“From the Lost Diary of TreeFrog7″
by Nnedi Okorafor

Translating…

Appendix 820 of The Forbidden Greeny Jungle Field Guide

This series of audio files was created by TreeFrog7

It has been automatically translated into text

ENTRY 1 (20:09 hours)

Some clumsy beast has been stalking us. It only comes out at night and it moves with no regard for the bushes, plants and detritus on the jungle floor. It sounds big and is probably dangerous. And…I think it brings the smell of flowers with it. I can smell it now, like sweet lilacs. Does Morituri36 even notice? I wonder. Regardless of the creature’s presence, he continues to compile information and I put it together and upload the finished entries into the Greeny Jungle Field Guide. That’s our mission and our system.

“Down with ignorance! Upload information!” We are true Great Explorers of Knowledge and Adventure. Joukoujou willing, we’ll survive this day, as we have the hundreds of others since choosing to dedicate our lives to informing the ignorant masses about this great jungle.

Whatever is stalking us, we’ll deal with it when the time comes.

Field guide entry (uploaded at 14:26 hours)

God Bug:

The God Bug is an insect of the taxonic order Ahuhu-ebe, which includes all beetles. It is common in the Greeny Jungle. Usually blue, sometimes green. When it feels the urge, it spontaneously multiplies, becoming two independent god bugs. As it multiplies it may make a soft popping or giggling sound. There have been rare cases where one has multiplied into four or five. They are docile, almost playful insects. Diurnal.

— written and entered by: TreeFrog7/ Morituri36

*note: For some reason, this common insect has not previously been listed in the Greeny Jungle Field Guide. This may be because the god bug is also found in the city. Or maybe this is another example of the field guide’s incompleteness.

ENTRY 2 (18:55 hours)

Disgusting.

Everything here is disgusting. It rains constantly. The ground is always ankle-deep red-brown mud. There are a thousand types of biting and stinging insects. We have to sleep in the trees but the trees, bushes, and plants are noisy with buzzes, growls, snorts, screeches, clicks, whistles, too. Especially at night. The air reeks of moss, the syrupy scent of flowers, ripe palm nuts and rotting mangoes. And the jungle traps heat like a sealed glass tube held over a fire. The Greeny Jungle is a tough place to be while pregnant.

The heat leaves me light-headed. I vomit at least three times a day because of the strong smells. Yes, still, even in my eighth month. But though my sensitive nose makes for great discomfort, it makes for even greater documentation. You’d be amazed at how many floral and faunal specimens show themselves first and foremost with scent.

Yesterday, my nose led me to a tree full of those hairy pink spiders with striped orange legs. A year and half ago, Morituri36 and I uploaded a field guide entry on these creatures. We named them treebeards. They were our hundredth entry. Their bites paralyze your fingers and cause an intense headache. If these spiders ever became common back home they’d cause society to break down within a week. Imagine people unable to type on their computers!

Unfortunately, yesterday, I forgot that treebeards give off a strong smell that is very similar to figs. I thought I’d found a fig tree. I love figs, especially since becoming pregnant. The sky was cloudy. Any other day, I’d have seen all those webs. Instead, I walked right into them and the spiders descended on me like rain. Understandably, they thought I was attacking their home. Not good.

Morituri36 happened to be in the middle of one of his bouts when it happened. I had to save myself by running from the tree, throwing myself in the mud and dead leaves and rolling like crazy, the roots of some tree grinding into my back. Then I just lay there looking up…into the leaves and ripe fruit of a giant fig tree. The smell of real figs was all around me. treebeards and figs, can you believe it?!

Only my left hand was stung. I have to type with my right. I’m left-handed so this has been very very annoying. I’ll be better in a few days.

What a husband I have. He cannot even save his wife from bush spiders. What has this place made us into? But can I blame him for having dulled senses due to his junglemyelitis? Maybe. I have been exploring this jungle right beside him all these years. He has been the only human face I’ve had to look at, too. Yet the trees do not “close in” on me. I do not need to have the sun and moonlight wash over my face for at least four hours a day. My brain isn’t muddled with an irrational fear of shadows that makes me rant and rave once in a while. And I’d have yelled stop before he walked under a tree full of treebeards. Idiot.

The sun is setting and I can hear and smell it again — the creature following us. It’s definitely nocturnal.

ENTRY 3 (13:20 hours)

There is a reason I’ve decided to break science-speak and enter this journal appendix in the field guide. My name is Treefrog7 and my husband is Morituri36. We are from a village in southwest, Ọnaghị agba nahịa, the people of the impossible beads. Of course out here in the Greeny Jungle, we cannot wear our traditional beaded attire. Far too heavy. Instead we wear plain light clothing (northern attire). But we never take off our beaded bracelets and marriage earrings. And there is always the bead of the soul. So that is us and that is all I will say on the subject.

I’ve begun uploading this audio series because after three months of exploration, we are closing in on something big. Very big. The very process of finding it should be documented along with the scientific information.

All together, we’ve uploaded two hundred eighty-eight new entries to the field guide. Our fellow explorers are proud. What we explorers do is dangerous work. Many of us die for the information we gather. Many of us return to civilization with only half our bodies, or half our minds, or ill in a thousand ways. Many of us are lost. Morituri36 and I are not lost. We know exactly where we are and we know exactly what we seek. We will find it. And human civilization will be changed forever.

I’ll explain what “it” is when I’m in a less difficult place. The mud is deep here. My back aches. I need all my faculties for the time being. I wish Morituri36 would stop singing that song. “World of Our Own.” It reminds me of home. He has such a beautiful voice. I wish he’d shut up. I wish my body would stop aching. I’m sick of being pregnant.

ENTRY 4 (19:21 hours)

I was bitten by a clack beetle today. Their venom is itchy and the white spot it left on my skin is about the size of my fingernail. It shows up on me a lot more than it showed up on Morituri36 when he was bitten last year. I’m a much darker shade of brown than he is. Which means, yes, I get to complain about it. I don’t mind cuts, scratches, bites, etc. But something about a mark on my skin of temporarily-neutralized melanin really bothers me. No matter. It should be gone in a few days.

Last night, as we looked for a tree to sleep in, we heard the creature. How long is it going to follow us? What does it want?

ENTRY 5 (12:03 hours)

Shh. I have to whisper quietly. Morituri36 is beside me, too. Something just screeched very very loudly. An elgort? As soon as we can climb down, I need to find a certain seed… just in case. Morituri36 is too clumsy to handle them. He’s looking at me, annoyed, but he knows I’m right.

We’re still on the trail of what we seek and I believe that whatever has been following us is still on our trail, too. Maybe the elgort will scare it away, or better yet, eat it.

ENTRY 6 (21:12 hours)

We’re at the very top of a baobab tree. Morituri36 and his cursed junglemyelitis. If I fall out and die, our unborn child and I will haunt him until he joins us in death. Right now I can hear it below. Why is it following us? What’s it after? And what is it? It’s not violent, fast, huge or destructive enough to be an elgort. I’m glad it’s nocturnal. Come morning, we’ll be able to leave this tree and continue on our way.

We are searching for a mature CPU plant, so mature that we can actually download its hard drive. We call them M-CPUs. Acquiring a copy of an M-CPU’s hard drive has never been done in all the history of exploration. BushBaby42, a close friend of mine, found one three months ago but she disappeared before she could download anything. She happened to send us the coordinates of her location just before she stopped responding to us, so here we are. We’ve come hundreds of miles.

