“White Charles”
by Sarah Monette

The crate arrived at the Parrington on a Wednesday, but it was Friday before anyone mentioned it to me. Anything addressed from Miss Griselda Parrington, the younger of Samuel Mather Parrington’s two daughters, was automatically routed to Dr. Starkweather’s office, regardless of whose name she had written on it. I was, in truth, intensely grateful for this policy, for Miss Parrington most often addressed her parcels to me. She felt that we were “kindred spirits”; she considered me the only employee of the museum with the sensitivity and intelligence to appreciate her finds. Considering that she had inherited all of her father’s magpie-like attraction to the outré and none of his discernment, her opinion was less flattering than one might think. I endured some teasing on the subject, though not nearly as much as I might have; in general, the curators’ attitude was one of “there but for the grace of God.” They were even, I think, rather grateful, if not to me precisely, then at least for my existence.

Miss Parrington’s packages were inevitably accompanied by letters, sometimes quite lengthy, explaining what she persisted in referring to as the provenance, although it was no such thing. “I found this in a lovely antique shop in Belgravia that Mimi showed me,” conveyed no useful information at all, since nine times out of ten she neglected to provide any further clues to Mimi’s identity, and on the tenth time, when we managed to determine that “Mimi” was Sarah Brandon-Forbes, wife of the eminent diplomat, a polite letter would elicit the response that Lady Brandon-Forbes had never been in any antique shop in Belgravia in her life. The bulk of Miss Parrington’s letters described, lavishly, what she believed the provenance to be, flights of fancy more suited to a romantic novelist than to even an amateur historian. But the letters had to be read and answered; Dr. Starkweather had been emphatic on the subject: they were addressed to me, therefore it was my responsibility to answer them.

It was perhaps the part of my job I hated most.

That Friday, when I found the letter in my pigeonhole, I recognized Miss Parrington’s handwriting and flinched from it. My first instinct was to lose the letter by any means necessary, but no matter how tempting, it was not a viable solution. Dr. Starkweather saw through me as if I were a pane of glass; he would not be fooled by such an obvious lie. There was, therefore, neither sense nor benefit in putting off the task, unpleasant though it was. I opened the envelope then and there, and read the letter on the way back to my office.

It was a superbly representative specimen, running to three pages, close-written front and back, and containing absolutely no useful information of any kind. She had been at an estate sale — and of course she neglected to mention whose estate — she had recognized the name Carolus Albinus as someone in whom her father had been interested, and thus she had bid on and purchased a job lot of fire-damaged books, along with a picture she was quite sure would prove when cleaned to be an original Vermeer. She had not so much as opened the crate in which the books were packed, knowing — she said coyly — that I would prefer to make all the discoveries myself. But I would see that she was right about the Vermeer.

I propped my throbbing head on my hand and wrote back, thanking her for thinking of the museum and disclaiming all knowledge of seventeenth-century Dutch painters. I posted the letter, dry-swallowed an aspirin, and returned to the round of my usual duties. I gladly forgot about Miss Parrington’s crate.

I should have known better.

On the next Tuesday, I was standing in Dr. Starkweather’s office, helplessly watching him and Mr. Browne tear strips off each other over a casus belli they had both already forgotten, when we were startled by a shriek from the direction of the mail room. Dr. Starkweather raced to investigate, Mr. Browne and myself close behind, and we found Mr. Ferrick, one of the junior-most of the junior curators, sitting on the floor beside an open crate, his spectacles askew and one hand pressed to his chest.

“What on Earth?” said Dr. Starkweather.

Mr. Ferrick yelped and shot to his feet in a welter of apologetic half-sentences.

“Are you all right?” said Mr. Browne. “What happened?”

“I don’t know,” said Mr. Ferrick. “I was opening the crate and something — it flew into my face — I thought — ” He glanced at Dr. Starkweather’s fulminating expression and sensibly did not explain what he had thought.

A closer look at the crate caused my heart to sink, in rather the same way that reading the Oedipus Tyrannos did. “Is that, er, the crate from Miss Parrington?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Ferrick, puzzled.

“Oh good God,” said Dr. Starkweather in tones of utmost loathing, probably prompted equally by Miss Parrington and me.

“She said she, er . . . that is, she didn’t open the crate. So it probably — ”

“A bit of straw,” Dr. Starkweather said, seizing a piece from the floor and brandishing it at us. “You’ve heard of the boy who cried wolf, Mr. Ferrick?”

“Yes, Dr. Starkweather,” Mr. Ferrick said, blushing.

“Good God,” Dr. Starkweather said again, more generally, and stormed out, Mr Browne at his heels already girding himself to re-enter the fray.

I saw an opportunity to let Dr. Starkweather forget about me, and stayed where I was. Mr. Ferrick edged over to the crate as if he expected something else to leap out at him; it was with visible reluctance that he reached inside.

“What did you think it was?” I said.

“Beg pardon?”

“The, er, whatever it was that flew into your face. What did you think it was?”

“Oh. I’ve been spending too much time in Entomology,” he said with a grimace. I waited while he lifted out a book so blackened with smoke that it was impossible to say what color the binding had originally been. “It looked like a spider,” he said finally, tightly. “An enormous white spider. But Dr. Starkweather was right. It was just straw.”

“Make out an inventory,” I said, “and, er, bring it to me when you’re done.” And I left him to his straw.

Mr. Ferrick’s inventory included several works by Carolus Albinus, one by the alchemist Johann de Winter, three by the pseudonymous and frequently untruthful Rose Mundy, and a leather-bound commonplace book evidently compiled by the owner of the library — a deduction which would have been more satisfying if he had signed his name to it anywhere. One of the Carolus Albinus books was rare enough to be valuable even in its damaged condition: the 1588 Prague edition of the De Spiritu et Morte with the Vermeulen woodcuts said to have driven the printer mad. The rest of them were merely good practice for the junior archivists. I heard from Mr. Lucent, who was friends with Mr. Browne’s second in command Mr. Etheredge, that the “Vermeer” was no such thing and was sadly unsurprised. The crate and straw were both reused — I believe in packing a set of canopic jars to be shipped to San Francisco — and that was that. Another of Miss Parrington’s well-meaning disasters dealt with.

Except that the night watchmen, a pair of stalwarts named Fiske and Hobden, began to complain of rats.

“Rats?” said Dr. Starkweather. “What nonsense!”

The rest of us could not afford to be so cavalier, and even Dr. Starkweather had to rethink his position when Miss Chatteris came to him on behalf of the docents and announced that the first time one of them saw so much as a whisker of a rat, they were all quitting.

“But there have never been rats!” protested Mr. Tilley, the oldest of the curators. “Never!”

Hobden and Fiske, stolid and walrus-mustached and as identical as twins, said they could not speak to that, but Mr. Tilley was welcome to tell them what else the scuttling noises might be.

Mr. Lucent rather wistfully suggested getting a museum cat and was promptly shouted down.

Dr. Starkweather grudgingly authorized the purchase of rat-traps, which were baited and set and caught no rats.

Mr. Browne was denied permission to purchase a quantity of arsenic sufficient — said Miss Coburn, who did the calculations — to poison the entire staff.

Frantic and paranoid inventory-taking revealed no damage that could be ascribed to rats, although Decorative Arts suffered a species of palace coup over an infestation of moths in one of their storerooms and our Orientalist, Mr. Denton, pitched a public and monumental temper tantrum over what he claimed was water damage to a suit of bamboo armor. Mr. Browne took advantage of the opportunity to start a campaign to have the main building re-roofed. Dr. Starkweather chose, with some justification, to take this as fomenting insurrection, and the rats were forgotten entirely in the resultant carnage.

Except by Hobden and Fiske — and by me, although that was my own fault for staying in the museum after dark. I was writing an article which required the consultation of (it seemed in my more despondent moods) no less than half the contents of my office. Thus working on it at home was futile, and working on it during the day was proving impossible, as the inventories were bringing to light unidentifiables overlooked in the last inventory, and everyone was bringing them to me. The puzzles and mysteries were welcome, but I had promised this article to the editor of American Antiquities nearly six months ago, and I was beginning to despair of finishing it. Being insomniac by nature, I found the practice of working at night more congenial than otherwise, and the Parrington was blessedly quiet. Fiske and Hobden’s rounds were metronomically regular, and they did not disturb me.

And then there was the scuttling.

It was a ghastly noise, dry and rasping and somehow slithery, and it was weirdly omnidirectional, so that while I was sure it was not in the office with me, I could never tell where in fact it was. It was horribly intermittent, too, the sound of something scrabbling, and stopping, and then scrabbling again. As if it were searching for the best vantage point from which to observe me, and the night I had that thought, I went out to the front entrance and asked the watchman if they had had any luck at ridding the museum of rats.

He gave me a long, steady look and then said, “No, sir. Have some tea.”

I accepted the mug he offered; the tea was hot and sweet and very strong. He watched, and when I had met whatever his criteria were, he said, “Me and Hob, we reckon maybe it ain’t rats.”

This was Fiske, then; I was relieved not to have to ask. “No?”

“No, sir. Y’see, Hob has a dog what is a champion ratter. Very well known, is Mingus. And me and Hob brought Mingus in, sir, quiet-like, feeling that what His Nibs don’t know, he won’t lose sleep over . . .”

“Quite,” I said, perceiving that Fiske would not continue until he had been reassured on that point.

“Thank you, sir. So Hob brought Mingus in, and the dog, sir, did not rat.”

“He didn’t?”

“No, sir. We took him all over the museum, and not a peep out of him. And before you ask, sir, that dratted scratching noise seemed like it was following us about. Mingus heard it, sure enough, but he wouldn’t go after it. Just whined and kind of cringed when Hob tried him. So we figured, Hob and myself, that it ain’t rats.”

“What do, er, you and Mr. Hobden think it is?”

Mr. Fiske looked at me solemnly and said, “As to that, sir, we ain’t got the least idea.”

Two nights later, I saw it, entirely by accident — and not “accident” meaning happenstance or coincidence, but “accident” quite literally: I fell on the stairs from the mail room to the west storage rooms. The stairs were of the sort that consist only of treads — no risers — and when I opened my eyes from my involuntary flinch, I was staring down into the triangular space beneath the stairs and watching something scuttling out of sight. I saw it for less than a second, but I saw that it was white, and it was not a rat. And I all too easily recognized the sound.

For a moment, I was petrified, my body as heavy and cold and unresponsive as marble, and then I scrambled frantically up the stairs, banging my already bruised knees, smacking my raw palms as I fumbled with the door. It was more luck than anything else that I got the door open, and I locked it behind me with shaking fingers, then slumped against it, panting painfully for breath. And then I heard that dry, rasping, scuttling sound from somewhere ahead of me in the storage room, and with the dreadful epiphantic clarity of a lightning bolt, I knew and whispered aloud because it was too terrible a thing to have pent and unvoiced in my skull, “It’s in the walls.” Even that was not the truth of my horror, for in fact that was no more than a banality. What made my chest seem too small for the panicked beating of my heart was not that it was in the walls, but that it was using the walls, as a subway train uses its tunnels.

Subway trains, unlike rats, have drivers.

And then I was running, my mind full of a dry, rustling panic. Later, I would reason with myself, would point out that it had not harmed anyone, or even anything, that there was not the slightest shred of proof that its intentions were malicious, or indeed that it had any intentions at all. But nothing I came up with, no reasoned argument, no rational observation, could withstand the instinctive visceral loathing I had felt for that white scuttling shape. I remembered that Hobden’s dog, a champion ratter, would not go after this thing. I remembered Mr. Ferrick, shaken and embarrassed, describing the “enormous white spider” that had flung itself in his face. And I wondered that night, pacing from room to sleepless room of my apartment, just what else Miss Parrington had bought in that job lot of worthless books.

Was it a sign of insanity that I assumed from the moment I saw it that it was not natural? I do not know. I do know that discovering it to be a gigantic albino tarantula would have been an overpowering relief, and by the very magnitude of that imagined relief, I knew it was no such thing.

The next morning, I prevailed on Mr. Lucent to ask a favor of one of his friends in Entomology, and the two of them met me in the mail room. I brought a flash-light. Mr. Lucent’s friend was Mr. Vanderhoef, a shy young man who wore thick horn-rimmed spectacles and was an expert on African termites. Everyone in the museum, of course, knew about Mr. Ferrick’s spider, and I explained that I thought I had seen it the night before. Mr. Vanderhoef looked dubious, but not reluctant, and contorted himself quite cheerfully into the awkward space beneath the stairs. I passed him the flash-light.

“A big piece of plaster is missing,” he reported after a moment. “That must be how — oh! There is . . . something has been nesting here.”

“Nesting?” Mr. Lucent said unhappily. “You mean it is rats?”

“No,” said Mr. Vanderhoef, rather absently. “There aren’t droppings, and it doesn’t look . . . In truth, I’m not sure what it does look like.”

“What do you mean?” I said. Mr. Lucent and I were now both peering between the treads of the stairs, but all we could see was Mr. Vanderhoef’s shock of blond hair.

“There are no droppings, no caches of food, no eggs — nor viviparous offspring for that matter . . .”

“It couldn’t be a, er, trap?”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, er, like a . . . like a spider’s web.”

“Ah. No.”

“So, what is it using to nest in?” Mr. Lucent asked before I could find a way to get Mr. Vanderhoef to expand. “It isn’t as if we’ve got a lot of twigs and whatnot in the museum.”

“No, no,” said Mr. Vanderhoef. “Paper. Newspaper, mostly, although I think I see the remains of one of Dr. Starkweather’s memoranda.”

“Paper,” I said.

“Mr. Booth?” said Mr. Lucent, apparently not liking the sound of my voice.

“You’re quite sure it couldn’t be a spider?”

“That isn’t what I said. This is not a web. There are spiders that don’t build webs, but arachnids are not my specialty, and I cannot say for certain — ”

“Is there anyone in the museum who would know?”

“Dr. Phillips is our arachnid expert, but he’s on an expedition in Brazil until Christmas.”

“Thank you,” I said, because it was important to remember to be courteous, “you’ve been very kind.”

“Mr. Booth!”

I stopped at the top of the stairs. “Yes, Mr. Lucent?”

