Welcome to Freaky Fridays, where out-of-print paperback horror from the Seventies and Eighties straps on its M-16, scrawls “Born to Kill” on its helmet, and slogs out into the jungles of ‘Nam to get possessed by demons from hell before coming back home and stirring up trouble in Cleveland.

Every single horror paperback of the Seventies and Eighties is a special snowflake, each one a unique arrangement of Nazi leprechauns, arm-eating whales, jogging cults, and extraterrestrial orgasms. But one thing many of them have in common is their hero: the Vietnam vet. Tim O’Brien’s moving and accomplished memoir about his tour of duty in ‘Nam, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home, came out in 1973 the same year the US was withdrawing from Saigon. But horror had been there first. Bob Clark’s Deathdream, about a young soldier coming home from Vietnam to reunite with his family who do their best to overlook the fact that he’s now a flesh-eating zombie, came out the year before in 1972, as did Stanley about a Vietnam Vet killing people with snakes, and Targets had a deranged Vet turned drive-in sniper all the way back in 1968. Since then, Vietnam vets have become motion picture shorthand for damaged goods. Whether it’s Invasion of the Flesh Hunters (1980), Don’t Answer the Phone! (1980), Fleshburn (1984), House (1986), Combat Shock (1986), Fear (1988), or Jacob’s Ladder (1990) the traumatized and often violent or deranged Vietnam Vet has become an eye-rolling cliche.

Horror fiction, on the other hand, turned Vietnam vets into heroes.

In fiction, returned Vietnam vets were occasionally traumatized figures (Maynard’s House, 1980) but more often than not they were badasses. Whether they’re teaming up with Korean War vets to machine gun a rampaging army of homicidal children dressed in Halloween costumes (Piper, 1987), using astral projection to rescue their kids from a cult (Keeper of the Children, 1978), fighting deadly dolls (Toy Cemetery, 1987), or murdering members of a heavy metal band they hold responsible for their daughter’s death (Kill Riff, 1988), Vietnam vets weren’t fragile bundles of neuroses that were liable to explode into violence because of what they saw in the war, but bundles of awesome skills who were liable to explode into violence because someone threatened their family and totally deserved to have a Claymore planted in their guitar amp.

Occasionally they were both basket case and badass, most notably in Peter Straub’s gorgeous Koko (1988), and Alex Kane’s The Shinglo (1989). A more downmarket, pulp fiction version of Straub’s high-minded Vietnam novel, Shinglo is not to be dismissed. As the book’s central vet shouts at one point, “I tear things apart… bit by bit I’m going to tear this whole fucking country right down to the ground.” Not to put too fine a point on it, but Oliver Stone won an Oscar for directing a movie with pretty much that exact same premise.

Scott Pillar’s wife has walked out on him, taking their two kids because she’s sick and tired of her husband blaming everything on Vietnam, from his lack of a job to his night sweats and anger. She’s gone to Kentucky with the kids, leaving him in grimy, roach-infested Cleveland. Scott’s Vietnam mostly consisted of him getting drunk and shooting his rifle in the air during combat because he didn’t want to kill anyone, but he had one horrifying encounter in a spooky cave that left him with a hole in his memory. He and his buddy, Jimmy Benedict, may or may not have murdered some civilians in that cave, but after wandering for a week in the jungle they mostly blocked it out. The only survivor is a spectral yellow dog from the cave that follows Scott around to this day.

Scott’s ‘Nam nightmares are getting worse thanks to news of a booby trap death at a building site downtown where demolitions guys are tearing down the Barlow, an abandoned hotel. A grenade on a tripwire takes out a few workers, and then the site foreman goes to turn on the light in his garage and is bitten by a five-foot long black mamba nailed to the wall by its tail. Things get worse for Scott when the alleged killer starts leaving long rambling messages for the cops about his buddy Scott, which causes them to grab the twitchy vet and his wife and kids and stick them in protective custody out in the middle of nowhere. Because Scott claims to hear poetry on the recordings sent by the killer that no one else can hear, they send Dr. Felix Kleeze, a psychiatrist, along with them, just to be safe.

Out in the woods, Scott’s son starts seeing the ghost dog, too, and when the cop guarding them gets garotted, Scott, his family, and Kleeze go on the run. Jimmy Benedict may still be alive, and he may be possessed by an evil demon let loose in Vietnam, and since he’s been living in the Barlow Hotel, working on a magic ritual that will cause a “Blood Sea” to drown the world, he takes exception to attempts to tear it down. Exceptions that involve blood magic, punji sticks, and urban warfare.

The metaphor of the Vietnam vet bringing something back from the war that puts his wife, kids, and community in danger is pretty obvious, and being a mass market paperback original, there’s plenty of obvious to go around. There’s even a pesky “lady reporter” who keeps misunderstanding Vietnam vets. But there are also a lot of nice touches that elevates Shinglo above mere paperback fare. Kleeze is one of the few psychiatrists in horror fiction who are actually sympathetic, and the book’s cops are as likely to quibble over who gets to use the awesome nightvision scope as they are to solve crimes. Pillar may be a standard issues traumatized vet, but he has more depth to him than that, as in the moment when he tells his wife he was repulsed that she named their newborn son after him while he was fighting in ‘Nam because it felt like he was being replaced and would now never be “allowed” to return home.

It’s in the book’s middle that things take a huge turn. Acting more like a mad scientist than a caring psychiatrist, Kleeze gets Scott to agree to hypnosis while hooked up to a lie detector and injected with sodium pentothal. Maybe now he will finally remember what happened in that cave, and any clues he dredges up from his subconscious might help them defeat the drippy, oily, demonic octopus that’s riding Jimmy Benedict like an pony. But the primal trauma they unearth turns the book into an Eighties action movie, much to its benefit. The “truth serum” lowers Scott’s guard and the Shinglo almost gets its slimy black tentacles on his mind, leading to a lecture on the how a lack of self-discipline can be dangerous and therapy can often lead to this loss of self-control, letting in bad spirits and evil thoughts. Sometimes denial and drinking until you pass out is better.

But the near-possession lights a fire in Scott’s belly and he decides to stop running away and instead stands up and fights. On the one hand, it’s a bummer that a book this sympathetic to veterans equates PTSD with “running away”, on the other hand, now things kick into high gear as Scott takes charge and sends his family shopping for the Coke bottles and pillow cases he’ll transform into the deadly, makeshift weapons he needs to destroy Jimmy Benedict. Ending with a firefight in the old abandoned Barlow, Benedict and Scott taking each other on with bandanas tied around their heads while “Eye of the Tiger” plays inside the reader’s head, The Shinglo gives its third act action movie emotional heft because Scott wants to stop Benedict without killing him. He says it’s because killing him will make the Shinglo even more dangerous, but we all know it’s because the two vets understand each other. They both came home bearing demons, one literal, one metaphorical. Neither of them deserves to die for that.

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

Beehive Books has a funded Kickstarter (that’s ending today!) for three gorgeous editions of classics that you don’t often see; The Willows, The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde, and The Island of Doctor Moreau. We are very sad that these will not be appearing in bookstores everywhere, but we figured you might like to stare at them with us!

Feast your eyes:

There is more art and information on the Kickstarter website, but just knowing that these edition will exist out there in the world is enough to keep us smiling through the weekend.

How could we not have seen it before? It was right in front of us, through two deceptively simple words: “Yub nub.”

Comic book writer John Barber (Doctor Strange, Ultimate Spider-Man) has blown the lid off one of the biggest mysteries of the new Star Wars trilogy: Who is Supreme Leader Snoke?

Barber lays out his argument based on what we know so far:

• Snoke possesses a scar from a mysterious head wound.
• He projects himself as a gigantic hologram, which could mean he’s the size of an average human… or even smaller.
• Kylo Ren—and by that we mean Ben Solo—is Snoke’s pawn.

Is the truth starting to form in your minds? Do you realize who has been leading the First Order from the shadows?

Wicket W. Warrick, that’s who.

Let’s examine the evidence:

• Wicket got whacked in the head in Return of the Jedi.
• A three-foot-tall being could decide that projecting himself to the size of a temple is an effective way to rule over his pawns.
• Here’s the part that Barber’s argument hinges on: The real love triangle of Jedi was Han/Leia/Wicket. When the princess chose the smuggler, the Ewok vowed revenge, even if it took generations.

Barber tweeted this chilling screenshot with the caption Look at this: this is an Ewok thinking “I am going to use your children to destroy you.”

LOOK UPON THAT EVIL.

Now, Barber did misspell Snoke’s name, which may bring into question his true Star Wars expertise… unless it was a crafty ruse to mislead the Disney lawyers trolling Twitter for this exact kind of intel.

Barber is absolutely joking, but it’s funny just how much evidence you can stack up to paint Wicket as Snoke. Reddit has explored the same theory, with other supporting details: Snoke went after Han and Chewie first! Wicket recovered Darth Vader’s charred helmet and gave it to Kylo Ren!

Most interesting is that Warwick Davis, the actor who portrayed Wicket so long ago, has a part in Star Wars: The Last Jedi. He won’t say what, but we think we already know…

Monsters fascinate. There’s something in the shadows that you don’t understand, can’t quite make out the shape of—something that can eat you. Something that can steal your children, spoil your crops, or worst of all turn you into a monster yourself, so that you’ll no longer be welcome in the warm places where we tell stories about monsters.

That warm place started as a small campfire in the dark night, surrounded by very real predators. Beside that fire, you could lay down your spear and basket and feel almost safe for the night. We keep fearing monsters even as the shadows retreat and the campfires grow, even now when light pollution banishes them to the few remaining dark corners, where they must surely shiver and tell stories about our advance.

Mustn’t they?

It’s become increasingly obvious that humans are terrifying. Not only in the “we have met the enemy and he is us” sense, but in the sense that we can eat everything, steal offspring, spoil crops, and reshape the world into our image. I had this in mind as I wrote Winter Tide—the most sympathetic species can be terrifying if you catch their attention, and the people who terrify you may huddle around their own campfire.

Sometimes I want to hide in the shadows near that campfire, and listen to the stories.

Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley

Shelley’s masterpiece is as famous as a book can get, and as misunderstood as its non-titular main character. Thinkpieces invoke it as a warning against scientific hubris. In fact, it’s a fable about the importance of good parenting: Dr. Frankenstein brings his revenant into the world, and promptly abandons him in a fit of revulsion. That leaves the unnamed monster to wax philosophical, teach himself to read, and make tentative forays into joining human society. Unfortunately for him, humans tend to run screaming at the sight of sewn-together corpse quilts. Or sometimes they just attack. Eventually, he decides we’re not worth having around.

If at any point in the book, Dr. Frankenstein could have gotten his act together enough to love his kid, this would be one of those stories about an ugly duckling finding his place. Instead it’s a perfect tragedy about how monsters are born not out of the inherent hubris of their creation, but out of our own fears.

Tooth and Claw, by Jo Walton

Tooth and Claw is a Victorian novel of manners. It starts with a fight over inheritance, and concerns itself with forbidden romance and ambitious merchants and social welfare movements. Oh, yes, and all the characters are cannibalistic dragons. The inheritance fight is over who gets to eat which parts of the family’s deceased patriarch, thereby gaining the magical power and strength of his flesh. The social welfare movement may be radical, but would certainly never forbid the rich feeding their offspring a nutritious diet of “excess” poor children.

It’s a wicked and witty commentary on the ostensibly bloodless conflicts of Trollope and Austen. The monsters, even as they cheerfully consume their own kind, make for remarkably good company. I’d happily join them for afternoon tea—as long as I was very sure of the menu in advance.

The Final Reflection, by John M. Ford

Klingons have gotten pretty sympathetic in the past couple of decades. In the original series, though, they were the most two-dimensional of goateed villains. The Final Reflection was the first story to give them a rich and detailed culture, to give them nuance while still letting them be worthy antagonists to the Federation. Ford’s Klingons keep slaves, merge chess with the Hunger Games for their national sport, and see conquest as a moral imperative. (That which does not grow dies, after all.) They also love their kids, and draw real and deep philosophy from their games of klin zha kinta.

Reflection reveals the truth behind the mustache-twirling not only to 20^th and 21^st century readers, but to the 24^th century as well. In the framing story Kirk is alarmed to come back from leave and find his crew passing around surreptitious copies, swearing in klingonaase. Krenn’s story is banned by the Federation, of course. Letting people see the monster’s side of the story is dangerous.

Fledgling, by Octavia Butler

I’m a hard sell on vampires, and an almost impossible sell on amnesia stories. But I adore beyond words Butler’s final novel, the tale of a young woman who wakes up with no memory—and turns out not to be as young as she looks. Like most of Butler’s work, it dives deep into questions of power and consent. Shori has to drink blood to live, and can’t help forming an intimate and unequal bond with those she feeds from. In between trying to learn who stole her memory and why, she has to figure out how to have an ethical relationship with people inherently weaker than her—and whether it’s even possible.

There were supposed to be more of these, damn it.

The Golem and the Jinni, by Helene Wecker

Immigrants come to the US and try to fit in—learn the language, get a job, find friends. Wecker’s protagonists are no different, except that they happen to be a fire elemental locked in human form by unknown magic, and a golem whose master died shortly after awakening her in the middle of the Atlantic. Ahmad is arrogant and impetuous, a monster because of his confident lack of concern with others’ needs. Chava is made to put others’ needs first, but still a monster because—as everyone knows—all golems eventually run mad and use their inhuman strength to rend and kill until they’re stopped.

Together, they don’t fight crime (mostly), but they do help each other resolve the mysteries behind their respective creations. They compliment each others’ strengths and monstrous natures. Chava teaches Ahmad how to take care of people beyond himself, and Ahmad helps Chava learn to value herself. They give each other the thing Frankenstein’s monster never had, and together find a place in the world and a community where they can survive.

This article was originally published in March 2017.

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 available from Tor.com Publishing on April 4th. Ruthanna can frequently be found online on Twitter and her blog, and offline in a mysterious manor house with her large, chaotic household—mostly mammalian—outside Washington DC.

Some people don’t like karaoke. Some people even consider karaoke some kind of abomination, in which amateur singers inflict their dreadful tunesmithing on their fellow humans. I do not understand those people. To me, karaoke is a vital cultural tradition, that takes the best aspects of pop music and our pomo “remixing” and participatory culture and makes them even more amazing.

I have been a karaoke fiend for as long as I can remember, and I even once managed to be featured on Japanese television, doing a particularly energetic performance at a Tokyo karaoke bar. I used to be the designated karaoke-bar reviewer for a local San Francisco newspaper, and I adore any chance to bust out with a crazy over-the-top performance.

To me, karaoke is really about being as dramatic and silly as you can possibly be. I don’t entirely agree with the people who say that singing ability is irrelevant to do karaoke, but I do think that a willingness to be ridiculous in front of your friends (and possibly strangers) is essential. The best karaoke performances I’ve witnessed have been ones in which some kind of threshold of silliness was reached and surpassed, and the performer ended up doing something kind of memorably bonkers.

My favorite karaoke performers are theatrical, weird, possibly queer, and definitely subversive. I used to go to a karaoke bar on the edge of the Castro district in San Francisco (one of our main gay neighborhoods) every week, in part because of all of the wonderfully gender-warping and camptastic performances I saw there. Nowadays, my favorite karaoke night is at The Stud, a venerable gay bar where a drag nun named Sister Flora Goodthyme is the karaoke hostess on Thursday nights.