It is hard for me to speak of BushBaby42.

I don’t wonder what happened to her. She is an explorer which means it could have been anything. It is very often our fate.

On the M-CPU’s hard drive will be unimaginable information, the result of centuries of gathering. Legend has it that these plants connect to networks from worlds beyond. Imagine what it knows, what it has documented. We will not kill or harm it, of course. That would be blasphemy. We won’t even clip a leaf or scrape some cells. We’ll only make a copy of what it knows. Our storage drives should easily adapt to fit the plant’s port. Though our drive is most likely a different species of plant, they’d have to at least be of the same genus.

The CPU plant’s entry does it no justice. The entry is a human perspective, ascribing significance to the plant because it is cultivated and used as a tool for humans, a personal computer. The true CPU plant grows in the wild, neither touched nor manipulated by humans. And this plant takes hundreds of years to mature.

Many of us have seen young CPU plants with their glowing monitor flower-heads that light up nights and sleep during the day. They plug into the network and do whatever they do. But an M-CPU? Nearly legend. What must BushBaby42 have felt gazing upon it all alone as she was? What must she have seen on its screen? And what happened to her? She could take on a man-eating whip scorpion with nothing but a stick!

Incidentally, the creature we heard screeching this afternoon was an elgort. Big as a house, with tight-black skin that shined in the daylight, beady yellow eyes, fast as the speed of sound, irrational and food-minded.

We dealt with it. Maneuver 23, specifically for the elgort. We lured the crazed beast to a tall strong hardwood tree. That’s the most dangerous part, luring it in. We had to climb very very fast as soon as it smelled us. Once in the tree, as it reared up below trying to snatch us down with its tooth-filled trunk (a terrible sight in itself), Morituri36 dropped a bursting seed (which I picked this afternoon, thank goodness) into its maw. BLAM! Its entire head exploded. We now have meat for many days. elgort meat doesn’t need salt or to be preserved and it’s naturally spicy; some say this is due to the creature’s anger and intensity in life.

We thank Joukoujou and the Invisible forces for giving us the skill to protect ourselves. Unfortunately, The Forces of the Soil also protected from the elgort whatever creature is stalking us.

ENTRY 7 (21:34 hours)

Today was all pain. In my back and lower belly. The stretching of ligaments. My belly feels like a great calabash of water. This baby will come soon. Really soon. I hope we find the plant first. The trees here are spaced apart, allowing the sun to shine down, so Morituri36 had a good day. He carried both our packs and even prepared breakfast and lunch — mangoes, roasted tree clams, elgort meat, figs and root tea both times. It is days like this where I remember why I married him.

It is night now and we are in a large but low tree with one wide branch to hold us both. We can see the sky. It’s been a long time since we had a night like this. I think the last time was the day that our child was conceived. Not long afterwards was when he started coming down with the junglemyelitis. His ailment will pass; he’s a strong man.

My gut tells me this is the calm before the storm. But maybe I’m just being melodramatic.

ENTRY 8 (04:39 hours)

Dragonflies! Swarms of them. BushBaby42 described these just before she found the plant. We’re close. But the creature is still on our trail. This morning, it left its muddy smelly droppings right at the foot of the tree, as if it wanted us to step right into it. I almost did. It was covered with flies and the mound smelled like the vomit of demons. It was so strong that I nearly fainted with nausea. Morituri36 had to carry me away from the mess. Just thinking about it makes me shudder.

Cursed beast, whatever it is. No matter how we try to glimpse it at night, it keeps out of sight as it blasts its angry flowery scent. Biding its time, I suspect. But when the fight comes, it will be shocked when instead of running we turn to meet it. We haven’t survived the jungle solely because of luck.

But Morituri36 needs to remember that he is a human being, and that I am a human being, too. When he gets in his moods, he speaks to me as if I’m a piece of meat. As if I’m lower than his servant. He speaks to me the way the Ooni chief speaks to his wives. How dare him. I am carrying our child. I have done as much work as he has. And junglemyelitis or not, we are in this together. There is no need for insult.

“It dies well beforehand!” he snapped at me earlier today as we inspected a morta. We’d caught it this morning. A morta is a beautiful red bird with a long thin beak. When it dies, its dead body keeps flying aimlessly for days. Strange creatures but not the strangest in the jungle. Morituri36 seemed to think that their carcasses also rotted as they flew.

“Look at it,” I calmly said, despite my rising anger at his tone. The dead morta was still trying to flap its wings. “This is the fifth one we’ve caught! No rot anywhere!”

He just huffed and puffed the way he always does when he knows I’m right. The entry someone uploaded to the field guide was simply wrong and needed to be changed. The fact is that morta probably don’t fly for that long after they die. Maybe a few hours and that’s it. Certainly not days. If it was days, it would be infested with rot and maggots. But that wasn’t what I wanted to find out most about the morta. I wanted to know what made it fly as a dead creature. Morituri36 and I agreed it had to be some sort of parasite with strange faculties. We just needed to run some tests.

But he wasn’t so interested in answers today. He threw the bird corpse to the ground. “It is because it is freshly dead,” he muttered. “Stupid stupid woman.” Immediately, the dead bird hopped up and took off. I cursed, watching it go, wondering what microscopic organisms were working the bird’s muscles and how intelligent they could be to do so. They were obviously using the morta carcass to search for food or a special place to procreate.

I wanted to slap Morituri36. How many pockets of information had we lost because of his temper? He and I are south westerners, the people of beads. Amongst our people, we say, “Many beads protect the thread.” He knows this kind of behavior will not get him far. Maybe one day I’ll push him out of one of the extra high trees he forces us to sleep in every night.

We didn’t talk to each other for hours. Then we started seeing millions of dragonflies.

The land was still spongy and muddy. There were large pools of standing water. The air smelled like wet leaves, stagnant water and spawn. An ancient CPU plant would thrive in a place like this.

The dragonflies must have loved this place, too, but the huge swarms were because of the plant. CPU plants send out strong sine waves. These types of dragonflies are attracted to the electromagnetic waves like moths, mosquitoes, suck bugs and butterflies to light.

We’d always been plagued by a few of these sine-wave drinking dragonflies because of the portable we use to type in and upload information (including this audio journal) to the field guide node. Our portable is powerful. Even hundreds of miles from civilization, we can access the network and communicate with other explorers who wish to communicate. But there is a downside to everything. Large dragonflies zooming around our heads is one of them. The sine waves intoxicate them.

Usually, there are only two or three plaguing us. Now it’s about twenty. They’re like flying jewels, emerald-green, rock-stone blue, blood-red. A few of them are of the species that glow blue-purple. But none of them stay long. They zoom about our heads for a few minutes and then zip off, replaced by another curious dragonfly. Something bigger is attracting them, of course. I can’t wait to see it. We don’t even need BushBaby42’s coordinates anymore. Just follow the dragonflies. I hope BushBaby42 is ok.

ENTRY 9 (22:20 hours)

We cannot sleep. Morituri36 is sitting beside me. For once he’s looking down instead of up. Even he can smell the beast’s scent now. It’s right down there.

The dragonflies are going mad around here. We can see the plant just starting to glow about a mile away, to the north. By the night, it’ll be glowing like a small planet. But the creature is below us. Right at the base of our tree. I hope we make it through the night without a fight. Doing battle in the dark is the worst kind of fighting.

