At least since Tom Baker left the starring role of Doctor Who back in 1981, fans have wondered if the time-traveling eccentric could ever become a woman. And the show’s producers, over the years, have enjoyed trolling the fans by hinting that it might be possible this time, or by making extreme statements about why the Doctor must always be a bloke. (And then there’s Joanna Lumley…)

But meanwhile, for the past few years, one of Doctor Who’s most important characters, the Master, has been female-bodied. As fans know, she now goes by Missy, and as played by Michelle Gomez, she’s like Mary Poppins crossed with the Joker. And this year’s series has turned out to revolve around Missy, and whether she’s finally on her way to becoming a good person.

And I have to say, I vastly prefer Missy when she’s being bad.

Spoilers for recent episodes follow…

The main reason to enjoy Doctor Who season 10, without question, has been Bill (Pearl Mackie), the new companion who’s brought a wonderful snark and curiosity to the role. At first, the Doctor and Bill had a lovely Educating Rita dynamic, as the Doctor takes her on as his student at St. Luke’s University. Bill has helped bring a new energy to the venerable show, and she powered the season’s best episode, “Thin Ice.”

But this season’s slow-burn arc involves Missy, who has been locked in a vault in the basement of a university on Earth for decades. (It’s become a motif of Doctor Who in recent years that decades or even centuries pass, largely offscreen, for these nigh-immortal characters.) It turns out the Doctor was supposed to execute Missy on some alien planet, but rescued her instead, because she pled for clemency and he believes she can change. Ever since then, the Doctor has kept her locked up, and has been guarding her with his life. Except when he gets bored.

(Does the Doctor still remember the thing where Missy nearly tricked him into murdering his companion Clara, by trapping Clara inside a Dalek? Or was that wiped along with his other memories of Clara? We’ll probably never know.)

The business of the Doctor keeping Missy in a vault has suffered a bit from too much build-up, not enough story. We didn’t actually see much of Missy until halfway through the season, and since then it’s been full speed ahead on the question of her redemption. Meanwhile, only the Doctor’s friend Nardole seems to take the responsibility to guard Missy seriously—probably because Nardole will be the first to die if she gets free.

The key signposts of Missy’s redemption arc have been her tears, as well as some scenes where she talks about remorse for all the countless people she’s murdered. Plus, when the Doctor chooses to spare her life on the executioner planet, she asks him to teach her to be good, and maybe he’s been doing that offscreen. (She also rescues the Doctor from Mars in “Empress of Mars”, but she’s rescued the Doctor countless times before, including in last season’s Dalek two-parter.)

Meanwhile, though, there are reasons for doubt. Missy is still willing to sacrifice Bill’s life to put an end to another alien invasion, the threat this time coming from monks who created a virtual-reality version of Earth, and then ruled the real world for six months by means of love and historical revisionism (don’t ask.) Missy even gets in one of her best jabs at the Doctor, telling him that his version of “good” is vain and arrogant.

The question of the Master’s redemption is one that has popped up quite a bit over the long history of the character. The very first time we meet the Master, he switches sides to help the Doctor save the world from the Autons, and the fractured friendship between the two has always been a major focus of the show. Many fans already know that the Third Doctor’s era was supposed to end, not with Buddhism and giant spiders, but with the Master sacrificing his life to save the Doctor once and for all.

But there’s always been a somewhat clear distinction between the Master’s fondness for the Doctor (which borders on obsession) and the evil Time Lord’s inability to change. Russell T. Davies muddied the waters by introducing a new backstory in which the Time Lords had turned the young Master evil on purpose, so he could save them during the Time War—making the Master’s crimes, in some sense, not his fault. For his part, the Doctor has always seemed to be convinced that his arch-nemesis can never really change. Notably, in 1984’s “Planet of Fire,” the Doctor watches the Master plead for his life…and then just lets him die.

One of the most interesting Master stories is the 2013 novel Harvest of Time by Alastair Reynolds, in which, among other things, we meet countless potential incarnations of the Master, including men, women, and aliens. (Spoilers for Harvest of Time follow, sorry.)

At one point, the Third Doctor and the Master are taken outside of time, and suddenly the Master is free of his madness. He tries to convince the Doctor that he finally has the potential to be a good person…and the Doctor refuses to believe that this is anything but another ruse. The Master warns that if the Doctor returns them to normal time/space, he’ll become evil once again, and the Doctor will be, in essence, destroying him. On his knees, the Master begs, “We were friends once. Let me live. Don’t make me become that thing again.” But the Doctor just says, “It was a nice try,” and then restores them to normal space/time. Soon, the Master is exulting that he’s been freed once again from his pathetic weakness, and the Doctor realizes he’s made “the gravest error in judgement in all his years.”

As for the current storyline, I get that the Twelfth Doctor still wants to save his old friend, and that he’ll clutch at any hint that Missy might have changed—but at this point in the season, Doctor Who hasn’t shown me any reason to believe in Missy’s change of hearts. And I think we’re supposed to have at least some hope that she’s miraculously reformed.

It doesn’t help that we already went down this road last season with the Daleks’ creator Davros, who claimed at great length to be having a crisis of conscience—and then turned out to be just as unrepentant as you’d expect. (After all, Davros is a fascist mad scientist, clearly based on Josef Mengele, who experimented on countless innocent people and then unleashed an army that he knew would slaughter billions.)

Missy’s redemption will probably turn out to be just as illusory as Davros’, but we’ll find out soon enough. I’m more concerned, right now, with the way her redemption has been sold thus far. The set-up for the season-ending two-parter relies entirely on the audience at least believing that Missy may have changed—otherwise, our suspense is literally limited to just, “What evil scheme is she pulling this time?”

The final scene of this past weekend’s otherwise-good episode, “The Eaters of Light,” leans on a dramatic arc for Missy that the show has in no way earned. We see Missy listening to Celtic music and weeping, and she says that she doesn’t know why she keeps crying nowadays. Then the Doctor acknowledges that it’s probably just another devious scheme… but he can’t resist the hope that it’s real, and he can have his friend back. “That’s the trouble with hope. It’s hard to resist.” Then Missy cries some more. We already know from the “next episode” teasers that John Simm is coming back, as Missy’s utterly remorseless previous incarnation—and most likely, he’s either going to derail her redemption, or help her spring some trap.

So I’m just going to say it: We probably wouldn’t be spending this much time watching Missy cry and being told to wonder if she’s really changed if the Doctor’s arch-nemesis were still a man. Missy’s female body seems to be the main reason why this is even a dramatic point, as far as I can tell. Her tears, her insistence that her conscience is tormenting her, rely almost entirely on Michelle Gomez’s use of notes of feminine vulnerability and softness—like when she acts bashful after the Doctor says this is probably just another scheme. And meanwhile, there’s no question that Missy is a much better character when she’s indulging in total irresistible evil.

Gomez’s turn as Missy has been one of the best things about Doctor Who in recent years, and it’s been a joy to see this classic supervillain take on such a colorful, unpredictable persona. While the old Master occasionally busted out with a Scissor Sisters dance routine, Missy has torn through every scene, punching up the role of antagonist with a series of completely outrageous acts like her flirty murder of Osgood and the aforementioned death trap for Clara.

Apart from anything else, Gomez has proved conclusively that a female Doctor wouldn’t just be as good as any of the male versions—with the right actor, in many respects, she would be even better.

Missy starts out as a version of River Song—another sexually aggressive older woman with a complicated past—and in her very first scene with Peter Capaldi’s Doctor, she kisses him so hard that he’s stunned for a few minutes afterwards. But her sadism, her willingness to use the “little girl” voice right before doing something unspeakable, the louche decadence she infuses into her contempt for human life… her whole performance has become something more distinctive and startling.

Introducing Missy as a female version of the Master, from the beginning, was a way to take the latent sexual tension in the tortured Doctor-Master bromance and bring it to the surface. (Writer Steven Moffat notably stuck a joke into the “Time Crash” mini-episode about the Master’s abused wife, Lucy Saxon, being his “beard.”) Missy doesn’t just French kiss the Doctor, she macks on him constantly, and Gomez’s body language towards Capaldi is positively filthy at times.

All of which makes the stuff about the Doctor and Missy having a broken friendship—which is what drives Missy to create a Cyber-zombie-army to prove they’re not so different, and the Doctor to give her his “confession dial”—much more interesting. Even this week’s scene, where the Doctor says maybe they can be friends again, is played as if they’re ex-lovers: Gomez lunges towards Capaldi and he backs away, but then he takes her hands in his own and looks at her tenderly.

But Missy is much more interesting as a lit stick of dynamite than as a damp squib. No scene with her this season has been as electrifying as the moment in season nine where Clara asks if they’re supposed to believe that Missy’s turned good. And Missy is so affronted by the very notion, she incinerates a UNIT soldier in cold blood, before remarking that he seemed to be married, maybe with kids. Missy’s most fun when she’s cackling, dancing, wreaking havoc, piling up a huge body count.

I love a good redemption arc—but it’s a tough thing to earn. The worse the crimes, the higher the threshold. Among the many things I admire about Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., the show’s crown jewel is its handling of Grant Ward, who betrays his friends for the Nazis and is never once forgiven. (Even when we meet an alternate Grant Ward who’s made different choices, it’s more of an object lesson, not a sign that the real Grant deserved easy redemption.)

There’s almost no question that this season will end with Missy (or the Master, if she goes back to being a bloke) going firmly back to the side of evil. You have to put the toys back into the box, after all, and the Doctor always needs a dark reflection. I just hope before the storyline wraps up, we get to see more of Missy at her best—and by that, I mean her worst.

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.

Victor LaValle’s career started with literary fiction. He earned an MFA from Columbia’s writing program (he’s now their Acting Fiction Director) and, like a lot of MFAs, published a collection of interconnected short stories as his first foray into the world of a published author. He has won a series of illustrious awards, including a Whiting Writers’ Award, a United States Artists Ford Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Shirley Jackson Award, an American Book Award, and the key to Southeast Queens.

His own childhood reading, however, was shaped by horror. He loved the work of H.P. Lovecraft, Stephen King, Algernon Blackwood, Shirley Jackson, and Angela Carter . As he got older and revisited those stories he saw that some, particularly Lovecraft’s, were riddled with hateful ideas about race and class. In his own work, LaValle has often used Lovecraft’s trick of the hapless every man who realizes he’s trapped in a horror story (the horror story being, you know, the universe) but with an acute sense of racial dynamics, class inequality, and tensions across gender lines. This careful interrogation of the status quo make all of his stories all the more rich and vital for readers who are looking for depth in their horror and fantasy.

When you’re reading an author who hops around genres as much as LaValle, you’re spoiled for choice in where to begin! So whether you’re in the mood for a dark fairy tale, an update on a haunted house story, or a conversation with the Founding Mother of Science Fiction, you’ll find the perfect book to dig into…

Literary Fiction (With a Little Mystery)

Slapboxing with Jesus told the stories of young Black and Latino men in New York. It won a PEN Open Book Award, an award dedicated to fostering diverse voices in publishing. Though dark, and often harrowing, the stories stayed in the realm of the realistic. LaValle’s first novel, The Ecstatic, returned to one of Slapboxing’s characters. Young Anthony is beginning to exhibit symptoms of schizophrenia, and the novel deals with the realities of mental instability as his condition worsens. With Big Machine, LaValle edged a little closer to genre, and follows Ricky Rice, a man who has survived both addiction and time in a suicide cult, only to find himself summoned via letter to a mysterious compound in Vermont. With each book, LaValle edges further from standard literary fiction, while keeping the sharply-drawn prose and emotional truth of the best litfic.

Horror (With a Haunted-ish House)

With The Devil in Silver, LaValle stepped straight into horror, the genre he has now called home for four projects. This book is literary, beautifully wrought horror, sure, but it’s also scary as hell. A man named Pepper is picked up for a drunken fight, and rather than dealing with the paperwork of giving him the usual night in jail to sober up, they dump him at the New Hyde mental hospital in Queens. Under New York state law he can be held for observation for 72 hours, with no rights whatsoever…certainly not the right to a phone call. But once he’s had a few violent outbursts, and been drugged a few times, that 72 hours stretches in odd ways. No one knows he’s there. No one’s coming to save him. And the longer he’s there the more he realizes that he’s as forgotten as all the other patients who shuffle through their days with no hope of escape. This story would just be One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest but for one big, ominous, growling change: the other patients are sure there’s a real monster lurking among them, and that monster might just be the Devil.

Dark Fairy Tale

The Changeling is a terrifying tale of new parenthood and fairy tales come to life. Apollo Kagwe and Emma Valentine give birth to a beautiful baby boy they name Brian. But within a few weeks Emma begins to suspect that Brian is not what he seems, and the young family quickly descends into a nightmare as secret worlds are revealed behind the glittering façade of modern New York City. It isn’t spoiling anything to say that this is a legitimately frightening book, with standout chapters that are among the most gripping horror passages I’ve ever read. But again, some of the best moments are when LaValle tackles the realities of trying to live a fairy tale as a modern Black man. He has to go on a quest, like any proper Fairy tale hero, but if the quest involves digging for hidden knowledge within sight of a police station, or a following a crooked path through a forest in a fancy white neighborhood, he faces many more questions than his golden-haired Germanic counterparts would in a Grimm tale.

Lovecraftian Horror

The Ballad of Black Tom is a novella that takes on H.P. Lovecraft’s most racist story, “The Horror of Red Hook”, from a different angle. Tommy Tester is a young man living in Harlem, who hustles people by pretending to be a bluesman, and, more dangerously, deals in occult texts. Just like every Lovecraft protagonist, he ends up seeing the squamous reality that hides behind the surface of life, but unlike Lovecraft’s characters, Tester if a Black man who is also under constant threat from corrupt cops, white supremacist thugs, and an entire system built to keep him “in his place.” When he tries to escape that place by doing business with a worshiper of the Old Gods, things get very bad very fast.

Politically Conscious Horror

LaValle teamed up with artist Dietrich Smith to engage with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, creating a comic called Destroyer that explores a little-discussed corner of Mary Shelley’s tale, while also tackling police violence and the Black Lives Matter movement. The story, which is being published by BOOM! Studios, follows Dr. Jo Baker, a descendant of Victor Frankenstein’s last living relative, Edward. When Dr. Baker’s son, Akai is shot by police on his way home from baseball practice, she is naturally devastated. But when no one is charged with his murder, her pain transforms intro rage, and she turns to history and science to find a way to save her son. She’s able to bring Akai back as a postmodern cyborg Prometheus, but he’s still a child—nowhere near as set on vengeance as his mother. Luckily for her, her ancestor’s original, un-killable monster still stalks the earth, and he might be ready to come back from Antarctica and make humanity pay for the pain they’ve caused him.

LaValle has spoken at length about his love for Frankenstein, and this update grapples with the intersections of race and gender that are only hinted at by Shelley’s work.

Even if horror isn’t typically your thing, LaValle is dragging some classic work into our modern world, and asking all the most important questions, so go forth and enjoy your reading!

Leah Schnelbach does love horror, and this is some of the best she’s ever read. Come discuss monsters on Twitter!

Shattered Minds is Laura Lam’s second science fiction novel. It’s not a direct sequel to last year’s excellent False Hearts, although it’s set in the same continuity, and in the same region—and I think in many ways, it is a stronger, tighter book than False Hearts anyway.

Or maybe I just liked Shattered Minds’ protagonists better.

Carina wants to kill people. She has detailed violent fantasies about murder. She has a PhD in neuroprogramming, and she used to have a research job with corporate giant Sudice—until the violent fantasies emerged from her cold inability to feel much of anything not related to her intellectual work. She’s dealt with her intrusive violent thoughts by becoming a Zeal addict, working her urges out in a virtual reality landscape in order to avoid an arrest for murder, and counting the hours between trips to a Zeal parlour.

But when a former coworker dies and his last act drops a shitload of encrypted information—locked to Carina’s memories—into her brain, Carina finds herself on the run and pursued by a criminal conspiracy within Sudice spearheaded by Dr. Roz Elliot. Elliot, although Carina can’t remember it, had previously used Carina herself without Carina’s consent as a guinea pig for new and untested mind-altering technology.

Carina doesn’t want to be part of anyone’s quixotic quest for justice. But with Dr. Roz Elliot determined to hunt her down, revenge might be a different thing entirely.

Shattered Minds’ second protagonist is a young man called Dax. Dax is part of a group of hackers called the Trust that are determined to expose Sudice’s misdeeds and bring them down. Dax isn’t as good a hacker as his twin sister used to be—he trained as a medical practitioner—but his sister is in a coma thanks to Sudice’s security measures, and he and the other two members of the Trust are running out of options. It may even be that they have no other option left but to wind up operations—before Carina stumbles to their doorstep, led by the encrypted information in her brain, and promptly collapses.

Thanks to Dax’s medical skills, she recovers. The four of them agree a tentative alliance, though the Trust does not trust Carina, and Carina doesn’t really know how to deal with people, or with her increasing difficulty in staying in control of her murderous urges. They’re going to try to bring Sudice down together—but time is running out, because Sudice has been trialling a form of technology that’s effectively mind control, and soon, it may be too late.

Dax is a really engaging character. He’s a trans man, and it’s a decent portrayal of trans-ness: his experiences inform his character (like, for example, his revulsion at the idea that someone might interfere with his mind), but he is not defined solely by his trans-ness. His compassion and understanding for Carina, even when he learns how bloody and detailed her murderous fantasies are—even when he understands that she is trying really hard not to be a serial killer, and perhaps failing—and his loyalty to and fear for his sister, along with his determination, combine to make him a character that it’s nearly impossible to dislike.

Carina is a different story. Cynical, self-destructive, with difficulties relating to other people, and more than a little terrifying, she’s managing her serial killer urges as best as she can. She’s fascinating, and I find her portrayal really compelling, because her intrusive violent thoughts are portrayed by the narrative in a similar fashion to how intrusive self-harming or suicidal thoughts work—she doesn’t particularly want to want to stalk and murder strangers, but she can’t figure out how to fix her brain in order to not have these counter-productive desires.

Dax and Carina’s developing relationship, and the stresses of being pursued by a powerful corporation that’s more than willing to kill—or worse—to protect its secrets, allows Lam to examine the strain on Carina’s coping methods, and on Dax’s, making Shattered Minds a compelling examination of human nature.

It’s also a tight, tense and nail-biting science fiction thriller, informed by cyberpunk influences like Nicola Griffith’s Slow River and Melissa Scott’s Trouble and Her Friends as much as by the near-future extrapolatory science fiction tradition. It’s damn good. I recommend it, and I hope Lam writes more in this vein.

Shattered Minds is available now from Tor Books and Tor Books UK.

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.

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
Written by Leonard Nimoy and Lawrence Konner & Mark Rosenthal and Nicholas Meyer & Denny Martin Flynn
Directed by Nicholas Meyer
Release date: December 6, 1991
Stardate: 9521.6

Captain’s log. We open with the explosion of Praxis, a Klingon moon, and the location of their primary energy production facility. The subspace shockwave from the explosion travels all the way to Federation space, where the U.S.S. Excelsior, under the command of Captain Sulu, is returning from a three-year survey of the Beta Quadrant, charting gaseous anomalies. The Excelsior is hit by the wave, which Science Officer Valtane traces to Praxis—but while he can confirm the location of Praxis, he can’t confirm the existence of Praxis. Most of the moon is gone. Sulu has Communications Officer Rand send a message asking if they require assistance. A distress call from the moon is overlaid by Brigadier Kerla, who responds to Sulu’s offer of help with a definitive “no,” calling it an “incident” that they have under control. Sulu is, to say the least, skeptical and has Rand report this to Starfleet Command.

Two months later, Kirk, McCoy, Scotty, Uhura, and Chekov are summoned to a classified briefing at Starfleet Headquarters. This surprises them, as they’re due to stand down and retire in three months. The other attendees are all admirals and captains. The Starfleet commander-in-chief announces that the Klingon Empire has only fifty years of life left, then turns the briefing over to the Federation Special Envoy: Spock. He explains that the destruction of Praxis will render the Klingon homeworld uninhabitable within five decades, and that Spock—at Sarek’s behest—has reached out to Chancellor Gorkon to discuss a peace treaty.