To me, karaoke is really at its absolute best when there’s a drag nun with a saucy pun name encouraging you to sing your heart out.

And yes, if you can’t sing at all, that just means more wild spoken-word stylings. Take a page from the master of songcraft, William Shatner, whose singing ability remains somewhat theoretical but who has recorded the definitive renditions of countless songs at this point.

The point is, karaoke is magic. It’s taking songs that we all know, and turning them into something ephemeral and wonderful and frequently a bit bizarre. Karaoke is a chance for everybody to expose his or her own inner avant-garde pop diva, and let the musical insanity burst out for everyone to see.

When I was teaching Clarion West back in 2014, I had some amazing times with my students, and I like to think we bonded a lot in general—but I really didn’t get to know them, and discover the full range of their personalities, until we went to this weird nautical-themed karaoke bar where half the decorations were mermaids and the other half were signs explaining that the bartender didn’t need to put up with your s—-t. Some of science fiction’s most promising new writers busted out with renditions of Lady Gaga, Madonna, and The Cars that stay with me to this day.

But my favorite karaoke memory might actually be the contest I helped judge at Convergence, a convention in Minneapolis—the winner was this incredible performer who did “Take On Me” by A-ha, and during the instrumental break, he actually “played” the keyboard solo with his feet, by dancing. It was the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen.

If your coworkers don’t want to go do karaoke with you, that means that they hate you and are secretly doing karaoke behind your back. Guaranteed.

Which brings me to the great karaoke controversy: do you sing in a bar or in a “karaoke box,” which is a tiny enclosed room with a few couches and a single small screen? I vastly prefer the former, because I think it’s actually easier to get intensely silly in front of a larger audience of drunk strangers. And I like getting to hear total strangers do their own mind-blowing (and occasionally eardrum-blowing) renditions of songs I would never have expected. But some people prefer the karaoke box experience, because then you’re just singing to friends (and maybe acquaintances). You don’t have to wait as long to sing, and you don’t have to deal with weird people that you don’t know. But like I said, I vastly prefer the “bar” setup. A DRAG NUN from the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence can cheer you on as you sing your heart out. What part of that sentence doesn’t make you want to go out in public?

Also, karaoke is the subject of one of the weirdest movies of all time—Duets, starring Huey Lewis and Gwyneth Paltrow as a father-daughter karaoke hustler duo. Also featuring Paul Giamatti as an uptight businessman who gets hooked on beta blockers and utters the immortal line, “Bam bam bam! John Wayne I am!” And so, so much more.

So is there any karaoke in my upcoming novel about a witch and a mad scientist, All the Birds in the Sky? Alas, no. There actually was rather a lot of karaoke in the book, at one point, but a brutal revision process left the book karaoke-free.

Early on, there was a whole chapter from the point of view of Kevin, a young webcomics artist who dates Patricia, the witch. Kevin meets Patricia at a party with some really terrible DJs, but then he runs into her again at a karaoke night at a dive bar, and finds himself falling for her because of the sadness, and yet giddiness, with which she sings some ’90s pop songs. But that scene never even got transcribed from my longhand draft.

And then there was also a scene, which was in the book until almost the last round of revisions, where Patricia and her fellow witches do karaoke at a “box” in Japantown. And yes, they use magic to cheat at karaoke, like you do. When I get around to posting deleted scenes from the book on my Tumblr, it’ll probably turn up there.

But meanwhile, I do have one urban fantasy story in which karaoke is a major plot device, and basically the means by which the plot is resolved. It’s called “Fairy Werewolf vs. Vampire Zombie,” and it’s sort of my tribute to The Vampire Diaries. You can read it online at Flurb, or in the new anthology Love Hurts. It ends with a lethal karaoke contest and a vitally important lesson about the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

So to sum up—karaoke. It’s awesome. It will help you summon strange spirits. Karaoke is the alchemy of pop culture. Rock the mic, and it’ll make you a better explorer of the uncanny.

This article was originally published in December 2015 as part of our ongoing Related Subjects series.

Before writing fiction full-time, Charlie Jane Anders was for many years an editor of the extraordinarily popular science fiction and fantasy site io9.com. Her debut novel, the mainstream Choir Boy, won the 2006 Lambda Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Edmund White Award. Her Tor.com story “Six Months, Three Days” won the 2013 Hugo Award and was optioned for television. Her debut SFF novel All the Birds in the Sky, recently won the 2016 Nebula Award in the Novel category and earned praise from, among others, Michael Chabon, Lev Grossman, and Karen Joy Fowler. She has also had fiction published by McSweeney’s, Lightspeed, and ZYZZYVA. Her journalism has appeared in Salon, the Wall Street Journal, Mother Jones, and many other outlets.

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I remember the first time I saw Old Man’s War. It was in my local Borders—a good one, where the books mostly had their spines intact and the staff actually knew what they were talking about. I asked the science fiction guy if he’d read anything good lately, and he pointed me right at it. But I guess I saw that throwback cover art and thought “Heinlein”—and “early Heinlein,” at that. The Heinlein who hadn’t yet embraced free love and freakydeaky libertarian thought experiments. The one who wrote Starship Troopers, an undoubtedly significant novel, but whose John Wayne attitude to war had always rubbed me the wrong way.

I would eventually fall in love with Old Man’s War—even though it is, in one sense, a love letter to Starship Troopers. But it would take some time.

Two years, to be precise, and some dogged insistence on the part of a book-minded friend whose taste overlaps with mine, and who rarely insists I read anything (let alone science fiction). So now I had to give Old Man’s War a fair shot.

I went back to Borders and bought a copy. I went home, turned on the light by the couch and opened to the first page…

I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visited my wife’s grave. Then I joined the army.

Forty-eight hours later I was done. The next day I went back to Borders and bought the rest of the series…

WARNING: Spoilers follow.

Old Man’s War tells the story of John Perry, a 75-year-old American who volunteers to serve in the Colonial Defense Forces (CDF). To make sense of that, consider the book’s central conceit—a future in which humanity has conquered the stars but whose colonies lack sufficient population to successfully compete with the other species that populate the galaxy. So the Colonial Union, which rules beyond Earth’s gravity well, monopolizes advanced technology (such as the skip drive that allows for interstellar travel) and uses Earth as a sort of people farm. From the developing world come the colonists; while developed states—and the United States in particular—supply its soldiers. But not just anyone can sign up to join the CDF. You have to be old—75 to be precise.

This conceit serves to propel Midwestern septuagenarian John Perry into basic training—after, that is, the CDF transfers his consciousness into a (highly modified) new body, complete with the ability to regenerate lost limbs, oxygen-retaining SmartBlood, and an on-board computer/networking interface, called a BrainPal. And, of course, green skin.

Despite the best efforts of an obligatory ass-chewing sergeant, Perry and his band of fellow trainees, who dub themselves the “Old Farts,” make it through with flying colors. Then they are separated and deployed across the known universe, where they proceed to engage pretty much any alien species with plasma or projectile weaponry.

Few survive.

Superficially, Old Man’s War is exactly what it seems to be—an homage to Heinlein that appears to share the sensibilities and even narrative structure of Starship Troopers. But its impact on the science fiction landscape has been far greater, and more complex, than would be possible to extract from a formulaic rehash of what is, to this day, a polarizing work. That’s because, as much as Old Man’s War is homage (and it certainly is), it is also something else entirely, and it is this duality that marks Old Man’s War—and, even more so, the completed trilogy it belongs to—as significant.

Early reviews noted the connection to Heinlein, while praising the book as an unusually good piece of Heinleinian SF. Writing for sfreviews.net in 2004, Thomas Wagner characterized the novel as:

… a tremendous, confident SF debut for well-known blogger John Scalzi. Openly patterning itself after Starship Troopers, Old Man’s War takes an exciting tale of alien conflict and dresses it up intelligently with such themes as individual identity, what makes one human, the significance of mortality, and the ethics of life extension. Economically told at just over 300 pages, the story, peopled with remarkably well-drawn and memorable characters, never flags for an instant and steers a steady course without veering into self-importance or maudlin sentiment.

In 2006 Justin Howe, for Strange Horizons, dubbed Old Man’s War (and its sequel):

…fast-paced and enjoyable, making use of technology and culture in a playful fashion, while never forgetting the debt owed to such authors as Robert Heinlein and Joe Haldeman.

The book, with its depiction of heroic soldiers saving humanity from rapacious barbarian hordes at the gate, appeared to strike a chord with politically conservative SF readers. This is perhaps unsurprising. But the extent to which Old Man’s War became a cult hit in the conservative blogosphere is nevertheless notable, and played no small part in its commercial success. Eugene Volokh and Professor Brainbridge were early fans, as was Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, who apparently wrote about the book more than 20 times in the span of a year.

The book also had its champions on the left—Cory Doctorow, in a 2004 review, memorably referred to it as “Forever War with better sex; Starship Troopers without the lectures.” However, there were some who felt uncomfortable with a story that seemed to validate the Colonial Union’s aggressive, militaristic foreign policy.

This view is seemingly embodied in a sequence featuring two-time Democratic Senator Thaddeus Bender, famed negotiator and, we learn, a new recruit to Perry’s platoon. Bender is a caricature, a narcissistic figure whose appeals to idealism—in this case, peacemaking—are entirely self-serving. And though the resemblance is likely unintentional, Bender does come off a bit like John Kerry—who, at the time of publication, had just lost the most recent U.S. presidential election, and who is also from Massachusetts.

Regardless, Bender exists to be scorned, and a straightforward reading of the scene where he dies, gun down and arms outstretched in a rather ill-conceived attempt at diplomacy, is to assume that this scorn should be extended to the act of peacemaking. In a widely debated review of the book from 2006, Nicholas Whyte argued that this implies a politics in which:

…even the slightest thought of peace-making is for dummies who get their come-uppance by making futile pacifist gestures. Give war a chance, and don’t ask what it is actually for.

This is also, one notes, the standard critique of Starship Troopers from the left. In the words of David Itzkoff:

Starship Troopers tells of the education of a naïve young man who enlists in a futuristic infantry unit. Raised by his father to believe that the practice of war is obsolete, the immature soldier—and, by extension, the reader—is instructed through a series of deep space combat missions that war is not only unavoidable, it is vital and even noble. While peace, Heinlein writes, is merely “a condition in which no civilian pays any attention to military casualties,” war is what wins man his so-called unalienable rights and secures his liberty. The practice of war is as natural as voting; both are fundamental applications of force, “naked and raw, the Power of the Rods and the Ax.”

I’ll admit that I share some aspects of this view. I’ve always appreciated works that, like both Starship Troopers and Old Man’s War, recognize the humanity, bravery and enormous sacrifice of those in uniform (for a more recent example, check out my review of Embedded by Dan Abnett). At the same time, I’ve never had much patience for works that use that bravery and sacrifice to validate policies that are morally or strategically ruinous, or which glorify the use of violence as as default mode of problem-solving.

For a bit more than half of its 300 or so pages, Old Man’s War appears to do exactly that. In a briefing, Perry and his fellow recruits are told that:

…the reality is that on the ground, we are in fierce and furious competition. We cannot hold back our expansion and hope that we can achieve a peaceful solution that allows for colonization by all races. To do so would be to condemn humanity. So we fight to colonize.

In a perfect universe, we would not need the Colonial Defense Forces…but this is not that perfect universe. And so, the Colonial Defense Fores have three mandates. The first is to protect existing human colonies and protect them from attack and invasion. The second is to locate new planets suitable for colonization, and hold them against predation, colonization and invasion from competing races. The third is to prepare planets with native populations for human colonization.

As Colonial Defense Forces, you will be required to uphold all three mandates. This is not easy work, nor is it simple work, nor is it clean work, in any number of ways. But it must be done. The survival of humanity demands it–and we will demand it of you. (106-7)

Perry, initially at least, buys into the rhetoric of “kill or be killed.” But recall that he is an individual who possesses limited experiences with the CDF. As those experiences rack up, so do his doubts. Bender’s death, and the ensuing bloodbath, serves as a turning point of sorts. As Corporal Viveros, who to this point had been Bender’s chief antagonist in the platoon, explains:

We didn’t have to do this, you know. Knock these poor sons of bitches out of space and make it so they spend the next couple of decades starving and dying and killing each other. We didn’t murder civilians today—well, other than the ones that got Bender. But they’ll spend a nice long time dying from disease and murdering each other because they can’t do much of anything else. It’s no less of a genocide. We’ll just feel better about it because we’ll be gone when it happens. (179)

Perry comes to understand this truth as he is forced to engage in what can only described as a string of atrocities, from preemptive strikes against the pterodactyl-like Gindalians or literally stomping the lilliputian Covandus’ homeworld into dust. “I don’t feel connected with what it was to be human anymore,” he says:

Our job is to go meet strange new people and cultures and kill the sons of bitches as quickly as we possibly can. We know only what we need to know about these people in order to fight with them. They don’t exist to be anything other than an enemy, as far as we know. Except for the fact that they’re smart about fighting back, we might as well be fighting animals.

The theme of the inhumanity of humanity is one Scalzi develops far more in later volumes, as Martin McGrath’s brilliant exegesis of the series illustrates. But it’s clearly signaled in Old Man’s War. As often as humanity is put at risk in the universe, Colonial Union is just as often the aggressor. It is a more or less rapacious, expansionary entity with little regard for life and even less for the notion of coexistence. And Old Man’s War does not revel in or glorify this fact. Rather it gives you people to care about, shows them being indoctrinated into the cause, and then presents their doubts.

Yet Scalzi never quite repudiates the Colonial Union either, or at least, not yet. The threat to humanity is very real, and very frightening. Hence the case for reading the novel as equal parts homage to and subversion of its source of inspiration.

This duality is, I think, reflective of the historical moment in which the book was written. Joe Haldeman’s Forever War is rightly cited as a rebuttal and counterpoint to Starship Troopers, military SF refracted through the prism of post-My Lai Vietnam and the death of the John Wayne ideal. Yet Forever War and Starship Troopers are equally idealistic works. War, in the latter, is righteous; in the former, it is misguided. Characters who come to accept the veracity of these underlying “truths” may thus achieve a form of catharsis.

Such is not the case for John Perry in Old Man’s War. War is justifiable because the threat of extinction is real; but war is equally a source of insecurity, a tool that is used too quickly, too frequently and with too little thought given to its implications and consequences. In this sense, Old Man’s War embodies a peculiar zeitgeist of the post-9/11 era—on the one hand, the perception of, and desire for protection from, perpetual, existential threat; on the other, growing discomfort at the costs—moral and material—of endless and preemptive war. Perry comes to perceive the galaxy’s hostility to humanity in such terms, as equally the product of aggressiveness from humanity’s competitors and of human aggressiveness toward them.

Read Excerpts from The End of All Things

And it doesn’t supply us with an easy answer, or a right answer. Not yet, at least. But for now, you can read militarism or anti-militarism into the text, because they are both there—coexisting in dynamic tension, itching for resolution.

If ever there was a book screaming for a sequel, this was it. And it would get them—first two, then a third, then two more—the latest of which is being released in hardcover today. There are, I’ve heard, more on the way.

