“Futures in the Memories Market”
by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

You can’t do anything else when you emp one of Geeta Tilrassen’s memory modules. Her senses seize you; you see through her eyes, taste with her tongue, hear with her ears. And touch? You’ve never felt air against your skin until you’ve felt it breathe across hers. In a desert environment, there’s a sense of cinnamon in the air. When Geeta’s on a water world, you feel the humidity as embrace instead of torture, as though you are constantly being kissed. Every module Geeta makes is fresh and innocent, and every time you use one, you feel as though it’s the first time.

I’ve got one legitimate copy of a Geeta memod; I’m only allowed one at a time, and I’ve kept this one for a while. It’s her visit to the Hallen people. Nothing very exciting happens. She walks into their village. (The red sand gets into your sandals, but instead of grinding against your feet or raising blisters, it’s a pleasant friction.) The air smells of woodsmoke, charred flesh, and sage.

Hallen burrows are mostly underground, but they have built delicate aboveground structures of woven withies, beautiful as spider webs, with small crystals at the intersections that flare in the red sunlight.

The Hallen greet Geeta, draw her into one of the withy shelters, and give her the only thing it’s safe for her to ingest from their cuisine, some kind of berry drink with bits of leaf in it. She drinks. The liquid is cool on your tongue, a nice contrast to the desert heat. You taste the essence of that drink a long time after she’s swallowed the last sip, a sour-sweet merging of bright and dark flavors. She presses palms with the head lizard, smells his individual scent that shares species straw-tones with the others in the shelter but smells a shade more like sulfur and ginger. She listens to their drum-intensive music and sits in a woven-leaf chair with a Hallen egg in her lap. The music gets inside you like a second heartbeat, chasing your blood until you want to rise and dance. You can feel how warm the egg is, how there’s something moving inside that leather shell. You sense Geeta’s delight, the way it feathers her insides.

It only lasts about a minute real-time, maybe twenty minutes mod time. It’s my favorite possession. I save it for the most difficult days, when I hate being Itzal Bidarte, the man who lost his home as a child and has never found another. I long for roots, and all I do is wander.

 If I had Geeta’s power, perhaps my memories of my homeland would be stronger. They are fragments, mostly visual, a plane of light on my mother’s cheek as she leans to kiss me, my father settling in a deep chair beside the hearth and lighting his pipe with a coal on a wire he’s fished from the fire.

I acquired a memod made by a cousin of mine, dead now. When I play it, I see again the stream beside our village, smoke rising from the chimneys of the white-plastered, red-shuttered houses on a cool morning, pots of red geraniums beside the doors, and even, I think, I catch a glimpse of my father leading a donkey down to drink. My dead cousin’s memory is too flat, too simple. There are only muted sounds, distant scents, no touch. I don’t feel as though I’m there. It is more like seeing something in a smoked mirror.

I’ve emped Geeta’s memory module of the Hallen about twenty times. I notice different things each time. She is so alert to every sensation that a normal person can’t take it all in at once.

What I don’t see in the memod are Geeta’s bodyguards. GreaTimes, the memory merchants who have the sole license to distribute Geeta’s mods, edits us out. Even though I’ve gone on memory missions with Geeta, you will never sense me in one of her mods.

As the ship approached our next destination, I pressed the alert beside Geeta’s cabin door. The door slid up and let me in.

Geeta stood in the middle of the cabin, with colored outfits draped over the omnishapes of furniture whose functions she hadn’t set.  The scentser laid down a faint, unobtrusive smell that covered any other odors in the cabin, and the audio was playing very low, something melodic without any percussion. Aside from the colors, this was Geeta neutral, as close as she could get to shutting down her senses and living on a par with the rest of us.

“Itzal,” Geeta said, “you know more about this than I do. What should I wear on Tice?”

She had been to Tice before, but she didn’t remember.

I looked over all her outfits and pointed to the scarlet one with the gilt, point-edged hem. “We’re going to a big city on Tice, lots of energy and interaction. That dress will attract attention and intensify your experience.”

She looked at me sideways, her broad mouth quirked at one corner. She was not beautiful in any of the regular ways, but her face was full of character, elastic enough to reflect her moods and thoughts. Only lately had I learned that she might be a different person behind her face, that there were parts of herself she had been hiding. “What if I want to have a quiet time?”

“Do you?” I asked.

She spun around, stopped, hugged herself. “You know me better than I know myself.” She took the red dress and hung it from a ceiling ring. I helped her pick up the other clothes and store them behind the wall. She controlled the furniture into two chairs and a table, and we sat facing each other.

She tapped her wrist. I lifted my own wrist and swept the room with the spystopper. No glow: Geeta’s corporate masters weren’t watching us.

“Did you get me one?” she asked.

I shook my head. Sentients all through the interlinked worlds could buy Geeta’s memods, but access to them was strictly limited aboard The Collector. Each crewmember could own one at a time, and Geeta was not allowed to use any of them. She didn’t have an implanted emp receptor like the rest of us. She had to use an external one to get the cultural gloss and language of the places we visited before we arrived. Her corporate masters allowed her some forms of entertainment so she would be stimulated during our tween-worlds journeys through the skip nodes and in and out of systems. Nobody wanted Geeta to get bored.

“Maybe I can pick up something on Tice,” I said. “I’m not sure how to get it aboard, though.”

“Could you disguise it as something else?” she asked.

I thought about that. “Maybe. If I have enough money. I’d need to find an underground tech there who could make it look like your normal entertainment emps, so you could put it into the emper without them knowing what you’re doing.” I tapped my lips with my index fingers. Before I landed this job as Geeta’s bodyguard, I had done some less-than-legal things — most of my guard training had come from people operating at the fringes of the linked worlds, in shadowy spaces often called Underground. I knew a few signs of the Starlight Fraternity that might lead me to someone on Tice who could successfully disguise an emp. Or the signs might have expired, and using them could get me into trouble.

I shook my head. “I don’t think I can pay enough.”

“I’ll give you money.”

“But Geet, you don’t have any.”

Geeta made the best memods in the business, according to her fans, who were legion across many worlds. GreaTimes bought her contract when she was very young, recognizing her memory potential even then; they had automated observers on most worlds, watching for talented children like Geeta. Geeta was kept in luxury, given everything she needed and wanted so long as it wouldn’t interfere with her memories, but she had no salary, and no real freedom.

“I’ll trade something.” She looked around her cabin, went to the wall and opened a drawer full of jewelry. She had a robber bird’s delight in sparkling things, so she often asked for and received jewel gifts when she had completed a memory job. She got out the Kudic rubies, a necklace with raw chunks of pink stone. It was one of her most expensive pieces.

