Matthew Telemachus seems, at first glance, like a typical fourteen-year-old. Some of his problems are prosaic enough. His mom Irene, for example, has fallen on hard times, forcing her to move home, to once again share quarters with Matty’s grandfather and deeply eccentric Uncle Buddy. Matty is also nursing a lusty, hopeless crush on his step-cousin. Malice is two years older, after all, not to mention indisputably cool. She’s also totally indifferent to him.

But Matty isn’t ordinary, and neither is his family. At one time his grandparents, mom and uncles were a bona fide psychic act, billed as the Amazing Telemachus Family. True, grandfather Teddy was a straight up conman, able to pull off miraculous mind-reading feats by virtue of well-honed sleight-of-hand. Grandmother Maureen, though? Maureen was Gifted with a capital G, the real deal. She and Teddy met at a CIA-sponsored investigation into psychic abilities. Somehow in the process of keeping the wool firmly pulled over their testers’ eyes, Teddy found his way into both the intelligence community and Maureen’s heart.

As Daryl Gregory’s Spoonbenders opens, the Amazing Telemachus Family’s career as exotic performers has long since died on the vine. The family was discredited on national television; the act fell apart. Maureen was obliged to continue remote viewing work for U.S. Intelligence until her tragic, premature death. Now in 1995, Teddy and the three kids are batching along, in many ways still mourning her loss.

Maureen’s genetic gifts to her children took different forms. Irene—inconveniently for all her loved ones—is a human lie detector. On his rare good days, Uncle Frank is telekinetic. As for Buddy… well. He generally can’t be convinced to explain his visions, or even to speak. Mostly, he just engages in an endless, silent round of baffling home renovations while wondering what year he’s in.

As the three Telemachus siblings tread water against misery and the always-hovering threat of financial ruin, Matty begins to come into powers of his own.

The subject matter of Spoonbenders makes it something of a charming literary stepcousin to books like Katherine Dunn’s unforgettably savage novel Geek Love and Connie Willis’s more recent book Crosstalk. Like the former, Spoonbenders is a tightly focused family story about a group of performing tricksters—freaks, if you will. But where Geek Love is a knotty, searing, emotionally difficult book, whose characters often seem bent on tearing each other apart for the sheer joy of destruction, this novel has a comic and romantic bent. In tone, it has more in common with Willis’s comedy about the hazards of dating under the influence of telepathy.

Spoonbenders has a complete and pleasing story arc for each and every member of the Telemachus clan—Gregory’s website says it has already been optioned for television, and I am not at all surprised. Along the way, they all go to enormous lengths to sabotage their own happiness. Matty, for example, can’t bring himself to tell his mom about his powers. He feels bad about them, because Irene wants so desperately to lead a normal life. Meanwhile Irene herself is hunting romance in the single parent chatrooms emerging on AOL, attempting to handicap her treacherous ability to detect every lie, no matter how small, when she talks to someone in person. A requirement of total honesty, after all, sets an impossible standard for any potential relationship. (This, too, is an echo of Crosstalk, but Gregory’s approach is messier and more convincing: Irene’s romance was one of the things I loved most in this book, which is filled with delightful relationships.)

Oblivious to his daughter and grandson’s problems, Teddy moves through a world of his own, living in the past and running small cons on women in grocery stores, apparently just to keep a hand in. The CIA is circling him, shark-like, hoping they might find a replacement for Maureen camping on one of the bunk beds Buddy keeps bolting, randomly, to the basement walls of the family home. The skeptic who debunked the Telemachus clan is out there somewhere, and Frankie is energetically operating pyramid schemes, cheating at roulette, and getting in ever deeper as he borrows money from mobsters.

Even Maureen is still in play, sending her husband letters from beyond the grave, and collaborating with Buddy on a project that may redeem the whole family, but at a terrible cost to him.

Gregory has a wry, clear, powerful voice, and his characters leap off the page. They are charismatic enough to hold the attention, yet imbued with the kind of qualities that make them seem like people anyone might meet in their day to day lives. Despite their powers, the Telemachus clan come off like the folks next door. Paranormal abilities haven’t kept them from craving or losing the essentials of human existence: security, respect, connection, and above all affection. The result of all their efforts, somehow, is a book that is unabashedly lovable.

The Spoonbenders plot doesn’t offer a huge number of surprises. Its story unfolds stylishly, and all of its oddball romances thrilled me to my bones, but it wasn’t hard to see the ending coming. Even so, this novel’s resolution left me with a sense of genuine, unalloyed emotional uplift. It is the kind of happy conclusion Hollywood films frequently try to deliver… and unlike so many of those cinematic attempts, this story doesn’t strike a wrong note, or descend into cheese. Gregory has written a story about a family in freefall, one that manages to not only land on its feet, but to find those feet clad in elegant dancing shoes, ready to deliver a spin and final flourish as a prelude to a well-deserved fictional bow.

Spoonbenders is available June 26th from Knopf Doubleday.

A.M. Dellamonica‘s newest book is the Prix-Aurora Award nominated The Nature of a Pirate, and you can read the first chapter here! She has a book’s worth of fiction up here on Tor.com, including the time travel horror story “The Color of Paradox.” There’s also, “The Glass Galago,” the third of a series of stories called The Gales. This story and its predecessors, “Among the Silvering Herd,” and “The Ugly Woman of Castello di Putti,” are prequels to this newest novel and its predecessor, Child of a Hidden Sea. If sailing ships, pirates, magic and international intrigue aren’t your thing, though, her ‘baby werewolf has two mommies’ story, “The Cage,” made the Locus Recommended Reading List for 2010. Or check out her sexy novelette, “Wild Things,” a tie-in to the world of her award winning novel Indigo Springs and its sequel, Blue Magic.

Some time back, when I still had cable, I fell asleep on the couch and woke up at three in the morning to a documentary about Pablo Escobar’s hippos. It was a topic so weird that my brain refused to believe it was true. Clearly, I was still dreaming. The very idea that a drug kingpin would (A) buy hippos for his own zoo, and then (B) that those hippos would get loose and start to take over the countryside, seemed ridiculous. When I got up the next morning, I looked it up online convinced that my brain had produced it during some sort of bizarre fever dream.

It was 100% true, and I still can’t believe it. That documentary immediately sprang to mind when I saw the summary for River of Teeth by Sara Gailey. I thought, “This sounds absolutely bananas.” Followed by, “I need to read this.”

River of Teeth by Sarah Gailey

River of Teeth is much like the hippo itself. It seems, at first glance, to be incredibly silly. The hippo is big and round and cartoony and utterly ridiculous as a creature. It’s not something we ever think of as being a killer. And yet, they’re considered to be one of the most dangerous land mammals in Africa. Which makes them more deadly than LIONS. (From now on, the line from The Wizard of Oz will be, “Hippos and tigers and bears, OH MY.”)

Gailey plays up to this just right, taking what appears at first glance to be a ridiculous concept—cowboys on hippos out for revenge and glory—and striking that pitch perfect note between taking it utterly seriously, and giving a little wink to the reader. Yes, it says, this looks silly. But it is also a ferocious blood bath. So while it’s not what I would consider laugh-a-minute, I’m putting it under the whimsy category. Not enough of a hard sell for you? Anje, a bookseller at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park, WA, nails it with her summary:

Discount Armageddon by Seanan McGuire

I had read several of McGuire’s October Daye books, and while I enjoyed them, they don’t really fall into the area of great whimsy. The InCryptid series, however, revels in it. The lead character in Discount Armageddon, Verity, is a member of the Price family, which has been policing the monster world for a couple of generations. Verity is also a ballroom dancer. There are a lot of cool creatures, of course, but my favorite thing? Verity lives with a colony of Aeslin Mice. The mice are highly religious, have an excellent memory, and turn many of the events in Verity’s life, now matter how small, into holy holidays. The mice are hilarious.

Cold Cereal by Adam Rex

I was reading this book out loud to my son and my husband walked by, stopped, popped his head into the room and said, “I’m sorry, did you just say ‘dragon vomit’? What on Earth are you reading?” (This is a frequent conversation.) Cold Cereal is about a boy, Scott, who hallucinates some pretty weird things—like a leprechaun stealing his backpack. Or a giant talking rabbit. Only it turns out that his hallucinations are real, and they’re hiding from an evil cereal company. Complete with commercial breaks and silly illustrations, Cold Cereal is Adam Rex at his wacky best. (We also love his picture book Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich and Frankenstein Takes the Cake.)

The Awesome by Eva Darrows

I’m going to start this with a caveat—not every young adult book is appropriate for every teen. The Awesome is definitely aimed at older teens and is full of language that some parents would object to and talks a lot about sex, which even more parents might object to. So keep that in mind. I would hand it over to my teen, but then he’s heard all that language from me and I’m a big believer in talking openly about sex because knowledge is power and all of that. Got all that? Great. Let’s move on. The Awesome? It’s awesome. Maggie Cunningham fights monsters with her mom and desperately wants her journeyman’s license so she can kick butt on her own. The problem? She’s a virgin, and that’s like catnip to certain kinds of dangerous creatures. Maggie is crude, funny, and actually sounds like a teen. Her attempts at seduction are awkward and hilarious. The honest and open relationship with her mom is delightful. This book is darkly funny and snarky and I wish I’d had it as a teen. Also the cover is, well, awesome.

Big Trouble in Little China Vol 1 by Eric Powell, Brian Churilla, and John Carpenter

It’s no secret in my house that Big Trouble in Little China is one of my favorite movies. It’s weird and funny and different, especially when you realize that Jack, the lead, is actually the sidekick. Wang is, of course, the actual hero. He’s talented, special, and trying to save the love of his life. Jack is just…well, he sort of just falls into everything. So I was both excited and wary of a Big Trouble in Little China comic book. I felt better after I saw that Carpenter was attached to it, but it was Eric Powell’s name that made me really breathe a sigh of relief. (I loved Goon.) So I started picking up the single issues and burning through them. The comic takes up right where the movie ends and continues Jack’s exploits. Powell’s humor and the almost cartoony art style meshed perfectly, and I really enjoyed it. Funny and weird, my two favorite things. However, I have another caveat for you—after the third graphic novel collection, the creators change, the art style shifts drastically and the story takes a huge left turn. The changes might work for you, but they didn’t for me at all, and everyone had to listen to me whine about it for weeks.

Zombie in Love by Kelly DiPucchio, illustrated by Scott Campbell

I have a two-year-old obsessed with zombies. He likes zombie toys, pretends to be a zombie, basically goes nuts for anything zombie. (I know I’m biased, but his zombie impression is pretty stellar.) Oddly enough, there aren’t a lot of zombie things aimed at toddlers. When he found Zombie in Love on my shelf, he went nuts. The book is about Mortimer the zombie, who is lonely and just wants to find love. It’s funny, sweet, and a little creepy. (Mortimer is followed around by a zombie dog and a group of adorable worms.) The illustrations are wonderful and done in a watercolor style. They are full of funny and smart details and fit perfectly with DiPucchio’s wit. (Mortimer’s personal ad can be read to the tune of the Piña Colada song.) It is adorably creepy whimsy, and if you love it, you should pick up Zombie in Love 2 + 1 where Mortimer and Mildred end up with a human baby.

Have a favorite funny or whimsical read? List it in the comments! Everyone could use a little more in their lives, don’t you think?

Lish McBride currently resides in Seattle, spending most of her time at her day job at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park. The rest of her time is divided between writing, reading, and Twitter, where she either discusses her desire for a nap or her love for kittens. (Occasionally ponies.) Her debut novel, Hold Me Closer, Necromancer was named an American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults and was a finalist for the YALSA William C. Morris Award. Her other works include Necromancing the Stone, Firebug, and Pyromantic.

In Which… Brandon Sanderson’s dedicated band of Knights Radiant search out problems in the world of Roshar, on behalf of Cosmere fans everywhere. Oathbringer is coming, and work behind the scenes has been building for many months. Now it’s time to ramp up your anticipation, making sure y’all are as excited as you can get by November—as much as we can without giving anything away, of course, because we would NOT do that to you. However, spoilers for The Way of Kings and Words of Radiance abound, so if you haven’t read them, be warned.

A long time ago (a little over three years), my first article for this website was about beta reading Words of Radiance. There’s a fair amount of water under the bridge since then, and I’ve done more beta reads, all of which functioned more or less like that one. Then came Oathbringer. I’m here today, in collaboration with a few of the beta readers, to talk about what this one was like. Special thanks to Ted Herman, Ravi Persaud, Joel and Jory Phillips, Ross Newberry, Brandon and Darci Cole, Deana Whitney, Alyx Hoge, Eric Lake, Nikki Ramsay, Gary Singer, Paige Vest, Becca Reppert, Lyndsey Luther, and Mark Lindberg for all their input. They are a small but representative (and vocal) sampling of the beta readers; so far as I know, they will all return for the gamma in the next few weeks.

Alpha, Beta, Gamma

For those new to the concept, here’s how the Greek letters work in the Sanderson world:

Alpha readers are (logically) the first to read what he’s working on, and give early feedback on bits and pieces before a complete novel has come together.

Beta readers from a variety of backgrounds and interests join the alpha readers later, to give feedback to and through the completed novel. Beta reader Brandon Cole writes:

As beta readers, we have two very different jobs that have to be balanced.

1. Immediate reaction feedback—Brandon wants to know how I as a reader feel at any given point. How do I feel about this? Do I have a question about this? What/how does this make me think?
2. Looking for continuity. While enjoying the book and fanboying over every new bit of lore, it’s important to look for and comment on anything that feels like it might be out of place, out of character, or just plain contradictory to other parts of the story. This can be difficult to balance against the thought that “Oh, he knows what he’s doing and is amazing, so everything must be intentional.” The BrandonFan goggles have to come off during the beta process.

Gamma readers are the final group to review the book before it goes to print, looking for nitpicky details that only a human brain will be able to catch: missing prepositions, the correct place to hyphenate an in-world term, a misplaced name… that sort of thing.

So. That’s how it usually works. For the most part, that’s how it worked for Oathbringer… except on steroids.

Now, you have to understand how our beta-reading functions. It begins when Peter Ahlstrom emails the document to the beta readers, who choose their own methods to read and to record personal reactions. He also emails the link to a Google spreadsheet, with tabs for timeline, general explanations, each chapter (sectioned by Plot, Character, Culture, Other, and Title Suggestions), and general reactions. The procedure is usually to read a chapter, making notes as you go, and then enter your comments in the spreadsheet. (Some folks prefer to enter stream-of-consciousness comments as they read. I used to, but I hit one too many spoilers for things later in the same chapter… so I started collecting my comments in my document margin and entering them at the end of the chapter.)

So, Oathbringer. Beta-reading on steroids. In the first place, the beta version was 517,000 words. (For reference, the final count for Words of Radiance was 403,000, and the final revision of Oathbringer is around 450,000.) Because of the size and the structure—and to streamline the process so deadlines weren’t so deadly—the beta read was done by parts. When we started on Part 1, Brandon was revising Part 2, and Moshe Feder (his editor) was still working on Part 3.

In the second place, there were approximately 8,257 beta readers. Okay, I’m exaggerating. There were about seventy… which is more than twice what I’ve experienced before. This created issues—the first one being that Google Sheets isn’t entirely prepared to have seventy people entering data at the same time in the same spreadsheet! The other major issue, initially, was that there were so many comments it was almost impossible to figure out whether your thoughts had already been addressed, or where to add them. Combine that with a lot of first-time beta readers (it’s so easy to forget to separate reactions into the different sections!), some of whom didn’t realize that we needed to keep the comments sequential within a section… well, it was pretty chaotic for a while.

These particular issues were resolved in a couple of ways. Because everyone reads and comments at their own pace, the initial volume dropped off as real life intruded on reading time, spreading out the inputs. So that helped, along with a gentle reminder via email about keeping things in order. We also had a new column for “upvotes”—plus-one if you just want to note your agreement with a comment—which cut down dramatically on the “Me too!” “Me three!” sort of thing we used to do. And one of the biggest innovations in Sanderson beta-reading came about when Mark developed a script that would insert persistent paragraph numbers—which was a huge thing, because with the variety of platforms we were using, page numbering was useless as a sorting tool. Let me tell you, paragraph numbers were AMAZING. They may have saved our sanity—and also friendships.

The ultimate solution was for everyone to pull together and make it work: for each other, for Peter, for Brandon. And it did work.

***

Question & Answer with the Beta Readers

A few weeks ago, I asked the Storm Cellar group what questions, if any, they would like to ask the beta readers. I did a little Google Sheet of my own, though not for 70 people—for one thing, I didn’t have everyone’s email addresses, and for another, I’m not as incredible as Peter! Still, we collected some good material for your entertainment and enlightenment. (I only wish I could include all of it!)

Q: How soon will you read Oathbringer again after it comes out?

A: Unanimously, “When the gamma read starts!” After that, the answers ranged from, “On the plane home from the release party,” to “Oh, sometime in the first couple of months. Life’s busy.” Most agreed that the first thing they’ll do with a hard copy, though, is look at all the artwork. Some of it will be included in the gamma version, but there will be some we won’t see until publication.

Q: How challenging is it when canon differs from what you read in the beta?

A: The most up-voted answer to this was Ross’s: “I occasionally get surprised by misremembering a detail that changed, but for me the best part is seeing how feedback was incorporated to make the end result a better work.” Beyond that, several people commented along the lines of “I expect it to change, so it’s not a problem.” A couple of my personal favorites were these:

Alyx: “I feel like I’ve been filing away “suspect scenes” that are likely to be changed so that I can intentionally pay attention to what’s different when the final version comes around. I’ll just have to be careful to keep the final version straight in my head!”

Becca: “This is my first time as a beta reader so I don’t know yet. But I’m excited to see how much changes and if future me remembers things wrong because of it.”

Q: How extensive are the comments that you make? And how many of your comments/ changes/ suggestions actually make it into the book? Sub-question, has a suggestion of yours become a major (or not) point in the canon?

A: BAHAHAHAHA!! Fun trivia fact: there were more words in the comments (not even including quotes) than there were in the manuscript; Peter stopped counting after 550,000 words. The comments were… extensive. Yes. Oddly enough, most of us thought we were commenting a lot, but as Ted noted, “when I look at the accumulated comments of the other betas, I feel like I didn’t make enough comments.”

As far as how many of our inputs “make it into” the book… well, it’s more a matter of influence, and that’s hard to quantify. In the final version, there are definitely changes that reflect the discussions we had, though we rarely know how much of that is a matter of confirming something Brandon planned to change, versus taking a new tack. Even when there are specifics, we’re a bit skittish of pointing them out; while it’s nice to know we helped, we have no desire to cast any shade on the author! Plus, to avoid spoilers and because we don’t yet know what was changed, we can’t give any examples from Oathbringer.

That said, Joel reminded us of how Words of Radiance was slightly altered to include the pain and the aftercare involved in acquiring tattoos, based on the personal experience of several beta readers. He also recalled his support for Dalinar calling Kaladin “Soldier;” some thought it sounded derogatory, but for a guy with military experience, it was a term of respect. It stayed. Lyndsey led the charge to formalize the wording of Kaladin’s third Ideal, which originally seemed too casual for such a momentous occasion. And then there was The Great Skirts in Water Discussion, wherein all the women piled on to insist that skirts will most emphatically not flow gracefully when descending into water. (To be fair, I’m reasonably sure the men had limited experience with the general behavior of skirts in such situations, and none of them were foolish enough to argue with us.)

Also, Gary is counting the number of his jokes included in final versions. He’s at three so far.

Q: Does beta-reading take away the enjoyment of experiencing the published work in its final form?

A: The responses to this covered the full spectrum from, “No, not at all,” to “Yes, absolutely.” One of the most reflective responses was this one from Nikki:

For me, yes, it does take away some of the joy of reading the final published book…. It takes away from the excitement of Release Day, the ability to read at your preferred pace, and the ability to be in your own world while reading it. That last is one of the major downsides, for me, of a beta-read done by such a huge group in a relatively public space. You lose that first pure, personal experience with the book, because you’re also seeing many other people’s opinions and predictions, and discussing things as you go. Beta-reading turns that first read-through into “work” for me. It’s a completely different experience than just picking up a new book and reading it for fun.

Whether it takes away the enjoyment for any individual is… well, individual. But I think we all agreed that beta-reading changes the enjoyment.

Q: Did you make sure he didn’t use “maladroitly” again?

A: We had a good laugh about this one—and naturally, Ravi had to research it. Turns out that Brandon used “maladroitly” five times in one book, and only three times in all his other books, but that five times made it a Thing. We did threaten to find places to insert it in the gamma, though.

Q: How have you seen Brandon’s writing evolve with Oathbringer vs. previous works? (Specifically wrt: TSA, focused on technique improvements and that sort of thing, not content-specific.)

A: Everyone who responded to this had a different angle, but everyone said they had certainly seen improvement. It’s really hard to pick just one or two comments for this one! Ravi noted Brandon’s increasing ability to elicit emotion, and as Eric said, “The lows are so devastating, and the highs will make you scream with joy.”

Others mentioned greater skill with chemistry and romantic tension; the self-contained structure within each Part; the build-up of context and meaning to a dramatic pay-off at the end; and the remarkable ability to still surprise the reader with amazing plot twists and incredible character moments throughout the book.

