she wondered how he avoided that, so oblivious to environments he sometimes seemed. He took small steps, flapping his hands like the wings of a flightless bird. When he finally looked up a tiny smile warmed his face, the expression he almost always wore, unless displaying the pouted frown that so easily tore her heart.

“Hi, baby,” she said. “Got words for Mommy?” Mommy loves to hear anything you have to say. Anything at all.

She hoped he couldn’t hear the pain in her voice. He deserved better than that. Much, much better.

But as always, he did not speak to her— more… at her, without meeting her eyes. He rarely looked directly into her face, seemed more comfortable looking at a spot a few degrees to the left or right of whoever he was addressing. “Oatmeal. Want oatmeal. And cartoons.”

He moved his gaze to stare up at the wall as he spoke, as if distracted by a ghost. “With nuts.”

Cartoons with nuts. That should be easy.

Oh, and oatmeal.

She kissed his cheek, and he wiggled away from her. That stung, but Olympia tried not to see it as a personal rejection. “I love you, too, hon. We have a good life.”

Was that wrong? To assume that he was thinking something he had not said? To answer questions he had never asked? Almost as if he understood her yearning, he reached out with one arm and hugged her without looking at her, as if the contact was an obligation, not a comfort.

Once, his hugs had been different. He had clung to her with full body, showering her with small, warm kisses. He had done that for Raoul as well.

Back when Raoul was still alive.

* * *

Nicki was awake when Olympia opened the door to her room. The thirteen-year-old knelt on the edge of her bed, staring out through her window, down at the common grass area shared by all the Foothill Village condominiums. A rectangle of manicured green, a basketball court. Behind a gated wall, a swimming pool and spa. So much more than she’d had as a girl, living in the concrete wasteland of Miami’s Liberty City.

“Almost time for school,” Olympia said. She peered over Nicki’s shoulder to share the view. Nicki was five years older than Hani chronologically, a thousand miles from him mentally.

Nicki still wore her hair in braids, still had her baby fat, but Raoul’s Seminole cheekbones already lent her face an arrestingly exotic flavor. Even with minimum care, her long dark hair was lustrous, much straighter than Olympia’s own tight and wiry curls. Even her wire-rimmed glasses just made her more appealing. Her daughter was going to be a knockout.

“What’s going on out there?” Olympia asked, already knowing what had captured Nicki’s attention.

Her daughter was focused on the neighbor across the street. If Harry Belafonte and Eartha Kitt had spawned an athletic love child, he might have looked like Terry Nicolas. Fortyish, six feet tall, he seemed to glide as if wearing invisible ice skates.

At the moment, Terry was crouched down on the basketball court, flexing through his morning body-weight exercises. Even before daylight hit the grass he was usually out there, bending and stretching his legs and torso into patterns that resembled nothing so much as a cross between break dancing and a solo game of Twister. On other occasions, he imitated Cirque du Soleil, balancing on his forearms, palms flat on the ground with elbows tucked tightly into his sides, shaven head close to the ground, pushing his legs and trunk off the ground in apparent defiance of gravity, holding that impossible position for sixty seconds or more.

What ever he was doing, it kept his body looking like an action figure woven of knotted rope. Not an ounce of excess fat dappled his frame. Scars, yes, a fascinating variety of puckered ridges and pale valleys… but no flab, as she remembered… viscerally.

Viscerally. That was the word, and she fought a blush as the memory swept her in dizzying waves.

She had first encountered Terry fifteen months ago, at a Foothill Village barbecue mixer. Hannibal had run breakneck into him, almost bouncing off into the empty swimming pool. With reflexes that would have shamed a tennis pro, Terry had scooped Hani out of the air and deposited the boy lightly on his feet.

Hannibal had just giggled, unfazed by his brush with disaster. Terry had patted Hani’s curling hair, and smiled dazzlingly at her. The impact of that smile was like Yo-Yo Ma strumming a cello string in her tummy.

He had asked her to coffee, and then wrangled her to Mongolian barbecue, speaking of life (Olympia’s adventures growing up in Miami, her father an impoverished civil rights lawyer. Terry’s on army bases around the world with his constantly reassigned father), dead siblings (Olympia’s preemie older sister, dead weeks after birth. Terry’s younger brother, victim of a hit-and-run at the age of thirteen), and shared love of cinema (they both loved Poitier’s In the Heat of the Night and Lady Sings the Blues, Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, as well as Kim Jee-woon’s The Good, the Bad, the Weird. Go figure), all the time carefully ignoring their growing mutual awareness of each other’s bodies. One October night he had kissed her, so sweetly she thought she was dreaming. She had surprised herself by kissing him back and then leading him, hand in warm hand, to her bed. Their lovemaking had been exquisite, a revelation of sensual hungers she’d feared she’d buried with Raoul. Banked but not extinguished, when fanned those fires had burned so very, very brightly…

She didn’t know where things between them might have gone. How far.

But within days of their first date, she had begun to feel an odd panic, a fluttering in her gut almost like mild food poisoning. He’s lying about something. I can feel it. See it when his eyes shift away when he talks about that “consultant” job of his. About his relationship with his roommate, Mark. Bisexual? Drug dealer? There’s a secret here. Be wary. Keep your mind on your family, not this foolishness.

She recognized that voice instantly: her mother’s. Gone but hardly forgotten. Terry had lost both his parents as well, one of the bonds they had shared.

That is, if stories of his childhood had been true. If any of it had been true.

If Hani hadn’t responded to Terry with such an evident, naked hunger for male attention, the entire misadventure might have been less devastating. No. There was nothing that could have diminished the pain. Terry had been a wonderfully visceral reminder that life flowed on. And then he was gone, and that was just the way it was.

“Come on. We have to get moving.”

Nicki nodded and rolled off her bed. “Need to feed Pax.” Olympia smiled at that thought. They shared a backyard with the houses on either side, and their right-hand neighbors, the Haleys, had once again gone on an extended Christmas Royal Caribbean cruise and left their lovable doofus of a dalmatian-spotted Great Dane in the Dorseys’ care. This was the third year they’d pulled that disappearing act, and Olympia was getting irritated.

Nicki, on the other hand, loved walking, grooming, and feeding Pax, and Paxie loved her, so Olympia tended to keep her irritation to herself.

In her nightgown, Nicki’s strong, slender body reminded Olympia of her own early teenage years. Ample hips, slightly thick waist, and only a promise of the spectacular figure that had exploded by seventeen.

Olympia had yet to have that talk with her daughter, but suspected Nicki knew enough to figure out what had happened between her mother and the handsome neighbor, and accepted it with a wisdom informed by the Internet generation’s infinite access to imagery.

“Down in five, Mom,” she said, and Olympia knew that her daughter’s word was good.

Unlike Raoul, who had promised to stay with them forever.

Chapter 3

Shilo Middle School was generally only eight minutes away from Olympia’s Foothill Village driveway, but this morning she spent another minute dawdling before pulling out. Terry was heading back to 906 Market, across the street from her own three-bedroom, and Olympia hoped that he would saunter past them without comment or notice. If she pulled out he’d be forced to acknowledge her and…

But no, damn it. He waved and smiled, and Hani waved back, although Nicki sat like a stone.

“ ’Erry!” Hani yelled. Olympia gave up and backed out, so that their Kia pulled up parallel to Terry. It was cold, but perspiration glistened on his arms, and his cutoff sweatshirt was dappled with wet spots. He made pistols of his fingers and fired shots through the back window. Hani giggled as if he’d never seen anything so funny in all his young life.

Then Terry’s eyes met hers, and his hands relaxed. Although nothing save kindness lived in his dark brown eyes, she could barely meet them.

Correction—while she could see nothing but kindness in his eyes. But…she felt something more, as if he was somehow focused beyond her. Saw through her, or this place, and this time, to something else. You don’t want to see what I’ve seen, those eyes seemed to say. What I see.

I saw it… so that civilians like you don’t have to.

“Olympia,” he said.

His voice was friendly-neutral, but she sensed that it required enormous effort to keep it in check.

Holding back what? Or was that just more wishful thinking?

“Terry,” she replied. A game. Tit for tat. Childish, fun, sad in an odd way. She received an answering nod in return. Olympia accelerated away before she could embarrass herself.

* * *

In the backseat, Nicki tickled and teased Hannibal, who was lashed into his safety restraint. Georgia law did not require an eight-year-old to use a booster seat, but Hani was small for his age and she had no wish to give any Smyrna cop an excuse to pull her over.

As she waited in Shiloh’s drop-off queue, Olympia watched through the rearview mirror, disliking the flash of jealousy she felt when Hannibal whispered in his sister’s ear.

Some of the time she was sure that the whispers were nonsense, perhaps a favorite poem like “Jabberwocky” or “Eletelephony” or G. Nolste Trinité’s classic “The Chaos”:

Dearest creature in creation
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse…

Hani loved the tongue-twisting rhymes. They calmed and thrilled him. Nicki wouldn’t give a clue as to which of their favorites she was engaged in, claiming secrecy was part of a deal she’d made with her brother. But at times she was certain that they actually talked to each other, in a way that he never did with her, or so far as she knew, anyone else in the entire world.

Nicki adored her brother, smothered him in a cocoon of hugs and kisses. He seemed to be more receptive to Nicki’s affections than her own. His hand slipped reluctantly out of his sister’s as she opened the rear passenger door, blew Mom a kiss, and sprinted off.

Jealousy is a thing of small parts and intimate imaginings. Instantly, Olympia was ashamed of herself and grateful to her daughter for providing a bit of the stability they might have enjoyed in another, better life. Her daughter ran lightly along the line of cars, long dark braids bouncing on her shoulders, graceful as a gazelle. As she vanished into the school, Olympia felt her heart surge with love so power ful it was like being tumbled by a wave. Her vision wavered, and she wiped the back of her hand across her eyes before continuing on.

The Golden Dream community center was another five minutes away through commuter traffic, tucked in the back of a shopping complex dominated by a Best Buy electronics superstore and a Wells Fargo bank. She passed two ethnic eateries, a sports uniform shop, a dry cleaner, and a storefront called Caskets ‘n’ More. On numerous occasions her reporter’s instinct had prodded her to investigate, but she had never quite managed to do so.

She pulled her three-year-old silver Kia Soul into a space between a brown station wagon and a white Mercedes SUV plastered with a faded Obama bumper sticker glued down over an even more faded Hillary for President banner. Hani didn’t need to be coaxed from the car, thank God. He loved this place. Somehow it lured him “out of himself” more than any other school ever had.

Crackling techno-pop music bounced across the parking lot as they approached, hand in hand. The center hosted classes on dance, yoga, and martial arts, as well as— miracle of miracles— a licensed K through sixth grade private school with a sliding payment scale. She knew that the center was one of many Golden Dream centers in a dozen countries, and one of… nine, she thought. Yes, nine. Nine in the continental United States. Olympia knew that they believed in a “common thread” of spiritual truth running through all world religions. And also, thank God, in something called neurodiversity. They accepted every one.

She’d fallen in love with the center the moment she’d walked through the door. Maria Cortez, a blogger who worked with her at CNS, had first mentioned the Golden Dream centers, in connection with a story about fringe spiritual groups in the Bible Belt.

Whatever their beliefs, they didn’t try to proselytize, and despite their robes and blissful smiles seemed pretty harmless.

It sounded too good to be true—an affordable, state-accredited private school that didn’t stigmatize kids like Hannibal. When she’d first walked through the door Olympia had been joyously bombarded with the sights and sounds of happy children bounding and kicking and tumbling and twisting like little circus acrobats. From the first moment, Hannibal had been transfixed. And that was all she’d needed to see.

After talking to the director she went to the back room and saw kids hooked to LCD video screens by sensor bands attached to foreheads and fingertips.

Her first question of course, had been: what is all of this? The reply had been like a double espresso on a cold morning: the Golden Dream was testing children, and they reassured her that unlike the world in general, or even her own family, they hadn’t the slightest inclination to hold her responsible for Hani’s condition.

The number of children diagnosed with autism and ADD was skyrocketing, but Olympia was assured this was primarily due to improved diagnostic procedures, not an increase in the number of such children per thousand. Attention deficit disorder was a mental issue, and could be likened to conflicting computer programs causing crashes and slowdowns of a CPU. But the autism spectrum was a matter of external communication. A problem in social interaction. More like a breakdown between the CPU and the monitor or speakers or camera. Perhaps Hani’s internal world was simply more interesting to him, with outsiders reduced to no more than unwelcome intrusions.

Thank God the Golden Dream center had welcomed her son, and had immediately done every thing possible to provide him with a happy, healthy space. The space was cavernous, large enough to hold two RadioShacks and a Tastee-Freez. She wondered if the recession had had at least one blessing associated with it: making a resource like this affordable on a single mother’s bud get. The front room was jigsaw-matted front to back, with a narrow walkway around the edges leading back to a door in a pastel-blue wall. The walls were arrayed with weapons and odd pointy tools, as well as framed photos, posters, and drawings, many obviously by the students themselves.

One of the instructors, a slender man with broad shoulders and a flat stomach, was totally engaged with a chunky kid whaling on a heavy bag with clumsy, enthusiastically swivel-hipped tae kwon do kicks.

“That’s it,” the instructor said. “Fade back, get your distance. There’s a sweet spot in every technique. Have to figure your timing and…” He suddenly noticed her, snapping his head around. “Ms. Dorsey!”

“Yes?” Olympia asked.

“Your group is meeting in room B.” His high, pale forehead glistened with perspiration, as if he had been demonstrating a moment before she walked in. He pointed toward a door at the room’s far end.

Unable to remember his name, she nodded a generic thanks. Pass through the door and you entered a maze of cubicle classrooms, each aswirl with its own joyous frenzy, some teaching language arts, some math on computer-linked Smart Boards, and others practicing various gymnastics or dance drills.

Hand clasping hand, mother and son entered a tiled hall, and continued on past three more doors. Through the door’s window, Olympia could spy on adults chanting and stretching as instructors in gold-fringed uniforms paced between their rows. The third door opened to a smaller martial arts room, where six children were tying themselves into pretzels.

Releasing her hand, Hani giggled, then howled with laughter and scrambled into a series of rolls and leaps over and around a carefully designed obstacle course constructed of blue matting. All of this was observed and guided by the head instructor, a shaven-headed, smooth-skinned Asian named Mr. Ling.

“I still have a hard time understanding why you provide so much service to your students.” Ling could have been anywhere between thirty and sixty. She smiled to herself: the “black don’t crack” axiom was nothing compared to some of the Chinese or Vietnamese she had known. “Only six of them… you can’t be making much money.”

Ling smiled. “Not every thing is about money, ma’am.”

“No,” Olympia said. “Not every thing. Nice to hear someone say that.”

“It is good to find mutual needs satisfied, ma’am.” Ling’s voice, fractional bow, and patient expression possessed a pleasant combination of Asian formality and Southern gentility. “We have ancient methods for healing and strengthening mind and body, but westerners are quite pragmatic. We believe what we can see. Our task is to demonstrate the value of our methods.”

“Well, Hannibal loves it here.”

“I assure you, the feeling is mutual.” Ling sighed with what seemed deep satisfaction. “For most of these children, we’re using rhythmic entrainment, bilateral motion to stimulate cognitive development, teaching them to focus… every thing we’ve spoken of…”

“But?”

Ling consider for a moment. “But we may be moving Hannibal from this group.”

Her stomach clinched. She realized she was bracing for the talk that would shake her from her denial that Hannibal could thrive anywhere. Ever. “Why?”

“We’ve completed his tests, ma’am.”

She froze. Then whispered: “I think that he’s had enough tests, thank you.” A firestorm erupted in her gut. I thought you people were less judgmental…

Ling touched her arm gently. “No, you don’t understand. We’re not criticizing Hannibal. Just the opposite. We think he is… extraordinary.”

Despite his soothing tones, something inside her bared its teeth. “He’s been called ‘special’ before.”

“Have you ever heard the term ‘indigo child’?”

She gnawed at her lower lip. “No…”

Ling smiled again. “The world is a living thing, ma’am. And it responds to challenges, just as nature evolves new species when the environment changes. We believe that children like Hannibal are part of that response. They are… special. And we will eventually learn how to nurture their new abilities.”

Despite her initial chill, she found her interest piqued. “How?”

“We have a center north of here,” he said, “in the mountains. Very lovely.” He clapped his hands, as if delighted by a sudden thought. “You should go! I’ve spoken with our head instructor about it.”

“About this class?” Olympia asked.

“About your son. Some children need to focus— that seems to be the issue with ADD. But we believe autistic children are focusing just fine.” He grinned.“But not upon the things we wish they’d focus on. Much of the theory suggests that they are unresponsive. We believe that, to the contrary, they are too responsive, too sensitive, and in essence learn to trip a mental ‘cir cuit breaker’ to disengage with that intensity. They retreat to a safe place where the input can be managed. Hannibal has tested highly on some special mea sure ments we have devised. Madame has already heard of these results, and is very interested.”

“Who?” she asked. “Madame?”

“Madame Gupta.” His eyes widened with evangelical fervor.“Our guru and inspiration. You’ll be able to speak with her yourself. She’s coming here for a demonstration.”

“Martial arts? A woman?” Her memory scanned back over the poster-heavy walls, recalling a framed photo of a bronze-skinned, fierce, smiling Amazon in overlapping meditative and martial poses. Very, very feminine features, her fierceness unlike some of the macho MMA women she’d seen, virtually men with breasts. This was different, someone who looked as deadly as a leopard, but still every inch a woman. Her African blood was clear but there was something else, something more exotic. South Asian? Sri Lankan? At first Olympia had found the apparent contrast between femininity and warrior aspect puzzling, but in time it had simply faded into the background.

Could that be the “Madame” he referred to?

Ling smiled. “It is either a new world, or a very old one. Some of the greatest masters were women. But the martial arts are the merest splinter of her skills.” A sudden thought brightened him. “You are encouraged to invite a friend, if you know someone interested in such things. The demonstration is rare, and not open to the public… but each member, or parent, can bring one guest. Hannibal’s father, perhaps?”

“I’m a widow,” she said, too quickly.

“I’m sorry,” Ling said, chagrined by his faux pas.

She paused. She did know someone interested in such things, didn’t she? Wouldn’t it be a neighborly gesture to…

Damn, who was she kidding? “ There may be… someone else,” she blurted out. “A friend.”

“Well.” Ling’s smile returned. “Why not bring him. Her?”

“Him.”

Ling gave a shallow, apologetic bow. “Political correctness in the twenty-first century. Whichever it is. You would both be welcome.” Ling seemed to read her mood. “And Hannibal, of course. By all means, please bring him.”

He looked over at her son, who was already playing with a set of blocks. And… constructing another building, perhaps thinking of the two-dimensional one at home.

