“Placa del Fuego”
by Tobias S. Buckell

Tiago would normally have taken his cut of the picked pockets and stopped right here at the Seaside Plaza. On the very edge, past the vendors on the cobblestone sea walk, Tiago would sit with his legs over the rocky sea wall and look out over the harbor.

Today he only detoured through the plaza to throw the crowd in between him and the woman chasing him.

He’d gotten a brief glimpse of her before the running started: tall, dark eyes, dark skin, dark leather jacket and microfibre pants, careful dreadlocks pulled back into a pony tail.

She was fast in the crowd. She wasn’t dodging around legs, using the ebb and flow of the masses to see open routes like Tiago. No, people who got in her way were just… thrown out of the way.

Too strong. She was some sort of soldier, Tiago thought, refocusing ahead.

He might have gotten himself into a bit of a situation.

Slipping onto the seawall path, he sprinted harder, deciding that she was covering the gap in the crowd. To his right the harbor was filled with ships and their cargo, anchored and waiting for a spot to clear on the docks. One of them was throwing out a parasail, the windfoil bucking in the inconsistent harbor wind, but then filling out, rising up into the air hundreds of feet overhead, and then some.

The ship began to pick its way out of the harbor, headed between the tall forest of wind turbines at the harbor’s edge: a dangerous move to unleash a windfoil in the harbor, but suddenly Tiago noticed other ships unfurling sails in haste. A cloud of brightly colored parafoils leapt to the harbor sky like butterflies swarming from a shaken limb.

This was worrying enough that Tiago slowed, somewhat, and looked to his left. The warehouses, three and four stories tall, dominated the first row of buildings. But behind them, climbing tenaciously up the side of the mountain, homes and houses colorfully dotted the slopes.

A large, dark mass of gray haze topped the rocky crest and slowly fell down toward the harbor like a heavy cloud.

“Oh shit.” Tiago stopped. People in the Plaza were turning too, and murmuring started to spread. They stood up from picnics or meals and the edges of the crowd were already leaving.

The woman smacked into Tiago and grabbed his upper arm.

“Take your damn money,” Tiago shouted. I don’t want it. I’m sorry. Just let me go.”

She looked puzzled as he shoved the paper money into the pockets of her jacket. He may have even given her more than he’d stolen, he wasn’t sure.

“What’s…”

Tiago pointed up the mountain. “It’s going to rain.”

She looked over the buildings and let him go. “I forgot.”

Forgot? There were two things on the island to remember: stay out of the rain, and avoid the Doacq’s attention by staying inside at night.

He bolted. The last thing he saw was the armada of harbor ships, parafoils all full overhead, pulling their hulls up onto their hydrofoil skids as they all scattered to get well clear of the island.

Then the sirens began to wail all throughout Placa del Fuego, alerting its citizens to the descending danger.

From the open sweep of the docks and seawall of the harbor, Tiago headed into the heart of Harbortown. He could breathe easier seeing overhangs above him, and walls he could put his back to.

People hurried about with carbon-fiber or steel umbrellas. Some had already gotten into their hazmat gear.

The klaxons wailed in the background, constantly blearing out their call  for all to find shelter. Shops slammed thick windows shut and bolted them, while people yanked tables and chairs and billboards inside. Customers packed in, shoulder to shoulder.

No self respecting shop would let Tiago inside: he was an urchin. His clothes were ripped and melted, his face dirty, and he ran on bare feet.

They’d toss him out on his ass faster than he could get inside.

A faint stinging mist started to fill the air. Tiago squinted and slowed down. The unfamiliar would run faster, but then they’d inhale more. He cupped his hands over his mouth, a piece of flannel in between his fingers to filter the air. He looked down at the cobblestoned street to protect his eyes.

His calloused, flattened feet knew the street. Knew how many steps it would take to reach the alley, knew how many times he’d have to pull himself up on the old pipe running outside to get up onto the roof, and how many more steps across the concrete to get to his niche.

It was a spot between two old storage buildings a few streets back from the waterfront, almost near the Xeno-town enclave. One of them had a large, reinforced concrete gutter along its edge, and when the second building had been built right along side, wall to wall, had left a sheltered ledge the length of the building.

You wouldn’t know it to look at it. Twenty street kids had taken bricks and concrete and built a wall along the overhang, blending it into the architecture. It was behind this that Tiago had his very own room.

To get to it, he stepped out over the edge of the building, and behind the wall.

Safe.

His skin stung from contact with the mist, but he could sit in the entryway along the corridor leading down to the seven foot by four foot concrete cubicles they called home, and watch the rain.

It was a floating, frothy jelly, spit out from the trees on the island into the air, that slowly floated down. In most cases it just slowly burned at whatever it landed on, like some sort of an acid.

But after that, all it took was a spark for it to ignite.

In the distance the harbor pumps thrummed to life. All over the city the engineers were fighting back the rain with a mist of their own, taken from the harbor water to coat and rinse the harbor.

Usually being on this side of the mountain protected them. But sometimes the wind changed. Sometimes the fire forests were unusually active.

Either way, you didn’t want to be outside. The burns and scars on the children huddled around the openings of their sanctuary testified to that.

The steady rain continued, sizzling as it hit the ground outside.

Tiago relaxed in the quiet among his neighbors as the city fought the rain. He could worry about explaining to Kay why he was coming back with no money from the morning’s work later, as much as that scared him. For now, he was just happy to be out of the rain.

He just about leapt out of skin as the wall next to him crumpled and the woman who’d been chasing him shoved her way through and crouched in front of him.

“Hello,” she said. “We still have business to finish.”

Tiago jumped up to run and the other kids moved back away from him.

But where could he go with the rain coming down so hard?

He looked back at his pursuer. The rain had eaten away at the skin on her forearms, exposing silvery metal underneath. Metal pistons snicked as she flexed her fingers.

A cyborg. Here on Placa del Fuego.

Impossible.

There was no advanced machinery on Placa del Fuego. It all failed on the island, until one reached three miles offshore. In Harbortown the sailors said scientists from other worlds clustered aboard large ships near the wormholes, monitoring what islanders called the deadzone and they called ‘an unexplained continuous EMP event.’ They claimed the epicenter was somewhere deep under the crust of the planet, right under Placa del Fuego.

The wormholes that lead from the ocean around Placa del Fuego to the oceans of other worlds light years away were anchored in the water just on the edge of the deadzone, and the scientists were there to order the wormholes moved as the deadzone expanded slightly each month.

One street rumor said that one of the alien races had buried a device under the island, intending to use it as a cover for a last stand during the human war for independence. Some said it was the Doacq that bought the deadzone with it. 

It didn’t matter what or who caused it. The end effect was that the town used pneumatic tubes to send messages. Ox-men from Okur pulled rickshaws around, or people used the compressed air powered trolley cars. Everything ran on compressed air: the town’s reservoirs were filled by the myraid wind turbines that festooned the harbor entrance and the exposed ridges of the mountain.

But because of the deadzone, this woman shouldn’t have been here, Tiago thought. She shouldn’t even work. But in the cramped darkness of his room the cyborg woman squatted on Tiago’s hand-carved wooden stool.

As Tiago turned on a bright white LED lamp she counted off a lot more money than he’d stolen, or given back to her. Bill after bill after bill. A massive fistful. A month’s takings.

It hovered between them.

“Before you tagged me and made the pick,” she said, “you seemed to know your way around the harbor. I need someone like you.”

Tiago took a deep breath. He wasn’t sure if he needed someone like her.

She was trouble.

The hesitation must have been obvious to her. She smiled. “I’ll double what you want.”

What was the alternative? Tiago took the money. He’d be a fool not to.

“What are you looking to do?” he asked.

“I need to find the person at the top of the underground. Who sees all and knows all.” The cyborg shifted, and the stool creaked. Tiago grimaced. It was made of imported wood, and it was his most precious possession. “I’m looking for Kay.”

“Kay?” Tiago feigned confusion.

“You know who I’m talking about,” the woman smiled.

He did. He wasn’t very good at lying straight-faced. He swallowed nervously. “What do you need from her?”

“I need Kay’s help.” Tiago waited for more, and the cyborg continued. “To find my grandfather. How do I find this person?”

“You don’t find Kay,” Tiago said. He folded the money away into the depths of his ragged clothes. “She finds you. Go find yourself a nice room along the waterfront somewhere. Kay will show up now that someone knows you’re trying to find her. That’s how it works.”

“Word on the street.” The woman leaned forward and held out her hand. A card rested in her palm. “I’ll pay you the other half when I meet Kay. Come find me tomorrow at noon.”

Tiago took the card. An address had been scribbled onto it. “What is your name, then?”

“Nashara.”

Nashara. A cyborg called Nashara. The Nashara? Was he really talking to a living, breathing legend?

Tiago’s hands shook.

She was a lot more than just trouble.

He’d gotten himself in way, way deep into something.

Nashara, left, walking out in to the sizzling rain like it was no more than an inconvenience.

It was only a moment before Tiago’s neighbors parted and the tiny figure of Kay walked out. Her grey eyes took in the broken brick with a flick before she turned to face him. Her hair was cut just short of her ears, almost boyish. She was shorter than Tiago, something that always surprised him. In his own mind she stood much taller. “I’ll have it repaired,” she said calmly, flicking her head at the destruction.

Kay’s fixing the damage would obligate them to her.

But no one said anything. Refusing it would be an even bigger problem.

They might come to beat him up tonight, Tiago thought. If they weren’t too scared.

“You were here the whole time?” Tiago asked, his voice cracking slightly with fear.

Kay ignored his surprise. “That was a Nashara. Here on the island. I wonder how she’s able to work here?” Ox-men: two large slabs of hairy muscle, large eyes and flat noses, squeezed into the passageway behind her, stooping over to fit. They regarded Tiago with dull, incurious eyes.

“I don’t know…” Tiago muttered.

Kay unpacked a kevlar poncho and pulled it carefully on. She buckled on a gas mask. Behind her, the two Ox-men did the same.

In a muffled voice she told Tiago, “Do you know how expensive it would be to shield someone like her, a cyborg, to be able to function in the deadzone? That must be what she’s done. It means she has access to… incredible resources.” She paused thoughtfully, thinking about that. Then she continued. “I have preparations to make before I’ll meet her. Keep your appointment. I’ll send someone for you both.”

She stepped out into the rain, and the Ox-men followed her. The three of them disappeared over the side of the building in the haze, and Tiago turned around to face the boys trying to hide in the shadows.

He could tell by the fear on their faces that they would not be bothering him.

They were far, far too scared of Kay.

So was he.

Nashara sat at a table outside a seawall restaurant, surveying the Plaza over a cup of tea. A few small fires had broken out the night before where jellied rain had landed on canopies or abandoned stalls. But considering the strength of last night’s storm, it wasn’t too bad, Tiago thought. He’d certainly seen worse.

His new benefactor motioned Tiago to sit with her.

“It’s odd,” she muttered as he sat. “All this stone, brick, slate. Leather for clothes. No wood, no fabrics. Hardly any trees, not even scrub. Grim.”

Tiago looked down at his patched clothes. She was surprisingly ignorant about the island if she was the real Nashara. The real Nashara had cloned her own mind to infect alien starships  in the fight for human independence. The real Nashara was a founder of the Xenowealth. The real Nashara was a force of nature. That Nashara, it seemed to Tiago, would, at least know about stuff here on the island. “Rich people have them,” he said. “In those glass houses.”

“Greenhouses?”

Tiago shrugged. “Sure.”

Sometimes, in the quieter moments, looking out over the harbor, he’d wondered what the places were like out over the horizon, and through the wormhole the ships sailed through to get to the oceans of other worlds, and through wormholes in those oceans to even more. Other worlds where things were made, and then transported here. Where people like Nashara came from.

But it was useless to daydream too much about where the ships went. Because they weren’t taking Tiago along with them. No matter how much he wished for it whenever he sat on the sea wall.

Nashara set her tiny wooden cup down and stood up. “I think Kay will be receiving us now.”

Tiago turned around, and the two Ox-men he’d seen last night had silently, amazingly for their bulk, walked up right behind him.

They didn’t have to say anything, they turned around and began to walk away. Nashara followed.

And that, he thought, was the end of that.

Only it wasn’t.

Up at the end of Onyx street, down the stairs cut into the side of the road and in the basement of an old house tunneled into a rock outcropping at the very edge of town, was one of Kay’s many lairs.

He’d been summoned there, two days later.

Amber late-afternoon light pierced the dusty windows, and a menagerie of Placa del Fuego’s shadowy denizens milled about. There were more Ox-men, some Runners, and even a few simple-minded Servants. Lots of grubby kids like Tiago, many of them faces he recognized from Elizan’s crew crowded in, as well as others from all over the rest of the city. They were Kay’s crew, now, all of them. She owned the Waterfront and the Back Ring, and was almost done finishing up controlling the Harbor.

If it was criminal, and happened in Placa del Fuego, Kay wanted to run it.

It had been different, last year. Last year Tiago worked for Elizan; a high strung old man who would leap at a chance to whip anyone who’d held back the take.

A tough life: Tiago still had misshapen broken bones to prove it, but it beat trying to live outside alone. Something he’d learned quickly enough.

Placa del Fuego had no heart for the homeless.

When Kay appeared on the streets in the Back Ring, rain-burned and tired, she’d been ignored. For the first week. The second week she’d figured out the command structure of one of the drug cartels and executed the commander with a sliver of knapped flint.

Within days the cartel danced to her tune.

Rumors said she came from Okur, where the birdlike alien Nesaru had established a colony. Under the Bacigalupi Doctrine, anticipating the lack of fuel and the collapse of the interstellar travel after the war for independence, the Nesaru had bred humans into a variety of forms to serve them. Nesaru engineered, bred, and reshaped human Ox-men and Runners had fled Okur to Placa del Fuego. So had Kay.

She was something else, Okur refugees said. Something designed to control the modified human slaves under the Nesaru’s thumb. She could read your thoughts by the slightest change in your posture, a twitch in a facial muscle. She emitted pheromones to calm you, convince you, and used her body to control your personal space.

