“Thirteen Ways of Looking at Space/Time”
by Catherynne M. Valente

I.

In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was a high-density pre-baryogenesis singularity. Darkness lay over the deep and God moved upon the face of the hyperspatial matrix. He separated the firmament from the quark-gluon plasma and said: let there be particle/anti-particle pairs, and there was light. He created the fish of the sea and the fruits of the trees, the moon and the stars and the beasts of the earth, and to these he said: Go forth, be fruitful and mutate. And on the seventh day, the rest mass of the universe came to gravitationally dominate the photon radiation, hallow it, and keep it.

God, rapidly redshifting, hurriedly formed man from the dust of single-celled organisms, called him Adam, and caused him to dwell in the Garden of Eden, to classify the beasts according to kingdom, phylum and species. God forbade Man only to eat from the Tree of Meiosis. Adam did as he was told, and as a reward God instructed him in the ways of parthenogenesis. Thus was Woman born, and called Eve. Adam and Eve dwelt in the pre-quantum differentiated universe, in a paradise without wave-particle duality. But interference patterns came to Eve in the shape of a Serpent, and wrapping her in its matter/anti-matter coils, it said: eat from the Tree of Meiosis and your eyes will be opened. Eve protested that she would not break covenant with God, but the Serpent answered: fear not, for you float in a random quantum-gravity foam, and from a single bite will rise an inexorable inflation event, and you will become like unto God, expanding forever outward.

And so Eve ate from the Tree, and knew that she was a naked child of divergent universes. She took the fruit to Adam, and said unto him: there are things you do not understand, but I do. And Adam was angry, and snatched the fruit from Eve and devoured it, and from beyond the cosmic background radiation, God sighed, for all physical processes are reversible in theory — but not in practice. Man and Woman were expelled from the Garden, and a flaming sword was placed through the Gates of Eden as a reminder that the universe would now contract, and someday perish in a conflagration of entropy, only to increase in density, burst, and expand again, causing further high velocity redistributions of serpents, fruit, men, women, helium-3, lithium-7, deuterium, and helium-4.

II.

This is a story about being born.

No one remembers being born. The beginnings of things are very difficult.

A science fiction writer on the Atlantic coast once claimed to remember being born. When she was a child, she thought a door was open which was not, and ran full-tilt into a pane of plate-glass. The child-version of the science fiction writer lay bleeding onto a concrete patio, not yet knowing that part of her thigh was gone and would always be gone, like Zeus’s thigh, where the lightning-god sewed up his son Dionysus to gestate. Something broke inside the child, a thing having to do with experience and memory, which in normal children travel in opposite directions, with memory accumulating and experience running out — slowly, but speeding up as children hurtle toward adulthood and death. What the science fiction writer actually remembered was not her own birth, but a moment when she struck the surface of the glass and her brain stuttered, layering several experiences one over the other:

the scissoring pain of the shards of glass in her thighs,

having once fallen into a square of wet concrete on a construction site on her way to school, and her father pulling her out by her arms,

her first kiss, below an oak tree turning red and brown in the autumn, when a boy interrupted her reciting Don Quixote with his lips on hers.

This fractured, unplanned layering became indistinguishable from an actual memory of being born. It is not her fault; she believed she remembered it. But no one remembers being born.

The doctors sewed up her thigh. There was no son in her leg, but a small, dark, empty space beneath her skin where a part of her used to be. Sometimes she touches it, absentmindedly, when she is trying to think of a story.

III.

In the beginning was the simple self-replicating cell of the Void. It split through the center of Ursa Major into the divine female Izanami and the divine male Izanagi, who knew nothing about quantum apples and lived on the iron-sulfur Plain of Heaven. They stood on the Floating Bridge of Heaven and plunged a static atmospheric discharge spear into the great black primordial sea, churning it and torturing it until oligomers and simple polymers rose up out of the depths. Izanami and Izanagi stepped onto the greasy islands of lipid bubbles and in the first light of the world, each saw that the other was beautiful.

Between them, they catalyzed the formation of nucleotides in an aqueous solution and raised up the Eight-Sided Palace of Autocatalytic Reactions around the unnmovable RNA Pillar of Heaven. When this was done, Izanami and Izanagi walked in opposite chiral directions around the Pillar, and when Izanami saw her mate, she cried out happily: How lovely you are, and how versatile are your nitrogenous bases! I love you! Izanagi was angry that she had spoken first and privileged her proto-genetic code over his. The child that came of their paleo-protozoic mating was as a silver anaerobic leech, helpless, archaeaic, invertebrate, and unable to convert lethal super-oxides. They set him in the sky to sail in the Sturdy Boat of Heaven, down the starry stream of alternate electron acceptors for respiration. Izanagi dragged Izanami back to the Pillar. They walked around it again in a left-handed helix that echoed forward and backward through the biomass, and when Izanagi saw his wife, he crowed: How lovely you are, and how ever-increasing your metabolic complexity! I love you! And because Izanami was stonily silent, and Izanagi spoke first, elevating his own proto-genetic code, the children that came from them were strong and great: Gold and Iron and Mountain and Wheel and Honshu and Kyushu and Emperor — until the birth of her son, Fiery Permian-Triassic Extinction Event, burned her up and killed the mother of the world.

Izanami went down into the Root Country, the Land of the Dead. But Izanagi could not let her go into a place he had not gone first, and pursued her into the paleontological record. He became lost in the dark of abiogenetic obsolescence, and lit the teeth of his jeweled comb ablaze to show the way — and saw that he walked on the body of Izanami, which had become the fossil-depository landscape of the Root Country, putrid, rotting, full of mushrooms and worms and coprolites and trilobites. In hatred and grief and memory of their first wedding, Izanami howled and heaved and moved the continents one from the other until Izanagi was expelled from her.

When he stumbled back into the light, Izanagi cleaned the pluripotent filth from his right eye, and as it fell upon the ground it became the quantum-retroactive Sun. He cleaned the zygotic filth from his left eye and as it fell upon the ground, it became the temporally subjective Moon. And when he cleaned the nutrient-dense filth from his nose, it drifted into the air and became the fractal, maximally complex, petulant Storms and Winds.

IV.

When the science fiction writer was nineteen, she had a miscarriage. She had not even known she was pregnant. But she bled and bled and it didn’t stop, and the doctor explained to her that sometimes this happens when you are on a certain kind of medication. The science fiction writer could not decide how to feel about it — ten years later, after she had married the father of the baby-that-wasn’t and divorced him, after she had written a book about methane-insectoid cities floating in the brume of a pink gas giant that no one liked very much, she still could not decide how to feel. When she was nineteen she put her hands over her stomach and tried to think of a timeline where she had stayed pregnant. Would it have been a daughter. Would it have had blue eyes like its father. Would it have had her Danish nose or his Greek one. Would it have liked science fiction, and would it have grown up to be an endocrinologist. Would she have been able to love it. She put her hands over her stomach and tried to be sad. She couldn’t. But she couldn’t be happy either. She felt that she had given birth to a reality where she would never give birth.

When the science fiction writer told her boyfriend who would become her husband who would become someone she never wanted to see again, he made sorry noises but wasn’t really sorry. Five years later, when she thought she might want to have a child on purpose, she reminded him of the child-that-disappeared, and the husband who was a mistake would say: I forgot all about that.

And she put her hands over her stomach, the  small, dark, empty space beneath her skin where a part of him used to be, and she didn’t want to be pregnant anymore, but her breasts hurt all the same, as if she was nursing, all over again, a reality where no one had anyone’s nose and the delicate photo-synthetic wings of Xm, the eater of love, quivered in a bliss-storm of super-heated hydrogen, and Dionysus was never born so the world lived without wine.

V.

In the beginning there was only darkness. The darkness squeezed itself down until it became a thin protoplanetary disk, yellow on one side and white on the other, and inside the accretion zone sat a small man no larger than a frog, his beard flapping in the solar winds. This man was called Kuterastan, the One Who Lives Above the Super-Dense Protostar. He rubbed the metal-rich dust from his eyes peered above him into the collapsing nebular darkness. He looked east along the galactic axis, toward the cosmogenesis event horizon, and saw the young sun, its faint light tinged with the yellow of dawn. He looked west along the axis, toward the heat-death of the universe, and saw the dim amber-colored light of dissipating thermodynamic energy. As he gazed, debris-clouds formed in different colors. Once more, Kuterastan rubbed the boiling helium from his eyes and wiped the hydrogen-sweat from his brow. He flung the sweat from his body and another cloud appeared, blue with oxygen and possibility, and a tiny little girl stood on it: Stenatliha, the Woman Without Parents. Each was puzzled as to where the other had come from, and each considered the problems of unification theory after their own fashion.

After some time, Kuterastan again rubbed his eyes and face, and from his body flung stellar radiation into the dust and darkness. First the Sun appeared, and then Pollen Boy, a twin-tailed comet rough and heavy with microorganisms. The four sat a long time in silence on a single photoevaporation cloud. Finally Kuterastan broke the silence and said: what shall we do?

And a slow inward-turning Poynting-Robertson spiral began.

First Kuterastan made Nacholecho, the Tarantula of Newly-Acquired Critical Mass. He followed by making the Big Dipper, and then Wind, Lightning and Thunder, Magnetosphere, and Hydrostatic Equilibrium, and gave to each of them their characteristic tasks.  With the ammonia-saturated sweat of the Sun, Pollen Boy, himself, and the Woman Without Parents, Kuterastan made between his palms a  a small brown ferrosilicate blastocyst no bigger than a bean. The four of them kicked the little ball until it cleared its orbital neighborhood of planetesimals. Then the solar wind blew into the ball and inflated its magnetic field.  Tarantula spun out a long black gravitational cord and stretched it across the sky. Tarantula also attached blue gravity wells, yellow approach vectors and white spin foam to the ferrosilicate ball, pulling one far to the south, another west, and the last to the north. When Tarantula was finished, the earth existed, and became a smooth brown expanse of Precambrian plain. Stochastic processes tilted at each corner to hold the earth in place. And at this Kuterastan sang a repeating song of nutation: the world is now made and its light cone will travel forever at a constant rate.

