“The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew”
by Catherynne M. Valente

“Being unable to retrace our steps in Time, we decided to move forward in Space. Shall we never be able to glide back up the stream of Time, and peep into the old home, and gaze on the old faces? Perhaps when the phonograph and the kinesigraph are perfected, and some future worker has solved the problem of colour photography, our descendants will be able to deceive themselves with something very like it: but it will be but a barren husk: a soulless phantasm and nothing more. ‘Oh for the touch of a vanished hand, and the sound of a voice that is still!’”  
   — Wordsworth Donisthorpe, inventor of the Kinesigraph Camera

View the Famous Callowhale Divers of Venus from the Safety of a Silk Balloon! Two Bits a Flight! 
   — Advertisement Visible in the Launch Sequence of The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew

EXT. The cannon pad at the Vancouver World’s Fair in 1986, late afternoon, festooned with crepe and banners wishing luck and safe travel.

The Documentarian Bysshe and her crew wave jerkily as confetti sticks to their sleek skullcaps and glistening breathing apparati. Her smile is immaculate, practiced, the smile of the honest young woman of the hopeful future; her copper-finned helmet gleams at her feet. Bysshe wears women’s clothing but reluctantly and only for this shot, and the curl of her lip betrays disdain of the bizarre, flare-waisted swimming costume that so titillates the crowds. Later, she would write of the severe wind-burns she suffered in cannon-flight due to the totally inadequate protection of that flutter of black silk. She tucks a mahogany case smartly under one arm, which surely must contain George, her favorite cinematographe. Each of her crewmen strap canisters of film — and the occasional bit of food or oxygen or other minor accoutrements — to their broad backs. The cannon sparkles, a late-model Algernon design, filigreed and etched with motifs that curl and leaf like patterns in spring ice breaking. The brilliant nose of the Venusian capsule Clamshell rests snugly in the cannon’s silvery mouth.

They are a small circus — the strongmen, the clowns, the trapeze artist poised on her platform, arm crooked in an evocative half-moon, toes pointed into the void.

I find it so difficult to watch her now, her narrow, monkish face, not a pore wasted, her eyes huge and sepia-toned, her smile enormous, full of the peculiar, feral excitement which in those days seemed to infect everyone who looked up into the evening sky to see Venus there, seducing behind veils of light, as she has always done. Those who looked and had eyes only for red Mars, all baleful and bright, were rough, raucous, ready and hale. Those who saw Venus were lost.

She was such a figure then: Bysshe, no surname, or simply the Documentarian. Her revolving lovers made the newsreels spin, her films packed the nickelodeons and wrapped the streets three times ‘round. Weeks before a Bysshe opened, buskers and salesmen would camp out on the thoroughfares beside every theater, selling genuine cells she touched with her own hand and replica spangled cages from To Thee, Bright Queen! sized just right to hold a male of Saturnine extraction. Her father, Percival Unck, was a brooding and notorious director in his time, his gothic dramas full of wraith-like heroines with black, bruised eyes and mouths perpetually agape with horror or orgiastic transcendence. Her mother was, naturally, one of those ever-transported actresses, though which one it is hard to remember, since each Unck leading lady became, by association and binding contract, little black-bobbed Bysshe’s mother-of-the-moment.  Thus it is possible to see, in her flickering, dust-scratched face, the echoes of a dozen fleeting, hopeful actresses, easily forgotten but for the legacy of their adoptive daughter’s famous, lean features, her scornful, knowing grin.

Bysshe rejected her father’s idiom utterly. Her film debut in Unck’s The Spectres of Mare Nubium is charming, to say the least. During the famous ballroom sequence wherein the decadent dowager Clarena Schirm is beset with the ghosts of her victims, little Bysshe can be seen crouching unhappily near the rice-wine fountain, picking at the pearls on her traditional lunar kokoshnik and rubbing at her make-up. The legend goes that when Percival Unck tried to smudge his daughter’s eyes with black shadows and convince her to pretend herself a poor Schirm relation while an airy phantasm — years later to become her seventh mother — swooped down upon the innocent child, Bysshe looked up exasperatedly and said: “Papa. This is silly! I want only to be myself!”

And so she would be, forever, only and always Bysshe. As soon as she could work the crank on a cinematographe herself, she set about recording “the really real and actual world” (age 7) or “the genuine and righteous world of the true tale,” (age 21) and declaring her father’s beloved ghosts and devils “a load of double exposure drivel.” Her first documentary, The Famine Queen of Phobos, brought the colony’s food riots to harsh light, and earned her a Lumiere medal, a prize Percival Unck would never receive. When asked if his daughter’s polemics against fictive cinema had embittered him, Unck smiled in his raffish, canine way and said: “The lens, my good man, does not discriminate between the real and the unreal.”

Of her final film, The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew, only five sequences remain, badly damaged. Though they have been widely copied, cut up and re-used in countless sallow and imitative documentaries on her life, the originals continue to deteriorate in their crystalline museum displays. I go there, to the Grand Eternal Exhibition, in the evenings, to watch them rot. It comforts me. I place my brow upon the cool wall, and she flashes before my eyes, smiling, waving, crawling into the mouth of the cannon-capsule with the ease of a natural performer, a natural aeronaut — and perhaps those were always much the same thing.

EXT. Former Site of the Village of Adonis, on the Shores of the Sea of Qadesh, Night.

A small boy, head bent, dressed in the uniform of a callowhale diver, walks in circles in what was once the village center. The trees and omnipresent cacao-ferns are splashed with a milky spatter. He does not look up as the camera watches him. He simply turns and turns and turns, over and over. The corrupted film skips and jumps; the boy seems to leap through his circuit, flashing in and out of sight.

When she was seventeen, Bysshe and her beloved cinematographe, George, followed the Bedouin road to Neptune for two years, resulting in her elegaic And the Sea Remembered, Suddenly. There, they say, she learned her skill at the sculpting of titanium, aquatic animal handling, and a sexual variant of Samayika mediation developed by a cult of levitation on tiny Halimede, where the wind blows warm and violet. There is a sequence, towards the melancholy conclusion of And the Sea, wherein Bysshe visits coral-devoured Enki, the great floating city which circumnavigates the planet once a decade, buoyed the lugubrious Neptunian current. Reclining on chaises with glass screens raised to keep out the perpetual rain, Bysshe smokes a ball of creamy, heady af-yun with a woman-levitator, her hair lashed with leather whips. When theaters received the prints of And the Sea, a phonograph and several records were included, so that Bysshe herself could narrate her opus to audiences across the world. A solemn bellhop changed the record when the onscreen Bysshe winked, seemingly to no one. And so one may sit on a plush chair, still, and hear her deep, nasal voice echo loudly — too loud, too loud! — in the theater.

The levitator told her of a town called Adonis, a whole colony on Venus that vanished in the space of a night. Divers they were, mostly, subject both to the great callowhales with their translucent skin and the tourists who came to watch and shiver in cathartic delight as the divers risked their lives to milk the recalcitrant mothers in their hibernation. They built a sweet village on the shores of the Qadesh, plaiting their roofs with grease-weed and hammering doors from the chunks of raw copper which comprised the ersatz Venusian beach. They lived; they ate the thready local cacao and shot, once or twice a year, a leathery ‘Tryx from the sky, enough to keep them all in fat and protein for months.

“It was a good life,” the blue-skinned levitator said, and Bysshe, on her slick black record, imitated the breathy, shy accent of Halimede as onscreen version of herself loaded another lump of af-yun into the atomizer. “And then, one day — pop! All gone. Houses, stairs, meat-smoking racks, diving bells.”

“This sort of thing happens,” Bysshe dismissed it all with a wave of her hand. “What planet is there without a mysteriously vanished colony to pull in the tourist cash? Slap up a couple of alien runes on a burned-out doorframe and people will stream in from every terminus. Might as well call them all New Roanoke and have done with it.” (In fact, one of Percival Unck’s less popular films was The Abduction of Prosperina, a loose retelling of that lost Plutonian city, though presumably with rather more demonic ice-dragons than were actually involved.)

Crab-heart trifles and saltwhiskey were passed around as Bysshe’s crew laughed and nodded along with her. The levitator smiled.

“Of course, Miss,” she said, eyes downcast within the equine blinders knotted to her head. “Well, except for the little boy. The one who was left behind. They say he’s still there. He’s stuck, somehow, in the middle of where the village used to be, just walking around in circles, around and around. Like a skip on a phonograph. He never even stops to sleep.” The Documentarian frowns sourly in black and white, her disapproval of such fancies, her father’s fancies, disappeared heroines and eldritch locations where something terrible surely occurred, showing in the wrinkling of her brow, the tapping of her fingernails against the atomizer as bubbling storms lapped their glass cupola, and armored penance-fish nosed the flotation arrays, their jaw-lanterns flashing.

But you can see her thinking, the new film, which was to be her last, taking shape behind her eyes.

This is what she came to see.

Dead Adonis, laid out in state on the beach-head. Her single mourner. The great ocean provides a kind of score for her starlit landing, and in the old days a foley-boy would thrash rushes against the floor of the theater to simulate the colossal, dusky red tide of the Qadesh. We would all squint in the dark, and try to see scarlet in the monochrome waves, emerald in the undulating cacao-ferns. The black silk balloon crinkles and billows lightly on the strand, clinging to the ruin of the landing capsule. The dwarf moon Anchises shines a kind of limping, diffident light on Bysshe as she walks into frame, her short hair sweat-curled in the wilting wind. She has thrown the exhibition costume into an offscreen campfire and is clothed now in her accustomed jodhpurs and famous black jacket. The boy turns and turns. His hands flicker and blur as if he is signing something, or writing on phantom paper. She holds out her hand as though approaching a horse, squats down beside the child in a friendly, schoolteacherly fashion. The boy does not raise his head to look at her. He stares at his feet. Bysshe looks uncertainly over her shoulder at the long snarl of sea behind them — the cinematographe operator, temporarily trusted with the care and feeding of George, says something to her offscreen, he must, because she cocks her head as though considering a riddle and says something back to him. Her mouth moves in the silent footage, mouthing words the audience cannot ever quite read.

Once, a deaf scholar was brought to view this little scene in a private projector room. She was given coffee and a treacle tart. She reported the words as: Look at the whales. Are they getting closer?

Bysshe stands up straight and strides without warning into the child’s path, blocking his little pilgrim’s progress around the sad patch of dune grass.

The child does not stop. He collides with Bysshe, steps back, collides with her again. He beats his head against her soft belly. Back and forth, back and forth.

The Documentarian looks helplessly into the camera.

EXT. Former Site of the Village of Adonis, afternoon.

One of the crewmen shaves in a mirror nailed to furry black cacao-fern bark. He uses a straight razor whose handle is inlaid with fossilized kelp.  He is shirtless and circus huge, his face angular and broad. He catches a glimpse of Bysshe in his mirror and whirls to catch her up, kissing her and smearing shaving cream on her face. She laughs and punches his arm — he recoils in mock agony. It is a pleasant scene. This is Erasmo St. John, the Documentarian’s lover and lighting-master, who would later claim to have fathered a child with her, despite being unable to produce a convincing moppet.

Clouds drift down in long, indistinct spirals. Behind them, the boy turns and turns, still, celluloid transforming the brutal orange of the Venusian sun into a blinding white nova. Beyond him, pearlescent islands hump up out of the foamy Qadesh — callowhales, a whole pod, silent, pale.