Was that a better world he was assembling, one saw-edged block at a time? A happier, healthier world? She wished she knew, and simultaneously dreaded the answer, what ever it might be.

Chapter 4

Hannibal dreamed, awake…

A thousand rooms, a hundred halls. It was his, all his, and every thing within it was the result of his daily efforts. He couldn’t remember when he had begun the Game. There may not have been a beginning. It might have always been under construction. And that meant it might never end, and that was good, because it was the safe place, the happy place.

Hannibal was alone, as he had always been alone in here, which was good. That was safe. Alone, there was no one to leave you. No one to tell you what to do (which he often just ignored, anyway).

In the Game, there was nothing but learning and playing and remembering.

Every room had exactly ten objects in it: here, a yellow Pikachu statue, a Michael Jackson poster, a miniature blue electric guitar, a stuffed piranha fish, an Ultimate Spider-Man graphic novel, a DVD of a movie about a Saint Bernard, a bottle of dried watermelon seeds, a blank slate, a pink wig, and a Christmas card from an imaginary friend. Every object bristled with ten hooks. Every corridor had ten rooms. Every wing had ten floors. Every floor had ten corridors.

Every day things happened, opportunities to learn, and he remembered every thing, every thing, and stored them all in their places. Nicki’s morning kiss on a branch of a Christmas tree, next to a gymnastics cartwheel learned yesterday. A SpongeBob joke about pancakes reflected in an ornament next to a crazy slide Pax did across a waxed floor. Funny! If there was something unusually interesting, or something that he needed to know, he could return to it later, find the wing and floor and corridor and room and object on which he had placed the memory, and experience it once again.

He could not share this with Mommy. Wished he could share it with Nicki. Nicki, a warm and loving shape, a happy smile and adoring eyes, strong arms holding him close. His very first memory, the foundation on which all others rested.

Her smile was so strong, like looking into the sun, that he could not long withstand its focus, had to look away.

Touch had grown almost as bad. It felt as if he had no flesh, no bones, only raw bundles of nerves. He heard the way the doctors talked about him. They used phrases like “theory of mind,” which seemed to mean that he saw other people as costumes, as bags of skin with nothing inside them. They said it right in front of him, as if he weren’t there, talked about how he didn’t understand people, couldn’t understand how they felt.

It made him want to laugh and cry, but he was afraid that if he started, he would be unable to stop. They thought he understood and felt too little. The opposite was true. Every thing threatened to overwhelm him, and he needed a place to be safe.

That was the Game.

Always he had been alone there, but lately, he had begun to wonder if that was still true. There were signs, small signs, that something in the Game was changing. It was most obvious in certain dreams. When he slept most deeply, so deeply that he had trouble awakening in the morning. In those times, he walked the Game and fell into memories of curling on the couch watching Phineas and Ferb and Power Rangers, or splashing in the pool with Nicki, or riding their neighbors’ Great Dane, Pax. He was almost too big to do that now. Pax chuffed and labored but still put up with him, so it was all good.

A few times, potted plants had appeared in the halls, plants he could not remember placing. And through the windows (he almost never peered out the windows. He didn’t care what was out there) odd trees had become visible. Palm trees, things that might grow in Florida.

Or Africa.

The last time Hannibal played, he had seen his daddy standing at the end of a corridor. Handsome Daddy, still wearing his paramedic’s uniform, still waving and smiling at the son he loved. That was normal, and had happened many times.

But this was different. In the eighth room on the seventh floor of the third wing, a teddy bear sat on a white wooden chair. And on the third of ten hooks on that bear’s belt, there was a memory of the time he and Nicki and Mom and Dad had seen Finding Nemo. He could go into the bear, and inside it were rooms, and floors, and hooks, and in the totality lived every image, every word of every moment of that movie. He could play them forward and backward, take them to the big television room and watch them, surrounded by his toys, and all the friends he had never had.

But the last time he was there, a leafy green shrub of some kind was growing through the floor, like a sprig of grass pushing up through a concrete sidewalk. That wasn’t the only strangeness: a little girl had slipped in as well. He did not recognize her. Had never seen her before. She was darker than he, but a little strange, her face thin. Pretty. She sat watching the movie. Something about her posture made him think she was very sad, but she turned and smiled at him.

He was surprised to see her in his special place, but sat away from her, eating popcorn one kernel at a time and watching out of the corner of his eye.

Once, she turned and smiled at him. He liked her smile.

He told her that his name was Hannibal. She said her name was Indra, and that she was something called a Siddhi. He had no idea what the word “Siddhi” meant.

When he awakened, he knew that somehow she was still there in his mind. Sometimes when he went back he could not find her, but sometimes footprints indented the rugs, or some of his toys had been moved.

He would find her. Would find Indra, the Siddhi girl who played with his things. And then…

And then…

Odd. He wasn’t sure what he’d do.

And in its own way, that was fun as well.

Excerpted from Twelve Days © 2017 by Steven Barnes

If you’re a fantasy reader (and, if you’re reading this, I suspect you are), 2006 was a vintage year. One for the ages, like 2005 for Bordeaux, or 1994 for Magic: The Gathering. The Class of 2006 includes Joe Abercrombie’s The Blade Itself, Naomi Novik’s His Majesty’s Dragon, Scott Lynch’s The Lies of Locke Lamora and Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn: The Final Empire. All of which, remarkably, are debuts (except Mistborn, but Elantris was only the year before and Mistborn was the breakout hit, so we’ll roll with it). And hey, if we stretch the strict definition of “2006,” we can even include Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind in the mix as well.

These are five authors that have dominated the contemporary fantasy scene, and to think that they all published more or less simultaneously is, well, kind of ridiculous.

However, as tempting as it is to examine the lunar conjunctions of 2006 in the hopes of finding some sort of pattern, the fact that these books all published at the same time is total coincidence—and, in many ways, irrelevant. Publishing ain’t quick, and by 2006, these books had all been finished for some time. For some of these authors, their books had been out on submission for several years. If anything, we’re actually better off prying into 2004, since the process between acquisition and publishing is generally around two years. What was in the air when five different editors all decided to lift these particular manuscripts from the stack?

Or do we go back further? We know, of course, that these books were all written at completely different times. The Name of the Wind was the culmination of a decade’s hard labor, beginning in the 1990s. Mistborn, given Sanderson’s legendary speed, was probably written overnight. But what were the influences of the late 1990s and early 2000s that would’ve led these five different people to all write such amazing, popular books? In the years leading up to 2006, there are some clear trends. These trends may have impacted the authors as they wrote these stunning debuts. They may have influenced the editors as they chose these particular books out of the pile.

Or, of course, they may not have. But where’s the fun in that? So let’s take a look at some of major touchstones of the period:

Harry Potter

From 1997 onward, the world belonged to Harry Potter. And by 2004, five of the books were published and the end of the series was on the horizon. Publishers, as you might expect, were pretty keen to finding the next long-running YA/adult crossover series with a fantasy inflection. Moreover, Potter proved that a big ol’ epic fantasy had huge commercial potential, and could be a massive breakout hit. It also showed that the hoary old tropes—say, coming of age at a wizard school, detailed magic systems, and a villainous Dark Lord—still had plenty of appeal.

The British Invasion

Rowling—deservedly—gets the headlines, but the Brits were everywhere during this period. Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell was one of the breakout hits of 2004, a fantasy that couldn’t be more British if it were served with scones and a gently arched eyebrow. China Miéville collected every major genre award between 2000 and 2004. Looking at the Hugo finalists in from 2000, you can also see Stross, Richard Morgan, Ken MacLeod, Ian McDonald, Iain M. Banks… and that’s just in the Novel category. Seeing so many British authors up for what’s traditionally been a predominantly American award shows that the UK was, well, trending. That could only help inform—or sell—a UK author like Joe Abercrombie, or a British-set novel like Novik’s His Majesty’s Dragon.

A Game of Thrones

This is a little weird to think about—by 2006, every A Song of Ice and Fire book (save A Dance with Dragons) had already been published. The Potter arguments apply here as well—ASoIaF was proof of concept: big fantasy series would sell, and publishers were on the prowl for the “next” one. And, for authors, ASoIaF had dominated the scene since 1996: even before the HBO show, it was a massively popular series. Big Fantasy, again, could be successful—and by subverting the tropes, Martin ushered in a new world of possibilities. Characters could die. Good guys could lose. Surprise was as interesting—and as rewarding—as simply doing the expected.

 * * *

But if we simply limit ourselves to books, we’re missing out. A lot. The Class of 2006 was surrounded by storytelling in a host of formats, both personally and professionally. Abercrombie and Novik, for example, worked in the film and the gaming industries, respectively. So let’s also consider the impact of the following:

The Lord of the Rings

The three most successful fantasy films of all time were released in 2001, 2002, and 2003. Everyone knew how to pronounce “po-tay-to” and had an opinion on eagles. The films were ubiquitous, breath-taking and, most of all, lucrative. Jackson’s trilogy meant that Hollywood wouldn’t shy away from Big Fantasy, and, as with Harry Potter, everyone was on the prowl for “what would be next”…

Gaming

The biggest and best fantasy worlds weren’t in cinemas—they were in your home, to be devoured in hundred-hour chunks. 1998 alone saw the release of, among others, Thief, Baldur’s Gate, Half-Life, and The Ocarina of Time. By the early 2000s, games weren’t just hack-and-slash; they were about stealth, storytelling, meandering side-quests and narrative choice—with a rich visual language that stretched the boundaries of the imagination. From Baldur’s Gate 2 (2000) to Final Fantasy (1999-2002), Grand Theft Auto (2002, 2004) to Fable (2004), huge worlds were in, as were immersive stories and moral ambiguity.

Games were no longer about levelling up and acquiring the BFG9000; they involved complex protagonists with unique skills, difficult decisions, and complicated moral outlooks. Whether it’s the immersive environments of Scott Lunch’s Camorr, the unconventional morality of Abercrombie’s Logen Ninefingers, the deliciously over-the-top Allomantic battles in Sanderson’s Mistborn books, or the rich and sprawling world of Novik’s Temeraire, it is easy to find parallels between game worlds and the class of 2006.

The Wire

Television’s best drama started airing on HBO in 2002. Critically acclaimed (and sadly under-viewed), it’s had a huge impact on the nature of storytelling. Big arcs and fragmented narratives were suddenly “in.” Multiple perspectives, complicated plotlines: also in. Immediate payoffs: unnecessary. Moral ambiguity: brilliant. Pre-Netflix, it showed that audiences—and critics—would stick around for intricate long-form storytelling. The Wire’s impact on fiction in all formats can’t be underestimated.

Spice World

In 1998, the Spice Girls had sold 45 million records worldwide. Their first five singles had each reached #1 in the UK. The previous year, they were the most played artist on American radio—and won Favorite Pop Group at the American Music Awards. Yet, later that year, Geri Halliwell split from the group. Sales foundered. Lawsuits abounded. The Spice World had shattered. As an influence, we can see here the entire story of the Class of 2006. The second wave British invasion. The immersive, transmedia storytelling. The embrace of classic tropes (Scary, Sporty, Ginger)—and their aggressive subversion (Posh, Baby). The moral ambiguity—who do you think you are? The tragic, unexpected ending: what is Halliwell’s departure besides the Red Wedding of pop? The void left by their absence—a vacuum that only another massive, commercially-viable, magic-laced fantasy could fill.

 * * *

Okay, fine. Probably not that last one.

But it still goes to show the fun—and futility—of trying to track influences. With a bit of creativity, we can draw a line between any two points, however obscure. If anything, the ubiquitous and obvious trends are the most important. We don’t know everything that Rothfuss read or watched while crafting The Name of the Wind, but we can guarantee that he heard the Spice Girls. If a little bit of “2 Become 1” snuck in there… well, who would ever know?

Chasing an author’s influences—or an editor’s—is nearly impossible. There are certainly those inspirations and motivations that they’ll admit to, but there are also many more they don’t. And many, many more that the authors and editors themselves won’t even be fully aware of. We are surrounded by media and influences, from The Wire to BritPop, Harry Potter to the menu at our favourite Italian restaurant. Trying to determine what sticks in our subconscious—much less the subconscious of our favourite author—is an impossible task.

What we do know is that, for whatever reasons, many of which are completely coincidental, 2006 wound up being a remarkable year. Thanks, Spice Girls.

With huge thanks to r/fantasy and /u/TeoKajLibroj for kicking off the conversation.

Jared Shurin is the editor of Pornokitsch and over a dozen anthologies, the latest of which is The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories.

One could convincingly argue that horror with a literary spin on it has increased its profile in recent years, with writers like Victor LaValle, Karen Russell, and Brian Evenson tapping into a potent sense of dread and gut-wrenching terror. That said, writers on the literary side of things have always had a fondness for the horrific. Kingsley Amis’s The Green Man and Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori both feature sinister supernatural figures and moments of white-knuckle fear, for instance.

Still, we do seem to be at a point in time when the literary and the horrific have begun to overlap. Thomas Ligotti’s first two collections were recently given the deluxe Penguin Classics reissue treatment. Michel Houellebecq wrote a book analyzing the horror of H. P. Lovecraft. The rise of literary horror is likely happening for the same reasons that more “literary” writers are also embracing science fiction and fantasy: it’s what they grew up on, and they don’t see any reason to change gears now. Some of that may also be a generational thing: the likes of Stephen King, Peter Straub, and Chuck Palahniuk are all generous with blurbs both within and without the genre of horror. (See also: the long shadow cast by Cormac McCarthy’s fiction, especially Blood Meridian.) Here’s a look at several recent books that may appeal to those who love a great scare and a great sentence in equal measure.

Brian Evenson, A Collapse of Horses

There’s a solid case to be made for Brian Evenson as one of the most influential figures in terms of a growing convergence between the literary and horror worlds. Part of that is that his fiction simultaneously grapples with intellectual questions about reality and perception while also tapping into a literally visceral world of shattered bodies and terrifying visions. (See also: Kafka.) And, for literary writers of a certain generation, Evenson is a towering figure. A Collapse of Horses is Evenson’s latest collection, and it’s head-spinning stuff, situated at the place where existential terror and the more straightforward variety meet.

Daisy Johnson, Fen

Not all of the stories in Daisy Johnson’s atmospheric collection Fen head into horror territory, but quite a few do: opener “Starver” features a character who’s becoming increasingly eel-like, and whether you read that as a metaphor or as an explicit shift away from realism, the visceral sense of body horror remains. There’s a tremendous sense of place in these stories, alongside a monstrous amount of dread; it could make for an excellent double bill with Michael McDowell’s Toplin.

Elizabeth Hand, Wylding Hall

Another place where horror and more literary work converge is in the pages of journals like Conjunctions. Karen Russell’s story “The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis,” comes to mind, along with regular contributions by the likes of the aforementioned Straub and Evenson. Elizabeth Hand is another writer whose work frequently appears in said journal; this short novel, documenting a cult band’s fateful recording of an album in a very old building, ends on an image that’s hard to shake.

Jarret Middleton, Darkansas

There are aspects of Jarret Middleton’s novel Darkansas that seem almost self-consciously literary and realistic: its protagonist is a hard-living musician who’s spent his whole life in the shadow of his father, and his twin brother’s wedding offers the potential of reconciliation with his family. And then Middleton takes things in a markedly different direction, invoking the family’s cursed history and introducing a pair of sinister, impossibly long-lived figures with their own interest in the outcome of certain significant events. What begins as a grittily realistic novel turns into a horrifying meditation on fate, family, and violence as it approaches its conclusion.

Drew Magary, The Hike

Drew Magary’s novel The Hike quickly ventures into surreal territory: its protagonist is a man on a work trip, who sets out on a hike near his hotel to kill some time before a meeting. Then he spots a pair of killers wearing dog masks, and from there things get much, much weirder. Magary’s novel blends grotesque imagery, bleak humor, body horror, and moments of outright terror towards a decidedly unique conclusion.

Josh Malerman, Black Mad Wheel

Mysteries abound in Josh Malerman’s novel Black Mad Wheel, in which a once-promising band is recruited by the U.S. Army in the late 1950s to investigate the origins of a mysterious sound that may be a weapon, something supernatural, or something beyond human comprehension. Malerman juxtaposes multiple timelines here, along with parallel plots and various characters’ hidden agendas. The result is a heady and tense work, in which nerve-wracking suspense and supernatural forces coincide with pensive thoughts on the nature of music.

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).

This week, The Handmaid’s Tale dipped briefly into spy caper, with Offred deciding that she wants to help out with the Mayday resistance and then being terrified when they immediately take her up on it. Because for all that she raged to Nick in the prior episode about him being complacent with the way things are, it’s a huge leap from penning a secret note to her actually-alive husband to picking up a mysterious package from Jezebels. And while she’s a pro at cajoling the Commander into sneaking her out of the house again for another “thrilling” night of pleasure, once they return to Jezebels she can’t even make it out of the damn room to track down said package. Offred does not make a very good spy.

Spoilers for The Handmaid’s Tale 1×09 “The Bridge”

I’m glad that the TV series hasn’t diverged much from the books in that case. Offred isn’t a dystopian heroine like Katniss Everdeen; she’s just a woman trying to stay alive. She possesses some skills, but not a quiver full of them. It was fascinating to note that while she can intuit what the Commander wants to hear and pitch her voice just right and choose just the right words to convince him that she loved dressing up for him (shudder), she has to do so with her back to him. Her face, such an expressive face, could give her away, so she waits to look him in the eyes until she nearly has him agreeing with her plan, believing that he thought it up himself.

Photo: George Kraychyk/Hulu

Like a good spy movie, this episode had a number of misdirections. The purpose of returning to Jezebels ultimately isn’t for Offred to pick up the package; it’s to see Moira again, a welcome divergence from the books because we couldn’t have our last glimpse of her be so defeated. This time she’s angry—furious that June would willingly put herself in danger rather than just keep her head down. Their argument is the natural continuation of their conversation from the night before, the roles reversed and June prodding Moira to action. This time, she brings up Hannah:

June: Moira, I thought you were dead. I thought they killed you. I thought they strung you up somewhere to rot. It tore me apart. But I didn’t give up like a coward.

Moira: You think what you want.

June: I think you’re a liar. ’Cause you said we would find Hannah.

Moira: You will find her.

June: No. We will. That’s what you said. When all of this was over, you promised—you fucking pinky swore—but don’t you remember? Moira, do not, do not let them grind you down. You keep your fucking shit together, you fight.

Moira: Was doin’ all right until I saw you again.

My skin crawled when the Commander was flaunting “Ruby” in front of Offred like a thoughtful gift, his assumption that they were “friends” carrying the same innuendo as Luke’s question over their illicit lunch years ago. When Offred curtly cuts off his attempts at a threesome, he turns almost petulant: “Relax. I did something nice for you. ‘Thank you, Fred.’” And she has to parrot “Thank you, Fred” like a scolded child. When she allows herself to sob over Moira in front of him, he looks disgusted: “Pull yourself together.”