Cartwright is dead set against this course of action, and so is Kirk, feeling the Klingons are untrustworthy. So the captain is rather surprised to find that Spock has volunteered the Enterprise to escort Gorkon’s flagship to Earth for negotiations.

The meeting breaks up, leaving Kirk and Spock alone. Kirk is livid that Spock volunteered him, as he doesn’t trust the Klingons. When Spock points out that they’re dying, Kirk’s rather appalling response is, “Let them die.”

However, Kirk takes command, meeting Lieutenant Valeris, one of Spock’s protégés, who has volunteered to serve as helm officer. Valeris later overhears the end of Kirk’s log entry because Kirk left the door to his cabin open for no compellingly good reason. The log in question discusses how Kirk has never trusted the Klingons and how he can’t forgive them for the death of David.

Later, Valeris meets with Spock in his quarters to share a drink. He indicates that he’s grooming her to serve on the Enterprise, eventually to take command of her, as he will be retiring from Starfleet and entering diplomatic service. He also reminds her that logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end of it.

The Enterprise rendezvouses with Kronos One. Kirk muses that he’s never been this close to a Klingon ship, having apparently forgotten that he’s been on one in each of the last three films. Kirk and Gorkon speak, and Kirk invites Gorkon to dinner on the Enterprise, then grumbles, “I hope you’re happy” at Spock like a sullen teenager after the chancellor accepts. Chekov mutters, “Guess who’s coming to dinner?” and Valeris offers to have Romulan Ale be served at the dinner. (Kirk’s approving response: “Officer thinking, Lieutenant.”)

Gorkon, his daughter Azetbur, Kerla, General Chang, and two bodyguards beam aboard. Chang fangoobers Kirk, and after he takes them off for a tour, the two security guards, Burke and Samno, make racist comments about how Klingons all look alike and smell bad, until they are rebuked by Valeris.

At the dinner, the Klingons are befuddled by the silverware, and then Gorkon offers a toast to “the undiscovered country”—which makes everyone uncomfortable, until he explains that he’s referring to the future, not death, as Hamlet was. It’s the first of several Shakespeare quotes, including Chang saying, “to be or not to be” in Klingon.

Attempts at conversation are hesitant and awkward, with the humans far more uncomfortable than the Klingons or the half-Vulcan. Kirk at one point even Godwins the conversation by noticing that Chang makes a comment about needing breathing room, which Kirk cites as a Hitler quote.

After dinner, the Klingons beam off, with Gorkon telling Kirk that he knows the captain doesn’t trust him, and that if there is to be a brave new world, it is their generation that will have the hardest time of it.

Once they dematerialize, the Enterprise crew sighs with relief, Uhura and Chekov decrying the Klingons’ table manners, Spock tartly reminding them that their own behavior was pretty damned wretched. Kirk wanders off to sleep the evening off, asking folks to let him know if there’s another way they can screw the evening up. He makes a note to the galley that Romulan Ale is never to be served at diplomatic functions.

Spock summons Kirk to the bridge, as he is detecting a large amount of neutron radiation. Then a torpedo fires on Kronos One, seemingly from the Enterprise, quickly followed by another. The second shot knocks the gravity out on the Klingon ship. Even as Scotty reports that the Enterprise still has all its torpedoes, two people in Starfleet security armor (complete with magnetic boots) beam to the Klingon ship, killing or maiming dozens of Klingons along the way before finally getting to Gorkon and assassinating him.

The assassins beam back. Chang accuses Kirk of firing on them without provocation, and Spock verifies that the Enterprise did fire, even though they have all their torpedoes. Kirk surrenders and beams over with McCoy, refusing to start a war on the eve of peace. Spock very deliberately touches Kirk’s shoulder in a manner that we’re supposed to notice. That will probably be important later.

Kerla almost fires on Kirk and McCoy as soon as they dematerialize, but he is willing to give Kirk’s denial the benefit of the doubt and bring them to Gorkon. The ship’s surgeon is also dead, so McCoy offers to try to revive the chancellor. Azetbur and Chang agree, but McCoy is unable to save him. Gorkon’s last words are to ask of Kirk, “Don’t let it end this way, Captain.”

Chang has Kirk and McCoy arrested for assassinating the chancellor. Spock assumes command, tells Uhura to fill Starfleet in and then he works to determine what, precisely, happened.

The Klingon ambassador meets with the Federation president. The president is not happy about Kirk and McCoy’s arrest, but both Sarek and Romulan Ambassador Nanclus concur that their arrest was legal. The president therefore abides, and the Klingon ambassador departs. Even as he goes, the Starfleet C-in-C, Cartwright, and Colonel West enter. They object to Federation citizens being abducted, but the president reminds them about that pesky rule of law. West displays a plan to rescue them with “acceptable” loss of life. When the president asks about the possibility of war, West boasts that Starfleet will “clean their chronometers.” The president, however, dismisses the Starfleet personnel—and Nanclus, who was inexplicably allowed to remain in this meeting that discussed military strategy despite being a diplomat from a hostile power.

The Enterprise is ordered to return to Earth. At Valeris’s suggestion, Uhura and Chekov fake a malfunction so they can’t receive communications. Scotty and Spock try to figure out why they have all their torpedoes, yet the sensors say they fired twice.

Azetbur and the president agree to try the peace conference again in one week’s time at a neutral location—but that location should be kept secret, and the conference will only happen if Kirk and McCoy are allowed to stand trial and no attempt at a rescue is made. Kerla and Chang are as eager to go to war as West and Cartwright were, but Azetbur wishes to do what her father wanted.

Kirk and McCoy stand trial. Chang himself prosecutes, with Colonel Worf defending. The trial is broadcast all over the galaxy, and when the magnetic boots are mentioned, Spock immediately starts a search for them. The president and some of his staff, as well as Sarek, watch from his office, as does the crew of Excelsior; Sulu has Rand send a message to the Enterprise offering assistance. Meanwhile, Chang accuses McCoy of being drunk and/or incompetent when he tried to save Gorkon, and then he uses Kirk’s earlier personal log against him to prove malice toward the Klingons on his part. He also admits that as captain, he is responsible for the conduct of his crew.

They’re found guilty, but in the interests of peace, they are not sentenced to death. Instead, they are sentenced to life in prison on Rura Penthe in the dilithium mines there.

Spock and the rest of the crew continue their investigation. They determine that there must have been a small Klingon ship that can fire while cloaked positioned beneath the Enterprise. He then has Valeris conduct a search—either the assassins came from the Enterprise, or the people who sabotaged the computer to make it look like they fired did. Or both. Either way, the saboteurs need to be found.

Kirk and McCoy arrive at the frozen wasteland of Rura Penthe. They befriend a woman named Martia, who informs them that there’s a contract out for their deaths. McCoy is, to say the least, thrilled.

Spock’s investigation continues, but there is no sign yet of the boots. He has Scotty pretend that the warp drive is down so they can’t return to Spacedock as ordered by Starfleet.

Kirk gains the respect of the other prisoners by beating one of them up, and then he and Martia smooch, because we must make sure all prison movie clichés are checked off. She has a way off the planet, but she needs a partner, and she thinks Kirk is the first person to come through Rura Penthe who can swing it.

Chekov finds traces of Klingon blood on one of the transporter platforms, and then they find magnetic boots in the locker belonging to Crewman Dax. Unfortunately, Dax is from an alien species with oversized feet, so he couldn’t possibly be the culprit.

Martia turns out to be a shapeshifter. In the form of a different alien, she accompanies Kirk and McCoy to a mining detail, then changes her shape to that of a little girl, thus sliding out of her leg irons. They sneak out through a bit of ductwork (because there’s always ductwork) and up a big rock to the surface, and thence past the magnetic field’s influence, thus freeing them to be transported.

Uhura has been keeping an eye on the transponder that Spock put on Kirk when he touched his shoulder earlier, and once she detects that it’s outside the shield, Spock has Chekov set course for Rura Penthe. Uhura bluffs her way past a listening post by using dozens of books of the Klingon language, because it’s been a few minutes since we had a scene with forced laughter, and then they proceed.

Once Kirk, McCoy, and Martia have settled down with a flare, Kirk slugs Martia. The whole escape was far too convenient. He just hopes Spock arrives before Martia’s employers, who have promised her a full pardon in exchange for getting them out. Having them killed while trying to escape will make the most convincing cover story. The warden tracks them down, shoots Martia (who has assumed Kirk’s shape, which leads to Kirk fighting himself) and is about to tell them who’s responsible before Spock beams them up. Timing is everything.

Scotty finds the uniforms used by the assassins. The uniforms belong to Burke and Samno, and their bodies are found in a corridor. They were killed by phasers used on stun at close range to their heads.

There’s at least one more saboteur, however, and Kirk thinks he knows who it is. He puts out a PA announcement, asking for a court reporter to report to sickbay to take a statement from Burke and Samno. Valeris then goes to sickbay armed to finish what she started when she killed the two yeomen. Spock is livid, and Valeris admits that she is part of the conspiracy, undertaken because Klingons can’t be trusted. As if to prove it, there are Klingons and Starfleet officers alike who are working together to keep peace from happening. Valeris refuses to name her co-conspirators, so Kirk orders Spock to forcibly mind-meld with her, and Spock agrees to do it, thus utterly destroying any vestige of heroism on the part of either character.

Spock forcibly grabs her, yanks her closer to him by the arm, and keeps her from moving away from him. The hand that doesn’t activate the meld has a tight grip on her hair. And when Spock probes deeper to find the location of the conference, she screams in agony.

While she doesn’t actually know the location of the conference, she does reveal that Cartwright, Chang, and Nanclus are all part of the conspiracy, and that Chang’s experimental Bird of Prey that can fire while cloaked is the only one. Uhura contacts Sulu on Excelsior, and he reveals that the new location of the conference will be Camp Khitomer. Both ships proceed there at maximum warp.

When the Enterprise arrives at Khitomer, Chang contacts Kirk from his cloaked ship and starts taunting Kirk and also firing on him. Spock and Uhura hit on the idea of detecting the ionized gas the Klingon ship must exhaust while at impulse, and Spock and McCoy modify a torpedo so that it can detect those gasses. Chang fires on both Enterprise and Excelsior when it arrives, but then the modified torpedo does its job and exposes Chang’s ship. Both Enterprise and Excelsior fire on it and destroy it.

Meanwhile on Khitomer, the president and Azetbur discuss the peace process. A Klingon gets up and walks out of the conference, setting up a sniper rifle, intending to kill both the president and Azetbur. Kirk, Spock, Scotty, Chekov, Uhura, and Valeris beam down—the latter there mainly as evidence of her confession—as does Sulu with a landing party of his own. Cartwright and Nanclus are taken into custody, and Scotty shoots the sniper—who turns out not to be Klingon. Worf and the C-in-C unmask him to reveal West. Kirk makes a speech about how the future shouldn’t be the end of history and how important it is to finish Gorkon’s work. Everyone applauds.

Sulu says it’s good to see Kirk in action one last time, and Excelsior buggers off. Uhura reports that they’ve been ordered to return to Earth for decommissioning. Spock says that if he were human, his response to those orders would be, “Go to hell.” Kirk orders Chekov to set a course for the second star to the right and straight on til morning. Then he gives a benedictory log entry that wishes well to the next folks who command a ship called Enterprise, boldly going where no man—where no one has gone before.

Can’t we just reverse the polarity? The Klingons have developed a ship that can fire while cloaked, because the plot won’t work otherwise.

Fascinating. Spock is the one who—at Sarek’s urging—starts the dialogue with Gorkon following Praxis’s destruction. He, like most of the rest of the crew, is retiring, and he’s obviously getting ready to enter the diplomatic service, like his father, as seen in TNG when he’s an ambassador.

I’m a doctor not an escalator. McCoy tries heroically to save Gorkon even though he professes right there as he’s doing it that he doesn’t know much about Klingon anatomy. So how much good was he supposed to be doing, exactly? He also helps Spock modify the torpedo, because why use an engineer to do technical work when you can have one of your main characters violate his Hippocratic Oath?

Ahead warp one, aye. Sulu finally gets the command he got in the script for The Wrath of Khan, as the movie opens with him in charge of the Excelsior, and also has him play a critical role in the climax.

Hailing frequencies open. Uhura inexplicably has absolutely no knowledge of the Klingon language whatsoever, nor is the Enterprise computer programmed with any information about it, since she and a half-dozen others are poring over a ton of codex books about the language.

I cannot change the laws of physics! Scotty accuses Azetbur of killing Gorkon herself, calling her “that Klingon bitch,” and opining to Spock that Klingons don’t value life “the way we do.” Yeah.

It’s a Russian invention. While he, Spock, and Valeris are searching the galley, Chekov doesn’t understand why the saboteurs didn’t just vaporize the boots. Valeris grabs a phaser (they keep phasers in the galley????) and vaporizes a stewpot, which immediately sets off an alarm. Chekov is supposed to be chief of security, you’d think he’d know this. Adding insult to injury, both Uhura and Scotty enter the galley asking if someone fired a phaser set on vaporize, so they both know this, and Chekov doesn’t?

Go put on a red shirt. Burke and Samno prove the perfect fall guys for Valeris, as they think all Klingons look alike and smell bad, and so she easily conscripts them to commit regicide and then she can later murder them with impunity, as they’re racist, murdering assholes.

No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. After Martia kisses Kirk, McCoy just stares at him and asks, “What is it with you?”

Channel open.

“She doesn’t know.”

“Then we’re dead.”

“I have been dead before.”

–Spock determining that Valeris doesn’t have a vital bit of intel, Scotty lamenting this, and Spock making a funny.

Welcome aboard. The big guests are master thespians David Warner and Christopher Plummer playing Klingons, the former as Gorkon and the latter as Chang. Warner previously appeared in the last film as Talbot and will be on TNG as Gul Madred in the “Chain of Command” two-parter.

Back from The Voyage Home are Mark Lenard as Sarek, Brock Peters as Cartwright, and John Schuck as the Klingon ambassador. It’s the final appearance by all three as those characters, though Lenard has two chronologically later appearances on TNG that predate this movie, in “Sarek” and “Unification I.” The character of Sarek will subsequently be seen in the 2009 Star Trek played by Ben Cross and the upcoming Discovery played by James Frain, both chronologically prior to this film. Peters will next appear as Joseph Sisko in DS9‘s “Homefront,” while Schuck will next be in DS9‘s “The Maquis Part 2” as a Cardassian legate.

The Federation president is the first of three Trek roles for Kurtwood Smith, who will return on DS9 as Thrax in “Things Past” and Voyager as Annorax in “Year of Hell.” The C-in-C is the first of two Trek roles for Leon Russom, who will play Vice Admiral Todman in DS9‘s “The Die is Cast.” The Rura Penthe warden is the second of four Trek roles for W. Morgan Sheppard, who played Ira Graves in TNG‘s “The Schizoid Man” and will go on to play Qatai in Voyager‘s “Bliss” and the head of the Vulcan Science Council in the 2009 Star Trek.

Rosanna DeSoto plays Azetbur, Kim Cattrall plays Valeris, Paul Rossilli plays Kerla, and Iman plays Martia.

Michael Dorn appears as the Klingon lawyer assigned to defend Kirk and Spock. Credited only as “Klingon Defense Attorney,” he is named “Colonel Worf” in dialogue, and it was always the intention of both scriptwriters that he be the grandfather of the same-named character Dorn played on TNG and DS9.

Rene Auberjonois plays West. His scenes were deleted from the theatrical release, but was restored on home video. Auberjonois would two years later be cast in the regular role of Odo on DS9, and also play Ezral in Enterprise‘s “Oasis.”

Christian Slater, the son of casting director Mary Jo Slater and a longtime Trek fan, makes an uncredited cameo as a member of the Excelsior crew. Also appearing as Excelsior crew are Jeremy Roberts as Valtane and Boris Lee Krutonog as Lojur, who both will return in Voyager‘s “Flashback.”

And, finally, we have the usual suspects of James Doohan, George Takei, Nichelle Nichols, and Walter Koenig, as well as Grace Lee Whitney. Doohan will next be seen in TNG‘s “Relics,” and both Takei and Whitney will next be seen in “Flashback.”

Trivial matters: This is the last time the entire cast of the original series will all be together on screen. Kirk, Chekov, and Scotty are next seen in Generations, with Scotty also appearing in TNG’s “Relics.” Sulu will next be seen in Voyager’s “Flashback” (the events of which are concurrent with this film). Spock’s next chronological appearance will be TNG‘s “Unification” two-parter, which aired a month before this film’s release (those episodes also have a few callbacks to this movie), and he will next appear in the 2009 Star Trek. This is the last appearance of Nichelle Nichols as Uhura and DeForest Kelley as McCoy, though the latter’s next chronological appearance is in TNG‘s “Encounter at Farpoint” (which aired four years prior to this); both characters are next seen in the 2009 Star Trek, played respectively by Zoë Saldana and Karl Urban.

This was the last Trek movie made in Gene Roddenberry’s lifetime. He saw a screener of the film two days before he died in October 1991, two months before its theatrical release. The movie was dedicated to him.

The Klingons and Federation were established as allies in the 24th century implicitly by Worf’s presence on the Enterprise bridge in uniform in “Encounter at Farpoint.” The alliance was more formally established in “Heart of Glory,” and was borne of Roddenberry wanting to show that Ayelborne’s prediction in “Errand of Mercy” would come true, that the Federation and Klingons would become fast friends. This movie, made in the wake of glasnost and the end of the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, shows the process by which that alliance got started, complete with a Klingon chancellor whose name was inspired by Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, the architect of glasnost.

The dismal box office and reception for The Final Frontier meant this film almost wasn’t made, but the higher-ups at Paramount a) wanted to do something for Trek‘s 25th anniversary in 1991 and b) didn’t want the previous movie to be the original crew’s swan song. However, they also didn’t want this movie to cost any more to make than the fifth one, so Harve Bennett proposed a Starfleet Academy movie that could be done with younger and cheaper actors. However, the president of Paramount, Roddenberry, and the fanbase (when the notion was leaked) all rejected the notion vociferously, at which point Bennett quit in a huff. Leonard Nimoy was approached to develop the film, and he both suggested a glasnost allegory with the Federation and Klingons and requested that Nicholas Meyer be brought in. According to Nimoy, Meyer, and William Shatner, while Lawrence Konner & Mark Rosenthal were given co-story credit, nothing of theirs is actually in the movie. (They were hired at Paramount’s insistence.)

Nichelle Nichols and Brock Peters both had difficulty with lines given to them expressing racist attitudes toward the Klingons, using language that has been used in relation to African Americans. Nichols out-and-out refused to say, “Guess who’s coming to dinner?” and the line was transferred to Chekov.

Nichols also objected to Uhura being unfamiliar with the Klingon language, since as communications officer it would behoove her to be familiar with the language of the Federation’s enemies. Meyer overruled her. Interestingly, Star Trek Into Darkness will establish that Uhura is fluent in Klingon.

Both James Horner (who scored The Wrath of Khan and The Search for Spock) and Jerry Goldsmith (who scored The Motion Picture and The Final Frontier) were approached to score this film, but they both declined, leading to Cliff Eidelman being hired.

Sulu will again be seen in charge of the Excelsior in Voyager‘s “Flashback,” where it’s established that Tuvok was part of his crew at the time of this movie. The number of appearances made by Sulu and the Excelsior in the tie-in fiction are too numerous to list, but among them are The Sundered and Forged in Fire by Andy Mangels & Michael A. Martin, The Captain’s Daughter by Peter David, The Fearful Summons by Denny Martin Flynn (one of the writers of this film), The Last Roundup by Christie Golden, and One Constant Star by David R. George III, as well as several appearances in DC’s monthly Star Trek comic written by Howard Weinstein, as well as Marvel’s Star Trek Unlimited #8 written by Dan Abnett & Ian Edginton and IDW’s Captain’s Log: Sulu written by Scott & David Tipton.