You were a computer, waiting to be programmed. She was your taskmaster. A perfect, bred, engineered, manipulator of humankind.

“Tiago,” Kay said, beckoning him closer. “Nashara and I have quite a job for you.”

Nashara stepped out from behind a thick stone pillar. “There will be considerably more money in it for you.”

Kay put a protective arm around Tiago. “I really need your help with this, Tiago.”

He stiffened slightly as she moved in closer, creating a tiny world between just the three of them. “What do you need?” he asked, hesitant.

“You keep a low profile, Tiago. Back of the crowd. You don’t try to cheat me of my cut. You wouldn’t even dare think of it.”

Tiago nodded. Don’t get noticed. Don’t cross dangerous people like Kay unless you could run. Melt into the background. These were core life principles of his. It was why he made a good pickpocket. There was even a mid-sized bounty available for his capture.

“More importantly, you’ve been in the Dekkan Holding Center,” Nashara said. In the distant background the sound of rain alarms drifted through the streets. A night storm. The worst kind.

A cold chill gripped Tiago. “You want me to go back to The Center?” Images of the dark warrens flitted back to the front of his mind.

“Not as such.” Kay pointed a kevlar poncho and gas mask hanging by the door. “Suit up.”

They walked through the slowly darkening streets, the rain hissing against their protective gear. Nashara wore goggles and a long leather fisherman’s coat that seemed impervious to the rain, Kay the same outfit as Tiago.

Their footsteps clicked against cobblestone as Kay led them through sidealleys and tiny backstreets so cramped they had to move through them single file.

No one else was out.

Tiago stopped a tremble in his hands at the thought of being out at night.

Several times they came to dead ends, where small locked doors stopped Kay’s progress. But a few knocks in a pattern and they would open, and the trio would tromp through someone’s front room, leaving sizzling drops of rain behind.

There was no hurry, and Tiago gauged that they’d moved across the entire city over the last two hours.

Kay finally stopped and removed her gas mask in the quiet foyer of a restaurant, eerie in its empty state, though the tables were all set and ready: waiting for the morning crowd. She looked right at Tiago as he removed his mask. He burned his fingers on the wet straps as she said, “I’m turning you over to the warden of the DHC for the bounty. The driver of the prison wagon has been paid to suggest stopping to pick you up.”

He felt numb. Outside, Tiago saw through the windows, the rain had fallen to a drizzle. The gaslight streetlamps flickered shadows as the wind flicked their flames this way and that.

“So you do want me back in the hellhole,” he said, the misery leaking out into his voice.

Kay pulled out a packet of photos and spread them with a flourish across a nearby table like a card dealer. “No. You’ll get picked up, but there’s someone inside the wagon that Nashara wants.”

Tiago frowned. Kay was helping Nashara why? He couldn’t quite put together what was happening here.

Kay leaned close. She was doing it, creating that little bubble of space that seemed to exist just between the two of them. It was some sort of talent, almost magical. “Don’t try to figure it out, Tiago. Just take a look at the pictures of the crew of the Zephyr III. One of them will be in the wagon. We need your help.”

He looked up and out of the bay windows. He wondered how far he could get if just ran. He had some money, maybe he could stowaway on a boat.

How long could he evade Kay?

Not very long.

She gently grabbed his jaw to point his gaze back down at the table. She’d read his thoughts via his body language. “There’s no running, Tiago. Not now.”

He swallowed and committed the faces before him to memory, something other than fear building as she put a hand on his back to steady him.

“I’ll be there as well,” Nashara said from by the door. She’d opened her coat up, and underneath Tiago saw more guns lining the inside than he’d even known a single person could carry. She was a walking arsenal. You rarely saw any guns on the island, too expensive, even for criminals.

“So why don’t you just break into the wagon and get the person you want?” Tiago asked.

“Don’t want to tip my hand until we know we have the person we want. Otherwise, if we go in too early guns blazing on the wrong wagon, our guy could get hidden further, or put under tougher security.  So you’re our scout, Tiago. When you give us the go ahead, we move in to recover both of you.”

“And if the person isn’t there, I get beaten, interrogated, and locked up.”

“We will get you out quickly if that happens, we can bribe a few judges, and Nashara is ready to pay you well,” Kay said. She was pulling on her poncho. Before she snapped on the bug-like gasmask, she continued. “I have to go meet the wagon. I’ll be back shortly.”

This was his moment to bolt.

Nashara picked up the pictures of the crew. “Three weeks ago. You remember anything strange happening?”

Tiago stopped thinking about other lives and worlds. “There was a fight. At night. All over the town. Whoever it was burst through walls, fell through roofs. Ripped up road. No one saw much of it. We just saw the damage…”

“It was my grandfather: Pepper was on his way back with information about a new threat to the Xenowealth worlds. He disappeared here, last seen getting aboard the Zephyr III. But the Zephyr was destroyed in a limited yield nuclear blast event nowhere near any of the wormholes out, but a hundred miles north of here in the polar ocean.

“Word is that one survivor from the Zephyr III came back. You’re going to help me acquire him. I came with a ship, it’s pretty heavily armed up: the Streuner. Pepper didn’t have backup, I’m not making the same mistake. Once we’re on the ship, it’s a run for the wormhole, back into the heart of the Xenowealth, for debriefing.”

Acquire him. There was a strange turn of a word, Tiago thought. She was a kindred soul to Kay. Someone who wove the fate of everyone around them.

He was just a pickpocket. It was all he ever really aspired to. His own quiet moments on the seawall, a safe, dry place to sleep. Good food.

Now he was caught up in something that involved the fates of the connected worlds.

“What does Kay get out of it?” Tiago asked, treading into areas which he knew he shouldn’t be poking his nose.

Nashara tapped the inside of her coat, and the guns jiggled. “Force multipliers.”

“You know what she’ll do with all that?”

Nashara nodded, her dreadlocks shaking as she did so. “She plans to run the island.”

“She will.”

“Maybe. But only if she stops depending brazenly on those modifcations the Nesaru bred into her.” She smiled at Tiago’s shock that she knew about that rumor. “You’re an open book to her. And she holds your strings. But only when she’s standing in front of you. She has to learn other ways to get people to do her bidding, and her teachers have been the underbelly of Harbortown. To be a great leader requires more, it requires people to trust you just as much when you’re not standing right in front of them. That takes something else. Besides, what she has: it’s not that special a talent.”

“Do you have it?”

“Yes. Different technology, not biological, but same result. But Tiago, free will’s a bitch. Kay can only manipulate. Underneath, we still move our own lives forward. You understand? We fought the entire war over that, back when the Satrapy ruled everything. Before human independence.”

Only someone as powerful as she was, Tiago thought, could believe that about free will.

He chose not to say that.

But then, she could probably see him thinking that anyway.

“Here.” Nashara pressed a small sliver of metal into his palm. “Jam that under the target’s skin, it’ll tag him for me and let us know to come get you both.”

“Okay.” He’d have to keep this out of the cops’ hands. Easy enough. He’d snuck small items around the heavy security of The Center.

Outside the loud hiss of a compressed air powered wagon drew closer, and then it stopped. Nashara pulled a large pistol out and aimed it cheerfully at Tiago’s head. “Time to turn you in, Tiago.”

Tiago had sworn many oaths to never end back up in one of these wagons. Yet here he was again. It was near midnight as they jerked into motion with a belch. Tiago looked around. Unfamiliar, bruised, battered faces regarded him.

For a moment he panicked, not seeing any of the faces from the pictures Kay had shown him. He imagined getting locked away in the sweaty man-made caverns underneath Harbor Town.

Then he saw the youngest face in the wagon and recognized it from the photos he’d been shown of the crew of the Zephyr III. It was just a boy. A boy who was younger than Tiago.

Could he drag him into the net Kay and Nashara had cast?

Yes. The boy was already caught up in the mess from being on the same boat as Nashara’s grandfather.

Tiago stood up, tripped, caught himself, and then sat down near the locked rear door.

The boy hadn’t even felt the pinprick of Nashara’s tiny device.

Tiago waited, tensed, for something, anything, to happen.

The wagon rolled on, turning a corner, headlights revealing ten Ox-men blocking the road with spike strips. The wheels of the wagon exploded as they were shredded, and it rattled to a halt on the rims as prisoners in back were thrown against each other.

Nashara landed on the ground outside. She must have leapt off the top of a building nearby, Tiago realized, as pulverized cobblestone leapt into the air from her impact.

She ripped the door open, shattering the lock, and reached in to pull the boy out. Tiago jumped out next to them.

Three Ox-men ran into the alleyway, eyes wide with fear. “Doacq,” one shouted in a low rumble.

Nashara looked down the road. “Tiago, what the hell is that?”

Tiago didn’t need to glance a second time. “Oh shit. Shit! The Doacq. We need to get out of here. Now!”

The seven foot tall, hooded figure moved with unnatural quickness down the street. Tiago caught a glimpse, in the flicker of gaslamp, of two large, catlike eyes under the cowl and a slit-like nose.

But it was the mouth that he noticed most. It yawned, the jaw dislocating and stretching like a snake’s: a two foot gaping chase of darkness.

The Doacq whipped across the street, slamming into an Ox-man. The jaw dropped even lower, and the Doacq rose taller, somehow, and then the gaping maw descended on the Ox-man.

Hundreds of pounds of rippling, engineered, brute strength disappeared, and the Doacq turned to face the wagon.

“That’s a damn wormhole in its mouth,” Nashara said, awe in her voice. Then she grabbed the side of the wagon and grunted. “And it’s generating an EMP field…”

The Doacq flowed forward, the robe rippling in the slight wind. The massive jaw gaped wider and wider as it got closer. It seemed all maw to Tiago, mesmerized by the black nothingness opening up, propelled by the creature’s feet.

Nashara pulled out a large shotgun, and the deafening discharge filled the tiny stone canyon of street and houses. The Doacq twitched to face the incoming shot… and swallowed it all without any change in its approach.

“Son of a bitch,” she said, and then leapt forward. The Doacq, ducked and grabbed her, redirecting the energy of the jump to throw her in the side of a house.

Nashara staggered back to her feet in the middle a mess of rubble.

Tiago grabbed the boy and looked around for a place to hide. One of the nearest doors opened, and whip-lean shape of a Runner beckoned at him to get inside.

He needed no encouraging. He ran for the door.

Three explosions shook the street, and Tiago saw with a glance back that Nashara had flicked grenades at the Doacq. It swallowed several, but couldn’t be in more than one place at the same time.

Another grenade exploded to its side, and the Doacq faltered. Shreds of its cloak and flesh splattered on the ground and an animal-like shriek of pain filled the streets.

The Doacq was not supernatural, Tiago thought, dazed. It could be harmed. He paused at the doorway. Maybe Nashara could face it down.

But then the Doacq spotted him, and turned for the building, completely ignoring Nashara.

An Ox-man yanked Tiago into the house and barred the door shut. “This way,” the Ox-man grumbled, and shoved the two boys forward through the house.

A trapdoor underneath a table led them under the house, into a hidden basement lit by a single bulb.

“Through here,” said a Runner, appearing out of the dark. The shadows made his ribs, visible under a thin shirt, look even more pronounced than normal.

There was heavy, thick steel door a pair of Ox-men had opened. As they passed through that, they groaned shut, and then dropped to the ground as something was kicked out from underneath them. The smell or rank sewage took the breath away from Tiago, and he switched to breathing only out of his mouth.

In the distance, and explosion of brick and screaming startled Tiago. The Doacq must have gotten into the house. With Nashara in pursuit.

They were standing inside a tunnel, lit glancingly by the Runner’s flashlight. The center of the tunnel had a wide trench in it, currently dry.

It revealed Kay waiting with a pair of Ox-men armed with RPGs. They aimed the weapons at the thick door behind Tiago.

“So this is our quarry,” Kay said, turning on a small penlight to check the boy. “Your name is June, right?”

The shellshocked, beaten boy nodded.

“Can you speak, June?”

“Yes.” It was a faint whisper, unsure of itself. But it was the most June had done since this had all started, other than let Tiago drag him around to safety.

“Well June, this is Tiago, and we have to move quickly before the Doacq comes after us. It likes characters like us. It finds us interesting.”

Kay led them down the gentle slope of the tunnel at a brisk pace to a junction, where the sound of running water filled the air, and the stench increased.

Five Ox-men stood in a trench full of dirty water holding onto a small metal boat with an electric engine on the back.

Something boomed in the distance, echoing through the sewer tunnels, as they clambered in.

Kay smiled. “That should slow the Doacq down.” She waved her hand at the Ox-men and they let go. She gunned the engine up to a brisk whine as the boat shot clear, bouncing off the sides of the trench.

Tiago had a moment to absorb everything now. He turned to Kay. “All this preparation. You knew the Doacq was coming? How?”

“He always comes when there’s this much activity,” Kay said. “And he’s difficult to stop. I thought maybe he was allergic to the sun, but he shrugged off the ultraviolet and full spectrum lamps I installed on his favorite haunts. Since then, it’s gotten harder and harder to hunt. I can’t even get a good picture of it, cameras fail around it.”

Tiago felt like he was looking at a different person. “How can you know so much about the Doacq?” Most of the town didn’t even talk about it, they whispered about it and avoided the night. When people disappeared, you didn’t dwell on it. You knocked on wood that you would never be the one to turn a corner, and see the Doacq standing there.

“You hunt the Doacq?” Tiago asked.

She heard the stunned disbelief in his voice and turned on him. “It’s an alien. It’s not some supernatural creature, Tiago. It’s like the Nesaru, just more powerful. We don’t know where it comes from, but just like the other aliens, it plays on human land as if it owns it. It thinks it rules us, but it doesn’t!”

There was a hatred in her face, naked for the two boys to see. She’d let her control slip. “I will destroy it. And then I will take the island. And after that, I will make the Nesaru leave, and the Gahe, and the other stinking aliens that have kept us under their thumb flock through here. Pepper may have failed to kill the Doacq for me, Nashara may fail yet, but I won’t.”

She turned down another tunnel as Tiago bent over and grabbed his knees. This was insane. They were up against the Doacq?