A recurring theme of this episode is the exasperation of Commanders and Wives when the Handmaids won’t act within the expected constraints—when they let their guards down and experience real, gutting, awkward (for the Commanders) pain—when they don’t act grateful for what little they have. In the book, Janine’s story ended with her mad-eyed at the Salvaging, having finally cracked. The series has expanded her story so that that descent into madness is just one of many cracks. It’s not just that she has to formally give up her daughter Angela to her Commander and his Wife, but her insistence on believing the Commander’s promises that the three of them—he, her, and baby Charlotte—would buck the system and become their own family. When instead she’s sent on her way with empty thank-yous about how honorable and blessed her sacrifice was, then immediately transferred to another household, the Commander’s promise is revealed as the complete fiction it was.

Photo: George Kraychyk/Hulu

Another Wife, the one married to Commander Daniel, displays a surprising amount of sympathy to Janine, now Ofdaniel, on the night of their first Ceremony. (And how rough is it that the Ceremony comes so soon after she’s been transferred?) She’s so welcoming and almost even warm that I briefly wondered if we were heading into a subplot where it’s a Wife who’s sweet on a Handmaid. But it’s just sympathy, as she soothes Ofdaniel: “Don’t worry, sweetheart, I’m nervous, too.” Except that when the rape happens and Janine can’t take it, the Wife turns impatient, unsympathetic: “Aren’t we in this together?” becomes “Don’t move.” Kindness only goes so far when a Handmaid is being uncooperative.

Janine’s reaction is especially difficult to watch, after all of the Ceremony sequences have featured Offred’s stoic, silent face. By contrast, she acts like an abused animal, curled up in the corner and whimpering. So it’s no surprise that, like a lost pup, she finds her way back to Commander Warren’s household to steal Angela/Charlotte away and try to escape Gilead the only way she knows how. And so, to the eponymous bridge.

“The Bridge” nicely contrasted the dramatic with the domestic, in a number of small, effective moments. The most striking was the late-night conversation between Serena Joy and Rita over the kitchen stash of liquor, in which the Wife confides in the Martha about Mrs. Putnam complaining about her wailing baby. Rita is one of the characters who hasn’t been expanded much beyond the book, despite being a constant presence in the scenes set in the Waterford household. But even as she’s performing the emotional labor of patiently listening to her boss’ woes, she manages to reveal a detail: She lost her son, a 19-year-old, in the war. Vox makes an excellent point in noting that Serena Joy cuts Rita off before she can imply that her son was fighting against Gilead: “I’m humbled by your son’s sacrifice. Blessed by they who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” “Praised be,” Rita responds, a tad dryly, and they’re back to communicating in worthless platitudes.

Speaking of Marthas, we can’t forget the return of the Martha who used to be a James Beard Award-winning chef. On Nick’s second visit to Jezebels in a row, she’s pushing carbonara on him instead of pesto, but he’s too distracted by Offred’s brazenness to appreciate it. His inquiry into whether any of the Jezebels are acting suspicious shows that he’s taken notice of Offred’s spurious reasoning for coming here so soon again. What’s interesting is how the Martha chides him for putting his own neck out there—”a driver” asking around could get himself strung up on the Wall, she says, which means she doesn’t know that he’s an Eye.

Mere hours after returning from Jezebels doubly unsuccessful, Offred must don her Handmaid garb and play hostage negotiator at the bridge, saving the child and talking down Janine, in that order. But it’s not platitudes about “blessed be the suffering” that will get through to Janine, nothing that engages her as a Handmaid. Offred speaks to her as June to Janine, drawing on memories of life before and, in an incredible risk, alluding to the resistance:

June: Change is coming. There’s hope. All of this, it’s all gonna be over one day. And everything is gonna go back to normal. We are gonna go out, we’re gonna go out drinking. You and me.

Janine: And Moira?

June: Yeah.

Janine: And Alma?

June: Yeah.

Janine: Can we do karaoke?

June: Sure. Whatever you want. We’re gonna get hammered. We’re gonna go dancing, watch the sun come up.

Offred may have failed to pick up the package from Jezebels, but standing on that bridge, she nonetheless delivers something just as valuable: hope. Unfortunately, Janine is too far gone for it to mean anything. After handing off Angela/Charlotte, so that the child will have a chance at a future, Janine jumps.

What’s fascinating about Janine’s stunt is that it very publicly demonstrates the consequences of a Commander’s dalliances with a Handmaid: She yells at Warren, without regard for his title or power, about how he lied to her, how she endured “the kinky sex shit” that his Wife wouldn’t do, all so she could have a baby and they would be a family. Warren looks visibly shaken by her recriminations, not a Commander but simply a guilty man caught out. It looks as if next week’s season finale will deal more with Gilead punishing Warren for his sins, so I’ll hold off on more commentary til then.

Photo: George Kraychyk/Hulu

Janine’s faltering faith in her beliefs feels sadly inevitable, but Aunt Lydia’s is downright surprising. “A Woman’s Place” revealed that Lydia really does buy into this rhetoric, that the Handmaids will be rewarded for their suffering (or she would probably call it sacrifice). None moreso than Janine, who was the example of what happens when you mouth off to an Aunt. Not that I would expect Lydia to feel any sort of remorse for such violence—I think her self-righteous whipping of June’s feet in “Nolite Te Bastardes Carborondorum” speaks volumes—but I’ve noticed that she pays special attention to Janine in the present. Aunt Lydia is the one who soothes Janine when the maimed Handmaids must miss the big party because of their appearance; she presides over Janine’s transfer, bringing her from Warren’s household to Daniel’s without ever taking her eyes off her. Perhaps she sees Janine as a project and wants to make sure that she eventually achieves the supposed heavenly reward coming to her; maybe she simply acknowledges her Stockholm syndrome-esque power over the poor girl.

Which is what makes the final shot of the two of them so powerful. Initially I was frustrated at seeing Janine in a coma, thinking it was a narrative cop-out; I expected someone to die on that bridge. To be honest, I was surprised Janine didn’t throw the baby into the water to save her the potential fate of becoming a Handmaid someday. But it took reading The A.V. Club’s review for the true horror of the episode to sink in: Janine survives. As long as she’s still breathing and being fed nutrients, she’s still a vessel able to potentially support life. (A very uncomfortable Google search led me to this horrifying story from 1996, so there you go.) And now she can’t run away.

But Lydia remains by her side, sitting next to her body after murmuring, “May the Lord keep you in his mercy, you stupid girl.” Is she acting as Janine’s chaperone and keeper even while the latter literally can’t move? Or does she want Janine to wake up to a familiar face?

The MacGuffin of the package gets mostly forgotten in the bridge drama, which makes us share in Offred’s surprise and delight when the butcher hands her a special delivery:

And when it cuts to Moira, a new fire in her eyes and a toilet shiv in her hand, I cheered. June’s message of hope reached someone, the package got into the right hands, and shit is going to go down next week.

Natalie Zutter’s notes this week included oh thank god threesome averted and is Moira gonna stab a bitch. Share your finale predictions with her in the comments or on Twitter.

When, two hundred thousand words into what was to be her next novel, English author Naomi Alderman decided to ditch her current work in progress to focus, instead, on a feminist science fiction story about a world in which women can electrocute men just by laying their hands on them, she couldn’t have had a clue just what that book would do.

But that book just became the first work of speculative fiction to win the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction.

Published in the UK late last year by Penguin, The Power is—in the words of this year’s Chair of Judges, Tessa Ross—a “brilliantly imagined dystopia” whose “big ideas” the four judges under her jurisdiction just kept coming back to, despite a hotly-contested shortlist.

The Power follows four main characters as they pick their way through the changed landscape of Alderman’s imagination:

There’s Roxy, the daughter of a London crime family with three older brothers; she was never supposed to take over the family business but she starts to have other ideas. There’s Tunde, a young journalism student in Lagos, who sees that the revolution needs documenting, and gets himself into some dicey situations trying to be the one to do it. There’s Allie, who comes from a troubled background in the South of the USA and sees that what people need is something new to believe in. And there’s Margot, who was a low-level politician in New England but begins to have new ambitions.

Our own Mahvesh Murad was left “amazed and horrified in the best of ways” by Alderman’s award-winning novel, as she explained in Tor.com’s most recent Reviewers’ Choice:

I’ve been calling it the wild godchild of Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Rukaiya Hossain’s The Sultana’s Dream, and it is this and much more. In a world where women have the physical ability to electrocute anyone or anything at will, what happens to power balances between genders? What happens to the gender biases in current societal conflict, in politics, in family life? Why do we assume that if women have brute strength, they won’t use it to gain absolute power, and that absolute power won’t corrupt them? It’s a shocking book, not because if the actions of the women, but because it forces you to analyse your own gender based assumptions about women—even if you yourself are one.

At a star-studded ceremony in the Royal Festival Hall in London last night, the former games columnist was awarded £30,000 and a Bessie—which is to say one of the traditional bronze figurine given to every Women’s Prize for Fiction winner. On stage, Alderman said that “the women’s movement is more vital to me than any other utility that might come into my house. […] More vital to me than electricity,” even.

A little electricity will however be necessary if you ever want to watch the TV adaptation of The Power Sister Pictures, the co-producer of hit Brit series Broadchurch, is currently at work on. And that nugget of good news just got even gooder, because it’s to be written by Alderman herself, and promises to “expand” on the stories told in her now venerated text in much the same way Hulu’s version of The Handmaid’s Tale has.

But I dare say Alderman’s adaptation might yet be a while away. Meantime, you could, you know, read the book. I hear it’s quite good!

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.

Welcome back to the Warbreaker reread! Last week, Lightsong continued to poke at his investigations, and Vivenna learned about life on the streets. This week, Siri trades volleys with Treledees, while Vivenna hits rock bottom and gets kidnapped again. Twice. TWICE.

This reread will contain spoilers for all of Warbreaker and any other Cosmere book that becomes relevant to the discussion. This is particularly likely to include Words of Radiance, due to certain crossover characters. The index for this reread can be found here.

Click on through to join the discussion!

Chapter 40

Point of View: Siri
Setting: The Court of Gods
Timing: Indeterminate, but soon after the events of Chapter 36

Take a Deep Breath

Siri sits out on the lawn, using Susebron’s protocol for food-tasting; she doesn’t like seafood very much, it turns out. Treledees arrives, and she ignores him, just because she can. After finishing her current round of taste testing, she grants him her attention. She’s been ignoring his summons to her, on the principle that the God King’s consort shouldn’t get in the habit of obeying anyone else’s demands; he seems slightly amused along with his irritation. Confused by his repeated flashes of amusement as they trade barbs, she suddenly realizes that he’s got a lot of Breath and can read the tiniest changes in her hair color. Oops.

She clamps down on her hair-control, and they discuss pregnancy, spies, Susebron, Peacegiver’s Treasure, religion, Peacegiver, and information. Finally, he asks what it will take to get her to “return” to her wifely duties (she stopped her act so as to get his attention), and she requests that her main serving women be replaced with women of Pahn Kahl. He agrees, clearly assuming her Idrian prejudices are in play, and leaves; she recognizes this as a tempered victory, but at least she has proven that she can manipulate the priests to some extent. She returns to her taste testing.

Breathtaking

“I am well aware of the poisonous things your monks teach,” Treledees said, turning away. “The hatred into which you’re indoctrinated. Do you really think that we’d let a woman from Idris confront the God King himself, alone, unwatched? We had to make certain you weren’t intending to kill him. We’re still not convinced.”

“You speak with remarkable frankness,” she noted.

“Merely saying some things that I should have established from the beginning.” They stopped in the shadow of the massive palace. “You are not important here. Not compared to our God King. He is everything, and you are nothing. Just like the rest of us.”

This would be a lot more convincing if they hadn’t cut out his tongue… But Treledees reveals the truth later, when he talks about it being necessary in order to obey Lord Peacegiver’s orders to protect his gift. They don’t really worship the gods, or even the God King, though he stands highest due to holding the treasure. They really worship Peacegiver. Or his command and Breaths, anyway.

Local Color

According to the annotations, this chapter exists primarily for Siri to control her hair. Partly it’s to show the progress she’s already made, and partly it’s to give her a compelling reason to exert more control than she ever thought she could. Also, this was an unanticipated bonus of the magic system.

Of course, the other major event in this chapter is Treledees finally explaining to Siri (and to the reader) why the priests consider it justifiable to remove the tongue of the baby who is to become the God King. Whether it works for the individual reader or not, the intent is to show that the priests aren’t really evil; they’re just zealous in doing the duty assigned them by the guy who established them and ended the Manywar. We don’t get very many Hallandren viewpoint narratives, so we need some reminders that they, too, have humanly understandable reasons for what they do.

Chapter 41

Point of View: Vivenna
Setting: T’Telir slums
Timing: Indeterminate; something more than a week after Chapter 39

Take a Deep Breath

Vivenna holds out the single coin she gained from her day’s begging, hoping it will gain her entry as before to the alleyway behind two restaurants; the fresh garbage others are going through smells so good. The man who controls the access turns her away, saying that she needs two bits—but keeping the only one she had. Stunned, dizzy, sick, and starving, she finally stumbles away toward the Idrian slum, knowing she will have no chance for food this day.

Not far into the Highlands, she hesitates at the street of the whores, tempted to join them for the sake of food, warmth, and a dry bed. Horrified, she makes herself keep going, but she knows that she’s close to trying that route soon. She finally reaches the alleyway she’s been using; it is oddly empty, and before she can settle in she realizes that she is trapped by a group of thugs, led by the man who stole her dress that first day. They speak of taking her to Denth; exhausted and overwhelmed, she simply goes with them.

In the street ahead, a black sword in a silver sheath is rammed into the dirt. One thug picks it up and unclasps the scabbard, and Vivenna is hit with another wave of nausea. All the thugs go for the sword; predictably, when the others are all dead, the one who picked it up kills himself. Vasher lowers himself with animated ropes, retrieves Nightblood, and slings Vivenna over his shoulder.

Breathtaking

Men cried out, each one scrambling for the sword. The man holding it continued to swing, the weapon hitting with far more force and damage than it should have. Bones broke, blood began to run on the cobblestones. The man continued to attack, moving with terrible speed. Vivenna, still stumbling backward, could see his eyes.

They were terrified.

Scenes like this are a good reminder that Nightblood is really a nasty piece of work, you know? He’s got such a cheerful personification most of the time that he’s hard not to like… until you see this guy’s terrified eyes as he kills his friends and then himself.

Local Color

In the annotations, Sanderson clarifies what’s going on with Vivenna—that it’s not merely hunger and shock affecting her perceptions. Immediately after arriving in T’Telir, she acquired a stock of Breath which gave her magic-super-vaccination against All The Things, so she has developed no natural immunity to the local crud. When she became a Drab, she promptly acquired a nasty bug which overwhelmed her suddenly weak immune system. So all this dizziness and the surreal effect has a natural cause—and hopefully allows the reader to feel the drawn-out effect, without having to spend more than two chapters dwelling on it.

Also: Nightblood’s name is intentionally similar to the names of the Returned, and he wouldn’t really have to be a sword to function. He’s less a weapon in a sheath, and more a creature on a chain: once you release him, everything about him is deadly.

***

Snow White and Rose Red

Siri is walking a very fine line, here. As she notes at the end of her chapter, she’s won a victory but at the cost of further antagonizing Susebron’s highest priest. This may not have been the best idea in the world, although it did gain her some valuable information. I’m sure it would feel good to stand up to him and finally not get pushed around so much, though. The fact that she twigged to the way Treledees was reading her uncertainty was rather cool, and (as per the annotations) I loved the incentive that gave her to really gain control.

I was emphatically not pleased with the way she used her new-found leverage, though. While I can’t remember whether or not the Pahn Kahl servants actually working against her in the end (I’ll look it up later), it’s just playing into Bluefingers’s hands. I find myself very frustrated when I know so much more than she does!

As Siri begins to gain agency, Vivenna loses it all. Sick and starving, half delirious from malnourishment and disease, she can barely walk anymore. Some part of her still has the strength of character to be horrified at the thought of becoming a prostitute—better to be tortured and killed!—but like the question of stealing, the pragmatic part recognizes that she would do even that, in the end. She just has to get a little more desperate, even though the last time she ate well was a week ago, and the last time she ate at all was two days past.

Poor girl. She’s so worn down by the deprivation and illness that, when she realizes that she can’t run, she just sits and waits for them to take her away. I can actually understand that, and it gives me more sympathy for her than anything else so far. To have reached a point where there’s simply nothing she can do, surrounded by men far stronger than she could ever have been, you can almost feel the relief at having a final reason to just give up. I’m glad this is the bottom, and she can begin to go up from here.

It’s worth noting that she still clutches the shawl as her most valuable possession. Okay, it’s her only possession, aside from her shift, but it is quite valuable! I get the impression that she almost doesn’t remember why it’s so valuable, but she holds onto it like a lifeline.

Oh, and did you notice? Kidnapped yet again, twice within twenty minutes. Poor child.

As I Live and Breathe

There’s not a lot to say about BioChroma other than the earlier mentions of Treledees reading Siri so easily, but it is a nice little artifact of the magic system. Also, it was really fun watching Treledees grow a little less high-handed as Siri increased her hair control, because all of a sudden he couldn’t read her quite so well.

Don’t Hold Your Breath (Give it to me!)

Nightblood. Is. Creepy.

Background Color

This is one of the relatively rare times when the events of the Manywar have a direct impact on our active characters. Yes, of course, the whole history shaped the current situation, but this is different. Treledees talks about the sacred trust they were given, when Peacegiver ended the war Kalad had started, and gave them the Treasure of fifty thousand Breaths, charging them to keep it safe and never use it, in case he should Return and need it. On one hand, it’s hilarious to read things like this:

“We follow the god who came to protect us when your Austre—an unseen, unknown thing—abandoned us to the destroyer Kalad. Peacegiver returned to life with a specific purpose—to stop the conflict between men, to bring peace again to Hallandren.”

Knowing, as we do, that Kalad and Peacegiver are the same person, it’s almost hard to take the priests seriously—and also knowing that Peacegiver was already Returned when he did all that, and is still around and ornery as ever, it’s just funny. At the same time, we have to acknowledge that they don’t know any of that. As far as they can know, Kalad was an evil man who started the Manywar, and Peacegiver was a good man who gave his life to end it. On top of that, Peacegiver gave—gave—this treasure of fifty thousand Breaths to the new ruler of Hallandren, with the charge to keep it safe. While I don’t know, I’m guessing that the first God King was the one who came up with the idea of removing his own tongue to keep himself from risking the betrayal of that trust.