 Adonis was established some twenty years prior to the Bysshe expedition, one of many villages eager to take advantage of the callowhale hibernations. What, precisely, callowhale is is still the subject of debate. There are diagrams, to be sure — one even accompanies the Radiant Car press kit — but these are guesses only. It cannot even be safely said whether they are animal or vegetable matter. The first aeronauts, their braggart flags flapping in that first, raw breeze, assumed them to be barren islands. The huge masses simply lay motionless in the water, their surfaces milky, motley, the occasional swirl of chemical blue or gold sizzling through their depths. But soon enough, divers and fishermen and treasure-seekers flocked to the watery promise of Venus, and they called the creatures true. Beneath the waterline were calm, even dead leviathans — taninim, said a neo-Hasidic bounty hunter, some sort of proto-pliosaur, said one of the myriad research corps. Their fins lay flush against their flanks, horned and barbed. Their eyes were then perpetually shut — hibernating, said the research cotillion. Dreaming, said the rest. From their flat, wide skulls extended long, fern-like antennae which curled in fractal infinitude, tangling with the others of their occasional pods, their fronds stroking one another lightly, imperceptibly, in the quick, clever Qadesh currents. Whether they have any sentience is popular tea-chatter — their hibernation cycle seems to be much longer than a human life.

Some few divers claim to have heard them sing — the word they give to a series of unpredictable vibrations that occasionally shiver through the fern-antennae. Like sonar, these quaking oscillations can be fatal to any living thing caught up in them — unlike sonar, the unfortunates are instantly vaporized into constituent atoms. Yet the divers say that from a safe distance, their echoes brush against the skin in strange and intimate patterns, like music, like lovemaking. The divers cannot look at the camera when they speak of these things, as though it is the eye of God and by not meeting His gaze, they may preserve virtue. The vibrations are the color of morning, they whisper.

It is the milk the divers are after — nearly everything produced on Venus contains callowhale milk, the consistency of honey, the color of cream, the taste something like sucking on a dandelion stem caked in green peppercorn. It is protein-rich, fat-clotted, thick with vitamins — equally sought after as an industrial lubricant, foodstuff, fuel, as an ingredient in medicines, anesthesia, illicit hallucinogens, poured into molds and dried as an exotic building material. Certain artists have created entire murals from it, which looked upon straight seem like blank canvases, but seen slant-wise reveal impossibly complex patterns of shades of white.  Little by little, Venusian-born children began to be reared on the stuff, to no apparent ill effect — and the practice became fashionable among the sorts of people whose fashions become the morality of the crowds. Erasmo St. John pioneered a kind of long-lit camera lantern by scalding the milk at low temperatures, producing an eerie phosphorescence. The later Unck films use this to great effect as spectral light.   Cultivation has always been dangerous — the tubules that secrete milk are part and parcel of the ferny antennae, extending from the throat-sac of the callowhale. In order to harvest it, the diver must avoid the tendrils of fern and hope upon hope that the whale is not seized with a sudden desire to sing. For this danger, and for the callowhales’ rude insistence upon evolving on Venus and not some more convenient locale, the milk was so precious that dozens of coastal towns could be sustained by encouraging a relatively small population of municipal divers. Stock footage sent back to earth shows family after beaming family, clad in glittering counterpressure mesh, dark copper diving bells tucked neatly under their arms, hoisting healthy, robust goblets of milk, toasting the empire back home. 

But where there is milk, there is mating, isn’t there? There are children. The ghost-voice of Bysshe comes over the phonograph as the final shot of And the Sea Remembered, Suddenly flickers silver-dark and the floating Neptunian pleasure-domes recede. Everyone knew where she was bound next, long before principal photography ever began. To Venus, and Adonis, to the little village rich in milk and children that vanished two decades after its founding, while the callowhales watched offshore, impassive, unperturbed.

EXT. Village Green, Twilight.

Bysshe is grabbing the child’s hand urgently while he screams, soundlessly, held brutally still in his steps by the gaffer and the key grip, whose mucles bulge with what appears to be a colossal effort — keeping this single, tiny, bird-boned child from his circuit. The Documentarian’s jagged hair and occasionally her chin swing in and out of frame as she struggles with him. She turns over the boy’s hand, roughly, to show the camera what she has found there: tiny fronds growing from his skin, tendrils like ferns, seeking, wavering, wet with milk. The film jumps and shudders; the child’s hand vibrates, faster, faster.

 It is a difficult thing, to have an aftermath without an event.

The tabloids, ever beloved of Bysshe and her exploits, heralded the return of the expedition long before the orbits were favorable. They salivated for the new work, which would surely set records for attendance. The nickelodeons began taking ticket orders a year in advance, installing the revolutionary new sound equipment which might allow us all to hear the sound of the surf on a Venusian shore. The balloon was sighted in orbit and spontaneous, Romanesque gin-triumphs were held in three national capitals. Finally, on a grassy field outside Vancouver, the black silk confection of Bysshe’s studio balloon wrinkled and sighed to rest on the spring ground. The grips and gaffers came out first, their eyes downcast, refusing to speak. Then the producer, clutching his hat to his chest. Lastly came Erasmo St. John, clutching the hand of the greatest star of the coming century: a little boy with ferns in his fists.

Bysshe did not return. Her crew would not speak of where she had gone, only that she was to be left to it, called dead if not actually deceased — and possibly deceased. They mumbled; they evaded. Their damaged film, waterlogged and half-missing, was hurried into theaters and pored over by hundreds of actors, scholars, gossip columnists. It is said that Percival Unck only once viewed the reels. He looked into his lap when the last shot had faded to black and smiled, a secret smile, of regret, perhaps, or of victory.

The boy was sent to school, paid for by the studio. He was given a new name, though later in life he, too, would eschew any surname, having no family connections to speak of save to a dead documentarian. He wore gloves, always, and shared his memories as generously as he could with the waves of popular interest in Venus, in Adonis, in the lost film. No, I don’t remember what happened to my parents. I’m sorry, I wish I did. One day they were gone. Yes, I remember Bysshe. She gave me a lemon candy.

And I do remember her. The jacket only looks black on film. I remember — it was red.

I once saw a group of performance artists — rich students with little better to do, I thought — mount a showing of the shredded, abrupt footage of The Radiant Car, intercut with highlights of the great Unck gothics. The effect was strange and sad: Bysshe seemed to step out of her lover’s arms and into a ballroom, becoming suddenly an unhappy little girl, only to leap out again, shimmering into the shape of another child, with a serious expression, turning in endless circles on a green lawn. One of the students, whose hair was plaited and piled upon her head, soaked and crusted in callowhale milk until it glowed with a faint phosphor, stood before the screen with a brass bullhorn. She wore a bustle frame but no bustle, shoelaces lashed in criss-crossings around her calves but no shoes. The jingly player-piano kept time with the film, and behind her Bysshe stared intently into the phantasm of a distant audience, unknowable as God.

“Ask yourself,” she cried brazenly, clutching her small, naked breasts. “As Bysshe had the courage to ask! What is milk for, if not to nurture a new generation, a new world? We have never seen a callowhale calf, yet the mothers endlessly nurse. What do they nurture, out there in their red sea? I will tell you. For the space is not smooth that darkly floats between our earth and that morning star, Lucifer’s star, in eternal revolt against the order of heaven. It is thick, it is swollen, its disrupted proteins skittering across the black like foam — like milk spilled across the stars. And in this quantum milk how many bubbles may form and break, how many abortive universes gestated by the eternal sleeping mothers may burgeon and burst? I suggest this awe-ful idea: Venus is an anchor, where all waveforms meet in a radiant scarlet sea, where the milk of creation is milled, and we have pillaged it, gorged upon it all unknowing. Perhaps in each bubble of milk is a world suckled at the breast of a pearlescent cetacean. Perhaps there is one where Venus is no watery Eden as close as a sister, but a distant inferno of steam and stone, lifeless, blistered. Perhaps you have drunk the milk of this world — perhaps I have, and destroyed it with my digestion. Perhaps a skin of probabilistic milk, dribbling from the mouths of babes, is all that separates our world from the others. Perhaps the villagers of Adonis drank so deeply of the primordial milk that they became as the great mothers, blinking through worlds like holes burned in film — leaving behind only the last child born, who had not yet enough of the milk to change, circling, circling the place where the bubble between worlds burst!” The girl let her milk-barnacled hair fall with a violent gesture, dripping the peppery-sharp smelling cream onto the stage.

“Bysshe asked the great question: where did Adonis go in death? The old tales know. Adonis returned to his mother, the Queen of the Dark, the Queen of the Otherworld.”  Behind her, on a forty-foot screen, the boy’s fern-bound palm — my palm, my vanished hand — shivered and vibrated and faded into the thoughtful, narrow face of Bysshe as she hears for the first time the name of Adonis. The girl screams: “Even here on Earth we have supped all our lives on this alien milk. We are the calves of the callowhales, and no human mothers. We will ride upon the milky foam, and one day, one distant, distant day, our heads will break the surf of a red sea, and the eyes of the whales will open, and weep, and dote upon us!”

The girl held up her hand, palm outward, to the meager audience. I squinted. There, on her skin, where her heart line and fate line ought to have been, was a tiny fern, almost imperceptible, but wavering nonetheless, uncertain, ethereal, new.

A rush of blood beat at my brow. As if compelled by strings and pulleys, I raised up my own palm in return. Between the two fronds, some silent shiver passed, the color of morning.

INT. The depths of the sea of Qadesh.

Bysshe swims through the murky water, holding one of Erasmo’s milk-lanterns out before her. St. John follows behind with George, encased in a crystal canister. The film is badly stained and burned through several frames. She swims upward, dropping lead weights from her shimmering counterpressure mesh as she rises. The grille of her diving bell gleams faintly in the shadows. Above her, slowly, the belly of a callowhale comes into view. It is impossibly massive, the size of a sky. Bysshe strains towards it, extending her fingers to touch it, just once, as if to verify it for herself, that such a thing could be real.

The audience will always and forever see it before Bysshe does. A slit in the side of the great whale, like a door opening. As the Documentarian stretches towards it, with an instinctual blocking that is nothing short of spectacular — the suddenly tiny figure of a young woman frozen forever in this pose of surprise, of yearning, in the center of the shot — the eye of the callowhale, so huge as to encompass the whole screen, opens around her.

About the Author

Born in the Pacific Northwest in 1979, Catherynne M. Valente is the author of Palimpsest and the Orphan’s Tales series, as well as The Labyrinth, Yume no Hon: The Book of Dreams, The Grass-Cutting Sword, and five books of poetry. She is the winner of the Tiptree Award, the Mythopoeic Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Million Writers Award. She has been nominated nine times for the Pushcart Prize, shortlisted for the Spectrum Award was a World Fantasy Award finalist in 2007. She currently lives on an island off the coast of Maine with her partner and two dogs. Her crowdfunded novel, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, can be found at http://catherynnemvalente.com/fairyland

“Advection”
by Genevieve Valentine

The first day of fifth year a boy came in with the new eyeshields, a glossy expanse of black with no iris or pupil, and looking at him was like looking into an eclipse.

All the other girls said it made them uncomfortable; they teased him to take them out, to put on some normal sunglasses like everyone else. They said they’d never forgive him for hiding eyes in such a handsome face.

“Fortuni, it’s a little much,” said someone.

That was how I learned his name.

We were all Level Two intelligence, but before the first week was over the news was out that some had managed to find the money for a sixth year. Janik Duranti, who spent the history lectures drawing stick figures screwing on his computer screen, was getting a sixth year. I’d be cleaning his office someday. Answering his phones. Updating the registration on his blue ID cuff.

Carol Clarke opened the top button on her shirt as soon as the shades went down; obvious, but it was worth it to be married to a guy who had a sixth year.