Having read the whole sequence has, at times, complicated the writing of this essay—in large part because my thoughts and feelings on Old Man’s War are intrinsically bound up with my thoughts and feelings on the latter books, and especially for the direct sequels, The Ghost Brigades and The Last Colony. It is difficult for me to think of Old Man’s War as a story with a beginning, middle and end, because I know it’s just the beginning. And because I think the way we get from here to there is very important. Nevertheless, I’ve tried to make the case that, in ideational terms, Old Man’s War should be considered on its own merits, and as an important work of science fiction as well.

It also happens to be a very good work of science fiction. The story is fast-paced and exciting. The characters (Perry and Jane Sagan in particular) are memorable. The universe is well-rendered and believable. And the prose is lean and sharp—a hallmark of Scalzi’s work, but without the overemphasis on snark and banter that features in some of his more recent output. It’s a book that’s been cited as a great introduction to science fiction for new readers, and is actually used as such in at least one college course. I’ve spoken to many readers who entered fandom through this book, and others who rediscovered the thrill and wonder of SF as a consequence of reading it. And I understand that it sells very well, even today, ten years on from the first print edition.

So I’ll admit the thing that reviewers and critics often have trouble admitting: I love this book. I loved it the first time I read it, and I loved it even more this time.

Even still, there were some things that bothered me.

As Kenton Kilgore points out, Perry is strangely uninterested in the family he leaves behind. Yes, it’s true that some individuals have difficult relationships with their family, but that doesn’t appear to be the case here. Perry has a son, with whom he spends his final evening on Earth. They seem close, and the scene is suitably touching. But Perry doesn’t give him as much as a second thought after enlisting—not a single pang of regret or even stray thought as to what his son might be up to, or whether he is healthy, safe, happy, etc. In fact none of the recruits think about their kids. Some, like Perry, do think about their spouses—just not their kids. Odd, no?

And then there’s the fact that nearly everyone in the book is American—all but Corporal Viveros, to be precise, and she is gone after a handful of pages. There is a reason for this—Scalzi is, as discussed above, subverting the tropes of military SF, and Americentrism is certainly one of the most frequently encountered tropes.

But even Starship Troopers wasn’t this red, white and blue—Johnnie Rico, you will recall, is from the Philippines. Moreover, even if the intention is set up for subversion, there is the very real question of why the assumption of “American-ness” as default isn’t one of the things being subverted. The world is a big, crowded and increasingly interconnected place; as such, the days of cultural or political monopolarity are already over, if they were ever real to begin with. So why is the CDF so uniformly American—and white, middle-class American at that? This has always bothered me, and did so even more upon re-reading the novel.

Even still, the strengths far outweigh the faults, because Old Man’s War is that rare book that can speak to all sorts—liberals and conservatives, veteran and new SF readers, those looking for light escapism and those who want to be challenged, and so on.

And, as far as I’m concerned, it’s pretty remarkable that, ten years later, I’m still finding new things to appreciate.

This article was originally published in August 2015, the first in a reread of the Old Man’s War series.
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.

The G is founder and co-editor of the group blog ‘nerds of a feather, flock together’, which covers SF/F and crime fiction, comics, cult films and video games. He moonlights as an academic.

First, let’s start off with the easy stuff. Shadow and Wednesday stop off at Anansi’s clothier—just as Vulcan showed his allegiance, false though it was, by crafting a sword, Anansi does it with bespoke suits. Anansi tells another story of Black pain in an unforgiving New World, but this one has a darker turn. Then, we’re off to Easter’s Easter party. Wednesday lays on the charm and smarm to hook in Easter; meanwhile, Shadow, a man who refuses to believe in what he sees, is confronted with a holy host of gods. The storm Wednesday seeded in the second episode with the dandelion fluff finally blows in and makes The Children a sacrifice to Easter. Shadow’s spiritual crisis comes to a head as Wednesday forces the belief right out of him. Mr. World and the new gods declare war.

Wednesday set up Laura’s death as a sacrifice and to maneuver Shadow into his grasp. Clearly, Shadow can’t be as insignificant as Mad Sweeney believes—Wednesday wouldn’t have gone through all that trouble and all those years of planning to snare some meaningless rando. It’s Shadow’s belief in particular that sets Wednesday, or should I say Odin, off. Apparently, sacrifice of life is like a bump of coke for a god. If Easter was powerful enough to steal Spring before, she likely would’ve tried it. But with death on her hands, she has enough short term power to work her magic…just as Wednesday planned.

Since the premiere, I’ve been saying that at the pace the season was going it looked like Wednesday and Shadow would reach the House on the Rock just in time for the final credits. Turns out I was half right. Not to veer too far into the novel, but moving Shadow’s “come to Jesus” moment to before the House on the Rock rather than during their time there changes the whole meaning of the visit. In the book, that’s where Wednesday makes his pitch to the other gods and where Shadow finally sees so much he has no choice but to believe. Instead, both of those things happen at Easter’s. Without those moments, the House on the Rock is little more than a meeting spot; most of the godly debate happens after they exit the attraction. As to what’s next, I’m in the dark as much as the newbies.

Women get a lot to do this week. The two oldest deities we’ve seen are Bilquis and Easter, while Wednesday represents the next group of gods who supplanted the first order, and Mr. World the newest replacements. This could be a hint toward the Venus figurines from the Paleolithic era. While we don’t know their true purpose, some of the theories claim these figures were part of fertility rites, representations of mother goddesses, or women looking down at their own bodies as models. Their prolonged existence also nods to women as survivors and the traditional association of goddesses to love, sexuality, birth, and life.

Death does not become Laura Moon. Temporarily losing the sun coin has hastened her decomposition. Laura cared so little in life yet cares so much in death. “Good, because as it turns out I really have a lot to live for and it’s so close I can feel it. It’s the only thing I can feel. So, I would really like to not be dead anymore so I can feel it fully.” This is the first time seeing Laura acting timid. She smiles and simpers, but it isn’t a scam. She’s genuine in her respect and honest about her intentions. Easter is Laura’s only chance at becoming the woman Shadow always thought she was. But she’s not so lucky, even with a leprechaun at her side. Because her death was orchestrated by Wednesday as a sacrifice, Easter can’t undo it. Yet another woman screwed over by a dude.

“They forced our queen into the backseat.” What a hellishly layered line. A Black god in America saying that sentence about a Black woman who yearns for the freedom to live her life free of the patriarchy. And as he says it, we see Bilquis consume a light-skinned man, a man who initially dismissed her and only took interest when she offered her body. Here’s where I have trouble with Bilquis’ “Coming to America” story. The whole multiple Jesuses thing establishes that there can be many versions of the same god, depending on the believer. Bilquis splits in two, one going to Los Angeles to become a homeless woman and the other staying near the Ba’ran temple in Ma’rib, Yemen, to eventually be destroyed by Daesh during their 2015 occupation. That means there should be at least two other Bilquises floating around—one tied to Judeo-Christian-Islam lore as the Queen of Sheba and the other associated with Sungbo’s Eredo near Ijebu Ode, Nigeria, where she’s known as Bilikisu Sungbo.

As for the LA Bilquis, I don’t buy her descent into ruin. Not at all. Here’s a woman who thrives on sexual conquest, and you’re telling me that she, a very attractive and sexually available woman, can’t get any? In Los Angeles, a town infamous for decadence and hedonism? Even without a cellphone she should be able to pick up half a dozen conquests in a single evening just by walking to a bar. If she cleans out their wallets after the fact like book Bilquis does, she should be well off. Instead, the goddess that could adapt to changing times over the course of a millennium somehow couldn’t handle the shift to the US? Wednesday, Anubis, Ibis, and Anansi all exist without their original believers, so Bilquis should’ve been able to transition just fine without the Yemeni woman who brought her over. While Americans don’t worship Bilquis, Easter demonstrates that any kind of belief, direct or indirect, will suffice. Wednesday is obsessed with prayer in his name, but that seems more to do with his ego than with the realities of godhood.

More importantly, American Gods has now taken this powerful, independent queen and put her fate into the hands of men. Specifically, white men—the new gods are white and two of the three are men. Bilquis’ story is one of female empowerment and survival in the face of man’s rage, yet when brought to the New World she flounders until a white man offers her aid. She shows no initiative, takes no actions, just slides into oblivion. She doesn’t pull herself up, she waits for a man to do it for her. I don’t believe it and I really don’t like it. This portrayal is the exact opposite of the Bilquis we met in Yemen, and undercuts the Bilquis from the second episode. This new wrinkle minimizes her self-determination and puts her salvation in the hands of men. They even decided how she should look! Now Bilquis is little more than a pawn in the battle between angry white men. She has no agency now.

Not only did the show force Bilquis under a white man’s heel, but it did it again with Easter. Easter is another ancient goddess who also lost her position as queen to men and a male-dominated religion. When men steal her sacred day, she doesn’t adapt for the modern age, but apparently waits for a white man, Mr. World, to do it. She doesn’t resist the new gods until another white man, Wednesday, flatters her.

She’s supposed to be this all-powerful mother goddess and instead she’s easily manipulated by a dude and another dude’s spokeswoman. Easter has to be wholly ignorant of American spirituality if she really believes Wednesday when he says humans will pray to Ostara for their harvests. If anything, her actions will benefit the Jesuses, not her. We don’t live in an atheist world, and no amount of Media interference could erase the very Christian principles on which our nation was founded. Easter says she’s no fool, but buying Wednesday and Media’s hogwash is downright foolish.

There’s also something to be said about a show where a Black woman is allowed to live only by the grace of a white man while a white woman is allowed to not only thrive by submitting to white men but is also able to rebel and claim independence (all while being supported by a male ally). Bilquis is largely silent, whereas the other gods can barely shut up. It’s also pretty hinky watching a white woman treat a Black man as an object of her desire. Easter female-gazes all over Shadow and treats him not like a man or a human but as a thing that pleases her. That’s white feminism to a T.

So far, Wednesday has only sought alliances with men or white women. Yet the show doesn’t seem to notice the larger context surrounding Easter or Bilquis’ evolution, or consider how it looks to have a white woman get all “jungle fever” on a Black man. Or if it does, the series isn’t interested in exploring that context. I’ve said it before, but this is a show that really needs a diverse writers’ room if it wants to adequately tackle these topics. The white male perspective is all over American Gods, and when it comes to portraying racism and misogyny, that fact is much to its detriment. The show has a lot to say about the myriad elements of the American experience, but it lacks the contextual nuance to bring home the point.

Despite its many complicated problems, American Gods is still a tremendous show. It’s a gorgeous heartbreaker and a visceral escape. Every tiny little production detail is exquisite, and the acting superb. The changes from page to screen haven’t always worked, but I admire that they took the chance and tried to build something new. Even when it annoys the hell out of me, I love it. American Gods has made me a believer. See you for Season Two!

Final Thoughts

• Reminder to tag your spoilers.
• “You wouldn’t believe in me if I told you.”
• “Death hurts. I mean, mostly that hurt is just absences of things.”
• Anansi has just a touch of gray in his mutton chops, showing his age.
• Yeesh, those are some bad “natural hair” wigs they put on Yetide Badaki.
• Men took from Bilquis, so it’s fitting that the first person she takes on her way to the New World is a man.
• A scene of a woman dying from AIDS complications is especially powerful coming from a show helmed by two gay men.
• Why Kentucky? Who knows. In the book Easter lives in the pagan haven of San Francisco. De-Springing the landscape looks less impressive in a metropolis that stays green most of the year. Plus Kristin Chenoweth’s Southern Belle schtick is too delightful to leave out.
• I love Shadow’s little moments of revelation where he suddenly sees the real world.
• YOU’RE KILLING ME HERE, BRYAN.
• This week Media appears as Judy Garland’s Hannah Brown from Easter Parade.
• If Media and the new gods are responsible for Santa Claus’ popularity, that means Mr. World has been around since at least 1823, when Clement Clarke Moore’s “A Visit from St. Nicholas” was first published (the poem that really popularized the character).
• Mexican Jesus is apparently alive and well and enjoying the Easter holiday.
• Look at that goofy smile on Shadow’s face when he sees Laura for the first time since the hotel. He’s such an adorable puppy.
• I hope Bilquis uses House on the Rock to turn the tables on the new gods. Her act of bus conquest suggests she isn’t as cowed as Technical Boy thinks.
• The A.V. Club has a great interview with Chenoweth on Easter.
• All that glorious food porn is brought to by Janice Poon, crafter of the tasty eats on Hannibal.

Alex Brown is a teen librarian, writer, geeknerdloserweirdo, and all-around pop culture obsessive who watches entirely too much TV. Keep up with her every move on Twitter and Instagram, or get lost in the rabbit warren of ships and fandoms on her Tumblr.

Rising sea levels and disappearing ice caps have been a staple of science fiction futures ever since the first alarm bells were sounded that an ice-free earth was a possibility, no matter what culprit is left holding the smoking gun. (Though at this point, the science is long since in: climate change is happening, and the main cause is human activity.) We’ve seen these watery worlds depicted many times, particularly in film, with varying degrees of success—Waterworld springs immediately to mind. There’s such massive visual appeal to the image of once-great cities like New York inundated by the rising tides; skyscrapers become a new sort of submarine canyon for the divers of the future to explore.

And more recently, we’ve seen the US truncated from both directions by the Atlantic and Pacific in The Hunger Games. We don’t know a whole lot about what changed the shape of North America to give us Panem, other than the fact that the sea level rose to an unknown degree, and there was some sort of cataclysmic war.

I am here, I confess, to rain on that parade. If all of the ice on the entire planet melted, sea level would rise about 65-70m, depending on who you ask, and there’s probably some wiggle room in there for the thermal expansion of water on a much warmer Earth. But even at its fullest extent, the rising tide isn’t going to swallow skyscrapers whole. New York City has a multitude of buildings over 300 (~91m) feet tall, which would stick out of the ocean like steel and glass islands. Duluth, Minnesota could technically get buried under the waves—except that it’s on Lake Superior, not an ocean coastline, and the Great Lakes will mostly be just fine.

Sorry.

But we can have a new set of visuals, of skyscrapers poking up between wind-scudded ocean waves, the glittering remnants of a submerged civilization. People could be building new homes over the ocean, knocking out the windows above floor thirty. Except for the part where the water-flooded buildings, having not been designed to be submerged, collapse.

Double sorry.

It is a fact of rising sea levels that coastlines will change, and that people will be driven inland ahead of the inundation. Most humans live in proximity to a body of water, and as the sea level—what we refer to in sedimentology as “base level”—goes up, rivers will flood back inland as well, becoming wider. But looking at the fictional map of Panem (this one taken from The Hunger Games Experience exhibition, so I think it’s about as official as we’re going to find) it’s worth noting that not all coastlines are equal, and some will be affected much more drastically than others. It all comes down to plate tectonics.

In plate tectonics, there are two types of continental boundaries: active and passive. Active boundaries are where massive tectonic plates, normally a continental plate versus an oceanic plate, are actively colliding. This is the situation we see around the Pacific Ring of Fire, where the Pacific Ocean plate collides with all of the surrounding continental plates, continuously. And since ocean crust is denser than continental crust, the oceanic crust subducts underneath the continent. This is what causes the earthquakes and volcanoes that plague the zone—and also what causes those active margins to have a lot of mountains.