I felt a prickle of excitement. We usually visited backwater planets, because people who bought memods seldom went there, and they were hungry for Geeta’s fresh experiences. Tice was bigger than our usual stop; I might successfully fence jewels like these. They’d have a wider choice of memods for sale there, too. “Which memory do you want most?” I asked, tucking the jewels in an inner pocket.

“The horse people,” she said. Though she wasn’t allowed to emp her own memods, she could check the infostream and see the GreaTimes catalog, read the blurbs.

“I’ll see what I can do.” Geeta had a second guard, Ibo; we alternated shifts when we were in relatively safe environments. I had some leave due, and Tice had some quiet places Geeta was scheduled to visit.

“Thanks, Itzal.” She pressed her cheek to the back of my hand. I wondered what that was like for her. Did she like my smell? The feel of my skin? These were small random memories no one would ever buy. GreaTimes let Geeta keep all her memories between missions, the dull details of shipboard life; it was only the planet visits they siphoned off, leaving her with amnesia of all her adventures, unknowing of any lessons she might have learned. They kept her in a state of confused innocence. She wanted to change that.  She wanted me to help her recover the memories she had lost.

Ibo and I flanked Geeta as she stepped out of the shuttle, through the docking tunnel, and into Tice’s “Welcome Outworld Travelers” Terminal. She looked everywhere, smiling wide. Hanging baskets of local plants with long, colored fronds filtered the light coming through the hazed sky-ceiling, scattering spots of green and lavender on the floor. People attended by companion animals moved through the distance, intent on their own business. A mother with triplet daughters dangled a star on a string in front of her babies. They laughed and reached for it, and Geeta laughed, too.

I hungered for her response to this situation even as I surveyed the area for potential threats. Like Geeta and Ibo, I’d emped the culture and language memod for Tice last night. I still wasn’t sure about the companion animals; they’d be easy to mimic. Some looked like large dogs, some like pack animals, and some walked upright like the humans they accompanied, and looked like nothing I’d seen before. What if one of them was the kind of fan who wanted Geeta to experience death or pain so they could share her intense response to that? She’d encountered threats before.

Because of the nature of her memories, most people had no idea what Geeta looked like. She rarely looked at herself in mirrors. If her reflection happened to show up in a memory, GreaTimes fuzzed it. She had been captured in some tourist vids GreaTimes could do nothing about, though; a tricky outsider might have some idea of what she looked like. Plus there was always the general threat anyone might fall under in any place.

Ibo took the lead. We went through customs scan. They determined that Ibo and I were licensed to carry the stun weapons we had. We had no luggage. Geeta never stayed anywhere overnight. It only took her a few hours to collect several salable memory sets. She had already started. She had a long conversation with the customs official about what kind of people he met, what their stories were, what people tried to smuggle in. Ibo and I stood patiently while the customs official called over his superior and had her tell more stories. All part of Geeta.

I had the rubies in a shielded belt. I wasn’t sure the belt would fool sophisticated scanners on Tice, or even the ship’s scanner, though I hoped the stones would show up as just rocks and metal. (Emps triggered the ship scanner — it was looking for them.) Then again, rubies weren’t illegal or dangerous. I didn’t want Captain Ark to know about them, though, or Ibo.

We left the terminal through close-pressed crowds of various kinds of people and animals. Geeta smiled at them, and they found themselves smiling back, maybe without thinking about it. The usual ripple of pleasant spread around us as we moved. Even the pickpocket whose hand I caught in Geeta’s purse smiled after I retrieved Geeta’s pay-ID, because Geeta said, “Better luck next time,” with a short warble of laughter, and kissed his cheek before I released him back into the wild.

On the curb of Hollow Street, Geeta engaged a cab. She sat in the back sandwiched between me and Ibo and told the driver we wanted to go to the Queen’s Sculpture Garden, the first of four planned stops here.

Last time Geeta came to Tice, she started with the amusement park. I wasn’t with her then, but I’ve heard from people who have emped that module. They love it. Even when she threw up on the big roller ride. I was surprised that wasn’t edited out.

The sculpture garden was quiet when we got there, apparently not a big attraction early on a work day. Only some of the sculptures were made by humans; others had been left behind by vanished alien civilizations, or some made by the three alien species we regularly traded with. All were meant to be touched. Geeta was in her element, studying the sculpture with eyes, ears, nose, fingers, palms, finally full-bodied embraces. She climbed into the lap of a Greatmother and curled up there, hugging herself, her cheek against the smooth dark stone. The bliss on her face made me wonder if she were thinking about her own mother’s lap, or some other place where she had been perfectly comfortable. Her emotions loaded with the memods, but you couldn’t read her thoughts, though sometimes I felt like I could.

Ibo and I had been standing at an easily editable distance, watching Geeta make memories for half an hour, when she looked around and said, “Ibo, we’re safe here, aren’t we?”

Ibo and I both surveyed the garden, using our detection gear to see if anyone or anything dangerous was nearby. No threats.

“It’s okay for Itzal to take half an hour of his leave now,” Geeta said. “I’ll be here at least that much longer.”

“What have you two cooked up?” Ibo asked.

“You took leave on Geloway,” I said. We had been walking a tour trail through a spectacular lava field when Ibo begged time off. He had come back, smelling of sex shop perfume, when we were in the sweet shop at the end of the tour.

“True,” he said. He frowned as though he realized it was a mistake to accuse me and Geeta of anything during a memod. The GreaTimes people edited us out, but for sure they listened to our conversations before they eliminated them. “All right. See you later, Itzal,” he said, and I left.

We are not supposed to know how to hack our trackers, but my last job before joining the Geeta team was with a research and development security company, and I learned a lot there. I entered false coordinates in my tracker and headed for Pawn Alley.

Twenty-nine minutes later I was back in the sculpture garden with news I kept to myself.

The rest of our tour of Tice went without trouble, and Geeta, Ibo, and I taxied back to the terminal, our arms full of souvenirs — boxes of Tice teacakes in five flavors, soft and textured stuffed animals, three new dresses for Geeta with hats, shoes, overtunics, and jewelry to match, and an infostream address for the man Geeta had met and kissed at the races. Having walked through the day with Geeta, and watched her differing delights, including that kiss, I wanted the whole suite of today’s memods. Maybe I’d get them, one at a time, though there were so many Geeta memods on my wish list already….

Geeta had a party with the ship’s crew, sharing the treats she’d brought back, and talking about her day. We were all charmed, as we always were the night before the company extracted her memories. We got to see who Geeta might be if she could have held on to her experiences. We all loved the woman she would never become.

