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

Today we’re looking at John Glasby’s “Drawn From Life,” first published in the Michaelmas 1989 issue of Crypt of Cthulhu. Spoilers ahead.

“And the music! It rose and fell in wild, tormented shrieks and cadences as if the instrument had a soul of its own which was in mortal danger of being lost forever in the fires of Hell.”

Summary

Certain unmentionable things occur on “the very rim of human consciousness,” but our unnamed narrator is driven to mention them, lest ignorant public authorities pull down a certain house at the end of Mewson Street and discover apocalyptic horror! For Mewson Street is not only on the outskirts of London but on the outskirts of reality as we know—and cherish—it.

Narrator’s busy writing a book on lesser-known contemporary painters, and frequents bookshops and studios in search of material. One day he stumbles on a dingy shop in an obscure Chelsea square. Its offerings are of little interest, except for a canvas signed “Antonio Valliecchi.” The landscape depicts a rocky plateau drifted with green sand and faced by a cave-riddled cliff. In the cave mouths, the artist has painted the vague yet deeply disturbing outlines of eldritch things. No horror magazine daub this, but narrator buys the bizarre masterpiece for ridiculously little. Could this Valliecchi be the same man as the renowned violinist? The shopkeeper doesn’t know.

Narrator spends months looking for more of Valliecchi’s work. Finally, during an after-dark wander through tangled streets, he spots a shop window featuring two works in Valliecchi’s super-realistic style. One shows robed celebrants in a vast cavern. They look like they might not be quite human. There’s no doubt about their monstrous idol, which is “hideous beyond all belief.” The other painting, titled “Void Before Creation,” shows suns and planets, beasts and men, arrayed around a vague black tentacled mass. The image seems to suggest that all things were “originally formed out of utter evil and chaos and would remain tainted with it until the end of time.” The shopkeeper says he bought the paintings from Valliecchi himself. The painter is indeed the violinist, and in the shopkeeper’s opinion a haunted and frightened man.

A week later, narrator learns that Valliecchi will be performing at his exclusive club! What a coincidence! He goes to the concert and is surprised to find the artist an ordinary-looking little man in his early sixties. His eyes do look haunted, though, and his music rises and falls in “wild, tormented shrieks and cadences as if the instrument had a soul of its own which was in mortal danger of being lost forever in the fires of Hell.” What’s more, narrator has “the uncomfortable feeling there were curious antiphonal echoes coming from somewhere out of the distance in answer to that strange music.”

After the performance, narrator tells Valliecchi he owns three of his paintings and wants to discuss his artwork. Valliecchi at first denies he ever paints, but he also gives the impression he desperately wants to get something off his chest. At last he gives narrator his address in Mewson Street.

Narrator seeks him out that very night. Mewson Street turns out to be narrow, cobbled, decayed. A “humped” bridge leads to a hill from which narrator can see the lights of London, and there he finds Valliecchi’s isolated home.

The interior’s ordinary enough until Valliecchi shows narrator into his studio. On its walls are pictures far more horrible than the three narrator owns. Valliecchi watches narrator closely, as if gauging his reactions. No one else has seen the pictures, he confesses, but perhaps narrator can understand. Was not narrator affected by his playing that night? Would he be surprised to learn the music was written ages before any great composer he could name?

Just as narrator begins to fear he’s dealing with a madman, Valliecchi drags him toward a heavily draped window. Let narrator see what Valliecchi has seen for so many years, see what his music can call forth!

Behind the curtains is no depraved mural, only a window into the dark night outside. But when Valliecchi begins to play his Stradivarius, the window becomes a portal to the hideous places he’s painted: the green-sanded plain with caves that spew worm-like demons, a burial ground desecrated by ghouls, all the visions of Earth’s early priests, all the terrible truth that spawned man’s myths. These are the gods that walked before even Mu and Lemuria rose from the waves!

Narrator screams, but is paralyzed beyond escape—also the door’s locked. As Valliecchi’s music reaches new heights of hysteria, the window goes black. Black with the blackness of ultimate chaos, and what lurks there: an amorphous and ever-changing intelligence, purely evil. Valliecchi tries to change his tune but it’s too late. Inky tendrils ooze through the window and draw the man screeching into outer darkness.

Narrator flees mindlessly, somehow making it home. Now, he seldom ventures out at night. He can’t explain what happened on Mewson Street, but he does know what he saw in his last backward glance.

What lay behind the drapes in Valliecchi’s studio was no window at all, only a blank brick wall.

What’s Cyclopean: The cave openings in Valliecchi’s cliff are full of “eldritch things.”

The Degenerate Dutch: The ancient Egyptians apparently worshipped pre-Lemurian gods called up by off-key fiddle music. (Pre-Mu, too. There’s no poetic word for things that happened before the rise of Mu, which is probably why Lemuria and Atlantis are so much more popular.)

Mythos Making: Clark Ashton Smith’s paintings are “horrifying enough,” if one understands their hidden meaning…

Libronomicon: …let’s not even talk about the naïve folks who read horror magazines, though.

Madness Takes Its Toll: When he meets Valliecchi, narrator’s convinced that he’s in the presence of a madman. But after that, he mostly questions his own sanity. He ends the story phobic of shadows, which isn’t necessarily unreasonable under the circumstances.

Anne’s Commentary

John Glasby (1928-2011) was a research chemist and mathematician, the author of Encyclopedia of the Alkaloids and Boundaries of the Universe. But when he felt like getting serious, he’d don any of a multitude of pseudonyms [RE: including “Ray Cosmic”] and bat out fiction: crime and mystery, science fiction and fantasy and horror, war stories, spy stories, westerns, even hospital romance. Yes, hospital romance is, or was, a thing. Nothing could be more erotic than the glint of freshly autoclaved scalpels, the tender squeak of gurney wheels, and the sweet scent of disinfectant, am I right?

I’m thinking of a series of very graphic novels: Herbert West, Reanimator, meets Cherry Ames, Student Nurse. Call my agent, publishers. We’ll set up an auction.

But about “Drawn from Life.” Sometimes less is more, especially at short story length. This one is groaning a little too loudly with Lovecraftian tropes. To name a few:

• Mankind is not meant to know too much. On the other hand, somebody has to know too much, in order to warn the rest of us against knowing too much.
• Venturing into odd little shops is dangerous. Ditto wandering in maze-like neighborhoods you’ve never seen before. Cobblestone streets and decrepit houses are a dead giveaway.
• Artists of the bizarre are either crazy or know too much or are crazy because they know too much. Or know too much because they were crazy to begin with. They usually paint either trans-Saturnian landscapes or ghouls or both.
• If a musician plays tunes you can’t hum along to because wildly atonal, beware. Violins and pipes seem especially suited to such tunes.
• If a window is heavily draped, leave the drapes be.
• Oh that I ever saw it!
• People will call me mad or overly imaginative or obsessed, but I know what I saw!
• Don’t bore the reader by describing your escape following the Big Scare. Just flee blindly/mindlessly and end up at home.
• Wormy things are scary. Also tentacled things. Also animal-tainted humanoids with red eyes. And especially black amorphous things, with vast inhuman intelligence. And tentacles.
• First person narrators should go nameless, while they live bachelor lives without familial obligations and write monographs about subjects at least tangentially related to their eventual obsessions. They should also be prone to coincidences that further the plot. Unless those coincidences are actually malign fate?

Sometimes more is more, as in: If one “mad” genius is good, why not two, or two-in-one. Here we’re talking Richard Pickman, the hyperrealistic painter, and Erich Zann, the violinist whose outre strains link him to other dimensions and summon problematic fans. I didn’t buy the mash-up here, alas, probably because I didn’t buy Valliecchi being a sublime genius in two very different arts, the visual and the aural. The story was too short to support the notion, gave too little detail.

Too little detail, too little specific and piquant detail, too little concentrated atmosphere. “Drawn from Life” is another story that, of late, has heightened my appreciation of Lovecraft’s, um, craft. Compare it to “Pickman’s Model” for detail, and detail beyond the cliche, the expected, like the painting of ghouls laughing over a Boston guidebook to supposedly still-interred notables. Compare Mewson Street to the Rue d’Auseil for eerie vividness.

I was thinking the Big Scare of the story was Azathoth, because Chaos associated with ear-lancing music. But it’s intelligent, an attribute one associates with Nyarlathotep. Of course, it could be both, Azathoth manifesting as Soul and Messenger. Or it could be a generic cosmic horror. To be fair, our nameless narrator wouldn’t know.

I was thinking, too, whether narrator needed to worry about the last house on Mewson Street being razed. If Valliecchi has been opening portals to beyond for many years, then the portals aren’t associated with any one place, but rather with Valliecchi and his music. I guess he created portals wherever he played the right tunes. What narrator really needs to worry about is whether he’s inherited Valliecchi’s connection to beyond. Like, what if he stops writing harmless art criticism and starts writing really, really scary stories that open “windows” in “brick walls?”

I was thinking, finally, about whether the Intelligence snatched Valliecchi’s Strad away with Valliecchi. Because that would have been really rude, as far as us music lovers are concerned. Though, yeah, could be one of the Servitors at the heart of creation is sick of its everlasting whiny pipe and wants to whine on the violin for a change.

Ruthanna’s Commentary

One of my own childhood phobias was born of a short claymation film, played for my class by a music teacher who was feeling either uninspired or sadistic. In the film, a band sets up on a forested slope to practice, I think, Joplin’s “The Entertainer.” The mountain erupts, the band is destroyed along with the surrounding ecology, and I ended up terrified of 1) seismic activity, and 2) “The Entertainer.” I kinda sympathize with our narrator’s newfound fear of shadows, is what I’m saying.

Be careful where you practice your instruments. You never know when powerful, inimical natural forces might be feeling judgy.

In addition to providing a timely warning about what happens when your music fails to soothe the savage beasts, this week’s story appears to be fanfic for Erich Zann. It has overtones of Richard Upton Pickman as well, but the clear spark seems to be the desire to know what terrors lay outside Zann’s window. Who doesn’t, reading that story, yearn for just a little more detail about the inhuman movement filling the void beyond the Rue D’Auseil? There are advantages, of course, to showing the reader less than she wants to see—but sometimes you just want all the gory abominations.

And we do glimpse some fabulous abominations. A good three quarters of Glasby’s prose in this story is an iffy effort to sound Lovecraftish—the hideous affair and the terrible happenings and the shocking events and the horrendous truth. (And that’s just the first paragraph.) But the other quarter breaks through into at least hints of genuine hideousness. The window where no window should be, blank as an inactive screen. The wormlike beings of uncertain size, creeping out of their caves to listen to Valliecchi’s ancient song. (Poor worms, they still get a bad rap.) The dark thing, almost invisible, in the void before creation.

And that same dark thing, here and now, slipping a tentacle through the wall of illusory safety between its world and ours to snatch Valliecchi. And leaving behind the question of why. Is it, as I suggested facetiously above, merely a cosmic music critic? Or the converse—does it want the violinist for its cosmic orchestra, perhaps playing alongside Azathoth’s tuneless flutes? Was V just unlucky enough to hit on the melody that cries: “Here I am, the chosen sacrifice, come eat me?” And that uncertainty leads to a greater and more terrible uncertainty: what is it, exactly, that drew the Power’s attention? Could it happen to you, if you happened to look in the wrong direction or hum in the wrong key?

About that Power: actually Azathoth? I always think of Azathoth as blindingly bright, rather than void-within-the-void darkness. But I may be pulling that from my persistent misinterpretation of “Whisperer in Darkness’s” description of a “nuclear horror.” Intellectually, I know that for Lovecraft, “nuclear” just meant “central.” Nevertheless, the unintended image has infiltrated my whole concept of the mindless god with weird taste in wind instruments. Mushroom clouds and piccolos, that’s where my head goes every time.

On a more serious note, one thing I appreciate about “Drawn From Life”—despite the spoilerific title, tropey overload, and “mere words cannot describe this… any way other than the way that I just did” language—is the portrayal of art connecting with art. Valliecchi is a genius musician, but in order to fully understand his music he turns to painting. The synaesthetic connection between different forms of creativity, between sound and sight, hints at the more mundane ways that artists struggle to understand their own experiences—and to communicate them. Anne’s right that “Drawn From Life’s” short length doesn’t do this theme justice. For me, though, it feels worth playing out at greater length, minus the tentacular cut-off.

Speaking of a sudden, legit fear of shadows, next week we dip back to M. R. James’s “Casting the Runes,” with bonus rude responses to rejection letters.

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

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

In the last ten years or so, geek culture has gone mainstream, with everyone who’s watched a movie from the MCU or played GTA playing a part in the larger movement. But the more fans learn about their particular areas of nerd interest, the more they tend to gain a deeper understanding of how varied and amorphous true geek culture is. Not every nerd loves Doctor Who, and among those who do, choosing “your doctor” can start an ugly fight (and we won’t even get started on the plight of River Song). Star Trek vs. Star Wars could launch a new cold war lasting years.

One of the best parts of the Geek Renaissance is that we’re now able to unabashedly let our nerd flags fly. We’ve found our tribe, and it’s ubiquitous. But until recently, it was tough to know where to look to find accurate depictions of our lives and, shall we say, “particular” interests. We both remember combing through libraries, hoping for any sign that an obsessive love of comics or Jean-Luc Picard didn’t mean we were socially inept weirdos. And as any hardcore geek knows, the representations really have always been hidden in the library books stacks, sometimes proudly announcing their nerdities, and sometimes, disguised in plain sight. Those words and characters have been a homing beacon since childhood, and even with the newly pervasive culture, they bring us back to our first true loves.

Let’s take a look at five books that taught us the true meaning of geek culture.

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

We’d all say we’ve “escaped into” books, but what if we could really do it? Fforde’s Thursday Next is a bad-ass female literary detective working in Spec Ops. She owns an extinct dodo, her husband may or may not exist, and those pesky Mrs. Danvers from Rebecca keep causing headaches. She gives voice to our strange dystopian fears all while being the female near-superhero we always felt we deserved. And the best part of Fforde’s world-building is that Thursday’s geekdom is so intrinsically tied to her persona that it’s never a source of discussion—it just is, which is a powerful message for younger readers.

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

On the other end of the spectrum is the granddaddy of geek, Hitchhiker’s Guide. It isn’t just a touchstone of the culture, it’s also a celebration of it. Arthur Dent has a best friend named Ford Prefect and that doesn’t strike him as bizarre. Sure, he’s dismayed when he discovers the world is about to end, but he catches up to the whole “Don’t Panic” philosophy pretty quick. Trillian gives up an average life to rocket through the stars with an alien moron, and bad poetry is used as a form of torture for the Vogons. And who among us wouldn’t like to build luxury planets in our spare time? Adams created a cast of nerd-tacular characters who wouldn’t seem at all out of place at a con.

Hold Me by Courtney Milan

The very foundation of geekery is fandom … and correcting anyone who is wrong on the Internet. In Hold Me, Maria creates an alias, a blog, and dystopian world that circumvents further disasters using mathematical theories. Of course, her biggest fan on the blog is always ready to point out any holes. A friendship grows though neither reveal their true identity. The twist? Their real-life identities actually do know each other and the hate is strong between them. Hold Me shines a wonderful light on online communities, the friendships outside of that bandwidth, and tackles preconceived notions of geek, nerd, and gender.

Ghost Story by Jim Butcher

The Dresden Files is filled with geeky Easter eggs, and Harry Dresden is a self-identified one. The series is also filled with fantastical creatures, some good, some bad, some downright evil, and Dresden faces them down with magic and sarcasm. But for several books the reader only gets bits and pieces of his past. Ghost Story is his origin story. Like any superhero worth his salt, both of his parents are dead. A bad wizard raised him, making Harry who he is now—a man who stands for justice. Honestly, out of all the books in the series, this felt like a love letter to fandoms and all things geek.

Luke Skywalker Can’t Read by Ryan Britt

The newest addition to our list, and the only non-fiction entry. Let’s face it, we all have our “rules” about what works or doesn’t work in world-building, either as a reader or a writer. And occasionally, the things we love most (Star Wars, Battlestar Gallactica, Harry Potter) either toe the line of their own rules—or worse, leap into a big bunch of nettled bushes. Britt’s Luke Skywalker Can’t Read is a collection of essays about his life in geekery that are not only funny, but highly relatable to those of us who go crazy over bad ret-con and logic issues (i.e. can Stephen Moffat explain the ins-and-outs of Time Lord regeneration energy, please?).

Top image: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (2005)

Rachel Stuhler, best known for novel Absolutely True Lies and TV movies “Kristen’s Christmas Past” (Lifetime) and “Love Takes Wing” (Hallmark), continues to work in TV and is busy plotting her next move in world domination, or writing about world domination, which is more fun and a lot less work. Melissa Blue’s writing career started on a typewriter (an idyllic situation for a writer if it had been 1985, not 2004), where she penned her first contemporary romance, after which she upgraded to a computer and hasn’t looked back since. Melissa and Rachel, along with Cathy Yardley and Cecilia Tan, are the writers of Geek Actually, which you can read or listen to on SerialBox! Follow them on Twitter @mel_thegreat and @RachelStuhler.