“Did you . . . what were you . . . where are you going?”

“Paper,” I said. “Will you ask Major Galbraith to get the plaster repaired?”

Mr. Lucent sputtered; I made good my escape and went to do what I should have done weeks ago and examine the commonplace book from Mr. Ferrick’s inventory.

Mr. Ferrick was not happy to see me, though I could not tell if it was a guilty conscience — an affliction which seemed to be frequently visited on the junior curators in my presence — or simply that I irritated him. In either case, he stared at me as blankly as if I had asked about the second book of Aristotle’s Poetics.

“The commonplace book,” I said. “From, er, Miss Parrington’s crate.”

I noted that he had not been at the Parrington long enough for her name to have its full effect; we all winced reflexively, even Dr. Starkweather, but Mr. Ferrick merely frowned and said, “Is that the crate with the damaged books?”

“And the enormous white spider,” I said before I could stop myself.

He gave me a look of mingled shock and reproach and said, “Oh! That commonplace book. I gave it to Mr. Lucent because it was holograph. Was that wrong?”

It was now obvious that he did not like me. I was glad he was a naturalist by training; once he had finished his probationary period, I was unlikely to have to deal with him again.

“No,” I said. “That’s fine.” I was as pleased to leave as he was to have me go.

I spent the rest of the morning in a treasure hunt that was simultaneously ridiculous and nightmarish, pursuing the trail of the commonplace book from Mr. Ferrick to Mr. Lucent; from Mr. Lucent — who was miffed at me, he said, for rushing away in the middle of things and leaving him “holding the baby,” although whether he meant by that the hole in the plaster, or Mr. Vanderhoef, or possibly Major Galbraith, I could not determine and did not like to ask — to Mr. Roxham; from Mr. Roxham, after a protracted and egregiously dusty search, to Miss Atterbury; from Miss Atterbury to Mr. Vine; and finally from Mr. Vine to Mr. Horton, who said, “Oh, I haven’t gotten to it yet,” and reached unerringly into the middle of one of the stacks of books waiting to be catalogued that surrounded his desk.

I retreated to my office with my prize and locked the door. The first few pages of the commonplace book told me that its owner was strongly antiquarian in his tastes, largely self-educated, and with an unhealthy penchant for the occult. Judging by the authors he quoted, he must have had quite the collection; the coup of the 1588 Albinus paled in comparison.

I flipped steadily through the pages, trying not to inhale too deeply, for the book reeked of smoke and secondarily of tobacco, and there was another scent, too faint for me to identify but sharply unpleasant. I was looking for quotes from Carolus Albinus or one of the other books that had been in the crate, and I found them starting about three-quarters of the way through. Albinus; Mundy; a lengthy passage from de Winter on golems; a passage from an even more unpleasant author on the abomination called a Hand of Glory, although I had never seen these particular virtues ascribed to it before; and then the quotes began to be interspersed with dated entries such as one might find in a diary. These were written in a highly elliptical style, using an idiosyncratic set of abbreviations, and I could make neither heads nor tails of them, except for repeated references to “cllg” — ”calling”? — someone or something called White Charles — the literal translation, of course, of Carolus Albinus, but the referent was decidedly not a book. And I did recognize the diagram drawn painstakingly on one verso page.

He had summoned something he called White Charles — presumably because he was using Carolus Albinus as his principal text, which ought to mean I could use my own knowledge of Carolus Albinus at least to make a guess at what he had been trying to do and what that white scuttling thing was.

So. He had summoned something, following — or improvising on — the rites of Carolus Albinus. Albinus had been a necromancer who dabbled in alchemy; White Charles was probably a revenant of some kind. The passage about the Hand of Glory suggested several further hypotheses; I was selfishly, squeamishly grateful that he had not discussed that matter in any greater detail. He had wanted power, no doubt, imagining it was something one could acquire like a new umbrella.

Whatever he had summoned, its actions indicated clearly that it had self-volition, unlike what very little I knew of golems. It had preserved itself from the fire, stowed away with the books — its books? I wondered. Did it know that those particular books were relevant to its existence, or was it mere coincidence? On reaching the museum, it had acted to preserve itself again, scavenged paper, made a nest. It had not, so far as I knew, harmed anyone, although it had greatly perturbed Fiske and Hobden — and Mingus — and had scared the lights and liver out of me. I certainly did not like the idea of a necromantic spider scuttling around the museum, but I could not immediately see any way of either catching or destroying it, and I quailed from the thought of explaining my theory to Dr. Starkweather — or even Mr. Lucent.

I would watch, I told myself. Probably before long, the thing would die or de-animate or whatever the correct term was, and it would not be necessary to take any action at all.

But over the next week, it became apparent that if I had decided to watch White Charles, White Charles had also decided to watch me. Any time I was in the museum after dark, the scuttling dogged my footsteps, and I could sit in my office and track the thing’s loathsome progress from wall to ceiling and back to wall. The plaster under the mail room stairs had been patched, but that clearly hadn’t caused White Charles more than a momentary inconvenience.

It unnerved me, but it still was not doing any harm, and surely it would disintegrate soon. Surely I would not have to . . . to hunt it down, or any of the other melodramatic imaginings that plagued me when I tried to sleep. I wanted desperately to avoid seeing it again, and most especially to avoid seeing it more clearly. This way, at least I could pretend I believed it was some sort of albino spider.

I was very carefully not thinking about Hands of Glory.

It was a Wednesday night when I finally finished my article for American Antiquities. I tidied the manuscript into an envelope and started for the mail room to leave it in the box for Miss Rivers the typist, but as I turned into the hallway leading to the mail room, I stopped so abruptly I nearly stumbled over my own feet. There was someone standing in the middle of the hall, a strange slouched figure who was certainly neither Hobden nor Fiske.

I had thought I was the only person left in the building save the watchmen. “Wh . . . who’s there?” I said, my voice wobbling and squeaking embarrassingly, and groped toward the light switch.

“Noli facere.”

It was not a human voice; it crackled and shirred like paper. And it spoke in Latin. I think I knew then, although I did not want to.

“Who are you? How did you get in here?”

“In a box,” it said, in Latin. It understood English, even if it would not, or could not, speak it. “Full of smoke and straw and lies.” It took a step toward me, rustling and crackling. I took a step back.

“What are you?” I said, although I did not expect an answer. I only wanted to distract it while I gathered myself to run for the front entrance and Fiske and Hobden.

But even as I began to turn, shifting my weight, it said, “I am the ghost of a Hand of Glory.” This time I did fall, sprawling my full ungainly length on the marble; before I could pick myself up, before I could even roll over, it was on top of me, paper scratching and scuffling, pinning me flat, holding my wrists in the small of my back. It should not have been able to hold me — even at the time I knew that, but I could not move, could not free myself.

“He called me White Charles,” it said, the English words gratingly incongruous, and though it spoke in my ear, there was no breath, only the rustling and sighing of paper. “But he did not know me to name me truly. You do.“

“No, I don’t!” I said vehemently.

“You lie,” it said, and I shuddered and cringed into the floor, because it should not have known that, no matter how closely it had observed me.

And what served it for eyes? Had it fashioned those out of paper, too?

“What do you want?” I asked.

It pressed even closer. I had often wondered morbidly what it would be like to be buried under one of the teetering stacks of paper that rose in my office like the topless towers of Ilium; now I knew that I did not want to know. It said, in the soft susurration of paper, “I want freedom.“

I tried to scream, but there was paper blocking my mouth. I heaved desperately against the — truly, almost negligible — weight on my back, bucking like a wild horse in a dime novel. I could not dislodge it; it seemed to have molded itself to me and merely waited until I was lying still again.

“It must be you,” it said. “No one else knows what I am.“

No one else was a threat to it, it meant, but dear God, neither was I! I had no idea how to banish it or to bind it — I did not even know how that foolish antiquarian had managed to summon it. Carolus Albinus alone could never have given him the idea of making a golem from a Hand of Glory, and I could not begin to imagine what mishmash of experiment and tradition and insanity he must ultimately have used.

The paper crinkled as the thing settled lower. I strained away from the paper covering my mouth and now also my nose, and realized that I did know one thing. The antiquarian had tried to fight his creature by burning his books; he had failed, but he had hurt it. It had taken White Charles several weeks in the museum to reach the point where it could be a danger to anyone. Moreover, it had stayed with the books when that was surely the most inconvenient and dangerous course of action. And although it said he had not known it, perhaps there was nevertheless a reason he had called it White Charles.

It was the ghost of a Hand of Glory, it said, yet it clothed itself first in paper.

Perhaps it was merely panic and lack of oxygen that made me so certain I was correct, but I twisted my head, freeing my mouth, and said, “White Charles,” as loudly and clearly as I could. I felt the thing flinch.

“That is your name,” I said. “Your name and your nature, and you cannot escape it.”

Its hold on me loosened; I lunged free, crawled a few awkward paces, then got my feet under me and ran. I did not look back. The single sheets of paper that flew around me and slid under my feet were evidence enough. I had hurt it; worse than that, I had guessed its secret. It would not confront me directly again if it could help it.

I was not foolish enough to believe that that meant I was safe.

In the front entrance, behind the long curving counter that separated the coat check from the rotunda with its Foucault’s Pendulum ceaselessly swinging, Mr. Fiske and Mr. Hobden came to their feet in alarm as I burst through the doors.

“I need your help,” I said between heaving, panting breaths.

“All right, sir,” said one, after exchanging an unfathomable look with the other. “What is it you need?”

“The furnace is going, isn’t it?”

A stupid question, but they took it in good part. “Yes, sir,” one of them said, taking a step forward. “First of October, just like clockwork. Takes a powerful amount of heating, the museum does.”

“And you have the, er, the keys? To the boiler room?”

“I do.”

“Then please, if you’d, er . . . That is, there’s something I need to burn.”

“All right,” he said equitably, as if he had received stranger requests. Given how long the two of them had worked for the museum, I supposed it was possible that he had.

“What is it you’re wanting to burn, Mr. Booth?” said the other, and I was appalled by my own inability to remember which of them was Fiske and which was Hobden.

“Ah,” I said. “As to that, I, um . . .”

“Fiske, sir,” he said, without any trace of surprise or resentment. I wondered in miserable distracted panic how many times he had faced that blank look from men who saw him every day.

“Fiske, yes. I, er, I’m going to need your help. I need to get into Dr. Starkweather’s office.”

“Oh,” said Fiske. “Oh dear.”

Most of the books from Miss Parrington’s crate were readily accessible to me. The commonplace book was still in my office; the others were languishing in the communal office of the junior archivists. But the valuable one, Carolus Albinus’ De Spiritu et Morte, Prague 1588, was immured in Dr. Starkweather’s office against the alleged depredations of Mr. Browne and the Department of Restoration and Repairs.

Mr. Fiske had the key to Dr. Starkweather’s office, of course, but he balked at letting me in to appropriate something I had already confessed I intended to burn. His position was entirely reasonable and understandable, and it made me so frustrated that I wanted to sit down and howl at the ceiling. Finally, in desperation, I said, “This will get rid of the, er, the rats that aren’t rats.”

Fiske’s eyebrows rose. But he said, “Well, nothing else has, true enough. All right. But when he asks, I don’t know anything about it.”

“Absolutely. I’ll tell him I picked the lock.”

“Can you?”

“No, but I doubt Dr. Starkweather will, er, ask for a demonstration.”

“Fair enough,” Fiske said, and he escorted me — and my increasingly unwieldy stack of books — to Dr. Starkweather’s office. It took me only a moment to find the De Spiritu et Morte, for unlike my own, Dr. Starkweather’s office was immaculately tidy and oppressively well-organized. Fiske watched from the doorway, and he locked the door again when I came out.

“That it?” he said.

“Yes. This is all of them.” I thought it likely that the only book it was necessary to destroy was the De Spiritu et Morte, but I was not prepared to gamble.

Hobden was waiting in the doorway of the boiler room, and he was not alone. For a moment, in bad light and panic, I thought the other person was White Charles, but then he shifted a little, and I realized it was Achitophel Bates, the colored man who maintained the boilers and other machinery of the museum’s infrastructure. I had thought — assumed — hoped — that he had already gone home.

“Good evening, Mr. Booth,” he said. He was Southern by birth, and spoke with a slow unhurriable dignity even to Dr. Starkweather.

“Er . . . good evening. I . . . that is . . .” I looked at Hobden, who merely shook his head.

“Mr. Hobden says you’re wanting to burn some books.” Achitophel Bates was a tall, thin man, as tall as I, and when he looked into my eyes, he did not have to crane to do so. “Seems like a funny thing for an archivist like yourself to want, Mr. Booth.”

I was unaccustomed to have anyone identify my profession correctly, much less a colored mechanic, and my surprise must have shown, for he said, “Not all colored men are ignoramuses, Mr. Booth. Some of us can even read.”

“I . . . I didn’t mean . . .” But I could not take back words I had not said, words I would never have said aloud.

Achitophel Bates waved the matter aside with one long hand. “But tell me, why are you burning books at this time of night?”

I did think of lying, but it was hopeless. Even if I had had any gift for deception, I had no story I could tell. I had nothing but the truth, and so that was what I told Achitophel Bates and the listening Hobden and Fiske. Achitophel Bates’ eyebrows climbed higher and higher as I spoke, and when I had finished — or, at least, had run out of words — there was a long silence. In it I could see Achitophel Bates trying to decide if this was some sort of elaborate and cruel hoax. Certainly, it was a more plausible explanation than my lame and faltering truth.

“You remember the trouble we had with Mingus,” said Hobden or Fiske.

“I do,” said Achitophel Bates, and he looked thoughtfully from me to the watchmen and back again. “You think this is part of that same trouble, Hob?”

“Mr. Booth thinks so,” said the watchman, and therefore he was Hobden and surely I could remember that if I tried. “And he’s a learned man.”

Achitophel Bates snorted. “Learned men. Haven’t you been working here long enough to know about learned men, Hob?”

“Mr. Booth ain’t like Dr. Starkweather,” said Fiske mildly. “Or like that crazy man — what was his name? — who came down here and tried to get you to sabotage the boilers.”

“Mr. Clarence Clyde Blessington,” Achitophel Bates said, rolling the name out with a certain degree of relish.