I used to have a bumper sticker on my car that said, “Subduction causes orogeny. Think of the children.” Not only is it hilarious if you like stupid science puns, it’s also true. Subduction—oceanic crust grinding down under the continental crust—provides the compressive pressure that causes orogeny—mountain building. Active margins, which come with subduction zones, tend to experience a lot of compression and folding of crust, which equals mountain building. Which equals elevation. Which equals not getting drowned as quickly when the sea level starts to go up. This is the case with the west coast of North America and South America.

(Fun fact: The mountain ranges on the west half of North America get younger as you head east. The hypothesis is that a piece of subducting oceanic crust was unusually buoyant and kept grinding along under North America until it got about halfway along before finally succumbing and dropping off.)

On the other hand, you have passive margins, which is basically the case for the eastern coastlines of North America. It’s nice and non-volcanic over there, but the tradeoff is that there hasn’t been mountain building in quite some time. And in that quite some time, water’s had its chance to bring the land closer and closer to base level via erosion, making for a gentle, close to sea level slope that heads out into the Atlantic. And when you have a long, low slope, just a little sea level change means the ocean heads far inland.

This brings us back to the puzzling map of Panem. The east side of the former United States makes plenty of sense—that’s pretty much in line with what I’d expect from a drowned world, assuming that rivers haven’t been included on the map. But what is up with the west coast? If the war was so cataclysmic that it bombed the elevation right out of California, I’m surprised Katniss is human and not a large, mutant cockroach. For comparison, here’s a map from CalculatedEarth.com with a projected sea level rise of 70m—the maximum we could really expect.

This future we’re imagining is not alien and unknowable. It’s even likely, given our current course as a species. There are a lot of useful tools for imagining the landscape of a future, ice-free Earth, with the relative grimness, or the human spirit’s capacity for bouncing back, determined by imagination. Here are a few of my favorites:

• At Geology.com you can go from present to +60m of sea level rise overlaid on regular road maps.
• At CalculatedEarth.com, there’s a fun tool that lets you play with sea level rise up to an absolutely impossible 3000m. (You’d better have a good explanation of where all that water came from, ahem Waterworld.)
• And National Geographic has a series of beautiful paintings showing the changing coastlines of flooded continents, with the old coasts still outlines.

There’s something weirdly fun about drowning the entire world with the twiddle of a slider on a web app, like you’re a merciless god in pajama pants—at least until you’re reminded that you’re forecasting the future of our world and species. Sometimes speculative art meets life in cognitively discomforting ways.

There are plenty of other questions surrounding sea level rise that we don’t know the answer to. What is the inundation going to do to local climates? What plants and animals and entire ecosystems will survive and what will their new ranges be? What about those moving shorelines? But we know with a reasonable degree of accuracy where those shorelines will end up being: the Earth and its elevations are very well-mapped, and sea level rise is a heartlessly mathematical process.

I feel I should apologize for this being much more of a downer than the endless squee about desert planets in my previous post, but I did my thesis research on climate change, and this is the sort of thing that keeps me up at night. I’m putting out the call and leaving it to you to imagine stories of survival and hope as the slider on our sea level reality creeps higher.

Alex Acks is a writer, geologist, Twitter fiend, and dapper AF. Their sweary biker space witch debut novel, Hunger Makes the Wolf, is out now from Angry Robot Books.

I don’t usually cry at celebrity deaths, but I teared up when I learned of Anton Yelchin’s passing. He always seemed like a genuinely caring, decent person. And though he was only 27, he’d put out a remarkable amount of high-quality work. It breaks my heart to think of all the roles Anton Yelchin never got to play, all the lives he never got to touch, all the years he never got to live.

On the night of his death last year, I went back and rewatched two of my favorite films of Yelchin’s, Fright Night and Odd Thomas. If this year is any indication, it’s going to be an annual tradition. Now, I’m not going to argue that these are his best films—that honor goes to Green Room and Only Lovers Left Alive—but they are the ones I keep going back to, like the cinematic equivalent of comfort food. I’ve written before about my boundless adoration of the updated Fright Night, so now let me talk your ear off about the other Yelchin movie love of my life, the delightfully odd Odd Thomas.

Mild spoilers ahoy.

If you aren’t familiar with Odd Thomas yet, here’s the skinny: based on an urban fantasy series by Dean Koontz, the movie is about a young man named Odd (Yelchin) who can see the dead. They let him know who killed them, and he considers it his responsibility to go after the culprits. He delivers the killers, usually after a physical altercation and some fudging of the details, to police chief Wyatt Porter (Willem Dafoe), who keeps his secret as a trade-off for cleaning up the streets of their small desert town, Pico Mundo. Odd’s life is easy and uncomplicated; he has no vehicle, no property, not even health insurance, and works a chill but dead-end job as a cook at a diner, where he hangs out with his girlfriend, Stormy (Addison Timlin), the manager of a mall ice cream shop.

Things quickly become more complicated when a creepy dude turns up at the diner, bringing with him a hoard of bodachs—freaky invisible creatures drawn to sites of future acts of horrific violence. Odd sets out to investigate the creepo and gets sucked into a mystery that’s bigger than he can handle on his own. When diner waitress Viola (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) has a nightmare about her own death, and as more bodachs infest the town, Odd has to stop an unknown crime from being perpetrated by unknown assailants. Think the Dresden Files books crossed with the movie version of Constantine, but with a cast of chipper young ‘uns against a small town/desert background. The film was set up to spin off into a franchise, but instead it took a thrashing from critics and tanked at the box office.

It’s not like the poor ratings weren’t well-deserved. The plot is scattershot, full of so many holes that it gives Swiss cheese a run for its money. There was so much obvious cutting, editing, and reshooting that the whole thing feels stitched together, rather than presenting a cohesive whole. Lazy filming choices like slo-mo action shots, techno beats over fighting scenes, quick pans and zooms, and an infodump-y voiceover give the film a campy, made-for-TV air. Even for a relatively low-budget action flick, the CGI is cheap, shoddy, and obvious. I’ve seen better CGI on network television—it’s that bad.

None of the characters have any real depth or development. The movie is so concerned with freaking out the audience with spooky effects that it forgets to do anything interesting with its characters. Nothing the characters do has any real motivation, explanation, or logic behind it other than the fact that the script needs them to get from point A to point B.

Women, of course, are treated the worst. All four of the adult women are reduced to sex objects, constantly subjected to the ever-pervasive male gaze. Viola’s wardrobe consists of mostly push-up bras and low-cut tops. Stormy works retail all day long in short shorts and high heeled wedges and parades around Odd’s bedroom in a baggy t-shirt and lacy thong. Lysette (Melissa Ordway), a friend of the police chief, appears just long enough to be forced to run for her life in a halter top before being abruptly fridged. Even the wife of the Chief of Police exists only to fret, dangle from her husband’s arm, and occasionally turn up in sexy positions. Despite having seen this movie a million times, I still can’t remember her name…that’s how little she affects the story or other characters.

And yet, even though the characters are all surface and the high stakes are lowered by hodgepodge editing, Odd Thomas is still a surprisingly pleasant way to spend an hour and a half. There’s a rollicking supernatural adventure tale under all the lackluster execution. A bigger budget, less post-focus group finagling, and axing the insistent male gaze would have gone a long way in bringing the movie’s strengths to the fore. More importantly, I genuinely like Odd and Stormy. I like spending time with them, watching them untangle the mystery, and working together to save the day. Odd is quirky and weird and a bit of a doofus, but he pulls it together when he has to. Stormy is bright and cheery and wiser than she appears. I love the world Odd lives in, the hint at a greater supernatural mystery looming in the background, the tease of more adventures to come.

And I love Anton Yelchin as Odd. Yelchin had a way of elevating a movie just by being in it. He took a cheesy urban fantasy flick and imbued it with passion, fear, and sense of belief. Rather than phoning it in like a lot of actors would have, he brought truth and genuine feeling. Yelchin makes Odd pop off the screen with energy and excitement. There’s this moment near the end of the film where Odd bids farewell to another character, and Yelchin completely pours himself into it. Odd trembles as he tries to keep from weeping. The gesture is so minute, but powerful. It’s a tremendous moment. He single-handedly turns a clunky finale into a powerhouse of emotion through sheer force of will and talent.

Odd Thomas will always have my heart. Part of what makes it so enjoyable is that it was adapted and directed by Stephen Somers, writer, director, and producer of other goofy “dude battles monsters” movies like The Mummy, The Mummy Returns, The Scorpion King, Van Helsing, and Deep Rising. Odd Thomas has a lot in common with the Brendan Fraser/Rachel Weisz Mummy series. Both took a dumb premise seriously enough to make it earnest but not so seriously as to crush it under the weight of its own ego (looking at you, Tom Cruise’s Mummy remake). They benefited from casting good-to-great actors and didn’t let the material talk down to the characters. And most importantly, they made sure to balance the heavy drama with playfulness and humor. There was no way Odd Thomas would ever be considered, by any stretched definition, a “good” movie…but it sure is a helluva lot of fun.

Alex Brown is a teen librarian, writer, geeknerdloserweirdo, and all-around pop culture obsessive who watches entirely too much TV. Keep up with her every move on Twitter and Instagram, or get lost in the rabbit warren of ships and fandoms on her Tumblr.

The sequel to The Crystal Gryphon doubles down on stalwart Joisan and damaged Kerovan. Oh, is he damaged. He’s so damaged he won’t even let himself be married to his own wife.

As the story begins, the survivors of Ithkrypt are settled in the Abbey of Norsdale, but Kerovan is gone. Joisan leaves the redoubtable Nalda in charge and goes looking for him.

She’s making a choice here. Duty to her people is one thing, but her priority, first and always, is her husband.

Kerovan has not been treating her well. He’s refused to consummate the marriage, and now he’s disappeared.

Joisan understands his childhood trauma and does her best to forgive it, but she is not giving up on him. She’s not letting him dump her and bolt, either.

Almost immediately after she leaves the Abbey, she meets a pair of Object Lessons: a witch named Elys (who doesn’t know what she is, just that she has powers; people in High Hallack don’t know about Estcarp) and a warrior named Jervon. These two are clearly life-bonded, and are to each other what Joisan desperately wants herself and Kerovan to be.

This is a thing in Norton: the outsider looking in on happy lovers, and feeling sadly left out and rather jealous. It happens to Kemoc and Kaththea in the Tregarth series. It definitely happens here. I find myself wondering if this is something the author herself felt in her life. Hard to say of course, but still.

Kerovan meanwhile is in a sad state. He’s tied completely in knots over Joisan, and feels he’s toxic and should stay far away from her. He’s also obsessed and intermittently possessed by the dream of an ancient gryphon-man named Landisl, who sleeps in a mysterious hall or tomb but seems to be hovering on the verge of waking.

While Kerovan contends with these emotional upheavals, he’s offered himself as scout and ally to a lord, Imgry, who has some hope of uniting the remnants of the Dales against the invaders from Alizon. These invaders are actually just passing through; Imgry has discovered that they’re searching for some treasure in the Waste, which they hope will help them oppose an ancient enemy. Kerovan volunteers, or is volunteered, to venture into the Waste and learn more, and also try to find allies to help Imgry with his war.

Joisan meanwhile travels with Elys and Jervon, and learns a little from Elys about the crystal gryphon and what powers she herself may have—not much, Elys thinks, but Joisan doesn’t give up hope on that score. She works to train and expand such powers as she has, and to discover what the gryphon pendant is and how to use it.

Kerovan alone and Joisan with company foray separately into the Waste. Joisan tracks Kerovan to a mysterious wood. There, we discover, Kerovan has met a stranger and been taken to the hidden fastness of the Wereriders, where he presents Imgry’s case, asks for help against Alizon, but is refused. He inadvertently brings terrible news: that the Thas are moving underground.

Joisan and her companions are caught in a trap and she is swallowed by the earth, where she encounters the evil Thas firsthand. The gryphon helps her somewhat, and also helps her to contact Kerovan mentally.

Kerovan comes out of the Wereriders’ wood to find Elys and Jervon frantically digging for Joisan. Kerovan has been blissfully ignorant of Joisan’s travels, believing that she’s been safe in the Abbey. He’s shocked to discover that she came after him.

And of course he’s convinced that he is not worthy and she should have nothing to do with him. “I was bound to a dark past, perhaps a worse future. She must be free of me.” This is a refrain, just as persistent as her “Nope. I’m staying with you.”

Kerovan is a bit of a drama queen. And really should know by now that Joisan is impossible to get rid of.

Elys helps him to scry for Joisan and assure himself that she’s alive. He goes hunting for her, with the other two for backup—and in the process makes a choice. It’s the same one Joisan made: love over duty. He sets the mission for Imgry aside and goes after his wife.

Joisan in her underground wanderings finds a mysterious cavern full of ancient magic, marked with the sign of a winged orb. The place appears to be of the Light, and she’s compelled to walk around and around it until she passes through what we (but not Joisan) recognize as a portal.

The portal takes her to the ruins of a castle or manor surrounded by gardens and orchards. She has no idea where she is on the map, but the place is a true oasis, protected by good powers.

The place has guardians: a small, cranky bear and a pair of insouciant cats. All of them are able to speak to her telepathically. None of them is impressed with her. They let her know that the gryphon is a “Key,” though they aren’t inclined to explain what they mean by that.

Kerovan, traveling with Elys and Jervon, has a powerful vision of Joisan. This exacerbates his already significant problem with dreams and compulsions, and makes him even more certain that he’s bad news for her and everyone else. Meanwhile, like Joisan before him, he’s half envious and half baffled by the pairing of witch/Wisewoman and mundane warrior. He starts to wonder if it’s possible that Joisan the normal human being might, just might, be able to tolerate Kerovan’s half-inhuman self.

Eventually they come to an ancient road that offers safe passage through dangerous and magic-ridden country. Kerovan manages to realize that he’s now completely fixated on finding Joisan. “She was all that was real now in my world.”

Kerovan does nothing by halves. Maybe because he’s a halfling, and he never stops fighting that aspect of himself?

While Kerovan obsesses, Joisan explores the ruined castle and discovers that it looks out on the sheared-off remnant of the same kind of road that Kerovan is traveling on. Things are coming full circle, it’s clear.

On the road, Kerovan starts to perceive strange shadows and possibly past travelers. Abruptly Elys and Jervon have to leave—they’re “forbidden,” she says, to go farther. She’s devastated, but she can’t fight the compulsion. Kerovan has to go on alone, at least for now.

Kerovan is pulled onward by a compulsion of his own, until he comes to the ruined castle. He meets the cats, who tell him to wait—and finally he reunites with Joisan.

Joisan meanwhile has been exploring the area and ingratiating herself with the cats, who tell her that dark things are stirring and that this warded place is named Carfallin, and the Waste is more properly called Arvon. The rising of the dark isn’t humans’ fault, they say; it may even be a natural cycle.

In the process of exploration she finds a single intact chamber, which puffs to dust when she opens it, all except a most peculiar cat’s-head ring that she is clearly meant to have. Just as she puts it on, the cats alert her to Kerovan’s arrival.

Their reunion is remarkably passionate. Kerovan hauls himself back, but Joisan isn’t having it. She won’t let him shut her out again. “I have no pride,” she says.