Nolite te bastardes carborundorum, the faux-Latin rallying cry in Margaret Atwood’s novel, gets a whole episode devoted to it in the TV series. But at the end of that episode, after learning that “don’t let the bastards grind you down” was nothing more than a schoolboy joke to the Commander, Offred silently rallies her fellow Handmaids with an appended version: “Nolite te bastardes carborondorum, bitches.” It’s a jarring line that, when I first heard it, took me entirely out of the emotional payoff of that episode. It felt too glib, too smug, too oddly anachronistic for a dystopian story; Vox called it “a rare false note.” It seemed as much of a misstep as the use of the peppy song (Penguin Cafe Orchestra’s “Perpetuum Mobile”) that backed it over the credits.

That was episode 4. The next time “bitch” is used at a key dramatic moment comes near the end of the season, when Moira shakes off her defeat to procure a dangerous package for Offred. This puzzle piece of Mayday’s larger plan comes with a note that signifies Moira’s return to the resistance: Praised be, bitch. Here’s your damn package. And suddenly, it all clicked.

No spoilers for The Handmaid’s Tale season finale.

Handmaids’ position within society is coded into Gilead’s language. “Blessed be the fruit” is the greeting bestowed upon Handmaids, whether it be from their fellow red-robed slaves, Commanders, Wives, Aunts, Marthas, Guardians, Eyes, or visiting trade delegations. “May the Lord open” is the required response to that particular call. Other statements get a blanket “Praised be”—praised be that there is good weather, that a new baby has been born, that they are not laboring in the Colonies or hanging on the Wall. “Blessed are the…” is a favorite of Aunt Lydia’s, a perversion of the Beatitudes to fit whatever punishment or trauma of the moment with the disingenuous promise of a divine reward.

The TV series’ expansion of the novel’s world means that the number of scenes in which these stock phrases are uttered is increased tenfold. Whereas the book features Offred in a handful of encounters with Gilead’s power figures—a few Ceremonies, a single Salvaging, Birth Day, and Particicution each—the TV series features multiple reminders, some occurring in the same episode, of how much cause for praise there is. Of how blessed the Handmaids are, how selfless, how deserving of praise and admiration. And yet, this does not stop Commanders from raping them, Wives from imprisoning and abusing them, Aunts from indoctrinating and maiming them. The Handmaids are simultaneously raised up as Gilead’s most vital members of society and held down as its most disenfranchised.

It’s a disturbing contradiction that comes to a head in “A Woman’s Place”: Offred must present herself to the Mexican trade delegation and lie about choosing this life, knowing that she will be punished if she diverges from Gilead’s script in any way. Though the ambassador attempts to engage Offred in direct conversation, the Handmaid is so accustomed to being treated as the lowest member of her household, speaking only when spoken to, that she automatically responds in the designated platitudes. Mrs. Castillo presses, emphasizing Offred’s “sacred position” and how “it’s an enormous sacrifice, what you’re doing.” Offred is unable to contradict her. When asked directly about whether or not she is happy having “chosen” such a difficult life, Offred pauses briefly, grinding her teeth against the truth, before finally responding, “I have found happiness, yes.”

Offred is tongue-tied talking to another woman—in this case, a potential ally or even savior—inquiring into the truth about her experiences because Gilead’s language has been drilled into her. She and the other Handmaids have been conditioned, through slaps and electric prods and whippings and maimings, to respond only to and only with variations on “praised be” and “blessed be,” to constantly praise their circumstances.

This is gaslighting.

Photo: George Kraychyk/Hulu

The silent flipside of the constant barrage of “praised be” is Why are you so ungrateful? It’s in Aunt Lydia’s first appearance in the series, a flashback in the pilot to her indoctrinating Handmaids in the early days of Gilead. Preaching on the “special plague” of infertility made worse by “dirty women’s” decisions to “murder babies,” Lydia directly contrasts the Handmaids with these women, raising up June and her fellow prisoners as being spared for a divine purpose:

[Y]ou are special girls. Fertility is a gift directly from God. He left you intact for a Biblical purpose. Like Bilhah served Rachel, you girls will serve the Leaders of the Faithful and their barren Wives. You will bear children for them. Oh! You are so lucky! So privileged!

The Handmaids repeat this language of being oh-so-fortunate, as when Ofglen wryly describes how she, “a carpet-munching gender traitor,” nonetheless wound up as a Handmaid: “I have two good ovaries. So they were kind enough to overlook my sinful past. Lucky me.” Even as sarcasm, it reinforces the mindset that they’re better off than working themselves to death in the Colonies.

“Praised be” is used 28 times in the series; it oversaturates nearly every conversation, to the point that it becomes oppressive white noise. The highest concentration of “praised be”s per episode occurs in “The Bridge”—chorused by the Handmaids as they gather to usher Janine to her next posting after successfully giving birth to a healthy baby. This after the excruciating ceremony in which Janine/Ofwarren has been forced to hand over her infant daughter to Commander Putnam and his Wife, as they read from Bible verses praising her for her supposed selflessness:

For he hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden.
For, behold, from henceforth, all generations shall call me blessed.
Then the handmaidens came near, they and their children. And they bowed themselves.
May the Lord now show you kindness and faithfulness, and I, too, will show you the same favor. The Lord bless thee, and keep thee.

Side note: Can we talk about the fact that the above passage is actually stitched together from a number of different Bible verses from separate books? There’s Luke 1:48 (which, by the way, is Mary proclaiming how blessed she was to be pregnant with Jesus), 2 Samuel 2:6, and Numbers 6:24. So, they can’t even pretend there’s some Biblical precedent like with the Rachel/Bilhah story. Taking a verse about Mary out of context and using it to justify the Handmaids is an especially ballsy move, though it doesn’t seem likely that any of the women, Handmaids or Wives, would know that the passage is fake.

Photo: George Kraychyk/Hulu

“Praised be” erodes the women’s identities, sanding them down from complex, flawed creatures into (as Offred puts it) “walking wombs.” “Praised be” lies as heavy on them as the red cloaks, cuts them off from one another like the winged bonnets that block their peripheral vision. In the same way that they are trained to walk in lines, to chant the same phrases at Birth Days and Salvagings, any personhood is eclipsed by the uniformity of their station. No Handmaid is exceedingly smart, or witty enough to induce giggles, or a real pain to make small talk with, or prone to outbursts; they are blameless, and they are interchangeable.

Which is why it’s so radical when Handmaids call each other bitches.

Here in 2017, the pre-Gilead times of The Handmaid’s Tale, “bitch” is ubiquitous: Bad bitches. Boss bitches. Best bitches. Bitches get shit done. It’s a tender affection for the closest of friends and a curt, confrontational insult to a stranger; a way to both celebrate and dismiss other women. Thinkpieces argue both sides, that the word demeans women to the point that it makes it easier for men to do so, and that the word is so overused as to have lost its meaning. In Gilead, it’s almost certainly a forbidden word. There’s a fire behind “bitch,” the kind of anger that the Aunts discourage the Handmaids from holding on to, that they are allowed to sublimate only through the Salvagings and nowhere else. To be a bitch is to assert agency, positive or negative. The Wives consistently complain about their Handmaids, but they would never dare grant them the power of being called bitches; they’re “selfish girls,” “ungrateful girls,” a servant and a surrogate, but not a woman.

When Offred proclaims “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum, bitches” at the end of episode 4, it’s both a call to arms and the moment in which Offred begins to see her peers as the unique, complex women they were before Gilead. A bitch is Ofglen/Emily, jumping behind the wheel of a car and running over an Eye’s head in the middle of the market. A bitch is the new Ofglen, cranky and self-serving, desperate to keep her cushy new lifestyle. A bitch is Janine escaping her new posting, kidnapping her daughter, and calling out Warren for his philandering and lies in front of everyone. It’s no mistake that Moira refers to Janine as “that crazy bitch” when she and June are reunited at Jezebels in episode 8. Janine is a crazy bitch—have we forgotten her psychotic break during the Particicution?—and that exchange says more about her personality than the useless words that Warren and his Wife heap upon her. To call a Handmaid a bitch is not reductive but revelatory.

An episode later, June and Moira are moving one another to tears at their second reunion at Jezebels: June is pushing Moira to rebel, shaming her for giving up—being, frankly, a bitch—with Moira snapping back that she was doing just fine before June showed up. But June’s words jar Moira out of her paralysis, because by the end of “The Bridge” she’s smuggled out a package for the resistance and arranged to get it into June’s hands—along with a special note:

After five episodes of Offred reframing her perspective of her fellow Handmaids, Moira’s message says I see you to June, recognizing that she also contains multitudes. The message—which is radical enough merely for being written by a woman—also specifically says fuck you to the notion of “praised be,” dismantling the system that oppresses Handmaids by making a mockery of one of its key phrases.

The bitches are back.

Natalie Zutter wrote this piece for all the bitches who get shit done. Talk The Handmaid’s Tale season 2 with her on Twitter!

Charlie Brooker’s frighteningly prescient television series Black Mirror is all about how humans use social media, video games, and other forms of technology to turn on each other in disturbing ways. But his latest project in that universe is exploring an entirely new format: the book. Del Rey, Penguin Random House’s science fiction and fantasy imprint, will release a series of three anthologies collecting the kinds of stories that made for nightmare-inducing TV episodes. Brooker will edit the collections, which will include “original, mid-length stories penned by soon to be announced popular writers.”

Brooker commented on the news in his characteristically wry way: “All-new Black Mirror stories from exciting authors—that’s a joyous prospect. And they’re appearing in a high-tech new format known as a ‘book.’ Apparently, you just have to glance at some sort of ‘ink code’ printed on paper and images and sounds magically appear in your head, enacting the story. Sounds far-fetched to me, but we’ll see.”

It will be interesting to see how Black Mirror, one of the most visually arresting speculative-fiction TV series in recent memory, will translate to the page. (In fact, artist Butcher Billy reimagined each of the existing episodes as pulp book covers.) Penguin Random House teases the first volume on their website:

Edited by Charlie Brooker, the creator of the hit Netflix original series Black Mirror, this book takes the very essence of the globally acclaimed cult TV show to create new, original, darkly satirical stories that tap into our collective unease about the modern world. This is Black Mirror in book form, allowed to roam through the imaginations of some of the leading names in contemporary fiction. This collection will challenge you to see the world in a different—and more disturbing—light.

Black Mirror: Volume I will be published February 20, 2018; the second is expected to be released fall 2018, the third in 2019. Netflix is expected to release the second half of Black Mirror season 3 later this year. In the meantime, catch up on our reviews of the first six episodes of season 3.

The United States of America is no more. Broken into warring territories, its center has become a wasteland DMZ known as “the Tropic of Kansas.” Though this gaping geographic hole has no clear boundaries, everyone knows it’s out there—that once-bountiful part of the heartland, broken by greed and exploitation, where neglect now breeds unrest. Two travelers appear in this arid American wilderness: Sig, the fugitive orphan of political dissidents, and his foster sister Tania, a government investigator whose search for Sig leads her into her own past—and towards an unexpected future.

Sig promised those he loves that he would make it to the revolutionary redoubt of occupied New Orleans. But first he must survive the wild edgelands of a barren mid-America policed by citizen militias and autonomous drones, where one wrong move can mean capture… or death. One step behind, undercover in the underground, is Tania. Her infiltration of clandestine networks made of old technology and new politics soon transforms her into the hunted one, and gives her a shot at being the agent of real change—if she is willing to give up the explosive government secrets she has sworn to protect.

As brother and sister traverse these vast and dangerous badlands, their paths will eventually intersect on the front lines of a revolution whose fuse they are about to light.

Christopher Brown’s Tropic of Kansas is available July 11th from Harper Voyager.

1

Looking at the bright blue sky from the backseat of the armored truck, which was more like a cell than a seat, Sig could almost believe it was a warm day. But the shackles around his ankles were still cold from the walk out to the vehicle, and when Sig put his head up against the bars to test for faults, he could feel the ice trying to get to him. And winter was just getting started.

“What day is it?” asked Sig.

“Deportation day,” said the big constable who had muscled him out of lockup thirty minutes earlier. When he talked the red maple leaf tattoo on the side of his thick neck moved, like a lazy bat.

“Friday,” said the Sergeant, who was driving. “December 1. The day you get to go back where you came from.”

The thought conjured different images in Sig’s head than his jailers might have imagined.

“Back to cuckoo country,” laughed the constable. “Lucky you. Say hi to the TV tyrant for me.”

The Mounties had nicknames for Sig, like Animal and Dog Boy, but they never called him any of those to his face. They didn’t know his real name. When they trapped him stealing tools and food from a trailer at the Loonhaunt Lake work camp a month earlier, he had no ID, no name he would give them, and they couldn’t find him in their computers. They still tagged him, accurately, as another American illegal immigrant or smuggler, and processed him as a John Doe criminal repatriation. They did not know that he had been up here the better part of seven years, living in the edgelands.

The memory of that day he ran tried to get out, like a critter in a trap, but he kept it down there in its cage. And wished he had stayed farther north.

He pulled his wrists against the cuffs again, but he couldn’t get any leverage the way they had him strapped in.

Then the truck braked hard, and the restraints hit back.

The constable laughed.

They opened the door, pulled him out of the cage, and uncuffed him there on the road. Beyond the barriers was the international bridge stretching over the Rainy River to the place he had escaped.

“Walk on over there and you’ll be in the USA, kid,” said the sergeant. “Thank you for visiting Canada. Don’t come back.”

Sig stretched, feeling the blood move back into his hands and feet. He looked back at the Canadian border fortifications. A thirty-foot-high fence ran along the riverbank. Machine guns pointed down from the towers that loomed over the barren killing zone on the other side. He could see two figures watching him through gun scopes from the nearest tower, waiting for an opportunity to ensure he would never return.

Sig looked in the other direction. A military transport idled in the middle of the bridge on six fat tires, occupants hidden behind tinted windows and black armor. Behind them was an even higher fence shielding what passed for tall buildings in International Falls. The fence was decorated with big pictograms of death: by gunfire, explosives, and electricity. The wayfinding sign was closer to the bridge.

UNITED STATES BORDERZONE

Minnesota State Line 3.4 Miles

Sig looked down at the churning river. No ice yet.

He shifted, trying to remember how far it was before the river dumped into the lake.

“Step over the bridge, prisoner,” said a machine voice. It looked like the transport was talking. Maybe it was. He’d heard stories. Red and white flashing lights went on across the top of the black windshield. You could see the gun barrels and camera eyes embedded in the grill.

“Go on home to robotland, kid,” said the sergeant. “They watch from above too, you know.”

Sig looked up at the sky. He heard a chopper but saw only low-flying geese, working their way south. He thought about the idea of home. It was one he had pretty much forgotten, or at least given up on. Now it just felt like the open door to a cage.

He steeled himself and walked toward the transport. Five armed guards emerged from the vehicle to greet him in black tactical gear. The one carrying the shackles had a smile painted on his face mask.

2

The Pilgrim Center was an old shopping plaza by the freeway that had been turned into a detention camp. It was full.

The whole town of International Falls had been evacuated and turned into a paramilitary control zone. Sig saw two tanks, four helicopters, and lots of soldiers and militarized police through the gun slits of the transport. Even the flag looked different—the blue part had turned almost black.

No one in the camp looked like a pilgrim. Instead they wore yellow jumpsuits. There were plenty of local boys in the mix, the sort of rowdies who’d have a good chance of getting locked up even in normal times. The others were immigrants, refugees, and guest workers. Hmong, Honduran, North Korean, Bolivian, Liberian. They had been rounded up from all over the region. Some got caught trying to sneak out, only to be accused of sneaking in.

They interrogated Sig for several hours each day. Most days the interrogator was a suit named Connors. He asked Sig a hundred variations on the same questions.

Where did you come from?

North.

Where specifically?

All over.

What were you doing up there?

Traveling. Hunting. Working. Walking.

What did you do with your papers?

Never had any.

How old are you?

Old enough.

Are you a smuggler?

No.

Where were you during the Thanksgiving attacks?

What attacks.

Where were you during the Washington bombings last month?

I don’t know. In the woods.

Tell me about your friends. Where were they?

What friends.

Tell us your name. Your true name.

They took his picture, a bunch of times, naked and with his clothes on. They had a weird machine that took close-up shots of his eyes. They took his fingerprints, asked him about his scars, and took samples of his skin, blood, and hair. He still wouldn’t give them his name. They said they would find him in their databases anyway. He worried they would match him to records in their computers of the things he’d done before he fled.

They made fun of his hair.

3

The improvised prison was small. A one-story mall that might once have housed twenty stores. The camp included a section of parking lot cordoned off with a ten-foot hurricane fence topped with razor wire. They parked military vehicles and fortification materials on the other side, coming and going all the time.