The first time Fortuni opened his mouth was two weeks after start-of-year in geohistory, when Mr. Xi was talking about the five oceans.

“After the emergency desalinization,” Mr. Xi said, “we held the first HydroSummit to determine the best use of resources.”

“I think it’s awful about the dolphins that died,” said Kay, whose water ration was unlimited because her father was a diplomat, and that was how I first noticed her.

Mr. Xi opened the rain cycle diagram on our screens; the blue advection loop from a hundred years ago had been overlaid by a three-point process from the Atmo water collectors to the thirsty ground, and the green web of the surface sweat system that preserved the little underground things that managed to survive.

My grandfather sent my mom a postcard from Niagara Cliffs when there was still a river at the bottom (RAIN! All my love, Dad), and as Mr. Xi talked about desalinization I traced the advection circle, thought about the sky filling with wet clouds, about water sliding over everything.

I looked up, and Fortuni was watching me, his lashes casting shadows over his flat black eyes.

“I’m going to engineer some rain,” he told me, and after a moment I laughed.

That was how I met him.

It was nearly the end of year when I walked past the upper-class apartments and saw the plant in the garbage.

My heart leapt into my throat, and I checked to see if a cop was recording me, because nobody just left a clipping on the street. But besides the tram down the street full of commuters, there was nobody.

I knelt and stared at the glossy tops, the browned underside where it was drying out, the pale hairs on the stem. Even from this distance the smell was overwhelming, wet and clean, and without caring if the cops were watching I scooped it up and dropped it into the back of my hood where it would be safest from the sun.

The tram home was endless; I felt the stem pressing against my neck and shivered.

Half a day’s water ration went into a glass bowl, and I looked up what plant it was (jade) and how much water it would need (hardly any. It was a survivor).

I sat up all night watching the pattern of leaves on the walls. I expected it to die; I cried like I’d already lost it, ended up dehydrated from tears and lack of water.

When Fortuni walked with me after school the next day I didn’t ask why. I was making up my mind to show him the plant. My heart raced. He could turn me in. I didn’t really know him. It was too dangerous. I couldn’t.

“Come with me,” I said, and he got in the tram without asking why.

Even before I opened the door I hadn’t wondered why he walked me home, and when he smiled at the plant and said, “Beautiful,” I knew.

He wasn’t a Level Two. Everybody else was a fool.

He lifted his hand to the glass, closed his eyes over the black shields. He smiled like he knew he looked silly, or like the plant told him a joke.        

“The water is cool,” he said.

“I keep it under my bed at night.”

He opened one eye, grinned at me. “Hiding it from your parents or trying for condensation?”

After a moment he took his hand off the glass and went home without another word.

The next day he messaged: How is it? Dream about it?

Stronger, I messaged back, didn’t tell him what I dreamed.

At school we didn’t talk about it — we didn’t talk at all, because I had to work to pass exams, and he had to work to avoid tripping over girls who couldn’t get enough of his bone-white skin and his blue cuff.

Kay ignored him. She sat one row in front of him in classes, and when he asked her a question she turned just enough to give him her profile, answered him curtly, turned back.

“This winter I’m going to my uncle’s farm,” she told Carol. “He’s scheduled an Atmo so we can get rain.”

“Oh, wow,” breathed Carol.

My pen snapped, and I had to wait until end of class to get another one.

Mr. Xi talked about the Reclaimers and the class got into a screaming match about whether they were terrorists or guerillas. They yelled about the cave communities who harbored the sleeper cells; about whether wild rain was even a good idea any more.

“It’s a waste of water,” said Janik, and I wanted to kick him.

When I looked over at Fortuni, he was gazing unblinking ahead of him, his eyes fixed on the knot of hair at the nape of Kay’s neck, on her pale hand writing.

I didn’t hear the rest of the class.

Fortuni messaged: What do you think of Kay?

I don’t.

Try.

The plant was outgrowing the bowl, and I adjusted the stem, didn’t get around to answering him.

The next day in geohistory Mr. Xi talked about Free Water, about the cave-towns authorized to collect condensation without reporting. The class got into it again about Reclaimers seeking asylum there.

I looked at the cliffs and thought how they were underwater once, about vegetation breathing into the sky, about water so big you couldn’t see the end of it, about the wet slide of rain across skin.

“It’s weird when you miss rain you’ve never felt,” Fortuni said, like I’d spoken, and my fingers went cold.

“I know,” I said.

He looked back at Kay, who had turned a little towards him as if by accident, resting a white hand on her throat.

When I got home he’d messaged me. Clip it.

I didn’t think about Fortuni when the side-by-side clippings grew so fast; all I knew was my dreams filled with the creaky, quiet sound of growing.

Summer. The last day of fifth year Fortuni wasn’t there. I didn’t really think about it (he was Level Zero) except that Kay looked nervous, and it worried me that if something was wrong with Fortuni, Kay knew more than I did.

I stopped her as she was walking back to her seat with her certificate, said, “Have you seen — ”

She pulled away from me like she was poisoned.

Carol laughed, and I hoped she had to marry Janick Duranti.

On the tram on the way home someone came up behind me, said in my ear, “Figured out rain yet?”

It was Fortuni’s voice, and I was so relieved that I must have really been worried before.

I turned, but he was wearing a black UV hood and I couldn’t see his face. It had a white bird outline on the side, and as I tried to find his profile behind the hood the silhouette took flight, wings beating.

My hood was from the bargain market, standard SPF 150 striped brown and purple, and I’d never wanted to be rich so much in my life.

“You weren’t in class,” I said. “Tapped for Level Zero?”

He looked at me like he couldn’t help it, and for the first time I thought that maybe I’d managed to surprise him. “You think I’m special?”

I didn’t answer that, and he grinned, shrugged. “Yeah, I wish. Just got held up with something.”

For the rest of the tram ride he looked out the window, and I watched the bird flying on the taut black fabric between two of the ribs; when he put his hood back, the bird would disappear into the folds. It seemed really sad. I don’t know why.

At my stop, I got off without asking him to follow me, and he took one step and changed his mind, gave me a half-wave as the tram pulled away from the stop and back onto the street.

At home I slid it out from under my bed so it could breathe for an hour. It was big enough to be illegal; I was a criminal.

I messaged him. You should see it.

The words sat on my screen, and he didn’t answer.

Autumn. One of the big government offices was hiring, and I got my credentials and made coffee and shuttled lunches and watched sixth-years plan trajectories and irrigation patterns and wildlife preservation.

I made sure my plant had enough water.

Winter. The dreams about Niagara Cliffs and the water cycle never stopped, and I applied for a sixth year without telling anyone.

Spring. I went into one of the banks in my nice suit and folded back the expensive UV hood I borrowed from a nice sixth-year at the office, and arranged to go into a decade of debt for a year of Meteohydronics and a chance at a seat on an Atmo. My parents were surprised.

Summer. It was too big for the bowl, and I had to leave clippings on the sill with the shade cracked, five minutes at a time until the sun shriveled them and they were dry enough to burn.

A message came back from Fortuni.

Want to go to a concert?

It had been a year.

As I waited outside the back entrance of Roseland I couldn’t think of anything but Fortuni’s UV hood, black with a white bird silhouette that flew in place as you watched. I pressed against the grimy brick to avoid the swells of tourists sweating in their “NYC” rental hoods, and my breath fluttered in my chest as I looked for Fortuni in a sea of strangers. My hands were clammy.

When I saw him, bouncing along next to that little white bird was Kay’s pale blue hood with her coat of arms on each side — two greyhounds and a pile of helmets and swords. Kay must have just finished her sixth year, because as the crowd parted for her (crowds always did) I could see she carried nothing except a smug expression.

I sucked in a sigh, and felt dust coating the inside of my mouth.

“Sarah, hi!” Kay stepped under the marquee and pushed back the hood, shook out her long blonde hair. She’d gotten a grey wash in between exams — the latest thing to make you look paler.

I made fists in my pockets.

When Fortuni pushed his hood back, the white bird spread its wings into the folds. “Did we keep you waiting?” he asked.

“Of course not,” said Kay. “She doesn’t have to worry about studying any more.” She grinned. “You must be so relieved that’s all over.”

“We should go inside,” said Fortuni, and opened the back door. For a moment Kay looked disgusted by the shabby welcome, but she went. It was Fortuni, after all.

Music was already throbbing as we approached the bar, and Kay gave Fortuni a look of delight. Her hood was too big for her; folded down against her back it made her look like a crested lizard.

She brought him a glass. He passed it to me, and she had to go back for another one and look like it didn’t bother her. 

“This band is totally derivative,” she told Fortuni, who had hung back with me.

He shrugged. “It’s the opening act. I didn’t pay much attention to the bill.”

It was just like Fortuni to go to a concert without even knowing what band it was, and so I didn’t think much of it. He just liked to stand in the crowd, eyes closed, feeling the breath of two hundred people.

I’ve never felt lonelier than when I was standing next to Fortuni in a crowd.

“Well, I figured you had better taste than that. I hear Hammond is amazing.” Kay swung back and forth between baiting and appeasing Fortuni so quickly I thought she’d get whiplash.

“If you can hear anything around that stupid hood,” I said under my breath.

Fortuni smiled into his glass, and his laugh, if he laughed, was drowned out by screams and applause.

Kay flirted with the bartender through two more free drinks, glancing backs at Fortuni to make sure it was all right.

“You’ve applied for a sixth year,” he said.

He knew it the way he knew everything, and I didn’t bother to answer him. I’d requested a year in Meteohydronics.

The study of rain.

“So,” I said, “are you and Kay dating?”

He smiled, still not looking at me. “Nah. We just talk.”

I thought about green leaves spilling over the edge of the bowl. “What about?”

“She has ambition,” he said. “It’s not something you run across often.”

The ambition was her as the pretty shadow of some boy, and I saw that ambition all the time.

“I don’t really feel like a concert.” I pressed my drink into his hand. “I need to study. See you.”

“No,” he said, stepped forward. “Please, stay. Please.”

He had his hand on my arm, the first time he’d ever touched me. I looked up and could see past the eyeshields into green, frightened eyes. He’d never asked me for anything, not one thing that whole silent year.

“Okay,” I said.

He smiled as if he’d never doubted, and I wondered if I’d just imagined that I could see through him.

Kay materialized at his side, smiling, but her hand was wrapped around her glass so hard that the skin under her nails was red.

“Sorry,” she said. “Am I interrupting? Hammond was announced, but if you want to be alone…”

Fortuni dropped his hand. My arm was cold where he’d touched it.

The band was loud, and when Fortuni leaned over and spoke he had to repeat himself, louder, before I heard him.

“Come with me,” he said.

My heart constricted. “What?”

“You and Kay,” he said. “Come with me.”

“Where are you going?”

He half-smiled. “To engineer some rain.”

I thought, Reclaimers, but didn’t dare say it.

I thought about his fingers on the glass bowl as he listened to the plant growing, thought maybe he didn’t even need the Reclaimers to make rain.

My lungs pounded against my ribs. “Me?”

“I want you with me for the first wild rain.”

I don’t know why he could still surprise me, but he could; he was a wondrous thing, and back then I was easy to surprise.

“And Kay?” I asked, because I was afraid, and it sounded like a spurned child asking.

He said, “Come with me.”

I had signed up for a sixth year. I wanted to work with the Atmos.

I had a plant that would die without me.

In Fortuni’s black eyes the reflection of the crowd was like wet clouds gathering, like the dream of rain.