ENTRY 10 (20:14 hours)

It’s a moth! With a large hairy robust but streamlined body, thick fuzzy black antennae with what looked like metallic balls on the ends, and a large coiled proboscis. But it’s wingless, the size of a large car and has six strong insectile running legs. And it uses its proboscis like a flexible spear!

It came after us just after dusk, while we were looking for a tree to sleep in. Out of nowhere you just heard the sound of branches snapping, and leaves getting crushed as it rushed at us from behind. Within moments, it speared me in the thigh and my husband in the upper arm. We’d be dead if it weren’t for our quickness and how good we’ve become at climbing trees. I guess I have to thank my husband and his stupid illness. We’ve bandaged each other up. At least some of the bleeding has stopped, my husband’s wound was worse than mine. So far no sign of poisons from its proboscis.

The moth’s body shape tells me that this thing’s relatives clearly used to be fliers. It’s been following us for days and now, as we close in on the plant, it has become aggressive; it’s guarding something. I can guess what it is.

We could kill it. My husband and I have certainly killed larger more dangerous beasts. But killing it might eventually cause what it protects, the M-CPU, to die. The death of centuries of information. No. We’d rather die. So instead, we’re stuck in a tree a mile from the plant.

There’s a problem. My water just broke. No, not now. Not now!

ENTRY 11 (20:45 hours)

We’re in another tree. About 200 feet from the M-CPU. Like everything around here, it’s infested with dragonflies. Their hard bodies smack against my face like hail. The wingless moth is below, waiting, angry, protective. We’re about to climb down and make a run for it. I hope my husband is right. Otherwise, we’re dead.

The M-CPU’s smell is overly sweet, syrupy, and thick. I’ve vomited twice up here. The labor pains drown out the pain from my leg. They are getting stronger and faster, too. Can barely control my muscles when the contractions hit. If they get any worse I won’t be able to help myself, I’ll fall right out of this tree. A terrible way to die. A terrible way for an unborn child to die. I hope my husband is right.

ENTRY 12 (21:26 hours)

If I focus on talking into this portable, I will not die.

We’re cornered. But we are lucky. We made it to the plant. Dragonflies are everywhere. Their metallic bodies shine in the plant’s light. They make soft tapping sounds when they hit the plant’s screen. Oh, the pain. My husband was right, bless his always sharp mind. The wingless moth indeed is guarding the M-CPU. And thus, now that we are close to the plant, the moth fears we’ll harm it. If we don’t move, the creature will not attack. It is not stupid. It can reason. Otherwise it would have killed us both by now… soon there will be three of us.

My body does not feel like my own.

The…M-CPU is as tall as my husband. He can look right into the flower head, which is a bulbous monitor with large soft periwinkle petals framing it. There is indeed a slot right below the head, where the green stem begins. The moth is a pollinator. Morituri36 says that below the disk is a tube that goes deep; only the proboscis of this wild creature could fit down there. It is a most unique but not an unheard-of pollination syndrome. But there are deeper things at work here.

Maybe the moth will leave come dawn when the plant goes to sleep. But the night has just begun. As the flower opens wide, so do I. The baby will be here soon. Why do the gods create this kind of pain when bringing life into the world? Why?

ENTRY 13 (23:41 hours)

I was screaming when she came out screaming. My husband wasn’t there to catch her; I wanted him to stay near the M-CPU’s flower. So our daughter landed on the cloth he’d spread. Morituri36 laughed with joy. A blue dragonfly landed on her for a second and then flew off. I had to lean forward and pick her up. I cut my own cord. She is in the crook of my arm as I hold this portable to my lips and record these words. A beautiful thing.

The moth has backed off. Could it be that the gift of life was enough to stop this intelligent beast in its tracks? Or does it know what my husband is doing? Our storage drive fit perfectly into the port just below the flower head.

The flower is fully open now. It is sometimes good to be a man. My husband can stand up and watch as we wait for the download to be complete. I can only lie here in the mud and listen to what he tells me as I slowly bleed to death.

ENTRY 14 (00:40hours)

“Are you alright?” he keeps asking, with that look on his face. Don’t look at me like that, Morituri36. Like I’m going to disappear at any moment. The moth looms. I’ve washed our daughter with the last of my husband’s water. She seems happy and angry, sleeping, trying to suckle and crying. Normal. Amazing.

Just tell me what you see! I’m talking to Morituri36. Doesn’t he think I want to know? As if I am not an explorer, too. Giving birth can’t change that fact.

Morituri36, you know the portable can only record one voice. Here, take it. It’s better if you just speak into it.

*Voice recognition detects Morituri36, a male, husband to Treefrog7, Greeny Explorer number 439, 793 days in Jungle, approximately 600 miles north of Ooni, 24:44 hours*

*Allowed*

My wife is crazy. She cannot properly describe the situation we are in right now as I speak. The trees creep in on us like soldiers. She can’t see them, but I can. Every so often, I see a pink frog with gold dots sitting in the trees just watching us. Treefrog7 doesn’t believe me when I speak of this creature. It is there, I assure you.

But neither the trees nor the frog is our biggest threat. Treefrog7 is truly amazing. It is not that she just gave birth. That is a miracle in itself but a miracle most women can perform. No. It is that we have been stalked and hunted by this beast that our explorer ethics prevent us from killing and yet and still, this woman can concentrate enough to blast a child from her loins, even as the creature stands feet away, biding its time for the right moment to spear me in the heart and her between the eyes and then to maybe make a meal of our fresh and new healthy daughter.

But Treefrog7 wants me to talk about this plant that led us to our certain deaths. The M-CPU of legend and lore. The One Who Reaches. The Ultimate Recorder. Bushbaby42’s obsession. How old must this M-CPU be? Seven, ten thousand years? Older than the plant towers of Ooni? I believe it’s an true elemental with goals of joining its pantheon of plant griots.

My wife looks at me like I’m crazy…but who knows. You look into its head and how can you not wonder? Look at it, surrounded by purple sterile ray florets the size of my arm and the width of my hand. Its deep green stem is thick as my leg and furry with a soft white sort of plant down. No protective spikes needed when it’s got a giant moth guarding it.

It’s deep night now. And everything’s color is altered by the brightness of the flower’s head. An organic monitor is nothing new. It is what we know. We Ooni people have been cultivating the CPU seed into personal computers for, what, over a century? It’s how the CPU plant got its name. And explorers have seen plenty of wild CPU plants here in the Greeny Jungle. Lighting the night with their organic monitors, doing whatever it is they do. But an uncultivated M-CPU? How did Bushbaby42 find it? And where is she? We’ve seen no sign of her. Treefrog7 and I will not speak of her absence here.

So back to the M-CPU’s head. What do I see in it? How can I explain? It is a screen. Soft to the touch, but tough, impenetrable maybe. But I wouldn’t test this with the moth looming as it is. And I would never risk harming the M-CPU.

The plant’s screen is in constant flux. There is a sort of icon that looks like a misshapen root that moves around clicking on/selecting things. Right now it shows a view of the top of a jungle. It cannot be from around here because this jungle is during the daytime. There are green parrots flying over the trees.

Now it shows text but in symbols of some unknown language. A language of lines branching off other lines, yes, like tree branches, roots, or stems. The root-shaped cursor moves about clicking and the screen changes. Now it’s a star-filled night sky. A view of what looks like downtown Ile-Ife, not far from the towers. There are people wearing clothes made of beads, south westerners. I know that place. My home a minute’s walk from there!