They rolled in buses with more detainees every day. A couple of times they brought a prisoner in on a helicopter that landed right outside the gate. Those prisoners were hooded and shackled, with big headphones on. They kept them in another section.

At night you could hear helicopters and faraway trains. Some nights there was gunfire. Most nights there were screams.

Every room in the camp had a picture of the same fortysomething white guy. Mostly he was just sitting there in a suit, looking serious. Sometimes he was younger, smiling, wearing a flight suit, holding a gun, playing with kids and dogs. In the room where they ate there was a big poster on the wall that showed him talking to a bunch of people standing in what looked like a football stadium. There was a slogan across the bottom in big letters.

Accountability = Responsibility + Consequences

One of the other detainees told Sig the guy on the poster was the President.

They just tried to kill him, Samir explained. He whispered because he didn’t want them to hear him talking about it. Said people got into the White House with a bomb. Sig asked what people. Samir just held up his hands and shrugged.

Samir was the guy who had the cot next to Sig. He was from Mali. Their cot was in a pen with an old sign over it. “Wonderbooks.” There were holes in the walls and floors where once there had been store shelving. One of the guys that slept back there, a middle-aged white guy named Del, said they were closing all the bookstores on purpose. Samir said it was because no one read books anymore. Sig wasn’t sure what the difference was.

The women detainees were in a different section, where there used to be a dollar store. Sometimes they could see the women when they were out in the yard.

One day a lady showed up at Sig’s interrogation. Blonde in a suit. She said she was an investigator from the Twin Cities. Why do you look so nervous all the sudden, said Connors. They asked him about what happened back then. About other people who were with him. Sig didn’t say anything.

Looks like you get to go to Detroit, said Connors.

Sig did not know what that meant, but it scared him anyway, from the way the guy said it, and from the not knowing. He tried not to show it.

That afternoon Sig found a tiny figure of a man in a business suit stuck in a crack in the floor. His suit was bright blue, and he had a hat and a briefcase. Del said there used to be a shop in the mall that made imaginary landscapes for model trains to travel through, and maybe this guy missed his train.

Del and Samir and the others talked whenever they could about what was going on. They talked about the attacks. They talked outside, they talked in whispers, they swapped theories at night after one of the guys figured out how to muffle the surveillance mic with a pillow they took turns holding up there. They talked about how there were stories of underground cells from here to the Gulf of Mexico trying to fight the government. How the government blamed the Canadians for harboring “foreign fighters,” by which they meant Americans who’d fled or been deported. They told Sig how the elections were probably rigged, and the President didn’t even have a real opponent the last time. Some of the guys said they thought the attacks were faked to create public support for a crackdown. For a new war to fight right here in the Motherland. To put more people back to work. Del said he had trouble believing the President would have his guys blow off his own arm to manipulate public opinion. Beto said no way, I bet he would have blown off more than that to make sure he killed that lady that used to be Vice President since she was his biggest enemy.

One of the guys admitted that he really was a part of the resistance. Fred said that lady’s name was Maxine Price and he’d been in New Orleans when she led the people to take over the city. He said he joined the fight and shot three federal troopers and it felt good.

Sig asked the others what it meant when the interrogator told him he was going to Detroit. They got quiet. Then they told him about the work camps. They sounded different from what he had seen in Canada. Old factories where they made prisoners work without pay, building machines for war and extraction.

On his fourth day in the camp, Sig made a knife. It wasn’t a knife at first. It was a piece of rebar he noticed in the same crack in the floor where he found the little man. He managed to dig out and break off a sliver a little longer than his finger, and get a better edge working it against a good rock he found in one of the old concrete planters in the yard. Just having it made him feel more confident when the guards pushed him around.

The seventh day in the camp, as the other detainees loitered in the common areas after dinner, Sig escaped.

He got the idea watching squirrels. The squirrels loved it behind the tall fences, which kept out their competition. Sig saw one jump from a tree outside the fence onto the roof, grab some acorns that had fallen from another nearby tree, and then jump back using the fence as a relay.

Del went with him. Samir said he didn’t want to die yet.

They waited until the guards were busy after dinner. Samir took watch. They leaned Sig’s cot up against the wall and pushed through the section of cheap ceiling Sig had cut out the night before. They carried their blankets around their shoulders. Del could barely fit when they got up in the crawl space. Sig didn’t wait. They followed the ductwork on their hands and knees to the roof access and broke out into the open air. Sig half-expected to get shot right then, but the guards in the tower were watching a prisoner delivery.

He could see the black trucks driving by on the high road behind the mall.

They tossed their blankets so they would drape over the razor wire where the fence came close to the back of the building. Del’s throw was good, but Sig’s went too far, over the fence. Too bad, said Del. Sig backed up, got a running start, and jumped anyway.

The razored barbs felt like sharpened velcro, grabbing onto his prison jumpsuit in bunches, poking through into his forearm and hand.

Del didn’t even make it to the fence.

Shit.

“You go!” said Del, curled up on the ground, groaning.

The sound of Sig’s body hitting the chain link like a big monkey got the guards’ attention, but by the time bullets came they hit torn fragments of his paper jumpsuit that stayed stuck when he leapt from his momentary perch.

The tree branch Sig landed on broke under his weight, and he hit the frozen ground hard. But he got up okay. Nothing broken. His blanket was right there, so he grabbed it.

He looked through the fence. Del was up on his knees, hands behind his head, hollering at the guards not to shoot as they came around the corner and from the roof.

Sig ran. He heard the gunfire behind him, but didn’t hear Del.

They came after Sig fast, but he had already disappeared into the landscaping that ran along the side road. He heard them off in the distance as he crawled through a vacant subdivision of knee-high grass, broken doors, and gardens gone wild. He evaded capture that night moving through cover, the way a field mouse escapes a hawk.

He was glad it took them half an hour to get out the dogs.

He used torn chunks of his prison jumpsuit to bandage his wounds. They were little bleeders, but he would be okay. Then he cut a hole in the middle of the blanket to turn it into a poncho. He thought about where he could get new clothes, if he made it through the night.

Later, as he huddled in a portable toilet behind a convenience store just south of the borderzone, he wondered if what that Mountie said was true. That they had robots in the sky that could see you in the dark, tag you and track you, and kill without you ever knowing they were there. Sig thought maybe if he got cold enough, their heat cameras couldn’t find him.

Excerpted from Tropic of Kansas © 2017 by Christopher Brown.

Indigo, a collaborative novel from ten critically acclaimed authors, is available June 20th from St. Martins’ Press—and to celebrate, we want to send you a prize pack including one book by each of its co-authors! One lucky reader will receive a galley copy of Indigo and a copy of each of the following books:

Sleep Like a Baby by Charlaine Harris (advance reader’s copy)
Ararat by Christopher Golden
City of the Lost by Kelley Armstrong
Dogs of War by Jonathan Maberry
Greywalker by Kat Richardson
Rosemary and Rue by Seanan McGuire
The Silence by Tim Lebbon
The Family Plot by Cherie Priest
Seven Forges by James A. Moore
The Wraiths of War by Mark Morris

In Indigo, investigative reporter Nora Hesper spends her nights cloaked in shadows. As Indigo, she’s become an urban myth, a brutal vigilante who can forge darkness into weapons and travel across the city by slipping from one patch of shadow to another. Her primary focus both as Nora and as Indigo has become a murderous criminal cult called the Children of Phonos. Children are being murdered in New York, and Nora is determined to make it stop, even if that means Indigo must eliminate every member. But in the aftermath of a bloody battle, a dying cultist makes claims that cause Indigo to question her own origin and memories.

Nora’s parents were killed when she was nineteen years old. She took the life insurance money and went off to explore the world, leading to her becoming a student of meditation and strange magic in a mountaintop monastery in Nepal…a history that many would realize sounds suspiciously like the origins of several comic book characters. As Nora starts to pick apart her memory, it begins to unravel. Her parents are dead, but the rest is a series of lies. Where did she get the power inside her?

Comment in the post to enter!

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY TO ENTER OR WIN. A purchase does not improve your chances of winning. Sweepstakes open to legal residents of 50 United States and D.C., and Canada (excluding Quebec). To enter, comment on this post beginning at 3:30 PM Eastern Time (ET) on June 14th. Sweepstakes ends at 12:00 PM ET on June 18th. Void outside the United States and Canada and where prohibited by law. Please see full details and official rules here. Sponsor: Tor.com, 175 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10010.

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!

You learn quickly as a published author that each of us reads with a very personal lens—what is engaging and fluid prose for one reader might be boring and stilted for another—never mind the myriad of themes, tropes, characters and plots that fill all the many stories we have. As individuals, we are likely to react differently to the same story. Why wouldn’t we? We read with our personal histories and filters.

One of the most interesting pieces of advice that I have heard for writers is: Write the story that only you can tell. I agree with this. Although I think the majority of stories indeed have already been told, what a writer brings to the table is storytelling through their own voice, experiences and lens. This is unique and is what makes a familiar story fresh time and again.

I’ve been a student of Chinese brush painting for nearly two decades. I can hardly believe it myself as I write this, but it is an interest that has brought me much joy through the years and also changed the way I viewed the world. As a beginning brush artist, you learn by copying, whether from famous artists or guide books. In a class of a dozen brush painting students all painting plum blossoms using the same example, there will be twelve very different paintings at the end of the evening, because every artist will develop their own style just as every writer will develop their own (that elusive thing called) “voice.” This is what makes us stand apart as creators.

When I wrote my debut Silver Phoenix, it seemed natural for me to make my heroine Ai Ling a student of brush painting as well. Silver Phoenix was the first novel I had ever written, and what easier way than to have your heroine view the world in similar fashion as you would?

That night she dreamed of wandering alone in the bamboo forest. But instead of a lush green, the bamboo was ink black with leaves in gradations of gray, like a painting by the old masters.

“Bamboo” by Cindy Pon

But in my Serpentine duology, my heroine was an uneducated handmaid, unlike Ai Ling who was a treasured daughter of a scholar. Still, my world of Xia is filled with flora and scenery reminiscent of traditional Chinese paintings. From Sacrifice, the second book in the Serpentine duology:

Daybreak unfurled across the gray horizon, tendrils of light illuminating magnificent jade peaks, their sloping and jagged points dissolving into mist. Skybright had seen these famous Xia mountains painted by artists on vertical scrolls—the masterpieces hung in the main hall of the Yuan manor. She remembered being mesmerized by the paintings in ink, touched with the subtlest hints of stone green or accents of red.

“Blue Mountains” by Cindy Pon

When it came to my fantasy writing, the connections between the classical settings of a Chinese-inspired kingdom abundant in the popular subjects (bamboo and landscape) that have been painted for many dynasties were obvious. But how would it translate in my first non-fantasy novel WANT, a near-future thriller set in a pollution choked Taipei?

Because the history of Chinese brush painting is tied closely with the scholarly class—those who were educated and privileged—it wasn’t a leap to have my WANT heroine Daiyu, the daughter of the richest man in Taiwan, study the art:

The card inside featured a traditional Chinese brush painting, a single pine tree perched on a rocky ledge, its needles laden with snow…. Turning the card over, it simply noted the title of the painting in the front as “Wintery Solace” by Jin Daiyu.

“Pine” by Cindy Pon

But what of my hero Jason Zhou? Orphaned at thirteen and living on his own—a junior high school dropout? He had little time for art when he was merely trying to survive on the streets on his own. And yet my eye, my way of seeing the world—the colors and beauty in nature—still made their way into the text, even from his perspective:

It was the tattoo I had gotten in memory of my mom—a single calla lily—on the left side of my chest, above my heart. It had been her favorite flower. She’d take me to the calla lily festival every spring on Yangmingshan, to admire the sea of white flowers surrounded by dark green leaves.

“Lily” by Cindy Pon (Author’s note: Not a calla lily)

I am an intuitive writer, and although I knew everything I had said in the first few paragraphs of this post—that what makes us unique as both readers and writers is our individual perspectives on the world—it was definitely enlightening to go through my novels and find specific moments in text where I was writing from an artist’s lens. But then, writing is a form of art as well, and all our interests and loves are intersectional, just as our identities can be.

Cindy Pon is the author of Silver Phoenix, which was named one of the Top Ten Fantasy and Science Fiction Books for Youth by the American Library Association’s Booklist and one of 2009’s Best Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror choices by VOYA. Serpentine, the first title in another Chinese-inspired fantasy duology, is a Junior Library Guild Selection and received starred reviews from School Library Journal and VOYA. She is the cofounder of Diversity in YA with Malinda Lo and on the advisory board of We Need Diverse Books. Cindy is also a Chinese brush painting student of over a decade. Learn more about her books and art at her website.

No joining the army, or going into interstellar space, until you’re at least 75 years old.

Each month, the Tor.com eBook Club gives away a free sci-fi/fantasy ebook to club subscribers. We’re happy to announce that the pick for June 2017 is John Scalzi’s seminal work Old Man’s War!

Responsible for protecting humanity, the Colonial Defense Force doesn’t want young people; they want people who carry the knowledge and skills of decades of living. You’ll be taken off Earth, never to return. You’ll serve two years in combat. And if you survive, you’ll be given a homestead of your own on a hard-won planet light-years from home.

John Perry is taking that deal. He thinks he knows what to expect. But the actual fight is far, far harder than he can imagine—and what he will become is far stranger.

Old Man’s War is available for download from June 15th to June 21st

Please download the ebook before 11:59 PM ET on June 21st.

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

One thing that’s been said about John Scalzi’s fiction, starting with the publication of Old Man’s War, is that he doesn’t let the writing get in the way of the story—which people often interpret as “this book may not get caught up in fancy language, but it sure goes spin a good yarn.” I submit to you, however, that this description severely underestimates both the power of Scalzi’s prose, and the extent to which he has calibrated it for precise effect.

If we consider it from a distance, to take in a structural perspective, Old Man’s War might strike some readers as unpromising. From the first chapter, where John Perry checks in to formally enlist in the Colonial Defense Forces, the novel is loaded with scenes in which Perry has something explained to him, alternating with scenes in which Perry has a conversation where he and his friends or comrades try to figure something out, including more than one philosophical discussion. When I put it to you that baldly, it sounds like your worst nightmare of a Golden Age SF novel, right?

Well, stop looking at Old Man’s War from a distance and come on inside.

I can’t presume to know exactly what science fiction Scalzi read growing up, but I’m willing to hazard a guess that he’d read any number of those nightmare Golden Age “novels of ideas” I invoked just now, where barely defined characters maneuver through a barely-more-defined futuristic backdrop, hitting all their talking points as they go. He’s also read the “novels of ideas” that worked (most obviously Starship Troopers), and he’s figured out the difference: Everything in the novel—from the philosophical ideas to the world-building and so on down the line—everything must be secondary to the characters.

Before we learn anything about the world of the Colonial Defense Forces, Old Man’s War plunges us into John Perry’s world: the life of an ordinary 75-year-old man who’s spent most of the last decade mourning his wife, who died from something as simple as a stroke while making breakfast. He’s reminded of her everywhere he goes in the small Ohio town where he still lives, to the point where, as he tells us, “it’s easier to miss her at a cemetery, where she’s never been anything but dead, than to miss her in all the places where she was alive.”

Through everything else that John Perry experiences once he commits to the Colonial Defense Forces, leaving Earth behind to fight aliens among the stars, the first-person narration always underscores his emotional complexity as a character. Because things don’t just happen to him: They happen to him and, as he describes them to us, we can see how they make him elated, or frustrated, or shocked, or depressed. And, from what we can see of the novel’s other characters through Perry’s eyes, most of them are just as complex, just as real.

Old Man’s War may have a lot of ideas in it, you see, but it’s not a “novel of ideas” so much as it’s a novel about ordinary people grappling with extraordinary circumstances, and thinking through their situation is just one of the ways they do that. But John Perry’s voice is the essential component in all this; Scalzi intuitively understands that it’s by learning to care about Perry as a character that we’ll accept the invitation to see the world through his eyes, at a carefully controlled pace that won’t be overwhelming but, more importantly, never insults readers’ intelligence.

Where did Scalzi get that intuitive understanding? Again, I can’t say for sure, but I have to suspect that all those years he spent as a film critic taught him plenty about storytelling architecture. Whether or not he’s ever read Robert McKee (and that’s actually something I’m fine not knowing), Scalzi clearly understands how to emotionally connect with readers, and doesn’t waste any time doing it. It’s not even a matter of “the writing doesn’t get in the way of the story;” with Old Man’s War, and every novel that comes afterwards, Scalzi’s writing is the way, the only way, to the story. And I realize that, as an appreciation, this may all be a bit technical, so I want to close with a simple, straightforward invitation: Pick up Old Man’s War, and get to know John Perry. You’ll be glad you did.