The music washed over us, and I was half-dreaming about walking beside Fortuni, walking into some other unknown life that was full of water, and without Kay’s white bracelet lighting up a warning we wouldn’t have known the police were coming.

Kay moved first (she must have been used to getting out of something right before the cops got in), and shoved us towards the stairs, shouting something that was drowned out by the drums and the bass. As much as I distrusted her I ran, and beside me Fortuni ran, too.

When we took the turn on the landing I caught a glimpse of her in the crowd, swaying to the music like she didn’t know us at all.

At the top of the stairs I saw the EXIT sign and ducked into the utility hall pulling Fortuni behind me; he crouched and slid along the wall, and I followed his lead.

“They’re not after your plant,” he said, which was the first time I thought they might have been.

“What were you doing all year?” I imagined him in a cave, drinking condensation, blowing up reservoirs, blowing up Atmos with people like me in them. My voice shook.

He turned and grinned. “Engineering some rain,” he said, and as we heard footsteps echoing in the stairwell he held out a hand, said, “Come with me.”

We couldn’t make it to the fire exit before the cops got there, and he was holding out his hand, and I didn’t understand what he was saying, what he was.

I hesitated, shook my head.

He turned and ducked into the door on his right; I saw a cluster of rooms before the door swung shut behind him.

As I moved to follow, the cops swarmed me.

They weren’t all cops, some of them were kids drinking over-ration who got spooked and bolted, but it felt like a sea of uniforms and I covered my head to protect myself from the kicks, and I let myself be yanked up and handcuffed, listened for Fortuni to make his big escape.

He didn’t. They stormed the dressing room (I bit my lips until they bled), someone shouted, the bang of a gunshot.

They had to drag me out by the cuffs because I was trying to run into the room, to see what had happened, to see them carry out his body.

I heard, “ — nothing left!” just before the door swung shut and they yanked me down the stairs.

I thought of the little white bird, of the folds in his hood, how something could be so neatly tucked away. I stumbled. My eyes burned.

Kay was outside, talking to the cop with the most brass on. As I walked past them, Kay laughed.

“Her? Oh please. No way she’s over ration. Can’t afford anything.”

And Kay stared at me like I knew something she didn’t know.

I knew he had gone into the dressing room, and there was one shot — but maybe he was out by then, maybe he ran, he looked like a sprinter — and he would have run with me, taken me with him, but there was the shot, but even when his hood was folded back, and even when you couldn’t see it the little white bird was flying away and away and away.

He would have taken me with him.

Kay looked sick and turned away, and I wondered if he had leaned in over the music and asked her to come with him, too.

They still play music there, not that anybody can get tickets unless they’re willing to sit under the stage, and when my big brother did that for Goblin Dust he almost failed his service physical six weeks later because he couldn’t hear.   

The top of the balcony stairs is dark and quiet — everyone goes for the view over the railing, no one even sees the hall behind the utility door. Baby-blue walls, like Kay’s hood, and two dressing rooms — one an inch deep in grime, makeup mirrors with all but two lights burned out, a pinball table rusted stiff.

The second door opens to a honeycomb of little rooms, cloth tacked to the walls, carpet crunching underfoot.

If there was ever an escape it’s not there now, and I ram the walls until my shoulder wrenches in the socket, tear down the fabric and check for hidden doors, and I fall to my knees and drag my fingers along the floor looking for a crack that will open the way.

You have to apply at the Embassy to see anyone privately, even if you can recognize Ambassador Arnaun’s crest in a sea of hoods, even if his daughter called the cops off you.

It’s a paper form, and if it’s not the Ambassador you want to see, then you write the person’s name in a little box underneath, and in the box below that you fill out the reason for your visit.

I write, Accepted into sixth year. Advice?

A guard directs me to the proper line, and I stand between Visas and Water Permits, and some woman stamps my paper and tells me to look for a response in my email.

It takes six weeks, and then the image of my form is sent back so I can see that under ENTERED it has been stamped DECLINED.

I end up looking up the social calendar for her kind of people, and a week later I find her outside a club, smoking, bare-armed in the cold to show off the big white smoking permit on her wrist.

When she sees me she licks her lips, turns her profile to me like she used to do with Fortuni.

“Declined,” she says when I’m close enough, “have they not gotten to long words in sixth year yet?”

I say, “Do you know where he is?” which I mean to say, and “I miss him,” which I don’t.

She says, “Well, I don’t know, do I?” which I expect, and bursts into tears, which I don’t.

I go home and look up her life until then, little mentions on the society sites and on the galleries of the most fashionable people, and I feel like I’m checking up on someone I used to babysit.

I get another message from the Embassy, which I expect, and accept the invitation, which I don’t.

At night I pull the bowl out from under my bed and press my hands to the glass, feel with my palms for the voices of living things. When I sit back, the beads are already condensing, two handprints full of water.

“I’m going to engineer some rain,” he told me, and I dream of him standing on the dry seabed, closing his eyes over black shields, spreading his arms, opening the sky.

About the Author

Genevieve Valentine’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Journal of Mythic Arts, Fantasy, Shimmer, Escape Pod, Sybils Garage, and Federations. She is a columnist at Tor.com and Fantasy Magazine. Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable, a tragedy she tracks on her blog.

“Long Before They Were Read: Speculative Fiction Book Editors Speak Out, Part 2 of 2″
by Jeremy L. C. Jones

The first half of this interview appeared in our July issue.

Slow openings, rushed endings, point of view shifts, gaps in logic, over-blown language, book editors see it all — even in manuscripts they’ve bought from masters in the field.  They also see manuscripts that need little or no work, manuscripts that make them jump up and down, and manuscripts stacked high enough to build bunkers with.

Editors are readers.  It’s what they do, and they are good at it.

“In many ways, an editor is a professional reader, able to separate their personal preferences from the needs of the audience,” said Susan J. Morris, an editor at Wizards of Coast.  ”Learning how to recognize what is good, even if it is not your preferred style or genre of writing, is very important.”

Editors are readers who help decide what books get published and what shape those books are in when they arrive on bookstore shelves.

“An editor’s list is a reflection of his or her specific tastes and judgments,” said Lou Anders, editorial director of Pyr. “If readers respond to the books in an editor’s line, then that editor is doing their job, and if they don’t, he isn’t.”

Below, a dozen speculative fiction book editors talk about manuscripts, editing, self-editing, and the publishing industry.  Mostly, though, they talk about shaping the book-length stories they love.

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.

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

Darren Nash is the editorial director at Orbit UK.

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.

Part II

What are some of the most common problems you find in manuscripts and how do you and the writer generally fix them?

Blake: The biggest problem is in the opening. I see too many manuscripts that begin with an alarm clock going off in the morning, or with a man walking up stairs, or with the protagonist making himself breakfast. I don’t need a car chase and an explosion to start with, but I do need the story to start from page one, sentence one. There is frequently too much throat clearing before the story gets underway.

Other problems include “lyrical” language without any obvious purpose or point. That’s a major pet peeve of mine. Language should serve the purpose and intent of the story. Everything in the story should serve the purpose and intent. If the language is something that the author wants — i.e., it’s the author’s choice, not the story’s necessity — then there is a problem.

Spanton: This presupposes that we’re talking about books that we’ve acquired. Unevenness of writing. Lack of confidence in their ability to get the reader to get what they’re doing (i.e. over-determination). Extraneous material.

Athans: One of the easiest ways to spot an inexperienced author is what former Wizards of the Coast editor Mark Sehestedt described as “weather report, fashion report, travel report.” This is when a book begins with a lengthy description of the roiling gray clouds traced with ominous flashes of lightning then slowly but surely moves on to what the character is wearing — exactly — and how long and what color his hair is, before finally resting into several pages of the history and customs of the realm and the difference between a flugle tree and a tizzleberry bush, so that you’re most of the way through chapter one before anyone says or does anything.

This is solved by keeping in mind the Latin phrase in media res, which translates roughly to “in the middle of things.” Start in the middle of a fight, or with the hero dangling by his ankles over a pit of crocodiles, or the hero floating face down in a pool, or running from a giant rolling boulder (see where I got at least two of those from?) and fill in the details as you go, when they become relevant.

If you’re an American, write like an American. Time and again I see manuscripts written in some kind of (probably mostly) Tolkeinesque British accent. Adding a “u” to the word armor and using the words “about” when you mean “around” or “which” when you mean “that” doesn’t make you smarter or more sophisticated, it just makes you sound like someone trying to sound smarter or more sophisticated.

Another rule that our friends across the pond tend to disagree with: one scene, one point-of-view [POV]. Anyone who tells you they write in “third person omniscient” is really telling you they write in “third person lazy.” Pick a character and get into his or her (or its, in the case of fantasy and SF) head and stay there until you think you need to switch to someone else’s head, in which case you need to employ the services of a scene break.

Harbowy:  Starting and ending the story in the wrong place is a big one. Beginnings should drop the readers into the world and into the action at an interesting point: when things that have always been the same have just started to change, or in the middle of something exciting. It should be a point that captures readers’ attention and makes them want to see more, not one that’s too far removed from the action… but also not one where so much is going on that they can’t catch up.

Similarly, endings should hit that sweet spot where all the loose ends are tied up and the readers are given some closure, without dragging out too long. This isn’t a hard one to fix from a technical standpoint — it just requires a little detachment and a bird’s eye view of the plot — but it can be hard for a writer to let go of a very long beginning or a very long ending that they’ve grown attached to. I say cut it and save it. Maybe they can find another use for it in another work, or offer it to fans as bonus content down the road.

Another problem I see is over-explaining. “Show, don’t tell” is something writers hear often, but I often see areas where writers both show and tell. Doing both is redundant, and it often weakens a point instead of strengthening it. Writing something like, “She looked around with confusion, scratching her head. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said, puzzled. She couldn’t figure out what had just happened,” is overkill. About three quarters of it isn’t necessary. The solution is to point one or two of these instances out to the writer, and to offer suggestions for streamlining them that demonstrate how a single cue can be stronger than too many cues. Once the writer realizes that his or her intentions are coming across more effectively in fewer words, he or she will be able to identify and cut out the unnecessary parts and tighten up his or her own writing, going forward.

Guran: Gaps of logic and leaps of faith. Authors know their worlds. They are gods and they created them. They sometimes forget to include information we readers need. Or something simply isn’t plausible enough. Fantasy has to be plausible to “work.” Plots can run amok, too, even timelines.  Fixing this sort of thing is generally just a matter of pointing them out.  Sometimes a little brainstorming.

Overuse of words/actions. Characters grinning, chuckling, looking, gazing, sighing, snorting, clenching hands into fists, stomachs churning, breaths catching, etc. over and over and over and… Again, identifying (thank goodness for Microsoft Word’s “find” function and showing the author what they’ve inadvertently done. Since these “revelations” are usually to their utter surprise and chagrin, they have no problem finding alternatives.

Too many subplots and characters and a lack of resolution. The books I am working with now are series books. There’s a difficult balance to achieve of staying fresh and satisfying the reader while still spinning out the story line, characters, world, what have you. (Continuity from book to book is another challenge.) Other than the truly obvious calls, this is a tough one to deal with. Some readers want more, more, more… others want more clarity and fewer complications. So “fixes” are individual.

Morris:  William Strunk, Jr. said, “Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.” Authors unfamiliar with Strunk’s wisdom often commit the sin of overwriting. Luckily, it is also one of the easiest problems to fix. Editing here usually consists of helping the author figure out exactly what scenes, subjects, sentences, and words are necessary to paint the desired picture.

John Irving said, “A writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.” Recent manuscripts I’ve received mimic the passive, movie-watching experience rather than the active, living experience. Usually, the author just needs to be encouraged to maintain a tight third person POV; to write in active voice; and to focus on emotion and action, letting the reader experience the story as it happens.