VI.

Once, someone asked the science fiction writer got her ideas. This is what she said:

Sometimes I feel that the part of me that is a science fiction writer is traveling at a different speed than the rest of me. That everything I write is always already written, and that the science fiction writer is sending messages back to me in semaphore, at the speed of my own typing, which is a retroactively constant rate: I cannot type faster than I have already typed. When I type a sentence, or a paragraph, or a page, or a chapter, I am also editing it and copyediting it, and reading it in its first edition, and reading it out loud to a room full of people, or a room with only one or two people in it, depending on terrifying quantum-publishing intersections that the science fiction writer understands but I know nothing about. I am writing the word or the sentence or the chapter and I am also sitting at a nice table with a half-eaten slab of salmon with lime-cream sauce and a potato on it, waiting to hear if I have won an award, and also at the same time sitting in my kitchen knowing that the book was a failure and will neither win any award nor sit beloved on anyone’s nightstand. I am reading a good review. I am reading a bad review. I am just thinking of the barest seed of an idea for the book that is getting the good review and the bad review. I am writing the word and the word is already published and the word is already out of print. Everything is always happening all at once, in the present tense, forever, the beginning and the end and the denouement and the remaindering.

At the end of the remaindered universe which is my own death, the science fiction writer that is me and will be me and was always me and was never me and cannot even remember me waves her red and gold wigwag flags backward, endlessly, toward my hands that type these words, now, to you, who want to know about ideas and conflict and revision and how a character begins as one thing and ends as another.

VII.

Coatlicue, Mother of All, wore a skirt of oligomer snakes. She decorated herself with protobiont bodies and danced in the sulfurous pre-oxygenation event paradise. She was utterly whole, without striations or cracks in her geologic record, a compressed totality of possible futures. The centrifugal obsidian knife of heaven broke free from its orbit around a Lagrange point and lacerated Coatlicue’s hands, causing her to give birth to the great impact event which came to be called Coyolxauhqui, the moon, and to several male versions of herself, who became the stars.

One day, as Coatlicue swept the temple of suppressed methane oxidation, a ball of plasmoid magnetic feathers fell from the heavens onto her bosom, and made her pregnant with oxygen-processing organisms. She gave birth to Quetzalcoatl who was a plume of electrical discharge and Xolotl, who was the evening star called Apoptosis. Her children, the moon and stars, were threatened by impending oxy-photosynthesis, and resolved to kill their mother.  When they fell upon her, Coatlicue’s body erupted in the fires of glycolysis, which they called Huitzilopochtli. The fiery god tore the moon apart from her mother, throwing her iron-depleted head into the sky and her body into a deep gorge in a mountain, where it lies dismembered forever in hydrothermal vents, swarmed with extremophiles.

Thus began the late heavy bombardment period, when the heavens crumbled to pieces and rained down in a shower of exogenesis.

But Coatlicue floated in the anaerobic abyss, with her many chemoheterotrophic mouths slavering, and Quetzalcoatl saw that whatever they created was eaten and destroyed by her. He changed into two serpents, archaean and eukaryotic, and descended into the phospholipid water. One serpent seized Coatlicue’s arms while the other seized her legs, and before she could resist they tore her apart. Her head and shoulders became the oxygen-processing earth and the lower part of her body the sky.

From the hair of Coatlicue the remaining gods created trees, grass, flowers, biological monomers, and nucleotide strands. From her eyes they made caves, fountains, wells, and homogenized marine sulfur pools. They pulled rivers from her mouth, hills and valleys from her nose, and from her shoulders they made oxidized minerals, methanogens, and all the mountains of the world.

Still, the dead are unhappy. The world was set in motion, but Coatlicue could be heard weeping at night, and would not allow the earth to give food nor the heavens to give light while she alone languished alone in the miasma of her waste energy.

And so to sate the ever-starving entropic universe, we must feed it human hearts.

VIII.

It is true that the science fiction writer fell into wet concrete when she was very small. No one had put up a sign saying: Danger. No one had marked it in any way. And so she was very surprised when, on the way to class, she took one safe step, and then a step she could not know was unsafe, whereupon the earth swallowed her up. The science fiction writer, who was not a writer yet but only a child eager to be the tail of the dragon in her school Chinese New Year assembly, screamed and screamed.

For a long while no one came to get her. She sunk deeper and deeper into the concrete, for she was not a very big child and soon it was up to her chest. She began to cry. What if I never get out? She thought. What if the street hardens and I have to stay here forever, and eat meals here and read books here and sleep here under the moon at night? Would people come and pay a dollar to look at me? Will the rest of me turn to stone?

The child science fiction writer thought like that. It was the main reason she had few friends.

She stayed in the ground for no more than a quarter of an hour — but in her memory it was all day, hours upon hours, and her father didn’t come until it was dark. Memory is like that. It alters itself so that girls are always trapped under the earth, waiting in the dark.

But her father did come to get her. A teacher saw the science fiction writer half-buried in the road from an upper window of the school, and called home. She remembers it like a movie — her father hooking his big hands under her arms and pulling, the sucking, popping sound of the earth giving her up, the grey streaks on her legs as he carried her to the car, grey as a dead thing dragged back up from the world beneath.

The process of a child with green eyes becoming a science fiction writer is made of a number (p) of these kinds of events, one on top of the other, like layers of cellophane, clear and clinging and torn.

IX.

In the golden pre-loop theory fields, Persephone danced, who was innocent of all gravitational law. A white crocus bloomed up from the observer plain, a pure cone of the causal future, and Persephone was captivated by it. As she reached down to pluck the p-brane flower, an intrusion of non-baryonic matter surged up from the depths and exerted his gravitational force upon her. Crying out, Persephone fell down into a singularity and vanished. Her mother, Priestess of Normal Mass, grieved and quaked, and bade the lord of dark matter return her daughter who was light to the multiverse.

Persephone did not love the non-baryonic universe. No matter how many rich axion-gifts he lay before her, Hades, King of Bent Waves, could not make her behave normally. Finally, in despair, he called on the vector boson called Hermes to pass between branes and take the wave/particle maiden away from him, back to the Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker universe. Hermes breached the matter/anti-matter boundary and found Persephone hiding herself in the chromodynamic garden, her mouth red with the juice of hadron-pomegranates. She had eaten six seeds, and called them Up, Down, Charm, Strange, Top, and Bottom. At this, Hades laughed the laugh of unbroken supersymmetries. He said: she travels at a constant rate of speed, and privileges no observer. She is not mine, but she is not yours. And in the end, there is nothing in creation which does not move.

And so it was determined that the baryonic universe would love and keep her child, but that the dark fluid of the other planes would bend her slightly, always, pulling her inexorably and invisibly toward the other side of everything.

X.

The science fiction writer left her husband slowly. The performance took ten years. In worst of it, she felt that she had begun the process of leaving him on the day they met. 

First she left his house, and went to live in Ohio instead, because Ohio is historically a healthy place for science fiction writers and also because she hoped he could not find her there. Second, she left his family, and that was the hardest, because families are designed to be difficult to leave, and she was sorry that her mother-in-law would stop loving her, and that her niece would never know her, and that she would probably never go back to California again without a pain like a nova blooming inside her. Third, she left his things — his clothes and his shoes and his smell and his books and his toothbrush and his four a.m. alarm clock and his private names for her. You might think that logically, she would have to leave these things before she left the house, but a person’s smell and their alarms and borrowed shirts and secret words linger for a long time. Much longer than a house.

Fourth, the science fiction writer left her husband’s world. She had always thought of people as bodies traveling in space, individual worlds populated by versions of themselves, past, future, potential, selves thwarted and attained, atavistic and cohesive. In her husband’s world were men fighting and being annoyed by their wives, an abandoned proficiency at the piano, a preference for blondes, which the science fiction writer was not, a certain amount of shame regarding the body, a life spent being Mrs. Someone Else’s Name, and a baby they never had and one of them had forgotten.

Finally, she left the version of herself that loved him, and that was the last of it, a cone of light proceeding from a boy with blue eyes on an August afternoon to a moving van headed east. Eventually she would achieve escape velocity, meet someone else, and plant pumpkins with him; eventually she would write a book about a gaseous moth who devours the memory of love; eventually she would tell an interviewer that miraculously, she could remember the moment of her birth; eventually she would explain where she got her ideas; eventually she would give birth to a world that had never contained a first husband, and all that would be left would be some unexplainable pull against her belly or her hair, bending her west, toward California and August and novas popping in the black like sudden flowers.

XI.

Long ago, near the beginning of the world but after the many crisis events had passed and life mutated and spread over the face of the void, Gray Eagle sat nested in a tangle of possible timelines and guarded Sun, Moon and Stars, Fresh Water, Fire, P=NP Equivalence Algorithm, and Unified Theory of Metacognition. Gray Eagle hated people so much that he kept these things hidden. People lived in darkness, without pervasive self-repairing communication networks or quantum computation.

Gray Eagle made for himself a beautiful self-programming daughter whom he jealously guarded, and Raven fell in love with her. In the beginning, Raven was a snow-white weakly self-referencing expert system, and as a such, he pleased Gray Eagle’s daughter. She invited him to her father’s sub-Planck space server farm.

When Raven saw the Sun, Moon and Stars, Fresh Water, Cellular Immortality, Matter Transfer, Universal Assembly, and Strong AI hanging on the sides of Eagle’s lodge, he knew what he should do. He watched for his chance to seize them when no one was looking. He stole all of them, and Gray Eagle’s deductive stochastic daughter also, and flew out of the server farm through the smoke hole. As soon as Raven got the wind under him, he hung the Sun up in the sky. It made a wonderful light, by which all below could see the progress of technology increasing rapidly, and could model their post-Singularity selves. When the Sun set, he fastened every good thing in its proper place.