The method may seem bizarre and horrific to us, but if you try to put yourself in their place, you can see how seriously they take their task. Keeping that Breath from being used or lost is their highest, holiest task; even the God King must make a sacrifice to ensure that it is kept safe. Even he must be considered lower than Peacegiver.

Exhale

I just have one more question. Did anyone ever ask who those fifty thousand people were, whose Breath Peacegiver was carrying around like he owned it all? Not to mention all the Breath it took to create the D’Denir? There were an awful lot of Drabs out there somewhere, three hundred years ago.

That’s it for the blog—now it’s time for the comments! Join us again next week, when we will cover chapters 42 and 43, in which the squirrel performs yet another task and Vivenna comes back to life.

Alice Arneson is a SAHM, blogger, beta reader, and literature fan. As you may have noticed, preparations for the Oathbringer release are starting to become visible. Keep an eye on the front page; there will be—among other things—a series of refresher articles upcoming, to help everyone get back up to speed on the world of Roshar and the happenings there.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
Written by Leonard Nimoy & Harve Bennett and Steve Meerson & Peter Krikes and Nicholas Meyer
Directed by Leonard Nimoy
Release date: November 26, 1986
Stardate: 8390.0 

Captain’s log. A giant log flies through space making funky noises. The U.S.S. Saratoga investigates; it appears to be a probe, and it’s also heading directly toward Earth.

On Earth, the Klingon ambassador demands that Kirk be extradited to the Klingon Empire for several crimes, including the theft of Kruge’s ship, the death of Kruge and his crew, and his involvement in Genesis, which the ambassador describes as a doomsday weapon Kirk developed via his son (no mention of Carol Marcus) to be used against the Klingons.

Sarek shows up and counterargues, and then the Federation President announces that Kirk has been charged with nine counts of violations of Starfleet regulations. The Klingon ambassador is outraged, and declares, “There shall be no peace as long as Kirk lives!” before stomping out in a huff.

On Vulcan, McCoy has painted “HMS BOUNTY” on the side of Kruge’s ship. It’s been three months since the last movie, and Spock has spent his time re-training his brain meats. At one point, he answers a barrage of questions, some verbally, some by typing them in. Spock’s mother Amanda has programmed an extra question into the mix: “how do you feel?” Spock finds the question to be a silly goose, no matter how Amanda tries to explain it to him.

The Saratoga is hit with a communication from the probe, which burns out all its systems, leaving the ship adrift. And it’s not the only one: two Klingon ships, and several other Starfleet vessels have also been neutralized by the probe. And it continues to head straight for Earth.

On Vulcan, the crew gets the Bounty ready for departure. Everyone’s wearing the same outfit they had on three months ago when they landed on Vulcan (an entire planet full of logical beings, and nobody has a change of clothes?????). Kirk says his goodbyes to Saavik—who, for reasons nobody bothers to explain, isn’t coming along—and his hellos to Spock, who takes the science station. Saavik says she hasn’t had the opportunity to tell Kirk how David died, which makes you wonder what they’ve been doing for the past three months that that opportunity didn’t present itself.

The probe arrives at Earth, killing power to Spacedock and directing its communications at Earth’s oceans. This causes tremendous upheaval, including tsunamis and storms.

As the Bounty approaches Earth, Chekov reports no ships on assigned patrols, and Uhura’s having trouble deciphering the comm traffic. However one thing gets through: a planetary distress call from the president, warning everyone not to approach Earth. The probe has ionized the atmosphere, wiped out power systems, and is burning the oceans.

After the crew takes a minute to be gobsmacked, Kirk has Uhura put the probe’s signal on the speakers. Spock points out that the signal is directed at Earth’s oceans, and Kirk has Uhura modify the signal to what it would sound like underwater. Spock recognizes the sound, and confirms it in the Federation database that was downloaded into the Bounty‘s computer: it’s the song of the humpback whale. Unfortunately, there are no humpback whales, having been hunted to extinction in the 21st century. They can simulate whalesong, but they don’t know the language, so they can only provide gibberish. The only solution Spock can see is to find humpback whales—which only exist on Earth of the past.

So they go back in time. Because of course they do.

Using Spock’s computations, Sulu flies the ship around the sun and through time, winding up in 1986. Chekov engages the cloak and Uhura picks up whalesong—in San Francisco, oddly. However, they have a bigger problem: the dilithium crystals are destabilizing. However, Spock has a theory that they could recrystallize the dilithium using the high-energy photons from a nuclear reactor.

Sulu lands in Golden Gate Park (scaring the crap out of two garbage collectors). Since they’re using money in this time period, Kirk sells the antique glasses McCoy gave him in The Wrath of Khan, getting a hundred bucks for them, which he divvies up among the group.

Kirk and Spock track down the whales, Uhura and Chekov are tasked with collecting the photons needed to fix the ship, while Sulu, Scotty, and McCoy get to figure out how to construct a tank in the cargo bay of the Bounty to hold the whales.

After Kirk sees an ad for the humpback whales George and Gracie at the Cetacean Institute in Sausalito, he and Spock hop on a bus, Gus, and head to Sausalito. They get a tour from Dr. Gillian Taylor of the institute, who talks about the slaughter of whales, before introducing their “pride and joy,” George and Gracie, a pair of humpback whales who wandered into the institute as calves.

Kirk sees this as a godsend, as they can beam them up together from the tank. But they have a ticking clock, as the plan is to release the pair of them (George and Gracie, not Kirk and Spock) into the wild. And then they get released into the wild, too, as Taylor tosses them out of the institute because Spock dives into the tank and mind-melds with the whales.

Spock wanted to make sure they had the whales’ consent before they just yanked them onto a space ship. He seems to think that he has it, and says so to Kirk as they walk back to San Francisco.

Taylor talks with her boss, and says that the decision to let George and Gracie out is tearing her up. She doesn’t want to lose them, but they’ll die in captivity, plus the institute can’t afford to keep them. She drives home, and sees Kirk and Spock walking along the bay. Against her better judgment, she offers them a lift. Also against her better judgment, she agrees to dinner with them—though Spock winds up declining—mostly because Spock somehow knows that Gracie is pregnant. That information hasn’t been released to the public.

Uhura and Chekov track down a nuclear submarine to Alameda, though directions to Alameda prove difficult to come by. Eventually they find their way there, and one of the ships in dock in the yard is the Enterprise. Yay symbolism! Their plan is to beam in at night, snag the photons, and beam out with no one the wiser.

Scotty and McCoy go to Plexicorp, where the former poses as a visiting professor from Edinburgh who is outraged that there’s no record of his scheduled tour of the facility. Dr. Nichols, however, is more than happy to provide that tour. At the end, Scotty offers him the formula for transparent aluminum in exchange for enough Plexiglas to construct the tank they need (since that will cost more than the thirty bucks Kirk gave them). Sulu, meanwhile, makes friends with a helicopter pilot.

Taylor and Kirk have pizza and beer. Kirk takes a shot at convincing Taylor that he can save the whales. He goes ahead and tells her the truth—well, he leaves out the part about the probe destroying Earth, just saying that they want to repopulate the species in the 23rd century—but when she informs him that they’re being shipped out at noon the next day, Kirk ends dinner early. Before they go their separate ways in Golden Gate Park, Kirk says that he has to take two whales to the 23rd century. He can go out to the open sea to get them, but he’d rather have George and Gracie. Taylor is now completely convinced that he’s nuts.

Uhura and Chekov beam onto Enterprise and collect the photons Scotty needs to recrystallize. Unfortunately, the carrier crew tracks the power drain. Scotty is only able to beam one at a time, so Uhura goes first with the collector, but the radiation interferes with the signal and Scotty can’t get a lock before Chekov is captured. He’s interrogated, to very little effect, and then he makes a break for it. Unfortunately, he’s injured in the escape attempt and is brought to a nearby hospital.

Scotty has finished prepping the cargo bay for the tank, and now is working on the recrystallization. Uhura is scanning the radio waves for any news on Chekov.

In the morning, Taylor shows up for work to find that the whales are already gone. Her boss sent them out quietly the previous night to avoid a media mob scene. Taylor is furious that she didn’t get to say goodbye, and storms out, heading straight for Golden Gate Park, just as Sulu is flying the tank into the Bounty with the helicopter. Taylor screams out Kirk’s name and crashes into the cloaked ship. Kirk beams her up and she’s rather stunned to realize that everything he said was true—and more, as she sees Spock without the headband hiding his ears and eyebrows.

Uhura has finally found Chekov, in Mercy Hospital, going for emergency surgery. He’s listed as critical and not expected to live.

Kirk, Taylor, and McCoy infiltrate the hospital (they’re all wearing scrubs) and find Chekov—McCoy bitching and moaning about 20th-century medicine the entire time—in a secure ward. They manage to bully their way in and then lock the surgical staff in a closet so McCoy can cure Chekov without drilling holes into his head. They wheel him out of the room and get chased by security before beaming out while in an elevator out of sight.

Taylor bullies her way onto the ship—she has no family and they need her help to acclimatize the whales to the future—and they take off. Uhura tracks the radio transmitters on George and Gracie and they arrive just as the pair are being pursued by a whaling ship. Sulu manages to maneuver the Bounty between the harpoon and the whales, and then Kirk orders the ship decloaked. Scared shitless, the whalers bugger off, and Scotty beams George, Gracie, and the water around them onto the ship.

They head out into space and do the time-warp again (it’s just a jump to the left!), arriving right after they left the 23rd century.

Unfortunately, in order to deliver the whales, they have to land on Earth, and that puts them in the probe’s path. Main power is shot to hell, and the Bounty crash-lands near the Golden Gate Bridge. The release for the tank is underwater, so Kirk orders everyone to abandon ship while he manfully swims down to release the whales. (It’s fun watching Shatner’s weave go wobbly as he swims, too…..)

George and Gracie respond to the probe, they have a nice talk, and then the probe buggers off. The Earth is saved.

However, now that that’s taken care of, there’s the matter of the charges against Kirk and the others. They stand before the president and the council, accused of conspiracy, assault on Federation officers, theft of the Enterprise, sabotage of the Excelsior, destruction of the Enterprise, and disobeying Starfleet orders. Kirk pleads guilty, but then the president announces that all charges are dismissed save one, thanks to the mitigating circumstances of the crew saving the planet. The one charge that sticks is disobeying orders, which is only on Kirk. His sentence is to be demoted to captain and to be put back in charge of a starship. Gawrsh.

Taylor takes her leave of Kirk—she’s off to a science vessel to catch up on three hundred years—and Sarek also takes his leave of Spock. Spock gives him a message for Amanda: “I feel fine.”

The seven of them take a shuttle through Spacedock to their new assignment. Because even though three of them are captains, and the other four are commanders (and of those four, one is ready for command and the other was until very recently a first officer of a starship), they’re all being assigned to the same ship in the same positions they were in two (or more) rank grades ago. Because that totally makes sense. (It makes no kind of sense.)

McCoy is expecting them to get a freighter. Sulu is hoping for Excelsior, to Scotty’s disgust. Instead, they get a Constitution-class ship that has the designation NCC-1701-A: the U.S.S. Enterprise.

On the bridge of their new ship, Kirk tells Sulu, “Let’s see what she’s got,” and off they go into the wild black yonder.

Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Apparently travel back in time makes you see images that look like busts of your friend’s heads that grow up out of the ooze. Or something.

Fascinating. At the end of the movie, Sarek mentions that he disapproved of Spock’s entry into Starfleet, and now—decades later—he admits that he might have been mistaken in that disapproval. Real fucking generous there, Dad.

I’m a doctor not an escalator. McCoy is beside himself at Mercy Hospital, snarking off at every medical professional he meets, and also giving a patient on dialysis a pill that grows her a new kidney.

Ahead warp one, aye. A scene was written and attempted to be filmed where Sulu meets a young boy who turns out to be an ancestor of his. However, the child who was hired for the role was having trouble performing the scene, and it had to be scrapped.

The film establishes that Sulu was born in San Francisco.

Hailing frequencies open. While Uhura has no standout scenes like she did last time, she is quietly superbly competent throughout the film, playing the probe’s communication as it would sound underwater, tracing the whalesong in 1986, finding out what happened to Chekov, and tracking the whales once they’ve been released.

I cannot change the laws of physics! Scotty has a grand old time playing the blustery professor at Plexicorp, to the point where McCoy cautions him not to bury himself in the part.

It’s a Russian invention. Chekov does a lovely job of stonewalling his interrogator aboard the Enterprise when he’s captured, and then almost manages to escape, done in by a fall from a great height. After McCoy repairs the damage to his noggin, Kirk asks him for name and as he’s coming out of it, and he says, “Chekov, Pavel. Rank: admiral,” that last word said with a goofy smile. 

Go put on a red shirt. While it’s likely that some people on Earth died when the probe started kicking up the oceans, there are absolutely no on-screen deaths in this movie. Indeed, only once is a weapon actually fired, when Kirk uses a phaser to zap the door locking the surgical team in the closet while McCoy works on Chekov. (Chekov threatens his captors with his phaser, but the radiation from the Enterprise‘s nuclear reactor makes it futz out, so it won’t fire.) 

No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Kirk’s tropism for brainy blondes continues unabated, as he flirts outrageously with Taylor, and it actually works. That he’s there to save Taylor’s beloved whales from extinction certainly doesn’t hurt…

Channel open. “Cloaking device now available on all flight modes.”

“I’m impressed. That’s a lot of work for a short voyage.”

“We are in an enemy vessel, sir. I did not wish to be shot down on the way to our own funeral.”

Chekov being efficient, Kirk being impressed, and Chekov showing a knack for fatalism and humor all at the same time.

Welcome aboard. Back from the previous film are both Mark Lenard as Sarek and Robin Curtis as Saavik, the latter very briefly and left on Vulcan for no reason the script can be arsed to explain. Sarek will next be in The Final Frontier played by Jonathan Simpson, with Lenard reprising the role in The Undiscovered Country and TNG‘s “Sarek” and “Unification I.” Ben Cross will play the role in the 2009 Star Trek, with James Frain set to play him in Discovery.

Jane Wyatt reprises her role as Amanda from “Journey to Babel“; a younger version of the character was seen in “Yesteryear,” voiced by Majel Barrett, and younger versions will be seen again in The Final Frontier and the 2009 Star Trek, played by Cynthia Blaise and Winona Ryder, respectively.

Majel Barrett returns as Chapel, last seen in The Motion Picture. This is Chapel’s final onscreen appearance, though Barrett will continue to provide the voice of Starfleet computers, and also play Lwaxana Troi on TNG and DS9, starting in “Haven.” Grace Lee Whitney returns as Rand; she’ll be back in The Undiscovered Country and Voyager‘s “Flashback” as a member of Sulu’s Excelsior crew. Both Chapel and Rand are working at Starfleet Headquarters.

Madge Sinclair plays the Saratoga captain, significant in that she is the first female ship captain seen in Trek history, finally putting the lie to Janice Lester’s comment. And she’s a woman of color, too! Sinclair will return to Trek in TNG‘s “Interface” as another starship captain, Silva La Forge.

Catherine Hicks debuts the role of Taylor. Brock Peters plays Cartwright; he’ll be back in The Undiscovered Country, and also have the recurring role of Joseph Sisko on DS9, starting in “Homefront.” Robert Ellenstein plays the Federation President, the first person to be seen playing the occupier of that office; the actor will also appear in “Haven” as Troi’s almost-father-in-law. John Shuck plays the Klingon ambassador; the character is next seen in The Undiscovered Country, while the actor will also return as a Cardassian legate in DS9‘s “The Maquis Part 2,” a member of the chorus in Voyager‘s “Muse,” and Antaak in Enterprise‘s “Affliction” and “Divergence.” And two of the Marines on the Enterprise were played by actual Marines assigned to the Ranger (the ship they filmed on): 1st Sgt. Joseph Naradzay and 1st Lt. Donald W. Zautcke.

We get a Robert Knepper moment, as Alex Henteloff plays Nichols. He had the recurring role of ambulance-chasing lawyer Arnold Ripner on Barney Miller, one of your humble rewatcher’s favorite shows.

And, of course, we have James Doohan, George Takei, Walter Koenig, and Nichelle Nichols, as ever.

Trivial matters: The film is dedicated to the astronauts who were killed when the space shuttle Challenger exploded ten months prior to the movie’s release.

This movie is a sequel to The Search for Spock, picking up three months afterward and dealing with the ramifications of the events of that film.

Originally intended to be released in the summer, just like the other Trek films, it had to be pushed back to accommodate William Shatner’s shooting schedule for T.J. Hooker.

The movie was released in 1986, which was the twentieth anniversary of Star Trek‘s debut. In addition, this was the year in which Paramount announced that the next year would see a new Trek TV show, Star Trek: The Next Generation, which some dork rewatched on this site a few years ago.

The method of time travel used is the same as that employed in both “Tomorrow is Yesterday” (to get home) and “Assignment: Earth.”

Kruge’s Bird-of-Prey is renamed after the HMS Bounty, the 18th-century Royal Navy ship on which the crew famously mutinied against Captain William Bligh.

The early drafts of the script had Taylor as a male UFO nut, and Eddie Murphy was considered for the role. He decided to do The Golden Child instead (not one of his brightest career moves, though probably a good one for the Trek franchise, all things considered), and Taylor was rewritten as a woman.

The Klingon ambassador was given the name Kamarag in Vonda N. McIntyre’s novelization. The character will return in The Undiscovered Country, and also be seen in the novels Sarek by A.C. Crispin, several issues of DC’s second run of monthly Star Trek comics by Peter David, James W. Fry III, & Arne Starr, and your humble rewatcher’s novella The Unhappy Ones in Seven Deadly Sins.

McIntyre’s novelization also included the scene with Sulu’s ancestor, includes Kirk and McCoy discussing the events of “The City on the Edge of Forever” when the notion of time travel first comes up, gives the garbage collectors who saw the Bounty land a subplot for some strange reason, and establishes that Nichols really did invent transparent aluminum, thanks to this helping hand from Scotty, and that Scotty has, in fact, heard of him for this reason which, if nothing else, keeps Scotty and McCoy from being irresponsible assholes.

The Federation President was named Hiram Roth in your humble rewatcher’s Articles of the Federation and Alistair Fergus in the Star Trek IV Sourcebook Update of FASA’s role-playing game. In the former novel, I established that Roth died in office during the reconstruction of Earth following this movie.

This is Taylor’s only onscreen appearance, but she is seen in the graphic novel Debt of Honor by Chris Claremont, Adam Hughes, & Karl Story, the short stories “Whales Weep Not” by Juanita Nolte (Strange New Worlds VI), “Scotty’s Song” by Michael Jasper (Strange New Worlds IV), and “The Hero of My Own Life” by Peg Robinson (Strange New Worlds II), and the reference book Federation: The First 150 Years by David A. Goodman.