But she does, in her way. She holds to honor and her sworn word, and to love even when its object does his best to drive her off.

Kerovan is fighting himself every step of the way, to keep from giving in. He’s that convinced that he’s not worthy.

They both back off a bit and defuse the situation for the time being by filling each other in on what’s happened since the last time they met, particularly their respective encounters with Elys and Jervon. Since a storm is coming, Kerovan somewhat grudgingly allows Joisan to invite him into the ruin.

Once inside, Joisan continues talking about Elys and Jervon, leaning hard on the fact that they’re totally different, not even of the same human type, but they’re still a couple.

The conversation wanders off to further catching up, until she shows Kerovan the ring. When he touches the hand that wears it, the blue-green armband he’s been using as a defense against the dark and a guide to places and creatures of the light starts to glow. The ring responds by lighting up.

It dawns on Kerovan, as it has long since on Joisan, that he has to stay with Joisan after this. It’s not his idea—he’s being moved around by Powers again—but he more or less accepts it. In a way, it’s a kind of agency: at least he’s making a decision to do what he’s being forced to do. And lord knows, Joisan has more than enough agency for both of them.

Meanwhile Kerovan is fighting the dreams again and the sense of being possessed by another, possibly past self. In his dreams he hears two Old Ones talking or arguing. One, who appears to be evil, is called Galkur.

This, Kerovan learns, is the entity whom his mother tried to summon, but failed. Another came instead, and the result was Kerovan with his cloven hooves and his yellow eyes. Kerovan represents Galkur’s failure, and the second voice in the dream mocks him for it.

Kerovan recognizes the second voice as the Old One he met in the Waste in the previous book, the being called Neevor. Just as he realizes this, he sees again the vision of the gryphon-man asleep, but now he’s about to wake, and Kerovan can almost, but only almost, access the memories of his past life.

When Kerovan wakes, he’s as cruel to Joisan as he ever was, and completely obsessed with finding the Sleeper. They leave the ruined castle together, doing their mutual best to be open about where they’re going and why. Joisan realizes in the midst of this she’ll never go home again. She’s part of the Waste now. She’ll always come back to it.

They’re still not really together, and Joisan is reduced to tears by it. She does learn from the male cat, who has followed them, that the lady who owned her ring “loved deeply” in her time, and the ring is a great gift.

The ring helps Joisan arrive at the understanding that Kerovan can’t give her more of himself right now because he’s consumed by the quest to find out who he is. He is incapable of resisting the compulsion.

Joisan is incapable of letting him leave her behind. He tries to set her free, but she refuses.

Evil attacks wearing the form of Kerovan’s late mother. (She’s called Temphera here; she was Tephana in the previous book. Bad copy editor. No cookie.) Kerovan drives her off, and he and Joisan speculate as to whether hate can endure past death. He acknowledges that Joisan is amazing and that—however reluctantly—he loves her. They actually cling to each other, which is the most physical contact they’ve had.

Naturally Kerovan can’t let this moment last. He has to drive her off again, because he’s a bad person and he’s bad for her and he has nothing to give her.

Joisan, yet again, isn’t having it. Kerovan, yet again, has to admit that he’s outmatched.

Finally they come to the big denouement that’s been building since the first book. There, the conflict played out between Kerovan and his mother and cousin, with other powers working through them. Here, at last, the powers come out in the open.

They find themselves at the same dead end in the road as at the end of the first book, but this time Joisan is able to use the key she’s had all along: the crystal gryphon. The globe shatters and the gryphon flies free—through the mountain, drawing the two humans with it.

They find themselves in the hall of Kerovan’s dream. The Sleeper wakes and acknowledges Kerovan as kin, and tells Joisan the gryphon’s name: Telpher. Then he takes them through a portal to yet another ancient stronghold.

Neevor shows up at this point. This is the culmination of a very old conflict, and he’s here, more or less, as a referee. We discover that the gryphon man, Landisl, foiled Galkur’s attempt to take human form through Tephana’s summoning, and that Galkur has been helping the Hounds of Alizon destroy the Dales and make their way into Arvon.

Neevor doesn’t take credit for sending Kerovan and Joisan to wake Landisl. That did that themselves, he says. But now it’s time for Neevor and Landisl to take over.

In the conflict that follows, Kerovan and Joisan have a role to play after all. Joisan feeds him strength, and he pulls out a piece of ancient blue-green metal (it’s called quan-iron, we’re about to learn) that he found in the Waste.

But Galkur knows how to manipulate Kerovan through his own insecurities. Kerovan is of the dark, he says. It’s as obvious as the hooves he stands on.

Joisan fights to keep him from giving in, but he throws her off. He tries to kill himself, but Landisl reminds him at the last instant that only a creature of the light can wear quan-iron.

Galkur keeps leering and mocking, and Kerovan gets mad. Finally—finally he catches on to the truth. “You are you alone. What you make of life lies within you.”

And there’s Joisan, whom he finally has enough sense to choose over the dark. He defies Galkur, who keeps calling him “son,” and faces him down.

This is a fight for possession of Kerovan. Galkur keeps pushing long after he’s lost, until Landisl points out that Kerovan is his own individual self, and Galkur has broken the “Law” of the Old Ones in trying to meddle in human affairs.

A battle ensues. Joisan is wounded, which maddens Kerovan. Kerovan’s wristband blasts minions of evil. Good, led by Landisl and aided by Neevor, the gryphon, and Joisan, wins the day. Landisl and the gryphon give their lives; Joisan grieves mostly for the gryphon.

Neevor offers Kerovan a choice. He only gets it once. He can inherit Landisl’s power, or he can choose to be an ordinary human.

Kerovan chooses ordinary—and Joisan. Neevor gives them his blessing, and admits them to “the world of your choice.” (Interesting echo here of Simon Tregarth finding the world of his heart through the Siege Perilous, and taking to the Witch World in the first book of the series.) And then, at long last, Joisan and Kerovan manage—chastely—to get it together.

This is a rather frustrating book. Joisan is relentless in her determination to stay with Kerovan. Kerovan is one long whine and moan of “I am not worthy.” By the halfway point I was ready to smack him silly, and ready to smack Joisan for not doing it on her own account.

He has an excuse of sorts. He really needs to find out who he is and what he is. He manages that, and comes out ahead: he’s more than the sum of his parts, and he’s better than his peculiar genetics.

Meanwhile we get a grand tour of the Waste and the realm of Arvon, and we have an encounter with telepathic cats. Andre was a cat person—she used to say she was owned and operated by a herd of them—and here we meet two very opinionated members of the species. They’re ancient and apparently immortal, and humans to them are mere children. But the male at least takes to Joisan, and tells her what she needs to know about her magic ring.

This isn’t the heart-book that The Crystal Gryphon is, but it rounds out the story nicely, and after far more foot-dragging and self- and Joisan-flagellating than strictly necessary, Kerovan actually surrenders to the inevitable. He’s a sexual being, or a romantic one in Andre’s straitlaced terms, and his true lifemate is right there.

He really is nasty to her. But as I said, he has an excuse—more or less. And he makes up for it in the end. More or less. He’d better treat her right is all I can say.

Though that’s a story for another book. I am not going to discuss the collaborations for the most part, but Gryphon’s Eyrie was on sale when I happened to be checking ebook ads, and collaborator Ann Crispin was a dear friend and we miss her greatly—cancer took her far too soon. I’m going to do that reread next, to finish off the story of Joisan and Kerovan. Then off to the other tales of High Hallack.

Judith Tarr forayed into the Witch World with a novella, “Falcon Law,” in Four from the Witch World. Her first novel, The Isle of Glass, appeared in 1985. Her new short novel, Dragons in the Earth, a contemporary fantasy set in Arizona, was published last fall by Book View Cafe. In between, she’s written historicals and historical fantasies and epic fantasies and space operas, some of which have been published as ebooks from Book View Café. She has won the Crawford Award, and been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award and the Locus Award. She lives in Arizona with an assortment of cats, a blue-eyed spirit dog, and a herd of Lipizzan horses.

Entertainment Weekly has revealed an exclusive excerpt and the cover to John Scalzi’s Head On, a brand new story set in the same universe as 2014’s Lock In. Check out the cover art below!

Head On’s ‘exclusive excerpt is up on Entertainment Weekly, with a special intro from Scalzi himself! Head on over (haha, get it) to EW and check it out.

Head On hits shelves on April 17 , 2018.

After many long months of waiting, Star Trek: Discovery finally has a premiere date! Plug it into your calendars, friends and fans alike….

From the Discovery’s Twitter account came a cute little video revealing the date:

Yes! Let’s do this, autumn! We also have our first tiny peek at the Discovery itself, which was not present in the first series trailer….

The broadcast schedule is set to split the fifteen-episode season; the first eight episodes will air from September to November, with a short break around the holidays. Then the rest of the season will pick up in January 2018. If you can’t wait until fall, take a look at our breakdown of the first trailer.

Star Trek: Discovery will premiere Sunday, September 24th at 8:30pm on CBS and CBS All Access.

[Via io9]

The swashbuckling Arabella Ashby is back for a brand new adventure in the ongoing story of her life among the stars. Arabella and the Battle of Venus is available July 18th from Tor Books.

Arabella’s wedding plans to marry Captain Singh of the Honorable Mars Trading Company are interrupted when her fiancé is captured by the French and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp on swampy Venus. Now, Arabella must find passage to an enemy-controlled planet in the middle of a war, bribe or fight her way past vicious guards, and rescue her Captain. To do this she must enlist the help of the dashing privateer, Daniel Fox of the Touchstone and build her own clockwork navigational automaton in order to get to Venus before the dread French general, Joseph Fouché, the Executioner of Lyon.

Once on Venus, Arabella, Singh, and Fox soon discover that Napoleon has designed a secret weapon, one that could subjugate the entire galaxy if they can’t discover a way to stop Fouché, and the entire French army, from completing their emperor’s mandate.

Chapter 1
An Unexpected Letter

Arabella Ashby sat at the writing-desk which had been her father’s, and was now her brother’s, staring out across the endless ranks of khoresh-trees which were her inheritance, her livelihood, and her legacy. And also, at the moment, her greatest vexation.

The wood of the khoresh-tree, known to the English as “Marswood,” was at once the strongest and the lightest in weight of any in the solar system. It was this wood which composed the aerial ships of the Honorable Mars Company, of His Majesty’s Royal Navy, and even of the defeated tyrant Napoleon’s Marine Aérienne. Arabella’s family had been tending and harvesting these trees for generations—nearly as long as the English presence on Mars itself—and from her earliest girlhood she had climbed them, sported among them, picnicked in their shade. Yet it was only in the past few months, ever since her tumultuous return to Mars from Earth, that she had learned just how tedious their upkeep could be.

At the moment it was tokoleth-grubs which required Arabella’s attention. The grubs had infested the southern acreage, and on the desk before her lay two offers to eradicate them—one from a Martian firm, whose tame predators were reliable but came at a grotesquely high price, the other from Englishmen, whose novel chemicals were cheaper but might damage the trees—but her thoughts would not remain focused upon them. Instead, her eye kept drifting to the Fort Augusta Courier nearby, which proclaimed in large type: ASTONISHING EVENTS. ~ BONAPARTE ESCAPES MOON. ~ GREAT OGRE FLEES TO VENUS. Though the news was months old and tens of thousands of miles distant, it occupied her mind exceedingly.

She was still attempting to redirect her concentration to the tokoleth-grubs when Martha, her lady’s maid, entered. “Letter for you, ma’am,” she said.

Arabella took the letter—exceedingly battered, with evidence of the seal having been broken and replaced—and her heart leapt as she recognized the hand in which it was written. It was that of Captain Prakash Singh—the commander of the Honorable Mars Company airship Diana, and Arabella’s long-absent fiancé.

My dearest Arabella, it began, and as she read, it were as though his voice, low and steady, tinged with the subtle accent of India, and always supremely confident, breathed in her ear.

I regret exceedingly that I must inform you that, just as we were preparing to round Venus’s horn after a reasonably profitable call at Fort Wellington, Diana was intercepted by Résolution, a French aerial man-of-war of sixteen guns, and were compelled by superior force of arms to return to the planet’s surface. The ship and all her cargo and fittings, regrettably including Aadim, have been impounded, and her officers and company are being held as prisoners of war.

I am told that no exchange of prisoners is currently anticipated, and we may be required to remain here until the war’s end, which I devoutly hope will not be long. My officers and I have given our parole, as a matter of course, and are currently at liberty in the fortress town of Thuguguruk; the men are imprisoned in the ancient chateau above the town. I am doing what I can to make them as comfortable as possible.

Although some of the other prisoners have sent for their wives, I must insist that you remain on Mars. Conditions here are far from pleasant; the local food is atrocious, and the climate entirely inhospitable. At any rate, as we are not yet married, it would be both unseemly and contrary to my captors’ regulations for you to join me here.

Letters are, unfortunately, not permitted prisoners. I am not without resources, however, and I have induced one of our Venusian gaolers to smuggle this missive to the nearest English settlement, from which I hope it will reach you without undue delay. I will attempt to write to you as often as I may.

Please know that you are ever in my thoughts.

Your most devoted

Captain Singh

Captain Singh was the most intelligent, the bravest, and the most honorable man Arabella had ever known. From the very moment she had met him—she had been in disguise as a boy at the time, and mere moments from signing on with the Royal Navy—he had treated her with the utmost decency and respect, and had saved her life on that occasion and many times since. She, in her turn, had lied to him—a necessary deception as to her sex, which had been the only way to obtain rapid passage from Earth to her birthplace on Mars—but had served faithfully as his captain’s boy. In those tumultuous months she had worked diligently at her duties, fought a battle with a French corsair, nursed the captain when he was sick, and even helped to break a mutiny before her deception had been revealed. But despite her duplicity, he had shared with her his personal history and the secrets of Aadim, his automaton navigator, and they had grown close. So close, in fact, that when her brother Michael, grievously injured, insisted that she marry immediately in order to insure the continuity of the estate in case of his death, the captain had been her first and only thought. The captain—and Aadim—had agreed, in what must surely be the strangest proposal in the history of romance.

But before the wedding could be performed, he had been called away to Venus on urgent Company business. His eagerly anticipated return, and the nuptials which would follow, had been delayed by months—months of silence from the captain, accompanied by increasingly distressing news of the monster Bonaparte’s resurgence. Her nineteenth birthday had come and gone without the slightest word from him. And now this letter had arrived.

The letter’s flimsy, crumpled paper trembled in Arabella’s hand as she read it over a second time and then a third, searching in vain for some particle of hope therein. Surely there must be some mistake! Surely he had already been released, and was even now making his way back to Mars! But no matter how hard she stared at her fiancé’s firm, even handwriting, no matter how tightly her fingers gripped the paper, no succor could be found.

Her husband-to-be was a prisoner of war.

This matter could not be allowed to stand.

Arabella was just rising from her seat when the door opened, admitting her brother Michael. Still wearing the large floppy hat and fur-lined leather coat which were his habitual garments when riding the plantation’s boundaries, he rushed to her as quickly as he could, his crutch thumping on the floor-boards. The wrappings on the stump of his leg, she noted automatically, were due for changing.

“I am informed,” he gasped as he clumped across the floor, “that you have received a letter from Venus.”