“Oh dear,” I said involuntarily. “Mr. Blessington is, er . . .”

“A committed Marxist and a card-carrying member of the Communist Party,” Achitophel Bates finished. “Yes, I know. He told me. He showed me the card, even, when he was trying to persuade me that he knew what being oppressed by the bourgeoisie was like better than I did. Tell you the truth, I prefer Mr. Vanderhoef. He won’t admit I exist, but at least he doesn’t try to improve me.” His sigh was a mixture of exasperation and contempt. “So just because he’s a learned man, Fiske, doesn’t mean a goddamn thing.”

“I . . . I wouldn’t . . .” But what was it, exactly, that I would not do? I settled on, “I wouldn’t tell a lie like that,” even though that was not, exactly, the point at issue.

“I admit,” said Achitophel Bates, “that I would expect a liar to have a better story — and to tell it better, too. And I do remember the trouble you had with your dog, Hob, and that’s not behavior I’ve ever seen out of a ratter. So, all right. Let’s say it’s true. Let’s say there’s some sort of monster wandering around the museum. I still don’t see why you need to burn those books.”

“I told you,” I said despairingly. Had he not understood? “It’s the only way I can think of to destroy it.”

“And destroying it has to be the answer?”

“It tried to kill me!”

“Well, what choice did it have?” Achitophel Bates said reasonably, and I stared at him, abruptly and utterly bereft of words. “It doesn’t want to be your slave.”

“I don’t want — ”

“I know. And I believe you. For one thing, I figure if that’s what you wanted, you could manage it for yourself, you being a learned man and all.” And I winced at the derision in his voice. “But how is White Charles supposed to know that?”

And when I floundered, he pressed his point: “You’ll forgive me if I have some sympathy for a slave who wants to be free.”

He was not old enough to have been a slave — but of course, I realized, flushing hot with my own failure to think the matter through, his parents would have been.

“I . . . I don’t want to enslave anyone. But I also don’t want to be killed so that White Charles can be free of the slavery I’m not trying to . . . that is . . .” I became hopelessly muddled in my own syntax and fell silent.

“That’s a reasonable position,” Achitophel Bates said, so gravely that I suspected he was mocking me. “So what you need isn’t to burn it. You need to talk to it.”

“You, er, you are assuming that it is an entity with whom one can have a reasoned conversation.”

“You said it had self-volition. And that it spoke to you. So what other conclusion should I draw?”

“And if you’re wrong?” I said and hated how near to sullen I sounded.

“Then I’ll throw the damn books in the furnace myself. But I’m not wrong. The only question is, how do you convince it to talk to you?”

“It is not necessary,” said a new voice, and even if it had not spoken in Latin, I would have known it to be White Charles, for it was a new voice in the most fundamental sense of the word, harsh and dull and not in the slightest human. It had spoken from inside the boiler room; Achitophel Bates turned and pushed the door all the way open and I saw why.

White Charles had abandoned its first body and built itself a second one out of newspaper and scrap lumber and an assortment of Achitophel Bates’ tools. Where I had gathered only impressions of that first body, I saw this one all too clearly, slumped and strange, as if it could not quite remember what a human body felt like. Its hands were enormous, with screwdrivers and socket wrenches for fingers, its head no more than a suggestion, a lump between the hulking shoulders.

I thought, distantly and quite calmly, that if it did intend evil, we were all doomed.

But, “Audivi,” it said. I heard. “You do not wish to command me?“

“No,” I said. And then I realized that by speaking in English, the language in which White Charles had been given the name it hated, I was belying myself. I groped after my Latin; I read it fluently, but had not had to attempt composition since I graduated from Brockstone School. “I do not,” I said finally, haltingly — although at least in these circumstances I had an excuse for my habitual hesitations and stammers. “I want no one to be hurt.” Clumsy, but my meaning should be clear.

There was a silence long enough that I began to believe that self-assessment had been rankest hubris, but then White Charles said, “I do not want to hurt.“

I thought, suddenly and painfully, of the creature in Mary Shelley’s novel, which had not done evil until it was taught that evil was all it could expect, and which had yet been so horrible of aspect and origin that it was never offered anything else. Certainly, White Charles was horrible — the ghost of a Hand of Glory — but that horribleness was not the fault of the intelligence which animated its scavenged bodies. Like Frankenstein’s creature, it had not asked for the parody of life it had been given, and although, whatever my sins, I was not Victor Frankenstein, I had an obligation not to perpetuate evil for its own sake.

“What do you want?” I asked it, as I had asked it before, but this time I asked in awkward Latin, and this time White Charles stood and answered me, if not face to face — for indeed it did not exactly have a face — openly. “I want freedom.” It made a strange gesture with the massive armatures of its hands and said, “I want freedom from this.” Iste. This itself, and very emphatically.

“The body?” I said, guessing both at its meaning and at the right word.

“It is not correct,” said White Charles.

“I don’t understand.“

“That a ghost of a Hand of Glory should exist. It is not correct. It is not right. I do not want to be this thing.“

“What is it saying?” Achitophel Bates said in an undertone.

“It says it wants to be free of being what it is,” I said, which was a syntactic nightmare but — I thought — substantially accurate.

“It wants you to kill it? That’s awfully convenient.”

The irony and skepticism in his voice made me flinch, but I swallowed hard and said, “It understands English. If I were lying, it would know.” And I looked, rather desperately, to White Charles.

“Verax,” it said. And then slowly, and as if it were actually painful to it, “Truthful.”

“But how can you want that?” Achitophel Bates demanded, almost angrily. “How can you want to die?”

“I was not meant to live,” White Charles said in Latin, and I translated. “I am not a living thing enslaved, but a dead thing . . .” Another of its strange gestures, which I thought perhaps meant it could not find a word to express its meaning. “A dead thing called into life to be a slave. It is not the same.“

“Frankenstein’s creature was a new life created out of death,” I said, half to myself, “but that’s a poet’s conceit.”

“Sum mors vetus,” said White Charles. I am old death. “I am death that was never alive.“

“The ghost of a Hand of Glory,” I said. “Not even the ghost of the man whose hand was cut off.”

“You understand,” said White Charles.

“The ghost of a book,” I said, and only then realized that I was still carrying the entire unwieldy stack of books from Miss Parrington’s crate.

“So that means we’re burning the books after all?” Fiske said doubtfully.

“No,” I said, purely on instinct, and was echoed by White Charles’ clamorous voice. There was silence for a moment, as Fiske and Hobden carefully did not ask the next obvious question, and Achitophel Bates stood with his arms folded, waiting to see what I would do.

“He brought you out of the book,” I said, thinking of that paper body, of the name the creature bore and hated. Then I remembered something else and fell into English because I could not think of the Latin words quickly enough. “No. He called you out of the book. Called you and bound you and feared you so greatly that no binding could ever be enough.”

“He bound me to murder at his command,” said White Charles, “and he was not wrong to fear what I would do if the binding failed.“

I did not, I decided, want to know anything more about the antiquarian or his death. I found my Latin again and said, “If you were called out of the book, you must go back into the book.“

White Charles said again, “You understand,” and although its voice was not expressive, I thought the emotion in it was relief.

Achitophel Bates was still angry, although I could not tell whether his anger was directed at me or at White Charles or at something else entirely. But he came with us to the rotunda, as did Fiske and Hobden, and watched disapprovingly as I opened the antiquarian’s books and used them to lay out a rough circle, with the Carolus Albinus in the center. White Charles also watched, its low-slung head turning minutely to follow my progress.

My circle was somewhat cramped because of the Foucault’s pendulum, but this was the largest open space in the museum that did not also contain a host of valuable objects. It would have to do.

Abruptly, Achitophel Bates blocked my path. “Do you know what you’re doing?”

“More or less,” I said. “Education is, er, not without value.”

“I never said it was. But my experience has been that the value is in the man, not in what he knows.”

I was assailed by examples confirming his contention. Learned men — learned persons, I corrected myself, thinking of my colleague Miss Coburn — were just as prone to be selfish, short-sighted, and stupid as anyone else. Or even more so, as the evidence of White Charles itself suggested. It took a learned man to make such a terrible and complicated mistake.

“. . . I do know what I’m doing. And I, er . . . that is, it’s the right thing to do.”

“I want freedom,” White Charles said thunderously from the other side of the circle, and Achitophel Bates raised his hands in a gesture of surrender.

“That word it keeps using. Libertas. Is that liberty?”

“Yes.”

“All right,” said Achitophel Bates. “I guess from where he’s standing, liberty and death are the same thing. Not like Patrick Henry.”

“It, er, is dead. The state it’s in . . . there isn’t a word for it, but it isn’t alive. ‘Awake’ is closer. Maybe.”

Achitophel Bates was frowning, but it seemed more concentration than anger. “Well, I can’t argue a creature has free will and then argue it can’t choose for itself. As long as you’re sure what you’re doing is going to do what it wants.”

“As sure as I can be,” I said.

He looked at me searchingly, but seemed to accept that I was telling the truth. “All right,” he said and stepped aside.

I picked up the de Winter and closed it to create a door in the circle and said in Latin, “Step inside.“

White Charles did not hesitate. Its groaning, grinding body shambled past me to stand over the book in the center of the circle. I stepped into the circle myself, then opened the de Winter again and put it back in its place. I knelt in front of White Charles and opened the Albinus at random. It fell open, as books will, to a page that had been often consulted, adorned in this instance with a Vermeulen woodcut of a grave-robber — not inappropriate in a ghoulish Sortes Vergilianae fashion. I reminded myself not to wonder how the antiquarian had come by his materials.

I looked up at White Charles. It was still horrific in aspect, a crude approximation of the human form built by something that did not wish to be human, but I was no longer frightened of it. Achitophel Bates was right. When given the chance, it did not choose evil.

The longest part of my preprations had been working out the Latin; while awkwardness did not matter, imprecision might matter a great deal, and the consequences of using the wrong word could be rather worse than fatal. My words were inelegant, but I knew their meaning was correct.

“You were called from this book,” I said in simple, careful Latin, “and now I call you back to it. Relinquish this unnatural existence. Rest.” And, although even now I cringed from touching the creature, I reached out and guided one of its screwdriver-fingers to touch the page.

Around the circle, one by one, the books snapped shut.

The edifice that was White Charles was perfectly still for a moment; I saw — or thought I saw — something depart from it, and it went from being a constructed body to being simply an amalgamation of metal and wood. It swayed and sagged, and at the same time I realized what was going to happen, the entire thing came down on my head.

I regained consciousness on the sofa in the Curators’ Lounge with the doubled bulldog visages of Hobden and Fiske staring down at me.

“You all right there, Mr. Booth?” said one. And I still could not tell one from the other.

“I, er . . . did it work?”

“As best any of us can tell,” said the other.

Everything hurt. My right wrist was made of broken glass. My head was pounding; I felt that if I could observe it from the outside, I would see my temples pulsing like the gills of a fish. “Oh God, the books!”

I started to get up, but sagged and failed halfway.

“D’you reckon you ought to have a doctor, Mr. Booth? You’ve got a lump on your forehead like a goose-egg, and you’re not a good color.”

“I’m never a good color,” I said. “But we can’t leave the books in the rotunda — not to mention the, er, the tools and whatnot. It must be nearly dawn.”

“Just past it,” said one of them. “But don’t worry. We took care of that part. Although Bates said he’d have a word with you later about his tools.”

“I put the books back where you found them,” said the other, who therefore had to be Fiske. “Including the fancy one in His Nibs’ office. I may have got some of the others wrong.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. I could not bear it any longer; I reached out with my left hand, caught the material of his sleeve. “Are you Fiske?”

“Yessir,” he said, though he and Hobden exchanged alarmed glances.

I squinted to focus, first on his face, then on Hobden’s. They were not identical lead soldiers, after all; they were men. And when finally, reluctantly, I met their eyes, first one and then the other, both frowning and worried, at last I saw. Fiske’s eyes were brown. Hobden’s eyes were blue. And around those eyes, dark and pale, their faces resolved. Nothing changed, for indeed there was nothing in them that needed changing, but I saw them.

But I looked away quickly, before they could see me in return.

About the Author

Sarah Monette was born and raised in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, one of the secret cities of the Manhattan Project. She studied English and Classics in college, and has gone on to get her M.A. and Ph.D. in English Literature. Sarah's novels are published by Ace Books; she also has a collaboration with Elizabeth Bear, A Companion to Wolves, from Tor. Her short stories have appeared in lots of different places, including Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Alchemy, Weird Tales, and Strange Horizons. She collect books, and her husband collects computer parts, so their living space is the constantly contested border betwen these two imperial ambitions.

“Non-Zero Probabilities”
by N. K. Jemisin

In the mornings, Adele girds herself for the trip to work as a warrior for battle. First she prays, both to the Christian god of her Irish ancestors and to the orishas of her African ancestors — the latter she is less familiar with, but getting to know. Then she takes a bath with herbs, including dried chickory and allspice, from a mixture given to her by the woman at the local botanica. (She doesn’t know Spanish well, but she’s getting to know that too. Today’s word is suerte.) Then, smelling vaguely of coffee and pumpkin pie, she layers on armor: the Saint Christopher medal her mother sent her, for protection on journeys. The hair-clasp she was wearing when she broke up with Larry, which she regards as the best decision of her life. On especially dangerous days, she wears the panties in which she experienced her first self-induced orgasm post-Larry. They’re a bit ragged after too many commercial laundromat washings, but still more or less sound. (She washes them by hand now, with Woollite, and lays them flat to dry.)

Then she starts the trip to work. She doesn’t bike, though she owns one. A next-door neighbor broke an arm when her bike’s front wheel came off in mid-pedal. Could’ve been anything. Just an accident. But still.

So Adele sets out, swinging her arms, enjoying the day if it’s sunny, wrestling with her shitty umbrella if it’s rainy. (She no longer opens the umbrella indoors.) Keeping a careful eye out for those who may not be as well-protected. It takes two to tango, but only one to seriously fuck up some shit, as they say in her ‘hood. And lo and behold, just three blocks into her trip there is a horrible crash and the ground shakes and car alarms go off and there are screams and people start running. Smoke billows, full of acrid ozone and a taste like dirty blood. When Adele reaches the corner, tensed and ready to flee, she beholds the Franklin Avenue shuttle train, a tiny thing that runs on an elevated track for some portions of its brief run, lying sprawled over Atlantic Avenue like a beached aluminum whale. It has jumped its track, fallen thirty feet to the ground below, and probably killed everyone inside or under or near it.