Later, the cakes gone and souvenirs distributed amongst the crew, to be hidden any time Geeta came near — though she always got to keep any clothes and accessories she bought — I escorted Geeta back to her cabin. She went into the changing alcove while I spystopped. I found a new active camera and managed to remotely access its feed while my back was to it. Geeta fluttered back into the cabin in her exercise clothes, talked about her adventures, then started her nightly routine. Three repetitions in, I created a loop and sent the camera into nontime. As soon as I gave Geeta the all-clear, she rushed to me.

She saw my expression and sighed, two steps before she would have collided with me.

“They were fake,” I said.

“The rubies?”

“I went to three pawn shops and they all told me the same thing. Decent fakes, not spectacular. Worth no more than glass. Didn’t get enough to even contact anyone who might have disguised the real memods. I traded what I got for the rubies for a couple disguised bootlegs, the lava walk on Placeholder and the plunge valley on Paradise. I need to test them. Maybe they won’t be infected.” I had tried a couple of bootlegs of Geeta’s memods without testing them, back when I was younger and stupider. They were dirt cheap but still amazing, though they suffered from copy fatigue. Often the bootleggers placed compulsions in them that took money, time, and effort to eradicate. I still had the urge to gamble every time I passed an Ergo machine.

“Fake,” Geeta repeated. She wandered to her jewelry drawer, stared down at her treasures, and shut the drawer, her shoulders drooping. Then, angry, she stepped back into place and resumed her exercises. I unlooped the spy camera and we went through her night-of-a-collection-day routine, which included a shower for Geeta and a furniture keying for me: I had to shape the bed so it would do the extraction during the night.

Washed free of every trace of Tice, Geeta let me help her into the bed, fasten the restraints, and plug in her head. “Kiss me,” she said. “I want two kisses in a day. I never had that experience before, did I?”

I kissed her long and deep, kissing the woman we were killing. This kiss wouldn’t make it into the memods; her return to the ship was always cut out. We had done the Tice Ending Shot at sunset on a mountain where cool wind touched us with feathered fingers; it would be spliced onto the end of each of Geeta’s Tice memods.

Geeta would not remember the kiss, but I would, the taste of her sorrow and desperation mixed with the last sweet tang of willowcake. She often kissed me last thing after a mission; I had a collection of these moments in my memory, moments that sometimes deceived me into thinking we were closer than we were.

Her lips relaxed, and I straightened out of the kiss, looked down into her tear-wet eyes.

“Good night, Geeta,” I said softly.

“Good night, Itzal.”  She closed her eyes. I set the bed on COLLECT and touched off the lights as I left the room.

In my own much smaller and sparer cabin, I checked for spies. I had never found one; what I did away from Geeta didn’t concern the GreaTimes people, as long as it was legal and not going to impair my care for her.

I put the Hallen memod in the recycle slot and took out the memod I had bought with the ruby money, what I hadn’t put away. I had bought the horse people, the one she’d asked me for. It was a memod she’d made before I was part of her staff. I had read the sales copy on all of them, wanting to know who she had been as much as she did. This was one of the better ones; all the reviews said so.

I set the new memod in my receptor and settled down to emp.

Geeta walked down a ramp into a sky seething with dawn clouds and the tracks of skitterbirds. The air smelled of damp and green, and morning animals called, a random concert with notes that sometimes clashed and sometimes harmonized. In Geeta’s mind, it was all beautiful. The air was cool; Geeta felt it as a pleasurable hug from a chilly friend.

Three horses galloped up the soft-surfaced road and stopped just in front of her, breathing grass-scented breath, musky warmth pouring off them. She laughed and went to hug one, even though the culture memod said people weren’t allowed to do that. How amazing to have your arms around so much huge intelligent warmth; the texture of damp hair against your cheek, the solid muscles shifting against your chest. The smell of the horse’s sweat, salty and musky, stirred Geeta awake on several levels.

“Miss,” said the horse, “Miss, I don’t know you.”

She released him and stepped back. “Oh! I’m sorry. Please forgive me. You don’t know me yet, but I hope you will.” He watched her with one large dark eye, as intricate and beautiful a glistening eye as I had ever seen, with a depth in it that might lead to mystery. I fell in love with the horse. I knew Geeta smiled up at him, because I saw his response: charmed, his head nodding a little, even as his companions laughed at him.

I settled deeper into being Geeta, finding a home that wasn’t really mine but felt like mine. Geeta was home everywhere she went, and when I was emping her, I felt that way, too.

I didn’t know if I would ever share this with her.

About the Author

Over the past twenty-some years, Nina Kiriki Hoffman has sold adult and YA novels and more than 250 short stories. Her works have been finalists for the World Fantasy, Mythopoeic, Sturgeon, Philip K. Dick, and Endeavour awards. Her first novel, The Thread that Binds the Bones, won a Stoker award, and her short story “Trophy Wives” won a Nebula Award in 2009. }}} Her fantasy novel Fall of Light came out from Ace in May, 2009. Her middle-school novel Thresholds will come out from Viking in August, 2010. Nina does production work for the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. She also works with teen writers. She lives in Eugene, Oregon.

“My Father’s Singularity”
by Brenda Cooper

In my first memory of my father, we are sitting on the porch, shaded from the burning sun’s assault on our struggling orchards. My father is leaning back in his favorite wooden rocker, sipping a cold beer with a half-naked lady on the label, and saying, “Paul, you’re going to see the most amazing things. You will live forever.” He licks his lips, the way our dogs react to treats, his breath coming faster. “You will do things I can’t even imagine.” He pauses, and we watch a flock of geese cross the sky. When he speaks gain, he sounds wistful. “You won’t ever have to die.”

The next four of five memories are variations on that conversation, punctuated with the heat and sweat of work, and the smell of seasons passing across the land.

I never emerged from this particular conversation with him feeling like I knew what he meant. It was clear he thought it would happen to me and not to him, and that he had mixed feelings about that, happy for me and sad for himself. But he was always certain.

Sometimes he told me that I’d wake up one morning and all the world around me would be different. Other nights, he said, “Maybe there’ll be a door, a shining door, and you’ll go through it and you’ll be better than human.” He always talked about it the most right before we went into Seattle, which happened about twice a year, when the pass was open and the weather wasn’t threatening our crops.

The whole idea came to him out of books so old they were bound paper with no moving parts, and from a brightly-colored magazine that eventually disintegrated from being handled. My father’s hands were big and rough and his calluses wore the words off the paper.