Q: How much is Team Dragonsteel involved in your discussion? Do you talk with Peter Ahlstrom or even Brandon himself very much during the beta read?

A: To paraphrase Jory a little, “Contact with Dragonsteel is limited, but not restricted. Peter is constantly on the prowl through the beta spreadsheet, offering points and counterpoints and generally keeping us in line… We had no direct contact with Brandon, though we did occasionally see him creeping through our work late at night.”

Lyndsey mentioned the late-night creeping at a signing: “He laughed and said it was a huge temptation to just leave the spreadsheet open all the time and watch us comment.” She also observed, as we all must sometimes, that Peter is marvelous. “He doesn’t get NEARLY enough credit for all the amazing work he does on these books. Any time any of us had a question, he’d be there to answer it. He worked with us to streamline the process and make it easier for us all.”

Q: Are there any obvious hints you don’t catch during beta and find them later on reread (and facepalm yourselves)?

A: From Darci: “I ALWAYS miss stuff when reading these books. So for me it was incredibly eye-opening to watch the rest of the betas discuss points of interest that had completely flown past me. I’m much more of a casual reader, paying less attention to wider Cosmere references, so getting to see others catch those as I read was awesome.”

We each tend to look for different things, but I’m pretty sure we all miss things the first time through. My personal example from Words of Radiance was Zahel’s identity; I missed that, and didn’t entirely believe the beta readers who did catch it… until Nightblood showed up. So it’s less a matter of finding them on a reread, than it is being stunned by what someone else catches that I just flat-out missed.

Q: I would also love to hear any stories you’ve got about particularly intense debates or silly controversies that the beta readers got into, or weird inside jokes or misunderstandings.

A: This one could be a standalone article of its own!! We’d talk about Ravi, our resident speed-reader, who would be making comments on the last chapters when most of us were still in the first third. The pun-offs in the beta chat. The debates… well, we can’t talk about those yet, because they have too many spoilers. (I’ll include some of those in the spoiler review or the follow-up, I promise.) The theorizing while waiting for the next Part to come out. (Mark thinks we should find a way to force everyone to stop at one specific point and discuss for several weeks before being allowed to move on.) The typo jokes. (Well, mostly one, which will forever among this group of beta readers be a rallying cry: “That tight sh*t!”)

One that will always be a “fond” memory—or perhaps not so fond, because the argument got flaming hot—was “that one point where Brandon directly asked for our positions and mine ended up being the opposite of what I ever thought, and everyone was divided and it was awesome to read all the opinions. That was pretty great.” (Mark) It was pretty great—I, too, was shocked to find myself voting exactly the opposite of what I’d always said. We’ll all be watching to see how the final version of that turns out!

My personal favorite, though, is the Beta Babies. Yes, we had Beta Babies, and they are adorable. “Thumper” was born to Brandon and Darci Cole, just a few hours before Lyndsey Luther delivered Sammy, about a week before the beta read officially started.

Beta versions:

Here’s “Thumper” in early January, just about the time the beta started:

And Sammy (photo credit to Shannon Sorensen):

For the Gamma versions, here are brand new pictures as of the day of uploading this article:

Grown just a bit, they have. Check out the stuffed animal for scale! All. The. Cute.

Q: How unique and/or similar are the analyses of each of the beta readers?

A: From Joel: “What I love about this group of beta readers is the diversity of style and vision. It can cause interesting discussions in the beta chat. Everyone seems to have an open mind to a new idea, possibility, or vision. These discussions have never devolved into anything ugly, either. We all seem to recognize that we have equal input, regardless of education, background, and interests. We get multiple opinions/viewpoints on multiple subjects.”

Ross pointed out that the different areas of focus and expertise worked well together: laws of physics, magic system quirks, fashion, relationship dynamics, politics, historical accuracy, physical descriptions… Add it all together and the coverage is pretty thorough.

Several people noticed certain trends in perspective. Nikki says, “As you beta-read, you’ll definitely start to notice the people whose opinions (mostly) align with your own, or those whose opinions (mostly) don’t. But I don’t think there’s ever been someone I NEVER disagreed with, or NEVER agreed with. We all come at it with different perspectives, and that definitely shows.” Paige also remarked that eventually, whenever she found a comment from Ravi that she agreed with, she felt it was worth mentioning in the spreadsheet. (Come to think of it, that was pretty rare…) There were strong disagreements over the emotional responses of characters in certain situations, for example. (Very. Strong. But civil, too.)

Q: Do you ever feel like Peter and Brandon are delighted—or surprised—by your impressions?

A: It was passed on to us by Peter that Brandon is particularly happy with the beta process this time around. (Thanks for the reminder, Jory.) When the author feels that the beta process was extremely helpful, all the work is worth it.

Darci also passed on one that several of us missed: “Peter mentioned to us that Emily (Sanderson) read a lot of our commentary and she feels like she knows us now, which I think is equally as cool.”

Personal notes from the beta readers:

To conclude this section, let me present a collection of random inputs on the general subject of the Oathbringer beta read:

Ravi: “It’s like we threw an unfinished book and a bunch of crazy, amazing people into a blender and a finished book came out! I loved every second of it.”

Jory: “The most wonderful part of this process is the friendships that have grown from the beta … we all come together in a mutual respect for each other and love for the book that we’re nurturing together.”

Ted: “Reading is usually a solitary activity, but beta-reading and beta-discussion add a whole amazing dimension to reading enjoyment!”

Ross: “For a number of the seasoned beta readers, the Oathbringer beta process started well over a year ago, with a private group reread of the whole Stormlight Archive…, noting unanswered questions as we went.”

Alyx: “It’s really a team effort like nothing else. Every fan has the things that they focus on and their own perspectives to bring to the table. We all put in some contribution and the finished product is a better work for it.”

Mark: “I’d like to highlight the amount of work that being a beta reader involves. For three months, I planned anything outside of work around the beta schedule, because when a new part arrived, I disappeared into my cave, working through a few chapters every evening. I had no free time. It was gruelling, intense, and sometimes discouraging when it felt like all I was doing was +1-ing comments that other people had already given. It is not for everyone, and there are plenty of people who say they want to be beta readers but don’t realize how much work it really is.”

Deana: “The greatest surprise of the Beta was the new friendships. The beta chat can become very busy at times. Yet talking to them every day about something we all loved was friendship development on fast forward.”

Joel: “To know 100 years from now my great great great grandchildren could pick up a Sanderson novel and see our names and know that we contributed to the final product of these amazing stories that Brandon writes, gives me such a warm feeling. For me, a man without a college degree, that grew up reading all kinds of fantasy—C.S. Lewis, McCaffrey, Eddings, Tolkien, Jordan to name a few—to know that over the coming years Sanderson’s name will be considered among equals with those great writers, and to know that even on a small scale you helped contribute to the final product of some of his books, it’s difficult to put to words….”

Darci: “I’ve beta read for a lot of authors, published and aspiring. As a writer myself, I’ve loved seeing the diversity of thought in the readers’ responses, the roughness of Sanderson’s work (it’s nice knowing your heroes aren’t perfect), and seeing the many ways that Peter and the Dragonsteel team help sustain Brandon so he can focus on the part of his work that he truly enjoys. I’ve loved it.”

Eric: “The Oathbringer beta came at my busiest time at my work, but there’s nothing I’d rather lose sleep doing than working on this. It really is a huge array of work. It’s not fun and games. You read an exciting bit—there are lots of them—and you have to stop and write down your thoughts coherently. It’s way more time consuming than reading the book for fun. Still, there’s no place I’d rather be.”

Gary: “I loved it, but it was 2.5 months of sh*t hard work!”

Paige: “I knew it would be difficult yet satisfying work. I did not realize just HOW difficult it would be (my only previous beta being Edgedancer) or how utterly, wonderfully, fantastically satisfying it has turned out to be—both during and after completion. It was the best experience as a fan and I cannot wait to do it again.”

Lyndsey: “I’m going to get a bit sappy here. I’ve done a LOT of beta and gamma reads over the last four years, but this one… This one was so special to me. My baby was born about a week before we got part 1. I was in and out of the hospital with complications and dealing with a lot of depression and mood swings, and beta reading this book kept me sane. Working on this gave me something to look forward to, something to focus on, when everything seemed so bleak and I felt like I would never recover. At least I had Kaladin and Adolin and Bridge 4 to escape to. At least I had this wonderful group of people to be there for me, to talk to me about something other than the depression, to heap compliments and love on my babe when I shared photos. Most of them didn’t know the extent of the pain I was in, but the puns and the debates and the camaraderie helped me to feel connected. To say that this book means a lot to me is an understatement, but a necessary one, as there are no words to adequately express my thankfulness for my involvement and this community of people, in addition to the usual joy of being able to help—in a small way—make something I love even better.”

Becca: “This was so much harder than I expected it to be. I made things hard on myself by planning a wedding and studying for a professional exam as the same time as the beta. I had no idea that the time commitment would be so great and there were times I wondered if I’d be able to do everything. But despite the stress and complete lack of free time, I am so happy to have been given this opportunity to contribute. I would absolutely do it all again.”

So you want to be a beta reader?

Here’s a challenge from Deana Whitney:

1. Wait a week in between parts. Are you still sane?
2. Stop reading in the middle of the climax to write two pages about your thoughts and feelings and “his eyes are blue” comments. Were you able to stop reading?

If both answers are “Yes,” you might have what it takes. The personal notes above will give you some idea of the additional challenges. There are probably hundreds of people out there thinking they’d like a chance, but … like Eric says, it’s not fun and games. It’s bloody hard work. Several of us were on the verge of burning out by the time we were done. Only 45 of the original 70 even put their names on the Part 5 spreadsheet. Brandon Sanderson himself was tired of Roshar by the time he finished revision 3. (And he still had another revision to do!) Peter had to enlist the aid of a couple of the beta readers to sort through the comments, collate them, and create a condensed version to be useful. Emily sorted through our myriad chapter-title suggestions to pick the best ones. It was, as several people noted, a grueling process for everyone.

But, WOW. It was worth it. Come on, November!

Alice Arneson is by now a veteran beta reader—who nearly met her match in Oathbringer. Watch for upcoming articles from Tor staff and the beta readers on the story to this point, various refreshers, cosplaying The Stormlight Archive, being a Stormwarden, new artwork, and of course early release chapters of the book itself. Oh, and Alice is sure to do another “spoiler-free reactions” article for you to throw darts at, come early November.

Science fiction is rarely great at depicting older women: it seldom does, and when it does, rarely does it seem interested in them as women—with grown children, family issues, rich inner lives, friends and relationships both platonic and sexual—as opposed to ciphers. When I find a book that does depict an older woman well, and moreover puts her in a central role, in the narrative forefront—well, that’s a special occasion.

Nancy Kress’s Tomorrow’s Kin has Dr. Marianne Jenner, human geneticist, for a main character. Dr. Jenner is a mature woman who has just made a minor but important breakthrough in her field when she is summoned to an alien embassy in New York’s harbour. There, she learns that Earth may be facing a catastrophe: space-born spores that could potentially wipe out the whole world.

(Light spoilers ahead.)

Jenner’s response to the likely extinction of her entire species is to focus on her work—she’s helping to find people with a genetic connection to the aliens. But her emotional response is mediated through her reflections on her adult children: her two eldest children have established careers of their own, while her youngest, Noah, is a drifter and a dreamer who finds a connection to the aliens and immediately finds a sense of belonging with them and with their culture. Jenner’s relationship with her children is fraught—as is often the case with adults who have different values and priorities even when they’re not faced with a threat to their very existence that only a handful of people can hope to do anything about—but it is clear that she loves them.

In many respects, Tomorrow’s Kin keeps a tight focus on domestic and personal questions. Jenner’s life after the immediate crisis is past is dominated by her desire to bridge the gap of resentment between Earth’s humans and the aliens, her desire that there should be open communication and commerce between them. But thematically the book is most interested in Jenner’s human relationships with the people around her: her estrangement from her elder son, her complicated relationship with an academic peer who is her sometime lover/partner, her desire for and eventual sexual relationship with her younger, less-educated male bodyguard, her role in locum parentis for her grandchildren—her son’s children, one of whom has a really interesting sensory condition that resulted from the spore crisis—and her friendships, such as they are.

Tomorrow’s Kin is deeply interested in Jenner as a person, and its quiet, close intensity makes for a refreshingly original piece of science fiction. That’s not to say it’s without flaws: the first section is amazingly well-constructed, but the second half of the book sees a reduction in emotional force and thus, in consequence, feels like a bit of a let-down. It’s also a bit of a let-down from the point of view of being inclusive: both the gay best friend and the black personal assistant (and yes, they’re sufficiently singular as to require the definite article) kick the bucket. So there’s that, too.

On the other hand, it’s really good to have a science fiction novel that is so interested in an older woman with a family who already knows who she is, and must negotiate the challenges of a mature life. Instead of a novel that takes a coming-of-age narrative, or a chosen hero one, for its model.

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.

Almost fifteen years after Syfy’s Tremors television series got cancelled, the network is taking another stab at transferring the monster movie franchise to the small screen. But instead of a spinoff, like the 2003 series, this new project is going the route of Starz’s Ash vs. Evil Dead and having Kevin Bacon reprise his role from the 1990 cult classic.

In the original movie (which has since spawned a franchise of direct-to-video sequels), repairman Valentine McKee (Bacon) discovered giant, worm-like monsters called Graboids lurking beneath the town of Perfection, NV. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the Tremors sequel series picks up 25 years later and find Valentine “attempting to save the town again—but this time, also battling age, alcohol and a delusional hero complex.” Andrew Miller (The Secret Circle, League of Pan) will write the pilot.

In a press release, Bacon shared his excitement to play Valentine again: “This is the only character I’ve played that I’ve ever thought about revisiting. I just got to thinking, where would this guy end up after 25 years? Andrew Miller has a fantastic take on it and we hope to create a show that will be fun and scary for fans of the movie and folks that have yet to discover it. Let’s kick some Graboid ass!”

If that didn’t get you sufficiently amped up for more Tremors, check out the trailer for the original film:

The new Tremors series is one of several projects in the works from Blumhouse Television, including the TV series set in the universe of the horror franchise The Purge. Blumhouse’s film division was also behind Jordan Peele’s Get Out.

A fair number of my stories feature science or technology, even when they’re fantasy. About my first novel, Updraft, my friend Max Gladstone said, “There’s no magic in this book. It’s all engineering.” He was right… and a little wrong (sorry, Max!). There is magic in Updraft, and it’s all engineering.

Because the Bone Universe series — which began with Updraft in 2015 — concludes with Horizon this September, I’m thinking a lot about engineering and how it appears in science fiction and fantasy. For Tor.com, I assembled a roundtable of SF author-engineers and analysts. I also pulled one of the engineering consultants for the Bone Universe series into the discussion. Today, Hugo-Award winner John Chu, Nebula- and Locus-award winner Aliette de Bodard, short story author A.T. Greenblatt, and short story author, editor, and 2017 debut novelist Nicky Drayden join New Zealand-based naval architect and marine engineer (aka: my sister) Susan Lake for a roundtable on engineering in science fiction and fantasy. Here we go:

Engineering Roundtable: Considering that without engineering, we wouldn’t have many trebuchets, forts, rocket ships, or ray guns, why do you think engineering is or isn’t featured as much in science fiction and fantasy as other scientific fields?

John Chu: It is and it isn’t. There are any number of hard SF stories that valorize engineering. The heroes are engineers. They talk tough to each other. They build the thing or they fix the thing and, so, save the day. Sometimes, it’s described as science rather than engineering but engineering does get its due. (E.g., many mad scientists are probably really mad engineers.)

Then there are also any number of worlds in genre where the infrastructure is taken for granted. Now, taking some aspects of the world for granted isn’t unusual. I mean, the DM of the Pathfinder game I play in doesn’t enforce the encumbrance rules because neither he nor anyone playing in the game find them fun. (Yes, there are people who view those rules as part of what makes role-playing fun but none of them are playing this game.) If some aspect of the world doesn’t impinge on the story in a way that’s interesting or useful to the story, it tends to be assumed. Hence, we have universal translators, food production and distribution happens somehow, and buildings are generally sound.

If something is everywhere, it looks as though it’s nowhere. And anything that it is built is a matter of engineering.

Susan Lake: I’m probably looking at this question from the opposite point of view. Engineering is and always has been the way I see the world. I love SFF where engineering is respected—even if the rules are different. Where there are rules and they are applied? That’s what separates a good engineering story for me from one where logic must be suspended to be enjoyed.

Nicky Drayden: The biggest problem is that engineering isn’t much of a spectator’s sport. It’s similar to being a visual artist. People recognize and love your work, but most would be hard-pressed to name any but the most famous artists. And virtually no one cares what brushes the artist used to get a particular effect, or how she buys her canvases in bulk from Costco. In science fiction, we want our rayguns to vaporize alien invaders, but we don’t care about the nuts and bolts that make the light show possible. Engineers get none of the glory or recognition when things go right, but the very instant our space toilets fail, you can bet their names will go down in infamy.

A.T. Greenblatt: For me, SFF gets some things right about engineering and misses the mark on other things. Things that it does well is imagination and that’s the first step in any new design—imagining what a solution would look like and how it would be used, not only by a single user but a society as a whole. SFF is really excellent at that.

But I also think engineering gets brushed over in SFF. I have a few theories for why. First, good engineering is invisible. If something is designed well, it works and no one thinks to question that. Second, we as consumers are usually more interested in the final product than understanding the design cycles needed to make it. That’s the unglamorous part of engineering. It’s sort of like writing in that way—most readers are uninterested in reading earlier drafts of a story if they have access to the final, polished version.

Engineering Roundtable: Who are your favorite engineering-influenced or engineering-driven SFF authors and media?

Aliette de Bodard: I think Ken Liu is pretty good at this—both in his SF stories, but more surprisingly in his fantasy ones. The Wall of Storms has a set of really delightful passages where the main characters try to make airships and weapons to resist a foreign invasion, and where they work out how huge war animals breathe fire and use that to defeat them. In the same vein, Fran Wilde’s Bone Universe has a lot of delightful passages about how cities of bone would keep growing upwards, and how people would fly and how they would design flying machines.

Susan Lake: With Doctor Who, Star Wars (love the Rogue One prequel catalysis), Neil Stephenson (Seveneves being the most recent example, as colonists use engineering to survive), engineering is the foundation that makes everything else work and the story believable.

John Chu: Hmm… I’m genuinely not sure. I do think that “The Man Who Bridged the Mist” is one of the greatest stories of all time.

A.T. Greenblatt: I’m going to be cliché on this one. Isaac Asimov and Star Trek. For both of these, I love how they asked the “what if” questions and explored the answers with an eye both on the scientific possibilities as well as the social ones. Runtime by S. B. Divya also does this really well.

Nicky Drayden: Andy Weir’s The Martian does a great job of making engineering appealing to the masses. Weir throws one life-threatening obstacle after another at an engineer who has few resources and sometimes mere seconds to work out a solution. MacGyver-like ingenuity in the face of certain death is one way to create interest in fiction centered around engineers.

Engineering Roundtable: What’s the most SF thing you (or your characters) have ever engineered?

A.T. Greenblatt: The coolest SFF thing I’ve ever made was a robotic fish feeder in high school. The coolest thing a character of mine ever made (to date) is her own home in the middle of a void.

John Chu: A branch predictor for a microprocessor in a technology where instead of electrons, they use nanoscale dots and all the interactions are physical. (E.g., logical gates are literal gates.) I did this in my story, “The Sentry Branch Predictor Spec: A Fairy Tale”, which was published in Clarkesworld in July 2016 (where the design is explicated in the form of a quest-oriented fairy tale).

Nicky Drayden: Once upon a time, I briefly considered studying to become an architectural engineer, and one great thing about writing fiction is that you can easily play around with these could-have-been career paths. Last year I took a free online course from Monash University, called “How to Survive on Mars.” We assessed available resources and cutting-edge technology that could make living on Mars possible within our lifetimes.

A lot of my classmates were heavy proponents for nuclear power as an energy source, but I felt that if we did away with our bigger-is-better mindsets and tried to build environmentally friendly architecture with Martian sensibilities, we could harness all the energy we need through solar, wind, and kinetic power provided by people with these cool floor tiles. Buildings could be 3-D printed from Martian soil, opening so many possibilities for unique architecture, which could also incorporate plant material into the designs to supplement the food and oxygen supplies. And that’s just Mars! Imagine building ice palaces on Titan, or undersea stations on Ganymede. The sky is literally the limit.

Susan Lake: Well, at my firm, we’ve built foiling catamarans, and energy kites (makani). We’ve created build plans for hydro turbines and flying cars.

I’ve had long conversations with inventors who were sure they had perpetual motion machines—usually magnet based. I also get a lot of late-Friday-afternoon phone calls—the ones where you’re pretty sure that the person on the other end has maybe been down to the pub, had a brilliant idea, and then somehow googled a number for a composite engineer to ask them to build things.

Lately, clients have included architects realising that the composites (carbon fiber, mostly) I work with can make their wacky concepts/ideas/visions a reality. So I’m making a lot of structures that appear to “float” or free-span while remaining extremely thin.

What’s coming next? I have no idea, and I wouldn’t count free-form creativity among my strengths. But once someone does have that idea, I’ll figure out how to build it.