The screen changes again. Now… most bizarre, the sight of people, humans but as I’ve never seen. And primitive shaped slow-moving vehicles that are not made of woven hemp but of metal. There are humans here with normal dark brown skin but most are the color of the insides of yams and these people have light-colored hair that settles. My wife looks at me with disbelief. It’s what I see, Treefrog7. The legend is true. The M-CPU can view other worlds. Primitive old worlds of metal and stone and smoke but friendly enough looking people. Now there are more symbols again. Now an image of a large bat in flight. The roots of a tree. The symbols. A lake surrounded by evergreen trees.

My guess? This is the plant thinking and it is deep thought. Back to my wife.

*Voice recognition detects Treefrog7, Greeny Explorer number421, 793 days in Jungle, approximately 600 miles north of Ooni, 01:41 hours*

ENTRY 15 (01:41 hours)

I feel better. It’s been about two hours. Baby’s fine. My bleeding has stopped. The moth is still there. Watching us. The download is almost done. I can stand up (though it feels like my insides will fall out from between my legs) and see the monitor for myself now.

It just showed something I’ve never seen before…a land of barrenness, where everything is sand and stone and half-dead trees. Where could this nightmarish place be? Certainly not Ginen. It’s almost 2 am. In a few hours, we’ll know if that moth actually sleeps.

Field guide entry (uploaded at 01:55 hours)

Wingless Hawk Moth:

The Wingless Hawk Moth is an insect of the taxonic order Urubaba which includes butterflies and moths. It is the size of a large car, has a robust grey furry body with pink dots, pink compound eyes, and hearty insectile legs for running. Its antennae are long and furry with silver ball-like organs at the tips. Its proboscis is both a feeding/sucking organ and a deadly jabbing weapon. It is the pollinator of the M-CPU. It makes no noise as it attacks and is known to stalk targets for days that it deems hostile to its plant. Nocturnal.

— written and entered by: TreeFrog7/ Morituri36

ENTRY 16 (02:29 hours)

I’m having a catharsis as my husband and I stare into its monitor and it stares back. I am looking into a distorted mirror. We are gazing into the eye of an explorer. It is like us.

ENTRY 17 (05:25 hours)

My baby is beautiful. She is so fresh and I can see that she will be very dark, like me. Maybe even browner. Thank goodness she is not dada and that she has all ten of her fingers and toes. Think of the number of times in the last eight months that I’ve been poisoned, touched the wrong plant, been bitten by the wrong creature, plus I am full of antibiotics and micro-cures. Yet my baby is perfect. I am grateful.

If we ever make it home, my people will love her. But the wingless hawk moth is still here. The sun rises in an hour.

ENTRY 18 (5:30 hours)

The M-CPU shows pictures and they are getting closer to where we are! Pictures of the sky over trees. Symbols. Clicking. The jungle at night. More symbols. I can see our backs! What?! The moth is coming, but slowly, it’s walking. It is calm, its proboscis coiled up. But what does it want? Download is done. What…the M-CPU’s monitor shows two eyes now. Orange with black pupils. Like those of a lemur but there is nothing else on the screen. Only black. Just two unblinking…Joukoujou help us, o! Now I see. Don’t come looking for us! Don’t…

*Voice recognition detects…Unknown*

*Hacked Allowance*

They will never die. No information dies once gathered, once collected.

The creatures’ field guide is thorough but incomplete.

I am the greatest explorer.

I am griot and I will soon join the others.

End of Appendix 820

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About the Author

Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu is the author of the novels Zahrah the Windseeker and The Shadow Speaker. Her forthcoming book for children, Long Juju Man, recently won the Macmillan Writer’s Prize for Africa. She has also been an NAACP Image Award and Andre Norton Award nominee, as well as a finalist for the Essence Magazine Literary Award. Her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons and in anthologies such as So Long Been Dreaming and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones.

“The Devonshire Arms”
by Alex Dally MacFarlane

1. The door, welcoming.

The door closed behind Ambri with a click.

A candle burned.

There was a sword by the heavy wooden door, and a coat made of raven feathers.  The leather on the sword’s hilt was faded from long use. The coat had holes at the elbows and armpits.

Overhead hung a chandelier of amber and glass. The walls were dark, and fabric-covered lights hung over the counter. Windows admitted the murky rainlight of day’s fade. In high-sided booths made of leather like the finest dark shoe, murmurs and laughter passed from mouth to ear, mouth to glass.

With a swish of her dark red skirts, Ambri swung onto a stool and asked for a whiskey with lemonade. The painted man behind the counter nodded and mixed the drink, moving his hands with the surety of one fluent in the language of bottles and taps. Ambri watched him. A map of the London Underground had grown on his skin, and when he shifted she saw the blues of Victoria and Piccadilly merge into one, the yellow of Circle split into two circles, four circles: an irreal mitosis of helical tracks.

A strange never-told story, Ambri thought.

With a word of thanks and an exchange of coin, she received her drink.

She looked at it sitting on the counter, one amid many low, broad glasses stomach-full of liquids light and dark, and she sucked from the thin black straw. When the alcohol-laced sweet coldness slid down her throat, she smiled.

It is so good to be back here.

She smiled over and over.

2. The walls, dark like cushions

Ambri had put her sword by the door many times in the century and a half since finding the pub, since that day when she had stepped inside with shoulders aching like the un-oiled joints of a suit of armour and she had seen a woman made of smoke and fire napping in a chair.

Many times since, she had seen new solid faces between the wispy, unfocused shapes of the short-lived people. She had been the woman the solid people saw at the counter, in a chair, talking at a naval-high table — the woman they approached, saying, “This place! Are you here often? Do others like us come here?”

“This place is very new,” the woman made of smoke and fire had said when Ambri woke her with those words. “It is my first visit. But I think I will return.”

Her voice had sounded like spices and sun-baked bricks.

“Welcome.”

“Welcome,” Ambri later said to Esnan, who wore a gold ring in his eyebrow that winked like a courtesan. “Welcome,” Ambri later said to the earth-skinned and sun-haired epicene, calling hirself Aus in these times, who had created cassowaries and platypi in hir youth. “Welcome,” Ambri later said to others.

And afterwards she often saw them in the pub, resting between their work, between the hard steps of their lives.

“Welcome,” Ambri said to the girl who could not tolerate rhythms, the first time they met.

3. The plates, hot like embraces

In a booth of blue leather Ambri found her friends: Esnan, mixing trickeries with the fortunes he sold and talking to Aus, who practised hir next creations with napkins and straws. Idjinna smouldered in the back.

“Ambri! Good to see you!” Esnan stood up so that she could slide to the back of the booth. “How are you?”

“Busy.”

Her sword, with well-worn leather on its hilt, rested by the door.

Aus flicked dark fingers, and a marsupial bird made of folded napkins crumpled into sleep.

“Yes,” Ambri said, laughing, “I would like that. But I’ll relax, first.” A four-legged cactus with cocktail sticks for spines walked across the table, guided by Aus’ other hand.

“This one is possible,” the epicene said.

“I like it.”

Esnan pushed his half-finished plate of fish across the table. The warm ceramic pressed against Ambri’s arm. “You’re in the right place for relaxing.”

“Yes, I am.”

The fish was light and lemony over her tongue, tinted with a taste she could not identify — like the pub itself. Ambri had never found a place quite like it.