“You did good, Tiago,” Kay said, her face under control again. “You got her to chase you, despite the rain incident. You got her to invest in you, to want to protect you, just enough that instead of grabbing June and running back to her ship, she decided to tackle the Doacq. It was perfect. You have a place among my lieutenants, a place on this island, Tiago. You did well.”

He didn’t feel like it.

Things had gotten complicated quickly. He hadn’t intended the mark to be a living legend.

He certainly hadn’t expected to be involved in the betrayal of a living legend.

Tiago shivered.

Kay had a safe house set up for them. It took getting out of the sewers and back onto the streets, through the alleys and people’s homes again. By the time they got inside, Tiago couldn’t tell where in Harbor Town he was. They’d doubled back, and around, and it was so late it was now probably officially early. His eyes were scratchy, his movements felt like they were delayed by a half second.

“Don’t worry,” Kay told him as she took their protective gear. “You’ll be safe here. There are people for the Doacq to catch. He’ll eventually slow down, turn his attention elsewhere. It’s all planned.”

It didn’t make Tiago feel any better. He caught the eyes of June, and the other boy certainly didn’t look reassured either.

But Kay caught that. And she spent time with them until they were mollified, and relaxed. There were Ox-men guarding the house, equipped with heavy machine guns, and escape routes everywhere.

A tall man came in with cold water and sandwiches. Somehow getting something in his stomach took the edge of Tiago’s fears.

Maybe it was just having something to do.

“There is more I have to do,” Kay said. “The caches of arms Nashara promised me need swept up and stored in secure locations. And eventually, I need to see who won.”

She left the room, five foot figure flanked by a pair Ox-men.

June stopped eating. “Do you trust her?” He asked.

Tiago looked up and wanted to say he did, but the words caught in his mouth. “I don’t know. She’s dangerous to cross.”

June gestured at his face. “As dangerous as this?”

“Yes.”

“Then I don’t want to have anything to do with her,” he said. “I’ve had enough.”

The boy looked exhausted.

“I’m sorry,” Tiago muttered. “I’m very sorry. I thought you would be going with Nashara.”

“The woman?”

“She’s looking for someone called Pepper. She says he’s her grandfather. She thinks you know…”

“They all do.” June looked down at the remains of his sandwich. “He was okay. I liked him. He paid us in gold to get him out of here, but there were ships waiting for us between the wormholes out and the island.

“He fought them off, and then when he realized we were in danger, jumped into the ocean and sank. Didn’t stop them from sinking the Zephyr III anyway. They killed everyone but me. Dragged me out of the ocean and took me back, forced me to tell them everything he did, or said.”

Tiago wrapped his arms around himself and leaned forward.

The Doacq was hunting them. Nashara may not even be alive, a victim to Kay’s machinations, just like Pepper.

And what was he? If she could throw their lives away so easily, what chance did he have of living if he moved closer into Kay’s world?

He thought of the contact, the compulsion he had to do what she wanted. It came from her voice, her posture, the way she could read him. And it wasn’t real.

With her out of the room, he could struggle away, couldn’t he? All that was left was his fear. Fear of consequences.

Fear that she would track him down for betraying her.

“She has a ship, an armed ship, she said, waiting for her. It’s called… the Strainer, or something like that,” Tiago said in a tumble of words. And then he said something he never would have, had he been doing this for Kay. “If you want, we can try to run for it.”

June didn’t even pause to think about it. “Yes. I’d run with you.”

“I could be trying to trick you,” Tiago said.

“I don’t care. I’ll take the chance. I don’t want to be trapped here, I don’t want to get eaten by the Doacq.”

Tiago found himself nodding with June.

“We leave the moment we see morning,” Tiago said.

“So you can spot rain?” It’d be suicidal to try and move through the city without any rain gear. And if he couldn’t see the rain coming, he wouldn’t know to hide from it.

“Yes. Do you have any family?”

June shook his head. “No. They’re dead now.”

Tiago did not follow that up with more questions. He didn’t want to know.

The Ox-men guarding them checked on them randomly. The moment the door closed, the early sun lighting a band of orange up over the rooftops, Tiago broke the locked windows open. There were other skills he’d picked up in addition to picking pockets.

June started to climb down the side, but Tiago shook his head. “Go up, to the roof. They’ll expect us on the street.” The Runners and Ox-men would fan out down there, hunting them.

Rooftop to rooftop would keep them out of sight for longer.

Once up there, Tiago oriented himself. They were closer to the docks than he’d dared hope.

They stuck to the roofs, clambering awkwardly up drain spouts and slipping on tiles. But they made it to the edge of the plaza after an exhausting hour.

The docks ran out from the seawall, long piers of concrete stacked with unloaded goods and Ox-men hauling carts back and forth.

It wasn’t until they’d walked through the crowds of the plaza, and then up onto the seawall, that Tiago relaxed a little. The Ox-men guarding them would have called the alarm by now, phoned Kay, and the entire town might be crawling with people hunting for them, but they’d at least gotten to the docks.

Tiago stopped a dock worker in greasy coveralls overseeing the unloading of a ship docked almost by the seawall. “We’re looking for a ship called Strainer, have you seen it?”

The man frowned. “Streuner? It’s over there.”

Tiago looked. It was a gun-metal gray boat with a large green flag with a black and yellow X on it.

June yanked Tiago around to face the plaza behind them. The hooded figure of the Doacq stood at the far side, people scattering away from it.

“I don’t think it…” Tiago started to say, as the Doacq looked over the top of the crowd right at them, and began to move toward them. “Shit.”

“But it doesn’t come out in the day,” June said, his voice breaking with fear.

Kay had said it seemed to choose the night. That her lights replicating daylight hadn’t harmed it. He shouldn’t have been surprised. But he was. From across the plaza Tiago could see the unnaturally long jaw dislocated and drop, down past the alien’s chest, down almost to its feet. Anything that stood in the way disappeared into it: scared people, tables, chairs. It swallowed them all.

Tiago and June turned and sprinted for the dock leading to Streuner. An act of faith that they could protect them, really, but what else could they do?

They shoved people aside as they ran the slow curve, ignoring the curses aimed in their direction.

When they turned onto the dock and sprinted, Tiago looked over at the seawall. The Doacq barreled along it.

He realized he was screaming as he ran. Dockworkers were turning to look, and then jumping into the water as they realized it was the Doacq.

It gained on them. They had half the dock before they could reach the Streuner, and the Doacq was coming up the dock, may three hundred feet behind them.

Tiago knew he shouldn’t look over his shoulder, it slowed him down, but he couldn’t help it.

The dark pit of its maw was so wide and inescapable, ready to swallow them, the pier, and anything else.

As to where people ended up when it got them, only those swallowed knew, and they’d never come back to talk.

Tiago realized he was about to find out. He wasn’t going to make it to the end of the dock, where the Streuner waited. Maybe even if they made it, they’d still be swallowed up.

Maybe it could eat the whole boat.

He glanced back over his shoulder, and as he did so, a loud boom came from the end of the dock. Something large whipped past his had, and the Doacq staggered and fell.

Its mouth dipped, hitting the concrete of the dock and swallowing a scoop of it, concrete chipping around the edges of its mouth.

Another boom stopped it as it struggled up to its feet again.

Tiago redoubled his run, as did June. He ran so hard it felt like his joints would pop, his brain would be jarred free of his skull, and his lungs would burst into flames.

As they moved clear, the booms turned into an all out barrage. Continuous thunder rolled from the ship, bursting out from large guns that had rolled out of emplacements all over the ship.

His eardrums stopped trying to understand the deafening sound as the entire section of the dock under the Doacq disappeared.

The Doacq had picked the wrong ship to run at.

Two dark-skinned crewmen, just like Nashara, held out their hands at the top of the plank leading on to the deck. Tiago sprinted into them, knocking them over and collapsing, panting, amazed to still be alive.

“Cast off!” Someone yelled, and the plank was tossed free. From his viewpoint on the deck, Tiago saw a tiny rocket shoot up several hundred feet into the sky, dragging a length of parafoil with it.

The foil expanded, filled with air, and the ship began to move.

A pair of feet in familiar boots stopped in front of Tiago’s face. He looked up. It was Nashara. She moved slowly, with a slight limp, and wore a patch over one eye. Her hair had been burned off, and one arm was in a sling.

She kneeled and grabbed his hand and said something, but he couldn’t hear it through the ringing in his ears because the guns still hadn’t stopped: Streuner shivered constantly as it continued firing on the Doacq as they moved away from the dock. Slowly, at first, but then the ship built a bow wave as it sped up.

A few minutes later the entire ship slowly struggled up onto the hydrofoils underneath its hull, and it popped free of the resistance of pushing against water.

They sped away from the docks, the deck tilting alarmingly as the Streuner turned hard toward the open sea.

The alien Doacq was falling further away from Tiago with each minute. So was Kay.

June was still in a room being checked over for injuries, but Tiago was allowed to wander around inside the ship. There were crew cabins, a kitchen, storage rooms, a common sitting area.

Nashara sat there, playing with a small piece of paper. She kept folding it until she had turned it into a tiny flower.

“She sent me to pick your pocket,” Tiago confessed, standing at the table. He’d expected the boat to sway more than it did, but the foils kept it almost rock steady. “It was a trap from the beginning. And I’m sorry.”

She looked up at him with one eye, and Tiago flinched. What would he do to someone who’d cost him an eye? What would someone as powerful as Kay do?

“I knew it was a trap,” Nashara said. “What I wasn’t expecting was the Doacq.”

“You?” He found that hard to believe, knowing the things Nashara had seen and participated in.

Nashara shook her head. “It’s a massive universe, Tiago, with many participants. The Doacq’s an important force, and I’m not sure what it’s up to. We need to find Pepper, if we can, if he’s still alive. If June can help. Maybe together we can find some answers, find out if the Doacq is a threat to us. But Tiago, I’m just tiny player on the edge of some large events. I don’t know half of everything. The universe is not tidy. You don’t always get quick answers.”

It was a sentiment that Tiago felt a kinship to. She felt just like him. Navigating her way through all this just as best she could.

But then that raised his suspicions.

“Are you saying that just to make me feel better?” He asked. “Do you rule me know, like Kay?”

If she had the same talents, why not?

“I mean, if I’m your pawn, you seem calmer than Kay,” he continued. “She isn’t just someone organizing street kids, protection setups, scams. Not anymore. Now she’s just using us up like our lives don’t even mean anything.”

Outside the ship slowed, hydrofoils sinking deeper into the water until the hull hit water.

Nashara crushed the little paper bird into a wad. “Sometimes we become the thing we’re fighting hardest against,” she said thoughtfully. “And Kay is fighting hard against an unimaginable past on Okur. I was there, once. I’ve seen what she came from. I don’t think she will stop fighting it for quite a while.”

Tiago thought about Placa del Fuego, caught between the forces of Kay and the Doacq, and wondered if the island would survive the both of them. “She said she’d rule the island.”

“And maybe more, no doubt,” Nashara said. Then something strange happened, a fluttering sensation in the deepest pit of Tiago’s stomach that left him suddenly dizzy. Nashara stood up and grabbed his shoulder. “Come, Tiago, I want to show you something.”

She led him out onto the rear deck of the ship, which was dominated by the black nothingness of a wormhole.

Tiago gasped. He’d never seen one this close, towering over his head. Large enough for a whole ship to pass through and that had once floated above a world. Spaceships had once passed through it before being deorbited.

And now him.

The sky overhead was covered by a dark, orange cloud in outer space, whisps of it streaming off toward the horizon. And cutting the sky in half: a silver twinkling band. The Belt of Arkand. He’d heard it mentioned by sailors, and here he stood looking at it with his own eyes.

“You asked if I made you do this,” Nashara said. “But this was your own choice. I didn’t make you do it. This is your new life now.”

But was it the right choice?

He looked around at the strange sea they plowed through, and saw another wormhole far ahead in the distance, propped on floats and bobbing on the surface of the green ocean. That wormhole led to yet another ocean, and more worlds.

More possibilities.

Maybe not the right choice. Only time would tell that. But it was certainly his choice, he knew, leaving all those years of sitting on the sea wall and dreaming behind for a chance just like this.

About the Author

Tobias Buckell Tobias S. Buckell is a Caribbean-born speculative fiction writer who grew up in Grenada, the British Virgin Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. His latest novel, Sly Moongoose, a Caribbean Space Opera, is currently out from Tor and his first short story collection, Tides from the New Worlds, has recently been published by Wyrm Publishing.

“On the Lot and In the Air”
by Lisa Hannett

The crow’s talons gouged new gashes into Jupiter’s enamel as the orrery revolved a clockwork orbit beneath him. Gaslights incandesced from the base of the carnival booth, projecting the solar system’s rotations onto the canvas dome above the crow’s head. Light strobed into his eyes each time Jupiter completed a rotation, which did nothing to improve the crow’s temper. He lifted an articulated wing to shade his eyes; when he dropped it a moment later, he saw a gawking crowd congregating on the midway, its collective attention captivated by the golden gear held steady in his beak.

The midway’s makeshift stalls had sprouted like rank weeds, hell-bent on doing damage before they were uprooted. As evening slid into pungent night, the carnival had colonised the city’s neglected streets, transforming them with its garish gaslights and flea-bitten draperies. Tents had whorishly spread themselves along all surfaces, like the cheap skin show dames who plumped and corseted their wares in the fair’s liminal spaces.

Now the thoroughfare teemed with noxious odours, secreted by a horde of notorious bodies, all crammed into collapsible houses of ill-repute. The buildings supporting the carnival’s crooked pavilions dripped constantly, as if a giant pig was spitted in the sky, its juices left to fall like fatty rain onto the scene below. By morning, discarded candy wrappers and flocks of shredded ticket stubs would papier-maché every tent, signpost, and tree, leaving archaeological layers of rubbish to congeal in the city’s slime.

This whole place reeks, thought the crow.

“Forget cheap arcades with rubber-limbed benders! Forget dime museums, string-shows and flea powders! What y’all need is to let off some STEAM! Step right up and have a FREE shot at this Foul Fowl! Sock him in the block and win a plethora of prizes!”