Aliette de Bodard: I don’t get around to engineering much (except embedded software which can get pretty cool and pretty scary), but my characters definitely do build quite a few things! I designed an intergalactic plague for two linked stories, “In Blue Lily’s Wake” and “Crossing the Midday Gate”—a virus that was transmitted from organic artificial intelligences to humans. It was a lot of work because I had to not only have an idea of how the virus worked, but also had to come up for an entire set of scientific history around the development of the vaccine—how they found it and how they ran the vaccination campaigns—and finally another entire set of problems, because the plot required the first round of vaccination campaigns to fail, and I had to come up with reasons that it did!

The second most complicated thing I did was run on something close to engineering principles: one of the characters in my novel The House of Binding Thorns was pregnant in a 19^th-century alternate Paris, and I needed to work out how her pregnancy would have been followed medically—which was a bit tricky as they had medicine that wasn’t quite at the same stage as in the real world, due to the presence of magic. I also needed to write a birth scene that led to complications–and it turned out that the major difficulty of all this wasn’t so much coming up with complications, as it was making sure said complications didn’t kill either the mother or the child. I read a lot of medical and midwifery history, and it was in equal parts fascinating and horrifying to see how bad it got back then, and also how far we’d come!

Engineering Roundtable: What are common flaws and assumptions you see in SFF that are engineering related?

Nicky Drayden: One engineering trope that bugs me is how Howard Wolowitz, the aerospace engineer on The Big Bang Theory, is constantly degraded by his peers. I don’t know if this reflects common views in actual scientific communities, since my theoretical physicist friends are few, but the dude flew to space, and still gets flack.

Aliette de Bodard: By far the most common one is “perfect projects” that are always delivered on time and where nothing ever goes wrong. In real life you’d expect delays, and compromises made to fit existing technology into the budget and the time available: sometimes the technology just isn’t available, sometimes it’s available but it costs too much, sometimes it’s available but it just can’t meet all the requirements for operations. But in SFF a lot of people just seem to order an engineering-related thing like it’s a meal from a menu—and get exactly what they expected in record time!

The next one is maintenance, which often gets skipped on: the future is always shiny and exciting, and nothing ever seems to go wrong: the artificial intelligences never have tiny glitches (when they do have glitches generally it’s of the world-destroying, humanity-ending kind!), and you never quite seem to see people who work all day long trying to keep the spaceships going, the ambient systems live, etc.

John Chu: That engineering isn’t primarily about people. That engineers only get involved when something has gone horribly wrong. That the immutable laws of physics are somehow the engineer’s biggest obstacle. I should point out that, on the other extreme, “Oh, this would be brilliant if it were not for all the bureaucracy forcing the engineers to make it awful” is also a pitfall.

A.T. Greenblatt: One of the biggest inaccuracies I see in engineering in SFF is that the napkin sketch looks exactly like the final product. When designing things in real life the end product is often quite different from those initial concept ideas. Especially if you’re working in a team with other engineers. (And engineers usually work in teams.) Another one is that in stories, the end user uses the product exactly as intended, with no hiccups. In real life, this is a pipe dream. The end user is often a creative abuser who never bothers to read the manual before installing. So usually this results in: 1. A redesign. 2. Lots of broken products. 3. The user finding innovative and unexpected uses for that design.

Engineering Roundtable: What question would you most like to ask or see asked about engineering in SFF?

A.T. Greenblatt: I want to know how will design standards change when Earth and Earthlike conditions are no longer standard for all humans? Will there be engineers who specialize only in constructing things for Mars? How will that affect industry and the economy?

Aliette de Bodard: What would engineering be like if the laws of science turned out be different? (either because we’ve discovered new ones or because we’re in a universe where ours don’t apply). I think a lot of SF focuses on laws of science as they’re known now, but people tend to forget that they can and do change. 150 years ago we didn’t know about quantum mechanics, string theory or general relativity, or even imply about exoplanets and all the odd and wonderful things you can find in space, so just imagine what we could be doing in a few centuries! (I’d love to see more aliens with a different understanding of science as well—not just magical thinking but a rigorous system that just takes a completely different set of explanations to ours for the universe and makes it work!)

NIcky Drayden: What constraints are the most challenging to overcome when engineering for space travel? Do these constraints make for better design overall?

Susan Lake: I’d like to see inquiry into more details—making the structures, the vehicles, and the physics not a background but a contributing character to the story.

John Chu: Patrick Nielsen Hayden once described hard SF as “two engineers talking tough to each other.” He did this at a Boskone panel some years ago. As a working engineer, I feel I can say that “talking tough to each other” does not reasonably describe my day-to-day interactions with my workmates. So, I’d like to see SFF explore other ways engineers interact with engineers (or non-engineers, for that matter).

Engineering Roundtable: What engineering related fields would you like to see explored?

John Chu: Like I said, if it can be built, it involves engineering. So, for example, I find the engineering of musical instruments endlessly fascinating. We’re still trying to figure out how to build a good violin!

When I was in grad school, the choir I sang in toured Italy. One space we sang in—I think it was in Assisi—was so live at rehearsal. Everything echoed and the echo hung for what seemed like days. Our conductor actually demonstrated this to us by having us sing a chord, cutting us off, then just having us listen to the echo as it didn’t fade. Come concert time, though, the space was fine. The acoustic now worked for the music we sang. The difference, of course, was that the space was now filled with people and their clothes absorbed the sound.

There is lovely interaction between music, fashion, and architecture. (My choir sang unmiked, but, nowadays, you can throw in electronics as yet another way to create an acoustic.) What I’d like to see more of is an interdisciplinary approach where we see not only how engineering affects various areas of life but how those areas affect the engineering.

Aliette de Bodard: I would definitely like to see more transport engineering—not only because it’s my day job but because transport networks and how they integrate with the cities and space habitats is a subject that has a lot of potential, and a lot of material for stories. It’s already changing quite a lot especially in urban environments: I’d be really interested to see takes on what happens when you have an entire intergalactic empire to keep together, and you need to keep lines of supply going.

I also would like to see more materials engineering: there’s a lot of related sciences being explored but materials tend to be a little handwavy in the sense that characters get exactly what they need and generally don’t ask themselves further question on how it was designed and manufactured.

Nicky Drayden: I could totally geek out on a book about an architectural engineer. Building structures on other planets is sure to hold interesting challenges that would make for good fiction.

Susan Lake: Civil, chemical, environmental, mechanical, geotechnical… All of these. Both about what contributions engineering can make to SF stories, but also—and probably more so—about SF foretelling where engineering will take us. The last I think is the closest to how I see it—SF is that Friday afternoon phone call posing the crazy new reality that engineering will get to sort out how to make happen.

(Moderator’s note: I DO NOT PHONE UP MY SISTER ONLY ON FRIDAYS.)

A.T. Greenblatt: Lately, I’m loving stories that are using 3D printers. Also, I would love to see stories that explore greener societies and solutions. SFF is the imagination that inspires engineers and I want to see more stories imagining better futures.

***

John Chu is a microprocessor architect by day, a writer, translator and podcast narrator by night. He has a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Most of his day job work is covered by NDA. His fiction has appeared at Boston Review, Uncanny, and Tor.com among other venues. He has narrated stories for Lightspeed and the Escape Artist podcasts. His translations can be found at Clarkesworld, The Big Book of SF and other publications. His short story “The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere” won the 2014 Hugo Award for Best Short Story. His most recent publication is “Making the Magic Lightning Strike Me” in the May/June 2017 issue of Uncanny Magazine. His bibliography can be found at his website. His Twitter handle is @john_chu.

Aliette de Bodard works as a System Engineer, designing embedded software for automated trains. By night she writes stories of maths and magic. She is the author of the critically acclaimed Obsidian and Blood trilogy of Aztec noir fantasies, as well as numerous short stories which have garnered her two Nebula Awards, a Locus Award and two British Science Fiction Association Awards. Her space opera books include The Citadel of Weeping Pearls, a book set in the same universe as her Vietnamese science fiction On a Red Station Drifting. Recent works include the Dominion of the Fallen series, set in a turn-of-the-century Paris devastated by a magical war, which comprises The House of Shattered Wings (Roc/Gollancz, 2015 British Science Fiction Association Award, Locus Award finalist), and its standalone sequel The House of Binding Thorns (Ace, Gollancz).

Nicky Drayden is a Systems Analyst who dabbles in prose when she’s not buried in code. She resides in Austin, Texas where being weird is highly encouraged, if not required. Her debut novel The Prey Of Gods is set in a futuristic South Africa brimming with demigods, robots, and hallucinogenic hijinks. See more of her work at her website or catch her on twitter @nickydrayden.

By day, A.T. Greenblatt is a mechanical engineer for a small telecommunications company where she’s usually juggling about five different designs at any given time. She lives in Philadelphia and is known to frequently subject her friends to various cooking and home brewing experiments. She’s a graduate of Viable Paradise XVI and is part of Clarion West’s class of 2017. Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in Strange Horizons, Flash Fiction Online, and Mothership Zeta. Her most recent work is “A Place to Grow” at Beneath Ceaseless Skies. You can find her online at her wesite and on Twitter @AtGreenblatt.

Since 2011, Susan Lake has worked with Core Builders Composites (New Zealand) building America’s Cup 50 platforms and wings for the USA and Japanese America’s Cup teams as well as components for Artemis Racing, Groupama and ETNZ. Other recent projects include clean energy kites, hydroturbines, solar cars and bespoke architecture. With a Masters’ in Mechanical Engineering and degrees in Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering, she has served as President of the Composites Association New Zealand since 2014 and advocates on behalf of the industry to promote composite manufacturing for architectural and infrastructure projects around New Zealand. She likes to make things that go really, really fast. She’s not allowed to talk about the flying cars.

Fran Wilde has been a science and technology writer for clients including the Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins University and University of Maryland. Her novels and short stories have been nominated for two Nebula awards and a Hugo, and include her Andre Norton-winning debut novel, Updraft (Tor 2015), its sequels, Cloudbound (2016) and Horizon (2017), and the novelette “The Jewel and Her Lapidary” (Tor.com Publishing 2016). Her short stories appear in Asimov’s, Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Shimmer, Nature, and the 2017 Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror. She writes for publications including The Washington Post, Tor.com, Clarkesworld, iO9.com, and GeekMom.com. You can find her on Twitter, Facebook, and at franwilde.net.

Let’s cut to the chase up front—Transformers: The Last Knight isn’t very good. At all.

It manages to sidestep the stultifying narrative incoherence of Age of Extinction and a good dose of the weird cruelty of Dark of the Moon, but runs headlong into the massive racial stereotypes of Revenge of the Fallen and the bloated running length of the entire franchise to date.

There’s a three headed robotic dragon in the movie. Somehow it’s still dull.

But, in a weird way, it’s also a really interesting movie. Because this looks, and feels, like the end of an era. A mere four films late, Michael Bay is (probably, hopefully) finally stepping away from the franchise he’s been exploding in slow motion for a decade now. And while he leaves vast, and vastly photogenic, damage in his wake there’s some hope for the future.

But we’ll get to that.

Because there are elements of The Last Knight that don’t just work, they’re actually REALLY fun. Especially an opening sequence depicting King Arthur and his knights at a pivotal battle and Merlin getting sozzled and yelling at a spaceship.

YES.

Played with Captain Jack Sparrow when he was still fun levels of glee by Stanley Tucci, this Merlin is a liar and a fraud. But he’s a liar and a fraud who’s found an alien spaceship and talked to the beings inside…He pleads for their aid and just as all seems lost, Merlin and the OTHER knights of the roundtable, the Autobot ones, ride to the rescue.

This idea is so gloriously over the top, and Tucci is clearly having so much fun that you’re genuinely sad when this sequence stops. Had Bay done an entire robotic knights versus Saxons movie then this would have been way better than it is. Odds are we may get that movie later though, so go Team Drunk Tucci Merlin!

We jump forward in time from there and discover that the events of the previous movies have, for once, had consequences. Optimus Prime, Murderbot is lost in space after forgetting interstellar distances are a thing. Earth is so thunderously sick of the transformers that a rapid response force has been set up to kill them on sight and areas of Chicago destroyed in the last movie are still roped off and patrolled.

It’s an interesting, untidy set up which gives these movies a weight they’ve never had before. Instead of hand waving away the consequences of events this feels like a world buckling under the weight of a decade of trauma.

Front and centre in that world is Izzy. Played by Isabela Moner, Izzy is an actual female lead with actual agency and intelligence who’s actually fun. In these movies that’s like going ten minutes without an explosion. A survivor of the Chicago attack, she’s angry and homeless, living in the locked off zones and repairing any Autobots she can find. This includes Canopy, who lives just about long enough for us to get his name, and Sqweeks, the obligatory comic relief Autobot.

Izzy’s GREAT. She’s fun and tough and has a great back story and the entire movie could be hung off her.

So of course, Mark Wahlberg rocks up ten minutes later to do the exact same thing he did last time just grumpier and without the repellent sub plot about his daughter. Cade Yeager was dull in Age of Extinction and he’s duller this time although Wahlberg at least doesn’t shout as much. He’s an odd leading man, occasionally brilliant, often serviceable and just as often actively bad. Age of Extinction was the worst performance he’s ever turned in. This just about makes it into the serviceable range.

Aided by Jerrod Carmichael as Jimmy, his assistant, Cade runs a junkyard/sanctuary for the Autobots. His ‘tenants’ include Grimlock and the dinobots from last time as well as Bumblebee (Still Bee), Drift (Still every samurai cliché rolled into one), Hound (still dull) and Crosshairs (Still actively mean spirited for no good reason). But there’s a problem, without Optimus Prime, Murderbot the Autobots are fighting amongst themselves.

Worse still, colossal structures are appearing all over the planet and a planetary mass is heading into the solar system. Something on Earth is waking up and Cybertron is riding to meet it. In the meantime Megatron makes a deal with the humans, Prime meets his goddess and in England, Sir Anthony Hopkins and Laura Haddock patiently wait for the plot to catch up to them.

This all happens in the first 90 minutes or so of the movie. Bay and scriptwriters Art Marcum, Matt Holloway and Ken Nolan appear to have responded to the non-existent plot of the previous movie by throwing three scripts’ worth of events in a blender and hitting MAELSTROM. As well as Izzy, Jimmy, the Autobots, Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch, Prime meeting God and the TRF there’s some back-filling continuity about every previous movie, a little (but not enough) more about the Knights of Cybertron from last time and an entirely superfluous NASA sub plot as well as a high speed chase through London and a profoundly weird sequence with a submarine.

Some of this works surprisingly well. The massive amounts of exposition Sir Anthony Hopkins is required to spout as the last member of the society who have recorded Transformer presence on Earth in particular. Plus it sets up a lot of potentially interesting spinoffs. Because apparently the Transformers helped win World War II. And helped Harriet Tubman. And caused a volcanic eruption or two. And fought in World War I.

Consistent with previous movies? Not even a little! Way more interesting than previous movies? You bet!

Likewise Haddock’s Viviane Wembly, a no-nonsense British academic whose best moments involve telling Cade to shut up or being the most competent person in the room. Of course she ends up falling in love with Cade, because movie, but Haddock is, along with Moner, the first woman who’s ever been given something substantial to do with the series and clearly relishes it.

And that brings us to the problems. Because fun as Haddock and Moner are, they’re endlessly pushed off screen by too much of other things. For reasons that defy rationality John Turturro literally phones in his info dump cameo from Cuba. Santiago Cabrera is utterly wasted as the head of the TRF, the anti-Transformers force. He’s required to do nothing more than look grumpy and be yelled at by Cade and a returning Josh Duhamel as Lennox who somehow has even less to do than he does. Then there’s the fact that Izzy and Jimmy, who get chunky introductions, are written out of the movie for an hour so Bay and co can de-camp to England. Or at least the version of England they think exists, where Sir Anthony Hopkins runs a de facto retirement home for dementia-riddled old Autobots and you can walk up to the door of Number 10 Downing Street, call a policeman a ‘dickhead’ and not get shot.

If this sounds bad, it is. It’s made even worse once you take a look at the Cybertronian cast. Drift, Crosshairs and Hound are catchphrase machines. Bumblebee is quite fun, as ever, but given this movie establishes he’s basically unkillable and that he’s still messing around with his voicebox there’s nowhere to really go with him. Unless it’s into the past with Hailee Steinfeld of course.

Then there’s Optimus Prime, Murderbot. The greatest leader of the Autobots is off screen for at least half the movie and it’s so much better for his absence. Bay’s Prime is a murderous, arrogant sociopath and while this movie tries to make that a feature not a bug, he’s still startlingly unlikeable. Prime’s narrative line here is:

1. Fail to make it out of the solar system on a quest to murder God.
2. Impact on Cybertron.
3. Get brainwashed, return to Earth.
4. Murder some autobots.
5. Get talked down by Bee.
6. Apologise.
7. Be late to the final fight.
8. Save Viviane and Cade.

If there’s a character Bay has destroyed in this series, it’s Prime—and while it’s great to see his awful choices have consequences for once, the character is still a very long way from likable. Hopefully he’ll be rested for a few movies. Hopefully he’ll take Drift and Crosshairs with them. Hopefully he’ll forget to bring them back.

Then there’s Megatron’s collection of tropeticons. Mohawk is a bike who, you guessed it, has a Mohawk. Barricade’s sum totality of character is in his PUNISH and ENSLAVE knuckledusters and Nitro Zeus is almost implausibly terrible. Idiotic name aside, he talks like someone who failed an audition for Oz and wears an actual, hand to God, gold chain.

He’s a 30 foot transformer.

Wearing a gold chain.

To scale.

And the first time we see him he’s getting out of prison.

Yeah.

The last time these movies were this overtly racist and stereotypical was Revenge of the Fallen, which is less a film and more a series of blows to the temple. It’s somehow got even less charming since then.

In fact, the movie makes a very definite return to the mean-spiritedness of Revenge of the Fallen. There’s a fat joke about once a half hour and an entire running gag about how funny it is when British people say ‘bitch’ Throw in the moment where Cade calls Izzy ‘Lil J-Lo’ and you’ve got a veritable tapas spread of terrible script choices. Possibly the most surreal of which is the excellent Omar Sy being cast as Hot Rod, only to spend the movie complaining about his accent.

So, yeah, this is a bad movie. But there is good news. This really does feel like the last time around for this iteration. Next up is Travis Clark’s Hailee Steinfeld fronted Bumblebee movie set in the 1980s. Written by Christina Hodson it’s already being talked up as a smaller focus, more character driven movie. Every single member of the creative team do good work and I’m hopeful that it will be a much needed course correction for the series. Likewise Transformers 6 which, so far, is not being directed by Bay, won’t star Wahlberg and will be largely set on Cybertron sounds promising. But we’ve been here before, more than once.

If The Last Knight is the last bow, then these movies may finally be en route to being as fun as they should have been from the start. There’s vast intelligence and potential in the Transformers and the comics—More Than Meets The Eye and Lost Light have demonstrated that for years. Maybe with the help of Clark, Hodson, Steinfeld and the 1980s, we’ll finally see that on screen. Because, fun elements aside, we definitely don’t see it here.

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

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

I have always loved the idea that the world is greater and more mysterious than we will ever understand; that there are strange things moving in the far corners of the world and in our own backyard. That what we call our reality, our history, is just a story among many others. It could be because I was reared on fairy tales, mythology, and stories of weird beings in the Swedish countryside. No matter the reason, there it is.

There was a special moment when I walked over from the library’s children’s section into the adult section. There, I found a shelf that was different from the others: Disputed Phenomena, or as it would be classified in the modern Dewey system, 130-135. I devoured all the books on that shelf and was left hungry for more. I went on to empty the same section in the central city library, and then went for the esoteric shelves in used bookshops. I collected books on paranormal phenomena, mysterious places and cryptozoology. I loved two things in particular: humanoid beings that aren’t really human, and lost civilizations. That’s when I stumbled over Zecharia Sitchin’s The 12th Planet.

Sitchin argues that the sudden rise of human civilization was triggered by alien visitors from a “twelfth planet” that passes through our solar system every 3,600 years. He claims that evidence can be found in old Sumerian myth, which was then passed on to later civilizations. He isn’t alone with his theory. You might be familiar with books like Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods or Gerhard Steinhauser’s Jesus Christ: Heir to the Astronauts. Or, for that matter, the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens series. The message is the same: aliens have visited Earth numerous times in the past, and stories of those visits live on in myth and art.

The idea of ancient aliens hit all my sweet spots. There really were gods. And even better, the gods were aliens. What’s not to like? And let’s face it. When you look at depictions of gods in ancient art, they look human … but not quite. Aren’t the proportions off? Doesn’t that headgear look suspiciously like a helmet? Isn’t that gadget eerily reminiscent of a jetpack? Is that man actually seated in a cockpit? What’s with those weirdly elongated skulls?

In myth all over the world, the gods came down from the sky to teach humans about agriculture, about technology, about architecture. There are a lot of stories of flying chariots and strange aerial ships: vimanas, shem, chariots of fire. There are even tales of the gods engaged in something like nuclear warfare. In the Bible, you can read about the nuclear destruction of Sodom and Gomorra; the Mahabharata speaks of “incandescent columns of smoke and flame, as bright as ten thousand suns”. Even the Norse myths tell of the world ending in something like a nuclear winter. Surely, all these images and stories point to one single thing: the memory of alien visitors with a technology far superior to our own.