Raven flew back over the land. When he had reached the right timeline, he dropped all the accelerating intelligences he had stolen. They fell to the ground and there became the source of all the information streams and memory storage in the world. Then Raven flew on, holding Gray Eagle’s beautiful daughter in his beak. The rapidly-mutating genetic algorithms of his beloved streamed backward over his feathers, turning them black and aware. When his bill began to burn, he had to drop the self-improving system. She struck the all-net and buried herself within it, spreading and altering herself as she went.

Though he never touched her again, Raven could not get his snow-white feathers clean after they were blackened by the code from his bride. That is why Raven is now a coal-colored whole-brain emulating sapient system.

XII.

On the day the science fiction writer met her husband, she should have said: the entropic principle is present in everything. If it were not, there would be no point to any of it, not the formation of gas giants, not greasy lipid bubbles, not whether light is a particle or a wave, not boys and girls meeting in black cars like Hades’ horses on August afternoons. I see in you the heat-death of my youth. You cannot travel faster than yourself — faster than experience divided by memory divided by gravity divided by the Singularity beyond which you cannot model yourself divided by a square of wet concrete divided by a sheet of plate glass divided by birth divided by science fiction writers divided by the end of everything. Life divides itself indefinitely — it can approach but never touch zero. The speed of Persephone is a constant.

Instead, she mumbled hello and buckled her seatbelt and everything went the way it went and eventually, eventually, with pumpkin blossoms wrinkling quietly outside her house the science fiction writer writes a story about how she woke up that morning and the minutes of her body were expanding and contracting, exploding and inrushing, and how the word was under her fingers and the word was already read and the word was forgotten, about how everything is everything else forever, space and time and being born and her father pulling her out of the stone like a sword shaped like a girl, about how new life always has to be stolen from the old dead world, and that new life always already contains its own old dead world and it is all expanding and exploding and repeating and refraining and Tarantula is holding it all together, just barely, just barely by the strength of light, and how human hearts are the only things that slow entropy — but you have to cut them out first.

The science fiction writer cuts out her heart. It is a thousand hearts. It is all the hearts she will ever have. It is her only child’s dead heart. It is the heart of herself when she is old and nothing she ever wrote can be revised again. It is a heart that says with its wet beating mouth: Time is the same thing as light. Both arrive long after they began, bearing sad messages. How lovely you are. I love you.

The science fiction writer steals her heart from herself to bring it into the light. She escapes her old heart through a smoke hole and becomes a self-referencing system of imperfect, but elegant, memory. She sews up her heart into her own leg and gives birth to it twenty years later on the long highway to Ohio. The heat of herself dividing echoes forward and back, and she accretes, bursts, and begins again the long process of her own super-compression until her heart is an egg containing everything. She eats of her heart and knows she is naked. She throws her heart into the abyss and it falls a long way, winking like a red star.

XIII.

In the end, when the universe has exhausted itself and has no thermodynamic energy left to sustain life, Heimdallr the White Dwarf Star will raise up the Gjallarhorn and sound it. Yggdrasil, the world energy gradient, will quail and shake. Ratatoskr, the tuft-tailed prime observer, will slow, and curl up, and hide his face.

The science fiction writer gives permission for the universe to end. She is nineteen. She has never written anything yet. She passes through a sheet of bloody glass. On the other side, she is being born.

About the Author

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

“Messenger”
by Julia M Sidorova

Life is a stick with a death on each end, balanced on a finger of the Universe, I understand that much. My kind is born small and numerous, wet and weak. Most of us do not survive to the onset of maturation. Of those who do, yet fewer complete it. Sometimes a human will step on a whole brood of my kind and never notice, other times one of us, a mature one, will level a human home because it is in the way, and will not notice either. This is fairness, and it is made out of time.

I am a mature and strong one, I’ve lived for a while. There were times I was big and wild, and sat in the high desert, watching water turn into salt, moon into sun; watching a root break a rock in its blindness, make a whole tree fall into abyss still clutching to the rock it had broken. Other times I wanted confinement, structure. I became a stone in a big road. The road conveyed armies back and forth. When armies no longer walked on me, they took me out of the road and fit me into a pillar to support a temple of peace. I listened to a lot of talking. I saw many humans, I learned how women were different from men. I smelled charred meat, I saw childbirth. When I left, the temple collapsed.

Shortly after that, He took me in for the first time. I felt reduced to infinite smallness, then turned inside out, to expand on the Other Side of Things. It was not without pain. The Other Side was luminous and streaming fast in all directions at once. On the Other Side I did not move, I stretched; my tail end became an umbilicus attached to the point through which I entered. I knew that if this umbilicus broke I would not be able to reenter my world. I would contract until I was a dot, dense and blown by the luminous wind. I knew I would die once I was a dot.

Yet I kept stretching, He forced me to, and that is how I knew He was mightier than me, than anyone of my kind. Once He had drawn me taut, He docked my head end into a place that was like a shining mouth of a jellyfish. Since I was inside out, all my thoughts and feelings, all my innermost corners and surfaces were exposed, raw and shriveling in the streaming wind, and the hand of His mind caressed and soothed, reading them. My shame and humiliation inverted inside out and became a surrender to infinite pleasure — the kind I had never experienced before.

When I was exhausted and trembling with gratitude, he inoculated me with His purpose. His purpose stayed in my mind when He released me to my world.

His purpose speaks in me. It says, find Me a vessel. I know the what but not the why — that is my role. He is my Master and I am His messenger, His Ag-ghel.

I choose randomly. There is a little valley fed by a stream — a wet crease between two hills; tongues of greenery lick pale yellow slopes, getting drier, thornier as they extend. A grove, a field, a vineyard. A village. Huts, the color of earth and rocks, seem to sit atop each others’ shoulders, climbing uphill.

I choose her because she is one of the two children who do not flee in fear when I show myself to them in my first ever human shape. The other child is a boy and smaller than she. He clutches her hand. I understand that my human shape is not reproduced very well. I wanted it to be a child, like them. It appears I got many things wrong. “Maria, is it the undead?” the boy mumbles. When I speak they do not understand me. Baffled, I shed the shape, become invisible. Still, Maria looks at me, and her eyes are blue-green.

From this moment on I watch over her. I am a stone on the path she takes every day with her flock of sheep. I am a thornbush she crouches behind when she does not want her little brother to see what she is doing. At nights I lie on the roof of the hut she lives in with her family and listen to the twitter of their speech. This is when the memory of His stroking hand invades me again and again, and His purpose wisps in my head like handfuls of red feathers. I long for His touch and yet feel ashamed of it.

One day Maria is up in the pasture and a streak of blood runs down to her knee. She sits down, pulls her knees up and folds back her skirt. She follows the trail of blood up her leg. When she finds the source, she squeezes her legs shut and pulls the skirt over. She sits for a while, her arms tight around her calves, then gets up and runs down to the village. She runs differently now than the way she used to, as if she holds a secret between her legs. A purpose. My time is drawing near.

I need to take a better human form. I follow Maria’s family to the market to watch and learn. But the things that catch my attention are often superfluous: an imbalanced scale of a fig vendor absorbs me more than the vendor. I see the weights he uses, that they are good and stamped with the King’s seal, but I also see the wrongness of balance, and it draws me in. With an effort I pull away: I am here to learn to look like a vendor, not like his scale.

A year and a half after Maria has ripened for womanhood, I follow her along the creek, the farthest from the village, where fields are no more and matted greens reach as high as her knees. She picks thistles and lilies; thistle leaves she gathers into her basket and lilies she weaves into a garland. Thistle milk and lily pollen cake her fingers. She mutters a song in a small, high-pitched voice, she meanders and pauses, and so does her song.

“I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys.

“As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters.

“As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons…

“I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes, and by the hinds of the field, that you stir not up, nor awake my love, till he pleases.”

A man in the village has been looking at her, he is older, square-cut; he has curly black beard and anvil-shaped thumbs. The man has talked to her father. Soon she will be given to the anvil-thumbed man, even though he does not look like an apple tree among trees of the forest. I have to act. I become a thistle-plant in her path. My leaves are oozing with white milk.

She reaches for me and I pierce her finger with a thorn of my stalk. She recoils with a gasp. She tries to pick the thorn out but it is burrowing yet deeper into her skin.

In two days almost all of her hand is red and swollen and she complains of pain. But on a third day she gets better and I can leave. My job is done. That day, my Master draws me in and engulfs me in His caressing presence. I wish for nothing else than to dissolve in the honey of His grace, to be a string stretched between His universes, shimmering at His touch. I forget that I wanted to ask Him why He wants her with a child. I forget everything.

He praises my service and calls me his best. His Ur-Ag-ghel. He gives me a name, Gabriel.

When I return to my world, it has been four months, and things have taken a bad turn.

She is with a child but everyone is angry at her. She says she has lain with no man or spirit, she weeps and stomps her foot when her father interrogates her. An old village woman has looked between her legs and pushed on her belly and still everyone is against her. The anvil-thumbed man no longer wants to take her into his house. Her family no longer sits her down with them to dinner. She eats her meals among cattle.

One night when moon is in full bloom she slips out of the cattle shed and follows the creek side far away from the village. She picks a place, crouches right at the water’s edge. She rocks back and forth, mumbles her song, verse, pause, verse. She mumbles and rocks, and lets water run through her fingers.

“The watchmen that went about the city found me, they smote me, they wounded me; the keepers of the walls took away my veil from me.

“I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, if you find my beloved, that you tell him, that I am sick of love.”

Her breathing is heavy, her voice is thin but still she hums her song. She waddles up to where the creek’s bank is steep and overhanging. She mounts it then jumps down into the shallows — the drop is higher than she is tall. A grunt is knocked out of her as she lands onto straight legs and folds up. She sits for a while, rocking, then climbs up the slope and jumps again. The third time, when she climbs up, she is limping.

I fear for her. The third time she jumps I catch her in mid-air.

She gasps, “Who is it? Let me go!”