Both Kirk’s middle name of Tiberius and Sulu’s first name of Hikaru are spoken aloud for the first time in live action here. Tiberius was previously used on the animated series in “Bem.” Hikaru was first used in the 1981 novel The Entropy Effect by Vonda N. McIntyre, and was given as Sulu’s first name extensively in the tie-in fiction thenceforth. It’s a rare instance of the tie-in fiction influencing something appearing onscreen. (Peter David was on the set when George Takei filmed the Excelsior scenes, and he encouraged Takei to use the first name for his log entry, which is how it got in there.)

Uhura is mistakenly credited as “Uhuru” in the closing credits.

Kronos is established as the name of the Klingon homeworld, thus supplanting “Kling,” briefly and hilariously used in “Heart of Glory.”

Khitomer had already been established as the site of a Klingon base attacked by Romulans (an attack that killed Worf’s parents) in TNG‘s “Heart of Glory” and “The Neutral Zone.” Your humble rewatcher dramatized that attack in the novel The Art of the Impossible. The peace treaty between the Federation and Klingons that resulted from the events of this movie will be established in DS9’s “The Way of the Warrior” as the Khitomer Accords.

Klingon blood is fuschia colored in this film, the only time in the five decades that Klingons have been shown onscreen that their blood has been anything other than red.

The Klingon love of Shakespeare seen in this film has inspired several Klingon translations of the Bard’s work, including The Klingon Hamlet. When he created the Klingon language two movies previous, Marc Okrand deliberately made the language not have the verb “to be.” And then he was asked to provide the phrase, “to be or not to be” in Klingon.

Gorkon and Azetbur are both identified as the chancellor of the Klingon High Council. This title will retroactively be applied to the 24th-century leaders of the empire (K’mpec, Gowron, Martok) in “The Way of the Warrior.”

Gorkon appears in the Vanguard novel series by David Mack, Dayton Ward, and Kevin Dilmore, the Legacies trilogy by Greg Cox, Mack, Ward, & Dilmore, In the Name of Honor by Ward, and the Errand of Vengance and Errand of Fury trilogies by Kevin Ryan as an up-and-comer in the Klingon Empire. His history with Chang is chronicled in the Klingon Academy video game. A Federation starship will be named after him in the 24th century, as seen in “Descent.” In addition, your humble rewatcher will establish the Chancellor-class of heavy cruiser developed in the Klingon Defense Force and launched after the Dominion War, where all the ships are named after past chancellors, including ships named Gorkon and Azetbur.

Azetbur appears in the novels Sarek by A.C. Crispin and Serpents Among the Ruins by David R. George III, as well as the novella Its Hour Come Round by Margaret Wander Bonanno (part of the Mere Anarchy miniseries). Serpents shows her reign’s end at the wrong end of an assassin’s blade. TNG‘s “Redemption” established that women cannot serve on the High Council; Azetbur’s becoming chancellor seems to contradict this, but your humble rewatcher established in The Art of the Impossible and The Klingon Art of War that Azetbur’s reactionary successor Kaarg immediately passed the law that women could not serve on the council as an extreme reaction to Azetbur’s regime.

This movie is one of three times we see a change of power in the Klingon Empire. The other two—in TNG‘s “Reunion” and DS9‘s “Tacking Into the Wind“—involve someone winning a challenge to earn the chancellorship. This is the only time it’s seen as hereditary, and your humble rewatcher established in The Klingon Art of War that the naming of an heir was a tradition among Klingon emperors before the ascension of the High Council to control of the empire, and Gorkon revived that tradition with Azetbur.

Colonel Worf is seen again in The Art of the Impossible, where he’s been promoted to general by the early 24th century. He is killed in that novel, and it’s established that his son, Mogh, names his first-born son after him, thus fulfilling the intention of the scriptwriters of this film that Dorn be playing his own grandfather.

The events of this film provide the frame for the comic book miniseries Blood Will Tell written by Scott & David Tipton, as several Klingons look at past relations between the Federation and Klingons while trying to figure out how to proceed in the wake of Praxis’s destruction.

Several novels establish that Uhura starts a career in Starfleet Intelligence in the 24th century, with the seeds being sown by her attendance at the Khitomer Conference, among them the Lost Era novels Catalyst of Sorrows by Margaret Wander Bonanno and the aforementioned The Art of the Impossible, as well as the novels Vulcan’s Forge, Vulcan’s Heart, and the Vulcan’s Soul trilogy by Josepha Sherman & Susan Shwartz.

The “Unification” two-parter on TNG will establish that Spock met Senator Pardek at the Khitomer Conference. Pardek would be instrumental in getting Spock to go underground to Romulus in those episodes.

The DS9 episode “Blood Oath” established that Curzon Dax negotiated many treaties between the Federation and Klingons, and “You Are Cordially Invited…” formally established that Curzon helped negotiate the Khitomer Accords. Several novels—Forged in Fire, The Art of the Impossible, etc.—established that Curzon started his diplomatic career as an aide to Sarek.

Rura Penthe will be seen again in an earlier timeframe in Enterprise‘s “Judgment,” which will also have a Klingon court very similar to the one seen in this movie. It was also in the script for the 2009 Star Trek as the prison where Nero and his people were imprisoned for the twenty-five years between when George Kirk was killed and the primary events of the movie, but the reference was cut. That imprisonment is dramatized in the Nero comic book miniseries written by Tim Jones & Mike Johnson.

This movie establishes that the president’s office is in Paris. The Voyage Home has the president and the Federation Council meeting in San Francisco at Starfleet Headquarters, which never entirely made sense. The president’s office will still be in Paris when we see it next onscreen in DS9‘s “Homefront” and “Paradise Lost.” The building that houses the president’s office and the Federation Council Chambers is identified in David Mack’s A Time to Kill as the Palais de la Concorde (located on the Place de la Concorde in the City of Light), and the tie-in fiction has continued to use that designation, including in your humble rewatcher’s Articles of the Federation, the aforementioned Errand of Vengeance and Errand of Fury trilogies, and the Typhon Pact series, among others. (Some have theorized that the Council meets in San Francisco, while the president’s office remains in Paris, but it really doesn’t make sense that the president operates in a position that is separated from the council by eight time zones.)

The president is not named in the script, but J.M. Dillard’s novelization referred to his as Ra-ghoratreii. The novelization identified him as Deltan, but all other sources have had him be Efrosian (named after unit production manager Mel Efros, who worked on the previous two films; an Efrosian was also seen as a crew member of the Saratoga in The Voyage Home). Ra-ghoratreii will also be seen in tons of tie-in fiction, including the novels The Ashes of Eden by William Shatner with Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens, the aforementioned Sarek, and the Crucible trilogy by David R. George III, and the novella The Blood-Dimmed Tide by Howard Weinstein (part of the Mere Anarchy series). Articles of the Federation established that one of the conference rooms in the Palais de la Concorde is named after him.

The commander in chief is just called “Bill” in the script, but the novelization gives his last name as Smillie. The character will appear again in Forged in Fire and the Crucible trilogy.

Chang’s Shakespeare quotes come from Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Henry IV Part II, Henry V, The Merchant of Venice, Richard II, Romeo and Juliet, and The Tempest. Gorkon and Martia both quote Hamlet as well. In addition, there are references to Richard Nixon (“Only Nixon could go to China”), Sherlock Holmes (“if you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”—Meyer wrote three Holmes novels, one of which, The Seven Per-Cent Solution, he also adapted into a screenplay), Adlai Stevenson (“Don’t wait for the translation, answer me now!”), The Bridge on the River Kwai (the Rura Penthe warden’s speech to the new inmates), and Peter Pan (Kirk’s course request at the end).

Early drafts of the script had Saavik in the role that eventually became Valeris. Kirstie Alley declined to return, and Nicholas Meyer did not like Robin Curtis‘s portrayal, and rather than cast a third actor in the same role, they created the new character. Valeris‘s backstory and eventual fate are chronicled in the novel Cast No Shadow by James Swallow. She also appears in the DC comic book Star Trek Special #2 written by Steven H. Wilson, where she encounters Saavik at a point prior to this film. The Mirror Universe version of Valeris is seen in David Mack’s The Sorrows of Empire, where she tries to assassinate Emperor Spock, but is stopped by Saavik.

In addition to Dillard’s novelization, this film was adapted into comic-book form by Peter David, Gordon Purcell, & Arne Starr. Both the novelization and the comics adaptation included a dialogue exchange from the script between Sulu and Valtane, where the latter says that he’s committed treason, and Sulu replies, “I always hoped that if I ever had to choose between betraying my country or betraying my friend, I’d have the courage to betray my country,” echoing a line from E.M. Forster’s essay “What I Believe.” The scene was cut from the movie.

To boldly go. “Cry havoc! And let slip the dogs of war!” This movie utterly destroys the characters of Kirk and Spock for plot expediency, and while it’s the most revolting crime committed by this misbegotten disaster of a movie, it’s far from the only one.

Let’s get this out of the way: Kirk orders Spock to rape Valeris. Yes, that’s a charged comment; yes, that’s a serious allegation; yes, that’s utterly revolting. But it’s completely true. And just in case we’re not sure, Meyer films it that way, with Spock looming over Valeris, grabbing her arm, yanking her toward him when she tries to back off, and maintaining a firm grip on her hair while performing the meld. It’s a horrid act, a despicable violation of a person, and one that should never have been committed by people we have two-and-a-half decades of seeing as heroes up to this point.

But it’s just the latest in a series. None of the crew comes off well here. Kirk’s “Let them die!” is a horrifically bloodthirsty response from the guy who twice spoke of how the most important thing a person can decide is “I will not kill today,” who publicly upbraided one of his officers for his bigotry toward Vulcans and Romulans, and whose hallmark has been to seek out a compassionate response over a violent one where at all possible. Yes, yes, yes, a Klingon killed the son he barely knew three movies ago. That doesn’t make what he says any less revolting, and the fact that he goes along with being the Federation’s olive branch only reluctantly and whining like a four-year-old does nothing to make the character look like anything other than a racist shithead.

In that, he’s in good company. The dinner is a rhapsody in awkward, but Chekov and Uhura’s bitching about their table manners just because their culture involves eating with their hands comes across as the worst kind of racist, classist snobbery. When Spock acidly reminded them how shitty they all behaved, I was cheering.

This movie is full of racially charged commentary by our theoretical heroes, from Scotty’s line about how they don’t respect life the way we do to Cartwright’s alien trash line to Chekov’s citing the title of a movie about racist attitudes to Uhura’s gawking at the Klingons eating. To have such behavior from Uhura—played by an actor who was convinced to stay in the role due to its importance by Martin Luther King Jr. his own self—is a howlingly high level of tone-deafness. It’s to her credit that she out-and-out refused to say, “Guess who’s coming to dinner?” though the line is no better coming out of a white guy than it would be a black woman.

This wouldn’t be so bad if there was any kind of history of racist attitudes on the part of the Federation toward Klingons, but there really isn’t. The only time we’ve seen such is in “Day of the Dove,” and that was artificially imposed by the swirly thing, and that episode ended with the two crews cooperating and laughing together. The differences between the Federation and Klingon Empire has been portrayed, since “Errand of Mercy,” as political, not racial.

The hallmark of Star Trek when it debuted in 1966 was that it showed a united Earth, that we had put aside our differences, so that the bridge can have Russians, Asians, Africans, Europeans, and Americans all working together without it remotely being an issue. So for the show to celebrate its 25th anniversary by portraying the good guys as unrepentant racists is an insult to what made the show so important and groundbreaking in the first place. Some of them stay unrepentant, too! At the end, Uhura says that she feels the same as Valeris, even after everything is over, which is yet another notch on the character assassination belt, as Uhura has just sympathized with someone who murdered two of their crewmates in cold blood.

The only characters who come out unscathed are Saavik and Sulu, the former by the unwillingness to re-cast the role, so we get Valeris instead, the latter by virtue of being on another ship. Speaking as someone who always loved the character of Sulu, seeing him get his own command is a very nice touch, and gives him a big role to play in the story without stealing the spotlight from the big three. Uhura, Chekov, and Scotty are less well served by being stuck on the Enterprise, especially since the movie keeps marginalizing them to build up Valeris to make the reveal about her more effective, at which they’re only partially successful. As it is, Valeris’s betrayal isn’t much of a surprise, because who else could it be? While making our heroes into jerks is acceptable, making them into murderers would not be, and there’s nobody else on the ship who even has a speaking part.

Even leaving aside the character assassination, the racism, the rape—this is still a dumb movie. The entire plot is predicated on fear that Starfleet will be mothballed, as if the only reason Starfleet exists is to combat Klingons, which makes no sense. (There’s even a Romulan right there in the story. Plus, the whole seek-out-new-life-and-new-civilizations thing, which you’d think somebody would have remembered since it’s spoken at the top of every episode of the show, and was also used in two prior movies.) Somehow, Starfleet computers don’t have any information about Klingon language, and they have to consult a huge pile of books in order to communicate. And what if the listening post wasn’t run by a bored drunk? And that’s one of several scenes that are played for laughs that are forced and unconvincingly stupid (e.g., the revelation about Dax’s feet, “only Nixon could go to China”). When Excelsior and Enterprise battle Chang’s Bird-of-Prey, where are all the other ships in orbit? (The delegates to the conference had to get there somehow.)

The movie is not a total disaster. As I said, seeing Sulu in command of his own ship is a joy to see, and is the sort of thing we should have seen more of beyond this and Chekov’s being on the Reliant four movies ago—these people have grown older and should have actually advanced more in their careers. Christopher Plummer is simply superb as Chang, a wonderful antagonist. David Warner and Rosanna DeSoto both bring gravitas to their roles, with DeSoto in particular showing the struggle between two responses to her father’s death: revenge for his murder and needing to finish the work he started. Kurtwood Smith has similar gravitas as the president, trying to balance several different needs and agendas, and Leon Russom also gets credit for bringing some nuance that neither Brock Peters nor Rene Auberjonois are allowed to have (which is too bad, as both actors deserved better than this).

And in the abstract, the movie does a good job of showing the process of peace and alliance that had already been established as happening eight decades of story-time hence. The general storyline does a good job of showing the start of the road that led to Worf on the bridge of the Enterprise (casting Michael Dorn as his own ancestor is a nice nod to that, as well).

But this crew deserved a better sendoff than to be portrayed as racist relics who blithely commit horrid acts. By ordering Spock to commit rape, Kirk is no better than the allegedly untrustworthy Klingons, and Spock—the only member of the Enterprise crew who doesn’t come across as prejudiced—goes along with it unhesitatingly. Before this movie, I was sad to learn that this was the last hurrah for the Big Seven. After this movie, I never particularly wanted to see them again.

Warp factor rating: 2

Next week: Star Trek Generations

Keith R.A. DeCandido has several upcoming items available for preorder: Orphan Black: Classified Clone Report, out in August from Insight Editions (just in time for that series’ final episode); Nights of the Living Dead, edited by George Romero & Jonathan Maberry, which ties into the classic zombie film, with Keith’s story “Live and On the Scene,” out in July; Joe Ledger: Unstoppable, set in Maberry’s horror/thriller oeuvre, with Keith’s story “Ganbatte” featuring Lydia “Warbride” Ruiz, due in October; Stargate SG-1/Atlantis: Homeworlds, edited by Sally Malcolm, with Keith’s Carter-and-Teal’c story “Sun-Breaker,” out in eBook this month and print next month; and the omnibus Marvel’s Tales of Asgard, which collects Keith’s three novels Thor: Dueling with Giants, Sif: Even Dragons Have Their Endings, and Warriors Three: Godhood’s End, out in August (just in time for the release of Thor: Ragnarok).

Jim Shooter wrote the book that changed my life, the book that, I’m confident, landed me here. Here’s how it happened.

I’m twelve years old. We live way out in the country in West Texas, maybe fifteen miles east of Midland, an actual city—probably ninety thousand people then, thanks to the oil boom—but we’re not quite to Stanton, a little place of about three thousand. Stanton’s big compared to where we live, Greenwood. No post office, no mention on the map. Just a school and church on the same grounds, and lots of cotton fields, lots of pumpjacks, lots of pastures, and, every few miles, a house, a trailer out in the mesquite.

Every couple weeks, my mom would load me and my two little brothers up and we’d head into Midland, for groceries. It was a big event. Just shy of Midland, there was this gas station, Pecan Grove. We’d each get fifty or seventy-five cents and get to go in, buy a coke. Cokes were very rare in our lives.

One of those times—the Jim Shooter time—on the race back to the cooler for a Big Red or a Dr. Pepper, I saw something I hadn’t seen before.

Comic books.

A round rack of them.

Understand, in 1984, I’d never been to the theater to see a movie. All I knew about Star Wars was from a page I studied and studied in the JC Penney’s catalog I had to leave in the living room, because I’d stay up all night looking at it.

This is where things start for me, there in Pecan Grove. I’m staring at a comic book. I’m staring at the Incredible Hulk on the cover of issue 4 of Secret Wars. He’s green, even his hair. And, to save his friends, he’s holding up one hundred and fifty billions tons of rock.

I walk out of Pecan Grove without a coke, yes, and then over the next few months I’m always scrambling over my brothers to get to that round rack in Pecan Grove. I wouldn’t read Secret Wars in actual sequence until years later—the kids in the trailers behind Pecan Grove were probably nabbing the issues—but I was able to read a few of them.

Specifically, I was able to read issue 10. For me, for a long time, that’s where Secret Wars stops.

In the thirty-three years since that day I found the Hulk holding a mountain up, I’ve read thousands of books, thousands of comics, and they’ve all left their print on me, they’ve all left me a different person. But none so much as issue 10 of Secret Wars.

If you don’t know it, Secret Wars is all Earths’ mightiest heroes and villains getting spirited away to this Battle Planet for a sort of tournament of champions, so this omnipotent entity the Beyonder can watch them struggle, and perhaps understand this strange-to-him concept of “desire.” It makes for some cool fights, fun reversals, unexpected allies, character-changing developments, and of course lots of heroics and dark brooding—chief among the brooders is Doctor Doom.

Never content with the hand he’s dealt, Doom elects to try to change the nature of the game itself: he goes after the Beyonder, to steal his limitless power with a specially modified chest-plate, one that only works at about arm’s length.

This is an enterprise with no hope, of course. Not only is the Beyonder all-powerful, but Doom’s a bad guy, and bad guys don’t win, right?

But look at that cover of issue 10.

Doom’s green tunic is in rags. His metal armor has been shredded away. He’s bleeding, he’s broken, he’s crackling and smoldering—this is what happens when you slog through wave after wave of energy hurled at you by an omnipotent being. This had to sell on the magazine rack, so the cover couldn’t show it, but one of Doom’s legs has even been burned off, and an arm would soon follow. There’s no way he can live, no way he can make it even one step closer to the Beyonder.

Yet he does. He’s Doom. “A way,” he says, “there must be—”

He’s hurt, he’s bleeding, he’s destroyed, this is impossible, this is stupid and crazy, but that doesn’t stop him. Then Beyonder, in all his vast innocence and naive curiosity, he draws close enough for Doom’s chest-plate to activate, and Doom, like that, steals the power infinite.

All because he wouldn’t give up.

All because he kept going.

That year, 1984, a lot of craziness started for our family, and left us moving all across Texas, just trying to stay together. A lot of bad situations. I was always the new kid at school. I was always having to prove myself on the playground, on the basketball court, in the parking lot, under the bleachers, in the principal’s office, in the back of cop cars, on a pumpjack, on a horse, under a hood.

But, each new hallway I walked into, each next job, each next whatever, I would set my eyes like Doctor Doom in issue 10, and I would tell myself that I would keep walking no matter what came at me, no matter the injury, no matter the chances, no matter the teachers standing me up in front of class as example to the rest, of somebody they should all look up when I was twenty, to see if I was still so funny.

I kept going. I kept insisting.