This article was originally published in January 2012.
For a limited time, get a free ebook of Old Man’s War by joining the Tor.com eBook Club! Offer expires June 21st at 11:59 pm, US & Canada only.

Ron Hogan is the founding curator of Beatrice.com, one of the first websites to focus on books and authors. Lately, he’s been reviewing science fiction and fantasy for Shelf Awareness. He’s known Scalzi ever since they hung out on Usenet together in the mid-1990s, so to heck with objectivity.

What’s fascinating about The Handmaid’s Tale finale is that, after a season of building out Margaret Atwood’s dystopian world, it ends in the same place as the book. Though true to the series’ penchant for expanding the novel, it took the final two chapters of Offred’s story basically verbatim but then split them into bookends. Or, to take a metaphor from the episode, the first and final scenes were like the wrapping and string on Mayday’s package. Cut them apart, and the entire episode comes spilling out in little, radical, heartbreaking, inspiring moments.

Spoilers for The Handmaid’s Tale 1×10 “Night”

By the end of the novel, Offred has grown complacent; she’s rebuffed Mayday’s attempts at joining their rebellion, focusing instead inward on the fetus that she’s pretty sure she and Nick have conceived. Serena Joy’s discovery of the dress, of Jezebels, of her husband’s infidelity and Offred’s part in it, brings the Handmaid back to the reality of how tenuous her safety in the Waterford household is. By contrast, the Offred of this series approaches the end of the first season electrified with rebellion; the package she carries in her shopping bag, not an illicit pregnancy, is the hidden secret full of potential to change her life. She also notes subtle shifts in her fellow Handmaids; where they used to regard one another with terror, now they gaze at one another clear-eyed, sharing silent secrets and sedition.

Photo: George Kraychyk/Hulu

But not even this package can protect Offred from the wrath of a Wife. Despite the brutality of slapping Offred so hard into the doorframe that it gives her a nasty gash, Serena Joy’s outburst carries wounded notes of betrayal: “I trusted you. I tried to help you! You could have left me with something.” But, as is clear from later scenes between the Commander and his Wife, there wasn’t much for Offred to take. In fact, Offred has given Serena Joy the greatest gift: She’s pregnant. This is one of the series’ best deviations from the book, especially because Serena Joy is there at the moment of knowing, weeping and praying over a pregnancy test and then comforting a battered Offred as if this is some great joy they can share in.

Just as the Handmaids are beginning to drop the platitudes among themselves, for the first time Offred is able to speak plainly to Serena Joy. Like Janine, she’s aware that she now has something the Wife wants, which protects her and emboldens her. Her snarl of “Do you think I want this?” is a slap in the face to Serena Joy’s beliefs, with the unspoken threat that she could still dash this small shred of hope on the rocks.

So Serena Joy pulls out the most brutal safeguard: She drives Offred to another household, leaves her in the car like a dog, and goes to meet the child of the couple living there: Hannah, alive and dressed in the pink of Gilead’s next generation. Offred can’t believe that she’s actually seeing her daughter, and she reaches for the door.

And it’s locked.

I didn’t guess that Serena Joy would produce Hannah in the flesh—in the book, it’s just a Polaroid—but the moment Offred registered the locked car, I burst into tears. It’s a breathtakingly cruel power move, even moreso than Serena Joy’s later threat of “You keep my child safe, I’ll keep yours safe.” To bring Offred that close to her daughter, who she has yearned for years to find, and not let Hannah know that she’s alive, is the kind of torture intended to break someone. What’s worse, Serena Joy defends it with condescending calm: Hannah has a better life without you as a mother, is the subtext.

Photo by: George Kraychyk/Hulu

Just like that, Offred is trapped again. Until, in a fit of desperation, she opens up Mayday’s package to see what’s so damn precious to the resistance. And here is the small but vital change that the entire first season has built up to:

The Handmaid’s Tale becomes The Handmaids’ Tale.

The package is a collection of letters, so many that they spill out like confetti. Some are written on paper, but most seem to be scrawled on any potential writing surface: I saw napkins, maybe scraps of wrapping paper or strips of wallpaper. These are journal entries, messages to loved ones, pleas for help. The voices are a million internal monologues like Offred’s, freed onto paper, finally heard by someone else.

I have to admit, I was briefly upset that the series was diverging from the book in such a way, that we would not find out that all of Offred’s silent witty asides and raging rebellion had been surreptitiously recorded onto cassette tapes, to be found by some future population. But it’s what makes the most sense for this season, especially as the last few episodes have moved far beyond Offred’s frame of reference to depict the experience of other Handmaids like Emily and Janine, of Jezebels like Moira, even of Luke fleeing to the border. This isn’t just Offred’s experience; it’s societal, it’s endemic. Furthermore, women have slowly been regaining the ability to read and write over the last ten episodes: Offred playing Scrabble and writing a note to Luke, Moira sending the message of “Praised be, bitch” along with the package. The message of Gilead’s oppression had to come from all of its Handmaids.

You wouldn’t believe just one woman.

That’s what happened in “A Woman’s Place,” when Offred finally risked her safety to tell everything to Mrs. Castillo, only for the other woman to acknowledge Gilead’s crimes against women and place that atrocity below her own country’s need for babies. But if all of the Handmaids speak, their words might actually travel outside of Gilead’s borders.

Photo: George Kraychyk/Hulu

The revolution begins with letters, and with stones. The attempted Salvaging of Janine/Ofdaniel, for endangering her infant daughter, turns into a cheeky take on let (s)he who is without sin cast the first stone: Ofglen, the new one who supposedly would do anything to hold on to this life better than what she had, draws the line at killing Janine. Then Offred, who has found her voice, says, “I’m sorry, Aunt Lydia” and drops her stone, prompting every Handmaid to follow in a Spartacus-esque moment. This moment was uneven for me; on the one hand, the Handmaid solidarity was excellent, but the self-congratulatory use of Michael Bublé’s “Feeling Good” kind of ruined it. But the “I’m sorry, Aunt Lydia” was perfect, considering the episode opened with a flashback where Lydia forces June to apologize to her for the first of many times.

Photo: George Kraychyk/Hulu

Of course, Gilead isn’t brought down with dropped stones. The Handmaids still file away to their respective households, and Offred finds a black van waiting for her at the Waterfords’. This is where we return to the book’s ending, where she doesn’t know whether to fear her fate or be serene. Nick tells her to trust him—Nick, who openly embraces her in front of Serena Joy when he discovers she’s pregnant. Maybe, like Offred, he knows that she is untouchable now; perhaps that’s when he begins planning this extraction. But a car comes, and Nick tells her it’s going to be OK.

Before she is pulled away, Offred passes on the location of the letters to Rita, who finds them behind the bathtub. Rita is not who I would have expected to take on the package; if anything, I had briefly entertained Offred somehow smuggling the letters to the Salvaging and leaving one in each of the Handmaids’ bonnets. Yes, this would have been impossible, but wouldn’t it have been a great visual? At any rate, the point stands: The letters must be delivered in one package to ensure their veracity and effectiveness as a mass narrative. Rita and Offred’s relationship has developed so slowly over the course of the season that their tenderness in this episode still came as a surprise. When Rita thought Offred might be pregnant in “Late,” she gave her preferential treatment because she knew that a baby would save their household. When the pregnancy happens for real, there seems to be genuine joy and care in how she holds Offred.

Photo: George Kraychyk/Hulu

Offred leaves behind the Waterfords with no message beyond a smirk—enjoyment at their panic as they watch their pregnant Handmaid taken away. They are powerless to stop her, and possess enough secrets between them that either could be to blame for the Eyes’ sudden arrival. I hope that we return to the Commander and Serena Joy next season, as this episode spooled out several fascinating threads of their dynamic: She tells him that it’s not his child, insulting his manhood and his worthiness in the eyes of God. He deflects his infidelity onto her, blaming her for bringing temptation into the household (presumably when she tried to help him with performance issues during the failed Ceremony). But he quickly changes his tune after the Leaders of the Faith condemn Commander Warren for his philandering with Janine, all based on his Wife’s testimony and desire for her husband to have the harshest possible punishment—that is, his hand cut off. Suddenly Fred is all about this family and raising another man’s child, anything to stay on Serena Joy’s good side. Before she’s taken away, Offred asks him to protect Hannah from his Wife, but I don’t think she should put much stock in his power there. I didn’t think I would say this at the end of this season, but I really want to see Serena Joy take over the household.

Photo: George Kraychyk/Hulu

But for now, we drive away from the Waterfords’ home, in a black van carrying a serene Offred. I have to admit, I briefly wondered if it were going to be Luke behind the wheel, spiriting her away. Instead, we got just as satisfying of a reunion: Moira makes it to Ontario, to a refugee center. In one of the episode’s best scenes, excellent for how bizarre it was, Moira wanders through the room as her case worker hands her clothes, money, a prepaid cell phone, and health insurance—basic human decency, no strings attached. Her trembling disbelief is heartbreaking. Then Luke appears, because he had her on his list of family. Reuniting these two was an unexpected move but will hopefully lead to a united front from the Canadian side next season, as Offred is spirited away to god-knows-where.

Weirdly, I feel about as serene as Offred about where she’s headed. In part, I think, because the series has expanded its scope to include so many other characters that I have faith that, whether Offred is headed to the Underground Femaleroad or the Colonies, there will be a way for her to return to her family—or, at the least, for The Handmaids’ Tale to get into the right hands.

What do you want to see happen in season 2?

Natalie Zutter still can’t believe she got to see one of her favorite books in such a powerful adaptation, and that there’s more to come! Share your season 2 theories with her here or on Twitter.

Neill Blomkamp never got to make his Alien movie with Sigourney Weaver, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t try their darnedest to get the closest possible thing. Here is a twenty-minute short film called Rakka, written and directed by Blomkamp and starring Weaver.

Rakka reads more as a pitch for a longer work, even ending on a cliffhanger. There’s a frightful amount of exposition in here, which certainly makes the story clear, but would be better if it wasn’t woven throughout the entire thing.

What do you think? Would you watch a full film version of Rakka?

Welcome back to the Warbreaker reread! Last week, Siri sparred with Treledees, and Vivenna got kidnapped a couple more times. This week, Lightsong re-employs his Lifeless squirrel, and Vivenna learns yet more uncomfortable truths – but some comforting ones, too.

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 42

Point of View: Lightsong
Setting: Allmother’s Palace
Timing: Immediately or very shortly after Chapter 38

Take a Deep Breath

Lightsong is again denied permission to see Allmother, and his persistence results in orders that none of her priestesses may bring her a request for any form of communication with him. He refuses to move until she meets with him, and as encouragement sends his Lifeless squirrel into the palace. The squirrel  leaps to do his bidding, though Llarimar assures Lightsong that the mind of a squirrel will be inadequate to follow all those orders. After a few hours, a priestess finally comes to summon him.

He pauses at the entrance to Allmother’s audience chamber, where she listens to a petition and grants a solution that will provide the needed help. Lightsong facetiously pretends that the squirrel got away from him; in a private chamber, she reprimands him for his conduct, which reflects badly on all of the Returned. He asks if that’s why she puts on the “show,” and she retorts that once, all of the Returned did their best to help their petitioners.

Before she can leave, he says that he came to give her his Lifeless Commands. He explains that since Blushweaver has two sets, he thinks another Returned should too, as a rein on Blushweaver’s power. Allmother muses that Calmseer had trusted him, and Lightsong abruptly tells her his core security phrase. She refuses to let him off so easily; as he turns to leave, she gives him her core phrase. He demands to know what’s wrong with her, entrusting him with her soldiers when she thinks him a fool. Calmseer’s trust and her dreams convinced her that it was the right thing to do, and she suggests that he, too, would benefit from some soul-searching.

Breathtaking

The room fell still, and Allmother looked over, meeting Lightsong’s eyes. She nodded to the side, where a priest stepped up, holding a small bundle of fur tied tightly with ropes.

“That is yours, I am told?” Allmother asked.

“Ah, yes,” Lightsong said, flushing slightly. “Terribly sorry. It kind of got away from me.”

“With an accidental Command to find me?” Allmother asked. “Then run around in circles screaming?”

“That actually worked?” Lightsong said. “Interesting. My high priest didn’t think the squirrel’s brain would be capable of following such complicated Commands.”

Allmother regarded him with a stern look.

“Oh,” Lightsong said. “I mean, ‘Whoops. It completely misunderstood me. Stupid squirrel.’ My deepest apologies, honored sister.”

You know, there’s absolutely nothing profound to be said about this conversation. There’s no reason to make it the big quote of the chapter. Just… I love it.

SQUIRREL!!

Local Color

This chapter’s annotations touch on the reason the squirrel is so capable, the development of Allmother as a character, and the backstory connections between her and Lightsong. (It was quite organic, compared to what one often expects from Sanderson.) In more detail, he addresses the difficulty of getting this scene right. Lightsong had to surprise us by giving his Commands away, but at the same time he couldn’t get out of his responsibilities (and the plot) that way. So Allmother – who dislikes Lightsong and thinks he’s useless – needs a valid reason to trust him with her Commands. Hence the dream, and her belief in the legitimacy of Returned dreams. (Maybe it’s cheating, as he says, but as far as I’m concerned, legitimizing the dreams legitimizes the Returned, so IMO it’s well worth the risk!) Anyway: the dream, combined with Calmseer’s trust, works as a reason to trust him.

Also, the man petitioning Allmother was an Idrian who has basically converted from Austrism to the Iridescent Tones; having gods you can see and talk to convinced quite a few of the Idrian transplants. (And if you have one like Allmother, who might actually do something for you, that would be pretty persuasive!) Anyway, it’s not in the text, but it seems that the non-converts call the converts “scrapes.” Huh. Worldbuilding FTW. Also, Allmother’s actions are not a new thing for the gods, but a return to an old thing. All the gods used to try to really help their petitioners, but the current crop is too lazy and self-centered. (My interpretation.)

***

Chapter 43

Point of View: Vivenna
Setting: Vasher’s lodgings
Timing: A week after Chapter 41

Take a Deep Breath

Vivenna awakes, still sick and exhausted, but clean and in a comfortable bed. Vasher is eating nearby, sheathed sword leaning against the table. He paid the woman who runs the place to bathe, dress, feed, and care for her while she’s been unconscious; she had contracted a local disease which caused the dizziness and dementia. He understands what she’s been through, but is unsympathetic – he says she deserved it for being foolish enough to trust Denth.

When asked, she admits she put all her Breath in the shawl she’d been carrying. He leaves the room, and she promptly begins scarfing down his food – even the hated seafood. He returns with the now-clean shawl; she’s startled that he’s giving it back, but he tells her she’s the only one who can recover the Breath she put in it. Surprised at how little she knows, he gives her the Command to recover her Breath from the shawl, and the shock and pleasure of regaining her stock of Breath is so strong she falls out of her chair. Of course, the Breath heals her of disease completely, and the past few weeks suddenly seem surreal. She reminds herself never to forget what she was willing to do in her desperation.

Vasher tosses her a bundle of clothes in shades of blue, and tells her to get dressed; it’s time to go. It’s men’s clothing, but it’s sturdy and Vasher refuses to spend a lot of money buying her fancy dresses. She wonders what Vasher intends to do with her, and he says they’re going to stop Denth. She admits that Denth played her, and when Vasher laughs at her, the Royal Locks respond for the first time since Parlin’s death, going from white to red. She defends herself, saying that she was doing her best to help her people in the upcoming war, and he rather brutally points out that everything Denth had her doing was aimed at intentionally starting that war.

As they walk through the slum, she realizes that she had simply accepted the assertion that war was inevitable. Vasher claims that war has always been close but never inevitable; the Returned would have to be convinced that it was more important than their current ease. Vivenna begins to wallow in her failure, but Vasher reminds her that Denth has been working on this for a long time, and she was nothing more than a convenient tool. What he doesn’t know is who employed Denth, much less why they want a war. Vivenna asks Vasher why he cares, but he shuts down the conversation.

At their destination, Vasher stomps into the meeting of Idrian workers, refusing pleasantries, and requires Vivenna to change her hair. The men present are naturally convinced of who she is, but wonder why she’s suddenly changed sides; she apologizes that she had been manipulated into believing that war was inevitable. Vasher then ignores her and asks the men what they’re doing to stop it. Vivenna listens, beginning to understand both them and herself better than before. The Idrians are afraid and angry, and are moving toward desperate measures. Vasher is angry at them for not understanding what he sees so clearly; Vivenna realizes that she could present better arguments than he can, but wonders if she should help him or not. Concluding that her people are more important than any other considerations, she moves forward and proposes other ways to resolve the situation. In shame and humility, she speaks of diplomacy, and promises that Idris will no longer forget them but will be their ally, even if they choose to stay in Hallandren; with Siri’s possible help and the support of Dedelin, she promises that they will be seen as heroes in their homeland if they can help stop this war. They agree, and leave to see what they can do.