The Saratoga captain is given the name of Margaret Alexander in McIntyre’s novelization, and she later appears with her family name changed to Sinclair-Alexander after marrying. She shows up in the Crucible trilogy and Serpents Among the Ruins, all by David R. George III, Forged in Fire by Andy Mangels & Michael A. Martin, and Cast No Shadow by James Swallow.

Early drafts of the script had Saavik remaining behind on Vulcan because she was pregnant with Spock’s child after their little pon farr experience on the Genesis planet. With that dropped, there’s no reason given why Saavik doesn’t go with the Bounty to Earth. This winds up being Saavik’s last onscreen appearance as well, though the early drafts of The Undiscovered Country had Saavik in the role that eventually wound up with Valeris. The character has continued to be seen in tie-in fiction, such as the novels The Pandora Principle by Carolyn Clowes (which gave her origin), Dwellers in the Crucible and The Unspoken Truth by Margaret Wander Bonanno, and Vulcan’s Forge, Vulcan’s Heart, and the Vulcan’s Soul trilogy all by Josepha Sherman & Susan Shwartz (in which Spock and Saavik are married in the early 24th century), the Mere Anarchy novella The Blood-Dimmed Tide by Howard Weinstein, the short stories “Infinity” by Susan Wright (The Lives of Dax), “Just Another Little Training Cruise” by A.C. Crispin (Enterprise Logs), “Prodigal Father” by Robert J. Mendenhall (Strange New Worlds II), and “The First Law of Metaphysics” by Michael S. Poteet (Strange New Worlds II), as well as more comic books than I can possibly list here.

Michael Okuda was hired to create the computer displays for this film, beginning a relationship with Star Trek that would continue for decades, as Okuda would continue to be the go-to guy for computer displays (among many other things, including co-authoring The Star Trek Encyclopedia with his wife Denise Okuda).

While Chekov and Uhura were on the aircraft carrier Enterprise, those scenes were actually shot on the Ranger, which was in dock. The Enterprise was at sea, and also on active duty, so they wouldn’t have been allowed to film on it in any case.

In Greg Cox’s The Eugenics Wars: The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh, Roberta Lincoln, the partner of Gary Seven from “Assignment: Earth,” infiltrates Area 51 and retrieves Chekov’s phaser and tricorder so 20th-century Earth won’t get their hands on 23rd-century technology. Earlier in that same duology, Lincoln briefly meets Taylor at a conference.

The novel Probe, nominally written by Margaret Wander Bonanno (the whole sordid story is on Bonanno’s web site), is a sequel to this film, which explores the origins of the probe.

Novelist and writer of “The Pirates of Orion” Howard Weinstein served as a story consultant of sorts in the early development of the film, and he is one of the ones who turned Bennett and Nimoy on to the notion of having the crew save humpback whales from extinction. Weinstein is given a thank-you credit in the film, and he used those talks as a jumping-off point for his novel Deep Domain.

To boldly go. “Everybody remember where we parked!” This is a fun little movie, probably the most genuinely enjoyable of a bad lot—and by “bad lot,” I mean “Star Trek movies,” as I maintain that Trek and movies are a bad fit.

It’s best remembered as the “save the whales” movie, and the overriding message is a very important one, as sledgehammery as the script has it be. Luckily, things are better now than they were thirty years ago, as humpback whales went from being classified as endangered in 1986 to being upgraded to vulnerable in 1996 and least concern in 2008. The movie’s prediction of a 21st-century extinction for the species is looking less likely. I, for one, am grateful to see that Trek‘s track record for predicting the immediate future remains dreadful (viz. the lack of any Eugenics Wars in the 1990s), as I really don’t want to live to see World War III and the post-atomic horror, thank you very much.

And the dialogue in this movie simply crackles. Just as with The Search for Spock one suspects Harve Bennett’s influence (one of four credited scriptwriters), as the conversational humor is just as strong in this one as it was in the last film, this time aided by a more lighthearted storyline (the stakes are high, and there’s plenty of social commentary, but the basic story is the, ahem, fish-out-of-water story of the crew in the 20th century). McCoy’s snark, Kirk and Spock’s banter both with each other and with Taylor, Scotty’s bluster with Nichols, Sarek and the Klingon ambassador trading insults, and so on. “Double dumb-ass on you!” “You look like a cadet review!” “What does it mean,’exact change’?” “I love Italian—and so do you.” “I’m from Iowa, I just work in outer space.” “We’re dealing with medievalism here!” “One little mistake.” “The bureaucratic mentality is the only constant in the universe.” Just a lot of fun.

It’s not without its flaws. Saavik’s remaining on Vulcan is utterly incomprehensible on every possible level. Just a few scenes earlier, Spock told his mother that he had to go to Earth to offer testimony because “I was there.” So was Saavik, so shouldn’t she be offering testimony, too, as the only survivor of the Grissom? (Of course, the characters can’t actually say, “Sorry, Saavik, you could come with us, but nobody liked you as much as the person who played the role before you, and you were created to replace Spock who we wound up bringing back instead, so as we say on Earth, c’est la vie.”)

Scotty’s cavalier granting of the invention of transparent aluminum to some schlub he needs Plexiglas from is spectacularly irresponsible, and in a franchise that has generally done a good job of stressing the need to not muck with history (Christopher’s son’s importance in “Tomorrow is Yesterday,” Edith Keeler’s tragic influence in “The City on the Edge of Forever,” the knife’s edge of Gary Seven’s work in “Assignment: Earth,” not to mention future works like First Contact and DS9‘s “Past Tense” two-parter), Scotty’s recklessness is appalling. Worse, it’s played for a cheap laugh.

Plus, how did nobody bump into the invisible spaceship that was in the middle of a big clearing in the most popular public park in the Bay Area? How come Uhura and Chekov have no idea where Alameda is when both of them went to Starfleet Academy, which is headquartered in San Francisco? (This stands out particularly coming after McCoy’s comment that San Francisco hasn’t changed much in three hundred years as they’re flying over it.) Why are three captains and four commanders being assigned to the same ship? (Just in general, the crowbarring of everyone into the same roles they were in fifteen years earlier in their careers is stupid, and will sour every remaining Trek film in this timeline.) Sending George and Gracie out before their scheduled press event makes no sense for the institute, as museums rarely pass up opportunities for publicity. And the climax is very anti, as the endless flight toward the whaling ship is tedious and uninteresting.

To be far, that last sequence is the only pacing misstep in the film. Leonard Nimoy’s sophomore effort as a feature film director is far more successful, as the performances are looser and less stiff, the visuals are stronger—just in general, Nimoy is far better at framing shots in this one than he was in The Search for Spock.

All in all, a fun outing. Enjoy it, ’cause it’s the last good outing for this crew. (Cue crowds ready to tar and feather me for disliking The Undiscovered Country. Just wait two weeks, and you can beat me up then…)

Warp factor rating: 6

Next week: Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

Keith R.A. DeCandido talked about The Voyage Home once before, in 2011 when Tor.com did a Trek movie marathon.

You know how those big family get togethers, when you’re the only kid and everyone else is… dead? Pixar’s latest animated adventure feels your pain. Check out the latest trailer for Coco!

We’re getting more and more excited for this one! (Can we have that magical guitar?) It’s hitting theaters on November 22, so get ready!

Folklore and fairy tales are riddled with tales of child abandonment: purposeful and accidental, peasant and royal, orphaned and unorphaned alike, nearly every child in a fairy tale spends at least some time alone. Some stories, indeed, focus on that abandonment, and the lengths that children must go to in order to survive, particularly if not discovered by unusually friendly dwarves or bands of thieves. Including “Hansel and Gretel”: on its surface, an adorable story of an adorable boy and adorable girl (they’re in a fairy tale) who just happen to find a gingerbread house in the woods. Nothing could be cuter.

Well, if you ignore all the starvation and the murder.

The Grimm Brothers apparently first heard the German version of Hansel and Gretel from a member of the Wild family, a prosperous middle class household, perhaps from their chief storyteller Henriette Dorothea Wild, better known to history as Dorchen Wild. Some sources allege that Dorchen’s father, a pharmacist, may have abused his children and frowned upon her friendship with Lotte Grimm, sister of the Grimm brothers, which might help explain why some of the fairy tales told in the household focus on parental abuse. Or possibly, they just liked to tell stories about evil families to contrast those lives with their own. The Wilds, like the Grimms, also lived through and observed the Napoleonic wars and later displacement of adults and children alike, something that seems to have influenced their retellings. In any case, several years after the story appeared in the first edition of Household Tales, Dorchen Wild married the younger Grimm brother, Wilhelm. They had four children, three of whom survived to adulthood, none, apparently, ever abandoned in the woods.

The Grimms were also aware of Giambattista Basile’s considerably more brutal and vulgar version (pretty much every one of Basile’s fairy tales can be summed up as “considerably more brutal and vulgar”), “Nennilo and Nennela,” one of the last stories in his collection, The Tale of Tales. By the time Basile scribed this tale, he seemed to be running out of steam, filling it with—even by his standards—unusually random elements such as pirates, fish whose insides contain palaces, knife sharpeners, and death sentences focused on barrels of studded nails—in an ending later echoed in the ending of “The Goose Girl,” also collected by the Grimms.

Before all of the pirates and knife training, however, Basile tells a simpler story of child abandonment. After the death of his unnamed wife, Iannuncio, identified only as a father, remarries a woman that I shall call Pasciozza since the words Basile uses for her are not exactly safe for a mostly family-friendly website. Pasciozza is, to put it mildly, not fond of his two children, Nennillo and Nennella. To be fair, the story suggests that at least one of these children does not always use diapers, so this hatred isn’t completely without cause, even if I can’t help but think that the solution here is to try to make sure the kid keeps diapers on. Or hire an extra maid. Anyway, she gives her husband an ultimatum: it’s either them, or any chance of ever sleeping with her. This is where I kinda begin to question the fairness of Basile’s description of Pasciozza, since given this choice, Iannuncio pretty much chooses sex, taking his children not once, but twice, to the woods and leaving them there, barely even protesting. The story wants me to believe that Pasciozza is the only person at fault here, but (a) it seems that Iannuncio didn’t exactly tell his new wife all that much about the kids, and (b) maybe just a TOUCH more protest before abandoning your toddlers in the woods, dude. Especially since the tale clarifies at the end that while Iannuncio and Pasciozza are not nobles, or wealthy, they are certainly not starving or poor. (Indeed, although the kids aren’t quite well born or wealthy enough to marry kings, they end up marrying quite well.)

To be completely fair, Iannuncio does leave his children a basket of food, as well as a trail to follow back home (ashes the first time, bran the second). I’m not overly inclined to be fair, however, because just seconds later we find out that Nennilo is so young, he can’t even tell people the names of his parents, which STRIKES ME AS FAR TOO YOUNG TO BE LEFT ALONE IN THE WOODS SO THAT YOU CAN HAVE A ROMP WITH YOUR NEW WIFE, IANNUNCIO. It is really saying something when the pirates end up being better parents—until, that is, they violently die a few sentences later, because, well, again, this is a story written by Basile.

(If you’re trying to remember him, he’s the same guy who published an early version of “Sleeping Beauty” where Sleeping Beauty doesn’t wake up when the prince finds her and sleeps with her and later had about half the characters start eating each other. So, you know, a group of suddenly dead pirates is sorta in his style and even a bit of a comedown.)

Basile, I should note, disagrees with me completely, starting the tale with a rant about stepmothers, and continuing by putting all of the blame for everything that goes wrong on the evil stepmother, even when these things are clearly the fault of pirates or people refusing to notice that the fish right next to them is TALKING, the sort of thing that really, characters should pay attention to. Apart from the pirates, Pasciozza is also the only person specifically punished for her misdeeds.

The Grimm brothers were less certain about where to put the blame. Their footnotes mention both the Basile story, where the blame rests with the stepmother alone, and Madame d’Aulnoy’s Finette Cindron, where the children are abandoned by their father and mother, not stepparents. In the Grimm’s original version, Hansel and Gretel are abandoned by their mother, though their father protests. Only in 1840, in their fourth edition of their tales, did the Grimms change the mother to a stepmother, once again pulling away from blaming parents for abandoning their children in the woods.

Other tales of children abandoned in the woods took care to distribute the blame. In Charles Perrault’s story of Little Thumb, the mother protests abandoning the children; the father insists, arguing that the family will otherwise starve. In the English story of Molly Whuppie, the starving parents only abandon their youngest three children, keeping the rest, suggesting more complex motives. This is also true of the Polish story of Jan and Hanna, which, apart from the increased number of children, is otherwise fairly close to Hansel and Gretel, right down to the gingerbread house. A Romanian version blames the stepmother again—and adds a touch of cannibalism.

(Really, the more I read of these fairy tales, the more inured I’m getting to all of this eating other humans in soup or as nicely dressed main courses for huge feasts.)

The more desperate the financial situation, the more competent the children. Basile’s children, from a home with sufficient food and money (if not, apparently, sex), are in nearly constant need of rescue and are generally helpless. Finette, raised a princess, and only poor, not starving (and at that, “poor” only by the standards of the wealthy French aristocracy, whose description of “poor” in this tale would fill most poor people with envy) needs the help of a fairy godmother—though she is later able to trick an ogre into an oven. The poorer Molly Whuppie defeats a giant without help. Hansel, from a home without food, manages to mark a path back home, initially defeating his mother’s plans to kill him. Gretel, also from a home without food, crying and helpless at the start of the tale, ends up killing the witch towards the end.

And generally, the more poverty stricken the parents and stepparents, the more violent the children. Finette, for instance, rarely in any real danger of starvation apart from a brief moment of eating acorns, tricks an ogre into going into an oven and dying inside, never raising a finger to him. Molly Whuppie also defeats her giant through tricks, and he remains alive at the end of the tale. The considerably younger Gretel, poorest of them all, finds herself pushing the witch into an oven.

The prevalence of these tales reflects an ugly reality: throughout Europe, parents could and did abandon their children. Some of these children ended up as forced laborers in various professions. Others ended up as beggars or criminals. Still others died. The reasons for abandonment varied. In some cases, these children seem to have had minor to severe disabilities that their parents felt unable to cope with. Other mothers abandoned unwanted babies at the steps of churches and convents—especially babies born outside the bonds of marriage. Famines and war forced many families to split up, sometimes leaving children behind. In other cases the historical record is silent on the reasons; we only know it happened.

We can guess, too, that then as now, parents worried about their children getting taken away by strangers—strangers who would, perhaps, try tempting their children away using candy and treats not available at home. It’s perhaps not surprising that the hungrier the children are in these tales, the sweeter and more abundant the food that tempts them towards hungry monsters and witches. Thus Hansel and Gretel, more desperate than most of these children, and lacking a fairy godmother (though they do have friendly birds, and prayers) find themselves tempted not just by a table covered with food, or even the hope of bread and milk from the first house they encounter, but cake, pancakes, apples and other sweet things, in a house specifically designed to attract and fatten children. Other fairy tale children content themselves with bread, milk and soup.

Incidentally, the “gingerbread” that forms such a large part of “Hansel and Gretel” is absent in all of the Grimm versions. That later detail may have come from some Polish versions, or was possibly in a reflection of the German custom of building small houses from gingerbread. The original house does, however, have a roof made of cake, turning the house from sanctuary to trap. That cake probably isn’t needed—as hungry as they are, the bread would probably be enough to tempt them. On the other hand, the witch was presumably looking for better fed children than Hansel and Gretel—especially given that she later spends time trying to fatten Hansel up—so used cake to sweeten the deal and the temptation. The cake also, of course, suggests the comparative wealth of its owner.

Given that the witch has access to plenty of food, at a time when her neighbors just a three day walk away are forced to abandon their children, and yet still wants to eat her neighbors, her death has been read as a bit of wish-fulfillment on the part of peasants towards their wealthier, landowning, sometimes rapacious neighbors. But it also serves as a warning to the tale’s listeners to be wary of strangers, particularly strangers with sweets—and a warning to parents that these monsters might be out there. The witch in Hansel and Gretel may have gone to rather elaborate lengths to attract starving children, but she could and did go to those lengths because she knew children would be out there, in the woods.

Still, the image of young, starving helpless children overthrowing a well fed oppressor is a powerful one, one that probably helps account for the ongoing popularity of the story. In a period of multiple displacements and abandonment, we can guess that children and parents alike needed stories of competent children who could survive abandonment in the woods. Or, in the case of Basile, incompetent children lucky enough to be rescued by princes and pirates, or with Finette, lucky enough to have a fairy godmother—as well as a touch of intelligence and charm. Or with Hansel and Gretel, a young girl strong and brave enough to be able to shove her next caretaker, if needed, into an oven.

Mari Ness lives in central Florida.

In this ongoing series, we ask SF/F authors to describe a specialty in their lives that has nothing (or very little) to do with writing. Join us as we discover what draws authors to their various hobbies, how they fit into their daily lives, and how and they inform the author’s literary identity!

Growing up in West Texas, I figured out pretty fast that the ranchers and farmers, they’d always have a certain part of some pasture where they would shoot the animals of theirs that needed to be put down, where they’d drag their cows and horses after they’d wondered out into the road, got hit.

I would spend hours crawling through those corpses. I had cigar boxes where I’d keep collections of all the elbow callouses I’d peeled up, that felt like shallow little stone cups. For a while I had a jar filled with what I’d convinced myself was the shiny disc that made cows’ eyes flash green in headlights.

It wasn’t biology or anything forensic that interested me. What interested me was pretending this was all much older. Pretending this was ancient.

Another thing I’d figured out, it was that if I could find the old footprint of a house way out in the mesquite, some place people had lived eighty or a hundred years ago, then I could walk in circles around it and jab a piece of rebar down through the crust of the dirt every few feet, wait for that deep-down dirt to be black on the rebar. That meant burn. That meant burn pile. That meant this had been the trash, a century ago.

I would peel through that midden spoonful by spoonful, and come home with all these neat old bottles, all these rusted tools I wasn’t even sure how to hold, much less what they might have been for.

A few years later—say, fourteen, fifteen years old—I got transfixed by that transformation scene in the movie Altered States, where William Hurt’s character regresses into his own genetic prehistory and becomes something vaguely, wonderfully australopithecine.

This made my heart pound against the wall of my chest.

Then, like it was meant to be, I stumbled into the 1987 anthology Neanderthals, the sixth installment in Isaac Asimov’s Wonderful World of Science Fiction series. And wonderful it was. The last story is Philip José Farmer’s the “The Alley Man,” which suggested that maybe all the Neandertals hadn’t died off, which was the best secret ever.