And yeah, I ran away into the pastures and the trees and the night and worse so many times, but I always came back. Because of Doom. Doom wouldn’t have given up. Doom would have insisted on seeing this hopeless enterprise through.

So I did too.

Secret Wars 10 didn’t turn me into a writer. Secret Wars 10, it kept me alive through all of my secret wars. Without it, there’s no me.

Thank you, Jim Shooter.

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

After a bird fatally collides with her car, a troubled young woman’s life changes irrevocably.

On a grim Tuesday in November, when the world seemed empty of mystery and magic, indeed, empty of all beauty, Winona Li drove down the two-lane country road that counted for a highway in this area, heading home from a second interview. The copper sting of failure sat on her tongue. At the midpoint of a wood whose laced branches cast gloom upon the road, a small, quick thing fluttered across the windshield of her Impala, thumped the glass, and fell.

Winona slammed the brakes and the Impala twisted and screeched to a halt.

The ditch that ran along the road bristled with knee-high chicory and wild mustard. Leaves drooped from their stalks, rusting. Seeds puffed from cleft husks and horns. Winona dug through the weeds, her own heart thrumming, until she found the broken bird. Its eyes were dull with shock, and one wing hung askew, but it was breathing.

“Thank God,” she said. “Hang on, please hang on.”

Even as she spoke, her heels sinking into the mud, the suede toes filling with ditchwater, its trembling stopped.

“You can’t,” she said. “Not today. It’s too much.”

The woods were silent.

Leaving the bird among the yellowing weeds for the ants to devour would be the easiest thing. Easier than laughing. Easier than sleeping.

Clutching the dead bird to her breast, Winona staggered to her car, dabbed at her toes with a fistful of tissues, then drove.

She had passed the Kingston Ornithology Museum many times without stopping. Now she shouldered open the doors under the glassy yellow glare of taxidermied eagles. The display cases along the entrance held rows of eggs ordered by size, from ostrich and emu to hummingbird: pitted, speckled, nubbled, hollow.

The woman in a pink blouse and cat’s-eye glasses behind the desk didn’t look up as the doors swung shut. Winona thrust the bird at her. “I hit it. Can you do anything?”

The receptionist pinched her lips together and fumbled for the phone.

“Penny? Can you come to the entrance? Someone brought in a bird strike. Yeah, I remember that macaw. It was a hoot.” She paused and squinted at what Winona held. “White-throated sparrow. Nothing special. Okay.”

While Winona waited, her shoes oozing, the receptionist rearranged the plastic racks of bird-watching brochures into a wall between them.

Each of the eggs in the vitrines was accompanied by a stiff card, labeled with species and date. Most resembled rocks, pretending to be boring, willing her to look away. Those evolutionary tricks wouldn’t work on her, she told them silently; she was a geologist. Or she had been.

The dribbled surface of the great bowerbird’s egg suggested a painting in a stark modernist gallery. The great tinamou’s resembled an enormous candied almond. She was puzzling over the teardrop egg of the common murre when sharp footsteps tapped and boomed across the wooden floor.

The stocky woman in a comfortable brown sweater, the sleeves rolled back at the wrists to leave her hands free, was probably Penny. A jet dove perched at her collarbone, and her hard boots could have crushed chicken bones, or climbed mountains, or dug wells.

Winona had owned boots like those, once.

“Thanks for bringing this in,” Penny said.

“It was horrible of me, I’m sorry—”

“It happens. We get a lot of window and vehicle collisions. We prepare them as museum specimens.”

“You mean formaldehyde?”

“Skinning and drying. Easy storage and access when we want to ask questions. Do insecticides change claw shape? And so on.”

Penny held out her hand, and Winona, suddenly reluctant, opened her fingers one by one. The silken softness peeled from her damp palm and fell.

The receptionist coughed and rattled a stack of brochures. For a moment, Winona was back in the clinic, hearing the light cough, the shuffle of papers, the doctor’s dry voice. You’re fine. It’s over. Would you like someone to escort you to your car?

Her feet, wetter and colder by the minute, pulled her back to the present.

“You said you’ll skin it. Can I watch?”

The receptionist clicked her tongue. “You’ve got good intentions—”

“Professional curiosity. Specimen prep isn’t complicated in geology.”

Penny raised an eyebrow.

“Also guilt. I killed it. I want to see it through.”

“It’s quite enough for you to bring it in. Don’t go bothering our researchers—”

“I don’t mind, Edith. I was going to prepare a few today anyway.”

“You’re responsible for her.”

“Of course.”

“And I’m not cleaning up the mud she’s tracking in. What a mess.”

Winona blushed.

“Understood. The cleaners come at seven, anyway.”

Penny led Winona down a long hall glassed and pinned with severed wings and diagrams of beaks. Doors beeped and opened to her badge, and they entered a black-benched lab that smelled faintly of bleach, lemons, and decay.

“Is that a dodo?”

“Yes. The one on the right’s a Carolina parakeet. Last one died in captivity in 1918, or in the wild a decade or two later, depending on who you believe. The main museum has nicer specimens—less scruffy—if you want to see them later.”

Penny took a tray and gathered scalpel, scissors, forceps, probes, a cup of water, and a scoop of cornmeal in a plastic box.

“You really don’t have to stay if you don’t want to.”

Winona pressed her hands to her stomach. “I’ve seen worse.”

Penny parted the sparrow’s breast feathers and ran the scalpel in a single smooth motion along its keel. As the skin split and shrank, it showed the cherry-red muscles beneath. With fingers and blunt tools, pushing and probing, Penny flayed the breast and back and rolled down the skin of the thighs like stockings.

Then she snagged the knee joints in her shears and crunched through. The sound was splintering bones and cracked teeth.

Winona winced.

“Why?”

“Tidiness. Anything that can rot, will.”

After stripping the wings, Penny pushed the head backwards through the neck, bit by bit, until the creamy skull and its sockets were exposed. Taking up the forceps, she tore out each eye. They pattered like overripe blueberries onto the tray.

The forceps were exchanged for pointed scissors. The two sharp tips groped inside the skull, then pinched shut with a pulpy, gritty noise.

Two points of a starry headache began to pulse above Winona’s eyebrows, as if in sympathy.

“That—”

“The soft palate. Hard to clean out the brain, otherwise.”

Penny dipped her fingers in cornmeal and wiped them on a wad of white cotton, streaking it pink. Two more wisps of cotton, rolled between thumb and forefinger, formed balls with trailing stalks.

“And these are the eyes.”

The restored head, once Penny eased it back through the crackling skin of the neck, stared blindly at Winona.

Penny slit the crop and spread the seeds that spilled out, probed in the dark cavity of the sparrow’s chest, and jotted quick notes in a binder.

“Dead from trauma and blood loss. As expected, from a car strike.”

“How can you tell?”

“This black jelly here.”

Winona followed the direction of Penny’s finger and felt her own abdomen cramp.

“I was distracted. I was coming back from an interview. I’m unemployed.”

“You said you were a geologist.”

“I was. Out on the Bakken Formation in North Dakota. Before prices crashed.”

Penny selected a dowel, sharpened it to a point, and wrapped it in cotton batting, around and around. “Oil and gas, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Not what I’d expect, looking at you. You’re so—small.”

“I wasn’t working on the rigs. Just computer models in a field office. The men who operated the rigs were tough. I saw them drinking and swinging at each other in the bars.”

“You go to a lot of bars?”

“Nothing else in those towns. I played a lot of pool.”

“I can recommend the Reynard, if you’re local. Are you local?”

“I’m trying.” Winona laughed, a brittle sound. “I tried in North Dakota, too.”

“My nephew plays guitar there on Thursdays.”

Penny angled the dowel through the sparrow until its point entered the skull, eased the loose skin over the lump of cotton, and started sewing the edges of the incision together.

“Why don’t you write the label, since you brought this one in? There’s a pile of them—yes, right there.”

“What should I write?”

“Species—that’s Zonotrichia albicollis, two l’s—the date—it’s the 20th—my name—Thomason, one s. Go ahead and tie it to the legs. Here’s thread. Now one thread through the nares, to keep the beak closed. Good. The foam drying boards are over there. Smooth out the feathers, make it look nice—that’s right. Now pin it in place.”

The pins crossed over the sparrow like swords. Apart from its cotton eyes, the sparrow looked undamaged, its overlapping breast feathers concealing incision and seam.

“And now?”

“Now it dries. In three days, it goes in a specimen drawer until a researcher wants to see it. Should last three hundred to four hundred years, if we keep the beetles away.”

Winona stroked the mottled breast. It felt silken and warm. Behind her, taps gushed; Penny was washing her tools.

“How many specimens do you prep a day?”

“Two or three, time permitting. There’s a dozen owls and corvids in that freezer, and it’s one of two.”

“Do you have an assistant?”

“Usually. She’s on maternity leave for the next three months.”

“I’d be happy to help. If you taught me.”

Penny shook the container of cornmeal into the trash. “I didn’t think you enjoyed that.”

Winona swallowed, twisting one thumb in her other hand. “You’re taking death and waste—my death and waste—and making a library of birds.”

“You have no experience.”

“I can learn. I did fieldwork. I know my way around my tools. I know how to be gentle.”

“Ever seen a museum budget?” Penny snorted. “We can’t afford snacks, much less another person.”

“I don’t need money. I have four months of expenses saved. Just teach me and let me help.”

Penny picked up the wet scalpel and set it down, picked it up, set it down. The lines around her mouth deepened.

“Fine,” she said. “One trial week, and if it works out, you leave when Maxine comes back. I’ll tell Edith to let you in tomorrow.”

The next morning, as sleep shredded itself to threads, Winona awoke in the tiny apartment she rented month to month with the slight pressure of a foreign object against the outside of her thigh. She lay still for a moment longer, considering the possibilities. She did not eat in bed, since she hated the itch of crumbs in her sheets. Neither did she bring to bed the pointed corners of books, nor the harsh flicker and chilly surface of her cell phone. Her network barely had any coverage where she lived, for that matter. And her Internet might as well have been a candle in the wind.

Displeased, she dug beneath the covers and closed her fingers on something small and round.

It looked like a polished ball of smoky quartz, but it was lighter than quartz, lighter than wood, even, and warm. Winona peered into its cloudy depths, perplexed. She had never bought tchotchkes of that sort, with no purpose whatsoever. Her apartment had been sparsely furnished and empty of all ornament when she moved in, and nothing—no loose sequin or feather or forgotten bus ticket trapped between the floorboards—had suggested magpie tastes in the previous occupant.

Then again, her memory seemed to fail her more and more often these days, whether out of kindness or exhaustion.

The smooth crystal surface offered her no answers.

Sighing, Winona dressed, pocketed the bauble, and made toast.

For three hours a day, after that, Winona skinned and prepared specimens under Penny’s guidance. The freezer revealed icy wonders in plastic bags: snowy owls peppered with shot, crows battered by trucks, Anna’s hummingbirds with translucent tongues drooping out of open beaks, looking for all the world like cartoon characters playing dead. She discovered the long, wiry hyoid horns wrapped around woodpecker skulls, the plump orange ooze of ducks’ preening glands, the reek of thawed fat, the black spots where blood supplied new feathers, the varied contents of bulging crops, and one day, in astonishment, three pearly, unfinished eggs in the wet depths of a robin.

Fall deepened to winter. Ice whitened the lake. The pines along the shore creaked and groaned, and every so often one crashed through the rest, weighed down with snow. Winona slept under three comforters, tucking her cold feet tight against her shivering self.

Each morning she found another of the crystalline enigmas in her bed. None were perfectly spherical; they tapered and swelled. She lined them up on her dresser with dabs of blue putty. Despite the frost on the windows, they were never cold to the touch.

Questioned, the iron-jawed landlady denied all knowledge of ghosts, then fell silent and eyed her tenant with a speculative air.

The mystery vexed Winona, but as the days passed, she grew used to it. She could, she had learned, grow used to anything.

“You said North Dakota.” Penny was elbow-deep in a swan, and Winona had a tufted titmouse open in front of her.

“The company sent me different places for six to eight months each time. Brazil. Texas. Alaska.”

“Exciting. Why did you come all the way out here?”

“From the middle of nowhere to another nowhere?”

“Most people here think it’s the best town in the world.”

“But—”

“Just keep that in mind.”

“My parents lived here for a few years before I was born.”

“International students? We have a lot of those.”

“Yes.”

“Where are they now? Back in China?”

“They passed away six years ago. Car crash. It was fast.”

“And you could still work for oil and gas, after that?”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“What drew you that way in the first place?”

“You mean, what’s attractive about a solid, safe job?”

“You’re out here where no one knows you, skinning dead birds for fun—you like solid and safe?”

“We were always a dollar or two away from not eating, when I was a kid. A fight every time the bills came. So yes, I liked safe. I could travel. I could eat at restaurants. I could buy nice shoes, the ones that are pretty and comfortable. And those savings let me hide out here and do this.”

Penny, measuring the swan’s stringy, wobbling oviduct, said, “I see.”

“It’s Thursday—is your nephew at the Reynold?”

“The Reynard. Probably.”

After her titmouse was stitched shut and shelved, Winona drove home, ate alone at her scratched pressboard table, then wrapped herself in layers and walked to the Reynard.

She had hoped Penny would be there, but she saw no one she knew. The bar had no pool table, only three kinds of beer and a spindly teenager grappling with a large guitar. He sang in a clear, sweet voice and ignored her completely.

Every other head had turned to her when she walked in, and some continued to stare, brows wrinkled. One or two glared. All the faces in the bar were white. Even those deep in conversation, half smiling, kept glancing at her.

Winona gulped her bitter pint, her head down, her shoulders crawling.

The man beside her tapped her shoulder. “Nee haw,” he said.

“Please don’t,” Winona said.

“Nee haw nee haw,” he said, and his blonde companion tinkled with laughter. “Go back to your own country.”

Everyone was watching, now.

Winona abandoned her pint on the counter and fled.

It was for the best, she told herself later, gazing at the seventy-six mysteries on her dresser. She had made mistakes out of loneliness before, in oil-field cots, in dark corners. One of them had been particularly bad. If she closed her eyes, she could recall in fine detail the shape of his knuckles and the thin brown hair on the backs of his hands. Those hands could be kind—holding her up, stroking her face—then abruptly cruel. When, after two days of vomiting, she held up the stick, warm and redolent with urine, she had wanted to drop dead.

Instead, as the rigs and her friends fell silent, she bought a ticket to upstate New York, found a clinic, then paid with a little blood for her freedom.

Of course it would be hard. Life was not easy, her parents had said, again and again, until the words were inscribed on her bones. This was what she deserved. This and no more. She could imagine staying forever among the pines beside the lake, searching for answers in dead birds, growing old in insignificance. She would waste little, consume little, take up barely any space. She would never sink another well to bring the rich darkness bubbling up.

“Then I ran out of there,” she told Penny, as she printed Mimus polyglottos in careful letters on a paper tag. “I don’t think I’m going back.”

“You probably misunderstood. They’re nice people, there.”

“They didn’t seem friendly.”

“You must have seemed unfriendly, then. Or your behavior was off.”

Winona tied the tag to the scaly black legs and smoothed the long gray feathers.

“I think I could do this for years.”

“Do you.”

“As a job, I mean. You don’t think so?”

“With your background?”

“What, geology?”

“Gas and oil.”

“Do you have something against—”

“The greater sage grouse. The lesser prairie chicken. A million birds a year die in oil pits and spills. Have you seen what they look like, when you pull them out? Have you cleared their eyes with toothbrushes? Have you seen their lungs?”

“You drive a car,” Winona protested. “A Honda Civic. Imported. Not electric, not even a hybrid—what do you think it runs on?”

“Sure, I drive. I even fly. We’re all poisoning ourselves and each other, every minute of every day. I can read it in beak lengths, in the thickness of eggshells. We’re monsters, all of us. You’re monstrous, I’m monstrous. Everything in our freezer is evidence of that.”

“So why teach me?”

“As I said, our budget is tight, and you’re working for free. And I’m keeping a geologist off the oil fields, at least for a while.”

“Well,” Winona said, “I hope you can keep me here longer.”

Penny said nothing.

When Winona had pinned her mockingbird—she could prepare one bird a day to Penny’s three—Penny stood.

“I have a research trip to Costa Rica at the end of February, to look at Talamanca speciation. Flying, before you ask. Very hypocritical.”

“For how long?”

“Three months.”

“Is it all right if I still come in?”

“Actually.” Penny tapped her fingers on the table. “I think it’s time you moved on.”

Winona’s chest tightened. She could not speak.

“Maxine will be back in two weeks. We can’t afford to pay you. This is the next best thing I can do. Go home. Or go somewhere else. Don’t come back tomorrow.”

It was snowing when Winona left the museum. She drove slowly, her headlights picking out the quick slanting streaks of snowflakes, her windshield wipers sweeping feathery handfuls to either side.

At the door to her apartment, she stomped the slush from her boots, then set the kettle on and opened the last teabag in the box. Outside her frozen windows, the blue and purple of evening deepened to black. Here and there the orange slash of a sodium light illuminated the swirling snow.

She had stuffed so many small, soft, pointless deaths into the semblance of life. Her hands remembered the shearing of joints. Her eyes remembered the pink stains and jellied blood. She closed her eyes and bowed her head, hearing their silent singing. The shadows of hundreds of birds swept over her, flying wing tip to wing tip, and were gone.

Her tea grew cold, untouched. When her shoulders ached from stillness, and her skin felt uncomfortably loose on her, she set the mug down and went to her bedroom.

The eighty-nine enigmas on her dresser had cracked open at their crowns, the smoke and gleam emptied out of them. The shells sat hollow and transparent in a scatter of shards. She was not altogether surprised. Something strange and beautiful had been waiting, just as she was, for the hour of departure to arrive.

She scratched her itching collarbone, feeling the skin flake and peel, then her elbows and forearms. Where had these little dark bruises come from? They bloomed down her arms like blood feathers, though it had been months since she had last seen Fletcher, since she had come to him trembling with her news and he had gripped her wrists, tighter and tighter, to keep her from leaving his room. But she had freed herself. She was light with relief, clotted with guilt, sad and joyful, all at once.

With trembling, changing hands, Winona raised the window sash to the blowing cold, and the wind rushed in and blessed her cheeks with snow.

A moment later—who knows how long?—a white-throated sparrow darted out into the flurrying flakes, its dark eyes shining, the compass of its heart pointing south, toward the spring.

“The White-Throated Transmigrant” copyright © 2017 by E. Lily Yu

Art copyright © 2017 by Linda Yan

We’re thrilled to show off the cover for Liz Ziemska’s Mandelbrot the Magnificent, a stunning, magical pseudo-biography of Benoit Mandelbrot as he flees into deep mathematics to escape the rise of Hitler…

Learn more about the story and check out Will Staehle’s full cover below!

Mandelbrot the Magnificent is available November 14th from Tor.com Publishing. From the catalog copy:

Born in the Warsaw ghetto and growing up in France during the rise of Hitler, Benoit Mandelbrot found escape from the cruelties of the world around him through mathematics. Logic sometimes makes monsters, and Mandelbrot began hunting monsters at an early age. Drawn into the infinite promulgations of formulae, he sinks into secret dimensions and unknown wonders.

His gifts do not make his life easier, however. As the Nazis give up the pretense of puppet government in Vichy France, the jealousy of Mandelbrot’s classmates leads to denunciation and disaster. The young mathematician must save his family with the secret spaces he’s discovered, or his genius will destroy them.