The idea of gods and strange creatures walking among us fed directly into my writing when I started out. On a backup drive somewhere are lamassu come to life; Nefilim swooping down from the sky to wreak havoc on humanity; the remains of ancient civilizations with strange and wonderful technology.

The ancient alien theory doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, of course, and as I got older I also realized that the premise is inherently problematic. The civilizations claimed to have had contact with aliens in ancient times are mostly non-western, many of them located in places that once colonized by the West. There is an underlying assumption that these ancient civilizations were savages who couldn’t do math on their own. Someone had to come and teach them. Realizing that one of my favorite theories was built on a racist and colonialist foundation was less than fun, but it’s part of growing up.

Still, all experiences leave traces. Everything I see, hear and read lands on the great compost heap of creativity. The elements mix, ferment, mutate. What finally lands on the paper is, you could say, the juice that seeps out from the bottom of that heap. I don’t actually write about ancient aliens. What all those books about paranormal phenomena and ancient aliens have left me with is the sensation that the world is stranger than we know. I write about things that are almost-human, and encountering intelligent life with minds and agendas we can’t understand, and sometimes that intangible sense of old age that you sometimes encounter in certain places: the remains of older worlds. My story “Listen” deals with beings that claim to be human but who communicate in a way that humans have enormous trouble understanding. “Starfish” describes mysterious concrete roads built on the bottom of the ocean. In my novel Amatka, there are remains of an older civilization; it’s not the main theme, just present at the edges of the story.

Adulthood and research have stripped me of the idea that humans weren’t capable of great feats on their own, and I have accepted that sometimes a vimana is just a vimana. But I still like the idea that older civilizations knew things that we have forgotten, although that knowledge wasn’t passed on to them by aliens. And even though alien beings may not have uplifted humanity, perhaps something walked the earth in ancient days, something that wasn’t quite human. Mythology is flush with those not-human beings. John Keel, author of The Mothman Prophecies, theorized that those beings that modern humans interpret as aliens or cryptids are in fact native to this planet. I like that idea too.

The idea of a richer reality is part of what made me a writer. I don’t really believe that the truth is out there. But I’ll always be in love with the thought.

Top image: cover art from The 12th Planet (Harper, 2007)

Karin Tidbeck is originally from Stockholm, Sweden. She lives and works in Malmö as a freelance writer, translator, and creative-writing teacher, and writes fiction in Swedish and English. She debuted in 2010 with the Swedish short story collection Vem är Arvid Pekon? Her English debut, the 2012 collection Jagannath, was awarded the Crawford Award 2013 and short-listed for the World Fantasy Award. Her novel Amatka is now available from Vintage.

Star Trek Generations
Written by Rick Berman and Ronald D. Moore & Brannon Braga
Directed by David Carson
Release date: November 18, 1994
Stardate: 48632.4

Captain’s log. A bottle floats through space and breaks on the U.S.S. Enterprise, NCC-1701-B. Joining Captain John Harriman on her maiden voyage is a gaggle of press, as well as Kirk, Scotty, and Chekov. The trio look around and talk to the helm officer, Ensign Demora Sulu, Hikaru Sulu’s daughter.

After Kirk gives the order to leave Spacedock—which he only does reluctantly, and only after Harriman insists—they set course for a trip around the solar system. However, they pick up a distress call. Two ships are stuck in an energy ribbon and are about to be destroyed. Harriman tries to fob it off on another ship in range—but there is no other ship in range, so Harriman reluctantly sets course. Throughout all this, Kirk is practically jumping out of his skin.

When they arrive, they can’t get close enough to transport without getting sucked into the ribbon. The ship’s tractor beam and photon torpedoes won’t be installed until Tuesday, and the medical staff doesn’t report until then, either, which is why Harriman was reluctant to enact a rescue. They manage to beam 47 of the 300 people on the two ships away before they’re destroyed—and then the Enterprise itself is being torn apart by the gravimetric forces of the ribbon.

Since there’s no medical staff, Chekov and a couple of reporters take care of the refugees, one of whom, Soran, is beside himself wanting to go back for some reason. Another we recognize as Guinan.

Scotty thinks that an antimatter blast will disrupt the gravimetric field, but without photon torpedoes, that’s hard to manage. The deflector can be gimmicked to simulate a torpedo, though. Harriman is about to do it, leaving Kirk in charge. Kirk eagerly sits in the center seat at first, then thinks better of it, telling Harriman that his place is on the bridge of his ship.

Kirk goes to deck 15 to do what needs doing. Demora activates the deflector when he’s done, and they break free, but a backwash from the ribbon hits decks 13-15, including the section where Kirk was. Scotty, Chekov, and Harriman go down to find the hull breached, and no sign of Kirk.

Seventy-eight years later, a promotion celebration is held on the holodeck of the Enterprise-D, with a sailing ship—also called Enterprise—re-created and the crew in 18th-century sailing outfits. Worf is treated as a prisoner, the charges against him being performing above and beyond the call of duty and earning their respect. Picard then promotes him to lieutenant commander, “And may God have mercy on your soul.”

Worf then has to walk the plank and snatch the tricorn hat from a bit of rigging. Riker then “accidentally” removes the plank rather than retract it, and Worf falls into the water. Data doesn’t get the humor of the situation and asks Crusher to explain it. Her explanation inspires him to push Crusher into the water, which everyone in the audience thinks is hilarious, but nobody on the ship does for reasons the script never adequately explains.

The festivities are interrupted twice, first by Picard receiving a personal message that his brother and nephew have died in a fire, then a distress call from the Amargosa Observatory that they’re under attack. Everyone leaves the holodeck and the Enterprise-D goes to red alert.

When they arrive, there are no ships in the area and the observatory is in bad shape. Only five of the nineteen crew members assigned to the observatory have survived. Riker takes an away team over with Worf, Crusher, and a security detail. One of the people they rescue is Soran. They find two Romulan corpses as well, which indicates that they were the ones who attacked.

On the Enterprise, Data views his difficulty with humor as a reason to finally install the emotion chip that Dr. Soong made for him and that Lore stole. (Never mind that the difficulty was with everyone else, as what he did was funny! It was even the same kind of funny as what Riker did to Worf!) Meanwhile, Soran goes to Picard and insists that he return to the observatory to complete an experiment, but Picard won’t let him until the investigation is complete. Soran then says some crazy-ass things that would do absolutely nothing to convince anyone to let him do what he wants, which makes you wonder why he said it. He also avoids Guinan’s gaze for fear of being recognized.

Worf’s investigation reveals that the Romulans were looking for information on trilithium, even though that wasn’t part of the observatory’s remit. La Forge and Data beam over to try to find traces of trilithium, and they don’t find any, though Data does finally get a joke La Forge told seven years earlier. However, they do find a hidden door that Data gets open, revealing a hidden lab. Before they can investigate, Data is overwhelmed by his emotion chip—then Soran inexplicably shows up and ambushes La Forge and threatens Data so that now he’s overwhelmed with fear.

On the Enterprise, Troi checks up on Picard, who finally reveals that Robert and René died in a fire. He laments the end of the Picard line—because, apparently he’s sterile? I dunno. Anyhow, they’re interrupted by the sun imploding. A shockwave is going to destroy the observatory, and La Forge and Data are still on it. Riker and Worf try to enact a rescue but Soran fires on them, then beams to a Klingon ship that has just decloaked, along with La Forge. Data is cringing in fear, but he, Riker, and Worf beam back before the shockwave hits.

Soran is in league with Lursa and B’Etor, who are still trying to put themselves in position to rule the Klingon Empire. They stole the trilithium from the Romulans for Soran, which is why they attacked the observatory. He wants to figure out a way to destroy suns for his own reasons, and the Duras sisters are aiding him so they will have a powerful weapon.

Crusher has found Soran’s Wikipedia entry and discovers his connection to Guinan. According to Guinan, the ribbon isn’t just a spatial phenomenon, it’s a gateway to a place called the Nexus, a place of total joy. Soran has been trying to get back there, but Guinan has no idea how destroying suns would further that goal.

Picard and Data work through the problem, and they realize that he’s destroying suns in order to affect gravitational fields in the vicinity, which will change the ribbon’s course so that it will hit a planet. Soran plans to be on that planet—Veridian III—in order to reenter the Nexus. He’ll destroy Veridian’s sun, which will send the ribbon to the planet. Unfortunately, that will shortly thereafter destroy all the planets in the Veridian system, including the fourth planet, which has more than two hundred million people on it.

Soran has modified La Forge’s VISOR, and then gives Lursa and B’Etor the secret to the sun-killer before beaming down to Veridian III. Picard negotiates with Lursa and B’Etor to return La Forge in exchange for Picard himself as a prisoner—but only after he beams down to talk to Soran. They agree, mainly because they put a camera on the VISOR. Through La Forge, they’re able to find out the ship’s shield frequency and fire their torpedoes through the shields. Data, Worf, and Riker manage to figure out a way to remotely engage their cloaking device, which lowers their shields long enough for Worf to fire a torpedo, which destroys them, but not until after the Klingons have pounded the shit out of the defenseless Enterprise.

Picard’s attempts to talk Soran out of his destructive course fail, and Picard can’t get through the force field Soran has protecting himself. However, Picard does find a way under it, which he crawls under once Soran isn’t looking.

Meanwhile, the Enterprise took too much damage. The warp core loses containment. Riker evacuates everyone from the drive section into the saucer and they separate, but they can’t get far enough away from the drive section before the breach. The saucer is damaged in the explosion and crash lands on Veridian III.

Soran and Picard get into a fistfight on a catwalk. Soran wins and then the probe launches, destroying the sun and sending the ribbon to Veridian III. Both Soran and Picard are swallowed up by the ribbon and sent to the Nexus.

Seconds later, Veridian III and the Enterprise saucer are destroyed.

Picard finds himself in a beautiful Victorian house in the midst of a Christmas celebration with his wife and many children, nieces, and nephews—including René, alive again.

However, the twinkle of the ornaments reminds him of a sun going nova, and he knows this isn’t real. He encounters Guinan, dressed as she was when the Enterprise-B rescued her—in truth, it’s an echo of her from when she was in the Nexus. While he is reluctant to leave his newly discovered family, his sense of duty takes over and he insists he has to go back so he can confront Soran again.

Guinan can’t go back with him—she’s not really there—but there’s someone else who is there: Kirk.

Picard finds him chopping wood outside a rustic cabin in the middle of the mountains. Kirk is confused, as he sold the cabin years ago. To his surprise, his ex Antonia is there, and his dog Butler is there as well, even though he died seven years earlier.

Kirk finally realizes that he’s returned to the day he told Antonia he was going back to Starfleet. Picard tries to convince him to return to Veridian III with him. Kirk, though, has been informed that history believes him to be dead, and who is he to argue with history?

He goes to bring Antonia her breakfast, but instead of telling her he’s going back to Starfleet, he’s going to tell her that he’s going to stay with her—

—except that doesn’t work. Instead, they both wind up at Kirk’s uncle’s stables, which is the day he met Antonia. He rides off to do so, and Picard follows on another horse. Kirk makes a jump with the horse that he made dozens of times, and it always scared him—but this time it doesn’t, because it isn’t real.

Kirk decides to join Picard. They come out of the Nexus. The Enterprise crashes again. Soran goes to the catwalk again.

And this time he’s confronted by both Picard and Kirk. Soran manages to get away, and they give chase. Fisticuffs ensue, and Soran manages to cloak the launcher—but then he drops the controller. Kirk runs to the catwalk that the controller fell on, and Soran shoots it. Picard helps Kirk get off the catwalk safely, then they split up. Kirk goes for the controller while Picard goes for the launcher. Kirk manages to snag the controller and decloak the launcher, enabling Picard to clamp the launcher in place. When Soran chases him away from the launchpad, he runs to it only to be blown up when the launch sequence completes and the thing can’t fire.

Picard goes to where Kirk has been crushed by the fallen catwalk. Picard assures him that he helped save the day. Kirk says it was fun and then dies. Picard buries him, then is rescued by a Starfleet shuttlecraft.

Casualties were light in the crash, but the Enterprise isn’t salvageable. Three Starfleet ships rescue the crew and they head back home.

Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Even though they had to evacuate the ship once to get rid of trilithium resin, Riker and Worf talk like trilithium is a new thing. It will be seen as an explosive moving forward, and I guess it’s 50% more lithium-y than dilithium…

I cannot change the laws of physics! Scotty, of course, manages to beam some of the El-Aurian refugees away despite the temporal interference, and also comes up with a way to get the Enterprise-B away from the ribbon. He also takes great joy in tweaking Kirk.

It’s a Russian invention. After (re)introducing Kirk to Demora, Chekov insists that he was never that young. Kirk puts a friendly hand on his shoulder and says that he was younger. 

Ahead warp one, aye. Sulu apparently had time for a family. This rather shocks Kirk.

Thank you, Counselor Obvious. Troi notices that Picard has had an emotional whammy as soon as he gets the e-mail that his brother and nephew are dead, but it takes her a bit to get him to actually open up about it.

If I only had a brain… Data implants his emotion chip. It doesn’t go so hot.

There is no honor in being pummeled. Worf gets a long-overdue promotion to lieutenant commander, a rank he’ll keep through the remaining films as well as his tenure on DS9. In honor of this, he finally gets a chair at tactical.

Syntheholics anonymous. Guinan spent some time in the Nexus after she was rescued following the Borg attack on her homeworld. She helps navigate Picard through it.

In the driver’s seat. Two different officers are seen at conn, but when the ship is crashing, Troi winds up taking the helm. Many imbeciles have used this as an excuse to ding Troi—ha ha, the counselor flew the ship and it crashed—but it was gonna crash no matter what. While she was flying it, the ship landed somewhat safely with what Picard described in his log entry at the end as minimal casualties. That’s actually good piloting.

No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Picard goes on at some length to Troi about how the Picard line ends with him. No news on when Picard got the vasectomy…

Channel open. “Just imagine what it was like—no engines, no computers, just the wind and the sea and the stars to guide you.”

“Bad food. Brutal discipline. No women.”

Picard being romantic about sailing ships, with Riker being a bit more realistic.

Welcome aboard. Back for more are William Shatner, James Doohan, and Walter Koenig, starring alongside Sir Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, Brent Spiner, LeVar Burton, Michael Dorn, Gates McFadden, Marina Sirtis, Patti Yasutake, and an uncredited Whoopi Goldberg, the latter nine reprising their roles from Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Alan Ruck—probably best known as Cameron in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, though his resumé is far more extensive—plays Harrisman while Jacqueline Kim—probably best known as Lao Ma on Xena: Warrior Princess—plays Demora. The rest of Harriman’s crew is played by Jenette Goldstein—probably best known as Vazquez in Aliens—and Trek veterans Tim Russ (Tuvok on Voyager, as well as guest roles on TNG‘s “Starship Mine” and DS9‘s “Invasive Procedures“), Thomas Kopache (TNG‘s “The Next Phase” and “Emergence,” DS9‘s “Ties of Blood and Water” and “Wrongs Darker than Death or Night,” Voyager‘s “The Thaw,” and Enterprise‘s “Broken Bow” and “Harbinger”), and Glenn Morshower (TNG‘s “Peak Performance” and “Starship Mine,” Voyager‘s “Resistance,” and Enterprise‘s “North Star”). In addition, one of the journalists is played by John Putch, who played two different Benzites in TNG‘s “Coming of Age” and “A Matter of Honor.”

Barbara March and Gwynyth Walsh make their final appearances as Lursa and B’Etor, following TNG‘s “Redemption,” “Redemption II,” and “Firstborn” and DS9‘s “Past Prologue.” Brian Thompson plays their helm officer; he appeared as various other aliens (including another Klingon) in TNG‘s “A Matter of Honor,” DS9‘s “Rules of Acquisition” and “To the Death,” and Enterprise‘s “Babel One”/”United”/”The Aenar” three-parter.

And finally, Malcolm McDowell plays Soran, the man who killed Captain Kirk. Lucky him.

Trivial matters: Famously, this movie went through a major reshoot of the ending when test audiences very much disliked the way Kirk died. It was re-shot at the last minute. The original ending can be found in J.M. Dillard’s novelization, which had already gone to press when the re-shoots were done. Dillard’s novel also included additional prologue material with Kirk, Scotty, and Chekov, as well as appearances by Spock, McCoy, Sulu, and Uhura. The novel also had a YA novelization by John Vornholt and a comics adaptation by Michael Jan Friedman & Gordon Purcell.

The prologue of this movie takes place about a year or so after The Undiscovered Country. As promised at the end of the previous film, the Enterprise-A was decommissioned, and this is the launch of the Enterprise-B. The main body of the film takes place about a year after “All Good Things…,” the final episode of TNG.

We finally get the missing Enterprise, as it were. “Encounter at Farpoint” established Picard’s ship as the Enterprise-D, with The Voyage Home having set that precedent with the Enterprise-A. The Enterprise-C was seen in “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” and we at last get the Enterprise-B here. The Enterprise-E will be established in First Contact.

This is the final appearance of William Shatner, Walter Koenig, and James Doohan as Kirk, Chekov, and Scotty, though Scotty’s next chronological appearance is in TNG‘s “Relics,” which aired in 1992. The characters will next appear in the 2009 Star Trek, played respectively by Chris Pine, Anton Yelchin, and Simon Pegg.

When Scotty is rescued from the Jenolen by the Enterprise-D in “Relics,” he posits that Kirk himself rescued him, which is at odds with Scotty being present for Kirk’s “death” here. Ronald D. Moore has said in interviews that it wasn’t worth trying to reconcile them, and he’s right.

When TNG wrapped, the studio always intended to bring these characters to the screen, with The Undiscovered Country having been the final outing for the original crew (at least in this timeline). Rick Berman wanted to do a passing of the baton, as it were, from the original series, and commissioned story pitches from several TNG past and present staffers—former show-runner Maurice Hurley, current show-runner Michael Piller, and current staffers Ronald D. Moore & Brannon Braga. Piller declined and the studio preferred Moore & Braga’s notion over Hurley’s.

Earlier drafts of the script called for the entire original crew, and later it was simplified to three, originally intended to be Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, with Kirk later interacting with the TNG crew. Both Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelley declined, so instead they got James Doohan and Walter Koenig, with Spock’s lines given to Doohan’s Scotty and McCoy’s to Koenig’s Chekov.

The studio’s first choice for director was Nimoy, but he declined to direct a Trek movie he had no say in the story of. Instead, they turned to veteran Trek TV director David Carson.

Internal dating on the movies themselves indicate that there’s roughly a decade of time between The Motion Picture and The Wrath of Khan. (The former was two-and-a-half years after the end of the five-year mission, the latter fifteen years after “Space Seed,” which was early in the 5YM.) This movie establishes that, for part of that time, Kirk retired and lived with a woman named Antonia. She’s seen in the distance, and played by stuntwoman Lynn Salvatori. In her honor, the character was given the last name of Salvatori when she was seen in tie-in fiction, particularly the Crucible trilogy by David R. George III. She’s also referenced in Christopher L. Bennett’s The Darkness Drops Again (part of the Mere Anarchy miniseries) and Dayton Ward’s Elusive Salvation.

The backstory for Demora was provided in Peter David’s novel The Captain’s Daughter, which also did a certain amount to redeem the character of Harriman. Harriman, Demora, and the Enterprise-B were further seen in David’s short story “Shakedown” in Enterprise Logs, David R. George III’s Lost Era novels Serpent Among the Ruins and One Constant Star and his short story “Iron and Sacrifice” in Tales from the Captain’s Table, Andy Mangels & Michael A. Martin’s novel Forged in Fire, and in the comic books Alien Spotlight: Klingons by your humble rewatcher and JK Woodward, Captain’s Log: Harriman by Marc Guggenheim & Andrew Currie, and Spock: Reflections by Scott & David Tipton, David Messina, & Federica Manfredi. Demora will next be seen as a child in Star Trek Beyond.

Several works of tie-in fiction deal with the fallout from Kirk’s apparent death in the prologue, among them the novels Vulcan’s Forge by Josepha Sherman & Susan Shwartz, The Ashes of Eden and The Return by William Shatner with Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens, Engines of Destiny by Gene DeWeese, and the aforementioned The Captain’s Daughter, the novella Its Hour Come Round by Margaret Wander Bonanno (part of the Mere Anarchy miniseries), the aforementioned Crucible trilogy, and the aforementioned comic book Captain’s Log: Harriman.

Up until this film, TNG and DS9 were filmed as if starbase personnel wore the turtleneck uniforms seen in DS9 while starship and headquarters personnel wore the TNG uniforms (as evidenced by Sisko switching to a TNG uniform when he was assigned to Earth in “Homefront” and “Paradise Lost“). However, Starfleet personnel in this movie wore the TNG and DS9 uniforms interchangeably, and Voyager would have everyone assigned to that ship wearing the DS9 uniforms. So not confusing at all.

Neither Jeremy Kemp nor David Tristan Birkin, who played Robert and René Picard in “Family,” were used for the photographs Picard looks at. Instead, uncredited actors played the two roles.