Adele goes to help, of course, but even as she and other good Samaritans pull bodies and screaming wounded from the wreckage, she cannot help but feel a measure of contempt. It is a cover, her anger; easier to feel that than horror at the shattered limbs, the truncated lives. She feels a bit ashamed too, but holds onto the anger because it makes a better shield.

They should have known better. The probability of a train derailment was infinitesimal. That meant it was only a matter of time.

Her neighbor — the other one, across the hall — helped her figure it out, long before the math geeks finished crunching their numbers.

“Watch,” he’d said, and laid a deck of cards facedown on her coffee table. (There was coffee in the cups, with a generous dollop of Bailey’s. He was a nice-enough guy that Adele felt comfortable offering this.) He shuffled it with the blurring speed of an expert, cut the deck, shuffled again, then picked up the whole deck and spread it, still facedown. “Pick a card.”

Adele picked. The Joker.

“Only two of those in the deck,” he said, then shuffled and spread again. “Pick another.”

She did, and got the other Joker.

“Coincidence,” she said. (This had been months ago, when she was still skeptical.)

He shook his head and set the deck of cards aside. From his pocket he took a pair of dice. (He was nice enough to invite inside, but he was still that kind of guy.) “Check it,” he said, and tossed them onto her table. Snake eyes. He scooped them up, shook them, tossed again. Two more ones. A third toss brought up double sixes; at this, Adele had pointed in triumph. But the fourth toss was snake eyes again.

“These aren’t weighted, if you’re wondering,” he said. “Nobody filed the edges or anything. I got these from the bodega up the street, from a pile of shit the old man was tossing out to make more room for food shelves. Brand new, straight out of the package.”

“Might be a bad set,” Adele said.

“Might be. But the cards ain’t bad, nor your fingers.” He leaned forward, his eyes intent despite the pleasant haze that the Bailey’s had brought on. “Snake eyes three tosses out of four? And the fourth a double six. That ain’t supposed to happen even in a rigged game. Now check this out.”

Carefully he crossed the fingers of his free hand. Then he tossed the dice again, six throws this time. The snakes still came up twice, but so did other numbers. Fours and threes and twos and fives. Only one double-six.

“That’s batshit, man,” said Adele.

“Yeah. But it works.”

He was right. And so Adele had resolved to read up on gods of luck and to avoid breaking mirrors. And to see if she could find a four-leafed clover in the weed patch down the block. (They sell some in Chinatown, but she’s heard they’re knockoffs.) She’s hunted through the patch several times in the past few months, once for several hours. Nothing so far, but she remains optimistic.

It’s only New York, that’s the really crazy thing. Yonkers? Fine. Jersey? Ditto. Long Island? Well, that’s still Long Island. But past East New York everything is fine.

The news channels had been the first to figure out that particular wrinkle, but the religions really went to town with it. Some of them have been waiting for the End Times for the last thousand years; Adele can’t really blame them for getting all excited. She does blame them for their spin on it, though. There have to be bigger “dens of iniquity” in the world. Delhi has poor people coming out of its ears, Moscow’s mobbed up, Bangkok is pedophile heaven. She’s heard there are still some sundown towns in the Pacific Northwest. Everybody hates on New York.

And it’s not like the signs are all bad. The state had to suspend its lottery program; too many winners in one week bankrupted it. The Knicks made it to the Finals and the Mets won the Series. A lot of people with cancer went into spontaneous remission, and some folks with full-blown AIDS stopped showing any viral load at all. (There are new tours now. Double-decker buses full of the sick and disabled. Adele tries to tell herself they’re just more tourists.)

The missionaries from out of town are the worst. On any given day they step in front of her, shoving tracts under her nose and wanting to know if she’s saved yet. She’s getting better at spotting them from a distance, yappy islands interrupting the sidewalk river’s flow, their faces alight with an inner glow that no self-respecting local would display without three beers and a fat payday check. There’s one now, standing practically underneath a scaffolding ladder. Idiot; two steps back and he’ll double his chances for getting hit by a bus. (And then the bus will catch fire.)

In the same instant that she spots him, he spots her, and a grin stretches wide across his freckled face. She is reminded of blind newts that have light-sensitive spots on their skin. This one is unsaved-sensitive. She veers right, intending to go around the scaffold, and he takes a wide step into her path again. She veers left; he breaks that way.

She stops, sighing. “What.”

“Have you accepted — “

“I’m Catholic. They do us at birth, remember?”

His smile is forgiving. “That doesn’t mean we can’t talk, does it?”

“I’m busy.” She attempts a feint, hoping to catch him off-guard. He moves with her, nimble as a linebacker.

“Then I’ll just give you this,” he says, tucking something into her hand. Not a tract, bigger. A flyer. “The day to remember is August 8th.”

This, finally, catches Adele’s attention. August 8th. 8/8 — a lucky day according to the Chinese. She has it marked on her calendar as a good day to do things like rent a Zipcar and go to Ikea.

“Yankee Stadium,” he says. “Come join us. We’re going to pray the city back into shape.”

“Sure, whatever,” she says, and finally manages to slip around him. (He lets her go, really. He knows she’s hooked.)

She waits until she’s out of downtown before she reads the flyer, because downtown streets are narrow and close and she has to keep an eye out. It’s a hot day; everybody’s using their air conditioners. Most people don’t bolt the things in the way they’re supposed to.

“A PRAYER FOR THE SOUL OF THE CITY,” the flyer proclaims, and in spite of herself, Adele is intrigued. The flyer says that over 500,000 New Yorkers have committed to gathering on that day and concentrating their prayers. That kind of thing has power now, she thinks. There’s some lab at Princeton — dusted off and given new funding lately — that’s been able to prove it. Whether that means Someone’s listening or just that human thoughtwaves are affecting events as the scientists say, she doesn’t know. She doesn’t care.

She thinks, I could ride the train again.

She could laugh at the next Friday the 13th.

She could — and here her thoughts pause, because there’s something she’s been trying not to think about, but it’s been awhile and she’s never been a very good Catholic girl anyway. But she could, maybe, just maybe, try dating again.

As she thinks this, she is walking through the park. She passes the vast lawn, which is covered in fast-darting black children and lazily sunning white adults and a few roving brown elders with Italian ice carts. Though she is usually on watch for things like this, the flyer has distracted her, so she does not notice the nearby cart-man stopping, cursing in Spanish because one of his wheels has gotten mired in the soft turf.

This puts him directly in the path of a child who is running, his eyes trained on a descending frisbee; with the innate arrogance of a city child he has assumed that the cart will have moved out of the way by the time he gets there. Instead the child hits the cart at full speed, which catches Adele’s attention at last, so that too late she realizes she is at the epicenter of one of those devastating chains of events that only ever happen in comedy films and the transformed city. In a Rube Goldberg string of utter improbabilities, the cart tips over, spilling tubs of brightly-colored ices onto the grass. The boy flips over it with acrobatic precision, completely by accident, and lands with both feet on the tub of ices. The sheer force of this blow causes the tub to eject its contents with projectile force. A blast of blueberry-coconut-red hurtles toward Adele’s face, so fast that she has no time to scream. It will taste delicious. It will also likely knock her into oncoming bicycle traffic.

At the last instant the frisbee hits the flying mass, altering its trajectory. Freezing fruit flavors splatter the naked backs of a row of sunbathers nearby, much to their dismay.

Adele’s knees buckle at the close call. She sits down hard on the grass, her heart pounding, while the sunbathers scream and the cart-man checks to see if the boy is okay and the pigeons converge.

She happens to glance down. A four-leafed clover is growing there, at her fingertips.

Eventually she resumes the journey home. At the corner of her block, she sees a black cat lying atop a garbage can. Its head has been crushed, and someone has attempted to burn it. She hopes it was dead first, and hurries on.

Adele has a garden on the fire escape. In one pot, eggplant and herbs; she has planted the clover in this. In another pot are peppers and flowers. In the big one, tomatoes and a scraggly collard that she’s going to kill if she keeps harvesting leaves so quickly. (But she likes greens.) It’s luck — good luck — that she’d chosen to grow a garden this year, because since things changed it’s been harder for wholesalers to bring food into the city, and prices have shot up. The farmers’ market that she attends on Saturdays has become a barterers’ market too, so she plucks a couple of slim, deep-purple eggplants and a handful of angry little peppers. She wants fresh fruit. Berries, maybe.

On her way out, she knocks on the neighbor’s door. He looks surprised as he opens it, but pleased to see her. It occurs to her that maybe he’s been hoping for a little luck of his own. She gives it a think-over, and hands him an eggplant. He looks at it in consternation. (He’s not the kind of guy to eat eggplant.)

“I’ll come by later and show you how to cook it,” she says. He grins.

At the farmers’ market she trades the angry little peppers for sassy little raspberries, and the eggplant for two stalks of late rhubarb. She also wants information, so she hangs out awhile gossipping with whoever sits nearby. Everyone talks more than they used to. It’s nice.

And everyone, everyone she speaks to, is planning to attend the prayer.

“I’m on dialysis,” says an old lady who sits under a flowering tree. “Every time they hook me up to that thing I’m scared. Dialysis can kill you, you know.”

It always could, Adele doesn’t say.

“I work on Wall Street,” says another woman, who speaks briskly and clutches a bag of fresh fish as if it’s gold. Might as well be; fish is expensive now. A tiny Egyptian scarab pendant dangles from a necklace the woman wears. “Quantitative analysis. All the models are fucked now. We were the only ones they didn’t fire when the housing market went south, and now this.” So she’s going to pray too. “Even though I’m kind of an atheist. Whatever, if it works, right?”

Adele finds others, all tired of performing their own daily rituals, all worried about their likelihood of being outliered to death.

She goes back to her apartment building, picks some sweet basil and takes it and the eggplant next door. Her neighbor seems a little nervous. His apartment is cleaner than she’s ever seen it, with the scent of Pine Sol still strong in the bathroom. She tries not to laugh, and demonstrates how to peel and slice eggplant, salt it to draw out the toxins (”it’s related to nightshade, you know”), and sautee it with basil in olive oil. He tries to look impressed, but she can tell he’s not the kind of guy to enjoy eating his vegetables.

Afterward they sit, and she tells him about the prayer thing. He shrugs. “Are you going?” she presses.

“Nope.”

“Why not? It could fix things.”

“Maybe. Maybe I like the way things are now.”

This stuns her. “Man, the train fell off its track last week.” Twenty people dead. She has woken up in a cold sweat on the nights since, screams ringing in her ears.

“Could’ve happened anytime,” he says, and she blinks in surprise because it’s true. The official investigation says someone — track worker, maybe — left a wrench sitting on the track near a power coupling. The chance that the wrench would hit the coupling, causing a short and explosion, was one in a million. But never zero.

“But… but…” She wants to point out the other horrible things that have occurred. Gas leaks. Floods. A building fell down, in Harlem. A fatal duck attack. Several of the apartments in their building are empty because a lot of people can’t cope. Her neighbor — the other one, with the broken arm — is moving out at the end of the month. Seattle. Better bike paths.

“Shit happens,” he says. “It happened then, it happens now. A little more shit, a little less shit…” He shrugs. “Still shit, right?”

She considers this. She considers it for a long time.

They play cards, and have a little wine, and Adele teases him about the overdone chicken. She likes that he’s trying so hard. She likes even more that she’s not thinking about how lonely she’s been.

So they retire to his bedroom and there’s awkwardness and she’s shy because it’s been awhile and you do lose some skills without practice, and he’s clumsy because he’s probably been developing bad habits from porn, but eventually they manage. They use a condom. She crosses her fingers while he puts it on. There’s a rabbit’s foot keychain attached to the bed railing, which he strokes before returning his attention to her. He swears he’s clean, and she’s on the pill, but… well. Shit happens.

She closes her eyes and lets herself forget for awhile.

The prayer thing is all over the news. The following week is the runup. Talking heads on the morning shows speculate that it should have some effect, if enough people go and exert “positive energy”. They are careful not to use the language of any particular faith; this is still New York. Alternative events are being planned all over the city for those who don’t want to come under the evangelical tent. The sukkah mobiles are rolling, though it’s the wrong time of year, just getting the word out about something happening at one of the synagogues. In Flatbush, Adele can’t walk a block without being hit up by Jehovah’s Witnesses. There’s a “constructive visualization” somewhere for the ethical humanists. Not everybody believes God, or gods, will save them. It’s just that this is the way the world works now, and everybody gets that. If crossed fingers can temporarily alter a dice throw, then why not something bigger? There’s nothing inherently special about crossed fingers. It’s only a “lucky” gesture because people believe in it. Get them to believe in something else, and that should work too.

Except…

Adele walks past the Botanical Gardens, where preparations are under way for a big Shinto ritual. She stops to watch workers putting up a graceful red gate.

She’s still afraid of the subway. She knows better than to get her hopes up about her neighbor, but still… he’s kind of nice. She still plans her mornings around her ritual ablutions, and her walks to work around danger-spots — but how is that different, really, from what she did before? Back then it was makeup and hair, and fear of muggers. Now she walks more than she used to; she’s lost ten pounds. Now she knows her neighbors’ names.

Looking around, she notices other people standing nearby, also watching the gate go up. They glance at her, some nodding, some smiling, some ignoring her and looking away. She doesn’t have to ask if they will be attending one of the services; she can see that they won’t be. Some people react to fear by seeking security, change, control. The rest accept the change and just go on about their lives.

“Miss?” She glances back, startled, to find a young man there, holding forth a familiar flyer. He’s not as pushy as the guy downtown; once she takes it, he moves on. The PRAYER FOR THE SOUL OF THE CITY is tomorrow. Shuttle busses (”Specially blessed!”) will be picking up people at sites throughout the city.

WE NEED YOU TO BELIEVE, reads the bottom of the flyer.