Cover design by Will Staehle

Praise for Mandelbrot the Magnificent:

“We will never know the full extent of what we lost in the Holocaust — what histories, what innovations, what music and science and literatures we might have had. In Mandelbrot the Magnificent, the talented and imaginative, the impeccable Liz Ziemska has fashioned a beautiful story about one famous survivor and the magic and mathematics he’s brought to the world.” —Karen Joy Fowler

“Mandelbrot the Magnificent is completely persuasive in its magical-realist rendering of the émigré experience in occupied France in World War II. Even as it’s wrenching in its delineation of how unjustly the fortunate and unfortunate are separated by extremity, it’s uplifting in the way it reminds us just how infinitely resourceful we can be — even if history is our very own Book of Monsters—when it comes to the magic-making of truly loving the world and each other.” —Jim Shepard

“Pure delight and a sense of play right up against the gravity and horrors of history; this is writing that moves into different tones with such ease and joy, even at its most serious.” —Aimee Bender

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

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | iBooks

Using a historical setting for a tale of monsters or terror can be a reliable way to increase suspense and provide a counterpoint for the horrors described therein. Whether it’s Edgar Allan Poe summoning up a bygone age—and its accompanying menaces—in “The Masque of the Red Death” or, more recently, John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake setting their graphic novel Kros: Hallowed Ground against the backdrop of the Battle of Gettysburg, it’s the kind of narrative decision that can accentuate certain themes and ratchet up the tension even further.

But a specific point in history can also summon up a number of more mundane terrors over the course of a narrative: totalitarian governments, horrific attitudes about race and gender, and unrestrained abuses coming from the powerful all come to mind. Sometimes reading a story set in the past can haunt us for reasons other than literal monsters that lurk on the page. What follows is a look at five books that explore the demons of the past along with monsters in the past…

Blood Crime, Sebastià Alzamora (translated by Maruxa Relaño and Martha Tennent)

The Spanish Civil War has, in the last decade and a half, been the setting for a number of notable works of horror and the supernatural, with Guillermo del Toro’s film Pan’s Labyrinth being the highest-profile example. The novel Blood Crime features plenty of horrible behavior on the part of its human characters, who are caught between warring factions, along with mounting evidence that the killer stalking the city of Barcelona is either a vampire or someone who believes himself to be one. Narration from a jaded and undead voice punctuates the novel, suggesting that the former is the case. And the book gets weirder and weirder as it approaches its climax, including a subplot that riffs on a very different work of Gothic fiction.

The King in the Golden Mask, Marcel Schwob (translated by Kit Schluter)

The stories in this 1892 collection, newly translated into English in its entirety, abound with glimpses of European history where horrific violence occurs, terrifying secrets are revealed, and conflicted characters descend into madness. Translator Kit Schluter, in his afterword, notes that the book “suggests time and time again that one’s true identity comes to light only in the crucible of a struggle so intense that it bares him of any privilege or nicety behind which he could otherwise hide.” Schwob’s vision encapsulates royalty and everyday people alike, and shows all of them capable of monstrous acts and harrowing moments of self-deception. For Schwob, the past is more charnel house than museum piece.

The Fisherman, John Langan

Much of John Langan’s award-winning novel The Fisherman unfolds in the recent past, as its narrator describes a fishing trip in New York’s Hudson River Valley that takes a turn for the cosmically horrific. But nestled in there is another tale of horror, set across two centuries and involving a war profiteer, the resurrection of the dead, and a trip to the shores of an otherworldly ocean. It’s a powerful counterpoint to the framing story, one which establishes a cyclical nature to the novel’s central menace and shows how different moments in time react to similar supernatural conspiracies.

The Essex Serpent, Sarah Perry

Trying to categorize Sarah Perry’s sprawling novel, set in London and Essex in the late 19th century, isn’t an easy thing. It’s about the star-crossed connection between the newly-widowed Cora Seaborne and the Reverend William Ransome, each sympathetic and flawed. But there’s also the possibility of a sea serpent lurking just off the coast; there’s a mysterious epidemic of madness going around, and there are a host of nerve-wracking scenes of anatomies dissected and pondered. Some of this comes from the novel’s third major character, Dr. Luke Garrett, a man of science decades ahead of his time–which, in another novel, might mark him as the sort of character who meddles in nature and unleashes monsters. But that isn’t this kind of story–and Perry’s manipulation of expectations makes for a breath of fresh air even as she summons dread with other aspects of the novel.

Maleficium, Martine Desjardins (translated by Fred A. Reed and David Homel)

The framing story of Martine Desjardins’s Maleficium is fascinating: it’s ostensibly a found document from the Archdiocese of Montreal, documenting a series of 19th-century confessions too horrific or bizarre for public consumption. Each of the chapters is a standalone vignette, with ominous titles in Latin like “Oculus Malignus” and “Osculum Infame.” There’s body horror aplenty here, as well–one of the narratives, about a parasitic insect, features an abundance of literally gut-wrenching prose. Over the course of the book, certain themes come into focus as well: colonialist abuses coming back to hurt their perpetrators, with acts of sexist violence and negligence turned on their head with vicious consequences.

Top image: Pan’s Labyrinth (2006).

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

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

We’re excited to share an audio excerpt from the novella below, read by Seanan herself!

Author and narrator Seanan McGuire had this to say:

I’ve done voice work before, but never for an audio book, and heading for the studio for the first time was both exciting and terrifying—a combination that only got stronger as our GPS led us deeper and deeper into a landscape out of one of my books.  We found the place tucked up on a hill, surrounded by trees and unexpected wildlife.  Once there, it was perfectly professional and absolutely delightful, even if I couldn’t have soda near the microphone.  So I sat, and I read, for hours and hours and hours.  I met my own text in a whole new way, and I loved every second of it.  Even if Dr. Bleak’s voice sort of hurt my throat.

Listen to Seanan read Chapter 3 below—you can also read Chapters 1 and 2 here.

Down Among the Sticks and Bones is available in paperback, ebook, and audio formats from Tor.com Publishing! From the catalog copy:

Twin sisters Jack and Jill were 17 when they found their way home and were packed off to Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children.

This is the story of what happened first….

Jacqueline was her mother’s perfect daughter—polite and quiet, always dressed as a princess. If her mother was sometimes a little strict, it’s because crafting the perfect daughter takes discipline.

Jillian was her father’s perfect daughter—adventurous, thrill-seeking, and a bit of a tomboy. He really would have preferred a son, but you work with what you’ve got.

They were five when they learned that grown-ups can’t be trusted. They were 12 when they walked down the impossible staircase and discovered that the pretense of love can never be enough to prepare you a life filled with magic in a land filled with mad scientists and death and choices.

You can find the audio edition on Audible or get the ebook edition at the links below!

It’s easy when the world is falling apart to feel like a tragedy is too big to look at, too dire to capture in words. It’s easy to think that nothing an artist does can possibly matter—you’re just one more small weak meat envelope against an unbeatable system. But of course this is exactly when you have to engage with the world. It’s an artist’s most important job: to look at the world you’d rather hide from, to engage with tragedy, to wring humor and joy out of wretchedness.

In 1988, Tony Kushner began writing a play called Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. It was supposed to be about two hours long, and he wanted it to be about gay men, the AIDS crisis, and Mormonism…and he knew there was an angel in it. He was also choosing to write about what was then the very recent past. The first version of the first half of the play (which ended up being over seven hours long) premiered on stage in London in 1990, and on Broadway in ’93. The play is set in 1985-6—not the neon tinted, shoulder-padded dream of American Psycho, or even the manic hedonism of The Wolf of Wall Street, but the desolate, terrifying time in New York when the queer community was fighting AIDS with little recognition from a conservative government, when racial progress was at a standstill, and the increased visibility of the women’s and queer rights movements were under constant attack by the Religious Right.

The easy thing would have been to turn away and write about a lighter topic, but Kushner looked at the attacks on his community and set out to write a play that would offer comfort, inspiration, and even hope to a generation of people.

I know that when I started TBR Stack part of the point was for me to read my way through books I hadn’t gotten to yet, and that is still my main MO.

BUT.

It’s pride month, and what I really wanted to talk about this time was Angels in America, because if I had to pick one reading experience that was IT, the one, the triple underlined, bright neon Book That Saved My Life? It’s this one.

First, a quick plot summary: Prior Walter and Louis Ironson are a gay couple living in New York. When Prior learns he has AIDS, Louis leaves him and embarks on a fling with a closeted Mormon named Joe Pitt. Joe’s depressed wife, Harper, self-medicates with Valium. Joe’s boss, Roy Cohn (yes, that Roy Cohn), pressures Joe to take a job in the Justice Department to act as his inside man after he learns people are trying to get him disbarred. Roy then learns that he, too, has AIDS. Belize, Prior’s best friend, is assigned as Roy’s nurse, and Joe’s mother, Hannah, flies out from Salt Lake City and ends up caring for both Harper and Prior after they’re abandoned by their partners. Also, there’s an Angel who won’t leave Prior alone, and the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg has decided to haunt Roy, and everyone is in a tremendous amount of pain both physical and psychological. Got all that?

The play gave me a window into the mythical land of New York, a quick education in queerness, socialism, and Mormonism, and an ice-water bath introduction to the early days of AIDS. No one had any explanations at first, or any overarching reason why dozens of men would suddenly get illnesses like Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia or Kaposi’s sarcoma, two common symptoms that had been incredibly rare until the early ’80s. The first patients were young, otherwise healthy men, most in New York, and the only throughline seemed to be that they were gay.

It also captures is the sheer panic that came with the early days of the AIDS epidemic, and the way it was immediately weaponized against the queer community. With the syndrome being called “gay cancer,” fundamentalist preachers were only too happy to call it a punishment from God; people were calling for quarantines of gay men; people were terrified that you could catch it from public restrooms. And William F. Buckley—a tweedy scholarly man considered the leading intellectual of the Right—said that people with AIDS should be tattooed both on the forearm (so needle-sharers would be alerted) and on the ass (so gay men would be alerted during sex). He suggested this seemingly in all seriousness, apparently not realizing that visibly tattooing people would put them at risk of being attacked, and seemingly also blind to the resemblance to the serial numbers tattooed onto the arms of people who had, two generations earlier, been rounded up and thrown into Holocaust Centers concentration camps.

There were several plays around the same time that tackled AIDS: Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart (1985) and The Destiny of Me (1992); Paul Rudnick’s Jeffrey (1992); Terrence McNally’s Lips Together, Teeth Apart (1991) and Love! Valour! Compassion! (1994). Indie films Parting Glances (1986) and Longtime Companion (1990) focused on gay men in the early days of the virus. Shortly thereafter Philadelphia (1993) and Rent (1994) were much bigger budget, higher-profile productions that centered straight characters, while the prestige medical drama And the Band Played On (1993) focused on the epidemic. All of these were pure realism, with the ravages of the illness depicted just as starkly as political indifference and societal prejudice. (Parting Glances and Jeffrey each get a single dream sequence/angelic visitation involving a friend who has died of AIDS, but these are both anomalous moments explained away by grief.)

Angels could have been a realistic play, but Kushner instead chose to do something crazy. Something that should not have worked. He chose to reach beyond what realism could accomplish and infuse the play with fantastic elements, which were treated with just as much respect as the domestic drama and harrowing scenes of illness. Prior Walter begins having visions, but these may just be caused by his AIDS medication. Over in Brooklyn, Harper Pitt also has visions, but these may just be caused by the not-quite-suicidal doses of Valium she takes to get through the day. Prior and Harper meet up in dreams, but since those dreams are, as Harper says, “the very threshold of revelation”, the two are able to intuit real truth about each other. Prior goes to Heaven, and his actions there have real world consequences. Finally, Roy Cohn, the slightly-fictionalized villain based on the real-life (and pretty damn villainous) Cohn, is visited by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg. But Roy is also suffering from AIDS and whacked out of his mind on pain meds, so, Ethel might be a hallucination, as well? Except then there’s a point when Ethel is kind enough to call an ambulance for Roy, and paramedics actually show up and take him to the hospital, so…where are the lines of reality drawn?

But by the end of the play Kushner chooses to go even further. He takes the complex philosophical idea of the Angel of History, makes her real, and hauls her down to Earth for a wrestle. And when she got away from him, he sent one of his characters to Heaven so he could confront her there.

In 1920 Paul Klee painted a portrait of a creature he called Angelus Novus—New Angel. The following year a philosopher named Walter Benjamin bought the print, and became obsessed with it, eventually writing about it in his final paper, Theses on the Philosophy of History. You can read them here, and it’ll take about ten minutes to read the whole thing. Benjamin was dead about a month later—having fled Vichy France, he decided to kill himself in Spain so he wouldn’t be sent to a Holocaust Center death camp.

Paul Klee: Angelus Novus, 1920

The Theses is a short work, twenty numbered paragraphs. In Paragraph Nine, Benjamin returns to his painting:

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Kushner takes this Angelus Novus and gives it a voice, agency, a mission. He makes it one of Seven Continental Principalitiesan Angel for each continent, with America obviously snagging the one who has the most direct experience of progress.

Prior begins receiving visions from the Angel of America, and he clings to them because the beautiful voice of the angel not only comforts him, at one point he even says that it’s all that’s keeping him alive. Someone reading this or watching it from the vantage point of 1993 would probably think that the angel would offer a comforting message, some sort of hope, succor in the face of plague and death? But that’s not quite what happens.

At the climax of the first play she crashes through his ceiling, announcing herself. Prior is terrified, the play ends. (Apparently many viewers assumed that was the end, and that the angel had come through the ceiling to collect Prior, who had died alone after a series of hallucinations.) But in the second half of the play, Perestroika, Kushner subverts the saccharine late ‘80s-early-90s angel craze and turning it into a dark exploration of Jewish mysticism, Mormonism, and socialism. He recommits to the fantastic element and makes it a central part of the story. Prior journeys to Heaven and meets with a council of angels…but these are not the touchy-feely, benevolent creatures of CBS evening dramas, or the adorable cherubim cavorting with ceramic kittens on your favorite aunt’s fireplace mantle. These aren’t even the types of celestial beings you’d find atop a Christmas tree. These angels, each representing a different continent, are cantankerous, angry, ready to wrestle and fight humanity for their cause. They want history to STOP. They want humanity to STOP. Stop innovating, stop creating, stop breeding, stop progressing, just cut it out and give the universe some peace, because each new innovation wracks Heaven with earthquakes. The novelty of humans has driven God away, he’s abandoned his angels and his humans and taken a powder, who knows where. The message resonates with Prior, newly diagnosed with AIDS, feeling his young body collapse into terminal illness, and abandoned by his partner Louis—he fears the future. Any change can only be for the worse.

And yet. As Prior wrestles with the message, and discusses it with friends, he realizes more and more that to stop is to become inhuman. His help comes from two marvelously diverse points: his BFF Belize, a Black nurse who has done drag in the past but somewhat given it up as politically incorrect, and Hannah Pitt, the—say it with me now—conservative Mormon mother of Prior’s ex-partner’s new lover. Hannah, who turns out to be far more than a stereotype of religious fundamentalism, is the only one who believes in Prior’s angelic visitations. She instructs him on how to wrestle, literally with the angel, in order to gain its blessing. And so Prior and the Angel of America reenact the Genesis story of Jacob wrestling an unnamed angel/God (the event which led to Jacob renaming himself Israel, or “he who wrestles with God”) right there on the hospital room floor. Prior wins, and climbs a flaming ladder to Heaven, a beautiful derelict city. It doesn’t matter anymore if this is hallucination or reality: what matters is that Prior Walter, sick, lonely, human, is facing a council of Angels and rejecting their message. What matters is that the human is standing up to the awe-inspiring, fantastical Angel of History, and telling her that progress is not just inevitable, it is also the birthright of humanity.

In this way, by embracing fantasy, making History an Angel, and making that Angel a living, breathing, wrestle-able character, Kushner is able to grab Capital Letter Concepts like Plague, Progress, Socialism, Love, Race, and embody them. And since this play is about AIDS, those bodies are sick, suffering, tortured, covered in lesions and blood. The Angels themselves are in tatters, because Progress is a virus that’s killing them. The play only works because of its fantasy element—the fantasy allows Kushner to tie the AIDS crisis to other huge historical markers, and make straight people pay attention. It also means that the play will never be a dated nostalgia piece, because it’s about so many huge ideas that even if a cure for AIDS was found tomorrow Angels would remain vital. And maybe most of all it takes these characters who could have been trapped in a domestic tragedy, and it lifts them out of their own time and their own pain and posits them as the most important people in history. And after doing that, the play ends with Prior Walter, AIDS survivor, turning to the audience and blessing all of us. “You are fabulous creatures, each and every one. And I bless you: More Life. The Great Work Begins.” We are brought into the play, and into history, just as important as any Angel.

About that…Tony Kushner, a gay Jewish man living through the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, visiting loved ones in the hospital, attending funerals, all the while knowing that he might be the next one to get bad news, had every reason to despair. Instead he wrote a story of hard-won hope. Rather than maudlin angels swooping down to fix everything, he gave us flawed, fabulous humans, working together to form families. Rather than cower in fear of infection, he put men naked in bed together onstage. Rather than let the fortunate few who remained unaffected off the hook, he gave us Prior Walter shitting blood and screaming in agony. Rather than succumb to bigotry, he gave us a conservative religious woman who becomes the most three-dimensional character in the play. Rather than succumb to hate, he made his characters say the Kaddish over Roy Cohn.

None of us can see the future. We are all the Angel of History, pushed forward as life unfurls around us, helpless to stop time or change. But we can be present in the world and do whatever we can to help each other, support each other, keep each other safe. Kindle hope in the face of darkness.

Now. Now. Now. Now.

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

Last night the news broke that the directing team of Phil Lord and Chris Miller have departed the Han Solo spin-off movie. A new director has yet to be announced, but after a spirited discussion with my co-workers, I’ve got a few potentially polarizing suggestions for a fresh take on the galaxy far, far away…

Quentin Tarantino

Han and Lando ride around in the Millennium Falcon, bickering about who she belongs to, and committing occasional acts of horrific violence.

Martin Scorsese

Han and Lando ride around in the Millennium Falcon, committing occasional acts of horrific violence, while pausing to wrestle with the moral implication of their violence, and the silence of God.

Whit Stillman and Noah Baumbach

Two directors known for their scabrous takes on upper-class city life give us a tag team take on Han Solo! Will the young, scrappy smuggler find his way in the bright lights and big, planet-sized city of Coruscant? Or will his tortured intellectualism and serial adultery ruin his life?

Wes Anderson

After the death of Woody Harrelson’s Garris Shrike, Han, Lando, and Chewie go on a rollicking-yet-emotionally-resonant trip through the far reaches of space to work out their grief, and their complicated love for each other. Do the Kinks exist in this galaxy? They do now.

David Cronenberg

Each day the Millennium Falcon’s dials and ports seem more…organic. Could it be that the hull is breathing? Is this reality? Han Solo doesn’t know what to believe anymore. He needs to make the Kessel Run, but will he have to merge with his ship in order to do it?

Stephen Spielberg and Tony Kushner

The Young Han Solo movie gets the Lincoln treatment in this haunting meditation on friendship, loyalty, and honor as Han fights the enslavement of Wookiees.

Bong Joon Ho

HAN SOLO EATS BABIES.

Richard Linklater

Han Solo ambles around Mos Eisley, running into old friends and new acquaintances, on a vague mission to meet up with Garris Shrike. As he wanders, Han finds himself in conversations about death, the Force, the totalitarian desires of the Empire, and the possibility of love in a universe that is always changing.

Patty Jenkins

Why is Wonder Woman in the Han Solo movie? Stop asking questions, just sit back in awe as Gal Gadot’s Diana Prince single-handedly defeats the Empire and restores freedom to all the star systems of the galaxy.

Joel and Ethan Coen

The Han abides. It wasn’t always the high-stakes life of a smuggler for young Han, who once preferred blue (milk) Russians and looser-fitting garb. What strange young woman comes along to push him out of his life of leisure?

George Lucas

…maybe not.

So who do you think should take over now that Miller and Lord have taken their leave?

The easily-offended will be offended easily by Tom Holt’s new novel, a madcap Miracle on 34th Street in which religion in particular gets a ribbing, but readers with less delicate sensibilities should be ready to romp, because The Management Style of the Supreme Beings is a whole bunch of fun from word one. And it’s more than a simple send-up: it also stands as a sublimely ridiculous examination of morality in the modern era.