The El-Aurian refugees found by the Enterprise-B are fleeing a Borg attack on their homeworld, which was previously referenced by Guinan in “Q Who.”

Data’s emotion chip first appeared in “Brothers,” and Data acquired it in the “Descent” two-parter. Despite this movie establishing that the chip is permanently fused to his neural net and unable to be switched off, he will switch it off in First Contact and remove it in Insurrection. It isn’t even acknowledged in Nemesis. The evolution of the emotion chip is dealt with in the short story “Friends with the Sparrows” by Christopher L. Bennett (in the anthology The Sky’s the Limit) and the novella The Insolence of Office by William Leisner (part of the Slings and Arrows miniseries). Leisner’s novella also deals with La Forge switching from the VISOR to optical implants, done in part due to the VISOR being used against him in this movie.

In “The Chase,” Picard is given a Kurlan naiskos by his mentor and father figure, Dr. Richard Galen. He goes on at some length about how rare it is and how honored he is to be given this amazing gift from a person to whom he was truly closer than his own biological father. So it’s rather disheartening to see him casually toss the naiskos aside in the wreckage of the Enterprise-D…

A cut bit of dialogue establishes that Guinan’s sensitivity to temporal mechanics, as seen in “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” is because of her time in the Nexus.

In Lursa and B’Etor’s previous appearance in “Firstborn,” Lursa was pregnant with a son. That son’s fate is unclear, though the Star Trek Online game establishes the son, named Ja’rod after Lursa’s father, is alive and serving the empire.

In the tie-in fiction and Star Trek Online, Picard and Crusher marry some time after Nemesis, and they have a son, named René. So not the end of the Picard line after all…

To boldly go. “I hate this! It is revolting!” When I first saw this movie in 1994, my first thought was that it was a promising first draft that was rushed into production. This is mostly because it was a promising first draft that was rushed into production. Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga wrote this in about seven-and-a-half minutes, at the same time that they were writing the (much much better) “All Good Things…” and then the movie was slammed into production right after TNG wrapped production as a TV show.

This rushed nature is seen most obviously in the visuals. The sets and costumes and props were all designed to be seen on a small screen—and this was before the days of high-definition TV, remember—so despite David Carson turning all the lights down all over the Enterprise, they still look chintzy. So does La Forge’s VISOR (I still remember chortling twenty-three years ago during the discussion of Data’s emotion chip when you can see LeVar Burton’s eyes blinking through the slats of the VISOR in closeup).

But the main place it’s seen is the script. There are good themes here, ones involving emotions and how you handle them, of the passage of time and how it affects one, of life and death and loss. Precisely none of those themes are handled well. Data’s journey through his emotion chip should have been linked to Picard’s grief over his family instead of being relegated to an idiotic low-comedy subplot. (It didn’t help that the whole thing was inspired by Data apparently not getting humor even though he did something incredibly funny! C’mon, pushing Crusher into the water was fucking hilarious!)

Soran has no bite to him as a villain. Malcolm McDowell does the best he can, but we don’t know what he went through in the Nexus beyond quick, cursory mentions by Crusher and Picard, and he’s just a guy being nasty. Snore.

Lursa and B’Etor are mainly there as a vehicle by which they can destroy the Enterprise and build a new one that looks good on a movie screen next time.

Picard’s Nexus experience makes absolutely no sense. It feels like it was inspired by Sir Patrick Stewart’s regular gig of doing a one-person performance of A Christmas Carol, but while a Victorian Christmas with a wife who cooks goose and a bunch of moppets might be a cute experience for Stewart, there’s nothing about it that says, “Jean-Luc Picard.” And why is he bemoaning the end of the Picard line? Why isn’t he using Robert and René’s death as the impetus to finally grab Crusher, kiss her on the mouth, and go make babies? Sheesh.

The one way in which this movie shines is in the prologue. The Enterprise-B launch-as-photo-op is very well done. Alan Ruck deserves a ton of credit here, as he’s obviously been put in a terrible position, trying to mount a rescue with a half-empty, half-finished ship. While it would’ve been nice to see Spock and McCoy alongside Kirk, Scotty and Chekov work just fine—the entire crew has been together long enough that it’s just as funny to see Chekov and Scotty snarking off Kirk after he says, “Take her out” to thunderous applause, and Kirk grumbling, “Oh, be quiet.”

In general, the interactions among the 23rd-century folk work beautifully. Shatner is especially good, amused by the whole spectacle, and then wanting desperately to take over when the crisis hits. Not to mention the moment when he stops Harriman from modifying the deflector, knowing that it’s Harriman’s ship, not his.

Also Kirk’s Nexus experience is interesting. There’s this big honking gap between The Motion Picture and The Wrath of Khan when Kirk went from being back in the center seat to go exploring to a desk job with the Enterprise as a training ship with Spock as her captain. While lots of people have, unimaginatively, in my opinion, posited a second five-year mission for that timeframe (it just doesn’t strike me as being that interesting, to have them do exactly what they did before), there’s lots of things they could have been doing in that decade, and even if you do put another 5YM in there, that could have resulted in Kirk having the ship taken away again and him deciding to retire and live with Antonia for a while before the siren call of the center seat came back.

I also like Kirk’s advice to Picard about how the big chair is where you can make a difference and you should never give it up.

The final battle of Kirk and Picard vs. Soran is spectacularly uninteresting. Lots of people have complained that it was a lousy death for Kirk, but there’s no such thing as a good death, and at least he helped save a solar system that included two hundred million inhabitants. No, it’s just that the whole thing is just perfunctory and boring and full of middle-aged men flailing on catwalks and bleah. Shatner, at least, is having fun with it—”Call me Jim!”—which is pretty much all that’s memorable about it.

Speaking of things that aren’t memorable, man, do the Trek movies have trouble coming with things to call their planet-threatening menaces. I mean, we start with “V’ger,” which sounds like a badly thought out comic book sound effect, then we have “the probe,” and now we have “the ribbon.” What’s next, the doily?

Also, if Picard could leave the Nexus any time, why not come back to Ten-Forward when he first met Soran, only this time come with a security detail and throw his ass in the brig? As it is, we never do find out how Soran managed to beam off the Enterprise to the observatory to capture La Forge without anyone noticing. Then again, nobody noticed that Soran put a frickin’ camera on La Forge’s VISOR, either…

This basic story could have made a good movie. The themes could have been tied together much better. We could have had a proper exploration of the Nexus as a place where your dreams come true, but it’s all hollow unless you embrace it. It’s interesting that the long-lived El-Aurians so totally embraced it while the much shorter-lived humans didn’t. There’s perhaps something to that that a script that actually had had some time spent working on it might have been able to do something with.

Warp factor rating: 2

In two weeks: Star Trek (2009)

Rewatcher’s note: We’ll be taking Independence Day off, returning with the Bad Robot TOS films on the 11th of July.

Keith R.A. DeCandido will be the Toastmaster at InConJunction XXXVII in Indianapolis this weekend, alongside Guest of Honor Mercedes Lackey, Larry Dixon, Marc Gunn, Shonna Bedford, Michelle Mussoni, Kimberly Richey, and more. Check his schedule out here.

Whatever happened to ESP?

Psi powers—telepathy, telekinesis, precognition, and other parapsychological activity—was one of the founding tropes of science fiction, up there with rocket ships, time travel, and aliens. John W. Campbell coined the term “psionics”—from psi and electronics—and encouraged his stable of authors to write about it. And so they did.

But after reaching maximum saturation in the 1950s, psionics began disappearing from SF in the 70s, became uncommon by the 90s, and are a rarity today. (That’s one of the reasons I wanted to write one. I miss them!) The five books below, as well as being some of my favorite novels, show how the subgenre evolved, and why I think it’s unlikely to go extinct.

The Ur Text: Slan by A.E. Van Vogt

It’s hard to overstate the importance of Slan to science fiction. Van Vogt’s prose style is not to everyone’s taste (see Damon Knight’s infamous essay dismantling Van Vogt in In Search of Wonder), but the power is in its big idea: a hidden race of supermen, wielding awesome mind powers, is secretly controlling the world.

Slan, which was first serialized in 1940, established the idea that psi powers go hand in hand with the evolution of the human race. To paraphrase Bowie, you gotta make way for homo superior. Van Vogt’s ubermensch conspiracy resonated deeply, and perhaps not healthily. The early science fiction community embraced “fans are slans” exceptionalism—weren’t SF readers smarter and more special than the “mundanes?” Every psi story to follow had to wrestle with this yearning for a master race.

Psi as a Job: The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester

Bester’s novel, which won the first Hugo in 1953, offers one solution to the superman problem: register and license them. In the 24^th century there are many “espers,” from low-level class 3’s to powerful Class 1’s, and some of those Class 1’s want to rule the world. Lincoln Powell, a Class 1 esper detective, is chasing a murderer (and latent telepath) that he knows is guilty—Powell read his mind—but because evidence gained via telepathy is not admissible in court, he has to collect evidence the old-fashioned way. Great power, Bester argues, can be reined in by laws and society.

It’s a Family Thing: Mind of My Mind by Octavia Butler

This 1977 novel, the second book in the Patternist series, was the first Octavia Butler novel I read, and it was thrilling. The story is about Mary, a latent telepath who is part of a breeding program orchestrated by a 4,000-year-old immortal, Doro, whose mind hops from body to body. Mary becomes the most powerful psionic in the world (there are flying telekinetics, too) by linking with first six, then over a thousand telepaths in what she calls a Pattern.

But typical for Butler, Mary doesn’t want to rule the world; she wants to protect her family, and this community of Patternists. When Doro, feeling threatened, attacks Mary, the group kills him. Butler demonstrates that power for the sake of power is a hollow goal.

Making it Personal: The Hollow Man by Dan Simmons

Speaking of hollow… Jeremy, the protagonist of Simmon’s 1992 novel, is a grieving telepath who was married to a woman who shared his powers. When she dies, he can no longer keep out the “neurobabble” of other minds, and so goes on the road, seeking isolation.

As in the best SF, metaphors are artfully literalized. The marriage of true minds has dissolved, and Jeremy’s become yet another widower trying withdraw from the world. Then he meets a sociopathic killer whose mind is full of static, a person literally disconnected from all human connection. And Jeremy hears a “voice” calling him, a new telepath who needs his help. The purpose of Jeremy’s life is not to save the world or create a new race: it’s to save one child.

The Next Step in Psi: More than Human by Theodore Sturgeon

Just to prove that there’s no ultimate psi novel, no master text that this subgenre will evolve into, here’s what I consider a timeless classic in the field. Written over fifty years ago, More than Human is about a group of damaged yet powerful people who gradually find each other. There’s a troubled young man with telepathic powers, a telekinetic girl, two mute twins with the ability to teleport, and Baby, a toddler super-genius. They become more than a family; they’re a new kind of organism: homo gestalt. The organism becomes whole only when it’s joined by a normal man, who serves as their conscience. This new race won’t dominate humans, but work with them.

More than Human is still finding readers, partly because the creation of homo gestalt—like Butler’s Patternists and the improvised family in Simmons’s novel—captures the way the world feels when we’ve finally found our family. And that’s why psi novels, though they may never again be as popular as they were in the 50’s, will continue to be written. They’re excellent vehicles for showing that mysterious process by which we come together, each of us with an array of abilities and dysfunctions that are mostly invisible to the outside world, and become a little stronger than we were alone. Also? Psionics is just plain cool.

Top image: cover art for French edition of Slan (J’ai Lu, 1977); illustration by Jean Mascii.

Daryl Gregory’s latest novel is Spoonbenders, about a family of down-on-their-luck psychics, out now from Knopf. Recent work includes the novels Afterparty and Harrison Squared, and the novella “We Are All Completely Fine,” which won the World Fantasy Award and the Shirley Jackson Award. Daryl lives and bends cutlery in Oakland, California.

Laura Lam’s newest novel, Shattered Minds, is a journey to the exact sort of utopia that I like—namely, a complex, untidy one. Her Pacifica novels explore a future that’s ideal but not idealized and what happens when people fall, or sometimes, jump, between the cracks.

I talked to her about Shattered Minds, Pacifica, the Micah Gray books, and more…

Alasdair Stuart: How did you get started writing?

Laura Lam: I grew up one of the biggest bookworms, and I kept starting various things but never finished. The furthest I got was about 30,000 words of a fantasy based on feudalism. The first line was “The sunset was as red as blood.” It didn’t improve from there.

I started it at 15 at the same time as I met a Scottish boy online in 2002. We fell in love while discussing books and writing those somewhat awful early efforts. I ended up going to university for English Literature and Creative Writing, which taught me to finish work to a deadline. When I moved to Scotland after marrying the Scottish dude in 2009, I had a boring job filing and photocopying, as that was the only job I could get with my English degree at the time. I decided to become more serious about writing and finished a book (Pantomime) in 2011 and sold it in 2012. My method was mostly trial and error.

AS: Which authors inspired you? And continue to do so?

LL: Anyone who knows me at all knows Robin Hobb is my favourite author. False Hearts and Shattered Minds are very different genres to her fantasy (though in Micah Grey, the influence is more obvious), but I think her approach to characterization has stayed with me. I also love cyberpunk, so Gibson and Stephenson mainly, and psychological thrillers are another big inspiration. I read all genres and try to read 100 books a year, though I don’t always make it. As a writer, I feel like reading is such a vital component of my job. I need to know the market, and to see all sorts of ways of putting together stories. I teach on the Creative Writing Masters at Napier in Edinburgh now, too, so I’m also looking at stories from a craft viewpoint for lecturing. Every book I read inspires me in some way, even if it’s not always obvious.

AS: Tell us a little about the Micah Grey books.

LL: The Micah Grey trilogy is Pantomime, Shadowplay, and Masquerade. Short pitch: an intersex, genderfluid, bisexual daughter of a noble family runs away and joins the circus presenting as a male aerialist’s apprentice named Micah Grey. Set in a gaslight fantasy world vaguely based on Victorian Scotland with some Greek mythological influence. Magic that might just be advanced tech in disguise. Stage magic. Court magic. The growing threat of civil war. Returning beings from myth. Found families, friendship, and some romance.

AS: How do the Vestigial Tales series tie in?

LL: They’re largely prequels. “The Snake Charm” is about one of the secondary characters, Drystan, in the Circus of Magic before Micah joins. “The Fisherman’s Net” is a short fable about a mermaid and the dangers of greed. “The Tarot Reader” is another character, Cyan’s, story in the circus she worked in before she’s introduced in Shadowplay, book two. “The Card Sharp” is another story about Drystan, about him being a Lerium drug addict and card sharp before joining the Circus of Magic. “The Mechanical Minotaur” I released this year, and it’s sort of like a non-racist Indian in the Cupboard meets Boy Cinderella, and doesn’t really feature any characters from the main series (but is still best read after Masquerade as a cap to the series).

AS: How did you find the process of producing the Vestigial Tales? How did your process change for the shorter work?

LL: I initially wrote the Vestigial Tales to learn about self-publishing. Pantomime and Shadowplay originally came out through Strange Chemistry, which was the YA imprint of Angry Robot Books. But Strange Chemistry shut down in 2014, and I wasn’t sure what the fate of the series was going to be. I thought it was likely I’d have to release the third myself (I ended up not needing to do this—the rights reverted to me and my agent re-sold them to Tor UK). But before I knew that, to keep myself in the world of Micah Grey, I wrote the stories and had friends help me edit them, another friend made the covers (Dianna Walla, who was my childhood pen pal!), and I formatted them myself. Shorter work obviously requires different plotting and skill. “The Tarot Reader” and “The Snake Charm” are novellas of around 30k, whereas the others range from 5-10k. I really enjoy writing novellas though, as it’s nice and meaty but it’s something that can be read in an afternoon. I’d like to do more of them sometime. The first Vestigial Tale is permanently free if anyone wants to check it out, and it can be read before Pantomime.

Acting as your own publisher is an interesting experience. I already had appreciation for my publishers, but it gave me more. So much goes on behind the scenes, and I think it’d be good for more authors to give self-publishing a go. Hybrid publishing is going to become more popular—I like knowing now that if I have a project I believe in but for whatever reason isn’t appropriate for a trade publisher, I can do it myself and get stories out there. There’s so many ways of doing it now, too. Self-publishing via Amazon and other retailers, releasing work through Patreon, putting things up on Wattpad. It’s an interesting time for publishing.

I didn’t make a huge profit from the short stories, but some money still trickles in every month, and helps me buy lattes when I work in cafes. It was a great experience. I offered two more short stories set in Pacifica for free if readers pre-ordered Shattered Minds this time, and I’ll put them up on Amazon in a few months, too.

AS: Let’s chat about Pacifica. How does the world of Shattered Minds and the first book, False Hearts, differ from the present day?

LL: False Hearts and Shattered Minds are standalones in the same world. They’re set roughly 100 years in the future. Climate change came to a head in 2030-2050, resulting in everyone having to put aside their differences to save the world. That’s the sort of “ghost from the past” that is mentioned but not dwelled on a lot within the books. After the Great Upheaval calmed down, tensions were still high in the U.S. and it fractured. Pacifica is now California, Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii. There’s also the South, The Great Plains, and Atlantica on the East Coast.

Technology is now zooming onwards. People can order pretty much anything from a replicator (yes, stolen from Star Trek. No, no one orders Earl Grey. Not yet at least). Climate change is under control. Self-driving hover cars are common, as well as orchard skyscrapers or glowing algae that makes the Bay shine green at night. People can walk into flesh parlours and change their face and body at will, yet mostly people choose to look blandly beautiful. Crime is very low now and poverty has been eradicated. It should be a utopia in many ways. But it’s not. Scratch the surface and the shine is gone.

AS: There’s a definite kind of Californian futurism which I see in those books—that combination of positivity and hope and almost sun-drenched noir. Where do you think that comes from?

LL: I love the idea of “sun-drenched noir!” It does fall into that a bit.

I don’t think our future will be a complete dystopia. I think it will somewhat like now—lots of good things, lots of terrible things. There’s more equality in this world, monetarily, but those who control data have the most power. Sure, in Pacifica life expectancy is longer, they’ve cured a lot of genetic diseases, and people work fewer hours. But people are still hungry to have more than others, just in different ways. Lots of people will work towards bringing light into others’ lives, but there’ll still be those who thrive on darkness.

Plus, straight up utopias are a lot harder to write about.

AS: Tell us a little about Shattered Minds.

LL: I tend to describe Shattered Minds as female Dexter with a drug problem meets Minority Report. Serial killer becomes addicted to dream drugs so she only kills people in her imagination. When a colleague sends a bunch of encrypted information into her brain before he’s murdered, she’s forced to return to real life and take down an evil corporation with a group of ragtag hackers. It’s about addiction, identity, and overcoming the darkness within.

AS: How does it tie into False Hearts?

LL: False Hearts tends to get the pitch of Orphan Black meets Inception. That one is about formerly conjoined twins. They were raised in a cult, escaped when they were 16, and separated, each fit with a mechanical heart. Ten years later one twin is accused of murder and the other twin has to go undercover into the organised mob, prove her sister’s innocence, and save her life.

Both books are set in Pacifica. False Hearts is in San Francisco and Shattered Minds is in Los Angeles. So same world, a minor crossover character, but otherwise completely self-contained stories, each looking at a different facet of darkness in Pacifica.

AS: How are you finding working in a sandbox rather than a series?

LL: It’s a really nice compromise. I really like the world so I get to keep playing with it, but each story is its own creation. There’s some fun Easter eggs to link them, but otherwise you should, theoretically, be able to pick up any of them and dive right in. If you read Shattered Minds, you will pick up a few things that happened as a result of False Hearts, so it’s probably still best to read them in order, but not essential. It also means there doesn’t have to be a set number, or if there’s a bit of a gap between releases, people aren’t kept hanging like they were with the third book of my trilogy when it changed publishers. That was disappointing for them and vaguely traumatic for me. This is less stress and more fun.

AS: What’s next for you? And for Pacifica?

LL: At the moment, my response is “no comment.” I’m working on a bunch of things, but don’t have any clear idea of what’s happening next. Which is scary, but all I can focus on is the words, so I do that.

Shattered Minds is out now in hardback with the previous novel in the Pacifica sequence, False Hearts, available in paperback. Also available in paperback are Pantomime, Shadowplay and Masquerade. Find Laura online at her website and on Twitter @LR_Lam

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

A reader suggested I review the 2003 movie Timeline. I agreed, mostly because I couldn’t remember anything about the film.

That should have been a clue.

Let me start with the conclusion: Don’t watch this movie. In fact, you’d probably do well not to even bother reading this review. Because it’s bad, people. (The movie, not the review. I hope.)

I wanna put that tag line on all my syllabi every fall.

And it’s a bummer. Timeline should be a good movie. I recall the 1999 book by Michael Crichton being decent enough, the director was usually solid (Richard Donner), and the film had a pretty terrific cast on paper. Plus, you know, the Middle Ages.

But oh how it fails.

Here’s the setup:

It’s the present day, and Professor Edward Johnston (played by the ever-wonderful Scotsman Billy Connolly) is running an archaeological dig near the village of Castelgard, France. He’s got a group of students and fellow archaeologists with him, including Marek (Gerard “This is Sparta!” Butler) and Kate (Frances O’Connor). His son Chris (Paul Walker) is also visiting. The dig is sponsored by a super-rich dude named Robert Doniger (David “Lupin” Thewlis), who seems to know way more about the site than he should. The good professor heads to Doniger’s headquarters to find out why, and a few days later the archaeologists find the professor’s eyeglasses in a previously undisturbed part of the dig, along with a note from him asking for help … dated 1357.