Two beings always sat at his feet. Me, growing up, and a dog, growing old. He adopted them at mid-life or they came to him, a string of one dog at a time, always connected so that a new one showed within a week of the old one’s death. He and his dogs were a mutual admiration society. They liked me fine, but they never adored me. They encouraged me to run my fingers through their stiff fur or their soft fur, or their wet, matted fur if they’d been out in the orchard sprinklers, but they were in doggie heaven when he touched them. They became completely still and their eyes softened and filled with warmth.

I’m not talking about the working dogs. We always had a pair of border collies for the sheep, but they belonged to the sheep and the sheep belonged to them and we were just the fence and the feeders for that little ecosystem.

These dogs were his children just like me, although he never suggested they would see the singularity. I would go beyond and they would stay and he and the dogs accepted that arrangement even if I didn’t.

I murmured confused assent when my father said words about how I’d become whatever comes after humans.

Only once did I find enough courage to tell him what was in my heart. I’d been about ten, and I remember how cold my hands felt clutching a glass of iced lemonade while heat-sweat poured down the back of neck. When he told me I would be different, I said, “No, Dad. I want to be like you when I grow up.” He was the kindness in my life, the smile that met me every morning and made me eggs with the yolks barely soft and toast that melted butter without burning.

He shook his head, and patted his dog, and said, “You are luckier than that.”

His desire for me to be different than him was the deepest rejection possible, and I bled for the wounds.

After the fifth year in seven that climate-freak storms wrecked the apples — this time with bone-crushing ice that set the border collies crazed with worry — I knew I’d have to leave if I was ever going to support my father. Not by crossing the great divide of humanity to become the seed of some other species, but to get schooled away from the slow life of farming sheep and Jonagolds. The farm could go on without me. We had the help of two immigrant families that each owned an acre of land that was once ours.

Letting my father lose the farm wasn’t a choice I could even imagine. I’d go over to Seattle and go to school. After, I’d get a job and send money home, the way the Mexican’s did when I was little and before the government gave them part of our land to punish us. Not that we were punished. We liked the Ramirez’s and the Alvarez’s. They, too, needed me to save the farm.

But that’s not this story. Except that Mona Alvarez drove me to Leavenworth to catch the silver Amtrak train, her black hair flying away from her lipstick-black lips, and her black painted fingernails clutching the treacherous steering wheel of our old diesel truck. She was so beautiful I decided right then that I would miss her almost as much as I would miss my father and the bending apple trees and the working dogs and the sheep.  Maybe I would miss Mona even more.

Mona, however, might not miss me. She waved once after she dropped me off, and then she and the old truck were gone and I waited amid the electric cars and the old tourists with camera hats and data jewelry and the faint marks of implants in the soft skin between their thumbs and their index fingers. They looked like they saw everything and nothing all at once. If they came to our farm the coyotes and the re-patriated wolves would run them down fast.

On the other end of the train ride, I found the University of Washington, now sprawled all across Seattle, a series of classes and meet ups and virtual lessons that spidered out from the real brick buildings. An old part of the campus still squatted by the Montlake Cut, watching over water and movement that looked like water spiders but was truly lines of people with oars on nanofab boats as thin as paper.

Our periodic family trips to Seattle hadn’t really prepared me for being a student. The first few years felt like running perpetually uphill, my brain just not going as fast as everyone else’s.

I went home every year. Mona married one of the Ramirez boys and had two babies by the time three years had passed, and her beauty changed to a quiet softness with no time to paint her lips or her nails. Still, she was prettier than the sticks for girls that chewed calorie-eating gum and did their homework while they ran to Gasworks Park and back on the Burke-Gilman Trail, muttering answers to flashcards painted on their retinas with light.

I didn’t date those girls; I wouldn’t have known how to interrupt the speed of their lives and ask them out. I dated storms of data and new implants and the rush of ideas until by my senior year I was actually keeping up.

When I graduated, I got a job in genetics that paid well enough for me to live in an artist’s loft in a green built row above Lake Union. I often climbed onto the garden roof and sat on an empty bench and watched the Space Needle change decorations every season and the little wooden boats sailing on the still lake below me. But mostly I watched over my experiments, playing with new medical implants to teach children creativity and to teach people docked for old age in the University hospital how to talk again, how to remember.

I did send money home. Mona’s husband died in a flash-flood one fall. Her face took on a sadness that choked in my throat, and I started paying her to take care of my father.

He still sat on the patio and talked about the singularity, and I managed not to tell him how quaint the old idea sounded. I recognized myself, would always recognize myself. In spite of the slow speed of the farm, a big piece of me was always happiest at home, even though I couldn’t be there more than a day or so at a time. I can’t explain that — how the best place in the world spit me out after a day or so.

Maybe I believed too much happiness would kill me, or change me. Or maybe I just couldn’t move slow enough to breath in the apple air any more. Whatever the reason, the city swept me back fast, folding me in its dancing ads and shimmering opportunities and art.

Dad didn’t really need me anyway. He had the Mexicans and he still always had a dog, looking lovingly up at him. Max, then OwlFace, then Blue. His fingers had turned to claws and he had cataracts scraped from his eyes twice, but he still worked with the harvest, still carried a bushel basket and still found fruit buried deep in the trees.

I told myself he was happy.

Then one year, he startled when I walked up on the porch and his eyes filled with fear.

I hadn’t changed. I mean, not much. I had a new implant, I had a bigger cloud, researchers under me, so much money that what I sent my father — what he needed for the whole orchard — was the same as a night out at a concert and dinner at Canlis. But I was still me, and Blue — the current dog — accepted me, and Mona’s oldest son called me “Uncle Paul” on his way out to tend the sheep.

I told my father to pack up and come with me.

He ran his fingers through the fur on Blue’s square head. “I used to have a son, but he left.” He sounded certain. “He became the next step for us. For humans.”

He was looking right at me, even looking in my eyes, and there was truly no recognition there. His look made me cold to the spine, cold to the ends of my fingers even with the sun driving sweat down my back.

I kissed his forehead. I found Mona and told her I’d be back in a few weeks and she should have him packed up.

Her eyes were beautiful and terrible with reproach as she declared, “He doesn’t want to leave.”

“I can help him.”

“Can you make him young, like you?”

Her hair had gone gray at the edges, lost the magnificent black that had glistened in the sun like her goth lipstick all those years ago. God, how could I have been so selfish? I could have given her some of what I had.

But I liked her better touched by pain and age and staying part of my past. Like the act of saving them didn’t.