God, the thing begins, is getting on. “Fact is […] I feel old,” He says to his dearly beloved son as they fish for the same Sinderaan species that “had split the atom and proved the existence of the Higgs boson when Earth was still entirely inhabited by plankton.” An age or an instant later, as the five-dimensional fish nibble and divine drinks are sipped, the Big Guy admits that He thinks it might be time to step aside—as manager of the planet, naturally.

You build a business from the ground up, you care for it, worry about it, you take pride in its progress, you’re there for it when things don’t go so well. But there always comes a time when you have to let go. Or does there?

For obvious reasons, Jesus—who goes by Jay these days—doesn’t disagree. After all, “they’re father and son but also equal aspects of the One; it’s therefore logically impossible for them” to part ways in anything other than a philosophical fashion. It’s to His credit that Jay does wonder where that’s likely to leave Uncle Ghost, who’s gotten a bit dotty in His dotage, before giving God the nod… but notably, nobody mentions Kevin.

Kevin is “the younger son of God, marginally less well beloved” than his celebrated big brother “and with whom his father was not always quite so well pleased.” That’s probably because Kevin is desperately inept. He’s the kind of person who sticks to instant because he broke the cappuccino machine and everyone in a position to fix it with a minor miracle is too busy. Even celestial mechanics, “the easiest part of the business,” is beyond this poor kid, whose destiny seems to be to watch one rerun of Touched by an Angel after another, which… well, the less said about, the better.

To wit, when the time comes to hand off the heavens and the earth, Kevin isn’t even in contention. “Everybody seems to think the Venturi boys are a safe pair of hands” in any event. They’ve taken over and turned around plenty of struggling planets in the past, and they’ve offered a fair price—namely “a number [that] couldn’t possibly exist in human mathematics”—for the aforementioned firmament.

Kevin takes off in something off a strop when his high-flying family proffer this plan to him as a fait accompli, so as the Big Guy, Jay, and the Ghostest with the Mostest drive their holy camper van into the stars, the black sheep of the bunch is left on our lowly level when the Venturi brothers explain how they’ve made problematic planets like ours profitable:

Traditionally, your planet, and millions like it, have lumbered along through the Dark Ages on basically dualistic moral systems. You think in binary terms. Mostly it’s Good versus Evil, though in the past—credit where it’s due—some of you went for the more rational and commonsensical Honour/Shame dichotomy—which you guys currently regard as quaintly primitive. But let’s not dwell on that because everything’s about to change. From now on, there is no more Right or Wrong, Good or Evil. We’re doing away with all of that. It’s holding you back: it leads to war, unhappiness and grossly inefficient distribution of valuable resources. It’s gone. Don’t give it a second thought.

Instead:

Under Venturi morality, every sentient being is master of his fate and captain of his soul. You can do whatever you want, when you want, how you want, provided you pay for it. And we’re not talking some vague metaphysical, allegorical, wishy-washy philosophical price here. We’re talking about a fixed tariff of charges, payable in your local currency, fourteen of your Earth days from date of invoice, no excuses, no credit. [And] if you don’t pay, you go to jail.

Looks like the Venturis know what they’re doing, too, because over the months to come, criminal empires dissolve into debt as violent individuals are finally made to pay. Relatively little things, like extramarital flings, end up too expensive to pursue; even potty mouths cost more than a curse word’s worth. Faintly evil though it may be, the new system seems to work—at least at first.

There are, of course, those outliers who are unhappy about the recent change in the planet’s management. Malcontents like Jersey Thorpe, an action hero cut from distinctly Dan Brown-coloured cloth who had “dreamed the impossible dream, fought the unbeatable foe, made the impossible call and been put through—only to find the very next day that God had sold out to the Venturi boys and everything was suddenly completely different, rendering his colossal achievement meaningless.” Not to speak of Santa Claus: actually an ancient thunder god too popular with the people for God to put in his place, as He did all the other deities. Even the Venturis might have difficulty bringing this beirdy weirdo to heel.

Between them—them and a couple of other characters that may be more mundane but are no less marvelous—they dream of destroying the new world order that’s made us safer, but (sniff) sadder. And when their paths cross Kevin’s—who, as “the son of the Big Guy [was] born with an overwhelming instinct to redeem, even if none of it’s your fault and you had no say in the major policy decisions”—they find an unlikely ally who’ll probably be no help at all.

The Management Style of the Supreme Beings is, hands down, the best book Tom Holt has turned out in the ten years I’ve been reading his winningly silly fiction. God knows it’s not going to be for everyone—Holt is as happy to skewer the sacred as he is to take the piss out of the profane—but it’s not as barbed as all that, in fact. Its is a wit served with warmth: a sense of affection that softens the story’s sharp parts.

It’s not, on that note, Holt’s strongest story. Narratively, a lot of The Management Style of the Supreme Beings is nonsense, particularly the last act, which gets so grandiose that it almost loses sight of the little people at the book’s beating heart, however Holt is such an entertainer of an author that he could write a trilogy about watching a pot boil while paint dries and I’d read it in a gleeful evening. He has a sparkle in his authorial eye that makes every satirical sentence glimmer, and a spring in his storyteller’s step that makes even the most distracting of his digressions a devilish pleasure.

His characters are, in any case, more fully formed than his narrative, and between cretinous Kevin, Satan’s suck-up of a secretary Bernie Lachuk, and Jersey’s unexpectedly independent love interest Lucy, Holt has a cast of winners on his hands here. Also: a bloody good book that’s perfect for folks who like a lot of fun, and a little Father Christmas, in their fantasy fiction. Unless, I guess, they’re over-sensitive.

The Management Style of the Supreme Beings is available from Orbit.

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

The latest Game of Thrones trailer is a great mess of action designed to delight and confuse the viewer, but whooooaaaaa is that every Greyjoy ship that ever existed?

Uh-oh.

It’s all Sansa! Dragons! Zombies! Dragons! Boats! Jon Snow! Daenerys! Snow!

Are the dragons going to “flame-on” that Greyjoy armada? It kinda looks like they might. And Jon Snow is going to make everyone work together to fight back some winter zombies, if it’s the last thing he ever does. Which is could be. Given how things have gone for him so far.

Winter is here on July 16th.

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

Today we’re looking at M. R. James’s “Casting the Runes,” first published in 1911 in his More Ghost Stories collection. Spoilers ahead.

“Dear Sir, — I am requested by the Council of the ___ Association to return to you the draft of a paper on The Truth of Alchemy, which you have been good enough to offer to read at our forthcoming meeting, and to inform you that the Council do not see their way to including it in the programme.”

Summary

Mr. Karswell of Lufford Abbey, self-styled wizard, isn’t happy about the rejection of his paper on alchemy. Not happy at all, as the secretary of the rejecting Association tells his wife. At lunch with friends who live near the Abbey, the pair learn how vindictive Karswell can be. According to the friends, he never forgives an offense. To keep children off his estate, he treated them to a magic-lantern show of horrors, including a piece about a flopping white thing that does away with trespassers in the Abbey woods. Then there’s what happened to John Harrington, who wrote a damning review of Karswell’s History of Witchcraft. One night, on his usual walk home, he scaled a tree, fell, and broke his neck. No one can imagine what he sought to escape, but John’s brother suspects Karswell was responsible.

The secretary hopes Karswell won’t learn that Edward Dunning reviewed his paper for the Association. But Karswell would have to inquire at the British Museum for fellow alchemical scholars to learn his reviewer’s name.

Karswell, alas, is a clever man.

Dunning’s quiet life is first upset when he notices an unusual advertisement on his tram ride home. It reads: “In memory of John Harrington, F.S.A., of The Laurels, Ashbrooke. Died Sept. 18th, 1889. Three months were allowed.” By the next day the ad’s disappeared. Then Dunning’s given a leaflet by a man with a strangely rough and hot hand. Dunning glimpses the name Harrington before the leaflet’s twitched away by a passerby. It disappears, as has the distributor.

These incidents leave Dunning pensive. On his next visit to the Museum, he drops some papers. A stout man sitting behind him returns his notebook, saying “May I give you this? I think it should be yours.” Dunning later asks the attendant the man’s name. Oh, that’s Mr. Karswell, and actually Karswell has been asking about authorities on alchemy, and of course was given Dunning’s name.

As Dunning heads home, he feels that “something ill-defined and impalpable had stepped in between him and his fellow-men—had taken him in charge, as it were.” His physician meets him at the door with the news that his servants are both in hospital, poisoned by shellfish they bought from a door-to-door vendor. Dunning must spend the night alone. He’s in bed when he hears his study door open. Investigating, he sees and hears no more, only feels a gust of hot air around his legs. Back in bed, he reaches under the pillow for his watch, only to touch “a mouth, with teeth, and with hair about it, and…not the mouth of a human being.” He flees to the guest bedroom, to spend a miserable night of listening for—something—to fumble at the door. In the morning no intruder’s to be found.

Our Association secretary meets Dunning and is shocked by his haunted appearance. Learning that Karswell has identified his reviewer, the secretary refers Dunning to John Harrington’s brother, Henry. Henry relates John’s story, how a stout man—Karswell—handed John back a dropped program at a concert, after which John felt unaccountably “followed.” He and Henry later discovered a slip of paper in the returned program, covered with black and red runes. Henry remembered a chapter in Karswell’s History of Witchcraft about “casting the runes” to “get people out of the way.” He believes his brother could have escaped Karswell’s curse if he’d been able to give the slip back, but unfortunately (and totally coincidentally) wind caught it and blew it into the fire. Three months from the night of the concert, something chased John to his death.

Dunning recalls Karswell returning his notebook. He and Harrington find in it a slip marked with runes, identical to the one John received. Wind tries to whisk it out the window, but Harrington is able to grab it. They must keep it safe at all cost and somehow trick Karswell into accepting it back.

A week before Dunning’s three month reprieve will be up, Harrington learns Karswell’s leaving for Europe. Dunning and Harrington contrive to be on the same boat train, Dunning in disguise. Karswell is visibly anxious, keeps leaving the car, then spying back through the window. The last time he leaves, one of his ticket cases falls to the floor. Dunning quickly puts the runic slip into it and hands it to Karswell on his return; somehow he keeps his voice from trembling as he says, “May I give you this, sir? I believe it is yours.”

With a distracted air, Karswell takes the ticket case. At the Dover pier, the conspirators watch him board the boat to France. The boarding official calls him back, asking if the gentleman with Karswell has also shown his ticket. Karswell snarls that no one is with him, and indeed that seems to be the case. The official apologizes, then puzzles to a mate about whether Karswell had a dog with him, or did the official just mistake his bundle of coats for another person?

Dunning, uncomfortable sending anyone to his death, dispatches a telegram to Karswell’s hotel warning him to check his ticket case. Evidently the message doesn’t get through, because a couple days later, at the end of Dunning’s three months, a stone falls from a church under repair and kills Karswell. No workmen were around at the time of the accident.

Back in England Harrington tells Dunning about a dream John had before his death, but Dunning soon stops him.

What’s Cyclopean: James’s writing is perfectly sedate—but of Karswell’s we hear that it’s full of “split infinitives, and every sort of thing that makes an Oxford gorge rise.”

The Degenerate Dutch: The tram workers need Dunning’s gentlemanly testimony to avoid getting sacked for “making up” a creepy disappearing advertisement.

Mythos Making: Witches, from Keziah Mason to the thousand heirs of Salem, appear throughout Lovecraft.

Libronomicon: John Harrington reviewed Karswell’s History of Witchcraft; unfortunately for him Karswell doesn’t take criticism well.

Madness Takes Its Toll: The scientific man may be reluctant to concede the evidence of other people’s senses, but “hypnotic suggestion” soothes many ills.

Ruthanna’s Commentary

Scientific rivalry isn’t what it once was, back in the day. Twenty-first century researchers may excoriate their reviewers—or worse, the authors of failed replications—in the vilest of terms, but that’s generally as far as it goes. The active sabotage and libel of the Bone Wars is well behind us. Even that pales beside a fellow like Karswell. The gentleman (and I use the term loosely) is an excellent argument for anonymous peer review. The field of alchemy is fortunate that he’s not a more prolific writer.

There are a lot of excellent creepy details in “Casting the Runes.” I’m going to think twice before the next time I stick my hand under my pillow, let me tell you! Karswell has the Riddler’s sense of drama, and combines actual (possible) witchcraft with the sort of ominous hints that more mundane organized criminals and stalkers use to intimidate. “I can get to you any time” is powerfully and unpleasantly suggestive, with or without curses. Then again, like the Riddler’s requisite hints and tricks, it also affords getting caught. In Karswell’s case, that’s a pretty severe risk.

That risk is where the story breaks down for me—it feels a little too pat. Once Dunning compares notes with Harrington, his own hazard feels somewhat more relaxed and more predictable. Yes, all is death and ruin if he fails to get the paper back to his tormenter, but he has a plan, and it mostly involves waiting around. Plus, there’s an end to mysteriously etched tram windows and inhuman mouths under pillows, at just the point when the reader’s appetite has been whetted.

Harrington (Henry) and Dunning feel a little too confident in their guess, unsupported but perfectly accurate, that safety lies in surreptitiously returning the runes to Karswell. Then I have trouble buying Karswell’s willingness to accept a returned item, any returned item, a week before his curse comes up. If I were him, I’d check every coat and scrap of paper that came within 50 feet, ever. He seems paranoid from the moment he gets on the train—why would he not carry that through to actually, dunno, guarding against the very ruse he’s so fond of?

Then again, all my two-star reviewers are still alive. So clearly my mindset isn’t much like Karswell’s; I could be missing some deep psychological explanation behind his willingness to hug the idiot ball.

Even with these flaws, the story retains a core of power. Karswell is a writer, albeit one who horrifies Oxfordians with dreadful split infinites and mixed mythologies. Runes aren’t a random choice of tool: live by the pen, die by the pen. It’s interesting that he chooses to separate Dunning from his household via poisoning. Slipping something into someone’s food, and slipping something into someone’s papers, are parallel weapons. Writing isn’t so far from cooking in its range of possible effects, from transcendent pleasure to excruciating pain.

Given that similarity, perhaps Karswell should have paid more attention to his critics, rather than dismissing them with deadly force. You can’t avoid your own cooking forever, after all, and a willingness to improve would have made the taste more palatable.

Anne’s Commentary

Discussing the “Modern Masters” in Supernatural Horror in Literature, Lovecraft mentions a number of James’s stories, but not “Casting the Runes.” Or else he mentions it only obliquely, by stating how a Jamesian creature is “usually touched before it is seen.” Surely that description applies perfectly to the moment of purest terror in this week’s selection! I don’t keep handkerchiefs or books under my pillow anymore, for fear I might reach for them and encounter something else instead. Something inhuman. With teeth. Teeth!

As if anticipating the ire of “Runes” fans, Lovecraft offers a pre-emptive apology: “Amidst this wealth of material it is hard to select a favourite or especially typical [M. R. James] tale, though each reader will no doubt have such preferences as his temperament may determine.” That’s okay, Howard. I too have a hard time picking a favorite James, but “Casting the Runes” would definitely make the top five, probably clawing for number one with “Oh Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad.” And Howard nails it with his analysis of what makes James a master. The most donnish of dons, antiquarian of antiquaries, James deploys his learning lightly, strategically.

To avoid the “technical patois” of scholarship and occultism is one of the rules James himself set for the weird tale. Another is to catch the reader where he lives by using contemporary and ordinary settings, giving him no opportunity to say, “Oh, that sort of thing only happened long ago and far away, in exotic dreams, don’t you know, kind of thing that Lord Dunsany chap writes.” James’s closest contemporaries were the fellow academics and writers who listened to his stories around the Christmas fire, and their “type” forms the bulk of his characters. They remain highly relatable, I think, for what do they do to precipitate themselves into supernatural adventures? Nothing we moderns couldn’t do: Buy the wrong book or picture, stay in the wrong hotel room, write a scathing review on Amazon or GoodReads.

The third rule is simple and paramount: Make the ghost (or other supernatural entity) malign, not benevolent or neutral. Come on, we’re out to scare readers to ecstatic shivers, right?

“Runes” certainly meets James’s own standards, and exceeds them. It’s notably light on magical jargon and pedantic asides—compared, within the author’s own oeuvre, with stories like “Number 13” (Danish church history) and “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book” (lotsa Latin.) It’s rich with contemporary and prosaic detail, into which the uncanny slowly filters, at first a light taint, finally a choking darkness. On his daily tram ride Dunning scans the old familiar ads, only to find one unfamiliar and subtly unnerving. On the streets of London someone hands him a leaflet. So what? Except this one somehow ties into the unnerving tram ad. He drops papers. A stranger returns some to him. Only the stranger turns out to be exactly the man Dunning would like to avoid. Only, afterwards, Dunning’s vague anxiety deepens, and his servants are sick, so he’s alone when something comes out of his study and creeps into his bed, gaping and toothy. No sooner does he hear the story of how Karswell cursed another critic than he learns he’s under the same curse himself. Escalation of peril, set off and even heightened by the preceding and interspersed bits of character humor: the Secretary and wife at lunch, the dialect-spiced repartee of the tram driver and conductor.

And is the supernatural entity malign? Hell yeah. What’s more, we experience it (and its precursors) through that most intimate of senses, touch. Dunning doesn’t just look at the strange tram ad—he rubs it with gloved fingers, yet fails to erase the lettering. The man who gives him a leaflet leaves no visual or auditory impression—he’s nothing but the odd heat and roughness of his hand. After the warning squeak of his study door opening, Dunning hears nothing more, sees nothing—he only feels hot air gust over his shins. Then there’s the touch that James describes with such brilliant brevity, leaving it for our own rousing imaginations to elaborate how Dunning must have felt the sticky give of furred lips under his fingers, and beneath them sharp ivory, and the ivory parting to release still hotter air, no, breath.

One sort of touch is still worse for Dunning’s victims, and that’s the touch of the intangible, the invisible, the inaudible yet undeniable, the phantom follower that dogs them and oppresses through their extrasensory perceptions of imminent danger, of doom that will shadow-tease and shadow-torture until the given time is up, when it will once again materialize.

Materialize, and do the deed the indecipherable runes have summoned it to do.

James pours on the suspense through the last quarter of the story, making the reader fret with Dunning and Harrington about whether they’ll be able to transfer the curse back to Karswell. But that’s not the final twist to our nerves, nor is Karswell’s death. The ending that proves James’s subtle mastery is again all suggestion. When Harrington finally tells Dunning what cursed brother John dreamt about his familiar, the truth is so horrible Dunning must cut him off.

Good God, man, it—it must have been the very Unnameable!

Next week, your hostesses try to counter a stressful summer with “Winged Death,” the very last Hazel Heald collaboration. We’ve been saving it like the last truffle in the box of chocolates; let’s find out if it’s worth the wait!

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

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

We come to the final part of our Dune Messiah Reread. Now we must deal with the consequences of this these machinations, which happens to be… twins? Of course twins. It’s always twins.

Index to the reread can be located here! And don’t forget this is a reread, which means that any and all of these posts will contain spoilers for all of Frank Herbert’s Dune series. If you’re not caught up, keep that in mind.

Summary (through the ending)

Paul’s remaining eye tissue is removed, but he won’t get the Tleilaxu eyes he offers the other men. He tells Chani that they have eternity when she admits that she feels they are running out of time. Chani notes that Paul always refers to their unborn progeny as a single child, but she assumes that he must know she carries twins because he always knows everything. He tells her that their child will rule an even greater Empire than his own. The trial against Korba takes place, with the Fremen all nervous over Paul’s ability to see without eyes. Korba demands to face his accuser, but Paul say his accuser is Otheym—they have his voice by way of Bijaz. The other conspirators have fled Arrakis with the worm they kidnapped. Korba insists that he be judged by Fremen law, and Stilgar agrees—because he plans to take care of Korea himself later. Alia realizes that this was a plan between Paul and Stilgar to flush out the other traitors. Stilgar is surprised that Alia could not sense that ahead of time, and she wonders how he has changed. Stilgar asks if she is questioning his loyalty, and she insists that she isn’t… but she knows that he is about to betray Paul and tells Stil so.