I read this anthology front to back and over again, and came to know that all these stories were both true and written specifically for me.

Then, looking for More Like This, I found William Golding’s The Inheritors, where, instead of rendering Neandertals as dim witted hunched over almost-humans, he gives them dignity, and curiosity, and these complicated longing and suspicions.

Four years later I’m eighteen, and—big surprise—carrying something of a torch for proto-humans, one I was certain was going to light up the dawn of man in a completely new and better way. I could figure out all the steps and developments everyone else kept missing, I knew.

Where to shine that torch, though, right? Thanks to alternative school I had a diploma, but I had zero plans for any more schooling—you don’t need college to drive tractor, which was was what I had in mind. But then, because I wanted to get a date with a girl who needed a ride to the SATs, I ended up enrolled in college.

The first big thing to happen there was I took a beginning philosophy course, that showed me there was a world where the kind of thinking I liked to do didn’t make me a weirdo. The second big thing was I took an archaeology course. You mean I could get course credit for reading about what I wanted to be reading about anyway? I was that girl in Indiana Jones’s classroom with love you painted on her eyelids, yes.

A couple weeks into that archaeology course, though, the prof doddered into class, regarded us all, and shrugged, said he was sorry if any of us were wanting to get our hands dirty, because the only digging left to do in archaeology was in museums drawers.

So I became a philosophy major.

My heart, though, it stayed in the trash middens, in the bone yards, in the goings-on I could imagine from all these things left behind.

And that’s still where my heart is.

What I most love to think on and read about and dream towards, what I spend my free time chasing down as best I can, it’s our hominid ancestors, our human precursors, ourselves before we had a sense of self. My first novel, even, my big plan was for it to be a series of long answering machine messages from an uncle to a nephew, theorizing why we ever stood up on two feet. And what we could see from that new vantage point.

I don’t go on digs, no—I don’t have the training, and don’t get any invites either—and I don’t sift museum collections, but I do page through everything I can find, certain that I’m going to make some vital connection no one else has made yet, one that shakes the family tree, makes it all make sense. Just, I also know I don’t really have the science to be anything, finally, but an enthusiast.

That’s never stopped a dreamer, though.

And, some days, I even want to thank that archaeology prof who scared me away from his field.

If not for him, I never write fiction.

That next semester after I signed on with the Humanities way of learning, I stumbled into writing stories. And, what I found, what I never would have guessed, it’s that the way of thinking I’d been engaging for so long, that I had to apply to try to figure out what this rusted tool was, that was exactly the kind of imagination I needed in order to make characters and plots come together on the page in a real way.

To me, that’s what fiction is: a cigar box rattling with artifacts.

My job as a writer, it’s to hold each of those objects up, inspect them from every side, then lay them out with the other objects, and see the story that brings them all together, the story that’s right there, waiting to be told.

I’m still that kid walking the pasture for the people who used to live there, the people who came before.

Only, now, with my pen, I can make them real.

Stephen Graham Jones is the author of 22 or 23 books, 250+ stories, and all this stuff here. His horror novella, Mapping the Interior, is available June 20th from Tor.com Publishing. He lives in Boulder, Colorado, and has a few broken-down old trucks, one PhD, and way too many boots.

The Space Between the Stars is Anne Corlett’s first novel. It is a striking effort that explores life, death, love, isolation, and the search for meaning in an uncaring universe, and one that treats these topics with a surprisingly accomplished touch. I read it back to back with another debut novel, Katie Khan’s Hold Back the Stars, with which it shares several apparent similarities (notably, a miscarriage provides part of the emotional background of the main female character in both novels). The contrast shows to some effect: Corlett is far more successful at giving her themes weight and resonance.

Reading The Space Between the Stars, I was struck by how much it was in dialogue with the same themes as Joanna Russ’s We Who Are About To… The two books are very different in their structures, in their characters, and in their emotional arcs—We Who Are About To… tends towards bleak defiance, while The Space Between the Stars moves from despair to a place of hope—but they are both concerned with death and civilisation.

For those who are not familiar with Russ’s work, We Who Are About To… is the story of a small number of people—less than a dozen—who crash-land on a planet that is at least temporarily survivable. They have no hope of rescue and no way to get back to the rest of human civilisation. The narrator is a woman who understands that they are doomed, and is determined to live what remains of her life with autonomy and self-respect. Most of the rest of the party, however, especially the men, are determined to found a new civilisation, a project which will include rape and forced pregnancy for the women. (A probably futile endeavour, given the numbers, leaving aside the utter immorality of such a case.) We Who Are About To… is a furious, polemical novel about autonomy, personhood, and the choices we make as humans when facing death and the prospect of being forgotten to memory.

The Space Between the Stars is neither furious nor polemical. But it explores human connection and human ways of dealing with isolation and the prospect of extinction, after a virus has swept through human space, leaving only thousands (or perhaps tens of thousands) alive where once there were billions.

Jamie Allenby, the viewpoint character, was a vet on the frontier planet of Soltaire before the virus. She wakes, having survived, to an empty world. An undecipherable communication leads her to the conclusion that her estranged partner Daniel has also survived, and that he intends for them to meet on Earth. Here, at the end of everything, she decides that she loves him still. As she strives to reach Earth and her childhood home on the Northumberland coast, she encounters other survivors, some of whom form a small community for traveling to Earth: a former priest, an extremely religious scientist who is disturbed in her mind and believes that God has chosen them all to make a new world, a taciturn spaceship captain and his unsociable engineer, a young woman who was a professional prostitute, and a young autistic man.

As they travel, they encounter other small communities of survivors, and must face the different ways in which people are reacting to the new status quo. Some of them are responding violently, and trying to replicate the social divisions of the old world—trying to enforce their hold on power and reproduce the world they knew. And when Jamie finds her former partner, she must face the knowledge that her view of him does not coincide with the person he is now.

On Earth, they find other people who have survived the end of the world: a young woman in a bookshop in Alnwick, trying to keep the remains of the internet alive with the aid of people of the far side of the world; a community of aged Regency re-enactors, determinedly ignoring the near-extinction of the species. At last, at Jamie’s childhood home, she encounters someone whom she never expected to see again—her stepmother, with whom she had a strained relationship in her teens.

The Space Between the Stars intersperses the present-day narrative with small snippets from Jamie’s past, giving us a larger picture of the kind of woman she is and the relationships that formed her. This fills out the world, and makes Jamie’s isolation more poignant. We come to understand that she was always, perhaps, isolated, and that now, in the isolation of post-plague humanity, she might finally reach beyond her own personal isolation. And here, near the island of Lindisfarne with its two surviving monks, she must come to terms with learning that the plague was not, after all, a natural disaster.

In its emotional arc, in its concern with connections and its respect for individual choices and autonomy, The Space Between the Stars recalls Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (though it is not nearly as concerned with queer themes as Chambers’ work). It has something of the same sense of a small, enclosed, misfit community.

The Space Between the Stars is, ultimately, a kind novel. Strikingly written, with very human characters and a deep concern with human frailty, it is an excellent debut. I recommend it, and I look forward to seeing what Corlett does next.

The Space Between the Stars is available now in the UK and publishes June 13th in the US from Berkley Books.

Liz Bourke is a cranky queer person who reads books. She holds a Ph.D in Classics from Trinity College, Dublin. 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.

It seems that some writers set up dystopian environments with the express aim of fixing them by the end of the book (or series). This is particularly true of YA dystopian fiction, the category in which my Steeplejack series most obviously fits, but I’m particularly interested in how such dystopias come about and how the characters in those stories survive, using the means at their disposal to resist the status quo.

The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood (1985)

This is one of several books I could have put on this list which seem especially—even painfully—topical right now and have gotten a lot of attention in the last year or so (Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm being other obvious possibilities), and not merely because of the new TV adaptation. The focus is, of course, on gender, the Republic of Gilead (once the United States) having stripped women of the most basic rights (including the right to read). While it may seem unlikely that a civilized country could take such a retrograde step, the circumstances which create this culture in the book—the rise of a Christian fundamentalist movement which asserts its ruthless influence after an attack kills the President and most of Congress—are unsettlingly plausible.

The Machine Stops E.M. Forster (1909)

A novella (at most) which—with staggering prescience—looks forward to a version of earth in which people are isolated, every aspect of their lives mediated by a central “machine” whose operations are viewed with almost religious awe. The story centers on the machine’s gradual apocalyptic failing and the people’s inability to either repair it (all technical know how having being lost) or to live without it. It’s a bleak indictment of a culture so obsessed with labor saving technology that they lose touch with their own bodies and any meaningful notion of mental independence.

The Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham (1951)

The nightmare premise of this book is that, after a night in which a dazzling meteor shower (which may actually be orbiting weapons) leaves most of the British population blind and therefore at the mercy of the triffids: giant, mobile, venomous and carnivorous plants produced by genetic manipulation. What follows is the chaos of trying to survive not just the triffids, but the humans (individual and governmental) which are attempting to exploit the situation to their own ends.

Riddley Walker, Russell Hoban (1980)

Set in southern England a couple of thousand years after a nuclear holocaust, this remarkable book depicts not just the lives of the survivors but their garbled cultural memories, much of which is rendered in the very words they use. The people hold on to the vestigial traces of things their society once valued, the meaning of which has long since been lost. Against this strange and shadowy second Dark Age, the title character (in a quest reminiscent of an old Star Trekepisode!) seeks to relearn the lost art of making gun powder.

Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift (1726)

A slightly perverse addition to the list, but a neat one because it identifies part of what makes the subgenre so powerful. As is well known, Gulliver travels from place to fabulous place, encountering various outlandish, comic and troubling cultures. Invariably, of course, Swift’s satire is directed not so much at the foreign places as at Gulliver himself, who—in addition to being gullible—frequently derives the wrong lesson from what he experiences. The final visit, in which he is shipwrecked in the land of the horse-like Hounhynyms which are plagued by the clearly and barbarically human Yahoos, turns him into a tortured misanthrope incapable of spending time with people. The book is, like many dystopian novels, finally a searing critique of the way humanity’s stupidity and selfishness is allowed to dictate the terms under which everyone lives and, of course, dies.

Part of what separates great dystopian novels from the rest is the sense that the messed up world presented is plausible, a credible extension of real world social problems. With the less convincing sort I find myself wondering how on earth a society could ever actually evolve in the way represented by the book. The world feels fictional because it’s clearly an artificial problem the author has invented in order for the plucky hero to fix it. When the dystopia does get fixed, the resulting world often looks uncannily like the one in which the reader actually lives. I’m more interested in dystopias that ring true because we can see them looming in some nightmare version of our own future. They stand not just as fictional environments in which our heroes can be brave, but cautionary tales about what might happen if we aren’t.

Top image: Earle Bergey cover art for The Day of the Triffids, Popular Library Edition (March, 1952)

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

Terry Brooks’ early Shannara novels had a tremendous impact on me as a young reader. (Say what you will about The Sword of Shannara—it helped save epic fantasy.) While I was introduced to epic fantasy by J.R.R. Tolkien, it was Brooks who cemented my lifelong love for the genre. Those books, from Sword all the way to the conclusion of The Heritage of Shannara, were expansive and entertaining, chock full of new, interesting ideas (which, in a stroke of genius on Brooks’ part, piggybacked off of familiar elements from earlier volumes.) They swept me away and ignited my imagination with each new volume. Unfortunately, Brooks was unable to maintain momentum, and, in an effort to move onto a once-yearly publishing schedule, his novels began to slim down and started to shed their most redeeming qualities.

I remember the first time I was disappointed by a Terry Brooks novel. It was 2002, and Brooks had just released the conclusion to The Voyage of the Jerle Shannara trilogy, Morgawr. (The Shannara series is built of smaller sub-series, usually consisting of three volumes each.) While the first volume was fresh and welcome departure from the darkness and vast scope of the previous quartet, by the conclusion it was flat and ineffective. Up to that point, I had come to expect each of Brooks’ sub-series to conclude in a way that felt like the world had been saved from greater peril or changed in some monumental way. The Elfstones of Shannara saw the rebirth of the Ellcrys, The Wishsong of Shannara introduced one of the series most iconic forms of magic, and The Heritage of Shannara introduced the science-friendly Federation, who is still a staple in the series. The Voyage of the Jerle Shannara introduced one of the series most important and fascinating characters, Grianne Ohmsford, but Morgawr left too many hanging threads, and its conflicts proved more intimate and personal than world-changing. I met Brooks on book tour that year, and asked him a few questions that cautiously circled around my disappointment, but even speaking to the man himself couldn’t reconcile the way I felt. It just wasn’t the type of story I wanted or expected from Shannara. Unfortunately, with only a few exceptions here and there (The Dark Legacy of Shannara trilogy in particular), I’ve been let down by these slimmer and less satisfying novels ever since.

Until now.

The Black Elfstone, the first volume of The Fall of Shannara series, is the start to an epic story that I’ve been waiting for since The Heritage of Shannara.

A large part of this is due to the scope of The Black Elfstone’s main plot, which is focused on the Druids and their response to a ghostly invading army. The Druids, bogged down by a corrupt leader and all the other perils of bureaucracy, flounder as this army tears through the Four Lands, leaving nothing but the dead in its wake. As the first act in a larger story, The Black Elfstone suggest that the coming story is larger and more complex than the rest of Brooks’ recent Shannara novels. There’s a sense of ambition and momentum in its pages that I wasn’t sure Brooks would find again, and it’s a lovely experience to be whisked away by remembrances of what made me fall in love with his work in the first place. The Black Elfstone blows the doors open on a story that pulls together many disparate strings from the series’ history, and also propels it forward towards its inevitable and much-awaited conclusion.

As expected from a Shannara novel, The Black Elfstone introduces readers to a handful of principal protagonists: Drisker Arc, Tarsha Kaynin, and Dar Leah. They’re all characters we’ve seen before in some form or another since The Sword of Shannara (respectively: druid, magical youth, earnest warrior.) While they don’t make remarkable strides towards breaking these stereotypes, they do play their roles well and propel the plot forward efficiently. Tarsha Kaynin may be The Black Elfstone‘s Shea Ohmsford (actually, wait, Shea Ohmsford is the Shea Ohmsford of The Black Elfstone, but, well…), but she has a complexity to her personality that sets her apart from Brooks’ other young heroes. She’s plucky, sure, but she’s also demanding and proactive, strong and frustrated by inaction. Despite being young and untrained, she stands up to Drisker Arc, and, when push comes to shove, chooses her own path rather than hitching her wagon to the Druid’s horse. Brooks has always been a socially-minded writer, so it’s not unusual for him to focus his stories on women, but Tarsha Kaynin is one of his best—a well-crafted young woman who creates her own space in the novel, rather than taking a back seat to the more experienced men.

Brooks doesn’t just tell us that Tarsha is strong and capable, he constantly proves it to the reader through her actions.”I don’t want to be protected,” she tells Drisker. “I want to be educated.” During a visit to Varfleet, a rough-and-tumble trade city, Drisker recognizes just how much he has underestimated the young magic-user:

When Drisker turned to see where she was, he found her pinned against the wall by two men in similar states of inebriation. One had his hand on her arm, the other in a less acceptable place. She was looking up at them as if petrified.

Uttering a silent oath, the Druid started back immediately. He hadn’t taken two steps before Tarsha put her knee into the groin of the man who was groping her, and then seized the wrist of the other man and gave it a vicious twist that left his arm dangling. Both men collapsed into the crowd, their cries loud and painful. Tarsha gave them a quick look and moved away. In seconds, she was back beside Drisker.

“What a cesspool,” she offered as they set off again.

This brings to the forefront something that’s bothered me not just in The Black Elfstone, but in the last several Shannara novels in general: the increased presence of sexual violence. Brooks’ earlier Shannara novels featured little to no sex, but lately he’s started using sexual violence or the threat of sexual violence as a plot point or as part of a character’s background. He’s tasteful and discreet (the above example being one of the more obvious moments), and features both male and female victims, but it often comes across as (a) unnecessary, and (b) an attempt to make the series feel a little tougher.

In the above scene, Brooks uses the encounter to show readers that Tarsha is tough and self-sufficient, but it also feels exploitive. Tarsha can be physically threatened in many ways that don’t involve two drunk men sexually assaulting her in an alley. At another point, while trying to infiltrate an assassin guild, Drisker creates a false story about Tarsha being raped and dumped by her former fiancé, against whom they’re seeking revenge (Chapter 21). Again, Brooks wields sexual violence as a crude bludgeon. Had Tarsha been a boy, Drisker would not have concocted such a story. The final inferred instance of sexual violence involves a mentally ill teenage boy and his abusive uncle. It’s raw and heartbreaking, but is an unnecessary addition to a relationship that is already believably broken. This isn’t A Song of Ice and Fire in its handling of sexual violence, but at the same time Brooks’ novels have always been a safe place for me as a reader, and I’m disappointed by his decision to change tack.

Such change, however, has been a hallmark of the Shannara series for its entire existence. While plots and characters always take on familiar silhouettes, the Four Lands, where the majority of the series takes place, is constantly in a state of flux.

The big news when Brooks first announced The Black Elfstone was that it would be the first of a four volume conclusion to the Shannara series. (There’s a whole lot more to this, as Brooks still plans to write more Shannara novels, just not ones that move the story forward chronologically.) Since the series’ inception, Brooks has been toying with the sometimes-cold, sometimes-hot war between magic and science. The Four Lands is actually post-apocalyptic America—only magic (and faerie races who hid themselves from humans) reemerged after humanity managed to nearly wipe itself from the planet. One of the series’ most unique aspects is the way Brooks has allowed the technology of the world to grow and evolve as time passes. The Four Lands of The Black Elfstone is very different than the Four Lands we were introduced to in The Sword of Shannara. What began as a fairly traditional pastoral fantasy world has become something more akin to Final Fantasy XII—magic and technology coexist, and people fly around in airships while still fighting with swords. Computer science doesn’t really exist, but mechanical and industrial science thrive. Brooks is intensely curious with how the more primal and spiritual aspects of magic interact with science and humanity’s desire for progress. The Black Elfstone is the first volley in the final war between science and magic, and if the novel’s pulse-pounding conclusion is any indication, readers are in for a larger and more complicated battle than anything the Four Lands has seen in the history of the series.

Early on, Drisker Arc, exiled High Druid, muses about the state of the world, and the bureaucratic failing of the Druid order he once led:

The world was changing once more, and the Druids were changing with it. Wasn’t that why he was here instead of at Paranor? New science was emerging, mostly from the Federation, forms unknown in the Old World that had come alive in the new. Forms that relied to a substantial extent on diapson crystals and the power that could be unleashed through skilled faceting and a harnessing of sunlight. There were airships and ground vehicles that utilized both. There were flash rips and thunderbolts, railguns and shredder slings all capable of releasing power that could shred and destroy enemies and their weapons. There were new communications devices that allowed conversations and visuals between people who were hundreds of miles away from each other. There were machines that could affect the weather, machines that could generate storms to provide rain for farmland. There were transports of such size they could carry entire armies. So much changing, but the Druids weren’t changing with it.