I hadn’t known that until that very moment, when I suddenly hated myself for the wrinkles around her eyes and the way her shoulders bent in a little bit even though she was only fifty-seven like me. “I’ll bring you some, too. I can get some of the best nano-meds available.” Hell, I’d designed some of them, but Mona wouldn’t understand that. “I can get creams that will erase the wrinkles from your hands.”

She sighed. “Why don’t you just leave us?”

Because then I would have no single happy place. “Because I need my father. I need to know how he’s doing.”

“I can tell you from here.”

My throat felt thick. “I’ll be back in a week.” I turned away before she could see the inexplicable tears in my eyes. By then I flew back and forth, and it was a relief to focus down on the gauges in my head, flying manual until I got close enough to Seattle airspace that the feds grabbed the steering from me and there was nothing to do but look down at the forest and the green resort playgrounds of Cle Elum below me and to try not to think too hard about my dad or about Mona Alvarez and her sons.

I had moved into a condo on Alki Beach, and I had a view all the way to Canada. For two days after I returned, the J-pod whales cavorted offshore, great elongated yin and yang symbols rising and falling through the waters of Puget Sound.

The night before I went back for Mona and my father, I watched the boardwalk below me. People walked dogs and rollerbladed and bicycled and a few of the chemical-sick walked inside of big rolling bubbles like the hamster I’d had when I was a kid. Even nano-medicine and the clever delivery of genetically matched and married designer solutions couldn’t save everyone.

I wish I could say that I felt sorry for the people in the bubbles, and I suppose in some distant way I did. But nothing bad had ever happened to me. I didn’t get sick. I’d never married or divorced. I had nice dates sometimes, and excellent season tickets for Seattle Arts and Lectures.

I flew Mona back with my father. We tried to take Blue, but the dog balked at getting in the car, and raced away, lost in the apple trees in no time. Mona looked sick and said, “We should wait.”

I glanced at my father’s peaceful face. He had never cried when his dogs died or left, and now he had a small smile, and I had the fleeting thought that maybe he was proud of Blue for choosing the farm and the sheep and the brown-skinned boys. “Will your sons care for the dog?”

“Their children love him.”

So we arrived back in West Seattle, me and Mona and my father.

I got busy crafting medicine to fix my father. These things didn’t take long — time moved fast in the vast cloud of data I had security rights for. I crunched my father’s DNA and RNA and proteins and the specifics of his blood in no time, and told the computers what to do while I set all of us out a quiet dinner on the biggest of the decks. Mona commented on the salty scent of Puget Sound and watched the fast little ferries zip back and forth in the water and refused to meet my eyes.

Dad simply stared at the water.

“He needs a dog,” she said.

“I know.” I queried from right there, sending a bot out to look. It reported fairly fast. “I’ll be right back. Can you watch him?”

She looked startled.

An hour later I picked Nanny up at Sea-Tac, a middle-aged golden retriever, service-trained, a dog with no job since most every disease except the worst allergies to modernity could be fixed.

Mona looked awed almost to fear when I showed up with the dog, but she smiled and uncovered the dinner I’d left waiting.

Nanny and Dad were immediately enchanted with each other, her love for him the same as every other dog’s in his life, cemented the minute she smelled him. I didn’t understand, but if it had been any other way, I would have believed him lost.

The drugs I designed for him didn’t work. It happens that way sometimes. Not often. But some minds can’t accept the changes we can make. In the very old, it can kill them. Dad was too strong to die, although Mona looked at me one day, after they had been with me long enough that the wrinkles around her eyes had lost depth but not so long that they had left her face entirely. “You changed him. He’s worse.”

I might have. How would I know?

But I do know I lost my anchor in the world. Nothing in my life had been my singularity. I hadn’t crossed into a new humanity like he prophesied over and over. I hadn’t left him behind.

Instead, he left me behind. He recognized Nanny every day, and she him. But he never again called me Paul, or told me how I would step beyond him.

About the Author

Brenda Cooper has published fiction in Analog, Oceans of the Mind, Nature, and in multiple anthologies. She is the author of the Endeavor award winner for 2008: THE SILVER SHIP AND THE SEA, and of the sequels, READING THE WIND and WINGS OF CREATION. By day, she is the City of Kirklands CIO, and at night and in early morning hours, shes a futurist and writer.

“Finding the Language I Need: A Conversation with Caitlín R. Kiernan”
by Jeremy L. C. Jones

Born in Ireland, raised in Alabama, Caitlín Kiernan now lives in Rhode Island. Each of these evocative locales has influenced her science fiction and dark fantasy novels and short stories. An early interest in paleontology, archaeology, and snakes led her to a career in paleontology and teaching.  

A love of reading led her to writing fiction. 

“There’s no way to come to writing unless one has first been a reader, and a careful, dedicated reader, at that. And one must remain a reader,” said Kiernan. “Everything about reading teaches me something about writing. What has it taught me in particular? Everything that I did not learn simply by living, that’s what reading has taught me about writing fiction.”

Kiernan is the author of the recent The Red Tree, six other novels, and one novelization (of the 2007 motion picture, Beowulf). Her recent short story collections from Subterranean Press Tales from the Woeful Platypus and A is for Alien will be followed up with the forthcoming The Ammonite Violin & Others and Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart.

Her tales are populated with ghouls and changelings, demon-slayers and werewolves; they are as atmospheric as narcotic hallucinations, folk tales and nightmares. At the heart of most of her books are characters experiencing existential shock and characters sorting through messy relationships.

Below, Kiernan and I talk about writing, paleontology, and finding the language she needs after all these years at the craft.

What, ultimately, do you write about?

I’ve written so much over the last eighteen years, this seems like an almost impossible question to answer. At least, it seems almost impossible to answer it concisely. But if I put my best reductionist thinking cap on, and try very, very hard, I suppose I would say that, ultimately, I’m writing about a relatively small number of things.

The weight the past exerts on the present, that’s a big one. Encounters with the Other, and the almost inevitably transformative nature of those encounters, that’s another theme that’s present in almost everything I’ve ever written. Also, the insignificance of humanity when faced with deep time and the vastness of the universe. No, never mind the vast universe. Humanity’s insignificance when faced with the depth of the ocean, or the distance to the edge of our own solar system, or, inversely, the space between an electron and an atom’s nucleus. Anyway, on a more personal level, I’m often writing about insanity, or at least the unreliability of perception and cognition. I write quite a bit about gender.

So, what does this all add up to, ultimately? Sometimes I think of it as existential shock. I’m writing about existential shock, and by this I mean, simply, the shock that arises from the realization that the world is not only not what we think it is, but the realization that we can probably never arrive at conclusive answers about reality. Nothing is as it seems, and even if is it, there’s probably no way to know.