Wordlessly, she held out the letter, the expression on her face forestalling any further questions. He read quickly, then let his hand drop, the letter rattling against his thigh and his eyes filling with solicitude. “Oh, dear Arabella…”

“Do not be concerned for me,” she said, though her voice trembled. “So long as my captain is alive and healthy, I will be well.”

“You are very pale, Sister. Pray take a seat, and I will send for lureth-water.”

She sank back into her chair—realizing as she struck the seat how weak her knees had become—and watched numbly as Michael moved to the bell-pull in the corner. Lureth-water would help, she supposed, though what she truly craved at the moment was a full ration of good Navy grog. “If only those fools on the Moon,” she muttered, half to herself, “had managed to keep Bonaparte locked up.”

At the end of the War of the Sixth Coalition, Napoleon had been completely defeated, forced to abdicate and sent into exile on the far side of the Moon. But after less than a year of exile he had somehow managed to escape, decamping to Venus with a substantial contingent of soldiers and airmen. No one seemed quite certain why he had chosen that planet rather than returning in triumph to Paris, from which King Louis had already fled with an army at his heels, but there Napoleon was—he had already taken the Venusian continent of Gomoluk, and seemed quite intent on taking the entire planet.

Martha returned, with a pitcher and two glasses on a tray. Arabella sipped at hers without tasting. “I do not understand,” her brother said, “why the Company sent your fiancé to Venus at all, under these conditions!”

“Nor do I.” She drummed her fingers on the table, then rose and paced to the window. “But he assured me, before he left, that his assignment was of the utmost importance.” The khoresh-trees stretched to the horizon, rank on rank, like the tall masts of so many aerial clippers. They reminded her of the scene at the docks in London, where she had met her husband-to-be for the first time.

Arabella turned and strode toward the bell-pull. “I shall go into town, and importune the Company and the government to intercede on his behalf.” But before she could reach it, Michael stayed her with a touch on her arm.

“Pray do not disquiet yourself, Sister,” he said. “I am sure they are already doing all that they can.”

She paused momentarily, then continued to the corner and gave the embroidered ribbon a firm tug. “Perhaps. But if there is any thing which can be done to encourage them to further action, I intend to discover it and do it.”

His Excellency General the Honorable Sir Northcote Parkinson, Governor-General of the Presidency of Fort Augusta, proved to be a frail old man who affected an old-fashioned powdered wig. “My dear girl,” he said after the preliminaries had been discharged, “I am afraid that the situation is far more complicated than you imagine.”

Arabella sat rigidly on a stiff high-backed chair, wearing her best gown—finest Venusian silk, luminous white, trimmed in ribbons of pomona green—with gloved fingers knotted in her lap. Weeks of supplication, insistence, and pure unalloyed obstinacy… visit after visit to first Company House and then Government House… had finally obtained her an audience with the Governor-General himself, one of the most powerful men in the entire Honorable Mars Company, and His Majesty’s representative on Mars. She had not expected him to be so thin and stooped.

A drop of perspiration trickled down the back of Arabella’s neck, and she shifted in her chair. A robust fire roared in every fire-place of Government House, for the comfort of the English, but for her part she found the heat oppressive.

Lord Parkinson adjusted his pince-nez upon his nose. “You are aware, of course, that a state of war does not at this time exist between the governments of England and France.”

“Of course, Your Excellency. But as my fiancé is being held as a prisoner of war by the French…”

He silenced her with an upheld index finger. “Officially he, along with the other English subjects unfortunate enough to have been in Gomoluk when Napoleon captured the territory, are not prisoners of war but détenus, or hostages. Many of these are prominent landholders, Company factors, and other significant individuals. Even my own counterpart on Venus, Lord Castlemare the Governor-General of the Presidency of Gomoluk, is being held under house arrest. And their fortunes, their safety, indeed their very lives, are the subject of negotiations being held even now at the very highest level.” He removed his pince-nez, closed his eyes, and shook his head with weary resignation. “For the Company to intervene at this delicate moment, even indirectly, would be considered an act of war.”

“But Napoleon has already—!”

Again he silenced her, this time by patting the air between them. “I understand your perspective, but please do hear me out. It may appear to you that Napoleon has already initiated hostilities, by taking control of territory under Company jurisdiction. But it is important to understand the distinction between the Company and the Government.” He folded his hands primly upon the desk before him. “You were born and raised on Mars, I collect?”

Arabella seethed at the Governor’s condescension, but fought to keep her temper in check. Displays of strong emotion had already set her back several times in her long struggle to reach this point. “I was, Your Excellency.”

“Then all your life you have understood John Company to be the government, and the government to be the Company. We even wage war against the local satraps and principalities. But the Company rules Mars and Venus—portions of Venus, I should say—only as representative of His Majesty and His Majesty’s government back home. And only the king himself may declare war upon another sovereign power.”

“By which you mean France.”

“By which I mean France.”

“But Napoleon is not Emperor of France,” Arabella insisted. “He was deposed by the Sénat after the capture of Paris! Is mere escape from captivity sufficient to transform a criminal into an emperor?”

“Perhaps not. But the loyalty of his marshals, generals, and admirals… may very well be.” He spread his delicate white hands in a gesture of resignation. “As I have said, the situation is complicated.”

Arabella bit her lip, to prevent an unseemly comment from escaping. “But surely some diplomatic solution…”

“Please do rest assured that the Company is already doing every thing in its power to bring Diana and her company safely home.” His watery blue eyes above the pince-nez met hers levelly.

“Which you may not describe in more detail.”

“Regrettably.” But his face and voice betrayed no regret at all, only annoyance at her importunity.

At that moment an aide appeared and whispered rapidly into the Governor-General’s ear. Immediately the great man rose, saying “Unfortunately, my presence is required elsewhere.”

“I thank you, Your Excellency, for your kind attention.” Her tone, she thought, was sufficiently civil for propriety; she took what pride she could in that small accomplishment.

“Your servant, Miss,” he replied mechanically, but his eyes and thoughts were already directed elsewhere. He cleared his desk of papers, stuffing them hurriedly in a drawer, and then he and the aide departed, conferring urgently between themselves.

She remained in her chair for some time, breathing hard through her nose, lips tightly pursed… for she had not failed to note that, though the Governor-General had removed his private papers from the desk, he had not taken the time to lock it. Perhaps it had been due to the haste of his departure, or perhaps he had not thought of a young woman as any kind of threat—or, indeed, worthy of any consideration at all.

For a moment she hesitated. Then, glancing all about, she stepped to the other side of the desk and pulled open the drawer.

Most of the papers therein were meaningless or pedestrian. But one—a brief note, hastily scrawled, dated the previous Tuesday—struck Arabella like a thunderbolt. Talleyrand has recalled Savary to Paris, it said, for insufficient severity. His replacement, Fouché, departs Paris for Venus on Indomptable, sailing at the full moon.

In recent weeks she had studied the gazettes assiduously for any news of the war. Talleyrand, she had learned, was Napoleon’s chief diplomat, who had taken charge in Paris on Napoleon’s behalf after the departure of King Louis, and Savary was Napoleon’s minister of police—and, as such, the man responsible for the treatment of prisoners of war, including her husband-to-be. From all accounts he was a man of honor. But Fouché, known as “The Executioner of Lyon,” was an entirely different matter. During the Terror he had dispatched hundreds; his methods were brutal even by the standards of that horrific time. It was said that at Nantes he would take the poor unfortunate Royalists out on the river, tie them in pairs, male and female, and drown them together, calling this Le Marriage de Nantes.

Arabella had to bite her knuckle to prevent herself from crying out. Even so, a gasp escaped from her.

“What’s that?” came a voice from without, accompanied by the sound of footsteps.

Panicked, Arabella stuffed the paper back into the drawer and pushed it closed. Then she ran, half-blinded by tears, from the room and down the corridors, ignoring the concerns of those she passed. Once she achieved the cool air outside Government House she paused, gasping, hands on knees. The back of her fine dress was soaked with perspiration.

Fouché—the “Executioner of Lyon”—was to replace the honorable Savary as her captain’s gaoler. And he would be sailing for Venus within the month… might already have departed.

What might such a monster do to a prisoner accused of espionage?

A solicitous older couple soon approached her, asking what was the matter. She quickly straightened, doing what she could to put her face and dress in order, and explained that she had received some bad news but was in no need of further assistance. She curtseyed, not meeting the strangers’ eyes, then hurried down the steps, bound for the tea-house where Martha and Gowse awaited her.

But as she began to cross the street, the bells of the clock on the tower of Company House across the way drew her attention.

The Company House orrery clock was one of the greatest treasures of the town of Fort Augusta, and the clock tower had been among the first structures repaired following the end of the recent insurrection. The clock itself had only recently been put back into working order, and its precious metals and gemstones shone in the late-afternoon sun. The mechanism behind it, she knew from having once had the privilege of viewing it with her father, was still more impressive—the ingenuity of its brass and steel was far more valuable to her than any gold or platinum frippery.

As befitted Company House, the administrative headquarters of the Honorable Mars Company for the entire Martian territory of St. George’s Land, the clock told not only the time but the positions of the Company’s planets in their orbits, indicated by jeweled spheres which ran in tracks surrounding the clock face. From the center of the dial, a smiling Sun’s polished golden rays spread to touch the planets which danced attendance about him. Venus, the innermost planet displayed, glowed green with emeralds; next came Earth, sparkling blue and white with sapphires and diamonds; and finally Mars, the outermost, gleamed with the red of rubies and garnets. Beyond the planets, the symbols of the constellations were set into the stone wall in burnished brass.

As the last notes of the hour echoed into silence, Arabella noticed that green Venus and red Mars were in conjunction in Leo—both near five o’clock on the clock dial—while blue-and-white Earth orbited in splendid isolation in Capricorn, near ten o’clock.

The jeweled planets, she knew, were grossly exaggerated in size, and their orbital tracks were not entirely to scale. But the positions of the planets within their orbits were as accurate as clockwork could make them, and from her work in maintaining and running Aadim, Diana’s automaton navigator, she knew that could be very accurate indeed. And as the clock had been so recently set in motion, she was certain those positions would be correct.

If she raised one hand, fingers spread, she could span the distance from Mars to Venus with ease. But from Earth to Venus—the distance that must be traversed by the French vessel Indomptable bearing the executioner Fouché—was many times farther, and the need for the ship to avoid the Sun’s great heat made the voyage longer still.

She could beat him there. If she left immediately, she could arrive at Venus before Fouché.

What she would do when she arrived… she knew not. But she must make the attempt.

Chapter 2
No Time to Lose

The huresh-coach rattled along, Gowse driving the scuttling creatures forward with more than usual haste. One look at Arabella’s face had shown him her urgency, her need to leave town and return to Woodthrush Woods as quickly as possible.

Quite contrary to propriety, Arabella rode atop the coach next to her huresh-groom and former shipmate. The cool air whipping through her hair suited her desire for immediate action, and it served to revive her after the stifling warmth of Government House.

One of the team began to pull to the side—it was Nimrod, a scarlet-shelled buck with a strong will—but with a cluck of his tongue and a quick lash of the reins against Nimrod’s carapace, Gowse brought the beast back into line. For a human, born and raised on Earth, Gowse had a remarkable facility with huresh. “They’s no different from horses,” he liked to say, “apart from the eight legs and the looking like giant beetles.”

Gowse was a huge, burly airman with broad shoulders and the enormous calves typical of those who strain at the pedals to propel their craft across the airy spaces between the planets. His unlovely face was marred by a badly broken nose—an injury which Arabella herself had inflicted, in a fair fight, earning for herself Gowse’s respect and loyalty. So much so, in fact, that when Diana had departed for Venus he had chosen to remain on Mars and join the staff at Woodthrush Woods.

As they pulled through the plantation’s gate—which still bore the scars of the insurrectionists’ forked spears—Gowse slowed the team from its headlong pace so as not to startle any of the servants or animals. With the rush of wind and the rattle of wheels somewhat stilled, and the storm of difficult sentiments that had been clogging her throat somewhat abated, Arabella found herself able to converse.

“I have had some news about the captain,” she said after a long hesitation. “Though I must confess it did not reach my ears through any official channels.”

Gowse gave her a sidelong glance. “Not good news, I’ll warrant.”

She shook her head, unsurprised by Gowse’s comment—her sullen silence and downcast expression on boarding the coach would have made the character of her news quite clear—nor by his bluntness. “It seems that Napoleon’s chief gaoler on Venus is to be replaced, and his replacement is a man called Fouché.”

“The Executioner of Lyon?” Gowse’s expression darkened.

“You have heard of him?”

“Every airman’s heard of him, Miss Ashby. Master gunners frighten their powder-monkeys with tales of Fouché’s cruelty. When he was minister of police during the war, even cowards’d fight to the death rather’n be taken as prisoners under his tender mercies. Even Bonaparte’s afraid of him.”

Arabella felt her own mouth tightening to match Gowse’s sour expression. “Then there is no time to be lost.”

He quirked an eyebrow at her.

She leaned in close. “Venus and Mars are in conjunction. To reach Venus, Fouché’s ship will be forced to take the long route around the Sun, but the distance from Mars is much less. If I were to depart immediately, I could easily reach Venus before he does—as much as several months earlier. Time enough to devise some stratagem to free the captain from his imprisonment.”

The carriage pulled up in front of the manor house then, and the stable-boys came running out to unhitch the huresh. “Won’t be easy to find passage to Venus,” Gowse said as he assisted Arabella down from the carriage, “what with Napoleon and all. But I’ll ask around and see what’s in port.”

“Thank you, Gowse. I appreciate your assistance.”

“Nothin’ I wouldn’t do for an old shipmate,” he replied, and winked.

“Absolutely not!” Michael fumed, his eye fixed firmly on Arabella.

At this moment, she thought, her brother resembled their late father more strongly than ever before… but with an admixture of their mother’s intransigence. Yet she knew what she must do, and she would not be stayed from her course.

They were alone in Michael’s office. Father’s collection of automata still adorned the high shelf behind the desk, all tidily dusted and polished, but hardly ever wound—a fact which caused Arabella some pain. Michael had never participated in the passion for automata which she had shared with her father, and now that the office was her brother’s demesne those meticulously crafted devices stood motionless, nothing more than expensive knickknacks. The automaton dancer, in particular, whose mainspring Arabella had broken in an excess of zeal as a young girl, seemed to look down in silent rebuke.

Arabella knew just how valuable a properly designed and maintained automaton could be. If not for Aadim, Diana’s automaton navigator, she might not be alive to-day, and certainly would not be engaged to be married.

“I will not be dissuaded,” she replied, returning his stare evenly.

“In the first place, we are very nearly in a state of war with France. For all I know, war may already have been declared! For you to take ship at all under these circumstances, let alone to the disputed territory of Venus, is sheer folly!”

“The air is very large. On my last voyage, as you know, we were also at war, and Diana encountered only one French privateer, which we defeated.” It had been a very near thing, to be sure, but she saw no need to mention that.

“In the second place, you are needed here.” He gestured impatiently at the stub of his leg. “You know that I cannot survey the grounds and supervise the caretakers as I should.”

“But you are improving every day! Dr. Fellowes assures me that you should be sufficiently recovered to ride huresh-back in a month or less. Until then, Markath can be your eyes and ears on the grounds. I know that you trust him implicitly.”