The crow snorted as the sprocketed showman jangled out from behind a threadbare curtain. His stovepipe hat belched steam as he clanked over to the bally platform, which was girded in dusty organza. The showman’s pliable tin shanks were clad in darted velour leggings; aluminium tails grafted onto his torso lent his outfit a certain panache, as far as tarnished suits go. Small beads of humidity or grease drip-dropped down his pockmarked cheeks and neck, watermarking the collar of his ruffled shirt with grey splashes. Leaning on a bamboo walking stick atop the dais, he surveyed his flock for a heartbeat. On the second beat, he raised a gloved hand to his breast and bowed like a courtly gentleman.

“Robin Marx, at your service,” he said to rapt listeners, “on behalf of the Outdoor Amusement Business Association. That’s right, folks — you’ve heard the rumours, and I’m here to prove ‘em true — Robin Marx always gives the first shot for free! Win on that shot and the prize is yours! It’s no sin to be a winner, my friends; so come and collect an easy dinner.”

Revellers were drawn to Marx’s stall faster than you could say shine on spit. He had greased more than a few palms to score such a choice locale; his bird-show was the first thing people’d see when they came in, set up as he was on the right-hand side of the midway, only two paces away from the carnival’s main entrance. The showman smiled, and blessed the corruptible lot man as he surveyed his coffer-filling patch of turf.

It was proving to be the prime location for shooting marks.

Ladies and gents disembarked from a motley collection of dirigibles — steam-powered and boiler-driven, with leather balloons or finest silk, depending on the owner’s station — directly outside Sideshow Alley’s hastily erected plyboard fences. Two guineas were extracted from each heavy purse by way of an entrance fee; once inside, the gullible masses would sure as sugar leave a goodly portion of their remaining shillings to Robin Marx, proprietor and entrepreneur extraordinaire.

Pockets jingling, Marx wove through the crowd as if he were the Lord Mayor hisself; winking at the ugly girls and pinching the cute ones’ bottoms; shaking hands with the gents and slapping sharpies on the back as he progressed. In the midst of his campaigning, Marx made his way over to the crow’s slowly orbiting perch.

Night clung to the bird’s mangy figure; his wings hung sodden tissue-like by his sides. The crow felt like a feathered showcase for their racket, a curio cabinet with an aching beak and flea-bitten wings. A cabinet that would do anything for a day off. He sighed, making sure not to knock the gear out of his beak as he did, and listened to the sideshow dames singing to their Johnnies:

“ — one fire burns out another’s burning,
One pain is lessen’d by another’s anguish;
Turn giddy, and be holp by backward turning;
One desperate grief cures with another’s languish…”

“Why don’t you ever sing like that, bird?” Marx bent over and turned the ornate key jutting out of the orrery’s bulbous base, and forced the slowing planets to rev into dazzling motion once more. The crow flapped his discontent. He growled down at the showman’s oxidized head, much to the crowd’s insipid delight. A mechanical band organ began to caterwaul across the thoroughfare, drowning out the crow’s curses.

“Ah,” said Marx, pausing before giving the key a final firm twist, ‘the only sound more haunting than the calliope is the music of money changing hands, my friend.’ And with a pseudo-sincere wink to his partner, he turned on his heel and directed his attention to the burgeoning audience.

Robin Marx hoisted his walking stick, jabbed it skyward to reinforce his ballyhoo. ‘The winner of the day will get the key to the midway, straight from my two hands!’ He flashed a large bank roll — a carny roll, thought the crow, or I’ll be buggered — and made sure to expose the cash reward for only the briefest second before squirreling it away in his waistcoat pocket.

“Get the bird to release his bootlegged prize! Five pence a shot,” the showman cried.

The crow made sure to tilt his head as Marx worked the bally; the golden gear winked in the gaslight, catching more than one poor sap’s eye. As his roost lifted him skyward, he scanned the faces milling in the throng below him. Tried to guess which unfortunate sucker would reveal hisself — for it always was a bloke — to be Marx’s front-worker.

Could be him, the crow thought, as a stocky gentleman in a bowler hat disembarked from a locomotive rickshaw and stepped onto the midway. But he changed his bet as the skin show dames peeled away from the shadows, snagging the bowler hat and its owner with their lurid insinuations. ["Me they shall feel, while I am able to stand: and 'tis known I am a pretty piece of flesh," sang the dames down the way.] He’ll be there for hours, the crow realised, or until his pockets (and other things) are sucked dry.

Jupiter convulsed on its brass frame, lurching further upward. The crow over-compensated for this movement and pitched forward at a precarious angle. His tomfoolery earned a round of raucous laughter from the carnival anemones swaying on the polluted floor beneath him. As he regained his balance, he saw a frogman wobble his way out of the ale den four stalls down, ribbetting up his dinner and the keg of piss-weak beer he’d consumed on a dare. Next door, a seedy-looking weasel in patched plus-fours emerged from the sky-grifter’s tent. He slid across the frogman’s spew, leaving a trail of putrid footsteps as he zigzagged his way up the noisy thoroughfare toward Robin Marx’s stall.

The weasel’s shifty eyes didn’t blink twice to see the team of spontaneously combusting phoenixes bouncing on rickety trampolines in the centre of the midway. His listless mouth didn’t so much as twitch toward a smile, even when a row of constructs whirled a metallic dervish for his pleasure and coin. No, the weasel had the expression of a man on a mission. He had a job that wanted doing, just as sure as Old Cranker’s sausages weren’t stuffed with bona fide cud-chewer.

That’s him all right, the crow thought. That’s the shill.

He watched the weasel’s stilted progress, humming a fiddley snippet one of the lads from Labrador had played while the caravan steam-rolled its way across barren plains the previous night. The crow tried to ignore the ornamental gear whose jagged spokes were doing their utmost to bash his beak into a less functional shape. Agonising moments passed; the crow’s eyes began to water; his ears felt downright clogged with the midway’s hubbub. Finally, the weasel stepped up and placed his grimy paws on the footprints Marx had painted on the cobblestones, no more than spitting distance away from the crow’s orrery.

“Al-a-ga-zam, capper. Give the crowd a wave, and tell us your name,” said Marx in a voice as slick as the carnival’s boulevards.

“Trouper,” said the weasel.

“Well, Trouper, as I’ve just been telling these here folk, this bird’s a scoundrel of the nineteenth degree. That’s right: this rotten crow is flaunting stolen merchandise in his good-for-nothing beak. He pinched that gear right out of my pappy’s precious time-keeper” — he withdrew an unremarkable watch from his breast pocket and dangled it mid-air, just as he’d seen hypnotists do — ”and now it’s ticked its last tock. Irreplaceable, that’s what this piece is.  You’ve got to help me, Trouper! Help me get it back from that vicious crow so I can get my pappy’s ticker started again!”

The crow pretended to bow his head in shame at hearing Marx’s accusations. He swept his wings up before him in a gesture of mock supplication — his least favourite part of the act — and in so doing deftly swapped the golden gear for a confectioner’s imitation while Marx explained the rules of the game.

“The first shot’s always free, folks. Trouper, give it your best go. If you’re a real lucky son-of-a-gun, you’ll be the one to empty my purse after one sweet shot.” As if of its own volition, Marx’s hand stroked his waistcoat pocket while he spoke; and with each tender caress, the counterfeit bankroll bulged for all to see.

The crow gripped Jupiter more tightly as the weasel drew a jacked-up slingshot out of his leather satchel. Trouper braced hisself. He cranked the miniature catapult until its arm was fully cocked and in assault position. He took aim, his furry finger extending toward the trigger on the slingshot’s wooden handle, and fired. Across the midway, a group of girls squealed as their teetering seats topped the Ferris wheel’s luminous peak; the crowd at Marx’s stall gasped as the slingshot snapped into action with an ear-splitting crack of released carbon dioxide.

The crow mimed he’d been hit. He creaked his sooty wings around in comical circles, then swallowed the confectioner’s gear with a tinny gulp. The orrery shuddered to a halt. From beneath cracked eyelids, he watched his performance drain dollar signs away from the sea of greedy faces beneath him. He chuckled as he righted hisself on his now-stalled perch.

“Take that, you old shit,” he squawked at Marx, ruffling his oil-slick plumage. “Try and get your precious gear now.”

“You see, folks? You see what pain he gives me? Please — someone — anyone — step right up! Help me shut that miserable trap of his for good!” Right on cue, the bird started wheezing, hacking and choking, reeling the crowd in with faux suffering. He covered his beak with a wing — as all polite crows should do when they cough — and replaced the dissolved candy gear with its golden counterpart. Beams of golden light twinkled out of the crow’s mouth as the clean gear was reinstated, wedged between the upper and lower sections of his beak.

The crowd fell quiet at Marx’s feet. A chorus of accordions droned down the midway; coal-burners roared with delight as they powered bumper cars next door; whistles sporadically announced winners all across the carnival’s crooked landscape; [" — yet I cannot choose but laugh, To think it should leave crying — " wafted out of the skin-tents]; but the group that had pressed in close to witness the crow’s imminent demise was shocked into distrustful silence by the weasel’s apparent failure, and the crow’s derring-do.

Venus chose that moment to add insult to the audience’s injury. The rose-coloured globe, two prongs away from the crow’s own Jupiter, flared on the orrery with a sudden brightness that blinded the already mute crowd, throwing the midway into unflattering relief. Yet when the yellow-blue afterimages faded from the spectators’ eyes, their hands sprang together with gleeful applause. Tiny wind-up fireflies had escaped their Venusian cage: on Marx’s command, they buzzed into formation, their minute bodies spelling out ‘Golden Guinea‘ in a bewitching message of fortune.

“Never fear, my friends. What did I tell you? Everyone’s a winner at Robin Marx’s.”  The showman beamed with feigned magnanimity from his position on the stall’s counter. He released the hidden lever that had unleashed the automatic fireflies, and blew contented smoke rings from his hat as he coddled the ersatz pocket watch. “Yes, the crow’s still a crook, but good Trouper here shook him up a good one, didn’t he?” Catcalls and wolf whistles punctuated general expressions of good humour in response. 

“And as the Lady Venus wills, the Gentleman shall receive,” Marx said. A newly-struck gold coin instantly appeared in Marx’s hand, and disappeared just as quickly in Trouper’s. The weasel snatched the throwaway as if it were the first and last coin he’d ever see, then forced a retreat through the jostling herd now vying to knock the crow senseless.

Mark after mark placed feet on painted footprints, squared their shoulders and threw — but none seemed blessed with Trouper’s luck. Children began throwing tantrums instead of projectiles. One snivelling whelp kicked up such a stink that Marx gave both boy and mother a few ducats to go and see the Marx Brothers’ Rocket-Powered Penny Farthings. This one tactical freebie was all it took; a deluge of 5p’s avalanched across the countertop, and into Marx’s purse.

More stones were launched the crow’s way amid showers of minor coins; the first of these missed, but the latter staunchly met their target. “Sorry, matie,” Marx said to one sour-breathed contestant, whose chest heaved against his sweat-soaked shirt after another pebble hurtled wide of its mark. “Your robust bear-huggers are just too strong for this game! You threw that one so quick, I reckon an African cheeter couldn’t have caught it.”

“C’mon, Marx. Give me a rehash. I’ll slip you a free strudel next time you come past my bakery,” said the blubbery man through his long mustachios. Marx walked behind the counter, tilted his bulk forward on the orrery’s concealed pedals, and said, “Tell you what I’ll do for you, matie: if you win on the next go, I’ll give you back every penny you’ve gambled. Guaranteed. Peg this wretched bird with all your impressive might and you’ll have more dough than you could ever knead at that bakery of yours.”

Marx’s tongue kept flappin’ until he got his way; such smooth words never did the marks any good. Bitter smoke billowed from the street vendors’ burners, following the losers home. Nightwatchmen changed shifts, grunting salutations and beating billies against enhanced meat-hooks, as adrenaline levels bloated the carnival’s nihilistic avenues. ["To see now, how a jest shall come about!" laughed the dancing girls, " I warrant, an I should live a thousand years, I never should forget it — "] The disgruntled baker turned away from Marx’s stall, stuffing his remaining two guineas into a ragged pocket. He nearly tripped over the fox wheeling its way up to the target.

Dressed in a chrome yellow top hat and matching damask suit, the fox was a dapper fellow, every inch a gentleman. The spiked wheels of his wicker invalid’s chair sought purchase on the midway’s greasy cobblestones; they skidded nauseatingly, and moved forward at an inchworm’s pace. No matter if it took until morning for his master to reach his goal, the fox’s kettledrum construct would not interfere. Only when he was contentedly puffing away on a mahogany pipe, his wheeled chair jauntily parked on the scuffed painted footprints, did the housebot approach. He draped a Burberry rug across his master’s immobile copper knees, tucking it gently between the chair’s arms and the fox’s atrophied hindquarters, then stood off to his left-hand side.

The fox’s eyes never wavered from their prize as he asked the bot to analyse the odds of his winning this game.

A slender ticker tape chugged out of a slit beneath the construct’s speaker box. He tore it against his serrated teeth, and passed the results over to his master. “Immeasurably in your favour. As usual, Sir.”

“Hey there, cowboy.” Marx rearranged his features until they imitated a passably charming grin. He released a burst of steam from his top hat as he spoke.

The crow eyeballed the fox from his lofty perch. Those who balanced on wheels instead of legs were such simple targets. Weaker than children, and less confident. “Come have a go,” he said, flicking the gear to the corner of his beak and projecting his voice for all to hear. “In fact, what’s say we give him TWO goes for free, on accounta his poorly condition? Don’t that sound fair, Robin?” he asked, seeking and receiving the showman’s nod.

The fox tapped his pipe on the chair’s padded arm, watched its sticky contents combine with the sludge lazily seeping around his wheels. [" — let them measure us by what they will, We'll measure them a measure, and be gone..."] He flicked a shred of tobacco off his lap, and gently cleared his throat.

“Indeed, I will take two shots, as you’ve so kindly offered, Mr Black,” said the fox.

It took a second for the crow to realise the fox was addressing him. Not ‘bird’, not ‘jackdaw’, not ’scoundrel’, no. He was Mr. Black.