A place built over a century and a half ago, by short-lived people who had not known what it would become: a place for those longer-lived, with different tasks and difficult lives.

She ate the plate bare and reclined against the dark blue leather, letting her lids slide shut until she saw only the faint glows of lamps above and Idjinna at her right. Laughter speckled the air. Idjinna’s skin crackled and flared, as if she was made of small twigs catching alight one after the other. “How are you?” Ambri murmured, reaching out to touch Idjinna’s arm.

Her fingertips pinkened.

“There was a bronze bowl,” Idjinna said.

“Ah.”

Idjinna’s voice sounded like burning as she told Ambri of a merchant who found a way to trap her, to carefully tap her wishes through the latter years of his life. Medicine gardens flourished around his house and the murals stayed fresh.  Idjinna could not escape. The bronze bowl singed around the edges.  But the merchant died, eventually, and the bowl among many of his other possessions fell to the care of a young Englishman who took it to auction. As the auctioneer’s assistant held it high, his hand tremored and it fell.

“I was angry and happy all at once, and so I danced: it is what I do best.” She twirled dark, smoky fingers through the flames on her head. “The auction house was made of wood.”

Ambri laughed through a yawn.

“They are such a nuisance, these people who cannot even see me but who know how to trap me,” Idjinna said.

To Ambri and Idjinna and the rest of the group around the table, short-lived people were wispy, unfocused shapes, talking and drinking and unaware that there were others in their midst. If they even noticed Idjinna, they probably saw a dark woman wearing orange, or wearing a t-shirt painted with flames, or covered in too many tattoos. Only some of them, sometimes, knew a little more — but the man with a map of the London Underground on his skin had ways to keep them out.

Idjinna twined her fingers with Ambri’s and sighed. “I am particularly tired of crockery.”

As the four-legged cactus creature made of napkins and cocktail sticks marched across the table, examined at every step and turn by Aus and Esnan, the two women curled together in the back of the booth. Idjinna quietened her flames, and Ambri lay with her back against that hot chest and her legs linked with smoke and ember. Her skin did not burn.

They slept.

4. The chandelier, amber-eternal

The girl was a kaleidoscope, a patchwork quilt, a mosaic pieced together from tiles of multiple sets. So Ambri had thought, fifty years ago when they first met at the liquid-limned counter.

That first time, the girl’s hair drew Ambri’s eye before anything else. Part-stained pale with lemons, part-stained black with soot, with a streak tinted brown-red and smelling of a spice market, her hair hung in disorderly lengths over her broken nose, her bare left shoulder, her left ear with its seven piercings and her right ear with its one glass sphere dangling from the edge of the lobe. Then Ambri noticed her clothes: a blue skirt chopped to uneven lengths and a left trouser leg beneath it that fell to her grubby ankle; the right sleeve of a green dress; a waistcoat covered in beads and oddments. Among them Ambri saw empty-centred coins from China and Denmark, bright red beads from the Serengeti, ivory and jade amulets.  Rings, and the finger of a black velvet glove on her right thumb, covered the girl’s pale hands. Her eyes were one-blue, one-amber, like those of certain cats.

“Stop,” she had said to Ambri, who tapped her fingers to a popular tune on her thin-stemmed glass of water flavoured with wine. “Tha-at annoys me, stop it!” Her voice dipped into half a dozen accents, like bread into a platter of oils: Scottish and Indian, Russian and Thai, Turkish and Moroccan. “Fingers. Fi-ingers are too loud!”

She pulled the glass out of Ambri’s hands.

“You were tapping.”

“Good evening,” Ambri said, bemused.

“Too many rhythms. Pat-terns. I don’t like them.”

Ambri turned to the man behind the counter and said, “Can I have a glass of water, please, with the rim of the glass chipped for a third of its curvature, and with unevenly chopped pieces of carrot floating in it.”

When Ambri looked back at the girl, she was staring, her mouth ajar like a door.

“Here,” Ambri said, giving her the drink. “I hope you like this.”

“You…” Six of her fingers curled tightly around the glass. “No one has ever…”

Ambri smiled. “You are far from the strangest person to find your way inside this pub.” Less than a minute later she said it, after inviting the girl to sit down, take a long around, stay: “Welcome to the Devonshire Arms.”

5. The booths, soft like beds

They woke, and Ambri met for the second time the girl who could not tolerate rhythms.

“Do either of you want a drink?” Ambri asked Idjinna and Esnan.

“Feathers and kindling.”

“Just a glass of apple juice,” said Esnan, back at his phials mixing fortunes and trickeries and a hint of vanilla.

As she shuffled out of the booth, Ambri asked where Aus had gone.

Red and pearl-hued liquids mixed like different coloured hairs in a breast-round phial; a drop of something yellow turned the potion monochrome teal. “Something about needing to make the spines poisonous,” Esnan said without looking up.

Laughing at Aus’ intent, Ambri went to the counter and ordered three drinks from the map-covered man. Hammersmith & City snared Metropolitan like bind weed around a drooping branch, magenta into pink. The grey of Jubilee wriggled. With one hand the man took feathers from under the counter and mixed them in a metal tumbler with cocktail sticks; with the other, he poured hot blackberry liqueur into a wine glass.

Movement to her left caught Ambri’s attention.

At the far corner of the counter, a young woman scattered dried peas in un-patterned intervals. “Good,” she said when one nudged an empty glass; when three peas bounced off each other and one fell on the floor, she muttered, “Irreg-lar,” in a different accent. Another time she just smiled: a slow, lopsided curve of her thin lips.

This time fishnet covered the young woman’s left arm, and strips of a CD hung in hair that was chopped and dyed in more ways than Ambri could count. Seven of her fingernails were orange and two were white; pink and beige swirled on the tenth.  Her shirt was made of newspaper clippings.

“You’re still enjoying it here?” Ambri asked, pitching her voice above the murmurings of the wispy people.

The young woman looked up. “Hello,” she said, and her smile broadened.

When they met for the first time, the girl had said that a name always remained the same and she didn’t want that, but giving herself a new one whenever she wanted meant no one would remember what to call her. Easier to have none at all.

Ambri wrapped her hand around her wine glass of liqueur, putting each finger a different space apart. “You’re older than when I first saw you.”

The young woman watched Ambri’s fingers. “I don’t age in a pattern, ye-ar by year. Never have. Parents didn’t like that. I was born under Victori-ah.” With her bi-coloured eyes she looked up. “You don’t change at all.”

“I never have. I do not remember my birth, but I have heard many stories: that I was cut from the side of a wasp; that I was moulded from bone and metal; that I grew to this size in a womb and in tearing free from it killed my mother, the first death for me to collect.” Ambri inclined a brown shoulder in a shrug. “All I remember is doing my job.”

“That’s a long time to al-aways do the same thing.”

“It is.” She thought of her sword, resting by the door. “Though I am made for longevity, it is a long time. It is wearying.” But some of the tightness had left her shoulders, eased away by Idjinna’s heat; and her hands were warm from her glass, not exertion. “That is why I come here, from time to time.”

The young woman nodded, and two CD strips tapped each other.  

“Idjinna and Esnan are in a booth. I think you’ve met them?”

“Once.”

“Do you want to sit with us?”

Nodding more — up-and-down or sidewise gestures, unevenly spaced — the young woman gathered up her dried peas and slid off her stool.

“You’re always solid, you and the oth-ers,” she said on the way to the booth. “You always see me and you never stare, you ne-ever look at me like I left the circus.”