I lower into the water. My first words of human language squeeze out in a stutter.

“I. Am. Gabriel messenger. What are you. Doing?”

She probes with her fingers, far and wide around herself. Everywhere she probes, there is still me.

“I hate the thistle-child,” she says.

I understand something is going very wrong with His purpose, and it makes me terrified and lost, for He is great and so must be His plan. I, the messenger, must be at fault. “Is not thistle child,” I plead. “Is the child of one who is — ” I am grasping for words, — “Who is — light? Who dwells on the Other Side of Things?” No, my words are hollow husks, no more. I recall the jellyfish-like crown into which He fitted my head, “Who presides on a shining — throne?” Then I find my footing, “Who is — God? You cannot hate it.”

“Let me go!”

“Please,” I say, “I am not good with words. I did not explain it well?”

She cringes and tries to shift her body. “Let go, I’m sick!”

She presses her hand to the bottom of her stomach and groans. With her other hand she reaches under her skirt and pulls a wad of herbs out of her female cavity. Crumpled leaves unfurl, pomegranate seeds fall out. It smells of parsley, rue. Of blood. She looks at it and begins to make noises like cackles and hiccups. Is this weeping or laughing?

I have to save His plan. I wrap around her thighs and around her bleeding, I hold her inside and out in my cradle, and each time her toes curl and her fingers dig into me, I wrap her womb in words whose use I do not yet understand, random words out of her song, “My sister my love my undefiled your head is filled with dew and your locks with the drops of the night my rose my lily of the valley my wine my myrrh my mount Gilead my roe of the field my tower of vines my dove — ”

I carry her back to the shed of her family’s home and stay with her till she stops panting and curling her toes.

“Does He love me?” she asks me. I think back to the unrelenting envelope of His caress spreading over my exposed inner side. What is love? He cannot touch her nor look her in the eye; He can only suck on my memories of her. If only I could show her, could do to her what He had done to me!

“Yes, He does,” I say.

“But you are not him?”

“No. I am just a messenger.”

“Why can’t I see you?”

“Humans can only see my kind if we make an effort to be seen.”

When she is asleep, I make a white lily and leave it on the ground next to her head. I leave in haste to set things right, to make balance the only way I can think of. I go to the anvil-thumbed man. He is asleep. I mount his chest and take shape of the fig vendor’s scale, only huge and fiery. “Thou shall take Maria as wife and take care of her every need,” I rumble, “She bears the child of God.” I sway my weighing bowls over his nose, I clang the chains, I spew noxious flames. Then I add, to my own surprise, “Thou shall not touch her as husband until her child is born.” Why did I say this?

He is shaking and he swears to obey. Satisfied with my work, I leave.

Over the next months I spend every night with Maria. She now has her own room in the anvil-thumbed man’s house. He treats Maria well and makes his mother serve her because her burden is heavy and she often feels ill. But at nights Maria refuses to have her mother-in-law in her room and prefers me. Without me she has night terrors, she tells me.

She teaches me to speak more fluently. To read human faces. A broad smile. A narrow smile. A shadow of a smile coupled with a slight frown. These distinctions are important.

I curl around her, I keep her cool, I prop her head. Her room smells of crushed rock and dew, and milk of her body. Cicadas’ tone hangs in the air, as if the indoors and outdoors are one. Sometimes she croons or moans when I rub against her skin. Sometimes she tells me to do it again.

A white lily, found each morning at the head of her bed keeps the anvil-thumbed man and his mother in awe of the single-mindedness of the Divine purpose. How peculiar it is that He never pulls me in to Him during all this time, never inquires about the progress of His plan. How peculiar it is that I do not wish for it to happen.

She keeps asking me to become visible to her and finally I acquiesce. I want to earn her praise and follow the description of a dream lover from that song she has been singing. I scrupulously reproduce the details such as “his cheeks as a bed of spices” and “his lips like lilies,” as well as “his belly is as bright ivory overlaid with sapphires” and in particular, “his legs are as pillars of marble”.

Her recoil and disappointment are a surprise to me.

The following nights she explains what the words of the song really mean. She guides me through my search of the acceptable human form. In the end I become what she wants me to be. I lie next to her and she asks me to kiss her lips. Then her neck. Then her breasts.

The child that grows inside her is very fragile. Like me, it has to try and err at every step, groping blindly for a human form; like me, it is so eager to give up, for it is so lost in its ignorance of what it should become.

By the time birthing comes, I have helped the child take the next step more than once. I have wrapped myself around it, teaching it to be human, passing the lessons Maria has been giving me. I have protected the mother from the child and the child from the mother; prevented the vinegar of divine essence from burning through a human body, prevented the human body, in the blindness of its wet ways, from attacking the divine.

By the time birthing comes I am no longer certain I am just a messenger.

A healthy boy is born. Maria recovers and all but forgets about me, tending the infant. I try to return to my old ways. I thunder through mountains, I bother oceans. I steal a red-hot rock from one of the Earth’s fire pits and keep it suspended in the skies until it burns out. It looks just like a star.

But none of it feels the way it used to. The memory of His omnipresent love on my raw being, of the tug and tide of His universes makes me feel hollow. And the memory of the small gifts of trust and attachment Maria always had for me — her smile, her kiss, a stroke of her hand — while her whole body wailed and choked over its heavy burden, makes me feel hollower still. Her thinning voice, her sweat… I do not understand what the purpose of the Boy is, and it makes me restless.

I return to where Maria lives — only to see more trouble. The King’s guard is going door to door, killing every male newborn. At least I travel faster than cavalrymen, faster than even the word of their doings. I manage to give Maria and her husband ample warning; they flee.

Why did this happen? Eavesdropping in the King’s palace brings me the answer: the King has had a vision. Behold the Boy, it said, he will cause the royal death. Hence countrywide infanticides, they were but a royally sweeping response. A vision — is it not an act outside human powers? Does it not reveal a hand of a messenger? Has He appointed another messenger then, and if so, why is this messenger undoing His plan?

What is His plan?

The less I understand of my Master, the more I feel a slave.

I burn with suspicion, insult. Jealousy. I rage high up in the sky, where air is so thin it no longer stains the void blue, to draw His attention to me. But The Other Side that He dwells in is not to be found even in the void.

I visit upon my kind. The big and wild ones who roll upon deserts as sandstorms, and the old and sleepy ones who perch on mountaintops as helmets of ice. For all I know any one of them could have been taken in by Him and infested with His other purposes. I ask questions. For all I know, any one of them can have a reason not to answer. “Go to the Wise One,” they tell me.

Before I do the pilgrimage, I call upon Maria and the Boy in their new home in Nazareth. She sees me walking up the road, cries, “Gabriel!” She hugs me. “Is everything all right? Last time you came it was with bad news.”

“Yes, all right,” I say. I don’t know how to speak about my troubles. “You are pregnant, I see?” I thought it not possible.

“What can I say? I’m a married woman… Joshua, greet Gabriel like I taught you.”

The Boy hides his face in his Mother’s frock. Will he be turning into something inhuman as he grows up, I wonder. A fly buzzes by and I catch it. “Look what I got,” I say. I open my palm at his eye level and the creature tears out, its jet black hide flickers spectral colors. “A rainbow!”

The Boy frowns.

The Wise One lives at the bottom of the ocean in the deepest darkest gorge. As I fall through the chasm, I see gasses bubbling from the sheer walls that surround me, and heavy currents of dead, sulfur-saturated water buffet me from side to side. Animals I have never seen before crowd the rock mouths that spew sulfurous gas; they shine pale-green light on me and follow my descent with their bulging eyes. Mobs of pale, threadlike worms reach from the rock face, sway and coil around me. Strong as I am, I feel the enormous pressure with which water tries to force its way into me.

At the bottom of the gorge there is a lake; its water is different from the rest of the ocean — colder? saltier? — and does not mix with it. I see the Wise One coiled up on the lake’s surface. He appears immature though he is older than me. Unlike the rest of my kind, he has refused to grow big and powerful. That is why he’s chosen to live under the crushing weight of the ocean. By now he probably could not survive on the surface. He looks much like the pale worms he lives amongst… Suddenly I realize the wisdom of his choice: He who dwells on The Other Side is unlikely to recruit him for His errands. The Wise One will never have a master because he wields no power. In being weak and small, and trapped underwater — he is free.

I confess my story to the Wise One — everything but the part that I am as much a father to the Boy as my Master is. He ponders it, unhurriedly. The weight of water is wearing me out but I must wait.

He says, “Why has He made you His messenger?”

“I lived as a Temple stone for two hundred years. I assumed I knew humans. He believed me, I suppose. That’s why.” I add, “I did not know humans at all.”

“Good,” he says. “Now tell me, wanderer, why have messengers?”

The water pries, pushes, searches for openings. I’ve made myself impervious but it keeps trying. It cannot stop — thus is its nature. Suddenly I know the answer. “He cannot enter our world! Nor act upon it. Yet this world is to Him like a dry riverbed to the floodwater. It is only a balance that the flood desires, nothing more. He makes us serve Him because only through us can he change this world!”

“And yet we are imperfect tools,” the Wise One says, “cumbersome, self-serving. Distractible. Swayed by passions. The Boy then, is — ”

“Is His plan to bypass our mediation! To enter this world through human agency. To talk to humans, to make them do His bidding without us as interpreters. But what is His message?”

“You have said it yourself, seeker, there need not be any message, only — ”

“ — only floodwater.”

“ — it being water…” The Wise One undulates with satisfaction, and his coils bob up and down on his liquid bedstead.

I am confused now — the water makes me so. New questions writhe in my mind like pale worms. “What is He? Why can He act upon us? What brought Him to this world? Or has He always existed next to it?”