What do you enjoy about writing fiction?

Typing “The End.” Getting paid. No, seriously, I’m not a writer who loves to write. Usually, I’m not even a writer who enjoys writing. Mostly, I find it a very disagreeable and treacherous way to make one’s living. Sometimes, if I’m lucky, there are glimmers of satisfaction at having done the best I can do, the best at any given moment in time. Or, more rarely, I’ll lose myself in a story I’m telling, and there’s a certain joy in allowing it to buoy me along towards the conclusion, because I want to know how it all turns out. I rarely ever know why a story ends before I finish it.

Lately, I’ve been more satisfied with my writing, with the pieces I do for Sirenia Digest, and with The Red Tree, and my two most recent collections, A is for Alien and The Ammonite Violin & Others. I feel like after all these years, after almost two decades of writing, I’m finally beginning to find the language I need.

How has your understanding of the craft changed over the years?

I don’t know if it has. Maybe my understanding of the process — I never think in terms of craft — has been refined somewhat. Near as I can recall, it began as a search for voice, and has been a successive series of experiments in style and syntax. I look back at my early novels and short stories, and it’s obvious that I was obsessed with tearing apart language and putting it together in new ways. I was infatuated with the Modernists, and with more contemporary authors like Kathy Acker, William Burroughs, and, well, it’s a long list. But also with the earnest, wide-eyed wonder I’d seen in Ray Bradbury’s work, and the lushness of Baudelaire and Angela Carter, the rusty edges of Harlan Ellison’s prose. I wanted to find the secret to the soft-spoken madness of Shirley Jackson’s work, and the cosmicism and mastery of mood I saw in Lovecraft, Lord Dunsany, Arthur Machen, and Algernon Blackwood. I wanted to create a mad fusion of voices, a distillation, of all these authors, that I could then wield to my own ends. But what has happened, instead, is that I’ve found my own voice, admittedly greatly influenced by these writers and many, many more. I feel as if I’m not answering the question you’ve asked, but I really don’t sit around pondering process a great deal. For me, writing is a thing I do. And often I have no idea how I do it. I sit down and do it.

Are there any similarities between the study of paleontology and writing fiction?

Yes, in the sense that I’m motivated in both these endeavors by very similar needs and desires. I need a world filled with wonder, with awe, with awful things. I couldn’t exist in a world devoid of marvels, even if the marvels are terrible marvels. Even if they frighten me to consider them. What would be the point of a world like that, a humdrum world of known quantities and everyday expectations? A lot of people don’t grasp the importance of uncertainty to the scientific enterprise. A fact is only a momentary model of some aspect of the universe, backed by explanatory theory, waiting to be revised upon further study.

Likewise, my stories rely upon uncertainty, the inscrutable nature of both the human mind and the fantastic. Also, just as science is an undertaking that requires endless revision in search of one ideal truth that will likely always lie beyond the grasp of the scientist, so my writing has passed through innumerable stages of reinvention. I’ll think I have it all figured out. For example, when Tales of Pain and Wonder was first published in 2000, I thought, This is the best thing I’ll ever write. I’ll never get it more right than I have in this book. But now, I look at that collection, and despite whatever strengths it might have, I know that I wasn’t even close. 

And as much as I love what I’m writing now, I expect I’ll look back at it in a decade and wonder how I ever could have thought I was even close to getting it right. So, my writing and the work I’ve done in paleontology are alike in that they both require an acceptance of perpetual uncertainty in pursuit of unobtainable certainty, and they both require a willingness to tear down cherished constructions when something better comes along.

Where do you feel the most comfortable — novels, short stories, or comics? And is comfortable necessarily a good thing?

Well, no. Comfortable is never a good thing, for any sort of artist. You get comfortable and you stop growing. You stop growing and the work is dead. Stop growing and you’re just typing. So, I’ll answer this by saying that I seem to derive the most gratification from writing short stories. They’re succinct. They’re not so lashed by the tyranny of plot.

I write novels, and sometimes I even think I write novels well, but I’m extremely frustrated at the need for such long novels. I sign contracts to write novels with a minimum word count of, say, one hundred thousand words. Nothing could be more inimical to good writing than forcing a story to be longer than it needs to be, in order to satisfy consumer expectations of how long a novel “ought” to be. I tend to find most novels are these vast unwieldy things. Too often, the inherently contrived nature of all fictional narrative is, in novels, forced to go on so long that the contrivances become exhausting, annoying, trite. That’s one reason I look at The Red Tree and consider it my best novel yet. It’s more like my short fiction, more concerned with mood and character and theme than with some clever, unwieldy plot.

As for comics, that was an odd detour for me, I think. Some of the work I did on The Dreaming, I’m still quite fond of it, but some of it’s a mess. And I think there’s an inherently collaborative nature to doing comics — at least for a big publisher like DC — that I’m ill-suited for. It was never just me writing a script, or even just me working with an artist. It was me haggling with editors and their superiors about whether or not I could write what I wanted to write, and often I lost those arguments. It was an endless series of compromises. And I always had to consider so many other people in the chain of production — the penciler, the inker, the colorist, the letterer, and that was after navigating the maze of editors and executives. I’m better when I’m left to my own devices.

And left to my own devices, I prefer to write short fiction and novellas.

About the Author

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

“Moonage Daydream: The Rock Album as Science Fiction”
by Jason Heller

Rock ‘n’ roll was never intended to have a future. Hot, fast, loud, bright: the genre was made to be as disposable as the chemically-fueled rockets that had started putting objects into orbit just as rock was getting off the ground in the ’50s.

It’s perhaps more than coincidence that the song generally considered to be the first rock ‘n’ roll tune was titled “Rocket 88″ — a scorching instrumental by Ike Turner that, granted, was ostensibly an ode to an Oldsmobile. Still, even today the song takes off in a burst of fiery glory, one that most listeners back in the ’50s surely assumed would destroy itself in a puff of faddish obsolescence.

Of course, what “Rocket 88″ — and rock ‘n’ roll in general — really did was this: open up a jagged, flaming path into the world of tomorrow.

Science fiction served a similar purpose in the ’50s. Having vaulted from the fringes of pop culture into the mainstream after a newly atomic America became obsessed with films about mutants and aliens, SF literature matured and flowered throughout the ’60s and beyond, just as rock ‘n’ roll did the same. It was inevitable that the two would mix. And although plenty of random rock songs in the ’60s were fixated on SF themes — including The Byrds’ “Mr. Spaceman” from 1966 and “Space Odyssey” from 1968, not to mention Pink Floyd’s groundbreaking “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun,” also from 1968 — it was David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” in 1969 that really sealed the deal.