Ambri looked over her shoulder at the young woman. “I know.”

“You try not to make rhythms.”

“Hello!” Esnan cried, seeing them. “Sit down! Now, what do you think’s the best colour mixture? Thanks for the drink, Ambri.”

The young woman settled down in front of the phials arrayed chaotically across the table and stared at them all in turn, playing with the peas in her hands. Eventually she dropped a pea in a phial of cinnabar liquid and said, “That one.”

Esnan laughed. “I know exactly what that one’s for! Thank you, wonderful lady. Now tell me, where have you been travelling? Your shirt comes from all over the world.”

“I went to Malawi and Uruguay, and in a bo-at to Cyprus…”

As the young woman related her journeys, Ambri leaned against Idjinna and smiled. This is why we come here.

6. The floor, made for standing still

When they parted for the second time, the young woman told Ambri that she would travel with Esnan.

“To markets and sites of misfortune,” the man said. “You can find us there, if you wish.”

“Or he-ere.”

The young woman grinned up at Ambri, who climbed out of the booth with her cheek singed from Idjinna’s farewell and walked to the door, who took up her sword, fastened the belt and scabbard around her waist. One hand on the hilt, Ambri said over the early afternoon quiet, “I’ll be back here, of course.”

“We all will be back here,” said the young woman with phials in her hands. “Eve-entually.”

7. The door, welcoming

Glasses and plates slid on and off tables like a brocade cloth. In high-sided booths, dark blue like the late-night sky, friends and the newly met chewed and swallowed, sipped and smiled. With dried peas on their tongues they exchanged their lives.

The door creaked open and another entered: swamp-skinned and broad; or reptilian, ancient, the first creature ever to lay an egg in a nest; or tall and pale, dressed in scraps, wanting a drink from her begged coins and finding a booth full of people she saw plainly. They made space for her. The young woman with mismatched clothes and an intolerance for rhythms offered half a plate of chicken and couscous.

A candle burned.

“Welcome,” the young woman said.

About the Author

Alex Dally MacFarlane lives in the south-east of England, where she works as a Senior Content Editor for a defence publisher. Her short fiction has appeared in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Electric Velocipede, Sybil’s Garage, Shimmer, Farrago’s Wainscot and several other zines. One of her poems, published in Goblin Fruit, received an Honorable Mention in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 2008. The Devonshire Arms is a real pub in Kensington, London; for two years it was her local, and she always suspected it of keeping secrets.

“What if it All Goes Wrong? A Conversation with Robert V. S. Redick”
by Jeremy L. C. Jones

Robert V. S. Redick’s The Red Wolf Conspiracy (Del Rey, April 2009) is populated with tarboys, unwilling maidens, mad ship captains, and power hungry sorcerers. Monarchies clash and the lust for power obscures the weighty price of magic. The ocean rages and storm clouds loom. There is conspiracy, treason, and secrecy. Whole empires rest on small choices made by terrified individuals.  Set largely aboard the Chathrand, a giant, 600-year old ship, Red Wolf positively reeks of adventure.

All in all, Red Wolf tells the story of characters who, according to Redick, are a bunch of misfits.

“I have a soft spot for misfits, having been one roughly since my diaper years,” Redick wrote in a recent essay at suvudu.com. “Oh, not in any tragic, soul-scarring way: my misfit status has always been more a disposition than a curse… Misfits suffer (and cause) far more interesting disasters than those who fit snugly into a culture or a camp.

Redick’s misfits are unforgivably appealing — even his most wretched characters. Each seems to live in the crow’s nest, high above a stormy sea, holding on by fingernails and sheer determination. The jeopardy is constant. The world of Alifros teeters on the edge of collapse — one person at a time.

Redick’s prose is elegant without being florid, rich without being garish. There is much of the New World/Age of Discovery spice to the tale he tells.

In a recent review, Terry Brooks, author of the Shannara novels, praised Red Wolf as “a spirited and exciting journey” and “a throwback to the days of the European adventure story writers–Stevenson, Dumas, Scott and the like — a tale that is a gripping page-turner accessible to all ages.”

Yet, The Red Wolf Conspiracy is also a very humane book–a character driven-novel written from multiple points-of-view. Redick takes on human nature in all its complex glory — from assassins to mermaids, traitors to boy heroes.

After a year of critical acclaim in England, The Red Wolf Conspiracy is finally available in the United States. Redick and I spoke a few days after the novel’s US release on a rare afternoon off from drafting the third book in the Chathrand Voyage series.

Ten years ago, you were a literary writer fascinated with languages and other cultures.

Who’d have thought it’d come to this, eh? Well, I’d like to think I’m still the same guy: still a literary writer obsessed with language and place. You and I have talked before about how the SF and literary worlds fail to engage each other. And since committing to a fantasy novel I’ve thought quite a lot about what personal meaning I attach to the notion of the “literary.”  

To me the term indicates a concern with craftsmanship, and with human life as it is intimately experienced: the texture of thought and memory, the interplay of language and consciousness, the self-aware life of the mind — and the interface of these elusive, human phenomena with the larger universe. These happen to be my chief interests; without them I really can’t get too excited about your dragon or your mage.  

But come on, my fellow literary types, admit it: you’re genre writers too. Westerns have guns and cows; you have neuroses and unreliable narrators. 

Years ago John Updike — who as David Hartwell observes was something of a defender of SF, though he didn’t write it — accused the genre of being so wrapped up in the building of exotic scenarios that it failed to invest in all these “human subtleties.” We should not lightly dismiss that accusation.  

But my take on it is a bit different: I’d say that when a work — any work, speculative or mundane — does invest in those subtleties, we collectively push it in the direction of the literary, and see it a bit less as SF/F. Perhaps it began for marketing reasons, but the divide has taken on a life of its own. We are so conditioned to believe in the two spheres that we segregate ourselves.  

How often have you been to a craft discussion at a SF/F con and heard anyone invoke Conrad, García Márquez, Michael Ondaatje, or any other non-SF/F master in a discussion of technique? And how often in an MFA program does one encounter a teacher of literary orientation willing to explore the craft innovations with which SFF abounds? 

The good news is that I think both camps are getting over their hang-ups, and realizing how much the other side has to offer. It may take another generation, but in time literature in English may indeed let its useless guard down. Latin America managed this back in the 1960s, and the result was the greatest fiction renaissance of the latter half of the twentieth century: the so-called “Boom.” 

What do you enjoy most about writing fiction?

Nothing beats those moments of ecstatic discovery, when you first commit material (however rough) to the page. I’ll never forget the joyride of certain first-draft passages: the tiny ixchel fighting to get aboard the Chathrand without being discovered by humans; the fight in the Weather Tower on the emperor’s mountain, the moment Pazel and Neeps are hurled into the depths with orders to plunder a shipwreck or die trying. 

And yet your question’s harder than it appears. Those ecstatic moments are the most thrilling, sure, but they can also terrify you and leave you drained. What if it all goes wrong? What if (as R.E.M. has it) “all these fantasies come flaming aground?” There’s a scary image for your novel.  

But the image I return to most often is that of working clay on a potter’s wheel, as I’ve done. It’s sensual, and breathtaking at times: The soft, liquid form of the bowl or vase rises like magic under your hands. But it’s so fragile! As long as that wheel’s in motion there’s a chance the whole structure may list over and collapse. 

Did playing role-playing games (RPGs) as a kid influence what you write about and the way you write it?