“He is very good,” Michael acknowledged. “But he is only a Martian, and your particular skills—your rapport with the servants, your methodical care with the books, a thousand other things—are invaluable in the running of the estate.”

“You flatter me, dear brother, but you and I both know that Khema is ten times as valuable as I.” Khema had been Arabella and Michael’s itkhalya, or Martian nanny, when they had been children, and had taught them the ways of the desert and all things Martian. She had been instrumental in quelling the rebellion, and now served as the plantation’s majordomo. “Nothing whatsoever would be accomplished on this estate without her. In fact, during the rebellion, when she alone was responsible for the estate, every thing ran smoothly… despite the violence all around! I dare say that neither you nor I could have done as well.”

Michael pursed his lips, neither conceding her point nor offering any thing to gainsay it. “In the third place,” he said after a time, “even if I were so foolish as to allow you to travel to Venus, what could you possibly accomplish there? Surely the assistance of one young woman, even one so formidable as yourself, cannot make any difference against the massed might of Bonaparte’s forces.” He drew himself heavily from his chair and clumped across the floor with his crutch, then took her hand gently in his. “The captain is brave and very resourceful for a man of his race.”

Arabella glared at her brother. Although he had acceded to her betrothal to Captain Singh, he had never been completely comfortable with the captain’s color, accent, or religion. “For a man of any race.”

He acknowledged her correction by ducking his head and raising his hands, palms spread. “All the more reason for us to be certain that if any thing can be done to effect his release, he will do it. Nothing can be gained by you risking your life in such a foolhardy manner.”

Arabella straightened. “I have been reading the Naval Chronicle, in which are accounted the experiences of many English officers who escaped Napoleon’s European prisons during the recent land wars. Though many brave men managed to depart the prison itself through their own resources, most were recaptured before they reached neutral territory. Most of the successful escapes—those in which the escapees actually returned to England—were made possible only through the instrumentality of paid agents in the neighboring villages, on terms arranged by the fugitive’s friends at home.”

“I fail to see how this is relevant.”

“Let me put it to you plain: successful escape from Napoleon’s prisons requires help from outside—local guides, accommodations, forged papers, and, if necessary, even bribery. During the European wars, locals opposed to Napoleon were well known to the English, and payment and instructions for their services had only to be conveyed over the short distance from England to France. But in this case, our knowledge of the situation on Venus is extremely limited and the distance is very much greater. To obtain the equivalent assistance would require months and months—months Captain Singh does not have—and the chance that payment and instructions would be intercepted en route is very great. To ensure success I must voyage to Venus myself, and as soon as possible, in order to arrange and fund his escape from close at hand.”

“You have done your research,” he acknowledged grudgingly. “But I still cannot countenance such an adventure.”

“I am sorry,” she said, and cupped Michael’s hand in both her own, “my dearest brother, but this is a thing I must do.”

Michael drew his hand from hers and turned to the window, where rank on rank of khoresh-trees marched to the horizon. He stood in that contemplative pose for a long time before turning back to her. “You are a most vexing young woman, you know.” But his face bore a slight, whimsical smile.

“I know,” she replied, feeling her own mouth curve into a matching expression.

He blew out a breath. “As your brother, I could forbid you to go. But you and I both know that, even if I did so, you would do whatever you wish regardless. I suppose I have no choice but to accede to your request.”

She embraced him then, but her inward feelings bore no taste of triumph… rather, her sentiments combined concern for her captain, love for her brother, and anxious anticipation over events to come. “Thank you,” she breathed in his ear.

They held each other a moment longer; then he straightened awkwardly, nearly dropping his crutch in the process, and stumped to the desk. “You will require funds,” he said, seating himself and bringing out the ledger-book from its locked drawer. “I will instruct our banker to furnish you with a letter of note. Will five hundred pounds suffice, do you think?”

The astonishing figure made her breath catch in her throat, emphasizing as it did the gravity of the task before her. It was, she knew, a very substantial fraction of the plantation’s income, and equivalent to a year’s living—a very comfortable year’s living—for many a smaller landholder. Yet she knew from her readings that passage, paraphernalia, and influence—bribery, to be blunt—were all necessary for a successful escape, and could be extremely expensive. “I should hope that it would be,” she said at last. Then, considering, she added, “Be sure to instruct him to make certain that it is payable at Venus.”

He paused, tapping the pen upon his chin. “What currency do they employ there?”

“I…” She swallowed. “I do not know.”

They looked at each other for a long moment, both very much aware of how many unknown considerations stood between Arabella and her captain.

Then he took out a sheet of paper and began to write.

Excerpted from Arabella and the Battle of Venus, copyright © 2017 by David D. Levine.

Someone—I honestly don’t remember who—gave me some writing advice early on in my career, and it stemmed from a George Orwell quote: “Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane.” The idea behind this statement, as far as this advice went, was that prose should simply be the vehicle by which you convey character and story—it should be as unassuming and inconspicuous as possible in order to focus on what really matters.

Well, like just about every piece of advice in writing, I’ve come to trust that “rule” about as far as I can throw it (which, considering it’s a metaphysical concept, is not far?). There’s certainly truth to it, but I’ve found that at least for me, reality is fraught with nuance.

The idea of prose as a windowpane just seems restrictive to me. I like to think of prose more in terms of a good camera lens. I’m no photography expert, but I know a little bit about the topic, and there are, well, a lot of ways to adjust the settings on a photograph, from aperture and exposure to shutter speed, color, depth of field, and many, many more. All of these tools can help make a photograph look better, enhance certain aspects, subdue others, make it brighter, darker, and so forth.

I think prose can do the same thing for a story.

One of my favorite novels of all time is Alden Bell’s The Reapers are the Angels. The story follows a young girl named Temple as she navigates a post-apocalyptic zombie wasteland, and I’m not exaggerating when I say not only is it the best zombie novel I’ve ever read, it’s a serious contender for the best novel period. It’s … pretty fantastic. Like most good zombie tales, the “slugs,” or “meatskins,” as they’re referred to in Reapers, take a back seat to far more frightening, and often far more human, monsters.

But what really impressed me about Bell’s novel, and what really made me love it, was the prose. Let’s just look at the opening few paragraphs:

God is a slick god. Temple knows. She knows because of all the crackerjack miracles still to be seen on this ruined globe.

Like those fish all disco-lit in the shallows. That was something, a marvel with no compare that she’s been witness to. It was deep night when she saw it, but the moon was so bright it cast hard shadows everywhere on the island. So bright it was almost brighter than daytime because she could see things clearer, as if the sun were criminal to the truth, as if her eyes were eyes of night. She left the lighthouse and went down to the beach to look at the moon pure and straight, and she stood in the shallows and let her feet sink into the sand as the patter-waves tickled her ankles. And that’s when she saw it, a school of tiny fish, all darting around like marbles in a chalk circle, and they were all lit up electric, mostly silver but some gold and pink too. They came and danced around her ankles, and she could feel their little electric fish bodies, and it was like she was standing under the moon and in the moon at the same time. And that was something she hadn’t seen before. A decade and a half, thereabouts, roaming the planet earth, and she’d never seen that before. […]

See, God is a slick god. He makes it so you don’t miss out on nothing you’re suppose to witness first hand. (3-4)

Those paragraphs hooked me, and didn’t let go. The prose is anything but transparent here—in fact, the character’s voice is so intertwined with the prose that it’s almost impossible to separate the two. I’d argue that the prose in Reapers is so powerful and so present that it effectively becomes a manifestation of Temple herself. The prose in Reapers is a living, breathing thing, with its own cadence, slang, its own ticks and its own tricks.

Temple acknowledges the power of words, and I don’t think it’s by accident that it comes early in the novel: “…she knows that words have the power to make things true if they’re said right” (11). Prose does have that power, and it helps me to acknowledge that power as a storyteller. Sometimes I want my prose with #nofilter; I want it to be as clean and transparent as possible so I can get to the heart of whatever is at the story. Other times, however, I need heightened prose, with elaborate imagery and a strong, distinctive character voice, because it will enhance whatever is at the heart of the story. It’s like, I dunno, freaking cybernetic implants for my story. It may look a little strange, it may take some getting used to, but I’ll be damned if the enhancements they offer don’t outweigh their wonkiness.

Reapers is awesome because it’s a story about faith, love, and beauty, and it tackles all of those subjects in the most dreary, horrifying setting possible. But despite the mangled, tattered world in which she lives, Temple’s hope and positivity are conveyed most powerfully through the prose style itself. It’s just…it’s just beautiful, ya’ll. If you haven’t read this book, you need to. If you have read it, go read it again.

Framing and lenses matter. How we tell a story matters. And with The Reapers are the Angels, Alden Bell not only tells a story that matters, he tells it in a way that matters, too. Temple notes part way through the novel, as she and a companion come across a museum, how important beauty is in the world, and how subjective it is to the eye of the beholder: “This is art … these things have gotta last a million years so people in the future know about us. So they can look and see what we knew about beauty” (118).

As readers, we get to see what Temple knows about beauty through the apotheosis of the novel’s prose, as it becomes Temple herself. We also get to see hints of what Alden Bell knows about beauty, too, in how he crafts that prose and Temple’s character. I sincerely hope that The Reapers are the Angels lasts a million years into the future, so people can see this specific form of beauty.

Christopher Husberg was born in Alaska and studied at Brigham Young University, where he went on to teach creative writing. His debut novel, Duskfall, was published in 2016, and was described as “Perfect for fans of Daniel Abraham and Brandon Sanderson” by Library Journal. His new novel, Dark Immolation, is available June 20th from Titan Books. He lives with his wife in Lehi, Utah.

The Warrior’s Apprentice got me into the Vorkosigan Saga, but Brothers in Arms got me hooked. I don’t want to get too bogged down in the literary analysis here—these are the chapters where Miles proves that he can show us a real good time. I’m not sure he proves that he can show Elli a real good time, but I’m good.

REMINDERS

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

SUMMARY

The Dendarii set fire to a liquor store, and Miles and Elli go on a date.

COMMENTARY

OH YEAH, IT’S THOSE CHAPTERS. If you have ever recommended this series to anyone, it’s likely that you had this sequence in mind when you did. A lot of writers would take these two set pieces and spread them out across a larger number of chapters. Bujold is not afraid to spend her comedic genius.

Chapter 3 starts with Miles explaining his personal background, and his relationship to Ivan, to the wife of the Lord Mayor of London at a diplomatic reception. Why is Miles even at a diplomatic reception? He was ordered to be by his superior officer, who would like him to make pleasant conversation, charm guests, and report back on anything interesting he hears. Galeni has uttered kind words about Ivan’s aptitude for this work. Galeni would also like to keep Miles off the streets. But as the reception is winding down, Miles gets an emergency call from Elli. Some of the Dendarii are holed up in a liquor store, and the police are responding. Miles is the closest Dendarii officer. So obviously, he changes into his Dendarii uniform, and gets Ivan to help camouflage his exit from the reception. They deploy a pretty girl against the guards, and they both roll 20 for diversion. Sylveth is the attractive daughter of the Lord Mayor of London. She has silver-blonde hair, a color I am sure I would know if I ever saw it but really can’t imagine. Her character development doesn’t get a lot of attention here, so I’m going to speculate that she is deeply interested in galactic diplomacy with a focus on industry, innovation, and infrastructure, and she’s planning a career in civil engineering. In her spare time, she’s a recreational biathlete. Nice to meet you, Sylveth—thanks for your help with the door!

Bujold neglects Sylveth because we are following Miles, who is headed towards the drunken Dendarii and the liquor store where they have holed up. Miles tries to downplay the situation with the London Metropolitan Police, but they aren’t having any—the Dendarii have taken a hostage. So. That’s not great. Danio seems to be the ringleader. He’s got a pistol with notches on it for each time he kills someone. Xaveria is along for the ride. He distinguished himself at Dagoola. Somehow. They have a third companion who has a name, and who is completely out of his head—Miles thinks he’s been combining his alcohol with something else. That seems plausible. There seems to have been a little problem with credit cards that prevented the boys from acquiring more liquor in a legal and approved kind of way, and being very very drunk, they responded with weapons drawn. The hostage—the shopkeeper—has been tied up with Xaveria’s pants; The Dendarii certainly are resourceful. Miles talks them into surrendering peacefully and walks them outside to the police. A nice night’s work for the Little Admiral! But then the shop bursts into flames. Miles runs back inside to rescue the shopkeeper (still tied up). This leads to the exciting television coverage of Miles running out of the liquor store with his uniform on fire. It’s on, like, ALL the channels.

Television coverage is a notable feature of the Vorkosigan series on two other occasions—once when Cordelia kicks Steady Freddie, and once when Jole’s shirt catches fire in a hail of flaming leeches. Miles’s dramatic exit from the liquor store holds its own.

Miles now needs a clean uniform. And he needs to figure out what went wrong with the credit cards. He needs to be on his own ship, in orbit. Elli, freshly arrived on Earth’s surface, takes Miles and heads back to the Ariel. Items of plot significance here:

• Miles’s fleet surgeon treats his muscle spasm with the GOOD drugs. Miles is kind of high for the rest of the night. Not Danio’s-third-party-friend high. But high.
• Miles meets with his accountant.

I’m just a humble history teacher, and all I know about accounting is that the guy who invented double-entry bookkeeping was probably also Leonardo Da Vinci’s lover. But I do KNOW some accountants, and my sister offered some unsolicited thoughts on Vicky Bone’s standards and practices. Apparently, what Ms. Bone is proposing to do with concealing outstanding liens, ownership, and depreciation to use the Ariel as collateral for a loan violates some rules. We speculate that the rules might be different on Jackson’s Whole, which is where the Dendarii are chartered out of. Anyway, Miles and Vicky agree on a highly questionable plan of action that involves lying to a lot of people in order to address the Dendarii’s financial liabilities. It’s fun to charter an accountant.

And with that settled, Miles and Elli go on a date. Shopping!

QUESTIONS YOU SHOULD ASK BEFORE GOING ON A DATE WITH LT. LORD MILES NAISMITH VORKOSIGAN:

• Can you provide security at the same time?
• Do you have a breath mint? What about a safe house?
• How is your checking account balance?
• Are you rated for heavy ordnance?
• What will you say if he asks you to marry him?

Back in the moment, Elli is entranced by a cat blanket, which she wants to rub all over her skin. It’s “the very latest in biomechanical feedback systems” which is to say IT’S ALIVE. Miles almost buys Elli the cat blanket, but wouldn’t you know, he’s left his wallet in his other pants. Elli has to buy it for herself. He sure knows how to show a girl a good time. Elli isn’t bothered. Probably because IT’S THE BEST CAT BLANKET. People, I am not at all safe around the consumer goods of the Galactic Nexus. I’m riding around in my force bubble float chair with my mini-unicorn and my cat blanket. We live on butterbug milkshakes. No milkshakes for the cat blanket, obviously—you recharge that in a microwave at low power. You’re jealous.

Miles is entranced by Elli. There’s some kissing in a float tube (Miles thinks of Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”—WHOSE VIRGINITY WILL THE WORMS BE TRYING, MILES?) and a lot more kissing in the street car. How high is Miles? At one point, he thinks he hallucinates his Barrayaran uniform on his reflection. HOW WEIRD IS THAT? He chalks it up to the drugs. I know I said these were the good drugs, but the Dendarii surgeon is not handing out anything with street value for muscle spasms, even to the Admiral. HI MARK!!! Somehow, in the chaos, Miles winds up going home with the cat blanket that Elli bought.