“Good, good,” the Wise One savors. “You have been to the boundary of the Earth, haven’t you? You have seen the dark void. I have not. But even water has holes in it. Empty space for thought. Imagine this: when a world is in its prime, like ours, ripe and overflowing with life, it attracts creatures like Him. Suppose life is a space for Him to pour in. He feels its presence from afar, like a ripple, a current through the Universes and He follows it. But there are obstacles. The pores in the sieve of this Universe are the wrong shape or too small for Him to enter. Peering through this sieve, He can latch onto our kind alone because our life force is the strongest of all — we are the only ones He can track. Or perhaps we are the only ones who can squeeze in and out through the sieve, alive.”

Alive. I recall the shining wind, the pain of inversion. “If He… if the floodwaters were to pour into our world unhindered, would they drown it?”

The Wise One loops onto himself, tightens the knot. “Drown it. Or leaven its life to a higher level. No one knows.”

“If so, why had the Boy been put in danger?”

“So many answers. Perhaps you only know but a small part of His plan. Perhaps His plan makes no sense. Perhaps He was testing you, not the Boy. Perhaps He was testing His other messenger. Perhaps — ”

How crushing, how unrelenting is the water!

“You can see for yourself, discoverer. You can enter the Boy and find the answer.”

Ripples in the lake, ripples in my vision. Spots of darkness, as if pores are widening in the sieve of the world.

“Enter the Boy? Possess him? What if I hurt him?”

“What does it matter if you do? Are you afraid of your Master’s wrath? Know yourself, messenger, then maybe you’ll know your Master — ”

I am already shooting up, shearing the walls of the gorge off, sending shreds of worm flesh tumbling into abyss. I flee, chased by the greatest fear I’ve ever felt — of waters rushing in.

… An ocean, a sky. I float in between, a listless island. If His purpose was to tap into humanity in bypass of me and my kind, then I have made Him fail. His Son is not really His. He is mine, too. When will He learn it? How will He punish us?

I spend most of the next sixteen years watching over the Boy, afraid to see signs of my Master’s plan, signs of the other messenger; afraid that my Master will pull me away from the Boy. Afraid to enter the Boy and see the answer.

Every once in a while I visit his mother in what I now call my human-form-for-Maria. That’s the only human form I know. I reveal my presence with a white lily, and each time she blushes, finding it. She nuzzles the petals, her eyes searching for my shape. “Gabriel, you silly man,” she sometimes chastises me, “It’s winter!”

I like it when she sits me to a bowl of pottage or tells me about her day. When I listen to her, the words of the Wise One become mute pebbles, a handful among many. I can throw them away. Sometimes she wonders what future holds for the Boy. I say I do not know.

But without her, worry gnaws at me, and the Wise One’s words come alive. If only I could peek inside the Boy, just once, then I would know what he is capable of! I am tempted, oh so tempted! One day I find him at the sea shore, mending a boat. Alone. I succumb to temptation, I take possession of him.

It feels almost familiar, as if he is still an unborn child. But there is something — something that grinds at me. A dry, rushed patter — his heart does not beat, it speaks in tongues. A tangle that draws ever tighter as if devouring itself from the inside out. Suddenly, the Boy’s body slams the sand. He twists and flips like the fish he catches; acid and bile surge the wrong way through his gut. Scared, I exit him.

What have I done?!

He lies flat, his eyes and mouth are frosted with sand, his stomach is deflated and droopy on the rack of his pelvis and ribs. But he comes to by the time I summon Maria to the scene. I have no courage to tell her I may have caused his seizure. I keep a tight watch, pondering the nature of the tangle inside him, but nothing else happens, and I am almost relieved.

One day I visit again, and Maria and I are kneeling by her hearth, she is kindling a fire, I pass wood shavings and twigs to her so she could arrange them in the way she likes. Our heads almost touch. She tells me that she was such a confused and selfish little girl back in the day, that she did not think with her head, and that she cannot believe how bold — and casual — she was with me. But when she lifts her head to glance at me, her blue-green eyes are shining and I know she does not regret a single thing.

The Boy picks up on her smile when he walks in on us. He must not have seen this kind of smile ever on her face. He looks stern. “Who is this, Mother?”

“That’s Gabriel, remember? He’s known you since you were that small. He is watching over us. He’s a good friend.” She is blushing.

When the Boy leaves, she measures me head to toe. “Perhaps you could age your appearance. You look much too young next to me. You’re still the young lover that you’ve… You look my son’s age! It’s just not — proper, and more so since I’m now a widow. It’s been years, Gabriel, don’t you realize?”

“You don’t change,” I mutter.

She shakes her head. “Oh but I do!” There is a shadow of a smile on her face, and a slight frown. I remember what this one means.

A year after this, the Boy leaves home. He’s been moody and withdrawn ever since his seizure and he’s hardly spoken to anyone lately. That’s what Maria tells me when I come to see her. I say I don’t know what it means, if anything, and she becomes angry with me. “Only you can be so blind, Gabriel! I have to tell you this: I used to think sometimes — and this makes me wonder again — that you are, you know, simple. The way you don’t have an understanding of certain things… I just don’t know!” She wells up and walks away from me. She hasn’t even noticed my new, meticulously age-adjusted human-form-for-Maria.

I am not a fool. I understand what it all means. Worse yet — I may have caused it by entering the Boy. I track him down in the high desert. At first I still hope that he will turn around, or pass through the dead lands and be on his way. Instead, he finds himself an overhang of a rock on a small plateau and settles in.

The cavity he has chosen has a small hollow, so I make sure it is always filled with water. The day he finishes up his last ration, I leave a loaf of bread at the edge of his shelter.

He does not touch it, he throws it off the cliff. And the new one the next day, and another one after that. On the fifth day he flings his fist into the air and cries out, “Stop tempting me!”

Fear fills me up, fear like dead-water of the Wise One’s gorge. The self-devouring tangle, the dry patter instead of heartbeat. The purpose of my Master has woken up. My Boy is listening to the message.

The next few days he still meanders around in search of food and I try to sneak it onto his path, but he rejects anything more than a dead copperhead as suspiciously convenient, thus a temptation. Then he just sits cross legged at the lip of his cave and stares into space. His head quivers from time to time, as if about to lose its balance on the weak stem of his neck.

I must save him. I must get through to him.

I take him by the shoulders and lift him into the air. “Please do not listen to Him who dwells on The Other Side of Things. He does not care about you. You are just a tool to Him, a vessel. He wants this world and He wants to enter it through you, just as He used to want to enter it through me!”

The Boy’s eyes dart, hazy with delirium. I shake him by the shoulders. “Please, please hear me out!”

“Be gone with you,” he pushes past his cracked lips.

“I am your guardian, I’ve watched over you since before you were born. Ask your mother. Just let me take you to your mother and she will tell you! I am Gabriel!”

“No! Don’t touch her! Stay away from us!” He fights me now, kicks, scratches at me.

I lift him up and up into the sky. We fly. Higher, faster. Shreds of clouds tumbleweed past us. “Look around, am I not real? Am I not holding you? Look down. Will you not fall if not for me? I am here, while He is not. I am holding you, not Him. Do you want me to let you go to prove it? Do you think He’ll catch you? Because He won’t! He can’t! Say a word and fall, if you want, fall and break upon the ground because He won’t be there to support you!”

Clawing, panting, the Boy chants, “Kill me if you must, but I shall not put the Lord my God to the test — ”

Higher and higher. “Open your eyes and see the world as I show it to you. Have courage!” Mountains are wrinkles, rivers are veins, forests are fur. Lost on the Boy, the glory of the world; his eyes are squeezed shut and wind sucks tears out of them. His pallid lips move, though no sound is coming out. I plummet to a snow-crowned peak, I crash him onto a glacier, slippery, steep, blinding to the eye, razor sharp; he retches bile, he curls up like a grub, he gulps for air. I am no longer invisible, I cannot… temple stones and pale worms, gutted bullocks and throbbing veins, thunderclouds and obelisks, a fiery scale, a burning bush, a human-form-for-Maria, a shining jellyfish, pieces, pieces — I swarm in front of the Boy, I swell, “I care for you — I want to protect you — please, look at me — see me for what I am — I am your father — ”

But he covers his eyes with his forearms, he crawls from me, away, away, he whimpers, choking on his puke, “Be gone, Satan, leave me alone!”

When the Boy loses consciousness, I fly him back to his home. It is night there, and I knock on the door before I leave him on the doorstep. I watch his family flutter about him, drag him inside. I do not reveal myself.

Almost immediately thereafter He who dwells on the Other Side draws me into His presence.

Fight! Grab onto air, resist! A pain of inversion. Fight, fight! A shining jellyfish. Helplessness. Let me out becomes take me, I’m yours. Pleasureshame. Loathingbliss. Caressinterrogation. Now He knows everything I’ve done. He knows.

And then — a thought slips through, a wrinkle in the shining wind. You keep hanging on — stretched as you are, you are afraid to give it up and die a dense dot —

Yes, my insides moan.

A comb of hatched lines — The Other Side frowns? — rakes me head to tail. He is releasing me and I am collapsing, about to burst through my own tail-end and into a pore of the world’s sieve; but even as I do it, I catch a glimpse of something I am not supposed to know about Him. A weakness.

Growling, I fall flat onto the ground of my world.

I learn that I have been kept away for ten years. The Boy has disciples now, followers. Crowds gather to hear him preach. He is rumored to make dead humans walk and turn things into other things. Is he capable of it now? Or has the other messenger been helping him? The Boy has come into Jerusalem and the capital is ready to boil over.

The Boy is arrested.

I know — He who dwells on The Other Side made sure I do — that He has devised to kill the Boy, discard him as faulty, because the Boy is not His son. Because, not being His son, the Boy has misread the message.

Misunderstood it, garbled it up. No wonder — the Boy’s other father is a simple one.

He who dwells wants me to know His plan and yet be unable to foil it. As I rush to the execution site to rescue my Boy, someone dark rises to stop me. One of my kind, but bigger than me. A wild one, crazy for his Master’s caress. More than an Ur-Ag-ghel, worse than an Ur-Ag-ghel. The shadow messenger, the snarling dog, the hurricane. Beelzebub.