Unquestionably. I was a D&D addict for many years — though I haven’t played it in twenty. It’s juvenile. I mean that with great respect, and would play again in a heartbeat if I could so arrange my life. But again, let’s be honest: a large part of RPGs involves running around, stealing, smashing, crushing and killing things. Not unlike certain sports, except that the actions are literal mental abstractions, rather than symbolic physical ones. 

But in every other respect role-playing games are an exquisite form of training for storytellers. The most obvious way is world-building, but that in itself means so much more than choosing details and writing them down. There’s dialogue improvisation, scene building, three-dimensional spatial thinking, imaginary timekeeping, dramatic pacing: it’s all there, and you experience it in the most natural and honest way: in a private huddle with your peers. If those peers actually care about the quality of the experience… 

Is there a character in the novel (or trilogy) that you most relate to? Or most enjoy writing about?

Well, one man always springs to mind. I love writing from Captain Rose’s point of view, which in Red Wolf is given through letters he writes to his (possibly deceased) father. Rose is a paranoid, deceptive, violent and wounded megalomaniac. But he brings a twisted zeal to everything he does, and that’s compelling for a writer. There is also a fascination with evil, when it’s done in a complex way. Some might argue that it’s because we have more to learn from those who are not like us than those who are. I don’t think that’s the case: good has plenty to teach. It may be that we’re engineered to pay sharp attention to those we sense might threaten us. 

But The Red Wolf Conspiracy employs seven or eight points of view. I think the truth is that I relate most with the POV character I’m writing about at a given moment. Sometimes that identification is more pleasant than others. It’s not pleasant to enter the mind of Sandor Ott, the old spymaster responsible for some of the heinous political trouble my world’s thrown into. It doesn’t feel good to inhabit his internal asylum, his padded cell. But it is my job.

Red Wolf seems to be about what happens when differences collide. Is that collision at the heart of the book?

The collision of differences is near the heart of Red Wolf — but it’s more than that, I’d say. The old buzzword, the old cultural goal, used to be tolerance. And there’s nothing wrong with tolerance per se. It is, however, far from the best we can aspire to. Tolerance is rather flimsy: I’ll tolerate you this far, but don’t get out of line.  

In the case of Pazel and Thasha and Felthrup and Dri, tolerance certainly won’t keep them alive, or help them defeat Arunis or Sandor Ott. This book is about not just learning to tolerate and comprehend difference, but sometimes to choose it over the familiar. In other words, this is a book about questioning the community you’re born into, and in some cases choosing, building, a new one that reflects the person you’re trying to become.  

How has your understanding of the craft changed since you finished Red Wolf?

My understanding of the challenge of telling a story of this scale has changed in the course of doing so. There are dozens of characters, personal histories, national histories, religious and world-view differences across those nations, simultaneous plotlines: and all of these have to be conveyed with immediacy, drama and simplicity.  

I try to maintain a beginner’s attitude towards learning and relearning the fundamentals of good writing. There are weaknesses I’m probably more aware of than any critic. Use of the narrative zoom lens is one: when to be close-in, deeply embedded in a scene, when to pull back and allow the pace to quicken, and how to slide with grace between these extremes. 

How do you create tension in a world of magic?

In a word, restraint. In my world of Alifros, for example, the use of magic always exacts a heavy price. The animals who wake to human intelligence often go mad. Pazel Pathkendle can learn any language on the face of the earth, but he pays for it with terrifying seizures that make those around him fear that he’s possessed. His mother embraces the study of magic and ends up a distracted wreck who poisons children. And without giving too much away, the greater the power bestowed, the higher the price. 

Last January at Vericon (Harvard), Kim Stanley Robinson explained his dislike for most fantasy. As he put it, in a world where anything is possible, nothing is interesting. And I agree. I’ve never been able to enjoy a fantasy novel where anything is possible. Indeed part of the joy of the reading is often the discovery of what is possible and what is not. Without a doubt, you have to keep a tight rein on your miracles.  

And this brings us back to role-playing: another lesson I learned early was just how dull it was to play the part of a demigod, or other figure of unlimited power. I tired of that in an afternoon. Then I joined a campaign where magic was scarce; it had to be sought out and won at great price, and so did every reward of the game. And that kept me coming back for more.  

If you removed the magic from Red Wolf, would there be a world, a story?

Magic is a fact of the world of Alifros. If it did not exist, Alifros would not exist as I have built it. Consequently the story too would not exist. Another world and another story with many of the same elements could. But their resemblance would be limited at best.  

I hasten to add that magic is not all that counts. The politics, global and personal, matter a great deal too. Indeed questions of the human heart always seem to trump the efforts of the mighty to shape the world through force alone. Few are the successful writers who do otherwise. Asimov was as technically-oriented a writer as you’ll ever find, but what do his novels hinge on? A robot decides to show mercy. A woman finds the courage to stand up to a tyrant. Small, private choices with outcomes that shake the world. 

About the Author

Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and part-time professor living in his wife’s hometown. He is on the board of the South Carolina Academy of Authors, the Hub City Writers Project, and is the interview editor for the Southern Nature Project. In July of 2008, he and Jeff VanderMeer launched Shared Worlds at Wofford College, a creative writing and world-building sumer program for high school students.

“Models and Clay and Plaster, Oh My! : Creating the Cover Art for Tides From The New Worlds”
by Brian W. Dow

Every cover project has its own challenges and creative dilemmas. Tobias Buckell’s collection, Tides From The New Worlds  (Wyrm Publishing, 2009), offered some wonderful scenic opportunities which made it incredibly difficult to choose only one. In the end I decided on his story, “Tides”, and chose to go for a montage kind of approach rather than a specific scene. The story centers on a young girl named Siana. She lives in the village with her parents. Her older sister, Miasia, supposedly died in the coastal wars but shows up unexpectedly in Siana’s home. There are some great characterizations here: magic, tech and danger; lots of great stuff to draw from.

I assembled some sketches for my editor to look at and then went on to finished sketches for the various individual components. I needed to find some elements to draw from the text. Since I love the tech aspect of science fiction art, I felt that I wanted to have something to reflect that. I also wanted to include the society that Toby so richly described. Lastly, I wanted to have a character to anchor the image. Sometimes I’ll skip having the character and go directly with the thematic approach, but I chose not to do that here.

There was some descriptive text to draw from but Toby leaves much to the imagination regarding the fine detail of what the people look like, and what the village and tech look like. This left it open for my imagination to run wild. In my college years I was an actor of sorts and some actor friends would occasionally create a back-story to fill out the character. I decided that it might be of benefit to do that here, and began thinking about the world of the story.

Without giving too much away, there is a mention of a war. It has been going on for a while. Presumably, I thought, resources are scarce. Landmasses are scarce in the world of the story, so therefore wood is scarce. It took Siana’s father years to save money to acquire enough wood to add on a room for her to their meager home in the village…

The Village

The village… hmm… that was a challenge. Challenging, but fun. In the story the village is described as being in the middle of the ocean, and on stilts to keep it safe from the rising tides. That demanded an aquatic theme, so I decided to model the village around found items that may have been discovered in the ocean. I used shells, round glass forms that may have been creature-eyes for windows, and warped tree stalks for the supports of the village.

There would be no straight lines in the construction of the village. I wanted to make as strong a break from contemporary architecture as possible. I looked to Rodney Matthews for inspiration. He did some wonderful building designs in the early 70’s that were a strong influence on my designs: really organic and exotic. Here is my test of one stalk, and a more refined version of the village itself.