Hayt is sent to talk to Bijaz, who claims to have been there when they reanimated him and tells him that his flesh did not want to be brought back to life. Hayt suspects that Bijaz is there to unbalance Alia somehow, then realizes that the dwarf is actually there to unbalance him. Bijou sings to him, explaining that they were grown in the same tank, that they are like brothers. He possesses the words and phrases to trigger Hayt—who he insists is truly Duncan Idaho. He tells Duncan that the Emperor will come to him one day and say “She is gone.” And in that moment they will offer him a ghola of Chani, and when he is vulnerable. He also tells Duncan that the Atreides carry Harkonnen blood through Jessica to help tip the scale of his argument. And the price will be renouncing his godhood, his sister, and his CHOAM holdings. Then he claps his hands, preventing Duncan from remembering their discussion of these matters.

Alia has taken a great dose of spice to attempt to see what her brother sees. She talks to Hayt and calls him Duncan, which he does not want her to do. She tells him that the Bene Gesserit are hoping to get their breeding program back in line by getting Paul’s child… or hers. She cannot see who the father of her child will be, however. Hayt begins to realize that she has likely overdosed on spice and wants to call a doctor—he cannot bear the thought of an Atreides woman dying. Alia realizes that the ghola loves her, and a doctor is called to help with her overdose. The doctor worries that she was poisoned, but she dismisses them and insists that Hayt stay with her. She tells him that she wishes she were not part of her brother’s story, that she wants the ability to laugh and love. She asks Duncan if he loves her, and he admits that he does. He tries to get her to sleep, but she tells him about the plot against Paul and how bad it has become. She drifts off thinking of the child she will have one day, and how that child will be born aware, just like her.

Chani looks out on the desert near the sietch where she will give birth. Her contractions have started but she wants a moment to herself, confused as to why Paul has brought so many people with them into the desert, including enemies. Hayt insists that Chani comes inside to avoid the coming sandstorm, recognizes that she’s about to give birth and calls other to them. He is gripped by fear that Chani will die and Paul will tell him so, wondering where the panic is coming from. Then he knows that Bijaz has done something that will trigger him when the time comes.

Paul is thinking of the future that is rushing toward him, wishing that he could tell his believers to worship life and not him. Hayt comes by to warn him of how he’s been rigged, but Paul insists that he will not do violence to him. He calls him Duncan, which Hayt thinks is dangerous… but then Hayt calls him “young master” as Duncan used to do. Paul advises him to choose his humanity. One of the Fremen approaches to tell him that Chani is dead and Paul utters the trigger. Hayt moves to stab him, but then has a crisis of consciousness and realizes that he is Duncan Idaho. Paul tells him that this was the moment he came back to him. Paul is then told that Chani gave birth to twins and that the speed of the birth is what killed her. Paul is shocked that he did not see two children in his visions and finds that he can no longer see. He comes to the room where Chani’s body and his children are, and Harah directs him to them. Paul had only ever seen a girl in his visions. He tries to access them, to see what is around him now that his vision is truly gone.

Alia comes in with Lichna, who Paul knows is truly Scytale in disguise. The Face Dancer is fascinated to learn that Duncan Idaho has regained his past. He tells the room that he will kill the Atreides children if Paul does not take his offer to have Chani back as a ghola. Paul realizes that they gave him Duncan to further entice him with the possibility that Chani could truly come back to him, but he knows the price would be too high for all of them, at the mercy of the Tleilaxu forever. He tells Alia to bargain on his behalf, then suddenly regains his vision… from the vantage point of his son. He needs to kill Scytale, and he wonders if perhaps Chani’s needs for so much spice had been to give his children awareness just like Alia. The babies can focus already, staring at each other. He names the boy Leto, for his father, and the girl Ghanima, “spoil of war.” Harah objects, as that is an ill-omened name that Alia used to tease her with, but Paul insists.

Bijaz comes in and insists that the plan succeeded, despite Scytale’s death; the Tleilaxu knew that Idaho thought of Paul as the son he never had, so he would not kill him if he resurfaced. He offers again to restore Chani, and Paul is more tempted than before. He orders Duncan to kill Bijaz to prevent this, and Duncan does. Paul then goes into the desert, and though Duncan thinks he will not die there, no one knows for sure. Stilgar takes Alia’s orders now, killing all the traitors including the Reverend Mother Gaius, which was in conflict with Paul’s orders—betraying him as Alia said he would. Duncan goes to Alia, who is racked with grief, calling her brother a fool for giving in to this path. She has had no more visions since Chani’s death, and now has to contend with Irulan who insists that she loved Paul but never knew it. Irulan has promised to renounce the Bene Gesserit and spend her life training Paul’s children. Duncan realizes that now the Bene Gesserit have no hold over any of the Atreides heirs with Irulan on their side. Alia pleads with Duncan to love her and tells him that she loves him, which confuses Duncan as it is such a departure from his old life. But he loves her and agrees to follow wherever she leads him.

Commentary

The biggest problem with Dune Messiah as a book is that it spends ages debating philosophy about what is happening, and not a lot doing things. I’ve already sort of gone into this, but it comes very clear by the end of the book where every conversation is ultimately about whether or not Paul is a slave to his prescience or not. There are places where it gets kind of silly; Alia tells Duncan “Nature abhors prescience” like “nature abhors a vacuum,” and at that point you kind of have to chuckle at everything.

None of these ruminations are bad on their own, there are actually several fascinating arguments within this tale, but it seems like these arguments were really all that Frank Herbert was interested in writing and then he just kind of built the book around that. It’s a pretty common writing error that makes me wonder what might have happened if an editor had broken the book down a little more. Some of the back-and-forths are deliriously obtuse, and then the books legitimately stops being fun. But the ultimate point is that the life of Muad’Dib is tragic, as we were informed at the outset. Paul is not truly a savior, and he is not a deity. He did what he thought he had to do, but he still only ended up substituting one brand of tyranny for another.

The most important of these arguments is probably Paul’s insistence that people prefer despots to kind rulers, and that freedom results in chaos. Now, this is a pretty common theory that tyrants love to use when they feel the need to prove themselves right (see: Loki’s speech in Germany during The Avengers), but we’re observing a system in this book where that kind of thinking has literally subsumed an empire of billions, and resulted in slaughter. Given the long view of history, we can blame Paul for some of this, but not all—there is a system in place around him that led to his rise, all the myth making and legend-seeding that the Bene Gesserit did before he ever arrived. So the book is not just a argument against making individuals into gods, it is critiquing a system by which people are condition to accept such individuals. Without legends, without religions, without prophecy, the rule of Muad’Dib high have never come to pass.

Herbert is might be preaching, but his messages are largely sound: Think for yourself. People are not gods. Gods are not governance.

I kept coming back to the section where Bijaz and Duncan discuss Alia, and how she is described more than once as the “virgin-harlot.” That’s a pretty loaded term, as it combines two of few main archetypes that women are ever allowed in fiction: maiden or whore. On the fictional world level, these tropes have not left the universe that Herbert as created despite thousands of years having passed (from what is ostensibly our own time), which is still irritating to me because it suggests that people have not evolved at all… then again, the Dune Universe is kind of about that. On the other hand, the use of these tropes to label Alia—or to specifically call out the ways in which she cannot be labeled—is very interesting. Alia suffers continuously from having not just a dual nature, but a multiplicitous one. She is many lives at once, but she is also herself, and it is clear that the reader is meant to consider the impossibility of that, the difficulty of being Alia.

Later on, the book even goes for far as to describe the many over-complicated relationships she has with everyone in her life. Her father is her father, but he’s also her husband and lover. Her brother is her brother and he’s also her son. Her mother is her mother and also herself. These are all warning signs for what will happen in the following book, a clear breakdown of the sheer magnitude of Alia’s being. Paul spends a lot of time thinking how rough his life is, how he could not stop what happened to him, but Alia is the one who truly cannot help being who she is, whose very existence is a contradiction. Calling her a virgin-harlot is too simplistic at the end of the day. Alia is far more than that, and her grief at the end of the book should be painful; she is abandoned by everyone in her life, altogether and quickly. It is little wonder that she hangs onto Duncan with her fingernails.

Duncan’s tale is also bobbing up and down in the background of this story, but it is one of the most important arcs of the whole book. The idea of regaining humanity from a dead man, and how this resurrection changes his purpose is also central to the novel’s themes: what is a person made of? Are they their hopes and dreams? Their memories? Are they what other people require of them? This is particularly clear at end; Duncan is also grieving over Paul in his way, as once he comes back to himself at the end of the book, he means to serve his Duke as he did before. But then Paul is gone and he is left with Alia, who was not even born before his death. Now his life revolves around a member of the Atreides family that he never meant to serve, and he’s aware of the fact that he is recalibrating for a different purpose.

Chani’s death always bugs the hell out of me as a reader. There is a need for her to die in order for the events of the next book to work, but we don’t see enough of her for it not to feel like a slight. The worst part is, I really enjoy the way she is written when Herbert deigns to write her. She is such a fierce and keen presence when she is there, and her perspective is consistently one of the most interesting in the book. Then we have many more character deaths on top of hers once Alia chooses to murder all the conspirators against Paul. There is a vague mention of how broken up Alia is over Chani’s death, but because Herbert never writes their relationship into the book, it doesn’t land as well as it could. All the emotional moments between people who are not Duncan/someone else are missing in the novel, and it feels sparser for it.

We have Irulan, who is now claiming that she loved Paul all the while and now wants to teach his children. It’s one of those unfortunate places where the book wraps too quickly, because hearing that about Irulan is not a satisfying turnover, but getting to witness her reaction might help it make more sense. Of course, this will also be important going forward….

Jessica’s absence in this novel is glaring, and it is clearly meant to be. We will see her again, too… she can’t very well stay out of everyone’s affairs forever. With that said—Children of Dune is coming.

Emily Asher-Perrin has always been sort of mesmerized by the term “stone burner” as horrific weapon. You can bug her on Twitter and Tumblr, and read more of her work here and elsewhere.

Another golden morning in a seedy town, and a new memory tape and assignment for intrepid PI-turned-hitman—and last robot left in working order—Raymond Electromatic. But his skills may be rustier than he remembered in Killing Is My Business, the latest in Adam Christopher’s robot noir oeuvre, available July 25th from Tor Books.

Read chapter 2 below, or head back to the beginning with chapter 1 here, along with an excerpt from Ray Electromatic’s novella-length adventure, Standard Hollywood Depravity.

Chapter 2

It was when Wednesday rolled around for the fourth time that I rolled the Buick into a spot across the street from the downtown office in which Vaughan Delaney parked his blue-suited behind Monday to Friday, nine to five. While the building was owned and operated by the City of Los Angeles, it wasn’t actually city hall, which was good because paying a little visit to a target in city hall would have made the job a little more difficult than I would have liked. It wasn’t exactly going to be easy here but I had some ideas. I’d been scoping it out for long enough and it was now coming up to eight fifty-five in the morning on the last Wednesday of Vaughan Delaney’s life and it was time for me to get to work.

Two minutes after I turned the Buick’s engine off the red Plymouth Fury swept into the slot right outside the steps that led up to the front door of the building. The slot wasn’t posted as belonging to anyone in particular but it was always free. There was a spot marked for Vaughn Delaney in the parking lot out the back of the building, but that spot had the disadvantage of not being visible from the main street, and Vaughan Delaney was proud of his car and he liked it to be visible.

I knew about the parking lot around back and the slot that was posted for Vaughan Delaney because I’d checked. I’d checked everything there was to check about Vaughan Delaney and that included where he parked his car during the day and during the night and what his lunch habits were.

Lunch was my moment of opportunity. More specifically, lunch on Wednesdays, because Wednesday was the one day a week he poked his head out the office door before five o’clock. On Wednesdays he came out between twelve oh-two and twelve oh-three and he skipped down the office steps with one hand pressing his fedora against his scalp and the other swinging the buckskin briefcase. Then he got into his rocket ship, threw the briefcase on the seat beside him, and blasted off for galaxies unknown before making his re-entry anytime between twelve fifty-five and twelve fifty-six.

Vaughan Delaney was the kind of guy who watched the clock. That was something else I admired about him.

I say “lunch,” but that was really a misnomer, given that in the three weeks I’d been following him Vaughan Delaney hadn’t done much in the way of eating food, unless he had Cindy Delaney’s homemade sandwiches in his buckskin briefcase and he ate with one hand on the wheel. Because what Vaughan Delaney did during Wednesday lunchtimes was drive.

The first Wednesday I watched and waited in my own car outside his office. I didn’t move it from the spot across the street and I didn’t move myself from the driver’s seat. I just kept my optics on the office and watched as the city planner came down the stairs and got into the car and drove off and I watched as he drove back and got out of the car and went up the stairs again.

The second Wednesday I followed him and I must have been surprised at what I discovered (although I didn’t remember—never remembered) because all he did was drive in circles around downtown LA, going along East 1st Street until it become West 1st Street and then hooking in Figueroa and then down to Olympic Boulevard and then around and about and back to his office. I kept a good distance but he never got out of my sight. He never stopped for lunch either, and if he was eating on the go then I never saw him do it through the acreage of glass that wrapped around the upper half of his vehicle. The leather seats inside the Plymouth Fury were red and white like the outside of the car and you certainly wouldn’t want to spill mayonnaise and ketchup on them. Vaughan Delaney was nothing if not a careful man.

The third Wednesday he fired the boosters on the Fury and he headed into my territory. Hollywood, California. Beverly Boulevard. Highland Avenue. Santa Monica Boulevard. The Plymouth Fury bucked and rocked and weaved. It stopped at lights and I stopped with it. It roared off when the lights changed and I did my best to keep up.

Then he went back to the office and went up the stairs and that was that.

It was interesting but perhaps not remarkable. Maybe he just liked driving. A car like that, I’d stoke its afterburners once weekly too. Maybe Cindy Delaney’s sandwiches were waiting for him in the drawer of his desk.

Vaughan Delaney’s Wednesday sightseeing tours gave me an idea. Because one week he’d take off and then …

Well, one week he’d take off and he wouldn’t come back.

Vaughan Delaney had made my job just that little bit easier and for that I was much obliged. I’d been sitting in my car for too long and I was feeling restless. I didn’t know if we were on any kind of timetable but Ada hadn’t said anything about it.

Timetables, it had to be said, were not my strong point, given that I had no recollection of events prior to six in the morning, each and every day. That was because I was a robot with a state-of-the-art miniaturized data tape sitting behind my chest plate, a ribbon of condensed magnetic storage slowly winding from one reel to the other, the events of the day recording themselves through the medium of me.

“Day” being the operative word. My memory tape was a technological wonder, but it had a limit. Specifically, a twentyfour-hour limit. Subtract a couple more to allow my batteries to recharge back at the office, and I was down to twenty-two hours of working time. And when I switched back on afterward, the world around me was born anew, the old memory tape boxed and archived and a new clean one installed. I guess I was the one who did the boxing and installing. I don’t know. I didn’t remember.

So my surveillance of Vaughan Delaney, my three weeks of watching and waiting in my car, of following him on his lunchtime drives around town, my visits to his house in Gray Lake, my observation of Cindy Delaney and her own daily habits-none of this was anything I could actually recall. Every morning I’d wake up in my alcove in the computer room behind my office and my boss, Ada, would give me a rundown on current jobs. In fact, Ada was the computer room, and my alcove was inside her next to her own spinning memory tapes and flashing data banks. All that tape, she had no problem remembering anything at all. Once she’d laid out the details of the current job, including what I had done and what I needed to do, I was out the door with a spring in my step and a few homicidal thoughts fizzing between my voltage amplification coils.

And the current job, singular, for the last three weeks, had been Vaughan Delaney and nothing else. But even if I didn’t remember a thing about it, and even though there didn’t seem to be any particular kind of timetable supplied by our anonymous client, I figured I’d spent enough time sitting in my car and had better get the job done at some point.

That point was today. Wednesday.

I sat in the car and I watched and I waited. Vaughan Delaney had been in his office for an hour. He wouldn’t appear for another two. I sat and I waited. I opened my window an inch and listened to the beat of the city around me.

It was a busy street and the office got a lot of foot traffic, some of which even stopped to admire the car that was the same color as a fire engine parked right outside the door. Back on my side of the street there was a drugstore down on the corner that got a lot of foot traffic too. I watched people come and go and some of those people were carrying brown paper bags. Some people went inside and stayed there, sitting on stools at the bench inside the front window as they drank coffee and ate sandwiches.

I watched them a while longer and then I thought rd quite like a sandwich and a coffee to pass the time. I didn’t need to sit and watch the building. Vaughan Delaney’s schedule was as regular as the oscillators in my primary transformer. I had time to spare.

I got out of the car and stood on the sidewalk for a moment, one hand on the driver’s door, looking over at the office building. A sandwich and a coffee still felt like a great idea. It was the kind of thing you got when you spent a lot of time waiting and watching. It helped pass the time, like smoking and talking about baseball with the boys and making your own flies for fly-fishing.

Of course, I had no need for a coffee or a sandwich or a cigarette. IfI walked down to the drugstore and went inside and bought one of each I wouldn’t have any use for them on account of the fact that I didn’t eat or drink.

I was a robot.

And still as I stood there in the street the faint memory of the taste of fresh hot coffee tickled the back of my circuits. An echo of another life, maybe. A life that didn’t belong to me but that belonged to my creator, Professor Thornton.

A coffee and a sandwich would be a real waste, but maybe the drugstore could sell me something else. Maybe I could get a magazine. A magazine or a paperback book. That sounded fun. I had two hours to kill before I followed the target on his weekly jaunt around the City of Angels.

I closed the door of the car and I pulled my collar up and my hat down and I headed to the drugstore, just a robot minding his own business. Most people in the street minded their own too. So I was a robot. Big deal. The city had been full of robots once. Some people remembered them and some people were too young. Some people glanced at me and held their glance a moment longer than they normally would, but there was some stiff competition coming from the miracle machine parked up on the other side of the street.

I never made it into the drugstore, which was a shame as I was set on the idea of a paperback book. In fact, I never even got close to the corner, because this Wednesday Vaughan Delaney decided to make a change to his routine, and he did this by falling out of the window of his office on the sixth floor of the building and making a splashdown right on the white lid of the red Plymouth Fury.

The crashing sound this unexpected event made was just as loud as if another car had collided with the Plymouth instead of a human body. The initial smash was followed by the slow tinkle of broken glass and more than a couple of screams and shouts from the good folk who had, until that moment, just been minding their business on a sunny midweek morning.

I froze where I was and looked across the street. The car was still rocking on its suspension and the roof had caved in toward the back, bending enough for the rear windshield to shatter. The front windshield remained intact, most likely due to its prodigious expanse of curved glass, which clearly added a great deal of strength to the structure.

Vaughan Delaney lay in the concave roof, arms and legs spread out like he was getting comfortable in his big bed in Gray Lake after a good night out with the boys in accounting. Said boys were still in the office above the car and were now leaning out and looking down and pointing, as though there was some other direction their former colleague could have gone. I heard more shrieks and sobs from above as the realization spread across the whole office like the blood spreading out from Vaughan Delaney’s ruptured insides onto the roof of the car, turning the white leather covering it the same color as the bodywork. Soon enough other windows up and down the whole side of the building and its neighbors opened and more heads looked out. A man in a uniform that marked him out as the concierge ran out of the building and raced to the car fast enough to leave his peaked cap floating down the steps behind him. He was joined by a couple of other men, one of whom had flown off the sidewalk next to me to lend a hand at the scene. Around me people stopped and stared and either turned away with a shudder or a gasp as they dropped their shopping or they just stood there and looked on as they sucked their cigarettes and adjusted their hats.

I didn’t have a cigarette to suck but I was wearing a hat and I adjusted it just like everyone else. I stood there and watched as in just a few minutes more people came out of the building and from up and down the street to form a not insubstantial audience around the wrecked car.