In one of the most stunning romantic letdowns in literature, Miles wakes up in the morning to find that he is being strangled by the cat blanket. Underwear-clad Ivan, toothbrush in mouth, pets it while echoing the words Elli used—“You want to rub it all over your skin!” What does this reveal?

• The cat blanket has universal appeal, even though it seems like it might eat people in their sleep.
• The embassy has Miles and Ivan sharing a room. That sounds dangerous.
• Miles leads a hard life, rife with sexual frustration.

Bujold closes the loop for us with another diplomatic reception, at which Miles encounters a reporter from the liquor store incident and makes up a cover story about Admiral Naismith being his clone. He is confident that everyone will be pleased with this.

Next week, Miles is going to propose to Elli, which is exactly as fantastic a plan as you think it is. He’s also going to apply for a loan, and someone is going to try to smoosh him with a cargo container.

Ellen Cheeseman-Meyer teaches history and reads a lot.

Welcome to The Protectorate, the dominant nation upon Ea for centuries; a land where naga float upon the horizon and where machinery fights with magic for primacy.

Readers will get to fully explore this fantasy in September 2017, when Tor.com Publishing releases JY Yang’s dual novellas The Red Threads of Fortune and The Black Tides of Heaven. Our story begins as a set of twins, one who can see the future and one who can realize the present, is born to the Protector. Each novella follows one of the twins as their lives become entangled with the larger forces of their world.

Here, author JY Yang reveals the land that the twins will be winding through, revealing the glorious history and deep schisms of the Protectorate.

Art by Yuko Shimizu

From The Black Tides of Heaven:

Mokoya and Akeha, the twin children of the Protector, were sold to the Grand Monastery as children. While Mokoya developed her strange prophetic gift, Akeha was always the one who could see the strings that moved adults to action. While his sister received visions of what would be, Akeha realized what could be. What’s more, he saw the sickness at the heart of his mother’s Protectorate.

A rebellion is growing. The Machinists discover new levers to move the world every day, while the Tensors fight to put them down and preserve the power of the state. Unwilling to continue to play a pawn in his mother’s twisted schemes, Akeha leaves the Tensorate behind and falls in with the rebels. But every step Akeha takes towards the Machinists is a step away from his sister Mokoya. Can Akeha find peace without shattering the bond he shares with his twin sister?

Art by Yuko Shimizu

Meanwhile, in The Red Threads of Fortune:

Fallen prophet, master of the elements, and daughter of the supreme Protector, Sanao Mokoya has abandoned the life that once bound her. Once her visions shaped the lives of citizens across the land, but no matter what tragedy Mokoya foresaw, she could never reshape the future. Broken by the loss of her young daughter, she now hunts deadly, sky-obscuring naga in the harsh outer reaches of the kingdom with packs of dinosaurs at her side, far from everything she used to love.

On the trail of a massive naga that threatens the rebellious mining city of Bataanar, Mokoya meets the mysterious and alluring Rider. But all is not as it seems: the beast they both hunt harbors a secret that could ignite war throughout the Protectorate. As she is drawn into a conspiracy of magic and betrayal, Mokoya must come to terms with her extraordinary and dangerous gifts, or risk losing the little she has left to hold dear.

Yang explains their initial map of The Protectorate and the Lands Beyond:

• This is a Protectorate-centric map of Ea, focusing on the regions where the Protector holds power. Obviously, there’s more stuff in regions like Gaur Antam and Tiguman, but the map doesn’t show them. The map shows only the major waterways and cities.
• The yellow highlighter line shows the boundaries of the Protectorate. The dashed lines are the boundaries between countries.
• A bit more of the history to explain the color coding:
• The dark yellow regions encompass Kuanjin and Tesugi, which have been the core of the Protectorate for many centuries.
• The light yellow region includes the Gusai desert and tundra, and has historically been very sparsely populated.
• The orange/yellow region is Nam Min, which has been a vassal state of the Protectorate for nearly 600 years, but was annexed and declared part of Kuanjin only 50 years ago.
• The green region is Katau Kebang, which is an autonomous region consisting of several small kingdoms ruled by a Sultan, who is in turn subordinate to the Protector. They have a certain amount of control over their own affairs, but pay taxes to the Protectorate.

With this sketch, and a detailed outline including a breakdown of names for every region, mountain range, river, and feature from Yang, artist Serena Malyon assembled a fully realized world map for the Tensorate Series:

There are some historical aspects to the Protectorate and the Lands Beyond that didn’t make it into the map, but are important to note. From Yang:

• The Mengsua Pass (upper right quadrant of the map) was constructed by Tensors between the cities of Jixiang and Ruyi. It follows one of the tributaries of the Jingpai river for a bit.
• El Zaharad is a pair of barren islands full of ruins of the once-great Zaharadi empire, that existed thousands of years ago. For reasons lost to history, the soil on the islands became heavily saturated with toxic metals and killed 90% of the wildlife there. No one lives there now.
• The Quarterlands: This is a half-gravity region of the world, not very well mapped. Nobody knows what goes on there.
• “Great Storms”: Exactly what it says on the lid.

The Red Threads of Fortune and The Black Tides of Heaven arrive on September 26, 2017.

When I say “monster,” what do you think about? Frankenstein’s monster? Dracula? The creature from the Black Lagoon? Maybe even Cookie Monster… When we hear that word, we tend to think of monsters from movies or television shows (even when they began as literary characters), and most of the time, they are male. But some of my favorite monsters are female, and most of them have not yet appeared on the big or small screen. They aren’t as numerous as the male monsters, but they are just as interesting.

What is a monster, anyway? We tend to associate the monstrous with the ugly, evil, or frightening, but there’s a more sophisticated way of thinking about these creatures. In On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears, Richard Asma argues that monsters are examples of “categorical mismatch.” We like to organize reality into easily understandable categories: you are either male or female, human or animal, living or dead. When something or someone crosses those boundaries, it makes us uncomfortable: that’s when we label it as monstrous. That kind of labeling can be dangerous, because it can allow us to deny someone’s humanity. But the idea of the monstrous can also be powerful. If you’re a woman, it can be a subversive act to think of yourself as Medusa, with snakes for hair, turning men to stone.

Asma points out that the word “monster” comes from the Latin root “monere,” meaning to warn. In other words, monsters always have some sort of message for us. The following female monsters, some of my personal favorites from nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, tell us that both monsters and human beings are more complicated than we might assume.

Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu

The most famous vampire in English literature is Dracula, but Carmilla is his literary cousin. Bram Stoker was so deeply influenced by Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella that he originally set his novel in Styria, where Carmilla’s castle is located. She is the undead Countess Karnstein who comes to feed on Laura, an innocent English girl. But Carmilla would tell you she is not a monster. She loves Laura and wants to help her become her best self—a vampire. Carmilla is really a love story between two women—something that would have shocked Victorian society, if it weren’t concealed by the novella’s gothic trappings. In the end, Carmilla is destroyed, but she haunts Laura, just as she continues to haunt modern vampire fiction.

The Jewel of Seven Stars by Bram Stoker

Bram Stoker’s second best monster story concerns Queen Tera, an ancient Egyptian mummy. It was written during a time when English readers were fascinating by archaeological discoveries in Egypt. But it’s also a novel about gender dynamics. A group of English archaeologists want to revive Queen Tera, but it’s obvious that the spirit of Queen Tera is present and controlling events. She has a mysterious link with Margaret, the beautiful daughter of the famous Egyptologist who discovered the mummy; by the end of the novel, she has taken over Margaret and broken free of the men who are trying to control her. (Stoker really liked playing with anagrams: the letters of Tera’s name are also the last four letters of Margaret. Maybe Stoker was hinting that the modern young woman contains a powerful Egyptian queen?) When the novel was reprinted, an editor changed the ending so Queen Tera was defeated and Margaret survived to marry and, presumably, live happily ever after. Evidently, contemporary audiences were not yet ready for the monster to win.

“Lila the Werewolf” by Peter S. Beagle

This short story by Peter Beagle counts as a book only because it was originally published in chapbook form, but it’s one of the classic werewolf tales. Lila is a modern young women living in New York City. After she moves in with her boyfriend, he discovers that once a month, she turns into a wolf—with hilarious and gruesome results. Beagle’s story treats the werewolf theme realistically. As a wolf, Lila devastates the neighboring population of pet dogs. As a human, she has problems with her mother, who both loves her and wants to protect her in an overbearing way. In the end, the monster is not defeated. Although she and her boyfriend break up, Lila goes on to live a normal life—well, as normal as possible, if you’re a werewolf.

Dawn by Octavia Butler

In Jewish folklore, Lilith was the first wife of Adam, cast out of Eden when she refused to subordinate herself to the first man. She became a demon who preyed on children. Butler’s Lilith Iyapo is a young black woman who has survived the nuclear war that devastated Earth. She wakes to find herself on the spaceship of an alien race called the Oankali, who are gene traders—they trade genes with other races to continually change and adapt themselves to different worlds. The Oankali have three genders—male, female, and Ooloi. They have woken Lilith because they want to mate with her to create human-Oankali hybrids as part of the continual evolution of their species. Merging with the Oankali in this way might also help humanity overcome the two traits that have doomed it to destruction: intelligence and hierarchical thinking. In helping the Oankali, Lilith herself becomes part alien, benefitting from genetic manipulation and bearing the first human-Oankali child. When she tries to convince other humans to join with this alien race, they reject her as traitor. Ultimately, however, she helps humanity overcome categorization: the monster points the way to a healthy, productive future.

Tehanu by Ursula K. Le Guin

It seems strange to call Tehanu a monster, when she is most obviously an abused little girl. But like Lilith, she is an example of categorical mismatch: in Tehanu’s case, both human and dragon. In all the Earthsea books, Le Guin is deeply concerned with how we create and maintain borders, and how we can start to overcome our human tendency to categorize the world around us into hierarchical oppositions. The men who abused Tehanu want to maintain power, in part by enforcing traditional gender roles. Both in this book and in The Other Wind, the next book in the Earthsea series, Tehanu helps break down those constructed boundaries. Finally, we learn that humans and dragons are essentially the same—the human and what we consider the monstrous are really one.

All of these characters can be seen as traditional monsters: a vampire, a mummy, a werewolf, an alien, and a dragon. But more importantly, they are examples of Asma’s categorical mismatch, combining oppositions such as the human and animal, living and dead, self and other. They allow writers to talk about issues such as gender, sexuality, and racial prejudice that might be more difficult to talk about in realistic literature. I arranged these examples chronologically so you can see how female monsters have changed over time, from dangerous femmes fatales to heroines and saviors. We think about monsters differently than we used to, and that’s a good thing.

I’m fascinated by them because growing up, I always identified with the monsters rather than the princesses in need of rescuing. Monsters were powerful and dramatic, and what teenage girl doesn’t want that? But they also had problems—they were outsiders trying to make their way in the human world. Of course I identified with that as well. I wrote The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter because I wanted the female monsters of the nineteenth century, who so often don’t get happy endings, to at least have their own stories, and their own say. We could do a lot worse, I think, than listen to what monsters have to tell us.

Theodora Goss is the World Fantasy Award–winning author of many publications, including the short story collection In the Forest of Forgetting (2006); Interfictions (2007), a short story anthology coedited with Delia Sherman; Voices from Fairyland (2008), a poetry anthology with critical essays and a selection of her own poems;The Thorn and the Blossom (2012), a novella in a two-sided accordion format; and the poetry collection Songs for Ophelia (2014). She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Locus, Crawford, Seiun, and Mythopoeic Awards, as well as on the Tiptree Award Honor List, and her work has been translated into eleven languages. Her newest book, The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, is now available from Saga Press.

M.C.A. Hogarth’s “Princes’ Game” series is peculiar and compelling (and peculiarly compelling) space opera. I read the first two books, Even the Wingless and Some Things Transcend some time ago, and recently caught up on the next three, Amulet Rampant, Only the Open, and In Extremis. I want to talk about it here briefly, because—somewhat to my surprise—I really like it, and because of its determination to make the reader productively uncomfortable.

Now, let’s be clear. The “Princes’ Game” series contains quite a bit of sexual content, and a significant proportion of that sexual content is at best dubiously consensual, at worst outright rape. But one of Hogarth’s concerns in this series is, it seems to me, to examine the problems of power and culture, nature and society, and whether it is possible to change from a person who does evil acts and believes them natural and right to a person to whom those acts are abhorrent. (Which is to say that I found the rape and dubiously consensual sexual activity disturbing, but not necessarily gratuitous: the narrative never pretends that any of this is okay.) Hogarth is also interested in questions of consent, of trauma, and of recovery—as well as change, love, and personal growth.

This is also a space opera about telepathic/empathic space elves, shape-changing space dragons with a space empire, and a genetically altered society of furry people with a slightly smaller space-federation of their own.

Lisinthir Nase Galare is a prince of the Eldritch (space elves) sent as ambassador to the Chatcaavan Empire (space dragons) by the authorities of the Alliance. The Eldritch are not technically part of the Alliance—the Eldritch are an isolationist and conservative culture that has largely turned its back on the wider universe—but all the Alliance’s previous ambassadors have returned home early or dead: Lisinthir is their last hope to prevent a war, or at least stave it off a little longer. But when Lisinthir and the Chatcaavan court meet, things get… complicated.

Subsequent novels follow Lisinthir, the Slave Queen of Chatcaava, the Chatcaavan Emperor, Jahir—Lisinthir’s cousin, an Eldritch therapist in the Alliance—and Jahir’s partner Vasiht’h, and from book three, involve Sediryl, another Eldritch prince (princess this time) in exile. War and betrayal and intrigue and life-and-death hanging in the balance for millions: the stakes are really high, and Hogarth writes really fun characters.

Also, the series is queer as hell. It’s pretty delightful in that way, and in the way that trauma is treated seriously, with respect for the sometimes-difficult process of recovery. Despite the at times disturbing acts depicted in the Princes’ Game series, I find these books, on the whole, remarkably comforting.

And I’m really looking forward to the next installment.

Comforting isn’t the word for Catherynne M. Valente’sThe Refrigerator Monologues. Illustrated by Annie Wu, this slender volume is deeply and angrily influenced by the treatment of women in the comic book superhero genre. It collects a set of stories, unified by a linking narrator, in which a woman tells the story of how she ended up in Deadtown—the underworld of this linked superhero universe. While Valente’s prose is vivid and gorgeous, and her characters breathe life (despite their mostly-dead status), and while Wu’s illustrations are utterly gorgeous, I felt a little let down by how singularly reactive this book feels: it is talking back to the comic book superhero genre, and never really talks forward.

Of course, it’s entirely possible I’d feel differently about The Refrigerator Monologues if I were a more avid reader of superhero comic books: I might be more alert to the nuance of what Valente is in conversation with, and feel more engaged in her project of reclaiming women’s voices from male-dominated superhero storylines—the parallels are in some cases obvious, with just enough detail changed to not infringe any trademark.

As it is, The Refrigerator Monologues isn’t really the book for me.

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