Adele smiles. She folds the flyer carefully, her fingers remembering the skills of childhood, and presently it is perfect. They’ve printed the flyer on good, heavy paper.

She takes out her St. Christopher, kisses it, and tucks it into the the rear folds to weight the thing properly.

Then she launches the paper airplane, and it flies and flies and flies, dwindling as it travels an impossible distance, until it finally disappears into the bright blue sky.

About the Author

N. K. Jemisin has sold short stories to Strange Horizons, Postscripts, Baen’s Universe, and other markets. Her first novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, is forthcoming from Orbit in February 2010. She’s lived in New Orleans, New York, Boston, and Mobile (Alabama), and has only written stories about the first two cities so far.

“All Of These Worlds Are Yours”
by Paul McAuley

On July 1 2004, seven years after its launch, the Cassini spacecraft crossed the plane of Saturn’s ring system. Its chunky body, wrapped in gold-colored Kapton insulation and crowned by the dish of its high-gain antennae, bristled with instrumentation; an independent instrument package, the Huygens probe, clung to it like a limpet. After falling through the gap between the F and G rings, it fired up its engines for ninety-six minutes, skimming just 100,000 kilometers above Saturn’s cloud tops as it ended its interplanetary trajectory and inserted itself into an elliptical orbit.

I had some small personal interest in Cassini’s success. In the year it was launched, 1997, I published a short story, “Second Skin”, set on Proteus, a tiny moon of Neptune: it described an attempt to assassinate an enigmatic but fearsomely accomplished gene wizard, and was the overture to a long love affair with the outer regions of the Solar System. I wrote eight more stories that shared the same future history, and began to plan a pair of novels, The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun, about life in the outer regions of the solar system. I drew a great deal of inspiration from maps and best guesses at the geological histories based on images of the many and incredibly varied moons of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune snatched by Pioneer 11 and the two Viking probes; from high-resolution images returned by the Galileo mission; and most of all, because large portions of both novels are set on and around the moons of Saturn, from the images and data returned by Cassini-Huygens.

I wanted to know what it would be like to hike through the cratered and fractured plains of Dione, to swoop low and close across the plane of the rings, to fly above the chaotic landscape inside Herschel Crater on Mimas, the remnant of an impact that nearly shattered the small moon and gives it the appearance of Darth Vader’s Death Star. I wanted detail. I wanted to turn maps into landscapes. Cassini-Huygens did not disappoint.

Take Titan, one of its primary targets. First observed by the Dutch astronomer Christian Huygens in 1655, Titan is the biggest moon in the Saturn System: larger than Mercury, 50% bigger than our own Moon, only a fraction smaller than the largest moon in the Solar System, Ganymede. But until Cassini-Huygen’s arrival, almost nothing was known about Titan’s surface because it possesses a thick and frigid nitrogen-methane atmosphere filled from top to bottom with an opaque haze of hydrocarbon particles. The two Voyager missions failed to penetrate this shroud; ground-based surveys and the Hubble telescope revealed little more than enigmatic dark and light patches. But Cassini was not only armed with radar-mapping equipment and cameras able to peer through the haze and radar-mapping equipment, it was also carrying the Huygens probe, designed to fall through Titan’s atmosphere and land on and observe and taste its surface.

The saucer-shaped probe separated from the Cassini orbiter on Christmas Eve 2004, midway through the third orbit around Saturn, and both craft swung out close to Iapetus and fell back towards rendezvous with Titan. Although a software glitch meant that one of the orbiter’s two receivers failed to lock onto Huygens’s signals, leading to loss of some relayed data, the probe performed exactly as expected, decelerating through Titan’s atmosphere in a fiery arc, jettisoning its heat shield, deploying its parachute, and drifting down to surface. Instruments analysed the atmospheric gases and measured wind speed; cameras captured a vista that looked like a dark shoreline backed by bright hills cut by the lightning forks of rivers. The probe impacted east of the hills, and transmitted pictures of a flat landscape littered with cobbles. It looked a little like the rocky plains of Mars, but the surface was organic material with the consistency of crème brûlée, and the cobbles were water ice and rounded like pebbles on a beach from which the waters had withdrawn. Perhaps that’s exactly what it was: a beach, or the surface of a dry lake or river.

Huygens stopped transmitting soon after impact, but Cassini continued to swing past Titan at regular intervals, discovering that the moon’s poles possess lakes replenished by summer rains, mapping riverine valleys that cut through regions of rugged terrain, and huge tracts of giant sand dunes marching northward from the equator. Very few craters have been spotted, suggesting that traces of most impacts had been eroded by rain and wind, just as on Earth. There may even be volcanoes. But although Titan is stunningly Earthlike in appearance, its surface isn’t rock but granitic water ice at 103 kelvins (pure water ice melts at 273 K), rain is methane and ethane, the dunes are composed of gritty grains of frozen petroleum, and if Titan possesses active volcanoes, they’ll belch lavas of plastic water ice. There are also indications that, just like Earth’s tectonic plates, Titan’s surface floats on a deep layer of fluid.

Exobiologists and SF writers have long speculated that sluggish methanogenic creatures might inhabit Titan, but perhaps a more familiar form of life exists in a chthonic ocean of liquid water beneath the moon’s frozen crust. And while many SF novels and stories set in the Saturn system have assumed that its biggest moon was the best candidate for colonisation, and a vast resource of hydrocarbons and nitrogen, in reality, it is, despite its Earthlike landscapes, about as hospitable as the outer suburbs of Hell. The haze which extends all the way to the surface reduces visibility and incident sunlight; its gravity well as almost as deep as that of Mars, and because of its thick atmosphere (which is explosive when mixed with breathable air), descent from orbit requires the use of heat shields. No, if you want to colonise the Saturn system, there are much better places to live.

Enceladus, for instance. In 2005, images from Cassini’s third close encounter with this little moon showed plumes of water ice rising from its south pole. Tremendously exciting, but not completely unexpected. At just 500 kilometers in diameter Enceladus should have frozen solid long ago, but its icy surface is differentiated into smooth plains and cratered regions and shows signs of recent resurfacing and tectonic deformation, and the broad faint E Ring is brightest in the region in which Enceladus orbits, suggesting that it is the source of ring material. And so it is. Some of the ice dust lofted by the plumes falls back to the moon’s surface, giving it the highest albedo of any body in the Solar System (and making it one of the coldest surfaces in the Solar System too, because it reflects almost all incident sunlight); the rest goes into orbit around Saturn, replenishing the E Ring. Later flybys, including one within 52 kilometers of Enceladus’s surface, pinpointed the source of the plumes: long fractures or sulci in a wrinkled tiger-stripe terrain at the south pole that are significantly warmer than the rest of the surface.

The mechanism producing the plumes isn’t yet fully explained, but there’s convincing evidence for liquid water beneath the moon’s surface. Particles in the E ring contain sodium salts, suggesting that water has eroded material from the moon’s silicate core, while recent data show that the icy plumes contain ammonia, which when dissolved in water acts as an antifreeze, reducing the freezing point to temperatures as low as 176 kelvins. As on Titan, the presence of liquid water suggests that some form of life may exist deep beneath Enceladus’s surface. Thirty years ago, Mars was the only likely target in the search for extraterrestrial life; now, the range had been vastly expanded. In addition to Titan and Enceladus, there’s extremely strong evidence for oceans beneath the surfaces of Jupiter’s moons Europa and Ganymede, and liquid water might also be found beneath the surface of the largest body in the asteroid belt, Ceres, and beneath the surfaces of Triton and Charon, the largest moons of Neptune and Pluto respectively. Our kind of life, found on the surface of rocky planets and ultimately dependent on sunlight-driven photosynthesis, may be less common than chemosynthetic subsurface life.

It might be possible to colonise Enceladus’s subsurface sea, although it would be as dark as a coal cellar, and its freezing water would lack free oxygen — a fish would drown in it as quickly as a human being. Still, bubble cities and racks of sunlamps could be strung under the icy ceiling, and perhaps modified kelps could be grown. But if the sea harbors some kind of indigenous life, it might best be left as a kind of nature reserve; and besides, the surfaces of Enceladus and the rest of Saturn’s inner moons are more attractive places to live. Essentially, they’re frozen oceans of dirty ice wrapped around silicate cores, and ice can be melted to provide water and, by electrolysis, oxygen and hydrogen. As for building materials, there’s an abundance of hydrocarbons.

When it first approached Saturn, Cassini-Huygens passed within 2000 kilometers of Phoebe, the largest of Saturn’s flock of the small irregular outer moons. Once thought to be a captured asteroid, Phoebe was revealed to be more like an inactive comet or one of the planetesimals of the outer system, with dark carbonaceous material wrapped around a core of water ice. It most likely wandered inwards from the Kuiper Belt, and it is not the only wanderer captured by Saturn. Cassini and ground-based observations have detected almost forty tiny moonlets in large-radius, irregular orbits around Saturn, sorted into the Inuit, Norse (to which Phoebe belongs), and Gallic groups. A swarming bounty of moons, with the chemistry of the Solar System’s formation frozen across their surfaces. These primordial hydrocarbons could be turned into every kind of polymer, and habitats constructed from exotic plastics, fullerenes and diamond could be built into bright ice cliffs of Dione or fitted into Rhea’s craters, and fractures in the adamantine ice of Tethys and Mimas could be roofed over and linear cities the size of New York or London built on their floors. Gravity on these small moons is low enough to allow all kinds of architectural fantasies — even arboreal cities constructed on platforms and aerial streets strung between giant trees.

The best candidate for colonisation may be the outermost of Saturn’s large moons, Iapetus. In the 17th Century, the Italian-born astronomer Giovanni Cassini first observed that it was divided into a light and dark half (Arthur C. Clarke originally located a giant monolith at the centre of its dark plains, named Cassini Regio after their discoverer). The Cassini orbiter found that the dark material is very similar to the stuff caulking small irregular moons like Phoebe; possibly it was knocked off them by collisions early in the history of the Saturn system, and swept up by Iapetus’s leading hemisphere. Cassini also found that Iapetus possesses a huge range of mountains at its equator. Thirteen thousand kilometers long, thirty wide, and with peaks rearing up some thirteen kilometers, more than twice as high as the Himalayas, this equatorial ridge gives the moon the seamed profile of a walnut. The easy availability of carbonaceous material and possibility that activity associated with the formation of this huge mountain range may also have uplifted useful minerals and metals are excellent reasons to settle on Iapetus. And while most of the inner moons orbit in Saturn’s equatorial plane, so that the rings would be edge-on and difficult to see from their surfaces, Iapetus’s orbit is inclined with respect to Saturn and it is the only large moon from which the rings would be visible in all their glory.

But why should human beings go to the Saturn system when robots like Cassini can explore it for us?  In addition to mapping Titan’s hidden surface, probing the mystery of Enceladus’s icy fountains, and discovering Iapetus’s great equatorial ridge, Cassini has produced hundreds of stunning images of Saturn and its rings and moons. It has discovered a bizarre, deep hexagonal feature at Saturn’s north pole, some kind of standing wave that’s as wide as two Earths and extends deep into the atmosphere, and found a vast hurricane at the south pole. It has confirmed the presence of spokes in the ring system — clouds of dark material lofted above the ring plane by some as yet unknown mechanism — and discovered propeller moonlets within the A Ring and intricate patterns of ripples created by interaction between the rubble and dust of the rings and the gravity of the shepherd moons orbiting in ring gaps.

After successfully completing its original four-year tour, Cassini is now in the middle of its two-year Equinox Mission, due to end in 2010, and was recently granted an extension for a third mission of seven years duration. At the end of that mission, with propellant required for manoeuvring close to exhaustion, it will be deorbited and flung across the ring plane, gathering its last data as it plunges inward and finally flares out across Saturn’s atmosphere.

It will leave a tremendous legacy of scientific data and awe-inspiring images. Awe. Now there’s a word that’s been somewhat devalued; everything is either awesome of full of fail on the internet, these days. But many of Cassini’s images — misty Titan hung beyond the arc of Saturn’s rings, for instance, or a glistening close-up of the ravaged ancient battlefield of Dione’s surface — really are awesome. They evoke the kind of magisterial wonder beyond human plight and experience, unconstrained by calculation or measurement, to which the very best science fiction aspires. And the thought that human beings not only constructed and launched a spacecraft capable of travelling to the sixth planet out from the sun, but are also at this moment piloting it in an intricate and continuous ballet that now cuts it past the very edge of the rings, now sends it swinging outward to very nearly graze the top of Titan’s atmosphere, now hurls it through the plumes jetting up from Enceladus’s south pole . . . well that’s purely awesome, too. The things we can do!

I’m writing this as the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing is being celebrated by a plethora of newspaper articles and editorials, books, and documentaries. The three Apollo 11 astronauts were guests of honor at a banquet at the Smithsonian Museum. Google released Google Moon. And so on, and so forth. But the anniversary of the landing of the first men of the Moon is also the anniversary of another great achievement: the touchdown of the Viking 1 lander on Mars, in 1975. The coincidence of the two anniversaries was almost unnoticed, and I doubt there will be the same kind of hoopla about Viking’s fortieth anniversary. Unmanned probes like Viking and Voyager and Cassini-Huygens have given us immeasurably valuable insights into the moons and planets of the Solar System, and we are yes, awed, by the images they return. And yet we do not celebrate them in the way that we celebrate the skill and daring and true grit of astronauts who have placed their lives in mortal danger to extend human knowledge and the human frontier. For we are, after all, human, and not entirely governed by logic. Places aren’t really real to us until we can plant our boots on the ground. Thanks to the images and data of the Pioneer, Viking, and Cassini missions, the moons of Saturn have been mapped and given shape, but they are not yet — not yet — inhabited. For now, that’s still science fiction. For now.

Further Reading and Viewing:

Three excellent selections of high-resolution images: Cassini Nears Four Year Mark (http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/05/cassini_nears_fouryear_mark.html), Enceladus Up Close (http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/10/enceladus_up_close.html), Cassini’s Continued Mission (http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/04/cassinis_continued_mission.html)

Cassini Equinox Mission Website (http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/index.cfm)

CICLOPS - Cassini Imaging (http://www.ciclops.org/index.php?js=1)

About the Author

Paul McAuley has worked as a research biologist in various universities, including Oxford and UCLA, and for six years was a lecturer in botany at St Andrews University. He is now a full time writer of science fiction and science thrillers, and lives in North London. His most recent novels are The Quiet War (published in the US by Pyr) and Gardens of the Sun (published in the UK by Gollancz).