The fox feigned interest in the kaleidoscopic projections whirling around Marx’s tent while the crow fluffed and preened his feathers.

Then he opened fire.

“Shot the first: a question. How did such a magnificent creature — genuine Corvus corone, pure flesh and bone, not a single enhancement — how did such a miraculous being come to be shackled and used as a cyborg’s lackey?”

The crow spluttered, and nearly swallowed the gear in earnest.

“Shot the second,” the fox continued, undaunted. “An offer. Work for me.”

The crow cocked his head, and waited for the punch line.

“Let me set the terms,” said the fox, “for I am sure you will find them suitably appealing.”

“First,” he said, “I will prohibit you from participating in any specimen of show — even though it would be an absolute delight to hear your dulcet tones raised in song, Mr Black, old chap.”

“But, no. No singing today. Instead, I would like to employ your golden sense. What does Mr Marx pay you? Some flattering mirrors in front of which you might preen? Perhaps some chymical bird-feed?”

The crow kept silent.

["True, I talk of dreams,
Which are the children of an idle brain,
Begot of nothing but vain fantasy..."]

“I will offer you a gentleman’s fare, Mr Black,” the fox continued, quietly. “I am not interested in paying carny’s fees for such a one as you are. Sneer all you like at the term, Mr Marx; you cannot deny that you have treated this dark angel as nothing more than a lowly carny.”

“I need a partner, Mr Black, for a somewhat more lucrative… oh, let’s call it a venture, shall we? Your guile, your cleverness, your wit: these are exactly the assets I need for this undertaking. You are far too intelligent for this braggart’s show! In fact, the show’s very success hinges on your intellect. Don’t think I didn’t see you exchange the false gear with the real, earlier — ”

— the crowd stirred, grumbled as they fondled their weightless pockets —

— Marx fumed, “That’s enough out of you, cowboy — ”

“ — indeed without your finesse, there would be no Robin Marx! And how does he repay you? By tying you to a mouldy planet and shoving a gear down your gullet?”

["Ay, while you live, draw your neck out of the collar..."]

“What horror will he perform next? Are you a crow, Mr Black? Or are you a soiled dove, blackened much as this city has been of late, by too many trips up Marx’s sooty arse?”

The paralytic’s got a point, thought the crow.

He spat the gear out, propelling it with fury, loosening his tongue to ingratiate hisself to his new employer. The crowd dispersed like exhaled smoke. [Ladies, dames, raised their voices, " To move is to stir; and to be valiant is to stand; therefore, if thou art mov'd, thou runn'st away..."]

The tiny gear negotiated a haphazard path across the cobblestones, before spinning to a halt at the housebot’s burnished feet. Before Marx could shift his frame off the counter, the bot had dropped a silk handkerchief onto the gear, collected it, and polished it properly. Then he lifted his master’s damask coattails, exposing the clockworks inset in his narrow russet back.

Half of the works were still, while the other portion whirred out their quotidian functions. The bot gently laid the gear into the fox’s lower back, and used his index finger to screw it into place.

“What do you want me to do, boss?” asked the crow, his eagerness to escape the ramshackle orrery hanging like a painful chandelier from his brief question.

“Why, you’ve already done it, old chap,” said the newly mobile fox as his lower legs sprang to life.  “You really have done it!”

["O, Wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied?"]

Yipping like a newborn pup, the fox switched his tail into overdrive. He sprang out of his redundant chair, blew the crow a grateful kiss as he sped past, fleeing the scene before he could get slicked.

["What satisfaction canst thou have to-night?" chimed the sideshow dames as the Johnnies were ejected from their parlours. The women's laughter was harsh and raw.]

About the Author

Lisa Hannett lives in Adelaide, South Australia. Her short fiction is forthcoming in On Spec, Fantasy, and AntipodeanSF and has recently appeared in the Canterbury 2100 anthology. Lisa is a graduate of the Clarion South Workshop. When shes not writing fantasy, she writes reviews for the Australian Book Review and The Adelaide Review. She hopes to complete her PhD in medieval Icelandic literature before she is older than her subject matter.

“Dirty Hands and Invisible Words: Speculative Fiction Book Editors Speak Out, Part 1 of 2″
by Jeremy L. C. Jones

Editors are advocates — book advocates. They are champions of the books they edit and the authors they work with. They are, as Chris Schluep of Ballantine/Villard/Del Rey said, “both steward and cheerleader for the book and author.”

Below, fourteen book editors talk about what it is that they do. They represent a variety of publishers — from independent specialty presses in San Francisco, CA, and Lexington, KY to bigger houses in London and New York City.

The editors themselves wear or have worn many different hats.

“On creative issues, a good editor is a hybrid of critical gadfly and surrogate reader,” said James Lowder, who is both an award-winning editor and novelist. “The editor should challenge the writer, asking questions and highlighting problems so that the work’s artistic statement can be made clearer.”

Some of the editors below are or have been copyeditors, substantive editors, structural, or acquisitions editors. Each of them finds him- or herself a crucial part of a book’s production process. “We get a manuscript,” said Victoria Blake of Underland Press, “and we turn it into a book.”

Some are more hands-on than others. Some have moved more toward marketing, and others spend their days getting their hands dirty in the guts of a promising book from a beginning novelist.

Whatever their titles may be, they all seem to agree with Paula Guran of Juno Books, who said, “My job is to make the book as good as the author and I can make it.”

The Editors in Brief

Lou Anders  is the editorial director of Pyr, a science fiction and fantasy imprint of Prometheus Books.

Philip Athans has been a full-time staff editor at TSR, Inc. and Wizards of the Coast since 1995.

Victoria Blake is the publisher and founder of Underland Press, an independent specialty press.

Paula Guran is the editor of Juno Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster’s Pocket Books.

Gabrielle Harbowy is a freelance editor, and editor-in-charge at Dragon Moon Press.

James Lowder has worked as an editor for both large publishers and tiny independents, on projects that include New York Times bestselling shared world novels and small, critically acclaimed creator-owned titles.

John Jarrold has run three science fiction and fantasy imprints in the United Kingdom, worked as a freelance editor, and now runs the John Jarrold Literary Agency.

Susan J. Morris the Forgotten Realms® line editor at Wizards of the Coast.

Darren Nash is the editorial director at Orbit UK.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden edits books for Tor Books, among other publishers.

Chris Schluep is a Senior Editor at Ballantine/Villard/Del Rey.

Simon Spanton is the editorial director at Orion/Gollancz Books in the United Kingdom.

Deb Taber is the senior book editor of the Apex Book Company, an independent specialty press.

Jacob Weisman is the founding editor and publisher of Tachyon Publications, an independent specialty press. 

Are you a hands-on, hands-off, or somewhere in between editor?

Blake: I come from a journalism background, where editorial meddling is par for the course. As a journalist, I came to believe that the words I chose and the order I put them in might not be the best words in the best order. The editor’s job was to point that out to me, to help make my story better. I’ve taken a little of that attitude into book editing. I guess that would make me more hands-on than hands-off, but this depends entirely on the project and the author. In general, I’ve found authors to be appreciative of the editorial involvement.

There is as much art to editing as there is to writing, I think. In general, an editor’s role is to make the work better, not according to the editor’s rules and beliefs, but according to the intention of the work itself. This statement denies the very real market forces at work, and the occasional impulse to make the work more “marketable,” as opposed to “better.” But that’s a dangerous trap, one that I, personally, can only avoid by being aware of it and of the fact that “more marketable” does not equal “better.”

Harbowy: I like to be a hands-on sort of editor. I’m fortunate to do some of my work in the small-press environment where I often have the experience of being submissions editor and substantive editor and proofreader all for the same manuscript, really working with it all the way from slush pile to print. I like to be able to ask authors the sorts of questions about the characters and the world that will enhance the book for the reader. I’ve always been a compulsive typo-catcher, so I even like doing the copyediting, as much as my workload permits. Developing a rapport with the authors and watching the manuscript gain its refinement and polish are among my favorite parts of the job.

Guran: Hands-on. A few authors turn in books that need very few fingers, but most need more involvement.

Athans: Though it would be fair to say I’m hands-off in some respects and hands-on in others, in the greater scheme of things the specific sort of books we publish demand that I be more than a little hands-on. Our authors are bringing their creative vision into our shared worlds, so it’s up to me, and the rest of the editors here, not only to nurture those authors and their writing, but to maintain and develop the worlds they’re writing in, worlds that have grown, in the case of Dragonlance, over the course of twenty-five years now, and more than twenty for the Forgotten realms line. Ultimately my primary responsibility is to those properties and their fans.

Nash: I get as involved in the editorial process as I can, given the circumstances at the time I’m editing. There are a lot of factors that determine how deep one can delve into a manuscript — how tight the production schedule is, how polished the manuscript is, how the author prefers to work — so the process is different for every book. Am I a hands-on, hands-off, or somewhere in between editor? I think I’m somewhere in between but you’d have to ask my authors for the definitive answer.

Anders: This depends entirely on the project and the writer. There are manuscripts where I have delved very deep into the structure of the work, and there are manuscripts that I have left virtually untouched. I’ve just acquired a fantasy novel by a debut author, where I probably gave him about 20 separate notes of things that needed clarification (despite it being a brilliant book). In one instance, we’ve agreed to move a major scene from about the third-quarter of the book to the first quarter, for the way such new placement would help define/refine the arc of that character.

And there’s one book in the Pyr list where I was convinced that a major plot point could not have unfolded in the way it did from the clues the author dropped earlier in the text. When I pointed that out to him, he saw it to, and we changed the scene dramatically.

But there are other manuscripts that come in like perfectly-crafted diamonds, where I’m afraid to take a chisel to them least they fracture.

I think that I am very hands-on overall in the sense that I often seek out what — and who — I want, rather than waiting for it to come to me, and will suggest directions to writers for the kinds of books I’d like to see from them. I’m currently hounding two authors for books I very specifically want to see from them.

And in November we’re coming out with Mark Chadbourn’s The Silver Skull, a brilliant historical fantasy/secret history about an Elizabethean James Bond-type character on the front lines of a cold war with the Fae Realm. It grew out of Mark’s story “Who Wounds the Gyant, Slays the Beast,” which I’d read in The Solaris Book of New Fantasy. I was traveling in Asia, but couldn’t get the story out of my head. So I wrote Mark to ask him if he’d consider doing a novel based on the character, he responded immediately that his agent was going out with a pitch for it the next day, I asked to see it immediately, read it, called my boss long distance, and we’d acquired it within a few days. I negotiated the whole deal and even put together the contract from a hotel room in Hong Kong. So I’m hands-on in that way. I also have a big mouth.

Schluep: I consider myself to be a hands-on editor. It’s something I take pride in. But over the past five or so years, as editors’ lists have grown and the number of editors has constricted, I find there’s less and less time to just sit and work with a manuscript. It’s a constant struggle to balance all the necessary in-house work — covers, marketing, publicity, sales, agent relations, acquisition, and the basic nuts and bolts of making a book happen — with the work that originally drew me to the business, which is the part involving the words. Basically, I edit at home now.

Spanton: When it comes to editing the actual book I hope I’m as exactly as hands-on as I need to be. Even when a book might require you to be more hands-on than normal, though, it’s as well to remember that it’s not your name on the front of the book. With regards to all the other things an editor does, I hope I’m very hands-on.

Weisman: Mostly hands-off. I can get my hands dirty when I need to, but most of the writers we publish don’t need much editing.

Morris: I see editing as a dialogue. On a story level, I point out problem areas and suggest ways to fix them, but ultimately, I want to arrive at a solution the author and I are both happy with. When it comes to the line-by-line, I try to preserve the integrity of the author’s style and story while still serving the needs of the audience and Intellectual Property (IP), which often results in a heavy first draft edit, with conversation afterward, followed by a light final edit. I’d say this makes me an in-between editor.

Lowder: I consider myself an interactive editor. How “hands-on” or “hands-off” I am on a project depends upon the author’s wishes.

Taber: I’m a fairly hands-on editor (some of our writers might say more than “fairly”) but the vast majority of changes I make to a manuscript are simply for punctuation, so damages aren’t necessarily as overwhelming as they might seem at first glance. I’m also open to back-and-forth discussion of changes with an author.

Quite often, my request for a change leads to the author coming up with a third alternative that makes the story stronger than either the original or my suggested change. I think I enjoy that the most, because it makes the story stronger in the author’s own words.

I believe very strongly in maintaining the author’s voice in any work, but also in upholding a standard of grammar and mechanics. As a writer, I know how hard it is to have your words changed after all of the effort you put into creating them, but I believe that part of an editor’s job is to act as a representative for the reader. With very few exceptions, a reader shouldn’t have to work to understand any individual sentence in a story, or reread paragraphs over and over again just to find their surface meaning. Deeper meanings, of course, can take multiple reads, but with the exception of poetry and certain experimental pieces, the words should become invisible to allow the flow of action, character, and plot to absorb the reader’s attention. This can be achieved in a piece with a highly textured rhythm and style (I’m thinking of Paul Jessup’s work here), or it can be achieved through straightforward language (I’m thinking Connie Willis).

My job is to ensure that, whatever the author’s voice may be, the story works as a consistent whole that communicates its intent to the reader and doesn’t get in his or her way.

Jarrold: Hands-on. I love talking through editorial work with the author, having a dialogue. In some ways, I have to see the wood for the trees and to represent the reader, as well as looking through the eyes of a professional editor.

Nielsen Hayden: I like to think that a big part of the judgment that goes into being a successful editor is knowing when to get deeply involved in a book’s structure and text, and also knowing when to leave an author’s work alone. Whichever path I take, though, I try to keep in mind that it’s not my name that’s going on the cover of the book, it’s the author’s.