Vasher thanks her for her help, but she didn’t do it for him. She asks why she should obey him, how she can know he’s not just using her like Denth did, and whether he will force her to help him anyway. In frustration, he tosses her a bag of coins and tells her to go back to Idris. She doesn’t pick it up, though, confessing that she is just so confused by Denth and by Parlin’s death and… everything. Vasher finally concedes that Denth, however evil, is charismatic, and many people have been taken in by him. Vasher himself is just about as uncharismatic as it gets, but he promises not to lie to her. Ruefully acknowledging the similarity of their inner contractions, Vivenna agrees to do what she can to help stop the war.

Breathtaking

I know that anger, Vivenna realized. I felt it. Feel it still. Anger at Hallandren.

The man’s words rang hollow to her now. The truth was, she hadn’t really felt any ire from the Hallandren people. If anything, she’d felt indifference. She was just another body on the street to them.

Perhaps that’s why she hated them. She’d worked all of her life to become something important for them— in her mind, she’d been dominated by the monster that was Hallandren and its God King. And then, in the end, the city and its people had simply ignored her. She didn’t matter to them. And that was infuriating.

This is, I think, very insightful, and reveals a lot about human pride. In general, it takes an awful lot of beating down to get to the point where we’d just rather not be noticed, either as individuals or as a culture, and there are always some who never get to that point. Don’t get me wrong; I think that last is a good thing, to a point. No one should have to simply accept being considered subhuman, as we’ve seen happen in earth history multiple times. But all too often, we can’t stand being ignored, and we convince ourselves that we have it worse than we really do – or make things worse for ourselves because we can’t believe that we just don’t matter to other people all that much.

Local Color

You need to go read the extensive annotations for this chapter. Sanderson addresses: 1) The two distinct parts of Vivenna’s plot arc, as opposed to Siri’s more gradual progression, and the resulting difficulty in getting readers invested in Vivenna at all. 2) Vasher as a non-standard hero who has trouble relating to people. 3) Vivenna’s time as a Drab and the effects thereof, and that a member of the Royal Line has a fraction of a divine Returned Breath. 4) The trick of writing a good character who is working for the wrong side for a long time without knowing it. 5) What Vasher has been up to – trying to stop the war – and why we couldn’t be allowed to see it sooner. 6) Vivenna’s understanding of the Idrian resentment toward Hallandren, and some of its real-world parallels. Go read the notes, because I can’t even begin to address it all.

***

Snow White and Rose Red

As noted above, we’ve now come to the rather abrupt shift in Vivenna’s character arc. She started out as an arrogant princess, denying anything that didn’t fit her understanding of the world – and there were many things that didn’t, like Jewels’s devotion to the Iridescent Tones and Clod’s apparent protectiveness toward her. Then it all fell apart, with Parlin’s murder, the discovery of the dead Idrian agents, and the realization that Denth & company playing her rather than working for her. Then came the plunge into living on the street, starving and sick, learning that all her high standards would mean nothing if she were hungry enough. Now… now we start the upward climb.

It’s actually a fairly miserable way to start, though, in my opinion. Yes, being clean again is marvelous, and regaining her Breath even more so. But now she’s trying – from a rather abject position, too – to undo all the things she spent the last few months doing. Vasher doesn’t have much sympathy for her, because she’s caused him a lot of trouble so far; the fact that she was being used by Denth is only a minor mitigating factor. She’s going to be apologizing at every turn for her lack of understanding, and for company she gets grumpy Vasher… At least he’s honest with her, even if he does think she’s incredibly stupid.

The issue central to the new Vivenna gets mentioned in passing a couple of times, but I do think it’s vital for the reader to recognize it: she is really unsure of who she is now. The first mention is shortly after she’d recovered her Breath, and they were preparing to leave the lodgings.

It felt so surreal. Two weeks on the street? It felt so much longer. But now, suddenly, she was cleaned and fed, and somehow she felt like her old self again. Part of it was the Breath. The beautiful, wonderful Breath. She never wanted to be parted from it again.

Not her old self at all. Who was she, then? Did it matter?

Her old self had felt so guilty about that Breath, and wanted so much to be rid of it in the right way. It was an abomination to her old self, but now the thought of losing it again is terrifying. Then Vasher throws another wild thought her way:

“… Princess, you say every man thinks he’s on the right side, that every man who opposed you was deluding himself.” He met her eyes. “Didn’t you ever once stop to think that maybe you were the one on the wrong side?”

Which clearly she hadn’t. Not once. It hadn’t occurred to her to even question Denth’s counsel. Okay, a lot of that was because she was so naïve, and a lot was because he’s a very clever and charming man who presented everything as if he were following her orders. But now she knows she was wrong. “Wrong, wrong, out of the hunt, and wrong.”

She continued to kneel, ashamed before these men. Ashamed to be crying, to be seen in the immodest clothing and with ragged, short hair. Ashamed to have failed them so completely.

How could I fail so easily? she thought. I, who was supposed to be so prepared, so in control. How could I be so angry that I ignored my people’s needs just because I wanted to see Hallandren pay?

So she wasn’t at all who she thought she was when all the supports were knocked away. Who is she, at heart?

A pacifist with temper-control issues, she thought ruefully. What a combination. A little like a devout Idrian princess who holds enough BioChromatic Breath to populate a small village.

Well, that’s at least an acknowledgement of what she is. For the rest, we’ll wait and see.

Also? I was mildly amused that last week, Siri was carefully tasting Hallandren foods, and concluding that seafood was still revolting. This week, Vivenna wolfs down the remains of Vasher’s fish, with the thought that “seafood didn’t bother her anymore.” Hah.

As I Live and Breathe

There’s not a lot of active magic this week; mostly just Vivenna regaining her Breath from the shawl. There’s one bit worth noting, though; Vasher mentions it and the annotations expand on it. As a member of the Royal Line, Vivenna holds some fraction of a Returned Breath, and it’s what gave her the instinct to Awaken the rope Vasher had used to bind her. It’s probably also what gives her the technicolor hair trick; I think that gets clarified eventually.

Clashing Colors

The lack of understanding between cultures is such a critical part of this book as a whole, and it’s especially critical to Vivenna’s efforts on both sides of the war debate. The lot of the Idrian population in T’Telir is, of course, the means Denth has been using to manipulate them into “sabotaging the Hallandren,” and it’s also the means by which Vivenna finally understands how to change their approach. I’m sure it’s no coincidence that Vasher’s inability to figure out who’s behind it all is in this same chapter, because the lot of the Pahn Kahl is not so different from that of the Idrians. And in both cases, the thing that makes it tick is the indifference of the Hallandren people as a whole. It’s not that they go out of their way to put down either the Idrians or the Pahn Kahl; they just… don’t really notice them one way or another, except in the ways their own cultures set them apart.

Foreshadowing FTW.

In Living Color

Lightsong and Allmother are quite a pair, aren’t they? Unlikely allies, to say the least! As Lightsong notes, it was only their respective relationships with Calmseer that brought them together; in fact, he hasn’t been to Allmother’s palace since the last time the three of them shared a meal… the night before Calmseer gave her Breath away. I’ll admit that I find the Returned as a whole a rather sorry lot, but this chapter gave me a certain respect for Allmother. She’s not very nice to Our Boy Lightsong… but I honestly can’t blame her, the way he acts. It’s only when you get to be inside his head that he becomes an admirable character, after all. (Well, and later on, of course, but that’s many chapters away yet.) Anyway, these two are such opposites. She’s diligent, he’s indolent. She believes they have Returned for a purpose, he’s skeptical of their divinity. She believes their dreams are prophetic, he believes they are irrelevant. Or… he always has, until recently, but no one knows that his mind is starting to change.

Anyway, I love the way they shock one another here, by each giving the other their Lifeless security codes.

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

My squirrel returns again!! Such a clever little squirrel, to find Allmother and run around in circles screeching, just like he was told. Heh. I think I’ve said it before, but Squirrel and Stick have their own special little niches in my heart.

Like Fresh Blue Paint on a Wall

“I must ask, Allmother, and please think me not rude. But what in the name of the Colors is wrong with you?”

We’ve pretty well established by now that everyone on Nalthis swears by some variation on colors. Idrians use something about Austre, Lord of Colors; Hallandren use the Iridescent Tones, or merely “colors” in general; and of course there was Lightsong’s goofy attempt to get the gods and goddesses to swear by themselves. But… I liked this one, in context, and I haven’t found one different enough to be worth quoting for a while now. So, there we are.

Exhale

Once more, we see right out in plain sight the effect of suddenly taking on a lot of Breath. Sometimes I still can’t believe I didn’t figure out how Sanderson was going to use this… Since I’ve been actively looking for foreshadowing, this time it really stands out – this effect is referenced so stinking many times, it should have been like a stick beating on my head for notice, but I just didn’t catch on. Vivenna notices a couple of times what an unnerving effect it has, and Vasher thinks about it and talks about it  repeatedly. How did I not see it coming??

Well, that got long-winded. There’s just so much buried in that Vivenna chapter!! So… come play in the comments, and be sure to join us again next week. We’ll be tackling chapters 44, 45, and 46, in which Siri capitulates, Lightsong dreams, and Vivenna learns.

Alice Arneson is a SAHM, blogger, beta reader, and literature fan. In Oathbringer updates, the progress bar is now at 91%! Watch these spaces for new articles, including a soon-to-come post about beta-reading Oathbringer. Spoiler-free, of course.

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
Written by William Shatner & Harve Bennett & David Loughery
Directed by William Shatner
Release date: June 9, 1989
Stardate: 8454.1 

Captain’s log. We open on Nimbus III, the so-called “planet of galactic peace,” located in the Neutral Zone. (Which NZ, it doesn’t say.) A man named J’onn is working hard in the desert when he’s approached by a man on a horse. J’onn grabs his crude, handmade weapon to defend himself. (Weapons are, strictly speaking, forbidden on Nimbus.) The rider approaches and stares intently at him, which manages to take his pain away telepathically. J’onn is eternally grateful, and the rider asks in return that J’onn join his quest. J’onn agrees, and then rider throws back his cloak to reveal tapered ears—he’s a Vulcan. He tells J’onn that they’ll need a starship. And then he laughs.

Cut to Yosemite National Park, where Kirk is climbing El Capitan. Spock flies up to meet him wearing gravity boots in order to have a rather stupid conversation. Below, McCoy is watching through binoculars, talking to himself, convinced that Kirk is going to die. Sure enough, Spock’s babbling at Kirk distracts him enough to cause him to fall, though Spock is able to use the gravity boots to accelerate faster than the 9.8 meters per second per second that Kirk is falling and catch him just before he goes splat.

On Nimbus, the rider, whose name is Sybok, has gathered an impressive following. He, J’onn, and the rest of his forces storm Paradise City just as the new Romulan representative, Caithlin Dar, arrives. She’s barely met St. John Talbot of the Federation and Korrd of the Klingon Empire before Sybok’s forces take them prisoner.

On Earth, we find out why Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are free to take leave in Yosemite together: the new Enterprise is a mess. Nothing works, and Scotty opines in his log that the ship was assembled by monkeys.

In mid-repair, Starfleet Command contacts them with a Priority 7 situation. Despite their condition, all personnel to be recalled. Uhura contacts Sulu and Chekov—who are relieved to be contacted, as they’re lost in whatever park they’re hiking through. Meanwhile, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are having dinner around the campfire—McCoy’s family recipe of beans cooked in Tennessee whiskey—and toasted “marsh melons,” the latter from Spock’s attempt at research of campfire traditions. In the spirit of that research, they attempt a singalong of “Row Row Row Your Boat,” which is something of a disaster, and then they go to sleep, Spock grumbling that life isn’t a dream…

They’re awakened by Uhura in a shuttlecraft—since they didn’t bring their communicators with them, she has to pick them up unannounced. (The transporters are still not working. And won’t until the plot needs them to, but right now the plot needs them not to.)

Klingon Captain Klaa, whose ship has been modified with a personal periscope-style gunnery control for the command chair, receives word of the hostage taking on Nimbus and changes course, hoping to engage a Federation ship.

Kirk reports to the bridge and is informed by Starfleet Command about what happened on Nimbus. There are other ships in the sector, but no experienced captains. They need Jim Kirk, the admiral says, to which both Kirk and the audience say, “Oh, please…” Concern is expressed about the Klingons also sending a ship; at no point does anyone discuss the possibility of the Romulans doing likewise.

The ship sets course for Nimbus III, though absolutely nothing works right. Uhura provides information on the hostages, as well as the recording made by Sybok demanding a Federation starship to parley for their release.

Spock recognizes Sybok, and he informs Kirk and McCoy that he knew him as a student. He was brilliant but also a revolutionary, who rejected logic and embraced emotionalism. He was banished from Vulcan.

They arrive at Nimbus. There’s a Klingon ship two hours out, and the transporter still isn’t working. (Hey, Starfleet! Maybe don’t send a ship to do a hostage retrieval that doesn’t have a working transporter!) Kirk, Spock, Sulu, McCoy, Uhura, and a security detail fly down in a shuttle. Meanwhile, Chekov is in command, and he stalls Sybok.

The shuttle lands a good hour’s walk from Paradise City to avoid detection, but there’s a lookout party nearby with horses. Uhura distracts them by singing and dancing naked with fans—yes, really—and then the landing party takes their horses.

Except for Uhura, who goes back to the shuttle, they ride into Paradise City. Unfortunately, when they rescue the hostages, they discover that the three consuls are also on Sybok’s side. The landing party is taken prisoner, and Sybok and Spock have a lovely reunion.

The landing party hops onto the shuttle as Sybok’s hostages, pretending to Chekov and Scotty that they’re coming back with the bad guys. Unfortunately, the Klingon ship cloaks, which means they’re going to attack. Chekov raises shields, and advises the shuttle to find safe harbor on the planet. Sybok refuses, but does allow Kirk to land the shuttle on the ship. He has Sulu fly in manually, with the shields lowered only for a few seconds. As soon as the shuttle’s on board, Chekov goes to warp, barely avoiding being struck by Klingon weapons fire.

Sybok instructs Kirk to take him to the bridge. Kirk tries to fight back, but Sybok tosses him around like a rag doll. Spock gets his hand on Sybok’s weapon, but cannot shoot Sybok because, it turns out, Sybok is Spock’s half brother. Sarek was his father, his mother was a Vulcan woman.

Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are placed in the brig, while Sulu and Uhura, and later Chekov, are converted to Sybok’s cause. Sybok then addresses the entire ship and announces that they are headed to what Vulcan mythology refers to as Sha Ka Ree, which he says is at the center of the galaxy. Kirk points out that no ship or probe has penetrated the great barrier around the center of the galaxy.

Scotty has managed to avoid the brainwashing, and he breaks Kirk, Spock, and McCoy out of the brig. (Previous attempts at a breakout from inside have failed. Spock points out that the brig is new and they tested it against the most intelligent, resourceful person they could find—Spock himself.) Scotty directs them to a turboshaft that’s down for maintenance that they can climb to the forward lounge, which has an emergency transmitter. Spock flies them up via his gravity boots, and they get a message out—however, it’s Klaa’s ship that receives it. His first officer, Vixis, claims to be from Starfleet Command and assures Kirk that they’ll send a ship right away. Klaa then sets course for the center of the galaxy.

For his part, Scotty bumps his head on a pipe just after muttering that he knows the ship like the back of his hand. Sulu and J’onn find him and have him sent to sickbay, where Uhura greets him upon regaining consciousness.

Sybok enters the forward lounge and talks with Kirk, Spock, and McCoy about Sha Ka Ree—humans call it Eden or heaven, Klingons call it QI’tu, Romulans call it Vorta Vor. He also explains his brainwashing technique: he forces people to confront their pain and send it away, enabling them to also cast off fear (and, apparently, common sense and loyalty).

We finally get to see what it is Sybok does. McCoy sees himself at his father’s deathbed. McCoy confronts the fact that he committed euthanasia on his father—he was in tremendous pain, and McCoy did it to preserve his dignity and end the pain. But not long after that, they found a cure for what ailed him. Sybok claims that the pain of that decision has poisoned his soul.

He then takes on Spock, who insists that he hides no pain, but Sybok knows better. Sybok shows them Amanda giving birth to Spock, and Sarek sees the child (whose ears are not yet tapered) and cluck-clucks, “So human.”

Kirk refuses to take his own journey, saying he needs his pain. As for Spock, the brainwashing doesn’t take because Spock knows who he is now—he’s not the outcast child Sybok left behind. McCoy sticks with his buddies, though he actually is grateful for the brainwashing, same as the rest of the crew.

The Enterprise approaches the great barrier. Sulu reminds Sybok that no ship can get through the barrier. Sybok says they’re wrong, that it’s just fear talking, and then the Enterprise—a barely-together ship that’s not functioning remotely correctly—gets through the impenetrable barrier with no explanation.