“Mammals Underfoot! An Interview with Emerging Writers”
by Jeff Vandermeer

Every once in awhile, it’s good for a fool like me, entering mid-career, to check the pulse of what’s going on among the emerging writers who will one day call you a curmudgeon. Keeping tabs on this unruly, diverse lot not only lets you see the end of the road coming from much farther away and softens the often abrupt transition from “young turk” to “old fart” — it also re-energizes you and helps ensure that your reading patterns don’t get too predictable. Usually, I keep up via blogs and online fiction, but I thought it would be interesting to interview a few emerging writers about subjects like their connection to the larger community, where they see themselves in five years, what they’ve been reading, and their take on mammals versus large reptiles. A kind of core sample, if you will.

What is an “emerging writer”? I think of an emerging writer as someone who has published at least some stories but not yet published a collection, or published stories and has a novel pending, or even someone who has had a couple of books out but seems to be flying under the radar, relative to talent (see: Mr. Shipp). I like the term better than “new” writer because by the time writers come to our attention, they are often not exactly new. Some may have been writing for fifteen or even twenty years. An emerging writer could be in their teens, or in their forties. A writer’s career is for life, and a writer can come into focus for readers and the general public at any point during that career.

The sample provided below is by no means definitive or complete or arrived at via any scientific method, but all of the interviewees below are dynamic, original, intelligent in their approaches to writing, and likely to contribute in interesting ways to the next couple decades of non-realist fiction.

The following writers participated in the survey below:

Jesse Bullington spent the bulk of his formative years in rural Pennsylvania, the Netherlands, and Tallahassee, Florida. He is a folklore and outdoor enthusiast who holds a bachelor’s degree in History and English Literature from Florida State University. His novel The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart will be released by Orbit in November 2009. He currently resides in Colorado, can be found online at jessebullington.com.

N. K. Jemisin has sold short stories to Strange Horizons, Postscripts, Baen’s Universe, and other markets. Her first novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, is forthcoming from Orbit in February 2010. She’s lived in New Orleans, New York, Boston, and Mobile (Alabama), and has only written stories about the first two cities so far. Her website is at nkjemisin.com.

By day, Tessa Kum sits at her computer and types. By night, she also sits at her computer and types. Hers is the very definition of a rock ‘n roll lifestyle. She is a graduate of the Clarion South Writers Workshop, editorial assistant for Weird Tales, and assistant editor for the Best American Fantasy series. She has been published in Daikaiju 3 and ASIM, with forthcoming fiction appearing in anthologies such as Baggage and Last Drink Bird Head, and her short story collection 7wishes is currently free to read online at Silence Without. She lives in Melbourne, Australia, with a fridge full of condiments and no TV.

Meghan McCarron was born in 1983 and grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs. She has since spent time in Beijing, Los Angeles, and rural New Hampshire. Her stories have appeared in venues such as Strange Horizons and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and have been reprinted in several years’ best anthologies. She currently lives in Brooklyn, works at a tiny independent bookstore, and maintains a web resence at megmccarron.livejournal.com.

Shweta Narayan is something of a cultural crazy-quilt; she was born in India and lived in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, the Netherlands, and Scotland before moving to California. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in places like Strange Horizons, Realms of Fantasy, and the Beastly Bride anthology. She was the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship recipient at the Clarion workshop in 2007. Shweta can be found on the web at shwetanarayan.org.

Jeremy C. Shipp’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in the likes of Cemetery Dance , ChiZine, Apex Magazine, Pseudopod, and The Bizarro Starter Kit (blue). While preparing for the forthcoming collapse of civilization, Jeremy enjoys living in Southern California in a moderately haunted Victorian farmhouse with his wife, Lisa, and their legion of yard gnomes. His books include Vacation, Sheep and Wolves, and Cursed. And thankfully, only one mime was killed during the making of his first short film, Egg. His online home is jeremycshipp.com.

Angela Slatter is a Brisbane, Australia, writer of speculative fiction. Her short stories have appeared in anthologies such as Jack Dann’s  Dreaming Again, Tartarus Press’ Strange Tales II, Twelfth Planet Press’  2012, Dirk Flinthart’s Canterbury 2100, and in journals such as Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Shimmer, On Spec and Doorways Magazine. Her work has had several Honorable Mentions in the Datlow, Link, Grant Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror anthologies #20 and #21; and two of her stories have been shortlisted for the Aurealis Awards in the Best Fantasy Short Story category. She has a blog at angelaslatter.wordpress.com.

Genevieve Valentine’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Fantasy, Federations, and more. Her first novel, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, is forthcoming from Prime Books. She is a columnist at Tor.com and Fantasy Magazine; her appetite for bad movies is insatiable, a tragedy she tracks on her blog, glvalentine.livejournal.com.

Can you give us a sense of what writing means to you? How it fits into your life and what you get out of it?

Bullington: Writing is the strange mixture of hobby and purpose, or at least it was before I sold my debut novel—now it’s becoming more of a job, though not in a bad way. Instead of fitting time for writing into my life, lately I’ve found myself looking at writing as what I need to be doing unless I’m doing something else, such as spending time with my family, doing non-writing activities by myself, etc. As for what I get out of it, writing gives me more stress than most things in my life, but it also rewards me with a great deal of satisfaction, pleasure, and interesting nightmares.

Kum: I’ve come to think of writing as being similar to having a kidney — it just is. It doesn’t mean anything at all to have a kidney — do you think about your kidneys much? I don’t — and at the same time, it means the world to have a kidney. You know what happens without kidneys? Bad things. Life is not so sweet. That’s what writing is to me. I don’t choose it, I don’t think about it, I don’t lie awake at night questioning its meaning or giving it a greater purpose. It just is. Although I think writing is of more use when trying to impress people at bars than my kidneys. To date, no one has been impressed by my kidneys.

McCarron: This is a hilarious question to attempt to answer, because I ask it of myself all the time. I’ve always been drawn to books — I used to crawl around with them, and there’s video of me narrating stories I drew out in pictures because I couldn’t write yet. My love of books is this totally primal thing, and I have no idea why, as a drooling baby, I decided they were for me. You’d think this would mean that I knew from an early age that I wanted to be a writer, but instead I assumed it was something private, a hobby that I would fit around whatever I actually wanted to do with my life. It took an embarrassingly long time for me to put together that I could write for someone besides myself — that it could be what I “did.” As to how it fits into my life — well. New York is distracting. Let’s just say I wish it fit more!

Narayan: Writing means I live with a story filter on. Any experience, any idea, anything anyone does around me, is fair game. I’ll stop what I’m doing at random points to scribble furiously — in a book I carry around, on napkins and scraps, in crisp damp sand with a pebble. It means I’ve become a terrible conversationalist; I hear this isn’t unusual. It seems silly to say I get stories out of writing, but I do. I love the work of writing — pulling images into focus, listening to character voices till they are distinct(ive), poking at plots till they behave. I love/hate editing — hate the feel of my work being off and love the feel of it getting closer to right. But. Sure, I love all that, but it’s still work, and work carries the risk of failure. So if I wasn’t writing to communicate, to have these bits of my thinking out there for other people to read and respond to, I’m not sure I would ever get past the fun and non-threatening stage of playing with ideas.

Shipp: Even if I were trapped in the dimension of fiction-hating demonic clowns, I would still write. I need to tell stories the way I need to breathe. I’ve been writing almost constantly since I was 13, and I don’t know how to stop. And, of course, I don’t want to. I love writing. For me, the spawning of tales isn’t an exercise in escapism. When creating fictional worlds, I bring my pain and my love and my horror with me. And so, the process is cathartic, therapeutic and fun. And while I would continue to write even among fiction-hating demons, I’m exceedingly thankful that I live amidst those human beings who connect with my work. As a storyteller, I’m given the opportunity to share my heart and mind and soul with others. And if I can touch a few hearts, twist a few minds, massage a few spleens, then I’m a happy writer.

Slatter: I guess writing stops my head from exploding. There are a lot of ideas flying around in there that need to get out and writing allows me to do that. It also allows me to spend time on my own playing with imaginary friends and no one looks askance at me! It’s a way of me being able to ask and answer “What if” questions without driving the people around me nuts (”What if?” can have the same effect as “Are we there yet?” if heard too many times.) I like creating things, worlds, people, stories — does that make it a god complex?

Valentine: For me, writing is a way to explore questions the real world can’t answer.

Do you find there’s a personal or autobiographical element to your fiction? How does it usually manifest itself, and is this element usually obvious to readers?

Bullington: I think that there very much is, in varying degrees depending on the project. Because I write primarily historical and fantastical works I don’t think this is necessarily obvious but it’s there. Only rarely does the personal stuff come out in any overt fashion, such as dialect, turn of phrase, or description.

Jemisin: I think there’s always an autobiographical element in writing, whether the author intends it or not. That’s just the nature of art; it’s analytical. But like any self-analysis, it’s not always done consciously. Frankly, I’m often not sure what personal elements are manifesting in my fiction. Some of them I intentionally put in, but some I figure out years later, when I go back and re-read. I can speak to what’s deliberate: I try to depict realistic human characters — sometimes including nonhumans — dealing with difficult situations. Those difficult situations might be anything from angry gods to rogue probabilities, but I want the people to be real, in all the complexity and three-dimensionality of actual people. So I try to make sure my characters run the gamut of human diversity, and I usually choose to focus on the kinds of people speculative fiction frequently ignores — the blind artist who sells trinkets in the park, the meek office worker, the fallen chef who yearns for her glory days.

No heroes, though. I just don’t find heroes interesting unless they’ve got a generous dollop of selfishness and anger and a willingness to throw others under the bus for their own goals. Then they feel real to me.

Kum: This question is a trap, it must be, as the last several stories I’ve written have featured one Tessa Kum in the role of Madame Protagonist. As far as characters go, she’s not very convincing.

McCarron: My stories are definitely personal, and the stories I’m most proud of tend to be the most so. That said, I flounder when I try for straight-up autobiography — I seem to need a great amount of lying to keep things interesting. Also, the way “personal” manifests in my work surprises me. As for readers — I did once get an email from someone that implied I had read her mind and/or foreseen the future of her relationship with her ex-girlfriend, so maybe I’m writing other people’s autobiographies? Oh god, though, I really hope that isn’t true, because otherwise I’d feel like I had to write happy endings. 

Narayan: Yes. Always. I don’t think I’ve written a successful story yet that didn’t come out of something that was bothering me. Sometimes the personal element is pretty obvious; I retell stories I grew up with in a way that relates them to my experience. Or I write about shapeshifters and people pulled between different worlds because of my background as a neither-nor sort of cultural hybrid. It’s not that I’m drawing deliberate analogies, just that I know there’s a fictional “me” in the story while I write it. At other times, I don’t figure it out myself until far later. I wrote three stories about one character before figuring out why I keep coming back to her.

Shipp: There are definitely bits and pieces of me and my life in my fiction. For instance, in my debut novel, Vacation, the main character experiences a major paradigm shift. The story is, in a sense, an ideological autobiography of my life, although the plot itself has very little to do with my experiences. And the two main characters in my newest novel, Cursed, are basically the two halves of my personality. Nicholas is my neurotic, insecure side. And Cicely is my easy-going, passionate side. My life is often reflected in my fiction, although the reflections take many forms, as they’re distorted by the fun house mirrors of my imagination.

Slatter: Yes and no. When I’m writing a character I try my best to utterly be that character, think like her/him, make sure the rhythms of my dialogue match the character and hopefully nothing jars. I try to be really aware of how s/he sounds and also to engage with what the character feels and thinks without any kind of judgment - there’s no point in turning away from a character because s/he is doing or thinking something questionable. Sometimes my stories will start from a personal experience and then be filtered and changed to go with the story. So much of my work is based on fairytales because that’s what I had read to me in childhood and it remains a form I’m very comfortable with, although I have no personal experience of being caught in gingerbread houses or wearing little red riding hoods to hang out with wolves.

Valentine: I’ve only written two stories with autobiographical elements, which contributed to setting but had no bearing on character or plot. I feel like the “write what you know” refrain is a dangerous thing. Maybe “don’t write what you know nothing about” is a better approach; by all means, let outside knowledge inform your setting, but if you start sticking your friends into your stories wholesale it might come back to haunt you — either your readers will catch on or your friends will.

Is there a story of yours that proved a challenge to write? Can you tell us a little bit about the story and your struggle with it?

Bullington: The novel I’m currently working on is hands down the toughest project I’ve ever attempted. Part of the reason its proved challenging is that it is, in part, more serious in tone and subject matter than The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart, though there’s still some humor in it. The main reason I’m finding it difficult, though, is that I’m trying to evoke real emotion in the reader without exploiting said emotions — no easy feat when much of the plot consists of terrible things happening to good people.

Jemisin: All of them are a challenge to write. I love to write — can’t stop myself from writing — but it’s always hard for me. It almost never flows effortlessly. Though I’d have to say the hardest struggle I’ve had lately was with one of my efforts to depict nonhumans. I wrote a short story from the point-of-view of artificial intelligences in hiding from human beings, who have instituted anti-AI laws for fear of some Matrix-like apocalypse. The AIs think of themselves as humanity’s children, but humanity doesn’t want them, so they’ve grown up angry and lonely and a bit warped like any neglected children. I’ve rewritten that thing maybe five times, and while the voice is clear in my head, I’ve had trouble conveying its peculiar point-of-view to others. I’m determined to get it right one day.

Kum: Is the story worth writing if it doesn’t prove to be a challenge? I like my stories to fight back, so that when they’re conquered, defeated and lying bloodied on the battlefield that sense of accomplishment is so much sweeter. Veni, vidi, vici, bitchez. That said, the story “Acception” (to be published in the forthcoming Baggage anthology) proved a much greater challenge than I’d anticipated. The effect of cultural baggage on Australia was a great theme, lots of room to play and interesting angles to take, and I figured the story would near write itself. Instead, I discovered I had a huge emotional block concerning personal and cultural identity. There isn’t much else that can make writing as excruciating. And I may never again experience a greater sense of victory.