Ernest Hemingway said, “A writer should create living people; people, not characters.  A character is a caricature.” Authors can get protective of their characters — unwilling to let their favorites display negative character traits, and unwilling to let their villains express redeeming features. When characters could use a little fleshing out, I have authors trace out character development arcs for all their major characters as well as write up a more intensive character study. The character study often involves answering such questions as what the character wants more than anything, what they would do to get it, and, more importantly, what they would never do to get it.

Lowder:  I typically suggest writers read their work aloud as they’re revising, since this helps catch a whole host of problems — awkward dialogue, repetitious sentence structure, and so on. Pacing is also a pretty typical concern; a lot of writers spend too many words on their story’s first act, setting up characters and conflicts in ways that are not very compelling. I’ve worked on several books where the first chapter or two were cut to rather good effect.

If I’m working with a writer on a project from its inception, I like to review a relatively detailed plot outline broken down by chapters. You can avoid some plot logic traps, character development weaknesses, and general pacing flaws through a thorough review of an outline, and catching these things at this early stage can save the author a lot of time writing and revising.

Nash:  A slow start is quite a common problem. I don’t mean “slow” in the sense of there not being an immediate fight scene or breathtaking escape from danger or the like — I’ve read some stunning openings that are very light on action but are utterly compulsive — but some manuscripts take too long to draw the reader in. Sometimes the writer already knew this and was just looking for someone else to say “you need to lose about half of the first three chapters — it takes too long to get going”, but usually, it’s a case of looking at where the plot has to go or the characters have to end up, and then really scrutinizing the text to see whether all of the narrative is paying its way. There are other techniques I’ve been known to use but if I told you I’d have to kill you.

Sometimes the problem is characters behaving in a certain way because the plot demands they do, not because it flows naturally from what we know of them. In that case, it’s up to the writer and editor to put their heads together and work out whether the plot really needs to go that way and, if so, how we can get it there while remaining true to the characters; or perhaps there’s another way to progress the plot that allows the characters to remain consistent.

Probably the most common problem, though, is background information — either too little or too much. As you know, Bob, obvious info-dumping is a sin of the highest order, so it’s incumbent on author and editor to explore other, more inventive options. As to what those options are, it depends on the book — some books lend themselves to flashbacks, some to dialogue, others to “newsflashes.” And, of course, the opposite problem is easy to spot. You get to the point where you say “Huh? What happened there?”  Or — and this is more frequent in my experience — ”Man, I really wanted to know about that! Ripped off!”  And that” s when you ask the author to fill in the blanks.

Taber:  Tense and POV changes that aren’t warranted by the story bug the hell out of me. For tense, I make corrections in the manuscript and handle it the same way as any other line edit with the author. The main thing there is to find a good transition point — tense can be changed in the flow of a story, but not generally mid-sentence.  POV changes are a bit trickier and sometimes require rewriting a section. For those, I usually leave notes in the manuscript asking either for a rewrite to a different character’s point of view, or I find, again, a better place to transition from one viewpoint to another.

Incorrectly used colons, semicolons, and commas are by far the most common mechanical edits. Those are easily handled with line edits and don’t usually cause any fuss. I’ve said elsewhere that it’s a writer’s job to know the grammar and mechanics basics; it’s an editor’s job to know the details. Those are the details that make up the bulk of my job. Not exactly glamorous and exciting, but the grammar nerd in me loves it, and I’m 99% nerd (the other 1% is probably sleeping).

Passive voice tends to be a common problem in fantasy; less so in science fiction and horror. Consistency can also be an issue. Here, I’d like to advise all authors: please run a check on your character names and any invented words such as locations, new technology, etc. If you spell one character’s name three different ways, I’m just going to pick my favorite for them all.

Schluep:  Problem number one is a weak opening. I’ve had times when a manuscript has come in and the cover letter or agent stated something along the lines of  ”it takes a while to get started, but then it really picks up steam and leads to a brilliant crescendo.” Strike one and two. There are a lot of manuscripts for editors to read. There are a lot of books for consumers to choose from. And time is finite. Try to grab them from page one.

Problem two is trying to write like someone else. This is the toughest fix, because it’s almost impossible to make that many changes to a manuscript. Have your literary heroes, but be sure to write in your own voice. Copies almost always read like copies. Be unique. Be yourself. It will read true that way.

Lastly, I often see rushed endings to novels. Writing a book is difficult, tedious work. Writing endings can be worse. Sometimes I think writers are just so excited to bring the book to a close that they don’t give the ending time to breathe. Let it unfold on its own time. It’s easier to cut in the latter stages than it is to add.

Anders:  I think that this question will allow me to address a common misconception in general about what editors do. Typos belong to the world of the copy editors — I could not spell my way out of a paper bag — and while it’s true that I’ve rolled my sleeves up to the elbows in certain manuscripts and dug around in their guts, there are others I haven’t touched.

I hear this misconception a lot when readers are discussing the “Best Editor — Long Form” Hugo. One stated, “Well, I don’t know how much the editing improved or hurt the original manuscript so I don’t know how to vote.” I don’t think that’s the part of an editor’s job that need concern the reader. Rather, it’s the mere fact that they are reading the book in question at all, versus any one of the hundreds of other manuscripts and pitches that crossed the editor’s desk in a specific year. I get pitched maybe two to three times a day now, and out of that, I select/publish under 30 books a year. So it isn’t so much about whether I caught a typo on page 256, or said, “Do you think you need to explain that obscure reference a little clearer?” — it’s the fact that you are reading the book at all that counts.

Weisman:  Continuity errors can be extremely entertaining.  Marty Halpern, who has worked with us as our copyeditor and as one of our editors, is one of the best in the business at catching them — soda cans that are left in the kitchen and later picked up in the bedroom, changes in eye-color, wife’s maiden name, and so forth.

All manuscripts need to be fact-checked within an inch of their lives, and then fact-checked again.  Is that really the name of the song?  Was it really recorded by that artist?  In that year?  Are those really the lyrics?

The science isn’t always thought through.  Why would the aliens create a robot that can be immobilized by throwing a bag over its head?  Authors shouldn’t rely on editors to catch this stuff.  We know less than you do. Or at least we should.  Talk to experts.  Have people who have a little bit of know how read your stuff and try to poke holes in it, before you submit the story for publication.

Do you have some advice for someone who wants to break into editing?

Nash:  In this economy? Waiting until the houses are replenishing some of the blood spilled over the last six-to-eight months might be an idea. Really, though, everyone seems to have their own story about how they got into editing — some came up through the ranks, some from related disciplines, some horizontally from other departments at the same company (my own route was via marketing, which I’d entered after a period in sales).

Some of it’s probably the same advice you’d give a potential writer — read as much as you can; otherwise, try to involve yourself in fanzines, magazines, small presses, web-only publications — anything that gets you editing experience.

Anders:  If you think your flame is going to dim, just be a reader and go do something else that makes more money! If you don’t eat sleep breath this stuff, why on earth would you do it?

Beyond that, I’d say, involve yourself with the community from the start, online and in the flesh.

Taber:  If you don’t truly love it, don’t do it. I’ve worked with several proofreaders who thought it might be a good way to make some extra cash because they were “pretty good at grammar and spelling.” They burnt out quickly or vanished without a trace.

You have to be enthusiastic enough about understanding the ins and outs and shadings of language to run off and look up anything if you’re the slightest bit unsure. Gill Ainsworth — our Senior Editor of the magazine side of Apex — and I trade resources and pick each other’s brains frequently, not because we have to, but because we like to learn.

If you think you might be nerd enough to try, see if someone is looking for volunteer proofreaders. You’ll get the stuff that has already been through line edits, so if you get frustrated with that, you’ll know you don’t want to go deeper. If, instead, you find yourself wishing you’d been the one to do the line edits because that sentence would have worked so much better over there, then you’re on the right track and now have a little experience to cite when you start looking into copy editing and line editing gigs.

And don’t forget that rules and conventions change. What you were taught in high school may not be true today (plus, there are plenty of teachers who don’t teach well or clearly) so you must be willing to constantly refresh your knowledge of the subject.

Weisman:  Pay your dues. Do an internship and take any kind of publishing job you can get, no matter how humble.  Specialize. Network in both real-time and online by making a lot of contacts in your chosen area; in the SF/F world, that means attending conferences, commenting on (or starting) your own blog/Facebook page, etc. Read as much as you possibly can. And then read some more. Jeff VanderMeer is an expert on the publishing field, and I have to both give him credit for these ideas and to recommend his blog, www.jeffvandermeer.com.

Spanton:  Do whatever you can to get (and keep) a wider sense of the industry. I worked as a bookseller for four years before going into publishing and in marketing before going into editorial. Both were invaluable for letting you see that it’s all too easy for the editor to sit in an ivory tower of artistic endeavor (often feeling they have to be there on the author’s behalf). Moaning about the trade not getting your book, huffing about the fact that we haven’t sold many of such-and-such’s book just isn’t good enough. You have to try and make sure you have at least a sense of where all the other imperatives in the industry are coming from and learn how to work with and around them. A haughty retreat onto the sunlit uplands of “Art” does very few people any favors.

Of course, you also have to know when to die in ditch for a fantastic book but time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted and both you and the book you are fighting for will benefit from you not ending up dead in a ditch on as many occasions as possible.

Schluep:  Be prepared to start at the bottom. Assistant work is not glamorous, but that’s how nearly every editor starts out. Start at the bottom. Then work hard. It’s all self invention after that. The harder you work, the more people you meet, the better off you’ll be.

Lowder:  Editors need to be as widely read as possible. You never know when you’ll be working on a project that will benefit from some obscure bit of knowledge. One of the first books I was assigned to copyedit was a modern horror story set in the Soviet Union; I caught some mistakes the author had made in the structure of the characters’ names because I’d studied Russian in college.

You also need to learn to recognize the difference between suggestions you’re making that will clarify the author’s vision and ones that move a book closer to your vision, as if you were the writer. Some editors fail to grasp the difference. That can be deadly for a book and nightmarish for an author.

Athans:   Don’t do it!   But, okay, if you really feel you have to… Make sure you’re well read, especially in the category or genre you’re looking to edit, and pay attention to the business. There are several good publishing industry new services, like Publishers Weekly and Publisher’s Lunch.

Blake:  I read somewhere that if you scratch the surface of an editor, you’ll find a failed writer. I don’t think that’s true, but I do think that writers make great editors. There’s a sensitivity to language and tone, and an understanding of craft, that comes from an active practice of writing. That’s important, I think. But you have to be a reader, primarily, to be an editor. So read, read, read.

Also, there are a variety of different kinds of editing jobs. Most projects aren’t the dream projects we all think about when we think of art and letters. Most of the words out there in the world serve a purpose other than art. I mention this just to be realistic about the world of published words.

Harbowy:  When it comes to copyediting… Practice. Beta-read fan-fiction for friends. Get a feel for how to offer constructive criticism without making writers defensive. Learn to look things up — look everything up. Even things you think you know. Writers have the leeway to go with their gut when it comes to using “lie” or “lay”, referencing a real-live company several years before it was founded, or deciding whether “hair dryer” is one word or two, or to go with what “sounds right”. Editors don’t!

And be conscious of where you’re looking things up. Pick a style guide and a dictionary and use them consistently, and remember that just because something’s cited as fact somewhere on the internet, doesn’t make it true. Pick a source you can trust. Building these habits will make you the sort of trustworthy, meticulous editor that your writer friends will refer their friends to. Once you have those credits to your name, samples of your work, and clients who will serve as references for you, you’ll be able to start to approach editing professionally.