The story also talks about airships visiting the village. It would be reasonable to assume that they’d need a platform to land on. Keeping with the ocean theme, I based the landing platforms on sand dollars.

I live on the edge of a marsh and found that the bamboo that grows wild there is a great form to base the supports on. I’d also found some old reference photos of crystals during my picture search and had come across a spiral crystal. This, added to an internet story I’d seen about forty foot quartz crystals found in a deep cave, started my brain going again. Perhaps the village might utilize crystal forms in the construction as well. I did some sketch tests of the spiral crystals intertwining around and through the wood and it looked really interesting. It just seemed to add something more to the mix.

The Ship

The ship, I theorized, might have been built from the bones of a whale like creature, but with a swordfish-like protrusion from the front.

I wanted the main structure to be bone-colored with bits of tech added on. It needed to appear aerodynamic in design but have balloons for its lift mechanism. I thought about the world again. As the war progressed, fuel would be at a minimum and very, very expensive; probably prohibitively expensive. Private yachts would presumably need to make adjustments. This could be why they needed to add balloons to the ship.

In keeping with the maritime theme, the balloons may have been harvested from the sea. Whale bladders or giant blowfish came to mind. So in my mind the balloons took on a texture of having blotches and veins with a translucent greenish color. It was quite a challenge to find just the right look. I knew that I wanted them to be oval and translucent. I tried shooting balloons with lights behind them. That didn’t work. They just looked like balloons; no texture to speak of. Then I tried covering the balloons with a loose knit sweater for a netting effect. That was not what I wanted either.

I kept coming back to the organic look and decided to try coating a balloon with plaster of Paris.

I fastened string to the balloons to give them a more interesting look, as if they were secured to the ship with thick lines. The texture was okay but the balloons came off as being heavy and not as organic as I’d wanted.

Lastly, I fell back on painting a balloon with simple acrylic paint. In ordinary light it just looked like a painted balloon, but when I backlit it with the LED it just came to life! It had the look of a frog throat when it’s puffed up. I had assembled references on frogs as one of my inspirations in the look I wanted. The balloon looked like the throat of a frog that had swallowed a light bulb, and it was just what I was looking for.

I have created several tech pieces for other cover projects and usually I pick some found item to use as the base to build on: mouthwash bottle, salad bowl or whatever. This time I needed something that was more unusual. I had devised a design that was not based on something I had found in my collection of weird shaped items.

I began with a clay maquette to test out the design. When I was happy with that I moved to Styrofoam and began shaping it. Eventually I got it to a shape that worked and covered it with plaster cloth and then plaster (goop).

Lots of sanding and reshaping needed to be done. Not to mention mending when I’d forgotten that it was fairly fragile and was prone to breaking very easily. I added some model tech elements and there you have it.

I did a photoshop colored version to test the color combination and sent that to my editor for approval. With that in hand, I was off and running to the final product. I mounted the ship on my camera tripod. I’d built the ship so that I could remove the wings. This enabled me to try different angles and detail shots.

There was lots of testing of the lighting required to get it just right. Too much light or too little and it just didn’t look believable. The unfortunate part is that the ship is so small on the cover that you never really get to see the little details in there. I remember the special effects guys on the Lord of the Rings movies saying the same thing about their pieces, but it was the fact that they were there that made the difference to the piece, even if you couldn’t see them.

Siana

The young lady I’d chosen to play Siana was unfortunately unavailable to pose, and my stand in for sketches had been my daughter Gracie. Talk about the answer staring you right in the face. Gracie stepped right up and told me she was ready for her close-up.

I’d seen a technique in Photoshop about 10 years ago where only the highlights of an object are captured, and are then layered onto another reference. They would be superimposed over the background and would be somewhat translucent; almost a ghost image. This idea intrigued me. I was looking for a way of incorporating a portrait into the piece but I didn’t want to have just a pasted head. Siana and Miasia have this internal power in them that makes them special. It also demands a price. This technique drained the color from the character and gave her a ‘thin-ness’ (if that’s a word). While none of this is evident in the art, it was there for me when I was creating it.

The Energy Spheres

In the story Siana is just beginning to learn how to work her own personal magic. She can make spheres of protective energy. I thought this was a great image to work with. Since there was so much in the story already that leaned towards the organic, I decided that the shields she creates might be organic also. But what structure would they assume?

Crystals kept appearing in my mind when I was working on this piece. I had this idea that water, when it freezes, creates weird, unusual crystal forms. I froze some water balloons to try to get the crystal formation, but they just looked like frozen balls of ice…

What I wanted was a hollow sphere, so what I came up with was hanging water balloons of various sizes and only partially freezing them. They’d still be water in the center. It took a few experiments to get the thickness right but eventually I found that about three hours worked well. I’d take the balloons out of the freezer after three hours and carefully carry them to my kitchen sink. There I would drip warm water on them, drain the water out, and then shape the edges.

I’d then drill a small hole in the base and thread string though it with a toothpick to hold it, and then re-hang it in my freezer for another hour to harden up. This also gave me a way to shoot them without melting them. Adding an LED handheld light to the ice gave it that weird internal glow I was looking for.

Some might think this is a lot of work for one cover, but that’s just the way I work sometimes. There are moments when the ideas just flow quickly and easily and there are times when it’s like pulling teeth. This time was the latter. It’s like that Frost poem, ‘The Road Less Traveled’. It really did, at least for me, make all the difference. I hope you enjoyed this insight into the creation of the cover art for Tides From The New Worlds.

About the Author

I was born in the small, unsung hamlet of Bristol, Conn. in 1961. I always enjoyed science fiction, adventure and fantasy. I suppose many of us remember tying a towel around our necks and racing around the yard. While this practice has, for the most part, not carried over into adulthood, I have always clung to the imagination that those days engendered. Daydreaming was a constant occupation, much to my second and third grade teachers’ agitation. The dullness of everyday life just made it too difficult to concentrate on math and history. Where I truly found myself was in art class. Oh yeah, now this was something I could work with. Art became my passion. I attended Salem State College in Massachusetts and then The Art Institute of Boston as an illustration major. My invisible towel still firmly in tow. Upon graduating I spent a number of years in advertising, editorial and the random design firms doing layout and design to pay the bills, but I always dreamed of pursuing my passion. Illustration. I was so influenced by authors like Tolkien and Burroughs and illustrators like Rockwell, Parrish, Mucha, Wyeth, Maitz and Whelan. Their work just gave more fuel to my already overactive imagination.

My instructors at the Art Institute always used Chris Van Allsburg as an example of what to strive for with our art. They would tell us to use a vantage point that was unusual. Create interesting characters and illustrate the subtext as well as the main text.

‘The magic lives in the details’, they would tell us. I learned to love the details.

My recent projects include cover art for Tobias Buckell’s “Tides From The New Worlds” (Wyrm Publishing, April 2009), Charles Coleman Finlay’s “The Prodigal Troll” (Pyr, May 2005), Scott Mackay’s “Tides” (Pyr, November 2005), Keith Brooke’s “Genetopia” (Pyr, February 2006), and Alexis Glynn Latner’s “Hurricane Moon” (Pyr, July 2007)

I currently live outside of Boston with my wife Karen, also an artist, our daughter Gracie, a budding artist herself, and our 3 cats, who are presently writing a screenplay for a major studio.