Of course, Bowie would also be the artist to put the SF concept album on the map in the ’70s. Full albums, after all, are much better vessels for SF’s sprawling tropes. Since then, some bands have tried making bona fide, SF rock operas. Less ambitious groups have settled for loose concepts — many dystopian — for songs to revolve around. And some simply use the flash and fantasy of SF as a backdrop to their own warped vision of the future.

Below are a few of the most intriguing SF-themed records launched at the unsuspecting public since Bowie made his first foray into the concept album. While many rock albums — like The Alan Parson Project’s I Robot or Golem’s Dune-based The 2nd Moon — base their narratives to some degree around existing SF works, the list below sticks with original concepts: the fevered output of a few dozen buzzing brains addled by feedback, distortion, beats, drugs and, of course, the ever-morphing futurism of science fiction.

David Bowie, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972)

For a record that launched a thousand bloated, SF-centric concept albums, David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars is pretty concise — especially considering that title. In 38 minutes of apocalyptic surrealism rooted in the warped SF of Samuel R. Delany and William S. Burroughs, Ziggy Stardust tells the melancholic yet rapturous tale of a rock ‘n’ roll alien who comes to Earth during the five years prior to the apocalypse. While never matching his sweep and scope, other glam-rock artists of the era — including Roxy Music, T. Rex, the doomed American singer Jobraith, and even Elton John with his hit “Rocket Man” — would share Bowie’s love for glittery, gender-bending SF. After all, what’s more androgynous than a spacesuit?

Hawkwind, Space Ritual (1973)

Progressive rock is synonymous with the concept album, but surprisingly few bands of the ’70s prog movement actually made SF concept albums (Yes’ unfocused yet excellent Tales from Topographic Oceans being a notable exception). The idiosyncratic Hawkwind was never entirely a prog band, but frontman Dave Brock and crew (which featured a pre-Motörhead Lemmy on bass) took their primal, interdimensional drone to its apex with Space Ritual. A double album that approximates what space travel might sound like if astronauts flew around in bong-shaped ships, Space Ritual even has some real SF credentials. Legendary author Michael Moorcock, a regular Hawkwind collaborator, delivers a metaphysical spoken-word piece titled “Black Corridor” — which just goes to show that his stentorian voice is just as grandiloquent in reality as it in on the page.

Parliament, Mothership Connection (1975)

“A pimp sitting in a spaceship shaped like a Cadillac” is the overall vibe George Clinton said he was aiming for with Mothership Connection, his masterpiece as the leader of the funk collective known as Parliament. Making Bowie and his brethren look downright bland by comparison, Clinton and company amped up the psychedelic, satirically cartoonish edge of Kurt Vonnegut’s SF work (whether they realized it or not). The result is a cyberfunk phantasmagoria that refurbishes the interstellar void as a vast, cosmic dancefloor. Clinton continues to man the Mothership to this day, but this album is where he invented Funkier Than Light travel.

Rush, 2112 (1976)

Although this list is meant to focus on original works of SF music, it’s hard to dismiss Rush’s 2112 as a mere adaptation, despite the fact that it borrows blatantly from Ayn Rand’s novel Anthem as well as two episodes — “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?” and “Stopover in a Quiet Town” — of The Twilight Zone. In fact the latter example is even titled “The Twilight Zone.” But there’s no denying that Rush’s drummer and lyricist, Neil Peart, folded his SF influences into a unique and stunning work of sustained imagination that pairs the cosmic, dystopian, multi-suite epic “2112″ with excellent yet unconnected tracks that showcase the band’s prog chops, celestial melody, and philosophical waxing. Oh, and it rocks, too.

Gary Numan and Tubeway Army, Replicas (1979)

Glam, punk, and the robotic tones of Germany’s groundbreaking electronic group Kraftwerk came together in the late ’70s to form the basis of much of the new wave movement. But before bands like Duran Duran could chew that sound up into bubblegum in the ’80s, some truly edgy artists mined that dark sonic domain — one of the greatest being Gary Numan. His second album with Tubeway Army, Replicas, picks up on many of Philip K. Dick’s themes of alienation and self-negation in the wake of runaway technology. He wasn’t alone; at the same time Replicas was released, everyone from Klaus Nomi to Frank Zappa was using rock music to riff on androids as symbols of our dwindling humanity. Replicas‘ bleak depiction of artificial intelligence and metaphysical estrangement should be considered not only great pop music, but part of the cultural groundswell that resulted in the 1982 film, Bladerunner (Dick again, and “replicants”), and the cyberpunk explosion soon after.

Styx, Kilroy Was Here (1983)

Styx wasn’t the first mainstream ’70s rock band to tinker with SF after the ’80s hit — ELO beat them to it by two years with 1981’s alien-abduction parable, Time — but Styx set the standard for both excellence and excess with Kilroy Was Here. Capitalizing on the buildup to 1984, one of the most infamous years in the SF canon, Kilroy is singer-keyboardist Dennis DeYoung’s over-the-top masterpiece. A rock ‘n’ roll dystopia, it casts the oppressed rocker Kilroy as Winston Smith from George Orwell’s 1984, and the fascist leader Dr. Righteous as Big Brother. Bowie, of course, had already harvest Orwell’s most famous novel for his 1974 album Diamond Dogs, but Kilroy was a symphonic, synthesizer-soaked update for the Moral Majority era. Really, though, it all boils down to the album’s indelible hit single, “Mr. Roboto,” a song that’s more or less a rock opera unto itself.

Jonzun Crew, Lost in Space (1983)

While much of the SF community — and the world at large — debated just how close the real world was coming to resemble that of Orwell’s 1984, Jonzun Crew figured partying might be a healthier reaction. Picking up where George Clinton’s P-Funk crew left off (not that P-Funk ever really stopped), Jonzun Crew was part of an entire electro movement that married hardcore synthesizers and hip-hop into a sleek, chilling, yet wholly fun music. Granted, some electro groups like Time Zone and Cybotron were a bit gloomier, but Jonzun Crew’s SF-steeped Lost in Space struck the perfect balance between the nightmare of the future and the hangover of tomorrow.

Planet P Project, Pink World (1984)

Double albums were pretty much a dim memory of the ’70s in the slim, trim world of 1984. And yet Tony Carey’s Planet P Project decided that year was when the massive, 26-song Pink World needed to be unleashed. It failed to make the mark he’d hoped, but the album’s cult status persists, and for good reason. Although taking the name of his project from Planet P in Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, Carey — like the SF world itself in 1984 — had focused past the trite, tired tropes of space opera and tapped into the terrifying realms of inner space and the near future. Mixing the iciness of new wave with the chops, pomp, and circumstance of prog, Pink World remains a dizzying and literate SF vision.