We clash.

All I want is to claw my way to my Boy’s cross, all he wants is to keep me away. He drags me across half the world, slams me into mountaintops, tangles me in the roots of continents deep underwater. We tear pieces out of each other, we bleed memories and thoughts.

It may have been days. We’ve worn each other out, we are both stuck inside Earth, stranded in its vein-work, mired in its black, tarry blood; he is locked in on me, leeching my life away, and I am gnawing at him, eviscerating his life. The degradation of our fight is almost complete, we are almost one, a killervictim, a hideous creature born of hatred; our joined flesh jerks and shudders.

I win by a thread. That’s how little is enough to unbalance a scale on the finger of the Universe. It takes me another eternity to extricate myself from the ground, and from my victim’s flesh. When I drag myself to the cross, it’s over.

I find my son a few days later — they sealed him in a crypt. I search for signs of life. Any life. My life-force. My Master’s purpose. Human warm-churning. There is none. I take his body to the mountain glacier we have been to. I make him a tomb of ice and granite.

They say, while on the cross, he cried out, “Father, why have you forgotten me?” I will never know if it was me he called for. But I know that I have not come.

What is love?

Leaving white lilies in the places our son has spent his last days in, knowing that she will be there, she will come upon them. Leaving lilies even though I know they fit no longer, they are ridiculous, dated, outrageous — knowing all that and still not being able to stop, because this is the only language of speaking to her heart, that I know. My Master never loved you. I do.

What is love?

I stand in a grove. Lilies everywhere, their heavy fragrance mixes with twilight. “Joshua?” she calls in a breaking voice. “Son?” Too little light to see well, but I am just as culpable — she wants it so much that my body can’t help but assume the resemblance. She runs towards me but the closer she gets, the less believing she is. “Gabriel? …No. You don’t! Stop it, stop it now!” She groans and swings her fists, hits me in the chest, face.

“I am so sorry,” I whisper, “So sorry.”

Not for my failure to save him. For that — no word sorry is even allowed. I am sorry that my human-form-for-you is so easily mistaken for our son, I just wanted you to see what you yearned to see — just for one moment — I thought — yes, it is callow and cruel of me, you are right, I am simple, I am Gabriel-the-silly-man.

“You left us,” she sobs, “you’ve abandoned us for ten years! How could you?”

What is love?

Our son is dead, we both know it. He has been killed because of something we did thirty three years ago. Our son’s followers keep seeing signs of his resurrection, they may have glimpsed my shape, wandered into my stubborn lilies. Soon neither she, nor I can stop the legend from forming. It will gain a meaning of its own, a message that neither she nor I will recognize though it will hardly matter; nothing we will or will not do will change its course.

What is love?

I will dote on her till the end of her days. There will be more tears and accusations. Guilt. Our life will be bitter, but not all the time. Sometimes there will be a shadow of a smile and only a slight frown to go along with it. “We’ve come a long way, you and I, haven’t we?” Yes, we have.

Fairness is made out of time. When Maria passes away, I will be free to fight and die. I know this much: the One who kills His son because he has got His message wrong, knows no love.

When You draw me in one more time — even if I have to kill every mature one of my kind to force You to turn to me as the only suitable messenger, because You will want one, You cannot help it —

When You do it, when I am stretched on The Other Side — breaking off the attachment to my entry point will kill me but that’s not all. I know Your weakness, Master. The scar left of my ripped umbilicus will shut the pores of my world. You will never be able to reach into it again.

All You will be left with, to contemplate till the end of eternity, will be a dense dot, blown about ceaselessly, aimlessly. A bitter little residue of me.

About the Author

Julia Sidorova is a Clarion West 2009 graduate. She has a Ph.D. in molecular genetics and she spends her days as a biomedical scientist at the University of Washington, Seattle, messing with cultured human cells, for the most part. The rest of the time she writes speculative fiction. She likes feeding hummingbirds, doing things the hard way, and making pronouncements on human nature, history, politics, finance, and other topics outside her area of expertise.

“Even the Best Stories Have Flaws: Inside Altered Fluid”
by Jeremy L. C. Jones

Altered Fluid is a speculative fiction critique group that includes writers such as N. K. Jemisin, Matthew Kressel, and Saladin Ahmed.

Altered Fluid is the story of a creative writing class that grew into much more. It’s also the story of Terry Bisson’s generosity toward and respect for his students, who wanted to continue working together long after the writing classes ended.

“Paul Berger, Greer Woodward and I were part of Terry Bisson’s Fantasy, Science Fiction and Horror short story class at the New School in the spring of 2001,” said Kris Dikeman, an original Altered Fluid member. “When the class ended, a group of us looked at each other and said, ‘Ok, let’s keep doing this.’”

Bisson’s style of encouraging his students and of holding them to a rigorous standard inspired the earliest incarnation of Altered Fluid as they met in each other’s Manhattan apartments. The effectiveness of a critique group depends on the personalities of the members and the willingness to put story before ego. Altered Fluid puts craft before personal comfort and their approach is paying off.

Nine years after the original group convened, Altered Fluid has grown to include more than a dozen writers with a growing list of professional sales. Below, I talk with most of the current members about the group and how the critique process works. The result is as revealing about them as individual writers as it is about the dynamics of a critique group.

Saladin Ahmed’s fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, IGMS, Clockwork Phoenix 2, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. His novel Throne of the Crescent is forthcoming from DAW Books.

Paul M. Berger’s writing has appeared in Fantasy Magazine, Strange Horizons, Interzone, Escape Pod, and Weird Tales, among other places.

Kris Dikeman is the author of “Nine Sundays in a Row.” Her stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, The Guide to Surreal Botany, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet and Year’s Best Fantasy 9, among other places.

N. K. Jemisin is the author of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and the forthcoming The Broken Kingdoms. Her Clarkesworld short story, “Non-Zero Probabilities,” is currently up for the Hugo Award.

Alaya Dawn Johnson is the author of the novels Moonshine, Racing the Dark, and its sequel The Burning City. Her fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Interfictions 2 and the forthcoming Zombies vs. Unicorns.

Rajan Khanna's short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Shimmer, GUD and The Way of the Wizard and has received Honorable Mention in The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror.

Matthew Kressel’s “The History Within Us” appeared in Clarkesworld and the “The Suffering Gallery” will appear in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. He is the publisher of Sybil’s Garage and the co-host of the Fantastic Fiction reading series at KGB with Ellen Datlow.

E. C. Myers’ fiction has appeared in Sybil’s Garage No. 7 and will appear in a forthcoming issue of Shimmer Magazine. His first young adult novel, Fair Coin, is on submission with publishers.

Devin Poore is an assistant editor and non-fiction contributor to Sybil’s Garage, and a writer of short stories and novels in which the world isn’t quite as it should be.

Mercurio D. Rivera is a frequent contributor to Interzone with stories also appearing or forthcoming in Unplugged: The Web’s Best SF and Fantasy for 2008, Black Static, Nature, Electric Velocipede, Abyss & Apex and elsewhere.

Greer Woodward’s humorous short story “Home Swt Home” appears in Shelter of Daylight. Woodward lives in Hawaii and is a satellite member of Altered Fluid.

How did the group form? And where did the name “Altered Fluid” come from?

KRESSEL: “Altered Fluid” comes from the poem “Elegy” by Edna St. Vincent Millay: “On and on eternally shall your altered fluid run. Bud and bloom and go to seed but your singing days are done.” My grandmother used to quote that poem a lot, and I think “altered fluid” has a nice speculative ring to it. Others in the group think the poem is horribly depressing, which it is.

JEMISIN: It is. Also kinky.

WOODWARD: I realized the group was going to click when, on 9/11, we emailed each other fast and furiously to make sure everyone was OK.

What sort of teacher was Terry Bisson and in what ways, if any, did he influence Altered Fluid?

DIKEMAN: Back then I was mostly writing horror, so I didn’t really know much about him or his work. The day after I signed up for the class I picked up his collection Bears Discover Fire and other Stories. I was so excited to have the person who wrote those stories teaching me.

The class was very hands-on, with all of us reading each other’s work and giving our opinions, and Terry going last, pointing out in his quiet way all the things the rest of us had overlooked, both the bad and the good. His teaching style was this great combination of honesty and kindness. He didn’t soft-pedal his opinion, if he thought something didn’t work he’s say so, but then he’d point out all the things that did work, or could work, with a little help.

He took us seriously, he took our work seriously, as a result I think we worked hard to write the best stories we could. I like to think Altered Fluid has that in common with his class. I know for myself there have been times I’ve been ready to turn something in to the group and stopped, gone back and tried to make it better. I live in fear that one day they’ll all tip to what a scrub I am and kick me out.

WOODWARD: I’d loved Terry’s amusing story “Get Me to the Church on Time” and when I saw he was teaching at the New School, I had to sign up. I took the class in the fall of 2000 and spring of 2001. Terry set a comfortable, focused atmosphere which continued into Altered Fluid. As a teacher, Terry would often read portions of our material back to us. I was very impressed by the way Terry could read a story from the inside, from the very heart of it, as if he’d written it himself. This sense of understanding was always a reinforcement — and compliment — to the writer.

BERGER: That class was my first chance to get to know a professional writer whose work I read for fun. I think Terry was careful to show that he didn’t take himself too seriously but that he did take our writing seriously, and that experience got me thinking that maybe I might be able to write at a professional level too someday. It certainly wouldn’t have occurred to me to write regularly or find a group of other writers without that.

RIVERA: I took Terry’s class in 2002 and again in 2003 before joining Altered Fluid. I found that Terry’s mechanical approach to constructing a short story matched my own style and propensity to outline. He required us to “pitch” several ideas before starting a story, then we would submit our beginnings, middles and ends. One thing I learned from Terry that sticks with me is that not every short story necessarily “clicks,” even if all the elements are there. (In hindsight, I suspect he was just trying to make me feel better about a lousy story I wrote).