McCarron: I started writing my story “The Magician’s House,” in the dead of winter in New Hampshire, when there was three feet of snow on the ground and it got dark at 4:30 in the afternoon. The story was much darker than things I had written before, and while the beginning came out fast, working on the story alone in my tiny apartment deepened my winter funk considerably, so I set the story aside. I went back to it in hot, sunny August, when I was living in Brooklyn with several good friends, and I was able to finish it in a week. I think I had to start that story in a dark, wintery place, but I wasn’t able to write the darkest parts until it was warm and sunny outside, and I had lots of good people around to bring me out again.

Narayan: I am easily distracted by shinies, so I am terrible at writing what I know. If a story’s not enough of a challenge to demand my attention and make me learn new things in the writing, I’ll never finish it. I’m currently working on my first SF story, which means I’m hinting at a world that’s significantly changed from ours, but needs to hold together without either explanations or mythic structure to support it. The setting is rife with underlying class issues (and by virtue of being written in English, race issues) that I could mess up really badly — or even get reasonably right but fail to communicate well. The piece is also indirect narrative in the form of a paper, in an academic voice that has to ring true but still fail at dehumanizing the “subjects” to the status of “an interesting question”. I have no idea if I can make any of it work, but I shall have fun and learn things while finding out.

Shipp: When I was a teenager, I never struggled with my tales. I wrote rather unconsciously. But over the years, my style has become more and more minimalistic. And so, for the past few years, I’ve struggled with all of my stories. I’m more obsessive than I used to be, and I revise my work constantly. It’s horrible, but at my worst, I can spend an hour on one paragraph. I must be masochistic. Out of all of my recent work, Cursed was the most challenging for me to write. I saw the book as one big puzzle, and I wanted each piece to fit together appropriately. I was also rather fixated on the rhythm of the sentences. Everything had to sound right to my mad little mind. In addition to all this, I wrote this book because of my wife. She was disabled with CFIDS for a few years, and many people treated her as if she wasn’t a whole person. They looked down on her, pitied her, hated her. I wanted to write a story that honored what she taught me about disability and about life.

Slatter: I’ve been struggling with a short story called “Gallowberries” for almost three years now. It wasn’t until I thought about integrating into a collection of short stories (”Sourdough and Other Tales”) that I worked out how to finish it. I kept avoiding writing the hard emotional scenes and so it stopped me from getting the story finished — couldn’t see the forest for the trees. It was making me very grumpy. I’d also kept the story close to my chest, no one else had seen it until my friend and fellow Clarion Souther Lisa Hannett (whose “On The Lot and In the Air” appeared in Clarkesworld 34) read it and we talked about it and solutions gradually unraveled. I was on the train last week scribbling notes and it hit me in a flash ‘Oh, of course she turns him into a [spoiler].’ Sometimes you just need to talk about the story and tap into someone else’s brain.

To what extent do you feel part of the genre community? Why or why not?

Bullington: I certainly don’t feel unwelcome in the community, though I think it’s as rife with problems as any community, literary or otherwise — there’s the crackpot loudmouths who think they speak for everyone, the sticks-in-the-mud who don’t want the back-roads paved, the smiling old-timers who secretly worry about the neighborhood becoming “too dark,” and on and on. Overall, I think the genre community can be very exciting and accepting, more so than it is often portrayed by its detractors, but I do think identifying only with one style or genre can be stifling for writers as well as readers. All that said, so far everyone I’ve personally talked to has been aces.

Jemisin: I feel very much a part of the genre community — why wouldn’t I? This is my business. I’ve been blogging and attending cons and workshopping and so on for the past ten years or so — since I got serious about wanting to be published. It’s not always an ideal community to be part of, granted. (But then, what community is ever ideal?) This genre has issues. I think the same issues probably apply to futurism or New Age philosophy or any movement dedicated to exploring the hopes and fears and subconscious of humankind, but SF/F is uniquely ill-equipped to deal with the squicky issues that come up whenever you talk about that kind of stuff. As I see it, SF is endlessly self-congratulatory, proud of its optimism and willingness to ask questions. However, that optimism is an illusion. Frequently it’s just a stubborn unwillingness to speak or think about the world’s problems, like a child sticking fingers in his ears and humming really loudly. The questions being asked aren’t usually the hard questions, and the community tends to react badly to answers it doesn’t like.

That said, I’m relieved to see that more of those questions have been asked in the past few years. The resulting conversations have been difficult, but progress is always difficult. I’m hoping it will lead to long-term, substantive change, but we’ll have to see.

Kum: I am not a community-minded person. This is not because “all writers are introverts,” but because “I am a bloody misanthrope now get off my lawn before I come back with my cheese grater.”

McCarron: When I went to Clarion West in 2004, people kept telling me it was going to change my life, and I totally didn’t believe them. I’d found Clarion by happenstance — picked up Kelly Link’s first collection in the library, found out she taught at this thing called Clarion, and I decided to apply, since my college gave grants for “summer writing projects.” While I was psyched to spend six weeks writing and critiquing, I didn’t see how it would result in anything dramatic. Since then, I have met so many amazing people, formed so many incredible friendships, and learned so much about writing, that I am a completely different person than I would have been without that initial door into the genre community. So, yes, I completely feel a part of it, and I am grateful to have found it.

Narayan: I am, in fact, far more a part of the genre community than I was a couple of years ago. However, in the process of becoming more involved with it, I’ve learned a lot about internal tensions, many of which seem to be between people in power and people more like myself. Given the recent controversy around a book titled The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF: the 21 finest stories of awesome SF, which turned out to contain nothing by Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, or Ursula K. Le Guin, or in fact anyone not white and male, I think it’d be hard for a woman of color not to feel marginalized. Add in one writer’s argument that questioning the table of contents was akin to setting up “quotas,” and I can’t see my position in the community as anything but peripheral. However, I’m pretty heartened by the many people who’ve objected to this sort of marginalization, and by signs of change (like the table of contents of the Eclipse 3 anthology, which contains many women, several non-het writers, and at least one writer of color — and, not coincidentally, many of my favorite writers) and look forward to eventually being a proud part of a community that’s truly inclusive, of these differences and others.

Shipp: I do feel a warm and fuzzy connection with the genre community, especially the Bizarro and horror population. I’m active on various forums, and I’ve gotten to know many publishers, editors, and writers over the years. Most importantly, I try to keep myself as assessable as possible to my readers. I spend hours every day talking and interacting with them in one way or another.

Slatter: Ah, I guess part of it because so many of my friends are in the tribe in Australia and the United States. We’re kind of a funny group because a lot of our connections are enabled mainly through t’intertubes. It’s often quite funny to meet people at cons after chatting online with them after a year! I’m also a Clarion South grad and nothing makes you feel quite like part of the Borg Collective than that experience. Ultimately, writing is a solitary activity, no matter who looks at your work at what stage: the putting the words on the page and making them stick there, that’s all you. Sometimes I get a bit lost, spending so much time in my own head, so it’s a relief to go online and say “Hi” and have a those bright blinking lights of friends say “Hi, back, out of the cave, are we?”

In terms of the idea of a writing career as opposed to the writing itself, what’s the most frustrating, annoying, or just plain stupid part of the business end, in your opinion?

Bullington: I’ve had a remarkably charmed experience so far, so I suppose the lack of wheelbarrows full of hard cash being rolled up my driveway stands out. Seriously, though, what I’ve found really tough is trying to divorce myself from worrying about the business end of things and just focusing on the writing itself.

Kum: I don’t understand the business end. It’s some bemusing fog lurking in the distance, and from what I can tell, seems to be designed for the sole purpose of providing the transition between “writer” and “nervous wreck.” I daresay this is because the business end of a writing career is purely business, which is a vastly different animal and requires alternate environments and sustenance for its survival. Should I eventually meet this animal, I suspect I will be devoured whole, chewed a bit, and spat out much worse for wear. I could be wrong, of course.

McCarron: The business end of writing is changing so dramatically that the adjectives that come to mind aren’t so much “annoying” or “frustrating,” as “terrifying” and “exhilarating.” My experience with all of these possibilities has been relatively small so far, but I know all sorts of choices are coming. For instance, I love reading fiction in print, but it’s been immensely valuable to have my work available online. Except that often readers then tell me they read those online stories in print years’ best anthologies. So what, exactly, does one do with a collection? A novel? People are finding fiction in all these new, amazing ways — I once ran into a quote from a story of mine on someone’s MySpace page — but it’s hard to know where to focus your attention.

Narayan: The death of the midlist.

Shipp: The whole money aspect is rather frustrating.

Slatter: In Australia we have maybe 20 literary agents working — getting one to look at your work is very difficult. Even if you’re prepared to offer your first-born, it’s still quite difficult to get a look-in. If someone is kind enough to refer you then that’s wonderful and gracious, but sometimes people seem to forget that they can help others. I’m a big fan of networking and trying to build those helpful relationships that benefit everyone - paying it forward. The favours you do or the help you offer isn’t given in the expectation of “pay back”; you may never “collect”, but someone might remember you kindly and offer a good opportunity later in your career. It’s like Androcles and the lion — if you can, always pull the thorn out of a paw!

Valentine: I often feel it’s not my place to tell people what to think of my fiction — that authorial intent is negligible once it reaches an audience. Given that, it’s sometimes difficult to entice people to read my work by assuring them it’s very good; even when I’m feeling vain enough to say it, there’s no promise that a given reader will like it at all. It’s like playing a shell game with perfectly nice strangers.

What are the most pleasurable and most frightening parts of being a writer?

Bullington: For me, the most pleasurable part is the result, be it tweaking a sentence until it sings, crafting a paragraph that can’t be improved upon, or actually completing a project. As for the frightening parts, where to begin? In the film Barton Fink, the title character, played by John Turturro, has this great little bit where he talks about how “writing always comes with a great deal of pain,” which struck me hard when I first heard it — granted, I was still a kid then, but up until that point I always felt sort of like a fraud because of how difficult writing sometimes was for me, as if it should always be pleasant and easy. While there are certainly fun times and painless stretches, I very much find the process to be nerve-wracking — I was neurotic long before I found anything resembling success as a writer. I have a hard time turning off the part of my brain that mulls over whatever projects I’m working on at any given point, which leads me to being perpetually distracted when I’m really into something, and so one of the most frightening things is how much I sometime let projects take over my mind, to the detriment of my interaction with, you know, reality.

Jemisin: Most pleasurable: the act of writing, particularly when I’ve got an idea really burning in my head and needing to be written down. Indulging that urge is deeply, viscerally satisfying, whether the final result is publishable or not. (Though of course I like it better if it’s publishable!)

Most frightening: writing when I don’t know where I’m going. It feels like wandering around in a foggy room, not knowing when you’re going to hit a piece of furniture or some stairs. I’ve learned to work through this fear and just endure the bruises if I hit an obstacle. I will sometimes scrap huge chunks of text I’ve written and start over. (Scrapped a whole novel once; the rewritten version is getting published in February.) I don’t like doing that, but I refuse to think of it as a loss. It was necessary to map out the foggy room. Now I’ll be able to find my way around better.

Kum: Occasionally it occurs to me: HOLY SMOKES BATMAN, THEY’RE READING MY STORIES YAAAAAAAAAAY! Then it occurs to me: HOLY SMOKES BATMAN, THEY’RE READING MY STORIES AAAAAAUUUUUUGH! The two cannot be separated.

McCarron: The most pleasurable part of being a writer is waking up in the morning, making tea, sitting down at my desk, and falling completely into the story I’m writing. That level of surrender to fiction is also kind of scary.

Narayan: I choose to interpret this question as “Which parts are simultaneously most pleasurable and most frightening?” They are: a) Writing something completely outside my normal range — there’s no reassurance of familiarity, no idea if I’ll pull it together or not, but it is fun, and b) Going online the day something new comes out. Will people like it? Hate it? Not notice at all?

Shipp: As far as the writing process goes, I love when the characters start to feel real. I love putting them in impossible situations, and letting them find their way out. Sometimes they surprise me. And then there’s the publishing side of writing when people start reading a new book or story. I love feedback and knowing my work has affected someone in a positive way.

Slatter: Pleasurable is writing a sentence or a paragraph and finding it sings, that you’ve got all the words in exactly the right place and the rhythms are perfect and what you’ve written is beautiful. Frightening is putting your work out there, especially if it’s something you love, and putting it out there for crit (Clarion will take your skin off, no matter how experienced you are or how thick a skin you’ve grown), or for publication. It’s always like jumping off a cliff and wondering if you’ve remembered how to fly.

Valentine: The most pleasurable part of a story is the image that drives you to begin. All the other stages of the process are pretty frightening by turns.

If you had the luxury of daydreaming, what would you want for yourself five years from now in terms of the writing?

Bullington: I hope that I’m able to find more discipline, and of course more skill. The wheelbarrows of currency should really be arriving by then, too.

Jemisin: Well, naturally I’d be a bestseller, making enough money to live without a nine-to-five for the rest of my life! But what I think would make me just as happy would be if I begin to see changes in the fantasy genre as a result of something I’ve done. For example, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is an epic fantasy — with a woman of color as its protagonist. There’s also more than one strong woman character, and blatant bisexuality and poly-positivity, and men who display strength without Mighty Thews ™ and phallic objects. Also there’s some genre flexibility in the form of mystery and romance components. So it’s an epic that breaks the epic mold, in my opinion. A lot of people may reject it because of all this, but my hope is that the mould will become more flexible instead. Maybe it’s presumptuous of me to hope that I can contribute to this kind of change, but…well. I’m presumptuous.

Kum: Oh that’s easy. Let me hit fame and fortune harder than JK Rowling, Stephenie Meyer, and Dan Brown combined, then do the sensible thing and have a breakdown, which would lead to writer’s block, and then I would have no choice but to go and live out my days in some remote lighthouse of the coast of France with nothing but my millions and millions in royalties to feed me. There would be a lot of cake involved. Probably ice cream too. And I’d have to do that washed up celebrity thing of space tourism, as well. I think I’d buy land on the Moon and Mars. You know. Thinking ahead and all that. What was the question?