Adventure ensues, as it turns out that Doniger has built a machine that opens a wormhole back to Castelgard in 1357: a village caught between French and English armies in the middle of the Hundred Years War, just at the moment before there’s a big climactic battle. The professor has gone back in the machine and been trapped there. When the students head back to save him all hell breaks lose.

See? That should be a really great movie.

Yet it totally and positively is not.

Time-travel via hair blowers. Wish I was kidding.

I’ll get into the history issues in a moment, but first I have to say this movie fails in every way a film can fail. The acting is wooden. The pacing is uneven. The cinematography is often ill-conceived. The lighting is bad. The tone ranges wildly from cheesy humor to solemnity, often within the same scene. The foreshadowing is of the beat-over-the-head variety. The time machine—which should totally be a cool effects thing in a movie like this—consists of two-way mirrors and actors screaming in slow-mo. The “timeline” of their “fixed” wormhole is a plothole. Hell, the crew couldn’t even manage consistency with their own terms: on at least one computer screen early on Castelgard is misspelled “Castlegard.”

The history is terrible, too, even though it’s supposed to be set in our very real past. Castelgard isn’t a real place. It’s intended to fit more or less (mostly less) into the real Dordogne Valley in France, but Crichton (and thereby the filmmakers) decided to just make it all up. The castle isn’t real. Nor is the abbey or the battle or the characters or…look, this isn’t a movie for history buffs.

The only (semi-)redeeming part of the film is a big climactic siege/battle at night. And the best part of that sequence is unquestionably when both sides send up volleys of flaming arrows. (Flaming arrows were way less common than Hollywood would have you think, FYI.) Donner and company film the volleys passing each other against the night sky and some of the arrows actually hit each other and fall out of the sky (here’s a short clip of the scene). Despite the used-up burning arrow trope, it’s a moment of physical truth that serves as a reminder to how the purity of CGI can lose some of the randomness of real life.

Still, as fun as the big fight (sorta) is, it looks almost silly compared to the magnificence of such scenes in Lord of the Rings.

Speaking of that semi-decent barrow scene, you’ve heard of the “butterfly effect,” yes? (If not, you should probably go review Ray Bradbury’s 1953 short story “A Sound of Thunder” right now.) This movie, more than any non-spoof time-travel movie I’ve ever seen, completely and totally disregards this most basic principle of time travel: don’t mess things up, because little changes can have big effects. Instead of walking softly, our (ahem) “heroes” waltz around swinging big sticks. In fact, a major plot point (spoiler alert, though it doesn’t matter since you will not be watching this film), hinges on the fact that Professor Johnston has been captured by Lord Oliver d’Vannes (played by Michael Sheen); in order to save his life, the professor creates Greek Fire for the English to use against the French in the big battle at the end.

Greek friggin’ Fire.

Real Greek Fire at work.

I’ll set aside the fact that it’s highly improbable that your average archaeologist bloke knows how to make Greek Fire on the fly in 14th-century France—scholars are still not sure what recipe the Byzantines really used—because that issue almost doesn’t matter when set beside the butterfly effect problem. Ol’ Professor Johnston isn’t accidentally stepping on a butterfly here. He’s stepping on the butterfly and then setting it on bloody fire, along with a whole host of French fellows who otherwise might have lived, thank you very much.

And even that wasn’t the thing that bothered me the most.

If you’ve read my review of The 13th Warrior (also based on a Crichton novel), you know that I was tremendously pleased with how that film dealt with the very real language issues of the Middle Ages.

Timeline makes a gesture at this problem when our (ahem) heroes encounter medieval French folks and have to speak with them in French. That’s great, except that, well, they’re all talking in Modern French as if everything is hunky-dory.

It ain’t.

There’s a world of difference between the languages of the 14th century and their modern equivalents, and the film just blithely ignores it.

At least they got the sword basically right. #littlevictories

I mean, it’s bad enough that they really ought to be doing a particular medieval dialect given where they are, but it’s oh-so-much worse that the film just ignores language change over so many years. It’s especially noticeable when our heroes are in the camp of the medieval English folks and they talk just like modern English folks.

Oh, they all have British accents of one variety or another, but that’s not the same thing, Mr. Director.

For crying out loud, Chaucer is a teenager when this is happening. Do you think he and surfer-boy Paul Walker could have just chatted without any translation issues at all?

Walker: Like, what’s up, Geoff?

Chaucer: If ye art spekynge to me, ich understond ye noght.

Speaking of Paul Walker, he delivers the line that almost made me choke on the liquid I was imbibing through this movie:

“The way I see it, we’ve got what, we’ve got 650 years of knowledge on these guys. If we put our heads together, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to get out of here and home in 20 minutes.”

Hahahaha. Yep. Because your ability to use a phone or drive a car is gonna be soooo applicable in the fourteenth century.

Also, Paul Walker’s character is creepy-grabby in this film.

In conclusion, Timeline is one of those movies that’s so bad that it actually inspires critics to entertain themselves—so they don’t blind themselves by ballpoint in the theater, I imagine—by creating great pull-quote descriptions. Here are two of my favorites:

Resembles a Star Trek episode by way of Scooby-Doo. —Ann Hornaday

It’s like Back to the Future without the laughs. —Richard Roeper

Seriously: I do not suggest you see this film. It’s not even a good bad movie. (For that, see my review of The Norseman, which is still my leading contender for worst Viking film ever made.)

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

It’s the third book! Things are about to get weird…er. Yeah, they were already weird. And we get another decade-jump!

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 (up to “I hear the wind blowing across the desert and I see the moons of a winter night rising like great ships in the void.”)

Stilgar is watching Paul’s children sleep—they are nine years old. He thinks of what his planet used to be like and the many ways that it has changed, and he thinks of his hand in all of this. Stilgar wonders if he shouldn’t kill Paul’s children, if that would put an end to this new way. He thinks of dissident groups against Muad’Dib that he has brought down, even when he did not want to. Leto and Ghana dress in Atreides colors and clasps to meet their grandmother, the Lady Jessica, for the first time. They are both nervous about it, and Alia clearly is as well; this is the first time that Jessica will visit Arrakis since she left when Paul took power. Alia cannot figure out why her mother would want to come now, and cannot see the future to understand how things will go. It is rumored the Jessica has gone back to her Bene Gesserit roots.

Leto and Ghanima are still young enough that they have difficult separating out their previous lives from their own persons, and Alia is determined to lure Leto into a spice trance even though he and his sister both believe that they are too young. Gurney is arriving with Jessica and there are rumors that the two are lovers now. Alia wonders what he would think if he knew that they were related to the Harkonnens. Duncan told her that Jessica arrived to claim the twins for the Sisterhood and educate them herself. There are Sardaukar secretly training under the Emperor’s grandson Farad’n to eventually remove the Atreides and restore the Emperor’s house to its throne.

Jessica arrives and knows that Alia has become the Abomination that the sisterhood feared just by looking at her. Everyone is uncertain of how to behave around her, and Irulan does not trust Jessica despite their common sisterhood. Jessica meets a priest named Javid and finds the whole reunion disturbing. She wants to see her grandchildren, who are still at Sietch Tabr. Leto breaks through to an understanding about the history of Arrakis, that it was once a planet with water and the sandtrout were brought there and eventually got rid of all the water so that they could morph into the sandworms. Leto knows that if the sandtrout go away, there will be no more worms, and he knows that Alia knows it as well and is keeping it from the tribes. The twins know that no one will believe them if they say so. Leto wants to meet the man in the desert at the legendary Sietch Jacarutu, the one people call The Preacher. They both wonder if he might be their father, not truly dead, but they also fear it.

Gurney warns Jessica of the dangers about them. He has questioned some Fremen and found that under interrogation, they brought up the name Jacarutu and instantly died. The Preacher himself is a man who is led around by a young Fremen without a tribe of his own. He has burned out eye sockets as Paul Atreides did. He wandered one day through the many believers and cursed at them for being idolaters, and his commanding presence led many to wonder if he was indeed Muad’Dib, but he would only say the he was speaking for the Hand of God.

Princess Wensicia, mother of Farad’n, the daughter of Shaddam IV is plotting to get back the throne of House Corrino for her son. She has her Sardaukar working with Javid against Alia, and then she wants her mean to embrace the religion around Muad’Dib to better dismantle it. She is also training Laza tigers to hunt the Atreides twins. She talks to the head Sardaukar, a man named Tyekanik, who is uncertain of her methods. Wensicia tells him to send a planned gift to their cousins, plotting on Farad’n’s behalf without his knowledge; the Emperor’s grandson is a sensitive young man.

Jessica meets with Ghanima alone; she excludes Leto because while she does not perceive Abomination about the twins, she believes that he is concealing something. After realizing that she fears for her grandchildren and having a moment of connection with Ghanima, she lets her guards down completely for the first time since Duke Leto was alive, and Ghanima knows in that moment that her grandmother loves her. But she also knows that if they do not bear out “human” in the Bene Gesserit sense, her grandmother would still destroy them. Jessica admits that she believes that Ghanima is human, but that she is not sure about Leto. Ghanima insists that Leto is not… yet. Then she shares their theory that their decision not to enter the spice trance is what prevents them from going down Alia’s path to Abomination. They talk of the Preacher and the possibility of him being Paul, and their mutual distrust of Javid. Ghanima admits that she worries because Leto keep studying Alia and may empathize with her too much. She tells her grandmother that he has mentioned Jacarutu, and thinks that Alia wants Leto to look for it. Jessica sense a sweetness to Ghanima despite her concern for her grandchildren, and thinks that the twins must be separated and trained as the Sisterhood wants.

Commentary

There is a new status quo in this empire, and it didn’t take us long to get there.

This is an interesting point of contention I find often when I talk with fellow fans; how long should it take the universe to change? Because it has been a little over two decades since Paul Atreides assumed the throne, but everything is new. It prompts very interesting questions about cultural memory and how easily change can sweep over us. When you read Lord of the Rings, you’re told point blank that generations upon generations pass before history is legend and legend is myth and we forget things that we shouldn’t. It’s been literal ages.

Then you get a narrative like Star Wars, where people think that the Jedi are fairy tales a mere two decades after their destruction. The Emperor’s rise to total domination is a plan that only really takes him about fifteen years. It’s all so quick. Or seemingly so.

With both Star Wars and Dune, I think it is important to remember that you’re looking at vast universes where collective experience is a scattered thing at best. People will not have a unified version of events no matter what you do or how good your information systems are. But moreover, I think that both stories—Dune more consciously than Star Wars—are deliberately drawing attention to how short cultural memory is. In the opening of this book, Stilgar laments the change in his people already, the water discipline that has grown lax over this short span of time. Twenty years is long enough for a new generation to be brought up, one that has never known a world without Muad’Dib, never known an Arrakis that was totally devoid of water. That’s long enough for everything to have changed.

We have some of Herbert’s favorite tropes here, in that the twins are like Alia; children that both are and are not children. It’s almost as though he wants to make up for not writing enough of Alia as a child in Dune, and I find myself enjoying it because there are some genuinely fascinating concepts about the isolation of self that they embody quite well. Their ability to be their own people, only to get that lost in the mire of their ancestry and mental inheritance is a great place to begin with these characters. In many ways, I find it more interesting than Paul’s fight with prescience. This is even more true when you take into account the ways in which the twins are finally separating out as individuals and how confusing that is for two people who have essentially always been mentally connected to one another—Leto’s concern over how to explain something to Ghanima that only he has experienced speaks to a completely different form of communication.

The rest of the opening of this books is devoted to placing the players on the board and giving us an idea of what the trials of this story will focus on. So we know that the status of the twins is up in the air, we know that Alia is considered largely lost by those around her, we know that Jessica is reattached to the Bene Gesserit and hoping to bring her grandchildren into the fold. We also know that House Corrino is hoping to regain their throne due to the scheming of one of Shaddam’s daughters, Irulan’s sister Wensicia, but we also know that the son she wants to install is not the scheming sort. Stilgar is becoming disillusioned more and more each day, but is still undecided for what he will do. Then there is the relationship between Jessica and Gurney, which is an excellent turnaround from their journey in Dune itself. Being two people who loved Duke Leto so dearly, it makes sense to see them hanging on to one another.

There are a few things here that don’t ring quite true, and Irulan is the biggest glare coming off this opening. As I said at the end of Dune Messiah, the idea that she suddenly realized that she loved Paul just seems like a very convenient device for the story to do what it will with her. It still sits awkwardly.

The Preacher is brought to our attention, as is Jacarutu, which are both issues that will be expanded upon later. We’ll have to wait and see what they bring.

Emily Asher-Perrin is going to have to talk a lot about the term Abomination later, so that should be interesting. You can bug her on Twitter and Tumblr, and read more of her work here and elsewhere.

By now you’ve probably got a sweet tooth for Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series, which begins with the Nebula and Locus Award-winning Every Heart a Doorway and continues with the dark origin story of Jack and Jill in Down Among the Sticks and Bones (out now in ebook and print worldwide). This January, the series returns to Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children with Beneath the Sugar Sky, an irresistibly fun tale of friendship, baking, and derring-do that sees the return of fan favorites and the introduction of Rini, Sumi’s daughter. We’re excited to share the new illustrations by Rovina Cai that will be included in the book!

Take a look at the images below, and read selections from the story!

Beneath the Sugar Sky is available January 2018 from Tor.com Publishing. From the catalog copy:

When Rini lands with a literal splash in the pond behind Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children, the last thing she expects to find is that her mother, Sumi, died years before Rini was even conceived. But Rini can’t let Reality get in the way of her quest—not when she has an entire world to save! (Much more common than one would suppose.)

If she can’t find a way to restore her mother, Rini will have more than a world to save: she will never have been born in the first place. And in a world without magic, she doesn’t have long before Reality notices her existence and washes her away. Good thing the student body is well-acquainted with quests…

The girl in the pond rose up sputtering, with algae in her hair and a very confused turtle snagged in the complicated draperies of her dress, which seemed to be the result of someone deciding to hybridize a ball gown with a wedding cake, after dyeing both of them electric pink. It also seemed to be dissolving, running down her arms in streaks, coming apart at the seams. She was going to be naked soon.

The girl in the pond didn’t seem to notice, or maybe she just didn’t care. She wiped water and dissolving dress out of her eyes, flicking them to the side, and cast wildly about until she spotted Cora and Nadya standing on the shore, mouths open, gaping at her.

“You!” she yelled, pointing in their direction. “Take me to your leader!”

Rini shuddered, stepping a little closer to Kade, like she thought he could protect her. “How can they hold so still?” she whispered, voice horrified and awed. “I’d twitch myself into pieces.”

“That’s why this was never your door,” he said. “We don’t go where we’re not meant to be, even if we sometimes get born the wrong place.”

“There was a boy,” said Rini. “When I was small. His parents mined fudge from the northern ridge. He didn’t like the smell of chocolate, or the way it melted on his tongue. He wanted to be clean, and to follow rules, and to understand. He disappeared the year we all started school, and his parents were sad, but they said he’d found his door, and if he was lucky, he’d never come back, not ever, not once.”

Kade nodded. “Exactly. Your mother and I were born in the same world, and it wasn’t right for either of us, so we went somewhere else.” He didn’t ask what sort of lessons would be taught at school in a Nonsense world. His own world had been Logical, and what made perfect sense to Rini wouldn’t make any sense at all to him.

She was in her element: she knew exactly what she was doing, and was content to continue doing it until the job was done.

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 Lovecraft and Hazel Heald’s “Winged Death,” first published in the March 1934 issue of Weird Tales. Spoilers ahead.

“The Orange Hotel stands in High Street near the railway station in Bloemfontein, South Africa. On Sunday, January 24, 1932, four men sat shivering from terror in a room on its third floor.”

Summary

In a stifling hotel room in Bloemfontein, South Africa, four men sit shivering around a corpse. What inspires their fear isn’t the body, but a strange fly floating in a bottle of ammonia, an ink-scrawled message on the ceiling, and the notebook held by the coroner’s physician. The dead man checked into the hotel as Frederick Mason, but his notebook’s titled “Journal of Thomas Slauenwite, M.D.”

The physician reads aloud:

Slauenwite declares up front that he intends this as a posthumous record concerning the punishment of Henry Moore, entomology professor at Columbia. Moore was Slauenwite’s college friend and a fellow researcher in Africa. But as Slauenwite’s work on remittent fever was about to earn him fame and advancement, Moore accused him of deriving his theses from another physician’s unpublished papers. Slauenwite’s career stalled–what a return for all the guidance he gave Moore on his well-received text, Diptera of Central and Southern Africa!

From exile at a “hole” of an equatorial trading post, Slauenwite plots revenge. He’s heard from Africans about a “devil-fly” whose bite causes sure death from sleeping sickness, after which the victim’s soul enters the fly. Slauenwite pooh-poohs the latter as superstition, but is interested in the disease and its vector. A crocodile hunter guides him into a “pestilential” jungle of green-scummed lakes and Cyclopean ruins. Locals say the ruins are older than man, a former outpost of “the Fishers from Outside.” There Slauenwite obtains devil-fly specimens. They appear related to the tsetse fly. He decides to crossbreed them, hoping the hybrid that will intrigue Henry Moore. To give his hybrids a still more exotic look, he dyes their wings blue. His experiments on his black African servants prove the hybrids as deadly as he could wish–just ignore how the servant-biting fly battered itself to death in its cage after the man expired. Slauenwite will send the “unidentified” flies to Moore–Moore’s rash carelessness is sure to get him bitten, and dead. Punished!

Slauenwite mails the flies under a false name and in disguise. From friends in America, he learns Moore has sickened after a fly bite on the back of his neck. His correspondents’ increasing coolness makes Slauenwite wonder if Moore suspects foul play. Moore dies. Authorities seek the man who sent the blue-winged flies. Spooked, Slauenwite flees to Johannesburg under the alias Frederick Mason.

A couple months later, he begins to receive “visits” from a fly that looks just like one of his wing-dyed hybrids. The creature’s behavior baffles him. It hovers near his copy of Moore’s Diptera. It darts at him and evades swatting with great cunning. It dips its feet into his inkwell and crawls across the white ceiling, leaving an inked scrawl that looks like a question mark. Or is Slauenwite just imagining things?

Next visit the fly “writes” the number 5 on the ceiling. It beats its body against a window screen in series of five strokes. Is Slauenwite going mad, or has the fly really “inherited” human intelligence? From Moore? How did it get to South Africa from New York?

All his attempts to kill the fly fail. It communicates new numbers on successive days: four, three, two, one. Is it counting down Slauenwite’s time before delivering a deadly bite?

He runs to Bloemfontein, barricades himself in a sealed hotel room with plenty of food and necessaries. But on day zero the fly appears again, having smuggled itself in with the food! Now it crawls on the clock face, stopping on the figure 12. Noon, the hour at which Moore was bitten!

Slauenwite fumbles out chemicals from his doctor’s bag, hoping to gas the fly. His journal ends with the acknowledgement that he shouldn’t be wasting time writing, but it steadies him as the fly grows restless and the minute hand ticks toward 12…

Back to the coroner’s party in the hotel room. We learn that Slauenwite never did mix his gassing chemicals. Cause of death? Well, there is a fly bite on the back of his neck, but though later tests will show it introduced the causative parasites of trypanosomiasis, he died instantly of a heart attack, probably brought on by sheer fright.

What continues to frighten the coroner’s party is the ink-scrawl on the ceiling, which reads:

“SEE MY JOURNAL—IT GOT ME FIRST—I DIED—THEN I SAW I WAS IN IT—THE BLACKS ARE RIGHT—STRANGE POWERS IN NATURE—NOW I WILL DROWN WHAT IS LEFT—”

In that ammonia bottle, where a strange fly still floats, the blue dye still clinging to its wings….

What’s Cyclopean: Ruins in the pestilential Ugandan jungle.

The Degenerate Dutch: Slauenwite is a white South African in 1932, and talks and acts precisely as one would expect. Unpleasant company, much improved by being turned into a fly.

Mythos Making: The cyclopean ruins used to belong to “The Fishers From Outside”—Outer Ones/Mi-go?—and are sacred to Tsadogwa and Clulu. Do flies get mind-snatching powers by feasting on Mi-Go blood?

Libronomicon: Slauenwite conveniently leaves a journal detailing his revenge against Moore and vice versa.

Madness Takes Its Toll: Am I going mad, or is this fly mocking me? (In fact, the fly is mocking you.)

Anne’s Commentary

Well, “Winged Death” was a fine finale for Hazel and Howard, my favorite collaboration team. It features a chillingly sociopathic narcissist of a villain and one of nature’s least loved creatures, the fly. Even when they’re not spreading pestilence and throwing up on our food and biting the hell out of us, flies are annoying. They buzz, they bang into screens and windows (shoulda stayed outside in the FIRST place, sucker), they die all legs up in a blatant attempt to milk sympathy. Annoying!