I walked back to my own vehicle and got in. I kept my eyes on the scene. Someone in shirtsleeves had climbed up onto the hood of the Plymouth Fury, but on reaching the windshield he’d stopped with his hands on hips like he was unsure of the route ahead.

Sitting between me and the passenger seat in my car was a telephone. It started to ring. I let it ring and I started the car and pulled away and headed up toward Hollywood. When I was clear of the scene by an intersection or two I picked the phone up.

“Hi,” I said.

“What’s cooking, Ray?” Ada sounded cheerful as she always did and she sounded like she was pulling on a cigarette which she sometimes did and which I knew to be merely an echo in my circuits of someone else, given that my boss was a computer the size of an office.

”I’m heading back,” I said. “Get the coffee on.”

“Nice piece of action downtown, Ray.”

I frowned, or at least it felt like I frowned. My face was a solid flat plate of bronzed steel-titanium alloy and my mouth was a slot and a grill that was about as mobile as any of the four faces carved onto the side of Mount Rushmore.

“If you’re talking about the untimely end of Vaughan Delaney, then I guess that is action of a fashion,” I said. “Although I have to ask how you knew about it given that it happened all of three minutes ago.”

“Oh, it’s all over the place, Ray. Someone called it in to the cops and I just happened to be listening in. Then everybody started calling it in to the cops.”

“I did think it was a little early for the late edition.”

“It’ll be front page tomorrow,” said Ada. “Perhaps below the fold. Depends what other standard Hollywood depravity goes on before sundown, I guess.” Ada blew smoke around my circuits. “Not your usual style, but you know what I say, whatever works, works.”

“Except I had nothing to do with the death of Vaughan Delaney.”

“That’s good, chief. Keep it up. Deny everything, ask for your phone call, and don’t speak until you get a lawyer.”

I came up to a set of lights that were red. rd come several blocks and was at the corner of Beverly and South Union. I didn’t like this part of the city. Hollywood might have been crummy but downtown Los Angeles was strange to me, too many tall buildings standing too close to one another. I wouldn’t be happy until I was back home.

The lights changed and I kept on in a westerly direction.

“Ada, listen, it wasn’t me,” I said. “The city planner hit terminal velocity under his own volition.”

“Oh.”

“Oh?”

“Oh, as in, oh well, accidents happen.”

“You don’t sound too worried.”

“Should I be?”

“Do we still get paid?”

“Well,” said Ada, “the target is dead, isn’t he?”

“That he is.”

“So job done. That was good of Mr. Delaney to do our work for us. Nice and clean is the way I like it.”

I made a buzzing sound like a bumblebee trapped under a glass. Ada got the message and she laughed.

“Don’t worry about it, chief,” she said. “Come back to the office and take the rest of the day off.”

I thought again about the paperback book I was going to buy. As I drove I kept an optic out and I hit pay dirt nearly at once.

There was a bookstore on the corner with a Buick-sized space right outside it.

“I’m on my way,” I said as I pulled the car up. “I’m just making a little stop first.”

“Going for a root beer float, chief?”

I frowned on the inside again and Ada started laughing.

“Go knock yourself out,” she said. And then the phone was dead.

When I got out of my car I paused a while in the sunshine of the late morning. I turned and looked at the bookstore, and then I turned and looked down the street in a southeasterly direction. Four miles away Los Angeles city planner Vaughan Delaney was being scooped out of the broken roof of his red-and-white 1957 Plymouth Fury.

Then I swung the door of the Buick closed and I headed into the bookstore with just one thought buzzing around my solenoids.

It sure was a shame about that car.

Excerpted from Killing Is My Business, copyright © 2017 by Adam Christopher.

The first Octavia Butler novel I ever read was Fledgling, and it was a revelation. While I had been taught by early exposure to Ursula Le Guin that genre fiction could be political, could comment on social and cultural morés, I never expected that someone would use vampires to discuss bigotry, racism, and slavery. It’s been almost a decade since I read it, but I doubt I’ll ever forget that sense of wonder.

And that, more than anything else, is why Butler ranks as one of my all-time favorites. Of course, her accomplishments are many—this is a woman who conquered both dyslexia and prejudice to become an award-winning writer and a MacArthur Fellow. Kindred alone is enough to put her in the ranks of influential sci-fi writers. But I am a lifelong genre fan and a somewhat-jaded reader, and I’ve read a lot of good books and many great ones too. So when I read, I’m looking for a return to that moment we’ve all felt, in which an author does something so original, so creative, so truly surprising, that it feels like your mind has been blown wide open. Octavia Butler’s books create that moment, time and again.

For the first U.S. World Book Night, I chose to hand out Kindred. There’s nothing simple about trying to convince strangers first, that you’re not trying to give them religious materials, and second, that they should take this sci-fi novel from you. And believe me, I dearly wanted to say, “Have you accepted Octavia Butler as your personal reading savior?” but wiser heads convinced me this was a bad idea. So instead, I often found myself babbling. “It’s not just a time travel novel,” I told people. “It’s a book that shows how you can use science fiction to talk about politics and society.” “It’s amazing. It will change the way you look at genre fiction.” “She’s the most famous female African-American sci-fi writer!”

I said all those things because they were true, but mostly because “It will astonish you,” doesn’t seem like enough of a pitch. But truthfully, that’s the highest praise I can give: Octavia Butler will astonish you.

This article was originally published June 22, 2013 on Tor.com.

When I went to see Ratatouille in 2007, I was trapped in a terrible job. I was exhausted all the time, I felt completely uninspired, and spent a sickening amount of energy questioning myself, beating myself up, hating every decision I’d made that led me to that moment in my life, and creating a vomitous feedback loop of self-loathing. When I went to the movie with friends, I was paying for two hours of forgetfulness. Two hours to stop thinking about my life, and lose myself in a cute Pixar story. I remember hoping I liked the short.

And then the film started, and I didn’t get forgetfulness—I got a much-needed slap in the face.

This isn’t a cute Pixar movie—Ratatouille takes every cliche of every artist biopic you’ve ever seen and tweaks them just enough to both honor the idea of the artist, and to challenge it. This may be the only artist biopic that both presents the idea that its subject is a genius, and reveals him as kind of a snob who deserves a comeuppance. He lives with his loud, obnoxious, completely uncultured family, who urge him to use his keen sense of smell for practical things like sniffing out poison, rather than pursuing his artistic dreams. His brother loves him but doesn’t understand him. He’s bullied by larger rats, and especially crushed by his boorish father.

The movie is basically “every D.H. Lawrence novel, but with rats.” Finally he makes the journey from the countryside to the big city, where, cut off from his family and past, he can at last be himself and allow his gift to blossom. He makes new friends who understand him. He grows in his art, experts hail him for his creativity, he has a fall from grace, and he builds builds himself back up. He even has a muse.

The film gives us the greatest physical representation of inspiration I’ve ever seen. When Remy combines food for the first time, and it becomes a synesthetic symphony of color and music, we know what he means. We understand what he’s trying to explain to Emile. Remy’s art is ephemeral.

With most movies about writers, painters, sculptors, musicians – we know their art. When you watch Amadeus, you go in knowing at least a little of Mozart’s work, and a large part of the (inaccurate but fantastic) film is watching him transcribe the music he hears in his head. If you watch Pollock, you get to watch the artist figure out his paint-splatter technique. Even fictional writers get a similar treatment – in Wonder Boys we see the physical manuscript of James Leer’s debut novel, The Love Parade, and his mentor’s much heftier tome, The Wonder Boys; in Sideways Paul Giamatti’s character has to lug his enormous manuscript in two separate boxes when he wants to share it with a friend.

But Remy works in food. He’ll spend hours tasting and sniffing to perfect a flavor, he’ll arrange his mise en place, he’ll dab up any errant spots of sauce. Then the diners will eat the meal and within half an hour his work is just more fodder for a human digestive tract, the same as a Happy Meal or the “corn puppies” that Gusteau’s ghost finds so objectionable. He still has to put the work in. He still has to wring himself dry, laboring over each meal as though it were a painting that would outlive him. This is what makes Ratatouille, for me at least, the purest artistic film. With many artists, work = immortality. Watch Vincent and Theo, Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams, or “Vincent and the Doctor”: these portraits of tortured, suffering Vincent Van Gogh are all poignant, yes, but the audience knows that while Vincent’s life is a tragedy in many ways, his art survives. In Amadeus, Wolfi is buried in a pauper’s grave while his beloved Stanzi weeps in the rain, but we all know that Mozart’s music lived on after him. We can flinch while we watch Pollock skid down that slippery Long Island road, but we’ve seen One: Number 31, 1950 in history textbooks. It’s why we’re watching the movie. But Remy? He might write his recipes down, but an essential part of his art will die with him. (Or, well, did die with him. The movie’s a decade old, after all. Rats don’t live that long.)

Remy’s art is experiential.

As we see in the iconic scene when Anton Ego first tastes Remy’s ratatouille, his art acts as a time machine, transporting a bitter, middle-aged man back to a moment of safety and love in his childhood, when he still had his whole life stretching before him, but it didn’t even matter because here and now he had his mother’s love. Assuming that my mind and consciousness stay more or less intact as I get older, I will never forget the moment when Anton Ego takes a bite of Remy’s ratatouille.

In this final part of the film, Ratatouille does something revolutionary: Remy’s story of artistic greatness shares time with Anton Ego’s story.

When has a movie about the life of an artist ever paid attention to the importance of a critic? Back in the ’90s, Ratatouille director Brad Bird worked on a not-very-famous TV show called The Critic, about Jay Sherman, the film critic moviegoers relied on if Pauline Kael, Siskel, Ebert, Genre Shalit, Leonard Maltin, and Janet Maslin were all busy. It was a Simpsons-style comedy that hung upon the usual assumption about critics: they are failed artists. Jay’s one attempt at filmmaking was an abysmal student film in which Jay, playing Prometheus, hangs himself from a ceiling fan because no one understands him. Jay is a joke, snotty, angry at everyone, dismissive of the films he’s paid to critique.

Even respected, real-world critics are subject to the idea that they are somehow failures. Life Itself (2014)—a documentary about Roger Ebert and his and struggle with cancer—digs a bit into the relationship between critic and art, with friends (including Martin Scorsese) teasing Ebert for his only produced screenplay, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

But we get no such “failed chef” back story from Ego. Ego is a food critic for the disarmingly simple reason that he loves food: “If I don’t love it, I don’t swallow,” as he snarls at Linguine. But this isn’t a warning, it’s a challenge. Ego doesn’t create food, he critiques it, because he knows that creating food is an art, and he wants chefs to treat it as such. He didn’t give Gusteau a scathing review because he had a grudge against the man, he was disappointed in what he saw as a loss of passion. So when Remy presents him with the simply prepared, but expertly balanced ratatouille, all of his defenses fall away. He recognizes an artist who shares his passion. And then he asks to meet the chef.

This is the key moment. Maybe even more than that unforgettable flashback. Linguine and Collette weigh their options, and ask him to wait so they can introduce him to Remy with as little trauma as possible. The critic is not being mocked for his “snobbery”—he isn’t a snob. He isn’t being brought low when he wants to thank Remy. The act of criticism isn’t revealed to be a sham. An artist has given him something unquantifiable, and, as is only correct, he wants to thank him for the gift.

And then, after all the buildup and suspense? He accepts Remy as he is. Like any great critic, he’s able to look past boundaries and limitations. His life is dedicated to seeking art, and his real work is to be grateful when he receives it, and to share it with others without judging the source. While Linguini, Colette, and Django all retire to their various homes to think about the night, Ego goes to his office and works his own art, delivering a speech in defense of art and critique that would have been extraordinary in any context, but is made all the more so for being tucked into a children’s film about a rat.

And in the other best moment (I know, I know, there are a lot of best moments—blame Brad Bird.) Remy walks down to the Seine to be alone. Working in a kitchen leads to wired, sleepless nights, but in this instance he’s touched a numinous moment of pure creativity.  He focused his entire being into the food he made, and an expert in his field, a man he respects, has acknowledged him as an artist and appreciated his work. He needs to process this before he can be around people, or rats, so he spends the night with his city.

By the time I had come out of the movie I had stopped crying and was wearing an ear-to-ear grin. We went to Florent, a legendary, much-missed all-night diner, and I stuffed goat cheese into my face. The subway was extra full of rats that night, and I giggled like a child each time I spotted one. I started staying up late, and writing again, and I allowed the bad parts of the job to fade into the back of my mind while I searched for something new. The following year I wrote the short story that would later expand into the novel I’m finishing now. I wrote story after story. I took walks and watched people and began absorbing my city again. Most of all I stopped feeling sorry for myself and allowed myself to feel joy and anger. I started laying a path to change my life instead of looking backward and lamenting all the mistakes I’d made. And this might sound like hyperbole, but a huge amount of that momentum came from this rat who knew that anyone could cook, and the critic who believed in him.

Leah Schnelbach still watches this movie at least twice a year. It keeps her honest. Come discuss the art of criticism with her on Twitter!

Harry is the hero.

Right?

He’s the guy the story is all about, after all. He’s the Boy Who Lived. He has the scar and the prophecy. He has the sidekicks and the invisibility cloak. He has the mentor. He has the tragic backstory. He faces down the villain.

Harry is the hero. It’s his face on the covers of the books. They’re called Harry Potter and the… for a reason.

Right?

Art by Lila

Ron is a sidekick. You can’t deny it. He can’t even deny it. He trips over things and he makes faces and he provides Harry with a Normal Friend. He explains things but doesn’t always get them right. He supports. He humanizes. He gripes sometimes but other times, he’s there. He’s there when Harry needs him, mostly. He holds the team together until he goes off in a snit to explore his options, and when he does, Harry spirals for a while until he comes back.

Ron is a symbiote. He doesn’t get his own story that’s separate from Harry, not really. And sometimes he hates it, but also, he knows that it’s all there is for him. When he’s not with Harry or near Harry, his edges start to fade and people start calling him by the wrong name and he finds himself in a state of hibernation, not-quite-frozen but unable to really move until Harry comes back.

We aren’t discussing Ron right now. He’ll wait. He’ll be there when it’s time for us to get to him. He’ll be there once he’s needed.

He always is.

Art by sas

Hermione, though.

What are you, Hermione?

Are you a heroine? Or are you a sidekick?

Here’s the thing with Hermione: she’s always there. She’s always performing the ceaseless emotional labor that Harry and Ron require. She does the heavy emotional lifting so that Harry can continue to Hero all over the place and Ron can continue to sidekick. She is always there, even when she’s angry, even when she’s being horribly mistreated. She’s loyal to a fault, unwavering, unflinching. She’s patient.

Art by sas

That’s sidekick behavior.

But then.

When Harry’s not there, Hermione is busy. She’s not waiting for him. She decided at some point that it wasn’t Harry’s story, it was everyone’s story, and she acts accordingly. She’s not along for the ride.

Art by sas

This is something that the Harry Potter fan community has been discussing for years: Hermione drives the story because she has her own story. No one in their right mind would trust 13-year-old Harry Potter with a Time Turner, but Hermione gets one and she deserves it. She dates a celebrity, and she outsmarts Rita Skeeter, and she does those things in the background of Harry’s story. She convinces Harry to be a figurehead in the fight against Voldemort, and she creates Dumbledore’s Army. She schedules the DA meetings, she creates the consequences for DA defectors, she creates the galleons that allow the DA to communicate in code. She researches horcruxes and how to destroy them. She rereads all of Hogwarts: A History. She shows up with the tools and the knowledge and prevents Harry and Ron from standing around looking perplexed while the world ends around them. She saves everyone’s bacon all the time by being smarter and better-prepared than anyone else. Those two boys would be dead a thousand times over without her intervention.

She gets her own story, if you know how to look for it. She has her own narrative that’s completely separate from Harry’s. But does that make her a hero?

Art by Lila

Harry is the hero, right? He stands in opposition to Voldemort. He’s suffered loss at the hands of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. Unimaginable loss.

Except.

In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Hermione does too. She makes the same sacrifice that Harry did—losing her parents—but instead of losing them to the Avada Kedavra curse, she loses them to her own wand. She erases their memories of her. She hides them in Australia, tucks them away to make sure that they aren’t tortured for information. To make sure they aren’t tortured the same way she’s tortured later in the book.

Art by Katie

But everyone has lost people. Everyone has missing relatives, dead brothers, inaccessible parents.

That doesn’t make someone into The Hero. Everyone’s the hero of their own story, but not everyone gets to be the hero of this story. Too many people have died in the Harry Potter universe for loss alone to bestow heroism. Too many people have lost everything. Have sacrificed everything.

Sidekicks can suffer, too.

So, what are you, Hermione?

Art by Tufunny

Does anyone in the Harry Potter universe stand in more direct opposition to Voldemort than Hermione Granger does?

Voldemort stands for oppression. He stands for the fundamental superiority of blood-purity. He stands for status, not achievement. He stands for alignment, not friendship. He stands for fealty, not loyalty. He stands for a wizard’s foot on the neck of a house-elf. He stands for the sacrifice of one’s humanity in pursuit of one’s ambition.

Hermione Granger is his antithesis. She’s a muggle-born witch who arrives at Hogwarts prepared to dominate magic. She’s enormously ambitious, but consistently seeks to elevate others when she could easily let them fail. She walks beside Harry even when doing so means putting up with relentless scorn from the people who waver between hating him and worshiping him—even when that scorn is piled on top of the blood-status slurs she weathers continuously throughout the series. She stands up against a centuries-long institution of interspecies slavery, even when doing so means that everyone she cares about will laugh at her. She skips her final year of school in order to help Harry and Ron find the horcruxes, even though it could mean losing every opportunity she’s spent the previous six years working for. She chooses her causes over her ambitions every time, and she swallows the consequences because they’re worth it to her.

Art by Katie

What is Hermione?

She’s relatable. She’s an overachiever who consistently stands in the shadow of The Hero. She pursues victory without ever receiving credit. She accomplishes and innovates constantly without recognition. She is expected to have the answers, and to provide emotional support, and to weather the foibles of others with maturity and grace. She is shouted at for daring to have her own pursuits and interests. She is shouted down for disagreeing with the person who has designated himself In Charge. She is never allowed to be tired or sad because everyone always needs something from her. She must be the best at all times, and she must never demand a reward for her efforts. She is a cypher for every ass-busting girl who has been shunted to the side of the stage while a man who yells at everyone receives a medal from the mentor who’s never seen fit to so much as meet with her.

Hermione is where women and people of color and especially, too often, women of color so frequently find themselves: pushed to the side and asked for patience.

To Harry, she is a sidekick.

To us, she is a heroine.

Art by Lila

Top image by Frida Lundqvist.
This article was originally published in September 2016 as part of the Hugo-nominated Women of Harry Potter series.

Sarah Gailey’s fiction has appeared in Mothership Zeta and Fireside Fiction; her nonfiction has been published by Mashable and Fantasy Literature Magazine. You can see pictures of her puppy and get updates on her work by clicking here. She tweets @gaileyfrey. Watch for her debut novella, River of Teeth, from Tor.com in 2017.

Do you have a science fiction or fantasy book burning a hole in your laptop? Today might be the day you find it a home! Twitter is hosting #SFFPit today, so if you have a finished manuscript, you can craft a 140-character pitch, tag your tweet with a descriptor like #FA (Fantasy), #PA (Post-apocalyptic SF), or #WW (Weird West) and send it out into the world! The rules are simple: if a literary agent likes your pitch, you can follow their instructions to follow up with a formal query. If you want to support a pitch, you can retweet it, but don’t like it—only agents are supposed to like, and you don’t want to clutter another writer’s notifications. And remember, only pitch if you have a completed manuscript!

Click through for some samples!

Some authors use film classics as touchstones, from National Treasure:

To The Hunger Games:

While others stick to strictly literary comp titles:

And others hearken back to much older inspirations:

While others grab you with a terrifying hook:

And others unleash demons:

And still others have concepts that beg to be read:

Are you ready to dive in? Head over to #SFFPit to pitch your book, and best of luck to everyone!