McCarron: My two big goals for the next few years aren’t particularly unique ones — I want to write enough stories to fill out a collection, and I’d like to write, and publish, a novel. I’ve finished the draft of a novel, several times over, but I haven’t quite figured out how to make all the disparate elements of a big story fit together. So, in my daydreams, I have accomplished, or am on my way to accomplishing both those things, and I’ve managed to set up my life in a way that I get to wake up, have my tea, and sit down to write every morning. Or almost every morning, anyway. Brunch is too good to pass up sometimes.

Narayan: A multi-book deal, a Tiptree award, and an electrode headset telepathic computer interface. And a hypoallergenic pony.

Shipp: I’d want to write a book that makes the world a better place, somehow. I’d also want to write a screenplay about yard gnomes that gets made into a film. Perhaps a yard gnome musical.

Slatter: The ability to be a stay-at-home writer who doesn’t have to worry about an income. Being a successful novelist and continuing to be able to do short stories because I love them. Oh, and Zachary Quinto on speed-dial. Unreasonable, right?

What writers you’ve read recently have really excited and challenged you? In what ways?

Bullington: I haven’t read anything to top two that I discovered last year: The Dream of Scipio by Iain Pears and Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. The Dream of Scipio follows three lives — a professor during World War II, a poet during the Black Plague, and a philosopher, and patrician, during the death throes of the Roman Empire in the 5th century, and the manner in which Pears layers their stories on both literal and symbolic levels is nothing short of genius. It would have been incredibly easy for Pears to trip himself up, for the three stories to catch on one another or come off as contrived, but instead the reader is left in awe of his power and ability.

Blood Meridian, on the other hand, is a masterpiece of language instead of style, though it shares Scipio’s impressive historical detailing. That the poetry of McCarthy’s language is employed to tell the grittiest, most brutal western I’ve ever encountered only makes the novel more interesting. In talking about the novel I always mention this simile McCarthy uses, this perfect simile that would only be cheapened by repeating it out of context. He uses the simile early in the novel and for me it was one of those put-the-book-down-and-gape-into-space moments, and so when he re-used the simile about halfway through I very much took notice — it was such a great use of language that using it a second time very much diminished its power, except that by this point I was convinced McCarthy was far too meticulous to be unaware of this, and so I moved on, my curiosity piqued. Then McCarthy used the simile a third time, and it all fell into place, this one simile used three times establishing this beautiful cadence to the novel, a daring move, and a risky one, but in my opinion a complete success. And with it thus established, the simile was not used again; using it a fourth time would have spoiled the whole thing, it would have been too much, just as if he had only used it twice it would have stumbled the text, it would have not been enough.

Of late I’ve been enjoying some gothic and Victorian gothic novels such as Carl Friedrich Kahlert’s The Necromancer and G.W.M. Reynolds’s Wagner the Wehr-wolf. I’ve also really dug Joe Abercrombie’s First Law Trilogy, and the short fictions I’ve recently read by Orrin Grey, Ekaterina Sedia, J.T. Glover, and Brian Evenson.

Jemisin: Well, I’ve been raving about this woman all over the web, but I absolutely loved Kate Griffin’s A Madness of Angels. It’s an urban fantasy that, in my opinion, seamlessly blends the two kinds of urban fantasy. I’m not sure what to call those two kinds — China Mieville-esque and Laurell K. Hamilton-esque? The big-picture epic kind and the intensely personal noir kind? Whatever. I like both. Anyway, Griffin’s book has rich, gorgeous language and a tough protagonist whom I find incredibly sexy, fighting his way through a London that’s so rich and magical and diverse and organic and quirky that I’ve fallen in love with it sight unseen. I run into a lot of people who are writing off Urban Fantasy these days because it’s infested with girl cooties, or something. I’ve been referring those people to this book.

I’ve also been reading some interesting YA lately. The one that stands out in my mind is Skin Hunger, by Kathleen Duey. It’s not without flaws — the cliffhanger ending being one of them; I hate those — but it’s been one of the chief contributors to my understanding that YA really can be about anything, content-wise. This is a riveting, horrifying story about children in a school of magic being sacrificed, tortured, starved to death; it’s not easy reading at all. But holy crap, I wish there had been more stuff like this around when I was a kid/teen. I jumped to adult books rather earlier than I should have because I couldn’t stand being coddled and talked down-to, the way youth-oriented books did back then. I’m glad to see that the book industry has finally realized kids are actually intelligent, complex beings who aren’t always happy or ignorant of the world’s flaws.

Kum: I’ve had a good run recently, it seems every book I pick up is a fine and wonderful thing. I last read Ben Peek’s yet unpublished “Beneath the Red Sun,” in which he does a masterful job of splicing alternating narratives and, in a way, reversing the chronology of the story while surging forward. It’s also uniquely Australian in flavour, which is a rare and wonderful thing to encounter, and something I’d like to see more of in the genre.

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski did a number on me as well. In a purely ‘I love this but have no desire to break my brain in an effort to emulate it’ fashion. I know I’m late to the party with it, which makes me wonder why there aren’t more books in a similar vein sneaking onto the shelves. I do love a book that fucks with the reader in unexpected ways.

McCarron: The best part of my job (bookselling) is that I get to read all sorts of new, exciting fiction and then sell it to people who will (ideally) love it as much as I do. I just finished a galley of The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt, which is coming out in October, and I can’t stop telling everyone I know how amazing it was. I’ve actually been daydreaming about getting to hand it to customers. I think I’m on a big, thick omniscient-narrator kick, however, because the last book I was totally obsessed with was Middlemarch, which I read earlier this summer. I love fiction that talks to me, that tells instead of shows, but for a long time I had no idea what that looked like when done well. Now I do, and I look forward to stealing liberally.

Narayan: Nisi Shawl. Her characters always come from somewhere. Reading her stories made me realize the extent to which I’d been accepting blank generic cultural backgrounds elsewhere. Hers all have personal histories; the reader gets fragments only, but I never doubt there’s more than I was given. The personal histories tell me about the overall setting and how pressures are working on the characters, and makes them incredibly vivid, and because everyone has a past, her futuristic settings feel like they have real history.

Catherynne M. Valente. Not that her work is new to me, but her latest Clarkesworld story is part of why I’m writing an SF piece. Every time I read something of hers, I think “You can do that?” and some unseen wall in my mind crumbles away. Larissa Lai. Her mixture of humor, world detail, and multithreaded story structure in When Fox is a Thousand reminds me that fun and awesome stories go together.

This list could go on, you realize. Forever. But I’ll stop with the note that several of the speculative poets — Cat Valente, Amal El-Mohtar, Samantha Henderson, Jules Runolfson, JoSelle Vanderhoofd, Rose Lemberg, Mike Allen (and I know I’m missing people) — have been exciting and challenging me at the sentence level. The precision and power with which they use language reminds me that good enough isn’t.

Shipp: I’m currently exploring the tales of Haruki Murakami. His work confounds and mystifies me. I don’t know anyone who writes like he does, or who thinks like he does. When I can find a writer like that, I feel blessed. Some other writers that have electrified me recently: John Ajvide Lindqvist, Lois Lowry, Franny Billingsley.

Slatter: Mieville’s The City & the City because it was very different from his other stuff and it took a bit of a head-shift on my part to shake away expectations. Emma Donoghue’s Kissing the Witch, which is a collection of framed re-written fairytales, which is wondrous strange. Alan Moore’s Voice of the Flame is the book I have literally just finished and it’s totally amazing: the mastery of craft is phenomenal and how he weaves past and present into a story is just awesome. My only complaint was that the font size was too damned small for easy reading! Curmudgeonly person that I am.

Can you tell us a little bit about your current writing projects?

Bullington: I love history, and the work in progress, as well as the next few longer projects I have planned, will also be set in Europe, though in different eras and locations than The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart. The WIP is set in the early days of the Reformation, and will perhaps have a touch more of the fantastic than the last novel, though it hasn’t come out of the oven yet so we’ll see what shape it ends up taking.

Jemisin: Well, right now I’m working on Book 3 of the Inheritance Trilogy. (Calling it Book 3 because I suck at titles and keep changing this one.) Book 2, currently titled The Broken Kingdoms, is done. All three books are set in the same world, where something’s gone Horribly Wrong with the gods and humankind is just trying to cope. The third book looks to be the most “actiony” of the three, with magic battles and flying palaces and so on. I’m trying to figure out a way to insert giant robots. Okay, no. But I really think epic fantasy could use more giant robots, don’t you? I dig giant robots.

Next up, I’ve been wanting to write a YA novel for several years now, set in the world of that AI short story I mentioned. (Because there’s no better way to master something you’ve had trouble with than to try and write a whole novel based on it.) Also, am hoping to finally complete the third book of an unsold trilogy I’ve been working on for years — another epic fantasy, this one set in an Egypt-like society, with a magic system based on Jungian dream theory. Still might not sell, but I just need to get that one out of my system. There’s other stuff in my head. But first things first.

Kum: As mentioned, I just put myself through a whole lot of heartbreak and anguish dealing with culture and identity within Australia, the end result of which will be published in Baggage, slated for release early next year. I also just finished 35,000 word “short” story that was my first collaboration and written in the space of a month, and I haven’t quite recovered from that yet. One day I may even finish my novel.

McCarron: I’ve spent August revising and getting stories ready to go out. My next story to revise is a ghost story I wrote for the Sycamore Hill workshop this year, and then I’m going to finish a science fiction story I started earlier this summer about a woman sleeping with her roommate’s artificial lover. My (ambitious) plan for the fall is to knock out a big rewrite on my novel.

Narayan: Seems I can’t not, given that I’ve already mentioned the current piece twice. Besides that, I have several short stories waiting plaintively for edits, two that are still at the daydream stage. The short stories range from mythic fantasy to anthropological SF to I-don’t-know-what-to-call-this. There’s also a novel; it’s a third done (first draft) and keeps threatening to take over my mind. The setting’s a clockpunk Holland in which the Little Ice Age is getting rather big, and “elf” is a racial slur. It’s a sweet little love story, evident from the blood on page one. However, I also have rather less of a dissertation draft than I should, and a real deadline on that, so everything else is currently on hold. Well, as on hold as I can stand.

Shipp: “Fungus of the Heart” is the short story collection I’m working on. I’m also writing tales for my fiction subscription service, Bizarro Bytes. And there’s Sharkface, my children’s middle-grade book. And then my newest novel, Cursed, is coming out around Halloween. This is the story of Nicholas, Cicely, and their friends and enemies. They create an informal support group of sorts for cursed individuals. Together, they try to find out who cursed them, why, and what the heck they can do about it.

Slatter: “Sourdough and Other Tales” is a collection of short stories set in and around a fairytale city. “Sourdough” appeared in Tartarus Press Strange Tales II in 2007 and they’re taking “Sister, Sister” for Strange Tales III later this year. There are characters that wander between tales and over a period of about a hundred years. It’s about disconnected memories and fairytale themes. I’m working on a novel, “Well of Souls”, that’s about to get a huge re-work during an October writing retreat. Novels are a totally different shape to short stories, it’s an entirely different art form and you need to learn everything over again…

Valentine: My first novel, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, is due from Prime Books in early 2011. I’m working on several short stories, and have a few novels in various stages of completion. I am also moving forward in my attempts to watch every bad movie in the world and document it on my blog.

Pretend you’re a mammal in a writing landscape dominated by dinosaurs stomping around. Do you have a message for the dinosaurs or for your fellow mammals?

Bullington: Mind the tar beds, one and all, and keep in mind that even if you’re fast, hot-blooded, and new there’s still the risk of a blundering thunder lizard stomping your furry ass into paste.

Jemisin: To the dinosaurs: don’t eat me; I eat a lot of peppers, so I’d give you heartburn. And watch your step. I would make a really unpleasant schmear between your toes. Seriously. You’d never be able to scrape me off. To the mammals: WTF are you standing around reading messages for? You’re supposed to be at the Mammalian Auxiliary meeting, plotting the overthrow of the oppressive reptilian regime. Really, now — how can we build the Doomsday Weapon that summons an asteroid, without everyone on board? Remember, it takes a village to trigger an Extinction Level Event.

Kum: To Our Dear Dinosaur Friends: When the asteroid hits, you’re fucked. Love, Sir Tessa (a monkey)

McCarron: I have to say, I’m not so into this metaphor, mostly because (a) I love dinosaurs and am kind of pissed that we mammals are around and they are not and (b) this has not been my experience of the writing landscape at all. I went to Clarion when I was twenty-one, Wiscon when I was twenty-two, and Sycamore Hill when I was twenty-four, and in each of those places, the “established” writers were welcoming, generous, and extremely supportive. Sure there are exceptions, but compared to other writing communities, SF is extremely open. The one thing I would love to see, both inside and outside of the genre, is more openness to new experiences, not as writers, but as readers. Everybody gets caught in reading loops, or is sure that they will hate something with that kind of protagonist or in that genre over there, but then we miss all sorts of awesome stuff. People who think they’re mammals read mammals, people who think they’re dinosaurs read dinosaurs, when really we’re all big nerds who like books, and would probably get a kick out of each other.

Narayan: Fellow mammals! Do not incubate dinosaur eggs. They are delicious.

Shipp: The bigger they are, the harder they fall. And, of course, they’ll be falling on us, so let’s not knock them over, yes? Let’s create our own hunter-gatherer-based sustainable eco-villages away from the dinosaurs, where we can live in peace and harmony and other good words like that. Together, we can put on a yard gnome musical, and we’ll put those boring dinosaur musicals to shame.

Slatter: “Don’t make any plans for next week, guys. No, really.”

Valentine: I’m gristly and flavorless! Do not attempt under any circumstances to kill me for food.

About the Author

Jeff VanderMeer is an award-winning writer with books published in over 20 countries. He has collaborated on short films with rock groups like The Church, has had his fiction adapted for promotional purposes by Playstation Europe (by filmmaker Joel Veitch), and writes for the Amazon book blog, io9, New York Times Book Review and The Washington Post, among others. {{{ Jeffs novel Finch and writing book, Booklife, are forthcoming this fall.