Guran:  I can’t imagine anyone wanting to be an editor. Must be a genetic defect or something.

How about some Dos and Don’ts for writers who are self-editing their manuscripts?

Anders:  When I worked as a screenwriter, my co-writing partner and I had a technique we used. We would go sit in a the movie theatre early, when it was empty and the screen was blank, and we would close our eyes and try and picture what we’d written the day before on the screen in front of us. If we couldn’t, we threw it out.

I think when you are in a manuscript, it is easy to fool yourself because you know in your head what you want, and you may not be able to see that you haven’t achieved it. The ability to get out of your head and encounter what you’ve written as a viewer is very valuable but hard to cultivate.

Secondly, to speak to yet another industry, Sting once remarked that “songs aren’t created in studios; they are abandoned there.” While “all writing is rewriting,” there comes a certain point where you need to put it down and get on to the next one. Don’t spend your life rewriting the same book. Put it down and start the next one. That’s the only way to have any hope of a career.

Blake:  Don’t do it. Find a friend, or ten friends, to read it and help you. You won’t catch everything yourself. You know the rock sorters they use to separate the big rocks from the small ones? Think of editing as a series of filters. By definition, you can’t be both the big filter and the small filter.

Lowder:  Authors should never fall so in love with anything in their prose that they’re afraid to cut it. Develop the ability to step back from your work and look at it with a reader’s eyes. At the same time, don’t get so bogged down in tinkering and making small changes that you never finish the revision. Set yourself a deadline and make yourself keep it.

Athans:  I’m not sure it’s possible to self-edit. I also write, and it never ceases to amaze me that I get comments back from editors that show me I’ve done the very same things I complain about seeing in other authors’ work. Never underestimate the value of a fresh, informed, set of eyes on your work.

Here’s a fun, real-life example: When I first typed this answer, the second sentence read: “I’ve also written,” but then I thought it would sound better as: “I also write,” so I changed “written” to “write” then forgot to change “I’ve” to “I” so I ended up with: “I’ve also write.” Thankfully, I ran the whole thing past my boss, Bill Slavicsek, mostly to make sure I haven’t said anything that’ll get me in trouble, and he pointed out the error. Author, don’t edit thyself!

Harbowy:  Do give yourself time away from the manuscript before you try to edit it. The eye sees what it expects to see, not what’s actually on the page. Give yourself enough distance and time to forget the words on the page, so that you can read the manuscript with fresh eyes. It might help to read it in a different font, or read it aloud.

Don’t worry about marketability at first. Tell the story that you need to tell. Genre and word count can wait. You can always revise it later to make it a better match for the market.

Guran:  There’s no reason for me to offer my advice. Others have done it better. Buy this book: Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, Second Edition: How to Edit Yourself into Print by Renni Browne, Dave King, and George Booth. Read it.

If you are looking to sell a novel, read The First Five Pages: a Writer’s Guide to Staying out of the Rejection Pile by Noah Lukeman. Read it. Have the sense to know that not everything in either book applies to you specifically, but, generally apply what does.

Morris:  Do:

Remember you’re writing for an audience.

Trace out the plot arcs. Where does your novel really start and end? Are all the arcs complete? Could you make the arcs tighter? More dramatic?

Examine each scene. What is its purpose? Does it drive character and plot development? Is it told from the correct perspective? Is it necessary for the story? Is there a better scene that could go there?

Trace out each character arc. Does each character have an ideal arc? Are there any gaps that need filling? Have you forced your characters to their limits, to confront their greatest fears? Forced them to make the hardest choices?

Examine each paragraph and sentence. Are they as concise as you can make them? Do you overuse any unusual words?

Don’t:

Start editing immediately. Take at least a two-week break before you start editing your first draft. Regardless of the quality of your prose, you will become blind to both its virtues and vices when forced into close proximity with it for extended periods of time.

Spend too much time with your thesaurus. Remember, exotic words are like precious gemstones, and need to be set in plain, polished prose. One exotic word per paragraph is plenty.

Save over your first draft file. Keep previous versions of your text, just in case you change your mind about your edits.

Be afraid to take risks with your characters and plot arc, completely rewriting whole sections if necessary. If you limit yourself to tinkering, you may never discover what your story is meant to be.

Worry about the details on your first pass. Worry about character and plot first. Then do a second pass and worry about details.

Schluep:  Do write freely on the first draft, but don’t be afraid to kill your babies during the editing stage. You’re writing more to entertain others than you are to entertain yourself.

Nash: Do take the time to put the manuscript away for a month or two and come back to it fresh.

Do take the time to check for spelling and grammar errors rather than relying on your computer’s spellchecker to do it (there knot they’re four the porpoise of replacing you’re brain; write spelling of words inn the wrong context throes up all manor of miss takes).

Do remember the old saw “murder your darlings.”  If you’ve written a passage or a scene that you’re convinced is the most polished, most powerful, most brilliant piece of prose you’ve ever written, the odds are good that it should be the first chunk to come out of the manuscript.

Don’t assume that just because you have your characters laugh at something that it’s funny.

Don’t serially-abuse your thesaurus because you think there are too many “saids” in your work; “said” works just fine (he proclaimed).

Taber:  Do know what every word you’re using means. Sure, malapropisms are entertaining for me, but they don’t make you look good. Also, if you don’t really understand things like past perfect or passive voice, ask someone. Ask several people. Eventually, you’ll find someone who can explain it to you in a way that makes sense, and from then on you’ll be able to write and self-edit accordingly.

Reading your work aloud (or having someone else read it to you) is a great way to catch errors, especially words that you use far too often and don’t even notice (”now,” “just” and “suddenly” are some of the most common culprits).

Don’t get impatient — your work is worth the time it takes to get it right.

Spanton:  Write first, then revise. Get it down on the page and then go back. Don’t revise as you go. That may mean a chunk, that may mean a chapter, that may mean a whole book but get something substantial down first before you go back and start tinkering. At least half a day’s worth of writing I’d say — give yourself a chance to get in the swing.

Be brutal — kill your darlings. If the sentence you’ve written doesn’t progress the plot or tell the reader something important about the character, get rid of it. However beautiful the writing, however fitting the image, however many hours you spent laboring over it. Unwriting is as important as writing.

Do read your dialogue back out loud. Obviously you can’t reproduce speech, with all its repetitions, pauses, diversions and redundancies exactly but you can mimic its rhythms and its feel on the page. Reading dialogue out loud helps you spot if speech sounds right.

Try reading whole passages out loud, not just dialogue. You’d be surprised how awful some prose sounds when you try to read it out. If you stumble over reading it out loud, then the chances are the reader will stumble over it as well. Stories were listened to long before they were read.

Go back and be brutal again.

If the book sucks, move on. But don’t chuck the manuscript or delete the file. Keep it somewhere. You never know what’s in there that might be useful at another time.

Don’t feel that time spent on writing that wasn’t published was wasted. It almost certainly wasn’t.

Don’t listen to friends and family. They’re going to be nice to you.

Don’t edit (much less write) a book according to what you think the market may want. Write (and edit) for yourself and your imagined reader.

Go back and be brutal again. That’s right, a third time.

Weisman: If possible, don’t do it all yourself.  It’s hard to “see” your own work; once you’ve gone through several drafts (and you have by now, right?), you lose the ability to be objective about your work.  Get some other readers, particularly an agent (you have or are actively looking for an agent, right?) (Some agents do this and some don’t), or teachers/participants in a writing conference such as Clarion or Sycamore Hill.  A trusted friend might also be able to help, but in any case you need to be wary of how much or how little feedback you choose to incorporate in your work.  It’s your work and your vision, above all else.

If you could rule the world of book publishing, what would you change?

Athans:  I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the publishing business, really, that a top-to-bottom, exhaustive, total reorganization won’t fix. The number of things that happen in this business every day that are based on “well, we all know it’s stupid, but we’ve always done it that way,” would blow your mind.

If I was the Emperor of Publishing, the first thing I’d think about doing is breaking it up and moving it out of New York. The days when everyone had to live within walking distance of each other to work together has been over for a few decades now, and I’ll tell you what, being out here in Seattle is fantastic. There should be no more than two trade publishers in any given city, and the literary agencies should be required to be located in cities with no publishers at all.

In that ideal world, editors and authors should enjoy a richly collaborative relationship built around the single unifying principal of working tirelessly to create the best possible books. I’m proud to say that that’s true among my staff — and true among many of my friends and professional acquaintances around the business, even the ones who live next door to agents.

Morris:  In my ideal world, an editor’s job is completely focused on the actual manuscripts — on reading, selecting, obtaining, editing, and polishing great stories — and the author always has plenty of time for revisions, and I always have plenty of time to edit. And, of course, the fruits of our happy collaborations all sell brilliantly. My first change would be to claim more time with the manuscript, rather than being as tightly bound, as a shared world publisher is, to release dates.

Nash:  This is a difficult one, because the process has changed to reflect the realities of the marketplace. It’s no use advocating sweeping changes that would result in painstakingly crafted books not being stocked in the bookshops. I’ve seen it said that books are no longer edited — which is tremendously insulting to the many hard-working editors in the industry who spend their own time reading and editing manuscripts, and is simply not true. What is true is that the time we can spend on individual manuscripts is less than it used to be, because of all of the other elements of the job that need to be done.

I’d love to be able to spend more time working with an author to carefully polish the text, but if that meant neglecting cover briefs, cover copy, in-house championing of the author and all the other arcane practices we enact in order to give our books the best possible chance in a very competitive market, I’d argue that would make me a less effective editor rather than the person who goes over every line in the manuscript but allows the book to published with an embarrassing cover and dull copy. (I’m not saying anyone does that, by the way — just trying to illustrate a point).

But if you want a nice sound byte or bit of controversy, how about this: if I could rule the world of book publishing, I’d ban people from writing autobiographies unless they’d actually done something. Yes, I’m looking at you, vapid celebrities and teenage sportspeople with only half a professional season under your belts — go and achieve something before you bore us with your life stories.

In the most ideal of worlds, editors should be like sporting officials — invisible if they’re doing their job. The only time you remember the referee in a football match is when he’s had a stinker!

Anders: Don’t chase trends, set them. There are extreme commercial constraints on the publishing industry right now. I maintain that “good” and “commercial” are not mutually exclusive categories. I cannot publish a work that is “good but not commercial” and keep my job, but so far, every work I’ve selected is something I’ve judged (rightly or wrongly!) as “good and commercial” and none have been “commercial but not good.”

I think every quality book published by every house sustains the genre, by keeping the active readership engaged, and potentially swells the genre, by potentially being someone’s introduction. Likewise, every bad book published has the potential to diminish the genre, by providing someone with the excuse to quit reading with that book, to put SF/F aside as something they think they outgrew, or something not worth their interest. Ultimately, I think that publishing bad books because “they sell” is detrimental to the field.

That and I’d get rid of the return system. That’s something people have groused about for years, but the green movement and the recent publishing crisis might actually stand a chance of doing something about it. It will take some key big houses to lead the way there though.

Blake:  I actually think the production process is pretty well sorted by this point. Like ants, we’ve found the shortest way to the food. If I would change anything, it would be in other parts of the publishing world.  In marketing, I’d get rid of the bound galley; in distribution, I’d change the returns policy.

Guran: Be considered as goddesses/gods on earth?  If I ruled the publishing world I’d have a lot more information and understand a lot more about things I couldn’t tamper with. I’d probably also see a lot of things that could be improved. First, I’d make sure I had a secure job and benefits — or be independently wealthy — so no matter what I said or tried, I wouldn’t have to worry about the personal consequences.