There’s a world at the center, which Sulu puts the ship goes into orbit of. Chekov detects a power source like nothing he’s ever seen before. Sybok frees Kirk, Spock, and McCoy and lets Kirk have command of the ship again, to Kirk’s surprise. Sybok knows that, now that they’re here, Kirk won’t be able to resist exploring the world at the heart of the galaxy.

And he’s right. Leaving Chekov in command, Kirk takes Spock, McCoy, and Sybok down in a shuttlecraft—which another force takes control of as they approach. They land in an open field and disembark from the shuttlecraft. Sybok has apparently taken the time to get a haircut before boarding the shuttle. On the bridge, the crew, the consuls, and Sybok’s people are watching the feed from—well, I don’t know what it’s from, since we see the shuttle, so it can’t be from there. Everyone’s so enraptured by the sight of an incredibly boring desert planet that looks like half the other planets they’ve visited that nobody notices that Klaa’s ship has also somehow penetrated the barrier and is on approach.

After walking in a direction that appears to have been chosen at random, Sybok suddenly stops and screams, “WE HAVE TRAVELED FAR!” then quietly adds, “…by starship.”

Just when Sybok is thinking that maybe he came all this way for nothing, the sky grows dark, the ground shakes, and stalagmites start growing out of the ground, forming a sort of fence. The landing party walks in, and then a big giant head shows up in an explosion of light. The face is a white guy with a beard because that matches the landing party’s expectations—though I can only imagine it matches Kirk’s and McCoy’s.

The big giant head says that they’re his first visitors, and he asks how they penetrated the barrier, and when Sybok tells him, he asks if this starship can carry his essence, his power, his wisdom to the galaxy.

This prompts Kirk to ask a rather on-point question: what does God need with a starship? The big giant head refuses to answer the question, and when Kirk presses him, he gets himself zapped with ray beams from the big giant head’s eyes. When Spock points out that he hasn’t answered the question, he gets zapped, too. McCoy—who’s been willing to give the big giant head the benefit of the doubt (“Jim, you don’t ask the Almighty for his ID!”)—stands and declares that he doubts any god who inflicts pain for his own pleasure.

Sybok is aghast. The God of Sha Ka Ree would not behave this way. The big giant head has no idea what Sha Ka Ree is. He’s been imprisoned for an eternity, and he wants out via the starship. Sybok, realizing how badly he’s screwed up, approaches the big giant head and says that he can’t help but notice the creature’s pain…

As Sybok and the big giant head tussle, Kirk orders Sulu and Chekov to fire a photon torpedo at the big giant head. That doesn’t destroy the big giant head, but it gives Kirk, Spock, and McCoy time to run to the shuttle—which, apparently, is no longer working. Scotty has restored enough transporter power to beam two people aboard, so he takes Spock and McCoy—

—and then Klaa decloaks and fires on the Enterprise. His terms of surrender are that they give him “the renegade” Kirk and he doesn’t blow up the Enterprise. Spock counters that Kirk isn’t on board, and then he enlists Korrd to stomp all over him, since he’s Klaa’s superior officer. On Korrd’s order, Klaa beams Korrd and Spock over, takes the ship down to the surface, and fires on the big giant head, then beaming Kirk aboard. Klaa, reluctantly, apologizes, saying that firing on Kirk’s ship was not sanctioned by his government.

Kirk holds a party for the Klingons, his crew, and Sybok’s followers on the Enterprise. It’s unclear if or how Sybok’s brainwashing has worn off. Scotty and Korrd share some Scotch, Sulu and Chekov appreciate Vixis’s muscles, and Klaa salutes Kirk. Spock muses on how he lost a brother, prompting Kirk to say that he lost a brother once, but he was lucky and got him back.

Then we cut to Yosemite, where Kirk, Spock, and McCoy resume their camping trip. Spock has his Vulcan harp out, and he starts playing “Row Row Row Your Boat.”

Can’t we just reverse the polarity? The Enterprise and Klaa’s ship manage to penetrate the impenetrable barrier at the center of the galaxy because reasons. How they got to the center of the galaxy so fast is also left totally unexplained. Also, apparently they assembled the Enterprise-A in a hurry, because nothing on it works right—except for the get-us-through-the-impenetrable-barrier drive, that works great. 

Fascinating. We find out that Spock has a half-brother. Given that Sybok was exiled from Vulcan, and given how reluctant Vulcans in general and Spock in particular are with discussing their personal lives (cf. “Amok Time“), not to mention how revolting Spock finds rampant emotionalism, it’s not surprising that he never mentioned him before.

I’m a doctor not an escalator. As usual, McCoy gets the best lines, though they are fewer and farther between. Also, we learn that he killed his father.

Ahead warp one, aye. Not Sulu’s best day: he gets lost with Chekov (the pilot and the navigator get lost! Ha ha ha! That’s funny!), he gets knocked off his horse, he crashes the shuttle (to be fair, it was a damn difficult bit of piloting, and at least all his passengers survived), and he gets brainwashed. 

Hailing frequencies open. Uhura fares far worse, however. Not only is she brainwashed, prior to that she is conscripted to strip naked and do a fan dance and song to distract Sybok’s lookouts so they can steal their horses. Because the one thing that’s been missing from Star Trek all these years is a Russ Meyer moment.

I cannot change the laws of physics! Scotty manages to fix the transporter in the nick of time, and also keeps the ship from falling completely apart. He also bangs his head on a pipe right after saying he knows the ship like the back of his hand. (He knows the ship like the back of his hand, but he bumps his head! Ha ha ha! That’s funny!)

It’s a Russian invention. Chekov gets to pretend to be captain to distract Sybok, and does rather a good job.

Go put on a red shirt. Kirk brings a security detail to Nimbus, and one of them gets shot. Nobody seems to notice or care.

No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. For some reason, Uhura and Scotty start acting like a couple. There’s been no hint of it before, and there will never be any hint of it again.

Channel open. “You really piss me off, Jim!”

McCoy, speaking for the entire audience.

Welcome aboard. The big guests are Laurence Luckinbill as Sybok and David Warner as Talbot. Warner will be back in the very next film as Chancellor Gorkon and again in TNG‘s “Chain of Command” two-parter as Gul Madred. Charles Cooper plays Korrd, the first of two high-ranking Klingons on his resumé, the next being Chancellor K’mpec on TNG‘s “Sins of the Father” and “Reunion.” (Amusingly, he’ll wear the same cloak as K’mpec that he wore as Korrd.)

Jonathan Simpson and Cynthia Blaise play the younger versions of Sarek and Amanda seen in Spock’s memories. Bill Quinn plays McCoy’s dying father; it was his last screen role before he died in 1994 at the age of 81.

Stunt folk Todd Bryant and Spice Williams play Klaa and Vixis, respectively. Bryant previously played a cadet in The Wrath of Khan, and will return as a Klingon translator in The Undiscovered Country. These days, he’s mostly a stunt coordinator, fight choreographer, and second unit director. Williams—known now as Spice Williams-Crosby after marrying George Crosby—is a well-regarded bodybuilder, and has continued to work in the stunt world as well. She’ll play a Klaestron kidnapper in DS9‘s “Dax.”

Rex Holman plays J’onn; he was last seen as Morgan Earp in “Spectre of the Gun.” George Murdock plays the big giant head; he’ll return as Admiral Hansen in “The Best of Both Worlds” two-parter on TNG. Cynthia Gouw plays Dar.

Producer Harve Bennett plays the admiral who gives Kirk the assignment, and Melanie Shatner, daughter of the star/director, plays the yeoman who hands Kirk his jacket when he comes on board. With the latter appearance, all three of Shatner’s daughters have now appeared with him on Star Trek, with Lisabeth and Leslie having appeared as two of the kids in “Miri.”

Finally, the usual suspects of James Doohan, Nichelle Nichols, Walter Koenig, and George Takei are present. Takei gets an “and” credit, which is a bigger credit than simply being listed, which he probably got as a way of getting him to do the film. Reportedly, Takei—who has never gotten along with Shatner—wasn’t interested in being directed by him, but he was talked into it.

Trivial matters: As with the third film, this was William Shatner’s first feature film directorial credit, though also as with Leonard Nimoy, he had directed television before, having helmed ten episodes of T.J. Hooker, the cop show he also starred in. Shatner asked to direct this film based on the “favored nation” clause in both his and Nimoy’s contract that basically said that whatever one got, so did the other.

This movie picks up from the end of the previous film, as Scotty references Kirk’s final line in the film asking, “Let’s see what she’s got,” and answering it poorly.

This is the second time the Enterprise has gone to the center of the galaxy. Last time, in “The Magicks of Megas-Tu,” they found magic and mythical creatures. This time, they find a big giant head pretending to be God. The barrier around the center is called “the great barrier,” which is also how the barrier around the outside of the galaxy—first seen in “Where No Man Has Gone Before” and also traversed in “By Any Other Name” and “Is There in Truth No Beauty?“—is referred to.

The producers wanted Sean Connery to play Sybok, but he was already committed to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. They named Sha Ka Ree after him instead.

Each of the films from this one through to Nemesis are the only ones produced while a Star Trek TV show was on the air—this and The Undiscovered Country while TNG was airing, Generations while DS9 was airing, First Contact and Insurrection while DS9 and Voyager were airing, and Nemesis while Enterprise was airing.

Kirk really did lose his brother, in “Operation—Annihilate!” when George Samuel Kirk was found dead on Deneva. Kirk also says “men like us don’t have families,” even though all three of them do have families, as established in “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” and “Operation—Annihilate!” for Kirk, “Journey to Babel” for Spock, and “The Survivor” for McCoy.

While McCoy’s father is not named in this film, McCoy did provide “David” as his father’s name in The Search for Spock. In the novel The Sorrows of Empire, David Mack established that McCoy’s Mirror Universe counterpart (from “Mirror, Mirror”) tortured his father to death on orders from the Terran Empire.

The big giant head, identified as simply The One, will also be seen, and given an origin, in Greg Cox’s The Q-Continuum trilogy, which also features cosmic entities Q from “Encounter at Farpoint” and beyond, the swirly thing from “Day of the Dove,” and Gorgan from “And the Children Shall Lead.”

McCoy’s grumbling to himself that he’s worried about starting to talk to himself calls back to a similar line, also prompted by Kirk’s behavior, in the character’s first appearance in “The Corbomite Maneuver.”

The timeframe of Nimbus III’s establishment is problematic, as this movie can’t be more than a few months after The Wrath of Khan, which was fifteen years after “Space Seed,” which means it’s also fifteen years after “Balance of Terror“—which was the first contact between the Federation and the Romulans in almost a century. So how could the Romulans be involved in “the planet of galactic peace” twenty years prior to this episode?

Nimbus III is never mentioned again onscreen, but it does feature in the Decipher role-playing game, Star Trek Online, and the Vanguard novel series by David Mack, Dayton Ward, & Kevin Dilmore. It’s also seen in an alternate timeline in Geoff Trowbridge’s The Chimes at Midnight, in Myriad Universes: Echoes and Refractions.

Korrd also appears prior to this film in “Though Hell Should Bar the Way” by Greg Cox in Enterprise Logs and your humble rewatcher’s “The Unhappy Ones” in Seven Deadly Sins and after it in Sarek by A.C. Crispin, In the Name of Honor by Dayton Ward, “The Lights in the Sky” by Phaedra M. Weldon in Strange New Worlds, and J.M. Dillard’s novelization of The Undiscovered Country.

Klaa would continue to be a recurring antagonist for Kirk and the gang in DC’s second monthly Star Trek comic written by Peter David and Howard Weinstein. He also appeared in Weinstein’s novella The Blood-Dimmed Tide, part of the Mere Anarchy miniseries.

Sybok is mentioned briefly in your humble rewatcher’s The Brave and the Bold Book 2 during Spock and Worf’s mind-meld (Spock’s disagreements with Sybok paralleling Worf’s with Nikolai Rozhenko), and alternate timeline versions of him are seen or mentioned in Engines of Destiny by Gene DeWeese, The Tears of Eridanus by Steve Mollmann & Michael Schuster in Myriad Universes: Shattered Light, the comic book Star Trek Annual #6 written by Howard Weinstein & Michael Jan Friedman, and the aforementioned The Chimes at Midnight.

Harve Bennett’s admiral, simply identified as “Bob” in the film, is given the name Robert Bennett when he appears in the novels Forged in Fire by Andy Mangels & Michael A. Martin and the aforementioned In the Name of Honor.

The first episode of TNG to air after this movie’s release was “Evolution,” in which Data mentions that there has not been a total technological failure of a starship in seventy-nine years, a deliberate reference to the Enterprise-A’s balky shakedown in this movie.

This film was novelized by J.M. Dillard, who adapted all six of the remaining mainline universe films. Dillard reconciled Sulu being offered his own command with his being back to the helmsman here, explained how the Enterprise got the center of the galaxy so gosh-darned fast and was able to penetrate the barrier (Sybok modified the engines and shields so that they could get there fast and then get through, and Klaa acquired those new specs from scanning the Enterprise in order to follow), remembered things like the fact that Kirk actually had a brother, gave backgrounds for the three Nimbus III ambassadors, showed what Sybok did to brainwash Uhura, Sulu, and Chekov, and so on. In addition, as with the previous two, there was a comics adaptation from DC by the then-current creative team of the comic book, in this case Peter David, James W. Fry III, & Arne Starr

To boldly go. “What does God need with a starship?” What a godawful mess. Pun intended.

There is almost nothing to recommend this film. It’s bad Star Trek, it’s bad cinema, hell, it’d even be bad television. The humor is labored and forced, and very little of it elicits more than an occasional chuckle. (“I need a shower.” “Yes.” That works. It’s one of the few.)

Gene Roddenberry tried to declare this movie to be non-canonical, which many fans seized upon in order to dismiss the film. Of course, the reason why Roddenberry hated this movie isn’t because it’s bad, it’s because Shatner got to make his Enterprise-meets-God story and Roddenberry didn’t. The Great Bird’s original notion for what eventually became The Motion Picture, which Paramount rejected, involved meeting a version of God. Roddenberry even tried to make it into a novel, The God-Thing. (Here’s a very impressive chronicle of the tortured history of this never-to-be-published novel from the mighty Steve Roby.)

I suspect that Roddenberry’s story of the meeting with God would have been dire, though it couldn’t possibly be much worse than this misbegotten piece of crap.

The movie is not completely flawed. It has some good moments. For all that the dialogue is labored (a problem throughout the film), the campfire scenes are fun. The revelations of what Sybok focuses on for McCoy’s and Spock’s pain are very enlightening about both characters, especially McCoy. Knowing that McCoy, in a moment of weakness, performed euthanasia on his own father to preserve his dignity and relieve his endless pain pulls McCoy’s entire character into focus. His dedication to his work, his insistence on the sanctity of life (seen in this very film when he bitches out Kirk for risking his life for no good reason by climbing El Capitan), it all comes back to that one decision that he obviously regretted deeply and which has informed his entire life, making him into the superlative surgeon that we’ve been seeing regularly.

And this is the thing Sybok wants to take away. Kirk is the only person who seems to understand that. (Spock, to a lesser extent, does also.) All the people on Nimbus, all the rest of Kirk’s crew, they all just give in to the brainwashing.

Which, by the way, is never properly explained. Sybok stares at a person, talks about letting go of their pain, and then they blindly follow him anywhere, act out of character, commit acts of assault and theft, and so on. The leap from one thing—working through a past trauma—to the other—being a mindless moron—is too far to be in any way convincing.

The movie is one big character assassination of everyone who isn’t one of the Big Three. Besides the fact that Uhura, Sulu, Chekov, and possibly Scotty (it’s not clear with him) have succumbed to Sybok’s brainwashing (so has McCoy, but he’s at least got the wherewithal to remember his Starfleet oath, unlike the others), we get Sulu and Chekov getting lost, Scotty bumping his head, and Uhura’s fucking fan dance.

I still recall seeing The Final Frontier in the theatre at age twenty. With each scene, my jaw is dropping further, aghast at just how awful it all is, and then we get to the motherfucking fan dance, and I just closed my eyes and muttered profanity to myself. (I wanted to scream, “Oh, for fuck’s sake, noooooo!” but I was in a crowded Manhattan theatre and was mindful of the rest of the audience.) Star Trek has always had a major dollop of sexism leavening its enlightened attitudes, but there’s no excuse, none, for that appalling, disgusting, ridiculous scene of Uhura distracting the lookouts by dancing naked for them, getting them to all abandon their posts as one. (Funny how Sybok’s brainwashing is enough to make Starfleet officers violate their oaths but not enough to keep his lookouts from acting like a wolf in a Tex Avery cartoon.) Good thing for Kirk’s despicable plan that they were all heterosexual males in the lookout party…

All of this is done to make the hero look better. It’s really hard to forget whose name is on the director credit when the movie goes to such great lengths to make Kirk out to be the bestest captain evar!!! He climbs El Cap! He’s the only one who can save the consuls! He leads the landing party and wrestles a three-breasted cat lady! (No, really!) He’s the only one who manfully resists Sybok’s brainwashing! He dares to ask the big giant head an important question! (Which is another of the few great lines in the film.)