I can be very detail-oriented when it seems to me appropriate. I’ve been a freelance copyeditor and line editor. But by and large the kinds of books I tend to acquire at Tor aren’t “product” written to fit some preconceived template; they’re original work, written by people with distinctive styles and voices. I won’t hesitate to tell even a very literary, very craft-conscious writer that a particular sentence doesn’t work, that a passage of description is overlong or misplaced, or that the plot has taken a wrong turn. But I do try to be careful not to sand off the distinctive quirks of style that make an author read like herself. Jo Walton writes sentences and paragraphs in which, if I’d written them, I’d have deployed more commas. But that’s part (a very small part) of what makes Jo Walton read like Jo Walton. Just as authors sometimes find they need to forcibly quiet their internal editor, I make a conscious effort to squelch my inner copyeditor. (This is not a knock against actual copyeditors, who have saved my ass more times than I can count.)

What is entailed in editing a book? Or, put differently, what exactly do you do as the editor?

Guran: It depends on the book. I work with a lot of new authors and sometimes they need substantial notes in order to really get the manuscript to a point where we can then polish it.

Others don’t need that. Overall, I’m looking for everything to make sense plot- and character-wise; logic; clarity; proper conveyance of the author’s meaning; making sure there’s enough detail/description, but not too much; pacing; believable timeline; good dialogue — everything that makes a book a “good read.” I’m also looking for the mechanical stuff: grammar, usage, spelling, punctuation, etc. In the case of sequels, I am also making sure the books are consistent.

Harbowy: I do a lot of copyediting and substantive editing. I read carefully through a manuscript and leave notations to correct grammar, spelling, punctuation, and to standardize spellings and technical issues that might be inconsistent. Meanwhile, I look for inconsistencies, continuity errors, and anything vague, awkward or misleading that might confuse the reader (on the plot level as well as on the sentence level), or weak moments and threads that could be stronger. I query or leave comments on those issues. Often the author understands the concerns I’ve raised and they’re easily fixed or clarified in the manuscript, and sometimes more discussion is warranted.

Athans: It seems to me that the role of the editor in what we call “mainstream” publishing has been on the wane for the last decade at least, with agents taking on more responsibility for working with authors. That’s not something we’ve allowed to happen here at Wizards of the Coast. And again, the nature of shared-world or “tie-in” publishing means we have a very different process from most other publishers.

Our editors are more often than not the progenitor of the original idea for a book or series, and they sketch out the parameters that the authors will be working in. Sometimes this process is quite intense, requiring the creation of a detailed “series bible” that authors have to work from. This was the case with series like Sembia: Gateway to the Realms and R.A. Salvatore’s War of the Spider Queen. Sometimes the parameters are a little more loose, as with series like The Wilds, which are united by a basic theme but left more open to what an individual author can bring in.

From there our editors work with their authors to create an outline, we provide supporting materials like previously published books in that line, game products, and material that’s in the works but not yet published. Once we’re all satisfied that we’re headed in the right direction we let the author write, answering questions and acting as a sounding board for ideas as necessary as they go along. Once a first draft is completed it’s read carefully with a wide range of elements in mind, from the basic stuff like grammar and usage, to the “softer” elements like storytelling and characterization, and the ever-present requirements of continuity for the bigger line and the related game.

The editor then provides detailed notes and the author goes away and revises. When we’re satisfied that we have a final draft that hits all the points we need to make it the strongest possible addition to the line, we’ll use the services of freelance copy editors and proofreaders to help us get a fresh set of eyes on the text. Ultimately it’s the line editor’s responsibility to make a final pass through the text and make sure it’s as perfect as we can get it.

Blake: Book publishing is production work. We get a manuscript and we turn it into a book. Editorial work is only part of the job. The rest is project management: keeping schedules, designing workflow, sending this part of the project to design and that part to marketing. It involves daily communication with a team of people — designers, artists, writers, production, etc. I sometimes liken myself and my job to an octopus sitting at a desk, typing an email, talking on the phone, pouring some coffee, editing a text, checking some marketing copy, and making sure the barcodes match with the ISBNs.

Lowder: On creative issues, a good editor is a hybrid of critical gadfly and surrogate reader. The editor should challenge the writer, asking questions and highlighting problems so that the work’s artistic statement can be made clearer. He or she can suggest solutions, but it’s more important to point out the potential weaknesses in a work and allow the writer to address them in his or her own voice. On a practical level, this means reading the book at various stages, from plot outline through multiple drafts, and marking them up with comments for the writer’s consideration.

Editors also keep books on schedule — well, they try to keep books on schedule; they cannot force an author to turn over a draft that doesn’t exist — and perform other commercial support tasks. Depending on the publisher, those tasks can be anything from penning jacket copy to lining up PR blurbs to creating cover art suggestions. In this, editors are the mediators between the publisher and the writer. I still look at these jobs with an aesthetic squint. Presentation and other commercial concerns impact how a book, as a work of art, is perceived by the potential audience.

Anders: This is a big question, particularly in my case as I am the “editorial director” of the Pyr line, a role that encompasses more than just acquisitions. In this regard, I read all manuscripts that come in, select the very small percentage of these that I am interested in acquiring, present them to my parent company for approval, negotiate with the agents or authors for the sale, work with the author on any structural changes or clarifications/improvements that need to be made to the manuscript, select and hire the cover artist, art direct the cover, oversee/approve the internal layout of the book that is laid out by typesetting, write the back cover copy (in conjunction with the author and an in-house editor), art direct our in-house design staff for the typography and layout of the book’s jacket, advised marketing on how best to advertize it, work with publicity on same, assist in all the various outward focused efforts that require book descriptions, help compile comparative buys for online retailers, and serve as an advocate both inside and outside of the house for the book. Inside the house, because my parent company publishes 100 titles a year on average (out of which Pyr is about 30), I am the book’s advocate to remind all the various departments what the book is about, why it is important, and how to market and package it. Outside, I maintain our newsletter, blog, Twitter and Facebook pages/accounts, and travel about once every other month to speak at conventions and libraries on our book line. I also get asked for interviews about once a week now (which I happily/gratefully agree to, thank you), and I scheme constantly about how to get books into readers hands. So, basically, I eat breath and sleep science fiction and fantasy, and it’s not uncommon for me to wake up at 3 am with something in my head like “OMG, we need to put a map in the front of Joel Shepherd’s latest fantasy novel. I better get on that ASAP” or “Have I checked in with Stephan Martiniere to make sure the cover for The Dervish House is on track?” or “Did we switch that author photo of Mike Resnick on the jacket flap out with the new one he prefers?” With all of that going on, actually sitting down with a red pen and a manuscript seems like a very tiny portion of the job description.

Nash: An editor provides the crucial outside eye. We are (usually) able to be objective where an author can’t be, because he or she has invested so much of themselves in their work. I see my job as helping the writer to get his or her vision across as clearly as possible to as many people as possible. I help the author make sure that the structure of the book is both logical and entertaining, the characters are consistent, the pacing works, that the novel pays off in the end (and does so in a manner that flows logically from the rest of the book) — and, because I’m a commercial editor, I try to help the author make the book as accessible as possible. This doesn’t mean dumbing the book down for the lowest common denominator, by the way, it means removing unnecessary impediments to attracting the largest potential audience. It may not sit well with those who prefer their art to be unsullied by commercial concerns but part of my job is to sell as many books as I can for my authors — it is the source of their income, after all.

Morris: A novel either starts with a concept or with an author — and once I have one, I set about finding the other. From there, the author and I develop the concept into an outline, which I comment on and the author revises until we’re both happy with it. Then I answer any questions the author has while writing their first draft, providing support, ideas, and research.

Once I receive the first draft, I edit it for character, plot, theme, tone, grammar and spelling, and line continuity, as well as looking for additional unexplored opportunities within the IP — usually leaving detailed notes in-line and sending an editorial letter with larger-scale notes. The author and I discuss my notes, and then the author writes the final draft. After I receive the final draft, I do a line-by-line edit of the manuscript, requesting additional rewrites if necessary. I send it to a copy editor, followed by a proofreader, and lastly the author to try to get the manuscript as clean as possible. After checking and integrating everyone’s corrections, I proofread the typeset galleys one final time before the manuscript leaves my hands to be prepared for the printer.

Schluep: The first step in the author-editor relationship is acquisition, which almost exclusively involves dealing with an agent (we just don’t have time to read unsolicited manuscripts anymore). So we start out as acquisitions editors. We read the manuscripts, decide what we want to buy, attend the acquisitions meeting where we explain why we like the book and what we want to pay for it. Then we make the offer, negotiate with the agent, and hopefully get the book.

Once the contract has been put through, we have three basic concerns: sales, marketing, and the book itself. Before we can sell a book to the consumer, we first have to sell the book in-house — it’s essential that we get the sales force and our other colleagues excited about the book. Then we have to get the company’s resources behind it, and an important part of those resources is marketing dollars and attention. Those resources are limited, so it’s on us to make sure we funnel as much as we can toward our projects.

Lastly — but not leastly — there’s the book. Putting together a book involves book design, the cover, copy, copy editing, and the editing itself, among other things. All but the editing are primarily performed by other people, but the editor is certainly involved in each step along the way. When it comes to my editing approach, there are two important and separate stages: first, there’s the “big idea” edit, where we sharpen the beginning, fix the end, add or delete scenes, work on character development, that sort of thing; then comes the more fine tuned line edit and cutting, which I think is what’s traditionally seen as editing.

Weisman: For anthologies, we use external editors (such as Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, Ellen Datlow, James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel). I work with editors on the concept of the anthology and we come up with a list of potential contributors; they take over from there. With collections, I generally work closely with the authors to pick out the stories that will best form a cohesive (and enjoyable) book. Reprints don’t need editing. Original novels, of which we try to do at least a couple a year, may have some additional editing needed, but as we only work with established authors, the manuscripts will only need one to two rounds of additional corrections, if that.

Spanton: Actually working with the author on the text of the book is only part of the job. In short I’m the author’s main point of contact for the company and the company’s main point of contact for the author. I liaise with production, art, rights, marketing, publicity and sales on each and every book. I brief the cover, I write the copy, I review catalogue copy, I pitch the book to the sales team, I make sure the rights department know all they need to know about the book, I keep the author up to date with what’s going on, I negotiate with the author’s agent over the initial deal and liaise with the contracts department. I speak to bloggers and keep various forums up to date with what we’re doing. I attend publishing meetings, marketing meetings, art meetings, rights fairs and sales presentations. Oh, and I read submissions and acquire books.

Taber: Part of my job is to read submissions that have made it through the first round of slush and decide if they are something we want to acquire or not, but the vast majority of my work is performing line edits. That’s exactly what it sounds like — editing line by line. I convert the whole book or story into my preferred format first, then turn on the Track Changes (we’re fully electronic at Apex) and do an editing pass on the complete manuscript, often leaving myself comments in the margins about sections I want to take another look at later. Once the first pass is finished, I go back through to the notes I’ve left myself and take another look at those areas; then I do a quick once-over of the changes I’ve made. I clean up my notes and leave any notes for the author, then send the manuscript back with instructions on how to accept/reject/comment on the changes.

Once the author has gone through the manuscript, I’ll go through the new version and find the sections that still need a little bit of work. By this point, it’s usually fairly minimal — maybe six to ten notes for a novella/novel, or about three for a short story. I’ll usually just note those in an email to the author and we’ll work it out that way, rather than having to dig through the full manuscript for just a few notes.

After that, the manuscript goes to Jason Sizemore — the brains, brawn, and driving force of Apex Publishing — who does the layout himself. At that point I try to work on back cover copy, press release copy, and any other promotional materials while the story is still fresh in my mind. Sometimes that doesn’t happen if a new project is needing line edits, but that’s my ideal process.

Once the book is laid out, a PDF is sent to the author and one of our proofreaders (the talented Sarah Brandel and Emily Dettmar) for a final check.

Jarrold: When I worked in publishing, I would give full editorial notes — structural, general, and specific, which could range from two to ten pages long. Sometimes, I’d suggest swinging changes to characters, plotlines, even starting the book in a different place; sometime I only had to mention specifics, dependent on the author. But one is also the book and author’s main supporter in a company that might be publishing several hundred other authors. One has to make sure that both the author and the genre are taken seriously, in commercial terms, by the sales, marketing, publicity and other departments. And I also visited the main retail head offices to discuss the authors I was publishing.

Nielsen Hayden: At Tor, at any rate, the role of a particular book’s editor is to be a combination of project manager, cheerleader, and liaison with all the other departments. The project manager role encompasses what people imagine when they think about editors working on books — the actual hands-on-the-manuscript stuff. But the other roles are every bit as important. I spend a lot of time making sure that a critical mass of other people at Tor and Macmillan are sufficiently “signed on” to my particular books that they do better-than-average work. The plain fact is that every house publishes slightly more books than they actually should,* and the scarcest resource in any publishing organization isn’t money, it’s human attention. So while I don’t necessarily need everyone who works on my books to read every word of them, I try very hard to spot ways in which each of my books provides some kind of opportunity for other parts of the house to do work that’s fun and fulfilling. Sometimes that means talking to the art department about ways we could do something distinctive and different with the jacket. Sometimes that means nudging a publicist to see angles that weren’t obvious. Sometimes it does mean urging particular department heads or staff members to read a particular book, because (if I’m doing my job right) I’ve paid attention to my co-workers enough to have an idea which books are likely to get them fired up and interested.

In a sense, it’s very political work. And I’ve seen the occasional editors who regards this part of the job as a zero-sum-game, a struggle against their colleagues for the house’s limited resources. I don’t think it has to be that way, because when the right people are paired with the right work, energy begets more energy. Happily, most long-term book editors tend, temperamentally, to be the kind of people who recognize the advantages of cooperation over beggar-thy-neighbor competition.

* Footnote: All publishers publish more books than they should, and all publishers believe that the other publishers should cut back.

Has your job as editor changed in recent years? Do you see a trend for the future?

Nash: The main change in the editor’s role has been away from actually editing. The shelves are more crowded than they’ve ever been, and it’s becoming harder and harder to stand out from the crowd - especially in SF&F where the trade doesn’t have the same sorts of promotional vehicles that can make an instant success of a thriller or a big literary novel if the publisher is prepared to throw enough money at it. A modern editor needs to be involved in briefing a stand-out cover, writing enticing cover copy (the reality of the modern trade is that six months before a book is published it’s more important to have a finished cover than it is to have a finished manuscript), analyzing sales figures, liaising with the sales, marketing and publicity teams, keeping bibliographic databases up to date, watching for opportunities in the trade, keeping abreast of market trends, writing reports and a myriad other tasks that seem to be completely divorced from the editor’s role but actually have a good deal of bearing on how successful a book or author is. Oh, and somewhere in there it would help if we could edit the odd manuscript and read a few submissions.