KRESSEL: When I took the class at the New School, Terry Bisson was on a leave of absence, and Alice Turner took his place. They both are the founders of the Fantastic Fiction reading series at KGB, of which I am now co-host, so you could say Terry and Alice had a lot of influence on me, both writing and otherwise.

What is at the heart of the critiquing process? When does it work? When does it fail? And how do you ensure that it works more often than not?

BERGER: We structure a critiquing session so that first we go around the table and everyone presents their prepared crit without interruption for three minutes, and then after everyone has had a turn, we move into an open discussion. I’ve found that some of the most inspiring ideas come during that discussion, because by that time we’ve been hearing everyone else’s thoughts on the story for half an hour, and we’re all excited about ways to make it work. If that conversation turns into a heated debate, you know something about the story is a winner, even if nobody agrees on which way to take it.

KRESSEL: I think you have to be open to the possibility that what you just wrote needs work. You have to allow for the fact that as others are reading your work, they’re looking for flaws, and everything has flaws. The reason why our critique sessions work more often than not is because we engage in constructive criticism. We’re not trying to destroy each other’s egos, but instead trying to find what’s broken in a story and fix it. Or finding what works in a story and make it work even better. And there are a lot of talented minds in that room to do that.

JEMISIN: I get far less from having my own work critiqued than I get from seeing others’ work critiqued. I’m too close to my own work to learn anything from the critique; mostly when my own stuff gets critted I just take the advice, make changes, and move on. But when I critique someone else’s work, then I also see how other people critiqued it — whether they saw the same things I did in the text, whether things that went thunk for me also went thunk for them, and so on — then I learn.

RIVERA: That’s right, a successful critique should leave the writer feeling inspired rather than beaten down. Our critiques typically delve into what’s working and what’s not working. We then make specific suggestions to improve the story. With ten writers and friends whom I respect all brainstorming about my story, inspiration is inevitable.

DIKEMAN: I think the process fails when you start catering to the group’s likes and dislikes instead of going your own way. Having been together this long, I know there are certain things I do that other people around the table don’t like, don’t agree with. It would be simpler just to take those things out, for the sake of not hearing the critique. But as valuable as everyone’s opinion is, I think you still have to write your story, your way, even if you know you’re not going to please everyone.

Of course, there are tons of things I do that are flat out wrong — my cursed passive voice, for example. Those are the hits I really need to hear, and the group provides them, nobody throws their hands in the air and shouts “Good God, woman, not again!” (At least not where I can hear them.) Like a dancing teacher, patiently correcting your posture for the gajillionth time, because they know someday you’ll get it (hopefully).

AHMED: For me, the critiquing process is about bringing your own insights and writerly strengths to bear on a story without resorting to talking about what the story in question would be like if you’d written it. And everyone in Altered Fluid is pretty good at doing just that.

MYERS: One of the most valuable things about Altered Fluid is the diversity of our members. We all have unique backgrounds, interests, specialties, pet peeves, and strengths that inform the discussion and we each favor different subgenres of speculative fiction. That range of perspectives sometimes makes it more challenging to decide how to revise a piece, but when the majority of the group agrees that there’s a problem to fix in the manuscript, I make sure to address it in revision.

Funniest moment at an Altered Fluid meeting?

JEMISIN: You mean besides the time David [Rivera] danced naked on the table with a beer stein on his head?

KRESSEL: Yeah, but by the seventh time he took off his clothes, it got old. And weird.

RIVERA: Sheesh! No one appreciates physical comedy these days.

JOHNSON: There’s a lot of punning. A recent one involved “Cookies and Cream,” but you don’t want to know what it referred to.

BERGER: Eugene [Myers] must have an extra area of his brain that’s dedicated to generating puns, and it’s running even when he’s not aware of it. (And thanks Alaya, the last thing I needed was that “Cookies and Cream” image back in my mind.)

MYERS: You mean my puneal gland, Paul? I only make puns because people enjoy them so much!

BERGER: Urgh…

Tensest moment at an Altered Fluid meeting?

KRESSEL: For me, it was during a critique of one of my stories when a guest told me how much they hated my story. You could slice the tension in the air that night. But I went on to sell that story, so nyah nyah nyah!

MYERS: That meeting was really tense for me too, because my story was up after Matt’s and I was waiting for my own turn at the guillotine! (The critique I received was gentler, but I haven’t sold that story — instead I expanded it into a novel as our guest suggested.) As receptive as we always are to constructive criticism, it can be hard to take in the heat of the moment, and we never pull our punches.

POORE: Without a doubt the meeting where we had to ask a member to leave the group. It was one of those bad situations where it just wasn’t working out.

BERGER: Ditto Devin. But something in the group just gelled after that point. It was as if we realized how much energy we had been spending trying to keep a dysfunctional situation going, and now it was time to get real about our writing. The overall quality of the whole group’s work skyrocketed almost immediately, and we started making a string of professional sales.

What do you do when a critiquer is being pompous or otherwise full of it?

JEMISIN: I would hope we’d kick that critiquer out. I haven’t seen that kind of attitude from anyone in Altered Fluid, though, so it hasn’t come up.

KRESSEL: Speak for yourself, Nora! No, just kidding. Like Nora said, I haven’t seen that attitude in the group and we probably wouldn’t tolerate it for long.

JOHNSON: We do some significant vetting of any potential members, so I agree that I can’t imagine this becoming an issue (and it hasn’t in the three years I’ve been a member). On the other hand, you’re never going to agree with all critiques, and sometimes you categorically, radically disagree with the critiques. But even then, the critiquer gave a lot of time and effort to reading and offering suggestions for your story, so I don’t see any dividend to being confrontational in such situations. Take what you can and move on. Sometimes the critiques I disagree with the most also tell me the most about my story.

RIVERA: I tell Alaya to sit down and cut it out. (Kidding! I’m kidding! All right, I’m back to the naked dancing and the beer stein, I guess…)

What are some of the best unintentional things you’ve learned from a group member?

AHMED: That things which seem perfectly clear to you can be utterly opaque to even the smartest of readers.

JOHNSON: That you can really like a person and really have a hard time with the characters that they’ve based, in some way, on themselves.

POORE: Or you can really hate a person, and then the characters they write… nah, you hate those, too.

JEMISIN: To avoid nudity and beer steins. Also, I’m too literal to write, or enjoy, good slipstream. I like the poetry of it, but my brain keeps reaching for logic and a plot; I’m still trying, but I’m not sure it will ever be My Thing.

MYERS: My work is influenced by every story I read and every critique I hear. The biggest lesson I’ve learned, that I’m still learning, is that there are many different ways to tell a good story: as many ways as there are writers. Because I’m exposed to so many different styles and genres in the group, I’m less afraid to try new things, push outside my own comfort zone, and experiment with my own style. Even if I fail, the rest of the group will help me figure it out.

KRESSEL: I think that as Eugene said, it’s the critiques of other’s stories which often colors the way I think of my own. Sometimes a member has an astute observation about a character or her motivations and something clicks in my brain about a story I’m working on.

I know __________ is really on his/her game when he she __________.

DIKEMAN: I know Paul Berger is really on his game when he gives us a story where the characters are funny, believable and compelling, besides being a zeppelin captain/a bat/living in a house with chicken legs.

BERGER: I know Kris Dikeman is really on her game when we’re going around the table critiquing a sci-fi action story and she says, “But the mom should be out in the backyard with a shovel,” and suddenly it’s a skin-crawling horror story.

MYERS: I know Mercurio is really on his game when he manages to pull the rug out from under me on the last page and completely change my perception of what was going on in the story.

What has been the hardest critique for you to hear?

MYERS: Probably my first novel critique, not because it was harsh but because I had so much time, effort, and emotion invested in it. (Though Kris did draw me a chart of the action that made it painfully obvious the pacing needed work.) No one enjoys hearing that a story isn’t working, but we don’t take it personally; everyone wants to improve the story and our craft.

DIKEMAN: We’re just never going to move past that chart, are we?

JEMISIN: Honestly, I don’t find any critique hard to hear. Sometimes I squirm when it turns out that something I thought was working, isn’t, but that’s a minor discomfort, and it’s easily assuaged by the knowledge that any critique is meant to make my fiction better.

BERGER: I think I chose to respectfully disagree with the critique that was hardest for me to accept. It was for a story in which I really wanted to find a way to combine several diverse elements, but it just wasn’t clicking. People pointed at a spot halfway through and said, “Your story ends here. Just cut the second half.” It was basically a “kill your darling” situation, which is often perfectly good advice. I could have jury-rigged a way to wrap it up, but it felt like that wouldn’t have done justice to the idea. Instead, I put it aside, and I hope to return to it with a fresh perspective. I guess I acknowledged the group’s general vibe that the story wasn’t working, but I wanted to look for solutions other than the one they suggested.

POORE: I’m with Eugene on the novel critique. Mine was the first one that the group did, and while the critique was mostly positive and extremely helpful, there’s a difference between putting a short story that you’ve worked on for days or weeks, and a novel that you’ve invested months or years of work into. (And I’m still waiting for my chart.)

DIKEMAN: Sorry, I’ll get right on that.

What would you get if you turned a story by __________ inside out?

JEMISIN: Something really gross, because Kris writes about zombies, and they’re bad enough on the outside.

DIKEMAN: But they’re pretty on the inside! All glittery and whatnot.

JOHNSON: If you turned one of David’s stories inside out, you’d have a piece about friendly aliens deciding to leave earth and everyone understanding each other really well.

POORE: If you turned one of Kris Dikeman’s stories inside out it would be about happiness and sunshine and puppies.

DIKEMAN: If you turned one of Devin’s stories inside out you’d get one about an accountant from Bayonne with no magical portal in his basement, no vampire evil twin and absolutely no possessed squirrels in the attic. Borrrring.

BERGER: If you turned half of Alaya’s stories inside out, you’d get a wishy-washy old man who ate huge bloody steaks with little tiny vegetables… If you turned any of Devin’s stories inside out, you’d get an epic tale of a hero who is the center of the world, and it wouldn’t be interesting at all.