Sixteen years ago, I got into a discussion of this movie on a now-defunct Trek books board, and several people defended the movie as being thoughtful and it was actually about seeking out new life and new civilizations and that it was about something and that something was very much in Roddenberry’s spirit. Except, to me, all this movie had to say was that everyone (except for Kirk and Spock, anyhow) is a weak-willed moron who doesn’t have the ability to say, “Hey, maybe I shouldn’t mind-meld with this laughing Vulcan I’ve never met and let him give me hallucinations.” Also that Starfleet is so incompetently run that there’s only one captain who can handle a diplomatic crisis and they can’t even be arsed to give him a ship that works properly. (Seriously, I get that Kirk is the only one available with the experience, but in that case, give him a ship that actually functions, for crying out loud!)

As for seeking out new life and new civilizations, yup, the movie is about that—and it’s the villain of the piece who’s doing it, and our heroes are trying to stop him. That’s so very Star Trek. Sigh.

Naturally, there are no consequences for what happened. The next time we see the crew, they’re either in the same positions or have been promoted. Even though they disobeyed orders, endangered the ship, assaulted their fellow officers, and so on. Sure.

I was going to give this a zero rating, but watching it again I found myself drawn to McCoy’s flashback. It really does do a great deal to explicate one of the most compelling characters in the franchise, and DeForest Kelley does superbly with the scene.

But it’s the only rose in this pile of cowflop. Just an embarrassment to the entire franchise.

Though it did give us this………….

Warp factor rating: 1 

Next week: Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

Keith R.A. DeCandido‘s latest release is the short story “Behind the Wheel,” the latest in his cycle of urban fantasy stories set in Key West, Florida starring Cassie Zukav, weirdness magnet. The story is in TV Gods: Summer Programming, which also features stories by Trek scribes Michael Jan Friedman, Robert Greenberger, and Aaron Rosenberg.

I grew up in the East Bay area, just over the Bay Bridge from San Francisco. I moved a lot, so I lived in Oakland, Fremont (three houses in the same neighborhood! Once we moved 12 doors down the street), Union City, Hayward, and Castro Valley. Now I live half a world away in Edinburgh, Scotland. Writing the Pacifica books (False Hearts & Shattered Minds) has been a way to go back home, even if it’s through the lens of a twisted, near-future vision of that state.

The last two trips home, I’ve been exploring different areas of San Francisco and Los Angeles to feed into my fiction, and it’s been interesting to see California in a new way. I once told my mom I wanted to go to the Xanadu Gallery in San Francisco so I could imagine it riddled with bullets for a scene in False Hearts. I walked down downtown Los Angeles, imagining floating skyscrapers and mansions overhead. I picked apart California’s obsessions: with celebrity, with perfection, with presenting itself as a hippie ecotopia. In this future, it’s still the centre of loads of technological innovation, just as Silicon Valley is now. I created a walled off cult set in the redwoods of Muir Woods. I took so many places of my childhood and placed them in creepy thrillers, just to see what would happen. At first glance, California looks like a utopia, but if you scratch the surface, it’s just as grim as some of the cyberpunk I grew up reading.

Here’s a mix of books set in the Golden State that possibly fed into my Pacifica books, plus some I really want to read.

Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler

Many people are discussing the plausible dystopias that feel all the more likely after recent political upheavals, but I think Butler’s vision of a fractured United States as the characters go on a pilgrimage from Southern to Northern California is one of the most plausible. Water costs more than food, and police and the fire department will charge you if you need their services. Walled communities are common as there are people scavenging and stealing from anyone who has more than them. Drugs create side effects like hyperempathy, which our heroine Lauren Olamina has. Any time she sees someone people hurt, she feels their pain. If someone is shot in front of her, it’s as if she dies before returning to her senses. The world is grim, dark, and in many ways horrible. Yet there’s also a thread of hope in there. Not everyone in this future is out to get everyone else. In the sequel, a fundamentalist religious man becomes President and promises to “make America great again.” Sound familiar? And this was written in the 1990s. The sequel is just as dark, and both are epistolary. The first is the diary entries of Olamina, and in Talents, her daughter writes her own entries while piecing together her mother, father, and uncle’s writings into the narrative. They’re heartbreaking books, but so good.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

The story is set in San Francisco but the film Bladerunner is set in Los Angeles. I haven’t read this in years and I’m due a re-read, but it’s an enduring story about what it means to be human. In the story, the world is suffering from the aftereffects of a nuclear war. With the US dropping white phosphorous bombs and the UK debating Trident, this is sounding rather familiar as well. Like Butler, Dick also incorporates drugs, this time with “mood organs.” Deckard is told that the androids don’t experience empathy like humans, further othering them. I now want to re-watch the film for the millionth time.

Virtual Light by William Gibson

This is my favourite Gibson. The Bay Bridge is where lots of people live in this cyberpunk future, and I crossed that bridge every time I went into the city (unless I took BART). I also love how it’s hinged on a fairly basic plot: everyone wants those cool futuristic sunglasses that could rebuild ruined San Francisco. Chevette is allergic to brands and labels and rips them off her clothes. It’s set in 2006, or the year I graduated high school, so 11 years on, it’s an interesting alternate history of a futuristic world. The middle class is gone and corporations are running amok, as they tend to do in cyberpunk.

Three Californias trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson

I haven’t read these yet books yet, but The Wild Shore, The Gold Coast, and Pacific Edge all look fascinating. The Wild Shore looks at nuclear war shaping California’s future. In many ways, California has become rural, and there are interwoven tensions between the USSR and Japan. The Gold Coast looks at our obsession with car culture. It’s highly developed, like the sprawl of Los Angeles but everywhere. Designer drugs crop up here, too, and evidently there’s also anti-weapons terrorism and casual sex. Sounds fun. Pacific Edge postulates an ecotopia. Can we go fully green? If the world is this ecotopia, does that mean it’s a utopia as well? This is the one I’m more interested to read of the three.

All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders

Another one I really need to read. Have nothing but excellent things and I really enjoyed Charlie’s articles on io9. This is an interesting blend of sci fi and fantasy set in San Francisco, where Charlie lives. It’s magic versus technology. It’s two friends who go on wildly different paths. They’re both living in an unstable world where magic and science clash, much like the two main characters. It looks like a brilliant blend of genres and I swear I’ll get to it soon.

Bonus: United States of Japan by Peter Tieryas, the upcoming anthology Strange California, edited by Jaym Gates, and Zero Sum Game by SL Huang.

Does anyone else have any others to recommend?

Laura Lam was raised near San Francisco, California, by two former Haight-Ashbury hippies. Both of them encouraged her to finger-paint to her heart’s desire, colour outside the lines, and consider the library a second home. This led to an overabundance of daydreams. She relocated to Scotland to be with her husband, whom she met on the internet when he insulted her taste in books. She is the author of gaslight fantasy and near-future thrillers. Her latest novel, Shattered Minds, is available now from Pan Macmillan in the UK, and will be available in the US from Tor Books on June 20th.

Imagine, for a moment, that night after night you are doomed to trace a long spiraling staircase deep within the earth. Once at its base, your travels are still not done: you must walk though glittering “woods”—not living trees, but creations of bright gems and metals—and sail across an underground lake, where, on the other side, you must dance and dance and dance, until near dawn, when you can finally return to your own bedchamber and collapse next to your sisters, your shoes in tatters. Fortunately, you are a princess, with seemingly no responsibilities, who can sleep until noon if not later, and equally fortunately you have the money to buy new shoes every day—and cobblers apparently eager to make them. Still, this never varies, night after night.

Would you try to fight this enchantment, or casually arrange for the deaths of the princes who came to save you?

In the version collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in their 1812 Household Tales, the princesses choose the second.

“The Twelve Dancing Princesses” begins with a mystery: how, exactly, are twelve princesses managing to dance through twelve pairs of shoes each and every night, given that they are all locked into a single bedchamber by the king himself every night? Also a mystery: why the king started locking them into this chamber to begin with, and why all twelve of these presumably wealthy princesses are all sharing the same room instead of, say, at least three separate rooms. Or four. Everyone who has had to share a room with a sibling can immediately sympathize with this problem.

Both the story and the king are only interested in the first mystery, however—presumably because, even after saving at least some money by shoving the twelve princesses into one room, the footwear bills are starting to add up. Incidentally, as far as I can tell, no one ever raises questions about just how well made these shoes were to begin with, though I have to assume that after a few months of this, someone in the royal household decided to just buy cheaper shoes to begin with. No reason to spend a lot of money on shoes that are going to be ruined anyway. At least they don’t seem to be made of fragile glass, to confuse my fairy tales for a moment.

Anyway. The king decides to promise a princess and the kingdom to anyone who can figure out what, exactly, is happening to the princesses. If these hopefuls can’t find the truth within three nights, however, they will be beheaded. The usual sort of random princes on the loose try their luck, fall asleep, and are beheaded—without mercy, the story adds, somewhat unnecessarily.

Incredibly enough, these ongoing executions of presumably foreign princes don’t seem to bother any of the foreign kingdoms. Possibly a few kings felt this was a convenient way of getting rid of some extra heirs or troublesome princes, though the story never mentions this. Instead, it introduces a badly wounded soldier, who apparently has not been able to find another job, and is now desperate enough to start joking about maybe taking up the king’s challenge. A helpful old woman warns him not to drink the wine served by the princesses and gives him a cloak of invisibility. Off he heads to the castle, where the oldest princess takes one look at him and decides to drug him—the same way she’s drugged each and every other man who has attempted to discover the truth.

And let me just say: you go, girl. Ok, sure, by drugging these guys you are kinda condemning them to execution, which basically means being an accessory to murder, instead of—I dunno—telling your father to invest money in better shoes or something, or, better yet, explain the whole “Look, we weren’t exactly excited about getting locked up, so we found a way to get to an enchanted kingdom and dance all night, and can I just add, before you get too upset, that we did happen to find some princes down there so we’ve saved you a lot of time and aggravation on the husband-hunting front? You’re welcome.” On the other hand, by drugging these guys, you’re choosing enchantment over the mundane, not to mention seizing what control you can in a life where, despite your royal birth, you are locked into a room every night. If I can’t exactly applaud having young men killed off just so you can dance—well. I can at least applaud your effort to take at least some control over your lives.

Though that said, as we soon learn, all of the princesses have drunk the wine and eaten the food of an enchanted realm, so it’s possible that they are all acting under an enchantment, and I’m giving them way too much credit here for thinking they have any control or choice at all. In which case, well, princesses, yay on the finding a way to escape your locked room, minus several points for getting yourselves trapped along the way, not to mention various princes killed.

Anyway, the soldier, having tricked the princesses into believing he’s drunk the drugged wine, follows them down a long flight of stairs to their enchanted underground realm. Somewhat surprisingly, he decides to wait two more nights before telling the king the truth—possibly to give the princesses two more nights in that underground realm, possibly to give himself two more nights in that underground realm. And then, ending not just enchantment, but any hint of romance, he announces that since he’s not getting any younger, he’ll marry the eldest princess.

As an older child continually irritated by all of the nice things that happened in fairy tales to youngest children, and never the oldest ones, though, I must say that I greatly appreciated this touch.

As always, I am left with many questions: What happened to the poor cobblers who were making the shoes after this? Were they able to make up for their lost revenue, or was at least one princess kind enough to continue her daily shoe purchases? Even under an enchantment, how, exactly, can the oldest princess mistake a broken twig for a gunshot? Did any of the relatives of the executed princes seek revenge for their murders? And perhaps most importantly: how well is this marriage going to go, given that the eldest princess was more than willing to let this soldier die as long as that meant she could continue to dance in shadowed realms every night?

Altogether, the story is another startling find in Household Tales, which for the most part focused on stories that the Grimms believed reflected the solid German values of hard work, sobriety, modesty and honesty. Admittedly, dancing every night is hard work, and the princesses should be commended for keeping the local cobblers in business, the story does note that not drinking drugged wine greatly increases your chances of discovering an enchanted underworld realm and not getting executed, and the soldier is certainly modest enough—at no point does he claim or even try to claim that he can find out what’s happening to the princesses, and he’s also modest enough to realize that the king is not going to take his word for it, and will demand proof. But still, nothing in this story exactly stands out as an example of the virtues of hard work, sobriety, modesty and honesty.

The motif of the poor yet honest soldier, however, does appear frequently in the Grimms’ tales, at least a part as a reflection of the Napoleonic wars that had ravaged the region just before the brothers began collecting their tales and preparing them for publication. It’s also just one of many fairy tales, both in and outside of the Grimm collections, that contains an almost offhand mention of the death of several princes. A number of princes died trying to reach Sleeping Beauty’s palace, for instance, or while climbing a glass mountain. The only difference: here, the princes are fully aware that if they fail, they will die, and they are given a three day deadline.

The motif of an underground realm filled with trees formed from silver and gold and flowers made of gems is a little less usual in Household Tales, but the idea itself is at least as old as the epic of Gilgamesh, and quite probably older. Exactly where it came from is unclear, but I like to think that it arose from the shadows of caves, and burials, and what we know about gems, silver and gold: for the most part, after all, they come from the ground, and why not from living trees growing diamonds and sapphires, laced with vines of jade? (If this idea made you jump, I must once again repeat: Fairy tales are rarely safe reading for geologists.)

But what makes this tale stand out in Household Tales is its near defiant refusal to provide the princesses with either a happy ending or death, the more usual ending for morally questionable characters in those tales. This is in part created by the story itself: enchanted or not, the princesses have actively conspired to lead various princes and other men to their deaths—to say nothing of completely failing to alert anyone that hey, there’s several enchanted princes dancing under the ground, maybe we should let someone know about this. This makes them less sympathetic—or at least, a touch less innocent—characters than the girls and princesses of other Grimm tales, abandoned or forced to flee their homes through no fault of their own. And thus, arguably, less worthy of the happy ending granted to those heroines.

Not that death feels like quite the right ending either. Because, after all, the entire point of the story is to rescue them (and their shoes) from an underground realm—the sort of realm usually associated with the afterlife, or death.

It may be a bit much to say that the princesses of this particular tale are visiting the lands of the dead each night, however strong that mythic association might be. Rather, they seem to be visiting some in between spot—the very lands of Faerie, caught between the living and the dead—a place also hinted at in very ancient myths, the insubstantial land between life and death. But a place not exactly free from death, either: it is a place, after all, where nothing grows, and nothing changes, until the wounded soldier enters the realm. Sending these princesses to their deaths, then, means sending them back to the very enchantment that kept them dancing—hardly a punishment, let alone a satisfying ending. Allowing them to escape offered the hope, however faint, that yes, death could be escaped as well.

Whether it was the idea of so many destroyed shoes, or the hint that death could, indeed, be escaped, the story seems to have been relatively popular. The Grimms recorded several variations on the story in Germany alone, along with variants on the “how to trick a princess into thinking I’ve chugged down the drugs when I actually didn’t” which does seem to have some practical applications. Some of the tales had three princesses, others twelve; one version has only one princess dancing through twelve pairs of shoes each night. Another version tells of a princess who meets eleven other princesses in her underground dances—a somewhat more realistic variation on the idea of twelve still unmarried princesses all still living at home. In just one contemporary counter example, the very large family of George III—15 children in all—only included six princesses, one already married by the time the first edition of Household Tales reached print. Other real life royal families were considerably smaller, so it is hardly surprising to find versions that reflect that reality.

At least one French writer, Charles Deulin, was both charmed and troubled enough by the Grimms’ retelling to write his own version, published in his short story collection Contes du Roi Cambinus (Tales of King Cambinus) in 1874. Deulin’s tale kept the twelve dancing princesses and the eldest princess as their leader, willing to imprison or kill others as necessary in order to keep travelling to the underworld, but changed the soldier into a more magical figure, Michael the Star Gazer, and added a touch of love between Michael and the youngest princess, an element that allowed the enchantment to be broken not through the truth, but through love. This more unambiguously happy ending was presumably why Andrew Lang chose this version, instead of the one collected by the Grimms, for his 1890 The Red Fairy Book.

But for all of its magic and emphasis on love, this version also contains a surprising amount of snobbery: Michael, an orphaned cow-boy, decides to go after a princess because the maidens in his village are sunburned and have big red hands, which, thanks, Michael. After that, it’s not entirely surprising that the tale also includes a few offhand mentions of black servant boys, trapped in the underground castle, presumably killed when the castle crumbled to the earth once the enchantment had broken. I say “presumably killed” since although Deulin and Lang are careful to confirm that all of the princes and princesses made it out safely, neither mention the servant boys.

Perhaps that, or the length, or the snobbery was why, for once, the version published by Lang did not become the most popular English version of the tale. In this case, it was the version told by the Grimms, which did not promise a happily ever after for the soldier and the woman willing to accede to his death, that ended with the underworld princes remaining under an enchantment, but did offer some hope—however faint—that maybe, with a little magic, death could be escaped.