Harbowy:  If I could rule the world of publishing, I’d release paperbacks first, and shuffle hardcovers off to become library and collectors’ editions. Hardcovers are space-consuming, expensive, and I think that they hinder first-time authors. A reader would be more willing to take a chance on someone they’ve never heard of and buy an interesting-looking paperback for $5.99, than take a chance on the hardcover of the same book for $25 or $30.

Lowder:  As the major publishing houses have been consolidated and swallowed by international multimedia operations, editors find themselves with less and less time to nurture talent. Chasing fads and questing frantically for the next writer-with-a-back-story, the media-friendly guy or gal who might make it onto Oprah, has replaced the idea of growing markets and building authors over years, not months or weeks. Ideally, editors should be able to focus more on books and writers they care about, and then be given the time to develop them.

Schluep:  In my perfect world, editors would get two days out of the office to do nothing but read and edit. It would lead to less multi-tasking and more concentration. I do not believe there will ever be a perfect world.

Taber:  I would love to see big-name authors held to the same standards of quality as newer authors. Yes, established authors have earned a following and a little bit of leeway, but quality is quality. It hurts the publishing industry as a whole, in my opinion, when marketing efforts and book buying dollars are put into substandard work. I understand, from a marketing perspective, why this happens… but in my ideal world, it would not be so.

As for ideal editing, the only thing I think I would change is the timeline. I would love to have more time to go through the back-and-forth stages with an author to get the book into a shape that everyone is truly happy with… but then, it might never get to print.

Weisman:  Wow. I would publish all of the best books and have unlimited resources to market, promote, and sell them.  And time, lots of time. In an ideal world, editors have the time to work more closely with authors. In this world, the editing process in increasingly rushed due to economic constraints.

Spanton:  Don’t get me started… Seriously, though, I think the industry is pretty well evolved. I might think my changes would be the business but generally there are good (or at least powerful) reasons why things happen the way they do.

It’s writers who shape worlds, not editors.

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.

“The Minimal and Finely Focused Fantasy of Ian C. Esslemont”
by Jeremy L. C. Jones

Ian C. Esslemont has lived in and out of Malaz since 1982. And you can tell. The people breathe, the seas rage, and time stretches far in both directions. Malaz is a big world, a huge world, given life in Esslemont’s novels Night of Knives and Return of the Crimson Guard and in Steven Erikson’s nine novels, starting with Gardens of the Moon through to the most recent Dust of Dreams.

Malaz can be grim and dark and violent. In the hands of Esslemont, Malaz is always vibrant and real. “Far in the distance a dark smudge appeared,” writes Esslemont in Night of Knives, “but the figure continued its laboured march, on and on under a sky that remained hazy and dim, where shapes resembling birds swept high into the clouds.”

There are far distances and dark smudges, but Esslemont is the most concerned with the individual characters, the people as they struggle along. And it is here, in his characters, that Esslemont does the most world building, telling the story of a whole world in the lives of his characters.

“I hope that what I write contains everything — else it would not have the feel of a complete fiction (if you know what I mean),” said Esslemont. “More specifically, I suppose I write about contending goals and agendas, the evolution of mythologies, beliefs, and legends, the efforts of the individual to find his or her ’self’ and to understand and come to peace with the world and their place in it (everything, in other words).”

Malaz is a world built through conversations between two long-time friends, and reading Esslemont’s novels possess a certain intimacy, a certain closeness that is both exhilarating and real. 

These days Esslemont lives in Alaska with his family while finishing a graduated degree and working on more novels set in Malaz.

What do you enjoy most about writing?

What I enjoy the most about writing is the creation in creative writing. The surprise and discovery that comes with pushing ahead on the blank page: anything can happen, and sometimes does. 

[Writing] is like any other creative art — painting, sculpting — there’s always more to learn, skills to hone further. And one can always choose to take risks as well, if one is so inclined.

I am glad to see [writing fiction] regarded now as more of a ‘craft’ rather than how it has been regarded in the past: sort of as the divinely-granted mystical gift where one waits for inspiration to strike, like lightning. Really, it’s more of a job. Ninety percent of writing is planting one’s butt in a chair for four to six hours a day.

What did (or has) playing role-playing games taught you about writing fiction?

A great deal, I think. In your interview with Robert Redick, he confesses that he was an RPG fan. Like Robert, I think it helped teach me dialogue, character development, plotting, pacing, how to stage a scene … just about everything. At the same time I also read feverishly in fantasy and science fiction (as I’m sure he did as well). For me, the old-style RPG of a gang of friends gathered around a table provided a self-selected set of like-minded readers (an audience) to try out material.

Also, like any hobby or pursuit, the RPG can be handled poorly or skillfully. Dull, uninspiring campaigns and games are as common as poorly prepared meals at restaurants, stupid films, or shoddily made electronic goods. I suppose I was lucky in encountering such a skilled, intelligent, and dedicated group as I found at the University of Manitoba back in the ’80s. The games there were challenging, surprising, dynamic, even thrilling. As good as any fantasy story could be — as they should be. 

Then I met Steve [Erikson] and introduced him to role-playing games, and things just took off from there. The more we gamed the less we came to reference the mechanics and paraphernalia of the game and the more we came to just talk. We ran entire games just in dialogue between numerous characters who argued and sniped and vied amongst themselves all through the night.

Most of our fiction features our characters from those games — even those very scenarios we ran.

Both you and Steven Erikson have done archaeological work. Are there any similarities between that and writing?  Being a graduate student and writing fiction?

A lot of similarities, I think. To me, being a writer feels like being a perpetual graduate student — you never finish! At least with a dissertation one finishes the book and can then move on to articles and such, but in writing fiction there’s always the next book! And there’s always supporting research, etc. But then, I’ve been a grad student for many years so maybe that’s just what I’m used to. 

As to archaeology, yes, very much so. The analogy is no doubt quite well established: one digs up things, unearths what can be unearthed, makes connections and establishes context, constructs the weave of a society, a culture. It’s all there. 

Is there anything of Manitoba in Malaz?  Alaska in Malaz?

Hmm. Interesting question. Since both Steve and I grew up in Winnipeg there must be a lot of Manitoba in Malaz. Not directly though, no geographic stand-in. Steve and I have deliberately tried to avoid the old fantasy cliché of the northern ‘Scandinavian’ type region, the ‘Celtic’ region, and the eastern ‘Chinese’ type or Mongol type region or peoples who stand in for such. 

As to Manitoba, well, there is a great love of the land, of forest, and plain, that we hope comes through, and that is perhaps traceable to having been raised on the prairie. It’s a landscape that puts a stamp on one, that’s for certain.

Now, as to Alaska, well, the question of aboriginal vs. invader peoples is central in the world of Malaz, as is the question of colonialism and imperialism in its various historical forms. Alaska is a region where that is still very much playing out.

The world of Malaz began as a setting for a home-brew role-playing game.  How did this fact flavor the world?

In one foundational way you could say that the abandonment of the traditional single hero, single protagonist narrative line, in favor of the ensemble multi-character narrative, is perhaps traceable to Steve and my RPG roots. In Malaz, we deliberately threw aside the (ridiculous in hindsight) conceit that any single individual can defeat an army, or overturn history. That’s the old “great man” model of history that doesn’t really stand up once you take a good long hard look at it.

Malaz evolved out of our need for a milieu for our rpg. We poured everything we had into it, all our ideas, all our enthusiasm and creativity. It could have easily faltered or “failed” ( if disappearing counts as failure) at any time. It was frankly unlikely that Gardens of the Moon would have ever seen the light of day. Only Steve’s stubbornness and persuasiveness saw it over the hump into print — not to take away from the quality of writing, it’s just that so many turned it down … too long, too complicated, too many characters, too dense, too lacking in explanations for the readers … the list went on and on.

The world was built through a process of dialogue, collaboration. Steve would throw something onto the table and I would build on it, or I would throw something onto the table and he would then take that idea and run with it. Sometimes what we tried didn’t work, or didn’t appeal to the other and that element, withered. Naturally, the elements we liked were the one that we developed. I think that this process of natural selection made things very strong and cohesive (or so I hope).

What part or parts of Malaz feel the most yours?  Or, put differently, where is your stamp or fingerprint the most apparent?

Oh-oh, are you trying to foment trouble between Steve and me here? 

This is really hard to say as we originally developed each region together. Now, years later, as we flesh out further parts you might say that these are mine or Steve’s, such as how Letheras is very much fleshed out by Steve. Yet, it is not that simple as the Tiste Edur brothers were my player characters originally…

Or, for example, I might say that the Korel, or Fist, subcontinent has my stamp. But again that is not completely true — it’s a good example of how we shared development. All the city and country names were written in by Steve, leaving me to make of them what I may. Similarly, I filled in and named the regions of south Genabackis, including Darujhistan (excluding Bastion and regions which Steve later added), and mapped out the subcontinent south of Korel. 

Much of Knives of Knives takes place in a day and a night.  What did this limited time frame let you do?  Did you ever feel constrained by this abbreviated time frame?

I set this limited time frame deliberately. It was my creative response to the criticism of fantasy similar to the one raised in your interview with Robert Redick.  In that interview he cites Kim Stanley Robinson explaining his dislike of fantasy: “As he put it, in a world where anything is possible, nothing is interesting.” In effect, I guess that this implies there are no limits in fantasy and thus there is no creative challenge (in painting, for example, every canvas has a border).  My idea was that fantasy can work just as well in the minimal and finely focused. Thus the limit of twenty-four hours. There are well-known literary precursors and models for this but I won’t go into all that here. Suffice it to say that it is my opinion that fantasy can be just as effective a medium for investigating the close and intimate as any other genre. 

I learned an extraordinary amount in writing Knives. It was my apprenticeship piece, you might say. I cut my first chops and all that. Everything I learned with it then went into Return of the Crimson Guard. Mainly, I think I learned to trust myself more and to take my time … and I’m still working on those very hard lessons. 

What are you working on now and how does it expand upon the previous books and the world of Malaz?

I have a contract with Bantam for four more Malazan novels. I’m really excited by the chance to follow through with these. The first tackles the Korel, or Fistian, subcontinent. It centers on Malazan entanglements there, the Stormriders, and a local religious cult. After that I’ll turn to Darujhistan, then events on the continent of Jacuruku, and finally I’ll finish up by revealing Assail. All these four fit in with and complete Steve’s and my main arc for the world as a whole.

Are you ever over-whelmed by the sheer size of the world you and Steven Erikson have built?

No, not at all. In fact, I enjoy it immensely; it’s half the fun! There’s so much to tell; it all adds to the richness.

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.

“Eternal Lives on Hard-Drives?”
by Brian Trent

Dominique’s beloved father died two weeks before his sixtieth birthday. The present she bought him is still wrapped, a collection of his favorite Dirty Harry movies on DVD. He would have loved to watch them again after so many years.

Driving home from the hospital where Dad took his final breaths, Dominique sighs and begins making calls to family and friends. There will be no funeral. No burial. No cremation. Rather, Dominique’s calls are to set up plans for her father’s return, as soon as the insurance claim is approved and his digitally stored consciousness can be downloaded into a cloned body.

Dominique’s mother confirms that the last time Dad got saved was two years ago. Which means when he returns, he’ll have no memory of the cruise they took together last summer. Mercifully, he also won’t remember who accidentally knocked a can of red paint all over his golf clubs last Christmas.