The magic was all they needed, they kept saying.

The magic was the only power that mattered.

It wasn’t necessary to employ these new sciences. They didn’t need to embrace a future others claimed to own.

They held the balance of power among the nations, and they would continue to do so forever.

Drisker Arc pursed his lips. Not if you tear yourselves and your order to pieces from within first.

Brooks is obsessed with the price of magic and its destructiveness—to the environment and to its wielders. It’s one of the core themes and narrative devices that Brooks relies on in every Shannara novel. Magic, like science, is not inherently evil, but it comes at great costs, and can be turned to evil ends. It changes people. Fuels war. Arthur C. Clarke’s third law states that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Brooks flipped a coin at the beginning of the Shannara series, and readers have wondered ever since whether it would come up science or magic. The Fall of Shannara series promises to answer that question, but the line between the two is becoming as blurred as the images on that rapidly flipping coin. Perhaps this is not a battle fought between magic and science, but between greed and benevolence. The Black Elfstone is laying a canvas that is broad enough to finally examine the relationship to the extent that it deserves.

As always, Brooks’ prose is workmanlike and inoffensive, more concerned with telling the story than painting a picture. It’s straightforwardness is admirable, especially in a genre known for being purple as a lavender field. As a result his novels are breezy, and the pages always fly by. One of my main criticisms of his previous novels is that they sometimes feel like plot outlines with a bit of meat and fat added on for flavour, but with The Black Elfstone he manages to find a nice balance between a fast-moving plot, and actually allowing the story room to breathe. He’s working to set up a huge, possibly catastrophic collision between his series’ two warring forces, so slowing things down works at both establishing the conflict between science and magic, and also breaking up the momentum of a quick moving narrative that could easily fly out of control.

The Black Elfstone doesn’t offer the complexity of a Brandon Sanderson novel, the ocean-deep world building of Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen, or the labyrinthine politics of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire—but it doesn’t need any of that. Instead, it’s a Shannara novel through-and-through. A vintage Shannara novel. The Black Elfstone brings to mind the days when a young Terry Brooks saved epic fantasy, and proves that 40 years later, he’s still go it. It has epic scope, heroic characters, and so much heart. The series might be called The Fall of Shannara, but The Black Elfstone is proof that the Shannara series can still reach new heights.

The Black Elfstone is available June 13th from Del Rey.

Aidan Moher is the Hugo Award-winning founder of A Dribble of Ink, author of Tide of Shadows and Other Stories and “The Penelope Qingdom”, and regular contributor to Tor.com and the Barnes & Noble SF&F Blog. Aidan lives on Vancouver Island with his wife and daughter, but you can most easily find him on Twitter @adribbleofink.

When you think of the most famous time travel stories, invariably your mind lands on a machine: Wells’ original Time Machine, Doc Brown’s DeLorean, the Doctor’s TARDIS. Whether those machines are propelled hundreds of centuries forward, or land in the recent past before heading back to the future, or simply bounce around in wibbly wobbly timey-wimey, they’re carrying their intrepid time travelers all across space and time, freeing them from linear time.

So—time travel occurs via technology and/or science, which allows us to peek into the future. Sounds like science fiction.

Except.

In Outlander, visiting the standing stones at Craigh na Dun at a particular time sends Claire backwards in time 200 years, to 1743 and a new love interest despite being married in 1946. Whenever Dana gets injured in 1976, she returns to the same plantation over the early 1800s, compelled to interfere in the goings-on of a slaver family in Kindred. And The Ancient One has young Kate happen upon the ominously named Lost Crater and its grove of incredible redwood trees only to be propelled 500 years in the past, where she wields a magic staff and helps an extinct civilization fend off a giant volcano creature about to blow.

Three time travel narratives that not only include no technology but also contain no real method for time travel aside from an ineffable magic.

So… is time travel fantasy, then?

It’s a question I thought I had an immediate answer for, but the more time travel narratives I consider, the more difficult they become to categorize. The “how” of time travel, at least, seems straightforward enough:

Machines, vehicles, genetic or mutant powers, wormholes, tesseracts, devices… science fiction.

Magic, spells, mystical artifacts, time turners, ancient beings, multiple lives, whole buildings, or simply no explanation offered… fantasy.

But even that attempt at a taxonomy is fraught, as it just creates more questions: Isn’t a time turner technically a device? Is it merely the magic that powers it that distinguishes it from something like the DeLorean’s flux capacitor, which runs on…

Well, it’s not actually clear what that runs on. This special box is responsible for “flux dispersal,” but that still doesn’t actually answer why 88 MPH is the target speed, or how the DeLorean jumps through the space-time continuum. It’s just one of those things that the writers of Back to the Future handwaved away, and we just accept that that is how time travel works in that particular universe.

So how much “science” do we need for time travel to be science-fiction? Even aside from time travel narratives, some sci-fi will go always the handwave route, while others create hard rules for the technology or science propelling the story. Take, for instance, the divide between Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. Ditto for fantasy—writers can create in-depth, multi-layer magic systems with clear conditions and consequences, or describe a magic that just is. How do you have any hope of categorizing time travel as one genre or another when there seems to be so much gray area, when very little about it seems clear-cut?

Even though you would expect time travel to require hard rules, it seems to most often appear in both science fiction and fantasy stories that require a certain amount of handwaving on the details. We’re given some sense of how the TARDIS operates—the chameleon circuit, and the sometimes-isometric, sometimes-telepathic controls—but it’s best just to jump in and hang on. Similarly, there’s no clear explanation for the time travel in Kindred or Outlander aside from supernatural forces working outside of our understanding or control, forces that cause certain events to occur as part of some larger cosmic plan.

Regardless of genre, it seems, time travel is often treated like magic. So why does it feel easier to think of time travel stories as science fiction? And where do you fall in the sci-fi-versus-fantasy divide?

The Mummy is one of those monsters you just can’t keep down. The original Universal Monsters series of films ran from 1932 to 1955 and less than a decade later the bandaged one rose again, this time on the other side of the Atlantic. The Hammer series initially riffed off of Universal’s The Mummy’s Hand and The Mummy’s Tomb but soon became their own shambling, unkillable beast, and like all Hammer flicks the worst they ever get is still pretty fun. They’re no Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter but then again, what is? Clive Barker even took a run at bringing the Mummy back to life but it never quite came to fruition. There’s a whole book to be written about Barker’s near-misses with horror franchises but his take on The Mummy is the one I’d honestly most like to have seen. Being Barker, the approach to the material would have been violent and sexy and “would have been a great low-budget movie,” in his own words. There’s an excellent Cinescape article that covers the never-made Barker film in their May 1999 issue.

Instead of Barker’s version, though, we eventually got a loose remake of the 1932 original, written and directed by Stephen Sommers in 1999. The Mummy and its sequels, The Mummy Returns and (perhaps to a lesser extent) Tomb of the Dragon Emperor helped to set the early 21^st century’s gold standard for action cinema.

The reason for that is simple: these movies are FUN. They follow Evie and Jonathan Carnahan, a pair of orphaned siblings who’ve approached life in 1926 Egypt in VERY different ways. Jonathan is boozing and tomb-robbing his way to a fortune and Evie is intent on becoming the first woman recognized as a scholarly authority on Egyptian studies. Jonathan presents Evie with a box he…found. The journey to decipher its secrets leads them to Hamunaptra, the City of the Dead, and the terrible curse placed upon the ancient high priest Imhotep centuries ago. A curse they are about to unintentionally lift…

So far so Indiana Jones-without-the-whip, I know, but what makes these movies truly brilliant are the characters. Rachel Weisz, and later Maria Bello, play Evie as a glorious combination of turbo-charged Egyptology nerd, intensely proper upper class English woman, and fierce two-fisted ninja. The second film makes it explicit that Evie is a reincarnation of a figure from Imhotep’s time and may be destined to act as the final line of defence against him. Which, in any other movie series, would play out as a cheesy excuse to have your female lead engage in some unusually acrobatic martial arts.

Here? It’s also a cheesy excuse to get your female lead engage in some unusually acrobatic martial arts. But it isn’t ONLY that.

Instead, this revelation gives Evie a surprisingly nuanced and interesting character arc as she grows first into her role as a scholar and then blows past it, into new territory. Instead of trying to play the game that her country and era has set out for her, Evie plays by her own rules and that leads her to some really interesting places. There’s plenty of hints in 2008’s Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, for example, that she and Rick (oh, we’ll get to Rick) worked special intelligence missions during the war. (In my mind they did this with Atomic Robo, Doctor Henry Jones Junior, and, on occasion, Hellboy.)

Regardless, Evie’s transformation feels hard fought for and well earned. One of the single most affecting moments in the franchise occurs towards the end of The Mummy Returns, when the very fact that she has a family and people who care for her gets her killed: distracted by the realization that Rick and their son are alive, Evie is stabbed and bleeds to death.

Her death devastates everyone. Rick in particular, all 6’3” of him, just collapses over her, sobbing in a way that’s about as un-blockbuster as you can get, in terms of drama. It’s a complex, poignant scene, and it makes clear both that Evie is more than just her past self, and that she’s had to pay a heavy price for her life and choices.

It also gives the movie a great ticking clock to race against as they work out how to resurrect her (Spoiler: they win. Yay!)—but the emotional content is what stays with you.

The reason for that, oddly, is wrapped up in her brother. Jonathan, played with colossally charming rubbishness by John Hannah, is not good—at anything, in any sense, besides surviving. Not brave enough to be a treasure hunter, not rich enough to be a gambler, he charms his way across Egypt and always looks out for number one. He’s flawed, and knows it, and keeps going anyway because that’s what underdogs do.

And that’s what these characters are. Even with Evie’s Egyptian princess ninja skills cropping up in the later movies there’s no hint, at any point, of these folks being unkillable or a sure bet to win. They all screw up, they all make truly spectacular mistakes, and they all take their lumps getting to the end of the movie. That doesn’t just make them relatable, it makes them sympathetic—and that may be the key factor that the new version of The Mummy hasn’t carried through.

When we first talked about this piece, the Tor editorial team brought up the importance of the underdog theme, and I really responded both to that and to its apparent absence from the new version. In every trailer we’ve seen, the lead in the new version looks and behaves exactly like Ethan Hunt of the Mission: Impossible franchise—there’s the same relentless competency, the same grim demeanour at times, and the same sense of Nick Morton being another slightly by-the-numbers Tom Cruise action hero going through the motions.

If so, that’s bad for two reasons. The first is that Cruise is capable of SO much more as an actor in action films, as Edge of Tomorrow and the later Mission: Impossible movies demonstrate. The second is that, with a bulletproof action man in the lead, you don’t just lose the underdog factor—you replace Rick O’Connell with a lesser model. And nobody puts Rick O’Connell in the corner.

Seriously, he’s 6’3”. He’s not going in any corners he doesn’t want to be in.

Rick O’Connell represents Brendan Fraser’s finest hour. He’s also the great spiritual successor to Indiana Jones (though he doesn’t get the acknowledgement he deserves, for the most part). Rick tends to favour firearms over bullwhips, but the two men have a lot in common. There’s the same bruised fortitude, the same refusal to stay down, and the same near total absence of luck except when absolutely needed. The best way to understand Rick is this: Remember the look on Indy’s face in the famous scene in Raiders? With the big guy who’s all ready for an epic sword fight? And Indy just shoots?

That’s the essence of Rick.

(And yes, I know the reason why that scene happened that way was that Ford was ill. The character beat still stands.)

Brendan Fraser’s endlessly laconic, long-suffering O’Connell is a joy. Even in the third, notably less impressive movie, his combination of puppy-like enthusiasm, comic timing, and physical bulk is relentlessly endearing.

Better still, Rick and Evie are one of genre cinema’s great overlooked teams. Time and again they help each other out in a manner that’s refreshing in its complete equality. Look at the moment in The Mummy in which Evie drags a preoccupied Rick out of the way of a bullet. Or the moment in The Mummy Returns where Rick saves Evie from being sacrificed. These two are on exactly the same page almost all the time, and the rare times when they aren’t make for some of the movies’ best moments. Rick’s heroic destiny is hinted at while Evie’s is explicitly detailed and that subtle shift in focus really helps The Mummy Returns along. It’s not even that there isn’t a damsel in distress—it’s that sometimes that damsel is Evie, and sometimes it’s Rick.

But you can’t talk about the characters in these movies without discussing Oded Fehr. As Ardeth Bay, the head of the Medjai (the order dedicated to guarding the tombs and stopping people from raiding them), Fehr is amazing. He’s got natural screen presence, tremendous comic timing, strong action chops, and is phenomenally good looking. This series should have been Fehr’s career-making turn and instead he was condemned to years of playing terrorists (and Carlos, brilliantly, in the Resident Evil franchise). In a fairer world? Fehr would have been Doctor Strange (perhaps taking turns with Oscar Isaac), but at least we got his turn as Bay in these movies.

Those four characters are so fundamentally charming, and so banged-up, bloody-knuckled, and crumpled from their adventures that you can’t help but root for them. They’re the key to the series’ success, although Arnold Vosloo’s tragic and monstrous Imhotep is also impressive. Together, they give the Mummy movies an emotional core that’s sweet, funny, and tough. And that’s what makes these films so much fun to watch, even now.

They aren’t perfect, of course. Omid Djalili as Warden Gad Hassan is saddled with a character who’s so grotesquely stereotypical the film drops 20 IQ points every time he’s on screen. It’s especially a shame as Djalili is a fiercely smart, very funny stand-up comedian, and both the role, and he, deserved much better than what they got. Likewise, the version of Egypt we see is resolutely stereotypical, albeit with some nice touches. For example, Erick Avari, a veritable genre staple at this point his career, shows up as a Medjai who fights the war on a very different front. Likewise, the scattered remnants of various aviation corps are a common feature through the series. Through them, and Rick, you get a nicely-handled hint of the atmosphere of moral ambiguity filling the years between the World Wars—a grey area where treasure hunters can make a fortune, unearth an ancient evil, or throw a cat at a mummy. Perhaps even all three at once.

Charm, wit, jokes, and scrappy underdogs just trying to make a living make these movies as good as they are. A frankly horrifying amount of time has somehow passed since they were originally released, and they’re still immensely fun. Clearly it’s their shadow (much more than the earlier, “classic” iterations of the monster and story) that the new “Dark Universe” version of The Mummy needs to live up to, or surpass. Launching a shared universe is a massive undertaking, and at least according to the most recent buzz, the 2017 The Mummy certainly looks bowed under the weight of fan expectations. Here’s hoping the newest Mummy gets to have a little fun as well…or at least make sure it’s on the right side of the river.

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.

We want to send you a copy of Steve Tribe’s Doctor Who: A Brief History of Time Lords, available now from Harper Design!

Doctor Who: A Brief History of Time Lords tells the story of all of this ancient, legendary civilization, of notable historical figures, of Gallifrey itself, of the Time War and much more. The planet Gallifrey. The Shining World of the Seven Systems. Often to be found in the constellation of Kasterborous. Birthplace of one of the oldest civilizations in the universe: The Time Lords.

From their technologies and strategies to the renegades like the Master and the Doctor himself, this is the definitive guide to the oldest and most powerful civilization in the universe. They invented black holes, transmits, stellar manipulators, and they atrophied. A bunch of elderly academics in funny hats, the Time Lords watched the whole history of creation. This was the civilization that inflicted some of its most renowned and deadly renegades and criminals on the universe: the Master, the Rani, the Monk, the War Chief, yet it was also the benevolent power that rid the cosmos of the Great Vampires, the Racnoss and the Fendahl.

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Welcome to Freaky Fridays, that magical day of the week when we turn to dusty old out-of-print paperbacks of the Seventies and Eighties to learn about the world around us.

Last week, we confronted the question “What’s the matter with the Midwest?” and learned that mostly it was an issue of both immortal, blood-drinking serial killers cruising around in stretch limos with their psychotic lesbian henchwomen, and constipation. But to be scientific about it, that told us what was the matter with Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and as we all know, unfortunately there’s more to the Midwest than a single town in a single state.

Believe it or not, that ominous region known as the Midwest covers twelve states, and all of them are problematic. Wisconsin was home to cannibals Jeffrey Dahmer and Ed Gein; Illinois is where you can find the Seven Gates to Hell; Indiana hosted the murder of Sylvia Likens which spawned numerous books and movies; Iowa is infested with dragons; Minnesota is home to the infamous wood chipper murders; Ohio contained the haunted big box furniture store Orsk; North Dakota is stalked by pterodactyls; Charlie Starkweather hails from Nebraska; a Michigan crime inspired the horror movie Jeepers Creepers; Kansas hosted its own personal war; and Oklahoma? As you can see by the cover of Blood Sisters, it has an unusually high graduation rate for skeletons.

Starting with a prologue set in Baxter, Oklahoma, circa 1957, Blood Sisters introduces its sanguinary sibs at a funeral for their friend, Kathi. Attractive young ladies with too many i’s in their names (Vali, Liz, Margie, Francine) they are the Loreleis, their very own secret sorority at John Ross High School, whose colors are crimson and (ugh) lavender. Something terrible has happened to Kathi but even in the midst of all this pain “their grief did not mask their collective good looks. They had the appearance, each and every one of them, of young girls brought up in good, solid homes, of being accustomed to wearing good clothes, and eating substantial, well-rounded meals.” They’re so attractive that the dead girl’s father even asks to take a selfie with them before burying his daughter.

Cut to: 30 years later. The Loreleis have drifted apart but now it’s their high school’s 30th reunion and they reunite to perform their signature musical number at the talent show, “Singin’ in the Rain.” Ah, yes, high school reunions. A time when we want to show our former classmates how far we’ve come and how good we look. A time to reconnect. To celebrate. Yes, to even gloat a little. 30th reunions are when we mark our progress, rue our failures, and get murdered by our dead classmates whose ghosts are out for revenge.

But as we read the backstory of each Lorelei, we learn what the real problem with the Midwest is: everyone’s a dirty sex pig. Barbara Jean is a secret drinker trapped on a cow farm, moaning that she should have had an abortion instead of children. Even her 13 year old daughter encourages her to have an affair on her trip to Baxter. Liz is an American spy living in Moscow who has sex with tourists for the thrills, charging them $10 a pop. It’s the only way she can orgasm ever since she was 17 and started screwing anonymous college guys at a rib shack back in Baxter for $28 a trick to annoy her mom. Francine has married an elderly rich man who thinks that the bastard child she had with his son is actually his own offspring. Vali ditched her first husband in Baxter because she was so sexless and exhausted all the time when they were young and poor that he had an affair with a radio station receptionist. Now she’s a pilot. Anne is a struggling actress who lost her virginity to her drunk dad when she was 13. And Margie is haunted by the abortion she had in high school.