It’s tremendously difficult (not to mention dangerous) to try to predict trends in publishing — particularly with the digital landscape so fluid. I do think we’ll see more convergence in between print and digital publishing, particularly from the independent publishers and small presses. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to see more small presses pop up to fill the niches the larger publishers leave unexplored. Obviously, the online space is becoming more and more important. How long before online retail is worth more of the book market than bricks and mortar?

The main trend I see for editors, though, is that in an era of specialization, the editor is poised to go the other way and develop into the renaissance man of publishing — editing the manuscript, closely involved in the execution of the cover, an integral part of the marketing and publicity, and selling the book to the key trade buyers by virtue of head office presentations and close liaison with sales teams. Perhaps the place those small presses I mentioned will pop up is under the auspices of the big corporate publishing groups?

Lowder: Computers and the Internet have changed editing substantially. Word processing programs make it much easier for an editor to interact with a text, though the danger there is an easily satisfied temptation to tinker with someone’s prose more than is necessary or helpful. In this era when a careless keystroke can screw up an entire manuscript, writers need to be especially careful to review their prose at every step of production. Fortunately, the Internet makes that sort of communication and transparency simple. Drafts and page proofs can be exchanged for review in seconds rather than days, with negligible cost and in a format that can be transitioned to production with ease.

In the next few years, technological advances and staff cuts are going to mean editors will find themselves doing more production tasks. I find it saves a lot of time and streamlines production, without adding a lot of work to my schedule, if I typeset a book I’m editing. Once you have the software, it’s relatively easy to gain that skill set. And as the cost of that software continues to drop and more writers acquire those basic production skills, no doubt a lot of projects will be pushed into the marketplace with no editorial input at all.

Anders: My job is going backwards. I started in 2000 at a now-defunct company called Bookface.com that was in the online publishing space. We partnered with publishers to put browser-based etexts on line, with click-thrus to Amazon, etc… I was an early advocate of the notion that the book is the best advertisement for itself, with complete texts online for free reading, presented under the assumption that most readers would at some point stop working their way through the browser and order the actual book. Whether that’s true or not, I know my own book buying surged the year I worked there!

But anyway, when the dot com bubble burst, I was left with hundreds of contacts in the print publishing world, so I began freelance editing a series of anthologies and magazines, and in 2004, was approached by nonfiction publisher Prometheus Books to give them a science fiction line. We created Pyr, now over four years old, and suddenly I find myself looking at ebooks again, in what feels like a career that has come full circle. We (as an industry) hit a real tipping point sometime after Christmas, and in fact, I’d date it to the debut of the Kindle App for iPhone, but somewhere in the first quarter of this year, the promised arrival of ebooks as a force to be reckoned with finally materialized, and I think we are in a whirlwind of change right now.

Small trends that I see are the rise of the importance of trade paperbacks, the dwindling of hardcovers, the increased dominance of urban fantasy, the migration of classic science fiction out of the bookstore category and into both literary mainstream and teen category fiction, and the return of swords & sorcery and its infusion with epic fantasy.

I’d also add that “marketing” itself has changed utterly, with most publishers redirecting their efforts away from traditional print ads towards online promotions, and that “transparency” has become central to a brand’s integrity. Or, to put it in more human terms, the top-down relationship between publishers and readers has given way to a new relationship that is far more peer-to-peer. We are all fans and readers, and the back and forth discussion that the net affords is an invaluable part of the process now. Also, a lot of fun.

Athans: Personally my job has changed some, moving away from hands-on editing to include more administrative and “strategic” sort of stuff, managing the staff of editors and working with a cross-functional team within Wizards to make sure everything stays on track. Though I miss some of the creative parts of the job, I still get to work with at least two great authors, R.A. Salvatore and Paul S. Kemp, and I get a little say in everything, which is pretty cool.

The trend that seems to be getting the most press currently is the growing e-book category, but even then that’s really about what happens after my job is done. We’re content providers, and whatever form that finally takes, whether you buy a printed book or download an e-book file, the content still has the same demands, and still has to be just as good.

Blake: This is a geeky answer, but the biggest change recently was that I signed up for an online database tool for helping to centralize the files among all of my freelancers. I’m working with four designers, two artists, three proofreaders, a firecracker publicity man, and a dozen writers. The online tool makes it much easier to keep everything organized.

Weisman: As Tachyon gets bigger I’ve had to transition from being the press’ primary editor to more of a hands-on publisher, who also does some editing. This frees me up to do more acquisitions — we publish about five times as many books a year as we did thirteen years ago.

Guran: I started editing full time with a small press, so I did everything other than cover art and design (which I at least had a hand in helping with) and the business/printing end of things. In addition to acquiring and line editing, I also typeset the books, did publicity, wrote copy, went to marketing meetings with the distributors and chain buyers… you name it.

Now, since the beginning of the year with Pocket, I still acquire and edit. I also still do anything I can to bring public awareness to the line. Pocket’s deadlines run much further out than small press, so it has been a lot of work simply getting on something close to a normal-for-them-production schedule. I’m still running myself a little ragged in order to catch up despite supposedly doing fewer “jobs”.

Obviously there are great advantages to working with the “big guys”, so no complaints. But sometimes I wish I still had more direct influence on some aspects and more contact with the marketing end of things.

The future? I’m looking at how major publishing works as a total outsider right now, even though I’m a publishing wonk. Still, I see a lot that my gut reaction to is: “Why?” Or “Why not…?” I think New York publishers will need some fresh ideas and some real hard looks at how things are done to remain profitable in business in the future.

Harbowy: Thanks to digital innovations, editors are able to work remotely and paperlessly. All the work I do is computer-based. I mark up and annotate files and e-mail them back and forth, I receive electronic proofs, I communicate with authors and publishers via e-mail and videoconference. It saves paper, it saves time and office space, and it allows me to work effectively with clients all over the world. I’m not even in the same country as the publisher I do the most work for, and we’re able to exchange files as conveniently as if we were in the same office. There are still editors who would rather have paper in front of them than edit on a screen, but I’m seeing a trend toward more electronic submissions and file handling. I think that eventually paper submissions — and traditional proofreading marks — are going to go away.

Taber: I’ve taken on a little bit more of the acquisitions, along with Sarah Brandel, our Submissions Editor for the book side of Apex. Jason used to handle most of that himself, but now we share the workload. One of my first acquisitions was a reprint of Elizabeth Engstrom’s When Darkness Loves Us, which I’ve loved since I was a teenager. That’s coming out in November, and I’m quite excited for the release.

Morris: My job is going electronic. At this point, I usually only ever see a manuscript on paper three times — once when I send it to the proofreader, once when I send it to the author for proofreading, and once when it arrives on my desk, bound and ready to be put on my bookshelf. All four of the other editing passes are done electronically. Someday, I expect my proofreaders and authors will both be proofreading electronically as well. While it took some time to get used to, it is definitely faster, cleaner, and more cost-effective.

Schluep: There just seems to be less time — and I don’t see more time opening up in the future. Also, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that marketing has become more important. There are just so many books out there, each one vying for people’s attention, and we as publishers need to find newer (and hopefully cheaper) ways to get our books in front of readers. I see editors becoming more involved in marketing, which is not to say that we’ll become part of the marketing department, but that we need to think in those terms. A good book can be almost as easily ignored as a bad one, so there is great pressure on editors to find marketable books. That said, what’s more satisfying than discovering a book or author that no one else believed in and proving everyone wrong? (The cynical answer: keeping your job. But we try not to become too cynical.)

The biggest trend I see is an increased utilization of the internet. (Surprise, it’s already here!… Yes, I know, but it’s only just becoming fully noticed by publishers). Blogs and other internet-related media are a great way to reach the audience you’re trying to reach, and you don’t have to spend oodles of dollars to do so. It’s cheap, it’s viral, and the people who write about your books are doing so because they care about them. That’s a good thing.

Spanton: The industry is changing all the time, its having to adapt to new delivery methods, new marketing opportunities, new sales challenges.

E-books will grow but books will survive. Either way people will still read and still read science fiction and fantasy. And hopefully people will still need editors to point them at the good stuff; whether it’s a leather bound special edition or a download to their mobile phone.

Jarrold: I saw the editor’s job being taken away from them by too many sales and marketing people (and Managing Directors in some cases), some of whom don’t read books, and want every book the company takes on to be perfect and ready to publish before one is allowed to make an offer. They seem to forget that is why they employ editors: to see a wonderful book that needs work, and to do that work. I left corporate publishing in 2002, and I’m now an agent. I edit most of my clients’ books before they are submitted, for that reason.

Nielsen Hayden: The biggest change to my job in recent years is that I’m now spending a certain amount of my time on Tor.com, the website run by Macmillan in parallel to Tor-Books-the-print-publishing-company. This has provided me with an interesting perch from which to observe (and occasionally contribute to) the intra-corporate discussion of how we imagine we’re all going to be making a living ten and twenty years from now. But that, as they say at the Fourth Street Fantasy Convention, is A Different Panel.

What sort of book do you most enjoy editing?

Anders: A good one!In all seriousness, if I’m not jumping up and down out of my chair with excitement over a manuscript, it will never get to the editing stage. There’s way way way too much competition out there for “good enough.” To stand out, you need “brilliant” and “un-put-downable.”

Guran: If I weren’t so driven by deadlines right now, I might say the “beginner books” where I feel I’m an integral part of actually shaping the book with the author. But I find myself having to rush too much these days with that process. Practically? Near-perfect manuscripts almost ready to pass to press are a joy.

Morris: Books with a lot of potential. The most awesome part of editing is seeing something beautiful in an author’s work, and having the honor of figuring out just how to cut, polish, and set that diamond-in-the-rough. When you can see that everything is there to make a great book, and you just have to massage the arcs and bring out the threads here and there, you really feel at your most useful. And seeing an author who is passionate about his work come into his own is an incredible experience.

Schluep: That’s a difficult question to answer. In the past, I used to say that my favorite books to edit were the ones from debut novelists. That’s still among my greatest pleasures. There is nothing quite as exciting as discovering a new talent and launching a career. But now that I’ve been in the business for more than a decade, I’ve developed strong relationships with a good number of established writers, many of whom I’ve had a hand in establishing, and I love working with them, too.

On a more general note, I look for books that excite me. That’s really general, I know; but it’s the truth and I think that’s the case for most editors, no matter what else they say. We read a lot of books — some published, most not — so we’re going to look to get excited by them. To go further, I like books that will start a conversation, whether it’s the ideas, the setting, the characters, or something plotwise that will stick with readers and cause them to want to talk about it. There’s nothing cooler than seeing people talking about your books. It’s incredibly satisfying.

A good story is fun to work on, too, but that’s about the most boring and general answer you could possibly give (although it’s the same reason that most people read fiction).

Spanton: The sort that readers most enjoy reading. If you don’t enjoy book that your company is publishing there’s something gone seriously wrong in the process. That said you also adopt different reading (and editorial) hats for different sorts of books.

Athans: I’m delighted to edit any book that the author was passionate about writing. If he or she had a burning desire to tell the story, that desire will come through, and it’ll be a joy to read even in its first draft form. If the author really cares, really wants it to be good, my job isn’t just easier, it’s a great deal more rewarding.

Taber: I love working with writers who really know how to use language. I mentioned Paul Jessup above — his novella, “Open Your Eyes,” is one of my favorite projects to date because it has a strong science fiction element, is wonderfully dark, and the language is incredibly rhythmic.

A few of the Apex editors came into dark SF from the horror side of the genre. I come more from the science fiction side, so I prefer books with some science to them, be it technology, physics, biology, chemistry, or the soft sciences of psychology, sociology, and even linguistics. I’m especially fond of biology/genetics, so editing books with a root in those sciences is almost like reading just for fun.

Weisman: Each book is unique challenge. Story collections and anthologies are easiest. I’ve done a lot of them. It’s like putting together a jigsaw puzzle with no straight edges that can be put together four or five different ways. The trick is to find the best possible solution. Novels are trickier, but ultimately it’s the same challenge. The book has to work, the authorial voice has to be consistent and compelling.

Lowder: The sort of book I most enjoy editing is one written by an author who is passionate, but open enough to editorial interaction that I’m expected to do more than rubber stamp the drafts as they’re submitted.

Harbowy: There’s no specific genre or type of book that appeals to me over other books. For me, a good story, well-written prose, engaging characters and interesting, fleshed-out worlds beat out genre every time. It’s a challenge: I have to stay aware when I work with a well-written book. An editor can’t forget to edit just because the content is interesting!

Blake: I love love love to edit books in which the author has expert control over language and structure. It doesn’t so much matter to me what the book is about, thematically, but how the book is written. As a general statement of my stance within the world of letters, that’s as close as I can get.

Jarrold: A wide range. I enjoy SF and Fantasy equally. I love natural story-tellers and authors whose sentences make me smile. And particularly those whose first page has my thumbs pricking with delight!

Nielsen Hayden: This is one of those questions like “what kind of story are you looking for”, to which the real answer is “the one I didn’t know I was looking for.” I can generalize and say I like working with authors who take obvious pleasure in brainstorming through problems, but when I look at my current list, it turns out that this describes all of them. Whether this is a sign that my generalization is too broad, or the the residue of years of editorial choice, I couldn’t say.

I do get a charge out of publishing first novels, and I’m published a fair number of them. Some were by people who already had reputations in short fiction, like Susan Palwick, Cory Doctorow, or Geoffrey A. Landis, or people like Jim Macdonald and Debra Doyle who had already done work for packagers under other names. But there’s a special kick to acquiring and publishing the first novels of unknowns and near-unknowns like Maureen F. McHugh, Raphael Carter, Jo Walton, John Scalzi, and David Keck. Coming soon: Ian Tregillis. Watch that name.