Two years of life will have to be retold. But he’ll have life again. And those Dirty Harry movies won’t stay wrapped up forever. Dad will get to watch them, thanks to a technology not terribly different from the way those very DVDs are able to be watched and re-watched for all time.

The human brain is the most complex device in the universe. An elaborate network of roughly 100 billion neurons, it stores our thoughts, feelings, dreams, fears, lusts, quirks, and memories. The Egyptians were obsessed with immortality and took extreme measures to preserve the body from decay, even storing its organs in neat canopic jars. Yet the brain they threw away. Believing that the seat of consciousness was in the chest, they saw no purpose in preserving the skull’s most important resident. Ignobly, it was tossed out with the trash.

A cerebral system of 100 billion neurons is an advanced network configuration, but it is still a finite system. When Clint Eastwood pulls his .357 magnum and asks a punk if he feels lucky, there is a finite information set making it possible for that scene to be stored and played. This information is compressed on disc. We need only pop it into a DVD player, and it’s ready for resurrection.

Why should the information within the human brain be so different? It might not fit onto yesterday’s floppy, but perhaps on tomorrow’s hard-drives.

It will probably happen, says Dr. Christoff Koch, professor of biology and engineering at the California Institute of Technology in Southern California. Koch spent four years as a post-doctoral fellow at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and at the Brain and Cognitive Sciences department at MIT. He is also a visiting Professor at the Institute for Neuroinformatics at the University of Zürich.

Speaking of mental downloads, Koch says, “It is conceivable. It depends on your theory of consciousness, and on your technological platform. If you think consciousness is primarily information, then it’s something that will eventually happen. If you have a more ethereal definition of consciousness then this wouldn’t apply.”

This technological platform is a daunting task for today’s computers, certainly. Yet in Lausanne, Switzerland scientists have just recently managed to simulate an entire neocortical column inside a computer. Call it a very real first step.

That step came out of Project Blue Brain, a joint initiative since 2005 pairing IBM and the Federale de Lausanne Ecole Polytechnique (EPFL) to craft a working digital model of brain function using IBMs powerful Blue Gene supercomputer.

Within a year, the project had created a functional model of the neocortical column which, according to the researchers’ website, “can reconstruct biologically accurate neurons based on detailed experimental data, and automatically connect them in a biological manner, a task that involves positioning around 30 million synapses in precise 3D locations.” ¹ This virtual neocortical column contained 10,000 neurons.

The implications speak for themselves. With the immense strides in processing power each year, Project Blue Brain expects to eventually reverse engineer the entire human brain.

And why not? We’re already doing body-uploading courtesy of the Visible Human Project (VHP.)

In what sounds like something out of Tron, the VHP digitally records an entire human body as the physical copy is sliced up, section by section.  The grand result is a corpse rendered in digital.

The VHP is a research project by The National Library of Medicine. It is the “creation of complete, anatomically detailed, three-dimensional representations of the normal male and female human bodies,” the project team states. Acquisition of transverse CT, MR and cryosection images of representative male and female cadavers has been completed. ²

Of course the brain is many orders of magnitude more complex than the body which houses it. Yet even here, this kind of virtual simulation has been done in a basic way by the researchers behind the Digital Brain Atlas. Hoping to aid neurosurgical training and technique, the stated objective of this atlas is “to visualize spatially complex structures.” ³

Science-fiction has dabbled in this area; from the ROM-encoded personalities in William Gibsons Neuromancer to the pattern buffer of Star Trek. Surely getting an appropriately powerful storage medium is just half the battle. What remains is how to capture neurological data to be stored in the first place. At the very least, a method of connecting your organic brain to a computer to facilitate data transmission is required.

Fortunately, we’re already there.

Cyborgs are no longer science-fiction. After becoming paralyzed from a stab wound to his neck, Matthew Nagle volunteered to become one.

Nagle was the first test-subject to have an aspirin-sized device called BrainGate implanted in his head. Developed by Cyberkinetics in conjunction with the Department of Neuroscience at Brown University, BrainGate takes neural commands that originate in the brain and converts them to computer commands.

These neural commands are “not so complicated that we can’t read out the little pulses of the brain,” says Dr. John Donoghue of Cyberkinetics. “It can be interpreted.”

Nagle was able to control an onscreen cursor by “thinking” it to move, and could also access email, change TV channels, and play basic video games with the power of thought itself. ⁴

The eventual application is to allow paralyzed people to move prosthetic limbs as effortlessly as the real thing. University of Pittsburgh researchers have already shown this is possible with monkeys, as a 2004 experiment demonstrated. By wiring the monkeys brain to a microchip, researchers were able to demonstrate that the monkey could operate a robotic arm through thought alone, and feed itself. ⁵

In the same way, science has given blind people the first real chance to see again. Available now are devices which can transmit light to the brains visual processing center, bypassing optic nerve damage. Presently this only works for people who once had vision, since their brains know how to process visual information. ⁶

The greater implication of this brain-computer linkage is seldom mentioned. If you can think commands into a microchip, then surely that information can be saved. Why not then think your entire brain onto a storage device? A flash-drive for the soul?

In transhumanist circles, Ray Kurzweil is a prophet from the future or a god from Olympus.

Kurzweil is a best-selling author, computer scientist, and inventor. He is also a fierce advocate for life-extension and nanotechnology, and he makes no efforts to play it subtle. In an interview with David Jay Brown, Kurzweil waxes digital about the future of humanity.

“Today we already have computers that are placed inside peoples brains, that replace diseased parts of the brain, like the neural implant for Parkinson’s disease. The latest generation of that implant allows you download new software to your neural implant from outside the patient — and that’s not an experiment, that’s an FDA approved therapy.” ⁷

Kurzweil’s vision of tomorrow is one in which uploadable consciousness is a way of life. Counting on the continued increase in computer processing speed, Kurzweil foresees this technology as around the proverbial corner within a few decades.

Dr. Koch, who has worked on Project Blue Brain, is more cautious.

“It could happen in our own lifetime,” Koch says. “Or it could be 100 or 200 years from now.”

Koch compares research in this area to astronomy.

“Every time astronomers examine the stars, they increase our knowledge of the universe. Every time we look at the brain, we see more detail.”

It is this massive amount of detail that presently eludes scientists. In the film The Sixth Day, the brain’s internal structures could be quickly photographed through an eye exam. In reality, it won’t be that simple.

However, scientists are getting better at it. In March of 2009 scientists at Wellcome Trust Center for Neuroimaging at University College London reported that they have developed a way of “seeing” a person’s thoughts. By looking at brain data, the researchers were able to read the part of the brain which deals with memory and navigation.⁸

Is a stored consciousness as good as the original?

The very question ties into another: What theoretical method for storing such incredible amounts of data would be used? The compression methods used for a Dirty Harry film are typically lossy. JPEG and MPEG are common examples. Put simply, similar blocks of data are bunched together, a great deal is tossed away, and the differences between data groupings are used to reconstruct the general appearance of the original. It’s approximation, not replication.

Even fractal compression operates on a variation of this principle. Data is herded together by its similarities. From a high altitude of observation, the average day in an average life becomes a predictable topography — we don’t generally live like Indiana Jones swinging through wildly different adventures but rather tend to run in usual grooves.

Nonetheless, doesn’t a closer analysis of such average days reveal distinctions?

Superficially, our daily patterns become predictable yet each day we do change, think, and grow in unique ways. The person we are at the beginning of a year is not the person who exists by the end. A lossy compression would dismiss these nuances in favor of a generic data topography.

Lossless data compression is different. Rather than creating an approximation of the subject, it preserves all information. A ZIP file is the popular example.

But is the most advanced ZIP file of a human brain actually a human brain? Is it you?

The philosopher John Locke once said if you can remember thinking about something, then you are the same person who did the thinking to begin with. So too does the famous Cartesian proof agree. “I still think,” our digital soul might say, “Therefore I still am.”

Even allowing for this, however, we must wrestle with some ugly implications mind-uploading brings to the forefront.

If the total contents of the brain can be dropped into a spreadsheet, all possible chess moves are revealed. A society with this power has ready-made blueprints for the ultimate ant farm. Creativity, individuality, and surprise become regulated modules. Artists and freethinkers are the people who download the best app.

Eventually even that distinction fades. Artists and freethinkers are the app. Human behavior fits into a future accountants chart, and the job title Editor takes on awful new significance.

In Stephen King’s short story “Word Processor of the Gods,” the titular device was able to delete or insert things into the real world. Now picture behavioral engineering done the same way with uploaded consciousness. It starts with rapists and murderers: a rehabilitation system reviews the digital profile, and edits or deletes certain behaviors. In time, profile edits extend into any other category marked “deviation.”

The end result? Free will’s last stand. Byron succumbs to binary.

Legal definitions would need revising, too. Does habeas corpus apply to someone without a corpus? Is it still protected by due process?

Better yet, does due process cover a thousand copies of yourself? If an exact copy commits murder, is the original recording responsible? And if you murder someone in digital, is it really murder or an act without consequence… comparable to blowing away a teammate in a game of Halo?

These queries barely scratch the surface. The invisible man in H.G. Wells’ novel wasn’t born psychotic; he voluntarily chose to become a sociopath after living in a world that held no constraints for him. In effect, his indiscernible body meant no body and no consequences. While he considered his state to be transcendence above his peers — a popular theme in science-fiction — he was instead divorced from humanity in more ways than one.

If any of these fears have merit, why risk it?

We might ask people like Dominique who have lost loved ones.

At the very least, mind-uploading would be a preservation against entropy and death (if it works). The uploaded mind would then wait, frozen like a fly in amber, until downloaded into a newly-repaired or cloned body. Or it could be accessed while still on computer; we can imagine a live person interacting in a virtual world with the consciousness of the recently deceased. Our fictional Dominique, for instance, might be able to converse with Dad through a type of Second Life program, where Dad’s consciousness waits until a corporal body is ready for reinsertion. Purgatory version 2.0.

Eventually, a kind of Library of Humanity is formed. The entire species is backed up. Had such a technology been available millennia ago, the minds of Plato, Archimedes, or da Vinci would be accessible to us as teachers today. So might Caligula or Hitler.

Yet the impetus to defy oblivion has been with us since our prehistory; one of the oldest stories ever told is the Epic of Gilgamesh about a man’s desperate quest for immortality. Mind-uploading suggests the great fulfillment of that dream.

Might we live to see a future where the phrase “have you been saved?” means something quite different from what it does today?

References:  

1. Project Blue Brain:
http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/

2. Visible Human Project:
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/visible/visible_human.html

3. Harvard Publications on Digital Brain Atlas:
http://www.spl.harvard.edu/publications/item/view/347

4. BrainGate Neural Interface:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDiWFcA0gaw

5. “BrainGate Brain-Machine Takes Shape”:
http://www.gizmag.com/go/3503/

6. Bionic Eye Could Restore Sight:
http://thefutureofthings.com/news/1152/new-bionic-eye-could-restore-sight.html

7. Ray Kurzweil Interview by David Jay Brown:
http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0648.html?m%3D5

8. “Science Moves a Step Closer to Mind Reading.” Reuters.:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29666474/from/ET/

About the Author

Brian Trent is a genre-spanning writer of both fiction and nonfiction. His work has appeared multiple times in Clarkesworld, Electric Velocipede, Strange Horizons, Atomjack, The Humanist (including a cover piece on human longevity research,) Boston Literary Magazine, The Copperfield Review, The Eclectic Muse, Bewildering Stories, Writers Digest, and many others. He twice won Honorable Mention in the L. Ron Hubbards Writers of the Future contest last year, and was a panelist at Yales science-fiction symposium “Literary Visions.”