Once back in town, this assortment of middle-aged refugees from General Hospital move into the Lancelot Hotel, a fake castle featuring a bar where the barmaids dress in “wench” outfits, and two things happen. The first is that they immediately revert to their filthiest behavior. Anne pathetically pretends to be her own publicist and calls the local paper to announce that her plane has landed. Liz picks up a pharmaceutical salesman and hauls his ashes for $50 (he haggled her down from $100), and gets arrested by a cop whose idea of kinky sex is a woman wearing underwear with red hearts on them. He then forces her to have sex with him in order to stay out of jail. Barbara Jean gets drunk and sloppy with a guy she meets in the Lancelot Lounge because he remembers she used to be a Lorelei. Everything is so overheated that even a handgun mentioned in passing gets its own panting backstory (“She’d purchased it for self-protection when a pathological sex murderer had been terrorizing Baxter”).

The other thing that happens is everyone starts to see the ghost of Kathi all over the place: at the burger stand, in their living rooms, outside a church. Blood Sisters is a sleazy sandwich, with Lorelei buns on either end and Kathi’s meaty backstory in the middle. After being busted for shoplifting in 1957 the Dean of Girls forced the Loreleis to allow Kathi into their sorority or they’d be expelled. Problem is, the Loreleis spend their free time getting drunk and having abortions while Kathi thinks kissing is something only married people are legally allowed to do. To solve a problem like Kathi, the Loreleis decide to get her laid because it will “do her good” and “clear her complexion up” so they pay their buddy Butch $20 to get her drunk and hump her. “I always wanted to get paid for doing it,” he leers, proving that even the men of Baxter are dirty whores. But Kathi wants to be a nun and work in a home for crippled children when she grows up and her virtue allows her to totally avoid Butch’s sweaty man-trap.

Then Margie has a brainstorm while watching Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and, to be honest, I was mostly just surprised she was sober enough to make it through a theatrical performance without throwing up all over everybody. Margie wants them to break into the Catholic church and stage a black mass initiation with Kathi as the guest of honor (“I’ve got some ideas that are really gross,” she says), thinking that this occult orgy will scare Kathi straight out of the Loreleis. No one has a better idea, so on Halloween they break into the church, strip Kathi naked, surround her with candles, and start to chant. Then Kathi dies. The Loreleis feel bad about this and as a token of their grief they vow to never talk about her again.

Only now Kathi is back! Not only that, but Margie has lost her mind — again — and is wandering around town in her nightgown declaring that she is actually Kathi. Sorry to seem callous, but this is the second time she’s done this and the good people of Baxter are bored by her antics. Things come to an underwhelming climax that involves a church burning, a performance of “Singin’ in the Rain”, and love children coming back from the past—but it’s not the destination, it’s the journey, and this journey teaches us that Oklahoma is a dirty, dirty place. In Blood Sisters, the Midwest turns out to be the part of the country where you get married, then immediately catch your husband in bed with another man. Where you visit a grave, and someone inevitably throws herself across it sobbing for forgiveness. Go grab a drink alone and get arrested for prostitution. Midwesterners can’t even go to their 30th high school reunion without going crazy and burning down a church.

As Margie sighs, “It’s all so complicated. I still don’t understand.” You and me both, Margie. The Midwest will always be a great big melodramatic mystery to everyone. We should just leave it to the Midwesterners.

By the way, that skeleton cover is by the inimitable William Teason. A widely respected painter, he’s considered one of the great American illustrators alongside Normal Rockwell and N.C. Wyeth. Largely forgotten today, he’s considered a giant in the field. You can read more about him at his website.

Grady Hendrix has written for publications ranging from Playboy to World Literature Today; his previous novel was Horrorstör, about a haunted IKEA, and his latest novel, My Best Friend’s Exorcism, is basically Beaches meets The Exorcist.

With Every Heart a Doorway, Seanan McGuire introduced us to a vivid intersection of portal worlds containing magic, mystery, and occasional mayhem. Twin sisters Jack and Jill were seventeen when they found their way home and were packed off to Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children. Next June, readers will finally get to walk through the doorway that transported the pair to a world of vicious vampires and mad scientists in Down Among the Sticks and Bones, a new Wayward Children novella set before the events of Every Heart a Doorway.

Artist Rovina Cai illustrated a few select scenes from the book for us, bringing to life McGuire’s darkly magical world. Rovina previously illustrated scenes from Every Heart a Doorway, and we’re happy to have her on board again. Take a look at the images below, and read selections from the story!

They made an odd pair, strolling across the Moors, neither of them looking like they had a care in the world. Alexis was soft where Jack was spare, the daughter of wealthy parents who made sure she never went to bed hungry, trusting her to know her own body and its needs. (And if the local vampire favored willowy girls who would die if left outside in the slightest frost, well, loosen your belt and pass the potatoes; we’ll keep our darling daughters safe at home.) Jack’s hair was tightly braided where Alexis’s was loose, and her hands were gloved where Alexis’s were bare. But those hands were joined as tightly together as any lover’s knot had ever been, and they walked in smooth, matched steps, never turning their ankles, never forcing the other to rush.

Looking down, Jill could see her bare toes peeping out from beneath the cascading skirts, and she was grateful, because without that one small flaw, it would have all been too perfect to be real. She looked up. Mary was holding a purple choker with a small pearl-and-amethyst pendant dangling from its center. Her expression was grave.

“You are a member of the Master’s household now,” she said. “You must always, always wear your choker when you’re in the company of anyone other than the servants. That includes the Master. Do you understand me?”

“Why?” asked Jill.

Mary shook her head. “You’ll understand soon enough,” she said. Leaning forward, she tied the choker around Jill’s neck. It was tight, but not so tight as to be uncomfortable; Jill thought she would be able to get used to it. And it was beautiful. She didn’t get to wear beautiful things very often.

“There,” said Mary, stepping back and looking at her frankly. “ You’re as good as you’re going to get without more time, and time’s a thing we don’t have right now. You’re to sit quietly. Speak when spoken to. Think before you agree to anything. Do you understand?”

No, Jill thought, and “Yes,” Jill said, and that was that: there was no saving her.

Down Among the Sticks and Bones is available June 13th from Tor.com Publishing.
Read an additional excerpt here.
You can pre-order the novella at the links below, or from your favorite retailer!

I enjoyed Alien: Covenant immensely. I found the neomorphs frightening, the saga of David and Walter intriguing and the finale a gloriously grim statement by a legendary director in the winter years of his life. I left the theater satisfied, penned a short review and then did something unexpected.

I read Alien: Covenant—The Official Movie Novelization on an airplane.

To be clear, I hadn’t picked up a film novelization since middle school—and I’ve spent a good portion of my life since then dismissing novelizations as residual commercialism. But I felt a weird draw to this one, in part to see how the author addressed issues of interplanetary contamination but also because I’ve grown increasingly anxious on flights and figured any indulgence was better than freaking out over turbulence.

The deciding factor was the fact that Alan Dean Foster himself penned the book—a name you may recognize from decades of film novelizations, including books for the Star Wars and Star Trek franchises, plus the first three Alien films. But that’s just a portion of the Alan Dean Foster bibliography. In addition to his novelizations, he’s written numerous original books, including the the Humanx Commonwealth and Spellsinger series.

What I’m trying to say is that, sure, Foster participated in a fair share of literary mercenary work, but at 70 he’s a grizzled, experienced merc with a robust legacy all his own. Why should I feel self-conscious about reading a Foster film book? Why should I care anymore? I bought the book. The aircraft’s engines roared to life. I dove in.

Alien: Covenant is a very lean novelization. For the most part, if you see it in the film, you read it on the page. The only exceptions, aside from necessary internal monologues and light character development, fall into two categories: The re-sciencing of science fiction and script details that clearly didn’t survive final cut.

Re-Sciencing the Sci-Fi

If you’re at all familiar with film novelizations, you’ve observed this before. The best example of re-sciencing the sci-fi is probably Isaac Asimov’s 1966 adaptation of Fantastic Voyage. Asimov reluctantly agreed to the project, but instilled a great deal of hard science into an otherwise impossible scenario. Foster doesn’t attempt anything so grandiose in Alien: Covenant, but he does throw in additional details about the ship’s energy collectors, synth-dependent human culture and biological contamination.

The synth issue is of course most central to the grander themes in the film. I interrupted my journey through Ian M. Banks’ Matter to read this one, so I couldn’t help but interpret the synths of the Alien universe as a dark reflection of the Culture’s benevolent, pro-human AI masters. The humans of Alien: Covenant are “a dying species, grasping for resurrection,” holding back the harder edges of the technological singularity via the enslavement of their superior creations. At one point, Daniels muses to herself that humans have become “little more than backups to computers.”

Biological Contamination

In conversations about the film with friends, the topic of biological contamination comes up quite a bit. After all, planetary protection is no small matter. Here on real-life Earth, the issue’s covered by the NASA Office of Planetary Protection, the COSPAR Planetary Protection Policy and Article IX of the 109-nation Outer Space Treaty.

Why didn’t the Covenant crew wear protective gear on the alien world? Why didn’t they wear helmets? What the Hell did they think would happen?

For my own part, I was more inclined to overlook these details in viewing the film. Helmetless trips to a foreign world are tantamount to sound-in-space at this point in main stream sci-fi cinema, so I tend to activate my Harkonnen-esque disbelief suspensors and float on through. But it’s also fun to apply the rigors of known science to these scenarios (as we did in a recent episode of the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast).

Foster doesn’t quite give Alien: Covenant the Asimov treatment, but he does throw in a number of additional bits of exposition and dialogue to flesh out the crew’s approach to an alien biosphere. He stresses preliminary orbital bio-scans that clear the planet for landing. Then, the android Walter performs his own surface test prior to full debarkation. Again, everything turns up clean.

But of course it wouldn’t be much of a movie if there weren’t hidden death spores. After the blood and entrails settle a bit, David expands on the dormancy of the Engineers’ deadly pathogen:

“The pathogen itself has an extremely long lifespan. Given a suitable environment in which to exist in stasis, it can lie dormant for hundreds if not thousands of years until a suitable host presents itself and awakens it to commence the cycle again. If not controlled, a single application is quite capable of rendering an entire world permanently uninhabitable … While it is dormant, the virus is completely inactive. There was nothing for your ship or companion—competent as their respective instrumentation might be—to detect.”

That elaboration may or may not satisfy you (you really should learn to trust your machine masters), but it at least allowed me to lower the settings on my disbelief suspensors—notwithstanding questions about the nature and scope of their bio-scanning technology.

Alien Insight

But what does Foster’s novelization reveal about earlier versions of the Alien: Covenant script? This was a question that motivated my reading as well. What did Ridley Scott change and why? What clues might the book contain about the next film in the David series?

Major spoilers here obviously, but three deviations stood out to me—all from the final, doom-sealing moments of the film.

• David and Daniels don’t discuss the log cabin. The android’s ruse is not so overtly revealed. There’s no screaming and we’re left to wonder if Daniels even noticed at all. She promises to ensure a place of meaning for Walter in the colony. He tells her that, even if she can’t, he’ll “love her just the same.” I suspect the filmmakers found this too subtle and I personally prefer the gloomier tone of the final cut.
• David still asks Mother to play The Entry of the Gods into Valhalla as he ventures amid his comatose subjects, but there’s no regurgitation. The two facehugger embryos are already stored away. Again, I prefer the version of events in the film. It feels more fitting that David should, in some sense, “give birth” to the genetic seeds of his future kingdom.
• Prior to requesting Wagner, David asks Mother to “please open a secure line with the Weyland-Yutani Corporation headquarters on Earth”—a detail I don’t remember from the film (though I might have missed it in the horror of what was happening). We’re left to wonder what message he might wish to convey and how that might play into the next film. Perhaps David’s entry in the ship’s log (present in the film, absent in the novelization) achieves the same aim. Or does David intend to gloat over his creators? Is this a lure for more biomass? Perhaps the company far more insidious than any previous Alien installment led us to believe.

All in all, the book satisfied my curiosity. It answered a couple of questions and helped me get through the flight. I’d recommend the novelization to sufficiently obsessed fans, though for a story so dripping in violence and H.R. Giger’s morbid necro-eroticism, the book doesn’t pack much of a horror punch. The architecture and creatures feel somewhat sanitized without a language of sufficient bio-mechanical morbidity to describe them.

Foster’s not quite finished with the David-era Alien universe. He has an Alien: Covenant prequel novel due out this fall. Assuming it’s no mere Prometheus novelization, we might be in store for even more insight into earlier stages of production—or perhaps a fresh tale of android dreams and weaponized evolution.

Here’s hoping it’s ready for my next flight.

Robert Lamb is a science podcaster and writer who occasionally commits acts of fiction. Tweet him @vomikronnoxis and explore more of his work at rjlamb.com and stufftoblowyourmind.com.

On June 10, 1928, Maurice Sendak was born in Brooklyn, New York, and the world of children’s literature gained one of its greatest artists (although it would take a few more years before that fact became apparent…). At the age of twelve, Sendak walked into a movie theater to see Walt Disney’s Fantasia and walked out hell-bent on becoming an illustrator, and so he did—starting out by providing the art for a science textbook, Atomics for the Millions, and quickly becoming a sought-after illustrator of children’s books throughout the 1950s.

The best, as they say, was yet to come.

In 1956, Kenny’s Window—the first book both written and illustrated by Sendak—was published by Harper, and it was truly lovely. It was quickly followed by a string of delightful works: Very Far Away, The Sign On Rosie’s Door, and The Nutshell Library. In 1963, Sendak produced an instant classic, Where The Wild Things Are, which received international acclaim and remains, arguably, his best-known and most popular book.

Following the success of Where the Wild Things Are, Sendak became known for testing the limits of conventional children’s lit, both in terms of his art and his subject matter, which was often characterized as being darker and more subversive than most contemporary picture books. 1970’s In The Night Kitchen, a joyfully surreal romp through a toddler’s dreamscape, famously caused controversy with its depiction of its naked protagonist, Mickey, and continues to pop up on annual lists of most frequently banned and challenged books.

Outside Over There (1981) relates the story of Ida, a young girl who must rescue her baby sister from a horde of goblins—Sendak based the story on his own childhood memories of his older sister, Natalie, as well as his anxiety over the sensational Lindbergh kidnapping in 1932. As a small boy, his awareness of the case and its tragic outcome deeply affected him, and helped contribute to the themes of mortality and danger which inform so much of his later work.

On a similar note, 1993’s We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy features a community of homeless children, another stolen baby, poverty, illness, abandonment…when asked if children would have an adverse reaction to such troubling themes, Sendak insisted that only adults tend to recoil from such harsh realities:

Grown-ups desperately need to feel safe, and then they project onto the kids […] But what none of us seem to realize is how smart kids are. They don’t like what we write for them, what we dish up for them, because it’s vapid, so they’ll go for the hard words, they’ll go for the hard concepts, they’ll go for the stuff where they can learn something, not didactic things, but passionate things.

In spite of the occasional bleakness and sense of danger at the edges of Sendak’s work, however, an all-pervading sense of hopefulness lies at the heart of each of his books—an awareness of potential threats and darker emotions does not necessarily translate into pessimism. I find it helpful to think of Sendak’s approach to childhood in terms of the sublime—throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, various thinkers and poets explored the concept of the sublime as a way of describing a state of emotion or an idea too vast or complex for human consciousness to fully grasp and understand. At the risk of oversimplifying a rather complex idea, the experience of the sublime is often characterized as a mixture of terror, even pain, and ecstatic pleasure at encountering the unknown and awe-inspiring…and in some ways, isn’t childhood one long, epic encounter with the unknown?

Sendak had a way of making the ordinary trappings of childhood (tantrums, sibling rivalry, birthday parties, annoying encounters with overbearing relatives) seem fantastical and bizarre, and by the same token, he gave his protagonists a kind of glorious equanimity in the face of man-eating lions, monsters, goblins, and even emotionally needy Wild Things. Without ever moralizing, preaching, or adopting a didactic tone, Sendak presented his readers with the courage to navigate the complicated territory between loneliness and belonging, knowing when to walk away from an unsatisfying existence in search of something better, and when to come home again to surrender happily to the people who love you. More than anything, his heroes revel in the chaos of living life—in the thrill of just being alive, with all of its attendant drama, its perils, occasional doldrums, and exultant, joyful heights.

Beyond writing his own books, Sendak continued to illustrate children’s books, collections of fairy tales, poetry, classic literature, and plays throughout his career, as well as designing the sets for many operas, ballets, and stage productions. In the 1990s, he collaborated with playwright Tony Kushner to produce a new translation of the children’s opera Brundibár, which was first performed by children interned at Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia in 1943. Sendak, who had lost many relatives in the Holocaust, published an illustrated book based on the opera, with text by Kushner in 2003, and the newly translated opera premiered the same year. His work has also been adapted to TV, stage musicals, and film, from the animated Really Rosie (starring Carole King) to the live action movie version of Where The Wild Things Are which premiered in 2009.

Sendak’s life, like his work, was a fascinating blend of high art, straight talk, and wry humor. He maintained a lifelong love of Disney, Mickey Mouse, and of course Fantasia, as well as a passionate devotion to Mozart, Melville, and the poetry of Emily Dickinson. He received countless awards, medals, and other honors over the course of his career and became known for his caustic wit and gruff, irascible persona—he did not suffer fools, but he loved his young fans and always responded to children’s letters. He was grumpy and cantankerous and beloved, a celebrity who lived quietly with his partner, Dr. Eugene Glynn, for fifty years, before Glynn passed away in 2007. When Sendak died in 2012 at the age of 83, accolades poured forth from everyone from Neil Gaiman to Spike Jonze to Stephen Colbert, who noted that “we are all honored to have been briefly invited into his world.”

As a lifelong fan of his books, I never thought to send Maurice Sendak a letter when I had the chance—looking back, I honestly don’t know why it never occurred to me. But today, on his birthday, I’d like to thank him for creating stories in which children are never judged harshly for being wild, for being impetuous, or willful, or less than sensible. He didn’t force his characters to behave as miniature adults, but treated them instead as surprisingly perceptive, surprisingly powerful beings whose wildness and vulnerability never undermine their intelligence or integrity in the least. He was honest about the fact that the world can be an absurd and confusing place, but encouraged us to face the unknown with courage, and hoped that we might find joy along the way. He showed us how to see the world not as scary, but sublime.

This article was originally published June 10, 2014.

Bridget McGovern is the managing editor of Tor.com. She lives in Brooklyn with a wild thing named Max.