And potentially terrifying. Because not only are sleeping sickness and river blindness and leishmaniasis no joke, but the humble nonbiting housefly comes loaded with nasty pathogens like those that cause dysentery, typhoid and cholera. Too scary. Let’s talk fictional flies. One of the great TV events of my childhood was the more-or-less yearly showing of The Fly (1958). This is the one starring “Al” Hedison, who was really David Hedison, who was really Captain Crane from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, another childhood favorite, especially when the monster of the week would storm through a port and swat poor Seaman Kowalski to the deck for the hundredth time. Kowalski, the redshirt who would not die. But he’s a story for another day.

This is the movie that most scared the crap out of me until Night of the Living Dead came along, and I loved it. The wonders of science! Reasonably mild-mannered inventor builds a disintegrator-reintegrator machine! First horror of science! He tries transporting the cat, which does the disintegration part just fine, but not the reintegration, oops. Its phantom mewing tells inventor, “Um, not ready for life forms yet, jerk.” Second horror of science! After a bit of twiddling, inventor transports HIMSELF! Unaware that a housefly has gotten into the disintegration chamber with him! They both reintegrate, BUT OMG WITH THEIR ATOMS MIXED TOGETHER! Now there’s an inventor with the head and foreleg of a fly, a fly with the head and arm of an inventor! I found this cross-species merging deliciously shocking. In my innocence, I never wondered why both the man-fly and the fly-man retained (or gained) human intelligence. In fact, the monster with the fly head was way smarter than the monster with the human head, which ended up in a spiderweb.

Maybe they switched heads but not brains?

“Winged Death” scares me consistently, too. As I remember my first read years ago, the fly was the most terrifying element. This reread it’s Dr. Slauenwite. Given the nonchalance with which he “experiments” on any convenient African, his own servant included, I wonder whether these were his first “experiments” in murder. The Dr. Sloane whose remittent fever work Slauenwite purloined? Did Slauenwite just happen to come across his papers, or did he off Sloane to get hold of them? Because, you see, everything needs to be about Slauenwite. Moore should never have outed him – where was his gratitude, after Slauenwite made him, down to practically ghostwriting Moore’s career-making text on flies? Truth is, it’s not only the Africans who are woefully inferior to Slauenwite because superstitious black savages–it’s everybody!

Nerve-twisting thing? Slauenwite strikes me these days as too pertinent and realistic a character study. Yeah, there are people like him. Yeah, and maybe they can fool too many people too much of the time. Including themselves.

What’s a fly with a human soul to that? I’m all like, you go, fly! Only bite him right away, before he can catch on!

Wait, what’s that you buzz? Whom the gods would destroy, they first drive mad? All right, something in that. Not that a fly’s a god, even with a human soul, but maybe the devil-flies of Lake Mlolo are the latter-day minions of the gods. Tsadogwa (Tsathoggua) and Clulu (Cthulhu), that is. The “Fishers from Outside.” Fishers of men?

Lovecraft and Heald sneak a little Mythos into the story with their miasmal Cyclopean ruins and the deities mentioned above. Do they do it just for fun? To give an evocative though vague explanation for why the devil-flies are so weird (echoes of alien magic)? The story could have gotten along without Mythos references, substituting plain old jungle-variety legends from the dark heart of the Dark Continent. Interesting to consider, though, how the transfer of soul or consciousness is so central a concern in Mythos canon, from the consciousness-canning of the Mi-Go to intimate body-swapping a la Ephraim Waite to body-swapping on a cosmic scale with the Yith.

What would be the point, for any kind of god, to install a human persona in a fly? To punish, to torture, for the cheap giggles? What would be in it for the fly? Does its consciousness get shoved out by the human or augmented by it? What would be in it for the human? Cheap transportation, for one thing. Free, in fact. Fly onto a steamer from New York to Africa and feast on the best scraps from the kitchen. Hop a train to Bloemfontein, and who’s to know? Sneak into sealed rooms in a sandwich!

Talk about super spies, and with the help of some microbes, super assassins!

Then again, as we saw in 1958’s “Fly” movie, seeing the world through compound eyes could be a bit daunting for the human mind. People turned flies sure commit suicide a lot, as we see both in “The Fly” and “Winged Death.” It’s probably the compound eyes thing, yeah. Or the thought of having to throw up on food for the rest of one’s life, a nastiness explored in full in that other “Fly” movie by David Cronenberg, ergh, don’t remind myself.

Ruthanna’s Commentary

In so carefully saving the last of the Heald collaborations for a rainy day, I forgot that I had, in fact, already read it—it’s in the “Best of H.P. Lovecraft” collection where I first experienced his work. I’d also therefore forgotten that it’s not among the pair’s most cosmically thrilling stories.

Mind you, it’s an excellent read. Heald, as usual, has a talent for bringing out Lovecraft’s talents. But it certainly wasn’t the comfort read I was yearning for. The n-word/cyclopean ratio (3:1) is not ideal. The vicious racism is saved from unreadability by virtue of the narrator being an unambiguously villainous white South African. Lovecraft almost certainly sympathized with that barbarous culture—but readers from more civilized climes, while they may wince at the language, can rest secure knowing that Slauenwite’s unfortunate servant gets ultimate revenge along with his professional rival.

“Winged Death” was written several years before the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment came into the harsh light of public scrutiny. It’s no coincidence that those experiments were suddenly “discovered” at a point when American culture generally condemned such things; they were not a tightly held secret in earlier decades. Had Lovecraft heard casual mention of such things from family friends, or did deadly and non-consensual medical experiments simply seem like an obvious thing for a supremacist twit to do? Either way, the resonance is probably more effective than intended.

Other unintended horror: releasing a large quantity of chlorine gas in your hotel room is an excellent way to kill your neighbors, or at least make their lives miserable if the ventilation is good. Small quantities accidentally produced are the major cause of toilet-cleaning accidents. If a train carrying the stuff derails, they evacuate everyone within a 30 mile radius. Moore is a big damn hero. (PSA: As far as I can tell, an ammonia-soaked handkerchief won’t protect you from chlorine gas at all, though it will fill your final moments with the aroma of cat pee.)

In addition to the unintended horror, the intended horror is legitimately scary. It doesn’t quite meet the standard of “Out of the Aeons,” which still gets the award for Least Desirable Lovecraftian Fate, but getting your mind stuck in a fly still sounds pretty unpleasant. Magic or no, there can’t be much room for higher thought. On the other hand, judging from Moore, focus and determination are unaffected. If you wanted to write a scientific treatise rather than a death note, you’d be good to go.

In addition to the inherent creepiness of getting yourself insected, Moore has a fine flair for the dramatic. Ominous countdowns, mocking bows, hounding your victim into heart failure—all excellent ingredients in the dish best served cold. I suppose he had a lot of time to think everything through on his transatlantic flight.

Lovecraft often obsesses over forced re-embodiment, an interesting choice for a materialist. In some cases it’s as much blessing as curse: Yith bodies may be hard to learn to navigate, but they’re the epitome of Howard’s oft-quoted claim that he can easily imagine lifeforms superior to humanity in every way. (And then he can easily be terrified of them, because after all what do humans do to those they consider inferior? Apparently, that’s not one of our qualities that he could imagine an improvement on.) Getting turned into a girl is no fun if you’re a misogynistic twit like Ephraim Waite—or if Waite is then locking you-as-a-girl into the attic for future sacrifice. The Mi-Go offer a shot at the stars, and perfect helplessness. And Ghatanothoa just offers perfect helplessness.

Another repeating theme: people who take “primitive legends” seriously from the start… rarely play a starring role in horror stories. Slauenwite’s a pretty deserving unbeliever, but he won’t be the last person to dismiss extraordinary evidence long after he should have accepted the extraordinary claim as a working hypothesis. Lovecraft’s protagonists at least have the excuse that their ignorance preserves the thin veneer of sanity protecting human civilization. Your average non-genre-savvy horror movie character, less so.

Next week, we’re taking a break for the holiday. Then, for post number 150 (really!) we’re trying to get a hold of Kishin Houkou Demonbane, recommended by RushThatSpeaks way back at post 100 as a truly epic Lovecraftian anime. Several sites seem to have it, but also seem to drain the sanity from our malware detectors. We’ll share the link if we find a curse-free copy, or come up with an awesome/weird alternative if if we don’t.

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.

A collection of my assorted nonfiction, Sleeping With Monsters: Readings and Reactions in Science Fiction and Fantasy, is about to hit bookshelves and electronic retailers this July. It’s being published by Aqueduct Press, but—as the title implies—much of the material is based on my “Sleeps With Monsters” column here.

Today I’m here to try to convince you to read my book! Or at any rate, to read things that might surprise you.

Writing “Sleeps With Monsters” for Tor.com has shaped basically shaped my career as a critic. Week to week and month to month, I learned more about the science fiction and fantasy genre as I wrote on it—and as I stuck my foot in my mouth, on occasion. I’ve always tried to focus on women’s writing, and as I learned more, I tried to expand my knowledge of the writing of people who experience multiple marginalisations. (I don’t know that I’ve always quite succeeded!)

Learning to read critically is an interesting process. You find you can’t turn it off unless you try really hard: you’re always paying attention to what kind of work the narrative is doing, and what sort of thing it’s setting itself up to be. You learn to recognise what particular works are interested in, and the shape of the story they’re telling. In many cases, you can tell what sort of book any given volume’s going to be—good, bad, indifferent, actively offensive; whodunnit or military-focused or romance or thriller or coming of age—within the first few pages.

You’re always making mental notes and looking at comparisons, and looking at the way that sometimes comparisons fall short: nothing is ever exactly like anything else, but the elements that any given works have in common can be very revealing. C.J. Cherryh’s Foreigner series shares almost nothing in common with Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, but they are both concerned to some degree with domesticities and with relationships between people who are alien to each other, relationships across cultures that extend beyond romantic or sexual relationships. (Though Cherryh is far more concerned with cross-cultural politics.)

There are always layers in a book. The complex—at least, when it is complex, and not marginally competent dreck—interplay between plot and theme, worldbuilding and characterisation is really fun to tease out, to admire it if it all (or at least mostly) comes together in support of the same ends, and to shake your head at it if parts of it sit at odds. To take an example: Say you have a story whose plot involves finding justice for a murder, but in order to bring the perpetrator to justice, the main character commits a few murders themselves, and the narrative doesn’t do anything to acknowledge that this is, at the very least, dubious as all get out as a moral choice. Maybe you missed something. Or maybe it’s just not there.

If it’s not there for you, that doesn’t mean someone else won’t see it: but this fundamental subjectivity in the experience of reading does mean that every piece of criticism is as much about the critic as it is about the work.

As much as. We all bring pieces of ourselves to our reading. But the book remains an object created by someone else, received by the reader. Reading is an act, almost, of translation.

(…which makes criticism really a rather recursive past-time, come to think: the reader-critic and the critic-reader, the writer-critic and the critic-writer.)

Which brings me to Sleeping With Monsters. It’s a journey through the science fiction and fantasy where I learned—as much as I could be said to have learned, and not still be learning—to read and write critically. It’s a journey through science fiction and fantasy with a lot of yelling about the politics of representation.

It’s a journey through reading.

So whether you read it or not, I hope you go read things that startle and delight you, that open your eyes and fill up your heart.

Because I did, and I am.

Sleeping With Monsters publishes July 1st with Aqueduct Press.
Read the introduction to the collection, written by Kate Elliott, here on Tor.com.

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.

Six years have passed since the failed uprising of the High Holders, and the man behind the conspiracy is where the rex and Maitre Alastar can keep an eye on him.

Charyn has come of age and desperately wants to learn more so he can become an effective rex after his father—but he’s kept at a distance by the rex. So Charyn sets out to educate himself—circumspectly.

When Jarolian privateers disrupt Solidar’s shipping, someone attempts to kill Charyn’s younger brother as an act of protest. Threatening notes following in the wake of acts of violence against the rex and his family, demanding action—build more ships or expect someone to die.

L. E. Modesitt, Jr.’s Assassin’s Price is the eleventh book in the Imager Portfolio, and the third book in a story arc which began with Madness in Solidar and Treachery’s Tools. Available July 25th from Tor Books.

Chapter 1

“Good morning, sir,” offered the duty guard to Charyn as the heir approached the door to the rex’s official study.

“Good morning, Maertyl.” With a smile, Charyn held up a hand. “Not until the glass chimes.”

Maertyl raised his eyebrows.

“He doesn’t like it if I’m early.” Or late. As soon as the first chime of eight sounded, Charyn nodded.

Maertyl turned and rapped on the door. “Lord Charyn, sir.”

Lorien’s response to the guard was inaudible to Charyn, but Charyn had no doubt it was short and perfunctory.

“Thank you,” murmured Charyn as he opened the study door and stepped inside. He closed it quickly and walked toward his father.

“Waiting until the last moment, again, I see,” growled Lorien.

“You did say, ‘as the chimes strike,’ sir.” Charyn smiled pleasantly as he took the middle chair of the three facing the goldenwood desk.

The rex’s study was dark and gloomy, with the only real light coming from the two oil lamps in the bronze sconces on the wall behind the goldenwood desk. The light did not carry except faintly to the large oblong conference table at the west end of the study, where, occasionally, the rex met with either the High Council or the Factors’ Council of Solidar, if not, occasionally, both of the councils. The wind continued its low moan outside the chateau. From where he sat behind the desk, Lorien lifted the sealed envelope that rested on the desk, likely delivered earlier that morning by a guard or a courier. “This just came. It can wait… for a bit.” He set the envelope down. “I received the accounts on your Chaeryll lands. Minister Alucar says that over the past three years, you’ve done well in managing it. He doesn’t know how.”

“I went up there and talked to the tenants, sir. They suggested I let them try potatoes. Alucar had limited them to maize or wheat corn. I did. Because everyone else around there is growing wheat corn, potatoes brought more.”

“How much more?” Lorien’s question was almost a formality, as if he didn’t really care, but felt obligated to ask.

“Around two parts in ten more.” That was conservative. In two out of the three years since Charyn had been gifted the lands, the increased return had been more like four out of ten parts. He’d not only collected the rents personally, but kept track of the harvests. Some of the extra return might have just come from his closer oversight, but he had no way to know. He’d only put half of rents into the strongbox that was his in the family strongroom, since Alucar kept ledgers on each property. Even so, he’d had to use considerable ingenuity to keep a rather significant amount of golds hidden, and that was worrisome. At the same time, he didn’t like the idea of being totally beholden to his sire, not when Lorien might live another twenty years… or at least ten.

“That’s good, but don’t start to think like a factor.” Lorien coughed hoarsely, covering his mouth with a large kerchief. “Half of those that grow things spend more time at their exchange or whatever they call it than in doing what they should. Speculating on what price wheat will have three months from now? Or maize or flour? Ha! Not even the Nameless knows that. And the High Holders are worse in their own way, always moaning about how the weather makes it hard to pay their tariffs.”

Charyn nodded, then watched as his father, with hands that had come to tremble more and more over the last months, opened the envelope. Just from the silver-gray sealing wax even Charyn could tell that it had to have come from High Holder Ryel.

Lorien, without so much as another glance at his son, murmured, “Yet another trial,” and offered a heavy sigh as he began to read. Several more sighs followed.

Knowing that his father would only snap at him if he asked the nature of this particular trial, Charyn kept a pleasant expression on his face as he waited.

Finally, Lorien looked up. “The absolute gall of the man.” He glared toward the window to his right.

Charyn wondered why he bothered, since neither of them could see it, frosted as it was on the inside, even behind the heavy hangings. Although the sun had come out, it wasn’t that warm, even if winter was almost a month away, by the calendar, anyway.

“You read it,” said Lorien, handing the letter across the desk to his son.

Charyn took it and began to read.

8 Erntyn 408 A.L.
Your Grace—

I trust that this missive finds you and all your family in continued good health as we approach Year-Turn, and I offer my best and heartfelt wishes for prosperity in the coming year.

You had asked that I request another year’s extension of my current term as head of the High Council. As you well know, I have already served in that capacity for a full six years. During that time, I have seldom left L’Excelsis and then only for the briefest of periods because of personal travails, notably the early and untimely death of my only son Baryel from the red flux. These past years have been a time of change and of great stress for all, and in consideration of the difficulties we have faced, especially at your suggestion a year ago last Erntyn, I requested from the other councilors a year’s extension of my term as head of the Council, because I did not wish to be considered for another five-year term. They were gracious enough to grant that extension.

What were they going to do? thought Charyn. Deny it when both the rex and the Maitre of the Collegium wanted him to stay?

Much of my family has scarcely seen me for the past six years, and this has placed a great burden on my lady in dealing with Baryel’s children and all the duties of administering the holding. I trust you can understand my desire to return to Rivages.

Charyn had forgotten that Baryel’s wife had died after the birth of her daughter Iryella, and that Baryel’s death left the High Holder and his wife as guardians of the holding’s heirs.

Also to be considered is the fact that another extension of my term would be seen as very much against past practice and tradition, and might well generate unrest among those High Holders who have already expressed great concerns about the changes that you and the Collegium Imago have implemented and continue to pursue…

Charyn knew what Ryel wasn’t saying—that the High Holder had no desire to be associated with the additional changes, and that if he stayed he would be forever marked as a tool of the rex and the Collegium. But then, isn’t Father already a tool of the Collegium? Why should he alone suffer that burden?

…and for these reasons, I would suggest that it would be best for all concerned that you allow the High Council to choose another head of the Council for the next four years, either from the remaining members or from other qualified High Holders.

If not before, Doryana and I look forward to seeing you at the Year-Turn Ball, as do, I am certain, all the other members of the High Council.

Charyn lowered the missive.

“Well?” asked Lorien in a tone that was barely less than a bark.

“He doesn’t want to preside over another increase in tariffs and over any more limits on the powers of the High Holders. He also likely does truly want to leave L’Excelsis.”

“So he can plot from the relative safety of Rivages? That’s what he wants. That’s what he’s always wanted. He doesn’t want to tell all those High Holders who complain every time the weather turns bad that the weather’s always bad part of the time, and that they still need to pay their tariffs.”

“You don’t think that he worries about his grandson?”

“The only worries he has about those children is how he’ll use them to gain power. Karyel is fourteen, and Iryella is eleven or twelve… something like that. If it weren’t for your mother, he’d have been making overtures to marry her to you.”

“Why not Bhayrn? He’s closer in age.”

“Because Bhayrn won’t be rex. Ryel’s always been after power. He was behind pushing my late and unlamented brother to lead the High Holder revolt because he could influence Ryentar.”

Charyn wasn’t about to let his father rage on about his ungrateful brother… or more about Ryel, who was, unfortunately, his mother’s scheming brother. At times, it was hard to reconcile the warm and seemingly kindly Uncle Ryel who had once presented him with new-minted golds on special occasions when he had been barely old enough to remember those events. “You haven’t told me if you and Maitre Alastar talked this over and if the Maitre had anything to say about Uncle Ryel leaving the High Council.”

“No, I haven’t. As you could see, if you even thought, I just received the message early this morning.” Charyn again had to suppress his desire to snap back. “I have a thought… just a thought, sir.”

“Spit it out.”

“His missive emphasizes that he doesn’t want to be Chief Councilor any longer. He also says that it would be a bad idea for him to continue in that post and that he would like to see his family more, doesn’t it?”

“He just wants to go off and plot.”

“But that’s not what he wrote. You can act in terms of what he wrote, rather than what he may have in mind. What if you agree that his time as Chief Councilor should come to an end—”

“Absolutely not!”

“Sir… might I finish before you make a judgment? There’s more that you might find to your liking.”

“I doubt it, but go ahead.”

“You agree that his time as High Councilor should come to an end, but… but in order for there to be continuity and a smooth transition, he should serve the next year as just a councilor, and that he and the other councilors should choose the new Chief Councilor from the current councilors. That way, he would be free to occasionally travel to Rivages and see his family… but his options for plotting would be limited and much more likely to be discovered while you still have him under some measure of scrutiny. That way, you also can portray yourself as somewhat sympathetic to his concerns.”

“I don’t know…”

“Why don’t you talk that over with Maitre Alastar? Tell him it came up in a family discussion.”

“Why not say you thought it up?”

“Because it’s better that it be seen as… less specific. Either Mother, me, Bhayrn, or even Aloryana could have suggested it. If you do it that way, rather than suggesting it was your idea or mine, the Maitre is more likely to consider whether it is a good idea or not on the idea itself, rather than whether you came up with it or I did.” Charyn smiled self-deprecatingly. “He might think it a bad idea, but how he answers might suggest other possibilities.”

“Hmmmm…”

Charyn had the feeling that was about as much of a comment as he was going to get on that, and he eased the missive back onto his father’s desk. “When do you meet with the Solidaran Factors’ Council?”

“Not until the eighteenth of the month. That’s when I meet with both the High Council and the Factors’ Council. That meeting will be little more than a formality. The meeting in Ianus will be where everyone tells me what’s wrong and what I should do that they don’t wish to pay for. That’s soon enough. Too soon.”

“Are the factor councilors still opposed to the High Council’s proposal to forbid excessive interest rates?”

“No one has told me. Since factors will do anything for gold, and hate to pay even an extra copper for anything, I imagine they are.”

Charyn nodded. “What about the expansion of the regial post roads?”

“I almost wish that Maitre Arion hadn’t disciplined the imagers in Westisle by making them build roads.”