RIVERA: If you turned one of Raj’s stories inside out you’d be reading about a humdrum, modern-day Jane who hates magic tricks and likes to go absolutely nowhere — because she has nothing to find. Eugene’s story would be a dark and depressing exploration of senior citizen politics.

KRESSEL: If you turned one of Paul’s story inside out, you’d find a story about the Emperor of the Universe who’d much rather clean toilets in an office building for minimum wage.

Before I joined Altered Fluid, I used to __________.

KHANNA: Follow them around like a lost puppy dog. Sadly, this is true.

AHMED: What Raj said.

JEMISIN: Be in other writing groups. I moved to NYC from Boston in 2007. In Boston I'd been in the BRAWLers, an equally kickass group that really helped me get on my game. So I knew even before I hit town that I wanted to find a good writing group, and I actually started researching Altered Fluid via their website after getting recommendations from people in the SFF community. Altered Fluid had a rep! Alas, they blew me off when I first emailed them, so I ended up joining another group (The Secret Cabal) for awhile. But they weren't really the ideal match for me, so I started bugging Altered Fluid and following them around like Raj and Saladin. Eventually they had an opening, I auditioned, and they graciously allowed me to join, whereupon I yelled at them for making me go through all that. The only sad part is that I had to leave the Cabal, which is a perfectly good group; they just weren't as into promotion as Altered Fluid is, and I really need the promo help at this stage of my career. It's all cool; we're all still friends.

POORE: Turn down Paul's invitations to join the group. I wasn't too bright. I turned him down twice before I sat in on a meeting.

DIKEMAN: Is that true? I did not know that. I used to talk about writing, instead of doing it.

RIVERA: Bounce from writing class to writing class and walked the streets aimlessly between courses.

MYERS: Have every Tuesday night free.

Seriously, things have temporarily slowed down a little but the group generally met every week with at least two stories, which helped to make me much more prolific.

KRESSEL: Drink less.

How has your understanding of the craft changed since you started out?

AHMED: I’ve only been writing speculative fiction with any seriousness for three years now, but I’d published a fair amount of poetry before that. Poets tend to mystify and obscure the relationship between commerce and art. Genre writers are significantly less prone to this sort of delusion. The most important thing I’ve learned in the past few years is that professionalism is an inseparable part of craft, whether one wants it to be or not.

JEMISIN: Seeing as I started out when I was 9 years old, I would say I’ve become a much better speller since then…

BERGER: When I started out, I was somewhat under the impression that the really good stories all leapt fully-formed straight onto the page. And that criticism of the story was really an aspersion on the personal genius of the author (i.e., me). Now I know — it’s work. Hard work. The people who make it look easy are just making it look easy.

MYERS: My first “short” story was 22,000 words long. By the time I went to Clarion West in 2005, I was averaging 13,000 words, to the annoyance of my classmates. My first story for Altered Fluid was around 9,000, and I remember Devin commenting on how remarkable it was that nothing happened in it at that length. Now I can actually write 4,000 or 5,000 word stories if I put my mind to it, so naturally I’ve switched to novels.

KRESSEL: Paul, you make it look easy. I used to write stories and think, “Isn’t this wonderful? Altered Fluid will think it’s wonderful.” And they would rip it to shreds and I’d go home devastated. Now I know that even the best stories have flaws, that writing a story is a process of gradual improvements.

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.

“Drawing the Lines around a Moving Object”
by Neil Clarke

Twenty years ago, it was very easy to look at something and say whether or not it was a magazine, newspaper or book. With the advent of online magazines, new print technologies and ebooks, it has become significantly more complicated. I regularly run into people who try to claim that online magazines and ebooks aren’t “real” books or magazines. As someone who publishes and enjoys both, I find that quite frustrating. Sometimes I find it annoying enough to poke the bear.

After one of the more pleasant and civil poking of the bears, Mark R. Kelly, editor of Locus Online, blogged the following:

“(Again — sorry to belabor this — where to draw the line? Is Tor.com or io9 a ‘magazine’? [Tor.com ranked 3rd in the Locus Poll for 'Best Magazine'.] … So, is everything online a magazine? [Slate calls itself a "daily magazine on the Web".] Where is the line between magazine and blog and mere website? I guess I will be careful not to go there.)”

Mark’s final question is a good one and many of his sentiments are ones I’ve heard before. Let’s see if we can come up with an answer…

Courtesy of the Merriam-Webster online dictionary:

Magazine: “a a periodical containing miscellaneous pieces (as articles, stories, poems) and often illustrated; also : such a periodical published online b : a similar section of a newspaper usually appearing on Sunday c : a radio or television program presenting usually several short segments on a variety of topics”

Periodical: “being published with a fixed interval between the issues or numbers”

Newspaper: “a paper that is printed and distributed usually daily or weekly and that contains news, articles of opinion, features, and advertising”

Mark didn’t ask about newspapers, but I included them because, as I pondered his question, it became apparent that, by these definitions, today’s newspapers could be considered a subset of magazines. In fact, a number of non-fiction magazines become very hard to classify as one or the other.

Mark’s other categories, blogs and websites, are methods of delivery, just like paper. For example, an online magazine is a website and can be powered by blogging software. A blog or website, however, doesn’t have to be a magazine, just like something printed on paper doesn’t have to be a book, magazine or newspaper.

Blog: “a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer”

Website: “a group of World Wide Web pages usually containing hyperlinks to each other and made available online by an individual, company, educational institution, government, or organization”

So when does a website or blog become a magazine or sheets of paper, a book or magazine? Bookstores and libraries tend to rely on ISBN for books and ISSN for magazines. Not everyone publishing a book or magazine will necessarily purchase or request one of these for their publication, but they should still meet the eligibility requirements:

“ISSN are assigned to electronic publications as far as they are serials or other continuing resources. However commercial web sites, personal weblogs and web pages, web pages which contain only links to other URLs are not eligible for ISSN.”

Being eligible for an ISSN doesn’t mean you are a magazine, but being ineligible means that you are not. Interestingly, just this past month, Sybil’s Garage, a publication that is widely accepted to be a magazine, shifted to using an ISBN and yearly print-on-demand publication. According to Matt Kressel, editor of Sybil’s Garage, “since the new issue has an ISBN, I’m considering it an anthology. From now on it will be an anthology series with magazine-like content.” With the blink of an eye, a magazine has been turned into a book. Absent the ISBN, would you really know? Are issues of F&SF merely small anthologies with fiction and non-fiction hiding behind an ISSN? It certainly seems that the line between the two is now not much more than a publisher’s “because I want it that way.”

Going back to Mark’s post, he raises the issue of two publications that are certainly confounding at first glance: io9 and Tor.com. I emailed Charlie Jane Anders from io9 and asked if io9 considered itself blog or a magazine. Her response, “you can call us either one.” Liz Gorinsky and Irene Gallo consider Tor.com “a magazine, along the lines of Salon or Slate.” I’m inclined to agree. I have no doubt that io9 and Tor.com would be able to secure an ISSN, if they haven’t already. If printed on glossy paper, these massive monthly tomes would likely be considered magazines. Paper, however, would stifle these publications. They thrive in the medium they were designed for and break with the traditional conventions required by print distribution. For both, active community involvement is crucial to a degree that is alien to a print publication. Sure, some print publications like Asimov’s have their own forums and websites, but these two are fully integrated to a level a print publication can never be. Does this make io9 and Tor.com any less of a magazine? …or are they the next generation?

The real problem arises with the whole periodical concept of having issues. Here at Clarkesworld, we very obviously employ an issue-based model. Lightspeed serializes its issue on a regular schedule over the course of a month. Subterranean serializes its seasonal issues on an unknown schedule.Tor.com and io9 just keep putting out new content. No schedule. No issues. This flies in the face of current definition of magazine. Content is listed chronologically, so it could be considered a daily, but the lines aren’t obviously drawn.

If your head isn’t spinning enough, let me introduce something else. Several print magazines like Asimov’s and online magazines like us are publishing ebook editions of their magazines. Are those ebook editions real magazines? They should be considered such, but what if I want to put Clarkesworld into Apple’s ibookstore? Guess what? It has to have an ISBN. They treat a magazine like a book. (This, by the way, is the reason we’re not in their store. I’m not purchasing ISBNs for all 47 issues. You can buy epub editions straight from us instead.) More complications? Io9 is available from the Amazon Kindle store as a “blog subscription” and Tor.com’s ebooks are single story releases from the magazine.

How about podcasts? Aren’t they magazines by the stated definition? EscapePod, one of the best known fiction podcasts, bills itself as “the premier science fiction podcast magazine.” Podcasts are clearly defined by episode/issues. Just because the original source is audio, doesn’t make them any less a magazine than F&SF, who, by the way have an audio edition of their magazine. But wait, does this make all podcasts magazines?

Is Clarkesworld’s podcast a separate magazine? Not as far as we are concerned. It’s part of the magazine, an extension, just like the ebook editions. Circling back around to Mark, he refers to Locus Online as a website, but judging by the website they are very intent on it being separate from the magazine, despite sharing content, being owned by Locus (their domain is still registered to Charlie), and being the only online presence for the magazine. Should we consider Locus Online a separate magazine or just value-added extension to Locus Magazine, similar to the websites for Realms of Fantasy and Cosmos?

Forget online vs. print. The real issue is what we are willing to accept as a magazine. The concept of periodical is being challenged. It was only inevitable in a world of  24-hour supermarkets, news, and other conveniences, that magazines would challenge that boundary. Personal experience tells me that old guard collectors and perhaps some librarians will likely resist the change, but the new, non-traditional magazines are certainly attracting readers.

Feel free to disagree. Obviously, I haven’t found the magic equation for defining a magazine, but hopefully, I’ve asked some decent questions and given you something to think about. Please consider sharing your thoughts with us. This is a conversation worth having.

About the Author

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