Queensrÿche, Operation: Mindcrime (1988)

The spacefaring Hawkwind inspired many of the early metal bands, but it wasn’t until 1988 that the metal world truly embraced the idea of the SF concept album. Voivod’s brutal Dimension Hatröss is one such record that came out that year, but the more stunning example is Operation: Mindcrime by Queensrÿche. Melodic, immaculate, and surprisingly coherent for a concept album, Mindcrime is a speculative thriller about a heroin-addicted political dissident whose brain is rewired for assassination. Despite the ups and downs metal has suffered since the rise of grunge in the early ’90s, Operation: Mindcrime has remained a touchstone of the genre, even inspiring a serviceable sequel in 2006, Operation: Mindcrime II.

Donald Fagen, Kamakiriad (1993)

The ’90s were a tough time for the SF concept album (no, we’re not counting Billy Idol’s 1993 flop, Cyberpunk). Ironically, it took an old guy to remind everyone about the future. Donald Fagen of Steely Dan released his sophomore solo album, Kamakiriad, in 1993, and while it sounds as breezy yet sophisticated as your typical Steely Dan classic, it turned out to be a high-concept, cyberpunk travelogue through a virtual world of Fagen’s device, one that seems to tap into both J.G. Ballard and Neal Stephenson. (Another old guy, one David Bowie, would usher out the ’90s with another SF concept album — 1999’s Outside — that would set the stage for the format’s wild resurgence in the following decade.)

Deltron 3030, Deltron 3030 (2000)

Hip-hop producer Dan the Automator already had one SF concept album — Dr. Octagon’s scattershot Dr. Octagonecologist — under his belt when he undertook 2000’s self-titled album with Deltron 3030. With rapper Del tha Funkee Homosapian on the mike, the disc is a rich, multilayered, post-apocalyptic storyline whose polyglot music actually sounds like a new configuration of the future — that is, exactly what the year 2000 direly needed. To paraphrase Del himself in the song “3030,” the album is a “perfect blend of technology and magic”. The track “Time Keeps on Slipping,” which features guest vocals from Damon Albarn of Brit-pop traditionalists Blur, set the stage for Dan’s and Albarn’s massively successful “virtual band,” Gorillaz — a group that released its own futureshock concept album, Plastic Beach, in 2010.

Coheed and Cambria, The Amory Wars (2000-on)

The most ambitious SF story arc to ever be attempted in the rock arena, Coheed and Cambria’s The Amory Wars, is not an album but an entire epic that spans almost every song the band has released since its early days as an unknown group called Delirium Trigger. A few random, early songs introduced the characters of Coheed and Cambria Kilgannon and their messianic son, Claudio — who just so happens to share a first name with Claudio Sanchez, the frontman of Coheed and Cambria. Unlike fellow post-hardcore practitioners My Chemical Romance, who have tried the concept-album thing with less success, Sanchez and crew are now five albums deep into the Amory Wars storyline. Besides spawning a comic book, the latest release in the arc, Year of the Black Rainbow, spun off into a novel that Sanchez co-wrote with Peter David. Sanchez’s Star Wars-meets-Dune story has its faults, but paired with the band’s soaring, anthemic, neo-progressive rock, it’s as close to concept-album heaven as the SF world has come.

The Flaming Lips, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (2002)

Sometimes the first symptom of addiction to concept albums is denial. That definitely seems to be the case with The Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne, who followed his band’s cinematic record The Soft Bulletin with something even more solidly narrative: Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. Coyne has flatly denied that Yoshimi is a concept album, and certainly it wanders from the narrative quite a bit. However, there’s no denying that, at its core, the record is a sculpted, symphonic, indie-rock parable full of the kind of pop-culture pastiche Cory Doctorow would be proud to call his own.

Nine Inch Nails, Year Zero (2007)

Many of SF’s most horrifying predictions about the future have come true, in one form or another since 2001. Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor used the specters of perpetual war, terrorism, societal disintegration, and overall dystopia as fodder for Year Zero, a concept album that details militaristic oppression in the not-so-far-flung future of 2022. Compared to NIN classics like The Downward Spiral, Year Zero is jagged, guttural, and oozing paranoia — a high-tech yet visceral scenario that wouldn’t be out of place in a Richard K. Morgan thriller.

The Lisps, Futurity (2009)

Steampunk-associated acts like Rasputina and Sleepytime Gorilla Museum are as fueled by gleeful anachronism as the genre itself. But the Arcade Fire-influenced, Brooklyn-based outfit The Lisps took things a few steps further with Futurity. Rather than an album per se, Futurity is a full-length stage musical the band produced in 2009 — the story of a Civil War soldier and science fiction writer beset by hallucinatory visions of the future. With the same melting-pot abandon used by novelists like Cherie Priest and Brian Francis Slattery, The Lisps have crafted an indie-rock opera that combines vintage Americana with mind-bending weirdness. Now they just need to record the damn thing.

Mastodon, Crack the Skye (2009)

Heavy metal made a huge comeback in the ’00s, and so did the space opera. It only makes sense that the two would converge sooner or later. Mastodon, one of the heaviest yet most complex figureheads of today’s metal scene, used their latest record, Crack the Skye, as an opportunity to explore the darkest reaches of the universe — and of reality itself. It’s an overblown album, but gloriously so. Based around a paraplegic protagonist who travels the cosmos via astral projection, it’s more Arthur C. Clarke than Alastair Reynolds. But the metaphysical aspect of the story doesn’t dim the fact that Crack the Skye revels in the rich tradition of the SF concept album — including a “Space Oddity”-influenced video for the single “Oblivion” that brings everything full circle.

Fads and styles in music and SF come and go, but one thing is a constant: musicians will probably be trying to perfect the amalgamation of the rock album and the science-fiction novel for as long as there is such a thing as the future.

About the Author

Jason Heller is a Denver-based journalist and editor whose nonfiction has appeared in Weird Tales, Fantasy Magazine, Alternative Press, and The A.V. Club (where he’s a regular contributor). He’s also a co-author of Scribner’s A.V. Club book, Inventory. His speculative fiction has been published in Sybil’s Garage, Apex Magazine, Farrago’s Wainscot, Brain Harvest, and the Descended from Darkness anthology, among others. When unchained from his laptop, he plays guitar in a punk band called The Fire Drills. They do the worst Cheap Trick cover you’ve ever heard.