“Weren’t the roads to Liantiago in terrible shape? Didn’t they need rebuilding?”

“They did, but now the factors around Estisle want better roads, and the imagers building the new branch of the Collegium there aren’t established enough to do that yet. The High Holders away from L’Excelsis and Liantiago are complaining that they can’t get goods and crops to markets quickly, and that they’re suffering from an unfair situation.”

That made sense to Charyn, because in the years immediately after the failed High Holder revolt, the Collegium Imago in L’Excelsis had improved and widened the post road all the way to Kephria, as well as sections of the river road from the capital to Solis and the roads north from L’Excelsis to Rivages. “I thought the stone roads in old Telaryn were still in good condition.”

“They are. Most don’t lead to the larger cities or ports.”

“Aren’t the regional governors supposed to supervise post roads?”

“They claim I don’t give them enough golds for all the work that needs to be done.” Lorien shook his head. “There probably isn’t after what they pocket.”

“Maybe…” Charyn immediately broke off his words, then added smoothly, “Perhaps, as you replace each regional governor, you should make it clear that certain roads need to be repaired and improved, and that such repairs will determine in part how long they serve.”

“They’d just steal more until I caught them.”

Charyn was afraid that was true as well, but wanted to keep his father talking, in hopes of learning something he didn’t know. “What about an additional tariff on the banques… the exchanges… ?”

“A plague on the banques and exchanges—they’re what led to the revolt. Trading crops and debts and everything instead of producing. Speculation! Bah!”

Charyn nodded, but did not move. He’d learned early that patience was a necessity in dealing with his father… and most people.

Close to a glass later, he left the study, nodding again to Maertyl as he did.

He was headed toward his own chambers before his other appointments when he passed Aloryana’s door, just slightly ajar.

“Oh, no! Noooo!”

Charyn was struck by the distress in Aloryana’s voice, and since her sitting room door was indeed ajar, he knocked and pushed it open. “Are you all right?” Aloryana was straightening up as he stopped in the doorway.

“Oh… it’s you. Thank the Nameless it wasn’t Father. Or Mother!” Aloryana’s eyes did not meet Charyn’s.

“Oh?” Charyn could see that Aloryana held something silver in her hand. He thought he saw bluish gems as well. “Did you drop something?”

“Oh… nothing.”

“It didn’t sound like nothing.” Charyn waited.

“It’s just a hair clasp.”

“Is it broken? Maybe I can fix it.”

“Thank you, Charyn. I’ll take care of it.” Aloryana immediately turned away and hurried into her bedchamber, closing the door behind her, and leaving Charyn standing alone in the sitting room.

Charyn couldn’t help wondering what she had broken that she didn’t want him to know about. Finally, he stepped back into the corridor and gently closed the door to the main corridor. He thought he heard sobbing, but he was far from certain.

Excerpted from Assassin’s Price, copyright © 2017 by L. E. Modesitt, Jr.

When people are asked why they like Sherlock Holmes, they provide a whole spectrum of replies. Some readers talk about his intelligence, or his integrity. Others read the stories for the adventure aspect. (Today we have a train chase! And a fight over a waterfall!) Or the problem-solving (it’s a sealed room mystery, and the victim was found dead by poison). Or even the sense of humour. (I am convinced that in “The Adventure of the Dying Detective,” Holmes was getting amusement value out of convincing Watson that he’d gone mad and thought that oysters were going to take over the world.) And there are the other main characters, such as Watson and even Lestrade and Gregson, and the antagonists—Professor Moriarty, Irene Adler, Colonel Moran, Dr Grimesby Roylott…

But ultimately the stories revolve round Sherlock Holmes. Even later homages that focus on other characters such as Watson, Irene Adler, or Professor Moriarty, usually make Holmes a major background figure, or at least have his absence be a point in the narrative. Anyone trying to produce a new story based on Holmes, or even with Holmes as a background character, needs to have a clear idea of who Holmes is to avoid the story feeling “wrong.” We’ve all read or seen homages/pastiches/fanfiction where we ended up saying “I’m not sure exactly what it was, but it just didn’t feel right.”

Yet when other people do create homages to Holmes—be they literature, movies, television series, animation, manga, computer games, or whatever—they often emphasize different parts of his character, depending on the needs of the story and the author’s own perception of Holmes. This isn’t wrong. The fact that Holmes has all these facets only makes him more human.

Some recent versions (the Sherlock television series, or the Sherlock Holmes movies with Robert Downey, Jr.) comment on his social awkwardness and possible psychological issues. (“I’m not a psychopath, Anderson, I’m a high-functioning sociopath. Do your research.”) Others investigate his emotional side and his private life (the recent movie Mr. Holmes, or the earlier The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes and The Seven Per Cent Solution). The Basil Rathbone movies made during the Second World War stress Holmes’ patriotism and have him fighting Nazis. Crossovers with other authors’ characters often emphasise his mental qualities, but may also bring out his ethics, his prickly personality, and his fundamental morality. (Yes, I am one of those people who prefer to envisage Holmes as an ultimately decent man. My own reading of the stories…)

I’m going to quote a few examples of his qualities, taken from Doyle’s short stories. There are certainly many more examples available, and I apologize to anyone whose favorite quotation I’ve left out. I also apologize to anyone whose favorite Holmesian personal quality I’ve left out. Like all of us—even Holmes—my perspective is limited.

Withdrawn

From “The Greek Interpreter” (1893):

During my long and intimate acquaintance with Mr. Sherlock Holmes I had never heard him refer to his relations, and hardly ever to his own early life. This reticence upon his part had increased the somewhat inhuman effect which he produced upon me, until sometimes I found myself regarding him as an isolated phenomenon, a brain without a heart, as deficient in human sympathy as he was pre-eminent in intelligence. His aversion to women, and his disinclination to form new friendships, were both typical of his unemotional character, but not more so than his complete suppression of every reference to his own people.

Unsociable

From “The ‘Gloria Scott’” (1893):

“You never heard me talk of Victor Trevor?” he said. “He was the only friend I made during the two years that I was at college. I was never a very sociable fellow, Watson, always rather fond of moping in my rooms and working out my own little methods of thought, so that I never mixed much with the men of my year.”

Focuses Only on Problems

From “Wisteria Lodge” (1908):

“My mind is like a racing engine, tearing itself to pieces because it is not connected up with the work for which it was built. Life is commonplace, the papers are sterile; audacity and romance seem to have passed for ever from the criminal world.”

Dogged and Persistent

From “The Five Orange Pips” (1891):

“I have spent the whole day,” said he, “over Lloyd’s registers and the files of old papers, following the future career of every vessel which touched at Pondicherry in January and in February in ‘83…”

Lack of Tact

From “The Blue Carbuncle” (1892):

“On the contrary, Watson, you can see everything. You fail, however, to reason from what you see.”

Easily Bored

From “The Copper Beeches” (1892):

“Man, or at least criminal man, has lost all enterprise and originality. As to my own little practice, it seems to be degenerating into an agency for recovering lost lead pencils and giving advice to young ladies from boarding-schools.”

Pride

From “The Six Napoleons” (1904):

A flush of colour sprang to Holmes’ pale cheeks, and he bowed to us like the master dramatist who receives the homage of his audience. It was at such moments that for an instant he ceased to be a reasoning machine, and betrayed his human love for admiration and applause.

Intelligent and Inventive

From “The Dancing Men” (1903):

“What one man can invent another can discover.”

Physical

From “The Solitary Cyclist” (1903):

“He [Woodley] had a fine flow of language, and his adjectives were very vigorous. He ended a string of abuse by a vicious back-hander, which I failed to entirely avoid. The next few minutes were delicious. It was a straight left against a slogging ruffian. I emerged as you see me. Mr. Woodley went home in a cart.”

Unique Perspective

From “The Copper Beeches” (1892):

“… it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation, and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.”

Observant (too many cases to quote)

From “The Speckled Band” (1892):

For answer Holmes pushed back the frill of black lace which fringed the hand that lay upon our visitor’s knee. Five little livid spots, the marks of four fingers and a thumb, were printed upon the white wrist.

“You have been cruelly used,” said Holmes.”

Exacting Standards

From “A Scandal in Bohemia” (1891):

“Did I not tell you how quick and resolute she was? Would she not have made an admirable queen? Is it not a pity she was not on my level?”

“From what I have seen of the lady, she seems, indeed, to be on a very different level to our Majesty,” said Holmes coldly.

Loyal to Friends

From “The Three Garridebs” (1924):

“You are right,” he cried, with an immense sigh of relief. “It is quite superficial.” His face set like flint as he glared at our prisoner, who was sitting up with a dazed face. “By the Lord, it is as well for you. If you had killed Watson, you would not have got out of this room alive.”

Ethical

From “A Case of Identity” (1891):

“The law cannot, as you say, touch you,” said Holmes, unlocking and throwing open the door, “yet there never was a man who deserved punishment more. If the young lady has a brother or a friend he ought to lay a whip across your shoulders. By Jove!” he continued, flushing up at the sight of the bitter sneer upon the man’s face, “it is not part of my duties to my client, but here’s a hunting-crop handy, and I think I shall just treat myself to –“

He took two swift steps to the whip, but before he could grasp it there was a wild clatter of steps upon the stairs, the heavy hall door banged, and from the window we could see Mr. James Windibank running at the top of his speed down the road.

Empathetic

From “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” (1891):

“God help us!” said Holmes, after a long silence. “Why does Fate play such tricks with poor helpless worms? I never hear of such a case as this that I do not think of Baxter’s words, and say, ‘There, but for the grace of God, goes Sherlock Holmes.’”

Socially Aware (yes, really)

From “The Naval Treaty” (1893):

“The Board schools.”

“Lighthouses, my boy! Beacons of the future! Capsules, with hundreds of bright little seeds in each, out of which will spring the wiser, better England of the future.”

A Sense of Proportion (occasionally)

From The Valley of Fear (1915):

It was late that night when Holmes returned from his solitary excursion. We slept in a double-bedded room, which was the best that the little country inn could do for us. I was already asleep when I was partly awakened by his entrance.

“Well, Holmes,” I murmured, “have you found anything out?”

He stood beside me in silence, his candle in his hand. Then the tall, lean figure inclined towards me. “I say, Watson,” he whispered, “would you be afraid to sleep in the same room with a lunatic, a man with softening of the brain, an idiot whose mind has lost its grip?”

“Not in the least,” I answered in astonishment.

“Ah, that’s lucky,” he said, and not another word would he utter that night.

Some people blame inconsistencies in his characterization on the original author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, while others point the finger at Watson, calling him an unreliable narrator. The fundamental point which I would take from all of the above is that Holmes was human. It’s that humanity, and all the complexities in the human character, which have made Holmes a character that has lasted for more than a hundred years, and who has been and will remain an icon in popular culture. We know who Sherlock Holmes is. He’s real.

This article was originally published in January 2016.

Genevieve Cogman started on Tolkien and Sherlock Holmes at an early age, and has never looked back. But on a perhaps more prosaic note, she has an MSC in Statistics with Medical Applications and has wielded this in an assortment of jobs: clinical coder, data analyst, and classifications expert. She is the author of The Invisible Library series—The Invisible Library, The Masked City, and The Burning Page—and she has also previously worked as a freelance roleplaying game writer. Genevieve’s hobbies include patchwork, beading, knitting, and gaming, and she lives in the north of England.

After five massively successful films, John Lasseter thought it was about time to try something different. First, for once Pixar would create a film that would focus on humans instead of toys, bugs, monsters or fish. Superpowered humans, to keep things interesting. And second, instead of hiring a director from within Pixar’s ranks, he would hire an outsider, one of his former classmates, Brad Bird.

By 2000, director Brad Bird could have served as the poster child for broken dreams in Hollywood. Again and again he had seen projects approved by Hollywood executives, only to have those approvals rescinded by Hollywood executives—often the exact same Hollywood executives. In 1995 he thought he finally had his break, when Warner Bros hired him to direct the animated feature The Iron Giant. The film, released in 1999, received nearly universal critical praise, but bombed at the box office, earning only $31.3 million against a reported $80 million budget (less than the rival Disney, Pixar and upcoming Dreamworks pictures produced at the same time). Bird figured his career was over.

Until he reconnected with John Lasseter.

Bird wanted a movie that would, at its heart, reflect his current status as a middle-aged Hollywood screenwriter who had reached the point of doubting all of his life choices so far. Pixar wanted a movie that would, on its surface, make people laugh—and sell tickets. It all came together in The Incredibles.

The Incredibles tells the story of what happens after the happily-ever-after. Spoiler: Reality ensues. After saving people (and a cat) one last time, Bob Parr, aka superhero Mr. Incredible, marries the love of his life, Helen, aka Elastigal. Awww. Except for the part where they start arguing right during the wedding ceremony, since saving people one last time almost made Bob late to his own wedding. They also almost immediately get sued by various people upset about all the damage incidentally caused by superheroes. Public reaction—shown in some beautifully animated moments designed to look like old newsreels—reaches the point where all superheroes, including newlyweds Mr. and Mrs. Incredible, need to be forcibly retired and hidden in witness protection programs for their own safety, not to mention government finances.

Fast forward a few years, to Bob Parr now working an insurance job. He’s miserable. Partly because he’s stuck at a boring desk job which has nothing to do with his skills and talents. (I feel much of the adult audience can relate.) Partly because he can’t help trying to help people—not an advantage when working for a company eager to NOT pay out premiums. Not surprisingly, he spends his free time looking at treasured objects—including his supersuit—from his past, and going “bowling” once a week with an old superhero friend. By “bowling” what I really mean is “risk his life again to try to stop crime to give some meaning back in his life.” This infuriates his wife, who wants him to focus on his family. Largely because his family is also having more than a few issues: two of the kids have superpowers, and although Violet just wants to be normal, Dash has been known to use his powers to torment teachers, and resents that he can’t join any sports teams because that might give away his superpowers.

Naturally, when a message arrives that will self-destruct (and does) right after he hears it play, Bob is eager to come on board, no matter what the warning signs—or the potential impact on his marriage and kids.

Bird claimed that he had no particular superheroes in mind when he created his early sketches for The Incredibles, but none of them sport particularly unique superpowers. Mr. Incredible’s superstrength and near invulnerability are classic traits of the various superhero team Strong Guys. A point I bring up since he slightly reminds me of Marvel’s Strong Guy, although the characters have very different personalities. Elastigirl’s stretching abilities are remarkably similar to those of Plastic Man and the Fantastic Four’s Mister Fantastic. Their daughter Violet’s ability to turn invisible and create force fields are even more remarkably similar to the abilities of the Fantastic Four’s Sue Storm, while son Dash has the superspeed of various Flashes and Quicksilver. Frozone makes ice slides that look suspiciously like the ones created by Iceman in various comics and cartoons, and another character looks even more suspiciously like a very dead Cyclops. Fortunately, the Incredibles have five family members, not four, or I’d be even more suspicious. The creators of the 2005 Fantastic Four film were suspicious enough—or alarmed enough—to make a few changes to their film to ensure that they wouldn’t be accused of copying in the other direction.

Standard superpowers aside, this is as much of a James Bond spy film as it is a superhero film. To match its 1960s look and feel, The Incredibles provides a near perfect Bond villain, complete with plans to Take Over the World, an Over the Top Lair, and even a Sexy Bond Girl. (It helps that Michael Giacchino’s score often sounds quite a bit like a James Bond score.) Sexy Bond Girl’s name is Mirage, and she adds another tinge to a surprising subplot of The Incredibles—Helen’s fear that Bob is having an affair. After all, quite a few of the signs are there: Bob’s various lies, his sudden improvement in his mood, his decision to start working out more… It doesn’t help when Helen finds Bob and Mirage sharing a platonic hug. It does help when—spoiler—Bob’s reaction to all of this is to give Helen a major kiss. The kiss is mostly borne of relief, but still, Bob’s entire body language could not be clearer: he’s interested in Helen, not the bombshell who has just released him from his chains.

Which makes this also a film about marriage and trust and middle-age and fulfillment, all unusual themes for a children’s film, but all themes that by this time fit the Pixar style, which had previously explored questions of identity, loss, and parenting.

The Incredibles also took the time to explore many of the potential issues with being a superhero in real life, in both small things (if you have superstrength, you’re just a little more likely to break a plate while trying to cut through meat, and also, you might just be able to dent your cheap car with your fingers, a particular problem when you’re trying to hide your superpowers) and big ones: how to keep your secret identity after you’ve thrown your boss through several walls. The highlight of this is arguably the justly famous “NO CAPES” scene (I can’t help but think that Superman could have survived all of the examples Edna Mode lists, but then again, he’s Superman), but the film is littered with smaller and larger examples, most hilarious.

And also, a look at the other side: what is it like to live in a world where some people have superpowers, and you don’t? For Bob Parr’s boss, it means spending what looks like several weeks in traction. For a young neighbor kid, it’s the chance to see something awesomely cool. For Bob Parr’s lawyer, it’s a lot of paperwork. And for a young fan, it’s something much more: a desperate desire to be a superhero, to gain that sort of adulation. To be, well, special.

When that fails, the young fan angrily decides to come up with a new plan: to (eventually) release his superpowered gadgets to the world, allowing everyone to become a superhero. Once everyone is special, he claims, no one will be special.

I think, however, the film disagrees with this point. Not just because—SPOILER—this is the sort of film where of course the good guys win, defeating the young fan’s plan, or because the speech is made by one of the bad guys, or even the negative way The Incredibles treats Bob Parr’s job at the insurance company: a place filled with identical cubicles, where no one is encouraged to be special or give clients special treatment. But rather because, in the world of The Incredibles, happiness comes only after people embrace the extraordinary: whether this is Bob returning to superhero work, or Violet embracing her powers, or even Edna Mode delighting in her return to her true love, superhero costume design, The Incredibles is all about finding happiness through embracing what makes you different. Even if you still need to conceal those differences every once in awhile—or agree to come in only second place in track.

But for most viewers, I think, The Incredibles works not because of any of these deep issues, but because it’s just plain fun—particularly the second half, which switches from an introspective yet funny meditation on middle aged life and the need for superheroes to a fast paced action film that uses the characters’ superpowers in often surprisingly entertaining ways—for instance, the way Elastigirl manages to create a speedboat in the open ocean. It’s great.

Also great: the vocal work. For this, Pixar hired the usual mix of well-known if not exactly the first person you’d think of for the part actors—comedian Craig T. Nelson, then and now best known for his non-superhero role on Coach, and Holly Hunter, known primarily for her work in drama and comedy, not action films, along with well-known and definitely someone you’d think of for the part—Samuel L. Jackson, playing, as always, SAMUEL L. JACKSON, and Wallace Shawn, channeling his inner Vizzini as he demands more competence from his employees, which for him means no longer helping customers. Various Pixar employees filled in for various bit parts, with Brad Bird taking on the voice of stylish and commanding Edna Mode, one of the highlights of the film.

The Incredibles also benefited from another major advance in computer animation: subsurface scattering, computer coding that allowed the computerized image to reflect light the way actual human skin does—that is, with some light entering the skin, and some bouncing back, or scattering. Here, as with Finding Nemo, the animators had to take care not to overdo things: computer-created images of people that look nearly human can cause a feeling of revulsion in actual human viewers, one of the major reasons all of the characters in The Incredibles were drawn with exaggerated features. But exaggerated features covered with nearly-human looking skin, another remarkable step forward in computer animation.

On top of that, Bird’s script required multiple special effects shots—particularly in the multiple sequences focusing on volcanoes and fire, but also, several explosions and brief underwater scenes, the latter greatly helped by Pixar’s recent experiences with Finding Nemo. Fortunately, by this point, Pixar had invested in more and faster computer processors. Tricky though all this was, The Incredibles managed to mostly avoid the last minute panic and overtime that had marked most of the previous Pixar films.

The Incredibles did well at the box office, pulling in a more than respectable $633 million—less than the $940.3 eventually brought in by Finding Nemo, and less than the $919.8 million brought in by another animated film released in 2004, Shrek 2, but still well above the box office takes for Disney’s more recent films—something Disney executives noted with alarm. The film also did very well with critics, landing on several top ten lists. It won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form. Disney released the usual merchandise, careful to use the name “Mrs. Incredible” instead of “Elastigirl,” to avoid confusion with a DC comics character. I refuse to confirm or deny whether or not I have two little Lego figures of The Incredibles characters standing right next to Lego Stitch in my home, but I will confirm that Disney ensured that I could. Disney also licensed a short lived comic book, and a theatrical sequel is currently in production for a 2018 release.

On the surface, everything looked great—so great that Brad Bird was almost immediately hired to direct another Pixar film, this one about a rat. But behind the surface, Pixar executives were considerably less happy. From their viewpoint, Disney was profiting wildly from their films, while providing very little in return—not to mention stretching the original Pixar/Disney deal into more films than Pixar had planned on. It was time, Pixar executive Steve Jobs thought, for a change.

Cars, coming up next.

Mari Ness lives in central Florida.

We have a trailer for Marvel’s Inhumans! Tension among the Royal Family leads to a coup, which leads to an escape to Hawaii! Also, Lockjaw the teleporting bulldog gets a chance to shine.

See? That dog is amazing.

Inhumans will debut in IMAX theaters on September 1 and then begin its regular series on ABC September 29th.

[via The Mary Sue!]