Mari Ness lives in central Florida.

Silver bullets. Wolfsbane. We’ve seen them in just about every werewolf story out there, but in Stephen Graham Jones’s Mongrels, it turns out those tried and true methods of killing are the least of a werewolf’s worries. In this novel, a family of werewolves living on the fringes of society carves out a place for themselves in a world where gruesome death is a constant threat. It’s not the pitchforks and torches of incensed mobs that they have to watch out for—well, sometimes it is, but mostly their survival hinges upon seemingly trivial matters, like avoiding junk food and road rage, and knowing what not to wear.

This entire novel is charming beyond belief, but it’s the several-page stretch where our young narrator imparts upon us the four biggest threats to a werewolf’s existence that made me an instant believer. Both ingenious and crisp, these evocative details drew me deeper into this suddenly all-too-plausible story, locking me there with words sharper than lycanthrope teeth.

Spandex

The scenario:

Where pants will tear away, split out over the thigh and calf, burst at the waist no matter how double-riveted they are, your fancy panty hose, your stretch pants, they wolf out with you. I’d imagine you look kind of stupid, with your legs all sheer and shiny, but anybody who laughs, you just rip their throat out, feast on their heart. Problem solved.

At least until morning, when you shift back.

Just like that tick that impacted itself into Grandpa’s skin, a pair of panty hose, they’ll retract with your legs. Except, instead of one tick embedding itself in your skin, flaring into some infection, this time every hair is pulling something back with it.

What happens is your skin, your human skin, it’s part pantyhose now.

How it kills: Slowly. Painfully. Maybe you can pick some of it out of your flesh, but you’ll never get it all. You’ll spend your last breaths cursing that LuLaRoe leggings catalogue that had the misfortune of finding its way into your mailbox. If you’re lucky, though, your werewolf family will put you out of your misery.

Kitchen Trash

The scenario:

Each night at dusk one of us leans out the door to burn the trash, just because we all know what can happen if that trash is left in the kitchen: Somebody’ll go wolf in the night, and because shifting burns up every last bit of fat reserves you have and even leaves you with a hole for more, the first thing you think once you’re wolf—the only thing you can think, if you’re just starting out—is food…

When we first open our eyes as werewolves, the trash is so fragrant, so perfect, so right there.

Except.

There’s things in there you can’t digest, I don’t care how bad you are.

Ever wake up with the ragged lid of a tin can in your gut? Darren says it’s like a circle-saw blade in first gear. But it’s only because you’re so delicate in the morning, so human.

How it kills: Bleach bottles, twist ties, broken chicken bones, they can all do a number on your intestines. So you empty the kitchen trash every night, without exception. Only this carries a risk of its own, since these odd trash habits make werewolves easy for neighbors to spot.

French Fries

The scenario:

But calories aren’t the dangerous part of the french fry. The dangerous part of the french fry is that once you have a taste for them, then, running around in a pasture one night, chasing wild boar or digging up rabbits or whatever—all honest work—you’ll catch that salty scent on the air. If you still had your human mind, you’d know not to chase that scent down. You’d know better.

You’re not thinking like that, though.

How they kill: So you track down the smell. Gobble up the fries, bag and all. Maybe nibble off a few salty fingers that the fries had previously been attached to. You know, “have it your way.” Soon, word around town spreads that werewolves are busting up family picnics, and that’s when the pitchforks and torches come after you. And let’s be honest–how fast are you going to be with a bunch of greasy junk food sitting in your gut?

Plus, fries require ketchup, and if you run out, it might lead to the number one killer of werewolves…

Driving While Wolf

The scenario:

Usually it’s just making a run to the gas station for ketchup packets. Somebody cuts you off and you wrap your fingers extra tight around the steering wheel, until the tendons in the backs of your fingers start popping into their canine shape. At which point you reach up to the rearview to check yourself, to see if this is really and truly happening. Only, the rearview, it comes off in what’s now your long-fingered paw…

Give it a mile, you tell yourself. Just another mile to reel things back in. No, there’s no way to unsplit your favorite shirt, to save the tatters your pants already are. But you’re not going to wreck another motherf-

But you are, you just did. Scraping the passenger side along a guardrail, for the simple reason that steering wheels aren’t designed for monsters that aren’t supposed to exist.

How it kills: You know how your dog likes to hang its head out the window? Werewolves like that, too. Your former feet are heavy on the accelerator. Maybe your fur’s gotten tangled up in it. Either way, you’re doing 100mph now, having the time of your life…right until that oncoming semi-truck rises over the top of that hill, or the cop hiding behind that billboard catches you on their radar.

These things never end well for werewolves.

Many authors aim to get their readers to suspend their disbelief, but that’s just a game, an inside joke written upon a page. Werewolves are real, nudge-nudge, wink-wink. Stephen Graham Jones has moved beyond that. All throughout this book, the descriptions are so vivid, so specific, and so convincing that I believed, and you’d still be hard-pressed to convince me that this is merely a work of fiction. From now on, I’ll be leery of neighbors who have odd trash habits, of coworkers who order their burgers rare and never with fries, of friends who adamantly refuse to try on those stretchy pants even though they’ve got legs that would absolutely kill in them…

I see you. I’m watching.

Nicky Drayden is a Systems Analyst who dabbles in prose when she’s not buried in code. She resides in Austin, Texas where being weird is highly encouraged, if not required. Her debut novel The Prey of Gods, now available from Harper Voyager, is set in a futuristic South Africa brimming with demigods, robots, and hallucinogenic hijinks. Catch her on twitter @nickydrayden.

We’re excited to share the cover for Bearly a Lady, a smart and funny urban fantasy from Cassandra Khaw about navigating adult relationships as a werebear…

Learn more about the novella and check out the full cover by artist Muna Abdirahman below!

Author Cassandra Khaw had this to say about the cover:

I screamed when I saw the cover.  I’m not ashamed to say this. The tiniest shriek ever. I hadn’t quite figured out what Zelda looked like in my head. But when my editors pinged over the illustration, everything came together. This was her. This was Zelda. In the flesh. Except possibly better than anything I could possibly imagine. (Sidenote: I’m in love with how menacing her bear-form looks.)

Bearly a Lady is like nothing I’ve written before. It is fluffy, funny, focused on relationships, and entirely without a body count. No one dies in this book. Not on camera, at least. But it is a book about a woman trying to figure out societal expectations and all that entails, the toxicity of certain relationships, and how some people lack an understanding of boundaries.

It’s also about werebears nibbling on muffins.

I hope you love it as much as I do.

Cover art by Muna Abdirahman; design by Kenda Montgomery

Bearly a Lady is available July 18th from Book Smugglers Publishing. From the catalog copy:

Zelda McCartney (almost) has it all: a badass superhero name, an awesome vampire roommate, and her dream job at a glossy fashion magazine (plus the clothes to prove it).

The only issue in Zelda’s almost-perfect life? The uncontrollable need to transform into a werebear once a month.

Just when Zelda thinks things are finally turning around and she lands a hot date with Jake, her high school crush and alpha werewolf of Kensington, life gets complicated. Zelda receives an unusual work assignment from her fashionable boss: play bodyguard for devilishly charming fae nobleman Benedict (incidentally, her boss’s nephew) for two weeks. Will Zelda be able to resist his charms long enough to get together with Jake? And will she want to?

Because true love might have been waiting around the corner the whole time in the form of Janine, Zelda’s long-time crush and colleague.

What’s a werebear to do?

Pre-order the novella now at the links below, or from your favorite retailer:

Amazon US | Amazon UK

We are all for bringing reading material on the morning and evening commute, but if you happen to forget a book, Subway Library has you covered. The six-week program from the New York City MTA and New York Public Library, celebrating the new wifi in underground subway stations, is offering hundreds of ebook excerpts and short stories timed to half-hour, hourlong, and two-hour-plus commutes (which might come in handy if your train runs into some unforeseen delays).

“The New York Public Library’s mission is to make information and knowledge accessible to all, and this exciting partnership with the MTA is certainly right on track,” said NYPL president Tony Marx. “By making thousands of free stories easily available to subway straphangers, we are encouraging reading, learning, and curiosity.”

Subway Library’s offerings are separated into nine different categories, with plenty of genre titles in each. New York Stories features excerpts from Daniel José Older’s Half-Resurrection Blues and Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, as well as “The Tallest Doll in New York City,” Maria Dahvana Headley’s Tor.com Original love story about Big Apple skyscrapers. Head on over to New & Noteworthy and you can start M.R. Carey’s The Boy on the Bridge. Selected Shorts let you read Cory Doctorow’s “I, Robot” and begin Ken Liu’s collection The Paper Menagerie. Or go for the Classics with The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes or The War of the Worlds.

And if you’re riding the E or F trains, you might find yourself on the very-Instagrammable Library Car (above), outfitted to look like the Rose Main Reading Room at the 42nd Street branch of the NYPL.

“It used to be that you were ‘unplugged’ on the subway, and even though you’re connecting to the wireless now, you’ll still have the sense of being unplugged when reading books,” said Lynn Lobash, manager of reader services for the NYPL. “It’s a lot different than the frantic sense of checking your email or being on Twitter.”

But it’s only for six weeks, so hop aboard while you still can!

There are days—horrible, dark days—when I end up doing more algebra than writing. You remember those word problems from high school?

If Valyn is flying west on a Kettral, covering 300 miles a day, and Ran il Tornja is riding north-east on horseback, covering 100 miles a day, and Gwenna is running due south, covering 50 miles a day, will they all actually meet where they need to meet at the end of the damn book, or will you need to rewrite the whole ass end of the thing? You idiot.

And that’s actually a pretty easy one. When you start thinking about the nuances of travel, there are all sorts of variables: terrain, vegetation, injury, oceanic currents, weather, war, laziness, bowel movements, wrong turns… It’s not unusual for me to have twelve tabs open on Google, all researching some aspect of travel. How fast is a trireme? A quinquireme? What about in a crosswind? How much do those Mongolian steppe horses eat, anyway? How long did it take to navigate the length of the Erie Canal?

At a certain point, you can forgive Robert Jordan for deciding that every major character in the Wheel of Time could just cut a hole in the air and step directly into whatever place they wanted to go. In spite of all the odious algebra, however, there are narrative and dramatic opportunities inherent in the necessity of all that travel.

Most obviously, travel is fun. We like to go new places in our own lives, and we like to follow characters as they do the same thing. Imagine the loss if, in The Lord of the Rings, Frodo et. al. stepped directly through a portal into Mordor. No Bombadil or Rivendell, no Mines of Moria or Lothlorien. For a certain type of story, the voyage is the adventure.

More than that, travel gives the characters some down time. Compared with sword fights and orc-icide, down time might sound somewhat… less than enthralling, something to skip over, even. I think such skipping would be a mistake. For every ten minutes of regicidal bloodbath, the characters need hours or days to actually absorb what has happened, both what they’ve done and what’s been done to them. Stories that leap from climax to climax miss, at least to my mind, some of the most valuable opportunities, those quiet moments in which characters grapple with what they’re about to do, or with what they’ve just done. There are other places to find this time, of course, but travel offers the perfect opportunity, removing the characters as it does from a set scene for a set period of time.

On a more global level, the brute necessity of travel will affect almost all aspects of world-building. It’s not for nothing that the Romans built roads all over Europe: the speed with which armies could reach different borders informed the size of those armies, and, of course, the tax base necessary to support them. The politics and trade of a fantasy kingdom with easy access to shipping lanes will look radically different from those of one without.

Of course, when we come to war, this plays out dramatically. Authors who focus on the battles while neglecting the necessary build-up—build-up that involves the travel of troops and transport of material—sacrifice golden dramatic possibilities. In General Barrow’s famous words, “Amateurs talk tactics. Professionals study logistics.” The best part of the story might not be the battle itself, but the struggle to get the cannons to the battle on time.

Finally, authors of pre-technological fantasy can—in fact, they almost must—exploit for dramatic effect the informational asymmetry resulting from the difficulty of travel. Even in our modern world of Twitter and Instagram, not everyone has access to the same information at the same time. The problem is compounded many times over in a world that requires a woman to sit her ass in a saddle for a month in order to get a message from one place to another. A war could begin and end on a distant border before the capitals involved have any knowledge of the violence. The misunderstanding, terror, and acrimony that result from such knowledge asymmetry and uncertainty make ripe territory for exploration, not to mention dramatic irony. The brute facts of travel can become, in the right hands, the ingredients of human failure, triumph, or betrayal.

Of course, to do that requires a lot of math, so I’ll leave the next generation of aspiring fantasy writers with this bit of advice: write all you can, but don’t give up on the algebra.

This article was originally published in March 2016.

BRIAN STAVELEY has taught literature, religion, history, and philosophy, all subjects that influence his writing, and holds an MA in Creative Writing from Boston University. He works as an editor for Antilever Press, and has published poetry and essays, both in print and on-line. He is the author of the Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne—The Emperor’s Blades, Providence of Fire, The Last Mortal Bond—and his latest novel, Skullsworn, is set in the same universe. He lives in Vermont with his wife and young son, and divides his time between running trails, splitting wood, writing, and baby-wrangling.

Anglet Sutonga’s work as a steeplejack atop the towering roofs of Bar-Selehm may have primed her resume for her new job as a spy, but it certainly didn’t prepare her for it. Last year’s South African-inspired Steeplejack saw Ang flying from rooftops with enough poise and grace that she could (and did) keep a baby strapped to her back all the while. This summer, A.J. Hartley has released a sequel that pushes Ang far from her comfort zone of smoking precipices and constant danger. In Firebrand, our protagonist enters the world of the political elite—a world that is wealthier and more perilous than she could have imagined.

Bar-Selehm’s political turmoil isn’t new. Colonized by the white Feldish, its native Mahweni population is forced into constant poverty and displacement. Ang’s own people, the Lani—brought from afar to work and mine the land—don’t fair much better. Add to this the threat of the outside Grappoli army, and it is unsurprising (and dreadfully familiar) that Bar-Selehm’s powerful can’t agree on how best to protect its people—or even exactly who its people are. When designs for a terrifying new weapon are stolen by an unknown force, Ang’s employer, Josiah Willinghouse, sees an opportunity to topple his racist, warmongering parliamentary opponents. All Ang can see, as she confronts harrowing fights and drawing room gossip, are the faces of the people she’s trying to save.

Mahweni refugees pour into Bar-Selehm daily, uprooted from their homes by Grappoli attacks. Ang is distressed when she witnesses these displaced families, and not just because she can relate to their placelessness and oppression. She has also been to parliament and heard first-hand the new Heritage party’s plans to segregate and crack down on the city’s black and brown populations. And so she’ll do anything to untangle the messy threads of allyship, petty grievance, and extramarital affairs. If the stakes in Steeplejack were personal, the ones in Firebrand are political—which is to say, also personal.

Firebrand follows Ang as she attempts to connect the dots between three political parties, a foreign army, a dead thief, and a live one. A familiar cast of characters joins her in this puzzle, (including my two favorites from the previous novel: the genius reporter Sureyna, and the catty and longsuffering Dahria Willinghouse). New to Ang’s mismatched group of friends, however, is Madame Nahreem, the Willinghouses’ grandmother. Madame Nahreem is in many respects the heart of the novel, both in terms of character development and in pinpointing the intricacies of race and identity that form Firebrand’s theme. When Ang is tasked with masquerading as a foreign princess to infiltrate the exclusive Elitius Club, it is Madame Nahreem that trains her. “To be a lady,” she tells Ang, “you must unlearn seventeen years of thinking yourself an underling.” She, after all, was a Lani woman from the slums, just like Ang, until she married into a prestigious white family—if anyone knows how to erase and create a new identity, it’s her. The relationship she forms with Ang as a result of this mutual identity mapping is a fascinating one, not quite maternal, but not merely one of mentor and student, either. They are alike in values and social injustice, and Firebrand states quite clearly that these run far thicker than blood or water.

Despite loving the diversity and themes of Firebrand, it did feel very much like the second in a series to me. A great deal happened, but the pacing was stilted; at times, it felt as if Ang were collecting relevant plot points rather than experiencing life (a result, perhaps, of a plot too finely-stitched). The final stretch of the book, especially, introduced a number of new plot points and characters that will obviously be vital to future novels, but which were awkward and forced in the context of Firebrand itself. I am, that said, not dissuaded from reading those sequels. If Firebrand was disappointingly expository, I have faith that said exposition will crescendo in its successors, which are bound to be filled to the brim with bigger action and bigger ideas.

Books like those in Hartley’s Steeplejack series would be important at any time in history, but particularly at this juncture. Politically savvy and emotionally potent, they are still fun enough to trick their readers into thinking otherwise.

Firebrand is available now from Tor Teen.
Read an excerpt from the novel here on Tor.com

Emily Nordling is a library assistant and perpetual student in Chicago, IL.