The concluding half of this interview
will appear in our August issue.

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.

“Doing Crappy Things to Good Characters: A Conversation with Jim C. Hines”
by Jeremy L. C. Jones

What do a near-sighted, runt-of-the-litter goblin named Jig and a clear-eyed, big-witted storyteller named Jim have in common? A big heart? Determination? A pet fire-spider named Smudge?

Jim C. Hines is the author of Goblin Quest, Goblin Hero, Goblin War, The Stepsister Scheme, and the forthcoming The Mermaid’s Madness (DAW, October 2009). He’s also the co-editor with Martin H. Greenberg of the anthology Heroes in Training. Hines’ story, “Blade of the Bunny” won the Writers of the Future contest in 1998, and since then he has published over forty stories in magazines and anthologies, including “Gift of the Kites” in the October 2008 issue of Clarkesworld.

Hines has a knack for surprising readers and reinventing the familiar elements of fantasy. His goblins are protagonists. His cowards are heroes. And his princesses kick butt. Mostly, though, Hines likes to do really crappy things to unprepared adventurers.

How long do you suppose you and Jig from the Goblin series could spend in an enclosed space together?

Forty-five seconds. Maybe less. The problem is that in order for me to write an entertaining book, I have to do really crappy things to the characters. Who wants to read about someone who goes skipping through life, showered in rainbows and puppies while the bluebird of happiness sings Disney tunes? Books need conflict and struggle and obstacles.

Jig, being a goblin, probably wouldn’t want to sit down with his author and have a nice, civilized discussion about why I put him through everything from fighting a war to healing a nose-picking injury. He’d just gut me to make sure I never did it again.

What’s funny in fiction?

Nose-picking injuries. Drunk gnomes. Puppets freaking out and blowing away other innocent puppets.

Most of the time, I find that humor works best for me when it comes from the characters. Jig the goblin was great for this, because he was a total coward. A heroic coward, but still a coward. Watching him rail against fate and try to find creative ways of staying alive was just fun.

The most important thing I’ve learned is that the story has to come first. If a scene is funny, that’s great, but the scene also has to advance the story. That way even if the jokes don’t work for you, there’s still a good (hopefully) story to read and enjoy. Whereas if I start writing scenes that do nothing but go for the laughs, I’m losing everyone who doesn’t share my sense of humor.

What does humor allow you to do that a straight out, “serious” fantasy adventure wouldn’t?

I think humor lets me run a little further with ideas. Reductio ad absurdum, if I want to be all pretentious about it. Take the whole concept of creatures that magically regenerate wounds. Interesting… now add goblins, a cannibalistic race. Capture a few trolls, and you’ve got an endless troll buffet! Troll toes for everyone!

You played Dungeons and Dragons when you were younger. What did roleplaying games teach you about writing fiction?

My very first (thankfully unpublished) attempts at fiction came from role-playing games, writing back-stories and then moving beyond the game to write new stories about favorite characters. I think one of the most important lessons was the discovery that simply turning a game into a story doesn’t work.

The game relies on the dice to introduce a random element and keep things interesting for the players. In a story, nothing happens randomly. Every scene, every action, every line of dialogue is chosen by the author for a reason. Characters fail or succeed based on what’s right for the story, and what makes sense for their characters.

I’ve also found that the tendency to “railroad” characters in a game comes up in fiction as well. (Railroading being the game master’s efforts to force everyone down a specific plotline, often at the cost of fun and free will on the part of the players.) I tend to come up with plot first, so once I start writing the story, I realize I’m forcing the characters into actions and situations that make no sense. This is where you end up with idiot plots, characters making incredibly stupid choices because it’s the only way the plot will work. (Villains are especially famous for this.) In games and stories both, railroading sucks the life and fun right out of the experience.

Where did you start with building the world of the Goblin series?

The original idea for Goblin Quest was pretty straightforward. I wanted to take your typical fantasy adventure with all the trimmings and tell the story from the monster’s point of view. I wanted it to be funny, but I also wanted to get deeper into the culture and mindset of the monsters. Goblins are always around for the heroes to slaughter, but what are they doing there? How do they survive? What do they hunt, what’s their relationship with the other monsters like, how do they treat one another, and so on? Trying to answer all of these questions is how I built the goblins’ mountain and lair.

The biggest way the world evolved was in its growth over the three books. In book two, Goblin Hero, we get into the deeper caves, finding some of the abandoned lairs. Then we get out of the mountain and start to see the outside world in book three, Goblin War. I’d like to say I had the whole world planned out from page one. I wish it worked that way… it would have made the later books a lot easier to write!

Have we seen the last of the Goblin books?

I have no immediate plans for another goblin book, but anything’s possible. I’ve got a title in mind, but no story to go with it, beyond knowing it would take Jig and the goblins into the larger world of politics and kingdom rivalries and such. Writing a palace scene of Jig at court would be a blast!

That said, I’m in no hurry. I feel like the three goblin books gave me the chance to show Jig’s growth and tell his story. It ended in a good place, and I don’t want to write another one purely for the sake of getting more books out there. We’ve all read series that should have been retired a while back. I don’t want to write one of those, so I’m not going to do more goblins unless and until I come up with something new for Jig and company.

There’s quite a difference between a character like Jig and a character like Danielle from The Stepsister Scheme.

The goblin books were more humorous than the princess series, and there were things I could get away with when writing about goblins that just wouldn’t work for fairy tale princesses. Goblins talking about feasting on that poor dwarf who couldn’t run fast enough? Funny! Princesses having the same conversation? Disturbing. (Though now that I think about it, that could be a fun story to write too. Hm….)

Jig and Danielle both had the same basic challenge of being swept up in an adventure they weren’t completely prepared for, but their goals were very different. Jig’s easy to write. He’ll do whatever it takes to keep alive. Danielle’s motives are a little deeper, her conflicts less straightforward and up front.

You have a tendency to reinvent things the reader thinks he or she knows about — goblins, Cinderella. What is it about this mechanism that excites you creatively?

I was an English major in grad school, and while I had mixed feelings about literary criticism, I loved deconstructionism. I loved taking established ideas, disassembling them, and figuring out where they worked and where they fell apart. Ever since my daughter went through her princess phase, I knew I wanted to write some kick-butt fairy tales. The trick was taking apart those old tales and finding what worked and what didn’t, grabbing onto those “what if” moments. “What if Sleeping Beauty took those fairy gifts of grace and dance and used them to develop her fighting skills?” or “What happened to all those princes who didn’t make it through the hedge to save her?”

The biggest pitfall is that I seem to have started my career right around the time Dreamworks decided to do some fantasy spoofs of their own. Every time I turn in a finished project, they come out with another Shrek movie that does some of the same things as in my book. (My readers might notice that ogres don’t do well in my goblin books.)

In addition to the novels, you’re still writing a good many short stories these days. Do you prefer one to the other?

Earlier this month, I took a quick break from the novel I’ve been working on since August to do a short story for an urban fantasy anthology. I finished the draft in a week, revised it, and submitted it about midway through June. I absolutely love being able to play with an idea and turn it into a finished story so quickly. It lets me play more, knowing if I screw it up, I haven’t poured as much of my life into the process.

That said, I tend to prefer novels. I like having more time to get to know the characters, to get into deeper plotlines and secondary stories, to focus on more than the immediate incident. They’re more work and take a lot more time, but I also think the reward is greater.

What’s the best part about writing fiction of any length?

Writing is great, and it’s hard to pick a single best part. Hearing from readers is wonderful, especially the ones who tell you your books made a real difference to them. The goblin books are very light fantasy, but even they can have an impact. I’ve heard from teachers who told me Goblin Quest got a student to start reading, or people who brought my books to the hospital and were able to escape the stress and pain for a while.

The worst part is probably the sacrifices you have to make in order to really build a career. Every day I come home and choose whether to write another page in the book or to spend time with my wife and children. I try to put my family first, and to balance everything out the best I can, but there are always compromises. Sometimes it’s easy to choose the writing over a rerun of Scrubs. Other times, it’s knowing that if I accept that anthology invite, I’ll lose a week of being able to roughhouse with the kids in the evenings.

I’ve learned there’s an awful lot of my job that doesn’t actually involve writing fiction, which is peculiar. A lot more of my time these days is taken up by responding to fans, doing conventions, networking with other writers, trying to keep up on the industry, publicity, and so on. I try to make sure I still write a minimum of an hour a day (though I sometimes skip weekends), but I often find myself spending as much time on the non-writing aspects of being a writer than on the actual writing.

What are you working on now?

I’m currently writing Red Hood’s Revenge, the third book in the princess series. In addition to exploring Red Riding Hood: Badass Assassin, I’m also delving a lot deeper into Talia’s backstory. Talia comes from a desert culture, so I’ve been doing a lot of work to try to develop that part of the world in a realistic way, one that doesn’t just rip off the trappings of Middle Eastern cultures and mythologies from our own world. Beyond that, I think the biggest challenge is making sure each of my three main characters continue to grow and develop as the series progresses.

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.

“Helping Hands: Fairylands, Boneshops and More”
by Neil Clarke

It seems that times are tough right now. I know several people who have found themselves without a job, less work than normal, or forced to take pay cuts. I’ve heard from colleagues, at the school I work for, that charitable donations are down and I can say with authority that we’ve seen fewer donations to Clarkesworld in recent months. I could focus on that, but I’d rather draw your attention to something else for a moment.

I have a great affection for the people I’ve had the pleasure to work with through Clarkesworld, and in recent months, that little family has seen its share of trouble. If you haven’t already heard, these tough times have hit two of our own particularly hard. I’m talking about Catherynne M. Valente and Tim Pratt, two very talented authors whose short fiction and articles have graced our pages. Layoffs have taken their toll on both.

Catherynne details her situation on her blog:

So we sat down last night and did numbers. And the raw fact is, we don’t have enough for rent next month, we are behind on all our bills, and in a couple of days, we won’t have any money for food.

As bad as things have been at times, in my adult life, I’ve never been in this situation. I don’t know what to do that I haven’t done, I’ve been working constantly trying to make enough money to survive. The depression level in this house of late has been truly epic.

I hate doing this. I hate asking for help. I don’t want you all to think that I’m selfish — there are people so much more worse off than me — or that I’m lazy or entitled.

Instead of putting a hand out and asking for your money with nothing in return, she decided to take an approach similar to what Clarkesworld and many other webzines have done…

Starting Monday, I will start posting chapters of a full-length novel version of The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. I will be writing it in real time, posting every Monday. It will be free to read — but please know that the sheer calories to make my brain create it require funding, and I would very much appreciate your support. Pay whatever you like for it, whatever you think it’s worth. It’s kind of like an old-fashioned rent party. There’s a button at the bottom of the post to start things out.

This is a book about a little girl named September who gets herself a ticket to Fairyland on the back of The Green Wind and a somewhat cranky Leopard. There she discovers the realm of the capricious Marquess and the dangers of the Perverse and Perilous Sea. It is going to be something else.

And yes, you can read it to your kids. This is my first available YA novel, and everyone can read it for free.

Sound familiar? Just like us, she’s adopting free online fiction as a business model. Unlike working with a publisher however, she has no guaranteed minimum payment. On the upside, every penny that comes in (minus the cut taken by Paypal) will go to her.

A short while later, Tim Pratt and his family also ran into trouble:

My wife was laid off from her job yesterday. She’s looking for a new one, and for freelance work. She’s been a catalog and website copywriter, and a buyer, for the past eight years; she also has office manager/admin experience, and can write pretty much any kind of copy. If anybody knows of good paying gigs, drop me a note. Ideally in the SF Bay Area, for go-into-an-office jobs, though we’d be willing to entertain suitably juicy options farther afield. We have enough savings to get us through a couple of months, but if something doesn’t turn up by then, things will get extremely difficult.…

Keeping a roof over our heads is priority #1. Keeping up with our 19-month-old son’s medical bills is priority #2, since he has an ongoing chronic medical condition that requires examinations under anesthesia by a specialist, and occasionally surgery, at least a couple of times a year. Not to mention the constellation of pre- and post-operation visits. So I’m exploring my financial options.

Once again, a reader-supported fiction model arises as a potential supplemental income stream:

I could have just straight-out asked for financial help — and for those who’ve offered that, thanks, it’s appreciated — but I’m a writer, and if there’s one thing I have in ample quantity, it’s stories to tell.

Specifically a story I’ve been wanting to write for a while, but couldn’t find the right market for: a longish piece about the early adventures of my series character Marla Mason.

Bone Shop is a serialized, donation-funded urban fantasy novella, available for anyone to read for free. New chapters will go up every Monday. The Bone Shop website is here, though there’s not a lot there at the moment. I’ll post the first chapter on June 29.

The tip jars are out. They are out for Catherynne and Tim. They are out for Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and other publications that derive some or all of their income from donors. They are out for PBS and your alma mater. They are everywhere and there is no way you can help everyone, or in some cases, anyone. Giving, even small amounts, means a lot to the people who receive them. It adds up and becomes significant numbers.

However, when you can’t give or have given all you can, you can still help by spreading the world. Spreading the word about user-supported fiction is easy and requires only a little of your time. So, aside from telling you to go read Catherynne’s and Tim’s wonderful new stories and asking you to consider tossing a coin in the hat, I’m going to ask you to pick three or four online fiction ventures and (if you can):

Do a review or tell people about them on your blog. Pretend it’s a meme if it makes it easier. Pretend it isn’t if memes make you ill.

Link to a story or the main site on Facebook and Twitter.

Get an account on Stumbleupon and give “thumbs up” recommendations to your favorite works. (Honestly, this one is huge. A single recommendation can trigger a storm of new visitors.)

If you are already doing these things, thank you, now go encourage others to do the same.

Use your imagination and try something else I haven’t mentioned.

Give it a try. Sometimes, tough times can be eased by the simple measures of a group of individuals. When you’re done, come back to our website and tell us of your accomplishments in the comments section. I look forward to hearing your experiences… and to better days for us all.

Thank you!

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the publisher of Clarkesworld Magazine and owner of Wyrm Publishing. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.